Riflessioni ad alta voce

Poverty and community life When we read about the vow of poverty in our constitutions we see that the first and most important requirement is that the religious should handle any property and money under the authority of the superior. This means that all our possessions belong now to the Congregation, though we are the one using them. In this the vow of poverty is strictly connected with the vow of obedience. Practically speaking, whatever money we receive, either as donation or stipend, we should give to the community; whatever gift we receive, we should ask the permission of the superior in order to keep it; and for whatever thing we need to buy we should ask the permission and the money from the superior. This is a difficult practice which requires discipline, but it is exactly because of it that it becomes important for our life and is strengthening our personality. A good help for this discipline is to learn how to give a proper, clear, prompt and regular account of all ...

Poverty and apostolate In order to understand the relationship between poverty and apostolate we should clarify a few points. Jesus tells us to take care of the poor. All through the Gospel we see that Jesus helps the poor and encourages his disciples to do the same. The aim of the apostolate is the total redemption of the person. Apostolate is a community matter. Nowadays all the religious congregations speak about the poor and claim to be at the service of the poor. We have to avoid two temptations: - To remain at a generic idealistic level. We are called to solve the problems of concrete people, problems which very often do not fit in our schemes and ideals. - To use our charity work as an instrument to boast and to increase our prestige. Usually we tend to do those works which can be seen, which will appear in newspapers, which can make us famous and, eventually, will attract donations. We should instead look for those situations which are less visible, less attra...

This is an analysis of how the vow of poverty is lived also at the level of psychological life. To fully understand what is meant by the three levels of human life you have to refer to my previous post on this topic: "Vocation and our capacity to respond to it. Poverty and the three levels of human life We have seen previously that human life is based on three levels: Psycho- physiological Psycho-social Spiritual-intellectual We saw also that love, which is the engine of our life, when acting at these three levels takes the form of Eros, Philia and Agape. Since love is the key for understanding all the vows, we can try to see how the vow of poverty applies to the three levels. Psycho-physiological level. This level regards the relationship of the person with himself, his desires and passions. The desire to possess things serves to cover or satisfy the need of avoiding sufferance, avoiding hard work, and also to avoid the fact that we see ourselves as weak, unsafe, not ...

Danger of a wrong interpretation of the vow of poverty When a religious start doing things against the vow of chastity, soon or late he will leave religious life, people will simply pity him, maybe criticize for a moment but then forget about him. When he fails in the vow of obedience, nobody will bother about it except his superiors. When instead he goes against poverty, he can easily find false reasons to excuse himself and he carries on in the religious life. The problem is that all the people he deals with will really feel angry at him and often scandalized. The damage we do to the kingdom of God is bigger when we act against poverty than when we act against chastity or obedience, and this damage carries on longer. Furthermore for every one religious who falls against chastity there are at least ten who fall against poverty. The person who sins against chastity knows clearly that he is doing something wrong and usually feels guilty about it, when he sins against povert...