Ad Honorem Immaculatae Conceptionis Mariae Oblatio

91 Tabor playing the role of an icon of the mystery of consecration. The Pope devotes more space to the role of the Holy Spirit in the religious life. Its ecclesial, eschatological, and communal character are also more fully pre- sented. Naturally, this does not mean that Christ is being pushed into the shadows. Instead, it aims rather at deepening and enriching. Just like His face shone at the moment of the Transfiguration, His role in religious con- secration is illuminated by the interaction of the Father and the Holy Spirit. The title of the first chapter, Confessio Trinitatis can be considered repre- sentative of the theological perspective of the entire document. The Origins of the Consecrated Life in the Mystery of Christ and of the Trinity and a pas- sage from paragraph 14 that opens this part of the exhortation: Many of the baptized throughout history have been invited to live such a life ‘in the image of Christ.’ But this is possible only on the basis of a special vocation and in virtue of a particular gift of the Spirit. For in such a life baptismal consecration develops into a radical response in the following of Christ through acceptance of the evangelical co- unsels, the first and essential of which is the sacred bond of chastity for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven. This special way of ‘following Christ,’ at the origin of which is always the initiative of the Father, has an essential Christological and pneumatological meaning: it expres- ses in a particularly vivid way the Trinitarian nature of the Christian life and it anticipates in a certain way that eschatological fulfillment towards which the whole Church is tending (VC, 14). We may say that Vita consecrata inscribed the mystery of the consecrat- ed life into the fundamental structure of prayer and the Christian life: to the Father through Jesus in the Holy Spirit. In this case, the person of Jesus is placed in the center of the Holy Trinity’s actions. The Father entrusts to Him persons whom He calls to follow Him, which is only possible through the action of the Holy Spirit who awakens in people a longing for a total response to this calling and conforms them to Christ (cf. VC, 18-19). The presentation of the mystery of consecration in this exhortation is very positive in a sense because it takes root in an admiration of God’s beauty shining in the face of Christ. As a result, the Passion dimension of religious consecration is not overly emphasized. Very few are such de- scriptions as “self-emptying,” “putting to death,” “participation in the Cross and the death” which saturated the exhortation Redemptionis donum . In- stead, the post-synodal document emphasizes the quality of the human