Consecrated Persons and Their Mission in Schools: Reflections and Guidelines

The celebration of the two thousandth anniversary of the incarnation of the Word was for many believers a time of conversion and of opening to God’s plan for the human person created in his image. The grace of the Jubilee incited in the People of God an urgency to proclaim the mystery of Jesus Christ “yesterday, today and forever” with the testimony of their lives and, in Him, the truth about the human person. Young people, moreover, expressed a surprising interest with regard to the explicit announcement of Jesus. Consecrated persons, for their part, grasped the strong call to live in a state of conversion for accomplishing their specific mission in the Church: to be witnesses of Christ, epiphany of the love of God in the world, recognizable signs of reconciled humanity. (1) 2. The complex cultural situations of the beginning of the 21st century are a further appeal to a responsibility to live the present as kairos, a favorable time, so that the Gospel may effectively reach the men and women of today. Consecrated persons feel the importance of the prophetic task entrusted to them by the Church in these momentous but fascinating times, (2) “recalling and serving the divine plan for humanity, as it is announced in Scripture and as also emerges from the attentive reading of the signs of God’s providential action in history.” (3) This task requires the courage of testimony and the patience of dialogue; it is a duty before the cultural tendencies that threaten the dignity of human life, especially in the crucial moments of its beginning and its ending, the harmony of creation, and the existence of peoples and peace. 3. Within the context of the profound changes that assail the world of education and schools, the Congregation for Catholic Education wishes to share some reflections, offer some guidelines and incite some further investigations of the educational mission and the presence of consecrated persons in schools in general, not only Catholic schools. This document is mainly addressed to members of institutes of consecrated life and of societies of apostolic life, as well as to those who, involved in the educational mission of the Church, have assumed the evangelical counsels in other forms. 88