On Obedience in Secular Institutes

In secular institutes,¹ life in accordance with the Evangelical Counsels ought to be lived in a particular, while completely undiminished, way. Therefore in all attempts of adaptation to their special situation the attention must be sharply focused on the original model of every life lived in accordance with these counsels, that is to say Jesus Christ and His Church, as His immaculate bride. Canonistic concepts and distinctions cannot be the absolute point of departure, being subsidiary and secondary to the reality of revelation. The same holds for ascetic, psychological or sociological considerations, for the primary consideration is: what does God want of man? Only afterwards we ask how the redeeming will of God encounters us, promotes us, and how it will have to be interpreted in a given historical situation. Looking at the original data of revelation, we find a fixed point on which all variable theoretical and practical questions must be orientated, particularly for the Evangelical Counsels. We therefore consider 1. the obedience of the Lord as the original foundation of our obedience; 2. true obedience of the Church to her Lord; 3. obedience as an Evangelical Counsel. We pass over all its forms in monastic and apostolic orders and concern ourselves with its structure in secular institutes.

We can only deal in an approximate way with the first and second points. I apologize and ask for your understanding if, due to brevity not everything seems as clear as I may wish. The thoughts expressed may however serve for further consideration. To my mind they are indispensable for a fuller comprehension of our real subject. Finally it must be stated that Christian obedience is only lived and understood in the pneumatic (within the Holy Spirit) prospect of the freedom and love of God, even when taking legal and institutional forms.

I. The Obedience of Christ

Four signs show that the obedience of Christ is unique; in spite of this, His grace allows us to participate in it and to imitate Him.

1. In contrast to all other men, Christ, in taking human form (and hence in each act of His life) carries out a free act of obedience of the pre⁠-⁠existing Son of God to His Father (Phil 2:6). Here we look in faith into the mystery of the Trinity and experience that the eternal love of the Son to the Father within the Holy Spirit takes the form of a mission, and therefore of divine obedience. In the Trinity the persons are of equal rank, their acts of life are identical, and yet, the order of proceeding of the persons is real; humanly expressed, a “democratic” and a “hierarchic” element coexist in harmony within God. If the Son, out of His love for the Father, and in order to represent the love of His Father to the world, and to reconcile the world with God, becomes man, then His entire existence is purely at the disposition of the saving will of God (oboedientia antecedens). Through baptism but also on the basis of a special vocation and consecration in religious life, Christians participate through grace in the mystery of this readiness.

2. The incarnation is the active work of the Holy Spirit (whereas the Son lets himself become man), and after that the Holy Spirit will lead and inspire Jesus at all times in His free obedience of love [Liebesgehorsam]. This is important, since in the life of Jesus the Holy Spirit does not represent primarily the subjective and intra⁠-⁠divine intimacy between Father and Son but an objectivized and factual presentation of the paternal will, and this in a double form; first (similarly with the prophets) as a direct inspiration and mandate from above, and then, as an earthly pattern given to the Son in the law and the prophecies. He must fulfill both at the same time. Analogously, a member of a secular institute must try to comply simultaneously with the requirements of a spiritual rule and a temporal situation. The man Jesus also continues to pray to His Father to be able to comply with this double mandate.

3. In his existence, Jesus shows a complete identity between obedience to the Father and the task of personal responsibility in the accomplishment of His task. This identity too has its roots in the mystery of the Trinity. When we try to find this difficult identity in the imitation of Christ, we must remain aware of the fact that no purely human asceticism or psychology can reach it but that our being members in Christ and a life of sanctifying grace is its primary condition. On the one hand, the following is valid for Jesus: “The Son can do nothing of His own accord, but only what He sees the Father doing… the Father loves the Son and shows Him all that He Himself is doing” (Jn 5:19), on the other hand the Father transmits to the Son “all judgment” (5:22), giving Him even the possibility to have life in Himself (5:26), consequently to translate under His own responsibility the heavenly will of the Father to the temporal world and its situation. And because the Son dedicates Himself unconditionally to the will of the Father, He can also state His own will to the Father: “Father I desire…” (Jn 17:24, cf. 11:41).

4. But the goal of the life of Jesus is the Cross, the carrying of all the sins of the world. He walks towards the hour of the Father in free love, but the weight of this hour remains an absolutely excessive demand for His human nature. For this hour he came; He chose it freely. But He can only endure it in the night of obedience which lets happen what no man would want to happen (“if possible, let this chalice pass”), indeed feeling abandoned by the Father, which at the same time means that He can no longer see the meaning of the task in the night (cf. St. John of the Cross). There are moments in Christian obedience too where we are allowed to glimpse something of the summit of Christ’s obedience; and we must not forget that in the end, the world was not reconciled with God through words, deeds or miracles but through the cross (Gal 3:10; Eph 2:14; Phil 2:8; Col 2:14). It is from the cross that everything else receives its penetrating significance (cf. the Letter to the Hebrews).

II. The Obedience of the Church

1. Prior to being the socially organized “people of God” with a structure of charisms and offices, the Church is the body and bride of Christ, “purified” and sanctified by Him, intimately connected with His spirit and His disposition. This seemingly “ideal” Church has always been real already in Mary, who as a special grace received the spirit of absolute disponibility to the triune God: ecce ancilla. In her there is no dualism between commandment and counsel, between freedom and obedience, between divine mandate and her own responsibility. Therefore she can and may express her own will⁠—⁠in Cana⁠—⁠(just as Jesus expresses His will to the Father) because her will is immediately included in the will of Jesus. “Do whatever He tells you” (Jn 2:5). Her obedience is always one that surrenders [überlassender], so that she can react with the right spontaneity (Lk 1:29; 2:19,51). In spite of this her obedience is, like the obedience of the Son, overburdened and often does not understand (Lk 2:50; cf. Mt 12:48). In the end, this obedience is led to the Cross too.

Close to this center of the Church are all the truly holy members of the Church who, in whatever ecclesial form of life, have been able to unite their will in love, renunciation, and prayer to the divine will.

2. Every Christian knowingly accepting the faith and receiving baptism decides freely to identify his attitude fundamentally with the innermost attitude of the holy Church, and to allow himself to be educated and purified by the Church in the direction of this attitude in spite of his personal resistance. To bridge the gap between being totally conformed to the will of God and holy Church, and my sinful will that is always turning back to rebellion, Christians are provided with the ministerial hierarchy, scripture and sacrament, sermon and pastoral care. Here we may notice that the structure of the Church is again an image of the trinitarian unity between equality (democracy) and order (hierarchy). In the Church all are brethren, but among them here is service, deriving its authority from Christ and representing Him. The unity of these two aspects can be clearly seen, for example in the letters to the Corinthians, where the apostle due to his hierarchic power makes decisions incorporating in them the consent of the community by appealing to their better judgment, which ought to exist and which he tries to awaken by admonishing them. In the same way the first letter of John states that the Christians knew and understood everything but in spite of it the letter is not superfluous. So ecclesial authority must continue to elucidate everything that the Church and its members “properly” [eigentlich] know, everything each Christian as believer affirms implicitly and freely, not in uniformity, but rather in accordance with the multiplicity of charisms, the unity of which should be lived in ecclesial love. But how very ineffective these ecclesiastical structures for the most part remain, how separated are most Christians from the knowledge that their personal life of faith should be molded out of the ecclesial Holy Spirit of obedience to Christ and God! How very often does the empirical Church darken the access to an understanding of the immaculate Church! How exteriorly and problematically do Christ and Church remain in a tension that sets them apart, today in our time of protests and “creative disobedience”!

Here the significance of the life of the Counsels comes to the fore, which lets the disposition of Christ and the Holy Church become inevitably near and concrete for the individual Christian in a form of life founded by Christ and shaped in many ways by the Church.

III. The Counsel of obedience, referring especially to Secular Institutes

Here we no longer have anything to deal with concerning poverty and virginity, nor the multiplicity of forms in which the Counsels have been lived, but rather, exclusively concerning obedience and its particular stamp in secular institutes. One should, however, not dispute the doctrine formulated since the Middle Ages and lived in practice in earlier times, according to which the three Counsels intrinsically complete and require each other, so that from each one the other two may organically be deduced and are the expression of consecration.

Neither should one continue to dispute that we find the counsel of obedience laid down in the New Testament. For without any doubt the first disciples, who upon Christ’s calling left everything to follow Him, were not yet able to recognize Him in a strict sense as the Son of God; to them He was a man with divine authority, whom one may and should obey “in God’s stead” (cf. Heinz Schürmann, “Der Jüngerkreis Jesu als Zeichen für Israel und als Urbild des kirchlichen Rätestandes”, in Geist und Leben, 36 (1963), 21⁠-⁠35). One can also see how Paul’s assistants are at his disposal with their entire existence and are deployed by him wherever he needs them.

If the Church later approves Rules of religious orders and other communities, and thereby recognizing the spiritual authority of their superiors, it occurs every time in recognition of a stirring of the Spirit that awakens a smaller, more intense and more effective model within the larger Church, in which Christians are to be trained in the spirit of obedience of Christ and holy Church. And since Christ only gives orders as one who is humble and obedient, and since the Church likewise only exercises credible authority in the humble spirit of Christ, therefore in all forms of the life of the councils both commanding and obeying can only take place in the spirit of common ecclesial obedience to Christ. Once again, the democratic and the hierarchical mentality interpenetrate. The one who commands should be a spiritual man, if possible conformed to the mind of Christ and the holy Church; the subordinate, on the other hand, should not refer his own obedience according to the degree of perfection of his superior, for the latter merely concretizes for him the rule that refers to the disposition of Christ and holy Church.

And now for obedience in secular institutes.

In a secular institute the member is committed to God and His kingdom through the Evangelical Counsels by taking on a lasting responsibility in a worldly profession. How does this responsibility relate to his obedience in the community towards its representatives? Before trying to reply we want to bear in mind two consequences of the aforesaid. The first is that with Christ, and with holy Church too, no tension and no contrast exists between obedience and individual responsibility. Both aspects are integrated into each other in the mission of the Son received from the Father and in the mission of the apostles given by the Son. Whatever the Son undertakes using all the powers of his human ingenuity and creativity, he does at the instigation of the Spirit in order to fulfill the will of the Father. The second is that with Christ and with the holy Church too, there is therefore no limit of disponibility [Disponibilität]. In every situation the Father disposes over the whole of the Son in the Spirit, and the Son disposes in the Spirit over all the activity and passivity of his apostles in every situation.

From here, five guiding principles emerge for Secular Institutes. They may be applied in various ways according to a community’s charism. These guiding principles are to be taken only as a general frame, leaving a great deal of freedom.

1. He who enters the special service of Christ and His kingdom because of a special calling from God to the life of the councils puts⁠—⁠in the Spirit of the holy Church⁠—⁠his whole life, spiritual as well as worldly, at Christ’s disposal. The act of surrender (or “consecration”) in which this is done, also thus includes his secular post and conveys to it a new quality, even if it remains unchanged exteriorly. For, in a more intimate way than happens in baptism, that quality places him into the innermost space of the Christ-Church relationship, which is the original sacramental space. “Consecration” is no self⁠-⁠standing sacrament, but the consecrated person puts his existence voluntarily and explicitly into the original sacrament, with the intention to allow his life to be ruled from it. (Therefore, in a way, consecration may be called quasi⁠-⁠sacramental.)

2. Essentially the act of consecration takes place within a community, which makes the holy Church tangible, and, which possesses a genuine community-charism which transcends and embraces its members. If this is not stressed, people in Secular Institutes may get the impression that the community is nothing but a place of coordination which has to take care of the adequate formation and the spiritual progress of the individual members, thus being entirely at their service and hence in no position to expect anything essential from them. This is theologically wrong. If a community as such has a true charism that makes the Church concrete, then a member, in spite of all his “secularity” [Säkularität] is obliged to adjust himself, ever anew, to this charism and assimilate himself to it.

The special charism is expressed in the rule; but in order that this rule may not remain a dead letter but be living spirit, the personal encounter of each member in the spirit of this rule is needed with the other members, especially with those bearing responsibility. The latter are tasked with taking care that a member in his spiritual life (i.e. prayer, mortification, humility, charity) as well as in his practical life remains faithful and becomes more and more assimilated to the spirit of the Church living in the community. Genuine obedience as an evangelical counsel now comes into play in an undiluted way, even if it must come about, as always, in the spirit of brotherly love, and mutual openness and trust.

3. Obedience vis-à-vis those in charge with respect to a member’s worldly profession becomes relevant wherever, in the profession, the spirit of Christ, of the Holy Church, of the counsels and of the charism of the community is at stake. If a member himself were greatly endangered in his post, or if the spirit of his community were no longer expressed in his work, his superior could, after having got all the facts and taken advice, and after having had a brotherly talk with him, prompt the member to change his post or perhaps, in an extreme case, his profession. In such situations, it will be important that the person concerned does not bunker down into his personal charism and his personal mission but remembers the total disponibility [Disponibilität] meant in the “consecration”. He should also consider the great mobility in today’s professional life; despite increasing specialization, it happens, for example, that in large organizations persons are transferred from one division to another without further ado, or a diplomat is transferred from one country to another, etc. Beyond these purely human considerations, everybody must remember that the life of the counsels is one of renunciation and self-denial, not only in an increased zeal in the practice of his profession but even more so through the humiliations that run up against him in his personal will. It is especially in secular institutes that one can easily find pretexts for shielding himself against such a salutary education to follow the Cross.

4. For those who enter the community when still young and have not as yet chosen their profession, it will be appropriate not to make their professional choice without discussing it openly and thoroughly with those carrying responsibility, or at least with experienced members of the community. If, on the other hand, a person upon entering the community already has a profession, the subject of profession will only be taken up in exceptional cases; the person in charge will rather see to it that from now on the profession is practiced in the spirit of full disponibility to the needs of the kingdom of God and that the member takes over the full responsibility connected with it. If the composition of a community allows it, it would be very useful for there to be competent advisors available in it for the most important fields of work. This also relieves the superiors of the burden of having to deal with professional problems in which they are little or not at all competent. The member should let himself be counseled in all important professional decisions, not in order to shift the responsibility on someone else, but rather to make sure that he acts in the spirit of the community.

5. As much as possible the community as a whole should assist and be a model for every single member. According to St. Paul all members should be subject to one another (Phil 2,3; Eph 5,2). Secular institutes should preserve enough of community life for each member to participate in and benefit from it. This, of course, does not exclude that each member primarily tries to learn as much as possible from encounters with people in his secular environment. That means that he preserves a lasting disponibility in the Holy Spirit to prove himself in each actual situation⁠—⁠even when before nonbelievers⁠—⁠living in the spirit of Christ and Holy Church and also to let himself be instructed, spurred on and edified.

With this we have not touched upon, much less solved, all practical problems. But we could at least establish that the problems really are always solvable in the Christian spirit. Where legal norms may fail, the spirit of love and availability continuously helps and unites everyone, those in charge and the rest, in the same attitude. And above all we have seen that obedience in secular institutes, when contemplated theologically, is in no way a stepchild at the periphery of the life of the counsels, rather, that precisely this form of obedience accords with the central mysteries of Christian revelation in the best sense.