"conversatio morum"

At the talk Thursday evening, a question arose about the meaning of "conversatio morum" -- conversion of life or morals. Dr. Brand pointed out that the term used was "conversatio" -- hence there was an element of conversation. John Paul relates the conversatio to the need to examine or reflect upon the divine call, and a continual effort to "do the truth."

Pope John Paul II said "At the heart of St Benedict's monastic experience is a Simple, typically Christian principle, which the monk adopts in all its radicalness: to unify one's life around the primacy of God. This "tenere in unum", the first, fundamental condition for entering monastic life, must be the commitment unifying the life of the individual and the community, and be expressed in the "conversatio morum" which is fidelity to a life-style lived concretely in daily obedience. The search for Gospel simplicity requires continual examination, that is, the effort "to do the truth", by constantly returning to the initial gift of the divine call which is at the root of one's own religious experience. FROM SUBIACO SHINES A BEACON OF FAITH  7 July 1999

To do the truth -- there must be a continual fashioning of life in time in light of the eternal word, and this itself is a conversatio. Maritain, himself an Oblate of Solemes, noted that the order of human affairs must be constantly won through ceaseless effort of reason and will, imagination and virtue, “rescuing from evil of the time and fashioning with the tools at hand consonant with the temporal and the eternal good of human beings.” The very order of human acts and operations requires that reason at every moment “fashion in conformity with the eternal order the contingent and perpetually renewed order of the works of time.” One must make or do the truth --“facere veritatem” as is said in the Gospel of John (3.21)  “Qui autem facit veritatem, venit ad lucem, ut manifestenter opera eius, quia in Deo sunt facta” and endorsed by St Augustine in Confessions X.1.  

Is the Benedictine way? Constantly we come to the light, "venit ad lucem," and attempt to do the truth through the grace of God.  Obviously we are formed by others and are assisted by the cooperation of others. That is a conversatio between God and man and among the faithful as well.

O'Malley, Newman and St.Benedict on a Christ centered curriculum

Many years ago Notre Dame professor Frank O'Malley sketched a plan for founding a "Christ College" within the University of Notre Dame. I have made a few posts about this idea (Oct 25/26). But in light of what Benedict taught the dark ages, I wish to return to O'Malley on Newman for some ideas for a curriculum.

O'Malley wrote that John Henry  Newman was first of all: liturgical. This lesson we learn from St. Benedict, most of all. O'Malley says that in liturgy we encounter the very rhythm of Christian existence, "stirred and centered by the life of Christ." Liturgy demands "self-subjection, the disciplining of the inner life, never the flagrant and chaotic cultivation of the ego in the arbitrary and capricious." St. Benedict now comes to mind. For if we incline our heart to the master's precepts -- we learn we must carry out the labor of obedience and return to Him from whom we departed by the sloth of disobedience. Is liturgical life not the heart of St Benedict's admonition  in the prologue to the Rule to renounce our will (overcome the sloth of disobedience) and do battle under the Lord Christ, the true King, "by taking up the strong, bright weapons of obedience"?  How hard this for denizens of academia, both professorial  and administrative. But can we turn this around? Can we organize a curriculum, assign faculty, and recruit students for a "Christ College" on the firm basis of liturgical life?

O'Malley said the liturgy "is not aestheticism." The liturgy is "reality, physical and metaphysical. Neither thought nor emotion, it is a 'process of fulfillment, a growth to maturity.' It involves not the selfish universe of the individual but all creation."

O'Malley finds his inspiration in the work of Romano Guardini, The Church and the Catholic and the Spirit of the Liturgy. Guardini wrote "Under Christ the head, the Church gathers together 'all which is in heaven, on Earth and under the Earth.'" It is in liturgy that the so-called synthesis is attained, because the synthesis IS Christ, not in our mind but in reality. Again Guardini explains that everything in linked in worship "as a whole embraced in the relation with God established by prayer; the fullness of nature, evoked and transfigured by the fullness of grace, organized by the organic law of the Triune God, and steadily growing according to the rhythm perfectly simple yet infinitely rich."

O'Malley used the above passage to explain Newman, but I think it should describe a truly Catholic college. For it means that one has a "sense of Christ-in-time, of Christ-in-the-universe, of every age flowing and of every man growing in His Great Body -- the Incarnational view."

It is preposterous to believe that a committee of faculty can simply invent and designate "synthesis courses" without the majority of the members of the faculty, and the students, being rooted in the liturgical life of the Church.

There must this depth to life and learning derived from liturgy. When a minuscule percentage of faculty and students at a given Catholic university attend daily Mass, or even the Sunday liturgy, how could a Catholic education possibly ensue?

The vision of a Christ College beholds a majority of faculty and students living life and pursuing education under the formation of liturgical practice of the Church.

The effect will be a new idea of a "curriculum." For from the center of liturgy and new mode of learning could become habitual. We must look deeper than the model of Ignatius, based upon the formation of professionals in the world; and we must burrow beneath the Thomistic ideal of mastery and synthesis of philosophy and theology; we must discover the aboriginal mystery of Christ. And this mystery "slows down" the curriculum, but it slows it down to enrich it and teach us how to savor the wisdom of God, as F Russell Hittinger explained to us.

The late John Senior, teacher of Abbot Philip Anderson, wrote: "monastic education is essentially static -- quiet and still -- a curriculum no longer running anywhere; a course but not a track. It does not move across any measurable distance but only somewhere in the trackless wastes of Egypt, or inside the hortus conclusus in some unnumbered house in the heart of a city and in the heart of someone in that house, as in the depths of a sealed well. Such an education does not submit easily to tests and measurements; it baffles registrars; one never graduates. It seems like a retreat, a vacation but not an indolence -- it is a zealous leisure; careless of footnotes and bibliographies, its sources are within. One doesn't read the hundred books or even the book reviews. A single verse suffices for an hour or a year and one forgets the chapters and numbers. . . . The student is like a bee gathering honey from several flowers. . . . And all through the long afternoons in the  quiet  . . . listening in the interior silence . . . reading and rereading . . . the liturgical year moves about the fixed point of the turning wheel." The Death of Christian Culture (1978) pp. 176-77.

The Christ College should be a residential college, at least in the main. The majority of students need to be within the daily orbit of the liturgy and the intellectual life of the college. But the student cannot of course merely dwell in the afternoon of leisurely study -- we need ora et labora. The work of the mind must be accomplished. The faculty must play the role of an abbot in this Christ College by calling forth the students from the liturgical center to understand and discuss the books based upon the mystery of Christ: scripture, Church fathers, the poetry and writing of incarnation and passion, as well as high grade theology (Augustine and Aquinas), and a rigorous philosophy (Plato and Aristotle). In this college the reading of great books will not lead to relativism or scepticism because all is entered in Christ and liturgy. It is a living tradition. Something great is being passed on.

Why Thomists Need St. Benedict

In his talk at the University of St Thomas, F. Russell Hittinger, explains that one thing that St. Benedict taught the dark ages (his and ours) is "The slowness of the good, which is experienced as incredibly rich if one becomes as a child." It is about a way of learning, indeed a way of life. Our society, and surely our educational institutions, are based upon both the speed and ambition of learning. I can think of no better example than the AP tests of the high schools -- but the attitude extends all the way up. Learn the most, quickly, and advance to a new height, or put it all to some use. We do not dwell with the topic, we do not savor it. Benedict teaches us how to savor the good. Russell said: "The life envisaged by Benedict is not like a five-year plan, or a senior thesis, or a job report.  If one is obsessed with big projects under the strict temporal limits he will go starkers in a monastery.  The longest span of time worth considering is a liturgical season:  four weeks of Advent, forty days of Lent, fifty days between Easter and Pentecost.  Again, Ps. 90:  'So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.'  From a point of view within the monastery, it doesn’t matter whether one’s allotment of time is an hour, a day, a week, a season, or many seasons."

The evening of Newman's conversion

Russell brings to his aid the writing of John Henry Newman on Benedict. Thus he says "If a Rule for Beginners is to take root, it must do so in a way fit for a child – or someone child-like.  One teaches a child through the senses and the imagination. In one of his greatest essays, 'The Mission of St. Benedict' (Published in Atlantis, Jan. 1858) John Henry Newman reckoned that Benedict taught poetically (find it online here).   By poetry Newman did not necessarily mean the craft of poetry, which is the craft of constructing metered verse.  Rather, he meant a way of learning that arises from sense, experience, and imagination.  Its special feature is wonder, or what the Latin speaking peoples called admiratio.  Admiration, is taken from the adjective mirus, wonderful.  We could call it knowledge touched by the thing being known."

In the article by Newman, Hittinger finds this idea of poetical learning: "But as to the poetical, very different is the frame of mind which is necessary for its perception. It demands, as its primary condition, that we should not put ourselves above the objects in which it resides, but at their feet; that we should feel them to be above and beyond us, that we should look up to them, and that, instead of fancying that we can comprehend them, we should take for granted that we are surrounded and comprehended by them ourselves. Hence it is that a child's mind is so full of poetry, because he knows so little; and an old man of the world so devoid of poetry, because his experience of facts is so wide."


The lesson Hittinger would have learn from St Benedict is this --

Wisdom is more like poetry than proof.  In Latin, the word sapiens denotes a person who can savor or taste.  Wisdom is knowing something that one can savor.  In Ch 19 of the Rule, Benedict prescribes that psalms are to be chanted sapienter, wisely.  Appropriately enough, in his life of St. Benedict, Gregory the Great comments that he was scienter nescius et sapienter indoctus, Learnedly ignorant and wisely uninstructed.  Benedict did not have a scientific theology of the Psalms, but rather a Rule for savoring them."

Newman refers to a “Poetry of life, the poetry of ceremonies, -- of the cowl, the cloister, and the choir…”  It’s all rather Harry-Potterish.  First, the black hood, the cowl, or what was called the cucullus – a poncho worn by children in ancient Rome.  Then, the cloister – the internal space of the monastery, like a child’s house or bedroom.  Finally, the choir which is the place of beauty.  Newman notes that in this kind of world, a person can take “each new day as a whole in itself … and doing works which cannot be cut short, for they are complete in every portion of them.”  Imagine, now, chanting all 150 psalms once a week.  The variety of images, moods and emotions.  Each psalm is chanted, and is complete itself; the one psalm repeatedly is complimented by next psalm, and by the next office, and the next day without any effort to tie disparate parts together into a scientific system of theology.  Lectio divina – a snippet of scripture, that suffices unto itself. 

I think that this lesson that Russell proposes that we learn from St. Benedict has a particular relevance to the Thomists who wish to restore learning along the lines of St. Thomas -- to reintegrate faith and reason, and to build up the science of theology using the solid reasoning of philosophy. Some Thomists are focused upon solid reasoning, the scientia, of philosophy and may not even get to the theological synthesis. But we are missing the most important thing, the true center and heart of the enterprise, and to this St Benedict can lead us. The sapiential dimension, via the poetic mode, described by Russell in the passages above.

I pointed out to my brother that Newman also discusses Benedict in his sermon on the "Mission of St Philip Neri" (part 2) [found here].

Newman champions St Philip Neri because he comprehended the charisms of Benedict, Thomas (Dominic) and Ignatius. "He learned from Benedict what to be, and from Dominic what to do, . . . from Ignatius he learned how he was to do it."

Newman admires the achievement of Thomas and Dominic: "It was the magnificent aim of the children of St. Dominic to form the whole matter of human knowledge into one harmonious system, to secure the alliance between religion and philosophy, and to train men to the use of the gifts of nature in the sunlight of divine grace and revealed truth."

But the magnificent aim of the science of theology and philosophy, its great scope and synthesis, must be rooted in something deeper. This he learned from Benedict -- thus at Monte Casino Philip immersed himself in the Benedictine prayer, and found himself, Newman explains --

no longer amid the mediæval grandeur, but among the Saints and associations of primitive ages; it is no longer the busy, gaudy town, but the calm and pure country; no longer cloisters and paintings, but rocks and sea, leading to meditation; .  .  .  .  no longer the holy doctrines and devotions of later piety, but the aboriginal mystery, contained in Scripture, Creed, and Baptism, and battled for in the first centuries, the dogma of the most Holy Trinity. Thus, everything about Philip threw him back into the times of simplicity, of poverty, of persecution, of martyrdom; the times of patience, of obscure and cheerful toil, of humble, unrequited service; ere Christianity had gained a literature, or theology had become a science, or any but saints had sat in Peter's chair; while the book of nature and the book of grace were the chief instruments of knowledge and of love. Such was the school of St. Benedict . (Emphases added)

Faculty and students alike need to find and dwell in that "aboriginal mystery" of God. Theology must be rooted in an awareness of the real presence, and philosophy rooted in the intuition of being. How can one teach theology as a science without an acknowledgment of the mystery of God? Why even bother with the Catechism if there is no elan for the things of God? Like St. Philip Neri, Christian educators must remember what to be, not just what to do. Where is the "rule," the habit, for savoring the truth? Where is the all important poetry inspired by creation and fall, the heart and imagination formed by the incarnation and passion? Who dwells daily in the "aboriginal mystery" through prayer and sacrament? Catholic identity depends on much more than the checked box of religious affiliation and the disjointed distribution requirements that pass for a curriculum.

The late John Senior, teacher of Abbot Philip Anderson, wrote: "monastic education is essentially static -- quiet and still -- a curriculum no longer running anywhere; a course but not a track. It does not move across any measurable distance but only somewhere in the trackless wastes of Egypt, or inside the hortus conclusus in some unnumbered house in the heart of a city and in the heart of someone in that house, as in the depths of a sealed well. Such an education does not submit easily to tests and measurements; it baffles registrars; one never graduates. It seems like a retreat, a vacation but not an indolence -- it is a zealous leisure; careless of footnotes and bibliographies, its sources are within. One doesn't read the hundred books or even the book reviews. A single verse suffices for an hour or a year and one forgets the chapters and numbers. . . . The student is like a bee gathering honey from several flowers. . . . And all through the long afternoons in the  quiet  . . . listening in the interior silence . . . reading and rereading . . . the liturgical year moves about the fixed point of the turning wheel." The Death of Christian Culture (1978) pp. 176-77.

F. R. Hittinger on St. Benedict and what suffices for a "day"

"As regards the material of life, nothing is more important than light and dark: namely, an answer to the question what suffices for a day?  Infants and very young children are ignorant of what constitutes a day.  I am told that even college students have problems in this regard – that a collegiate “day” is a 24/7 flow of flickering images resembling a casino in Nevada.

Like the practical wisdom displayed in Genesis, Benedict begins with a Day.  A day equally measured: 8 hours of prayer, 8 hours of labor, 8 hours of rest.  Adjusted for the seasons. 

Thinking now about integration, the Rule prescribes a unity of things which the ancient world had usually kept apart:  On the one hand, the free or liberal arts and sciences, cultivated and practiced by the nobility.  This was called a universitas personarum, things tending toward one in and for the dignity of human persons.  On the other hand stood the work of artisans and manual laborers.  This was called a universitas rerum, a unity for the sake of the things being organized:  the bricks, the streets, the monies.  Benedict taught the proper order of these things.  Tools for the sake of monks, monks for the sake of God – hierarchy of action without distinction by class.

In the ancient world, personal dignity was measured by its remotion or distance from tools and labor.  Indeed, the rural warrior class in these centuries of the middle ages did not work the land.  They killed with their hands but they did not work with them.  Benedict’s motto was Ora et Labora, prayer and work.  The monks therefore are contemplatives and laborers:  Jedi’s who do the work of artisans and serfs: a very powerful and useful combination. Not surprisingly, it would yield great fortunes for some monasteries.  Look especially at chapter 57 of Benedict’s Rule on how to price monastic products sent to market (in a spirit of charity and poverty, the monks ought to sell them under the market rate).

In this vein, too, it is important to read chapter 48 which is on labor and reading.  The three most sensible things in Benedict’s school are the sound of the chant, the touch of hand to implement, and sight of the written page. 

Reading is essential.  Consider the acts associated with reading:

·      Speaking

·      Meditating, cogitating

·      Imagining

·      Remembering, understanding, desiring

·      For the monk, each word is like a hook, catching hold of other words; the monk was like a living concordance.

By summoning so many different mental actions and physical postures, reading can be profoundly integrative.  It forms a clearing in the forest of the sensations of the soul, and creates a place for study and prayer. "

From "What St Benedict taught the Dark Ages -- His and Ours"

F. R. Hittinger on the School of Benedict

The following remarks are taken from the paper that Professor Hittinger will deliver at Jones Hall, the University of St. Thomas, on Thursday at 7:30 pm. "What St. Benedict taught the Dark Ages -- His and Ours."

fulfill with the help of Christ this little Rule for beginners

Benedict was born in 480, fifty years after Augustine’s death.  He, too, came from a provincial Roman town, Nursia (today, Norcia) in the mountains of Umbria; going back some 1200 years, this was the borderland of the Etruscans and the Samnite tribes.  He too was the son of a Roman civil official.  As an adolescent, Benedict was sent, along with his nanny, to Rome to learn very same trivium studied by Augustine.  First, he needed to become a grammaticus.  What was grammar?  The knowledge of words.  According to the ancient wisdom: “Everything which does not deserve to pass into oblivion and has been entrusted to writing, belongs necessarily to the province of grammar.”  Like Augustine, Benedict absorbed himself in grammar but worried that rhetoric was morally corruptive.  Augustine did not pray for an emancipation from rhetoric until his was in his mid 30s (indeed, in Bk 9 of the Conf. he describes his baptism as a liberation from rhetoric); for his part, Benedict discerned this problem at the age of 16 or 17.  So far as we know, he only studied the first segment of the trivium. 

Abandoning his formal education, Benedict tried to live the monastic life as a hermit in caves in the vicinity of Subiaco, not far from Rome.  Like the desert father, St. Antony, Benedict learned experimentally.  He became so proficient in knowledge of the divine word that other monks asked him to be their master.  In the Rule, Benedict says that he intends to found a school – in Latin, a schola – for the service of God. 

Yet his first attempts to educate and govern other monks were troubled, to say the least.  On at least two occasions, his monastic sons tried to murder him … indeed, in the old fashioned Italian way, which was by poisoning.   But Benedict was discreet and prudent.  He learned how to govern monks – Even allowing a bit of wine every day to combat “sadness” and to relieve the temptation to “murmurring.” (Cap. 40)

Learning by trial and error he went on to found thirteen monasteries.   Moving to Cassinum, some 70 miles southwest of Rome, Benedict ascended the 1800 foot high Monte Cassino in 529, and there, at the summit, over top of a temple of Apollo, he laid the altar for his greatest monastery.  A year later, he began to write his Rule.  Written in vulgar or ordinary Latin, and amounting to less than 9000 words, it is quite different than Augustine’s work.  It has neither eloquence nor speculative power.  Untold thousands of souls have been converted by reading Augustine, but it is hard to imagine anyone being converted merely by reading Benedict’s Rule.  His genius was not in rhetoric or logic.

If Augustine was the greatest stylist and speculative thinker of the Roman world, Benedict exemplified, in the vespers of that civilization, the genius unique to Rome.  Romans always knew that their language and speculative tradition was inferior to the Greeks; that their religion was inferior to the Eastern religions, especially the Egyptians; that their aesthetics were inferior to the Greeks and the Carthaginians.  Rome’s destiny was different.  As Virgil declared in the Aeneid: 

Roman, remember by your strength to rule Earth's peoples -- for your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law, To spare the conquered [and] battle down the proud.

Albeit, in ways unimagined and unanticipated, Benedict’s Rule proved to be the greatest pacification program in western history. 

The shadows had lengthened since the time of Augustine.  Benedict was born 70 years after the Alaric and his Vandals sacked Rome, less than 30 years after Attila’s Huns had swept through Italy, and only two years after the demise of the last Emperor in the West, Romulus Augustulus.  In this sense – and only in this sense – can Benedict be regarded as a Minervian owl.  As Roman civilization collapsed around him, he established an institution that had the stamp of Roman genius. 

Otherwise, there is no evidence that Benedict thought of himself or his monastic Rule as either the end or the beginning of any epoch.  As a man of the ancient world, he had no intention to transmit any wisdom other than the ancient one.  After all, Christianity and monasticism, first arose and were practiced as an ancient wisdom.  Benedict perhaps first learned of monasticism from Syrian hermits who lived in caves around Norcia.  These and other monks simply believed that they were imitating Christ and his apostles.  They had read the scriptures, above all Luke 4:

Led by the Spirit into the wilderness for 40 days, Christ prayed, fasted, and was tempted by the Devil. 

The first Adam sinned and was expelled from the garden of delights – thrown into a wilderness – like the Prodigal Son in the plantation of sorrows, eating food not fit for the swine, and not knowing the way back to the house of the Father. As Augustine explained:  “For on whatever place one has fallen, on that place he must find support that he may rise again.” (De Vera Rel. XXIV.45).  The new Adam begins where the old Adam fell.  Christ went into the desert to confront Adam’s nemesis; and where the first Adam failed the New Adam succeeds in resisting the temptations and pomps of the Devil, thus showing the way back to the Father. 

Many things and institutions have their origin in the medieval centuries:  parliament, romance vernaculars, the heavy plow, tidal mills, cannons, the spinning wheel, universities, glass mirrors, and percussion drilling, invented by Cistercians.  But monasticism is not an invention of the middle ages.  It comes instead from a more ancient light discovered in the desert. 

In the last Chapter of the Rule, Cap-73, entitled:  “The Whole of Just Observance Is Not Contained In This Rule,” Benedict insists that, whatever is taught in this Rule, is only a part of what is transmitted from the Holy Fathers.  And by the Fathers, you will see that he meant (1) the Apostles, (2) the authors of Holy Writ, (3) the example of the Desert Fathers, (4) and those who have written Institutes for the governance of monks.  He concludes: 

Whoever you are [quisquis] hastening toward your heavenly homeland; fulfill with the help of Christ this little Rule for beginners …

This school for beginners includes rules for reading and writing, for chanting, for using and cleaning farm implements, for greeting strangers, for determining prices for goods sent to market, the organization of crafts, and many other simple, practical details.  The school is free – no tuition by way of social class or money.  We learn in Ch 58 that the only thing necessary is a willing heart (quaerere deum) and adherence to the Rule under the Abbot.  Benedict’s Rule governs a monastery in which the rich and the poor alike begin as beginners.  And these beginners begin where the light first appeared – in the desert, where Christ showed the sons of Adam the way back to the Father.  There is no other curriculum in this school.

Dom Delatte on St. Benedict

"that you may return to Him by the labor of obedience"

In anticipation of the visits of F. R. Hittinger, my brother, speaking on St Benedict and the dark ages and Abbot Philip Anderson, meditating on the Beatitudes, I secured a copy of the great Dom Paul Delatte's Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne Limited, 1921). It is an unassuming book, a bit worn and scuffed, but still in good shape. I opened it up and a slip of paper fell out containing a little note scrawled by Brother Vitus, OSB, dated 1944, on the importance of spiritual reading. A message from the past delivered to my lap: "Nemo dat quod non 'hat'" Brother Vitus wrote to himself ("We cannot give what we do not have"); he wrote further -- if we stop spiritual reading  we will become but "dry professors." I hear you, O quiet monk, down the corridor of time.

So I open the book, and get to page 3 on the prologue to the Rule and find this commentary by Dom Delatte -- "For our business is not to live many years, and to become learned, or to make a name in the world, but to walk to God, to get near to Him, to unite ourselves to Him." Could plainer, truer words be written?

Dom Delatte continues: "This manner of conceiving the spiritual life as a fearless walking to God is a favorite one with St. Benedict . . .Since the Fall, man has only one way in which to separate himself from God, and that is the way of the old Adam, disobedience; and he has, too, but one way to return and that is by obedience, with the new Adam. (Rom 5:19) We pride ourselves on our disobedience, as giving proof of energy and vigorous personality; but St. Benedict declares that it is merely cowardice and sloth; and if he speaks of the contrary attitude of mind as 'labor' he will presently tell us of its solid fruitfulness and incomparable dignity: "To you therefore, my words are now addressed, whoever you are, that renouncing your own will, you do take up that strong and bright weapons of obedience, in order to fight for the Lord Christ, our true King."

So St. Benedict founds a school, the monastery. In my next post, I shall allow my brother to explain what manner of curriculum we may find in the school of St. Benedict.

Francis Crane on Maritain and the Jews

Francis Crane has written a very good book on Maritain and the problem of Judaism. Maritain seems to have anticipated much of the development of Vatican II and Pope John Paul II. The book is entitled: Passion of Israel: Jacques Maritain, Catholic Conscience and the Holocaust (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2010. Pp. 203. $25.00 paperback.)

Passion of Israel sheds a new light on the life and work of French Catholic Philosopher Jacques Maritain (1881-1973) and it reveals the unfolding of Catholic thinking about Judaism. Vatican II’s Declaration Nostra Aetate expresses the culmination of a long process: "The Church of Christ, in fact, recognizes that according to the divine mystery of salvation the origins of the Church's faith and election are already found in the Patriarchs, Moses, and the Prophets. . . . since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is so great, this Sacred Council recommends and promotes a mutual understanding and respect, which can be obtained above all through biblical study and fraternal discussion" Pope John Paul II referred to the Jews as “an elder brother."

Who would be better to bring the Church along this road than Maritain? Converted to the faith along with his spouse, Raissa Oumansov, a Jewish family from Rustov Russia, Maritain was deeply formed by Leon Bloy, a Catholic writer who wrote of the Jewish mission in “otherworldly, even salvific, terms.” Maritain never abandoned this supernatural perspective for consideration of the Jewish problem as he went from the fascist and anti-Semitic group L’Action Francois to becoming the champion of philosemitism throughout the Church and the world at large. Crane considers a set of issues surrounding Maritain: (i) how did he come to establish a reputation as a leader in the fight against anti-Semitism? (ii) how did he frame the “Jewish question” and what were his reference points? and (iii) how did Maritain influence the changes in the Church’s thinking?

Maritain came to see Jewish persecution not the result of their alleged subversion of the nation, but rather as an outcropping of the modern disorder to build a secular utopia through scientific means and rationalistic thinking. The Jewish people bore the brunt of pseudo scientific racism and the efforts to establish uniformity. The mystery of Jewish life, set apart from the nations, rendered them in some way unable to be assimilated into modern society. Anti-Semitism was an “ evil fire that consumes peoples” and is readily used by Machiavellian style politics of violence. Maritain also understood the Jewish mission to be a testimony to the very passion of Christ. The “Final solution” he called nothing less than a “mass crucifixion.” The horror of the event led him to develop more deeply his defense of human rights and the affirmation of pluralism in modern society. He also struggled with the questions of Theodicy and the perplexing problem of God’s permission of great evil. And finally, the attempted to come to theological understanding of the relation of the Church to the Jewish people, resolving that the Christ should bring together; he hesitated to use the word “conversion” but he rather spoke of the coming to fulfillment or “plenitudo” of divine life. In all cases, he campaigned against Christian misunderstanding and distortion of Jewish people through such epitaphs as Christ killer.


I found the following interview with Dr. Crane (see this link)

How did the struggle with his own attitudes toward Jews and Judaism manifest itself in his views of the Holocaust?

At an earlier point in his career, in the 1920s, Maritain had shared some common philosophical and political beliefs with extreme right-wing nationalists in France. For the rest of his life he was haunted by how closely he had associated with proto-fascist and anti-Semitic figures whose ideas found fuller expression in the 1930s and 1940s in Nazi Germany and in France’s own Vichy regime. He increasingly saw pluralism and democracy as more authentic expressions of the Gospel, and took inspiration from contemporary Catholic teachings that condemned race hatred and the exaltation of the state. Maritain’s own marriage to a woman of Russian-Jewish origin also helped him reject the growing anti-Semitism that eventually culminated in the Holocaust. But within his Catholic conscience, he still struggled with the implications of Christian teachings about Jews as people whose ancestors had rejected Jesus as their messiah and had consequently distanced themselves from God’s love and mercy. The ambivalent image of Jews as both chosen and rejected, blessed and cursed, if you will, remained in his mind, and the minds of millions of Christians, as centuries of anti-Jewish prejudice gave way to an explosion of anti-Semitic mass murder.

Could he articulate, find in his heart, a place for Jews in the Christian theology of salvation that was consistent with the idea of a loving God in the shadow of the Holocaust?

He struggled to find a redemptive meaning in an otherwise senseless horror. His sense of Christ drawing the Jewish people ever closer during this time shows how deeply Maritain empathized with Jewish suffering to the extent of reconciling, or trying to reconcile, the Holocaust with what theologians would call the “economy of salvation.”

Yet this very idea of the Holocaust as part of God’s saving plan raises uncomfortable questions not only about God’s justice but also about Jewish “blindness” and “obstinacy” as traditionally understood by Christians since the time of St. Paul. For Maritain, the Nazi genocide raised more theological questions than it answered, but nonetheless it offered the unmistakable imperative that Christians finally reject long-held stereotypes about Jews as “Christ-killers” or about Judaism as a supposedly dead religion mired in petty legalism. He wanted Jews and Christians alike to gain a better sense not only of a common spiritual heritage, but a common spiritual destiny.

John Paul II on Judaism

Visit to the synagogue in Rome 1986

In Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul II discusses various religions, leaving Judaism for last. He said if we imagine other religions as concentric circles, Judaism is the inner most circle because it is "the religion that is closest to our own-that of the people of God of the Old Testament."

The question of Judaism and Christianity is fraught with great political, historical and theological tensions and subtleties. Even his famous phrase that the Jews are in a certain way an "elder brother" is a subtle statement. It is a statement of affection and admiration; but one may puzzle over just how or in what way this older and younger brother have different things to share with each other. It is Biblical to understand that the younger may in fact bear the greater gift.

John Paul II draws upon two sure points of reference -- Vatican II and his rich personal experience. Vatican II, Nostra aetate, states: "the origins of the Church's faith and election are already found in the Patriarchs, Moses, and the Prophets." Here is an "older brother" motif since what the younger has, the elder has from a longer time. The venture of faith and the awareness of election or divine favor are modeled by the elder brother. In addition, the elder and younger share a common spiritual "patrimony." Yes, a patrimony means the Father includes the brothers in his bequeathment. So we may not speak of a disinheritance.  Weigel, Witness to Hope (p. 485), tells us that John Paul II read this psalm (in Hebrew) to the synagogue in Rome:

O give thanks to the Lord for he is good
"His steadfast love endures forever!"
Let Israel say,
"His steadfast love endures forever."
Let those who fear the Lord say
"His steadfast love endures forever."
Amen

And he said "The Jewish religion is not extrinsic to us, but in a certain sense 'intrinsic' to our own religion." He said to the Jews at the synagogue in Rome, "You are our dearly beloved brothers." Nostra aetate spoke of a "mutual understanding and respect, which can be obtained above all through biblical study and fraternal discussion."

And this teaching was also borne out in the personal life of Karol Wojtyla: "I can vividly remember the Jews who gathered every Saturday at the synagogue behind our school. Both religious groups, Catholics and Jews, were united, I presume, by the awareness that they prayed to the same God. Despite their different languages, prayers in the church and in the synagogue were based to a considerable degree on the same texts." We pray to same God; and "to a considerable degree" we pray with the same texts. Just think how important the psalms are to the prayer life of the Church (and to Christ himself). It is unthinkable for a Christian to live and pray without the psalms. Augustine had his friends read him the psalms as he lay dying in Hippo (as did Gen Stonewall Jackson as he lay dying near Chancellorsville, requesting that Psalm 51 be read). Elder brothers in faith prayed these songs for centuries; Joseph and Mary were sustained by this patrimony of faith and prayer. We share it; we hold it in common.

John Paul also recalls his horror in the experience of World War II and the extermination of the Jews in Poland and throughout Europe. Racial hatred and greed for power are a deep corruption of political society. Anti-semitism is a sin against humanity.  Lovers of mankind must always stand vigilant.

John Paul II plunges to a deeper level, not content to remain on the level of politics alone. He sees the suffering of the Jews, our elder brothers, as a sign of their election. "Israel has truly paid a high price for its 'election.' Perhaps because of this, Israel has become more similar to the Son of man, who, according to the flesh, was also a son of Israel." John Paul II follows the lead of Jacques Maritain who pleaded for Christian respect for the Jews from the 1930s through the 1960s.

John Paul II even says "two great moments of divine election-the Old and the New Covenants-are drawing closer together." Christians cannot but see that "the New Covenant has its roots in the Old." But it is not obvious that those of Old will recognize the New:  "The time when the people of the Old Covenant will be able to see themselves as part of the New is, naturally, a question to be left to the Holy Spirit."

So John Paul II acts by this principle: "We, as human beings, try only not to put obstacles in the way." Thus he visited the synagogue; reached out in friendship;  and established diplomatic relations between the Apostolic See and Israel.

And he proclaims a faith in Christ, and this faith accepts a "New Covenant" which "serves to fulfill all that is rooted in the vocation of Abraham, in God's covenant with Israel at Sinai, and in the whole rich heritage of the inspired Prophets who, hundreds of years before that fulfillment, pointed in the Sacred Scriptures to the One whom God would send in the 'fullness of time' (cf. Gal 4:4)."

John Paul II was eager to endorse the work of the Vatican entitled "Notes on the correct way to present the Jews and Judaism." (See this link) He said the document would "help promote respect, appreciation, and indeed love for one and the other, as they are both in the unfathomable design of God, who does not 'reject his people' (Psalm 94.4, Romans 11.1) By the same token, anti-Semitism in its ugly and sometimes violent manifestation should be completely eradicated. Better still a positive view of each of our religions, with due respect for the identity of each will surely emerge." (Weigel, pp. 492-493)

Maritain and Wojtyla on Spiritual Renewal

Maritain and Wojtyla shared an understanding of the renewal called for by Vatican II would require the appropriation of the faith by the lay faithful. The faith should be minimized or watered down for them, but they must rather be elevated to live a new life in faith.

Maritain set out a vision for renewal of the Church and society through the kindling of “true new fires” of love and wisdom: “the true new fire, the essential renewal, will be an inner renewal.” The renewal will incorporate genuine discoveries and “Christian consciousness will penetrate deeper and further into the truth by which it lives and the evangelical reality.”

Wojtyla saw the need for a pastoral effort to teach the laity the meaning and depth of their faith: “The implementation of Vatican II, or the process of Conciliar renewal, must be based on the principle of the enrichment of faith. . . . .In the present study, designed to help towards the realization of Vatican II, we shall concentrate on the consciousness of Christians and the attitudes they shall acquire.”

This "consciousness raising," if you will, is not at all like the sixties new age notion of a secular enlightenment, but a prayerful meditation upon the truth of the faith. I think that Wojtyla would have agreed with the passage from Maritain:

The task which the new age we are entering expects of Christians is so difficult that they can not possibly accomplish it unless there are multiplied, in the very heart of and throughout the world, constellations of spiritual energy composed of humble stars invisibly shining, each a contemplative soul given over to the life of prayer. In each of them (this is the classic notion of "infused contemplation") the gifts of the Holy Spirit place the theological virtues in a state where they act in a higher and more perfect way, and they elevate the whole activity, including love itself to a "super-human" mode. Without contemplative love and infused prayer, and the participation of souls given over to them in the redeeming Cross, and without the invisible support which they bring to the work of all in the mystical Body, and to that strange traffic (not lacking in irony) which Providence carries on here below, the task demanded of the Christian, of all Christians, would be too heavy, and the great hope which is rising would be in vain. Jacques Maritain, Peasant of the Garonne, pp. 82-83

But Maritain was hopeful; he saw signs of renewal --  "This hope will not be in vain, for the humble stars I am speaking of have begun secretly to glimmer; there are many more of them than one realizes strewn across the world.” No doubt Wojtyla saw the humble stars as well. But many more are needed -- these "constellations of spiritual energy composed of humble stars invisibly shining." Unobservable to the Hubble. Stephen W. Hawking is clueless here.


As Pascal has said: "The infinite distance between bodies and mind symbolizes the infinitely more infinite distance between minds and charity for charity is supernatural. . . . The greatness of intellectual people is not visible to kings, rich men, captains who are great in a carnal sense. The greatness of wisdom, which is nothing if not of God, is invisible to the carnal minded and to intellectuals. Great geniuses have their power, their splendor, their greatness, their victory and their lustre, and do not need carnal greatness, which has no relevance for them. They are recognized not with the eyes but with the mind, that is enough. Saints have their power, their splendor, their victory, their lustre, and do not need either carnal or intellectual greatness, which has no relevance for them, for it neither adds nor takes anything away. They are recognized by God and the angels, and not by bodies or curious minds." (S308/B793) or 


The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one. We do not prove we ought to be loved by setting out in order the causes of love; that would be absurd. Jesus Christ and St Paul possess the order of charity, not of the mind, for they wish to heat up, not to teach. The same with St Augustine. (298)

Blessed Basil Moreau (1799-1873), Founder of Holy Cross

 Basil Anthony Moreau was born on February 11, 1799; he was the founder of the Congregation of the Holy Cross; he died on January 20, 1873. He was beatified on September 15, 2007 in Le Mans, France. The Congregation of the Holy Cross founded the University of Notre Dame and continue to guide it.
 I would like to draw a few positive lessons about this great Catholic priest and founder. Usually we commemorate the day of birth into new life, not the birthday, but I happened to find a biography about Father Moreau  (by Gary MacEoin, Bruce, 1962) on a book discard rack at St Thomas University in Fredericton New Brunswick; I read it on the plane, much to my delight and edification.

His priestly life and apostolate grew out of the ruins of the French Revolution, like the Basilian Fathers and the Solesmes Benedictines. These men knew the danger of secularism and the importance of religious knowledge and religious institutions. Indeed, MacEoin says this about the core idea that Father Moreau spent his organization skills on implementing.

As he saw it, the thing that would do the most for religion was wider diffusion of knowledge. His personal devotion to the Holy trinity made his thinking and action run in triads, and he projected religious knowledge on three levels: the highest professional studies for priests and teachers, a network of religiously oriented schools for primary and secondary pupils, and Christian teaching to adults by priests who would go from parish to parish preaching missions. (36)

He founded the Congregation in 1837, and today The Congregation of Holy Cross is a religious order of priests and brothers in the Roman Catholic Church. Approximately 1,500 Holy Cross members (carrying the initials C.S.C. for the Latin Congregatio a Sancta Cruce) live and work in some 16 countries on five continents. (See their website here)

It is remarkable to read the challenges Father Moreau faced through his years; persecuted, caluminated, deceived and manipulated by his own confreres, opposed by his own bishop (an advocate of Gallicanism, whereas Moreau was "ultra-montane" in favor of the Pope and the roman guidance of the Church). Father Sorin, a pioneer and true visionary about education in the United States, founder of Notre Dame, was a very difficult man to guide; Sorin was not the best supporter of Moreau to say the least.  Through all of this Moreau showed his great patience, persistence and holiness.  He was a very spirited man himself -- "there are frequent references to a violent temper" but through the temper he stood firm against opposition and false teaching. But he modeled his life on Christ and acted with patience and affection.

I should mention that I graduated from Notre Dame in 1974. As I praised the Oblates of St Francis de Sales, I must also express my gratitude to the priests of Holy cross. Fr Ed O'Connor taught me much in class and he provided spiritual formation and guidance; his influence has probably done more for me than any priest. Father Nogoski provided a spiritual presence in the dorm. Father Antonelli taught scripture in a scholarly and meditative approach. The presence of the Maritain Center; the professors such as McInerny, Evans and O'Malley, and countless others. What a dynamic Catholic presence was to be found at Notre Dame! But it is difficult to understand how the leadership at Notre Dame could have acted in a way that appears to me to abandon the legacy of Father Moreau in his loyalty to Rome. He adopted the roman collar to show his commitment; he was devoted as a son to the great Pope Pius IX, champion of orthodoxy. But now Ex corde seems to be jettisoned. And how a secularist and subverter of Catholic values such as Mr. Obama could be honored with an honorary degree of laws is mystifying. For comments about the current situation at Notre Dame visit our website for remarks by Notre Dame Philosophy professor Fred Freddoso (find it here).

Back to Father Moreau. At the end of his life he wrote: "With all my heart I pardon and humbly beseech the Divine Mercy, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin and St Joseph, to pardon all those who have harmed my reputation or the goods I have held in trust, thanking God for having found me worthy to suffer something on the occasion of the undertakings which I accepted for His glory."

MacEoin concludes: in the designs of providence such conflict and suffering fulfills "a double purpose, to ensure their personal sanctification by despoiling them of what they inevitably prize most highly in the world, and to ensure the full establishment of their work by launching it on the independent course for which it is designed. It is indeed the fulfillment of the law of nature and of grace which Christ proclaimed when he declared that the seed must fall in the earth and die before it can produce the fruit."

I think the deeper lesson can be drawn from Newman, as usual, in "Christ upon the Waters," Preached Oct. 27, 1850, in St. Chad's, Birmingham, on occasion of the Installation of Dr. Ullathorne, the first Bishop of the See, after centuries of suppression of Catholic religion. (Find it here) He said:

To do impossibilities, I may say, is the prerogative of Him, who made all things out of nothing, who foresees all events before they occur, and controls all wills without compelling them. In emblem of this His glorious attribute, He came to His disciples in the passage I have read to you, walking upon the sea,—the emblem or hieroglyphic among the ancients of the impossible; to show them that what is impossible with man, is possible with God. He who could walk the waters, could also ride triumphantly upon what is still more fickle, unstable, tumultuous, treacherous—the billows of human wills, human purposes, human hearts. 

Newman goes on to explain how the work of God takes time, decades and centuries, because it is not simply the work or ambition of one man at all, but the work of the Holy Spirit.

What an awful vitality is here! What a heavenly sustained sovereignty! What a self-evident divinity! She claims, she seeks, she desires no temporal power, no secular station; she meddles not with Caesar or the things of Caesar; she obeys him in his place, but she is independent of him. Her strength is in her God; her rule is over the souls of men; her glory is in their willing subjection and loving loyalty. She hopes and fears nothing from the world; it made her not, nor can it destroy her. She can benefit it largely, but she does not force herself upon it. She may be persecuted by it, but she thrives under the persecution. She may be ignored, she may be silenced and thrown into a corner, but she is thought of the more. Calumniate her, and her influence grows; ridicule her,—she does but smile upon you more awfully and persuasively. What will you do with her, ye sons of men, if you will not love her, if at least you will not endure her? Let the last three hundred years reply. Let her alone, refrain from her; for if her counsel or her work be of men, it will come to nought; but if it be of God, you cannot overthrow it, lest perhaps you be found even to fight against God.

In a second part of the sermon, found here, Newman explains how the Church is a Church of sinners, and that God can use such weak and flawed instruments to accomplish his purposes, But he warns us that our greatest enemy is our own corruption and luke-warmness:

One thing alone I fear. I fear the presence of sin in the midst of us. My Brethren, the success of the Church lies not with pope, or bishops, or priests, or monks; it rests with yourselves. If the present mercies of God come to nought, it will be because sin has undone them. The drunkard, the blasphemer, the unjust dealer, the profligate liver—these will be our ruin; the open scandal, the secret sin known only to God, these form the devil's real host. We can conquer every foe but these: corruption, hollowness, neglect of mercies, deadness of heart, worldliness—these will be too much for us.

His final prayer should be ours today. May Blessed John Newman and Blessed Basil Moreau pray for us:

And, O my dear Brethren, if, through God's mercy, you are among those who are shielded from these more palpable dangers and more ordinary temptations of humanity, then go on to pray for all who are in a like state with yourselves, that we may all "forget the things that are behind, and stretch forth to those that are before"; that we may "join with faith, virtue, and with virtue, knowledge, and with knowledge, abstinence, and with abstinence, patience, and with patience, pity, and with pity, love of brotherhood, and with love of brotherhood, charity." Pray that we may not come short of that destiny to which God calls us; that we may be visited by His effectual grace, enabling us to break the bonds of luke-warmness and sloth, to command our will, to rule our actions through the day, to grow continually in devotion and fervor of spirit, and, while our natural vigor decays, to feel that keener energy which comes from heaven.

Love as an "intimation of salvation"

"The Glory of God
is man alive"

In Sign of Contradiction, chap. 6 (The God who "cannot deny his own self"), Cardinal Wojtyla explains that Christ does more than provide a critique of the men of the world; he is greater than John the Baptist. And he surely does not simply adopt a superior position of the spiritual man who is above the men of the world in order to condemn them from the splendid isolation of the moral high ground. He joins us as a man and he brings a new message, a message of a new way to live, as sketched out in the Beatitudes. Wojtyla connects the critique of the world with "the truth of love." It is difficult to believe in love, he says. It is difficult for the person victimized or oppressed by evil to believe in love; it is difficult for one who is disillusioned by life; it is difficult for anyone "caught in the toils of consumerism and a prey to the hunger for status symbols." It is difficult for any of us sons of Adam to believe in love; we would rather hide in our fear.

Jesus had to enter the world the way he did, as poor and weak, oppressed, "in order that the whole of his passing from start to finish might confirm the truth of love." (51) The strength of love is the central message of redemptor hominis.

In these retreat meditations Cardinal Wojtyla is pressing the case for the Church in the Modern World from a spiritual point of view; neither in retreat from the world in fear or superiority, nor  simply jumping on the bandwagon, the Christian must witness to the truth of love.

Wojtyla also speaks about Maximilian Kolbe as an example of love. He gave himself freely for love. He is an example of the victory of love -- he is a sign that love is stronger than death. He offered his life out of love and Wojtyla said: "there passed through that hell-on-earth a breath of fearless and indestructible goodness, a kind of intimation of salvation."

And he triumphed in the name of Jesus and Mary. Thus Wojtyla speaks about the victory proclaimed in Genesis, the proto-evangelium, "He will crush your head," O serpent of pride. He says that God is "the one who is greater." He is greater through love.

Wojtyla concludes by suggesting that from this intimation of love we can see that St. Irenaeus (the glory of God is man alive) is more profound than Heidegger -- is man simply a being unto death or is man a "being on the way to glory"?

All this because God is greater than we can imagine from our position of falleness -- "if we are not faithful, he remains faithful, because he cannot deny his own self." (2 Tim 2:12-13)

The Poetry of Pope John Paul II

I wish to thank Mitchell Thomas, a member of the John Paul II advisory group, for providing us with this commentary on the poetry of Pope John Paul II.

A Meditation of Shores of Silence

1

The distant shores of silence begin
at the door.  You cannot fly there
like a bird.  You must stop, look deeper,
still deeper, until nothing deflects the soul

No greenery can now satisfy your sight:
the captive eyes will not come home.
And you thought life would hide you from
the other Life that overhangs the depths.

You must know-
there is no return from this flow,
this embrace within the mysterious
beauty of Eternity.

Only endure, endure do not interrupt
the flight of shadows-only endure
clear and simple-more and more.

Meanwhile you always step aside for Someone
from beyond,

who closes the door of your small room.
His coming softens with each step
and with this silence strikes
the target depths.

In a used bookstore I came across a copy of The Place Within: The Poetry of Pope John Paul II. The poems contained between the covers are profound and fraught with spiritual insight.  I have been very moved by them and inspired to pray and to recollect on my own life. 

John Paul II was a man on whom God had bestowed many gifts.  Certainly, he was a great philosopher, a man of unshakable conviction and courage, a personality both magnetic in charisma, and deeply introspective.  In his philosophical, theological and pastoral writings one sees the fruit of this introspection, this inner conversation with the God.  Yet, this introspection is seen all the more deeply from Wojtyla the poet. In fact the late Holy Father once remarked, “They try to understand me from the outside.  But I can only be understood from the inside.”  The poetry of JPII gives us that glimpse into the man inside.  Even more, and I believe he would agree, through poetry we too, can come to understand ourselves from the inside as well.  Indeed we are all mysteries waiting to be revealed to ourselves (cf. 1 Jn 3:2). The Church, and yes the world, was given a great gift in the Philosopher Pope but I believe the Poet Pope has much to teach us.  I know that that he has taught me and I would like to share with you some of what I have learned from reflecting on his poem the “Shores of Silence."

To come to a full appreciation of the poem, a brief word needs to be said on the happenings of his life during the time of composition.   The poem is dated at 1944.  At this time the young Wojtyla was all too well acquainted with suffering.  By his twenty-forth year, he had experienced the loss of all his immediate family, the Nazi invasion of his beloved Poland; and the murder (what else can you call it) by this same regime of some dear friends.  Here is a young man that had experienced more loss and uncertainty than most of us will face in a lifetime.  And consider the age!  Think back to your own life and remember the comparatively normal things like graduating from high school, moving away from home, looking for work, was enough to fill one with real anxiety.  Picture yourself at the same age confronted with what our Holy Father faced.  What deep anxiety and fear must have confronted him!  As I am writing this, I have suddenly realized why he had such a deep compassion for the young, a compassion, which he showed his whole life.  It was not a matter of pastoral obligation but of deep experiential understanding of that time of life- a never forgotten solidarity.  This understanding is a model which we as teachers and parents should never forget. 

1

The distant shores of silence begin
at the door.  You cannot fly there
like a bird.  You must stop, look deeper,
still deeper, until nothing deflects the soul
from the deepmost deep.

Young Wojtyla must have longed for this silence, this safety, as we also do long, in our quieter moments.  But these shores are not some distant place to which we can “fly like a bird”.  Wojtyla had learned that the shores are much nearer than we may expect (cf. Rom. 10:8b). . .or even fear.  This refuge is not found through that ceaseless activity the world recommends (what Pascal called diversion).  Nor is it found in retreat from the world.  These shores are not a place to merely hide from but a place to reside in, presenting the weary traveler not simply with an opportunity for quiet but an opportunity for communion.

In light of this, these shores are, paradoxically, found, “at the door”.  This “door” is the door of the heart, the heart even of one in the midst Hell on Earth.  What one must do is to “stop, look deeper, still deeper, until nothing deflects the soul from the deepmost deep.”   That phrase, “deepmost deep” reminded me of Psalm 42:7 where the psalmist tells us that in the midst of his longing for God as the “doe longs for running streams” (Ps. 42:1), “deep is calling to deep”.  This young man’s great suffering inspired him to ardently seek the Great Depth, who seeks dialogue with man in the depths of his heart (cf. CCC 2563).  Indeed, St. Faustina was told by Christ, that though she was an abyss of misery, He was an Abyss of Mercy and thus desired communion with her.

No greenery can now satisfy your sight:
the captive eyes will not come home.

            This passage shows that once Wojtyla encountered the “deepmost deep” all things were reoriented.  His sight has become transfixed, taken “captive” by a Reality from which a return to former ways will no longer prove satisfying. It is known that Wojtyla showed signs of the being a gifted actor and was drawn to drama and poetry. Such endeavors, when offered to God, are surely good things.  But the suffering that he endured was preparing him for something else, for something more, for the deep. Indeed the “greenery” of our lives, all that is good, safe, stable and pleasant is only a reflections of that Life from which they draw being.  We are called to more.  Yet, how often do we hide.  The young poet may have even been tempted to do just that; but there is something of a playful realization in his reflection,

“And you thought life would hide you from the other Life that overhangs the depths.”

The life in which we seek to hide is passing away.  The Life that is found in the depths of the deepmost deep is everlasting.  Wojtyla sees that the only proper response to this Life is to launch further into the depths, for where else may one go find this Life? (cf. Lk 5:4 and Jn 6:67-69)  Wojtyla knows there is no return, so he says to himself,

“You must know -- there is no return from this flow…,”

And yet, we would surely miss the mark interpreting this as a sad recognition or a capitulation to something beyond his control.  Such a response would be beneath the dignity of a true lover, which, as far as human creatures are concerned, is best called a saint.  No, this young man, who had experienced the loss of so much, has found in a most profound way, the Ground of Existence.  No return is possible from this “flow” because this is where one experiences an

“ …embrace within the mysterious beauty of Eternity.”

This is the True Beauty, not the simulacrum that is offered by the world.  This is the Beauty of the interior Life of the God Head.  Oh, what one would not give to have this embrace perpetually here and now!  The Gospel speaks of those seeing this Eternal Beauty revealed and wishing to remain undisturbed before it (cf. Mk 9:5a).  And, yet the young poet recognizes that our life is that of Homo Viator, a being on the way; this embrace within the “mysterious beauty of Eternity” is a both a here and not yet.  So we are encouraged in our “not yet” of life to

“Only endure, endure the flight of shadows -- only endure clear and simple -- more and more.” 

Though it is surely passing away, do not try to artificially “interrupt” the realities of this passing life for it is the place of fundamental decision.  This present life, amid the seemingly senseless, useless, and absurd sufferings is the site where we confirm our “Yes” or “No” to God.  Here, contrary to the wisdom of the world, failure is an option.  In this “not yet” endurance is what one needs to gain one’s life (cf. Lk 21:9).  Yet how is such endurance possible?  How does one endure the “clear and simple -- more and more,” without family support and while studying clandestinely for a vocation that, from a certain vantage point, had absolutely no future in his subjugated country?  How could Wojtyla endure?  He endured because he had learned the indispensible core of human living in the midst of this present darkness: one must pray (cf. Eph. 6:10-13).

Meanwhile you always step aside for Someone
from beyond,
who closes the door of your small room.

            Here is a man who knows the power of going into the depths of the deepmost deep to dialogue with God (cf. Mt 6:6).  Here is a man who in openness of heart will step aside for that Somone, that Tremendous Lover, in order to be conformed to His image.  Such a thing is never easy.  Yet, it is possible for the one who asks for the grace that his heart may become a place of prayer.  If we still have trepidation, we are told:

His coming softens with each step
and with this silence strikes
he target depths. 

            Wojtyla is encouraging us to see that this opening of the heart to God, this conversation with God in the depths our heart, is something which is not forced or imposed on us.  Our Lord opens this site, calls us to the depth, incrementally, though at the time it may feel as if the ground is disappearing beneath our feet (such is our fear of Love at times).  With a gentle silence he begins to touch the part of us that we scarcely know exists apart from Him.  The “target of the depths” is our true self.  This Someone enters into that place slowly and gently to reveal it to us (cf. Gaudium et Spes no. 22).  Wojtyla, the poet, is of one heart with another poet who also wrote of this Beloved Someone:

“His conversation is sweetness itself, he is altogether lovable.  Such is my Beloved, such is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.”  Sg. 5: 15b-16

Sign of Contradiction: threat to man's inner freedom and truth

Pope John Paul II, in his Lenten retreat to Pope Paul VI, indicated already that his view of the Church in the Modern World did not include anything of the so-called liberal optimism or spirit of accommodation to the world; indeed, it would be a continual battle against the powers. As Cardinal Wyszynski wrote in the forward, "The world does battle with the Son and with his Mother." This passage in chapter six reveals a theme that John Paul II would take up during his pontificate:

Nowadays there are so many attempts to reduce everything in human life to statistics, to mathematical formulae. In some places, under some political systems, man himself seems lost in a forest of figures which are used as tools to regulate his existence. And man cannot remain oblivious of the great threat posed by this gigantic machine at the disposal of material power, or rather the many powers, the veritable imperialisms which vie endlessly with one another but which cannot ultimately claim to have at heart the good or the real happiness of mankind. Indeed, the reverse is true: for those powers, those imperialisms, see in man -- in man's freedom and inner and truth  -- the biggest of all threats to themselves. (p. 50)

This passage is very good because it identifies the threat to human existence not simply in one political system, such as communism, but in the very basis of modern existence. The "machines" of progress indicate not modern equipment or technology as such but the new attitude towards man -- the reduction to an object of manipulation or use. And the fall of the Berlin Wall did not banish it. Corporate business, based upon free enterprise, for all of its benefits, develops with great intensity the reduction of man to numbers and seeks a certain regulation of consumer behavior and reduction to consumer identity. JP2 scores this attitude in Centesimus annus.

The passage is in the context of an explanation of Christ as the Redeemer of Man; Redemptor hominis, the first encyclical, was said to be already in his head and heart when he wrote it. Well, here it is in part. The economy of redemption is that Christ appears as a poor man; a defenseless man; a weak man. Christ lives for truth, he is the truth; hence Pilate asks what is truth: "Present day political economy has mastered the techniques of buttressing the power of this world. By contrast Christ could say in all truth -- not just once before Pilate but again before every power or political system in existence today -- 'My kingdom is not of this world' (Jn 18:36)."

And the Christian "economy" extends throughout the world. "It is a divine economy, with its source in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. From this source gush the waters of the great river that extends over the entire surface of the earth and permeates the whole of history. 'Out of the heart of him who believes in me -- as scripture says -- shall flow rivers of living water' (JN 7:38)." This is a statement of Christian faith and hope. The theme of "the permeation of the whole of history by Christ" would become central to Pope John Paul II's account of Catholic education.  Here is the first line of Redeemer of Man: "THE REDEEMER OF MAN, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history." And of course, there is this from Ex corde §16 “Aided by the specific contributions of philosophy and theology, university scholars will be engaged in a con­stant effort to determine the relative place and meaning of each of the various disciplines within the con­text of . . . a faith in Christ, the Logos, as the center of creation and of human history." IS there any other way to avoid the reduction of man, the abolition of man, but the recovery of the Christ centered life and Christ centered education?

This ideal for education is rarely found today as many Catholic universities still allow themselves to be directed by the various "imperialisms" of modern society; at the very least, we could say that most have succumbed to the temptation of rule by "formulae" and the reduction of students and faculty to the demands of marketing and management techniques. But true education is the least susceptible to the "machine" technique or "factory" model. The "inner freedom and truth" must be carefully nurtured and the truth of Christ must be the true center of all disciplines and all teaching. It must be the fruit of the Christian humanism or personalism espoused by Karol Wojtyla.

A Sign of Contradiction

"Behold, he is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and as a sign of contradiction" (Lk 2:34) -- from the gospel reading for the Feast of the Presentation.

Karol Wojtyla chose this passage as the connecting thread of the meditations he prepared for Pope Paul VI during a Lenten retreat in 1976. The meditations were published under the title "Sign of Contradiction."

He commented on this passage as follows:

Don't these words, spoken at the sight of a little child,  bring together in a wonderful synthesis bring together all that has the most profound impact on us and unceasingly perturbs us? Are they not a sign of our own times, or at least the key to understanding the various symptoms displayed by modern life, symptoms with which the Second Vatican Council concerned itself, and the Synod of Bishops too, and which are of continual concern to the Holy See and all bishops together with the People of God? Might not these words be a distinctive definition of Christ and his Church? "The sign of contradiction".  .  .  .  May this light give us strength and make us capable of accepting and loving the whole truth of Christ, of loving it all the more as the world all the more contradicts it." (7-8)

This is really a remarkable passage, refining, perhaps even redefining the more common interpretation of Vatican II and Gaudium et spes? The signs of the times? Wojtyla does not have in mind social trends and bandwagons upon which Catholics must run after or jump upon; the hopes and joys of mankind bring along as well the dashed hopes and the grief that must come from a life lived without Christ, projects hatched without grace, justice demanded without mercy. Indeed, the "human family may wander far from Christ, but then weary of exploring blind alleys, it will come back with renewed hope." Thus said the great Cardinal Wyszynski in the forward to the book. Vatican II was a call for renewal; but the renewal would come, must come, only from the "sign of contradiction," and from the woman who held the child in her arms, who would also be pierced in heart.

"The world does battle with the son and his mother. That is why she is ever present in the mystery of Christ and the Church," Cardinal Wyszynski continued; for he understood his Polish confrere all too well -- he said

Tomb of St Stanislaus, Bishop & Martyr

"Bishop Karol carried the 'yes' from the altar of St Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr, whose relics are preserved in the historic shrine of Wawel, and brought the good news." And "his gaze is on the 'sign' whom the world contradicts, but he views with serenity this contradiction hurled at Christ by the world."

It is time for "a new Advent for the Church and for humanity, a time of great trial but also of great hope."

Two years later Cardinal Wojtyla will step up to assume the role of the Vicar of Christ, a sign of the sign of contradiction.

In the Lenten meditation on the mystery of the presentation he says this mystery is linked with the mystery of the Pasch. On him "the future of mankind depends." (Redemptor hominis) "His reign begins when the temple sacrifice is offered in accordance with the law, and it attains its full realization through the sacrifice on the cross, offered in accordance with an eternal plan of love." (41)

Leonie Caldecott on the fittingness of Divine Mercy as day for beatification for John Paul II

Dear followers of John Paul II
It is my honor and delight to share some reflections by Leonie Caldecott on the significance of "Divine Mercy Sunday" as the day selected for the beatification of Pope John Paul II. It was written for a Catholic newspaper in the UK (The Catholic Herald) last month and used with the permission of the author. Readers may recall the Stratford Caldecott, Leonie's husband, spoke at UST last year in conjunction with Environmental Studies and the Forum. His talk may be found on the JP2 Forum website. Their website, Beauty for Truth's Sake, is a real treat and highly recommended; find it here. I should also mention that the Forum is working with the chaplain at UST to plan a special event for May 1 to celebrate the beatification. Details will be forthcoming. But let us appreciate the connection of Pope John Paul II and Divine Mercy Sunday as explained by Leonie Caldecott.

Rich in Mercy  by Leonie Caldecott

When the Holy Father decreed last week that his predecessor, John Paul II, would be beatified on May 1st this year, he knew exactly what he was doing.  For this, the first Sunday after Easter, is Divine Mercy Sunday. "The Message of Divine Mercy has always been near and dear to me,” said John Paul II.  He went so far as to describe it as forming “the image of this Pontificate."  He himself died on the vigil of the feast, 2nd April 2005.

“The power that imposes a limit on evil is Divine Mercy,” Pope Benedict has said.  Poland is a country that has experienced many evils, and yet survived.  Perhaps it is hardly surprising that the devotion to Divine Mercy comes out of Poland.  During the 1930s, in a series of mystical experiences, Sister Faustina Kowalska, a nun in a convent in Krakow, was entrusted with renewing the Church’s sense of God’s mercy, poured out through the wounded heart of Christ.  It was in many ways an extension of the devotion to the Sacred Heart: a deepening of our appreciation of God’s love for us, focusing specifically on the Easter message of redemption.  The devotion involves celebrating the first Sunday after Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday, the reciting of the chaplet of Divine Mercy, imploring God’s mercy on the Church and on the world, and a Holy Hour in memory of Christ’s death.  As Bishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla enthusiastically promoted Sr Faustina’s message, and initiated the cause for her beatification, which as Pope he took to its conclusion in 1993.  In 2000, he also canonised her, and announced that Divine Mercy Sunday was to be celebrated throughout the universal Church.  He described it as “the happiest day of my life.”

In order to understand why this devotion was so important to John Paul II, you have to know the extent to which he both suffered in his own life, and witnessed the suffering of others. Karol Wojtyla was born in 1920, just as Poland attained her longed-for independence. His mother and older siblings all died during his childhood.  By the time he was 22 his father too had died, leaving the young Karol alone in the world.  Meanwhile his beloved country was subjected to immense suffering, first during the Second World War (St Faustina died just on the eve of that war, in 1938), then during decades of suffocating communist rule.  No wonder that the second of the three Trinitarian encyclicals which marked the beginning of John Paul’s pontificate, the one devoted to God the Father, was entitled Dives in Misericordia – Rich in Mercy.   The central message of that document, which George Weigel has called “the clearest expression of the pastoral soul of John Paul II”, is that God is with those who suffer.

Suffering is of course the result of sin, the result of alienation from God.  John Paul II, whose close relations with the Jewish community began early in his life and was deepened by the agony he watched Jews go through during the Nazi occupation, meditated deeply on the experience of mercy in the Old Testament. The chosen people, even when they have gone astray, are brought back over and over again into communion with a “God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”

But it is in Christ, wrote John Paul II, that this loving Father is made fully present among men.  Both in his ministry of healing and liberation from sin, and in his own suffering and death, he shows what God’s mercy really means.  “The Cross is like a touch of eternal love upon the most painful wounds of man’s earthly existence.”   For not only does God show us the ultimate mercy of taking our sins on himself, but, astonishingly, he asks us to have mercy on him.  And of course we fail.  He is betrayed by one of his own; even his closest allies flee or deny him in the moment of trial.  The radical, even shocking, impact of this redemptive mystery is a theme which ran throughout Karol Wojtyla’s life.  His priestly vocation, and everything which followed, flowed from a desire to offer his life as Christ did, that others might have ‘life to the full”.  For him, the meaning of life was to be found in the gift of self to the Other.

Dives in Misericordia points out that in our times, torn by war and injustice on an unprecedented scale, wounded by our abandonment of God and all this entails, humanity has more need of mercy than ever.  And yet the concept of ‘mercy’ is not well understood.  It is often viewed only from the outside, and thus appears to be a condescending thing, an imbablance of power, something dispensed to the powerless by the powerful.  Yet for us who are not God, mercy is impossible to practise without a profound sense of our equal dignity.  In the parable of the prodigal son, for example, Jesus demonstrates how true fatherhood means having a profound respect for the dignity of even the wayward child.  The father in the parable runs to meet his son; he does not dwell on the ingratitude and waste of the past.  For what he is restoring to his son is precisely the meaning of his sonship. “The person who is the object of mercy does not feel humiliated, but rather ‘found again’.”

This is why the meditation on Mercy, which he called ‘love’s second name’, is at the core of Karol Wojtyla’s mission. Pope Benedict knows this well.  As the Church is rocked by scandal and dissension, attacked from without and undermined from within by our often merciless treatment of one another, he clearly means Blessed John Paul II to stand as a beacon of hope amidst the chaos. “Whoever looks for hope will find comfort,” said John Paul in 2002, when wracked with infirmity, he travelled one last time to his mother country for the dedication of the shrine of Divine Mercy at Lagiewniki near Krakow. It is for this reason that his successor has hastened to raise him to the altars.  For it is not enough to talk about hope: we have to see it incarnated.  We have to see someone living it.

Likewise it is not enough to beg for mercy.  We have to incarnate it ourselves, following Christ, forgiving even those who may have harmed us.  “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”  As Papa Wojtyla knew from his experiences of man’s inhumanity to man, and told young people as he shepherded them toward the new millennium, changing the world cannot happen unless we go beyond mere human justice:  “Love is the only driving force that impels us to share with our brothers and sisters all that we have and are….  Sometimes one has the feeling that Love has lost its power, that it is impossible to practise it.  And yet in the long run Love always brings victory: Love is never defeated!”

Leonie Caldecott is the author of ‘What do Catholics Believe?’ and the author of ‘Divine Comedy: A Theresian Mystery Play’.  She is working on a play about the charism of John Paul II, to be performed in the week before his beatification.