‘Wake up the World’, Pope Francis tells Religious Orders

Rome, 4 January 2014: Pope Francis has told Religious Orders to “wake up the world”, according to an article appearing in La Civiltà Cattolica, the Rome-based Jesuit weekly.

Editor Antonio Spadaro, SJ, has written the article recounting the private meeting last November between Pope Francis and the Union of Superiors General of religious men at the end of their 82^nd General Assembly.

The 15-page article (available in English at the La Civiltà Cattolica website) documents the views of Pope Francis on religious life.

“Wake up the world! Be witnesses of a different way of doing things, of acting, of living! It is possible to live differently in this world,” Pope Francis said.
According to the author, the Pope began by saying that he, too, is a religious, and he therefore knows from experience what they were talking about. The last Pope who belonged to a religious order was the Camaldolese Gregory XVI, elected in 1831. He then made explicit reference to Benedict XVI: “He said that the Church grows through witness, not by proselytism. The witness that can really attract is that associated with attitudes which are uncommon: generosity, detachment, sacrifice, self-forgetfulness in order to care for others. This is the witness, the “martyrdom” of religious life. It “sounds an alarm” for people. Religious say to people with their life: “What’s happening?” These people are telling me something! These people go beyond a mundane horizon. “Thus,” continued the Pope quoting Benedict XVI, “religious life ought to promote growth in the Church by way of attraction.”

“We are speaking of an eschatological outlook, of the values of the Kingdom incarnated here, on this earth. It is a question of leaving everything to follow the Lord. No, I do not want to say “radical.” Evangelical radicalness is not only for religious: it is demanded of all. But religious follow the Lord in a special was, in a prophetic way. It is this witness that I expect of you. Religious should be men and women who are able to wake the world up.”
We need a new language, a new way of saying things. Today God asks this of us: to leavethe nest which encloses us in order to be sent, added Pope Francis.

According the article, Pope Francis has asked the Congregation for Religious to revise, Mutuae Relationes, the 1978 instruction issued by the Congregation for Religious and by the Congregation for Bishops concerning the relations between bishops and religious in the Church.
Source: VR Sedoc