The Constitutions of 1991
This year is the 20th anniversary of the approval of the Constitutions (C) of the Discalced Carmelite Nuns (dcn), a sufficiently long time, almost a generation, which makes it possible for us to speak on this theme with sufficient serenity and objectivity and perhaps also to attempt to make an assessment of the ‘reception’ of this text – a word normally used to speak of the approval of texts by the Magisterium. We can speak about the C in different ways: the historical-genetic method, going over again the stages of their evolution; the thematic method, taking from the text the more important themes; the hermeneutical method, commenting on the text. I would like to follow this last method concentrating on paragraph 3 of chapter 1, entitled ‘Spirit and Norms’, which includes numbers 12 to 20. In my view we are dealing with a very important part of the C, in which are synthesized the principles that inspire the new text, in accordance with the renewal desired by the Council, and also some important ‘interpretative rules’. We can say that it is the section in which the C speak of the C.
Spirit and Norms
Let us begin with the title: ‘Spirit and Norms’. The relationship between these two terms is fundamental and in my view contains in itself a great part of the newness of the text. We always run the risk of placing spirit and norms in opposition to each other with the result that on the one hand, spirit without norms is anarchical and not ecclesial and one gets lost in subjective and individualistic ways; while on the other hand, norms without spirit are both blind and blunt: putting order upon, but without giving any meaning, inspiration or depth to life, imprisoning it without allowing it to grow. In the Church, instead, the gifts of the Spirit, the charisms, are authentic precisely in so far as they show themselves capable of building up and giving life to the ecclesial community, of incarnating themselves in ‘normal’ reality - and the root of the word ‘normal’ is ‘norm’. The exceptional nature of the gift is translated into the normality of a life spent daily in building up the Church and awaiting the Kingdom; the freedom of the charism becomes the humble service of one's neighbor. It is clear that the normality of the Spirit has nothing to do with the monotony and the inertia of the flesh or with servile dependence on law. The life of the Spirit, which is allowed regulate and incarnate in ecclesial structures, is a life in which the humble acknowledgement of one's own weakness is constantly undertaken and overcome in grateful memory of the salvation received and in the confident expectation of the encounter with the Lord. The person experiences the need of losing their own ‘self’ in order to find it again in the ‘we’ of the Church, the body of the Lord and the spouse of the Lord. Without this theological and spiritual base, all the canonical regulations of the Church, and in particular the laws that regulate religious life, would have no meaning and it would be reduced to a purely human institution.
One would not be able to comprehend all the work and travail that went into the conciliar renewal of religious life without this fundamental requirement: to give back to the religious vocation all of its freshness, the flexibility and the radicality of the following of Jesus Christ just as it is in the Gospel:
Since the ultimate norm of the religious life is the following of Christ set forth in the Gospels, let this be held by all institutes as the highest rule (PC2a).
To have the Gospel as the ‘ultimate norm’ does not mean not having other rules, but to give to every legislative and normative formulation its evangelical meaning, which is that of an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ so as to grow in conformity to Him. For this reason the concern, which is just as present in the constitutions of the friars as it is in that of the nuns, is to give an evangelical and christological foundation to the essential aspects of religious life: the vows, the life of prayer, community life, cloister, mission. For this reason, before giving norms for each of these areas, the C want to open the mind and the heart of those for whom they are intended to their spiritual and theological meaning. It is in this sense too that the guidelines of Ecclesiae Sanctae, 13 are expressed:
The union of both elements, spiritual and juridical, is necessary so that the principal codes of the institutes have a stable foundation and that the true spirit and life-giving norm pervade them; care must therefore be taken that a merely juridical or purely exhortatory text is not composed.
It appears evident that this new requirement, in which the legislative text cannot and ought not have a ‘solely juridical’ character, implies also a different understanding of the authority of the norm. The strength of the C consists in the fact that they are founded for the religious on the word of Jesus, his gospel and the radical requirements of following him. In this regard, no. 20 of the C is very significant:
Let the Discalced Carmelite Nuns respond to Holy Mother’s exhortation, by knowing their Rule and Constitutions and observing them with the greatest fidelity. Let their progress toward evangelical perfection be guided by the spirit and the laws set forth in them. May they follow Christ more closely, for he is the supreme norm of life. However, these provisions of proper law do not oblige under sin. That obligation may derive from other sources.
The binding force of the law is not the fear of sin and punishment, but the desire to follow Christ and to come to evangelical perfection. It is clear that we are dealing here with a ‘hypothetical’ power, with a proposal like those of Jesus: “if you want to be perfect …, if you wish to follow me .., if you wish to be a proclaimer of the Kingdom of God …, if you wish to be a child of the Father, etc. The radicality is not a characteristic of the norm of the law, but it is in the attitude of the person who embraces this way of life. No law can truly make us radical or evangelical or witnesses to the kingdom or, in the ultimate analysis, saints.
The Teresian Charism
Together with recalling us to the supreme norm of the Gospel, the Council has invited each religious family to return to its original spirit:
It redounds to the good of the Church that institutes have their own particular characteristics and work. Therefore let their founders’ spirit and special aims they set before them as well as their sound traditions - all of which make up the patrimony of each institute - be faithfully held in honour (PC2b).
These expressions reappear in the Code of Canon Law in a canon that is fundamental for the legislation of religious life:
All must observe faithfully the mind (mens) and designs (proposita) of the founders regarding the nature, purpose, spirit, and character of an institute, which have been sanctioned by competent ecclesiastical authority, and its sound traditions, all of which constitute the patrimony of the same institute (can. 578).
The specific charism of a religious institute is expressed using three fundamental terms: the mind (mens) and the designs (proposita) and the sound traditions. The mens is the original intuition which gave rise to the religious family, the goal proposed by the founder. The proposita are those means by which the founder realised that goal, means which also belong to the charismatic patrimony of the institute. To understand what is meant by ‘sound tradtions’, it seems opportune to make reference to ES 17 where it says:
Those elements are to be considered obsolete which do not constitute the nature and purpose of the institute and which, having lost their meaning and power, are no longer a real help to religious life. Nevertheless, consideration must be given to the witness which the religious state has as its role the obligation of giving.
One could therefore deal with the traditional distinction between essential elements and accessory elements which do not pertain to the essence of the charism, whose power and meaning are tied rather to the historical and cultural context. The principle is very clear, but we know very well how in practice this distinction may not in fact be simple, something that is incontrovertible, because in practice the charism is always found in a concrete historical ‘inculturation’.
As we know, one of the problems most discussed during the long process of drawing up the C of the dcn has been precisely that of fidelity to the teresian charism. Paradoxically, while the work of legislative renewal had among its principal goals a return to the “original inspiration of the institute”, the text produced ad experimentum was accused of being lacking in fidelity to the spirit of the teresian charism and for this reason it was proposed to keep sic et simpliciter the text of the C elaborated by the Chapter of Alcalà in 1581, in which would be expressed the ultimate will of Holy Mother Teresa. Clearly, we are dealing with two different kinds of fidelity: a literal fidelity to the text of the C of 1581 and, a dynamic fidelity, that – without removing away anything that is essential to the teresian vocation - takes as its point of referral not simply a legislative text, like that of Alcalà, but the fundamental orientations of the teresian charism just as Teresa had expressed it in all of her works and in the witness of her life. Such orientations and fundamental options are put at the centre of the context of the renewal of religious life as intended by the Council.
In effect, the history of the C of the dcn is somewhat long and complex. It is not by chance that no. 13 of the C notes that “in the course of centuries, the Teresian constitutions were added to and modified. Finally, the Second Vatican Council proposed to all religious families that they renew their life and it ordered them appropriately to renew their legislation.” Besides, there is no doubt that St. Teresa wrote the Way “to motivate and teach her first daughters of St. Joseph’s of Avila” (C 12) and the other works, in particular the Foundations and the Letters, as well as the testimonies of the nuns who were her disciples and who in many cases integrated and made more precise the will of their Foundress. In this sense, the elaboration of the points of referral is certainly at the service of a greater, not lesser, fidelity to the teresian charism. Also because, as the C make clear in no. 14, the new redaction of the C takes up the norms set out in the C of 1567 and then confirmed in the C of Alcalà. Besides, Raphael Zubieta writes: “One can say that all the norms of a constitutional character in the teresian C have been taken into the new text”.# For this reason he concludes by affirming that “the C now approved are the teresian Constitutions, duly revised according to the provisions of the Church.”#
Probably that which characterises the presentation of the teresian charism in the present C is, so to speak, the primacy of the contemplative (or mystical) goal over the ascetical means, and how it allows a rereading in positive terms of the aspects of detachment, solitude, mortification, that moreover is not intended to minimize, but to value them. Another characteristic, profoundly teresian and at the same time modern, is the emphasis on the interior dimension, on the values that ought sustain and motivate the external choices and on the maturation of the person. For example, speaking of the cloister, the C of 1991 are not limited to pointing out the ascetical requirements or the consistence with a life of following Jesus Christ in a radical way, but going back to teresian texts, they also underline its importance for attaining a true liberty of spirit and for the joyful experience of sisterly union in Christ (n. 107). Or in regard to penance, one is invited to “stress the interior spirit and the exercise of virtues more than the rigors of corporal mortification […] For this reason their first concern will be to acquire the sovereign virtues of sisterly love, detachment and humility” (no. 48). The teaching of the Way of Perfection is evident here and its originality in founding the spiritual life on the fundamental Christian virtues, rather than on attitudes that are characteristic of the monastic life (which obviously are not excluded). Evidently, this is not the style of the text of the primitive C or of that of Alcalà, but one cannot affirm on this account that the new C are lacking in fidelity to the teresian spirit or in evangelical radicality. We can say, instead, that they integrate “spirit and norm” aiming not simply at commanding and obligating, but at teaching and forming.
A Fundamental Code
Another important characteristic of the 1991 C is their temperateness. In accordance with the guidelines given already by the conciliar decree PC and then by the motu proprio ES, it is forbidden to ‘multiply norms’ without necessity. As the Council text says, “everyone should keep in mind that the hope of renewal lies more in the faithful observance of the rules and constitutions than in multiplying laws.” It appears to me that in this regard also one ought to recognize something that is new. While in the past every detail of daily life was rigorously regulated by legislative texts, after the Council we are limited to establishing the fundamental orientations of religious life, those on which its identity depends, its nature, its specific end and its mission. The details of everyday life are left to the discernment and the initiative of the individual communities. As it says in can. 587, 4: “Other norms established by the competent authority of an institute are to be collected suitably in other codes and, moreover, can be reviewed appropriately and adapted according to the needs of places and times”. This explains why many of the elements contained in old C are eliminated from the present text: from the quality of the material of the habits or of the bed sheets, to the exact length of the scapular, to not being allowed use carpets and mirrors, etc. Also in this case it needs to be clarified that we are not dealing with ‘infidelity’, but with a different concept of law for religious, whose renewal has been authoritatively asked for by the Second Vatican Council.
The C are considered a ‘fundamental codex’ containing the fundamental juridical and spiritual elements whose approval or modification is up to the Holy See. Those elements, considered stable and universal, are not subject to variation in time or place, or they are less so in relation to other elements that are more secondary. There is no doubt that in this choice the sensibility of the Council is expressed for the historical dimension of the church and of the human person. As is affirmed in GS 10, in the course of history there are constant changes and today more than ever, but beneath all of this “there are many things that have not changed; these find their ultimate foundation in Christ, who is always the same: yesterday, today and forever”. The choice not to legislate for all the elements of religious life seems to me to be important for two reasons. In the first place, it is good to be aware that, from the theological and canonical point of view, not everything is of equal significance and that we ought above all to be concerned about fidelity in the things that are truly important, so as not to fall into the attitude of the Pharisees that Jesus condemned: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others” (Mt. 23:23). It is a common experience that sometimes one can be very attentive to the observance of external details, which is clearly easier, while we are not at all so committed to the formation and interior growth of individuals and of the community. Secondly, a value that has come from the conciliar renewal is sensitivity to “the needs of places and times” (as expressed in the Code, can. 587, 4). The Christian faith and within it the call to the religious life does not suppress differences of culture, but enters into them, strengthening the positive aspects and appreciating their richness. Besides, the missionary nature of the Church, which belongs to every state of the life of the baptized, including that of the purely contemplative religious life, requires that we take on different languages and symbolic systems according to the cultures and the different historical situations. All of this is part of the journey through history of a church that is inserted in the contemporary world.
The character of the ‘fundamental codex’ which are the C is clearly expressed in no. 18 and its intention to maintain “the simplicity in structure and the sobriety of the norms of life and of governance that correspond, after all, to the mind of St. Teresa herself”, regarding whom, the intolerance she had for the imposition of norms and prescriptions, on the part of the visitator for any pastoral visit, is noted. Numbers 18-19 regulate possible integration (of norms) with the C by indicating two distinct ways: the elaboration of a ‘supplementary code’ (otherwise defined as ‘particular statutes’ or ‘particular norms’), in which particular norms proper to the tradition of each monastery are gathered; the chapter decisions which apply the norms of the C taking account of the particular conditions of the individual monastery.
As examples of norms that could be defined in the local statutes, you can look up nn. 50-51 (fast and “new forms of communal penance that fit better the different situations or conditions of times and places”), 75 (ceremonies proper to the Order), 92 (ways of holding the community Chapter, initial and concluding prayers), 109 (more detailed norms on cloister), 119 (times of access to the parlour), 162 (the length of the period in temporary vows and the mode of temporary profession), 248 (ways of safeguarding the goods of the monastery). In all of these cases you find in the old C a precise and detailed norm.
As regards chapter decisions, you can look up nn. 58-59 (ways of commemorating Mary and the saints of Carmel), 70 (days when there is a vigil celebration of the Office of Readings), 74 (liturgical singing), 79 (place of prayer “in special circumstances”), 93 (forms of blessing for meal time), 95 (adaptation of the toque and use of the white mantle), 96 (community horarium), 102 (prayers for the dead), 143 (length of postulancy), 150 (length of novitiate), 167 (preparation for solemn profession), 182 (external sisters). For many of these cases (e.g., liturgical singing, community horarium, prayers for the dead, the length of the novitiate) everything was laid down in the C before the Council.
It seems to me that every community has sufficient space to better express its own identity and its own needs. It would be interesting to verify the measure in which, during these last twenty years, the monasteries have responded to the invitation contained in the C to determine many particular aspects of their way of living, taking into account their particular human, cultural and geographical situations.
Legislation and Formation
The preparation and approval of fundamental legislation that restated the original charism in a way suited to our own times and to the renewal outlined by the Second Vatican Council was a long and arduous task. At times it may have been very painful but, precisely because of this, it resulted in providing substantial legislation for the life of the dcn. It would be an illusion, however, to think that the task of the renewal of our Order was concluded with the publication of these Constitutions. Ecclesiae Sanctae wisely points out:
Nevertheless, suitable renewal cannot be made once and for all but should be encouraged in a continual way, with the help of the zeal of the members and the solicitude of the chapters and superiors (ES 19).
It would be more accurate to say, then, that the approval of the Constitutions of ’91 marks a stage of great importance in a process that is not to be considered conclusive, but must continue to keep pace with the history of the Church and of the world. It is easy to pick out various material lacunae in the C of twenty years ago. For example, while speaking of communications no mention is made of the internet which has become such an established means of our habitual communication and has changed so many aspects of our daily lives. While faced with the difficulties in an ever increasing number of monasteries, particularly in Europe, due to the ageing of communities and decreasing numbers of vocations, number 208, which is the only reference to the suppression of monasteries would appear rather insufficient and in need of further refinement. As well as that, the Instruction Verbi Sponsa in 1999 supersedes the regulations of the earlier document Venite seorsum, the norms of which are included as an appendix to the ’91 C.
But the dynamic character of the legislative text cannot be merely reduced to a necessary material updating, keeping up with the times. In the light of what has been stated earlier, it is the new understanding and appreciation of the C as such which gives the text this sense of ‘incompleteness’ that demands the on-going attention of communities and those individuals called to live according to that way of life. A purely juridical set of rules requires that they be simply observed and carried out, whereas legislation that combines spirit and norms, doctrine and discipline, demands a very different approach – not obedience alone, but an openness to being guided, instructed and formed. In this regard, I feel that an observation in no. 18 of Perfectae Caritatis is very important:- “Adaptation and renewal depend greatly on the education of religious”. It was not by coincidence that preparation began on the Ratio Institutionis for the Nuns immediately after the approval of the Constitutions. This work was only concluded in 2003. As well as that the General Curia published eleven pamphlets from 1994 to 2002 in an effort to provide aids for ongoing formation for our Nuns. These studies were based on the Constitutions and developed fundamental themes of Carmelite life. This initiative was followed by the “Project of Theological-Spiritual Reflection” (2002-2008) which recommended an annual community study of aspects of the life of Carmelite Nuns (lectio divina, the following of Jesus, vows, community life, the Marian dimension). Finally, with the General Chapter at Fatima in 2009 we commenced preparations for the fifth centenary of St. Teresa’s birth by means of the systematic rereading of her writings.
All these efforts towards encouraging ongoing formation go hand in hand with the written text of the C and help an in-depth assimilation of their spiritual and legislative content. I am confident that the Nuns will continue on this path of ongoing formation, making use both of the contributions of the General Curia and the initiatives of the various Associations and Federations. All this will help to protect “the legislative letter” of the C. In the past insistence was on the subjective “observance” of the objective law. Today we might hope that the legislation defining the identity of a Religious Institution would be accepted in a formative process, that is, that there is a gradual subjective identification with that identity. In this process it is to be expected that there will be demands and questions arising from experience, all of which can help to enhance the C themselves
We have been given a wonderful vocation with a corresponding responsibility. The relationship between brothers and sisters, as St. Teresa well understood, is the life line to living our vocations to the full, through sharing our varied and complimentary experiences. Only in this way can we be a living Carmel, witnessing by our personal lives the values documented by our legislation.
