Back in the late 1980s, I briefly flirted with the idea of a religious vocation. At one stage I thought I might want to become a Catholic brother, largely because I wasn’t sure about the priesthood.

As any formation director worth his or her salt will tell you, that was a terribly immature way to approach a vocation. One shouldn’t commit to a way of life simply because of what it’s not; there has to be some positive attraction to what it is, because otherwise the vocation won’t sustain itself.

As it turns out, meeting my wife took the whole idea off the table, so I never had to ponder what the positive attraction to life as a Catholic brother might be. That’s too bad, because it means I never really broke through the wall of silence that often surrounds what is possibly the least-known, and least-appreciated, vocation in the Catholic Church.

All this comes to mind because on Monday, the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life — generally known by its less unwieldly nickname, the “Congregation for Religious” — presented a new document entitled “Identity and Mission of the Religious Brother in the Church.”

Like most Vatican texts, the document has been a long time in the making, and to be honest, it doesn’t pack much punch in terms of news value. It’s more a spiritual meditation, among other things reflecting on the communion of the Trinity as the model and inspiration for the fraternity lived by brothers with one another and with the world.

Neglecting the document would be a shame, however, because if there’s any constituency in Catholicism that deserves its day in the sun, it’s arguably the brothers.

Read the article “New Vatican Document Gives Religious Brothers a Moment in the Sun” on cruxnow.com.