by Sr. Liana de Jesus MMM                                Brazil/USA                 14.01.2026

Consecrated Religious Life lives in a time of great transformations with profound changes. ,  This leads us to think that challenges multiply, especially among the new generations directly involved in them, as well as the other generations challenged by the new reality.  Changes in new technologies. such as the internet, mobile phones, and social networks.   These facilitate information, break down geographical and cultural barriers, and create cultural multiplicity.  Because of these changes, consecrated life is challenged to seek a new identity and a resignification to better respond to the “signs of the times”.

The time we live in is marked by intense, fast and profound changes.  This leads us to think that after the “time of change” many of the old-style models support a worldview, insecurities and even disorientation.  For the late Pope Francis “this change of season was produced by the huge qualitative, fast and accrued jumps that occur in scientific progress, technological inventions in various areas of life”.  Changes are in all grounds and in all human actions, which straight or circuitously affect religious life.  Even, “the reoccurrence to the holy and the mystical exploration, which symbolizes our time, are equivocal miracles”.

Today everything seems temporary.  Human relations are temporary, marriages are temporary, work is temporary, are also provisional, and we live in an environment full of indecision about the future.  However, Religious Life continues to bear the permanence of obligations, even though it suffers the bitter losses of people who abandon it.  This makes us think that “if the dedication to permanent values is in crisis, it is since the actual idea of the period is also in crisis.”  Constant and strong values have little chance of happening in a fragmented life practiced in disengaged incidents and events.

This is our challenge in 2026!