Jubilee of Consecrated Life

 The Jubilee of Consecrated Life is being marked in the days 8th-9th October 2025. The invitation being extended on the Jubilee 2025 website indicates a range of charisms that express different ways of living a life very particularly dedicated to God:

All consecrated men and women from all forms of religious life are invited to this jubilee event: men and women religious, monks and contemplatives, members of secular institutes, members of the Ordo virginum, hermits, and members of "new institutes."

 The Catechism of the Catholic Church (n.915), citing the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, presents the evangelical counsels (chastity, poverty, obedience) as characteristics of the consecrated life:

Christ proposes the evangelical counsels, in their great variety, to every disciple. The perfection of charity, to which all the faithful are called, entails for those who freely follow the call to consecrated life the obligation of practicing chastity in celibacy for the sake of the Kingdom, poverty and obedience. It is the profession of these counsels, within a permanent state of life recognized by the Church, that characterizes the life consecrated to God.

 The word "consecrated" in the expression "Consecrated Life" is worthy of examination. The word can be used in different contexts - the consecration of a Church, the Marian consecrations of St Louis Marie Grignon de Montfort or Maximilimian Kolbe, for example. While these contexts have some analogous comparison to the consecration of a person that is effected by profession of the evangelical counsels, there is a decisiveness in the profession of those counsels that differentiates it from them. Reflecting on the idea of consecration can suggest something of the way of life to which those professing the evangelical counsels are called.

In his extensive study The Meaning of Consecration Today, Fr Rene Laurentin suggests the following as an account of the essence of consecration (italics in the original):

Consecration properly so called is nothing else but divinization: the transformation of human life into divine life by the communication of the latter, offered to our participating liberty. This process is not a passage or crossing in the material sense from earth into heaven. Rather, it is a transformation, or transfinalization, or transfiguration of human life - a life penetrated, elevated and supernaturalized from within by the gift of divine life, that is to say, by the love of God: his agape. It is given to us by means of consecration to know and love God as God, that is to say, by God's love, not by our own love.

After explaining how God brings about this divinization by means of his grace (and note that this action of grace is not the ex opere action of the sacraments), Fr Laurentin writes:

By grace we pass beyond the order of natural and scientific knowledge in order to arrive [at] a connatural and existential knowledge of God, comprising a special wisdom, intuition, and union. At the same time, eros (egoistic love) will be transformed into agape, that is, divine love, capable of loving quite gratuitously, as God knows how to love, in giving more than in desiring ...

The radical dedication expressed in the life of the evangelical counsels has an eschatological dimension, offering a particular witness in this world to the joys of the world to come. In the words of Pope Francis' Bull of Indiction for the Jubilee Year:

... by virtue of the hope in which we were saved, [we] can view the passage of time with the certainty that the history of humanity and our own individual history are not doomed to a dead end or a dark abyss, but directed to an encounter with the Lord of glory. As a result, we live our lives in expectation of his return and in the hope of living forever in him. In this spirit, we make our own the heartfelt prayer of the first Christians with which sacred Scripture ends: “Come, Lord Jesus!” ( Rev 22:20). 

And in the words of the Jubilee Prayer:

May the grace of the Jubilee reawaken in us, Pilgrims of Hope, a yearning for the treasures of heaven.