State of the Province Report

(given at the Plenary Council, 30-Sep-05 at the Sheraton Lakeside Chalet in St Louis MO, by Council president Elizabeth Korves)

First of all, on behalf of the Provincial Council, I'd like to thank everyone for coming and for the service, which you give to your community. As we make the shift from writing the Provincial Statutes into the more pastoral aspects of our duties as Provincial Council, we are very much enjoying getting to know the members of our province through the visitations and the councilor workshops offered earlier in summer. And this Congress provides us another welcome opportunity to meet the people we serve.

This report has some statistics, so I ask that you bear with me as I run through some of the numbers.

The Oklahoma Province has 19 canonical communities, 18 study groups, and 1 Group in Discernment. Associated with those communities and study groups are a total of 28 isolates.
Currently we have 862 OCDS in the province (including the isolates). There are 98 aspirants, 137 people in formation for First Promise, and another 129 in formation for Definitive Promise.

Since May 2002, 31 members have died.

Isolates

When receiving the plenary council reports from around the province, we learned that many communities/study groups have people they consider to be isolates that we on the Provincial Council have been unaware of. First, we must admit that for many years, we did not serve the isolates of our province well. It is certainly our hope that with the Constitutions and the Statutes, we have developed a better way to serve our isolates by asking that they have monthly contact with the community/study group to which they have been associated. Some communities and some isolates have been doing better at this monthly contact and some have not. We are all still very much in a time of transition and learning how to best live out our new legislation but we do hope things continue to improve in general. We refer you back to two items we placed in past issues of the Flos Carmeli with suggestions on those monthly contacts.

In touching upon isolates, I'd like to remind you that it is the Provincial Council who grants isolate status and associates an isolate with a particular community. When we first did this, we had three different and outdated lists of who the isolates in our province were. We contacted the folks on all three of those lists. As we received the plenary council reports from our communities and study groups, we found that some of them named isolates whom we were unaware of. We also had communities that listed isolates with addresses that were within easy driving distance of other communities or study groups. So we are doing some follow up on all those isolates to clarify their situation.

The reports from the communities and study groups indicate that most of our communities have been providing on-going formation in Carmelite spirituality for those who are definitively professed. However, only about half reported having spent time in the past three years studying our new Constitutions and Statutes. We encourage all our communities and study groups that have not made a study of the new legislation yet, to make such study a priority in the next year. Along side that, we encourage and ask you to also encourage all the members of our province to regularly read the Constitutions and Statutes on their own. Since we are committed to the Constitutions and Statutes by way of the obedience part of our Promise, each of us should review that legislation a few times each year.

Apostolates

The community apostolates that were reported covered quite a range. First, we'd like to remind study groups that they do not need to have a community apostolate. Many of our study groups are still young so far as being a group and they need to concentrate more on good formation and group development first. Those more established study groups may feel they are ready to undertake a group apostolate.

We'd also like to emphasize that our canonical communities should take some time in discerning an apostolate. Each community will have different gifts to draw upon and so should go through a discernment process as a community before undertaking an apostolate. This Congress is including much on apostolate that we hope will inform your discussions. We know it will take time for communities to discern what they can do by way of a group apostolate before they can be fully engaged in living out the mission of the Order. We hope our communities are creative in looking at ways to engage that mission. The primary criteria that the Statutes ask in relation to a community apostolate are - how does this share Carmelite spirituality with those outside of our community? This question should always be the guiding principle in discerning a community apostolate. While some of the apostolates named by our communities do show ways to share Carmelite spirituality, others didn't quite connect with the mission of the Discalced Carmelite Order.

The Provincial Council has begun to make visitations of our communities [beginning in March with Pascal's visitation to Birmingham. --see photo] We have scheduled visitations so that canonical communities will be visited once every three years. Our study groups will be visited more frequently based on their needs (some annually and some less often). Since the Provincial Council has responsibility for supervising study groups, we hope through more frequent visits to help them develop as communities and make good progress towards full canonical status. The Provincial Council is happy to report that the visitations seem to be going well and no major problems have come to our attention during the visits.

This past summer, the Provincial Council offered workshops in New Orleans and Dallas for members of our Local Councils. Most communities and study groups sent at least one person to a workshop. The workshops provided a great opportunity for all to meet other members of our Province and for much sharing back and forth on issues and concerns that all Local Councils encounter. The consensus coming out of the workshops were that they provided some valuable formation for council members and should be held each triennium shortly after elections, especially to help new council members learn about how to fulfill the duties to which they've been called by their community.

Formation Guidelines Approved

The provincial formation guidelines were submitted to the General Definitory at their September meeting for approval to be added to our Provincial Statutes. We received notice on Weds, 28 Sept that they had been approved and we've now added those to our Provincial Statutes.

In an effort to be sure that all the OCDS in our province have a copy of all current legislations, we are working on printing a book, which will contain the Rule of St. Albert, the Constitutions, the Provincial Statutes, and the OCDS Ritual. We expect the cost for the book to come to under $10 and hope to have the books ready sometime in November.

In the meantime, copies can be downloaded from our provincial OCDS website at:

http://www.geocities.com/korvesem/Province/oklahoma_province.htm

This is a temporary URL until the friars get their website set up and then we'll be
transferring the pages over to that domain.