The government’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has finally approved the application of the Association of Major Religious Superiors in the Philippines (AMRSP) to change its name.
The new Certificate of SEC Registration with the new name, the Conference of Major Superiors in the Philippines (CMSP), has been released on Friday, February 18, 2022.
The association decided to rename itself during its biennial online convention in April 2021, describing the decision as “the fruit of a long synodal process among the members.”
“The decision was born from the desire to use the more inclusive term ‘consecrated persons,’ as defined in Saint John Paul II’s Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Vita Consecrata in 1996, in place of the limiting term ‘religious,’” the association said in a statement.
It said that the renaming of the association is also “in line with the norms under Canon 708 and 709 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law.”
The change is also in line with similar acts of renewal adopted by the Holy See when it renamed the dicasterial office from “Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes” to “Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life” in 1988; and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines when it renamed the “Episcopal Commission on Mutual Relations between Bishops and Religious” into the “Episcopal Commission on Mutual Relations between Bishops and Consecrated Persons in 2020.
Besides the change in nomenclature, the renewal process will also entail the merger of the two constituting associations of AMRSP, i.e., the Association of Major Religious Superiors of Men in the Philippines or AMRSMP and the Association of Major Religious Superiors of Women in the Philippines or AMRSWP, both of which were established in 1955 and canonically erected in 1956.
The process of merger was supported by Cardinal Joāo Braz de Aviz in his address to the AMRSP Joint Convention in April 2020.
The CMSP membership is presently composed of 362 religious institutes, societies of apostolic life, secular institutes out of 453 religious and secular institutes in the Philippines, representing 80 percent of the total institutes present in the country.