The revised text of the Constitution of our Order of the Ministers of the Sick (Camillians) is the outcome of a pathway that involved all the religious of the Order, at various levels. The principal stages of this pathway can be summarised as follows:

1. During the course of the General Chapter that was celebrated on 2-18 May 2007 a motion was approved that gave a mandate to the General Consulta to begin the process of revising the Constitution and the General Statutes. This motion, which was detailed in describing the limits of the revision and the itinerary by which this was to be done, indicated that this was a revision of some parts and not a total rewriting (a). The revision was initially entrusted to a committee that was entrusted with proposing modifications (b). The General Consulta was responsible for the revision in its role as guarantor of the correctness of the work carried out and the interpretation of the Constitution (c). The major Superiors, at various stages of the process, were also involved as an extended government of the Order (d). The modifications that were proposed were subject to the careful assessment of the local and Provincial Chapters, which were celebrated on two occasions (e). The motion hoped for an involvement of the Order in different ways, something which, as things now stand, took place to the letter.
2. On 14 November 2007, on the occasion of a meeting of the major Superiors in Rome, the work programme was presented, and a few weeks later, on 7 December 2007, the Superior General and the General Consulta appointed the members of the Committee for the Revision of the Constitution.
3. In 2008, this committee met on 3-4 March and 17-18 May, drawing up a draft revision to be submitted to the General Consulta for further examination. The General Consulta met on 17-18 September 2008 to examine the material and produce possible further changes. The entire text, the outcome of the work of the committee and the General Consulta, was presented during the course of the meeting of the major Superiors in Brazil (November 2008) who were asked for their opinions before giving the amended text to all the members of the Order. After addressing certain specific subjects, the advice of the major Superiors was to send the text to all the communities of the Order by June 2009 as a preparation for the imminent local and Provincial Chapters.
4. On 6 July 2009, the revised text of the Constitution and the General Statutes was sent to the major Superiors. In the accompanying letter, the request was made to send this text to all the religious who had the task ‘of expressing their opinions on the amendments proposed at the end of the joint work of the ‘ad hoc’ committee, the General Consulta and the reflections of the meeting with the Provincials’, without in this way limiting the freedom ‘that other proposals for change can find room and be brought to the attention of the General Consulta’
5. In 2010, after the Provincial Chapters had been held, the opinions and views on the Constitution and the General Statutes were sent to the General Consulta. The General Consulta worked on the material in synoptic form in order to determine which articles had received majority consensus (or dissent), in this way excluding them from further discussion or receiving possible observations as regards their contents and deepening debate about them. The task of drawing up this synopsis was entrusted to Fr. Donato Cauzzo and Fr. Gianfranco Lunardon. At the end of an undertaking that was careful and not easy, the whole of the material, which was the outcome of consultations with the Chapters and the suggestions of the major Superiors at their meeting of October 2010 (in Rome), was sent to the committee.
6. The committee met again in February 2011 and examined each individual article, whether approved, repealed or amended. It sent its conclusions to the General Consulta which – at subsequent meetings starting in the month of March – performed its role of being the guarantor of the Constitution and the General Statutes, settling questions that were still open and confirming/abrogating ones that were not. In the month of July, the General Consulta sent the whole of the text to the major Superiors as a preparation for the meeting that was to be held in Peru in the month of October.
7. During the year 2011 (May), the expert jurist Fr. Pierluigi Nava, a Monfortian religious, was also contacted and from that point onwards he accompanied the process of the revision of the Constitution and the General Statutes.
8. On 21 October 2012, under the signature of the General Secretary, ‘the text of the Constitution and the General Statutes in its latest version’, ‘the outcome of variations proposed and approved starting in 2007’, was sent to the major Superiors with the request that it be sent to the Chapters. This text, which was to be discussed by the local and Provincial Chapters, was to contribute other material for the final revision – with the General Chapter now near – of the Constitution and the General Statutes.
9. Starting in the end of 2012 and the early months of 2013, the minutes of the Provincial Chapters that had been celebrated leading up to the General Chapter arrived on the desk of the General Consulta. Parts of these Chapters had been dedicated to the revision of the Constitution and the General Statutes, thereby offering further material on the amendments that had been proposed or generating further reflections or changes.
10. The general Chapter of May 2013 examined closely, discussed and approved the text which was then given to the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (24 November 2014) for final approval by the Holy See.
11. By the rescript prot. n. M.73 –1/2014 of 22 February 2016, signed by His Excellency Msgr. José Rodriguez Carballo, O.F.M., the Archbishop Secretary, the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (CIVCSVA) approved the modifications made to the Constitution of the Order, with ‘the hope that observance of the Constitution will be for us valuable help in the ministry of bearing witness to the merciful love of Christ towards the sick, according to the spirit of our Founder, St. Camillus de Lellis’.

Disposizioni Generali

Costituzione

Rescritto di approvazione da parte della Santa Sede