The stimulating article of Fr Oswin Magrath's on Contemplative Secular Institutes has raised issues which must have been in many minds since the publication of the Constitution Provida Mater Ecclesia. After the priest and religious has spoken, a lay-person may perhaps be allowed to present the same idea from a different angle.

It was surely not without a special significance that the Constitution was issued on the Feast of the Purification of our Lady, and there can, indeed, be no better guide for ‘contemplatives in the world’ than she, who led the sublimest life of contemplation in the most humble circumstances, as what seemed to her neighbours a carpenter's wife in a small town. The Queen of contemplatives had no need to cut herself off from her fellow creatures in order to enjoy an unbroken communion with her Creator.