Rome, Italy, June 1, 2018
“Men who are authentically free”
Constitutions, 200
Dear Fathers, Brothers, Seminarians, and Novices,
Benedict XVI once said to seminarians in Rome: “At all times, freedom has been humanity’s great dream, since the beginning, but particularly in modern times.” And, although in the 20th century the freedom of human beings was attacked probably like never before, it is done no less in our own times, though it may be done more slyly. Just think of the example of the biological, mental, and moral manipulation which the ideology of gender implies, the informational slavery which the means of communication submit us to, freedom apart from truth—proper of liberalism, the uncontrolled explosion of all sorts of addictions due to the eclipse of ethics and morals, progressivism, etc.
For this reason, our Religious Family having been born in these times, our proper law makes its own the denunciation of Saint John Paul II, who already said in 1992: “Today they have extended in a great way the range of the abuses of freedom, and this leads to new forms of slavery, very dangerous ones, because they are disguised under the appearance of freedom. This is the paradox, the profound drama of our time: in the name of freedom, slavery is imposed.” For the same reason, our Directory of Evangelization of Culture abounds in that subject.
Consequently, the problematic of freedom is a fundamental problematic for us—one of enormous transcendence—which is of particular concern to us.
Not only because we are interested in entering into the problematics of modern culture, but because Christian freedom is an intrinsic part and an indispensable component of the spirit of our Institute and of the manner according to which we desire to always live, as our Constitutions clearly declare: “The spirit which has animated our Institute from its beginning… is to live and to make others live under the action of the Holy Spirit, without coercion of any kind; this must be done by scrupulously respecting each individual’s conscience, promoting healthy pluralism, bringing others to fully live the freedom of God’s children, because where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”
Such freedom is found in the very beginnings of our vocation as consecrated persons in the Institute of the Incarnate Word. For, who can deny the fact that “every vocation is born from the encounter of two freedoms: that which is Divine, and that which is human,” and that our vocation to love the Incarnate Word above all things is nothing other than a call to freedom and to happiness. Furthermore, it is precisely by the full exercise of our freedom that we have deliberately decided to bind ourselves to God in loving service. That is why our formula of profession says: “I, N.N. freely make an oblation of my entire being to God.”
Thus, I think that it could be of great profit to our souls to go over those magnificent words from our Constitutions, which invite us to “fully live the freedom of God’s children,” for which I am dedicating this circular letter to this very topic.
1. Freedom according to our proper law
In keeping with the spirit that animates our Institute, the topic of freedom is explicitly mentioned countless times. In addition, the decisive implications that freedom has in the various applications of our particular way of living our consecration are manifest. Nevertheless, I consider it to be especially relevant the mention made in the Directory of Spirituality, in article 4, where it speaks of the glorious life of our Lord, specifically in reference to his Resurrection. We, who are called “to live as a resurrected people,” understand that we are “called…to freedom, because for freedom Christ has set us free.”
A freedom which has nothing to do with that attitude which carries on as “a pretext for evil…or as an excuse to serve the flesh.” Rather, it is about an “authentic freedom [which] identifies with holiness, with the New Law, with the Christian faith and with charity. It is liberty of the children of God. Freedom has truth as its foundation as Our Lord showed when He said, the truth will set you free. Freedom is characteristic of those who allow the Holy Spirit to lead them: The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. This is why Saint Augustine teaches, ‘Love, and do what you will.’ Saint John of the Cross places freedom at the summit of the mount of perfection, ‘There is no road here, for there is no law for the righteous man.’”
This freedom of the children of God—as the Directory of Spirituality so clearly explains—makes so that “we…live as if we were resurrected… [that is], in the freedom of the children of God who are not enslaved: neither under the elemental spirits of the universe; nor under the letter that brings death; nor under the spirit of the world; because we must not submit again to the yoke of slavery… (otherwise) Christ would be of no benefit to us.”
Thus, freedom, as our proper law so precisely understands it, according to the Magisterium of the Church, “implies ‘building a communion and a participation… upon three inseparable aspects: the relation of man with the world, as lord; with people, as brother; and with God, as son.’” To such an extent that, we can say that one who is authentically free has the spirit of a prince, which our proper law, with inspired lines describes by saying: “They do not demand freedom but hierarchy. They set laws and fulfill them… They feel honor as life [itself]… They are able to give things that no one demands and abstain from things that no one prohibits,” etc. They are “those who are free in Christ from all type of slavery” and go on through life “avoiding sin and doing meritorious works, without anything having the power to prevent them… from reaching the last end.”
Furthermore, following the overwhelming teaching of Aquinas, our proper law affirms: “Free is he who is the cause of his own action; a servant is he whose cause of action is his master. Therefore, he who acts by his own decision acts freely; he who acts by another agent, does not. Thus, he who avoids evil not because it is evil, but because it is God’s command, is not free; but he who avoids evil because it is evil, that one is free. The Holy Spirit, who makes the soul perfect interiorly through the good habit, accomplishes this. The result is that the soul abstains from evil because of love, as if it were God’s command. Therefore it is called free, not because it rejects divine law, but because it is inclined by good habits to do what is required by the divine law.” All of which, consequently, brings about “an immense joy” and a sound joy of soul, which will increase proportionately the greater our gift of self is.
Therefore, the clamorous exhortation arises: “We must be free and must know how to form free men and women: ‘Free… free… free… free… free… free with your freedom… that they may go everywhere with… the holy Gospel issuing from their mouth and the holy Rosary in their hands, and bay like your watchdogs, burn like embers, and illuminate the darkness of the world like suns.’”
This is the spirit of freedom which burns in our hearts and which we irrepressibly want to enflame in others. For, as the Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen said: “Freedom is ours to give it to others.” And so, our missionaries placing their “assignments totally and freely in the hands of their superiors” and exercising “dominion over everything, together with a free will that is quick to please God alone,” go forth to raise the banner of the Incarnate Word in those lands where nobody wants to go, and they are unafraid of “set fire to their ships after disembarking.” It is this very freedom that they preach to souls, convinced that “a true evangelization cannot exist without setting forth the entire truth about Jesus Christ, about the Church, and about man; because authentic salvation and true freedom do not exist apart from the logic of the Gospel, proclaimed and lived in its integrity.” For, ultimately, this is what our Lord sends us to: to bring glad tiding to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives. At the same time, “freely-based on one’s own conviction,” with love and courage, “with pious subjection and respect,” recognizing themselves as subjects of the legitimate authorities, they joyfully and completely adhere themselves to the discipline of the Institute and carry out their apostolate with “authentic ecclesial spirituality,” that is, “in union with legitimate Shepherds, most especially with a cordial fidelity with the Bishop of Rome,” multiplying enthusiastic projects so that more and more souls might come to the knowledge of the truth which sets us free. Such that, what Saint Irenaeus said of the first messengers of the Gospel might be said of us: “They were preachers of the truth and apostles of freedom.”
For this reason, in the following point of this letter, I would like to develop the first part of this affirmation: “We should be…free.”
2. Free in Christ from all type of slavery
In his first encyclical letter, Saint John Paul the Great wrote “Mature humanity means full use of the gift of freedom received from the Creator when he called to existence the man made ‘in his image, after his likeness.’ This gift finds its full realization in the unreserved giving of the whole of one’s human person, in a spirit of the love of a spouse, to Christ and, with Christ, to all those to whom he sends men and women totally consecrated to him in accordance with the evangelical counsels.”
Therefore, “the evangelical counsels of chastity, poverty, and obedience, lived by Christ in the fullness of his human nature as the Son of God and embraced for the love of God, appear as a way for the full realization of persons opposed to dehumanization…they proclaim the liberty of the children of God and the joy of living according to the evangelical beatitudes.” Then, far from being a renunciation which impoverishes, rather, our vows enrichen us because they free us: “obstacles that may separate us from the fervor of charity and the perfection of divine worship, and consecrate us more intimately to the service of God” to arrive at possessing God in an intimate and complete way.
In other words: the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience “do not alienate our freedom”—as some false brothersargue, who interfere to spy on our freedom in Jesus Christ; neither do the vows “hinder or limit our personality, but rather they free us, giving us the possibility of a more constant and generous gift in the daily service of God and our brethren.” Consequently, far from undermining our dignity, the vows carry it to maturity, and carry us to our full potential.
Yes, total belonging to the Incarnate Word makes us joyfully free. And we, have freely chosen to belong to Him, making an oblation of our entire being through the practice of the evangelical counsels “in accordance with the evangelical way traced in the Constitutions of the Institute of the Incarnate Word,” because we are convinced that, as the Mystical Doctor says, “the immense good of God do not fit nor come down except into an empty and solitary heart.”
- Chastity and freedom
In this way, by means of the vow of chastity, “we have freely chosen to be like eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven,” in order to have “Christ as the exclusive Spouse of one’s soul.” We joyfully sacrifice our fleshly affections so as to “be completely free to tend to God,” for it is towards him that we want to order all our loves.
And so, the practice of this vow gives us a great affective freedom and “frees us from many of the cares that would make it impossible to consecrate all our strength to the good of our neighbor.” Otherwise, how would our religious be able to dedicate themselves to caring for, with such loving dedication, the children, youth, and elderly people from the nine homes of mercy which our Institute has? Or how would our monks be able to hide themselves from the world to offer to God not only their prayers and supplications, but also their very immolation of self? Or, how would our missionaries be able to take on the great difficulties and tasks of the missionary pilgrimage across the immense horizons of the non-Christian world if they had to attend to the material and spiritual needs of a family? But, above all, how would we be able to love Christ with an undivided heart? An unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But a married man is anxious about the things of the world, how he may please his wife.
Thus, does the vow of chastity make us free: “free to generously occupy ourselves with the works of charity;” and furthermore, “to exercise a perfect charity with our neighbors;” but over and above all, free to love Christ with an undivided heart.
- Poverty and freedom
On its part, the vow of poverty “freely chosen,” and which for us “implies a life poor both in act and in spirit, following the example of Christ…eagerly restrained and detached from earthly riches, and as such, implying dependency and a limitation on the use and disposal of goods,” frees us from the earthly conditioning “to more perfectly and more radically imitate Christ in His poverty.”
Thanks to the conscious and effective practice of the vow of poverty, our life “endless worship of Divine Providence since the religious is certain that ‘bodily danger does not threaten those who with the intention of following Christ, abandon all their possessions and entrust themselves to Divine Providence.’”
A religious who follows “the naked Christ being himself naked” becomes an authentic witness of interior freedom and questions all other men, leading them to recognize the spirit of the Incarnate Word within him. In the words of Blessed Pope Paul VI, “In a civilization and a world marked by a prodigious movement of almost indefinite material growth, what witness would be offered by a religious who let himself be carried away by an uncurbed seeking for his own ease, and who considered it normal to allow himself without discernment or restraint everything that is offered him?”
For this reason, Saint John of the Cross recommended to a prioress: “see to it that you conserve the spirit of poverty and of detachment from all things—if not, know that you will fall into a thousand spiritual and temporal necessities—wishing only to be content with God alone. And know that you will not have, nor feel any more needs that those to which you subject your heart; because, in time of shortage, the poor in spirit is more constant and joyful, because he has put his all on nothing, and it is there that he finds the great depths of heart.”
Ours then, is that of “gaining total detachment not only from material goods (which is the proper object of the virtue of poverty), but also from everything that is not God Himself.” It is “loving everything that God wants us to love, without being slaves to our affections for creatures. This means to love without being chained, to possess without remaining imprisoned, to use without selfish pleasure, to keep absolute independence and to look for God’s glory in everything and for everything.”
- Obedience and freedom
Finally, in reference to the vow of obedience we should say, in all sincerity, that nothing makes us freer than the constant and radical practice of this vow, for love of God and love of neighbor. For, as you all know, this “This vow offers the most excellent of all goods to God, namely, one’s own will. It contains the other two vows that are made through obedience, and it properly refers to the acts that pertain more to the end of religious life, since nobody is a religious without this vow (even if one makes the other vows).”
Saint Thomas sees in religious obedience the most perfect form of imitation of the Incarnate Word, who became obedient unto death, death on a cross. That is why obedience takes the first place in the holocaust of religious profession. In this way, the vow of obedience becomes for us the most fitting way to overcome “attachment to our own will” and to unite ourselves constantly and completely to the salvific will of Christ. For we concretely pledge ourselves to imitate the Incarnate Word who learned obedience through what he suffered.
Following this solid and beautiful Christian tradition, through the vow of obedience we commit ourselves in a particular way “to obey our superiors in everything that relates to religious and apostolic life” imitating Christ who obeyed human authority, seeing in that authority a sign of the Divine will: “legitimate superiors act on behalf of God when they command according to the Constitutions,” as canon law and our proper law affirm. Such is the way that we become docile to the Holy Spirit and ready for all that God disposes for us: We ask you, brothers, to respect those who are laboring among you and who are over you in the Lord and who admonish you, and to show esteem for them with special love on account of their work.
It is fascinating to see the paternal condescension of our proper law in reminding us, following the Angelic Doctor, “how difficult obedience is. Because those who are not expert in obedience
and have not learned it in the most difficult things think that obedience is very easy. But for you to know what obedience is, it is necessary that you learn to obey in the most difficult things.
Those who do not learn through obedience to be subject, will never know how to command well when they should command.” Saint John Bosco taught his religious the same thing: “if we want to learn how to command, we must first of all learn how to obey.”
As a matter of fact, not only is an obedience of execution and of will asked of us, but we also aspire for an obedience of judgment, by which we should conform our interior judgment with that of our superior. Thus, the vow of obedience makes such that “moved by supernatural motives and without doing violence to the nature of things one adjusts one’s own judgment to that of the superior.”
It is always helpful to remember that our obedience is not simply submission to human authority. For, he who obeys submits himself to God, to the Divine will expressed in the will of the superiors. It is a matter of faith. We should believe that God communicates his Will to us by means of our superiors: “The religious must see in his superior someone who acts as Christ.” Even in those cases when the superiors’ defects are more patent; because the will of the superior, as long as it is not “contrary to the laws of God or the constitutions of the institute, or involving a serious and certain evil,” expresses the Divine will, here and now.
The masterful advice of Saint John of the Cross, which our Constitutions make their own, is both consoling as well as illumining in reference to the radical and convicted fulfillment of this vow: “Always look upon the superior as though [looking] upon God, no matter who he happens to be, for he takes God’s place. And note that the devil, humility’s enemy, is a great and crafty meddler in this area. Much profit and gain come from considering the superior in this light, but serious loss and harm lie in not doing so. Watch, therefore, with singular care that you do not dwell on your superior’s character, behavior, ability, or any other courses of action, for you will harm yourself so much so as to change your obedience from divine to human, as it will be motivated only by the visible traits of the superior and not by the invisible God whom you serve through him… If you fail to strive for indifference regarding the superiority of one over the other, with respect to your personal feelings, you will by no means be a spiritual person, nor will you keep your vows well.” How many religious, even among our own, have been lost for having ignored such holy advice!
Far be it from us that “‘judgmental’ obedience, which obeys meanwhile murmuring and complaining, and the spirit of antagonism, which forms groups that oppose everything ordered by the superior; subservience and pharisaic obedience, that is, a cowardly and hypocritical obedience that shows a defeated will, but not a surrendered will, and that even tries to move the superior in its own direction.” Our way should be marked by “learning to freely live the vow of obedience, and never succumbing to the false dialectics raised between freedom and obedience, or freedom and authority, or vice versa.”
- Obedience, freedom, and conscience
It is certain that, at times, obedience can be particularly difficult. But it is also true that, except in cases when obedience would lead to something immoral, one should never place opposition between obedience to the legitimate superiors and one’s own conscience. Regarding this point, I will take the liberty to quote certain full paragraphs from the document The Service of Authority and Obedience, by the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (nn. 26-27):
“In the concrete development of the mission, some instances of obedience can be particularly difficult because points of view or means of apostolic or diaconal action can be perceived and thought of in different ways. In the face of certain difficult situations of obedience, to all appearances absolutely ‘absurd,’ there can arise the temptation towards distrust and even abandonment. Is it worth continuing? Could I not realize my ideas better in another context? Why get worn out in pointless conflicts?
St. Benedict already confronted the question of an obedience ‘very burdensome or positively impossible to perform’; and St. Francis of Assisi considered the case in which ‘the subject sees things which are better and more useful for his soul than those which the prelate [superior] orders him to do.’ The Father of monasticism replies, asking for a free, open, humble and trusting dialogue between the monk and the abbot, though in the end, if requested, the monk ‘obeys for the love of God and confiding in his help.’ The Saint of Assisi invites the person to implement a ‘loving obedience,’ in which the friar voluntarily sacrifices his views and carries out the command requested, because in this way he ‘pleases God and neighbor,’ and sees a ‘perfect obedience’, there, where even not being able to obey because he is being commanded ‘something against his soul’, the religious does not break unity with the superior and community, and is also ready to bear persecution because of it. ‘In fact,’ observes St. Francis, ‘whoever chooses to suffer persecution rather than wish to be separated from his brothers truly remains in perfect obedience because he lays down his life for his brothers.’ This reminds us that love and communion represent supreme values to which even the exercise of authority and obedience are subordinated.
It must be recognized that it is understandable, on the one hand, to have a certain attachment to personal ideas and convictions, fruit of reflection or of experience and matured over time, and it is also a good thing to seek to defend them and to carry them forward, always in the perspective of the Reign of God, in a straightforward and constructive dialogue. On the other hand, it is not to be forgotten that the model is always Jesus of Nazareth, who even during his Passion asked God that his will, as Father, be done, nor did he pull back from death on the cross (cf. Heb 5:7).
When requested to give up their own ideas or projects, consecrated persons might experience loss and a sense of rejection of authority or to feel within themselves the ‘loud cries and tears’ (Heb 5:7) and pleading that the bitter chalice might pass. But that is also the time to entrust oneself to the Father in order that his will might be done, and thus to be able to participate actively, with all one’s being, in the mission of Christ ‘for the life of the world’ (Jn 6:51).
It is in saying these difficult ‘yeses’ that one can understand in depth the sense of obedience as a supreme act of freedom, expressed in total and confident abandoning of oneself to Christ, the Son freely obedient to the Father, and one can understand the sense of mission as an obedient offering of oneself that brings the blessing of the Most High: ‘I will bless you with every blessing…(and) all the nations of the earth shall gain blessing for themselves, because you have obeyed my voice’ (Gen 22:17, 18). In that blessing obedient consecrated persons know that they will again find all that they left with the sacrifice of their being detached; within that blessing is also hidden the full realization of their own humanity (cf. Jn 12:25).
Here one could ask: Can there be situations in which a person’s conscience would not seem to permit following the directives given by persons in authority? Can it happen, in short, that the consecrated person must state in relation to the norms or to their superiors: ‘It is necessary to obey God rather than men’ (Acts 5:29)? This is the case of the so-called objection in conscience of which Paul VI spoke, and that should be considered in its authentic meaning.
If it is true that conscience is the place where the voice of the Lord resounds, the voice that indicates to us how to behave, it is also true that it is necessary to learn to listen to this voice very attentively in order to know how to recognize it and distinguish it from other voices. In fact, it is necessary not to confuse this voice with those which emerge from a subjectivism that ignores or disregards the sources and criteria that cannot be given up and are mandatory in the formation of judgments of conscience: ‘It is the “heart” converted to the Lord and to the love of what is good which is really the source of true judgments of conscience,’ and ‘freedom of conscience is never freedom “from” the truth but always and only freedom “in” the truth.’
The consecrated person will then have to reflect long before concluding that it is not the obedience received but what is sensed within him or herself that represents the will of God. He or she will also have to remember to keep the law of mediation in force in all cases, guarding him or herself from making serious decisions without any examination and verification. It certainly remains indisputable that what counts is to arrive at knowing and fulfilling the will of God, but it ought to be likewise indisputable that the consecrated person is committed by vow to accept this holy will through determined mediations. To say that what counts is the will of God, not the means, and to reject them or to accept them only on the basis of what is pleasing, can take away the meaning of the person’s vow, and empty his or her own life of one of its essential characteristics.
Consequently, ‘apart from an order manifestly contrary to the laws of God or the constitutions of the institute, or one involving a serious and certain evil — in which case there is no obligation to obey — the superior’s decisions concern a field in which the calculation of the greater good can vary according to the point of view. To conclude from the fact that a directive seems objectively less good that it is unlawful and contrary to conscience would mean an unrealistic disregard of the obscurity and ambivalence of many human realities. Besides, refusal to obey involves an often serious loss for the common good. A religious should not easily conclude that there is a contradiction between the judgment of his conscience and that of his superior. This exceptional situation will sometimes involve true interior suffering, after the pattern of Christ himself ‘who learned obedience through suffering’ (Heb 5:8). Here, ends the quote from the document of the CIVCSVA.
The conduct of those false brothers who, acting “under the guise of ‘reasonableness’ go against their superiors, with complaints, murmuring, oppositions, so as to go on living according to their own disordered will” has nothing to do with the vow of obedience of a member of the Institute of the Incarnate Word. Because that way of acting is a lack of obedience which leads to affliction, to a lack of tranquility, which makes religious life feel like a burden, even leading, not infrequently to not being faithful and the abandoning of religious life itself; for it attacks the very essence of religious life in one of the vows, which, happens to be the most important of them; but what is worse, it attacks the very finality of religious life which gives meaning to everything else: charity.
On the contrary, as our proper law says, quoting Saint John Bosco, “if you will obey according to what is indicated I can assure you in the name of the Lord that you will have a peaceful and happy life in the congregation.”
And so we may say that the vow of obedience frees us as well “in a certain sense, from the worries and uncertainties in the direction of our own life in relation to God,” as the Apostle says: Obey your leaders and defer to them, for they keep watch over you. In addition, this vow “leads to human maturity. [For], ‘far from lessening the dignity of the human person, by extending the freedom of the sons of God, leads it to maturity.’ As it is ‘a particular expression of interior freedom.’ As Christ, who affirmed: I lay down my life … No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own.”
Throughout the history of consecrated life, and in our own Institute in past years, there have not been lacking cases of some who consider that obedience is a ‘necessary evil’ within religious life. Something along the lines of, if there are so many of us, somebody needs to ‘organize’ things. Understood in this way, obedience is considered to be an evil as far as it is a restriction on people’s freedom and in many cases an impediment of one’s personal growth. With what has been said so far, we have shown that this theory doesn’t hold, and it totally lacks the theological consideration of the vow of obedience as well as the consideration of religious life itself as a ‘theological space,’ in the words of Saint John Paul II. The same Holy Pontiff taught that this type of attitude could derive from “those perceptions of freedom which, in the fundamental human prerogative, separate freedom from its relationship with truth and the moral law.” He went on to teach that “the obedience which marks the consecrated life… in an especially vigorous way… reproposes the obedience of Christ to the Father and, taking this mystery as its point of departure, testifies that there is no contradiction between obedience and freedom. Indeed, the Son’s attitude discloses the mystery of human freedom as the path of obedience to the Father’s will, and the mystery of obedience as the path to the gradual conquest of true freedom. It is precisely this mystery which consecrated persons wish to acknowledge by this particular vow. By obedience they intend to show their awareness of being children of the Father, as a result of which they wish to take the Father’s will as their daily bread (cf. Jn 4:34), as their rock, their joy, their shield and their fortress (cf. Ps 18:2). Thus, they show that they are growing in the full truth about themselves, remaining in touch with the source of their existence and therefore offering this most consoling message: The lovers of your law have great peace; they never stumble (Ps 118:165).”
It is the example of Christ, whose way of life we are called to imitate, who drives us on to embrace obedience. Opposing obedience and freedom would mean considering that Christ himself was not free. For, in the Scriptures, it is precisely his obedience to the Father which is exalted. His food was the will of his Father, his prayer, from the very moment of his coming into the world (in the Incarnation) up until his Passion was: Father…not my will but yours be done… yet, not as I will, but as you will. He was the one who became obedient unto death, death on a cross, and Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered, and he was heard because of his reverence, that is to say, for his humble submission. Well, this Lord, whose obedience is so highly praised, was exceedingly free, augustly free, immeasurably free: I lay down my life …No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own. I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again. And in his obedience to the salvific design of the Father, did not disdain, but rather wanted to submit himself as well to human intervention, such as his earthly father and Mother: he was obedient to them. He became like a lamb [lead] to the slaughter, and freely gave himself up, handed over to sinners, as he himself announced: Herod, Pilate, the court o the Sanhedrin, the Roman soldiers. Had he not come, by chance, to make reparation for our disobedience? Did he not save us in this way? Is this not the attitude that we want to imitate when we profess our religious vows freely choosing to imitate the way of life that He chose for himself and the way of life led by the Apostles?
For all that has been said up to this point, we can say that “the renunciations, real and noteworthy, which the vows demand of us do not produce in us a depersonalizing effect, but they are rather destined to perfect our lives, as a fruit of the supernatural grace which responds to the noblest and deepest aspirations of our heart. It is in this sense that Saint Thomas speaks of spiritualis libertas and augmentum spirituale: freedom and growth of spirit.” Nor do the vows hinder or frustrate our freedom, but rather, we are convinced that our freedom is elevated, becomes more genuine, deeper, fuller, and we are brought to a greater communion with God and with others. With our spirit nourished by this freedom of the sons of God, we set out on the marvelous adventure of a total gift of self to the Gospel ideals, to the Person of Christ, within his Church and to the mission. “To fulfill this more perfectly, we consecrate ourselves to Mary in filial slavery of love.”
Finally, freedom with a capital F is given more precisely by the authentic practice of the religious vows. And so, we may attain to our fullness and the maximum dominion: only when we have fulfilled to the last the will of God. Opposing oneself to this is a distinctive work of the devil, who is jealous of man’s perfection, who raises up “charlatans and masters of seduction,” as Saint Thomas so energetically affirms.
3. Forming men who are authentically free
After what has been said, there arises a natural, irrepressible impetus to want to “form men who are authentically free and masters of themselves, who by that selfmastery are capable of giving themselves totally.”
Concerning this, our proper law dedicates numerous paragraphs to point out what we should understand by a “man who is authentically free” in accordance with the spirit which animates our Institute, and the means that we have to do so.
Our Constitutions explicitly define what authentically free man are by saying: “we must be priests who do everything out of love, who do good even when no one is obliges them, or because the Superior is watching, nor on account of commendations or rewards. We must not be obsequious with the superiors or try to obtain advantages. As priests, we should know how to implement fraternal correction, without caring about what others think of us, and understand with Saint Teresa of Jesus ‘the nothingness of the world and how it would soon come to an end.’”
And in our Directory of Major Seminaries it says: “we want to form seminarians who live a ‘lordship,’ over themselves, over men, over the world, and over the devil; who rejoice in the ‘freedom’ of the sons of God in full docility to the Holy Spirit, being convinced that Everything belongs to you, Paul or Apollos or Cephas, or the world or life or death, or the present or the future: all belong to you, and you to Christ, and Christ to God; who have the ‘spirit of a prince’ and who are noble; who are valiant and are totally determined to attain holiness; who overcome the temptations which are proper to priestly life […] Seminarians who admire and love the truth, thanks to an ample intellectual formation; who give time to theorize and intellectual leisure, and who genuinely seek the truth, that is, that they come to know it with certainty and make it their own through contemplation; that have an intelligence which they apply to temporal realities as subjected to eternal realities, in such a way that the former serve as a means to arrive at the knowledge of the latter. […] Accustomed to discipline, that is ‘submission to the rules of life so that the truth may become flesh in the disciple’s life;’ virtuous men, following the doctrine of the ‘great masters of the spiritual life.’ […] Seminarians who know how to give the proper worth to each thing, in a hierarchal way: who love the Institute by living the proper charism […] Seminarians with the soul of an artist […] We want to form, above all, seminarians who are disposed to be ‘given over totally to the service of God and to the pastoral ministry,’ even to the point of martyrdom, […] We want to form our future priests so that they be ‘poets, metaphysicians, and soldiers, who sing, contemplate, and fight.’”
To accomplish this, we have numerous means for human, intellectual, spiritual, and pastoral formation of our candidates. For, “Along with intellectual formation, the will must be appropriately formed through constant practice of the virtues and control of passions, so that we are seeking and choosing only the greater good, always and everywhere,” for in such a way, one can be said to be truly free.
It’s not only about forming free men but forming in freedom. Our proper law establishes it as such, following the directives of the Ecclesiastic Magisterium: “Formation ordered to a responsible freedom, united to an education of one’s moral conscience is necessary, so as to give ‘a conscious and free response, and therefore a loving response, to God’s demands, to God’s love’” For, ultimately, “Only in freedom can man direct himself toward goodness.”
A key task is played in this work by the very important and delicate mission of those who dedicate themselves as formators of our members, for “the formation of the students depends principally” on them. Because “Absolutely nothing is gained by forming clones. Forming in ‘series’ is a disgrace, a lack of respect for the dignity of the human person and it is a lack of respect to the dignity that each religious man and woman should receive. It is even preferable to have a certain disorderliness rather than going against freedom.” Therefore, we should promote to the full—as we have always tried to do—respect for freedom and for conscience of one and another in all that is legitimate: “respecting what which is specific of each one and his contribution to the community: some as superiors and others as subjects.”
This formation in freedom certainly implies an education following the religious vows, according to what has been said, in which “the seminarian is the necessary and irreplaceable agent in his own formation” “precisely by means of a docility […] which necessarily includes ‘a welcome for the human “mediating” forces which the Spirit employs.’ This docility is not opposed to due freedom, but it is properly in a docile acceptance of the educative action of the formators that freedom shines forth and is perfected in a radical way.”
May we always keep in mind that “what each one does, nobody else can do, not even God, because God does not make anyone holy against his own will. In this sense, one can reasonably affirm the need for a correct ‘self-formation,’ that is, the responsible use of a freedom which gives one’s ‘own convinced and heartfelt cooperation’ to the action of the Holy Spirit and of the different formators.” Our seminarians “should learn indispensably to govern themselves, as the nature of virtue demands…This is the end and the heights of all true education.”
For this reason, we should foster, “as the best means of educating in this free way of acting, the participation of all,” a participation which should be responsible and with clear attitudes of availability to a generous and diligent commitment. In this way, we will obtain a greater and deeper commitment on the part of all members by everyone being active in the formation process, rather than being merely passive objects which is the same as not being formed in any way.
It is our obligation, as it always has been, to strive to really reach that freedom, that true freedom which is a freedom which has its costs, a freedom which implies sacrifice, a freedom which implies renunciations, but in which one finds true love. On the contrary, a soul will never reach the extent of the full stature of Christ, which is holiness, as the Saint of Fontiveros most clearly illustrates: “It makes little difference whether a bird is tied by a thin thread or by a cord. Even if it is tied by thread, the bird will be held bound just as surely as if it were tied by cord; that is, it will be impeded from flying as long as it does not break the thread. Admittedly the thread is easier to break, but no matter how easily this may be done, the bird will not fly away without first doing so. This is the lot of those who are attached to something: No matter how much virtue they have they will not reach the freedom of the divine union.”
And so, dear brothers, to conclude: let us never conform ourselves to a false or partial freedom, but one that is heroic and full. We are not free only because we can do that which pleases us, or that which we are able to do with the few or abundant means which we might at one time have. We are definitely not free when we ‘fulfill ourselves’ with prejudices at the sake of others. We are not any freer because we have more options. Nor are we any freer when we act as if we knew no other teaching except our personal judgments, nor any law other than our own will. We are not totally free when we are not entirely available for the mission or for what our superiors might ask of us. We are not free when we are not docile to the discipline of Christ and when we do not let him be our Lord. Because all of this demonstrates that our heart is not emptied so that God might fill it with ineffable delight. And so, “may God deliver us from these evil obstacles that hinder such sweet and delightful freedom!”
May the “yes” of the Most Holy Virgin by means of which she became a servant be the model after which we conform our lives to that of the Word, who became flesh in her most pure womb.
A big hug for all of you.
In the Incarnate Word,
Fr. Gustavo Nieto, IVE
General Superior
