September 2000 Print

Letter of Archbishop Lefebvre published in Avis du mois (May-June 1967) the monthly letter of the Superior General of the 5,200-member Congregation of the Holy Ghost.

The Religious and Apostolic Life and Our Novitiate

"But when it pleased him who separated me from my mother's womb and called me by his grace to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles, immediately I condescended not to flesh and blood. Neither went I to Jerusalem, to the apostles who were before me; but I went into Arabia..." (Gal. 1:15-17). This typically Pauline quotation is rich in supernatural meaning, the essential meaning of St. Paul's vocation, and it tells us much about the steps to be taken in the realization of our own. The passage ends on a totally unexpected note: "sed abii in Arabiam..."

One would have expected Paul to set out straight away on his mission of evangelization, but instead he goes into the solitude of the desert where our Lord will reveal Himself to him as He has promised. Does not Paul's time in the desert call to mind our novitiate? Was Paul going to become a hermit or a cenobite? Not a bit of it. He was preparing to preach out in the wide world, in the midst of contradictions and persecutions, as well as spectacular successes. Yet to prepare for this ministry he went off to Arabia!

At a time when some very far-reaching moves are being made to "update" the novitiate, it would be a good thing to define it, for we live in an age of definitions, of clear ideas, of descriptions of the essence of things.

People today are rather quick to say that the novitiate as we have all know it up to now is egocentric, concentrating wholly upon the novice himself. It is also said that the religious life is only a means to further the apostolic life. These claims have an element of truth in them, but they risk being fallacious and deceptive if they are not explained and the terms used precisely defined.

What is meant by "religious life"? And what is meant by "apostolic" life? Properly defined these two realities prove to be fully complementary and much closer to each other than one might at first think. If the religious life be defined in terms of mere observances, such as silence, communal life and the three vows, then doubtless we may speak of it as a means, but, in truth, it is a means of acquiring, keeping and developing holiness in our souls rather than a means towards the apostolic life. For it is this holiness that is the immediate goal of the religious life, a holiness which consists in a total and definitive offering to our Lord Jesus Christ, and so makes us better fitted for the apostolate.

Was it not this simple and evident truth that made us love and long for our novitiate, as St. Paul longed for his sojourn in Arabia? For this is the heart of our novitiate. One can only give oneself to Jesus Christ in so far as one knows and loves Him. The aim of the novitiate is surely to attain a knowledge and love of our Lord which are not so much speculative as experimental. The religious, if he wants to be truly apostolic, must personally encounter Him Who is the source, the means and the end of every apostolate; Jesus Himself. If he does not meet Him like Saul on the road to Damascus, then he must meet Him in silence, in retreat, in prayer, like the apostles in the Cenacle. To this end nothing is more favorable and effective than a novitiate.

And just as the apostles emerged transformed from the Cenacle where they had received the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, so there must be a profound difference between a novice entering the novitiate and the same novice reaching the end of this time of retreat and drawing closer to God. So it seems contrary to the very purpose of the novitiate to transform it into a year of study and apostolic experience.

In mental prayer, reasoning and purely scientific inquiry are detrimental to union with God, and so would be a novitiate whose primary aim is no longer the personal, intimate and constant encounter of the soul with its one Lord and Master. Meditating on Holy Scripture and reading the Fathers and good spiritual authors inevitably help to orient the soul towards the knowledge of our Lord and produce in it an irreversible attachment to Him, founded on a faith like that of the apostles, of Paul, of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a faith able to bear anything, suffer anything, detach itself from all things for the love of our Lord.

Can we not see that there is a danger in making our religious life a mere means towards our apostolic life, the danger of dispensing with that means if it appears to some degree to be getting in the way of the end. The more limited one's conception of the religious life, the quicker one will reach that point. Hence the need to understand clearly in what our apostolic life consists—that is what we have to do if we are to find the solution to our problem.

Does our apostolic life spring from some human science? Is it applied psychology or methodology? Does it come from understanding and experimenting with the most up-to-date means and methods of influencing people's intellects and wills, that science excelled in today by those who manipulate formidable means of social communication, like advertising, publishing, news, television, etc.?

Is our apostolic life measured by how many catechumens or Christians we reach with our preaching, or in numbers of baptisms or communions or marriages? Does it correspond to the number of miles travelled or of days spent visiting villages, Mass centers, etc.? Does it become more authentic the more churches we build, or presbyteries, dispensaries, schools, religious houses, etc.? Is our apostolic life to consist above all in ensuring our own survival by encouraging numerous vocations to the priesthood and religious life? Finally, is it to be measured by how exhausted we are at the end of a day that goes on until midnight and beyond because of meetings and other activities that cannot be fitted in during the daytime?

Here again, do we not need to distinguish between the end and the means? In our modern civilization which puts at our disposal ever more means of multiplying our human activities, are we not in danger of obscuring the end and devoting our attention and interest rather to the means?

Archbishop Lefebvre (first on the right, bottom row) spent the first years of his missionary life as a professor at the major seminary at Libreville, Gabon, where he was appointed rector in 1934. At the time of this photograph he was professor of Dogma and Sacred Scripture.

 

To make an accurate assessment of any means, then, we need to define the end, the aim of the apostolate, which fundamentally determines what those means should be. If we refer to the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, we can easily determine what really constitutes an apostle. First, an apostle is the object of a choice, a calling; then, having been sanctified by the Holy Spirit, he is sent on a mission. The apostle is to preach the Name of Jesus and His Gospel in its fullness. The apostle is to sanctify souls by baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist and holy order. The apostle carries Christ in him and with him in his own person, in his acts and in his words. So the apostle is identified with Christ—ut dilectione qua dilexisti me, diliges eos—The love of the Father, Who is identified with the Son, identifies the apostles with the Son and with the Father. The Father's love is a love that begets the Son and transforms the hearts of men.

All that has been listed above as able to provide a measure of our apostolate, our apostolic life, is but a means to this end: to love Christ in order to bring Him to others, so that this love may speak and celebrate the glory of God.

Seen in this light, the problem of the dual ends of our religious life and our apostolic life turns out to be precisely that of the relationship between love of God and love of our neighbor.

The love of God is not a means of loving our neighbor, but is actually the source of our love for him, so that the two are bound together as cause and effect: "Cessante causa, cessat effectus—When the cause ceases, so does the effect."

The religious life in the canonical sense of the term is not the only way to love God, but it leads there "tutius, securius, velocius—more safely, more surely, more quickly." The evangelical counsels are instruments of perfection, means of attaining the perfect observance of the Commandments. In this sense we may say that the religious life—that is, its observances—is a means to the end, which is perfect union with God, but we should be putting the cart before the horse if we were to subordinate perfection, which consists in giving oneself entirely to God, to the love of our neighbor, which is a result of loving God.

Besides, is it not manifestly obvious that those who are most successful in converting souls are those who are most closely united to God? Experience shows that the most effective missionaries or apostles are not the most active or the busiest, but those who relate everything and everybody to our Lord Jesus Christ; who have an unshakable faith in His all-powerful grace, much more than in their own efforts; who are men of prayer, of interior life, of ordered and persevering action; men with faith and confidence in God.

At one stroke missionaries such as these achieve both loves, of God and of their neighbor, the latter depending upon the former. The formal object of both these loves is one and the same:

Ratio enim diligendi proximum Deus est; hoc enim debemus in proximo diligere ut in Deo sit....Similiter reprehensibile esset si quis, proximum diligeret tamquam principalem finem, non autem si quis diligat proximum propter Deum quod pertinet ad caritatem...—The reason for loving our neighbor is God, for what we must love in our neighbor is that of God which is in him...likewise he would be reprehensible who loved his neighbor as his ultimate end, but not if he loves him for God's sake, for that pertains to charity... (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 25, A. 1)

We also know from experience that our love of God is not an absolute constant, given us once and for all at our baptism or religious profession; it is a life which can grow or which can wither away, or even, alas, die completely, whence the immense value of the rules of the religious life to support us and help us to grow in this life of the Holy Spirit.

Thus we can see that if we seek to over-simplify the relationship between the religious life and the apostolic life, if we fail to define both precisely, we simply risk holding cheap the observances of the religious life and even of the novitiate. It is easy to say that the ways and methods of the novitiate were egocentric and that the novice was more preoccupied with himself than with the apostolate for which we are called, yet suffice it to change one word and to say that the novitiate is Christocentric, and one will have to agree that it is supremely apostolic, for the apostle lives on Christ and by Christ. Blessed is he who has drawn close to Christ in mind and heart and soul during his novitiate. He has increased his apostolic potential ten, even a hundred times over.

The Venerable Father [Ven. François Libermann, founder of the Holy Ghost Fathers] constantly stresses these truths. In the new edition of the provisional Rule produced by Fr. François Nicolas, the Venerable Father's excellent commentary transcribed by Fr. Lannurien, is full of this teaching. How desirable it would be for us to have this treasure on hand to be our daily reading. Fr. François Nicolas is to be warmly congratulated for having brought to light once more these documents which are of such enormous value for our Congregation.

From these reflections we may conclude that before changing the novitiate, we should think seriously and ask ourselves if we are not tampering with what is most precious and most essential in both the apostolate and the interior life of the religious apostle; the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, a knowledge which goes beyond the theoretical and which one might call quasi-experimental, a vital knowledge creating a union of wills and hearts.

All this in no way means that some useful adaptations cannot be considered.

What seems essential is that at the end of our novitiate we should be able to give our Lord the same answer as St. Peter when He asks us "Lovest thou me? "..."Domine, tu scis quia amo te—Lord, thou knowest that I love thee" (Jn. 21:15).