Brothers and Sisters of Charity

CHAPTER 1: BASIC PRINCIPLES AND VISIONS (from the Brothers and Sisters of Charity Constitution)

1. The Brothers and Sisters of Charity is a Catholic community of singles, celibates, and families called as a monastic and domestic spiritual family into deep love relationships with and in Jesus Christ. We also include non-Catholic participants in a way that respects and ensures the integrity of the religious beliefs and freedom of all according to the norms of the Catholic Church. Jesus is our primary example; the Scripture is our primary rule; our primary law is love.

 2. The primary charism of this community is love. For this divine love to avoid being only misdirected, human emotion, it is guided by divine truth which comes to us from God through the church.

3. This life of love and truth is formed and fostered through a balanced life of prayer and study, which overflows into apostolic service.

4. The primary expression of this charism of love is integration. Guided by official Catholic teachings on ecumenism and interfaith relations, we integrate all religions from a uniquely Christian base, all Christian faiths from a uniquely Catholic base, and all religious and monastic traditions from a uniquely Franciscan base. Franciscanism is our mother, but we are a child born from this heritage that is unique and new.

5. On other levels, we integrate the charismatic and contemplative spirituality, a call to socio-eremitical solitude with a call to cenobitical community, and a primary call to contemplative community with a mandate from the gospel to the apostolic action of the evangelical life.

6. We also integrate our specific and unique call to live in the single, celibate or married, the clerical or lay states, with the monastic or domestic expressions both locally and internationally. As such, we build on the monastic tradition, which sees the community itself as a quasi-church, and look prophetically toward the future as a microcosm and possible prototype of the whole church.

7. The community is composed of a monastic and domestic expression. Its base and center is monastic. The full monastic expression is integrated. The integrated monastic motherhouse of the entire community is the Little Portion Hermitage 350 CR 248, Berryville AR, USA, in the Diocese of Little Rock.

8. The monastic expression consists of single, celibate and family members, who live in a monastic setting patterned after the classical socio-eremitical skete or laura, or the house of prayer of the kellion. The domestic expression generally live in their own homes in less externally intense manifestations of intentional community.

9. While recognizing the goodness of all creation and humankind, the lifestyle of the community is intentionally counter-cultural. We are an alternative society living within and alongside of modern society. We are also an expression of renewal and reform within the church.

10. This incarnational and counter-cultural life is realized by embracing the three evangelical counsels according to one’s own state of life. We embrace the poverty of Jesus in the midst of modern materialism and consumerism. We embrace gospel chastity in the midst of modern sexual promiscuity. We embrace gospel obedience in the context of church and community in the midst of modern individualism.

11. We also embrace the ancient commitments of stability and conversion of manners from western monasticism. We seek to bring stability to the instability of our transient world, and true conversion of our whole life to a world that so desperately needs to turn to God.

12. We do all of this by simply seeking to live the evangelical and gospel life of Christ and his apostles, which integrates harmoniously those seeming opposites into a manifest and living whole.

13. In light of the gospel admonitions to go and teach all the nations, the scope of the community is immediately international. By its nature the community is free to make foundations and to carry out ministries in any diocese where they are made welcome by local bishops or other competent church authority.

CHAPTER 2: COMMUNAL LIFE

14. As the name Brothers and Sisters of Charity implies, we are a spiritual family, bound in the love of Jesus Christ. As a true spiritual family in Christ, the community is incarnationally guided by the leadership of a spiritual father and mother, who act as spiritual parents and whose job it is to develop attitudes and relationships of interdependence, rather than codependency or independency, within the community.

15. Each expression of community; the single, celibate brotherhood and sisterhood, family monastic, and domestic, exist under their own leadership and Particular Directory, but are united by one Scripture Rule, these Constitutions, and one General Leadership.

16. This attitude of family relationship reaches out to all branches of the Franciscan family tree, to all religious and monastic communities, to the entire church, and to all of creation, human and non-human, animate and inanimate.

17. We are always to be united with the church Jesus founded. The Franciscan tradition, moreover, binds us to a special reverence for the pope, and complete obedience to him. According to our monastic traditions, let us show respect for each individual bishop as the successor of the apostles.

Likewise, as was the desire and example of St. Francis, we give due respect to all priests, deacons, and religious. We likewise show respect for all the various ecclesial communities, which call upon Jesus as Lord. We show respect to all the people of God as members of Christ’s body, all people on earth as created in God’s image, and all creation as bearing traces of God. We try to bring the unity of Jesus Christ to and with all.