XXIX World Day of Consecrated Life
Pilgrimage of Hope, a journey through the Days of Consecrated Life
We took part in a World Day of Consecrated Life in Saint Peter’s for the first time in February 2024, when we first arrived at the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery. The Day was presided by the Holy Father and shared with a large number of women and men religious. It was an experience of true ecclesial communion, which we lived with profound gratitude in our first year in the heart of the Church. The Pope’s words, that echoed in our hearts with renewed strength, made us better understand what the Church and the world expect from consecrated people, both from those who serve the Church in the ministry of prayer and daily dedication to a hidden and silent life, and those who have the very important mission of bringing the Gospel to all the peoples.
This profound ecclesial experience led us to reflect on the thoughts of the Popes who instituted and continued these Days, which invisibly unite us to all the consecrated people in the world.
World Days of Consecrated Life
In order to reflect on the meaning and importance of the World Day of Consecrated Life, we have to go back to the time of Saint Paul VI, when religious and priests of Rome and neighbouring cities spontaneously gathered in Saint Peter’s Basilica on the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, to rekindle their faith and their hope by listening to the words of the Pope, and to be sent forth with their candles burning in the desire to bring Christ’s benevolent light to people. As Saint Paul VI said, Christ is truly the light of the world, the light of the Church, the light of souls. And it is to give us, others and everyone, the joy of fixing our gaze in this single light of salvation, which we are grateful to receive from your devout hands, that we send these candles throughout the world, so that they may be piously welcomed, and the benevolent light of the world may shine ever more brightly (2 February 1964).
Years later, in 1997, just before the Jubilee of the Year 2000, Pope Saint John Paul II instituted the World Day for Consecrated Life. The Holy Father said: “You have not only a glorious history to remember and to recount, but also a great history still to be accomplished! Look to the future, where the Spirit is sending you in order to do even greater things”. This called on us to look to the future with hope, trusting in the fidelity of God and in the power of his grace, which can make ever new wonders. It made us return to the wellspring of our vocation, encouraging us to take stock of our lives and renew our commitment to our consecration, and above all, to bear witness that the Lord is the Love that can fill the hearts of all.
Saint John Paull II’s prophetic intuition was continued by his successor Pope Benedict XVI, who on 2 February 2010 said, “dear friends, let us raise to the Lord a hymn of thanksgiving and praise for consecrated life itself. If it did not exist, how much poorer the world would be”. Indeed, “consecrated life witnesses to the superabundance of love that is an incentive to ‘lose’ one’s life in response to the superabundance of the love of the Lord who first ‘lost’ his life for us”.
These Days have been upheld by Pope Francis, who in the same way as his predecessors, offered us words of encouragement: “you are the Church’s perennial dawn. You, dear consecrated brothers and sisters, are the Church’s perennial dawn! I ask you to renew this very day your encounter with Jesus, to walk together towards him. And this will give light to your eyes and strength to your steps”.
The Days, Pope Francis and Hope
These Popes have loved and highlighted religious life as an irreplaceable part of the life and holiness of the Church. Today, we consecrated people are experiencing a particularly fruitful time in our history, a true Paschal mystery despite the fact that there are fewer vocations to consecrated life. We are encouraged to live the joy of our consecration more deeply and radically from the Pope, a religious himself. Indeed, all of Pope Francis’ messages are imbued with his being a religious man, his daily experience as a consecrated person, his understanding and the concreteness of his vows and his experience of community life. This is why he challenges consecrated people in a special way, and transmits to us the firmness of his faith and the joy of his hope, with renewed energy.
Rereading the words to consecrated persons on the Days of Consecrated Life, in the light of this Jubilee Year, one senses almost immediately how Pope Francis returns to the theme of hope so dear to his heart of a shepherd.
Journeying along these words is a pilgrimage of hope in itself because the past opens out to the future, what is old in us opens out to the new that he causes to be born.
- Hope arises from a personal encounter with Christ
How then, can hope be born in souls during this Jubilee Year? The Pope indicates the way clearly:
“Those who truly encounter Jesus cannot remain the same as before. He is the novelty that makes all things new” (2016).
The “encounter of God with his people brings joy and renews hope. … this alone will bring back our joy and hope, this alone will save us from living in a survival mentality. Only this will make our lives fruitful and keep our hearts alive” (2017).
“God calls us to encounter him through faithfulness to concrete things – God is always encountered in concrete things: daily prayer, Holy Mass, Confession, real charity, the daily word of God, closeness, especially to those most in need spiritually or physically. Concrete things, such as obedience to one’s superior and to the rule in the consecrated life. If we put this law into practice with love – with love! – then the Spirit will come and bring God’s surprise, just as in the temple and at Cana. Thus the water of daily life is transformed into the wine of newness, and our life, which seems to be more bound, in reality becomes more free” (2019).
“How good it is for us to hold the Lord ‘in our arms’ (Lk 2:28), like Simeon. Not only in our heads and in our hearts, but also ‘in our hands’, in all that we do: in prayer, at work, at the table, on the telephone, at school, with the poor, everywhere” (2018).
- Hope sustains us with a gaze fixed on the gratuitousness of God’s grace:
According to the Pope, if grace comes from the encounter with Christ, it is sustained by keeping one’s gaze on God’s Grace:
“Knowing how to see grace is the starting point. Looking back, rereading one’s own history and seeing there God’s faithful gift: not only in life’s grand moments, but also in our fragility and weakness, in our insignificance. The tempter, the devil focuses on our “poverty”, our empty hands: ‘In all these years you haven’t got any better, you haven’t achieved what you could have, they haven’t let you do what you were meant to do, you haven’t always been faithful, you are not capable…’ and so on. Each of us knows this story and these words very well. We see this is true in part, and so we go back to thoughts and feelings that disorient us. Thus we risk losing our bearings, the gratuitous love of God. For God loves us always, and gives himself to us, even in our poverty” (2020).
“Savouring the encounter with Jesus is also the remedy for the paralysis of routine, for it opens us up to the daily ‘havoc’ of grace (2018).
“The consecrated person is one who every day looks at himself or herself and says: ‘Everything is gift, all is grace’. Dear brothers and sisters, we did not deserve religious life; it is a gift of love that we have received…Whoever experiences God’s grace above all else can discover the antidote to distrust and to looking at things in a worldly way. There is a temptation that looms over religious life: seeing things in a worldly way. This entails no longer seeing God’s grace as the driving force in life, then going off in search of something to substitute for it: a bit of fame, a consoling affection, finally getting to do what I want. But when a consecrated life no longer revolves around God’s grace, it turns in upon itself. It loses its passion, it grows slack, becomes stagnant. And we know what happens then: we start to demand our own space, our own rights, we let ourselves get dragged into gossip and slander, we take offence at every small thing that does not go our way, and we pour forth litanies of lamentation – lamentation, ‘Father Lamentation’, ‘Sister Lamentation’ – about our brothers, our sisters, our communities, the Church, society. We no longer see the Lord in everything, but only the dynamics of the world, and our hearts grow numb. Then we become creatures of habit, pragmatic, while inside us sadness and distrust grow, that turn into resignation” (2020).
- Hope is renewed in the encounter with others:
We “can never renew our encounter with the Lord without others; we can never leave others behind, never pass over generations, but must accompany one another daily, keeping the Lord always at the centre” (2018).
“If we encounter Jesus and our brothers and sisters in the everyday events of our life, our hearts will no longer be set on the past or the future, but will experience the ‘today of God’ in peace with everyone” (2018).
Consecrated life “blossoms and flourishes in the Church; if it is isolated, it withers. It matures when the young and elderly walk together, when the young rediscover their roots and the elderly welcome those fruits” (2019).
- Hope is rooted in a God who always awaits us:
“This is the reason for our hope: that God never tires of waiting for us. When we turn away, he comes looking for us; when we fall, he lifts us to our feet; when we return to him after losing our way, he waits for us with open arms. His love is not weighed in the balance of our human calculations, but unstintingly gives us the courage to start anew” (2021).
“It is necessary then to recover the lost grace: to go back and, through an intense interior life, return to the spirit of joyful humility, of silent gratitude. This is nourished by adoration, by the work of the knees and the heart, by concrete prayer that struggles and intercedes, capable of reawakening a longing for God, that initial love, that amazement of the first day, that taste of waiting” (2024).
With their clarity and simplicity, these words give us a glimpse of the hopeful soul of Pope Francis, who continues to highlight ever more the personal encounter with Christ and our brothers and sisters, as a source of hope, and the importance of keeping our hearts’ gaze fixed on the gratuitous grace of a God who always awaits us:
“The gaze of consecrated men and women can only be one of hope. Knowing how to hope. Looking around, it is easy to lose hope: things that don’t work, the decline in vocations… There is always the temptation to have a worldly gaze, one devoid of hope. But let us look to the Gospel and see Simeon and Anna: they were elderly, alone, yet they had not lost hope, because they remained in communion with the Lord. Anna ‘did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day’ (v. 37). Here is the secret: never to alienate oneself from the Lord, who is the source of hope. We become blind if we do not look to the Lord every day, if we do not adore him. To adore the Lord. Dear brothers and sisters, let us thank God for the gift of the consecrated life and ask of him a new way of looking, that knows how to see grace, how to look for one’s neighbour, how to hope” (2020).
On 2 February, the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord to Temple, we will celebrate a new World Day of Consecrated Life. The Gospel account of the day speaks of gift, of offering and of donation, and is an icon of the offering we wished to make in following Jesus, the Consecrated One of the Father. The Gospel account also speaks of the hope of the elderly couple, Simeon and Anna, who were “waiting for the consolation of Israel”. In this same perspective, the Pope invites us to be pilgrims turned towards the future, and not to join the prophets of doom, who proclaim the absurdity of consecrated life in the Church today, but rather to follow Jesus Christ by carrying the light of hope high.
Thus, filled with gratitude to the People of God, who accompany us with their prayers on this Day and make us feel that we are part of the Church to whom we gave everything, we would like to turn to our beloved Holy Father with the words dear Blessed Eduardo Pironio addressed on another Day of Consecrated Life in 1984:
Holy Father, thank you for the gift of the Holy Year that is very good for us. Thank you for this Day of gifts and offerings. The Feast of the Presentation of the Lord is a feast of encounter, light and offering. Holy Father, we wish to be light in Christ’s light, we wish to be presented to the Father through the paternal heart of your Holiness, and thus, we would like to renew in your hands, the joy of our consecration: to say yes to the Lord today like Mary, teacher and guide of consecrated life. We wish to be faithful to Christ, to the Church, to our founders and to the world. Holy Father, receive our gift, present our offering to the Father, bless and encourage our renewed selves, illuminate our journey and open our hearts to the generosity of love and the firmness of hope.
Benedictine Sisters of the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery