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| Oblates Day of Recollection, 12 July 2014 St. Joseph Abbey, St. Benedict, Louisiana |
This is lightly edited from a presentation I gave on Wednesday, 1 October:
I. Introduction
A while back, Fr. Ryan Humphries of the Minor
Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Natchitoches, Louisiana, asked if I
might be interested in taking one of the Wednesday night Adult Catechesis
sessions at St. Mary’s School. After a
bit of thought and prayer – in part during a day-long “Oblates’ Day” retreat at
St. Joseph’s Abbey down by Covington – I proposed that I talk about the ways in
which Catholic laymen can associate themselves with a religious order, as I do
as a “Benedictine Oblate.” Father said
that sounded good to him, so here I am.
The actual title for tonight is, “Third Orders
and Oblates.” Those are the two most
common “popular” terms for what I’m talking about. But in reading up on them, I quickly found
something that surprised me: There is
remarkably little information handy on the subject as a cohesive whole, probably
because the subject is not a cohesive
whole. It’s a bit more complex than I suspected. I’ve made up some information sheets [appended below],
and the first thing I would direct you to on them is an online article that is
the nearest thing I have found to an overview and is what I used as a starting
point in my research: An essay by
Elizabeth Scalia entitled “Oblates, Tertiaries, Professed Laypeople” [LINK]. It’s a very good short introduction to the subject.
