We are grateful to Father Nicholas Edmonds-Smith for his very timely Recollection on the religious life, and the correct religious response to the troubles engulfing the Church and the world, very apposite in these days of dreadful scandals against chastity, in which the Devil might seem to have gained the upper hand. Not so. The text was delivered on 25th August at Farnborough Abbey.
I would like to thank the brethren of the Grand Priory for the kind invitation to be with you this morning. It is a great honour and privilege and I hope that something of what I have to say today might provide some food for thought, recollection and prayer for you. I must confess to knowing something about the great work of the Order of Maltathroughout the world, and of course, especially the work of the Companions in Oxford, but to knowing very little about the spirituality of the Order - so this day of recollection was also an opportunity for me to learn a little more. I must also confess to being a canonist and not a theologian, nor knowing much about spirituality, so apologies if I start to sound like I spend my time with my head in a book or reading case files or Vatican documents!
This is not a happy time for priests and religious in the Church. The most recent reports of child abuse by clerics and consecrated persons, and the disturbing revelations of episcopal and institutional failure, are the cause of great pain to the whole Church. Just two days ago, some Daughters of Charity - in their seventies and eighties - were arrested in Scotland on charges of terrible historical abuse at a children’s home. Our hearts go out to all those whose lives have been ruined by so-called men and women of God. As our Holy Father put it, St Paul’s words to the Corinthians, “when one member suffers, we all suffer together, must echo in our hearts as we reflect on this tragedy and how we, each of us and together, can help to bring about the renewed conversion, the turning back to the Lord, that God’s People must undertake as an urgency.
The reports will keep coming, as more and more horrible stories emerge of sexual and physical abuse, and the abuse of power, in the Church. There have been calls for the suppression of this congregation or that order. It is difficult to see what some religious houses or even dioceses can possibly do to recover. One article I read even called for the end of all religious orders, saying that they are too much the problem ever to be part of the Church’s future.
And, for very different reasons, one also hears of calls within your own Order to sideline, and diminish the role of, the religious brethren, those Knights who are consecrated to God and to his Church in the most solemn way.
So today I thought it was worth reflecting on the consecrated life, reflecting on its vital, essential place - its place in the heart of the church - and its place within the Order of Malta. In that reflection, one hopes to point out the fundamental and central role that consecrated religious have in the great work of the renewal of the Church: essentially, why we need religious today more than ever.
In his Apostolic Letter to all Religious Men and Women on the occasion of the Year for Consecrated Life 2015, Pope Francis wrote that consecrated persons are called to help the entire church wake up the world. Wake up the Church, and then wake up the World. And that they are to do this by showing the faithful that there is a different, better, more radical, joy-filled way of thinking, acting and living, in short a more Christ-like way of life than most in the church and in the world have adopted.
To say that we have to wake up the world means that much of the world is sleepwalking through life. Clearly many in the church are sleepwalking as well. The Pope stated that religious are the Church’s alarm clocks, the ones in perpetual advent, the sentinels who live the command of Jesus to “Be awake… Watch… Wait…” That they are to be signs of that union with God which comes only through watchfulness. The Holy Father stressed that the Year for Consecrated Life, like the consecrated life itself, is a gift for the whole Church. Because our religious brothers and sisters are to remind all the faithful what the Christian life is about, what our baptismal consecration means. They are meant to startle us from spiritual sleepwalking, so that whole church together can wake up the world. Its not the 1 percent of Christians who take religious vows who are going to do that; but the 1 percent is the catalyst to wake up the church so that the whole Church can go out like St John the Baptist, your great patron and guide, and prepare the way of the Lord, and call people, call God’s people, to repentance, to wake up, to change their lives and so change the world.
In his 1996 Apostolic Exhortation, St John Paul II taught that the consecrated life is not something isolated and marginal, but rather is a reality which affects the whole Church. The consecrated life is, as the Pope put it, at the very heart of the Church as a decisive element for her mission, since it manifests the inner nature of the Christian calling and the striving of the whole Church as Bride towards union with her one Spouse. In other words, the task of religious life in the Church is to make clear who we are called to be as Christians, and where we are supposed to be heading - the union of the whole Church with Christ, in this world and in the next. The consecrated life points out the paradigmatic elements which every Christian in every walk of life, ought to embrace.
So with this principle in view, that consecrated men and women are signs to the whole Church of who Christ is calling us to be and where he is leading us, I would like to look at a two basic elements of religious life. Time only permits a very superficial overview, but hopefully we will be able to touch on some main points. I will look at what consecration means, and how the religious life consists of the search for God.
Firstly, then, what does consecration mean? I’m sure the classicists among you will correct me, but I believe the root of the word consecrate is the idea of cutting and separating. That to consecrate is to cut someone from all the rest that they might be with the Lord. Benedict XVI used to stress that consecration involves a transfer of ownership, a movement from our domain to God’s domain, a deep belonging. He gave analogies for this: the transfer of the title deed of a house, or selling a car. What was ours now belongs to someone else - That is the nature of consecration, whether of things or places, or whether of ourselves, our whole lives. I am yours O Lord!
That was the nature of John Paul II’s motto, and the consecration to Our Lady which he made every day: Totus tuus. I am all yours. Not just partially yours. Here is my deed of ownership. All I am and have is now yours. When we are consecrated to God we belong to him and no longer to ourselves. Once we give ourselves over to the Lord, once we are united to him by that act, we see that Christ in turn consecrates himself for us.
That’s the meaning of the mystery of the Presentation in the Temple, which has become the great feast of Consecrated Life in the Church’s calendar. We know that Jewish Law required the consecration of the first born son, his being given back to the Lord, who’s gift he is. And so Hannah brought Samuel to the Temple, where he spent the rest of his life as God’s property. But the Law allowed that first born, now consecrated to God, to be redeemed, to be purchased back, with the price of a lamb, or two turtledoves or pigeons. In a way, the price takes the place of the child, and God gives him back, on loan as it were. And so our Lord was consecrated at his birth by his parents.
But Jesus also consecrates himself for us. At the Last Supper he prayed: Father, I consecrate myself for them so that they may be consecrated in the truth.Your word is the truth.
Our Lord was separating himself from everything else in order precisely to separate us from everything that was not him, was not of God, so that in himself he could unite us to God. So when we make this total act of belonging, so Jesus makes this total act of belonging. We’ve been bought back, purchased at a great price - the price of Jesus own total consecration for our salvation and sanctification. That’s what the 17th Chapter of St John’s Gospel is all about - that once we are united to Christ, once we belong to him and are separated from everything as he is, in order to be together with him fully, then we share his glory and his mission.
So Pope Benedict says, “At first it will seem that we are leaving everybody else, but we are only leaving for a time, in order to be with the Lord and be sent back by him, together with him, yoked to him, in order to continue his mission”.
In Mark’s Gospel we read about the calling of the first apostles: Jesus calls them by name to be with him, to be his disciples, so that they could be sent out as his apostles. That calling points to the two-fold nature of consecration: first, to be with the Lord, to belong to him; second, to belong to him in such a way that after he says come he says go - and we go, even to the ends of the world, to do his work and continue his mission. This is something that is supposed to become the reality of every baptised person: our baptism is our consecration.
The key is not to spend the rest of our lives trying to take back that gift, snatching ever greater pieces of our lives back from the hands of God. We will be able to profit from the Lord’s consecration, his gift of himself to us, to the extent that we are open to that gift, so that we can experience its fruits - 30, 60, 100 fold. But we don’t teach people this enough. That all their time is God’s, that all their possessions belong to God, all their talents are meant to be used for God’s kingdom and not for their own. A lot of the time we seem to teach the faith to people as if just giving God a few minutes before we go to sleep, mumbling a quick evening prayer, is all that God wants from them - or paying the tax of their time by coming to Mass once a week, or confession once a month; but not to look at their whole life as a total consecration, a handing over of everything, to the Lord.
One of the most important ways that religious wake up the whole Church and the world, is by showing the beauty, and the possibility, of a life given over to the Lord.
In his homily during the Mass which was regrettably not his coronation, Pope Benedict, quoting the inaugural homily of his predecessor, said:
Do not be afraid to open wide the doors of your heart to Christ. If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we give ourselves entirely to him, open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that he might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then end up diminished and deprived of our freedom? No, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. Only in this are the doors of life open wide. Only in this is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this do we experience beauty and liberation. He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life.
When we give ourselves to the Lord, when we consecrate our lives to him, we get ourselves and our lives back, purified and grace-filled. The great paradox is that the more we give ourselves away, the greater our mastery over the self, over our lives. The Church and the world needs to grasp this truth, but the only way that will happen is by the faces of those who live their baptismal calling in the consecrated. Our Lady is of course the great model for us in this: fiat mihi, let it be done to me. Let everything happen to me, according to your word - according to your will.
And how are we to renew that consecration? It is important here to think about the Mass, and why we use the word “consecration” during Mass. We renew our consecration, the gift of ourselves to Christ, as he renews his eternally for us, every day at Mass. Of course, Christ’s sacrifice is the one oblation of himself once offered - and offered for all.; whereas ours - even the solemn consecration of the priesthood or religious vows - is in constant need of renewal. Something that we are called to make again everyday.
Romans 12:1 synthesises the entirety of the Christian life according to Pope Benedict: “I beg you, brothers and sisters, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, your - as it is translated in English - spiritual worship.” But that’s a terrible translation. The Greek is logikēn latreian: logikē meaning logical, reasonable, rational or ordered; latreia meaning worship. So that basically means the only worship that makes sense is to offer all you are to God, that’s the holy and acceptable sacrifice, and that’s what we are called to do at the offertory: Orate fratres, ut meum ac vestrum sacrificium acceptabile fiat apud Deum Patrem Omnipotentem. Pray that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God. That’s when we are all to renew our consecration to the Lord: our baptismal consecration, our consecration as priests, or the gift of our whole selves to the Lord in religious profession. That will enable us to receive the fruits of Christ’s own consecration, and radiate that beauty - that radiance will wake up the Church and the world, and call both Church and World back to the Creator and Redeemer and Sanctifier of all that is.
Of course the special consecration of religious men and women takes place in the particular context of the religious vows. To be religious means to live a Christian life structured by the evangelical counsels, the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. In actual fact, all three are oriented towards that one principle which is to profoundly characterise the consecrated life: that the first place is to be given to the life of the Spirit. As Perfectae Caritatis, the Second Vatican Council document on Religious Life, put it:
Let those who make profession of the evangelical counsels seek and love above all else God who has first loved us (cf. 1 John 4:10) and let them strive to foster in all circumstances a life hidden with Christ in God (cf. Col. 3:3). This love of God both excites and energises that love of one's neighbour which contributes to the salvation of the world and the building up of the Church. This love, in addition, quickens and directs the actual practice of the evangelical counsels.
The Professed Knights, the first class of the Order, are those members who have made that fundamental commitment, that consecration of their whole selves, their possessions, and their wills, to the Lord. It is that consecration which gives the whole Order its religious identity and vocation and purpose: As the Constitutional Charter states,
The purpose of the Order is the promotion of the Glory of God, the sanctification of its members, service to the faith and to the Holy Father, and assistance to one’s neighbour, in accordance with its ancient traditions.
The Glory of God, and the Sanctification of its members. Just as in the whole Church consecrated men and women wake us up to the beauty and reality of a life dedicated to God, so in the Order of Malta, the professed stand as a sign of that commitment to God, that consecration, which is to mark the lives of all the other members.
Pope Benedict stressed the centrality of the Professed in his address to the members of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta in 2013 when he said,
In the nineteenth century, the Order opened up to new and more ample forms of apostolate in the area of charitable assistance and service of the sick and the poor, but without ever abandoning the original ideals, especially that of the intense spiritual life of individual members. In this sense, your commitment must continue with a very particular attention to the religious consecration of the professed members – which constitutes the heart of the Order. You must never forget your roots, when Blessed Gérard and his companions consecrated themselves with vows to the service of the poor, and their vocation was sanctioned by the privilege Pie Postulatio Voluntatis. The members of the newly created institute were thus configured with the features of religious life: commitment to attain Christian perfection by profession of the three vows, the charism for which they were consecrated, and fraternity among the members. The vocation of the professed members, still today, must be the object of great attention, combined with attention to the spiritual life of all.
The three vows are the means by which the consecration of a religious is made. In an address to the convocation of Chaplains of the American Association two years ago, the Prelate of the Order, Bishop Lafitte, reflected on the evangelical counsels from the perspective of a professed Knight of St John.
Poverty, said Bishop Lafitte, establishes a special bond with the suffering Lord. It makes the Knight available in a very special way for the service of the poor and the sick in whom Jesus comes close to us in our humanity. But religious poverty is not simply regarding things, but concerns absolutely everything that comes our way, including the gifts of God and our very selves. Perfect poverty is for a religious to unceasingly hold everything he is or has in open hands for God to use, remove, or alter as he would wish; but we also recognise that God has perfect freedom to add to them as well. Such open-handedness on our part is the pinnacle of utter hope in God alone, of generosity, and of a grateful and respectful love. Here again we have the example of St John the Baptist set before us, who drew people to himself because of his utter poverty, his detachment from the things of this world, and his dependence on God alone: it was clear to all that everything he was and all that he had came from God, and this is what made him attractive to those who were drawn to him and to his call to repentance.
Pope Francis drew special attention, though, to the fact that such hope in God does not mean that we rely on God only for the positive and welcome of his gifts, but also for the more demanding ones. We must seek to actively and joyfully accept even such things as sickness, diminishment, loss, being misunderstood, being rejected, being ignored and unloved if that is what God sends us in his wise and powerful love, and we must do so precisely because we believe deeply and beyond all doubt that our Father would never give us a scorpion if we ask for bread, a stone if we ask for an egg. If this is what we get, this is what God wishes to give. In hope and faith, those who give all to God to him, must accept joyfully, prayerfully, and gratefully all that God gives in return: all that God gives us is for our good, whether we would ask for it or not, and so living such a poverty is a matter of hope. The danger with poverty is the same danger as with the other two vows: thinking that because I have given up so much, I have given enough, so I’m entitled to the little that I have - to this or that thing, rather than giving it all to the Lord in hopeful detachment. Thats where the corruption really sets in. We aren’t going to be able to fit through the eye of the needle if we are still holding onto lots of things with a clenched fist. In a world that is so materialistic, the witness of evangelical poverty is sorely needed - to give credibility to the mission of the Church and of the Order.
The Prelate of the Order mentioned chastity, which is “always for the Kingdom of Heaven and not for other things”, and has the effect of “making our heart, the heart of man, free, thus allowing him to orientate himself towards charity for all men. It makes us more disposed to service”. That charity which is born of chastity, of surrendering romantic attachments and the promise of family love, enables us to love all people, to love even the unlovable. But in the first place we are to love each other. That means loving the brethren, and then loving the brothers and sisters who make up the rest of the Order. We cannot ever really think we can love and serve the Poor of Christ, or the Lords the sick, if we cannot love the brother who is sitting next to us in choir, or opposite us during a meeting, or who is our superior or inferior in the Grand Priory or the Order. Chastity means never having that word “enough” in our vocabulary - never saying, I’ve loved enough. That’s enough for today. John 13:1: Christ who loved his own who were in the world, loved them to the end. To the absolute extreme. Just kept on loving. We never run out of love if we love without limit. That kind of love founded the Order, and countless Orders and Congregations since. That kind of love built hospitals and schools and old age homes. That kind of love tends the sick and the dying. That kind of love lays down his life for his friends. That kind of love wakes up the world.
And in the third place, Bishop Lafitte said that obedience prepares for the sacrifice of one’s will and for humility, and certainly, the Bishop said, we all know that obedience and acceptation of authority is most difficult. And it is the toughest aspect of the priesthood or the religious life. Most people in the world think it is poverty or chastity - how can you go without owning this or that thing; how can you cope without sex or marriage or children for the rest of your life? But when you actually live it, obedience is where the real challenge is. Now the Lord will often bless us with superiors who are easy to obey, for whom we have great human respect for their wisdom and we think that they have better judgment than we do so its easier most of the time to trust them. But the Lord will also bless us with superiors who are very hard to obey, because then it has to become far more supernatural. But its through the humility of listening to God’s voice through any of his instruments, that we can show the world that we don’t always have to get our own way, and that God’s will can be done despite our wills not being done. That is what truly belonging to God will mean. It is, as the Bishop said, a gift of God. So obedience is extraordinary and with humility, it is an extraordinary gift. Its through disobedience that the devil tries to tempt us the most - and the first sin is always really one of disobedience, of not trusting in the Lord because of not listening to the Lord.
Of course religious obedience is always double obedience - superiors have to be listening to the Lord even more than those they command, they must equally have consecrated their wills to Christ, and be obedient to him in a conspicuous way so that their voice truly is the voice of God. This is the only way we can discover the true nature of freedom, without which we aren’t ever going to be able to love. We have been made by God who is love, to love, and we are only going to be able to experience that love in obedience to him. This witness is the only way to wake up a world which is obsessed with radical personal autonomy, showing how obedience doesn’t eliminate our human dignity, but ennobles it. As Pope Benedict taught, we lose nothing and gain everything.
The Second element with which religious are meant to sound the alarm clock is with regards to the search for God. It is increasingly obvious that we live in a world in which many people are seekers - they have a hunger for something beyond themselves, a hunger for God, for eternity, for something else, certainly a hunger for happiness - but a lot of the time they are going down dead ends rather than following the only way that will actually lead to these things. Priests and religious often get the reputation of people who have it all figured out: all this God stuff and spirituality and prayer and all that. The Church, however, expects religious to be paradigms of the search itself, of the hunger for God. Consecrated life, so various Church documents tell us, is defined precisely by the search for God. That is what distinguishes more than anything else the life of those who have said yes to the vocation to follow God as religious or consecrated people in the world.
In 2008 the Congregation for Religious summarised the entirety of the consecrated life in the words of Psalm 27: It is Your Face, O Lord, that I seek. Faciem tuam Domine, requiram. Consecrated life flourishes in the environment of the search for the face of the Lord and the ways that lead to him. The Congregation noted that the search isn’t easy, but rather it is a struggle - because God is God and his thoughts and his ways are not always our thoughts and our ways; and it added that consecrated persons give witness to the task “at once laborious and joyful” of the diligent search for the divine will and the divine life, and for this choose to use every means available that helps one to know it and sustain it while bringing it to fulfilment. Consecrated life, the life of professed religious in the church, is about that search for God’s face.
It’s not as if we don’t find the Lord; the consecrated life is about the fact that we have found the face of the Lord, but that face is not static - it is an eternal abyss into which we jump, the depths of which can never be plumbed. Consecrated life becomes stale - and therefore dangerous - when that search for the beauty of the Lord, the face of the Lord, begins to be something in past tense, rather than present tense with a yearning towards the future: the search for God becomes something we used to do, before, in the noviciate, or the first flush of religious life or priesthood.
Benedict XVI stressed this search in a powerful address to so-called Representatives of Culture in 2008 when he visited Paris. He spoke to many atheists there, but atheists who had some experience of Christendom, of the value, or at least the history, of Christianity in Europe. Of course he wanted to evangelise them, but went to meet them precisely on their terms and see what Church history provides with regard to answers. These were people who are searching for something, for the truth: you are not a member of one of these academies because you don’t think there’s something to find, despite the relativism which accompanies so much atheistic discourse. Benedict, in his beautiful way, with great brilliance, wanted to lead them to real culture, which is of course based on the cult, the worship of Almighty God. The service of consecrated people, seeking God’s face, helps everyone rediscover, or discover for the first time, the proper coordinated of life. Benedict said that the essential goal of the consecrated way of life that inspired the first monks to leave civilisation behind and go into the desert was querere Deum, seeking God. He said: Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent - think about the sack of Rome in 410 by Alaric, think about the other barbarian invasions, think about when St Augustine was writing in North Africa as the barbarian hordes were sweeping down and destroying literally everything in their wake, when it seemed as if they all were doomed - amid the confusion of the times when nothing seemed like it was going to last, they wanted to do the essential, they wanted to make an effort to find that which is perennially valid and lasting, they wanted to find life itself. Searching for God they were seeking the definitive behind the provisional; querere Deum.
Because they were Christians, this wasn’t an expedition into a trackless wilderness, a search leading to total darkness; God himself had provided signposts, he marked out a path that was theirs to find and to follow - Scripture, the Church, prayer and the sacraments, Christ Jesus himself. Pope Benedict said that in our own day, when God has become for some people truly the Great Unknown, this querere Deum, the seeking God and letting God find us, is no less necessary than in former times - if not more so.
Of course one of the big challenges through at us when we talk about seeking God is the argument that when you seek the face of God you necessarily turn your back on everyone else. This is of course the argument we all know so well, against Mass facing ad orientem, that in turning to God the priest turns away from the people. Whereas he turns to the Lord, he faces God, as the leader and shepherd who marches at the head of his flock, to help them towards him whom we are to love above all things. In the same way, in the consecrated life, we we turn our face to God we are not turning our backs on everyone else. Exactly the opposite in fact.
Benedict stressed that, as we can see in the lives of so many consecrated men and women, those religious who have not betrayed their vows and the Church and their God, the search for God spurs them to search for God’s lost sheep, and to draw near as Good Samaritans to those in need.
St John Paul II taught in Vita Consecrata: the fact that religious fix their gaze on the Lord’s face doesn’t diminish their commitment on behalf of humanity; on the contrary it strengthens this commitment, enabling it to have an impact on the world, on history - freeing history from all that disfigures it. The quest for divine beauty impels consecrated people to care for the deformed image of God in the faces of their brothers and sisters, faces disfigured by hinger or pain or disease, faces disillusioned by failed political systems and empty promises, humiliated faces of the weak and oppressed and dispossessed, faces frightened by violence, the anguished faces of abused and exploited minors or women, the tired faces of immigrants far from their homes, faces of the elderly with no one to care for them and give them the basics of a dignified life. This is another reasons why the search for God that defines the life of our consecrated vowed religious brothers and sisters is no less important today than ever - because when we lose that search for the face of God, we forget the image of God in others. And the world, the flesh and the devil became capable of trampling all over the dignity of the sons and daughters of our Father.
There’s a deep amnesia in systems like communism or fascism, in the abortion movement or sexual hedonists, or radical feminism, or all those thousand and one voices calling for personal freedom and self-determination against all others, a deep amnesia in all those wondering away, forgetting the search for God, exchanging their glory for the image of a bull that eats grass, and forgetting the God who saved them.
Prayer, adoration, the sacrifice of the Mass, the sacrament of penance, the voice of God as it speaks to us in the reading of his Word, seeking his face as he cries out to us in the sick, the poor and the needy. These are the obligations, the demands - but also the helps given to us - in the Christian life, and especially in the religious life - that require us to search for God and assist us in that search. The search which defines the consecrated life, and witnesses in those consecrated lives to the rest of the Church and the world what is to define our own lives as the People of God.
So that seeking him we might find him, and in finding him might be found by him, and in finding him and being found by him enter into love with him, and so that his will might become our own, and we can enter into an ever deeper communion with him. The temptation is for us to respond without that seeking, thinking that we’ve already got the answers, or the structures, or the tools, or the gifts, we need. Thinking that in finding him we capture him, or that the searching is not worth the cost. When we do that we become the hardened soil into which the seed of God’s word, and therefore God’s life, cannot penetrate.
It is in prayer, in faithfulness to prayer, that we realise we don’t have all the answers and the structures and the tools and the gifts we need, that we realise the search for God is worth any cost. Most Catholics will think that prayer is important, but they will pray only when they are finished all the other things on their agenda - rather than centring their entire life around God, they try to squeeze God into an already very crowded life. And this is both tempting and understandable - we are all busy, we all have very crowded lives, and the temptation is to say our prayers, or recite our Office, in moments of time snatched between other more important things. Consecrated people, however, meant to be able to show the rest of us that God comes first.
Chapter 43 of the Benedictine Rule states “nihil operi dei praeponatur”, Let nothing be preferred to the Work of God, to the worship of God. So the example of the primacy of prayer is so important for the world to see. John Paul II in 1996 said that religious are to be “true experts in prayer”. As much as a heart surgeon is an expert in triple bypasses, or an Apple Store genius in the inner workings of iOs 11.4.1, so consecrated men and women are supposed to be experts in prayer. The Pope said that
The call to holiness is accepted and can be cultivated only in the silence of adoration before the infinite transcendence of God: "We must confess that we all have need of this silence, filled with the presence of him who is adored: in theology, so as to exploit fully its own sapiential and spiritual soul; in prayer, so that we may never forget that seeing God means coming down the mountain with a face so radiant that we are obliged to cover it with a veil (cf. Ex 34:33); in commitment, so that we will refuse to be locked in a struggle without love and forgiveness. All, believers and nonbelievers alike, need to learn a silence that allows the Other to speak when and how he wishes, and allows us to understand his words".In practice this involves great fidelity to liturgical and personal prayer, to periods devoted to mental prayer and contemplation, to Eucharistic adoration, to monthly retreats and to spiritual exercises.
It is this emphasis on seeking the face of the Lord, to which the professed are to witness, but which we are all called to undertake as a fundamental indispensable aspect of the Christian life, which makes the Order of Malta, in the words of Bishop Lafitte, the exact opposite of an NGO. Every member, from the Grandmaster to the Companions, is called to holiness, and all their work is to be inspired by the search for God and the love that consecrates them to Christ. That consecration and that search is what makes fruitful all the activity of the Order in every part of the Church and the World.
Every day of recollection, every retreat or time of reflection and prayer should make us ask some fundamental questions: are we still willing to renew our consecration to the Lord? Will we still allow ourselves to be woken up by those men and women who are totally devoted to him? If we claim that devotion, are we willing to be sentinels, watchmen and warriors, calling our brothers and sisters back to their original holiness? Are we still seeking the Lord as we once did? Do we still have that passion to know him and to love him, and to make him known and loved? As my own St Philip said: He who wishes for anything but Christ, does not know what he wishes; he who asks for anything but Christ, does not know what he is asking; he who works, and not for Christ, does not know what he is doing.
I want to end with the words of Pope Francis, which is not something I often say. But in his Apostolic Letter to all Consecrated People, the Holy Father spoke in such a moving way of the value of religious in the Church that it bears repeating again and again, especially during the present crisis in the Church, and in the constitutional work currently being undertaken in the Order:
I ask the whole Christian people to be increasingly aware of the gift which is the presence of our many consecrated men and women, heirs of the great saints who have written the history of Christianity. What would the Church be without Saint Benedict and Saint Basil, without Saint Augustine and Saint Bernard, without Saint Francis and Saint Dominic, Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Angela Merici and Saint Vincent de Paul. The list could go on and on, up to Saint John Bosco and Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. As Blessed Paul VI pointed out: “Without this concrete sign there would be a danger that the charity which animates the entire Church would grow cold, that the salvific paradox of the Gospel would be blunted, and that the “salt” of faith would lose its savour in a world wandering from God. So I invite every Christian community to a moment of thanksgiving to the Lord and grateful remembrance for all the gifts we continue to receive, thanks to the sanctity of founders and foundresses, and from the fidelity to their charism shown by so many consecrated men and women. I ask all of you to draw close to these men and women, to rejoice with them, to share their difficulties and to assist them, to whatever degree possible, in their ministries and works, for the latter are, in the end, those of the entire Church. And let them know the love with the entire Christian people feels for them.
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