Lenten Letter--Unity
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15 February 1984
To Each Confrere

My dear Confrere,

May the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ be with us forever!

In Advent I wrote, telling you of the decision that had been made to redecorate our Chapel in the rue de Sèvres, which houses the mortal remains of St. Vincent and two of our Blessed. Among the reasons for this decision was our desire to make the Chapel a tangible expression of our concern to keep alive in the Congregation a sense of that unity of mission and of spirit which God, through St. Vincent, has given it.

The unity, and indeed uniqueness, of the Congregation's vocation in the Church is a gift of God which all of us wish to be preserved, and the Confreres who have participated in the General Assemblies that have taken place since the end of Vatican Council II can testify to the strength of that desire. The resolution passed at the General Assembly of 1980, that there be adopted throughout the Congregation a common "Ratio Formationis," is indicative of a concern that the unity of the Congregation be preserved in the future. What recent Assemblies have formulated is the ideal of unity in diversity: a unity of vocation that finds expression in a diversity of cultures, needs and traditions. "We are," observed St. Vincent, "missioners, and we make up one body only." (Coste XI, Fr. ed., p. 120).

The unity of the Congregation is a treasure, however, which is carried in an earthen vessel, and St. Vincent clearly recognized this fact. For how else can we explain the emphasis he has given in our Common Rules and Conferences to the importance of uniformity. Uniformity would be, to quote his own phrase, "the safeguard of good order and of the holiness which comes from being together." (CR II, 11). No line of his writings, however, suggests that he saw uniformity as identical with unity. His penetrating mind and breadth of vision would make it easy for him today to accept the fact that in the diversity of cultures and subcultures of our modern world, the model of uniformity, which he proposed in the seventeenth century, would need considerable modification. What would not be negotiable for him would be the unity of vocation which God gave to the Congregation at its very beginning and which is expressed in the first part of our present (1980) Constitutions.

"Only one thing is needed for this uniformity to be maintained constantly among us, namely, the most exact observance of our Rules and Constitutions." (Ibid.). Let these two truths be engraven on our minds: first, that the ideal of unity in diversity, to which the Church has called the Congregation in our time, is a delicate flower which the cold winds of individualism can easily wither and destroy; and second, that it is only when the Congregation is making its Constitutions and Statutes a point of reference and guidance in all its apostolates at international, provincial and local levels, that it can fully serve the universal and local Church.

If unity in diversity is a delicate flower, it is for all that a "many-splendored thing." Meeting a group of Confreres recently in an eastern European country, I was deeply impressed, not only by their loyalty but by the breadth of their interest in the Congregation world-wide. The fact that these Confreres have been dispersed now for thirty years or more, and communication with the center made difficult for them, did not weaken their attachment to or belief in the vocation of the universal Congregation, its mission and its spirit. lt is the unity of the Congregation's vocation in the Church which gives a special color to the union that Our Lord wishes to exist among us.

Union amongst ourselves is, in St. Vincent's vision, a starting point for our mission to the poor. The English writer, G.K. Chesterton, remarked on one occasion that, while we make our friends and our enemies, God sends us our neighbors. We preach the good news of Christ to the poor and thus become their friends. We must do so, however, without forgetting or neglecting the neighbors God has sent us in our community. Our local community, as well as the poor, has a claim on our gifts of nature and of grace, on our understanding and on our time. It is only when each of us is making a personal contribution towards union amongst ourselves that we can securely preach to the poor in the way envisaged by St. Vincent. It is for that reason that l make my own the wish and practical advice which St. Vincent offered on one occasion to a Confrere who was experiencing the difficulty of working for unity both outside and inside his community:

I pray Our Lord that He will give you the fullness of His grace and of His guidance, so that you may correspond fully to the intentions of the Bishop and so that you may maintain peace in your own house without which it would be difficult to do the rest. I pray the Holy Spirit, Who is the union of the Father and the Son, that He will also be yours everywhere. You ought to pray for that intention unceasingly and, in addition to your prayers, to pay great attention in trying to unite yourself with heart and deed to each one in particular and to all in general. The evil of communities, especially of a small community, is ordinarily rivalry. The remedy for that is humility. You ought to try to advance in that virtue, as well as in those other virtues which are necessary to bring about this union. (Coste V, Fr. ed., p. 582).

I hope to write to you again when our Constitutions and Statutes will have received definitive approval from the Holy See. There is good reason to believe that this approval will not be long delayed. In the meantime we can reflect on what St. Vincent wrote to M. Alméras, who was Superior in Rome. "What does not get done at one time gets done at another, particularly in Rome." (Coste III, Eng. ed., ltr. 1119, p. 459).

With warmest greetings from all of us here in the Curia, and recommending myself to your prayers, I remain in the love of Our Lord, your devoted confrere.

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