‘ROME - Almost 50 years after the Church published the new Rite of Consecrated Virginity, the Vatican has issued an instruction on the state of life, its discipline, and the responsibilities of diocesan bishops toward the vocation of consecrated virgins. The instruction was created in response to requests from bishops for clarity on the role and mission of consecrated virgins, especially following an increase in the number of women discerning the vocation since the revision of the Rite of Consecration, published in 1970 with the approval of Pope Paul VI.
‘A consecrated virgin is a never-married woman who dedicates her perpetual virginity to God and is set aside as a sacred person who belongs to Christ in the Catholic Church.The Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, which issued the instruction July 4, estimates there are now more than 5,000 consecrated virgins on all five continents “in very diverse geographic areas and cultural contexts.”’
--Crux, Vatican publishes norms on consecrated virgins
Since religious life for women is so weak in our time and place, I can imagine the individual consecrated life while still living in the world becoming attractive to a significant number of women. For example, I can imagine that women who reach their thirties and love the Church and no longer want to be “single” (in the sense of actively looking to date) might opt for this state of life, especially if it becomes better organized and supported, as the new Vatican Instruction envisions it could be.
The individual consecrated life is not without its spiritual dangers, and the tradition recognizes that there’s a need for rules to govern it. St. Benedict at the beginning of his Rule severely criticizes people who try to live “religious life” on their own, outside a community:
The third kind of monks, a detestable kind, are the Sarabaites. These, not having been tested, as gold in the furnace (Wis. 3:6), by any Rule or by the lessons of experience, are as soft as lead. In their works they still keep faith with the world, so that their tonsure marks them as liars before God. They live in twos or threes, or even singly, without a shepherd, in their own sheepfolds and not in the Lord's. Their law is the desire for self-gratification: whatever enters their mind or appeals to them, that they call holy; what they dislike, they regard as unlawful.
The new instruction tries to encourage bishops to provide for consecrated virgins a flexible form of consecrated life that doesn’t amount to people doing “whatever appeals to them,” but that truly structures their life to create a context for holiness. (That should be easier to do in major (arch)dioceses, which are more likely to have the capacity to set up a support structure to provides for serious and lifelong intellectual and spiritual formation of the consecrated virgins.)
