A Total Offering

Today the Church celebrates the Feast of the Presentation, when Mary and Joseph took Jesus up to Jerusalem so that He could be “consecrated to the Lord” (Luke 2:23). So it is fitting that Saint John Paul II started the tradition of celebrating the World Day of Consecrated Life on this feast.

In his message for the first celebration in 1997, the late Holy Father noted three different reasons for establishing a World Day of Consecrated Life. The first purpose is to thank the Lord for the gift of consecrated life, which enriches the Christian community in many ways. The second is to “promote a knowledge of and esteem for the consecrated life by the entire People of God,” and in this way draw men and women to discern a call to the consecrated life.

The third is for consecrated persons themselves, so that they might be affirmed in their vocation. This is important, for, as St. John Paul II says:

…there is great urgency that the consecrated life show itself ever more “full of joy and of the Holy Spirit,” that it forge ahead dynamically in the paths of mission, that it be backed up by the strength of lived witness, because “modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” (Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Nuntiandi 41).

Consecrated men and women offer everything to the Lord, and that is why we celebrate them on this feast. The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple is “an eloquent icon of the total offering of one’s life,” John Paul II writes, for it is at this moment that the “cause and model of all consecration in the Church” is offered up.

In this Year of Consecrated Life, let us pray for those men and women who have set out to live perfect charity through poverty, chastity, and obedience.