The new responses of Religious Life in a time of change

Witness and significance at the limit.

At the limits of the new forms of religion, Religious Life appears as a joyful and joyful witness of resilience, turning the following of Jesus into a way of life at the service of the Kingdom of God, accustomed to emerging as a dynamic response to the signs of the times, to the rhythm of the Holy Spirit with its multiple and pluriform charismatic accent.

From the contemplative monasteries that diligently accompany the processes of a church that is not sheltered in community bubbles but that places itself on the way out, in the vanguard, on the frontier, there where the lines of most incredible pain and suffering are being written at this moment, like birth pangs that illuminate a future full of hope, not only for the economic possibilities of the first worlds that lie behind them but also for the humanity that rests in pluri, multi- and intercultural relations.

On the margins of a planet in a crisis of humanity due to constant suicides, genocides and ethnocides, the planet and the universe are subjected to continuous ecocides and constant attacks against reason (epistemicide) or God himself, as a supreme maker with the determining theocides, in all cases, the presence of Religious Life is as significant as the life of the first Monks of the Desert, the dark night of St. John of the Cross or the martyrial dimension of so many consecrated men and women in Latin America.

…as a joyful and joyful witness of resilience, turning the following of Jesus into a way of life.

To feel, to think, to act within those limits where the commitment with the poor, with the last, with the most vulnerable, marginalised and excluded is a crime, where it accompanies processes, running the same risks as those who are at risk in the capitalist system, to the point of becoming one in their efforts for the liberation and transformation of reality, contributing with peoples, nations and even with planetary initiatives, to the point of becoming one in their efforts for the liberation and transformation of reality, contributing with peoples, nations and even with planetary initiatives, in that which draws a new map of solidarity and hope, converting the humiliations and humiliations of the significant impoverished majorities into greater dignity and respect for the person, the demagogic abuses of power and corruption into a greater justice and equality that even makes itself felt in the social, civil and criminal courts and tribunals.

It is the experience of following Jesus Christ in his revelation and permanent manifestation in the little ones that remain, both yesterday and today, that challenges the ancient and so rightly renewed religious orders as well as the more modern religious institutes, congregations, societies of apostolic life and secular institutes, virgins and consecrated lay men and women who enter and insert themselves where life cries out.

Sign and presence of what remains and endures in time, the living Gospel and the power of the incarnation of the Word, the community revitalises the evangelical counsels, bringing together the new paradigms of compassion and mercy, and helps to lift the anchors of comfort, indifference, selfishness and individualism, uninhibited from its fraternal constitutionality the possibilities of an authentic encounter with the human, Christian and religious meaning of life. Synodality, communion, participation and mission are not only the hype of a day of ecclesial euphoria but the centrality of a group or groups that interact from the love of God in the ideal of a new and more authentic humanity.

Julio César Molina Martínez, MSC