Preview of a Preview: November Series on the Son Rise Morning Show

As we end our series on the Son Rise Morning Show with Anna Mitchell or Matt Swaim and I discussing St. Thomas More's Treatise to Receive the Blessed Body of Our Lord this morning (although it will probably be rebroadcast on Thursday, November 3 during the first EWTN hour), I wanted to post a link to these prayers of St Thomas More.

They include prayers from his Treatise upon the Passion, among them this one for Devotion to the Eucharist:

Our most dear Savior Christ, who after finishing the old Paschal sacrifice instituted the new sacrament of Your own Blessed Body and Blood for a memorial of Your bitter Passion: give us such true faith therein and such fervent devotion thereto that our souls may take fruitful spiritual food thereby.

Amen!

On this All Hallows Eve, as we prepare to celebrate All Saints and All Souls, I also want to announce that we'll begin a new series next Monday, November 7, with highlights every Monday morning in November from Saint John Henry Newman's poem about the Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell), The Dream of Gerontius.

It seems like an appropriate series to air during the month of Prayers for the Faithful Departed, the Holy Souls in Purgatory! If you've followed my blog at all you know, dear reader, that I've commented often on this mini-epic poem: epic in scope if not in length, that is!

Please look for the first preview post in this series on Friday, November 4th!

Preview: St. Thomas More on Zacchaeus's House and Holy Communion

On Monday, October 31 (All Hallow's Eve), we'll conclude our discussion of Saint Thomas More's Treatise to Receive the Blessed Body of Our Lord on the Son Rise Morning Show. 

So I'll be on about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern in the last segment of the second EWTN hour (there's a local hour after that just on Sacred Heart Radio). You may listen live here.

After the string of examples from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew of those who either begged Jesus for some healing (the father with the mute son and the Centurion) or whom Jesus used as an example of contrition and humility (the Publican in the Temple in contrast to the self-righteous Pharisee), More concludes this brief treatise with the reminder of our own need for contrition and humility, especially as we remind ourselves of all that Jesus suffered in His Passion for our redemption:

 . . . And yet with all this remembrance of our own unworthiness, and therefore with great reverence, fear and dread for our own part, let us not forget on the other side to consider His inestimable goodness, which disdaineth not for all our unworthiness to come unto us, and to be received of us, but likewise as at the sight or receiving of this excellent memorial of His death (for in the remembrance thereof doth He thus consecrate and give His own Blessed Flesh and Blood unto us) we must with tender compassion remember and call to mind the bitter pains of His most painful Passion. And yet there-with-all rejoice and be glad in the consideration of His incomparable kindness, which in His so suffering for us, to our inestimable benefit, He showed and declared toward us. So must we be sore afraid of our own unworthiness, and yet therewith be right glad and in great hope at the consideration of His immeasurable goodness…

The last two paragraphs are an extended application of the story of Zacchaeus from the Gospel of Luke (19:1-10) to how we should receive Holy Communion:

And entering in, he walked through Jericho. And behold, there was a man named Zacheus, who was the chief of the publicans, and he was rich. And he sought to see Jesus who he was, and he could not for the crowd, because he was low of stature. And running before, he climbed up into a sycamore tree, that he might see him; for he was to pass that way. And when Jesus was come to the place, looking up, he saw him, and said to him: Zacheus, make haste and come down; for this day I must abide in thy house. And he made haste and came down; and received him with joy. And when all saw it, they murmured, saying, that he was gone to be a guest with a man that was a sinner. But Zacheus standing, said to the Lord: Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have wronged any man of any thing, I restore him fourfold. Jesus said to him: This day is salvation come to this house, because he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost. (Douai-Rheims translation)

Very appropriate timing, since the story of Zaccheus is the Gospel reading for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time October 30th!

More uses the story not only to encourage us to imitate Zacchaeus's repentance and penance, but to demonstrate the rewards we will receive from bringing Jesus into our bodies and souls (our own houses):

Let us (good Christian readers) receive Him in such wise, as did the good publican, Zacchaeus, which when he longed to see Christ, and because he was but low of stature, did climb up into a tree, our Lord seeing his devotion called unto him, and said: "Zacchaeus, come off and come down: for this day must I dwell with thee." (19:5) And he made haste and came down, and very gladly received Him into his house. But not only received Him with a joy of a light and fond feeling affection, but that it might well appear that he received Him with a sure, earnest, virtuous mind, he proved it by his virtuous works. For he forthwith was contented to make recompense to all men that he had wronged, and that in a large manner; for every penny a groat; and yet offered to give out also forthwith the one half of all his substance unto poor men, and that forthwith also; by and by, without any longer delay. And therefore he said not: Thou shalt hear, that I shall give it: but he said: "Ecce dimidium bonorum meorum de pauperibus. Lo, look, good Lord, the one half of my goods I do give unto poor men." (19:8)

More is emphasizing that Zacchaeus didn't just promise that he would do it: he did do it!

With such alacrity, with such quickness of spirit, with such gladness and such spiritual rejoicing, as this man received our Lord into his house, our Lord give us the Grace to receive His Blessed Body and Blood, His Holy Soul and His Almighty Godhead both, into our bodies and into our souls, that the fruit of our good works may bear witness unto our conscience, that we receive Him worthily and in such a full Faith, and such a stable purpose of good living, as we be bounden to owe. And then shall God give a gracious sentence, and say upon our soul as He said upon Zacheus: "Hodie salus facta est huic domui,:This day is health and salvation come unto this house" (19:9): which that Holy Blessed Person of Christ which we verily in the Blessed Sacrament receive, through the merit of His Bitter Passion (whereof He hath ordained His own Blessed Body in that Blessed Sacrament to be the memorial) vouchsafe, good Christian readers, to grant unto us all.

That's where More ended his Treatise to Receive the Blessed Body of Our Lord, but he did not stop wanting to receive Holy Communion worthily himself. After his trial and condemnation on July 1, he wrote a long prayer in preparation for his execution, which as far as he knew at that time, was going to be the brutal torture of hanging, drawing, and quartering. In that prayer, he demonstrates that he was of the same mind as he urged his readers to be:

. . . And pardon me, good Lord, that I am so bold to ask so high petitions, being so vile a sinful wretch, and so unworthy to attain the lowest. But yet, good Lord, such they be as I am bounden to wish, and should be nearer the effectual desire of them if my manifold sins were not the let. From which, O glorious Trinity, vouchsafe, of Thy goodness to wash me with that blessed blood that issued out of Thy tender body, O sweet Saviour Christ, in the divers torments of Thy most bitter passion.

Take from me, good Lord, this lukewarm fashion, or rather key-cold manner of meditation, and this dulness in praying unto Thee. And give me warmth, delight, and quickness in thinking upon Thee. And give me Thy grace to long for Thine holy sacraments, and specially to rejoice in the presence of Thy very blessed body, sweet Saviour Christ, in the holy sacrament of the altar, and duly to thank Thee for Thy gracious visitation therewith, and at that high memorial with tender compassion to remember and consider Thy most bitter passion.

Make us all, good Lord, virtually participant of that holy sacrament this day, and every day. Make us all lively members, sweet Saviour Christ, of Thine holy mystical body, Thy Catholic Church. . . .

I don't know if Saint Thomas More was allowed to prepare spiritually for his execution with a visit by a priest to hear his last Confession or receive Holy Communion. I've never read that detail in any biography.

Saint Thomas More, pray for us.

Image credit: (Public Domain) James Tissot's Zacchaeus in the Sycamore Awaiting the Passage of Jesus

Image credit: (Public Domain) Zacchaeus by Niels Larsen Stevns. Jesus calls Zacchaeus down from his height in the tree.

October 26 in English and English Church History

Not only is today the 493rd anniversary of Sir Thomas More becoming Lord Chancellor of England, but it's also the 1,123rd anniversary of King Alfred the Great's death, and the 1,262nd anniversary of the death of Saint Cuthbert of Canterbury, and the 1,358th anniversary of the death of St. Cedd. 

I hope that's far enough back for you.

Here's what the Catholic Encyclopedia tells us about Saint Cedd, based on Saint Bede the Venerable's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, demonstrating all the links between Cedd and other seventh century saints:

Bishop of the East Saxons, the brother of St. Ceadda; died 26 Oct. 664. There were two other brothers also priests, Cynibill and Caelin, all born of an Angle family settled in Northumbria. With his younger brother Ceadda, he was brought up at Lindisfarne under St. Aidan. In 653 he was one of four priests sent by Oswiu, King of Northumbria, to evangelize the Middle Angles at the request of their ealdorman, Peada. Shortly after, however, he was recalled and sent on the same missionary errand to Essex to help Sigeberht, King of the East Saxons, to convert his people to Christ. Here he was consecrated bishop and was very active in founding churches, and established monasteries at Tilbury and Ithancester. Occasionally he revisited his native Northumbria, and there, at the request of Aethelwald, founded the monastery of Laestingaeu, now Lastingham, in Yorkshire. Of this house he became the first abbot, notwithstanding his episcopal responsibilities. At the Synod of Whitby, like St. Cuthbert, he, though Celtic in his upbringing, adopted the Roman Easter. Immediately after the synod he paid a visit to Laestingaeu, where he fell a victim to the prevalent plague. Florence of Worcester and William of Malmesbury in later times counted him as the second Bishop of London, but St. Bede, almost a contemporary, never gives him that title.

Saint Cedd is on the calendar of the Orthodox Church in America, but his feast is on January 7th.

The St. Cuthbert noted above is not today's Saint Cuthbert of Canterbury, who

was a medieval Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury in England. Prior to his elevation to Canterbury, he was abbot of a monastic house, and perhaps may have been Bishop of Hereford also, but evidence for his holding Hereford mainly dates from after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. While Archbishop, he held church councils and built a new church in Canterbury. It was during Cuthbert's archbishopric that the Diocese of York was raised to an archbishopric. Cuthbert died in 760 and was later regarded as a saint. 

Saint Boniface (Winfred), the English Apostle to the Germans, corresponded with Cuthbert.

King Alfred the Great is the hero of G.K. Chesterton's The Ballad of the White Horse. Chesterton's introduction ("Prefatory Note") to his epic poem:

This ballad needs no historical notes, for the simple reason that it does not profess to be historical. All of it that is not frankly fictitious, as in any prose romance about the past, is meant to emphasize tradition rather than history. King Alfred is not a legend in the sense that King Arthur may be a legend; that is, in the sense that he may possibly be a lie. But King Alfred is a legend in this broader and more human sense, that the legends are the most important things about him.

The cult of Alfred was a popular cult, from the darkness of the ninth century to the deepening twilight of the twentieth. It is wholly as a popular legend that I deal with him here. I write as one ignorant of everything, except that I have found the legend of a King of Wessex still alive in the land. I will give three curt cases of what I mean. A tradition connects the ultimate victory of Alfred with the valley in Berkshire called the Vale of the White Horse. I have seen doubts of the tradition, which may be valid doubts. I do not know when or where the story started; it is enough that it started somewhere and ended with me; for I only seek to write upon a hearsay, as the old balladists did. For the second case, there is a popular tale that Alfred played the harp and sang in the Danish camp; I select it because it is a popular tale, at whatever time it arose. For the third case, there is a popular tale that Alfred came in contact with a woman and cakes; I select it because it is a popular tale, because it is a vulgar one. It has been disputed by grave historians, who were, I think, a little too grave to be good judges of it. The two chief charges against the story are that it was first recorded long after Alfred's death, and that (as Mr. Oman urges) Alfred never really wandered all alone without any thanes or soldiers. Both these objections might possibly be met. It has taken us nearly as long to learn the whole truth about Byron, and perhaps longer to learn the whole truth about Pepys, than elapsed between Alfred and the first writing of such tales. And as for the other objection, do the historians really think that Alfred after Wilton, or Napoleon after Leipsic, never walked about in a wood by himself for the matter of an hour or two? Ten minutes might be made sufficient for the essence of the story. But I am not concerned to prove the truth of these popular traditions. It is enough for me to maintain two things: that they are popular traditions; and that without these popular traditions we should have bothered about Alfred about as much as we bother about Eadwig.

One other consideration needs a note. Alfred has come down to us in the best way (that is, by national legends) solely for the same reason as Arthur and Roland and the other giants of that darkness, because he fought for the Christian civilization against the heathen nihilism. But since this work was really done by generation after generation, by the Romans before they withdrew, and by the Britons while they remained, I have summarised this first crusade in a triple symbol, and given to a fictitious Roman, Celt, and Saxon, a part in the glory of Ethandune. I fancy that in fact Alfred's Wessex was of very mixed bloods; but in any case, it is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment; to see all ages in a sort of splendid foreshortening. That is the use of tradition: it telescopes history.

He is also venerated as a saint in both the Church of England and the Catholic Church.

Encyclopedia Britannica offers these notes on Thomas More's term in office as Lord Chancellor:

On November 3, 1529, More opened the Parliament that was later to forge the legal instruments for his death. As the king’s mouthpiece, More indicted Wolsey in his opening speech and, in 1531, proclaimed the opinions of universities favourable to the divorce; but he did not sign the letter of 1530 in which England’s nobles and prelates, including Wolsey, pressured the pope to declare the first marriage void, and he tried to resign in 1531, when the clergy acknowledged the king as their supreme head, albeit with the clause “as far as the law of Christ allows.” [St. John Fisher's effort.]

More’s longest book, The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, in two volumes (1532 and 1533), centres on “what the church is.” To the stress of stooping for hours over his manuscript More ascribed the sharp pain in his chest, perhaps angina, which he invoked when begging Henry to free him from the yoke of office. This was on May 16, 1532, the day when the governing body (synod) of the church in England delivered to the crown the document by which they promised never to legislate or so much as convene without royal assent, thus placing a layperson at the head of the spiritual order.

This article was written by Father Germain P. Marc'hadour, founder of Moreana, and editor of Volume Seven in the Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, The Supplication of Souls, and co-editor of Volume Six, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, with Thomas M.C. Lawler and Richard C. Marius. 

Most intriguing to me, in light of my study of St. Thomas More's Tower Works, is that he wrote Thomas More et la Bible: La place des livres saints dans son apologétique et sa spiritualité (in English: The Bible in the Works of Thomas More). 

He died on February 22, 2022, at the age of 100! May he rest in the peace of Christ. Amen.

Saint Thomas More, pray for us!

Saint Alfred the Great, pray for us!

Saint Cuthbert of Canterbury, pray for us!

Saint Cedd, pray for us!

Image Credit (Public Domain): Miniature d'Alfred le Grand dans une généalogie royale du XIVe siècle.

The Catholic Literary Revival in England, Houselander, and Kaye-Smith, et al.

The Catholic University of America Press is publishing the "Catholic Women Writers" series, edited by Bonnie Lander Johnson and Julia Meszaros. From the CUA Press blog:

The novels of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene often focus on the solitary figure of a priest or layman in spiritual combat with the world around him. By contrast, the lost novels of Catholic women are usually situated in families and parishes and in the institutional communities in which the writers themselves first encountered the faith: schools and convents. Almost wholly unrecognized by scholarship on the Catholic novel are the frequent depictions of female religious life. The women writers of the Catholic Literary Revival were in their own time well-known and well-read, with no shortage of best-selling authors among their ranks. Most predated and greatly influenced Waugh and Greene. They wrote from a more diverse range of social and political positions than Waugh and Greene, and were often more radical in their use of ninetheenth- and twenthieth-century literary innovations. Their works are set in locations male writers never considered, and they often posed very different questions about how a person can find their way in a fallen world. . . .

After introducing the first two volumes in the series and discussing the achievements of their authors (Caryll Houselander and Sheila Kaye-Smith), "The Lost Women of the Catholic Literary Revival" post continues:

This all leads back to the big question: if Houselander’s work was daring and experimental as the literary scholars craved, and Kaye-Smith’s works resonated with the masses, how did they and other women writers of the Catholic Literary Revival fall out of circulation in both critical and commercial circles, in indeed they were ever there to begin with? We can point to changes in the commercial publishing world after World War II, changes within the Church itself, and redefinitions of the literary canon in University departments in the last decades of the twentieth century. Yet it remains puzzling that a body of writing so creative, so attuned to its historical moment, and so unique in its perspective on the human condition, should have fallen out of print for so long.

Please read the rest there.

Cluny Media, however, have published Caryll Houselander novel, The Dry Wood, the same one the series begins with, and the Maisie Ward biography of her already, still in preparation in the CUA Press series. And I know that I'm just an independent author with one book to her name, but I included Sheila Kaye-Smith in my book Supremacy and Survival in the litany of 20th century converts. Virago Press published some of her novels in the 1980's, although they're no longer in their catalog, and Country Books published a biography, The Shining Cord. So maybe these authors--certainly Caryll Houselander's spiritual writings have been in print for quite some time--aren't as forgotten as the post claims! Nevertheless, it's important to have a major press sponsoring a uniform edition of these works.

And when a friend asked about my birthday/Christmas wish list, I told her about Kaye-Smith's The End of the House of Alard! I wonder if the "House of Alard" is about the same family as Kate Alard's, the heroine of Superstition Corner?

Preview: St. Thomas More on "Every good gift" and Grace

As promised, we'll continue our discussion of Saint Thomas More's Treatise to Receive the Blessed Body of Our Lord on Monday, October 24 on the Son Rise Morning Show. 

So I'll be on about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern in the last segment of the second EWTN hour (there's a local hour after that just on Sacred Heart Radio). You may listen live here.

Saint Thomas More read and knew the Holy Bible very well. In his introduction to the Yale University volume of More's complete works that includes this treatise, Garry E. Haupt believes that More quoted Bible verses from memory (in Latin). Haupt also suggests that in 1534 More had two books with him in the Tower: the Catena Aurea of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Monotesseron of Jean Gerson, which provided him with passages from the Fathers of the Church and a harmony of the Gospels.

Furthermore, Haupt notes that More, like the other Christian Humanists of his time (John Colet, Erasmus, St. John Fisher, and others), while being most concerned about the literal meaning of Sacred Scripture, did not ignore the spiritual and moral applications of that meaning to the reader. In the three paragraphs we'll examine Monday on the Son Rise Morning Show, these concerns of More are readily displayed.

For example, More applies this verse from the Letter of St. James (1:17) to how Catholics should consider the gift of Holy Communion as one of the Father's good and perfect gifts, and how we should respond to that good and perfect gift with prayer and intention:

But for-as-much (good Christian readers) as we neither can attain this great point of Faith, nor any other virtue, but by the Special Grace of God of whose high goodness every good thing cometh, (for as St. James saith: "Omne datum optimum et omne donum perfectum, desursum est descendens a Patre luminum: Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above descending from the Father of Lights"), let us therefore pray for His gracious help in the attaining of His Faith, and for His help in the cleansing of our soul against His coming, that He may make us worthy to receive Him worthily. 

Saint Thomas More balances God's Grace and our response to it in the best Catholic tradition:

And ever let us of our own part, fear our unworthiness, and on His part, trust boldly upon His goodness, if we are slow not to work with him for our own part. For if we willingly upon the trust and comfort of His goodness leave our own endeavour undone, then is our hope, no hope, but a very foul presumption.

More stated before that we cannot achieve any worthiness to receive Holy Communion on our own, but here he reminds us that we must cooperate with God's goodness, and that there is merit in doing so.

He further gives some instruction on what to do even as we go to receive the Eucharist with thoughts that certainly echo St. Thomas Aquinas' Adore Te Devote:

Then, when we come unto His Holy Board, into the Presence of His Blessed Body, let us consider His high glorious Majesty) which His high goodness there hideth from us, and the proper form of His holy Flesh covereth under the form of bread, both to keep us from abashment, such as we could not peradventure abide if we (such as we yet be) should see and receive Him in His own Form, such as He is, and also for the increase of the merit of our Faith in the obedient belief of that thing at His commandment, whereof our eyes and our reason seem to show us the contrary.

As Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ translated two verses of Aquinas's hymn:

Godhead here in hiding
Whom I do adore
Masked by these bare shadows,
Shape and nothing more,
See, Lord, at Thy service
Low lies here a heart
Lost, all lost in wonder
At the God Thou art.

Seeing, touching, tasting
Are in Thee deceived;
How says trusty hearing?
That shall be believed;
What God’s Son has told me,
Take for truth I do;
Truth Himself speaks truly
Or there’s nothing true.

Remember that Pope Urban IV had added the feast of Corpus Christi to the universal Church’s liturgical calendar in 1264 and that this feast was celebrated with great devotion in England before the Reformation, with processions comparable to those on Holy Thursday and the performance of the Mystery Plays, which enacted salvation history from Creation to the Second Coming.

Finally, More strings together passages from the Gospels, like pearls of prayer for an increase of faith:

And yet, for-as-much as although we believe it, yet is there therein many of us) that believe very faint, and far from the point of such vigour and strength, as would God it had, let us say unto Him with the father that had the dumb son: "Credo, Domine, adjuva incredulitatem meam--I believe, Lord, but help thou my lack of belief" (Mark 9:24), and with His blessed Apostles, "Domine, adauge nobis fidem: Lord increase Faith in us" (Luke 17:5). Let us also with the poor publican in knowledge of our own unworthiness say with all meekness of heart, "Deus propitius esto mihi peccatori: Lord God be merciful to me, sinner that I am." (Luke 18:13) And with the Centurion, "Domine non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum (Matt. 8), Lord I am not worthy, that thou shouldst come into my house." (Matt. 8:8)

We'll conclude this series next week, on All Hallows' Eve (Halloween) on October 31, with the end of St. Thomas More's brief treatise on how to receive the Holy Eucharist as worthily as possible.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, pray for us!

Saint Thomas More, pray for us!

Top Image Credit (Public Domain): Lord, I Am Not Worthy (Domine Non Sum Dignus) - James Tissot

Lower Image Credit (Public Domain): The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, presented in three scenes. Middle: the Pharisee kneels before the altar; Left: the proud Pharisee leaves with a devil; Right: the tax collector leaves with an angel. (Barent Fabritius, 1661)

Saint Philip Howard and His Dog

Faithful old dog, do you recall
The days of frolic and fun?
When walls were trees,
Stone floors were earth and
Low ceilings sky and sun?
When you and my other hounds
Sighted the deer and coursed?

But captive now, your eyes follow me
As I pace and pray, and wait
And wait in this cell for death.

If you so dumb, can be so true,
And trusted to carry words
To him whom my dearest love doth know—

If you, so strong can be so meek,
What else can I do—?
But bear affliction in this world for
Glory with Christ in the next

—but Oh!—

How I long to see you course
And run as you once did run,
Chasing the deer and finding him in the glorious sun! (c) Stephanie A. Mann, 2017

Five years ago (!), the National Catholic Register posted my blog story about St. Philip Howard and his greyhound. Way down in the story was the bit of verse I wrote about the young nobleman and his hound. Please read the rest of the post here, including information about the artists who created the image of Howard in the Tower of London with his dog.

[I'm reading a book right now titled The Dog by Kerstin Ekman, trans. from the Swedish by Linda Schenck and Rochelle Wright. It's about a puppy lost in the wild and the man who brings him into domestication.]

I knew that a poem about the ruins of Walsingham has been attributed to Saint Philip Howard, but recently I noticed this poem about the saints has also been attributed to him:

No eye hath seen what joys the saints obtain,
no ear hath heard what comforts are possessed,
no heart can think in what delight they reign,
nor pen express their happy port of rest,
where pleasure flows and grief is never seen,
where good abounds and ill is banished clean.

Those sacred saints remain in perfect peace
which Christ confessed, and walked in his ways;
they shine in bliss, which now shall never cease,
and to his Name do sing eternal praise.
Before his throne in white they ever stand,
and carry palms of triumph in their hand.

O worthy place, where such a Lord is chief,
O glorious Lord, who princely servants keeps,
O happy Saints, which never taste of grief,
O blessed state when malice ever sleeps.
No-one is here of base or mean degree,
but all are known the Sons of God to be.

Here's a suggested tune for the poem as a hymn. Since our Lovers of Newman just read and discussed a Newman sermon about saints' feast days, and since All Saints Day is fast approaching, it seemed appropriate to end this post with it!

Our Lady of Walsingham, pray for us!

Saint Philip Howard, pray for us!

Preview: Saint Thomas More on Devotion to the Body of Christ

As promised, we'll continue our discussion of Saint Thomas More's Treatise to Receive the Blessed Body of Our Lord on Monday, October 17 on the Son Rise Morning Show. 

We'll pick up where we left off last Monday after St. Thomas More urges his readers not to be discouraged: And verily it is hard but, that, this point deeply rooted in our breasts, should set all our hearts in a fervour of devotion toward the worthy receiving of that Blessed Body.

So I'll be on about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern in the last segment of the second EWTN hour (there's a local hour after that just on Sacred Heart Radio). You may listen live here.

Thomas More, who'd been serving a monarch for several years and knew about Court etiquette, etc., uses an example from life in Tudor England as a comparison to receiving Holy Communion:

But now having the full faith of this point fastly grounded in our heart, that the thing which we receive is the very Blessed Body of Christ, I trust there shall not greatly need any great information further to teach us, or any great exhortation further to stir and excite us, with all humble manner and reverent behaviour to receive Him. For if we will but consider, if there were a great worldly prince, which for special favour that he bare us, would come visit us in our own house, what a business we would then make, and what a work it would be for us to see that our house were trimmed up in every point to the best of our possible power, and everything so provided and ordered, that he should by his honourable receiving perceive what affection we bear him, and in what high estimation we have him. We should soon see by the comparing of that worldly prince and this Heavenly Prince together (between which twain is far less comparison than is between a man and a mouse), inform and teach ourself with how lowly, how tender loving heart, how reverent humble manner we should endeavour ourself to receive this glorious, heavenly King, the King of Kings, Almighty God Himself, that so lovingly doth vouchsafe to enter, not only into our house (to which the noble man Centurion [ac]knowledged himself unworthy), but His Precious Body into our vile wretched carcass, and His Holy Spirit into our poor simple soul.

Part of the ground of More's comparison is that if you know how to prepare and are ready, willing, and able to welcome a human prince to your house, you should know how to prepare and be ready, willing, and able to welcome the High Prince of Heaven to your body and soul. (It's interesting to note that More compares behavior when entering the presence of a prince or monarch or other authority to how we pray when entering God's Presence in The Sadness of Christ, noting that we wouldn't be distracted or inattentive in the first situation--so why are we in the second?)

We would use the same metaphor now--would you go meet the President of the United States of America wearing the same clothing you wear to mow the lawn? would you be distracted and inattentive when he spoke to you? Probably not. Then, if you do so such things when you go to Mass, why?

His Gospel--and Liturgical reference--also drives his message home: The Centurion's words from Matthew 8:8 ("Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter under my roof: but only say the word, and my servant shall be healed.") have become our prayer before receiving Holy Communion: "Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed."

Once we admit our unworthiness, we rely upon God to make us worthy, as only He can.

More continues, comparing all that God has done for us to the little we can do in return:

What diligence can here suffice us? What solicitude can we think here enough against the coming of this Almighty King, coming for so special gracious favour not to put us to cost, not to spend of ours, but to enrich us of His, and, that after so manifold deadly displeasure done Him so unkindly by us, against so many of His incomparable benefits before done unto us? How would we now labour, that the house of our soul (which God were coming to rest in) should neither have any poisoned spider, or cobweb of deadly sin hanging in the roof, nor so much as a straw or a feather of any light lewd thought, that we might spy on the floor, but that we would sweep it away.

" . . .coming for so special gracious favour not to put us to cost, not to spend of ours, but to enrich us of His"--I wonder if More is thinking of line from the Roman Canon that "we, your servants and your holy people, offer to your glorious majesty, from the gifts you have given us, this pure victim, the holy victim, this spotless victim" (our current approved translation). Or as More would have read it when attending Mass: "offerimus præclaræ maiestati tuæ de tuis donis ac datis hostiam puram, hostiam sanctam, hostiam immaculatam".

All we can offer to God is what God has given us.

His metaphor of our sins as spiders, cobwebs, straws, and feathers is not to be taken lightly except that as More reminded us earlier in the Treatise, "we can (with the help of His special Grace diligently prayed for before) purge and cleanse our souls by Confession, Contrition, and Penance"!

Next Monday (October 17): More from More on the Graces we receive at Holy Communion.

Soul of Christ, be my sanctification;
Body of Christ, be my salvation;
Blood of Christ, fill all my veins;
Water of Christ’s side, wash out my stains;
Passion of Christ, my comfort be;
O good Jesu, listen to me;
In thy wounds I fain would hide,
Ne’er to be parted from Thy side;
Guard me, should the foe assail me;
Call me when my life shall fail me;
Bid me come to Thee above,
With Thy saints to sing Thy love,
World without end. Amen. (Newman's translation of the Anima Christi)

Saint Thomas More, pray for us!

The Third Anniversary of Newman's Canonization

Father Juan Velez, author of several books--and one to be published soon by Catholic University of America Press--on Saint John Henry Newman, posts this reminder on his Newman website:

October 13, 2022, will mark three years since John Henry Newman’s canonization in 2019. We recall the wonderful Mass of canonization at St. Peter’s Square and the joy of the faithful during the celebration as well as the days before and after. The official recognition of Newman’s holiness has helped many people to become acquainted with this wise and holy priest and thinker.

Since the canonization, various groups and Oratories have promoted devotion to St. John Henry Newman. For instance, the St. Paul Catholic Newman Center in Fresno, California, has had a novena to Newman preceding October 9 which would normally be St. John Henry Newman’s liturgical memorial but this year falls on a Sunday.

People who have been introduced to Newman now pray to him for his intercession and ask others to pray to him for their needs, and God grants favors in response to their prayers.

The canonization has likely been the inspiration for conferences and events, and has encouraged authors to continue writing both popular and academic works on Newman and his vast literary output. . . .

Please read the rest there.

Father Velez suggests three ways of developing greater devotion to St. John Henry Newman:

1. Working more to spread the study and devotion of Newman at University Newman Centers.
2. Fostering devotion to Newman through Newman prayer groups and discussion groups, and
3. Praying that Newman’s feast day be made a memorial in the general liturgical calendar of the Church.

I would add one more:

4. Praying that Newman be named a Doctor of the Church!

On Sunday, October 16, I'll be participating in a Newman discussion group as I do every month, our local "Lovers of Newman" group, meeting at the IHM Convent in Colwich, Kansas. We will read aloud and discuss this Parochial and Plain sermon, "The Use of Saints' Days"!

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

October 11: Feast of the Theotokos--The Divine Maternity of the Mother of God

In the liturgical calendar for the 1970 Roman Missal, there's an optional memorial today, that of Pope Saint John XXIII. October 11 was chosen as his feast day because that's the date on which he convoked the Second Vatican Council in 1962. But in the liturgical calendar of the 1962 Roman Missal, today is the feast of the Divine Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, commemorating the decision of the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D. that she is indeed the Mother of God, because Jesus is God from God, True God from God, True God and True Man. She is not just the mother of His "human nature"; she is the mother of His Divine Person.

As Saint John Henry Newman remonstrated with his old friend, E.B. Pusey, the Catholic Church believes what she believes about Mary because she believes what she believes about Jesus, rejecting the claims of Arius, Nestorius, and other heretics.

When Pope St. John XXIII convoked the Second Vatican Council on October 11, 1962, he mentioned this feast as an auspicious date on which to begin an ecumenical council:

Gaudet Mater Ecclesia quod, singulari Divinae Providentiae munere, optatissimus iam dies illuxit, quo, auspice Deipara Virgine, cuius materna dignitas hodie festo ritu recolitur, hic ad Beati Petri sepulcrum Concilium Oecumenicum Vaticanum Secundum sollemniter initium capit.

Here's some background about the Feast of the Divine Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, from a blog post I submitted to the National Catholic Register a few years ago:

On the Roman Calendar of the 1962 Missal promulgated by Pope St. John XXIII, Oct. 11 is the Feast of the Divine Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This feast was proclaimed in an encyclical letter issued by Pope Pius XI on Dec. 25, 1931 in celebration of the anniversary of the great Council of Ephesus in 431, 1500 (one thousand, five hundred) years before.

[N.B.: Now, that's 1591 (one thousand, five hundred and ninety-one) years ago.]

Pope Pius XI reigned from 1922, succeeding Pope Benedict XV, and died in 1938, succeeded by Pope Pius XII. In his encyclical, Lux Veritatis, Pope Pius XI celebrated the history of the Council of Ephesus and explained how the doctrine of the Person of Jesus, Divinity Incarnate, was essential to Catholic teaching and devotion about the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The Incipit—the first words—of this encyclical Lux Veritatis, refers to the light of truth found in the true understanding of history. One shining truth revealed by history, Pius XI declares, is that God is always with His Church, defending her in the midst of troubles, whether the troubles are from within or from without. He will protect “the integrity of the sacred deposit of Gospel truth.” (paragraph 2) . . .

The heresy of the priest Nestorius was that he “denied that wondrous and substantial union of the two natures which we call hypostatic; and for this reason he asserted that the Only begotten Word of God was not made man but was in human flesh, by indwelling, by good pleasure and by the power of operation.” Nestorius said that Jesus should be called Theophoros, or God-Bearer, like a prophet who had received God’s inspiration. If Jesus was not the Second Person of the Holy Trinity incarnate, with a human nature and human will (and a Divine nature and will), then Mary was not the Mother of God: she was not the Theotokos, but merely the Christotokos, the Mother of the human person Jesus. (pp. 9 and 10)

Please read the rest there.

Lord Jesus Christ, Only Begotten Son,
Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father,
You take away the sin of the world,
have mercy on us;
You take away the sin of the world,
receive our prayer;
You are seated at the right hand of the Father,
have mercy on us. (from the Gloria, the Angelic Hymn)

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Pope St. John XXIII, pray for us. Amen.

Image Credit (Public Domain): The image adorned with its Canonical crowns and jewel regalia, no longer attached today. The crowns are stored within the treasury department of Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Saint John Henry Newman Today (or Tonight)!

I received word from the Campus Ministry Office late last week that the 7 p.m. Sunday Mass at Newman University in St. John's Chapel will celebrate St. John Henry Newman's Feast Day, by special permission (since it's a Sunday and the Solemnity of that Holy Day has precedence!) So I plan to attend tonight. As a reminder, the date chosen for his feast is the anniversary of his becoming a Catholic in 1845 -- the date of death, August 11, is already the feast of St. Clare of Assisi!

The Collect:

O God, who bestowed on your Priest Saint John Henry Newman the grace to follow your kindly light and find peace in your Church; graciously grant that, through his intercession and example, we may be led out of shadows and images into the fullness of your truth. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Offertory Prayer:

Accept, O heavenly Father, this holy sacrifice that we offer in commemoration of Saint John Henry Newman for your praise and greater glory and for our salvation. Through Christ our Lord.

The Closing Prayer:

O Lord, as we rejoice to receive Christ, the living Bread, on this feast day of Saint John Henry Newman, so may our witness be made more real, never moving minds without touching hearts. Through Christ our Lord.

As you'll find on this publication from the Liturgy Office of the Dioceses of England and Wales of the Mass texts and the readings for the Office of Readings in the Liturgy of Hours (Common of Pastors), the second reading is from one of his Parochial and Plain Sermons, "Sins of Infirmity" preached on Epiphany, according to the note from the fifth volume of those sermons. Here is the conclusion from the excerpt:

We have much to be forgiven; nay, we have the more to be forgiven the more we attempt. The higher our aims, the greater our risks. They who venture much with their talents, gain much, and in the end they hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant;” but they have so many losses in trading by the way, that to themselves they seem to do nothing but fail. They cannot believe that they are making any progress; and though they do, yet surely they have much to be forgiven in all their services. They are like David, men of blood; they fight the good fight of faith, but they are polluted with the contest.

Newman aimed high, risked much, may have seemed "to do nothing but fail", but he, as testified by the miracles Almighty God worked through his intercession, heard the words, "Well done, good and faithful servant"!

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Medieval Monastic Ghost Stories for Modern Minds?

According to this History First article by Mark Bridge, "Dr. Michael Carter, senior properties historian at English Heritage, a specialist in medieval monasteries and leader of the tours", thinks one way to help modern non-believers appreciate the lives of monks and nuns in England's pre-Reformation monasteries and convents is through ghost stories and tales of the afterlife, including souls in Purgatory and Devils in the dormitory:

How do you help 21st century “post-Christian” audiences to get inside the heads of the monks, nuns and devout laypeople who created England’s great medieval monasteries? The answer, according to the custodian of sites such as Rievaulx Abbey, lies with ghosts and gore.

This October and November, English Heritage will offer free expert-led tours of five ruined monasteries in Yorkshire and Cumbria, telling of spectres such as the priest who rose from the grave to gouge out his concubine’s eyeball. The tours, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, are the first of their kind from the conservation charity and may be extended to other regions. They use dark tales from monastic manuscripts as a lens for understanding religious communities that flourished for hundreds of years before the Reformation.

Bridge quotes Carter:

“There’s this question of how do we engage people and make these belief systems understandable for an increasingly secular and, to some extent, post-Christian, audience? How do you get across concepts of death, damnation and, especially, the redemption of souls in purgatory? The role these monasteries played in the salvation of souls was so important — it was the whole purpose. One way of getting that across is through the ghost stories written by the Byland monk and at other monasteries.”

Please read the rest there. My first reaction was negative, especially because of the headline: "Ghosts of sinful monks and nuns illuminate England's monastic history". I thought that played into the view of religious people as being hypocrites, saying they want to be holy and dedicated to a rule of life and yet sinning and failing. So, what's the problem? Isn't that part of the human condition? 

But that's not really Dr. Carter's view of these stories and the way he wants to present them to his non-believing audiences, at least as evidenced by his comments in the article. 

I'm still not sure that this appeal to ghost stories of the past will move non-believers to gain more understanding of what the monks and nuns were trying to achieve as they followed their order's rule and fulfilled their vocations as monastics. 

Does the mere recognition that the monks and nuns believed there was life after death and that the way your soul (and later your body) existed after death depended how you'd lived help the non-believer? It is a good first step to gaining some understanding of these medieval lives?

Would a visit to a monastery or convent open now, with monks and nuns living by the same Rule, be a better way? This way of life is not gone, even though the glorious ruins of these monasteries may fool one into thinking it is.

I'm just not sure.

Of course, I'm believer. 

Patrick Leigh Fermor's elegy to the monastic ruins of England in A Time to Keep Silence resonates with my mind and heart just fine:

But, for us in the West, because of all such relics they are the most compelling mementos of the life that once animated them, the ruined abbeys of England that have remained desolate since the Reformation will always be the most moving and tragic. For there is no riddle here. We know the function and purpose of every fragment and the exact details of the holy life that should be sheltering there. We know, too, the miserable and wanton story of their destruction and their dereliction, and have only to close our eyes for a second for the imagination to rebuild the towers and the pinnacles and summon to our ears the quiet rumour of monkish activity and the sounds of bells melted long ago. They emerge in the fields like the peaks of a vanished Atlantis drowned four centuries deep. The gutted cloisters stand uselessly among the furrows and only broken pillars mark the former symmetry of the aisles and ambulatories. Surrounded by elder-flower, with their bases entangled in bracken and blueberry and bridged at their summits with arches and broken spandrels that fly spinning over the tree-tops in slender trajectories, the clustering pillars suspend the great empty circumference of a rose-window in the rook-haunted sky. It is as though some tremendous Gregorian chant has been interrupted hundreds of years ago to hang there petrified at its climax ever since.

What do you think? Please let me know.

Preview: St. Thomas More on Unworthy Reception of Holy Communion

We'll continue our discussion of Saint Thomas More's Treatise to Receive the Blessed Body of Our Lord on Monday, October 10 on the Son Rise Morning Show. 

By the way, check out their new website, with show notes, an archive, and other information about the program; you can even sign up to receive an email notification of who is going to discuss what every morning! And, you'll see a picture of me and my bio when I'm scheduled to be on the air (as I was yesterday, Thursday, October 6, during the repeat of my segment from Monday, October 3)!

So I'll be on about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern in the last segment of the second EWTN hour (there's a local hour after that just on Sacred Heart Radio). You may listen live here.

Last week I mentioned that St. Thomas More was allowed greater freedom during his first months of captivity in the Tower of London; he was permitted to leave his cell to go outside and might have attended Mass in the Chapel in the White Tower, named for St. John the Evangelist. (License for the photo above of the Romanesque St. John's Chapel may be found here with permission granted under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.)

We certainly know that he is buried in the crypt of the other Royal Chapel on the grounds of the Tower of London, St. Peter ad Vincula.

We also know that in 1535, after his interrogations by Thomas Cromwell and others, the books and writing materials he had with him were taken away (although he still had his Book of Hours). This is when Sir Richard Rich famously came to his cell with two other gentlemen to collect these books and materials--and Rich supposedly led More into the trap of denying the title of Supreme Head and Governor of the Church of England to Henry VIII--an event More vehemently, adamantly denied ever occurred at his trial on July 1, 1535: "In good faith, Master Rich, I am sorrier for your perjury than for mine own peril, and you shall understand that neither I nor any man else to my knowledge ever took you to be a man of such credit in any matter of importance I or any other would at any time vouchsafe to communicate with you. . . . Can it therefore seem likely to your honorable lordships, that I would, in so weighty a cause, so unadvisedly overshoot myself as to trust Master Rich, a man of me always reputed for one of little truth, as your lordships have heard, so far above my sovereign lord the king, or any of his noble counselors, that I would unto him utter the secrets of my conscience touching the king's supremacy, the special point and only mark at my hands so long sought for?"

Anachronistically speaking, that's a "mic drop". More has at once impugned Rich's integrity and the Court's integrity for presenting his perjured testimony as evidence of the crime More is accused of committing.

But in 1534, as More was writing about the Blessed Sacrament and had his books, and pens and ink and paper, we might be surprised that he starts with the dangers of receiving Holy Communion unworthily rather than the benefits of receiving it as worthily as possible:

In remembrance and memorial whereof, He [Almighty God] disdaineth not to take for worthy such men, as wilfully make not themselves unworthy, to receive the self-same Blessed Body into their bodies, to the inestimable wealth of their Souls, and yet of His High Sovereign patience, He refuseth not to enter bodily into the vile bodies of those whose filthy minds refuse to receive Him graciously into their Souls. 

Jesus does not stop us from receiving Him Sacramentally in Holy Communion when we should not: we have the free will to ignore what our Conscience tells us. But there are consequences:

But then do such folk receive Him only Sacramentally, and not Virtually, that is to wit, they receive His very Blessed Body into theirs under the Sacramental Sign, but they receive not the thing of the Sacrament, that is to wit, the Virtue and the Effects thereof, that is to say, the Grace by which they should be lively members incorporate in Christ's Holy Mystical Body: but instead of that live Grace, they receive their Judgment and their Damnation.

Further, More warns that without repentance and Confession, the dangers increase: 

till he [the devil] finally drive him to all mischief, as he did the false traitor, Judas, that sinfully received that Holy Body, whom the devil did therefore first carry out about the traitorous death of the self-same Blessed Body of his most loving Master; which he so late so sinfully received, and within a few hours after, unto the desperate destruction of himself.

So More advises anyone who desires to receive Holy Communion to 

consider well the state of our own soul when we shall go to the Board of God, and as near as we can (with the help of His special Grace diligently prayed for before) purge and cleanse our souls by Confession, Contrition, and Penance, with full purpose of forsaking from thenceforth the proud desires of the devil, the greedy covetousness of wretched worldly wealth, and the foul affection of the filthy flesh, and being in full mind to persevere, and continue in the ways of God, and holy cleanness of Spirit . . .

We should remember that in the sixteenth century most of the laity received Holy Communion only a few times each liturgical year. Even today, the precepts of the Church require us to receive Holy Communion only once a year, during the Easter Season. In More's time, that Easter Duty may have been the only time some Catholics received Holy Communion; they attended Mass on Sundays and Holy Days, but communed infrequently, so needed to be well prepared.

When they did receive Holy Communion, More reminded his readers, as Catholics, contrary to those who were introducing Zwinglian ideas about the Eucharist in England,

. . . we firmly believe that this Blessed Sacrament is not a bare sign, or a figure, or a token of that Holy Body of Christ: but that It is in perpetual remembrance of His bitter Passion, that He suffered for us, the self-same precious Body of Christ that suffered it, by His own Almighty power and unspeakable goodness consecrated and given unto us.

Supporting this deep concern of Saint Thomas More with the state of the soul of one receiving Holy Communion is this passage from St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians:

“And therefore, if anyone eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord unworthily, he will be held to account for the Lord's body and blood. A man must examine himself first, then eat of that bread and drink of that cup; he is eating and drinking damnation to himself if he eats and drinks unworthily, not recognizing the Lord's body for what it is. That is why many of your number want strength and health, and not a few have died. If we recognized our own fault, we should not incur these judgements; as it is, the Lord judges us and chastises us, so that we may not incur, as this world incurs, damnation.” (I Cor. 11:27-32) Ronald Knox translation.

When More reads St. Paul's words, he notes that this strong warning shouldn't discourage us, but increase our devotion:

Lo, here, this Blessed Apostle well declareth that he, which in any wise unworthily receiveth this most excellent Sacrament, receiveth It unto his own damnation in that he well declareth by his evil demeanour toward It, in his unworthy receiving of It, that he discerneth It not, nor judgeth It, nor taketh It, for the very Body of our Lord, as indeed It is. And verily it is hard but, that, this point deeply rooted in our breasts, should set all our hearts in a fervour of devotion toward the worthy receiving of that Blessed Body.

Next Monday, on October 17, we'll look at why Saint Thomas More thinks this is true.

Blessed be Jesus in the most holy Sacrament of the altar!
Saint Thomas More, pray for us!

Image Credit (Public Domain): Rembrandt van Rijn (and Workshop?) (Dutch, 1606 - 1669 ), The Apostle Paul, c. 1657, oil on canvas, Widener Collection