a brother: prophetic servant to the people
Posted by Br Nevil Bingley fms on 11 January 2011 | 0 CommentsRecently Br Emili Turú (our Superior General) gave an address to Instituto Teológico de Vida Religiosa in Madrid in December 2010. To me it contained the essence of being a Lay Religious Brother so I have spent some time with it. It can be accessed on the Marist Rome website, www.champagnat.org/en/index.php . I wish to make a few comments/reflections on this excellent document.
A few days ago I was in the pub (an hour every Friday evening!!) and one of the group was a person closely associated for many years with a college we have served in. He got to talking about the numbers of Brothers, what are Brothers doing these days, what about Priests — the usual things. Because Emili’s address was still quite fresh in my mind I was able to contrast Priest and Brother apparently quite succinctly by portraying the Priest as the servant of the Church in an official capacity. On the other hand because the Religious Brother is not a servant of the Church in the same way but is rather a servant of the people, he has quite a different task, a prophetic task. This is to take a lead in standing up for justice, for people who need it. In other words to be a conscience not only for the Church, but in any situation where politics or even pragmatic action is present.
This person looked up at me with his mouth partially open and I could see him saying Ahh-haaa! (which you can do with your mouth partially open). And then he said something to the effect that now he understood why I acted the way I did in a disagreement over methods of governance in the college a few months earlier. A few more pieces of the jig-saw had slotted in.
I mention the above as one of the aspects of being a Lay Religious Brother to show that reading such material helps us in our journey of understanding and appreciating what being a Lay Religious is, thereby directing our actions more purposefully, but also through us it might help others to understand this more fully.
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