What are the means the religious state uses?

What are the means the religious state uses?

The means that the religious life employs to achieve this end are: the common life, the practice of the Gospel precepts, and the practice of the Evangelical Councils (poverty, chastity, and obedience). The means make it indeed a "new life" separated from the world and with a new social order. Human life is governed by three prime tendencies, all forms of egotism:

• 1) toward external goods and enrichment.


• 2) toward the sensual goods of the body.


• 3) toward the goods of the spirit based on personal autonomy.

In place of these the religious substitutes poverty, chastity and obedience. The social order in the world is founded on the individual while a community of brotherly love is the center of religious life. It is these two essential ingredients, the common life and the evangelical counsels that make religious life religious life. Hence both have been bound together from the beginning of the Christian era—the counsels for the interior union and the common life for exterior practice. Together the create a unique cell of the Church, and a visible community based on love. It is the complete application of the Gospel teaching even to the heights of Calvary -- penance and persecution either sent by God or envisaged by its Constitutions.

You make it sound a lot different than I have seen it on the television or read in books.

Movies and novels portray religious life with a special romance or glamour. A religious vocation is a romance between Christ and a soul. however this romance does not equivocate into a romantic story book life. As Thomas a' Kempis says: "Our merit and the advancement of our state (the religious) consists not in having many sweetnesses and consolations, but rather in bearing great afflictions and tribulations. If indeed there had been anything better, and more beneficial to man's salvation than suffering. Christ certainly would have showed it by word and example. For He manifestly exhorts both His disciples that followed Him and all that desire to follow Him to bear the cross: “If anyone will come after Me. let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.'" The aim of Religious Life is the same as all baptized persons, but God has not suited all baptized persons to the means. It requires a special interior state. or intensity of desire often referred to as a "call from God", and it also requires a certain fitness or aptitude for Religious Life, for though it is true that much good is done by those in the world, yet it is done only at times, or else along congenial lines to those in whom they are interested. The religious do good of all kinds to all classes and always. They go where they are sent and do whatever work is assigned them without reference to their own likes or dislikes, day in and day out, year after year. Natural inclination would not incline to such a life so it must be the result of a supernatural vocation.