Benedictine Anniversaries (Benedict XVI)

We've celebrated a couple of anniversaries for Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) the past several days: his 95th birthday on Holy Saturday, April 16 in 1927 (also the day of his baptism), the anniversary of his election as Pope on April 19, 2005--and we will also mark the anniversary of his installation as Pope on April 24. 

(It should also be pointed on that when he was born and baptized on April 16, 1927 it was also Holy Saturday.) 

As his life as a theologian and cleric continues to be evaluated, his influence in doctrine and liturgy come to the forefront, and in my stack of books to read I have his The Spirit of the Liturgy from Ignatius Press in a commemorate edition which includes Romano Guardini's classic work of the same title, which I have read before.

All this--and the recent notice about the new edition of The Stripping of the Altars coming this summer--made the arrival of an e-mail from the Adoremus Bulletin with an article about the Roman Rite in the later Middle Ages even more fascinating. Father Uwe Michael Lang of the Oratory in London has written several books about the liturgy and writes here in objection to the common theme of liturgical decline before the Tridentine reforms, particularly commenting on lay participation:

The prevailing use of Latin as a sacred language certainly removed the liturgy from the vast majority of the lay faithful, but it did not raise an impenetrable barrier to popular participation, as is often assumed. At least in Romance-speaking countries, where the vernacular language developed from Latin, there was a basic understanding at least of the meaning conveyed in liturgical texts.[2] Moreover, the vernacular Prayer of the Faithful at the main Sunday Mass in the parish church offered to the laity a form of involvement that corresponded to their spiritual and temporal needs. The oldest known example of such “bidding prayers” from England precedes the Norman Conquest and has been dated to the early 11th century. In other countries, as well, the Prayer of the Faithful employed local languages, such as Catalan, Basque, and Breton, as well as Occitan and German dialects.[3] This vernacular rite was inserted at some point during the offertory, and commonly after the incensation of the gifts and the altar and before the priest’s washing of hands (lavabo).

And he also argues that comprehension and participation should not be limited to understanding only one text (the written word), but that there were other texts the lay participants "read":

Liturgical participation cannot be reduced to the comprehension of texts, and Frank Senn has proposed a broader conception that includes “other ‘vernaculars’ than language, not least of which were the church buildings themselves and the liturgical art that decorated them.”[4] From a similar perspective, Éric Palazzo has explored the sensory dimensions of the liturgy: the stimulation of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting made participation in the Mass a synesthetic experience.[5] Lay participation was by its very nature unscripted: it was not regulated by the official liturgical books that gave detailed instructions to the clergy regarding what to say and how to perform the sacred rites. Thus, the faithful were able to engage with the Mass in a variety of ways that are not easy for us to grasp precisely because they were not scripted. Paul S. Barnwell speaks of “the meditative and affective nature of much lay devotion in the period.”[6] The sensory dimensions of the late medieval liturgy offered important stimuli for such meditation.

Please read the rest there--it's one in a series of articles on the history of the Roman Rite of the Mass by the same author. The immediately previous article about Medieval devotion to Jesus in His Real Presence in the Eucharist is also excellent.

Being in Time with W.H. Auden

On Black Friday, the super shopping day after Thanksgiving, I did some online shopping and some real shopping (after Mass, at a Catholic gift/bookstore, with friends before lunch). But in the evening, I went to an event at the Eighth Day Institute's headquarters, The Ladder, and joined four good gentlemen in reading W.H. Auden's Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being. Alan Jacobs edited and annotated the poem for Princeton University Press:

For the Time Being is a pivotal book in the career of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. W. H. Auden had recently moved to America, fallen in love with a young man to whom he considered himself married, rethought his entire poetic and intellectual equipment, and reclaimed the Christian faith of his childhood. Then, in short order, his relationship fell apart and his mother, to whom he was very close, died. In the midst of this period of personal crisis and intellectual remaking, he decided to write a poem about Christmas and to have it set to music by his friend Benjamin Britten. Applying for a Guggenheim grant, Auden explained that he understood the difficulty of writing something vivid and distinctive about that most clichéd of subjects, but welcomed the challenge. In the end, the poem proved too long and complex to be set by Britten, but in it we have a remarkably ambitious and poetically rich attempt to see Christmas in double focus: as a moment in the history of the Roman Empire and of Judaism, and as an ever-new and always contemporary event for the believer. For the Time Being is Auden’s only explicitly religious long poem, a technical tour de force, and a revelatory window into the poet’s personal and intellectual development. This edition provides the most accurate text of the poem, a detailed introduction by Alan Jacobs that explains its themes and sets the poem in its proper contexts, and thorough annotations of its references and allusions.

I was assigned the roles of Mary, Rachel, the Semi-Chorus, one of the Wise Men, the Chorus of Angels, and "Feeling"! The long soliloquy of King Herod, in prose, was hilariously Stoic!

The end of the poem offers the challenge of Advent and Christmas, to prepare and then be in that time being of anticipation and fulfillment that really only the liturgy and liturgical prayer provide: to be on the tip-toe of a great event and yet live in it in the midst of all the distractions and griefs and troubles. To keep Christmas--the Incarnation--in my heart everyday:

                                        . . .To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;
"Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake."
They will come, all right, don't worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God's Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

IV
Chorus

He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

I say that the liturgy and prayer--especially liturgical prayer--are the best ways to be in that time because the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass makes the great mysteries of the Incarnation and the Paschal Sacrifice present to us NOW. As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in The Spirit of the Liturgy, summarizing his argument at the end of an article, "The Relationship of the Liturgy to Time and Space":

When we look back on our reflections hitherto in this essay, we see that we twice encountered—in different contexts—a three-step process. The liturgy, as we saw, is characterized by a tension that is inherent in the historical Pasch of Jesus (his Cross and Resurrection) as the foundation of its reality. The ever-abiding form of the liturgy has been shaped in what is once and for all; and what is everlasting—the second step—enters into our present moment in the liturgical action and—the third step— wants to take hold of the worshipper’s life. The immediate event—the liturgy—makes sense and has a meaning for our lives only because it contains the other two dimensions. Past, present, and future interpenetrate and touch upon eternity. Earlier we became acquainted with the three stages of salvation history, which progresses, as the Church Fathers say, from shadow to image to reality. We saw that in our own time, the time of the Church, we were in the middle stage of the movement of history. The curtain of the Temple has been torn. Heaven has been opened up by the union of the man Jesus, and thus of all human existence, with the living God. But this new openness is only mediated by the signs of salvation. We need mediation. As yet we do not see the Lord ‘‘as he is’’. Now if we put the two three-part processes together—the historical and the liturgical—it becomes clear that the liturgy gives precise expression to this historical situation. It expresses the ‘‘between-ness’’ of the time of images, in which we now find ourselves. The theology of the liturgy is in a special way ‘‘symbolic theology,’’ a theology of symbols, which connects us to what is present but hidden.

In so saying, we finally discover the answer to the question with which we started. After the tearing of the Temple curtain and the opening up of the heart of God in the pierced heart of the Crucified, do we still need sacred space, sacred time, mediating symbols? Yes, we do need them, precisely so that, through the ‘‘image,’’ through the sign, we learn to see the openness of heaven. We need them to give us the capacity to know the mystery of God in the pierced heart of the Crucified. Christian liturgy is no longer replacement worship but the coming of the representative Redeemer to us, an entry into his representation that is an entry into reality itself. We do indeed participate in the heavenly liturgy, but this participation is mediated to us through earthly signs, which the Redeemer has shown to us as the place where his reality is to be found. In liturgical celebration there is a kind of turning around of exitus to reditus, of departure to return, of God’s descent to our ascent. The liturgy is the means by which earthly time is inserted into the time of Jesus Christ and into its present. It is the turning point in the process of redemption. The Shepherd takes the lost sheep onto his shoulders and carries it home.

We can't be in the time being with Jesus on our own: we need His love and His grace. In the Holy Sacrifice of Mass in Roman Rite or the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Rites "earthly time is inserted into the time of Jesus Christ and into its present". 

Blessed Advent to you all!

Sophie Scholl's Conscience and Blessed John Henry Newman

Sophie Scholl, White Rose objector to Nazi rule in Germany, and her brother Hans were guillotined on February 22, 1943. Scholl is one of the most admired women in 20th Century German history because she and her brother, with a few others at the University of Munich, tried to persuade the German people to reject that Nazi rule by publishing pamphlets and distributing them widely.

As Paul Shrimpton explains in a 2018 article in the UK's Catholic Herald, Blessed John Henry Newman's teachings on conscience inspired Sophie and The White Rise group because of Theodor Haecker's translations:

The man who brought Newman’s writings to the attention of the Munich students was the philosopher and cultural historian Theodor Haecker. Haecker had become a Catholic after translating Newman’s Grammar of Assent in 1921, and for the rest of his life Newman was his guiding star. He translated seven of Newman’s works, and on several occasions read excerpts from them at the illegal secret meetings Hans Scholl convened for his friends. Strange though it may seem, the insights of the Oxford academic were ideally suited to help these students make sense of the catastrophe they were living through. . . .

When Sophie’s boyfriend, a Luftwaffe officer called Fritz Hartnagel, was deployed to the Eastern Front in May 1942, Sophie’s parting gift was two volumes of Newman’s sermons. After witnessing the carnage in Russia, Fritz wrote to Sophie to say that reading Newman’s words in such an awful place was like tasting “drops of precious wine”.

In another letter, Fritz wrote: “We know by whom we were created, and that we stand in a relationship of moral obligation to our creator. Conscience gives us the capacity to distinguish between good and evil.” These words were taken almost verbatim from a famous sermon of Newman’s called “The Testimony of Conscience”. In it, Newman explains that conscience is an echo of the voice of God enlightening each person to moral truth in specific situations. All of us, he argues, have a duty to obey a right conscience over and above all other considerations.

At the White Rose trial, Sophie said that it was her Christian conscience that had compelled her to oppose the Nazi regime non-violently. The same was true for Hans: he, like his sister, had found in Newman and other Christian writers the resources and inspiration to make sense of the brutal and demonic world around him.

More on Haecker here. He also translated Newman's Development of Christian Doctrine, Historical Sketches, and The Dream of Gerontius! (Edith Stein, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, translated The Idea of a University.) More about Newman's influence among Catholics in 1920's Germany here.

Sophie and Hans wanted to follow Haecker, Newman, and their White Rose partner Christoph Probst into the Catholic Church right before their executions, but were persuaded not to because of how it would have affected their mother, a devout Lutheran lay preacher!

In 1990, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger explained how he had been inspired by Newman's thoughts on conscience after the Nazi regime had been destroyed:

In January 1946, when I began my study of theology in the Seminary in Freising which had finally reopened after the confusion of the war, an older student was assigned as prefect to our group, who had begun to work on a dissertation on Newman's theology of conscience, even before the beginning of the war. In all the years of his military service he had not lost sight of this theme, which he now turned to with new enthusiasm and energy.

We were soon bonded by a personal friendship, wholly centred on the great problems of philosophy and theology. Of course, Newman was always present. Alfred Läpple— the name of the abovementioned prefect — published his dissertation in 1952 with the title: Der Einzelne in der Kirche (The Individual in the Church).

For us at that time, Newman's teaching on conscience became an important foundation for theological personalism, which was drawing us all in its sway. Our image of the human being as well as our image of the Church was permeated by this point of departure.

We had experienced the claim of a totalitarian party, which understood itself as the fulfilment of history and which negated the conscience of the individual. One of its leaders had said: "I have no conscience. My conscience is Adolf Hitler". The appalling devastation of humanity that followed was before our eyes.

So it was liberating and essential for us to know that the "we" of the Church does not rest on a cancellation of conscience, but that, exactly the opposite, it can only develop from conscience.

Precisely because Newman interpreted the existence of the human being from conscience, that is, from the relationship between God and the soul, was it clear that this personalism is not individualism, and that being bound by conscience does not mean being free to make random choices — the exact opposite is the case.

I wonder if Sophie, Hans, and Christoph realized they were being executed--born into eternal life--the day after their guide to conscience John Henry Newman's birthday 142 years earlier?

Happy Easter! Happy Birthday to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger!

Tracey Rowland writes for The Catholic Herald:

Benedict XVI will celebrate his 90th birthday on Easter Sunday. Cardinal Joachim Meisner famously described him as a man who is as intelligent as 12 professors and as pious as a child making his First Communion.

If one inserts the words “Joseph Ratzinger” into the Google Scholar search engine, which records academic publications, one obtains some 24,600 hits in four seconds. The words “Benedict XVI” bring up even more results – 66,100. As a comparison, Walter Kasper scores a mere 6,930 and Hans Küng 6,270. Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac score 16,900 and 13,200 hits respectively.

The only theologian of the last century I could find who trumps the 66,100 figure is Karl Barth, who has been the subject of a massive 127,000 academic articles. The Catholic theologian who came closest to Ratzinger was Karl Rahner, weighing in at 41,500 hits.

As Bavaria’s most famous son since Ludwig II enters his 10th decade of life, it is worth considering what the impact of all these publications might be in the brave new world of 21st-century Catholicism. My thought is that the publications of Ratzinger will form a treasury to be mined by future generations trying to piece together elements of a fragmented Christian culture. . . .

The discovery of Ratzinger by future generations may well lead them on to the literary and philosophical treasures of his Polish friend Karol Wojtyła and the theology of his Swiss friend von Balthasar, his French friend de Lubac, his Italian friend Giussani and an English author called John Henry Newman. They may even find Tolkien and a writer from the Orkneys called Mackay Brown, the Norwegian Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset and an Etonian called George from the noble house of Spencer who thought there needed to be a prayer crusade for the restoration of the old faith in Britain (he is known today as Ignatius Spencer).

Through these authors, a generation tired of the banality of cheap intimacy and nominalism gone mad may rediscover the buried capital of a civilisation built on the belief that the Incarnation really did happen. They may also gradually learn to distinguish a secularised Christianity that hooked itself up to whatever zeitgeist wafted along from the real mysteries celebrated in something called the old Christian calendar.

Please read the rest (the middle!) there. One reason future generations will be able to rediscover Pope Benedict XVI's great legacy will be Rowland's book!

From Pope Benedict XVI's Easter homily in 2012:

At Easter, on the morning of the first day of the week, God said once again: “Let there be light”. The night on the Mount of Olives, the solar eclipse of Jesus’ passion and death, the night of the grave had all passed. Now it is the first day once again – creation is beginning anew. “Let there be light”, says God, “and there was light”: Jesus rises from the grave. Life is stronger than death. Good is stronger than evil. Love is stronger than hate. Truth is stronger than lies. The darkness of the previous days is driven away the moment Jesus rises from the grave and himself becomes God’s pure light. But this applies not only to him, not only to the darkness of those days. With the resurrection of Jesus, light itself is created anew. He draws all of us after him into the new light of the resurrection and he conquers all darkness. He is God’s new day, new for all of us.

But how is this to come about? How does all this affect us so that instead of remaining word it becomes a reality that draws us in? Through the sacrament of baptism and the profession of faith, the Lord has built a bridge across to us, through which the new day reaches us. The Lord says to the newly-baptized: Fiat lux – let there be light. God’s new day – the day of indestructible life, comes also to us. Christ takes you by the hand. From now on you are held by him and walk with him into the light, into real life. For this reason the early Church called baptism photismos – illumination.

Why was this? The darkness that poses a real threat to mankind, after all, is the fact that he can see and investigate tangible material things, but cannot see where the world is going or whence it comes, where our own life is going, what is good and what is evil. The darkness enshrouding God and obscuring values is the real threat to our existence and to the world in general. If God and moral values, the difference between good and evil, remain in darkness, then all other “lights”, that put such incredible technical feats within our reach, are not only progress but also dangers that put us and the world at risk. Today we can illuminate our cities so brightly that the stars of the sky are no longer visible. Is this not an image of the problems caused by our version of enlightenment? With regard to material things, our knowledge and our technical accomplishments are legion, but what reaches beyond, the things of God and the question of good, we can no longer identify. Faith, then, which reveals God’s light to us, is the true enlightenment, enabling God’s light to break into our world, opening our eyes to the true light.

Dear friends, as I conclude, I would like to add one more thought about light and illumination. On Easter night, the night of the new creation, the Church presents the mystery of light using a unique and very humble symbol: the Paschal candle. This is a light that lives from sacrifice. The candle shines inasmuch as it is burnt up. It gives light, inasmuch as it gives itself. Thus the Church presents most beautifully the paschal mystery of Christ, who gives himself and so bestows the great light. Secondly, we should remember that the light of the candle is a fire. Fire is the power that shapes the world, the force of transformation. And fire gives warmth. Here too the mystery of Christ is made newly visible. Christ, the light, is fire, flame, burning up evil and so reshaping both the world and ourselves. “Whoever is close to me is close to the fire,” as Jesus is reported by Origen to have said. And this fire is both heat and light: not a cold light, but one through which God’s warmth and goodness reach down to us.

The great hymn of the Exsultet, which the deacon sings at the beginning of the Easter liturgy, points us quite gently towards a further aspect. It reminds us that this object, the candle, has its origin in the work of bees. So the whole of creation plays its part. In the candle, creation becomes a bearer of light. But in the mind of the Fathers, the candle also in some sense contains a silent reference to the Church,. The cooperation of the living community of believers in the Church in some way resembles the activity of bees. It builds up the community of light. So the candle serves as a summons to us to become involved in the community of the Church, whose raison d’être is to let the light of Christ shine upon the world.

Let us pray to the Lord at this time that he may grant us to experience the joy of his light; let us pray that we ourselves may become bearers of his light, and that through the Church, Christ’s radiant face may enter our world (cf. LG 1). Amen.

The Silence of Holy Saturday

The Tabernacle is empty; the Altar is bare; the Sanctuary Light is out: Holy Saturday. At Blessed Sacrament, where my husband took this picture several years ago, the Adoration Chapel is closed. The pre-sanctified hosts left from Good Friday's communion services are hidden away.

Of course, Jesus reigns in Heaven today as He did yesterday, Good Friday and He will tomorrow, Easter Sunday, and every day before and after, to the ages of ages. But today we pause to mourn for the suffering and death of Our Savior.

I watched some of the EWTN Family Celebrations last weekend. During his talk Father Larry Richards said something like, "Remember when the Romans martyred the Christians in the Coliseum?" Of course I can't remember it as though I directly experienced it; none of us can. But through the Judeo-Christian way of remembering, I can remember it in a significant way. I don't just remember it as a long-ago event; I remember it as something that echoes down the ages today. That's why history fascinates me so much.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger meditated on the silence of Holy Saturday, offering these reflections on the death of God and the pause of this day:

The terrible mystery of Holy Saturday, its abyss of silence, has thus acquired a crushing reality in these days of ours. For, this is Holy Saturday: the day of God’s concealment, the day of that unprecedented paradox we express in the Creed with the words: “Descended into hell”, descended into the mystery of death. On Good Friday we still had the crucified man to look at. Holy Saturday is empty, the heavy stone of the new tomb is covering the dead man, it’s all over, the faith seems to have been definitively unmasked as fantasy. No God saved this Jesus who posed as his Son. There is no further need for concern: the wary who were somewhat hesitant, who wondered if things could have been different, were right after all. Holy Saturday: the day God was buried; is not this the day we are living now, and formidably so? Did not our century mark the start of one long Holy Saturday, the day God was absent, when even the hearts of the disciples were plunged into an icy chasm that grows wider and wider, and thus, filled with shame and anguish, they set out to go home, dark-spirited and annihilated in their desperation they head for Emmaus, without realizing that he whom they believed to be dead is in their midst? God is dead and we killed him: are we really aware that this phrase is taken almost literally from Christian tradition and that often in our viae crucis we have made something similar resound without realizing the tremendous gravity of what we said? We killed him, by enclosing him in the stale shell of routine thinking, by exiling him in a form of pity with no content of reality, lost in the gyre of devotional phrases, or of archaeological treasuries; we killed him through the ambiguity of our lives which also laid a veil of darkness over him: in fact, what else would have been able to make God more problematical in this world than the problematical nature of the faith and of the love of his faithful? 

The divine darkness of this day, of this century which is increasingly becoming one long Holy Saturday, is speaking to our conscience. It is one of our concerns. But in spite of it all, it holds something of comfort for us. The death of God in Jesus Christ is at the same time the expression of his radical solidarity with us. The most obscure mystery of the faith is at the same time the clearest sign of a hope without end. And what is more: only through the failure of Holy Friday, only through the silence of death of Holy Saturday, were the disciples able to be led to an understanding of all that Jesus truly was and all that his message truly meant. God had to die for them so that he could truly live in them. The image they had formed of God, within which they had tried to hold him down, had to be destroyed so that through the rubble of the ruined house they might see the sky, him himself who remains, always, the infinitely greater. We need the silence of God to experience again the abyss of his greatness and the chasm of our nothingness which would grow wider and wider without him. 

But all the glory and joy will come back tonight with the Easter Vigil. In the meantime, Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence!

Deo Gratias!

Blessed John Henry Newman, RIP

John Henry Cardinal Newman died on August 11, 1890. In 1990, Pope St. John Paul II wrote an official letter to the Archbishop of Birmingham, remarking on the centenary of Newman's death:

At the approach of the first Centenary of the death of John Henry Newman and in response to your kind invitation, I gladly associate myself with the celebrations that mark this event in England and indeed in many countries throughout the world. The memory of the great Cardinal’s noble life and his copious writings seem to touch the minds and hearts of many people today with a freshness and relevance that has scarcely faded with the passing of a century.

The Centenary year coincides with the beginning of a period of profound change in world events. This period has begun with new prospects for genuine freedom and signs of a renewed awareness of the need to build life, both individual and social, on the solid foundation of unfailing respect for the human person and his inalienable God-given dignity. To all searching minds in this present historical context, Newman’s voice speaks with a timely message.

Newman’s long life shows him to have been an ardent disciple of truth. The unfolding of his career confirms the single-heartedness of his aims as expressed in the following words which he made his own: "My desire hath been to have Truth for my chiefest friend, and no enemy but error" (J. H. Newman The Via Media, London 1911, vol. 1, pp. XII-XIII). In periods of trial and suffering he persevered with confidence, knowing that time was on the side of truth.

Newman’s quest for the truth led him to search for a voice that would speak to him the authority of the living Christ. His example holds a lasting appeal for all sincere scholars and disciples of truth. He urges them to keep asking the deeper, more basic questions about the meaning of life and of all human history; not to be content with a partial response to the great mystery that is man himself; to have the intellectual honesty and moral courage to accept the light of truth, no matter what personal sacrifice it may involve. Above all, Newman is a magnificent guide for all those who perceive that the key, the focal point and the goal of all human history is to be found in Christ (Cfr. Gaudium et Spes, 10) and in union with him in that community of faith, hope and charity, which is his holy Church, through which he communicates truth and grace to all (Cfr. Lumen Gentium, 8).

That same year, then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger made a presentation in Rome commenting on Newman's influence in his life and especially on Newman's presentation of conscience and authority:

Newman had become a convert as a man of conscience; it was his conscience that led him out of the old ties and securities into the world of Catholicism, which was difficult and strange for him. But this way of conscience is everything except a way of self-sufficient subjectivity: it is a way of obedience to objective truth.

The second step in Newman's lifelong journey of conversion was overcoming the subjective evangelical position in favour of an understanding of Christendom based on the objectivity of dogma. In this connection I find a formulation from one of his early sermons to be especially significant today:

"True Christendom is shown... in obedience and not through a state of consciousness. Thus, the whole duty and work of a Christian is made up of these two parts, Faith and Obedience; "looking unto Jesus' (Heb 2: 9)... and acting according to His will.... I conceive that we are in danger, in this day, of insisting on neither of these as we ought; regarding all true and careful consideration of the Object of faith as barren orthodoxy, technical subtlety... and... making the test of our being religious to consist in our having what is called a spiritual state of heart...".

In this context some sentences from The Arians of the Fourth Century, which may sound rather astonishing at first, seem important to me: "...to detect and to approve the principle on which... peace is grounded in Scripture; to submit to the dictation of truth, as such, as a primary authority in matters of political and private conduct; to understand... zeal to be prior in the succession of Christian graces to benevolence".

Newman had been in failing health since the end of 1889; he was nearly blind (having memorized two votive Masses so he could offer Mass privately without reading from the Roman Missal) and had indeed said Mass the last time on Christmas day that year. Unable to read the Breviary, he prayed the Rosary. 

Two days before Newman died his niece Grace Longford, the only child of his estranged sister Harriett visited him. Newman had not seen her since she was three years old. 

Prayer for Canonization: 

ETERNAL Father, You led JOHN HENRY NEWMAN to follow the kindly light of Truth, and he obediently responded to your heavenly calls at any cost. As writer, preacher, counsellor and educator, as pastor, Oratorian, and servant of the poor he laboured to build up your Kingdom. 

Grant that through your Vicar on Earth we may hear the words, 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter into the company of the canonized saints.' 

May you manifest your Servant's power of intercession by even extraordinary answers to the prayers of the faithful throughout the world. We pray particularly for our intentions in his name and in the name of Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.

Note that his feast, celebrated in England and Wales, is on October 9, the date of his acceptance into the Catholic Church in 1845, instead of being on the date of his death--of his entrance into eternal life. Since August 11 was already the feast day of St. Clare of Assisi, this alternate date was chosen when Pope Benedict XVI beatified Newman in 2010--perhaps looking forward to the day when he is proclaimed a saint and honored on the Roman Calendar throughout the world!

Prayer for Mary Ward's Beatification

O heavenly Father, Almighty God, I offer up to Thee this day all the holy Masses said throughout the whole Catholic world, to obtain the grace that the Servant of God, Mary Ward, may be publicly acknowledged worthy of Beatification. O Jesus, deign soon to glorify Thy humble servant. Amen.

Venerable Mary Ward, foundress and recusant Catholic, died on January 30, 1645, near York during the English Civil War. Her congregation posts this information about the cycle of paintings that depict her life and journeys:

There are fifty paintings, each 142 x 105 cm, known as the ‘Painted Life of Mary Ward’ that show her spiritual journey. They are displayed in the ‘Mary Ward Hall’ in Augsburg in Germany. Very little information has come down to us as to the origins of the paintings. It is most probable that they were painted by various artists somewhere between Flanders and the Tyrol in the second half of the seventeenth century. There is written evidence that places them in Munich between 1680 and 1717, but how they came to Augsburg is unknown.

The initiative to commission the paintings must have come from Mary Ward’s first companions as the paintings tell the story of her life in considerable detail. Writing her life would have been risky as Mary Ward’s Institute had been condemned by the Church. Commissioning a series of paintings that told the story diminished the risk of ecclesiastical censure – though not entirely. At various times the local bishop ordered their removal from the walls of the Augsburg Convent. During the Second World War the paintings were removed and hidden, and therefore survived the destruction of the Augsburg convent.

The earlier paintings are better artistically than the later ones, and tell the story of Mary Ward’s early life, her vocation and the founding of her institute. Many of the later ones are artistically not remarkable but they contain a series of deep spiritual experiences that are not known from the written sources.

The inscriptions on the paintings are written in German and were most likely added at the end of the seventeenth century after the completion of the pictures.

Then Cardinal Ratzinger referred to one of these paintings in his homily for a Mass celebrating the 400th anniversary of Mary Ward's birth on January 23:

On the page of the booklet for this Mass we see a very lovely picture of the first stage of Mary Ward’s life. The little child has left her bed and taken the first steps towards the open space of life. From her mouth has come her first word, the name of Jesus. One gets the impression that little Mary is following the sound of that word, walking along the trail of that name. Her first steps coincided with her first word. The name Jesus became the path of her life. In fact the many journeys in the life of Mary Ward were made always in the ambit of that name, all her life was a response to the call expressed in the name of Jesus.

Pope Francis on Benson's "The Lord of the World"

Pope Francis talked about more than rabbits on his flight back from the Philippines. He mentioned Robert Hugh Benson's The Lord of the World in the context of discussing "ideological colonization" when first world countries offer funds to third world countries with strings attached:

There is a book, excuse me but I'll make a commercial, there is a book that maybe is a bit heavy at the beginning because it was written in 1903 in London. It is a book that at that time, the writer had seen this drama of ideological colonization and wrote in that book. It is called "The Lord of the Earth," or "The Lord of the World." One of those. The author is Benson, written in 1903. I advise you to read it. Reading it, you'll understand well what I mean by ideological colonization.

What Pope Francis is referring to is really the claims of secularization to create a perfect society imposed on the world. Pope Francis has referred to Benson's futuristic novel before, as Frances Philips of The Catholic Herald noted in 2014. She then cites Monsignor Robert Barron's analysis on Benson's novel:

Barron writes that it is the story “of the cataclysmic struggle between a radically secularist society and the one credible alternative to it, namely the Catholic Church.” Some people bridle at this claim, yet it is significant that innumerable converts cite it as the single most important reason for their conversion to the Church.

Barron points out that it is impressive that Benson “saw as clearly as he did the dangerous potential of the secularist ideology. By this I mean the view that this world, perfected and rendered convenient by technology, would ultimately satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart.” Benson’s bleak vision shows the “anti-Christ” – a charismatic personage called Julian Felsenburgh – winning all his battles against the Church with deadly efficiency, except for the final confrontation which takes place, not surprisingly, at Megiddo, “sometimes called Armageddon.”

Then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger also urged his listeners at a speech in 1992 to read The Lord of the World in response to then President George H.W. Bush's talk of a "New World Order", saying that Benson's book depicted "a similar unified civilization and its power to destroy the spirit. The anti-Christ is represented as the great carrier of peace in a similar new world order.".

Father John McCloskey offers an introduction to the book and its author here. Although there are many reprints available, you can also read it online here.

Next Week at Wichita's Spiritual Life Center

Just a reminder that I'll be presenting the first of two topics on Blessed John Henry Newman next Tuesday evening at the Spiritual Life Center in Wichita, Kansas. On Tuesday, October 7, from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m., I'll be discussing "Newman and Conversion".

While preparing for these classes--the second topic is Conscience--I found the perfect quotation from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (before he became Pope Benedict XVI) that demonstrates the connection between the two topics (quoted on the flyer):

Newman had become a convert as a man of conscience; it was his conscience that led him out of the old ties and securities into the world of Catholicism, which was difficult and strange for him. But this way of conscience is everything except a way of self-sufficient subjectivity: it is a way of obedience to objective truth.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger made this crucial comment in a presentation at a symposium sponsored by the International Centre of Newman Friends in the centenary year of Newman's death (1890-1990). He noted that Newman's teaching on conscience was so crucial to him after the Second World War and the fall of Hitler and the Nazi party: 

We had experienced the claim of a totalitarian party, which understood itself as the fulfilment of history and which negated the conscience of the individual. One of its leaders had said: "I have no conscience. My conscience is Adolf Hitler". The appalling devastation of humanity that followed was before our eyes.

The next year, in February 1991, Cardinal Ratzinger spoke to the United States' Catholic Bishops in Dallas, Texas about conscience and authority. Then he pointed out the crucial link between conscience and authority in Newman's thought: the truth.

First, Ratzinger comments--much as Newman did in his own day--on our modern tendency to create opposition between conscience and authority:

For him, conscience stands on the side of subjectivity and is the expression of the freedom of the subject. Authority, on the other hand, appears to him as the constraint on, threat to and even the negation of, freedom. So then we must go deeper to recover a vision in which this kind of opposition does not obtain.

Then Ratzinger highlights Newman's search for truth:

For Newman, the middle term which establishes the connection between authority and subjectivity is truth. I do not hesitate to say that truth is the central thought of Newman's intellectual grappling. Conscience is central for him because truth stands in the middle. To put it differently, the centrality of the concept conscience for Newman, is linked to the prior centrality of the concept truth and can only be understood from this vantage point. 

That's why when Charles Kingsley attacked Newman with the claim that Newman had said that truth did not matter to Catholic priests, Newman had to respond so seriously and comprehensively to this falsehood. For someone to whom truth meant everything to be accused of condoning dishonestly was utterly unacceptable. When Kingsley would not retract his statement, Newman answered with his Apologia pro Vita Sua which truly made Kingsley's comment so patently absurd that Newman's spiritual autobiography now stands on its own, without the catalyst.

More about the series and information about registration at the Spiritual Life Center is here.