Ve‘He should know that he has to be dead to all the things of this world, that is to say relatives, friends, possessions and himself’.

‘He should know that he has to be dead to himself, if he has so much capital of grace from the Holy Spirit, that he should not care about death or life, nor infirmity or health, but he should be dead to everything’.

‘Renewed in this way he should prepare himself for a great deal of suffering’.

These are three very severe passages from the Formula of Life, and such as to provoke a sense of guilt: indeed, it is difficult to be aligned with such involving programmes. It would be clumsy of me to speak of them in sugary terms.

Without doubt the requests that the Formula of Life made to the young men were radical in character.

The relations that St. Camillus had with his religious were based on great understanding. We are informed about gestures that were very sensitive when, for example, they needed care or he helped them in illnesses that they had acquired while assisting the plague-stricken.

On a number of occasions he tempered the rigour of the service that was provided by establishing periods of rest and obtaining for the larger communities residences in the country for the recovery and maintenance of health.

But he did not tolerate half-measures. Accommodations and ambiguities irritated him. A little more than a month before he died he entrusted the following observation to his testamentary letter: ‘Indeed our Order requires perfect men that do the will of God and reach perfection and holiness. It is they who not only do good to themselves but will also build up the holy Church and the whole world. In it great progress and advantage will be achieved through them. In opposite fashion, those who are sensual, of little religious spirit and mortified will ruin the Order’.

   But for today’s Camillian what does it mean to enter, or also to persevere in, the Institute to which the Lord has called him?

At the Synod of Bishops of 1990 two trends were highlighted as an assessment of the way things were. One was decidedly pessimistic and was summarised in the final report: ‘We are faced with challenges and difficulties, such as religious indifference, materialism, poverty and injustice, a growing ditch between rich and poor nations and social classes, family difficulties etc.’. Amongst the reasons for a negative assessment there also figured the crisis of the Catholic image of priests, a large number of abandonments, and the dramatic decrease in vocations. These are things that depress and discourage us. Although led to align myself with a more serene and optimistic vision of things, the fact remains that the world is hostile to us, or critical, or indifferent; the liberal creed emphasises individual responsibility outside religious frameworks, spreading seeds of contamination; the mystery of the revelation of God, the gift of the graces that come from on high exercise no hold on people; religious life itself, in which I believe, is leaking everywhere: there are, within it, too many freelances, there is a widespread presence of conflict within it, too many freelances, there is a widespread presence of conflict within the community groups, a multiplicity of opinions is experienced badly, and then liberties are taken of which it is difficult to approve and which do not seem to reproduce the model of the Formula of Life.

In these contexts it is not even easy to choose a religious Institute. But this has never been easy. Yesterday and today, St. Camillus does not want to deceive his followers. This choice is either radical or it would better if it did not exist: ‘he should know that he has to be dead to all the things of this world’; ‘he should prepare himself for a great deal of suffering’.

If we think well upon the matter…

Download here the Formula of Life, Testamentary Letter, the Transit, Spiritual exercises in the Formula of Life