In celebrating consecrated life one Sunday each year, we give thanks and ask for blessings. But what are we thanking and praying for, exactly?
Well, for women and men who publicly offer their lives to serve Christ-in-us, as Saint Paul says, through poverty, chastity, and obedience. I mean, of course, nuns, priests, brothers, monks, and hermits — people who offer their lives, just as people who celebrate the sacrament of marriage do, to serve and honor and bear witness to God’s gifts.
But think for a moment of one popular misconception of the consecrated life — that we who take vows give up so much, and shrivel up, and have lonely, gloomy, unproductive lives, and are incomplete and odd and probably unhappy and unbalanced because we give up sex and money and power.
Hmm. Here are some interesting numbers: the Catholic Church on this planet runs 5,500 hospitals, which annually treat 4.5 billion people — five times the Catholic population of the world. The Church runs 28,000 homes for the aged and 100,000 social service centers. The Church gives life to 53,000 kindergartens with 5 million students, 81,000 elementary schools with 25 million students, 32,000 secondary schools with 13 million students, and 6,400 colleges and universities with 2 million students. Almost all of these charitable and educational entities were founded by people who took vows to the consecrated life. Almost all of them are or were staffed by people who took vows to the consecrated life. Almost all of them are more than ever collaborations now, as the University of Portland is, between lay people committed to Christ-in-us and religious people who swore vows to Christ-in-us.
Which is to say, bluntly, people living the consecrated life have changed the face of the world.
Everyone knows about the late Mother Teresa, a great woman and a great saint. But her story is, of course, also the story of millions of women and men whose life consecrated to Christ’s endless love sent them on missions to the ends of the earth for twenty centuries.
One small example: in 1928, nine young Domincan sisters, all under the age of 20, were sent from Germany
to Montana. With no money and very little knowledge of the language here they bravely came to serve as nurses in the hospital in tiny Conrad. A few years later several of those sisters started a hospital in Colville, Washington. It was one of those sisters who served as anesthesiologist and held my mother’s hand as she gave birth to me and three of my siblings. Those German sisters eventually ran 12 hospitals in the Northwest. I grew up with those sisters. They told me stories of not having enough money for a stamp to send a letter to their family. But they were joyful, loving women who built hospitals where there were none and swabbed the wounds and tears of thousands of rural people here. Were they shriveled women leading gloomy, unproductive lives?
Another story. A dozen years ago I spent a winter week at a Benedictine monastery in Abuquiu, New Mexico. The monastery was called Christ in the Desert and it was so cold we renamed it Christ, It’s Cold In The Desert! When I was young and stupid I wondered if monks were simply trying to escape the world, but as I prayed alongside them that week, seven times a day, first prayers before dawn, I began to understand that they are there because they love the world madly. Most of them were raging extroverts with wonderful senses of humor and keen insights into the world. I think of them now as men who keep vigil for the world, praying for you and me, praying while we sleep, their prayers keeping those of us who have wandered far from God relentlessly in His eye.
What is it, in the scriptures, that brings light to the world? I quote the prophet: Share your bread with the hungry, shelter the oppressed, clothe the naked, do not turn your back on your own. Then your light will break forth like the dawn...then light shall rise for you in the darkness...
And so much of that light in this country has come from the consecrated life — education, health care, and social service alone, networks that mostly predated governmental involvement. Men and women of the consecrated life have been some of this country’s greatest entrepreneurs and visionaries — think of Elizabeth Seton, of Edward Sorin, of Frances Cabrini. So much American quality and dignity of life has been carried on the backs of women religious alone — America’s first feminists.
But the subtle key to this success is that it cannot be accomplished alone. The consecrated life at its best inspires others, men and women, married and single, to join in active prayer. Thus we work alongside each other, religious and lay, usually below market rates, because we inspire each other, we believe in the mission, we work for the rising light.
I confess baldly that we who chose the consecrated life do indeed suffer; but I suspect that it is more often suffering that comes from too much love, too many blessings, too many decisions to make that affect so many lives. Quite a paradox for those whose vows might suggest that we give up everything.
Every evening on this campus, if you look closely, you will see a stream of Holy Cross brothers and priests filing into this chapel. We come here to pray for you; we come here to pray because of you; and I close today by asking that you pray for us, for light always rising — enough light, as Saint Simeon says, to illuminate the entire world.
— Father Tom Doyle, C.S.C
