Looking Forward to the Weekend

This year's Midwest Catholic Family Conference presents some great speakers: Scott Hahn, Steve Ray, Monica Miller, Rachel Balducci, Tim Staples (who comes every year), Reverend Dennis McManus, and Raymond Arroyo. Mr. Arroyo will make two presentations--one on Saturday about fiction as a means of evangelization and another on Sunday about Mother Mary Angelica, the foundress of EWTN and two religious orders.

Inspired by Raymond Arroyo's Facebook announcement of a good deal on the eBook, I purchased the final installment of his biography his former boss: Mother Angelica: Her Grand Silence: The Last Years and Living Legacy. (Available for a limited time only at the special price.)

As he notes, EWTN fades to the background as Mother Angelica resigns as CEO of her broadcast empire and then after she suffers a stroke that leaves her speechless. She also has to retire as the Abbess of her community after a trip to Japan during which she is severely injured and ends up bedridden. There is a struggle for leadership and control within her community, the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration, between two sisters. Eventually, both of them leave the community, other sisters left Hanceville, Alabama to found new houses of Poor Clares, the number of postulants decreases, and the community merges with another house of Poor Clares from Charlotte, North Carolina, whose Abbess becomes the leader of the combined house in Hanceville.

Some reviewers (as you may see on Amazon.com) don't like Arroyo airing this "dirty laundry". They think it reflects poorly on Mother Angelica. Canonized saints like St. Alphonsus Liquouri and St. Francis of Assisi have endured struggles in their community, maintaining their vision, and even their influence in the orders they've founded. When her cause for canonization opens in a few years, her faithfulness and suffering will be the foundation of the declaration that she is a Servant of God.

In the course of this book, Arroyo details Mother Angelica's physical sufferings and the dutiful care her sisters give her inside the cloistered convent. He also provides details of reports of spiritual manifestations, visions, and attacks of the devil. Arroyo includes excerpts from the many letters received attesting to her influence on the lives of viewers and listeners to EWTN, where her old series are still rerun. He dedicates a chapter to how he worked for Mother Angelica and how she influenced him. The last chapter describes her very last days of agony during the Holy Week of 2016. The book exhibits great transparency and honesty about her love of God, her faithfulness to His inspirations, and her personality.

I have to admit that her story and her written works have appealed to me much more than her broadcast appearances, her old shows that EWTN airs on television and radio. Arroyo explains her importance for Catholics in the United States and around the world faithfully and loyally.

St. Thomas Aquinas on Mercy and Justice

Reverend Thomas Petri, OP, Vice President and Academic Dean and Instructor of Moral Theology and Pastoral Studies at The Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC, spoke at the Midwest Catholic Family Conference here in Wichita, Kansas this weekend. I attended his session titled “St. Thomas Aquinas: Mercy Flows from Being Loved” on Saturday morning.

Hearing the devout theology of St. Thomas Aquinas on any religious subject is always a great pleasure and joy. Father Petri provided the requisite clarity and application throughout this presentation. With St. Thomas Aquinas as our guide, we were reminded of how great and unlike us God is and yet how much He loves us, in spite of the fact that He does not need us or any of our response at all, since He is perfection. He does not owe us either justice or mercy, but He gives them to us--and they must be present and balanced together--simply because He created us, He loves us, and He wants us to be with Him forever. Father Petri demonstrated that this Thomistic precision in thinking about God and our relationship to Him is not esoteric or theoretical; it applies to our life and our relationship with God and with our neighbor.

This article from The Catholic World Report by Professor Thomas Heinrich Stark covers some of same material Father Petri explained:

Thomas adopts Augustine's definition of mercy as compassion in declaring, “Mercy is the compassion of our heart when considering the misery of another person”.

However, mercy is not confined to a mere sense or feeling of compassion. Rather someone is only merciful if he actively strives to avert the misery of others that touches his heart, in the same way that he tries to evert a misery that oppresses him himself. Because it is the distinctive feature of the affective compassion of mercy, that it—as Thomas expresses it—“moves us to do what we can do to help the other.” Only if the affective aspect of compassion is complemented by the effective aspect producing a truly helpful assistance can mercy manifest itself as that act of charity that recognizes the other—again, as Thomas puts it—as “another self”. Therefore only if the feeling of compassion is ordered according to the rules of reason, does it become the virtue of mercy. . . .

Now a specific feature of the ethics of St. Thomas is that it puts compassion and justice into the closest connection possible to each other. “Justice without mercy is cruel”, says Thomas. But, “Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution"—and, one might add, therefore cruel as well. This close connection between justice and mercy is not sufficiently obvious in human life. The reason for this is not merely the fact that people are often merciless. Rather, it is much more due to the finite character of human existence, which makes all the virtues in the life of the soul appear to be separated from each other and their exercise separate as well. This of course also applies to the virtues of justice and charity, the juxtaposition of which may highlight this fact of separation with particular clarity, so that justice and mercy may sometimes appear to us as as downright opposing intentions.

The situation is different with God. “The work of divine justice always presupposes the work of mercy and it founded in it,” says Thomas. So if God is merciful, then He is not in opposition to justice. That is because in God, unlike in man, justice and mercy are not separated from one another according to their being, although due to our human means of knowing them we must continue to distinguish them by name, and thus speak of them with distinct terms. In short, we are not able to grasp the nature of God in its entirety and in its unity but always only from a certain, finite perspective. So we recognize God as love, as omnipotent, as omniscient, as merciful, and so forth, without being able adequately to imagine that all these attributions form an inseparable unity, because they are identical with each according to their being. That means we have a knowledge of God that overstrains our imagination.

Read the rest there. In the course of his presentation, Father Petri observed that we have to remember that the only way that we receive any grace is through grace; we cannot earn it by pious practices or other means. He brought up terms coined by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI: the Pelagianism of the pious and the Pelagianism of the bourgeois. Tracey Rowland explains these terms:

[Pelagianism is the heresy named for Pelagius, a Roman monk (not an ordained priest) who might have been born in England. He believed that we could save ourselves; that Original Sin had not weakened us so that we need a Savior!]

First: Pelagianism of the bourgeois:

The use of the word "bourgeois" in the first label has nothing to do with being a member of the middle class - at least, not necessarily. Rather, the bourgeois mentality is about fitting in with contemporary social norms and being practical and efficient in one's use of resources. The bourgeois temperament is calculating, pragmatic, focused on efficiency and predictable outcomes. It discourages moral heroism as unreasonable and gives priority to the goods of efficacy over the goods of excellence. . . .

Transferred to the spiritual plane, the problem Pope Benedict identifies with the bourgeois Pelagian is the attitude that God doesn't really expect people to be saints. Benedict diagnoses this mentality as evidence of the spiritual disease of acedia - a kind of anxious vertigo that overcomes people when they are presented with the idea that they have been made in the image of God to grow into the likeness of Christ.

Then: Pelagianism of the pious:

The alternative spiritual pathology is that of the pious Pelagian. This type of person seeks a relationship with God that is modelled on contemporary professional practices - in particular the practice of enhancing one's curriculum vitae. The pious Pelagian performs certain works and says certain prayers and expects to get a return on his spiritual investment. While the bourgeois Pelagian is guilty of the sin of despair, regarding sanctity as an impossible pursuit, the pious Pelagian is guilty of the sin of presumption, assuming that he can have a contractual relationship with God. The bourgeois Pelagian is particularly lacking in the theological virtue of hope, the pious Pelagian is quite anaemic in relation to the theological virtue of love. Both have a warped understanding of faith.

I do agree that, as Father Petri noted, we in the USA, with our can-do, individualistic, self-confident attitude, can easily fall prey to the Pelagianism of the pious-- thinking that we can earn our way to Heaven; God has give us our due. We can be too confident in our own power and lack humility. Citing St. Thomas Aquinas, he said that we have to acknowledge our failures and sins and develop the virtue of humility.

This seems an appropriate reflection on the feast of St. Dominic, the founder of the Dominican Order, which is celebrating its 800th anniversary this year. 

St. Dominic, pray for us!

St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us!

All the Dominican saints and blesseds, pray for us!

The Wilton Diptych and "Popular Medieval Piety"

The Catholic Herald (UK) features an introduction to the week ahead in the UK version of the Magnificat monthly prayer magazine. Leonie Caldecott introduces the Wilton Diptych in this week's column:

This week I have been looking at the Wilton Diptych with our summer school students. It is remarkable that such a powerful pre-Reformation image should have survived, with its connotations of England as Our Lady’s Dowry. But the mysterious painting is much more than a symbolic exercise. The portrayal of the mother of Christ is one of the most beautiful and tender I have ever seen: her face has a marvellous spiritual maternity about it.

Apart from her face, the eye is also drawn inexorably toward her left hand, painted disproportionately larger than the rest of her body. This hand, like a human monstrance, holds out the Christ child’s foot for us to venerate.

According to England's National Gallery of Art:

The 'Wilton Diptych' was painted as a portable altarpiece for the private devotion of King Richard II, who ruled England from 1377 to 1399. The diptych is thought to have been made in the last five years of Richard's reign, although its artist remains unknown. It is called The Wilton Diptych because it came from Wilton House in Wiltshire, the seat of the Earls of Pembroke.

A diptych is a painting, carving or piece of metalwork on two panels, usually hinged like a book. The panels of the Wilton Diptych are made of North European oak, but have been transformed by immaculate painting and gilding, into a heavenly vision. On the inside, Richard II is presented by three saints to the Virgin and Child and a company of eleven angels. Nearest to Richard is his patron saint John the Baptist. Behind are Saint Edward the Confessor and Saint Edmund, earlier English kings who came to be venerated as saints.

The outside bears Richard's arms and his personal emblem of a white hart chained with a crown around its neck.

In 1993 the National Gallery held a special exhibition on the Diptych, resulting in a book and noted in this article from The Independent:

The Wilton Diptych has been a mystery for centuries. The painting's blend of naturalism and otherworldliness is both subtle and slightly puzzling: its most famous figures, those faintly insouciant long-necked angels with the most famous angels' wings in art, are a strange and compelling hybrid of real people and real birds, supernatural beings formed from a blend of observation and imagination. But they are just one part of an intricate symbolic scheme that has never been satisfactorily deciphered.

What, exactly, is the nature of the encounter which the picture depicts? What is the relationship between the kneeling King Richard II, flanked by three saints in a wild and wooded landscape, and the Madonna and Child in a paradise garden crowded with angels? Some momentous event appears to be taking place: that much is clear from the busy gesticulation of four of the angels, who are pointing at the figure of Richard; and also from the strange, open-handed gesture of the king, who appears to be waiting for some sign (approval? benediction?) from the Virgin and Child. Something is happening, some kind of transaction that bridges the two abutting hinged panels, worldly and heavenly, of which the diptych is made - but just what that might be has escaped us, separated as we are from the picture by a distance of six centuries.

The National Gallery exhibition (and its superb catalogue) may, however, mark a watershed in the history of the painting's interpretation. Recent cleaning of the picture has revealed a tiny detail, no more than a couple of centimetres across and previously obscured by dirt. The stave of the red and white banner held by the angel on the extreme left of the right-hand panel is crowned by a minute orb, previously thought to be blank. Restoration has revealed a tiny picture within the circumference of this orb: the image of a green island with trees on its horizon and a turreted white castle at its centre, floating in a dark sea which - according to the National Gallery's team of restorers - was originally painted silver but is now permanently tarnished.

This image, discovered in the greatest surviving painting of Richard II, inevitably calls to mind lines in the greatest piece of literature about him: John of Gaunt's description of England, in Shakespeare's Richard II, as 'this little world, / This precious stone set in a silver sea'. This suggests that Shakespeare may well have known the Wilton Diptych, or at least an image of an island very like the one that has been found in the picture. It may also provide the key to unlock the meaning of the painting.

The article by Andrew Graham-Dixon goes on to discuss the connection between the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and sums up the different, pre-Reformation piety it depicts:

This image of royal piety contains within it an entire world of popular medieval piety that has long sunk from view in this country, submerged by the great tide of the English Protestant Reformation: a world where people believed, fervently, in the power of prayer to incite divine intercession in the affairs of men; a world where not only kings but common people would plead with images of saints or of the Virgin to deliver them from their troubles.

Of course, what the author does not realize is that such a world still does exist: I was part of it this past weekend on Saturday, when a large group of Catholics processed behind the Holy Eucharist around the Century II Exhibition complex on a hot, steamy summer evening and knelt on concrete and grass to adore and worship Jesus Christ present on the Altar, singing hymns and walking on rose petals. It may be a small world, but we still believe, "fervently, in the power of prayer to incite divine intercession in the affairs of men . . ." We demonstrated that belief on the sidewalks of Wichita, Kansas at the Midwest Catholic Family Conference, chanting ancient hymns and modern psalms, with banners and incense, sweat and tears.

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)

The Annual Midwest Catholic Family Conference and Temptation

The temptation I write of, naturally, is books. The annual Midwest Catholic Family Conference always brings excellent speakers and presenters--but also, vendors with books, books, and more books--and many religious articles. (Colleges and universities come too, inviting parents and high school students to consider their higher education options, and offering promotional SWAG.) Alas, the St. John Fisher Bookstore no longer exists, but when it was among the vendors, it was hard to stay away: all the Neumann Press books (also, sadly defunct), all the Roman Catholic Books offerings, most of the Ignatius Press books, and most of the Scepter Publishers and Sophia Institute materials too.

I went hoping to find two books, both from the latter two publishers: Scepter's edition of St. Thomas More's Dialogue of Comfort and Tribulation, and Sophia's new edition of Blessed John Henry Newman's meditations, with an introduction by Bishop James T. Conley, formerly of the Wichita Diocese. I found the Newman, but the proprietor of the store that should have had the More told me he left all his More books in Cincinnati! But then I found this publisher, and this intriguing book:

The work which produced this volume began when the author, only twenty years old at the time, found himself standing in the Camera della Segnatura before Raphael’s Disputa del Sacramento Among the adoring Church—popes, monks, scholars and pastors—one head stood out from all the rest, crowned not in miter or tiara, but with laurels. Why should the painter bestow such august honor on the poet exile?

This book is an attempt to answer that question. Unlike many who comment upon the poet’s work, Ozanam stresses the fidelity of Dante to the Catholic tradition and his filial devotion to the Church. Far from the revolutionary anti-Papal anarchis found in the passages of most commentaries, the portrait which Ozanam, following Raphael’s lead, paints is the visage of aman who has set his mind on higher things and his hands on the lower:

Here is a poet who appeared in a tumultuous age, who lived as if enveloped in storms. Yet, behind the moving shadows of life, he divined immutable realities. Led by reason and by faith, he outstrips time, penetrates into the invisible world, there takes possession and establishes himself as if in his native land—he who has no longer a country here below. From that lofty station, when his eyes fall upon human things, he is able to see at once the beginning and the end; consequently, he measures and judges them.

Frédéric Ozanam (1813–1853) was professor of History and Literature at the Sorbonne, writing extensively on the historical contributions of Christianity to society and culture. In 1833, he founded the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1997.

And, yes, I succumbed to the temptation! I also met Lisa Hendey and Dan Egan, both fellow Son Rise Morning Show regulars, and Patrick Coffin from Catholic Answers Live, and many friends!