Let me start with the first of the keywords: “consecrated”. The brother is a consecrated person. There are different Christian vocations. There are those who follow Christ, while living in the secular milieu where they strive to extend God’s Kingdom: they listen to the Word of God, actively participate in the liturgical and sacramental life, pray personally and in their families, practise love in all the circumstances of their lives, serve their brethren and work for peace, justice and brotherhood among people. These are those whom the Church calls the “lay faithful”. Then, there are Christians who exercise an ordained ministry in the Church; I shall speak of them later.

And finally, there are Christians who choose to follow Christ in another way. They are taken up by the mystery of Christ’s whole life centred on the love of God the Father. They devote themselves entirely to bringing mankind to experience God’s love and respond in love. The Church and her mission are part of this “mystery” of love and have as their ultimate goal the establishment of God the Father’s reign over all. So, attracted by the person of Christ and by the experience of God’s love in their own lives, these Christians feel called to give their lives over to imitating and following Christ more closely, centring their lives too on God the Father and devoting themselves entirely to the service of his Kingdom.

To achieve this total dedication of themselves to God and his Kingdom in imitation of Christ, they choose to give up the way most people live their lives, viz. starting their own family and taking an active part in the economic and political development of the earthly city. Instead, they embrace a life of chastity, poverty and obedience, and embark on a different kind of life together with those brothers of theirs who have felt called the same way, beginning with their inspired Founder. These are those whom the Church calls “consecrated persons”.

Consecrated life, therefore, more than anything else, is essentially a loving relationship with Christ, with the Father and with the Holy Spirit, which leads one to love the brothers with whom he lives and whom he has been sent to serve. Each Founder lived this fundamental reality, bringing to it his own characteristics and accentuations, and in this way formed his Institute’s charism, which basically is his particular way of following Christ more closely.

So, a Salesian brother is a Christian who has experienced this attraction to follow Christ more closely in the footsteps of Don Bosco. Consequently, he gives the primacy in his life to God and dedicates his life entirely to bring young people to experience the Father’s love for them.

Being a consecrated person today has a beauty and importance all its own. As Vita Consacrata says, “the Church and society itself need people capable of devoting themselves totally to God and to others for the love of God”¹.

There are many individuals and groups in society who devote their entire lives to a particular value. For example, musicians to music; teachers to education; doctors and nurses to the health of people; policemen to peace in society. All these individuals centre their lives on those particular values and they serve to keep alive those values in the entire population. “Keeping alive” means many things, like: stirring up interest, creating a sense of concern, and reminding others of their own responsibility. Society needs all these people.

In a similar way, when consecrated persons centre their lives on the supreme value, God, they become pointers to people of how much God loves each one and how each one ought to love God in return. A Mother Teresa, for instance, becomes a sign of God’s tender compassion for poor, suffering humanity. Likewise, people used to say of Venerable brother Simon Srugi that “to see Simon and to remember the Lord were one and the same thing” and that “his presence was like the shadow of God’s presence”.

And so, consecrated persons open up a whole new horizon for people:

• they remind people to give God the first place in their lives, and show how they can find true joy and freedom in him;

• they make Christ present and active in the world today as they go about their teaching and healing and preaching and praying: through them Christ reaches out and touches people’s lives; they reveal the beauty of “falling in love” with Christ and how his love can truly fill a person’s life so that he does not need anything else for his happiness and fulfilment;

• in total availability to the Holy Spirit they live the spiritual life and receive the gift of holiness;

• they demonstrate what it is to be Church and how we can all live as brothers and sisters, notwithstanding our inevitable differences of origin, language or culture;

• they invite everyone to raise their eyes to higher things, e.g. to be convinced that chastity is possible and necessary for genuine human love; that being is more important than having, and sharing more satisfying that hoarding; that doing God’s will, not individualism and self-sufficiency, brings happiness and fulfilment;

• they remind everyone of the fullness of life that lies beyond this one, and that holiness is the highest realization of every human being.

As you can see, consecrated life is not only a gift of Christ’s love to a person for his own holiness and happiness, but it is a gift to the Church and to mankind. “To some for the sake of all, God gives the gift of a closer following of Christ in his poverty, chastity, and obedience”.²

Some questions still remain about the need for consecrated persons today. With so much insistence nowadays on lay people sharing in the mission of the Church, some wonder whether consecrated persons, and that includes Salesian brothers, are still indispensable. With lay people today making inroads into what was once the near-exclusive domain of consecrated persons - education, health care and social work - and accomplishing these tasks with professionalism and competence, have not consecrated persons become superfluous today?

I have already spoken above of the much-needed contribution consecrated persons make to the Church and the world through the witness of their lives and work. Let me add a further specific consideration on the work of consecrated persons. I have no doubt whatever that many lay people, as individuals and as groups, can do and are doing several of the works that consecrated persons usually do, and in a committed and effective way. And I can envisage that lay people will increasingly assume an important role in the Church and her mission. That said, however, I think one would be blind not to acknowledge the difference of contribution, both in terms of quantity and quality, that consecrated persons make to the Church’s mission.

Consecrated persons form part of a specialized apostolic group in the Church:

• they are specialized in certain apostolic works, for which they are better prepared, receive spiritual nourishment and are able to work with greater stability and constancy in a single direction;

• since their religious institute has a centuries-old existence, they have a lot of accumulated worldwide experience which is gradually enriched with newer insights and enables them to carry out a long-lasting work;

• at the same time, they have a relative autonomy that enables them to render their services in any part of the world, and quickly; in fact, consecrated persons are often the ones spearheading newer and more difficult apostolates, often in the most inhospitable or inaccessible regions; think of communities of consecrated persons caring for AIDS patients, working with street-children, freeing those caught in the web of slavery and prostitution, rendering humanitarian services to refugees and victims of violence and natural disasters;

• they normally work in teams enjoying a great deal of unity and flexibility; their effectiveness stems from the fact that they have the same spiritual tradition, the same formation, the same fraternal atmosphere to sustain them, and a community life that fosters communion and a sharing of responsibility;

• they can offer personalized guidance, religious education and a formation of those who wish to take part in the same apostolic endeavour; they know how to share the riches of their charism and their spirituality with others and to share responsibility for the same mission;

• their vows give them a great freedom and availability in serving those in need, and their spirituality enhances the authenticity, quality and fruitfulness of their work;

• above all, they are aware that they are not carrying out a purely philanthropic work but a divine-human enterprise: Christ sends them and fills them with love for his Father and for humanity, and their objective is to lead people to Christ and to the Father.

We cannot forget that Don Bosco had a band of dedicated lay people when he began his work for poor, abandoned boys, but he was eventually inspired by God and Our Blessed Mother to set up a religious institute to carry on his work.

2. “LAY”

The second keyword that defines the brother is the word “lay”. No doubt, the brother is not exactly a layman like the Christian layman in the world. He “combines in himself the gifts of consecration with those of the lay state”³. He is, in fact, a consecrated layman committed to God through the profession of the three evangelical counsels, life in community and a specific mission. The Christian layman, on the other hand, is generally a married man who holds a job and lives immersed in the secular field, like economy and politics, to mention just two areas. But, for all their differences, there are some key similarities between the brother and the Christian layman.

Through his baptism,

• a person becomes a son of God in Jesus Christ, a member of the Church, and a living temple of the Holy Spirit; he is called to live a life of holiness;

• he shares in the mission of Christ as prophet, priest and king. In the Old Testament, prophets, priests and kings were three separate categories of persons, all of them anointed or consecrated by God. Jesus instead combined all the three roles in himself: he was prophet and priest and king. And now, in baptism, he gives all God’s people a share in this triple mission of his. So, when the layman, in union with Christ and his sacrifice, offers himself and his daily activities to the Father, he exercises his priesthood. When he manifests the Gospel through his words and deeds, he acts as a prophet. And, when as a Christian he engages in spiritual combat to overcome in himself the kingdom of sin, and dedicates himself to spreading the Kingdom of God, he exercises his kingship;⁴

• the unique character of his vocation is that he seeks the Kingdom of God by working to renew and perfect the temporal order. By the “temporal order” we mean “the good things of life and the prosperity of the family, culture, economic matters, the arts and professions, the laws of the political community, international relations, and other matters of this kind, as well as their development and progress”⁵; in a word, the whole secular fabric of society.

We know, however, that sin has tainted every aspect of the temporal order; think of corruption, injustice, disrespect for human life, consumerism, intolerance, strife, hedonism, practical atheism, and a host of other ills that plague human life everywhere. Therefore, it is the layman’s role, his “special obligation”⁶ to act as a leaven in society: he deeply involves himself and fully participates in the affairs of the earth, the world and the human community, and from within works to free the temporal order from the influence of sin and imbue it with the values of the Gospel. This is “properly and particularly" his calling as a Christian layman.

It takes only a moment’s reflection to realize how precious, necessary and important is this role of the Christian layman. Considering the numerous problems that afflict society everywhere -unemployment, the depreciation and wanton destruction of human life from conception to the grave, the exploitation of women and children, war, mass poverty, hunger, disease, religious fanaticism - there is a long, long way to go in order to build up what Pope Paul VI called “a civilization of love”.

Heeding the anguished cry of the world for justice, peace and solidarity, the layman strives to make a difference, beginning from the ordinary circumstances of his family, his social life and his secular profession, and extending all the way to economics, politics and international relations. He fights against sin in all its forms: corruption, injustice, exploitation, violence, hatred, ignorance and poverty, and in its place he seeks to bring in honesty, justice, solidarity, tolerance, love, respect, the growth of persons and a decent human life for all.

Everywhere he seeks to inject Christian values, by striving to create a new mentality that is more in line with the Gospel; he wants the light of Christ to penetrate all sectors of society and transform society from within, giving rise to a culture imbued with Gospel values. This is the typical way in which he shares in the redemption of the world and evangelizes, showing in actual practice more than in words what the Gospel is all about.

Like the Christian layman, the Salesian lay brother too has a unique secular character, which is “his specific characteristic, a noteworthy and essential value of his identity”.⁷ Being consecrated, however, he does not go the whole way, as the Christian layman does, in immersing himself in the secular field; but he remains deeply engaged in things secular, and instead of dispersing his energies over a vast array of social issues, concentrates on crucial areas that are closely connected with his charism as a Salesian, viz. the integral education of poor youth, the Christian renewal of work, social communication, and the commitment to justice and peace.⁸

Our Constitutions tell us that “his lay status… [makes] him in a particular way a witness to God’s Kingdom in the world, close as he is to the young and to the realities of working life”.⁹ His link to the young and to the world of work, then, is part and parcel of his identity. Young people and the “world of work” may, and do in fact, change: the youth of today are so different in every aspect from the youth of, say, fifty years ago; that too was when computers didn’t exist, but today they have become a necessary part of the working world. It all means that the brother has to adapt himself to the changes taking place in the field of youth and the world of work, always seeking to be relevant and useful according to the needs of time and place, but he cannot lose his relation to the young and to the world of labour, because this is a part of his own identity.

At this point, I would invite you to stop awhile to dwell on the beauty and importance of the Salesian brother’s vocation and mission today. The young people with whom he works are “that part of human society which is so exposed and yet so rich in promise”;¹⁰ he has to “prepare them to take their place with dignity in society and in the Church and […] alert them to the role they must play in the Christian transformation of social life”.¹¹

As for work, it is a fact that our modern societies are built on work. Work is an important reality for man and society. Through work, man procures his daily bread for himself and his family, but also develops his skills and abilities, builds himself up, grows in values, and shares in the work of the Creator. However, to evangelize this vast and dynamic sector of modern life, one has to enter and take part in it, and that is what the Salesian brother’s vocation and mission is all about.

Being an educator, the brother seeks to inculcate in the young the many personal and social values present in the world of labour, such as: the spirit of brotherhood, solidarity and community, combined with respect for the person of the individual. At the same time, he points out and helps them overcome the evils that threaten them: a materialistic concept of life, indifference to spiritual realities, individualism, envy, sentiments of hostility, temptation to violence.

He is aware of the big challenge he faces in preparing them for life in the world of work today, not only in terms of training them for a job, but also and above all in terms of giving them a strong social, ethical, spiritual and Christian foundation for their lives. Furthermore, through the concern he shows and the love he unceasingly gives to others, he bears witness to a profound and universal brotherhood as an antidote to all forms of egoism, exploitation and self-interest. He reveals God’s Kingdom already present in the world, and proclaims the Kingdom that is to come¹².

Undoubtedly, the Salesian brother’s lay dimension is his particular characteristic. It is not limited to his type of apostolic work; it “permeates the entire life of the brother: his Salesian mission, his life in community, his apostolic activity, his religious profession, his life of prayer and his spiritual life”¹³. This original contribution of the brother enriches the community and the Congregation, and complements the contribution of his priest-confreres. Where the Salesian priest sees a soul to be saved and grace to be brought to transform his life, the Salesian brother sees a human being in need of experiencing God’s love in a tangible way - food, shelter, education, work - and requiring help to live an upright human and Christian life in the world.