The Religious Vows

Chastity

The Vow of Chastity is an outstanding gift of God's love, "poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us", inspires us, following the example and words of Jesus, to vow our whole person and our capacity to love God. The vow of chastity invites us to live celibacy; in this way we experience a greater freedom and capacity to love all people.

Through Chastity, lived as Hospitaller Brothers of Saint John of God, we experience and manifest the fruitfulness of our life in the apostolate of charity, because in this apostolate we carry out the mission of serving, protecting and encouraging life.

Chastity through Religious Profession is a gift of God and a free response, which we respond to through the strength of the Holy Spirit. We are challenged to nurture the gift we have received, through our close personal relationship with Christ in prayer and in the celebration of the sacraments, and to live our brotherhood with simplicity and joy, giving importance to the relations of friendship that have been established between people.

Poverty

Trusting in Jesus Christ, we undertake to follow Him and imitate him in Poverty and Simplicity. It is with Jesus that we confess our full trust in God; we proclaim the transitory nature of the things of this world and announce those things, which are unchanging.

Through the Profession of Poverty, we detach ourselves from material goods in order to be more open in the following Jesus who, though He was rich, for our sake became poor. Through Him becoming human, he shared our human way of life experiencing our weakness and hardships. Through this Vow we are led to freedom with Christ.

Like Jesus in our poverty we are invited to be with those who suffer and are in great need. We can enter into relationship with them and understand their situation existentially. We can work for their development and advancement, with vowed commitment against forms of injustice and the manipulation of people. We help carry out the duty of awakening consciences in the face of the drama of suffering.

Our vocation calls us to carry out our mission in places where people are suffering through sickness and other types of emargination and thus we feel the need to live and clearly show the poverty we have professed. This requires us to measure up to the principles of social justice deriving from the Gospel, the doctrine of the Church and the just laws of each country. Our possessions are not used as instruments of power but as means of service; living our poverty, accepting in freedom of spirit, the common obligations to work as a means of supporting ourselves and of carrying out the apostolate.

Like the early Christian Community, we place our personal possessions in common. We share what we are and what we have with our Brothers in the community: we live in a spirit of openness, availability to others, and service, as testimony to the spiritual communion, which unites us, and to the dependency implicit in poverty. All this enables us to accept what we receive from others with simplicity and gratitude.

We show our poverty through a simple life-style and by looking after the possessions of the community, resisting the consumer mentality in our personal and community life. In solidarity with our Brothers, we overcome the desire to amass things and we practice the sharing of possessions. Likewise, in order to avoid the danger of shutting ourselves off in our works and structures, we make sure that we remain sensitive to the needs of those amongst whom we live and that we help them to meet these needs.

In the practice of poverty, we do not stop at simply being obedient in the use and disposition of possessions, but strive also to live poverty truly and inwardly with personal and community commitment.

Obedience

Our Obedience is based on the desire to identify ourselves with Christ who brought about our redemption: He came into the world to do the will of God and fulfilled this in the service of people; He offered himself to God's will and "although he was God's Son, he learned through his sufferings to be obedient unto death".

Through Obedience we offer our whole self to God. We unite ourselves more closely to God's will, which is shown to us through God's word, the Church, the special laws of our Order, the decisions of Leadership, dialogue with our Brothers, and interpretation of the sign of the times.

In this way we proclaim that the freedom won for us by Christ, to which we feel ourselves called, enables us to live in the service of others, without submitting to the yoke of slavery, and avoiding tyranny, egoism, the lack of identification with the community and all those situations in which human dignity is compromised.

Our Obedience is a personal act, living in faith and love, and it helps us to move towards the freedom of children of God, and assists us in our progress towards overall maturity, since both authority and obedience are at service of the person, the community and the mission.

We express our obedience in the first place with fidelity to our charism and with the sincere common search for God's will for the Order, our Community and each individual Brother. Our openness and availability is the source of the spirit which keeps us free to respond readily to the needs of those who suffer, to whose service we vowed our lives being willing to carry out whatever mission the order entrusts to us.

Since we share in a special way in the life and mission of the Church because of our charism and apostolate, in virtue of this vow we are also obedient to the Church. Through the life of the Church we are united to the mystery of the Church.

Illuminated and strengthened by faith, obedience leads us, through open dialogue, to discover in the community and its members the apostolic charisma with which the Holy Spirit helps the Order to carry out its mission.

The same atmosphere of dialogue and mutual understanding enables us to develop, in community, that sense of co-responsibility, which helps bring about mutual union in the service of God and of our suffering brothers and sisters.

Hospitality

Hospitality has its source in the life of Jesus of Nazareth: anointed and sent by the Spirit to bring the Good News to those in need and to heal the sick. Jesus reveals to us the God's merciful love, faithfulness, trust and loving kindness towards all people. Jesus announces that he has been sent to bring life; aware of his mission, he dedicates himself with preference for the weak, the sick and sinners, whom He receives and welcomes with words and gestures of deep understanding and humanity; he suffers with those who suffer; he identifies himself with the poor, the sick and those in need, raising them to the status of living signs of His presence, so that anything we do to one of them he takes as being done to Him.

Attracted by the person of Jesus, especially in his attitudes towards those who are weakest, and anointed with the same Spirit, we vow ourselves to Hospitality in order to carry out Christ's instruction to care for all people. Having by the person of Jesus, especially in his attitudes towards those who are weakest, and anointed with the same Spirit, we vow ourselves to Hospitality in order to carry out Christ's instruction to care for those who suffer and are in need.

Having given our lives to the love of God in serving the emarginated and those in need, we announce the Kingdom as Jesus did. He has not eliminated suffering; nor has he wished to reveal its mystery fully; however, illuminated by faith and united with the suffering Christ, the person who suffers knows that, with his or her pain, he or she can contribute to the salvation of the world. We offer our assistance to the suffering and our service to those in need as a sign of the new and eternal life won by Christ's redemption.

Through the vow of Hospitality we dedicate ourselves, to helping the suffering and those in need, undertaking to provide them with all those services they need, even the most humble and the most dangerous to our own lives, in imitation of Christ, who loved us even to the extent of dying for our salvation.

Our greatest joy lies in living in contact with those to whom our mission is directed, we welcome them and serve them with the loving kindness, understanding and spirit of faith, which they deserve as persons and as children of God, and we place all our energy, talents and skills at their disposition in the various tasks entrusted to us.

The Hospitality we have professed means that we must defend and keep watch over the rights of the individual to be born, to live in a decent manner, to be helped in sickness, and to die with dignity. We strive to make sure in our Hospitaller Apostolate that it is always clear that our concern is the sick or suffering person.

We show our Hospitaller Spirit not only in the institutions in which we work, but extend it also to all those who lack food and drink, clothing, housing and medicine, or who are afflicted with trials and tribulations or ill health. Our hearts suffer because we are not able to help and welcome them all; thus they have a special place in our prayers and we are conscious of a special link with all those who work to bring about a more human and Christian world.

Our Vow to God in the service of those in need is the most precious fruit of our following of Jesus in the path of the Religious Vows, since chastity, poverty and obedience strengthen our capacity to love and make us more open and ready to serve the sick, emarginated and the suffering in the Hospitaller Apostolate.

For us, Mary is the special model of consecration: accepting the word of God, she vowed herself wholly to the person and work of Jesus. In the same way, it is Mary, humble and poor handmaid of the Lord, who, with her example, encourages us to be faithful to the designs of the Holy Spirit. It is, moreover, the "Mother of Mercy" and "Health of the Sick" who teaches us to have compassion for human pain and to try to relieve the affliction and distress of those who suffer.