How About a Trappist Revival?

"He gave to his God not just the fruit,

 but the root, trunk and branches of his life. 

He gave all and won all— the only All—

 the eternal All— God."

Raymond OSCO, Fr. M. (2015-09-07). From Cowboy to Contemplative: The Amazing Story of the Trappist Monk, Brother Mary Joachim, O.C.S.O. “The Man Who got Even With God” (Kindle Locations 120-123). Institute on Religious Life (here). Kindle Edition.

At 25 pages, this is little more than an epitaph for the first American citizen to become a Trappist brother and persevere in the vowed life until his death. It is a masterful celebration of this man's life, offering countless insights into Trappist spirituality and what we class as heroic virtue. I hope Amazon won't delay too long in making the whole book available in a Kindle Edition.

A frequent topic in my years in Ukraine was the urgent need for a revival of Byzantine monasticism and its full insertion into the life of the Church as it is today. Among the monks with whom I spoke, there reigned a certain anxiousness concerning their possibilities to find their place anew in society as Christian and living for Christ. The general Western tendency has been to despair of the possibilities for monks and especially for contemplatives to contribute to the life of the Church. There is a fundamental insertion into the lives of others which must be: it is so that we understand the care which St. Teresa of Avila took in choosing the places for her new foundations. Even so, the genius of the contemplative life is in its hiddenness and self-abnegation:

"Jesus had died because of sin, so, 

because of sin, 

Joachim would live what the world called death."

(Kindle Locations 242-243). 

Advent is meant to be a time for all of us to discover our vocation to be watchmen, keeping a lookout in expectation of the coming of the Lord. Pray with me this season for a monastic revival in the Church, especially for the Trappists. The self-abnegation of some out of love for the Person of Jesus Christ can certainly help us all to live more fully our specific vocations to priesthood, apostolate, marriage and family life.

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

My Struggle is not in Vain

Bishop Athanasius Schneider is a great teacher and he has taught again well recently in Rome (here). 

I know for a fact that many Catholic people today have a difficulty with Bishop Schneider. Some lay people, some bishops and priests are frightened by such clarity of teaching in part because it is confrontational and sadly, for whatever reason, they have been conditioned falsely to seek a semblance of peace which has nothing to do with the truth which comes to us from God alone in Jesus Christ. 

In this context, I would like to recommend for your consideration another approved author, a layman, Dietrich von Hildebrand and especially his book: Transformation In Christ, On the Christian Attitude and of that book, especially Chapter 13, Blessed Are the Peacemakers, (Kindle Location 4970). Ignatius Press. There we read:

"God alone, not a peaceable behavior as such, is the absolute good. Our fight for the cause of God is necessarily also a fight for true peace, seeing that the latter coincides with the victory of the kingdom of God. Therefore, the spirit of peace which must animate a true Christian will never restrain us from fighting for the kingdom of God. It will determine a basic difference in quality between that fight and any merely natural conflict." (Kindle Locations 5173-5176).

Many, and not necessarily all convinced Christians, diagnose the malaise affecting much of Western society, especially our youth, as rooted in the aimlessness which springs from a refusal to embrace real values and goals, enlightened by the truth. We, as adults, owe our young people an example approaching that of Dietrich von Hildebrand; we owe them a life's witness of clear thought and consequent action in defense of truth and God-given values. Beyond ethics or aesthetics, we owe them a witness of life lived in union with the Almighty.

On this last Saturday of the Church Year, the Office of Readings quotes St. Augustine talking about the Christian life as song pointed toward a more perfect hymn in our heavenly homeland:

"O! what a happy alleluia there, how carefree, how safe from all opposition, where nobody will be an enemy, where no-one will ever cease to be a friend! God’s praises sung there, sung here – here, by the anxious; there, by the carefree – here, by those who will die; there, by those who will live for ever – here, in hope; there, in reality – here, on our journey; there, in our homeland.

  So now, my brethren, let us sing, not to delight our leisure, but to ease our toil. In the way that travellers are in the habit of singing, sing, but keep on walking. What does it mean, “keep on walking”? Go onward always – but go onward in goodness, for there are, according to the Apostle, some people who go ever onward from bad to worse. If you are going onward, you are walking; but always go onward in goodness, onward in the right faith, onward in good habits and behaviour. Sing, and walk onwards."

Best wishes for an Advent truly lived and sung in company with the One Who comes, with Immanuel!

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Lost without Religion, without a Grounding in the true Faith

The Spiritual History of English

Thornton-Norris, Andrew

Kindle Edition.  (2009-12-01).

"The question is how any standards or authority external to the individual can be upheld when a philosophy and a practice prevails that makes the sole source of those standards or authority the individual conscience. This is also the problem of the role of individual conscience and external authority in religion, the problem of justification by grace or works, the question of transubstantiation and the nature of the sacraments. It is a problem of theology but also the problem of the institutional survival, and therefore the survival at all, of religion. This is the problem that has faced religion and hence culture since its institutional triumph at the Reformation, since the beginning of the emergence of modernity. In religion it determines the nature of ecclesiastical organization and social and moral teaching. In culture it is the similar question of the authority of the tradition, or the historic community, over the individual personality, where respect for tradition includes respect for accumulated wisdom. This book traces this relationship through the earlier period, when a literature was sustained by a collective faith that was orthodox or continuous with the historic faith. That was, in other words, external to the individual." (pp. 32-33). 

The author is an English Catholic poet, but for the life of me, having lived in Trinidad for six and a half years, I am puzzled by the authority he attributes to V.S. Naipaul.  Be that as it may, Thornton-Norris does bring home a very important point for the survival of culture about the death-dealing nature of protestant liberalism.

I won't recommend the book, but in the light of the continued and renewed dangers for western civilization which manifest themselves with greater clarity and force each day, I will raise a cry for the urgency of a rediscovery of Catholicism as the basis of culture, for a renewed and vibrant practice of the faith freely embraced by a world too long deprived of real and lasting joy. 

Another Possibility for Enrichment of the OF?

The nomination of a bishop for the Anglican Ordinariate in the US and Canada served as a "poke" to get me to look at the description of their new missal (Divine Worship), which got news coverage in these days:

As a liturgical text, it expresses a Eucharistic celebration that is “at once distinctively and traditionally Anglican in character, linguistic register, and structure, while also being clearly and recognizably an expression of the Roman Rite.” It has the stated purpose of situating itself “firmly within the shape and context of the Roman Rite so that it might be approached in a manner which respects its own integrity and authority.” As such, the text uses what is called “Prayer Book English,” making allowances for “a certain adaptability to local custom.”

Technically, the liturgical provision for the Ordinariate does not constitute its own proper rite. Any validly ordained Roman Catholic priest can concelebrate at a Mass according to Divine Worship, but such liturgies can be celebrated publicly only at parishes or communities of the Ordinariate. Catholics can licitly fulfill the Sunday obligation to attend Mass by hearing a liturgy celebrated according to the new missal.

Divine Worship ...offers two Eucharistic prayers, the normative one being the Roman Canon. An alternative prayer is included for use during the week...

Unlike Roman Catholic missals, Divine Worship does not have a liturgical season called Ordinary Time. Rather, “Time After Epiphany” (“Epiphanytide”) or “Pre-Lent” and “Trinitytide” fill out the year. Both Ember Days and Rogation Days are included. Christmas and Easter are celebrated on the same day universally throughout the Catholic Church. And, the cult of the saints is observed according to the General Roman Calendar. Some provisions have been made for the calendars of local or particular churches.

I pose the question about whether it be possible to see "Divine Worship", despite its being essentially Anglican, as a source of enrichment for the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite. I do so rather spontaneously, because DW notably does two good things: in restoring the normativity of the Roman Canon for Catholic Sunday worship; in going with the older and more suggestive names for times of year in the liturgical calendar: Time after Epiphany, Pre-Lent, Trinitytide. Ember and Rogation Days make a comeback as well in DW.

Needless to say, "Divine Worship" does not represent even a potential reset for the Roman Rite as such, capable of driving the recovery of that continuity with our Catholic tradition which would be a sine qua non for genuine organic development in the Roman Rite, but for so many who offhandedly reject restoration as the path to liturgical renewal, my hope would be that in the two points I have singled out DW might give certain hardened hearts pause to reflect on their refusal to look again at the EF as the ineluctable reset point.

We pray unceasingly for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit for the Supreme Legislator, that he might find ways to gently guide the flock home through adherence to worship ad Orientem and sound teaching on the requirements for worthy reception of Holy Communion. Generous exposure of our future priests to the EF being part of what might be understood as a necessary and serious commitment to the mutual enrichment of the two forms of the one Rite.

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

The Church's Freedom to Witness to Christ

Today's Gospel for Christ the King Sunday from John 18:33-37:

"‘Are you the king of the Jews?’ Pilate asked. Jesus replied, ‘Do you ask this of your own accord, or have others spoken to you about me?’ Pilate answered, ‘Am I a Jew? It is your own people and the chief priests who have handed you over to me: what have you done?’ Jesus replied, ‘Mine is not a kingdom of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, my men would have fought to prevent my being surrendered to the Jews. But my kingdom is not of this kind.’ ‘So you are a king then?’ said Pilate. ‘It is you who say it’ answered Jesus. ‘Yes, I am a king. I was born for this, I came into the world for this: to bear witness to the truth; and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice.’"

Beyond the Church's ongoing struggle against Principalities and Powers, against the gates of Hell, the Roman Catholic Church has generally found itself at odds with the powers that be in this world: with emperors who persecuted, as well as with those who feigned devotion while seeking to impose their own will upon the Church especially through the selection of bishops. In the last analysis, the condemnation of the tyranny of relativism even today is launched against the successors in law to types like Henry VIII, Hitler or Stalin, against a Godless constitutional order which imposes through law, fiat or higher court decision a common denominator with no sense for the truth which comes to us from God in Jesus Christ alone.

An old friend just sent me his new book, which is couched very much in these terms but which appeals to one of my great heroes, the church historian Hubert Jedin (1900-1980), to extend this condemnation beyond kings, dukes, diets and parliaments to the mass media, which seem already for a long time, but especially in our day, to lead the whole constitutional order around by the nose. In his book, my friend recounts a valiant struggle, apparently lost, to witness faithfully to the truth of the Gospel as applied to marriage and family in the Church. With all the serenity he can muster, he sums up the bishop's lot at the hands of the media and in the face of terrible odds with the Latin expression 'Victor Quia Victima'. 

My English composition teacher back in college spent a lot of time teaching us if not how to read news magazines critically with an eye for the facts then at least to be skeptical in terms of what TIME and NEWSWEEK were feeding us back then about the Vietnam War and what either one or both weeklies might have had as an agenda which precluded simply chronicling what had happened in a given battle in which people died. Those were simpler times, no doubt, when even a lay teacher at a Catholic College could have recourse to talking about the truth without undue anxiety about being challenged by his students or denounced to the college administration for being rigid or sectarian.

Whenever I get onto such topics or think about the Kingship of Christ, Psalm 2 always comes to mind. I think of a world raging against God's Anointed. I draw confidence from the image of the victorious Lamb, once slain and now seated upon His Throne in glory. 

My own worry is about bishops today, about the resort to expediency which seems to move many entrusted with the shepherding task to step back, to stumble and to be lost or rather to be condemned for having abandoned the sheep entrusted to their care to the wolf, the lion and the bear. Broad-mindedness or tolerance don't fall in the usual catalog of attributes for the Son of Man. 

Jesus showed Himself triumphant lifted upon the Cross. May His bishops and priests find not so much the courage, but the love, profound and longing, to run after the King, drawn by the fragrance of His robes.

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

 

November Thoughts on Purgatory

Back in the early 70's as as seminarian in Rome there was on the book market in English something less than a coffee table edition of a picture book with a brief and easy to read text; I think the title was "Rome, the Fifth Day". It was partly meant as a guide for folks who spent more than the standard few days in the Eternal City and pointed out sights beyond the usual which were well worth seeing. One of those which, even in eight years in the Urbs, I never got to was the Purgatory Museum. It included artifacts, like fiery hand prints, from Poor Souls who besought prayers from the living such that they might complete their painful purification and pass into the glories of the Heavenly Kingdom.

I'm not going to take a stance one way or the other as to whether the Holy Souls have permission to rattle our cages or nerves in supplication for the prayers and sacrifices from us the living to hasten the completion of their purgation. I will just urge the reader to pray insistently for those who have gone before us that the expiation of the punishment due for sins committed and forgiven might quickly come to pass.

Not to be outdone by the Purgatory Museum, however, I want to relate a November experience which moved me to celebrate Mass again after some years for a younger friend who died of leukemia time back and whom I always considered an integral and zealous priest. Shortly after his death I cancelled him from Facebook but still received birthday reminders.... No big thing, given the way Facebook works! However! Finally, the other day, on the recommendation of technicians both in Ukraine and here in Switzerland, I changed phones when I signed my postpaid contract for cell service here in Bern. Against my own better judgment I succumbed to pressure also from my secretary to go with an IPhone, as this was supposed to better assure if not guarantee a break with my past and the menace of continued surveillance by whomever. As my dear Mother used to say, "Whatever!"

Despite my best efforts I lost all my phone contacts in the transition and must recopy them by hand from my computer... that is, with the exception of one which just popped up! You guessed it: that of my dear departed friend! Hence the Holy Mass for the repose of his immortal soul. May he and all the faithful departed mercifully rest in peace! 

Infancy Narratives as Real, Down-to-Earth Ecclesiology

Pope Francis' address to the German Bishops on the occasion of their ad Limina visit caused quite a stir, especially the quote: "Given these facts, one can truly speak of an erosion of the Catholic faith in Germany.”

What the Holy Father describes in Germany applies quite generally to most countries in Western Europe. What 25 years ago was 25% Mass attendance and infrequent Confession, Pope Francis generously pegs now at 10%, when in actuality few would give it 8%. What Pope Benedict XVI predicted about a much smaller Catholic presence is there and with no seeming vibrancy whatever. The sober optimism of the Pope emeritus about regrouping for mission from a smaller basis still eludes us as we continue to create and fund structures with money from the church tax or its equivalent, far from the Gospel freshness and dynamism, which could mark something worthy of the name New Evangelization. “We always inaugurate new facilities, from which, in the end, the faithful are missing,” Pope Francis said. 

Vatican Radio translates most of the German text into English, highlighting certain parts. As is his custom, in his words to the bishops the Pope is death on an institutional approach to solving these problems, recommending rather episcopal and priestly zeal to win people back to the Sacraments during the Year of Mercy, first of all through the Sacrament of Penance and a return to the worthy celebration of the Holy Eucharist. He attacks head-on the tendency to deprive priests of their dignity and their principal ministry in the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, supplanting them with lay ministries:

“The precious collaboration of the laity, especially in those places where vocations are missing, cannot become a surrogate for the ministerial priesthood, or give it the semblance of being simply optional,” he said. “If there is no priest, there is no Eucharist.”  

Sadly, much of the press commentary and even ecclesial commentary on the Holy Father's words fails to recognize his efforts to discuss such problems "thinking outside the box". People tend to point to what Pope Francis seems to criticize or exclude, in terms of institutional or structural (money-based) solutions to the lack of vibrancy in the faith, but they never seem to discover the real bottom line, if you will. There seems to be a reluctance to get beyond the rebel Gioachino da Fiore to the saint Francis of Assisi. Few are ready, especially here in Europe, to look again at a radical young woman named Elizabeth of Hungary, or if you live in Germany St. Elizabeth of Thuringia, and see that person and substance was what made her tick and what transformed the hearts of those around her.

What Pope Francis proposes to the German bishops by allusions to the zeal of a couple from Apostolic times, Priscilla and Aquila, I would like to propose in more radical fashion through reference to two small children from the Gospels: Mary, actually as we know her from the Tradition, and Jesus, as we know the baby and the boy, especially from the Synoptic Gospels. Today's Feast of the Presentation of Mary in the Temple, just like the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels concerning Baby Jesus, speak directly to what others address through a form of discourse which is readily labelled as anti-institutional. The point being that our recovery of the Church's vibrancy will require institutional reform and restoration, rooted in the personal embrace of the Divine Will which we see already in Mary the toddler and some years later in her beloved Son, the Savior of the World.

Empowering lay people for ministry has nothing to do with being Catholic and living in the Church centered on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The wholesale abandonment of the Tradition in the years following the Council was a break with living the Gospel in and through the worthy celebration of the Eucharist, which requires a life lived and the wholehearted embrace of auricular Confession, as the apex of post-baptismal penitential practice. The Holy Father rightly urges the bishops of Germany to their primary mission in defense of human life. There is a culture of nurturing and treasuring, best characterized by Joachim and Ann on behalf of their daughter Mary and by Mary and Joseph on behalf of Jesus, which has been jettisoned on behalf of self-realization schemes which smack of degradation or at best of something far short of that dignity with which we were endowed by our Creator.

Not just Germany, Switzerland or Austria, but our world needs prayers and the discovery of family time as oriented toward Sunday Mass and thereby to all that is possible at the feet of our Creator, Redeemer and Friend. Let Pope Benedict's little and vibrant Church come, such that the work of Evangelization for the sake of the life of the world truly might begin.

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI