In Answer to Your Question

(from the July-August 2001 Religious Life)

by Fr. Burns Seeley

Q. When members of communities of consecrated life profess the vow of obedience to God through their lawful superiors, and submit themselves to their direction, what does this mean?

A. It is understood that persons rendering such a vow are surrendering their freedom to govern their own lives. As a means for their spiritual perfection, they freely place the governance of their lives into the hands of their superiors, who represent God for them. In this way, they are following in the footsteps of Christ who came to earth not to do His will, but that of His Father who sent Him (cf. John 6:38). Thus, those who are capable of governing themselves have instead surrendered this freedom for a greater good and a greater freedom. They have freely chosen to live a life more akin to that which Christ Himself lived while on earth.

Can. 601 - The evangelical counsel of obedience, undertaken in the spirit of faith and love in the following of Christ, who was obedient even unto death, obliges submission of one’s will to lawful Superiors, who act in the place of God when they give commands that are in accordance with each institute’s own constitutions. 

Man can give nothing greater to God, than by subjecting his will to another man’s for God’s sake. (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, II-II, 186)

In professing a vow of evangelical obedience, and in observing it daily, a person is on the way to acquiring true freedom where sin becomes less and less an option. He is approaching the freedom enjoyed by the saints in Heaven where the freedom to do God’s will is the only option. By abandoning his freedom to rule his own life, a consecrated soul is placing himself on a “fast track,” so to speak, to finding his divinely-willed identity as a saint. He is losing himself to find himself.

If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it. (Luke 9:23-24) 

Religious profess obedience as to the regular mode of life, in respect of which they are subject to their superiors: wherefore they are bound to obey in those matters only which may belong to the regular mode of life, and this obedience suffices for salvation. If they be willing to obey even in other matters, this will belong to the superabundance of perfection; provided, however, such things be not contrary to God. (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, II-II, 104)

St. Ignatius of Loyola, in a letter written in 1553 to the Jesuits living in Portugal, praised the virtue of consecrated obedience. He noted that in spite of shortcomings and defects in superiors, they were to be obeyed because St. Ignatius exhorted that those under obedience should strive “to make the superior’s will one’s own in such a way that there is not merely the effectual execution of the command, but an interior conformity” as well.

“He who hears you, hears me.” (Luke 10:16)

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