Italy's surge in women religious hints at a wider renewal. Cardinal praises the "vitality and dynamism" and "profound faith and fervor" of Italian convents.
BY EDWARD PENTIN
REGISTER CORRESPONDENT
January 28- February 3, 2007 Issue |
Posted 1/23/07 at 9:00 AM
Vocations to female contemplative orders in Italy are
booming, according to the Italian bishops’ conference.
In
2005, 300 women took their solemn profession of vows, bringing the number of
contemplatives in the country to 6,672.
Cardinal
Camillo Ruini, president of the Italian bishops’ conference, welcomed the
increase at a prayer vigil in St. John Lateran Basilica last October, noting
that it is part of a wider trend.
“The
number of contemplative religious sisters is growing throughout the world, but
— and this is more significant — this is also happening in Europe and in our
own Italy, which often seems so hardest hit secularization,” he said.
Others,
such as Church statistical expert Brother Giovanni Dalpiaz, a Camadolese monk
from Bardolino near Venice, Italy, caution that the trend is only a start.
“It
is not good to deceive ourselves that all of the problems have now passed and a
new spring has arrived,” he said, pointing out that there have been only
incremental increases from 2001 to 2004.
But
Brother Giovanni added that the recent increase “is good because it encourages
hope that the Lord is still capable of bringing about strong and generous
answers to his call.”
Cardinal
Franc Rodé, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and
Societies of Apostolic Life, told the Register Jan. 13 that Italy is the
exception with regards to women religious.
In
other parts of Europe, vocation numbers have dropped sharply. Meanwhile,
vocations to apostolic institutions are also falling.
Still,
the attraction to contemplative life is real. Cardinal Rodé believes it offers
what is lacking in much of modern, secular society. In a general sense,
he said, it “shows what young generations are looking for today: a space for
silence, where they can enter into this silence, recollect, and therefore find
— themselves, and find God.”
Like Brother Giovanni, Cardinal Rodé
believes that the “vitality and dynamism” of convents in Italy is what is
attracting vocations.
If a convent has an atmosphere of
“profound faith and fervor,” Cardinal Rodé said, “vocations are born and grow
spontaneously.”
Today’s young religious sisters give
a variety of reasons for joining a contemplative order.
“On a cold Sunday in Advent, in the
silence of a church, I heard this unmistakable call inside me: ‘Do you want to
be only mine?’” remembered Sister Maria, 27, from the Benedictine convent of
the Perpetual Adoration in Verbania, northwest Italy. “Yes, Jesus, I want it. I
only want to follow you!” she replied.
At the time, Sister Maria was only
17, so she waited until she was 20 before “crossing the threshold.” She said
that in the convent, she has “come to learn how to love” and that “the leap of
giving oneself expands the heart.”
Sister Veronica, a Cistercian of the
same age at another convent in northern Italy, remembers thinking that by
joining an enclosed order, she had gone “inside.”
“Over
time, I found such an expression increasingly inadequate,” she recalled.
“Rather, as I began to enjoy the space of freedom that a relationship with the
Lord brings, I started thinking just the opposite — it’s the world that appears
as ‘inside,’ as narrow, a ‘prison,’ while the convent is a space where the
eternal begins to take root in one’s life and therefore gives you space to
breathe and an infinite horizon.”
For
Sister Elena, 23, who entered St. Benedict’s convent in Milan at 21,
contemplative life has allowed her to enter into a relationship with Christ
that has freed her from fears that plague her generation.
“We
young people today live our interpersonal relations with the nagging questions:
‘What do others think? Have I made the right choice?’ These fears paralyze you
and in the end waste energy,” she said.
By joining a convent, she added,
these fears disappeared and she felt freer and able to draw closer to God, “the
source of true joy.”
Sister
Veronica believes it was the Holy Spirit who brought her to a new family in God
and gave her the grace to courageously leave everything — and receive tenfold
back.
As a professed sister, she said, she
now feels she has “a hundred mothers, a hundred sisters, a hundred brothers,
and a hundred homes.”
Said
Sister Veronica, “I began to experience that full measure, pressed, shaken
down, and running over; as it says in the Gospel.”
Edward Pentin
writes from Rome.
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