Religious life in Latin America is living in a complex moment, now supporting unmeasured difficulty; at times, seeming a bit lost.  The goal is at the end of the road that is surrounded by great darkness and by many threats. It is Christmas time, a Long Christmas, but threatened by the forces of death, which attack from unusual positions.

The religious life is rising in Latin America. The seed that the religious have sown in the furrowed ground of the Latin American people has commenced to produce results, which are original. Many think that it deals with a new moment within the history of religious life. It is not a novelty incited in the foundation of new institutions, but that what is manifested in a new style of religious life that touches all the institutions.

The characteristics of novelty of this new style of religious life emerging in Latin America are the following:

- A religious life with a mature historical sense: many religious are made to feel responsible by the destiny of the people and of the cultures comprised in the mosaic that emerges from Latin America.

- A religious life with great potential for the prophetic: audacious prophetic voices representing humanity reduced to live in a netherworld.

- A religious life with faces of martyrs; while, at the origins of the religious life, the monastic life followed martyrdom, in Latin America the opposite happened: martyrdom followed the religious life; religious, laity, and ordinary ministers were martyred, the maximum expression of evangelical radicalism. There is a religious life that is excessively protected, distant from the feasibility of martyrdom, a religious life at low risk. However, in antithesis, another religious life at high risk is rising, not only on an individual level, but also on institutional and structural levels.

It is the first time that the cultural conditionings are modifying or decidedly influencing the comprehension and manifestation of fundamental elements of religious life.

To speak of “replenishing” is an attempt to find a name for something that the Spirit is manifesting beyond what we can foresee.

For many various reasons, it is always interesting to note the solidarity that connects various institutions and communities and, at the same time, converges them in certain common projects in life as mission to the people. Someone arrived exclaiming “religious life is rising!” the numerous institutions and communities that many times were disintegrated and inarticulate are replaced by common projects.

It is a religious life having an eschatological character; with a spirituality of escaping the old world for the kingdom; a religious life towards God the liberator; a religious life that seeks to be contemplative in the liberation.            It is a religious life that feels indebted to the People of God. It does not define itself as superior; it does not feel self-sufficient; it knows that only if inserted in the walk of the church, acquires all its reason to live.

This new type of religious life receives persecution in the most varied forms of external threats. It is criticized as destabilizing. It is persecuted by political forces, whether dictatorial or democratic. It is maligned by economic forces. It is considered as a small disillusioned David. Any means to discredit it are tried, certain labels are also assigned to condemn it. Every word, article, action is analyzed with a magnifying glass to discover errors, lacks, and omissions. Even in the church itself, this life is not comprehended nor sustained.

But there are other internal threats that are found inside the closed institutions of history, at the clamor of the very poor, that are entrenched in their securities in order to avoid risk. There are some communities that are more concerned for their own preservation than for the Kingdom of God. In such communities, a religious life is blocked and is as lifeless as a museum, without projects or new ideas to promote the kingdom of God. Another type of threat comes from presumptuous religious who are involved in this project of newness, but who have lost the religious sense and who are monopolized by a political sense; by religious that scorn the others, who exile themselves from their institutions and from the Church, who have changed their obedience to the Church or institution for total adherence to a revolutionary leadership, who have their trust in their strategies (“in their chariots and horses”) rather than in God, who make liberation their idol. Such unilateralists are also a threat for the religious life rising in Latin America, but they are not pose a counter-argument.

The signs of our time require that the religious life be more prophetic, be a life of witness, be a life of martyrdom, a religious life of high risk.