It’s
already well-known to readers of this blog that, as the Order of Virgins is a
form of consecrated life which has been only fairly recently re-introduced into
the life of the modern Church, there are still a lot of open questions
regarding the more concrete aspects of how this vocation is to be lived out.
For instance, we might ask: what is the life of a consecrated virgin supposed
to “look like?” How does she present herself in public? What sort of formation
should she have had? How is her relationship with her bishop and her diocese
supposed to function? And what exactly does it mean for her to be “dedicated to
the service of the Church?”
One
way that canonists often try to resolve these kinds of ambiguities is by
looking for parallel situations in the Church. When we find ourselves needing
to contend with gaps in the Church’s law—whether the lacunae pertain to
consecrated virginity specifically, or to any other challengingly vague
circumstance in the life of the Church—we can begin to address these gaps by considering
other approved ways of life (or circumstances with adequate legislation) which
are fundamentally similar in some important respect. Then once we have identified
how the Church approaches these better-understood situations, we can adapt and
apply the rules governing those situations to the circumstances which are still
in question.
To
this end, I’ve noticed many commentators tend to assume that secular institutes
provide the closest parallel to the Order of Virgins, based primarily on the
fact that both secular institute members and consecrated virgins “live in the
world.”* However, I believe that looking at secular institutes as the
interpretive key for understanding the revived Order of Virgins is a mistake,
for several reasons:
1. The Church is still
somewhat unclear on the canonical and theological nature of secular institutes
One
reason why I believe secular institutes really do not provide a good model for
understanding consecrated virginity is because, at this point in time, there is
still a lot about secular institutes which the Church can’t yet fully
categorize or articulate.
The
Church does give us a basic working definition of secular institutes in canon 710 of the Code of Canon Law. Here, a
secular institute is identified as: “…an institute of consecrated life in which
the Christian faithful, living in the world, strive for the perfection of
charity and seek to contribute to the sanctification of the world, especially
from within.”
We
know that, like religious, secular institute members make a profession to
observe the evangelical counsels (cf. can. 723 §1). But unlike religious, the
vows of secular institute members are not considered “public.” Secular
institute members are also similar to religious in the sense that they are
consecrated specifically as part of a particular community with its own founder
and charism. Yet in contrast with religious, they usually do not share a
household or live together. Secular institute members are often described by
the Church as called to be a “leaven in the world,” (cf. CCC 929) and as such they
generally work in secular jobs and refrain from adopting any special dress,
titles, or customs which would outwardly distinguish them as consecrated
persons.
However,
even in light of these basics, there is still a great deal of variety among the
different secular institutes. For example, secular institutes can vary widely
in how they understand the practice of “discretion.” Some institutes encourage their
members to share their special ecclesial identity openly whenever it could be
pastorally helpful (at least one secular institute even has special identifying
dress which members wear in some circumstances), while other institutes have
the tradition of keeping their members’ vocation much more hidden. Some secular institutes have a very strong emphasis on the “secularity” and specifically
“lay” character of their vocation, while other institutes were at least originally founded with the intention of their members living what was
essentially a modified form of religious life. In many secular institutes, the
members may only see each other once or twice each year; but on the other hand,
some secular institutes do allow for or encourage a certain level of common life among their members.
But
perhaps more significant to my point here, the Church’s writings on secular
institutes are often confusing, or even seemingly self-contradictory. For
example, the Church describes secular institutes as being institutes of
consecrated life, with the subsequent implication that members of secular
institutes are thus truly consecrated. The Church also describes consecrated
life as being a different state from that of laity (cf. can. 588 §1). However,
in canon 711, secular institute membership is described as something which
“does not change the member’s proper canonical condition among the people of
God, whether lay or clerical.” So it would seem to be currently a bit of
conundrum as to how secular institute members can be truly consecrated, and
truly lay (i.e., not having changed their canonical condition to “consecrated”)
at the same time!
A
similar confusing gap in the Church’s understanding of secular institutes is
the question of precisely what kind of vows secular institute members make.** Secular
institutes are distinct from religious institutes in that their vows are not
public. And since their vows are not public, then it would seem to follow
logically that their vows would therefore have to be considered private. One
characteristic of private vows per se
is that they are a personal initiative, and not something officially received
in the name of the Church. Yet it would seem that secular institute members’
vows are indeed received in the name of the Church when they are received by
the moderator of their institute. Some commentators have tried to resolve this
inconsistency by calling secular institute members’ vows “semi-public”—but this
is also problematic, since “semi-public vows” are not a concept which is
actually mentioned anywhere in our current canon law.
Naturally,
since secular institutes are a newer form of consecrated life, it is
understandable that there are still questions which have yet to be resolved,
and so these observations of mine are certainly not meant to undermine the life
and vocation of current secular institute members. However, it does still stand to reason that
all these unanswered questions would make secular institutes a
less-than-helpful interpretive key for other forms of consecrated life.
2. Secular institutes
have many fundamental differences from consecrated virginity
Even
apart from the above-mentioned ambiguities, when we consider what we actually do
know about secular institutes, it becomes clear that secular institutes are
structurally, fundamentally different from the Order of Virgins.
For
one thing, as was just noted, secular institute members’ profession of the evangelical
counsels is private (or at least less-than-fully public), whereas consecrated
virginity is very much a public state of consecrated life. In fact, we could go
so far as to say that a woman enters into the Order of Virgins in the most
public way possible, via a liturgical ritual to which all the faithful are to
be invited. This element alone carries implications which make secular
institutes inappropriate a parallel for understanding the Order of Virgins.
Another
very significant canonical difference is that consecrated virginity is a non-institutional
form of consecrated life, in the sense that virgins are consecrated as individuals
rather specifically as members of a special group or community. A consecrated
virgin remains under the direct authority of her bishop, and her only “institutional”
affiliation within the Church is her connection to her diocese. Likewise,
consecrated virgins do not have a special call to follow the charismatic
spirituality of any particular founder or foundress.
In
contrast, secular institutes are by definition institutional. One becomes
consecrated as a secular institute member specifically by joining a community
which is a secular institute. A secular institute member has his or her
profession of the evangelical counsels received by the moderator (the word used
in lieu of “superior” for secular institutes) of their institute, and the
concrete ways in which they observe the counsels is determined by the
constitution, customs, and spirituality, of their particular institute. And
like religious—but unlike consecrated virgins—secular institute members are
called to live out the unique charism handed down to them from the founder or
foundress of their institute.
Additionally,
there are many essential elements of the vocation to consecrated virginity
which the Church does not ascribe to secular institutes, and vice-versa. For
example, only consecrated virgins are explicitly identified as “brides of Christ.” While bridal spirituality is absolutely central to the vocation of a
consecrated virgin, it would seem to be, at most, optional for a woman secular
institute member.
On
the other hand, while secular institute members are given a specific mission “to
order temporal things according to God and to inform the world by the power of
the gospel,” (can. 713 §2) and are explicitly directed to “lead their lives in
the ordinary conditions of the world,” (can. 714) this sort of language and
“leaven” imagery is never used in magisterial documents to describe the Order
of Virgins. In fact, consecrated virgins are arguably given the very opposite
vocation of serving as an “eschatological sign of the world to come” (cf. the
praenotanda of the Rite of Consecration).
3. The issue of anachronism
There
is an issue of anachronism. Today’s Order of Virgins was intended as a revival
of an ancient Patristic form of consecrated life, (cf. Vita Consecrata, 7) whereas secular institutes are almost overwhelmingly
a twentieth-century development.
Secular
institutes are the newest form of consecrated life in the Church. While it
could be argued that various earlier associations in the Church history served
as precursors to today’s secular institutes (the earliest Ursuline Sisters and
French Daughters of the Heart of Mary are often cited as examples of this), secular
institutes as such were not formally recognized and endorsed by the Church
until 1947, when Pope Pius XII promulgated the Apostolic Constitution Provida Mater Ecclesia. What’s more, the
central defining charism of secular institutes—i.e., an apostolic mission to
order the sphere of temporal affairs in accord with Christian values—is very
recent development in the life of the Church. It was virtually unheard of
before the twentieth century to have a distinctive spirituality ordered
specifically around the call to be “leaven in the world.” (That is, prior to
the twentieth century, it’s difficult to find any examples of the Church
promoting “ordinary Christian life in the world” as a vocation to be embraced
through a special, recognized form of dedicated evangelical life. “Leaven”
imagery, being scriptural in origin, was of course still used before the modern
era. However, this tended to be a description of Christian life in general,
rather than as a distinctive charism in its own right.)
Of
course, the “newness” of secular institutes should not be automatically written
off as a bad thing. It is very reasonable to believe that the Holy Spirit would
inspire a new form of consecrated life to meet the specific needs of the modern
world, just as different forms of religious and consecrated life were inspired
at different points in the Church’s history to meet the needs of the Church and
human society as a whole.***
However,
this newness does make secular institutes an unhelpful parallel for
understanding consecrated virginity, which was meant as a restoration of the
ancient, Patristic-era Order of Virgins. To say that consecrated virgins should
look to secular institutes for guidance in understanding consecrated virginity
would be to anachronistically superimpose a distinctively modern charism onto
what is really an ancient vocation.
One other point…
To
address one final point, I’ve occasionally seen it argued that, because secular
institute members are at least officially permitted to receive the Rite of Consecration to a Life of Virginity,****
we can deduce that secular institute members and consecrated virgins “living in
the world” are meant to be living similar ways of life. Or in other words,
because a vocation to consecrated virginity and a vocation to a secular
institute can theoretically co-exist in the same person (just as a nun in
certain religious Orders could have a twofold vocation to religious life and to
consecrated virginity), we should therefore assume that the Church intended
non-monastic consecrated virgins to a live fully secular lifestyle in the
strongest sense of the term. According to this train of thought, since a
secular institute member can supposedly live out her distinctly secular
vocation even after receiving the consecration of virgins, it must thereby
follow that consecrated virginity isn’t something which could conflict or
overshadow this call to a strongly secular way of life.
The
first observation I have here is that, even after researching this topic fairly
extensively, I am not aware of any actual documented cases of a particular
secular institute encouraging its members to seek the consecration of virgins.
So to being with, it would seem that the issue of a woman needing to harmonize
her twin vocations to consecrated virginity and secular institute membership is
a primarily hypothetical one at this point in time.
But
more substantially, to me this line of reasoning also seems to be based on some
not-yet-justified assumptions. Namely, how do we know that secular institute membership
should be the “dominant” spirituality in a woman who is called to both
vocations? Why should we think of consecrated virginity as merely a possible
facet of a vocation to secular institute membership, rather than the other way
around? Instead, might it possibly make more sense to think of secular
institute membership as being more like a secondary support to a “primary”
vocation to consecrated virginity?
To
look at one potential parallel on this, we do have examples of diocesan or
secular priests (i.e., priests “living in the world”) who are also secular
institute members. In a few cases, these priest-secular institute members are
actually incardinated into their institute. However, most of the time, priests
who are members of secular institutes are diocesan priests who are incardinated
into their diocese in the normal way. While they share in the spirituality and
limited community life of their institute, these priests still owe their
primary obedience to their bishop, and remain dedicated to priestly ministry in
their dioceses.
Even
if they belong to a secular institute which includes lay members, such priests
still fulfill their specifically priestly obligations, and continue to dress
and present themselves publicly as priests. That is, such priests do not strive
to live as laypeople, even though most secular institutes put a heavy emphasis
on “lay spirituality.” Secular institute membership among the clergy is seen as
an affirmation and support of their priesthood, rather than a negation of the
“specialness” of their priestly vocation.
Similarly,
I think the theoretical possibility of female secular institute members
becoming consecrated virgins might say more about the nature of secular
institutes than it does about the nature of consecrated virginity. And so I
would go so far as to argue that—insofar as consecrated virginity and secular
institute membership aren’t de jure
incompatible—consecrated virgins who are members of secular institutes should see
consecrated virginity as their principal vocation, and should give this primary
vocation pride of place in terms of the way they order their exterior lives.
notes:
*
For example, Sr. Sharon Holland, IHM makes this very point in her famous article
“Consecrated Virgins for Today’s Church.”
**
And to make this even more confusing, some secular institutes profess the
evangelical counsels not through vows, but rather through some other “sacred
bond”—i.e., a commitment which is technically something other than a vow per
se.
***
Earlier examples of different forms of consecrated life developing in order to
respond prophetically to the needs of the Church and contemporary society could
include: organized monasticism arising just in time to preserve western culture
and learning after the fall of the Roman empire, or the foundation of the
mendicant Orders in the Middle Ages serving to bring renewal to the
comfortably-established medieval Church.
****
Sr. Sharon Holland also discusses this in “Consecrated Virgins for Today’s Church.”
