2.-  After Vatican II, the topic of Councils in Institutes of Consecrated Life literally exploded. To

promote increased participation, in these last 35-40 years, we have witnessed a multiplicity of studies to renew the government structures of our Institute, so as to better contain the new wine of the spirit of the Council. There was a mushrooming of project studies, of organigrams, consultation of the grass roots, in order to focus better on the nature of councils, their composition, powers, and the jobs of the individual consultors (or assistants according to the different terminology of different Institutes); we studied at length how to renew the election procedure for Superior and Councils; we almost searched for recipes to measure out well, according to a balanced harmony corresponding to each Institute’s charism, the values involved: participation, co-responsibility, freedom, apostolic effectiveness, and witness to authenticity of consecrated life, collegiality, subsidiarity, decentralization, etc…, which are, then, substantially the values involved in our topic “The Superior and his/her council”.

Thus we witnessed in this post-conciliar time a multiplication of new types of councils: the most traditional general, provincial or local councils; we saw chapters, or general, provincial or local councils. So we see appearance of congregational councils, provincial or regional councils, the enlarged councils, meetings of communities for a consultation of the rank-and-file members, etc…

Faced with this mushrooming of new organisms, sometimes one might have the impression that sociologists too easily acted like “bosses”, organizing the Institute or the Congregation and the individual sub-units (provinces,  departments, regions, local communities) or designing the figure of the superior at all levels, according to models taken from civil society or from social co-existence among people who make up purely human groups. We must accept and confess that there is a danger of forgetting that the congregation, before being a common human group, is “a structured whole formed by religious who call upon a same spiritual event” (Dortel-Claudot, p. 776). The Congregation is a spiritual reality in the strong and specific sense of the word, when it is understood in reference to the Holy Spirit.  It is a charismatic reality; it is a living, organic body animated by a vital principle that organizes it, give it unity, regulates and governs it in order to be developed and preserved. Alongside the Holy Spirit, since it is an organic and visible body, there is also human government which, before being a “structure” that can be represented in an organigram, is the totality of all those actions, relationships and movements of the Congregation’s life, converging toward the good functioning of the body and the fulfillment of  its individual members.