Scottish Catholic Observer

Pope Francis has said 2015 will be a year dedicated to the promotion of consecrated life, and is asking the Church’s religious sisters, brothers and priests to ‘wake up the world’ with their testimony of faith, holiness and hope.

Last Thursday Archbishop Leo Cushley of St Andrews and Edinburgh marked the year’s opening with a Mass at the Gillis Centre in Edinburgh and this Saturday Bishop Joseph Toal of Motherwell will celebrate Mass with the Poor Clare Sisters at St Bride’s in Bothwell.

Archbishop Cushley said last week that the religious are ‘a shining witness to the love of Christ in our midst’ when visited the Carmelite sisters at their monastery in Dysart, Fife.

“We had a lovely celebration, we used simply the Liturgy of the day and reminded ourselves of the call to Holiness and above all the call made by our Holy Father, Pope Francis, to make consecrated life attractive so as to attract people to God and to the religious life through our own behaviour, words and actions,” the archbishop said.

The Year of Consecrated Life, which will officially begin on November 30, the first Sunday of Advent, will be preceded by a prayer vigil tomorrow. The year will finish on February 2 2016, the World Day of Prayer for Consecrated Life. During these 14 months celebrations and diverse meetings will take place with the objective of highlighting the various dimensions of consecrated life.

Cardinal João Braz De Aviz, the Prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, announced earlier this year that the year would ‘embrace the future with hope.’

“We believe that the Second Vatican Council has been a breath of the Spirit not only for the whole Church but, perhaps especially, for the consecrated life,” he said. “We are also convinced that in these 50 years consecrated life has undertaken a fruitful journey of renewal, not free, certainly, of difficulties and hardships, in the commitment to follow what the Council asked of the consecrated: fidelity to the Lord, to the Church, to their own charism and to the people of today.”

For this reason, he said, the first objective of the Year of Consecrated Life would be to ‘make a grateful remembrance of the recent past.’ With this positive outlook on the past, he continued, ‘we want to ‘embrace the future with hope’— the second objective. Although the crises that affect the world and the Church are also felt within consecrated life, Cardinal Braz de Aviz said women and men religious remain full of hope, based not on their own powers, but on trust in the Lord. As in him, he said, ‘no one can rob us of our hope.’

During the special year, it is expected the new Apostolic Constitution on Religious Life, updating Pius XII’s 1950 document, will be published.

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