Consecrated Life in Catholicism

Since the beginning of the Church, there have been men and women who have been drawn by the Holy Spirit to follow Christ with greater freedom. They have sought to emulate Him by committing to poverty, chastity, and obedience (this is called "evangelical counsel"). This means that consecrated people are committed to giving everything (poverty) and doing anything (obedience) in God's service, in response to God's love for them (chastity).

Consecrated means “set apart.” Those called to consecrated life are “set apart” by God for this particular way of life which “expresses the deepest nature of the Christian vocation and the yearning of the Church as the Bride for union with her sole Spouse.”  In this “we see the hand of God who, in his Spirit, calls certain individuals to follow Christ more closely, to translate the Gospel into a particular way of life, to read the signs for the times with the eyes of faith and to respond creatively to the needs of the Church” (Pope Francis, Letter to all Consecrated People).

Like all vocations, consecrated life is not an end in itself but it serves to sanctify the individual and to build the body of Christ.

From the “God-given seed” of poverty, chastity, and obedience, “a wonderful and wide-spreading tree has grown up in the field of the Lord, branching out into various forms of the religious life lived in solitude or in the community” (LG, 43).  Some examples of forms of consecrated life are Monasticism,  Religious Life, Secular Institutes, Societies of Apostolic Life, Consecrated Virgins, and Hermits.  Each of these forms expresses itself in a variety of different orders.  Each order has a unique spirituality and charism (or “flavor”) which comes from the person who founded the order. The charism of a religious congregation refers to the distinct spirit that animates a religious community and gives it a particular character. The works (apostolates) of the community reflect the charism.

“There have always been men and women, in the Church, who have known themselves to be called by God find their way to a monastery wherein live a community of people vowed to the only search that really matters, the search for God. They do this, not for themselves, but for every lost soul that will ever walk or crawl upon this earth. They actually choose to take the place of all mankind before God. No drug addict, no criminal, no one, is exempt from the unseen life the monk lives with God.

To this end, they embrace a life of deep love, silence, solitude, prayer, and work. They appear to be cut off from the world by their life of enclosure, by their deliberate choice to leave behind all that is nearest and dearest to them. They do not tend to the obvious wounds of people as do other religious orders, rather they take up residence at the center of people’s pain, the place where known or unknown God is closest. They do battle with the forces that seek to destroy what is good in this world, with the forces that try to distort the image of the God who so longs to draw His people to Himself. They enter into real communion with God and in time come to know Him in ways they could never have imagined. They are like trees that take in carbon dioxide and quietly turn it into oxygen. Monastic men and women make a life form with God, of changing the carbon dioxide within the heart into the oxygen of love.

This is the recipe for monastic life. It varies according to the particular order concerned, just as families differ. All provide thorough, human, and spiritual training for this way of life. The road of love may be exacting from time to time but for the one called, all is joy.”