To this end, in
addition to the vow of chastity also taken by the secular priest, the
members of religious orders also take two other distinct and precise
vows. By the vow of poverty he (or she) renounces all property
whatever, at least that which is fully and completely his own,[3] the
arbitrary use of possessions, the enjoyment of what belongs to him
personally, which vow leads him to live like a poor man, to endure
privations, to labor, and beyond this, even to fasting, to
mortifications, to counteracting and deadening in himself all those
instincts by which man rebels against bodily suffering and aims at
physical well being. By the vow of obedience he (or she) gives
himself up entirely to a double authority: one, in writing, which is
discipline, and the other a living being, consisting of the superior
whose business it is to interpret, apply and enforce the rule. Except
in unheard-of cases, where the superior's injunctions might be
expressly and directly opposed to the letter of this rule,[4] he
interdicts himself from examining, even in his own breast, the
motives, propriety and occasion of the act prescribed to him; he has
alienated in advance future determinations by entirely abandoning
self-government; hence-forth, his internal motor is outside of himself
and in another person.
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