Saint Phillip Neri and Saint John Henry Newman

This has been quite a week and a day--from Monday, May 18, when I heard, while attending my godson's promotion dinner (to high school), that Warren Farha, my friend and former boss at Eighth Day Books was seriously ill in hospital--to hearing that he had died on the eve of the Orthodox Ascension on May 20/21--to Pentecost Sunday when I attended the first Mass of Thanksgiving offered by Father Luke Meyerhoff, the first priest from Blessed Sacrament to be ordained since 1989! 

On Monday, May 25, I attended a 25th anniversary party for our pastor and this evening, on the feast of St. Philip Neri, I'm attending an evening Mass celebrating that occasion. So there's definitely been a mixture of joy and sorrow these eight days with confidence in the Resurrection!

But my topic today, the eighth day of these momentous events, is Saint Philip Neri, Saint John Henry Newman's patron as an Oratorian. Newman wrote several works about his patron: two sermons (numbers 12 and 13 in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions), a litany and a novena in Part II of his Meditations and Devotions, and five poems or verses included in his 1867 collection of Verses on Various Occasions. Of the five poems, I chose number 164, "St. Philip Neri in his Mission" (the others are 165. "St. Philip in himself", 166. St. Philip in his God", 171. "St. Philip in his School", and 172. "St. Philip in his Disciples"). 

I chose this one because it highlights his whole holy life from his time praying in the catacombs, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, his mission to Rome, and the day of his death on May 26, 1595.

164. St. Philip Neri in his Mission
{293} (A song.)

IN the far North our lot is cast,
Where faithful hearts are few;
Still are we Philip's children dear,
And Peter's soldiers true.

Founder and Sire! to mighty Rome,
Beneath St. Peter's shade,
Early thy vow of loyal love
And ministry was paid.

The solemn porch, and portal high,
Of Peter was thy home;
The world's Apostle he, and thou
Apostle of his Rome.

And first in the old catacombs,
In galleries long and deep,
Where martyr Popes had ruled the flock,
And slept their glorious sleep, {294}

There didst thou pass the nights in prayer,
Until at length there came,
Down on thy breast, new lit for thee,
The Pentecostal flame;—

Then, in that heart-consuming love,
Didst walk the city wide,
And lure the noble and the young
From Babel's pomp and pride;

And, gathering them within thy cell,
Unveil the lustre bright,
And beauty of thy inner soul,
And gain them by the sight.

And thus to Rome, for Peter's faith
Far known, thou didst impart
Thy lessons of the hidden life,
And discipline of heart.

And as the Apostle, on the hill
Facing the Imperial Town,
First gazed upon his fair domain,
Then on the cross lay down, {295}

So thou, from out the streets of Rome
Didst turn thy failing eye
Unto that mount of martyrdom,
Take leave of it, and die. [Note]

The Oratory.
1850.

The note provides these details about the day of St. Philip's death:

On the day of his death, Philip, "at the beginning of his Mass, remained for some time looking fixedly at the hill of St. Onofrio, which was visible from the chapel, just as if he saw some great vision. On coming to the Gloria in Excelsis, he began to sing, which was a very unusual thing for him, and he sang the whole of it with the greatest joy and devotion," &c.—Bacci's Life.

More about Saints Philip Neri and John Henry Newman and the Oratory here.

Saint Philip Neri, pray for us!

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

BTW: If you do a search on Warren's name, you will find many, many great recollections from people around the world!

O God of spirits and of all flesh, Who hast trampled down death and overthrown the Devil, and given life to Thy world, do Thou, the same Lord, give rest to the souls of Thy departed servants in a place of brightness, a place of refreshment, a place of repose, where all sickness, sighing, and sorrow have fled away. Pardon every transgression which they have committed, whether by word or deed or thought. For Thou art a good God and lovest mankind; because there is no man who lives yet does not sin, for Thou only art without sin, Thy righteousness is to all eternity, and Thy word is truth.

For Thou are the Resurrection, the Life, and the Repose of Thy servants who have fallen asleep, O Christ our God, and unto Thee we ascribe glory, together with Thy Father, who is from everlasting, and Thine all-holy, good, and life-creating Spirit, now and ever unto ages of ages. Amen.

Eternal rest grant unto him O Lord, and may Warren's soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace. May Warren rest in peace. Amen.

Another Book on Catholic Converts in the Twentieth Century!

Stopping into Eighth Day Books to buy our next Chesterton group book (The Ball and the Cross) yesterday, I happened to see another book, and another, and another, since it is a bookstore. The particular book I saw and picked up and scanned, was Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century by Melanie McDonagh from Yale University Press:

Why did Catholicism attract so many unlikely converts in Britain during the twentieth century?

The twentieth century is understood as an era of growing, inexorable secularism, yet in Britain between the 1890s and the 1960s there was a marked turn to Rome. In the first half of the century, Catholicism became an intellectual and spiritual fashion attracting more than half a million converts, including fascinating artists, writers, and thinkers. What drew these men and women to join the church, and what difference did conversion make to them?

Melanie McDonagh examines the lives of these notable converts from the perspective of their faith. For the Decadent circle of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde—who converted on his deathbed—artists such as Gwen John and David Jones, the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, and novelists including G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark, Catholicism offered stability in increasingly febrile times. McDonagh explores their lives and influences, the reaction to their conversions, and the priests who initiated them into their faith.

There are 24 chapters, and the author recounts Saint John Henry Newman's story and influence in chapter eight. Here's an interview with the author.  

As I browsed through the book I noticed this name: Gwen John (Chapter 6), an artist who, like Camille Claudel, had a relationship with Auguste Rodin. Here's an article from The Catholic Herald by Melanie McDonagh, who also writes for The Spectator and other papers in England, about an exhibit of John's works in Cardiff:

Gwen John converted to Catholicism around 1913 and it had a profound effect on her art. The new exhibition on the artist, which opens in Cardiff, is striking in that it places the religious aspect of her work where it belongs, at the centre of her art and her vision of the world. In one way that isn’t surprising, for among her best known works is the series of Dominican nuns from the convent of Meudon, culminating in the wonderful images of their founder, Mère Poussepin, taken from a prayer card. But it can’t always be taken for granted that contemporary curators will be unabashed by religion (I remember a collection of David Jones paintings presented without reference to their religious aspect), so it is rather wonderful that the curators of this excellent show, Lucy Wood and Fiona McLees, give Gwen John’s faith the significance she gave it. . . .

More about the exhibition here. 

Did I buy the book? No. Do I want to read the book? Yes. 

Two copies are still available at Eighth Day Books! It would interesting to compare and contrast McDonagh's take with Patrick Allitt's!

I did buy another book, however: What I Saw in America by G.K. Chesterton (one of McDonagh's converts!), brand new from the American Chesterton Society!

Image credit (Public Domain): Gwen John - Self-Portrait

Book Review: "The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins"

Please note that I bought this book at Eighth Day Books. 

I have been reading and studying the life and poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins since I was a undergraduate English major, and before. This may be one of the very best books about him that I have ever read. I think the organization of the book facilitates its impact: Ellsberg supports her analysis of Hopkins's life and works with his poetry and prose in each part. My review comments are included in the outline of the Contents below.

From the publisher, Plough Books:

Gerard Manley Hopkins deserves his place among the greatest poets in the English language. He ranks seventh among the most frequently reprinted English-language poets, surpassed only by Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Dickinson, Yeats, and Wordsworth.

Yet when the English Jesuit priest died of typhoid fever at age forty-four, he considered his life a failure. He never would have suspected that his poems, which would not be published for another twenty-nine years, would eventually change the course of modern poetry and influence such poets as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney. Along with his contemporaries Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Hopkins revolutionized poetic language.

And yet we love Hopkins not only for his literary genius but for the hard-won faith that finds expression in his verse. Who else has captured the thunderous voice of God and the grandeur of his creation on the written page as Hopkins has?

Seamlessly weaving together selections from Hopkins’s poems, letters, journals, and sermons, Margaret Ellsberg lets the poet tell the story of a life-long struggle with faith that gave birth to some of the best poetry of all time. Even readers who spurn religious language will find in Hopkins a refreshing, liberating way to see God’s hand at work in the world.

Edited with commentary written by Margaret R. Ellsberg

Foreword by Dana Gioia (I was surprised that Gioia did not mention Saint Robert Southwell, SJ or Richard Crashaw as religious poets in his survey of those who preceded Hopkins, who revived the genre)

Contents:

Part I. Incompatible Excellences: An Introduction

*Three Highlights

    --Transubstantiation: when Hopkins discovered this Catholic teaching: that the words spoken during the Canon of the Mass effect the change of bread and wine into the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ, it was essential to his faith and his creativity: "never again could language prove merely decorative"

    --Creation: renewed constantly, even as it decays and dies: Hopkins's descriptions and drawings of nature: detailed and beautiful

    --Influence of Blessed Duns Scotus and haecceitas (pp. 12-13):

        " . . . Scotus's special take on the well-worn medieval debate concerning universals and particulars. . . . For Scotus, individual things always resulted from a process he called 'contraction' by which universals contracted down into haecceitas, the "thisness" of particular concrete things. . . . the concept of "selving" [for Hopkins].  . . . His idea of of selving blends with a Victorians taste for precise detail." 

*** One of the best explanations I've read of this essential concept for understanding Hopkins's creative impulses.

Part II. Christ Calls

*Highlights:

    --His conversion from Tractarian Anglicanism to Catholicism in 1866 (five other undergraduates at the time converted too)

    --His connection to Newman at the Birmingham Oratory and his communication to his father and family about his conversion

    --Error on page 19: Nicholas Wiseman was the first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster appointed by Pope Pius IX in 1850, not Henry Manning, who would succeed him (error repeated in the chronology at the back of the book)

        Poems (1864-1868)

        Letters (1866-1874)

        Journals (1864-1875)

Part III. Reckoning with the Wreck

    --Hopkins joined the Jesuits in 1868 and stopped writing poetry; after the five German nuns died in the wreck because of the Falk Laws in the Kulterkampf, his superior asked him to write something!

    --written in the form of a Pindaric victory ode

        "The Wreck of the Deutschland"

        Letters (1877-1878)          

Part IV. What I Do Is Me

--Because Hopkins (such a brilliant scholar at Balliol) preferred Scotus over Aquinas, his academic career as a Jesuit was stymied

--He was moved around to different missions and seldom achieved measurable success

        Poems (1877-1882)

        Letters (1879-1883)

        Sermons (very Ignatian with composition of place, etc)

            Oxford (at St. Aloysius)

            Bedford Leigh

            Liverpool

        Spiritual Writings

        Retreat Notes

Part V. Wrestling with God

 --Time in Dublin in 1884-1890 at Newman's Dublin University, teaching Latin and Greek, grading exam papers from mostly disappointing students

--Deplorable housing (plumbing) conditions for the Jesuits; Hopkins ill and exhausted

        Poems (1884-1889)

        *the "Terrible Sonnets"

        *"That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection"

        Letters (1884-1890)

        Devotional Writings (1883-1889)

**Ellsberg moderates a debate between those who see a profound conflict between Hopkins's vocation as Catholic (Jesuit) priest and his talent as a poet; from the evidence of his poetry, letters, spiritual and devotional writings, and his sermons, it seems clear to me that he had found great peace with The Holy Trinity and with the faith of the Catholic Church. He never doubted; he had difficulties, as Newman says, but not doubts. His vision of God's Creation, of--to use another idea from Newman--the visible world and the invisible world and his poetic method were both secure. Hopkins would not change the latter even though Coventry Patmore nor others, even his friend Robert Bridges, could understand what he was achieving. 

I don't think that Hopkins had a "struggle with faith" (contrary to the publisher's blurb) as a theological virtue; he believed in God; he believed in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and in the Resurrection; he trusted in the beauty of Creation and God's love. That Faith was the source of his inspiration. Hopkins struggled with--as we all do--life: its disappointments and difficulties, our failures and frustrations, the misunderstandings of others. His poetry reflects how he reconciled life with Faith through his trust in God.

Back matter:

A Chronology

Endnotes

Selected Bibliography

Index of Titles and First Lines

Book Review: The Hidden Power of Silence in the Mass

Subtitle: A Guide for Encountering Christ in the Liturgy. Please note that I purchased this book at Eighth Day Books in Wichita, Kansas. From the publisher, Sophia Institute Press:

In this game-changing book, Fr. Boniface Hicks, O.S.B., reveals how you can actively listen and open yourself to receive God’s personal love for you in the Mass, where our Lord waits to quench your deepest longing and heal your wounds. Drawing from the wisdom of the saints, modern-day spiritual giants, and his own penetrating reflections, you will learn how to quiet your mind, stretch your heart, and become childlike in the sense of experiencing the sacred mysteries with wonder and awe.

The Mass, as most Catholics are aware, consists of words and gestures through which the Church worships the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. But as far fewer Catholics know, the periods of silence are more than pauses or empty spaces, as Fr. Hicks explains. They are beautifully textured with prescribed prayers spoken quietly by the priest, meaningful images such as incense and chalice veils, and expectant faith ready to surrender or receive from God in particular ways. Learning how to attune our hearts to these silences can greatly increase the fruitfulness of our reception of grace at Mass.

In these soul-enriching pages, you will explore the various textures of silence in general, the ways in which silence affects your interior life, and how silence can draw you into more intimate prayer. . . .

You may also read a preview on their website.

Contents:

Foreword by The Most Reverend Andrew Cozzens (the Chairman of the 2024 National Eucharistic Congress)

Introduction

1. Silence in Prayer

    Prescriptions for Silence in the Roman Rite

        The Secret Prayers of the Priest

    Learning Silence in Prayer

        Mary's Example

        Learning from St. Benedict

        Practicing Silence in Prayer

(Each chapter ends with some reflection questions)

Father Boniface identifies five kinds of silence: Ascetical, Mystical, Sacrificial, Contemplative, and Eternal; Father Hicks treats each one in chapters following the sequences of the celebration of the Holy Mass:

2. Preparing for Mass (Ascetical)

    Images for reducing distractions

        Making room for God within us

        Stretching open

        Settling a snow globe

    Images for vulnerability

        Becoming a child

        Remembering whom we are meeting

        Entering another world

    Learning ascetical silence

        Mary's Example

        Learning from St. Benedict

        Practicing ascetical silence

3. Encountering the Word (Mystical)

    Awe and wonder

    A pure heart sees God

        Pure heart and lips to proclaim the Gospel

        The cleansing power of the Word

    Entering the silence of God

    Learning mystical silence

        Mary's Example

        Learning from St. Benedict

        Practicing mystical silence

4. The Silence of Offering (Sacrificial)

    Candles and Cut Flowers

        Candles

        Cut flowers (vs. potted plants)

    Our humanity becomes divinity

    The Fiery Furnace of the Altar

    Incense: Wounds Become Worship

    A Purer Offering

    The Eucharistic Prayer

    Learning sacrificial silence

        Mary's Example

        Learning from St. Benedict

        Practicing sacrificial silence

5. Silence of Adoration and Communion (Contemplative)

    Communion with the Risen Body and the Whole Church

    His Body and Blood set us free

    Finding refuge in Christ's Body and Blood

    Our Guardian for eternal life

    Learning contemplative silence

        Mary's Example

        Learning from St. Benedict

        Practicing contemplative silence

6. Savoring in Silence (Eternal)

    Purification of the vessels includes our hearts

    Maronite farewell to the altar

    Thanksgiving after Mass

    Learning eternal silence

        Mary's Example

        Learning from St. Benedict

        Practicing the silence of savoring

Conclusion

Bibliography

As you can see from the outline this is a very systematic and schematic book but it's not an artificial organization at all. It flows from the pairing up of the forms of silence with the sequence of the Holy Mass. Thus we do need to prepare ourselves for Mass by detaching ourselves from earthly things as we enter a heavenly celebration. Then we can listen to the readings and the prayers with awe and wonder. 

In Chapter 4, Father Boniface provides some great guidance for the laity during the Offertory, the Preparation of Bread and Wine, and the Presentation of Gifts. His emphasis on the symbolism of cut flowers rather than potted plants or flowers at the Altar and in the Sanctuary is important: they are sacrificial as their beauty will die without their roots; they are costly and must be attended to by the sacristans as offerings. He gave me a deeper insight into the use of incense during the Mass (at the beginning, before the priest proclaims the Gospel, during the Offertory, including the incensation of the congregation, and during the Canon of the Mass as priest elevates the Body and the Blood of Christ after the Consecration). I've always thought of the raising of my prayers like incense before the Altar, but Hicks comments on how the incense, formed from the sap of "a wounded tree" represent our wounds and sins healed by Christ, the burning coal: "the furnace of God's consuming love"!

As I was reading this in late Advent in the Adoration Chapel in my parish church it made me think of Saint Robert Southwell's "The Burning Babe"!

“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,

Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!

My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,

Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;

The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,

The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,

For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,

      So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”

And of course, the time after the laity has received Holy Communion needs to provide a period of silence, Eucharistic hymns notwithstanding. And remaining in silence after Mass for further mediation is important, rather than rushing out to the parking lot or starting long conversations in the pews while others are still praying . . .

In chapter six, Father Boniface comments on the Maronite Rite Prayer Bidding Farewell to the Altar, prayed by the priest after Mass. Throughout the book he also makes some comparisons between the Traditional Latin Mass rubrics, prayers, and silences (Missal of 1962 and before) and those in the Novus Ordo Mass (Missal of 1970). Often he, to this reader, has to stretch to approve some of the changes made and the options in the Novus Ordo that make periods of silence shorter or non-existent. Yes, he demonstrates that there should be silence during the celebration of the current Roman Rite, but he has to acknowledge that there is more room for abuse of these rubrics. Priests reading this book might be moved to emphasize those silences as they celebrate Mass; laity reading the book might be moved to request more silence during Mass.

The works cited and bibliography includes sources by authors one would expect in such a book: Romano Guardini, Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Saint John Paul II, Pope Francis, Rudolf Otto, Cardinal Sarah,and of course Saint Benedict of Nursia, etc. There are also some other interesting choices: the Catholic Psychiatrist Conrad W. Baars (1919-1981), Born Only Once: The Miracle of Affirmation; James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones; Judith E. Glaser (1946-2018), Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results, and others.

I found the book, perhaps not "game-changing", but insightful and helpful to my actual participation and reception of the mysteries at Holy Mass, which I try to attend as often as possible.

What I'm Reading Now: "John Henry Newman: A Life Sacrificed"

My, I had an eventful weekend: Adoration and Mass Friday morning; our annual Chesterton Advent/Christmas party at Eighth Day Books that evening; a Shakespeare play reading Saturday night (As You Like It); the monthly Lovers of Newman reading at the local IHM Convent ("Religious Joy") and Sunday evening Mass. Plus, I have discovered Ida Friederike Görres(1901-1971), by starting John Henry Newman: A Life Sacrificed from Ignatius Press:

This unparalleled introduction to St. John Henry Newman—mind, heart, soul, and personality—brings the great cardinal to life before our eyes, and with him the charged air of nineteenth-century England. Drawing from his letters, writings, and journal entries with precision and poetic flair, the book is one of Ida Friederike Görres’ masterworks.

While famous for his brilliance, Cardinal Newman did not hide in an ivory tower. His life was one of risk, sacrifice, and immense charity. His sharp turn to Catholicism rocked the University of Oxford, costing him his friendships, his livelihood, and his identity. Through failures and disappointments, over and over again, Newman let himself be recreated by God.

This work, in Görres’ words, is a portrait of “the boy, puzzled, who was startled and overwhelmed by God; the active, creative young prophet of his church in crisis; the hermit, who he was and wanted to be all his life; and the fighter, who he was with and against his will: the saint of the Church and the saint of humility, the one perfected in sacrifice”.

With an in-depth introduction by Ratzinger Prize winner Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, an extensive commentary by translator Jennifer S. Bryson, and a detailed index*, the book introduces readers not only to St. John Henry Newman, but to Görres, one of the greatest hagiographers of the twentieth century, whose spiritual writings have only recently been discovered by the English-speaking world.

*plus an extensive bibliography!

I bought my copy at Eighth Day Books before we started our Chesterton party, reminiscing about our favorite Christmas memories and reading a few selections from our author! We'll continue our discussion of his Autobiography in January, 2025!

More about Gorres here.

What I'm Reading Now: "The Catholic Reformation" by Pierre Janelle

I've just started this book which purports, according to the publisher's blurb (The Bruce Company of Milwaukee) to offer a different interpretation of Church history in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries:

"The Catholic Reformation began before the Protestant Revolt as a continuation of the Christian humanism movement of the late fifteenth century. It not only amended the discipline of the Church, but exerted its influence in every field of human endeavour."

This is the thesis of Dr. Janelle's book in which he corrects the world's generally mistaken impression that Catholic Reform, commonly termed the Counter-Reformation, was a consequence of and reaction against the Protestant Reformation. Analyzing the historical movement in all its aspects, he presents the first work on this subject ever published in English. . . .

I have the 1963 paperback edition. The Table of Contents:

Anarchy the Disease Within the Church -- Early Reactions against Disease in the Church -- Reformation Again Delayed -- Preparing for Trent -- The Council of Trent -- The Religious Revival among the Regulars -- Education and Scholarship -- The Catholic Reformation and Literature -- The Catholic Reformation and Art -- Piety and Mysticism -- The Catholic Reformation after Trent -- The Catholic Reformation in France -- The Catholic Reformation in Great Britain and Ireland -- The Missions

Here's some information about the author, whose books are out of print and hard to find:

Pierre Janelle was born on the 17th of September in 1891 in the village of Mouy in the French region of Oise. His father, Ernest Janelle, was a headmaster at several secondary schools in Paris including Lycée Charlemagne and Lycée Pasteur.

Pierre studied at the Sorbonne where he graduated in 1911 as an English academic. Between 1925 and 1928 he was also the holder of the Ernest Lavisse research scholarship awarded to him by the Sorbonne. In 1935 he obtained a D.Litt degree at the same university. . . 

As well as being an English Professor, Janelle wrote many influential books on religious history particularly surrounding the British Isles. Some of his books which can be found in the university library include Obedience in Church and State (1930) and The Catholic Reformation (1949). John Swinnerton Philimore an English Catholic covert [sic]*who was a professor of Glasgow University greatly influenced Janelle's interest in Britain's Catholic history and lent him many rare books so that he could carry out his research. Janelle also appeared as a guest speaker for the BBC in July 1948 to discuss his research on the religious history of Britain.

* [a covert convert?]

I'd really love to find a copy of this book: Robert Southwell, The Writer: A Study in Religious Inspiration, published by Sheed & Ward!

To conclude the author's Roll of Honour entry at the University of Glasgow:

Pierre Janelle died on 19th March 1964. He is remembered for his gallant military actions in the First and Second World War as well as his notable contributions to education and religious historical research.

I'm also reading Roland Millare's A Living Sacrifice: Liturgy and Eschatology in Joseph Ratzinger, which I purchased at Eighth Day Books last year in January (!) when the author was visiting Wichita:

A Living Sacrifice focuses on the inherent relationship between eschatology and the liturgy in light of Ratzinger’s insistence upon the primacy of logos over ethos. When logos is subordinated to ethos, the human person becomes subjected to a materialist ontology that leads to an ethos that is concerned above all by utility and progress, which affects one’s approach to understanding the liturgy and eschatology. How a person celebrates the liturgy becomes subject to the individual whim of one person or a group of people. Eschatology is reduced to addressing the temporal needs of a society guided by a narrow conception of hope or political theology. If the human person wants to understand his authentic sacramental logos, then he must first turn to Christ the incarnate Logos, who reveals to him that he is created for a loving relationship with God and others.

The primacy of logos is the central hermeneutical key to understanding the unique vision of Ratzinger’s Christocentric liturgical theology and eschatology. This is coupled with a study of Ratzinger’s spiritual Christology with a focus on how it influences his theology of liturgy and eschatology through the notions of participation and communion in Christ’s sacrificial love. Finally, A Living Sacrifice examines Ratzinger’s theology of hope, charity, and beauty, as well as his understanding of active participation in relationship to the eschatological and cosmic characteristics of the sacred liturgy.

It's a good follow up to re-reading and discussing the chapters on the Resurrection and Ascension in Pope Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth: Part Two: Holy Week from the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection with my best friend after Easter!

Happy 150th Birthday to G.K. Chesterton!

Only G.K. Chesterton could make such an event as his birth an excuse for levity, with deeper intent than at first perceived:

Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.

Nevertheless, the great Waterworks Tower was destined to play its part in my life, as I shall narrate on a subsequent page; but that story is connected with my own experiences, whereas my birth (as I have said) is an incident which I accept, like some poor ignorant peasant, only because it has been handed down to me by oral tradition. And before we come to any of my own experiences, it will be well to devote this brief chapter to a few of the other facts of my family and environment which I hold equally precariously on mere hearsay evidence. Of course what many call hearsay evidence, or what I call human evidence, might be questioned in theory, as in the Baconian controversy or a good deal of the Higher Criticism. The story of my birth might be untrue. I might be the long-lost heir of The Holy Roman Empire, or an infant left by ruffians from Limehouse on a door-step in Kensington, to develop in later life a hideous criminal heredity. Some of the sceptical methods applied to the world's origin might be applied to my origin, and a grave and earnest enquirer come to the conclusion that I was never born at all. But I prefer to believe that common sense is something that my readers and I have in common; and that they will have patience with a dull summary of the facts.

from his Autobiography. He has received and accepts on faith the history of his birth, as have nearly all of us. Please note that Chesterton finished his Autobiography just before he died and it was published posthumously.

He also wrote about birthdays:

The first fact about the celebration of a birthday is that it is a way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive….But there is a second fact about Birthdays, and the birth-song of all creation, a fact which really follows on this; but which, as it seems to me, the other school of thought almost refuses to recognize. The point of that fact is simply that it is a fact. In being glad about my Birthday, I am being glad about something which I did not myself bring about.

--from G.K.’s Weekly, 21 March 1935

Our local Chesterton society is meeting extraordinarily tonight (6 pm) at Eighth Day Books to celebrate his birthday by buying books and then repairing to a local ice cream shop -- not a pub? -- for a treat!

Happy Chesterton's Birthday to all his fans!

Image Credit (Public Domain): Picture of Chesterton with a Dog

Book Review: Sheila Kaye-Smith's "The End of the House of Alard"

From one English family saga to another! I already had this book, given to me as a Christmas present. To read it right after Josephine Ward's One Poor Scruple didn't invite comparisons as much as highlight how different two novels in same genre can be so different. The title indicates what is going to happen in the novel: a family "house", the hegemony of a family, not just the building of course, is somehow going to come to an end. No heirs, no handing on of the family property or traditions: the end.

How the family's house ends is the story: who are the last members of the house of Alard? What did they do that brought it to its end? That's the story Sheila Kaye-Smith tells as three sons and three daughters deal with the legacy of their land-holding, mortgaged to the hilt, over-taxed (in their opinion), failing, image-conscious family. They have a hard problem to solve in the first place and Kaye-Smith's plot demonstrates how the choices their parents, especially their dictatorial father, and they make contribute to the decline and end of their house.

One reason I was interested in this novel when CUA Press announced its publication was that I had read some of Sheila Kaye-Smith's fiction before: Joanna Godden, Susan Spray--and Superstition Corner, the tragic story of Kate Alard in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. 

Kaye-Smith wrote that novel, which I first read in high school, after she and her husband, an Anglo-Catholic minister, were received into the Catholic Church. This novel, about the later Alard family--at least, I presume it's the same family--pre-dates her conversion to Catholicism, but an astute reader sees the sympathy for Catholicism in post-recusant England after World War I. At least three characters are Catholic (including the parish priest), one converts to Catholicism, and another is shaken by what he discovers and desires when he learns just a little bit about the Catholic Church after stepping into the local parish and meeting the priest. The traditional, non-religious Anglicanism of the Alard family in the early twentieth century has little basis to respond to the incarnational, costly and rewarding Catholicism Kaye-Smith describes it--particularly as Gervase describes it to Jenny on page 329:

"But Catholic Christianity stands fast because it belongs to an order of things which doesn’t change. It’s made of the same stuff as our hearts. It’s the supernatural satisfaction of all our natural instincts. It doesn’t deal with abstractions, but with everyday life. The sacraments are all common things—food, drink, marriage, birth and death. Its highest act of worship is a meal—its most sacred figures are a dying man, and a mother nursing her child. It’s traditional in the sense that nature and life are traditional....”

As the publisher's blurb describes the book:

The End of the House of Alard (1922) documents the choices made by the final generation of the aristocratic Alard family and the ways in which they, both willingly and reluctantly, bring the long line of their ancestral blood to a complete and sudden end. For some of them, the end of the Alard line is as painful to enact as it is for others to witness; for others it is welcomed as a necessary modernization or a true realignment toward religious integrity and universal human truth. Some of the family's children yearn for individual liberty; others have it forced upon them. But none of them can find it under the burden of the Alard name and its crumbling estate. The End of the House of Alard is a novel about the human need for purpose, for a truth by which to live and for which to die. It is a novel about faith and idolatry, love and death, freedom and bondage, nature and grace. Put another way, it is about how human beings cannot escape the great challenge of salvation, of breaking free from false, man made gods in order to unite instead with the divine love of Christ. The novel's characters span a breadth of options on this spectrum and their various outlooks on life continue to reflect those available to us today.

That's very accurate summary of the book, and the reader's interest is constantly maintained as the characters make their choices while the omniscient narrator explores their thoughts and feelings. Each of the sons and daughters of Sir John and his wife Lucy (nee Kenyon), Peter, George, Gervase, Doris, Mary, Jenny receive their due attention, as do the women the brothers marry or are in love with: Rose, George's wife; Vera, Peter's wife; and Stella Mount, the doctor's daughter, loved by both Peter and Gervase. 

Except for Ben Godfrey, the men in Mary and Jenny's lives are less important to the plot of the end. 

The crux of the story really is that Peter, demobbed from World War I in 1918, loves Stella Mount, but marries for money as a sacrifice for the Alard family legacy, and although he contends he loves his wife, he just can't let go of his love for Stella. 

Gervase loves Stella too, but he finds a greater love and follows it. The end of the house of Alard comes down to those two men, and I won't spoil the plot, except to say, inscrutably: The end of the end is the only end there could be.

There is verse at the beginning of the novel, lines from G.K. Chesterton's "The Secret People":

We only know the last sad squires rode slowly towards the sea,
And a new people takes the land . . .

The section titles of the novel are:

Part One: Conster Manor

Interlude

Part Two: Leason Parsonage (George, the Anglican minister deals with his vocation and faith in this section)

Part Three: Fourhouses (Jenny, the youngest daughter, makes her choice in this section)

Part Four: Scarecrow

Again, I highly recommend this novel and my only disappointment is that there's only one more book currently published in this series, The Dry Wood by Caryll Houselander. But there's a consolation to be had there too: Eighth Day Books has two copies!

Book Review: Josephine Ward's "One Poor Scruple"

I could not put this book down Saturday afternoon. I bought it at Eighth Day Books that morning, ran a couple of errands after that, and started reading it at lunch. Finished it at 10:45 p.m., well past my usual bedtime! It was compelling, dramatic, and insightful. The blurb almost invites comparison with Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, so I'm going to follow that lead to some extent in my review.

The publisher's blurb:

The Catholic University of America Press is pleased to continue to present new volumes in our Catholic Women Writers series, which will shed new light on prose work of Catholic women writers from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Josephine Ward is one of Catholicism’s greatest literary treasures and a foremost contributor to English literary history – except that she has all but completely fallen from the historical record. She spent her life in close companionship with the most active minds working in the late 19th century to restore to the Catholic Church in England the intellectual, sacramental and theological integrity it had once enjoyed before three hundred years of persecution. All seven of her novels are out of print, despite their once high acclaim in the fin de siècle literary world.

First published in 1899, One Poor Scruple follows the recusant Riversdale family who have survived the long penal years by observing a quiet aristocratic life of sport and agriculture, never stepping into the public sphere from which Catholics in Britain had been barred for so long. But at the start of the twentieth century, a new generation has emerged. The novel’s younger characters are now legally able to go to Oxford and Cambridge and to enter the public life of letters. Emboldened by the confident work of John Henry Newman, this younger generation of Catholics are nonetheless cautioned not to trust the Protestant establishment. One Poor Scruple is a coming-of-age story in which the new generation of more worldly Catholics search for love, friendship and intellectual emancipation in the decadent social world of Edwardian London. Decades before Evelyn Waugh examined in Brideshead Revisited the human struggle to distinguish between true and false beauty, Ward’s novel examined the challenge of discerning between conflicting desires and of living a life that is as truthful and good as it is beautiful.

Since this is novel about a family, the relationships, good and bad, between the characters are consequential for the plot as Ward has woven it. One of the most crucial of these relationships is the one between the protagonist, the childless widow Marge Riversdale and her in-laws, especially her mother-in-law. Her late husband George, whom his mother idolizes, treated Marge badly (details about infidelity, lavish spending--leaving her in debt--abandonment, and a mysterious death are only hinted at), yet his mother blames Marge for not reforming him. Because of this divide, which even the regard Marge feels for her father-in-law cannot mend, she does not have the moral support she needs as she has entered London society. Even a visit to the Riversdale's home in Lancashire, where she intends to go to Confession after some delay, can't provide her refuge because of this rift (on both sides, of course).

I wish there'd been a family tree: these relationships are a little confusing to me! 

It also must be said that the older Mrs. Riversdale, Helen, has no great sympathy for her sister-in-law, Mrs. Arthur Riversdale, Janet, nee Harding, a convert from Broad Church Anglicanism to Catholicism through Saint John Henry Newman! Helen doesn't trust Newman as a Confessor to Janet because he'd been an Anglican too; and she doesn't like it that Janet is reading George Eliot's Adam Bede, details recounted in the chapter devoted to Janet and her daughter Hilda, who will be coming at the Hunt Ball (that must be delayed!). But Mrs. Arthur Riversdale, also a widow, doesn't figure much in the story, except for sending Hilda first to the family home and then to London, and keeping her there in dangers unbeknownst to her mother.

You can see some parallels to the Flyte family divisions in Brideshead Revisited, I think. One huge difference between the two novels is there is little or no humor--certainly no characters like Rex Mottram to provide ridiculous comic relief. The diversions of the world, the desire for Catholics to fit in British society after centuries of recusancy are dangers to the Faith for the characters in both novels. 

The big issue in One Poor Scruple, as in Brideshead Revisited, is that Marge (like Lord Marchmain and Julia), needs to repent and reconcile with Jesus and the Catholic Church. The problem for Marge is that she contemplates marriage to a divorced Lord Bellasis and that her London friends (?), most notably Lady Cecilia Rupert and Laura, Mrs. Hurstmonceaux plot to enmesh Marge: Laura wants her to marry Lord Bellasis, partly to demonstrate her power and partly to force Marge out the "superstition" of Catholicism, while Lady Cecilia wants Lord Bellasis for herself. Marge is no match for these two plotters, but fortunately, her sister-in-law Mary is (no spoiler!)

It's the web of gossip and double-timing that Laura and Cecilia weave that ensnares Marge, Hilda, Marmaduke Lemerchant, and even Mark Fieldes in great moral dangers. Cecilia's efforts to use Hilda, in London for her first Season, are particularly malign. One thing that Marge vows is to never see Laura Hurstmonceaux again, because she's a "heap" of trouble. The three men, Lord Bellasis, Marmaduke, and Mark, are also wrapped up in these plots as Laura and Cecilia find them useful.

Also unlike Evelyn Waugh's novel, this novel has an omniscient narrator, who knows the characters' thoughts and even interprets, for example, Hilda's efforts to write home to her mother, editing her letters as she writes them.

The denouement in One Poor Scruple is more realistic than Lord Marchmain's signed acquiescence to the Sacrament of Extreme Unction because it relies more on Marge's childhood devotion to Our Lady and her battles with her conscience before agreeing to marry Lord Bellasis. It is not quite as miraculous as that Sign of the Cross, but it is spiritually dramatic. And the aftermath of that intervention is congruent with Marge's character throughout the novel: she still struggles to confess her sins.

As Thomas Woodman comments in his Faithful Fictions: The Catholic Novel in British Literature, "No plot summary can do justice to the impressive psychological realism and restraint of this work." (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022 Second Edition, p. 25). Ward also excels in the physical descriptions of these people, their looks and mannerisms: they are embodied in my imagination.

I hope the editors of the Catholic Women Writers series, Julia Meszaros and Bonnie Lander Johnson, plan to publish more of Josephine Ward's fiction. She is an excellent novelist, based on this example, sympathetic and yet realistic about her characters, and with an eye for social satire combined with excellent plotting (not like Laura or Cecilia, though!).

The title comes from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1 in a speech of Portia's at the trial of the bond:

Therefore prepare thee to cut off the flesh.
Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more
But just a pound of flesh: if thou cut'st more
Or less than a just pound, be it but so much (2275)
As makes it light or heavy in the substance,
Or the division of the twentieth part
Of one poor scruple, nay, if the scale do turn
But in the estimation of a hair,
Thou diest and all thy goods are confiscate.

Highly recommended.

Book Review: "Flannery O'Connor's 'Why Do the Heathen Rage?'"

Last Friday I watched the repeat of The World Over on EWTN (the 1/26/2024 episode; about the 41:26 mark) and saw Raymond Arroyo interview Jessica Hooten Wilson discussing this book and her efforts to understand what Flannery O'Connor was trying to write about in what would have been her third novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage?

So after attending Adoration and Mass at the Newman Center (St. Paul's University Parish) at Wichita State University, I went to Eighth Day Books to purchase one of the copies stacked on the table on the first floor. The book is published by Brazos Press of the Baker Publishing Group and the full title is: Flannery O'Connor's Why Do the Heathen Rage? A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress. The publisher provides the Table of Contents on their website: 

Introduction

Why Do the Heathen Rage? The Porch Scene
Koinonia
Sequel to "The Enduring Chill"
Why Do the Heathen Rage? Walter's Last Will and Testament
Why Do the Heathen Rage? Baptism
Why Do the Heathen Rage? Walter/Asbury's Childhood
Why Do the Heathen Rage? Walter Recites the Ten Commandments
Epistolary Blackface
Why Do the Heathen Rage? The Black Double
Maryat Lee and Oona Gibbs
Documenting "Real" Life
Why Do the Heathen Rage? Photo Journal
The Revolting Conversion
Why Do the Heathen Rage? Do Not Come, Oona Gibbs!
Introducing the Girl
Why Do the Heathen Rage? The Girl
Who Is Oona Gibbs? Mother, Daughter, Aunt, Cousin, or Lover
Why Do the Heathen Rage? Walter's Aunt
Burning Crosses
The Violent Bear It Away: The Burnt Cross

Why Do the Heathen Rage? 
One Potential Ending

The Other Half of the Story
Afterword by Steve Prince

So when the content follows the bold type Why Do the Heathen Rage?, that's from the drafts of O'Connor's work, scenes and fragments of the novel she wanted to write. Then Jessica Hooten Wilson (JHW) provides background and offers analysis. In "Why Do the Heathen Rage? One Potential Ending", JHW provides her own version of the main character's conversion, based on a scene from O'Connor's The Violent Bear it Away.

Just a reminder that I have read another of JHW's books, Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky, which I reviewed here. She has visited Wichita twice to speak at Eighth Day Institute events, once at the Inklings Festival and once at a Symposium. She is now the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair at Pepperdine University.

This is a very personal book: there's quite a bit of JHW in the book: her first interest in Flannery O'Connor because she was encouraged to take her as a model for writing fiction as a Christian; her participation in the 2009 International Flannery O'Connor Conference in Rome; her visits to Milledgeville and the Georgia College & State University Special Collections; her familiarity with O'Connor's short stories; her efforts to understand O'Connor's last years and struggle to create this third novel. This is what she works to communicate to the reader. This book might be read as a follow-up to her defense of Flannery O'Connor after Paul Elie not only accused O'Connor of Racism, but even asked “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” in a 2020 New Yorker essay. JHW even repeats her analysis of the short story "Revelation" in that First Things article on pages 172 through 174 in this book. 

The book is sympathetic to O'Connor's struggles and takes care to place her in her historical and cultural context: the post-Gone With the Wind South at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. I use that historical marker because Margaret Mitchell's sentimental novel and David O. Selznick's even more sentimental movie of the novel (JHW highlights the movie's opening titles: "land of Cavalier and Cotton Fields" . . . "pretty world [where] Gallantry took its last bow" . . . "a Civilization gone with the wind") repulsed O'Connor: she did not want to write another book like that! See pages 157 through 161. Her oeuvre, which I think we should always grant to the writer, is to explore the eternal spiritual truths that infuse temporal, human, and fallen issues and actions.

I think this book succeeds in its purpose: to explore an artist's efforts to try something new (JHW emphasizes that O'Connor wanted to depict a different kind of revelation, of conversion and the change that comes over a person's life because of that conversion, in Why Do the Heathen Rage?) and even the issues of her own milieu and life (including a fatal illness) that hampered those efforts. As I read the book I thought of Arthur Hugh Clough's poem, usually titled "The Struggle":

Say not the struggle nought availeth,

     The labour and the wounds are vain,

The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

     And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;

     It may be, in yon smoke concealed,

Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,

     And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking

     Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back through creeks and inlets making,

     Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,

     When daylight comes, comes in the light,

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

     But westward, look, the land is bright.