We have received a request to sign a letter addressed to Pope Leo XIV, by members of the Third Order of the Incarnate Word (see text at the end of this article*), asking the Holy Father that, instead of Monsignor Satué, authorities be appointed who “feel true love” for the Institute of the Incarnate Word. Its authors (priests of the IVE, without a doubt) assure, moreover, that there are bishops who love the IVE and would be willing to assume its government.
The request seems reasonable. But it raises a very concrete question: What would those bishops do differently?
Suppose that one of them received the same mandate as Monsignor Satué, knew the same facts and assumed the same responsibility before the Holy See. Would he keep the novitiates open? Would he renounce revising the Constitutions? Would he immediately return the government to the previous authorities? Would he consider the denunciations and resistance pointed out by Rome unfounded?
The pontifical decree does not present the commissioner as a simple observer. It entrusts him with the governance of the Institute, the revision of its own law and a profound reform. The intervention does not seem to be aimed at destroying the IVE, but at preventing it from disappearing due to its inability to reform itself, as we have already explained in our article on the new government.
If these friendly bishops obeyed the same command, then the problem would not be Satué’s lack of affection. If they acted otherwise, it would be necessary to explain exactly what this difference would consist of and why it would be compatible with the decisions of Rome.
The question is not who loves the IVE more. A pontifical commissioner is not sent to be a friend or enemy of an institute, but to govern it in the name of the Church.
The future of the IVE should not depend on a competition between “friends” and “enemies”. One can want to save the Institute and demand, at the same time, truth, reforms and accountability.
Taking the Pope and the members of the Third Order for stupid
Reading this, one wonders:
- Do the people of the IVE really think that the Pope does not know the truth about the IVE?
- Are the people of the IVE transparent with the members of the Third Order about the very serious human, psychiatric, moral, etc. problems of many priests and nuns?
Let’s hope that Satué puts order once and for all.
The Letter to the Pope
*
Most Blessed Father,
We humbly and respectfully address Your Holiness, in our capacity as parents, relatives and friends of religious of the Institute of the Incarnate Word and the Institute of the Servants of the Lord and of the Virgin of Matará, and many of us also as members of the Third Secular Order of the Religious Family that brings together both Institutes.
It is our wish to express to you our deep and painful concern for the situation through which our beloved “Congregation” is passing given the circumstances that Your Holiness must be very well aware of.
Many of us have also had the grace to know both Institutes from their respective foundations. We have seen them grow with the poverty and sacrifices that come with it.
It implied, but also with the holy joy with which all its members bore the hardships of those times due to the few material means they had at their disposal and the large number of young people who, attracted by the priestly and religious style proper to the particular charism of the foundation, were approaching year after year in order to properly discern the call they claimed to experience for that life.
But, above all, we have also lived and known it in our beloved children who, by the grace of God, took that arduous but blessed path and with their lives have shown us their happiness.
Our paternal hearts — mothers know hearts even more than fathers — cannot be denied when we have seen the holy joy they transmitted in being able to bring the Gospel to those who still do not know it. And this, beyond the pain of the separations that occurred both when they began their religious life — Your Holiness has surely experienced this in your own family — and, when ordained priests or nuns who are finishing their studies, they have left for distant and often unknown lands.
Certainly, Your Holiness knows very well that they are often in very difficult places, from Gaza to Papua, from China to Egypt and Tanzania, from Syria to Ukraine, or, what is sometimes worse and more tempting, in places that are extremely advanced in progress and wealth, since, as we know, they have always sought and requested the most complex places and those to which few want to go.
The imprint of this Religious Family has been the “Mission”. A great task carried out in fulfillment of the Gospel mandate. However, we are aware in the “Congregation” that this great pastoral work has been sustained and is sustained supernaturally both with the prayers of those members who in particular have felt and discerned the call to a more withdrawn and contemplative life in the various monastic communities that have also been founded, and in the exercise of works of charity, mainly with those most despoiled from the earth, in the so-called “Little Homes”, where so many children, young and old of both sexes, and regardless of their origin or their beliefs, with their withered, lacerated, disabled bodies and minds, whose homes are in various parts of the world. And also, why not say it, with our poor, but frequent and fervent prayers of those of us who are parents and relatives of these religious.
That, Holy Father, is what ultimately sustains the “Mission” so that the word of Our Lord Jesus Christ may spread lovingly to every corner of the world.
But unfortunately, Holy Father, once again we receive rumors of misunderstandings, even of repudiation, of rejection and contempt for all this work, and on the part — we affirm this with great sorrow — of those who have been designated as “authorities” to supposedly “accompany” and “help” our beloved Institutes to “perfect” themselves as such. And we also note that these rejections and contempt — which we too have suffered in our own flesh — in many cases find their foundation in positions that, without a doubt, have a strong ideological charge that, as such, it is impossible to refute.
In our opinion, dear Holy Father, the advance towards the perfection so desired by the entire Religious Family of the Incarnate Word, including us, of course, will be achieved, with the Grace of God, with the best fulfillment and maintenance of the letter of their founding Constitutions and their respective Directories, that is, with the deepening of our Charism.
To change this, as those rumors that are intended to say, would be like changing the essence of both Institutes. And the vocation of their members to religious life in them, especially those who have already made their Perpetual Vows who have made them on the basis of and by virtue of that Charism. And even for us, Holy Father, as lay people of the Third Order, who have also felt the call to progress in our spiritual life through that Charism.
We know, Your Holiness, that many characteristics of our Religious Family are being questioned, which, on the other hand, have already been approved by the Church at the time, and which are included in the founding Constitutions.
This has been called into question, from the way in which vocations are received, to the formation that aspirants to the priesthood receive; from the habitual use of their religious habit to the careful liturgy they perform; from the existence of Minor Seminaries to the preaching of Spiritual Exercises according to the Ignatian method; from the supposed “worship” of the Founder to the fact that they remain “closed” in Thomistic formation. These, and many other questions that are impossible to understand both because of their distortion and falsehood and because of the ignorance of the truth, we have been hearing and suffering from the detractors who, in reality, do not want to help or accompany but only to radically change the foundational Charism or, in the best of cases for some of them, the suppression of the face of the earth of the Religious Family of the IVE.
In this sense, the closure for a certain time of the novitiates and postulancies and the consequent and regrettable loss of the admission of dozens of incipient vocations has
constituted an irreparable blow to the continuity of both Institutes.
The question that arises spontaneously, after the perplexity and amazement in which we are plunged, is WHY?
Dear Holy Father, who, according to those same Constitutions, are “the incarnating presence of the Truth, the Will, and the Holiness of Christ” (n°12), it is our intention to beg and beseech earnestly in this letter, prostrate before Our
Lord, in order to allow the continuation of the Congregation to which we belong together with our children, priests and religious at the service of the Catholic Church, may people be appointed to correct, if it is deemed necessary, what needs to be corrected, but continuing with our beloved Charism, people who, in addition to being suitable, also feel a true love for this Religious Family and who, sincerely and wholeheartedly, desire its true perfection and that of all its members in the same spirit in which it was founded and who lead us, in short, to the formation of our own government.
We know concretely that there are many Bishops who really love our religious family, who would be willing and with great interest, affection and dilection, to take on this magnificent task.
Let us therefore beseech you, Holy Father, in continuous prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary in our beloved title of Our Lady of Luján, and whose devotion our Congregation has been able to carry to its most distant missions, to receive these petitions that we humbly raise to you, and to accept and provide them benevolently for the good of our families and families.
that of the Holy Catholic Church.
Those of us who thus address Your Holiness also implore your Apostolic Blessing with the deepest respect and humility.
Members of the Third Order, family and friends of the Religious Family of the Incarnate Word from Albania, Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Iraq, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Nicaragua, Palestine, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Paraguay, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Russia, Solomon Islands, Syria, Tanzania, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Ukraine, United States, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela.
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