Matching the two terms frontier and communion with reference to the consecrated life in the church may sound somehow “hermetic”. In fact, the two terms seem to call back different realities: the frontier makes us think of its location, particularly with regard to apostolic commitment; communion, instead, indicates rather an attitude, a way of living one’s relations.

However, the indeterminacy, the “allusiveness” of this binomial expression allows us to penetrate some characteristic aspects of the consecrated life, which are not immediately evident.

I would first consider analytically the two elements -frontier and communion- and then I would put them together, thus catching something that comes out of mixing these two “ingredients” for the life of the Church.

First, the frontier

As far as we know about its origin, it seems that the religious life has loved from its very beginning a typical place of frontier: the desert. It is there that religious life was born. The desert is symbolically a far off place, a place outside the city’s boundaries, outside the conviviality. They practised the fuga mundi in the desert: this is a lucky expression in the religious life, particularly the monastic life, though often the common interpretation has gone on identifying improperly world and worldly (mundane). We could say that, under some aspects, it was the matter of going far from the Church: not from the Church as such, but for the fact that it showed of missing the living memory of martyrdom, while acquiring some specific features of the empire. Therefore, it was about a going far from a certain Church to be in a “truer” Church, closer to the Gospel: a going to the Frontiers to find oneself in the heart. In this apparently paradoxical “going far from the centre to be closer to the centre”, we can see a stimulating composition of frontier and communion. 

The history of religious life shows through the centuries one more evident way of attending the frontiers: that of the mission. The monks have evangelised, above all, Europe, but the Americas, Asia and Africa owe the Christian-catholic presences above all to the Orders of mendicants and then to many more religious institutions that took to heart the mission “ad gentes”. Today, the frontiers seem within reach (by planes), but in the past to reach the terrae infidelium took many days or weeks of exhausting journeys and the frontier dimension, in the sense of finis terrae,looked more evident.  The truly long list of the religious who lost their life in the mission proves that the missionary territories were frontiers (during wars the frontier becomes a trench, the most dangerous place).

However, today the mission of consecrated religious takes place in other frontiers, not far from home. For instance, they are environments marked by accentuated secularism or by a growing religious indifferentism, present also in the heart of old Christian Countries, where many people perceive faith as a stranger, incomprehensible and far off reality. Often such mission is not an explicit or traditional evangelisation, but a discreet evangelical witness ready to dialogue with everybody, or the practice of Gospel charity towards the least ones, something that all men and women can understand.

There has always been another very vast and challenging frontier for the religious life: it is the frontier of a society crowded with marginalised, oppressed, poor, voiceless and unhealthy people without any resource. Many consecrated persons attend places where usually people flee away from: bidonvilles or favelas, leprosarium, prisons, dispensaries in remote villages, shelters for “street children”, shelters for abandoned people, like those taken by Mother Theresa from the streets of Calcutta.

We do recognise other frontiers of inter-religious dialogue and ecumenism, of presence in  the area of culture and education.

 The communion

The communion in the consecrated life is a more evident reality. Let us think of three indispensable kinds of communion to live the “sequela Christi” faithfully. Communion with God is the fundamental communion that motivates and supports every other relation open to love, to passion for a God who loves us first, with whom we establish a relation that invades the deepest spaces of our heart. Celibacy or virginity is its most evident sign, the most typical characteristic identifying the consecrated men and women. It consents the total “concentration” on Him who conquered them with his beauty. The Communion with the members of one’s own community and Institute flows from this welcomed, before offered, communion.  These members are not simply “colleagues of work” in the same activity, or persons sharing the same house, but brothers and sisters united by the same call, the same faith and the same mission.  Their communion expands to all those whom they are sent to, those for whom they spend their energies, for whom they live their self-oblation.

We must say that we do not distinguish rigorously the subjects with whom we enter in communion –the Lord, our brothers and sisters in the community as well as the addressee of the mission- just as if we had to divide our heart into parts to distribute it in definite “doses”. It is a unique communion, which guides us almost indistinctly, but not disorderly, towards the Other and towards others. By living this communion, the consecrated beings build up the Church communion, with their sacrifices and contribution of love tending to overcome all boundaries.

To conclude, I wish to attempt a synthetic description of what flows from the mixing of frontier and communion in the consecrated life within the Church.

 Communion without frontiers

First, to favour the frontiers of various natures, spoken of above, confers to the consecrated life a particular character of universality, of overcoming too much circumscribed spaces. We say this, above all, for the reality of the local church, where the consecrated being must live with attention and dedication. They can also solicit the particular church to move beyond the “diocesan” boundaries, in order to breathe with the universal church. Moreover, since the consecrated persons make themselves available for the “missionary itinerancy” even to far off Countries, many of them are able to speak “different languages” in local churches that is, they are able to transfer the ecclesial sensitivity drawn from the experience of other churches. This would help all the believers to live a “communion without frontiers”.  

However, I think that another typical dimension of the consecrated persons expresses a communion lived “in the frontier”. They love to consider themselves as searchers of God. They are convinced that the relation with God needs constantly further steps, to set out of the positions in which they have the tendency to settle. The church needs to purify constantly her own idea of God, so that –as someone states- today’s God may not become tomorrow’s idol”. This ceaseless nomadic attitude towards the “beyond”, towards the extreme frontiers of God the Other generates the always sought and never fully reached communion, the only possible communion with God.   

Finally, there is another decisive going towards the frontier in search of communion: to be constantly tending towards the definitive encounter with the Lord expressing the deepest and inexpressible passion of the consecrated person. In fact, “the persons who have devoted their life to Christ cannot help living in the desire of encountering Him to be finally always with Him (Vita Consecrata 26). The fullest communion and the last decisive frontier identify themselves here. The consecrated life carries one of its peculiar and irreplaceable roles in helping the whole Church to point, beyond every frontier, towards the future Kingdom, place of perennial and total communion. 

Gianfranco Agostino Gardin ofmconv
Archbishop Secretary
of the Congregation for the Institutes
of consecrated Life
and the Societies of apostolic Life
Piazza Pio XII, 3 – 00193 Roma