Can Good Still Come in the Religious Life

A. Paul Dominic, S.J.

PHILIPPINES

CAN GOOD STILL COME FROM RELIGIOUS LIFE? Š 2017 A Paul Dominic S.J. Published by Pauline Sisters Bombay Society 143 Waterfield Road, Bandra, Mumbai 400 050, India Tel: (022) 2642 4081, 2643 6188 Fax: (022) 2641 9304 Email: paulineindiaedit@gmail.com All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published and distributed by Paulines Publishing House Daughters of St. Paul 2650 F.B. Harrison Street 1302 Pasay City, Philippines E-mail: edpph@paulines.ph Website: www.paulines.ph Cover design: Ann Marie Nemenzo, FSP Photo credits: Shanna Marie Perez 1st printing 2018 ISBN: 978-971-590-856-6

at the service of the Gospel and culture

Dedication To my father Arokiam A and my mother Arokiam R Fully alive in Jesus, Giving thanks to Abba God For their nurturing vocation in some of their children, On the occasion of Mother’s birth centenary year.

Contents Foreword

1

Preface

5

1. An Adventurous Experiment of Religious Life

10

2. Millennial Stirrings in Religious Life

27

3. Evangelization as Religious Mission of Joy

47

4. Art of Unobtrusive Mission

64

5. Favor and Fervor of Religious Life

87

6. Celebrating Religious Life

101

7.

120

A Last Word

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Notes

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Afterword

Foreword

J

ust a few months ago a Religious asked me this challenging question: “Is Religious life still relevant today? What is the future of Religious life?” I was hard pressed to answer convincingly but deep down I knew and said: “Yes, it is relevant and will be so in the time to come.

Basically it will be the same but expressions may change according to times.” It was then I came across the title of this little book by Fr. A. Paul Dominic, S.J., and wondered how my answer would have had depth of meaning if I had read it before I was posed the question.

The author asserts in no ambiguous terms in chapter one that good can still come from Religious life. I was intrigued by the little adverb “still”. Does it mean that it was doubted? Then I remembered the question I was asked by the Religious and my mind fell silent and I said to myself: thank God that there are still people with enough faith and trust in the goodness of God, which I find is the source of the good that is spoken of and acclaimed.

In chapter two the author uses a novel expression of “critical mass” in society to describe the presence and activity of the Religious in the modern world. The expression immediately made me think of the atomic reactor becoming effective with the nuclear material reaching the critical mass and setting off chain reactions.

I find the author’s expression very graphic and meaningful since the Religious in society are supposed to be precisely that factor, setting others on flame with the Love of God and neighbor. This 1

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brings peace and joy which is the theme of the third chapter.

Further, it leads to genuine missionary activity of being what you are wherever you happen to be; and appropriately responding to what you come across in your daily life—that seems to be the lay of the fourth chapter: the art of unobtrusive mission.

But all this does not mean that everything is fine with Religious life as it is lived out today anymore than with the Church itself. Though the Counter-Reformation movement opposed Martin Luther’s saying that the visible Church is unholy and needs to be reformed (Ecclesia semper reformanda, which means the church has to be always reformed) and asserted that the Church is ‘already holy’ as the spotless bride of Christ and does not need any reform, the truth needs refinement.

The truth is that the Church is basically holy but needs to always repent and be ready to change for the better. This was the vision of Vatican II; and Pope Paul VI humbly acknowledged that the Church needs constant ‘repentance’ which is a broader and more inclusive term than ‘reform’. St. John Paul II carried it further and did not hesitate to ask pardon from all and sundry. The Religious too are constantly to strike their breast and say: “mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” (my fault, my most grievous fault). This then is the theme of chapter five.

If the book had stopped here there would have been a serious lacuna. The author concludes in the final chapter on a joyful note, of celebrating Religious life. Indeed, this note of celebration can never be absent from a genuine Christian living an eschatological life. We are called to happiness and we live that here and now as a foretaste of the eternal happiness that is to come in its fullness hereafter. But for the time being we are

Foreword

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beset with sorrows, troubles and trials which cannot destroy Religious life’s fundamental hope. This hope is actually part of our baptismal robe. Is not Religious life the deepening of the baptismal commitment? I thank the author for writing such an encouraging book.

B. Joseph Francis Rev. Fr. B. Joseph Francis, of Bangalore Archdiocese, has served as parish priest and Vicar General for some years; and also as Rector of St. Peter’s Seminary, Bangalore, where most of his life he taught philosophy and theology so well that he continues the same work even after his retirement. He did his licentiate in philosophy and Theology at the Papal Athanaeum, Pune, and his doctorate at Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium.

Preface

“W

hat would become of the world if there were no Religious?” Quite a rhetorical question that is as recent as 1996 and as old as 1562 or so. Saint John Paul II quotes the question in the concluding section of the Apostolic Exhortation Vita Consecrata (#105) giving the reference to the Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. I am sure many would, resonate with his sentiments regarding the permanent value of religious life in the present age too. In this matter I find myself adhering spontaneously to what St. Ignatius advocates (despite what the Pope had done to the Jesuits when their General, Fr. Pedro Arrupe, was laid up with a stroke): anyone claiming to be a Catholic must think intelligently with the Church and, in particular, hold in esteem the basic charism of religious life with all that it involves (Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, ##356,357) personally, socially and publicly. What he says with his faith sharpened with the learning at the University of Paris his younger contemporary, Teresa of Avila, says in her learned ignorance (docta ignorantia). Indeed, what Teresa says is not simply: “What would become of the world if there were no Religious?” She rather reports that His Majesty (as she often refers to God thus) asked so.

Many a religious, I believe, especially those more religious than learned, would have cherished such a belief in God and religious life all their life, even when facing ups and downs in their daily living or when troubled by the confusion caused by 5

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newsmakers and questionable talkers. I myself would belong to their tribe. Indeed, most of the matter that appears in the book I wrote long before I stumbled upon what Teresa understood what God had to say on the existence of religious.

Were the religious of those bygone days ideal and exemplary? Far from it one could say, at least with reference to the Carmelites; otherwise Teresa would not have been inspired to reform her group. Still this is what she felt God telling her one day after Communion: “... even though religious orders were mitigated one shouldn’t think he was little served in them;” and it was in that background she understood God asking her: “... what would become of the world if it were not for religious?”1 Mutatis mutandis, may we not imagine and hope that God would still approve of religious life as it is not completely bereft of those who live up to the call of Jesus? They will not, like him, wrangle or cry aloud, and will not break a bruised reed or quench a smouldering wick (Mt 12:19-20) but acknowledge him before others (Mt 10:32) even as they do not hide themselves from their own kin (Is 58:7). In the history of salvation there is always a remnant of God to live by the grace God is offering to them (1 Kgs 19:18). And so Abba God makes sure of giving a little flock to his son Jesus (Lk 12:32); and Jesus appreciates them for what they have been, standing by him in some way (Lk 22:28).

Not that they, as a group, followed him with truth and loyalty to the end; but it was to them he comes back as the risen Lord calling them back to follow him for ever (Mt 28:9-10; Jn 21:19). As in the beginning now too, he is the one who chooses them; and it is for

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them to respond not only as in the beginning unsure of themselves but knowingly for good, indeed for the better!

All this is at once humbling and uplifting for the sort of religious women and men who, for all their sincere striving in their profession, find themselves limping and beginning their journey again and again! In this they are in the good company of such men as St. Francis of Assisi who, for all his holiness, never thought of himself as progressing. His famous namesake, Pope Francis, too has a way of leading us forward who (tend to) lag behind. If he has “provoked new attention to discussions on ethics, religion and morality�,2 giving rise to the new Italian weekly Il mio Papa (My Pope) as its editor-in-chief has pointed out, he has all the more been a catalyst for those in religious life: awakening them, cheering them, challenging them, reassuring them, and thus heralding the Year of Religious Life. Now that the Church has a Pope chosen from among the religious, nearly two centuries after the Camaldolese monk was elected to become Pope Gregory XVI in 1831 he has truly become a sign of the times that augurs well for religious life and the Church.

Such, hopefully, is the breath of the Spirit moving even the pages of this book. The answer to the question, Can Good Still Come from Religious Life?, is given positively in the first chapter, using the concrete example of a new mode of religious life inspired by Blessed Charles de Foucauld and given a concrete form by RenĂŠ Voillaume. The second chapter detects and evokes certain stirrings in religious life that made news in the opening decade of the third millennium. The third chapter projects the mission of joy as the universal mission of all religious irrespective of their particular charism. The fourth chapter

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suggests and encourages a sort of mission that eager religious cannot but engage in, though it may be traced back to Saint Ignatius and the likes of him. Mission being the inalienable expression of religious life, it is imperative to (re)discover the character of mission; it has to be now, as in some way it has been always, more personal and spontaneous than people realize. The source of all this fervor is the favor of God, which is the theme of the fifth chapter; broaching the undeniable betrayal of religious life frustrating the peace of religious, the chapter traces how the fervor of religious life may be gained again through the favor of God. The book concludes with the sixth chapter celebrating religious life.

This presentation, I hope, follows suit in the Year of Religious Life what was done by the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious in USA in their website in 2013, the Year of Faith.3 The preparation for it has not, however, been an instant undertaking. It took several years and was shared with an international audience of English speaking religious. This was possible thanks to the periodicals, in India and abroad, that carried my articles. So I would like to thank them and, in particular, the Review for Religious which published the original versions of chapters 1, 2, 3, 6 and part of chapter 4 (used here with permission: Š The Institute of Jesuit Sources, St. Louis, MO, USA. All rights reserved), and also The Pastoral Life for the first part of Chapter 4.

I would not be surprised if the readers of the book started with the Foreword and/or the double Afterword. I myself enjoyed reading them. Their contributors know I am grateful to them for obliging me with my request. Still I would express my heartfelt gratitude to them here explicitly with a prayer. With

Preface

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the same sentiments I would greet Sister Caroline, fsp, and her team in the Pauline Publications for their kind and generous service.

I would like to thank again my revered priest friend, B. Joseph Francis, who wrote the Foreword to this book, for framing a positive answer to the question posed by the title of the book.

He and I were proved right by the Pauline Publications, India, when they brought out a reprint of the book about a year or so after its original publication. I would like to thank them for their republication especially as I recall another priest friend with another thinking on the subject. Amused and far from enthused by the title of the book he smiled and, without batting his eyelid, voiced his negative answer to verbalize his knowing smile. For all I know, he may not be solitary in his thinking.

However, I believe, the truth of the positive answer draws a crowd of tried and convinced, if struggling, practitioners of consecrated life. That is why, I believe, the Pauline Publications in the Philippines brings out their edition of Can Good Still Come From Religious Life? in the East Asian world, about two years after its publication in South Asia. So I have this objective reason to thank them for their contribution, besides whatever personal reason I may have to welcome the new edition.

All this would not have happened unless the Pauline Publications in India had, in the first place, brought out the book in the Year of Consecrated Life. So I would like to thank them again with a prayer in my heart for them and their interested, hopefully growing readership.

A. Paul Dominic, S.J. pauldominicsj@yahoo.com January 1, 2018

1 An Adventurous Experiment of Religious Life You will see greater things. — Jn 1:50

C

an good still come from religious life? Yes, if only religious life can boast of enough men and women worth their salt! I felt a vibrant yes within my heart when I saw for the first time some men religious who called themselves Little Brothers of Jesus, though without the usual trappings of religious Brotherhood. Looking back upon the life of the Little Brothers and their counterparts, namely the Little Sisters of Jesus, the nonagenarian René Voillaume (1905– 2003), the founder of the Brothers, made bold to view the whole experience “as a spiritual adventure of our times.”4 In the years following the centenary year of his birth, may his tribe increase! And also, more importantly, may all kinds of religious life, that rightly or wrongly thrive or survive till today, find a new good reason for their existence and charter a new course of living worthily. That was a wish on a memorable day long ago that I cherish till today.

That was forty-odd years ago, during the exposure programme I enjoyed as a student of theology. On what would be one of my happiest days as a religious, I was introduced to 10

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a male religious house at Alampoondi, a village not far from Chenji, on the highway between Chennai and Tiruvannamalai, at that time the only house of its kind in India. (Till recently there were only two such houses in India, though the original house was recently closed down and therein hangs part of the story of the adventurous experiment of living religious life.)

The house, unlike other religious houses I had lived in or seen, was in no way different from the other houses in the village street. It belonged to the Little Brothers of Jesus. Three of them, two from France and one from Belgium, were living like the villagers in almost every respect except that they worked with the leprosy patients, prayed together regularly in an Indian way as enlightened Christians, and, unlike Indian males especially of those days, cooked their own meals.

Welcomed into their little tiled house of four small rooms— including a kitchen, a chapel and a storeroom for medicines used in their paramedical work—I felt much at home and, what is more important, I realized that religious life itself was at home there in close contact with the people around. I saw the Brothers being all things to all people, learning the customs and beliefs of their Hindu neighbors, joining their celebrations, speaking their Tamil language though amusingly with a French lilt, preparing and enjoying the local variety of quite spicy food, lending an ear to the varied tales of the young and old, lending a measure of rice occasionally, or just giving away a handful of chillies when a neighbor sent her child asking for some, and so on—and I felt a new thrill regarding religious life, at once Christian and Indian.

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The people of Alampoondi, the all-Hindu village in which the Brothers had settled, witnessed all that, but they had no idea of their specific identity except as foreigners and Christians. With their little knowledge of church or Christian community, they had scarcely any idea of the newcomers being members of a religious congregation, the Little Brothers of Jesus. Even among knowledgeable Christians very few knew of their existence. Like myself, hardly any of my theology companions had heard about their surprisingly unusual way of life, although the Little Brothers, though not large in number, were keeping a distinct, if quietly unassuming, presence on all the continents.

A New Charism of Living and Working The Little Brothers’ charism, as I learned from the Brothers in India, is to live as Jesus lived at Nazareth, unheralded though not unknown, but unfailingly helpful in little ways of social living. Who would want such a charism? About the Little Brothers who have taken to it eagerly and seriously, an outsider like me can say that they have shown themselves faithful to it.

The first Little Brothers who came and settled in India have not given up hope of their continuing presence although they have attracted only four Indian followers till date, despite the large numbers of religious vocations all over India.

In October 1933 Voillaume and a few of his friends, all of them newly ordained, left their native France and went to ElAbiodh-Sidi-Cheik in the Algerian Sahai’a and started living the Nazarene charism as a group. Voillaume served as their elected prior from the beginning till 1965. On 13 May 2003 he died at

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the age of ninety-seven. His death, if I am not mistaken, did not get much attention in the Christian press or even among members of religious orders and congregations, let alone in the secular world. Maybe, it could not have been different, but I incline to think that it was what it should have been, given his and his Brothers’ choice to live in today’s world like Jesus at Nazareth, in hidden mystery amid plain or harsh earthly reality. He died just as he had lived, with no splash of publicity for having accomplished some widely recognized good, though of course God knows all he did in the Nazareth-like places where he and his Brothers lived. I came to know of his death by chance, but at the very place where I first felt the spell of their humble charism.

Here I would like to present an account of the surprising charism as a tribute to the high evangelical ideal of religious life that Voillaume and his enchanted Brothers envisioned in their living. Willy-nilly, the new charism cannot but challenge the comfort zone that religious life has grown used to India. I hope this will bring forth more good from religious life!

The Original Recipient of This Charism The inspiration for Voillaume and his companions was Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916) who was by birth, certainly not at death, a French aristocrat. Though born in a devout Catholic family and educated in Jesuit schools in France, Foucauld turned his back on Christianity at sixteen and eventually entered military service only to quit it because of his undisciplined and even dissolute ways. Later, around 1880, he went on an expedition to unexplored parts of Morocco

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and returned to publish his findings in a book that won him no small fame. Still he was restless, least suspecting that the human heart is restless until it rests in God. In late October 1886 he found himself converted, in the confessional though he had gone there without wanting to confess. Once he was converted he knew the raison d’être of his existence: to live for God and only for God. He came to discover the person of Jesus as God’s incarnate Son. He entered and left the Trappists and then became a priest, only to feel a compelling urge to be like Jesus not only inwardly but even outwardly. Out of love he wanted to reproduce in himself the life of Jesus at Nazareth, hidden, humble, hardworking and helpful to others. In a letter he describes himself thus: The gospel proved to me that “the first commandment” was for me to love God with all my heart, and that I must put everything within that love; and, as everybody knows, one of the effects of love is imitation. I did not feel at all made for imitating him in his public life and his preaching; I consequently knew I must imitate the hidden life of the poor and humble workman of Nazareth.5

As he delved into the hidden treasure of Nazareth, he found that he could not keep it private: his newfound pearl of vision was not for himself alone. He hoped that it would become a pattern of life for others too. But, however much he wanted to have companions to live with him, he was not to have even one up to the day he died tragically. Even his tragedy was not perceived as greatness. He died as also the two French soldiers visiting him did, victims caught in a tribal conflict, shot in the head by a frightened Tuareg youth.

5 Favor and Fervor of Religious Life Lord, to whom can we go?

You have the words of eternal life.

Did I not choose you, the twelve? —Jn 6:68,70

T

he last bit of instruction that a Novice Master used to give his novices pertained to unusual Jesuits: “You have finished your novitiate, and years later you will be assigned to different houses. Then you’ll find Jesuits of very different kinds. Some of them you’ll find strange, so strange indeed that you may wonder if they are Jesuits. Don’t be shocked, though. They are Jesuits, to be sure! We need them from time to time. But don’t become like them!”

At the time Joaker (not his real name) told me this story he and I were living in different communities. Sort of friends, whenever we met we would talk about the goings-on in our communities; and I used to unburden to him, among other things, the unbelievable behavior of undependable companions who would not stand by their word. In one exchange he comforted me, remarking about one such man: “Don’t take to heart Maar’s behavior. He is sick, mentally sick!” A year or two later when we two lived together with none else with us his perception changed; I was out of his favor; I became the 87

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sick person who must have persecuted people like Maar! So he declared, in his worst outburst, I was the strangest Jesuit he had met in his life—all because I did not favor a particular decision of his that was to the liking of his few favorites and inconvenient to the large majority in the parish.

Far worse than the likes of Joaker in the community, are those at the head stinking of what may be called CSA (Circle Seizing Authority) syndrome. Once elected the members of the circle seem reluctant to give up their office, sometimes ending up in depression.90 Sometimes they form a clique and seek and sometimes manage, with their piety of religious politics, to hold on to their position for as long as possible. In one bizarre case the clique even chose to walk out of the Congregation when they were bereft of power.

Such cases give the lie to religious life based on the paradigm of Jesus (Mk 10:41-45). They bring to the fore questions of the actual status of religious life: its propriety, virtue, sanctity and fervor. How is it that religious life has made a home for betrayers despite its lofty light of Jesus? More basically, how did they first gain entrance into portals of religious life? And how have they survived there with their variety of vice? They give a bad name to it; they do not make but mar religious life. They make it more an experience of untruth, darkness and death rather than truth, light and life.

The religious of that sort are reminiscent of, indeed worse than, those who make up the church of Sardis and Laodicea (Rev 3:1-6, 14-22) of whom nothing good is said by the risen Lord. They have a name for being alive, but are dead or as good as dead; for nothing of their works is found to be good in the

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sight of God. Being neither cold nor hot but lukewarm they can only be nauseating. With all their delusion of prosperity they are only pitiable and wretched (Rev 3:1-3, 15-17). So their appearance or self-appraisal does not correspond to truth. In this scenario the only thing they can do is listening to what the Spirit is saying to them: “Remember then what you received and heard; obey it, and repent ... I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent” (Rev 3:3, 19).

Always in Need of Reformation If sat were to spring up in religious life today the first thing its adherents had better do would be to recognize the deep inroads asat has made into it. To put it in the old phraseology, if perfection were to become a pursuit again as of old in the religious state of life as a school of perfection we, religious men and women, would need to realize how much we have ignored the ideal and betrayed our vocation for over a generation or two.

In a way, at any given time religious life is whatever the Church is or happens to be at the same time. In recent times before Pope Francis came on the scene, the Church lost much of its moral credibility in the wake of the revelations of the sexual abuse; and that cannot but overshadow religious life too. Long before this, a knowledgeable Jesuit remarked with knowing conviction about the deteriorating laisser-faire state of affairs regarding wrongdoings of all kinds in his Society: “If such and such a thing happened some fifty years ago it would have invited immediate dismissal; twenty-five years ago there would have been a serious warning; today nothing will be done about it!” Here is a graphic picture of reduction of standards, abuse of

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freedom and abandonment of responsibility! Unless the Jesuits were worse than other religious, I would incline to think that the state of all Orders and Congregations everywhere suffered from the same kind of malaise and maladies, though of course in varying levels and spheres.

In the thick of it all, I believe, the right response of religious men and women to regain their true character is to see the writing on the wall and confess their sin of betrayal of their vocation, convinced that their situation of religious life, like the Church, is semper reformanda (always in need of reforming).

But, from my experience, only very few are willing to take the necessary step and lay again the foundation of repentance from dead works. While no one would advance the opinion that all is well in religious life, there are those who will make bold to call for the so-called realistic approach to the situation; and they will claim that, being in touch with reality in the given circumstances of human frailty in the modern world, they are conducting themselves well enough. Such a stand becomes worse when, in their refusal to be self-critical, they will defend themselves as even better than other groups; men religious, for example, will boast of the freedom they enjoy and, perhaps, the supposed wider reach of their mission. What is worst is that in their self-defence, vociferous religious can even resort to the proverbial best defence, namely attack against others who think otherwise! I know a newly ordained priest, though being no more than a greenhorn, who became even abusive against a jubilarian because the latter spoke in prophetic style about the misdeeds in their midst, calling a spade a spade.