The second week of Vocations Month, and the subject is the one the world understands least: monks, nuns, brothers and sisters, consecrated virgins. Men and women who did not make God the most important part of their lives — they made Him the whole of it. It is a way of existing so far outside common sense that it tends to be explained wrongly even inside the Church.
The question Peter had the nerve to ask
After the rich young man had gone away sad, and Jesus had said that line about the camel and the needle's eye, Peter said out loud the sum all the others were doing in silence:
“Behold we have left all things, and have followed thee: what therefore shall we have?” (Mt 19:27)
It is worth noticing that Jesus did not rebuke the question. He did not call it mercenary, nor tell Peter to love without expecting anything. He answered with a sum — and the sum is generous:
“And every one that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall possess life everlasting.” (Mt 19:29)
St Mark, recording the same scene, adds a precision that changes everything: the hundredfold comes “now in this time” — houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children — “with persecutions”, and life everlasting in the world to come (Mk 10:30).
That is: it is not a promise deferred until after death. Whoever enters a monastery loses one family and receives hundreds. Loses one house and gains an order spread across the world. The account is settled in this life — and, with evangelical honesty, persecutions come in the package.
The three counsels, and what each one answers
Consecrated life is built on three vows the tradition calls the evangelical counsels. They are not arbitrary rules invented by severe founders: each answers one of the three things that most hold a human being.
- Poverty — against having. Not destitution, not contempt for things; it is not being an owner. Whoever possesses nothing cannot be possessed by anything.
- Chastity — against using. Not a refusal of human love, but the renunciation of a legitimate love in favour of a more direct one.
- Obedience — against commanding. The hardest of the three, and the least discussed. Handing over your money is hard; handing over your own will is another order of thing.
This is why the Church calls these three counsels and not commandments. No one is obliged. They are the road of those who want to go beyond what is required — and going beyond, in the Gospel, is never a display: it is an answer.
“For the kingdom of heaven”
Shortly before that same conversation, Jesus had spoken of something strange, and spoke plainly: there are those who “have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 19:12). And He added: “he that can take it, let him take it”.
St Paul develops the same idea without any romanticism: the unmarried is concerned about the things of the Lord, and the married is concerned — legitimately — with the things of the world and with pleasing his spouse (cf. 1 Cor 7:32-34). It is not a criticism of marriage. It is an observation about where a human heart's attention must divide.
The world reads consecrated chastity as subtraction — something missing from a life, a faculty switched off, a part amputated in the name of religion.
It is exactly the opposite, and the reason is simple: no one gives what he does not have. Those who consecrate themselves do not hand God a dead affectivity or a sexuality that failed to work. They hand over a living and entire capacity to love — and they hand it over entire. A nun who cannot love is not a chaste nun, she is a cold one, and the difference between those two things is everything.
A line that comes out of the desert
This is no medieval invention. In the third century, when the persecutions ceased and being a Christian stopped costing you your head, men and women began going into the Egyptian desert to seek a martyrdom of another kind — dying to self by degrees. St Antony is the name that stuck.
Out of the desert came common life; out of common life came St Benedict and the Rule that organised Europe for a thousand years; from Benedict came Cistercians and Carthusians, then the mendicant orders of Francis and Dominic, then the Carmel of Teresa and John of the Cross, then the Jesuits of Ignatius. Every time the Church needed reform, the reform came from people who had left everything.
The Carthusians in the painting above, incidentally, keep a routine today that Hugh of Lincoln would recognise without effort. There are monasteries in Europe where the timetable of 2026 is essentially that of 1130. In a world that replaces everything every eighteen months, that alone is an argument.
“Be it done unto me”
The model of all consecrated life is not a founder or an ascetic. It is a young woman of Nazareth who answered an angel be it done unto me according to thy word without anyone explaining the price to her — and it was because of that yes that God entered human history.
Mary took no vows, had no rule, belonged to no order. But she did, before anyone else, what every consecrated person tries to do afterwards: she handed over her body, her time and her future with no exit clause.
Our Lady's answer is the subject of Gratia Plena — meditations on the Mother of God, written slowly, and returning always to the same point: the fiat was not an instant, it was a whole life spent holding up a yes given once.
If this week interests you, that is the book that comes closest to the subject from the inside.
And what about the married?
Many read all this and conclude, rather quickly, that it is not for them — they have a wife, children, bills. But there is a part of every life that nobody is competing for, and it is precisely that part God wants: the hidden time, the purity of the gaze, what you do when no one is watching.
Every Christian is called to a form of virginity of heart, which has nothing to do with marital status: to love without using anyone. A married man who treats his wife as a person and not as a resource is living, in his state, the same truth the vow of chastity professes in another.
Two requests for this week
- Pray for one concrete community. A monastery, a convent, a religious house — by name. Many are ageing with no one holding them up in prayer.
- Ask the honest question. “Lord, is there anything I still have not given You?” The answer usually comes quickly, and usually specific.
This week's prayer
Peter's question and Christ's answer, side by side, as they stand in the Gospel.
Ecce nos relíquimus ómnia, et secúti sumus te: quid ergo erit nobis?
Behold we have left all things, and have followed thee: what therefore shall we have?
Matthew 19:27 · Vulgate
Et omnis qui relíquerit domum, vel fratres... propópter nomen meum, céntuplum accípiet, et vitam ætérnam possidébit.
And every one that hath left house, or brethren... for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall possess life everlasting.
Matthew 19:29 · Vulgate
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