Pope Francis today pointed to three elements requiring harmony for the Order of Discalced Carmelites: friendship with God, fraternal life, and mission.
The following is the Holy Father Francis’ address to the participants in the General Chapter of the Order of Discalced Carmelites, whom he received in audience this morning in the Vatican Apostolic Palace:
The Holy Father’s Address
Dear Brothers,
I’m happy to welcome you, gathered for the General Chapter from different regions of the world, in representation of some four thousand Friars that are part of your Order. My greeting extends also to them, as well as to the Discalced Carmelite nuns and to all the members of the Carmelite Family who follow your work these days with prayer. I thank the new Prior General for his words, and the outgoing Prior General for the service carried out. Thank you.
You began your Chapter guided by three very significant biblical texts. First: listen to what the Spirit says (cf. Ap 2:7)’; second: discern the signs of the times (cf. Matthew 16:3); third: become witnesses to the ends of the earth (cf. Acts 1:8).
The fundamental attitude of the disciple — of one who puts himself in the school of Jesus and wants to respond to what He asks us, in this difficult but beautiful moment –, is to listen because it is God’s time. To listen to the Spirit, to be able to discern what comes from the Lord and what is contrary to Him and, in this way, respond from the Gospel, respond to the signs of the times through which the Lord of history speaks to us and reveals Himself. Listening and discernment, in view of the witness, of the mission carried forward with the proclamation of the Gospel, be it with words, be it, especially with one’s life.
In this time, in which the pandemic has put us all in face of so many questions and that has witnessed the collapse of so many securities, your are called, in as much as children of Saint Teresa, to take care of your faithfulness to the perennial elements of your charism. This crisis, if it has something good — and it certainly has –, is precisely to lead us back to the essential, not to live distracted by false securities. This context is also favorable for you to examine the state of health of your Order and enkindle the fire of your beginnings. Sometimes there are those that wonder what the future of consecrated life will be, and some prophets of doom say that this future is brief, that consecrated life is exhausted. But, dear Brothers, these pessimistic views, as well as those on the Church herself, are destined to be proved wrong, because consecrated life is an integral part of the Church, of her eschatological nature, of her evangelical genuineness. Consecrated life is part of the Church as Jesus willed her to be and as the Spirit generates her continually. Therefore, the temptation to be worried about surviving — instead of living in fullness, receiving the grace of the present, also with the risks it entails –, must be dispelled. In the school of Christ, one tries to be faithful to the present and, at the same time, free and open to the horizon of God, immersed in His mystery of Love. Carmelite life is contemplative life. This is the gift the Spirit has given the Church with Saint Teresa of Jesus and Saint John of the Cross, and then with the <other> men and women Carmelite Saints, there are so many. Faithful to this gift, Carmelite life is a response to contemporary man’s thirst, which deep down is thirst for God, thirst for the eternal, and so often man doesn’t understand it, he is searching for it everywhere. And he is at the mercy of psychologisms, spiritualisms, or fake updates that conceal a spirit of worldliness. You know well the temptation of psychologism, of spiritualism and worldly updates, which is the worst evil that can happen to the Church. When I read this in the last pages of Father de Lubac’s “Meditation on the Church” – read the four last pages — I couldn’t believe it: but how come — I was still in Buenos Aires –, but how come this happens? What is this spiritual worldliness? It’s very subtle, very subtle, it enters us and we don’t realize it. The text quotes a Benedictine spiritual Father. De Lubac takes up that text and says: “It’s the worst evil that can befall the Church, even worse than the time of concubine Popes.” I said this also to the Claretians the other day . . . We see that L’Osservatore Romano was alarmed by this text, which isn’t mine, it’s de Lubac’s and it reported “worse than concubine Fathers”, it was scared of the truth. I hope that L’Osservatore Romano will correct its <mistake> well.
Spiritual worldliness is terrible. It gets inside you. It’s in the Gospel, Jesus said it, when He speaks of “polite demons,” of “polite devils,” because Jesus says thus: when the unclean spirit was cast out of a person’s soul, it began to roam around desert places and then “got bored,” “had no work,” and said: ”I will return to my house from which I came.” And when he comes he finds everything clean and in order and, Jesus says: “he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil than himself and they enter. And in the end, that man becomes worse than he was at first.” But how do these seven demons enter? Not as thieves, no. They ring the bell, they say good morning and enter little by little; they go entering little by little and you don’t realize that they have taken possession of your house. This is the spirit of worldliness. It enters little by little, it even enters in prayer; it enters. Beware of this. It’s the worst of the evils that can befall the Church and, if you don’t believe me, read the last four pages of Father de Lubac’s “Meditation on the Church.” Beware of spiritual worldliness.
Let us remember that evangelical fidelity is not stability of place, but stability of the heart, which isn’t about refusing change, but in making the necessary changes to meet what the Lord asks of us, here and now. And, therefore, fidelity requires a firm commitment to the Gospel values and to the charism and the renunciation of what impedes giving the best of oneself to the Lord and to others.
In this perspective, I encourage you to keep your friendship with God, fraternal life in community, and the mission, as one reads in the preparatory documents of your Chapter. For Saint Teresa, friendship with the Lord is to live in communion with Him; it’s not only to pray but to make of life a prayer, it’s to walk — as your Rule states — in obsequio Iesu Christi,” and to do so in joy. There is something else I’d like to stress: joy. It’s awful to see consecrated men and consecrated women with a face as though coming from a wake; it’s awful; it’s awful. Joy must come from within”: that joy which is peace, expression of friendship. And something else that I included in the Exhortation on holiness: a sense of humor. Please, don’t lose your sense of humor. In Gaudete et Exsultate I inserted in that chapter a prayer of Saint Thomas More, to ask for a sense of humor. Pray for it, it will do you good, always with that joy of the humble, who accept normal, daily things of life to live in joy. In this perspective, I encourage you to keep your friendship with God, fraternal life in community and the mission, as I said. Friendship with God matures in silence, in recollection, in listening to the Word of God; it is a fire that is fuelled and guarded day by day. The warmth of this interior fire helps also to practice fraternal life in community. It’s not an accessory element; it’s essential. Your name itself reminds you of it: “Discalced Brothers.”
Rooted in the relationship with God, Trinity of Love, you are called to cultivate relations in the Spirit, in a healthy tension between being alone and being with others, against the current as regards individualism and the massification of the world — individualism and massification, community life. Saint Teresa exhorts to the “style of fraternity,” the “style of brotherhood.” It’s an art that is learned day by day: to be a family united in Christ, “discalced Brothers of Mary,” having as a model the Holy Family of Nazareth and the apostolic community. The Holy Family of Nazareth: thank you for having mentioned Saint Joseph, don’ forget him! At one point one of you gave me a little image of Saint Joseph with a prayer, a humble prayer, which says: “Accept me as you accepted Jesus” — a beautiful prayer, I pray it every day. It asks Saint Joseph to accept us and make us progress in the spiritual life, that he be a little bit our spiritual Father, as he was Father for Jesus and in the Holy Family.
From friendship with God and from the style of fraternity, you are also called to rethink your mission, with creativity and a decisive apostolic impulse, paying great attention to today’s world. I would like to insist on what I already referred to above: this renewal of your mission is inseparably linked to fidelity to the contemplative vocation: find out how to go about it, but it is linked. You must not imitate the mission of other charisms, but be faithful to yours, to give the world what the Lord has given you for the good of all, namely, the living water of contemplation. In fact, it’s not an evasion of the reality, closure in a protected oasis, but an opening of the heart and of life to the force that truly transforms the world, namely, the love of God. It was in prolonged solitary prayer that Jesus received the incentive to “break” His life every day the midst of the people. And so did the men saints and women saints: the generosity and courage of their apostolate is the fruit of their profound union with God
Dear Brothers, the harmony between these three elements: friendship with God, fraternal life and mission is a fascinating goal, capable of motivating your present and future choices. May the Holy Spirit — it is, in fact, He who creates harmony — illumine and guide your steps on this way. May the Holy Virgin protect and accompany you. I bless you from my heart. Remember, don’t forget to pray for me, I need it. Thank you!
© Libreria Editrice Vatican
[Original text: Italian] [Exaudi’s translation by Virginia M. Forrester]
