Nearly 600 Gather at Apostolic Religious Life Symposium

October 01, 2008

The challenges and opportunities confronting religious communities four decades after the Second Vatican Council were explored at Stonehill recently by a Vatican representative well-acquainted with the topic - Cardinal Franc Rode.

Cardinal Rode, Prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, said great vitality and hope exists in many communities in the United States, yet "all is not well with religious life in America."

As a representative of Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Rode expressed the esteem of the Holy Father and his own joy in meeting with "religious men and women who generously devote their lives to Christ and His Gospel."

Cardinal Rode gave the keynote address at the Sept. 27 symposium, Apostolic Religious Life Since Vatican II…Reclaiming the Treasure: Bishops, Theologians, and Religious in Conversation, that drew nearly 600 participants from the New England and beyond, including priests, brothers, sisters, lay Catholics, and several bishops.

The first keynote speaker, Sister Sara Butler, a professor of theology at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y., and a member of the International Theological Commission, said that something in apostolic religious life had been lost and needed to be reclaimed.

The Council, she said, presented great challenges through its universal call to holiness. In response, many communities abandoned disciplines in an effort to be in solidarity with the laity, and through its call for adaptation to modern needs that led some communities to alter practices and even give up the religious habit.

The Council also issued a commitment to social justice, she said, which prompted many religious to become involved in equal rights movements and to go from protesting injustices in society to protesting perceived injustices in the Church and to questioning many of its social teachings with the belief the Church itself must be a just institution in order to challenge global injustice.

Then the sexual abuse crisis and the inadequate response affirmed suspicions that the hierarchy could not be trusted, she said, and many religious responded by calling for institutional change, putting them "on a collision course" with the Church.

Now a new challenge has arrived to reclaim the treasure that was lost, Sister Butler said, which she described as the covenant relationship with Jesus Christ. To do that, she said, religious communities must return to the moral authority of Christ and the Church, and to the charism of their founders.

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