The Second Spring and the "Catholic Spring"

From Crisis Magazine and the inimitable Father George Rutler, this comparison between a great, holy Newman and 21st-century Newman:

On a Tuesday in 1852, the thirteenth of July for the literary record since it was a day important for English letters, Blessed John Henry Newman mounted the pulpit of Oscott College, its halls relatively new though designed by Joseph Potter and Augustus Pugin to recall the best of the Tudor times before the depredations of the eighth Henry. Always attentive to signs of decay, at 51 he claimed to be entering old age but was ready for a second breath, both for himself and his Church. That sermon, “The Second Spring,” is as poetic as homiletic, and could take its place in the annals of free verse as one of its most lyrical samples.

The occasion was the gathering of the First Provincial Synod of Westminster, when the Catholic episcopate had been restored, and hope was mingled with a quality of caution, for the road ahead was not straight and smooth and there were no sureties of rest along the way. That is why Newman took the temperature of the times:

Have we any right to take it strange, if, in this English land, the spring-time of the Church should turn out to be an English spring, an uncertain, anxious time of hope and fear, of joy and suffering,—of bright promise and budding hopes, yet withal, of keen blasts, and cold showers, and sudden storms?

The same might be preached today, in this peculiar period when the Church seems as conflicted as our nation, for the issues at hand have never been greater and the commentaries on them both in Church and State are almost burlesque in their shallowness and venality. Napoleon called China a sleeping giant and various sources have said the same of the Catholic Church. During the present election season, fevered as it is with unprecedented bitterness and banality, the Church could almost pass as a giant more comatose than slumbering.

If anything has stirred the Church, rusty when urban and flaccid when suburban, it has been the discovery of documents revealing cynical attempts by political strategist to subvert and suborn the institution, stripping her of supernatural credentials to become a tool of the State, like the Gallican Church of the French Revolution. Leaked emails from February 10-11, 2012 record exchanges entitled “Opening for a Catholic Spring?” between the current manager of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, John Podesta, and Sandy Newman, president of a political action group called Voices for Progress. Sandy Newman is certainly no heir to John Henry Newman nor are his visions of Spring like those of the Second Spring preached at Oscott. For Sandy Newman, “There needs to be a Catholic Spring in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic church.” The mandate for contraception coverage in medical plans might be a rallying point to “plant the seeds of the revolution.”

How Victorian! Accusing the Catholic Church of being medieval! 

Gentlemen, the Catholic Church is ancient; we are one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Podesta and this Newman may think they are sophisticated and brilliant strategists, planning the infiltration of the Catholic Church, but they should look up Julian the Apostate, Napoleon Bonaparte, and a few others along the long history of the Church and see how well they fared in their attempts.

As Father Rutler concludes:

So there we are at this crossroads of culture and, more than that, of civilization itself. Two Newmans proffer two Springtimes and they are not occasional variations of a common climate. Our nation has endured recent years of eroding faith and moral reason. It cannot endure several years more in the confidence that the erosion can be reversed as though it were just the habit of a cyclical season. There is a better prospect, but it is possible only if Catholics assent to the lively oracles of the Gospel and cast their votes and vows against those who are against it. The Newman who is blessed saw a Catholic Spring in the pulpit at Oscott that is not the clandestine plot of e-mails:

I listen, and I hear the sound of voices, grave and musical, renewing the old chant, with which Augustine greeted Ethelbert in the free air upon the Kentish strand. It comes from a long procession, and it winds along the cloisters. Priests and Religious, theologians from the schools, and canons from the Cathedral, walk in due precedence. And then there comes a vision of well-nigh twelve mitred heads; and last I see a Prince of the Church, in the royal dye of empire and of martyrdom, a pledge to us from Rome of Rome’s unwearied love, a token that that goodly company is firm in Apostolic faith and hope.

The photograph above is of the shrine Father Rutler installed in his former parish in New York, the Church of the Saviour. I certainly hope it is still there (the succeeding pastor made some changes). I took this picture in 2011 and so it is (c) Stephanie A. Mann.

Heresy Without Orthodoxy: Ross Douthat's "Bad Religion"

 

My husband and I visited our friendly neighborhood Eighth Day Books on Saturday and I purchased this book: Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. I am finding it fascinating reading. Heresies are essential topics in my study of Church History: the history of the Early Church can almost be seen as a struggle against heresy. As each heresy proposed a simple, logical way of understanding, for example, how Jesus was both God and Man, the bishops met at the councils and restated true Church teaching. The Arian heresy, particularly, divided the Church as St. Athanasius stood up against the world to defend the truth about Jesus. Sometimes we forget how cruel heresy can be (C. Fitzsimmons Allison wrote a book titled The Cruelty of Heresy: An Affirmation of Christian Orthodoxy that explored the more existential aspects of that cruelty), as the supporters of the heresy cast out the defenders of orthodoxy. I think we often view the orthodox as having all the power--but it isn't always so.

 

I'll post a review in the next couple of days, but for now, here's a couple of notes: Douthat's thesis is that the problem is not that religion is on decline in the U.S.A., but that we have almost too much religion, and most of it is unorthodox. While so much of the popular religion is unorthodox, the orthodox religion--let's use C.S. Lewis' term, "Mere Christianity"--is not strong enough, persuasive enough or perhaps even confident enough to call people back to historical, doctrinal, sacramental, and moral orthodoxy.  Douthat starts his review of these issues with the post-World War II situation, examines the era when Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, and Martin Luther King, Jr. demonstrated the strengths of Mainline Protestantism, Evangelical Protestantism, Catholicism, and the African-American Church. He then looks at the period of accommodation, including the sad story of the decline of the Catholic Church in America after the Second Vatican Council--his narrative seems accurate enough to me. Philip Jenkins, Russell Shaw, and Al Kresta (I want to read his new book and Eighth Day should have it in stock by our G.K. Chesterton reading group meeting this Friday) have covered some of the same ground in different works, but Douthat is both persuasive and compelling in his view of the past almost 60 years.

Book Review: Thomas More by Peter Berglar

Subtitle: A Lonely Voice Against the Power of the State. From the publisher (Scepter):

This book explores the conscience and motivation of one of the most admired persons in history: St. Thomas More. Most people know that Thomas More wrote a book called Utopia about a perfect society and got his head chopped off by King Henry VIII. But there was much more to the man. More not only occupied England’s most powerful position under the king as Lord Chancellor, but was also a devoted family man, a Renaissance figure of renown throughout Europe, and the author of works of apologetics as well as poetry, fiction and plays. Even while awaiting execution in the Tower of London, his multi-volume “Tower writings” poured out, evidence of his deep faith and life of prayer.

In Gulliver’s Travels, Protestant author Jonathan Swift named More among the six greatest defenders of liberty of all time, “to which all the ages of the world cannot add a seventh.” Erasmus praised him as one “born, created for friendship.” After his death, a popular tune sang the praises of his “gentle heart”:

When More some time had Chancellor been,
No more suits did remain;
The like will never more be seen
Till More be there again.

Peter Berglar, who has written ten biographies including one of St. Peter, and one of the earliest studies of Opus Dei and its founder, St. Josemaría Escrivá, deals in this new translation of the original German with the ultimate question: for what is life not worth living? When must it be purchased at a price that could devalue and perhaps destroy it? “It has been repeated in every generation. There will never be a lack of idols and dictators who demand this sacrifice.”

Peter Berglar organizes his biography of St. Thomas More according to the epitaph More wrote for his tomb in Chelsea, and even sent a copy of to Erasmus, after he had left the service of Henry VIII as Chancellor:

"Thomas More, a Londoner born, of no noble family, but of an honest stock, somewhat brought up in learning; after that in his young days he had been a pleader in the laws of this hall certain years, being one of the under-sheriffs of London, was of noble King Henry the Eight (which alone of all kings worthily deserved both with sword and pen to be called the Defender of the Faith, a glory afore not heard of) called into the court, and chose one of the Council and made knight; then made first under-treasurer of England, after that chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and last of all, with great favour of his prince, lord chancellor of England. But in the mean season, he was chosen speaker of the parliament, and besides was divers times in divers places the king's ambassador, and last of all at Cambray, joined fellow and companion with Cuthbert Tunstal, chief of that embassy, then Bishop of London, and within a while after Bishop of Durham, who so excelleth in learning, wit and virtue, that the whole world scant hath at this day any more learned, wiser or better; where he both joyfully saw and was present ambassador when the leagues between the chief princes of Christendom were renewed again, and peace so long looked for restored to Christendom, which peace Our Lord stablish and make perpetual.

When he had thus gone through this course of offices or honours, that neither that gracious prince could disallow his doings, nor he was odious to the nobility nor unpleasant to the people, but yet to thieves, murderers and heretics grievous, at last John More, his father, knight, and chosen of the prince to be one of the justices of the King's Bench, a civil man, pleasant, harmless, gentle, pitiful, just and uncorrupted, in years old, but in body more than for his years lusty, after that he perceived his life so long lengthened, that he saw his son lord chancellor of England, thinking himself now to have lived long enough, gladly departed to God. His son then, his father being dead, to whom as long as he lived being compared was wont both to be called young and himself so thought too, missing now his father departed, and seeing four children of his own, and of their offspring eleven, began in his own conceit to wax old; and this affection of his was increased by a certain sickly disposition of his breast, even by and by following, as a sign or token of age creeping upon him. He, therefore, irked and weary of worldly business, giving up his promotions, obtained at last by the incomparable benefit of his most gentle prince, if it please God to favour his enterprise, the thing which from a child in a manner always he wished and desired: that he might have some years of his life free, in which he little and little withdrawing himself from the business of this life, might continually remember the immortality of the life to come. And he hath caused this tomb to be made for himself, his first wife's bones hither too, that might every day put him in memory of death that never ceases to creep on him. And that this tomb made for him in his life-time be not in vain, nor that he fear death coming upon him, but that he may willingly, for the desire of Christ, die and find death not utterly death to him, but the gate of a wealthier life, help him, I beseech you, good reader, now with your prayers while he liveth, and when he is dead also."

Using that epitaph, which is More's outline of his own life's story to that point, Berglar traces More's career in the courts and at Court, his family life, and his involvement in the great crises of the Reformation and Henry VIII's Great Matter:

Contents:
Foreword
Part One: The Upward Climb
Chapter One: The Epitaph in Chelsea
Chapter Two: A Statesman and Writer
Chapter Three: Political Practice
Chapter Four: The Heretics
Chapter Five: A Father and His Children
Chapter Six: Farewell and Parting
Chapter Seven: The Two Women

In the last chapter, Berglar explores More's relationships with his two wives, Jane and Alice, to whom More paid tribute in his Chelsea epitaph:

Within this tomb Jane, wife of More, reclines;

This More for Alice and himself designs.

The first, dear object of my youthful vow,

Gave me three daughters and a son to know;

The next—ah! virtue in a stepdame rare!—

Nursed my sweet infants with a mother's care.

With both my years so happily have past,

Which most my love, I know not—first or last.

Oh! had religion destiny allowed,

How smoothly mixed had our three fortunes flowed!

But, be we in the tomb, in heaven allied,

So kinder death shall grant what life denied.

In the second part, Berglar looks more closely at More's responses to those two crises mentioned above by examining his works, like Utopia and The Humble Supplication of Souls (defending Church teaching on Purgatory), his defense of Church teaching on the Holy Eucharist and other works against the Reformers (written at the request of the great Defender of the Faith), and the Tower Works, composed during the 445 days he spent as Henry VIII's prisoner:

Part Two: The Testimony
Chapter Eight: The World of Erasmus
Chapter Nine: The Souls in Purgatory
Chapter Ten: Corpus Christi
Chapter Eleven: The Kings Path
Chapter Twelve: Consolation in Suffering
Chapter Thirteen: In Conversation with God
Epilogue
Index

This is an effective overview of More's life and works, with an interesting organizing pattern, and the reminder, especially highlighted in the epilogue, of the integrity of St. Thomas More's life. He thoroughly integrated his spiritual and professional life, his religious and personal life, so that there is no division or compartmentalization. Berglar notes when More may have failed in this effort (as when he followed Wolsey too closely) and does not ignore the difficulties and balance More had to work to achieve.

This book was translated from the German and the author notes in the epilogue the scarcity of German translations of More's works. Even though it is meant for a German audience, to bring St. Thomas More's example of responding to the crisis of the State attacking the Church, it's a good reminder for English and American audiences too, especially when discussing the distinctions between More and St. John Fisher:

"The difference between them was the difference between layman and priest. Fisher was obliged to resist the regime's aberrations directly. In this sense, his position was easier than More's. Priests who come into conflict with the state and wish to remain faithful to the Church will invoke St. John Fisheras their patron; whereas perplexed Christians entangled in the complexities and intrigues of the social apparatus and in need of an example and intercessor, will turn to St. Thomas More."

Fitting guidance for this Fortnight for Freedom in the U.S.A. (I purchased this book.)