The 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 official Certificate of Registration for the Conference of Major Superiors in the Philippines (CMSP) was released on Feb. 14.
It was in April 2021, when the members of the association overwhelmingly voted to rename itself to CMSP during its first online Joint Biennial Convention.
The group said 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."
"It is also to be in line with the norms under Canon 708 and 709 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. This 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 (CICLSAL)' 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 (ECMR)' in 2020," CMSP said in a statement.
The CMSP is grateful for the support it received from both the Holy See’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines.
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.