Religious Life: A Dialogue

Extract

I should like to question strongly the assertion made in Fergus Kerr’s article Priorities in Religious Life (October 1973), and repeated from the essay by Jerome Murphy O’Connor, that: ‘What is distinctive about religious life is that religious consent to live according to the evangelical counsels, but in community. That is the difference’.

I would maintain that what is distinctive about religious life is that religious undertake to live in consecrated celibacy, and I think that the writer of the article referred to implies this when he says, in his third section: ‘It is time, too, that there were religious communities to demonstrate that men and women can live together in consecrated celibacy,’ alluding to the fact that the cradle of the Dominican Order, Prouille, was by St Dominic’s legislation a double community (but there was a good deal more to that story!)’

If community, if living together, why celibacy? Surely this is contrary to the idea of community taken in its most radical and absolute form, which is the ideal the writer seems to be advocating. If celibacy is still to be maintained and consecrated even in the most ‘communitarian’ situation, this must surely be because it is prior to the ideal of community, and of the essence of religious life?

I freely admit that, historically, this has not always been considered so. There have been cases, such as that of the Order of Knights Templar, where the Church accepted as an authentic religious vocation a way of life combined with the married state, and I would not wish to suggest that the life of married clergy is not a religious vocation; I submit, however, that consecrated celibacy has come to be the defining characteristic of ‘religious life’ as we understand it in our era, and that participation in a formal ‘religious community’ is secondary to this.