Fr. Timothy Radcliffe has been speaking to the members of the General Congregation, giving them some ideas to be discussed together regarding the core of the gathering’s theme: The Radical Witness of Consecrated Carmelites in the World of Today.

The General Congregation began on Monday, September 5 and continues through next week.

Fr. Radcliffe was the master general (superior) of the Dominican Order from 1992-2001. He is a member of the English Province. He taught scripture at Oxford and has become a popular speaker and author. He addressed the 2007 General Chapter of the Carmelite Order.

Here we summarize what he has been speaking about during his presentations:

These meetings [General Congregations, Chapters, etc] are a time, in my experience, for us to rediscover together just how liberating is our mad way of life. It really is a way to happiness and freedom. I also believe that religious life speaks to our world.  We are friars, fratres, brothers, and we have sisters too. The world is desperately in need of living symbols of fraternity.

Pope Francis wrote Fratelli Tutti, ‘All brothers’, because our world is in danger of losing the old dream of universal brother and sisterhood. Now we see war in Ukraine, and China flexing its muscles. For the first time for sixty years, there is the threat of nuclear war. Millions of people are on the move trying to escape violence and poverty. Everywhere walls are going up to keep strangers at bay. The world order into which I was born seems to be crumbling. Many fear that we are entering a time of chaos.

In the face of this disintegration, we friars embody something wonderful and desperately needed:  brotherhood. These are the oldest Christian titles and the only important ones: brother and sister. Not just brothers and sisters of each other in the Order, but as living symbols of the human family, children of Our Father, gathered into Christ’s kinship.

It is also of immense importance for the Church. Pope Francis is summoning us to leave behind stifling clericalism. Most Carmelites are priests. But how can we be priests without being clericalist? We friars can embody just what the Church is looking for, a brotherly way of being a priest. It was in hearing confessions that I began to embrace priesthood. Here I was beside people in their sorrow, one of them. If I had not committed their sins, I had probably thought of doing so. I was their brother.

But what about the brethren who aren’t priests? When I became a Dominican, a third of the brethren were lay brothers. Now they are a tiny minority. In recent chapters we have constantly sought to recover the vocation of the lay brother as an intrinsic part of our life. We have endlessly discussed their identity. What does it mean to be a brother in a clerical institute? I have always argued that the real question is the other way around: What does it mean to be a priest in an order of brothers? What does it mean to a priest in “the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel.”

So I wish to open up a discussion of the pillars of our religious life, our vows, and search for how they may be live with joy and freedom. I will begin with obedience, then look at chastity, how we live our sexuality. Then leadership. I will not devote a special lecture to poverty. This is because religious orders have such deeply different ideas of poverty. I confess that I have no idea as to what is a Carmelite understanding of poverty!

But I think that the other vows each imply a profound poverty. The vow of obedience invites us to a more radical form of poverty than not just owning things. We do not own our lives. With chastity we learn not to own other people. And leadership is a sort of dispossession of oppressive power. So I hope that we shall see how poverty certainly includes a simplicity of life, but it is also much more radical than. It is a poverty of spirit. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven’. (Matthew 5.3).