Looking Forward to the Weekend: Midwest Catholic Family Conference

The annual Midwest Catholic Family Conference is coming up this weekend and my husband and I plan to attend the Saturday sessions. The theme is the Marriage Feast of the Lamb, illustrated with the central panel of Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s famous Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, better known as the Ghent Altarpiece of 1432, which is in St. Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC offers this analysis:

As the defining monument of the "new realism" of Northern Renaissance art, the Ghent Altarpiece was regarded as both the foundation of a distinguished tradition, and an exemplary achievement to challenge all later artists. In 1495, an early visitor named Hieronymus Münzer justly described it as encompassing the whole art of painting.

The discovery in 1823 of a rhymed quatrain on the frame of the altarpiece confirmed that it was begun by Hubert van Eyck, and even described him as greater than his more famous brother Jan, who completed the work upon Hubert's death in 1426. No one has ever convincingly distinguished their respective shares in this painting. Dedicated on May 6, 1432 in the Church of Saint John, Ghent (now the Cathedral of Saint Bavo), the work was installed above an altar in a chantry chapel founded by the wealthy patrician Joos Vijd and his wife Elizabeth Borluut.

The astonishing realism of the altarpiece rests not only in the fidelity with which figures, plants, and animals are represented in a convincing space, but also in its ability to forge a sense of continuity between the pictorial and the real world. On the exterior, the frames between the painted panels of the Annunciation scene appear to cast shadows into the Virgin's chamber, in accordance with the actual direction of light in the Vijd Chapel. On the lower level, the technique of grisaille is used to depict fictive statues of the two Saints John, possibly as a painterly challenge to the long-established convention of sculpted retables. More astonishing still are the near-lifesize nudes of Adam and Eve on the interior, who appear to project out of the depths of their niches into real space.

The complex theological program is based partly on the liturgy for All Saints' Day, which included readings from the Book of Revelation; however, no single text has been found to "explain" the entire program. Rather, the work stands on its own as a visual account of the redemptive mysteries of the Catholic faith, beginning with the incarnation of Christ at the moment of the Annunciation represented on the exterior. Didactic and identifying inscriptions, including legible texts in painted books, amplify and explain the imagery.

When the wings are open, the main feature of the lower level is a continuous heavenly landscape, verdant and rich, through which a multitude of figures travel on horseback and on foot to adore the mystic lamb of God on the central altar. The lamb, whose blood flows into a chalice, symbolizes the Eucharistic sacrifice of Christ and its repeated celebration through the daily masses in the Vijd Chapel. Underlining the concept of the Mass as the source of eternal grace is the stream of crystal-clear water gushing from the Fountain of Life in the center panel, which, with daring realism, is channeled downward toward the actual altar itself. At the upper level is a Deësis, showing Christ as High Priest, flanked by the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist, in the positions they assume as intercessors at the Last Judgment. To the left and right, angels play instruments and sing, their expressions reflecting their vocal pitch. Adam and Eve, at left and right, stand as the originators of sin in the world.*

In addition to the main adult program with speakers, there are programs for young adults, high school students, middle school students, children up to 5th grade age, and persons with disabilities. This event occupies all the exhibition space in the Century II facility and spills over into the Hyatt Regency hotel next door. The themes of the presentations vary, but several are dedicated to Marriage and the Eucharist. As informative as the presentations are, the exhibitors' booths are also fascinating, with their variety of shops, colleges, religious orders, and other organizations. The conference also offers time and space for prayer (Adoration Chapel and Eucharistic Procession), worship (Mass on Saturday and Sunday) and Confession. It's also great to see friends and make new acquaintances.

It's too bad the organizers did not include a session on the image used in their brochures and its place in the altarpiece: the altarpiece's history (including the mystery of the theft of one panel and how the Nazis plundered it during WWII) and its iconography. UPDATE: Bo Bonner, MC for the High School Program, reports that he will discuss the painting during one of his presentations! See the comments for more information.

*Jones, Susan. "The Ghent Altarpiece". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ghnt/hd_ghnt.htm (October 2002)

Blessed Columba Marmion

From Vultus Christi in Ireland:

A Great Irish Saint

Today is the feast of a great Irish saint! Born and educated in Dublin, Joseph Marmion served as a parish priest and seminary professor before becoming a Benedictine monk at the Abbey of Maredsous in Belgium. Dom Columba Marmion was elected of Abbot of Maredsous in 1909. He chose to receive the Abbatial Blessing on Rosary Sunday. It fell that year on October 3rd. When Pope John Paul II beatified Abbot Columba Marmion in 2000, the liturgical memorial of the new Blessed was fixed on the date of his Abbatial Blessing, rather than on the day of his death, January 30th.

John Paul II

In 1985 Pope John Paul II visited Belgium. When the papal helicopter flew over the Abbey of Maredsous on the way from Brussels to Beauraing, the Holy Father confided to one of his aides: “I owe more to Columba Marmion for initiating me into things spiritual than to any other spiritual writer.” The saints engender saints, and this in every age.

Cardinal Mercier, and Others

Cardinal Mercier, the holy Archbishop of Malines in Belgium and a contemporary of the Abbot wrote, after reading Christ, the Life of the Soul: “The perfume of Holy Scripture, to be breathed in at each page of this volume, gives the impression that it was conceived and prepared during prayer, at the foot of the altar, before being given to the public.” Pope Benedict XV kept the writings of Abbot Marmion close at hand and recommended them to the saintly head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church Metropolitan Andrei Sheptitsky of Lviv, saying: “Read this, it is the pure doctrine of the Church.”

When They Began the Beguines (And the Last Beguine)

Thanks to Elena Maria Vidal's Tea at Trianon blog for this story from The Telegraph about the last Beguine:

In the late 12th century a Flemish priest named Lambert le Begue established a community in Liège for the widows of crusaders who had not returned from the Holy Land. Without a protector, such women often felt obliged to seek security by joining a religious order, but many of them did not wish to devote their lives exclusively to religion. Called Beguines, the women lived in walled districts called beguinages.

Beguines took no religious vows. They could leave and marry, if they chose. They could own property and took no alms. Women of all classes were welcomed, and wealthy Beguines often brought their servants with them. They carried on professions, often in the textile industry; they did good works, such as teaching or caring for the sick. They elected women — Grandes Dames — to lead their communities. Each Beguine was expected to support herself and make a contribution to the beguinage, through work or rent payments. They had no motherhouse, no common rule, no general of the order. Every community was run according to its own rules.

Such institutions flourished in northern Europe in the High Middle Ages, particularly in the Low Countries, in northern France and the Rhineland, although they never took off in England, Norwich being the only city where there is evidence of such informal female communities. . . .

Marcella Pattyn was born in the Belgian Congo on August 18 1920 and, as a child, dreamed of entering a missionary religious order. But as she was almost blind she was rejected by several communities. It was only when a rich aunt intervened with a donation that she was accepted into the beguinage of St Amandsberg in Ghent in 1941.

There, and at the beguinage of St Elizabeth at Courtrai, where she moved in 1960, she spent her days praying, knitting clothes, weaving and making Beguine dolls, which she sold to tourists. She played the organ in the chapel and gave comfort to the sick by entertaining them on the banjo or accordion. In her later years she became a familiar figure in the streets of Courtrai, whizzing around in a motorised wheelchair.

In 1960 she was one of a community of nine. By 2008, when she moved into a nursing home, she had become, officially, the only surviving Beguine in the world.

On two trips to Belgium at the beginning of this century, I saw several of the beguinages in Flanders, especially in Leuven, Bruges, and Tongeron, and the accompanying "Beguinage Churches", where the Beguines attended Mass. In Bruges I remember the tour guide's flippant remark that there just weren't enough men to go around, so the young women starting living together. I particularly enjoyed a visit to Tongeren, the home of my hostesses' grandmother, with its great beguinage and St. Catherine's Church. For me, Tongeren was doubly fascinating not only because of the beguinage, St. Catherine's and the beautiful Gothic basilica of Our Lady, but also because of  its Gallo-Roman museum and its great hero Ambiorix, who rebelled against the Romans and Julius Caesar. Unfortunately, at that time during my travels, I was not a very good photographer, as my husband often complained. (And at the time, we did not have digital cameras!) Not much to share, I'm afraid. (photo source: Wikipedia commons.) More on Tongeren here.

Returning from our first trip to Belgium, I did some research and reading into the history and spirituality of the beguine movement and found this book: Brides in the Desert: The Spirituality of the Beguines by Saskia Murk-Jansen. She focuses on the mysticism of Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Beatrijs of Nazareth. I also dipped into Bernard McGinn's Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete. I think now the standard work is by Walter Simons, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press: Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565, part of The Middle Ages Series:

In the early thirteenth century, semireligious communities of women began to form in the cities and towns of the Low Countries. These beguines, as the women came to be known, led lives of contemplation and prayer and earned their livings as laborers or teachers.


In Cities of Ladies, the first history of the beguines to appear in English in fifty years, Walter Simons traces the transformation of informal clusters of single women to large beguinages. These veritable single-sex cities offered lower- and middle-class women an alternative to both marriage and convent life. While the region's expanding urban economies initially valued the communities for their cheap labor supply, severe economic crises by the fourteenth century restricted women's opportunities for work. Church authorities had also grown less tolerant of religious experimentation, hailing as subversive some aspects of beguine mysticism. To Simons, however, such accusations of heresy against the beguines were largely generated from a profound anxiety about their intellectual ambitions and their claims to a chaste life outside the cloister. Under ecclesiastical and economic pressure, beguine communities dwindled in size and influence, surviving only by adopting a posture of restraint and submission to church authorities.

Walter Simons is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College.

I wonder if I will ever have the opportunity to return to Belgium, to Brussels and Bruges, Antwerp and Leuven, Mechelen and Tongeren--and visit Ghent for the first time to see the "Mystic Lamb"--this time with a digital camera and taking lots of pictures!

The Spanish Netherlands and Scherpenheuvel

Mentioning the Archduke Albert and the Spanish Netherlands in the post about composer Peter Philips the other day reminded me of our visit to Scherpenheuvel (Sharp Hill) in Belgium during the 2000 Jubilee Year. During our second visit to Belgium (work related for my husband; fun related for me), our hosts took us to the Basilica of Our Lady of Scherpenheuvel in the Flemish Brabant region of Belgium. A series of accidents led both Mark and I to the shrine--the wife of the manager of the parts distribution company located near Brussels was taking me to Scherpenheuvel; her car broke down; she called her husband and her cousin. Her husband (and my husband) left work to meet us at her cousin's house/business (he had a tow truck) to drive us on to Scherpenheuvel. On the way to her cousin's house, the brakes failed on the tow truck as we exited the highway! He had to use the handbrake.

We waited at her cousin's house for her husband--everyone spoke Flemish in the household but we did have the universal language of a silly little jack russell puppy who played fetch and tug of war. The cousin's daughter was a flight attendant on the now defunct Belgian airline, Sabena, and when she spoke English she had a perfect Midwest American accent. Mark and his contact arrived, and we went off to Scherpenheuvel. This was in the days before digital cameras when, gasp, we took pictures and then came home, took the film out of the camera and went to a store to have it developed, waited for the store to call us and then went to the store to pick up the pictures!! (I am speaking of 12 years ago, in the Dark Ages of 35 mm and APS film.) That explains why the two pictures I've posted are from the wikipedia commons on Scherpenheuvel:

 

And the websites for Scherpenheuvel are in Flemish, so here's a link to the wikipedia entry for the Basilica and its role as a Marian pilgrimage shrine in Belgium. The Archduke Albert whom Peter Philips served, and his wife, the Spanish Infanta Isabella (Philip II's daughter) gave funds for the establishment of the shrine, the town, and the basilica. It was a major pilgrimage site and the city that grew up around it provided all the services of lodging, restaurants, and shopping--and protections with its walls. We ate lunch, as I recall, in a big restaurant called The Golden Ram, large enough to accommodate the big pilgrimage groups during the season from May to November.

A couple of years later, I read this book about the Archbishop of Mechelen, Mathias Hovius, by Craig Harline of BYU and Eddy Put: A Bishop's Tale: Mathias Hovius Among His Flock in Seventeenth-Century Flanders (which is now out-of-print at Yale University Press). Charlotte Allen reviewed it for First Things here:

 

Fortunately for scholars (and for us), Hovius kept a detailed daybook of all his activities—his building projects, his ceaseless and wearying parish visits, and the endless round of petitions and disputes, on issues ranging from pornography and marriage annulments to questions of heresy—that he adjudicated in his busy ecclesiastical court. Most of the journal has been lost, but in 1987, Harline, a history professor at Brigham Young University, and Put, a Belgian archivist, discovered in a seminary library in Mechelin the last volume, covering the period from 1617 to Hovius’ death. This book is the fruit of their reconstruction of Hovius’ life from that diary and other contemporary documents.

Harline, author of the well–received Burdens of Sister Margaret: Inside a Seventeenth–Century Convent, decided to focus on Hovius for his second book as a corrective to the worthy but perhaps exaggerated preoccupation of today’s medievalists with eclectic and colorful “ordinary” Catholicism in contrast to the official kind. Harline and Put decided that the career of a bishop would offer as good a vantage point as any for looking into the seventeenth–century social world. They thought that since “religious life was a constant negotiation among all parties rather than a simple matter of the hierarchy proclaiming and the flock obeying, then being a bishop was hardly the mundane, absolutist task it has been made out to be.”

Making one’s way as a Catholic prelate in seventeenth–century Flanders required negotiating skills and many other skills besides. To the north lay the staunchly Calvinist Dutch Republic, product of a protracted war of secession that had begun in the 1560s, when Hovius, born in 1542, was a young man. Until the Dutch formally declared their independence in 1581, more or less ending the strife, all of the Low Countries belonged to Philip II of Spain, who had inherited them from his father, the Flanders–born Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

After the Dutch breakaway, Flanders became known as the Spanish Netherlands, an uncomfortable moniker. Even the Catholics of the Low Countries detested the dour and culturally alien Philip, who tried to reduce their once–auto­ nomous territories to a Spanish province and who introduced the Inquisition to Flanders. At the very end of his life in 1599, Philip turned the Spanish Netherlands over to his daughter Isabella and her husband, Prince Albert of Austria, and made it a quasi–independent archduchy. Isabella and Albert were popular sovereigns, and a measure of peace finally prevailed.

The Leper Priest of Molokai and His Unlikely Defender

Today is the feast of St. Damian de Veuster, the missionary priest from Belgium who served the leper colony in Molokai, Hawaii. This site recounts the famous defense he received from Robert Louis Stevenson:

However, just months after Damien's death, when the Rev. C.M. Hyde's letter was published identifying Damien as "a coarse, dirty man, headstrong, and bigoted," accusing him of violating his vows, and expressing overall surprise that Damien should be seen as a "saintly philanthropist," one Robert Louis Stevenson, who was by now settled in Samoa, responded unambiguously.

The novelist appeared so bothered that though Hyde appeared to have acted with kindness towards him on more than one previous occasion, Stevenson now responded that his letter of rebuttal would represent the last correspondence he would ever have with the man.

Hyde perceived Damien as 'dirty.' Stevenson responded sarcastically saying 'he was.' Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty comrade. But the clean Dr. Hyde was at his food in a fine house.' Hyde perceived Damien as 'coarse' to which Stevenson conceded the possibility, then suggested that Peter and John the Baptizer were hardly gentle and asked, “but you, who were so refined, why were you not there, to cheer them [the lepers] up with the lights of culture?"

Regarding the charge that Damien was not faithful in his vows, Stevenson claimed to have heard this rumour once before in Samoa when a man from Honolulu volunteered the details only to be shouted down by an angry hearer who allegedly was on Stevenson's record as saying:

"You miserable little ------. If the story were a thousand times true, can't you see you're a million times lower ------- for daring to repeat it."

Point by point Stevenson deconstructed Hyde's letter, eventually reducing Hyde's entire argument to one of jealousy, and expressing overall surprise that Hyde should still seek to be heard.

"Your Church and Damien's were in Hawaii upon a rivalry to do well: to help, to edify, to set divine example. You having (in one huge instance) failed, and Damien succeeded, I marvel that it should not have occurred to you that you were doomed to silence."

The Rev. Hyde retracted his statements and made amends through donations to the leper colony:

Throughout the letter, Stevenson suggested that Hyde was in fact motivated by jealousy in that Catholics rather than Presbyterians were gaining converts due to their work amongst the lepers and also by hypocrisy, in that Hyde lived in comfort in his manse in Honolulu, while Damien lived a Spartan life on Molokai.

Stevenson even further argued that Hyde's letter, rather than serving to destroy Damien's reputation, would ultimately lead to his vindication and to his being proclaimed a saint of the Catholic Church, a prophecy which was to be fulfilled in 2009.

The letter had an almost immediate effect, with many, including the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), donating money to the leprosium of Molokai. To his credit, Hyde realised he had gone too far and sought to redeem himself through organising donations to the work of the boys' home on Molokai.

Robert Louis Stevenson had been raised in a strict Presbyterian home in Scotland, but seems never to have reconciled himself to Calvinist TULIP doctrines. Chesterton admired Stevenson's work and published a critical study.

Margaret Giggs Clement, RIP

Margaret Giggs Clement, ward of St. Thomas More, died in Mechelen, Belgium on July 6, 1570. She and her husband, Dr. John Clement, lived in the Low Countries in exile from Elizabethan England. She was one of the most learned women of the Renaissance, having benefitted from the fine education Thomas More thought the girls, as well as the boys, in his household should receive. She studied Galen for example and her treatment helped More recover from a tertian fever.

This site provides details of her care for the Carthusians of the London Charterhouse in Newgate Prison and the mystical experience she had on her deathbed, according to her daughter's account:

But the time had now come that God had appointed to reward her for her good works done to the Fathers of the Charterhouse. He visited her with an ague which held her nine or ten days, and having brought her very low and in danger, she received all the sacraments with great devotion, and being desirous to give her blessing to all her children who were all present except her Religious daughters and one more that remained at Bruges with her husband, she caused her to be sent for in all haste. Wednesday being now come, which was the last day before she died, and asking if her daughter were come, and being told no, but that they looked for her every hour, she made answer that she would stay no longer for her, and calling her husband she told him that the time of her departing was now come, and she might stay no longer, for there were standing about her bed the Reverend Fathers, Monks of Charterhouse, whom she had relieved in prison in England and did call upon her to come away with them, and that therefore she could stay no longer, because they did expect her, which seemed strange talk unto him. Doubting that she might speak idly by reason of her sickness, he called unto her ghostly Father, a Reverend Father of the Franciscans living in Mechlin, to examine and talk with her, to whom she constantly made answer that she was in no way beside herself, but declared that she still had the sight of the Charterhouse monks before her, standing about her bedside and inviting her to come away with them, as she had told her husband. At the which they were all astonished.

Margaret's daughter, also named Margaret, was the Prioress of the Convent of St. Ursula in Louvain--where Englishwomen, some of them daughters and sisters of Catholic martyrs (Ann Clitherow, Eleanor and Margaret Garnet) lived in exile.

Note also that Margaret Clement died on the 35th anniversary of her foster-father's martyrdom.