Fr John Okoro Egbulefu CCE, Rome 31/7/2026, Feast of St Ignatius of Loyola, Founder of the Society of Jesus

The comparison among the different Religious Institutes located in one and same Nation and sharing the same difficulties in that Nation, like the risen cost of living, has helped to identify those Religious families that are living above their income and thus deviating from the life of Jesus Christ the Father of all who, like Him, are in the world but not of the world and, like Him, live on divine providence and have nothing that they can call their own in the human society within the transitory world in which they live and through which they are passing, on their eathly pilgrimage to heaven, Jesus Christ from whose way of life the religious life has been developed in His Church as in the Union of His faithful Apostles and disciples as the visible fragile destructible temporal human container-component of the Church and the Holy Spirit as the invisible resistent indestructible eternal divine Content-component of the Church:

i) the poor Jesus, not only poor in spirit, in the sense of having no Will of His own, rather only that of the Father, but also poor in possessing/owning, in the sense of having/carrying no excess, but rather being content with only the necessary and far from living an extravagant and wasteful life;

ii) the obedient Jesus as the Godserving Jesus binding Himself to God the Father and doing the Will of God willingly, through subordinating His Will to the Will of God, by first converting His Will from its original form as a Noun to a new form, that of an adverb, and retaining the Will of God in its immutable form as a Noun, and hence doing the Will of God willingly;

iii) the chaste Jesus as the One that is not only pure/stainless/spotless in the body by not doing with His body anything that does not give glory to God, but also pure/stainless/spotless in the soul not only by having purity of heart as fruit of cultivating the habit of not habouring any evil but also by having purity of mind as fruit of cultivating the habit of not thinking any evil, and purity of hands as fruit of cultivating the habit of, on the one hand, not doing/giving any evil to anybody and, on the other hand, not taking/accepting any evil from anybody;

iv) the selfless Jesus as the One that not only is always thinking and saying good of others first, before, and more than, of Himself but also is always doing good to others first, before, and more than, to Himself, and without asking for anything in exchange;

v) the honest Jesus as the One not only in whom there is no dishonesty, no deceit, no guile, no cheating, no insincerity, no hypocrisy, no falsehood, etc, but also on whose life as on the life of the truth the true religious life is measured, and the authenticity of the religious life that any group of persons in the Church have professed to live is determined, and in the mirror of whose life as the model of perfection and holiness the claim of such group to be professionally re-living His life can be verified.