Religious life should focus on witness, not ideology, Pope tells Italian superiors

November 07, 2014

The Church grows by attracting people rather than by proselytizing, Pope Francis said in a November 7 address to a gather of Italian superiors of religious orders.

Pope Francis emphasized the importance of religious life as a means of attracting people to the faith. The radical nature of religious consecration forces people to ask questions, he said. By the testimony of their lives, religious draw people toward the faith, the Pope said. He added that “prophetic witness coincides with sanctity.”

“True prophecy is never ideological,” the Pope went on; “It does not oppose the institution; it is institution.”

Speaking about the charisms of religious communities, the Holy Father said that an institutional charism should produce energy that can be shared with the people of God, especially those “who live in the peripheries of history.” He said: “Every charism, to live and to be fruitful, is required to decentralize, because at the center there is only Jesus Christ.”

The Pope remarked that religious life should also bear witness to the virtue of fraternity, which is so often ignored in a society that is focuses on the individual and his subjective rights.

 

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Further information:

• Francis receives the major superiors: charisms are not to be conserved like bottles of distilled water, but to be put to the service of history (VIS)