Why Do We Need the Consecrated Life in the Catholic Church?

by Admin · Published July 26, 2024 · Updated July 25, 2024

By Fr Vaclav Klement SDB – There are 800,000 consecrated men and women in the Catholic Church. Some 40% of all Catholic priests belong to a variety of religious congregations, and 600,000 sisters and 50,000 brothers. Why do we need the religious in the Catholic Church? It’s not easy to understand even for diocesan priests, the ordinary Catholic faithful or the parents of the religious, the fathers and mothers.

Consecrated people in the Church were always more numerous than the priests. Religious men and women keep alive the living faith, the witness the primacy of Jesus, Christ in daily life, giving up everything for Him completely, in the Church community. Don Bosco used to say: ‘Give your heart completely to Jesus!’- detached from earthly goods (poverty), totally concentrated on God, renewing their YES to God every day.

Pope Francis, himself a Jesuit religious, is inviting us: ‘I’m counting on you, to wake up the world, the sleeping faithful through your radical way of living your faith and vocation’.

Religious are called to be a living memorial of Jesus, sign and bearer of God’s love for the young, necessary medicine for the whole Catholic community, a shining life of witness to the Gospel, proclaiming Jesus Christ through the testimony of chastity, poverty and obedience, of community life and wholehearted dedicated to the youth mission.

Religious consecrated people are not superior to other Christians, and also not the same as them. They are chosen by God to receive a special call to give their heart completely to Jesus in the community, with a chaste, poor and obedient heart of a Good shepherd.

Religious are a medicine, an antidote for the easy temptations of Jesus’ disciples, to compromise, free from desire for power, wealth and pleasure, signposts of the Resurrection which is the final goal and purpose of our life. Jesus-like life embraces chastity (Jesus loves all, up to giving up his own life), poverty (Jesus didn’t have a stone where to lay his head) and obedience (Jesus made the will of his Father his daily bread, until the shedding of his blood).