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| Religious from the many congregations throughout the archdiocese gather for Consecrated Life Day.
Carol Baass Sowa | Today's Catholic |
By Carol Baass Sowa
Today's Catholic
SAN ANTONIO • World Day for Consecrated Life provides an opportunity to call attention to the extraordinary contributions of men and women religious, as well as a time to pray for continued vocations to this calling. Celebrated on Feb. 8 in the United States, the archdiocese honored those in consecrated life at a special Liturgy of the Hours held at the Assumption Seminary chapel that day, under the direction of Sister Mary Teresa Cullen, CSB, of the Office for Religious, with Archbishop José H. Gomez as presider and Auxiliary Bishop Oscar Cantú providing the reflection.
“The Lord calls us; he has called us to be a light to the nations,” said Auxiliary Bishop Cantú to the many religious of the archdiocese who filled the chapel’s pews to overflowing. “He has called us to a life consecrated to him.” He added that the world is especially in need of God’s witness today.
To be “consecrated” means “to be set apart,” he related, and those gathered before him had been set apart by God to serve the church, the body of Christ, whether it be in education, administration, as caregivers or in other ministries.
Comparing a world without religious to eating food with salt and pepper — or huevos rancheros without salsa, he said, “It just doesn’t work!” He referred to those present before him as spice, “a very needed part” that reminds us of Jesus on the cross through the living out of the simple but beautiful evangelical counsels. “The world needs that tremendous witness that the counsels provide,” he added, “counsels that are lived by you.”
With greed having led to the failure of financial structures in recent times, he noted it is a time when religious can elevate their own witness to poverty, one of the counsels, pointing to Jesus’ solidarity with the poor. “The things that we have are not ‘mine’ to use in whatever way I want,” he continued, “but they are to be used in good stewardship.”
He went on to illustrate this counsel by relating that at the Super Youth Spectacular he had attended the day before, those present were randomly given tickets for three different types of meals. One group was served a first class meal with fine china and silver, a second group stood in line for a moderately nice meal served on paper plates, while the third group’s meal consisted of a bowl of rice and cup of water which they ate seated on the floor.
Those eating a good meal, he observed, began to feel guilty seeing others who had so little and wanted to share with them, bringing home the lesson of solidarity and the counsel witness of poverty. “So many have more than we need,” he said, “but we are called to look at the rest of the body of Christ.”
Another counsel is chastity and Bishop Cantú noted that “in a city with tremendously high rates of teen pregnancy, the witness of chastity is indeed needed today.” Obedience, he said, is also called for in the religious life and needed in the world today. “This lived obedience calls us to the good of the community,” he said, “calls us to the common good.”
“You are called to consecrate your lives and you have done so because Christ has loved you,” he said, quoting the words of St. John that, because God has loved them “first,” they can love others. It is, he said, “a love that penetrates our lives, penetrates our psyches and transforms our lives and allows us each day to be renewed and to go out into the world, to go out into our ministries and say, ‘Out of love I do this. Out of love I live my witness. Out of love I serve others.’”
At the close of the liturgy, Archbishop Gomez shared that the sight of so many religious from the archdiocese present reminded him how blessed the archdiocese was. “It is a source of joy for me and for all of us,” he said, “because we see the work of the Holy Spirit through each one of the congregations that we have in the archdiocese.”
“We need to be working and praying for more vocations,” he said, noting the efforts in this area of Sister Cullen of the Office for Religious and Father Arturo Cepeda of the Office of Vocations. He concluded by asking for prayers for Father Larry Christian, rector of Assumption Seminary, and Father Christian’s mother, who was seriously ill in California, and to pray also for the archbishop’s own trip to Rome later that week, where he would be attending a meeting of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America and would bring the Holy Father “the love and prayers of the people of the archdiocese.”
Leading the prayers of intercession for the Liturgy of the Hours were Priscilla Torres, a novice with the Sinsinawa Dominican Sisters, and Isak Keyman-Ige, a seminarian at Assumption Seminary. A reception in the seminary’s Student Union Building followed the liturgy.