Readiness of Religious Communities to Live Today and Tomorrow. Do Consecrated Persons Take Seriously Contemporary Theological, Social and Environmental Challenges?

Consecrated life is an ongoing phenomenon within the Catholic Church that changes over time and tries to respond to actual spiritual and social needs of the society. This study deals with the contemporary religious order communities facing the rapid development of society and changed theological emphases. The aim is to assess whether consecrated persons are ready to accept socio-cultural changes and respond to actual spiritual, theological, social, and environmental challenges. This readiness is an essential prerequisite if religious orders are to remain an integral part of the Church and society in the future, as they have been since the beginning of the development of Christianised Europe. After a brief outlining of historical context, using the basic statistical analysis, two groups of consecrated persons with different cultural-political backgrounds are compared, in order to find out to what extent they subjectively feel to fit in with the contemporary world and how familiar they are with the current magisterial documents. In the last section, the latest magisterial documents addressed to consecrated persons are analysed to determine whether religious order members are sufficiently theoretically equipped to integrate the current social changes theologically and practically. The results show a higher degree of integrity with contemporary society among Western religious order members compared to those from the former Czechoslovakia, as well as a varying degree of familiarity with individual documents. The theoretical basis provided by Magisterial documents for renewal of consecrated life was found sufficient, while the practical implications, the ability of individual institutes to undergo a balanced reform, as well as the overall attractiveness of consecrated life for the younger generations remain an open question.