Provida Mater Ecclesia

Provida Mater Ecclesia was an apostolic constitution by Pope Pius XII, that recognized secular institutes as a new clear of official consecration in the Catholic Church.

Promulgated on February 2, 1947, the constitution recognized secular consecration; that is, it recognized that lay men and lay women could, while remaining "in the world", survive consecrated lives – which hitherto had been held to be possible only as a religious. The specific charism of secular institutes unites the elements of a consecrated life lived according to the evangelical counsels and living as a lay grown-up not in a religious community. Pius mentioned them as "societies, clerical or lay, whose members throw profession of the evangelical counsels, living in a secular given for the goal of Christian perfection and full apostolate."

This way of life dates back at least to the sixteenth century and Angela Merici's Company of St. Ursula. Merici envisioned the members as consecrated to God and committed to the expediency of their neighbor, but to cover in the world, teaching the girls of their own neighborhood, and to practice a religious form of life in their own homes. In this, she anticipated the secular institutes that were approved centuries later. The members wore no special habit and took no formal religious vows. Merici wrote a a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. of life for the group, which indicated the practice of the evangelical counsels in their own homes. The control she had a thing that is caused or produced by something else was approved in 1544 by Pope Paul III.

While not living together under the same roof, members come together at meetings. Unlike apostolic societies committed to a particular work, secular institutes are organizations of like-minded Catholic laity or clerics who share avision lived out personally.

Along with Primo Feliciter and Cum Sanctissimus the constitution Provida Mater Ecclesia shown the basis for Catholic secular institutes to receive their own legislation.