Spiritan Rule of Life

The Spiritan Charism

The charism of a Religious Congregation refers to its founding vision.

• Its distinctive spirit with which it feels called by God to live the Gospel message;
• The way members perceive and relate to the world;
• The ethos that marks its internal life and the works that it undertakes.

Spiritan founder, Claude Poullart des Places, felt called by God to found a community dedicated to educating poor seminarians. Our charism allows us to be true to this original inspiration and intuitions of the founder, within the changing circumstances of the contemporary world.

Today we realize that the charism of a Religious Congregation is also shared by lay people, single and married, who feel drawn by the same vision.

Rule of Life

The Congregation of the Holy Spirit expresses its charism in its current Rule of Life: The evangelization of the “poor” (cf. Lk 4:18) is our purpose.

In faithfulness to the intuitions of our Founders, to their experiences and to the living tradition of our Congregation, we give preference to an apostolate that takes us to:

• those who have not yet heard the Gospel message or those who have scarcely heard it;
• those oppressed and most disadvantaged, as a group or as individuals;
• places where the Church has difficulty in finding workers.