Love, Friendship, and Beauty: On the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of a Magisterial Document about Religious Life and the Apostolate

Abstract

IN THE 2007 FESTSCHRIFT ESSAY that I offered to Fr. Matthew Lamb, I made reference to commission of American prelates that was appointed almost twenty-five years ago to inquire into sharp decline of vocations to religious life in our country after Second Vatican Council (1962-65). (1) It was within context of Extraordinary Holy Year in honor of Redemption, on Easter Sunday, April 3, 1983, that Pope John Paul II sent a message on this matter to bishops in United States. In this letter, Pope expressed grave concern over the marked decline in recent years in numbers of young people seeking to enter religious To address this grave concern, John Paul, in spring of 1983, appointed Quinn Commission. This circumstance forms proximate background for a document that affords occasion for this article. It was on May 31, 1983, that Holy See issued document whose twenty-fifth anniversary we observe in zoos: Essential in Church's Teaching on Religious Life As Applied to Institutes Dedicated to Works of Apostolate. Whereas findings and recommendations of Quinn Commission have come and gone, work of institutes and organizations that took seriously recommendations of Essential Elements continues to bear fruit. (2) Within this same time frame (1983-2008), John Paul began to speak frequently about a evangelization. The original mention of this phrase may date from his first apostolic visit to Poland on June 9, 1979, when John Paul in Nowa Huta vehemently lifted Cross and, deeply moved, proclaimed, A new has begun! From early 1980s, evangelization became a leitmotiv of rhetoric that we have come to associate with John Paul's papacy. This history may explain why Pope Benedict XVI chose ad limina visit of Polish hierarchy in 2005 to express his conviction that secret of new lies in sound collaboration among bishops, priests, religious, and laity. (3) In teachings of post-conciliar popes, we discover that new is intended to enact sanctification of culture. For John Paul, post-Communist European culture; for Benedict, post-Christian Western culture. Both popes however have emphasized actual urgency of renewal task, of promoting new evangelization, even though it must be acknowledged that Church has always been faced with daunting challenge to transform secular culture of a given period. Take, for example, church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Within church and cloister walks, one still sees fading frescoes that depict Dominican priests encouraging early Renaissance Florentines to look beyond richly material world of capitalist-humanist period we call Quattrocento. These Dominican friars urged citizens of Florence to consider instead spiritual values of eternal life. Fifteenth-century humanism constituted what one might call a distraction for Christian believers; certain figures of period give evidence of espousing misplaced values and of pursuing exaggerated directions. By contrast, new of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century encounters a culture that has been deformed by ideologies generated out of philosophical errors of modern period. In short, we find ourselves in a more disadvantageous position than did contemporaries of artists such as Donatello, Fra Angelico, and Botticelli. Today, Church asks Catholics to persuade a people wedded to technocracy and committed to expediency of truth that Christ alone reveals to us our high destiny and that Church alone provides what is required to pursue this destiny. To put it differently, to a world of technocratic utilitarians, Church announces way to highest wisdom; and to a culture dominated by allure of expedient, Church insists on life of virtuous excellence. …