Our Life as Canon 603 Hermits

+JMJ+

Dear MOME Family,                                

Just to share with you a little about our way of life:

We are  humbled, and honored and filled with joy to be called to the Canon 603 eremitical life within our personal way of liife.

A Canon 603 Hermit is one approved by the Church as a Consecrated Religious who has chosen to “devote their life to the praise of God and salvation of the world through a stricter separation from the world, the silence of solitude and assiduous prayer and penance.”

The Bishop approves a personal rule of life that we have written and follow.

As hermits we are meant to be a witness and encouragement to all, no matter what your vocation, that this life is very short, and but meant to be a preparation, a “building up treasure,” for life eternal with God.

Consecrated Life in the Catholic Church, giving oneself totally to Jesus as His bride, is not well understood by many people today. There are different forms of Consecrated Life. Most people are only aware of large Religious Communities (of which we both have been a part, but then felt “a call within a call.”) In the beginnings of the Church, there were only Hermits, and Consecrated Virgins, which eventually evolved into Religious Communities.

St. John the Baptist and St. Mary Magdalen became Hermits. St. Mary Magdalene, along with Martha, Lazarus and others, travelled to, France not long after Jesus' Death and Resurrection. After preaching the Good News for a couple of years, she went to Saint Baume. There she lived in a cave, up a mountain, as a hermit for 30 years, in intense prayer and union with Jesus, her Divine Lover. 
St. Anthony the Great was one of the first Desert Father Hermits, who in turn became the Father of all Monastic Communities due to the witness of his life, and his teachings. 

Pope St. John Paul II says, "It is a source of joy and hope to witness in our time a new flowering of … men and women hermits, belonging to ancient Orders or new Institutes, or being directly dependent on the Bishop, bear[ing] witness to the passing nature of the present age by their inward and outward separation from the world …. Such a life ‘in the desert’ is an invitation to their contemporaries and to the ecclesial community itself never to lose sight of the supreme vocation, which is to be always with the Lord." (Vita Consecrata #7)

Canon 603 which refers to the vows we have taken, reads:

§1. Besides institutes of Consecrated Life, the Church recognizes the eremitic or anchoritic life by which the Christian faithful devote their life to the praise of God and salvation of the world through a stricter separation from the world, the silence of solitude and assiduous prayer and penance.

§2. A hermit is recognized in the law as one dedicated to God in a Consecrated Life if he or she publicly professes the three evangelical counsels, confirmed by a vow or other sacred bond, in the hands of the diocesan bishop and observes his or her own plan of life under his direction.

    Be assured of our continued prayers for you and your families. As hermits, our primary work is “assiduous prayer.” And, oh how the world is in need!

In the Love of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary,

Benedictus Jesus et Maria!

Sr. Charista Maria of the Holy Trinity (Lilla Marie)

Sr. Mary Clare of the Holy Eucharist
Picture below is of St. Mary Magdalene's Cave up a mountain in St. Baume, where she lived as a hermit for 30 years.