Renewal of Religious Life

A comment posted by Stephen at my Champagnat Mass post made me think. Here is what he said:
Fr, I have been visiting your blog for a couple of weeks now and I was particulary interested in your comments on the state of the religious life in Northern Europe. I am not a religious but am intrigued as to the possibility of life led in such a way. I think a genuine Christian life led by Truth is a very attractive thing to others, in “professional” as well as lay life. Perhaps the looking at the original charisms of the individual orders as Vatican II instructed is just starting to materialise. As for the new orders… almost all hold a great amount to adoration (not something I’ve been brought up with but perhaps am beginning to understand) – I feel this perhaps is important. Some even go so far as to expressly refuse looking after parishes and actively encourage the lay brother vocation (Francsican Friars of the Renewal), perhaps so as not to be dogged by the image of the religious life as ‘simply as a form of priesthood. How are your Passionist community responding to this all this?
I asked him for a few days to relect before replying, simply because it was a difficult question (-the last bit).

If Stephen says “Perhaps the looking at the original charism of the individual orders as Vatican II instructed is just starting to materialise” in the wrong places, he might get lynched or at best cause apoplexy, because many religious in the pre-Vatican II orders and congregations think that they have spent the last forty years doing that. However, I have to agree with him that we are now at a point where a more serious looking at the charism is beginning to get off the ground. Vatican II asked religious to pay attention to the charism of the founder and to the signs of the times (“The adaptation and renewal of the religious life includes both the constant return to the sources of all Christian life and to the original spirit of the institutes and their adaptation to the changed conditions of our time.” Perfectae Caritatis 2.) In retrospect, there were two problems with this. The first was that the requirement of adaptation was often read in such a way that core evangelical values, such as asceticism or poverty interpreted in anything except its most spiritual sense, were deemed to be no longer relevant. At the same time, the notion of Charism itself was also problematic. For many religious, this word (which, interestingly enough is not found in Perfectae Caritatis) was something entirely new. Charism workshops were very common after the Council as congregations tried to discover their charism. My own slightly heretical view is that a number of congregations possibly did not really have a specific charism beyond that of discipleship and so had to manufacture something. What is certainly true is that the demands of adaptation and the demands of a return to the sources often seemed to be in conflict and that in many cases adaptation proved easier (and consequently stronger) than rediscovery. – To be continued!