Newman Memories on the Ides of November

“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me."--from Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.

November is a month for memories: we remember the faithfully departed; we remember the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month at the end of the war that was to end all wars; we remember all the blessings we have received and give thanks for them. My brother and sister and I remember our father's birthday on November 6 and our parents' wedding anniversary on November 25--they are both dead, but those events, not just the celebration of their memory are always with us. Without them, we are not. They are our life. And I do mean "our life" as well as our lives--they are our life as a family.

So I've been preparing for my presentations next week at the Spiritual Life Center for a Newman Retreat Friday, November 15 and Saturday, November 16:

Newman’s writings have long been esteemed by scholars. Now, with his canonization, his influence is being lifted up for all to see; not just for theologians, but for the whole Church. Among many other things, Newman is famous for his explanations of the way doctrine develops, the way God saves us through his Church, and the way people come to know and accept truth. Retreatants will walk through his teachings under the direction of Stephanie Mann and Fr. Tom Hoisington, both of the Wichita Diocese. Stephanie Mann will give two presentations: one focusing on the impact Newman has had in our diocese, and the other on the importance of Newman for the laity in light of his being raised to the altars. Fr. Hoisington will present on Newman’s personalism- his explanation of how an individual subject makes response to objective truth in a way that is both personal and universal- an essential area of Newman’s thought that is often misunderstood and underappreciated. New this retreat, participants will enjoy a Friday evening social time with music, appetizers and drinks as they enjoy each other’s company and build a Catholic Culture. Musician Jack Korbel will provide entertainment. For those who cannot attend the entire retreat, please consider joining us for Friday evening's celebrations for this new Saint!

The Friday evening presentation is made up of memories of all the different programs I've attended since 1979. And for the month of November, especially while we are remembering all the faithful departed, I'm using the word "late" often in my presentation.

The late Bishop David Maloney

The late Father Joseph Gorentz

The late Father Richard Stuchlik

The late Father Charles Taylor

The late H. Lyman Stebbins

The late James Mesa

The late Ralph McInerny

etc,

etc,

etc.

The schedule for Friday night, November 15, includes my presentation "focusing on the impact Newman has had in our diocese" and then we'll have a social hour with a musical performance by Jack Korbel!

On Saturday, November 16, we'll begin the day with Morning Prayer at 9:00 a.m.; then I'll make a presentation on St. John Henry Newman and The Laity: Notes for 21st Century Catholic Faithful; Mass follows, then lunch, and Father Hoisington will then present on Newman's Personalism.

Registration is open at the Spiritual Life Center through November 14!

Summer School at the SLC

Yes, I'm going to Summer School! I'm attending, with three other GKC group friends and several other friends and acquaintances, the eight week Christendom Academy book discussion course at the Spiritual Life Center. We meet from 9 a.m. to Noon with lunch following. Mass is offered at 8:15 a.m., so yesterday I was able to complete my interview on the Son Rise Morning Show, leave home by 7:30 and arrive at the Center a little before 8:00 to prepare for celebrating the Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist!

We discussed Sophocles's Antigone today; last week, The Epic of Gilgamesh; next week, the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. One of the themes we discussed today was the Greek idea of the polis, referencing H.D.F. Kitto's classic, The Greeks!

The rest of the readings:

Ecclesiastes
The Epistle of St. James
Life of St. Anthony (St. Athanasius)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Hamlet

The purpose of the Christendom Academy:

What has the cultural heritage of Christendom taught us about what it means to be a human person? What does it means to be happy? What is the meaning of suffering? What are our duties and responsibilities, and why do we have them? What does this all have to do with God, sin and judgment, and the afterlife?

Drawing upon pre-Christian tradition (what Joseph Pieper and others have referred to as ‘original revelation’), the Catholic Church has continued throughout its history to provide answers to these questions, and provided the framework for man to understand himself and the world around him. This program will highlight the unique contributions Western Civilization has made to our understanding of philosophy, theology, spirituality, morality, and citizenship. Students will be invited to learn new ways to answer perennial questions like who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? What contribution am I called to make for my own salvation, for the good of my family, and the good of the world?

Course content will be drawn from a handful of writings whose contents are essential to the development of Christian culture, as we delve deeply into the wellsprings of the Catholic tradition that has shaped the history of the world, and provided the lens through which every contemporary man examines himself.

More about the program, including biographies of the three tutors, here.

A Report on the Sunday Sessions of the Catholic Culture Conference

The Adult Education program of the Spiritual Life Center here in Wichita, Kansas recently presented the Fourth Annual Catholic Culture Conference. Joseph Pearce and Dale Ahlquist made presentations on Friday and Saturday and Brad (Bradley) Birzer from Hillsdale College spoke on Sunday. He was born and raised in Kansas and had attended a family wedding in Kansas City on Saturday before driving to Wichita on Sunday. He was born in Great Bend and grew up in Hutchinson--his mother and other family members met him during his presentations so there was a family reunion going on too.

He was a great presenter; his enthusiasm and knowledge of his subject was so evident. I enjoyed his talk on Russell Kirk because I had not read much about him. Here's a Catholic World Report introduction to Kirk that Professor Birzer wrote:

By almost any 21st-century American or western standard, Russell Amos Augustine Kirk (1918-1994) possessed a quirky, eccentric, and original personality. He was—to put it as simply as possible—genius. Descriptors like charitable, tolerant, loyal, intense, playful, mischievous, creative, imaginative, shy, romantic, brilliant, humble, eccentric, traditional, and innovative flow from the lips and pens of most of those who knew him personally. As with every person, of course, Kirk expressed an immense variety of emotions and thoughts during his life. No man or woman can be summed up in a sentence, let alone in a book or even in a series of books. Almost certainly, the person himself fails to apprehend all of his majesty and his failings. Of all appreciations of and attacks on Kirk, Dartmouth professor of English literature Jeffrey Hart says it best. “Russell Kirk was a fantastic individualist—in his own way, of course.”

Yet, of all major converts to Roman Catholicism in the 20th century, Kirk remains one of the least known. There were so many notable converts, as biographers such as Joseph Pearce have explored, that one middle-aged American’s conversion has understandably been overlooked. After all, Kirk is remembered mostly for his 1953 magnum opus, The Conservative Mind, and as the founder of intellectual and cultural conservatism. On the surface, Roman Catholicism is not inherently conservative, at least politically, and most Catholics would probably be more comfortable reading a Flannery O’Connor short story than a speech Kirk ghostwrote for Senator Barry Goldwater.

Still, it is unfortunate that Catholics have not paid more attention to Kirk’s story. His conversion to the Church not only provided a major asset to the faith but also reveals much about the nature of tradition, the continuity of the pagan and the Catholic, the fragility of civilization, and the sanctity of charity.

I bought Birzer's biography of Russell Kirk--and he bought a copy of my book. Very kind of him: we autographed each other's books.

He also spoke on J.R.R. Tolkien, emphasizing how much World War I influenced the creation of Tolkien's Catholic mythology of Middle Earth. This essay, from the Imaginative Conservative (which Birzer co-founded) gives you an inkling of what Birzer discussed:

One finds the most moving prose of The Lord of the Rings, somewhat surprisingly, in chapter two of Book Four (that is, the second chapter dealing with Frodo and Sam in The Two Towers), “The Passage of the Marshes.” In it, Tolkien offers a vast and broad claustrophobic landscape across which Frodo, Sam, and Gollum must travel.

As is typical with Tolkien, he allowed his experiences to influence and inform his writing, but he refused to let them dominate it. In a 1960 letter, he admitted that the approach came from his reading of William Morris as well as his own experiences in World War I.
"The Lord of the Rings was actually begun, as a separate thing, about 1937, and had reached the inn at Bree, before the shadow of the second war. Personally, I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains." [Letter 226 in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien].

That Tolkien mentions his experience in World War I at all is startling, as he rarely did this, and certainly not until the end of his life. In an interview eight years later, Tolkien confirmed the influence of his experience in the trenches on his writing. “I remember miles and miles of seething, tortured earth, perhaps best described in the chapters about the approaches to Mordor. It was a searing experience.” [Interview by Keith Brace, “In the Footsteps of Hobbits,” Birmingham Post (March 25, 1968)]

In almost every way, Tolkien’s “The Passage of the Marshes” presents a deeply frightening and suffocating experience for the reader, as the three figures—the two Hobbits and the decrepit Gollum, once a Hobbit himself—move across a landscape that has become, and continues to become through the chapter, devoid of grace. Unlike the area of the Old Forest (in The Fellowship of the Ring) that had once been the sight of a terrific battle in the North, the Dead Marshes, and the No-man’s land, just to the northwest of Mordor, has no guardian spirit or caretaker such as a Goldberry or Tom Bombadil. In the Old Forest, the evil of the angry trees and undead wights cannot prevail against the natural goodness of Tom and Goldberry, masters of the land. No such masters ever took hold of the Dead Marshes. Instead, there still lingers the rotting souls of elves, orcs, and men, all the remains of the Last Alliance against Sauron, a pyrrhic victory won more than 3,000 years earlier.

Birzer concludes:

If there is a passage in all of English literature that better describes the horrors of the twentieth-century—its world wars, its gulags, its holocaust camps—I have yet to encounter it.

In a genius moment of anti-Romantic Romanticism, “The Passage of the Marshes” echoes the structure of a medieval church—from the “lights” of the purgatorial recesses to the buttresses of the decayed walls to the obscene graveyard. This is a church unprotected, unguarded, unclean. As Frodo and Sam journey through it, even memory itself is elusive and unattainable.

As ghosts, Frodo and Sam continue through this nightmare realm, itself devoid of grace, armed only with the Elvish lembas, what would be translated into English as “the bread of life.”

If there is a story in the English language that better grasps the meaning of life and perseverance in this world of sorrows, I have yet to encounter it.

I hope that Professor Birzer returns to Wichita soon to talk Christopher Dawson or Charles Carroll of Carrollton, about whom he has also written.

Hail, Holy Queen Enthroned Above

In 1954, just shy of four years since he had declared the Dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Pope Pius XII proclaimed the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary. At my talk tonight at the Spiritual Life Center discussing Tradition in the Apologia series, I'm going to highlight his proclamation of Mary's Queenship, Ad Caeli Reginam to demonstrate how Pope Pius XII appealed to the Tradition of the Church through the interpretation of certain Scriptural passages, the teaching of the Fathers, the liturgy and devotion, and even art. I'll include some of those artistic representations, including Raphael's painting, which depicts both the Dormition/Assumption and the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary:

Like Raphael's painting of the Transfiguration of Jesus, the painting depicts two scenes, one at the top, one at the bottom--Jesus crowns Mary in the top half while the Apostles look up from her tomb, which is filled with flowers. Notice that they're not looking around them, but up!

My presentation is tonight from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m.; $10.00 at the door!

Newman: Docentium at the Spiritual Life Center

Our diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Advance, features a story (page 11) about my presentation on Thursday, August 18 as part of the Spiritual Life Center's monthly Docentium series. The title is: "Blessed John Henry Newman: Faith, Family, and Friends":

When Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI beatified John Henry Newman in September 2010, local author Stephanie A. Mann says, “Something changed about the way Catholics should view this great nineteenth century writer and intellectual. Blessed John Henry Newman is an intercessor and a heavenly patron now, not just an academic interest and research project.”

In the decades after his death in the late nineteenth, his Cause for Canonization moved slowly, Mann notes, but one reason some Catholics believed Newman should be canonized was his influence on others to become Catholic , both in his lifetime and for more than a century after his death. “Some even thought those conversions should be considered the miracles needed for his canonization,” Mann commented.

While Newman has had tremendous influence among converts, his own family rejected Catholicism entirely, and his brothers might even be said to have rejected orthodox, Trinitarian Christianity, in spite of his efforts. His equals in the Oxford Movement, E.B. Pusey and John Keble, didn’t follow his example but remained Anglicans.

Why did someone so persuasive fail within his own close family and friends? What does Newman’s failure mean for those of us whose family and friends have fallen away from Jesus and His Church?

Stephanie A. Mann will explore this aspect of Newman’s life and legacy as part of the Docentium series at the Spiritual Life Center on Thursday, August 18. “Blessed John Henry Newman is a model for us of how to follow Jesus and to reach out to others to follow Him too, despite the cost, difficulty, or failure,” Mann concluded.

Contact the Spiritual Life Center at 316.744.0167 or register online to attend. The Docentium format includes a brief social gathering, buffet dinner, and presentation.

Heroes and Sages and Their Consciences

Two years ago this October, I presented on Blessed John Henry Newman: Conversion and Conscience at the Spiritual Life Center. During the presentation on conscience I discussed Newman's depiction of the false idea of conscience he described in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk in response to Gladstone's pamphlet warning against the divisive effects of Papal infallibility in England:

When men advocate the rights of conscience, they in no sense mean the rights of the Creator, nor the duty to Him, in thought and deed, of the creature; but the right of thinking, speaking, writing, and acting, according to their judgment or their humour, without any thought of God at all. They do not even pretend to go by any moral rule, but they demand, what they think is an Englishman's prerogative, for each to be his own master in all things, and to profess what he pleases, asking no one's leave, and accounting priest or preacher, speaker or writer, unutterably impertinent, who dares to say a word against his going to perdition, if he like it, in his own way. Conscience has rights because it has duties; but in this age, with a large portion of the public, it is the very right and freedom of conscience to dispense with conscience, to ignore a Lawgiver and Judge, to be independent of unseen obligations. It becomes a licence to take up any or no religion, to take up this or that and let it go again, to go to church, to go to chapel, to boast of being above all religions and to be an impartial critic of each of them. Conscience is a stern monitor, but in this century it has been superseded by a counterfeit, which the eighteen centuries prior to it never heard of, and could not have mistaken for it, if they had. It is the right of self-will.

In my post-Easter mystagogical reading, In The Redeeming Christ by F.X.Durrwell, that author presents a higher standard of personal judgement in his chapter on Christian Obedience. He compares and contrasts The Greek Ideal of perfection and human excellence to the Old Testament and then New Testament ideals. I was struck by his characterization of Greek moral ideals according to a humanist standard:

Pagan man saw perfection as belonging to the order of reason; he expected to find it in the fullest human development of his own faculties. This humanism found its purest expression in the Greek world. This Greek ideal lay not in holiness in the biblical sense--consecration, union with God's will--but in the autonomous development of all that is noblest in man. This search for perfection achieved its goal most characteristically in the hero and in the sage. The hero's heroism consisted in an affirmation of himself whereby he was superior to all adversity, a lofty kind of egoism. The wisdom of the sage lay in grasping the great principles of human life and living in conformity with them. In both cases the result was complete freedom: each obeyed only himself, his own will to be great, the truths learnt from his own reason. Even when the Greek was obliged to carry his heroism as far as death, it remained always a heroism of fidelity to himself.

It may be a higher standard, but it's the same autonomy that Newman described as a false image of conscience and the standard it responds to: the individual decides what is excellent, good, and true--for him. It is still "the right of self-will". By that standard, what's excellent, good, and true for me might not be excellent, good, and true for you. We can establish no objective standards to respond to and measure ourselves by. If this rule applies to all areas of human endeavor, we can soon have no science, no arts, no literature, no history that we can share--we can hardly discuss the standards by which we judge the success of a scientific experiment, a painting, a novel, or a narrative, because of individual subjectivity. Judgment of excellence and perfection becomes a matter of taste, and de gustibus non disputandum est (of taste, there is no disputation or discussion). This is that "dictatorship of relativism" that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger spoke of to the College of Cardinals in 2005 before his election as Pope Benedict XVI:

We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.

We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An "adult" faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceipt from truth.

We must develop this adult faith; we must guide the flock of Christ to this faith. And it is this faith - only faith - that creates unity and is fulfilled in love.

On this theme, St Paul offers us as a fundamental formula for Christian existence some beautiful words, in contrast to the continual vicissitudes of those who, like children, are tossed about by the waves: make truth in love. Truth and love coincide in Christ. To the extent that we draw close to Christ, in our own lives too, truth and love are blended. Love without truth would be blind; truth without love would be like "a clanging cymbal" (I Cor 13: 1).

Here the standard--and Father Durrwell would certainly agree--is not myself but Jesus Christ, my Redeemer and Lord, His love and true humanism.

More on In The Redeeming Christ soon. And FYI: I will be speaking on Blessed John Henry Newman this summer at the Spiritual Life Center in the Docentium Series on August 18. My topic is "John Henry Newman on Faith, Family and Friends".

Another Catholic Literary Convert

Coincidentally, I had just read George Mackay Brown's name in Father John Vidmar's The Catholic Church Through the Ages (second edition); then I see that Joseph Pearce has written an article in The Catholic Herald about George Mackay Brown, who

was raised in a lukewarm Presbyterian family, where “all the words that clustered about [Catholicism] – rosary, pope, confession, relics, purgatory, monks, penance – had the same sinister connotations”. Yet Brown, a great and underrated Scottish poet who died 20 years ago on April 13, 1996, would be received into the Catholic Church in 1961, shortly before his 40th birthday.

The process by which he overcame these inherited prejudices is recounted in his semi-autobiographical story The Tarn and the Rosary (1974), especially in the letter that Colm Sinclair, a character in the story, sends home to explain to his parents why he took the unthinkable step of becoming a Catholic: “What saves us is ceremony … Ceremony makes everything bearable and beautiful for us. Transfigured by ceremony, the truths we could not otherwise endure come to us … It is this saving ceremony that you call ‘idolatry’ and ‘mumbo-jumbo’.”

This salvific “ceremony” was of course the Mass. Completing the letter, Colm walks to a nearby church to experience the beauty of the liturgy: “The celebrant entered … Once again, for the thousandth time, Colm watched the ancient endless beautiful ceremony, the exchange of gifts between earth and heaven, dust and spirit, man and God. The transfigured Bread shone momentarily in the saffron fingers of the celebrant.”

Having been transformed and transfigured by the sheer beauty of the Mass, it might be said that Brown’s conversion was essentially aesthetic. And yet, as is illustrated in his multifarious works – verse, short stories, novels and essays – he was acutely aware that beauty points towards the good and the true, forming a transcendental trinity which reflects the Trinity itself.

In contrast to the beauty of the Mass, the Reformation casts a gloom-laden shadow over Brown’s poems and stories. In “Master Halcrow, Priest”, one of the stories in A Calendar of Love (1967), religious images are callously and iconoclastically destroyed; and in his play, A Spell for Green Corn (1970), the Reformation is held responsible for the destruction of the old faith of the island folk and its replacement with a barren and lifeless puritanism: “The Word was imprisoned between black boards, and chained and padlocked, in the pulpit of the kirk.”

Read the rest there. More about Brown here at the Scottish Poetry Library.

I'll be at the Catholic Culture Conference all day today at the Spiritual Life Center, trying to decide which sessions to attend when I have a choice and making my own presentation:

Saturday, April 23, 2016

7:30am Holy Mass- Chapel of Mary the First Disciple

8:15am Breakfast and book sales

9am Opening prayer in Main Assembly Room

Plenary Lecture by Anthony Esolen- “Dante and the Glorious Liberty of the Children of God”

10am Break

10:15am Pillar Lecture by Anthony Esolen- “Assaults on Spiritual Liberty”

11am Break

11:15am Breakout Sessions

Bo Bonner- “Purifying the Passions through Wonder: Why Children should read Homer & Virgil” - Marian Room

Dusty Gates- “Imagination and Heroism: The Mystery of St. George the Dragonslayer” St. Joseph Room

Fr. Ken Van Haverbeke- “Touched by the Divine through our Imagination” Main Assembly Room.

12:00pm Lunch (Dining Room)

1:00pm Pillar Lecture by Stephanie Mann “Chesterton, Cobbett, and Merry Old England”

2:00pm Break

2:15pm Breakout Sessions

Matthew Umbarger- "Reading the Bible with an Overactive Imagination: Midrash as a Tonic for Fundamentalism"- Main Assembly Room

Jackie Arnold- “Inspiring a Catholic Imagination in Children”- Marian Room

Bo Bonner- “Chewing on God: Scripture, Prayer, and Lectio Divina”- St. Joseph Room

3:00pm Break

3:15pm Panel Conversation: Questions, Answers, and Comments

4:00pm Closing Prayer and Dismissal

Our Greater Wichita American Chesterton Society local group will have a table with information about our meetings and Chesterton and Eighth Day Books will also be there with tables and tables of books!

With Chesterton on the Middle Ages

Preparing for my presentation for the Catholic Culture Conference this weekend at the Spiritual Life Center ("Cobbett and Chesterton on Merry Old England"), I've been reading books and essays by Chesterton. Registration closes today at noon, so you'd better call in now!

Throughout his Short History of England, his study of Chaucer, and many essays in which he mentions the Middle Ages, Chesterton notes that the twentieth century Englishman (or woman) knows nothing about the Middle Ages except what prejudices he or she has received about the darkness and obscurity of that Catholic era. As an example, The American Chesterton Society posts this essay from the Illustrated London News, November 15, 1913, "Getting to Know the Middle Ages":

It is quite natural that the prosperous people in our time should know no history. If they did know it, they would know the highly unedifying history of how they became prosperous. It is quite natural, I say, that they should not know history: but why do they think they do? Here is a sentence taken at random from a book written by one of the most cultivated of our younger critics, very well written and most reliable on its own subject, which is a modern one. The writer says: “There was little social or political advance in the Middle Ages” until the Reformation and the Renaissance. Now I might just as well say that there was little advance in science and invention in the nineteenth century until the coming of William Morris: and then excuse myself by saying that I am not personally interested in spinning-jennies and jelly-fish – which is indeed the case. For that is all that the writer really means: he means he is not personally interested in heralds or mitred abbots. That is all right; but why, when writing about something that did not exist in the Middle Ages, should he dogmatise about a story that he has evidently never heard? Yet it might be made a very interesting story.

A little while before the Norman Conquest, countries such as our own were a dust of yet feeble feudalism, continually scattered in eddies by barbarians, barbarians who had never ridden a horse. There was hardly a brick or stone house in England. There were scarcely any roads except beaten paths: there was practically no law except local customs. Those were the Dark Ages out of which the Middle Ages came. Take the Middle Ages two hundred years after the Norman Conquest and nearly as long before the beginnings of the Reformation. The great cities have arisen; the burghers are privileged and important; Labour has been organised into free and responsible Trade Unions; the Parliaments are powerful and disputing with the princes; slavery has almost disappeared; the great Universities are open and teaching with the scheme of education that Huxley so much admired; Republics as proud and civic as the Republics of the pagans stand like marble statues along the Mediterranean; and all over the North men have built such churches as men may never build again. And this, the essential part of which was done in one century rather than two, is what the critic calls “little social or political advance.” There is scarcely an important modern institution under which he lives, from the college that trained him to the Parliament that rules him, that did not make its main advance in that time.

Read the rest there.

Also from The American Chesterton Society, Dale Ahlquist writes about Chesterton on Chaucer:

Chesterton has often been dismissed for blindly idealizing the Middle Ages, but the real problem is quite the opposite. The modern world automatically attacks the Middle Ages as something backwards, dark, and superstitious, the enemy of reason and liberty. Chesterton merely defended the truth that reason and liberty enjoyed a high point in medieval times that the world has not really seen since. He acknowledged that there were still problems in those times, and there are certainly many things that we can rightfully regard as improvements. But history is not a story of progress. Our fortunes move both backward and forward. While technology provides a kind of liberty, it also provides a kind of slavery. While the experts are useful as servants, they are unbearable as masters.

In the Middle Ages the peasant class, according to Chesterton, was still successfully fighting off the rise of the Aristocratic state. He refers to a famous peasant uprising where they “killed the lawyers; a comprehensible and (relatively) even commendable course; though they also showed some disposition to hang anybody who could read or write; which is perhaps carrying the distrust of professionalism too far.”

The most difficult thing for us to understand about that culture is that it was purely Catholic, there were no Reformers or Rebels to contend with. The theology was solid and widespread. The criticisms of the Church came in the form of making fun of stuffy Roman officialism, or, in the case of Geoffrey Chaucer, making fun of friars.

As I recall, though dimmed by years, when I studied The Canterbury Tales in college, it was as if the Reformation had already happened in Chaucer's time: the Church was corrupt; Indulgences were for sale; we were as anti-clerical as Lollards or Voltaire; Martin Luther came far too late to the ball! After this project, I think I need to read Chesterton on Chaucer and then re-read The Canterbury Tales without jaundice. After all, April is not over yet!

Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages-
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunturbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for the seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

First Printed Notice: The Annual Catholic Culture Conference

We are just two months away from the annual Catholic Culture Conference at the Spiritual Life Center. From the Wichita diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Advance:

. . . A Catholic culture is an environment which fosters our authentic development in mind, body, and spirit. John Senior described this culture as “the natural environment of truth, assisted by art, ordered intrinsically, that is, from within – to the praise, reverence, and service of God our Lord. To restore it, we must learn its language.”

This is the motivation, and hope, for the 2nd Annual Catholic Culture Conference April 22-23 at the Spiritual Life Center. The theme of this year’s conference is “Reviving the Catholic Imagination.”

Our keynote speaker is Dr. Anthony Esolen. Professor Esolen currently serves as professor of English at Providence College, and is perhaps best known for his widely acclaimed translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He has also authored several original works, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization and the satirically titled Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. He regularly writes for publications including The Catholic Thing and Crisis Magazine.

Dr. Esolen will give three presentations at the conference. A keynote presentation entitled “The Smallest of the Seeds: The Union of All Things in Christ” on Friday, April 22, followed “Dante and the Glorious Liberty of the Children of God” and “Assaults on Spiritual Liberty” on Saturday, April 23. The conference will also feature other presentations by regional and local speakers including Bo Bonner, Stephanie Mann, Jackie Arnold, Matthew Umbarger, and Fr. Ken Van Haverbeke.
Gates is assistant program director at the center.

Want to hear Esolen?

Space is limited to the first 150 registrants. Sign up early by calling the Spiritual Life Center at (316) 744-0167 or online at SLCWichita.org. Registration includes a wine and appetizer social Friday evening, and breakfast and lunch on Saturday. Early bird rates, by April 11, are commuter $55, single occupancy $85, double occupancy $75.

I'm preparing my presentation now: "Cobbett, Chesterton, and Merry Old England."

My 2016 Events and Speaking Calendar

Fortunately for me, I have a secretary, well, desk, because my calendar is filling up this year with events and speaking engagements.

This coming Friday and Saturday: I am attending the 2016 Eighth Day Institute Symposium. As this article in The Wichita Eagle described this year's topic and speakers:

The ecumenical Eighth Day Institute that seeks to renew culture through faith and learning is using the Paris Climate Conference and Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on the environment as a backdrop to its 2016 symposium, “Soil and Sacrament: The World as Gift.”

Mike Aquilina, Hans Boersma, Rod Dreher and Vigen Guorian will be among the speakers at the symposium from Jan. 14 to 16 at St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral.

The symposium will explore the notion of creation as a gift from God and humanity’s role as grateful stewards of the gift.

Guorian, who is an author, gardener and professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, will give two keynotes: one, a view from the garden called “Soil & Sacrament: Earth Meditations,” and the other a view from the classroom: “World as Gift: The Earth Poetry of Wendell Berry.” The event also includes a banquet with reflections by the speakers and live music.

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/living/religion/article51315235.html#storylink=cpy

On Thursday, February 4, I am scheduled to present at the Church of the Resurrection for a book reading group. The book they are reading: Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation! I'll follow up with a presentation in April to conclude their series.

On Saturday, February 13, I am scheduled to present at an all-day Chesterton Conference hosted by the Four States G.K. Chesterton Society at the St. Pius X Newman Center, Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, Kansas. More information to come! (I'll be talking to one of the organizers today.)

The Eighth Day Institute is hosting an important meeting about the situation of Christians in the Middle East and what we can do to help them in February. More info here.

In April, I'll be one of the presenters at the second annual Catholic Culture Conference at the Spiritual Life Center in Wichita, Kansas, which will be headlined by Professor Anthony Esolen, with the topic "Reviving the Catholic Imagination." (My presentation will be on Chesterton, Cobbett, and Merry Old England.)

The Catholic Culture Conference is an opportunity for faithful Christians to come together for formation and fellowship. The program intends to promote Catholic values in personal and family life, as well as in society at large.

The Conference will consist of multiple sessions, each geared towards some particular component of Catholic life in our modern age. A combination of large group lectures and smaller breakout sessions will give each participant the opportunity to learn more about how Catholicism relates to–and is intended to positively change-our culture.

Our Catholic Faith is not just a notional idea. It is a concrete reality with the power to open the hearts and minds of all peoples. It can make the societies in which we live flourish in the way God intended. This Conference will give participants knowledge and inspiration to go about doing just that.

Our Keynote speaker is teaches Renaissance English Literature and the Development of Western Civilization at Providence College. He is a senior editor for Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, and a regular contributor to Crisis Magazine.

On June 21, I'll be speaking on an English heroine, Margaret More Roper, at the Sisters of Sophia meeting of the Eighth Day Institute. (Ladies only).

Finally--so far--I'll go back to the Spiritual Life Center to present in the Docentium dinner/speech series on Blessed John Henry Newman: Faith, Family and Friends (August).

Every month the Wichita Area Chesterton Society meets on the third Friday at Eighth Day Books to discuss Chesterton's works. Once we finish The Wells and the Shallows, I think we are going to read the biography of Chesterton's wife Frances: The Woman Who was Chesterton by Nancy Carpenter Brown. I also look forward to the monthly meetings of the Sisters of Sophia at the Ladder.

If you want me to speak at an event or meeting, please contact me and we can work something out. Part of our negotiations must include effective promotion of the event, an opportunity (if my talk is related to the English Reformation) to sell and sign copies of my book, and travel expenses if outside Wichita. For Catholic churches in the Wichita diocese, please contact the Speakers Bureau to start the process of scheduling an event.

Thank you very much and Happy New Year!

Three Events Next Week

Next week is filled with events I plan to attend:

The first, on Tuesday, September 15 is the inaugural meeting of the Sisters of Sophia group at The Ladder (the home of the Eighth Day Institute):

After almost seven years of Hall of Men meetings, it is time to offer something similar for the ladies.

Beginning September 15, the Sisters of Sophia will begin commemorating the company of wise women at the Ladder on the third Tuesdays of each month.

Doors open at The Ladder at 6:15, food will be served at 6:30, the Eighth Day Convocation will begin at 7:30, followed by a presentation on Holy Wisdom by Nyleen Lenk. We'll wrap up with Q & A from 8:15-8:30.

We look forward to seeing you!

The second, at the Spiritual Life Center, is the first in a series of talks under the title Docentium:

Docentium: A Catholic Voice for Freedom
Docentium is a new program designed to weave Catholicism and Culture together. New topic each month!

The Mission of Docentium is:

~To form and equip disciples of Christ with sound teaching, faithful to our Tradition
~To build comradery in shared belief and shared interest, in the context of a shared meal
~To inspire more courageous witness in our families, parishes, workplaces, and communities

Join us on the third Thursday of every month at the Spiritual Life Center for an evening of food, friendship, and learning. Doors open at 6 p.m., food is served at 6:30 p.m., and a lecture will be given on some topic related to religion and culture. The cost is $15 per person.

This first gathering occurs on “Constitution Day” [which] celebrates the anniversary of the historic day on which delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the document in Philadelphia in 1787. Fr. Eric Weldon will give a presentation on Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic signatory of the Declaration of Independence.

And the third is our monthly meeting the Wichita-Newton-Hutchinson chapter of the American Chesterton Society on Friday, September 18 at Eighth Day Books. Our reading is the next three more chapters in The Well and the Shallows: "Babies and Distributism", "The Three Foes of Family" and "The Don and the Cavalier". Our meeting starts and 6:30 p.m. around the table on the first floor between to the Chesterton/Tolkien/Sayers/Barfield shelves and the Patristics section! Good company all around!

The Real St. Thomas More, Recorded

The Spiritual Life Center has posted a recording of my presentation on The Real St. Thomas More.

I must warn you that I do not lecture when I make a presentation--I involve the participants, who have their own input to make, throughout, inviting comments, questions, and other participation. So you will hear other voices.

The outline of the talk is:

~Discussion of A Man for All Seasons and Wolf Hall;

~Defense of St. Thomas More against charges of being fussily pious, sado-masochistic, and misogynistic (based on my article from The National Catholic Register);

~Description of the Real Thomas More: lawyer, judge, diplomat, husband, father, friend, writer, poet, theologian, etc, as the first modern lay saint (neither a third order member, nor a charity worker, nor a founder, but an active lay Catholic)--although he was of course canonized he as a martyr, not as a confessor;

~Emphasis on More's integrity;

~Discussion of the scurrilous language in More's apologetical works against Luther, Tyndale, and Fish and of his prosecution of heresy as Chancellor (based mostly upon Richard Rex's contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More);

~Description of the last 14 months of St. Thomas More's life in the Tower of London (based on my article in The Latin Mass Magazine, "The Long Lent of St. Thomas More") and discussion of his defense at trial.

~Discussion of contemporary reaction to More's execution--why it took so long for him to be canonized--and why St. Thomas More suffered and died as a martyr--what did he die for?--with input from Chesterton, Belloc and others.

I also highlighted St. John Fisher's example and his sanctity.

Walk-Ins Welcome at the Catholic Culture Conference

We enjoyed Dale Ahlquist's first presentation last night--he commented that he looks forward to the day when the Spiritual Life Center unveils the portrait of St. Gilbert K. Chesterton among the Doctors of the Church in the main conference room.

The program begins this morning with Holy Mass at 7:30 a.m. and breakfast before Dale Ahlquist's next talk at 9:00 a.m.: “The Trouble with Catholic Social Teaching”. Then the local speakers take the stage and after lunch and more local speakers, there's a panel discussion.

My husband took this picture of Mr. Ahlquist: he threatened us a few times with a two or three hour lecture, but his hour long talk about G.K. Chesterton, the Dark Ages, King Arthur, and today just flew by. More info here. Eighth Day Books has a table; Dale Ahlquist has a table, and our local American Chesterton Society has a table (there are lots of books available for purchase!).

Beware the Ides of April: Taxes and the Catholic Culture Conference

Midnight tonight is the deadline for your taxes to be postmarked. Registration for the Catholic Culture Conference at the Spiritual Life Center here in Wichita has the same deadline: midnight tonight:

Join Dale Ahlquist and many Diocesan speakers for this great conference about being Catholic in the world.

The Catholic Culture Conference is an opportunity for faithful Christians to come together for formation and fellowship. The program intends to promote Catholic values in personal and family life, as well as in society at large.

The Conference will consist of multiple sessions, each geared towards some particular component of Catholic life in our modern age. A combination of large group lectures and smaller breakout sessions will give each participant the opportunity to learn more about how Catholicism relates to–and is intended to positively change-our culture.

Our Catholic Faith is not just a notional idea. It is a concrete reality with the power to open the hearts and minds of all peoples. It can make the societies in which we live flourish in the way God intended. This Conference will give participants knowledge and inspiration to go about doing just that.

Our Keynote speaker is one of the most respected G.K. Chesterton scholars in the world, Mr. Dale Ahlquist. He will give a keynote lecture entitled "The Glorious Side of Social Decline" and a second lecture on "The Trouble with Catholic Social Teaching."

The Conference will also feature the following Diocesan speakers: Jackie Arnold, Bo Bonner, Dusty Gates, James Lewis III and Laurie Robinson.

And while you're hobnobbing with other cultured Catholics, you could find out more about my St. Thomas More presentation on Saturday, May 2. Also, our local chapter of the American Chesterton Society will have a table with info about our group and what we've read so far.

Blessed John Henry Newman, Part Two: Conscience

Tonight at the Spiritual Life Center in Wichita, Kansas, I'll be presenting Part Two of this mini-series on Blessed John Henry Newman. The session tonight is dedicated to his teaching on conscience and I will also recount some details and events from the second half his life--the Catholic half.

The first session last week went well from my view: I didn't make a major mistakes, fall over, or spill my glass of water. I maintained eye contact, presented good content, with some humor, and engaged the participants in discussion with good Q & A. My husband rounded out the small group and we were most happy to see a priest friend whom we knew in college at WSU through our activities at the St. Paul's Parish-Newman Center!

Tonight's topic is challenging: many Catholics do not understand the real meaning of conscience. Newman is persuasive in his explanation of conscience's rights and duties, however, and his life demonstrates how he both formed and obeyed his conscience, which included being obedient to his superiors in the Catholic Church, even when he had hoped to accomplish things for the laity and their formation in England after centuries of neglect and obscurity. Also, many today read his defense of the rights of conscience as an attack against the teaching authority of the Church and Papal infallibility in matters of faith and morals--selective reading of his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk!

At the end of tonight's class, I'll have copies of Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation available to sign and sell.

A Reminder and A Preview

Just a reminder that my series on Blessed John Henry Newman begins tonight at 7:00 p.m. at the Spiritual Life Center in Wichita, Kansas. I'll be talking about Newman and Conversion:

• What is conversion?
• Newman's Conversion(s)
• Newman and His Converts: advice and guidance
• Newman and Conversion Today

And a preview: I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show Thursday morning, October 9, Newman's memorial in the dioceses of England and Wales. We'll discuss some of the same insights Newman offered prospective converts in the nineteenth century. I'm scheduled for 7:45 a.m. Eastern time/6:45 a.m. Central--the last segment on the EWTN portion of the show.

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.

Dawson's Six Ages

Last Saturday, my husband and I attended a class on Dawson and Church History at the Spiritual Life Center here in Wichita. The presenter, Jackie Arnold, had written her master's thesis on this organizing principle of Catholic Church history. She had her reading suggestions for Church history, but I introduced her and the class to John Vidmar's one-volume book The Catholic Church Through the Ages: A History, soon to be published in a second edition by Paulist Press:

The Catholic Church through the Ages, now in its second edition, is a one-volume survey of the history of the Catholic Church from its beginning until (and including) the pontificate of Pope Francis. The book explains the Church's progress by using Christopher Dawson's division of the Church's history into six distinct "ages," or 350-400 year periods of time, each cycle beginning with great enthusiasm and advancement and ending in decline and loss. Writing with the experience of thirty years of teaching, the author has fashioned an ideal text that combines substance with readability.

Undergraduates, graduates, and interested lay people have given the author an idea of what topics should be emphasized. As a result, he has emphasized such areas monasticism, the Crusades, medieval theology, the Inquisition, Reformation, French Revolution, the nineteenth century, and the Church in the United States. And he has added material on the Oxford Movement, John Henry Newman s contributions to the Oxford Movement and to the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the Catholic literary revival that took place in several countries in the early twentieth century, as well as on the last three popes.

As a supplement to each chapter, the author has included an updated the recommended readings and bibliography, as well as the audio-visual materials.

The Six Ages of the Church are:

The Apostolic Age (1-ca. 300)
The Patristic Age (ca. 300-650)
The Carolingian Age (650-1000)
The High Middle Ages (1000-1500)
The Age of Baroque (1550-1789)
The Modern Age (1789-Present)

We discussed in class whether or not we are about to enter into a seventh age of the Church with a new cycle of revival to address our late 20th century/early 21st century crisis.

The same speaker will make another presentation on Saturday, October 11 from 9 am. to 12 noon:

Catholic Authors of the 20th Century

If you love books and Catholicism, this course is for you!

This class is geared toward literature-loving persons who appreciate a good novel while also seeking out Catholic themes. During this morning course, Ms. Arnold will introduce a number of “great” (by her own estimation) 20th century authors: J.R.R. Tolkien, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Sigrid Undsett, Flannery O’Conner, Walker Percy, and Michael O’Brien. A brief biography of each author will be given along with a look at the ideas and synopses of their major works.

The focus of the class will be to show the moral, liturgical, spiritual, and doctrinal themes that each author focuses on, as well as trying to weave them into a larger picture of addressing the issues surrounding the 20th century from a specifically Catholic viewpoint. Time permitting we will have some “book discussion” groups, perhaps after reading a short story.  

Next Month, at Wichita's Spiritual Life Center

I'll be presenting a two part series on Blessed John Henry Newman on Conversion and Conscience:

This two part series on Blessed John Henry Newman will focus on two of his greatest contributions to modern Catholicism: his teaching and example of conversion and his defense of the true meaning and function of conscience. Newman's conversion to Catholicism in 1845 was a bellwether event in his day and has influenced many other converts, especially from the Church of England and the Episcopalian church. His defense of the true meaning of conscience against what he called its counterfeit, self-will and false consistency, is even more important today. By highlighting Newman's conversion and conscience, the series will explore Newman's guidance for the New Evangelization and the laity's great role in spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ and His Church.

Our diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Advance, published a story to announce my presentation:

Stephanie A. Mann, a member of the Diocese of Wichita’s Speaker’s Bureau, will address two of the greatest themes of Blessed John Henry Newman’s pastoral care in a two part series from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Oct. 7 and 14 at the Spiritual Life Center.
When Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI beatified Newman on Sept. 10, 2010, in Birmingham, England, he paid tribute to Newman’s intellectual legacy, but also emphasized his pastoral concern and care for the poor.
“Newman received many letters from Anglicans or members of other churches in England, asking for advice about becoming a Catholic,” Mann said. “He counseled them on how to deal with family and friends opposed to their joining the Catholic Church; he answered questions about doctrine, history, and devotion – Newman helped many, using his own experience as a convert.”
Blessed John Henry Newman also helped Catholics facing concerns in 19th century England after the doctrine of papal infallibility was defined at the First Vatican Council. English politicians proclaimed that Catholics could not be good citizens if they obeyed the pope.
“Former Prime Minister William Gladstone said that Catholics would have to follow their own consciences and ignore the pope to be true citizens of England” Mann said. “Newman wrote a public letter to a famous Catholic, the Duke of Norfolk, to explain that an individual conscience, rightly formed, cannot conflict with papal teaching on matters of faith and morals.”
Dusty Gates, assistant program director at the Spiritual Life Center, said, “This series will show how Blessed John Henry Newman models two great aspects of the New Evangelization: the path of conversion and the formation of an obedient conscience. From the 19th century until today, he guides us to become holy disciples of Our Lord, spreading the Good News in a world that needs to hear Him so much.”
Want to participate?The series about Blessed John Henry Newman will be offered at the Spiritual Life Center on Tuesdays, Oct. 7 and 14. The cost for the series is $20. Register at www.SLCWichita.org or by calling (316) 744-0167.

I think I'll be relying quite a bit on Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in my preparation for these presentations. His appreciation of Blessed John Henry Newman's conversion and teaching on conscience is thoughtful and elegant. People like stories about converts and Newman's conversion story is so influential. People need to know more about what conscience really is instead of the counterfeit that we too often accept today--for those two reasons I hope that many in the Wichita area will attend these presentations.The Spiritual Life Center may--GASP--videotape their courses too.

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