It is not bad if sometimes we take into consideration these interrogatives, at least because the image people have of consecrated persons –and of consecrated life in general- is based also on these concrete and daily aspects.

It is superfluous to underline that a business company cannot assimilate a religious community. Business companies aim at the optimization of the resources to obtain the utmost profit, while the priority of religious communities is a commitment to favour the growth of charity and the attention to the spreading of God’s Kingdom. We cannot compare the timetable of a consecrated person with that of persons who carry on other professions, except the cases in which the person has a specified task linked to a particular timetable (for instance the profession of teaching).

Also from the viewpoint of work, a religious community is not comparable with a normal family, where it is necessary that one or more than one member be committed to a work, to the end of ensuring given incomes and where, sometimes, there is the worry of losing the job. In fact, the members of a religious community do not normally experience the worry of not finding a job, and from the economy viewpoint must not worry about the economic budget, because the responsibility of a careful economic management is entrusted to others (the local superior, the general council, etc). Finally, the religious live differently also the time of retiring, if compared with other categories of persons, because often, they continue to carry on their activity even after the retiring age.

The way a consecrated person uses the time depends. inter alia, on: the personality of the subject (degree of maturity, values, interest, attitudes….); it depends also on what obedience proposes to be done; on the degree of acceptance on behalf of the subject, on the assigned role and the concrete way of fulfilling it, as well as on the environment in which the subject has to work.

From a psychological viewpoint, the activity carried on by consecrated persons and the concrete way in which they use their time daily, have doubtlessly a meaningful relevance for what regards:

• their sense of identity;
• their sense of general comfort/discomfort and, more generally, their mental health;
• the quality of the contribution they can offer to the group, therefore the efficiency of the group in achieving the perspectives;
• the level of satisfaction of the group (the orderly and well motivated contribution of each member helps in creating a positive group climate, while the disengagement or any lack of clear roles may threaten the morale of the group, thus creating desegregation and dissatisfaction);
• the image of religious life offered externally.

We can say that the members of religious communities use their time well, if this allows the best possible satisfaction of what each member needs, as well as the best possible achievement of the apostolic finality that the communities aim at.

With reference to the theme, which we are reflecting on, we could distinguish between efficient and non-efficient religious communities (we must define the meaning of the term efficiency that we use here, by keeping into account our previous observations). An orderly and fruitful work on behalf of the members characterise the first ones, such as to allow the achievement of the perspectives, which they aim at. While this does not happen in the second case.

Now, the question that we ask ourselves is the following: What is today the situation of the religious communities and, more generally, of the religious Institutes as far as the use of time is concerned? What image of efficiency do the religious communities offer us today?

It is easy to realise that a generic type of answer is practically impossible: perhaps a single Institute may be able (should be able…) to have some elements that find an answer to these interrogatives. In general, we can state that the communities where things function well –namely the efficient communities- resemble one another and show common aspects, while the non-efficient communities are different from one another.

In the first ones there is an assimilation of the charismatic ideal, therefore an emotional identification of the single members with the group is realised. Consequently, they have a sufficiently clear and definite project of life. The group explicates and shares the perspectives, and the roles are clear. For this reason they know who and what each person must do. Each member gives one’s own contribute with joy and generosity. The communication processes are such as to favour a constant monitoring of the general situation, as well as a free confrontation with the unavoidable problems that they may meet.

If this does not happen, different situations may arise, which gradually create tensions within the community, putting it in the condition of not being efficient and of not possessing the human resources necessary for the achievement of the perspectives. The survey is varied.

For instance, there may be under-occupied religious who do not know how to manage their time or are bored in chattering or in futile, meaningless occupations, with a consequent sense of frustration and identity problems. Sometimes this depends on an insufficient way of communitarian planning, or on a scarce attention paid to the talents and personal characteristics of each member (their interest and attitudes are not appreciated), or they do not give significant responsibility to everyone.¹

In other cases, we see religious who love a comfortable ‘bourgeois’ life, with scarce apostolic motivations. They spend their time in cultivating some personal hobby (reading newspapers, phone calls…). They create a restricted group of personal relations to which they dedicate time and particular attentions.

Subjects with a high degree of dynamic commitment are not missing, but their commitment is markedly individualistic. They generally have a well definite sector of work and dedicate themselves passionately to it, however their commitment is ultimately little or not in agreement with the community. This may cause them to have their own timetable and habits of life, which at first appear as exceptions to the rule, but that with the time become consolidated habits, very difficult to contradict.

In some cases there are persons who, because of their choosing an Institute, go to the specialisation required for some particular sector. Their competence grows with the time and becomes for them a source of gratification (for instance they as psychologists constantly required by a growing number of persons, or social assistants whom many persons in difficulty constantly stand in need of). They become practically not available for other services within the community; they may even have the possibility of a certain economic independence. All this may lead the subject to a confusion of identity or to the prevalence of its professional identity over the identity linked to consecration, (the subject psychologically feels first to be a psychologist, a social assistant or an expert in economy…).

Lastly, there are subjects whom we may define as misfits, who cannot succeed, -or do not want it- to integrate themselves in the community dynamism. They are habitually dissatisfied and critical, for which the superiors are unable to find a role, which they would accept and carry on with a sense of responsibility and personal satisfaction. We often may find the motives of this situation in a non-authentic religious choice or in psychological immaturity.²

When one or more of these situations are verified, we have communities revealing a high level of conflicts and dissatisfaction. We have the impression of facing an enormous wastage of talents and human resources, with the image of a religious life that suppresses the responsibility of persons. It is difficult to understand how all this can be reconciled with the example of many fathers and mothers who face sacrifices to make ends meet and worry in search of and then in keeping a dignified work.

The above brief reflections should be sufficient to draw the attention of Institutes’ responsible persons on the problem of how their subjects use the time. We can also attempt to propose some cues of action, through some examples.

- The organisation of life depends on the sense of life that a person has. It is the theological vision of one’s own existence that guides us in our choices and, therefore, the lay out of our days. In this sense, for the consecrated man/woman, the time is strictly connected with the sense of identity that he/she must have. This means that the he/she must keep alive in himself/herself the knowledge of being a person at the service of God’s Kingdom, offered to God and brethren, animated by the charity of Christ ("chiarita Christi urget nos"), which St. Paul,³ speaks of. This is what he/she accepted, one day in public, in front of God and the Church. This is the fundamental starting point to reason on the use of time for consecrated persons.

- To exert an attentive discernment of the persons that reveal an attitude for the consecrated life and to verify if, out of the examined requirements, there is also the will of working, commitment, sacrifice and collaboration.

- To define clear projects of communitarian life, with evident distinction of roles, with assignments of meaningful responsibilities to individual members, appropriate for adult persons.

- To favour, in each member, the awareness that each person must live with one’s own work and must feel responsible also for the economic management of one’s own community and Institute. Each person must work to have the right of eating: this saying of St. Paul is valid also for the religious!

- The responsible persons must know how to invest money wisely for the formation and specialisation of each person. This may mean, for instance: to foresee the time required to perform a curriculum of study (sometimes we have the impression that this is not a problem for a religious institute, as it would be, for instance, for a family, so that a religious could defer the conclusion of its studies without any particular worry). Normally, members of Institutes should not interrupt the time necessary for a given curriculum of study in order to dedicate themselves to some other assignments, and then starting again their study after a number of years. If we want a member to specialise in some discipline or particular sector, we must have clear in our mind from the very beginning, the purpose for which we feel that it is opportune to invest money for the given specialisation.

In conclusion, we must be convinced that personal study is one of the most meaningful and important ways for consecrated persons to spend their time. Study and apostolic commitment must be ever more an indivisible binomial, according to St. Augustine.

To foresee adequate times of work and rest, to educate the members in the use of free time would create problems, at least in some cases: somebody in the community might spend hours and hours watching the TV or using the computer …. In every case there are two dangers that we should avoid: laziness and activism.

Lastly, out of the aspects of the communitarian life, to which we should pay attention during community meetings, –naturally besides the quality of liturgy or the observance of vows and the faithfulness to the charisma- there should be also a commitment to verify how each member spends its time. The responsible persons should make clear who has to do something and how to do it; to see whether a climate of hard work and committed life animates the community or if, on the contrary, there are persons who stand out for scarce performance.

Which image of consecrated persons could emerge out of the above considerations? Surely not the image of a busy and frenetic person, namely, of a well-programmed and unapproachable person because of its being always busy in many things. It is rather the image of a tranquil and hard-working person, convinced that we receive life by going beyond ourselves, rather than by looking at us; by giving up oneself to others in humility and love … We become rich by going far from ourselves".⁵

Aldo Basso
Seminario Arcivescovile
Via Cairoli 20 - 46100 Mantova

1 Erikson states "the mature man needs that others may need him". When a man has the sensation that it is indifferent for him to be or not to be, this becomes for him deeply frustrating.

2 To those who asked him how to recognise a mature person, Freud stated, that a mature person is one who knows how "to love and to work". This is a particularly deep answer: it is the matter of capacity to overcome childish narcissism, in order to go out of oneself and to invest one’s energies in love for others and in the work (responsibility) that a person performs, as a concrete modality of being useful for the world and the surrounding reality.

3 In reality, every Christian must think of how to make one’s life useful and holy in the eyes of God. He must be "convinced – as Manzoni states- that life is not destined to be a burden for many, and a feast for a few people, but that it is for everybody an investment, which everyone will have to give an account of" (I Promessi Sposi, cap. XXII).

4 "Otium sanctum quaerit charitas veritatis, negotium justum suscipit necessitas charitatis" (De civitate Dei, chapter 19, no, 19). Keeping into consideration the difficulties, which usually we find when we want to translate his thought into Italian, we can, more or less translate the sense of St. Augustine’s deep intuition like this, "The charity of truth needs a time consecrated to reflection, the urgency of charity shoulders a dutiful commitment".

5 BENEDICT XVI, address on the occasion of his visit to the Lutheran Evangelical Church, Rome, on March 14, 2010. We can bring the though of a great Hebrew thinker near the thought of the Pope, "This is the meaning of our existence: to reconcile freedom with service, the ephemerons with long-lived, to warp the temporal threads in the fabric of eternity. The deepest wisdom reachable by man consists in knowing that his destiny is to help, to serve" (A. J. HESCHEL, L’uomo non è solo, Rusconi, Milan 1987,292).