Book Review: Duffy's Newman

This book was published as an introduction to John Henry Cardinal Newman before his canonization last year. A reader who knew nothing about Newman before reading this book would likely ask by the end of it: "why was he canonized? He seems like a most disagreeable person, selfish, dishonest, manipulative, tyrannical--what in him was holy?" We are assured that he strove for holiness but Duffy's portrayal of his works, projects, and legacy emphasizes only his mind, his literary brilliance, and the opposition he faced--and all his faults and frailties.

I had purchased the book because I have trusted Eamon Duffy's works on the English Reformation from The Stripping of the Altars to Reformation Divided. Lucy Beckett, whose works I have read and somewhat enjoyed, liked the book too and recommended it in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. I also liked the extensive chronology at the front of the book. Duffy does pack quite a bit of detail, citations from Newman's works, letters, and sermons, into "A very short history" (145 pages, including the index) but is it really a good introduction to Newman, written in conjunction with his canonization, following a process in which the Catholic Church's hierarchy determined first that he was Venerable and thus had practiced the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity to an heroic degree, and in which the faithful had the devotion to pray for his intercession with the Holy Trinity to answer prayers for great miracles of healing?

I'd have to say: No. It's a good critical study of Newman but seems to have missed the sense of the occasion: Newman being proclaimed a Saint of the Church, someone we believe lived a holy life and thus merited not only the glories of the Beatific Vision in Heaven but also devotion and imitation on earth after his death. Additionally, for an introduction to a man's life and work--probably because of space limitations--the absence of even a biographical sketch is almost strange.

I'd also have to say that I disagree entirely with this statement in the review I excerpted recently by Dr. Bud Marr, Director of the National Institute of Newman Studies and Associate Editor of the Newman Studies Journal:

The strength of Duffy’s treatment is rooted in the way that he navigates a via media between biographers who are overly hagiographical in their approach to Newman’s life and those scholars who are hypercritical and, in some cases, even hostile to Newman as a historical figure. Duffy strikes a nice balance. On the one hand, he’s more than happy to acknowledge Newman’s enduring legacy as one of the great Catholic thinkers of the modern era. On the other hand, Duffy refuses to paper over some of Newman’s rougher edges for the sake of preserving a supposedly pristine understanding of the English convert’s saintliness.

In Duffy's book there is barely a mention of any virtue in Newman at all unless it is intellectual. His love for God, for his family, for his friends, for his spiritual correspondents, for his parishioners, both Anglican and Catholic, for the poor, for the men and boys he taught at Oxford and Birmingham, is never highlighted. His faith in God's providence and love; his hope in the reality and truth of God's revelation and salvation are also never adequately conveyed.

Even his intellectual virtues are criticized because they are idiosyncratic to Newman. There's not even a hint of hagiography here, nor really of "the English convert's saintliness". Duffy doesn't just refuse "to paper over some of Newman's rougher edges"; he emphasizes and highlights them!

There were some insights I gained from reading this book. Duffy's explanation of Newman's campaign, after the excellent reception of the Apologia pro Vita Sua, to reach out to his Anglican friends on subjects like the doctrinal declarations of Mary's Immaculate Conception and of the Infallibility of the Pope in matters of faith and morals, was incisive. Duffy describes how Newman seized those opportunities to defend the Church with the intellectual and rhetorical skills unique to him, in terms his Anglican audience would understand--as they indeed better understood him and his conversion to Catholicism.

Overall it was a disappointing read, and one which will not persuade me to to go back to the older view of the hyper-sensitive, dishonest, self-absorbed Newman described by Frank Newman, Bremond, and Abbott. As I have before I call your attention to the former Bishop of Raphoe, Reverend Philip Boyce's article on Newman's holiness. 

EDI's Seminar on Holiness

Before the Eighth Day Institute Symposium on Holiness in January, EDI held a two day Seminar on "Holiness in the Bible, the Fathers, the Liturgy, and Literature" at The Ladder, the institute's headquarters. Next Friday and Saturday, February 28 and 29, they are repeating the event and a friend and I are attending:

This four-session Seminar will be conducted in a Shared Inquiry format, the method of approaching texts used in the classrooms of St. John's College, Thomas Aquinas College, and other "great books" curriculum schools.

A good friend once said, "shared-inquiry is a way to read a book with more than one brain." This is an apt description, because one often discovers that a passage which proves difficult is illumined by someone else, and vice versa. Shared-inquiry facilitates a communal engagement with a given text so that we are informed and transformed together.

Seating is limited to first 12 registrants.

Readings include The Song of Songs from the Old Testament, selections from St. Maximus the Confessor (who was the patron saint of the Symposium in January), the Orthodox liturgy for the Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord, and Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation".

If you are in the Wichita area, please check it out here.

Book Review: "Liturgical Mysticism" by David Fagerberg

The Tenth Annual Eighth Day Institute Symposium was held this past weekend: I saw many friends, volunteered to pick up bagels for breakfast and help at registration on Friday and to introduce David W. Fagerberg at his Saturday break-out session. I also drove him to Mass Saturday evening after attending Great Vespers at St. George's Orthodox Cathedral, and then on to Eighth Day Books for that evening's reception. But I came home after that to our dogs Joey and Brandy and congratulated myself that I only bought one new book (David Lyle Jeffrey's Scripture and the English Poetic Imagination): I'd picked it up off one of the Eighth Day Books displays; Jessica Hooten Wilson, one of the speakers, was standing next to me and said, "Yes: get that" so I bought it. She reviewed it here.

But here's my review of David W. Fagerberg's Liturgical Mysticism, his latest book on Liturgy, Theology, Spirituality, Sacramentality, and Mysticism. He began his break-out session with the comment that he wrote this book with Mrs. Murphy, the late Father Aidan Kavanaugh's image of a Catholic attending Mass and becoming a liturgical theologian, in mind. As I read the book, I thought of myself, Mrs. Mann, a Catholic attending Mass and becoming a liturgical theologian and how this book could help me grow as a liturgical theologian, a liturgical ascetic, and a liturgical mystic. Jesus has given us the Sacraments, especially the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, as the primary means to receive Sanctifying Grace. I experience this sanctification--being made holy--in the midst of "the vastly complex vocabulary of experiences had, prayers said, sights seen, smells smelled, words said and heard and responded to, emotions controlled and released, sins committed and repented, children born and loved ones buried, and in many other ways no one can count or always account for", as Father Kavanaugh, OSB wrote.

As Kavanaugh's student, Professor Fagerberg explores the meaning of his teacher's statement: "All who are engaged in liturgy are theologians precisely because the liturgy is the Church’s faith." Fagerberg goes further to state that if Mrs. Murphy or Mrs. Mann is engaged in the liturgy--if she even begins to comprehend what happens at Mass every day--she is not just a theologian, she is a mystic and an ascetic. The Holy Mass represents such a great mystery that if I participate in it and know that what I'm participating is the re-presentation of the Paschal Mystery, I must become a mystic. Since the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is making present on earth, in a particular church at a particular time, the saving sacrifice of Jesus dying on the Cross, descending to the dead, and rising from the dead, I am a mystic, breaking the bonds of earth, my own limitations, and time and space. Since it is through the suffering of Jesus on the cross that I receive communion with God, I must become an ascetic as I imitate Jesus, being conformed to Him more and more through the liturgy. Receiving and cooperating with the Graces of the liturgy are a path to holiness and sanctification.

Fagerberg illuminates these truths much more gracefully than I do. On her Facebook page, Kris McGregor posted "Kindle Quotes" (I read a real book so had to write out quotations on paper and type them out on my laptop!) that offer examples of his scintillating prose. From the Prologue:

Also from the Prologue:

Fagerberg also notes that "Liturgical mysticism is when liturgy takes up residence in our lives." (p. xxi) And later, in an excellent example of polysyndeton, he writes, "Liturgical theology is written with incense and icon and temple and feast and sacrament and relic"! (p. 14)

At the end of the Prologue, he offers a summation of the themes he will explore in the book: "Liturgical mysticism is the Trinitarian mystery, mediate by sacramental liturgy and hypostasized as personal liturgy, to anchor the substance of our lives." (p. xxi)

The Table of Contents of the book:

Prologue
Chapter 1. An Enthralling Liturgy
Chapter 2. Ordinary Liturgical Mysticism
Chapter 3. Quickening the Liturgical Person
Chapter 4. The Narrow Gate
Chapter 5. The Path through Cross to Resurrection
Chapter 6. The Pathway Home
Chapter 7. Coming Home
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

In Chapter 1, he establishes that for the liturgy to make this development of graces possible, we have to stop thinking of liturgy as something we attend for our own satisfaction and enjoyment, such that we determine whether or not we get something out of it: "Liturgy must not conform to us but we to it." (p. 6) That's why liturgy is formal, repetitive, directed to God, worshipful (dulia) and pious (latria): year after year we "keep the liturgical year and its feasts", we "exercise the sacramentals in every nook of our lives", and we "let the prayer of the Church pass through our lips in the Divine Office" (p. 20)

In Chapter 2, Fagerberg cites Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange in support of his assertion that the ordinary Catholic Christian should be both a "secular ascetic" and a "mundane mystic": finding that this "infused contemplation of the mysteries of faith [celebrated in the liturgy] to be 'the normal way of sanctity and to be necessary to the full perfection of Christian life.'" (p. 26) Since Heaven will be mystical, adoring and loving God, we need to prepare for that meditative and peaceful mystical everlasting life. While there is an extraordinary mysticism experienced by a few, all Christians should prepare themselves for this ordinary mysticism by participating in the Church's liturgy.

In Chapter 3, he focuses on the "quickening of our baptism" in and with the Church: "Liturgical mysticism is ecclesial in form and sacramental in nature. It does not leave the Church behind . . . [it] is a liturgical life that sprouts from baptism and seeks union with God through his mysteries, on a mystical level." (p. 42)

Fagerberg offered a Saturday breakout session at the Symposium, based upon a section in Chapter 4, that highlighted one of the ways liturgical asceticism develops the graces we receive through the Sacraments as we deal with temptations along the purgative way. He explores Evagrius of Pontus's descriptions of the eight evil tempting thoughts or logismoi: gluttony, impurity, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia (the noonday demon), vainglory, and pride. They stand in the way of us participating in the Mystery of he liturgy, but the Mystery of the  liturgy and the sacraments help us avoid giving into those temptations. That Mystery orients us away from ourselves, to whom each of these temptations point us, and instead toward God and the opposite virtues of Faith in God, Hope in Heaven, and Love of God and neighbor.

In his plenary session on Friday, Fagerberg highlighted one of the Western spiritual writers he's been reading lately, Venerable Francis Libermann (more about him on Sunday, February 2 on this blog). He drew Libermann's spiritual advice, shared in letters with his family and with members of the missionary order he led, the Spiritans, from Chapter 5. Venerable Libermann urged his correspondents, in imitation of Jesus, to take up their crosses, bear them willingly, rejoice in their burdens for the sake of sanctification, the love of God and the love of neighbor.

In Chapters 6 and 7, Fagerberg continues this exploration of how liturgical mysticism guides us on our way in this life and how it points us to the eschaton, the end of this life and the beginning of the next. In the Epilogue, he concludes:

The liturgy that occurs within the hidden spaces of the heart is the liturgy hypostasized in the soul. Liturgical asceticism kneads both body and soul with that Resurrection power; liturgical mysticism looks fixedly at the mystery, who is Christ risen; and liturgical theology illuminates our world and our place in it. Liturgical mysticism is the Trinitarian mystery, mediated by sacramental liturgy and hypostasized as personal liturgy, to anchor the substance of our lives. (p. 149)

The bibliography is extensive, featuring titles by Louis Bouyer, Jean Danielou, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, C.S. Lewis, Joseph Ratzinger, and Alexander Schmemann, among others. Reading this book was a transcendent experience and I'm glad I had the opportunity to meet and hear the author speak. Recommended without reservation.

Newman on/in Heaven

Prompted by a conversation on life after death on ABC TV--what a source--I wrote my second blog piece for the National Catholic Register in 2017, discussing the Catholic view of Heaven. I cited one of Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons, among other sources:

Blessed John Henry Newman describes this standard of holiness in his Parochial and Plain Sermon “Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness”:

"To be holy is, in our Church's words, to have "the true circumcision of the Spirit;" that is, to be separate from sin, to hate the works of the world, the flesh, and the devil; to take pleasure in keeping God's commandments; to do things as He would have us do them; to live habitually as in the sight of the world to come, as if we had broken the ties of this life, and were dead already. Why cannot we be saved without possessing such a frame and temper of mind?"

And then he makes the startling statement that “even supposing a man of unholy life were suffered to enter heaven, he would not be happy there; so that it would be no mercy to permit him to enter.” Newman comments that we can have the wrong idea about Heaven—that it will be a place of pleasure and satisfaction and then proposes a better way to think of Heaven:

"Heaven then is not like this world; I will say what it is much more like,—a church. For in a place of public worship . . . we hear solely and entirely of God. We praise Him, worship Him, sing to Him, thank Him, confess to Him, give ourselves up to Him, and ask His blessing. And therefore, a church is like heaven; viz. because both in the one and the other, there is one single sovereign subject—religion—brought before us."

So someone who has no thought of God, what Newman calls an “irreligious man”, would be miserable in Heaven: the Face of God and the worship of God “would be no object of joy to him”. On the other hand, if you are happy in church, at Mass, in Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, etc, you will be happy in Heaven, as Heaven truly is.

Perhaps that last sentence should have read "you may be prepared to be happy in Heaven, as Heaven truly is"; but what I have written, I have written! Please read the rest there.

All Kinds of Saints

Author and essayist Joseph Bottum (formerly of First Things) writes about sanctity for Aleteia, particularly the sanctity of today's saint, Gregory Barbarigo, whose feast was removed from the Roman Calendar in 1969:

Work is not exactly made holy when done with awareness of Christ. It’s the worker, rather, who aims toward sanctification by working with God. The dignity of work is actually the dignity of the worker, who is both laboring and being with God.

All this was prompted in my mind by St. Gregory Barbarigo, whose feast day is June 18—today: a day perhaps for thinking about work. A powerful seventeenth-century cardinal from Venice, St. Gregory might be, in a sense, the most likely kind of saint: From the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, the Vatican’s official canonizations ran to a large number of Italian churchmen.

Of course, in another sense, he was an unlikely saint—a nobleman in the days of unchecked nobility. An advisor to Pope Alexander VII in the days of unapologetic Vatican nepotism. A political mover and shaker in the days when too many senior positions in the Church were considered the permanent fiefdoms of the noble Italian families, as they played the local form of Game of Thrones in their Italian principalities. Even today, it’s hard for a senior churchman to find the time, the energy, and the grace for personal sanctity in the endless press of the business at hand. But in the days of St. Gregory Barbarigo, the temptations—the lures of temporal power offered by the Church—were far greater and harder to resist.

To think about St. Gregory is to realize that you know this man—or, at least, you’ve read a profile of people of his kind in a business magazine or a Sunday newspaper supplement. He’s that senior bureaucrat the government needs regardless of the party of the president. He’s that CFO making a major corporation succeed. He’s your college president, your governor’s friend, your church’s major donor. Polished, important, organized, multi-talented, standing behind the scenes, he gives off an air that’s hard to describe, except perhaps with the word competent. A proficient man, an efficient man. A fixer.

Read the rest there. St. Gregory may have been removed from the Roman Calendar, but he is being celebrated today in Maryville, Missouri at the parish dedicated to him and there are Catholic schools and parishes dedicated to him in Houma, Louisiana and Garnerville, New York. St. Gregory's story reminds me of St. Francis Borgia, an unlikely saint from most unlikely circumstances--a Borgia saint.

Chesterton's Sanctity in THE ATLANTIC

James Parker writes about "Saint" Gilbert:

If the Catholic Church makes G. K. Chesterton a saint—as an influential group of Catholics is proposing it should—the story of his enormous coffin may become rather significant. Symbolic, even parabolic. Chesterton’s coffin was too huge, you see, to be carried down the stairs of his house in Beaconsfield, its occupant being legendarily overweight at the time of his death, in 1936. So it went out a second-floor window. Very Chestertonian: gravity, meet levity. Hagiographers might pursue the biblical resonance here, citing the Gospel passages in which a paralyzed man, unable to penetrate the crowds surrounding the house in Capernaum where Jesus was staying, is lowered in through a hole in the roof. Or they might simply declare that Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s was a spirit too large to go out through the conventional narrow door of death—that it had to be received, as it were, directly into the sky.

In his vastness and mobility, Chesterton continues to elude definition: He was a Catholic convert and an oracular man of letters, a pneumatic cultural presence, an aphorist with the production rate of a pulp novelist. Poetry, criticism, fiction, biography, columns, public debate—the phenomenon known to early-20th-century newspaper readers as “GKC” was half cornucopia, half content mill. If you’ve got a couple of days, read his impish, ageless, inside-out terrorist thrillerThe Man Who Was Thursday. If you’ve got an afternoon, read his masterpiece of Christian apologetics Orthodoxy: ontological basics retailed with a blissful, zooming frivolity, Thomas Aquinas meets Eddie Van Halen. If you’ve got half an hour, read “The Blue Cross,” the first and most glitteringly perfect of his stories featuring the crime-busting village priest Father Brown. If you’ve got only 10 minutes, read his essay “A Much Repeated Repetition.” (“Of a mechanical thing we have a full knowledge. Of a living thing we have a divine ignorance.”)

Read the rest here.

Our G.K. Chesterton reading group meets tomorrow night at Eighth Day Books (on the second floor at the table among books about Church history, the Bible, and education) at 6:30 p.m. We are reading The Well and the Shallows.

Gracewing publishes the book pictured above: The Holiness of G. K. Chesterton, with contributions by Sheridan Gilley, Ian Ker, Nicholas Madden OCD, Aidan Nichols OP, John Saward and Bob Wild and an introduction by editor William Oddie:

G. K. Chesterton was one of the most provocative and well-loved English writers of the 20th century. Renowned for his journalism and as an essayist, he was the author of around eighty books, some two hundred short stories, four thousand essays and several plays. His writing ranged from fiction and poetry, to history, philosophy, political, social and literary criticism, theology and Catholic apologetics. His works reflect a life that was filled with wonder and joy, a constancy in fighting for the Christian faith in a world losing belief, a lifelong devotion to the Blessed Virgin and his love for all men, especially the poor. But are these grounds for his canonisation? The late Cardinal Emmett Carter described G. K. Chesterton, on the 50th anniversary of his death as one of the “holy lay persons” who have exercised a truly prophetic role within the Church and the world.

Saints and Beauty: Pope Benedict XVI's "Holy Men and Women"

Father Benedict, the former Pope Benedict XVI and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, expressed the link between beauty and holiness often, for example, in this message to a gathering of Communion and Liberation in 2002:

Nothing can bring us into close contact with the beauty of Christ himself other than the world of beauty created by faith and light that shines out from the faces of the saints, through whom his own light becomes visible.

Another great quotation extends that link to its impact on evangelization and apologetics:

I have often affirmed my conviction that the true apology of Christian faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth…are the saints and the beauty that the faith has generated.

In this volume of addresses from his General Audiences in 2010 and 2011, Pope Benedict XVI beautifully conveyed the individual holiness of each of these Holy Men and Women of the Middle Ages and Beyond. For each saint (or holy man and woman NOT yet canonized), he delineates what made them holy, how they "let Jesus so totally overwhelm their life that they could say with Saint Paul, "it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal. 2:20)" (chapter 36, "Holiness"). Pope Benedict presents them as examples for us to follow to be united with Jesus--he points out their special contributions to the Church and the world and does not neglect to speak of their difficulties with Church hierarchy or their own communities. 

Benedict dedicated three addresses to Saints Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, and two to St. Hildegard of Bingen, whom he had canonized. He highlights many of the great saints of the Counter-reformation or Catholic reformation era, but omits St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Philip Neri from his survey; obviously there is a big chronological gap between St. Alphonsus Liguori and St. Therese of Lisieux, the two saints he describes last.

He did speak of St. Ignatius in 2006:

On April 22, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI presided over a Eucharistic concelebration for the Society of Jesus. He addressed the fathers and brothers of the Society present at the Vatican Basilica, calling to mind the dedication and fidelity of their founder.

“St. Ignatius of Loyola was first and foremost a man of God who in his life put God, his greatest glory and his greatest service, first,” the Pope said. “He was a profoundly prayerful man for whom the daily celebration of the Eucharist was the heart and crowning point of his day.”

“Precisely because he was a man of God, St Ignatius was a faithful servant of the Church,” Benedict continued, recalling the saint's “special vow of obedience to the Pope, which he himself describes as 'our first and principal foundation.'”Highlighting the need for “an intense spiritual and cultural training,” Pope Benedict called upon the Society of Jesus to follow in the footsteps of St. Ignatius and continue his work of service to the Church and obedience to the Pope, so that it's members “may faithfully meet the urgent needs of the Church today.”

I'm not sure that Pope Benedict wrote much about St. Philip Neri.

Since Pope Francis is encouraging Catholics to visit their parishes for Confession and Adoration today, it does seem appropriate to cite his predecessor's comments about St. Alphonsus Liguori and the forgiveness of sins:

In his day, there was a very strict and widespread interpretation of moral life because of the Jansenist mentality which, instead of fostering trust and hope in God’s mercy, fomented fear and presented a grim and severe face of God, very remote from the face revealed to us by Jesus. Especially in his main work entitled Moral Theology, St Alphonsus proposed a balanced and convincing synthesis of the requirements of God’s law, engraved on our hearts, fully revealed by Christ and interpreted authoritatively by the Church, and of the dynamics of the conscience and of human freedom, which precisely in adherence to truth and goodness permit the person’s development and fulfilment.

Alphonsus recommended to pastors of souls and confessors that they be faithful to the Catholic moral doctrine, assuming at the same time a charitable, understanding and gentle attitude so that penitents might feel accompanied, supported and encouraged on their journey of faith and of Christian life.

St Alphonsus never tired of repeating that priests are a visible sign of the infinite mercy of God who forgives and enlightens the mind and heart of the sinner so that he may convert and change his life. In our epoch, in which there are clear signs of the loss of the moral conscience and — it must be recognized — of a certain lack of esteem for the sacrament of Confession, St Alphonsus’ teaching is still very timely.

Reading this book does whet my appetite for the other two series, on the early Church Fathers from Clement of Rome to St. Augustine and on the Father and Teachers of the Church from Leo the Great to Peter Lombard, especially the latter, which I've already ordered on my Kindle!