Now, Scheme 3 is followed by a Capitular Decree on the same page, this is on page 8 of the present text of the Constitution. And that Capitular Decree was not made a separate scheme, but it was just the temporary measures needed to achieve Scheme 3, in a sense, which is the integration of the lay brothers. So, this is something that looks obvious, but wasn't obvious, because you had a two-class society, you see, in the monastic life, in the Benedictine monastic life, and also in the Communities for a long time. So this is doing away with that, in the path of Vatican II. So, we'll see how that works. Now, here it's very enlightening, actually, to look at the earlier Constitutions, because you find that the two-class thing is very clearly there. I should say declarations. If you refer to the earlier Declaration No. 3, you'll see the background.

[01:05]

No. 1 here, in Scheme 3, is, All the Professor of our Communities are, without distinction, brothers among themselves. Which would seem obvious, you know, according to the Gospel. But it was not what it meant at the time. Old Declaration No. 3 read as follows. Besides the choir monks in our congregation, there are lay brothers who are conversi. You'll find that conversus is, or a person who is converted, means convert, literally, is the expression used for these in the literature in Latin. Who are principally occupied in manual labor. They have no active or passive voice in the government of the order. B. Oblates, who have the same obligations as the lay brothers and enjoy the same privileges, but they make only a promise in place of the religious vows. C. Interim secular oblates, live with the community with a schedule of their own, observing the order and enjoying the spiritual privileges. Serving the order and enjoying spiritual privileges. There's a whole history to this, you see, which comes out of the Middle Ages, actually.

[02:09]

If you look in this R.B. 1980, you'll find a very brief sketch of the origin of the lay brother institution. It's on page 128 on the following page. During the Middle Ages, the Benedictine community became a quite different reality from that outlined in the Rule of Benedict. For a long time, the monks had been more and more assimilated to clerics. That means deacons, priests, people in holy orders. Insofar as their life demanded a level of education that separated them from the laity. Remember St. Benedict's dress on Alexio. Alexio meant, of course, the Bible in Latin, the Psalms in Latin. As vernacular development made Latin the language of an educated minority, the people became less active in the liturgy, which was more and more identified as the work of clerics and monks. See what's happening. So culturally, first of all, you get the split.

[03:10]

Then you get the split according also to holy orders, of course. And the monks become sort of lumped in with the clerics, the monks who know the laity. Which is both an educated minority, and it's also a religious distinction that's crept in. A distinction within the church. Holy orders. In the course of the Middle Ages, there was a gradual increase in the number of monks admitted to sacred orders, which we call a clericalization, a monasticism in the Middle Ages. The ritual development in the monasteries meant that the monks were occupied chiefly with sacred duties and did less of the common work. So now you see the Benedictine life is being turned out of the form that St. Benedict had given them, where the work is important. The new orders developed the institution of the conversi, or lay brothers, to take care of the work. They seem to have appeared first at Valambrosa. Valambrosa, which is a bad contemporary with Camaldoli in the 11th century.

[04:12]

Later we find them at Chersaute, and especially at Citeaux, where they were very numerous. And also they were present at Camaldoli, one reason being because the St. Romualdine wanted his hermitage to be priests for a new beginning. And then, if they're going to be in the cell, you see, if the life of the cell is a norm, everybody can't live the life of the cell. You can't operate a community on that basis. You've got individual hermits around, and each one will take care of what he needs and what he has to go out of the cell or what he's in it. But as soon as you form a group and then say that the norm is the life spent within the cell, you can no longer get the work done unless somebody else is living another style of life. So you simply have to have a kind of symbiosis and another group of people. Picture the Carthusians trying to live their life without the help of the lay brothers that would be inconceivable. The Conversi were not lay brothers in the modern sense, but laymen who were admitted to a religious life different from that of the monks.

[05:13]

Their vocation was not to a life of liturgical and private prayer and Lectio, but to a life of service for the monastery. They were often illiterate and were generally occupied with work. I don't think they were always illiterate. I think sometimes you had quite educated people who would take up that kind of work. In the Cistercian abbeys they spent most of the week at distant granges, out doing farm work, and came to the monastery only for Sunday. It was only much later that they were considered a kind of second-class monks. Many of them became extremely holy men, but this new development harbored an ambiguity whose effects remain to the present day. Obviously, the tenor of Vatican II is towards unification. I didn't bring the Vatican II documents, but they must be referred to here. At Perfecte Caritata's number 15, 15 is referred to there,

[06:16]

very probably urges the unification of religiousism. It doesn't say that you have to abolish something like the lay brother category, but that the lay brothers fully participate in the life. And there are various ways in which they didn't, in which there is a kind of unfair distribution. And also, see, for a long time the lay brothers were not monks in the same way that the Quorum monks were monks. They didn't make solid profession. That's the real criterion. They restricted the meaning of monk. So these are some very invidious distinctions that came in to religiousism. And in some places they still carry on, virtually unchanged. In other places they've been completely changed. In some monasteries you've even got an anti-clerical feeling. A lot of the monks simply don't want to have a minimum number of priests,

[07:19]

and a lot of the monks are not inclined to think of the priesthood as part of their monastic vocation at all, because they're reacting against those exaggerations. There's some of that, I think, in Christ in the Desert, for instance. It's so exaggerated in the other direction. So that's the background for what you see here. The relations between the brethren are to be characterized by evangelical simplicity and fraternal charity. Simplicity is the opposite of that. It's the opposite of a kind of formalism, of decorum, of a hierarchical, hieratic type of behavior. However, in the community life, the order of proceedings is determined by the seniority of first profession. Now, you have to remember, before this also, even in the choir there was a distinction,

[08:21]

that the priests would be its instrument, and one would be the choir. And then the laity would be the other one in the choir. Maybe sometimes they didn't even have a separate choir. They were saying separate prayers, because the choir monks, the priests would be praying in Latin, and he'd be praying in Hebrew, in Italian, or in English, as the case may be. First profession comes from the proceedings, and you need an order of proceedings, actually. Just, as they say, you have to know who's going to go through a door first. You can't both go through that at the same time. Just for simplicity, you have to have a kind of order, but it's, in a sense, an arbitrary order. Saint Benedict kind of wisely points out, well, there is an order. That gives you a way of doing things without discord, without disagreement, when there's an order that's agreed upon. Just a very elementary thing. It makes you know where you stand. So, that makes me uncertain,

[09:22]

to avoid embarrassment. And this is the order, actually, of Saint Benedict, because remember that the first profession was the profession of Saint Benedict. So this goes right back to the beginning, if you believe me. The priesthood is required for the office as a prior, general assistant, procurator general, visitor, master of novices, masters of the students. The reason is, in general, first, because the canon law requires it. See, the church law requires that certain officers in a community be priests. And secondly, because without the priesthood, they stand at a certain discipline. One example would be the superior of a monastic community who can never celebrate the liturgy. Okay. That puts him in a rather awkward place. He can never... I suppose he could give homilies to the community, certainly, even during the liturgy, but it's kind of a paradox

[10:24]

if he could not officially get to liturgy, say, on cheap feasts and things like that. It splits the thing in an unfortunate manner. Also, there are kinds of jurisdiction which require the priesthood. Now, for instance, in the old days, in the beginnings of monasticism, it may be that you would have confession which was kind of non-sacramental to a monk who was not a priest. And this was done in monasticism. Especially in the East, it was done for a much longer time. But you don't have that now, do you? Now we have only, practically speaking, sacramental confession and that requires the priesthood. And it's as if jurisdiction, as they say, in the internal forum, I suppose, we restrict real jurisdiction according to the truth, because we restrict it to the priesthood. We can criticize that, but that's the way it stands and that's the reason for the specifications of the agreement. Some of those are going to be changed.

[11:25]

It's gradually eroding, as a matter of fact. For instance, the chaplists have at least one novice pastor who is not a priest. You can get permission from the Holy See now to make someone a novice pastor who is not a priest. And if you think about it, pardon me, there's no absolute reason for a novice pastor to be a priest. For the superior, it's very convenient, actually, that he be a priest for various reasons. All kinds of reasons. Liturgical reasons, especially. The novice pastor, he doesn't have to have a liturgical role. And also, these reasons of jurisdiction that are built into canon law. It's just because the whole thing has been built up there. There's no absolute reason right in the bottom of it. Because remember that, as far as we know, Saint Benedict was not a priest. Now, if he was not a priest, you can understand the kind of caution that he has with regards to priests in the rural canon. And if most of the monastic superiors were not priests, you can imagine how they felt about a priest

[12:26]

coming into the community if they were not sure of it. It's just a natural solution, a natural situation for somebody to come in and take up a leadership role of his own, which is separate from the leadership role of the abbot himself. And if the abbot is not a priest, then he's at a real disadvantage at that point, you see. The other fellow can give confessions and celebrate in the liturgy and giving homilies and all kinds of things. And here's a poor abbot sitting alongside him trying to contend with this. Now, it depends on the quality of the individual. If the individual is sincere and humble, then OK. That's never the case. Now, we don't believe that Saint Benedict was a priest. And monasticism, as you can see, is basically a non-clerical thing. Basically, non-priesthood doesn't mean it's anti-clerical. It just is a different thing. Also, there's at least one case

[13:28]

of a non-priest superior, OK? But that was given by the Holy See in Africa where there was nobody, there was no African monk who was a priest who could have been made superior in that community. And it was absolutely essential, it seemed, that the superior be an African and be a local priest. And be a local man in that community. So they gave permission. They said, observe carefully that this is not a precedent. Of course, it is a precedent because when you do it once then somebody else can ask for it. And it gradually gets stretched. So gradually that may, gradually that may erode away too. It's like saying, be very careful not to notice what we're doing. All the professors have to wear the same form of monastic habit. You see, before the lay brothers had something else they had a leather belt instead of a white cincture. So there was a distinction

[14:30]

built into the habit. So that's abolished. Is that here? Also here. It was universal. Five. Regular oblates may also be received into our communities. They live according to the rule established for them and united to the family by virtue of a simple promise. So that's something that really should be revived. We talked about it under one name or another. The fact that the name oblate is given in the constitutions is the best. It means it gives that the most solid footing. As you notice and disagree about that in the community. Because of our experience with it earlier. But we need it. The prescriptions of the social laws of the region are to be consulted with regard to their activity. The reason for putting that in was that over-knowing they've got some pretty strict laws

[15:30]

about things like benefits. And if somebody is working and he's not fully a monk, he's not fully a member of the community, he's working for the community and he's not paid so the community can really get into trouble. Because he can take this to the local syndicato as they say who's the head of the workers' union and who around Kamaldi is likely to be communist. And they'll really go after that monster and they'll take him into court and they're likely to get to put the screws in. This has happened in several cases. Partly not just out of justice but to protect the monastery. There's famous cases where somebody lives quietly in a monastery for 20 years and works for a government board or something and then he goes away and he's not concerned about it but somebody persuades him that he should sue the monastery and they get into this awful thing.

[16:31]

And of course the monasteries can be unjust too they can exploit people they can abuse them and so on. So now they're very scrupulous. Okay, now the capitular decree there on the same page is just giving the tactical steps that are to be taken for governance. I should have brought the council documents today to read that perfected caritatus number 15 but that's what this is built on. Same habit they have precedence according to the seniority of first profession so that means that no longer do the priests occupy the head of the choir and then the lay brothers stand in a separate place in the choir and they can and extend it. Things like that seem small but at the moment when they happen of course they're kind of earthquakes especially in an old community where people aren't getting together. Number three now

[17:31]

in past times you see you had two separate choirs at least part of the time the lay brothers would be saying as they say their fathers and abbes which basically is like saying our fathers are given simple prayers in the vernacular because they didn't know the latin now they're all together in the same choir because the liturgy has come into the vernacular the liturgy has come into Italian and into English so there's no reason for them to be separated. You can say there is a reason because it's going to be harder for them to get in touch with the Psalms it's hard for everybody to get in touch number two it gives you an escape clause suppose you have a lay brother who's the cook and he's in the kitchen all day something like that well he can be excused from the office obviously this becomes a regular thing in some cases and then he may have difficulty in the choir

[18:32]

this was true with a lot of the trappist lay brothers they were They were furious when they started wanting them all to be in choir, but they didn't want to be in choir. They said, this is not our vocation. Our vocation is to live, to pray, to learn what we're going to pray and what we're going to do. It might surprise you. They were a lot more comfortable. That's true, there are other things. Is that from the lay brother angle, or are there some of the priests that object to the change in the liturgy? Were there any shootings, or was it all kind of quiet?

[19:33]

They just stayed away. It's a strange thing. But many years, many years, life can do that to you. Okay, then there's something about formation, because the brothers have not had a good, they haven't had any theological formation, and so on and so forth. You're dealing with a social situation like none other in this country for centuries. So it's not that simple to change it. It's different from us, because we start almost from scratch. When we come into the life, we're not coming out of ourselves. It's a lot easier for us to change. The lay brothers have active voice in the conventional chapters, and within the limits of the world, passive voice also.

[20:43]

Active voice means you can vote, passive voice means you can be electable. So, now this is a big change, especially in a community. Consider a community where you've got ten priests, ten psalmic professed priests and ten psalmic professed lay brothers. Now all of a sudden you've all got the same voting chapter. All these years, just the priests, the quorum monks have been voting, and all of a sudden you've got ten lay brothers in there who've also got to vote. That community can change pretty fast, can be turned upside down. So there's a certain amount of trepidation in making these decrees. Actually, they're pretty courageous. You can see how a community would really be afraid that things were going to change and get out of control. Any questions about that one before we go on to the next one? Okay, scheme four, the monastic community and the prior. This builds on scheme two, remember, the basic structure.

[21:45]

The first part is on the theological part, on the monastic community and the prior. And then we get down to the juridical stuff in part two and part three. So this is the theological basis, and it's built right on the theology, right on the ecclesiology of Vatican II. The monastic community, number one, is a continuation and reflection of the mystery of the Church. Now this is sort of what we call the Magna Carta, or the foundation stone of Lumen Gentium, of the Constitution of Vatican II and the Church. The mystery of the Church, which is in Christ as a sacrament or sign and instrument of union with God and of the unity of the entire human race. So you see, they've planted the meaning of the monastic community directly upon the meaning of the Church itself. The meaning of the Church itself being defined in terms of Vatican II as sacrament. Now there's a whole, very rich theology underneath that, which obviously we can't go into now. It's worth getting into gradually.

[22:53]

What does sacrament mean? A sacrament is a sign which also does something. It says something and it does something. Now the idea is that Christ himself is a sacrament. He's the primordial sacrament. Spilovic wrote a book called Christ, the Sacrament of Encounter with God. Because in the Incarnation, God comes into visible form. The Word of God is in visible form and becomes a sacrament. The Word becomes flesh, the flesh itself is sacrament, because a sacrament is a visible sign of something that's invisible. There's not only a sign that says something, it's a sign that does something. Saying and doing are in continuity here, because Brahma talks about what God is doing as his self-communication. Now saying is the beginning of communication, isn't it? But the full communication goes beyond saying into transforming, or into giving the Spirit, or into rebirth, or into whatever you want to call it, deification. Now that's what sacrament means. So to say that the monastic community as well as the church is that, is saying something pretty solid, something pretty important.

[24:03]

Now not everybody would say that. Some people would say, well, the monastic community is a group of people who are trying to seek their own spiritual liberation, their own spiritual perfection. It doesn't have this theological character of being a small church, a micro-equation. People like to speak that. But because of our Western monastic theology, and especially in Benedictinism, it does have that picture, it does have that character. You can ask if the same thing is true in the Hermitage. I think it's true in the Hermitage to the extent that the Hermitage is a community. And not only in columns, you know, not only in clusters or solitudes. It's very important. The sacrament of union of God and man, the vertical, and union of all men. So the vertical and the horizontal dimensions. That notion of sacrament, we can go into it another time, because it's very rich. And of course it expresses itself directly in the liturgy.

[25:05]

Sacramentum. Sacramentum is the Latin for that which is mysterion in Greek. So you see the connection between the mystery of the church and the sacrament. And usually the mysteria are the liturgy. Baptism in the Eucharist, for instance. Animated by the Spirit of... Now this is a very thick theological composition, where every word has been weighed, and most of it is taken straight from the Council documents, and then applied to the monastic community. So this is where the monastic theology becomes Vaticanized to the utmost. That is, it becomes put, as it were, into the mould of Vatican II. And then it has to assert itself again, at another point, in order to assert it from its own monastic character. Animated by the Spirit of the Risen Christ, attention to the word, continual conversion is the meaning of the monastic word.

[26:16]

To discover the will of the Father, the cross, and the hope of being glorified. So you see how that's an attempt to condense the whole of the core of theology, and inject it into the identity of the monastic community. Nourished by the word, and the same word, and the same bread, they conflict their communion of life with God in mutual unity. A vertical and a horizontal once again. Mutual unity of love. Okay, that's supposed to be the theology of the community. Now for the prior. The prior, and then, right away, they go, not Vatican II this time, but the Holy Will. Who in the monastery is believed to hold the place of Christ. So that makes him a sacrament too, in some way, even though they don't use that word for him. Now remember that the rule says that about the abbot, but we don't have any abbots. In the Kemaldolese, the prior takes the role, takes the place of the abbot. He's called, according to the teaching of Holy Father Benedict, to assure and promote his Father, Master, and Guide.

[27:23]

The sincere despondability of the entire community of his members in the voice of the Spirit. Notice how open-ended that is. That it's carefully been arranged not to close in this structure with the prior or the abbots who are sitting on top of it, but to keep it open, in effect, subservient to the direction, to the voice of the Spirit. So that's a very good way of putting it. It doesn't close it. It doesn't stop it. But the whole point of this thing is this discernment of the will of God, the voice of the Spirit. There's a kind of inspiration, I think, in the writing of a lot of this, even though other things remain to be brought out afterward. Father, Master, and Guide. You get three different nuances there, three different aspects. Father is the typically benedictine thing. And where you see the sacramental dimension of the prior, because sacrament, once again, is this kind of image, is a kind of communication.

[28:24]

So he's supposed to be able to communicate that Fatherly Face is a word of God. Master means teacher. Guide is more than a teacher, in a sense. It's somebody who's supposed to be able to act and lead in that way. I didn't read an analysis of exactly what it meant by this. Why they use three words, I've read, but I would guess that that's approximately it. The next paragraph, number three, emphasizes that it's service, quoting the Gospel. Next, he has to recognize, in the light of the Spirit, once again, a question of discernment in the individual, the needs and aspirations of his soul, in order to assist him and direct him toward an always more free and responsible growth in union with God and charity towards the good. If you compare this with the earlier declarations, I'm sure that there's a very strong contrast. Let's see if we can find a typical passage.

[29:26]

And in this, I have to apologize for making the earlier legislation always come out bad, like the Dark Ages, but we have to make the contrast. Let me round it up. Now, the declarations on chapter two are pretty simple and straight. They don't talk much about the good, because there's so much about it. Okay, he needs a theological formation and spiritual experience to break the Word and to guide. So you see the difference between master and guide there.

[30:28]

To guide them in the ways of God, which is more spiritual, more active offices. A double teaching office means with words and with life. These are the things that always make superiors blush. And that's from the rule, chapter two, which is a great chapter on the Bible. Like the firmament of divine justice. We love him. So he has to be ready to renew his personal commitment towards perfect charity, exercise of asceticism and contemplative prayer. You see how all the bases are touched continually. It's kind of an inventory of theological elements. For that reason, it doesn't look much political. Number four is the priority of his tasks, of his jobs. What is he supposed to be doing? Which one? Declaration number 354.

[31:31]

Let's take a look and see. Yeah, it means it's not the same article, okay? But it connects with the earlier article. In other words, it's a revision or a substitution, a replacement of the earlier article. Now, if you look at 354, you'll find it's an enormous change, that it's really a replacement. It's a new article to fulfill the same scope as 354. This is 354. In the same way, the priors and everyone else should be true to the name Herman. And if they are not forced by necessity, they should keep continual residence in their respective houses. So 354 says stay put. And this one here says... It's a lot more theological. Two different terms.

[32:37]

And it doesn't just say Herman, okay? See, the emphasis in the earlier declaration tended to be heavily on external observance. To be a Herman is to stay in your place. Well, that may be true. There's a lot more to it than that. So the new constitution, more fortunately, put the emphasis on the spiritual realities, the internal qualities of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a man. And... These here, since 1957, but some of them go back a lot longer, because this is the great, [...] great grandchild, you see, of a draft which was probably made in the 16th century. When the Coronis influence began to wash back over into our congregation. And a lot of these declarations just passed down for hundreds of years, see, virtually unchanged, until this earthquake here. That's right. Oh, yeah, it's a major, it's a major shake-up.

[33:42]

The time of Vatican II. And this is true in general in the Church. None of the monasteries. Okay, now the hierarchy of responsibilities of the prior. Number four. A. To promote the sanctification of the brethren. That's his principal task, his most important duty. Well, that's pretty good, you can't complain about that. And to promote their ascent towards monastic profession. But secondly, he is to provide at the same time for the adequate human and cultural formation. Because without that, they probably won't do the first one very well either. Now, that's something that you don't find stressed to the same extent in the earlier Constitutions. I won't dig out the articles, because often times we're talking about lacks, we're talking about something that's not in the earlier Constitutions, rather than a contrast with something that is there. But with this emphasis on human and cultural formation,

[34:45]

as distinguished from merely spiritual formation, in the earlier Constitution it would tend to be held a little bit at arm's length, that fear of humanism, and of something that's going to dilute, water down, and deviate the hermetical life from its true goal. And continually in our history we've got these two poles which are operating. The pole of pure prayer, and the humanistic pole, the pole of culture. And one, of course, tends to find itself in the hermitage, the pure prayer, the purely contemplative one. The other one tends to locate itself in the synagogue. This is not always true. You get a few humanists that are in the hermitage too, by and large, etc. And actually it's a beautiful thing to have those two poles. Man, it can really pull against one another. It can really be a destructive tension, but it can also be a beautifully enriching thing, living with that tension. You find the same thing in somebody like Thomas Newman, for instance,

[35:49]

who has got a notion of pure contemplation, which is razor sharp, in a sense, and very exclusive. And at the same time we've got him writing poetry. In fact, a lot of... He's very much into different cultural departments. He's an important man. And there's a kind of war between the two of them, too, I think. Part of it they pushed him to write, but there was a lot more than one thing that Thomas wanted to... Fortunately, he was inconsistent. Very fortunately. Thank God that he was so inconsistent. Because so much truth comes out that way.

[36:50]

When a person doesn't force kind of one mold on himself. Well, going back to the question of the two poles, okay, human and cultural formation. Let him open his heart and his intelligence to a sincere and paternal understanding of the Brethren, so as to express the charity with which God loves them. That's a marvelous expression, which comes from one of the fathers, and is found in Perfecta Caritatis. See, there you get the sacramental thing, where the prior is supposed to somehow show and pass on that love with which God loves them. And the father thinks... And see how, in the core of Christianity, that really is. The whole business of spiritual poverty. Now we get down to brass tacks again. Number five, wise and efficient government. It's not all spiritual. Dispose all things with solicitude. That means the material things as well.

[37:54]

Avail himself of the active collaboration of the Brethren. See, often it had been a tendency in the past for the role of the Brethren to be rather passive. In other words, you have certain people in the community who have got certain offices, like the cellar, and the cellarer sees to everything, and then the monks do what they're told, and that's it. The idea of an active and intelligent collaboration is something else, is something new. And this too is sort of in synchrony with Vatican II. And the notion of collegiality, as well as the notion of responsibility, a kind of adult religious life. Together, studying a practicable program of action according to the concrete requirements of time and place. In other words, things are not going to remain the same. You've got to have a program, as it were, which flows with the situation. Then these two dimensions. To provide for the conservation of the sound traditions of the community, as well as for its adequate material and spiritual development.

[38:56]

Conservation and development. Let the monks recognizing the power of the spirit of faith, now the attitude of the monks. His mission as Father and Master. Obedience. Full, conscious, and responsible, as befits those who enjoy the liberty of the sons of God. A commentary could be made on those words, of course. Full. Just as total as in the past, just as total as in the rule of Saint Benedict. But not the kind of obedience, blind obedience, or the obedience of the dead, in a sense. Or that kind of robot-like, or regimented obedience, that sometimes is found, but conscious obedience. It's much harder. And responsible obedience, which means that the person somehow thinks, you know, that the whole of him is obeying, and not just his muscles, and not just his willpower. And that's harder, because it doesn't pass the buck

[39:57]

of all of the tension onto the superior, and then you just put your head down and put your teeth in and do what he tells you. You have to be totally yourself at the same time, and then give yourself to God, through obedience, as a total person, as a whole person. You can't always do that. And obedience is a very varied thing. Sometimes we just have to do our teeth, just do it. Other times we shouldn't put our teeth out. Sometimes we shouldn't think about it. And sometimes we certainly shouldn't argue about it. But, there are critical times in life where we really have to. Whether we enjoy the liberty of the sons of God, if we forget that, then we've somehow lost the whole secret of the monastic way. And that's a very critical point for monasticism, that notion of the liberty of the sons of God. Whether monasticism really sets you free or whether it enslaves you. An imitation of the Lord,

[41:00]

let them offer themselves to God through their obedience as a living holy sacrifice. Now, that's scripturally based in the Romans, but also in other places if you look up that spiritual rational sacrifice as it's called. A true spiritual worship. Be careful to conserve the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace. Strive to attain the perfect stature of Christ in Ephesians. And that's kind of a summary that punctuates the whole section. Okay, now we get down to the juridical nitty gritties. So, ready yourself for legal language. We're going to move into part two. Superiors of sui iuris houses are designated priors. Regular prelates are major superiors according to... So, this is to hook it into the canon law of the church, okay? Sui iuris house is correlated with prior. So, you don't have any abbots. In fact, we don't call our monasteries abbots.

[42:00]

The monastery of Kamali is often called an archi-cenobia, arch-monastery. But not precisely an abbot. The Cenobite congregation used to have abbots and also an abbot general that he decided upon. Regular major superiors. So, that means that they're the same as abbots, practically speaking. There are things in canon law which are limited to major superiors. And the priors, therefore, can do those things. An example is certain permissions that can be given, say, for a leave of absence, certain things like that, we have to refer to a major superior. Some of the... I don't know how the superiors in the bigger orders work. The provincials are major superiors, but not all of the local superiors are major superiors, because often those local houses are controlled from the provincial center. So, people are moved around. I don't know where the levels change.

[43:04]

Ordinary jurisdiction... See, this language, language subjects, that's juridical language, unpleasant language. Ordinary jurisdiction... And the internal form as well as the external form. I looked that up, too, to get it as clearly in my head as I could before talking to you this morning. Jurisdiction is the power to bind and to loose, in Ecclesial terms. Jurisdiction in the external... The external form is a form of obedience. Now, obedience deals with external things. Obedience deals with work, deals with where you are, the way you live, in the external way. The internal form is the form of conscience. Now, the best-known jurisdiction where it's confidential, it's secret between you and the confessor, and it really goes into your interior life. Now, the jurisdiction that is in the sacrament of penance,

[44:09]

of confession, is the power to remit sins, right, through sacramental absolution. So, in a way, that's the strongest jurisdiction in the internal form. The jurisdiction in the external form means the power to tell somebody to do something out of obedience. Then, in the internal form, you have both a sacramental and a non-sacramental form, as they say. The sacramental form is the sacrament of penance. The non-sacramental form, hmm, exactly what does that mean? I'm not sure exactly. I'd have to look that up further. You've probably got it in all theology. But it's the outside of the sacrament. It can be spiritual direction or something like that. But the thing is, I don't know how jurisdiction comes into it. I don't know how an actual power comes into it, because spiritual direction is a purely voluntary thing. There's a contradictory thing

[45:13]

that comes into your canon, though, which is the canon that says that superiors should not The reason for that being that then they've kind of got a grip on in the internal form as well as in the external form, which is unfair, and in which they can sort of require a manifestation of conscience. There's a principle in the Church that you can't demand, you can't force anybody to a manifestation of conscience. It's kind of split from the internal. Somebody else has to be the confessor and maybe the spiritual director and so on. It tends to complicate things in the monastic school, although it does guarantee better than liberty to the individual. Any questions about that? Which is rather complex. Here,

[46:17]

we don't scrupulously abide by that thing about confession, but the whole principle is that the individual is absolutely free. In other words, he can go to whomever he wants to go for confession, including the superior, or including, say, the novice monks. We don't rule that out. The individual is left free. And that saves the principle. Otherwise, you see, you get this kind of thing in a monastery every week or something like that. It has a very tight grip on the whole thing. It can become a kind of spiritual tyranny, in that way, as well as in the external form. Doesn't that go back to the original concept, the one of the original concepts of the abbot? Well, remember that the abbot

[47:19]

of Saint Benedict doesn't have that priestly grip all the time. He doesn't have his authority reinforced by the sacrament of confession in that way. And then it's up to the monk who commits himself to that thing. But it can lead to bad results. That concentration in that regard of bad cases of that kind of tyranny. And so it's become very cautious in trying to protect the priesthood. This is an example. We think of the canon law and church law as being some kind of a box that ties people in. Actually, law often is very much on the side of the individual. A lot of the church laws are designed to guarantee the freedom of the individual, to protect the individual against the abuses of authority. Take the law of the seal of the confession, which is a very extraordinary law to protect the individual Christian and give him kind of an

[48:21]

unlimited freedom in a sacrament of confession. Unlimited confidence that he's dealing with God and he can say whatever he wants to say. That's marvelous. There are a lot of other laws like that. Sometimes we tend to focus on the ones which are more constricting. Okay. The candidate for the office of prior has to be solemnly professed for at least five years in our congregation. The reason for that is obvious, that he has that experience. You get somebody from outside and it's strange how the spirits of a community, one community, the spirit of one congregation differ from one another. You get some amazing tensions and dislocations when people come with a different background. If he's called upon to govern a hermitage, you should know something about the hermitage theoretically and practically. That article was put in there by a group of force.

[49:22]

At the end of number eight. And the reason why is that that's in canon law. I don't... It might not have been put in here had it not been required by the church law. There was a fear here that the Cenobite might be put in... in charge of a hermitage. And the same thing turns up again in the qualifications for the prior general that wanted to insist that he come out of a hermitage. If he's going to govern a hermitage or whatever. I'm sure in Blessed Rudolph that... The spirit is there in Blessed Rudolph even if the words are not there. Only Blessed Rudolph would light several candles and cast a few and that's all he's going to do. It's a shorter constitution.

[50:29]

It's a very long president that's calling now. All of the saints are... You'd think they were going to turn it into a pool hall. Would it be called in God... Evidently some of the monasteries were pretty... There are two sides to that. Some of the monasteries were quite corrupt in those days. St. Peter Damian didn't even want his hermits to come out of the monasteries. He wanted to take them straight from the work because the monasteries he thought were so... in such bad shape the monasteries. But secondly there is something there. There is a kind of purity about the United Way when it's really on the level of contemplation that is behind them. Like the Carthusians for instance the people have really experienced that contemplation in its purity and in its power to do anything they can to protect it.

[51:31]

But the trouble is that the institutional protection of that just somehow doesn't work. It's like you can't put it in another way. But the fact is that the hermitages survived that for nearly a thousand years. Maybe that kind of extreme force has played a large part in that. It's difficult to judge history. Sure. That's what they saw at that time. Sure. Well, the difficulty comes if we try to apply it to our time. As if we say that that's holding for us. And some people would say that. They'd say that these are the first commandments of these constitutions so they're binding on us as well and we should have the same attitude. That's when we get into a real problem. And you see where it splits them and that's the drive right down the center. And you say well those center-bites they're not even

[52:32]

in the same race. They're not people hardly. I think there's a constant tendency if you want to think of all the parts of a religious life as a state of life. I suppose that should be something like that. Because you have to keep on resisting the erosion that keeps happening. That's right. But whatever move you make to resist it somehow is always somewhat inappropriate in a way. It has to be made. And the thing about entropy is true. There's a kind of erosion and then with peaks jutting up now and then and reforms and new assertions. Excuse me I think I interrupted you. The principle of entropy. But Saint Robert didn't want his atheist to be in the monastery that he

[53:32]

lived in. They are not the ones that he spiritual advice or something and come back one day and say that was the strangest thing. How could that work? How could that work? The abbot would come down once a week and he would get just close enough so he wouldn't get hurt by the chaos that's going on down there. Give him a sermon from a distance and then run back to the monastery. Because he couldn't really be the abbot. That makes him a visiting abbot, visiting monk. No, but Saint Robert said that. They put their habits on and they cleaned things up on Saturday. Robert

[54:37]

was somewhat like Saint Francis. He's a charismatic man. He's not able to organize to get those two things together. And they also elected as prior a professor monk of another community. So, for instance, if you wanted to elect a prior here, you could call somebody from Kamaldolik. And it doesn't say just another Kamaldolik. It has to be professed in our congregation. So it can only be from the community of our congregation without some special exception. Okay, let's see if we can zip through. Maybe not all of it. A little more of these juridical things. The prior is elected. This is a beautiful piece of diplomatic Italian number nine. He's elected for an undetermined time. However, he cannot continue in his office

[55:37]

if he isn't confirmed every six years. In other words, there's this big red carpet with a trap door under it. So that happens every six years. Then they have a chapter of confirmation first, and he just has to get a simple majority. So he's given a kind of advantage. He has to get a simple majority for confirmation, and if he's not confirmed, then they hold another chapter and they elect someone. And then they go down, starting when you need a $2,000. Isn't that a simple majority for large communities? Say you get possibly you can have 46 for and 45 against. I mean, you've got half the community against. What would happen is probably that he would not accept. If he

[56:38]

was wise, he would probably refuse to accept. And this happens. Now that will be reelected with a narrow majority in this circumstance. There's not enough support to have that. And then there'll be advisors, you know. Maybe there's an advocate who's in charge, and that's how he's in charge of the election. Because they want to give the incumbent an advantage, they go back up to two thirds as soon as you have to. So if there's a lot of doubt, they could flunk him, and then they can reelect him afterwards, after they consider some other possibility. So it's simple majority, and then up to two thirds as soon as they feel they can confront him. And then they come down again if they get stalled. If they can't get that two thirds majority, they work down there. After two votes, it's a simple majority or something like that. And if they're stalled in the end, they just catch large. In fact,

[57:49]

it may be very small. It could be a dozen people or something like that. And also, in our communities, they all know one another pretty well. It's not like some monasteries. You get people out for 20 years in a parish, and then they come back to vote. They don't know. Okay. Now, the other things here are about the chapter, and we don't really care about proceedings, things like that. We don't need them. Superiors of the dependent houses are called vice priors. Now, you've got two kinds of vice priors. The first is the kind, talked about in number 16, who is the actual superior of a house which is not autonomous, okay? He's the second in command in an autonomous house, okay? Now, in

[58:50]

Benedictine language they have, in canon law, they have an expression for these two. The first is called a conventional prior. I forget what the second is called. But the second is a vicar, you see, who functions when the prior is outside the monastery, outside the monastery. The subprior would be, that's the same thing, okay? Whereas a subprior in the, in a big monastery where you have an abbot is the third in command. We wouldn't have a third in command in one of our communities because they're small. See, number 18 is the second kind of vice prior, which is not obligatory. Now, we don't have a vice prior. I think we did at one time, just for a little while. That's right. In other words, he'll take on a

[59:50]

lot of the domestic duties, a lot of the administrative duties of the prior, leaving the prior free to do other things. And then it gets on to the conventional chapter. Let's stop there after number 18, okay? And go on next time.

[60:07]

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