Forty-five years ago, I entered the Paulist Fathers' Novitiate, then located at Mount Paul, Oak Ridge, NJ, on some 1100 or so acres of rocks and trees (and a lake) in a beautiful, then still semi-rural locale in northern New Jersey, some 50 or so miles from New York city on the way to the Delaware Water Gap. Sadly, like so much of what was once American Catholic religious life, that novitiate is gone, but the incomparable experience of that year remains alive in my memory and enshrined in my heart.
Religious Life has taken many forms throughout the Church's history, but it has from its origin been an important, even integral part of the Church's life. The American Catholic Church I grew up in would not have been possible - or even imaginable - without the country's wide network of Catholic schools and the Religious Sisters who staffed them. The ubiquity of Religious Life throughout the Church's history was recognized by the Second Vatican Council in 1965. According to Perfectae Caritatis, 1:
Indeed from the very beginning of the Church men and women have set about following Christ with greater freedom and imitating Him more closely through the practice of the evangelical counsels, each in his own way leading a life dedicated to God. Many of them, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, lived as hermits or founded religious families, which the Church gladly welcomed and approved by her authority. So it is that in accordance with the Divine Plan a wonderful variety of religious communities has grown up which has made it easier for the Church not only to be equipped for every good work (cf. 2 Timothy 3:17) and ready for the work of the ministry-the building up of the Body of Christ (cf. Ephesians 4:12)-but also to appear adorned with the various gifts of her children like a spouse adorned for her husband (cf. Revelation 21:2) and for the manifold Wisdom of God to be revealed through her (cf. Ephesians 3:10).
Thus far, the theory. The practice, of course, is inevitably somewhat more complicated, for the obvious reason that religious life is about calling very ordinary people to do something somewhat surprising and extraordinary, while remaining their ordinary selves, equipped - for the most part - with still very ordinary means.
Such were the eight of us who assembled on that August afternoon 45 years ago, a very diverse group united only by our still dimly appreciated perception of a common calling. Of those eight, four of us were eventually ordained priests. Three of us four are still alive and active in ministry, but only I (perhaps the one once least likely to succeed) am still in religious life. Such are the strange ways of Providence!
Servant of God Isaac Hecker's vocational journey also had its ups and downs. He came to believe that "Divine Providence had led [him] as it were by the hand, through the different ways of error," to discern his vocation. His formation too was a baffling period of "abasement and helplessness," leading eventually to "great consolation" in the "duties of the sacred ministry." He too experienced severe setbacks, "the source of the deepest affliction" [Narrative of His Life," Rome 1858]. Through it all, he found in religious life meaning, purpose, and fulfillment - as have so many others before and since, myself included. His advice to his fellow Religious remains as relevant now as then: "Let us be thankful to God, humble towards each other and everyone else, and more than ever in earnest to do the work God demands at our hands" [Letter to the American Fathers, Rome, March 11, 1858].
Photo: Former Mount Paul Novitiate, Oak Ridge, NJ.
No comments:
Post a Comment