Dominican Sisters of St Cecilia Retreat, Motherhouse Nashville Tn., July 21, 2026
Forty years ago, I went out for the day with a former law professor of mine in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. I suggested we visit the convent of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart that is a real architectural gem. An Anglican himself, he asked what I meant by ‘convent’ and I said a house of nuns. He was shocked. “Weren’t nuns abolished by the Second Vatican Council?” he asked innocently. “One minute there were thousands of them, the next we didn’t see them anymore.”
Sure enough, amidst dramatic cultural and ecclesiastical change in the post-conciliar period, many experiments in renewing religious life failed, yielding not only invisibility but disorientation, hemorrhaging, and diminishment. Particular congregations entered terminal decline, and some people questioned whether religious life had a future. Does talk of vocation make sense anymore? they wondered. Can we expect young people to commit their whole life to it? What would be their relevance, identity, mission? What is still essential about consecrated life and what merely accidental?
This year we mark three decades since St John Paul the Great’s apostolic exhortation, Vita Consecrata.[1] Rather than reinvent the wheel of consecrated life, he began with Christ and His Gospel and then mined the riches of Christian tradition.[2] He noted that religious life is not primarily about vows, habits, structures or works — important as these are — but primarily a consecration to Christ, and through Him to the Father.[3] So understood, consecrated life is Christocentric, making visible “the form of life which the Son of God Himself assumed when He came into this world to do the will of the Father.”[4] And it is ecclesial, as Christ shapes a new family of God, in which the deepest bond is not of blood but fidelity to His will. Some would shine out in this new creation by virtue of their consecration.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is told that His family are waiting outside to speak with Him (Mt 12:46-50). It is a familiar experience. My own mother used to complain that she never saw enough of me and had to resort to reading about me in the Catholic Weekly! Those who loved Jesus could likewise never get enough of Him. But His response today is startling: looking around at His disciples, He says: “My mother and brothers and sisters? They are those who do the will of my Father in heaven.”
Is Jesus being rude to His Mom? No — after all, she did the will of our heavenly Father more than anyone. But perhaps there was a teasing humor going on here. On a previous occasion, when the adolescent Jesus had gone missing, His answer to His mother’s protest about how much He had worried His father was “But I was only doing my Father’s business.” I suspect He was only quoting back to her her own instruction to Him as a boy, to always put the heavenly Father’s business first!
But something else is going on here also: Jesus is identifying the true measure of kinship in God’s kingdom. Not race, or family connections, but obedience to the Father’s will. Not genetics, or affection, but alignment with His life and mission. That means exchanging ego and ambitions for the liberating selflessness of holy obedience; foregoing spouse and family for a broader familiarity in holy chastity; giving up property and domesticity to serve the whole Christian family in holy poverty.
St Thomas Aquinas taught that virtuous obedience is more than compliance with commands.[5] Animals and machines can do that. Obedience, for Thomas, is the virtue of responding reverently and appropriately to one’s superiors and their precepts. It participates in Christ’s own filial relationship with the Father and His will for humanity. And Christ’s obedience was not servile, but loving and free, expressing who He was as Son. To obey after the pattern of Christ is not about subordination so much as trust, even love.[6] When Jesus says that those who do the Father’s will are His family, He is inviting us to share in His filial posture before the Father and to experience something of what it means for one person of the Blessed Trinity to call the other ‘Father.’ This is why God’s law and our Order’s rule constrain not only subjects but superiors, and why subjects scrutinize their orders according to law and reason.[7]
So, Christ’s startling words to His Mom today are really about expanding God’s circle. The eternal, boundless, mutual love of Father and Son that is the Holy Spirit is now being offered to anyone willing to live according to God’s plan. Micah’s God shepherds His flock, pardons transgressions and delights in showing mercy (Mic 7:14-20); but still He commands obedience, steering His sheep aright, separating virtuous from vicious, forgiving but saying “Go sin no more” (cf. Job 34:31; Jn 8:11). Only by following God’s will as revealed in Scripture and Tradition, and applied in the legitimate directions of our superiors, can we truly flourish.
Jesus looks around the Church today and names those who obey His Father as brothers, sisters, and mothers. Every baptized Christian must make God’s will her own, but you, dear sisters, profess to do so in a more radical way as His sisters and mother. You embrace a form of life, with a rule, sisterhood, superiors, and other means of discernment that give purpose and shape to your life, that publicly express your ideals and commitment, and that measure your devotion to the divine Will.
An old father of my province explained when I was still a novice that, in practice, “Evangelical poverty means never having to worry where your next meal will come from, for the community will provide. Evangelical chastity means never having to get up at night to a screaming kid. And evangelical obedience means, however much you mess up your life, it is always the superior’s fault.” He was being ironic, of course, but he was underlining the risk that obedience can become avoidance of responsibility. In Dominican tradition obedience is inseparable from truth and its proclamation. Unlike more ‘military’ conceptions of obedience, as bending the mind to agree with our superiors’ thinking, St Thomas insisted we maintain our critical intellects. Indeed, on his account, we cannot make ourselves believe something we think is false. Sometimes reason requires that we respectfully question our superiors, offer our opinion, even privately disagree. Dominicans do not dull their minds in order to shine their wills!
Still, we obey, whether we agree or not, conforming our will to the precepts we are given, trying to see things from our superior’s perspective, recognizing that she may know more and must have an eye to a broader horizon, accepting that her charism of office and personal experience may make her a better judge of the common good and even our own good than we are ourselves. In any case, we trust that God’s greater plan will work itself out through our superiors and our obedience to them.
Some congregations think of obedience as primarily a penitential practice. Order the sisters to do something pointless and hard, like digging a big hole in the garden and then filling it in: that will teach them obedience! To a Dominican, that’s not just blind obedience but stupid obedience. As Blessed Humbert of Romans insisted, obedience in Dominican life is never an end in itself, but always ordered to the common good of the community and the mission of preaching and teaching; so, it makes demands of both the subject and the superior that what is ordered and obeyed will be fruitful for proclaiming the Gospel.[8]
The Dominican take on obedience may be more reasonable, but that does not make it easy. Religious can be impulsive, can put their own will first, can be their own god. Clever religious must rein in the tendency always to second guess their superior’s decisions, to critique motives and analyze politics, to manufacture justifications for wilfulness and passive resistance. Obedience comes more easily for a dumb ox or computer app than for an intelligent woman! But that makes Christ’s family talk today especially instructive. He is not looking for blood relatives, or robotic slaves, or even disciples: no, He calls us His brothers, sisters, mothers, friends. His obedience is about a deeper relationality, one that binds us to Him and one another, making us a family, a communion.
[1] St John Paul II, Vita Consecrata: Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Consecrated Life and Its Mission in the Church and in the World (March 25 1996).
[2] VC 1–3, esp. 2.
[3] VC 1, 16–18.
[4] VC 16-17.
[5] St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae IIa–IIae, q.104, and IIIa, q.47, a.1–2.
[6] Here Thomas follows St Gregory the Great, Moralia 35: “obedience should be practiced, not out of servile fear, but from a sense of charity, not through fear of punishment, but through love of justice.” (STh IIa-IIae q. 81, a. 3 sed contra.)
[7] STh IIa-IIae q. 81, a. 3, co. & ad. 3.
[8] Bld Humbert of Romans, Treatise on Preaching.
