Priorities in Religious Life—An Alternative View

Extract

Once the primacy of the existential witness provided by the quality of community life is firmly established, the community can undertake, either corporately or individually, any of the works of mercy. Material services have their place, but this is very definitely a secondary one. What people DO by way of work, projects, etc., is irrelevant to the apostolic dimension of religious life. This apostolate, as I have tried to stress in various ways, is exercised in and through the quality of common life. Any specific works of social benefit that members undertake, either individually or collectively, are entirely secondary.

‘Any of the works of mercy’, ‘material services’, ‘works of social benefit’; how many Dominicans, how many other religious, will recognise their work in those descriptions? Is this the kind of choice between community life and work that they are offered? How does it come about that such a false choice is both approved and supported? How is it that the break-down situation, which is what the ‘choice’ between community life and work is, can be seen as offering relevance and a future to Dominican, and other, communities? (In what follows I shall write mainly from what I believe to be a Dominican point of view. I doubt if any one writer can cope with a topic as broad as ‘religious life’; I am even less convinced that a male is going to provide the solutions for either female congregations or joint ‘communes’).