By Fr. Christopher Foeckler, MJ •  St. Josaphat Formation Center • Phoenix, AZ

As we conclude the Year of Consecrated Life, called by Pope Francis, on February 2nd, the Feast of the Presentation, which is also the annual celebration of World Day of Consecrated Life, we should take time to thank God for this great gift to His Church in its many forms—from hermetical and cloistered life to myriads of active religious and lay-consecrated Institutes, including Miles Jesu. These Institutes offer so many charitable services to the world, to Catholics and non-Catholics alike and especially the poor and most needy, all done in a spirit of imitating Christ’s heartfelt love and compassion.

Let’s pray this month especially in thanksgiving for this great grace and for all those men and women who respond so generously to it. Let’s pray, too, that the Master send more laborers to His harvest.

Since Consecrated Life is rooted in Baptism—the one necessary consecration of all our lives that enables a person to participate in the very life of God through sanctifying grace and by which we belong to God, are made His children by adoption and called to share in our Heavenly Father’s inheritance for eternity—let us renew our baptismal promises this month. Let us renounce Satan and all his works and pomps, while believing in and binding ourselves to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit in His Holy Catholic Church, with fidelity to His Vicar the Pope, and renewing our collaboration according to our capacity in the mission of the Church to evangelize and bring Christ to the whole world.

While members of Consecrated Life make vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, any and all baptized people are called to make a personal commitment to these ideals as well and may even formalize them in other kinds of simple “consecrations” such as in Total Consecration to Jesus through Mary by St. Louis de Montfort or consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to name a couple of the more popular forms of simple consecration. Just as the canonical consecration of vows draws a person into a special offering of themselves to God through the vows in a permanent state, so too these simple consecrations enable lay people to offer themselves to God completely from the heart according to each one’s own state in life. May it be so.

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