Pilate's Wife on the Son Rise Morning Show

UPDATE: I did not post this in time for the email distribution, so I've linked the Soundcloud version here, thanks to Anna Mitchell. It may or may not be included in the EWTN national hour on Thursday, April 13. I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show today a little after 6:45 a.m. Central/7:45 a.m. Eastern to talk with Anna Mitchell about my latest blog post for the National Catholic Register: from the Gospel of St. Matthew, we know that Pilate's wife asked him not to get involved in the trial of Jesus. She had a terrible dream and she believes that Jesus is righteous. What did she dream?

Two authors make suggestions in their dramatic and literary works (Dorothy L. Sayers and Gertrude von le Fort), and both of their ideas involve the Creed.

Read more here and listen live here.

In case you missed it, the Register also posted this last week: I wrote it after my husband and I attended Mass in Mountain Home and we saw the statues and crucifixes all veiled.

Blessed Holy Week! God bless you all!

Jesus and Women: St. Mary Magdalene

Saint Mary Magdalene is my confirmation saint. I attended the School of the Magdalen here in Wichita and the sisters were thrilled by my selection, except that I really chose the name to honor the grandmother I never knew. She had been raised Catholic but had left the Church. Personally, I am pleased that Pope Francis has raised St. Mary Magdalen's feast day to the level of a Feast (not just a Memorial). That means that the "Gloria in exclesis deo" will be sung or recited at Mass today and there is even a special Preface (before the Sanctus and the Canon).

When announcing the change, the Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Archbishop Arthur Roche commented on the reasons and the timing:

Archbishop Roche drew attention to the fact Mary Magdalene was the first witness to the Resurrection, and is the one who announced the event to the Apostles.

“Saint Mary Magdalene is an example of true and authentic evangelization; she is an evangelist who announces the joyful central message of Easter,” he writes.

“The Holy Father Francis took this decision precisely in the context of the Jubilee of Mercy to signify the importance of this woman who showed a great love for Christ and was much loved by Christ,” writes Archbishop Roche.

He also notes Saint Magdalene was referred to as the "Apostle of the Apostles" (Apostolorum Apostola) by Thomas Aquinas, since she announced to them the Resurrection, and they, in turn, announced it to the whole world.

“Therefore it is right that the liturgical celebration of this woman has the same grade of feast given to the celebration of the apostles in the General Roman Calendar, and shines a light on the special mission of this woman, who is an example and model for every woman in the Church.”

Dorothy L. Sayers clearly identifies with the women of the Gospels who are drawn to Jesus. In her radio play-cycle, The Man Born to Be King, Sayers identifies Mary of Bethany as Mary Magdalen as the woman who washes Jesus's feet with her tears in the house of Simon the Zealot. There are some controversies here, as Scott Hahn describes in his Dictionary of the Bible (Doubleday, 2009):

Tradition often identifies Mary Magdalene either with the sinful woman who anointed Christ's feet in Luke 7:36-50 or with Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus and Martha mentioned in Luke 10:38-42 and John 11-12. By the sixth century A.D., figures such as Gregory the Great had begun to advance the notion that these two women mentioned in Scripture were one and the same person: Mary Magdalene, who hailed from Bethany and who had become a disciple of Jesus after leading a notoriously sinful life. This tradition explains why Mary Magdalene was revered for centuries as the "model penitent." From a biblical standpoint, it is not impossible that Mary Magdalene could be identified with either one or both of these two women, but decisive evidence is lacking and so it must remain uncertain.

In "The Human Not Quite Human" Sayers writes that it's

no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized . . . who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension . . . who . . . never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female . . . who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious.

Then in “The Light and The Life,” the 7th play from The Man Born to Be King cycle, Sayers dramatizes this great attraction in a scene set at Bethany in the home of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. Mary remembers how Jesus forgave her, referring to Luke 7:36-50:

MARY: I love the wrong things in the wrong way—yet it was love of a sort . . . until I found a better.

JESUS: Because the love was so great, the sin is all forgiven.

MARY: Kind Rabbi, you told me so, when I fell at your feet in the house of Simon the Pharisee. . . . Did you know? My companions and I came there that day to mock you. We thought you would be sour and grim, hating all beauty and treating life as an enemy. But when I saw you, I was amazed. You were the only person there that was really alive. The rest of us were going about half-dead—making the gestures of life, pretending to be real people. The life was not with us but with you—intense and shining, like the strong sun when it rises and turns the flames of our candles to pale smoke. And I wept and was ashamed, seeing myself such a thing of trash and tawdry. But when you spoke to me, I felt the flame of the sun in my heart. I came alive for the first time. And I love life all the more since I have learnt its meaning. 

JESUS: That is what I am here for. I came that men should lay hold of life and possess it to the full.

Let us pray: O God, whose Only Begotten Son entrusted Mary Magdalene before all others with announcing the great joy of the Resurrection, grant, we pray, that through her intercession and example we may proclaim the living Christ and come to see him reigning in your glory. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Holy Saturday In "The Man Born to be King"

Dorothy L. Sayers' radio drama The Man Born to be King depicts the drama of Holy Saturday, that day of mourning and wondering as a day of activity and action for Jesus' female disciples. The men have nothing to do. Her notes for the production of the episode after the crucifixion emphasize this:

Note that, for the WOMEN, there is, on an occasion such as this, the consolation of being able to act. The male disciples are lethargic because they have come to a dead end; the women can occupy themselves with funeral details, and get a certain mournful satisfaction out of them. The bustle of preparing spices, of collecting towels and basins, of the early morning excursion--the contemplation of fine grave-clothes, a rich casket, a beautiful tomb--it all soothes and braces them. At births and deaths, women come into their own and can do something, while the men can only sit about helplessly. Melancholy as it all is, the women are on top--it is their adventure.

Sayers wanted to depict the Church's teaching about Jesus Christ, the dogma of the Incarnation, the Gospel, the Passion, Death and Resurrection through drama so that it would have an impact on people. She thought that hearing the human voices of actors portraying Jesus, Pilate, Mary and Mary Magdalen, Judas and John, would make the story compelling again. How can this story not be compelling? Particularly the story of the Passion, Death and Resurrection?

Blessed John Henry Newman, in a sermon I've posted before, noted that Christians in his day read the story of the Passion without realizing what it meant to them; they were detached and not involved--they did not feel anything:

Unless we have a true love of Christ, we are not His true disciples; and we cannot love Him unless we have heartfelt gratitude to Him; and we cannot duly feel gratitude, unless we feel keenly what He suffered for us. I say it seems to us impossible, under the circumstances of the case, that any one can have attained to the love of Christ, who feels no distress, no misery, at the thought of His bitter pains, and no self-reproach at having through his own sins had a share in causing them.

I know quite well, and wish you, my brethren, never to forget, that feeling is not enough; that it is not enough merely to feel and nothing more; that to feel grief for Christ's sufferings, and yet not to go on to obey him, is not true love, but a mockery. True love both feels right, and acts right; but at the same time as warm feelings without religious conduct are a kind of hypocrisy, so, on the other hand, right conduct, when unattended with deep feelings, is at best a very imperfect sort of religion. And at this time of year especially are we called upon to raise our hearts to Christ, and to have keen feelings and piercing thoughts of sorrow and shame, of compunction and of gratitude, of love and tender affection and horror and anguish, at the review of those awful sufferings whereby our salvation has been purchased.

Let us pray God to give us all graces; and while, in the first place, we pray that He would make us holy, really holy, let us also pray Him to give us the beauty of holiness, which consists in tender and eager affection towards our Lord and Saviour: which is, in the case of the Christian, what beauty of person is to the outward man, so that through God's mercy our souls may have, not strength and health only, but a sort of bloom and comeliness; and that as we grow older in body, we may, year by year, grow more youthful in spirit.

Sayers and Newman agree, as Gilbert Meilaender offers evidence in an article for Touchstone Magazine, recommending her plays on the Passion for Holy Week reading, just as C.S. Lewis did:

"God was executed," she writes, "by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own—in the over-ripeness of the most splendid and sophisticated Empire the world has ever seen." In her hands, "the greatest drama in history" regains the sting we sometimes, with the best of intentions, take out of it. Hers is the story of a man, but a man born to be king, and she will not allow us to "hear that story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not experience any shock at all." Lent is surely the right time for such a reminder.

Pilate's Wife and Her Dream

The Gospel according to St. Matthew contains a small detail not in the other Passion accounts. The wife of Pontius Pilate sends a message to him asking him not to have anything to do with Jesus, because she has had a terrible dream and suffered much because of him.

As it was recommended in The Catholic Herald, I decided to read Gertrud von le Fort's "The Wife of Pilate", a short story translated and published by Ignatius Press. The wife of Pilate, usually named Claudia, is a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

Like Dorothy L. Sayers in The Man Born to Be King, von le Fort, author of The Song at the Scaffold, depicts Claudia's dream to be her hearing the words from the Creed: "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried . . ."; "Crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato, passus et supultus es . . .".

Sayer's wife of Pilate hears different languages and voices; von le Fort's version of the dream has his wife traveling through time from the catacombs, to a Roman basilica church, to Gothic cathedrals ("the massive halls began to stand upright, as though they hovered weightlessly in the sky, freed from all the laws of stone") in which the choirs sang the words, and then to even stranger--to her--buildings with "strange draperies".

The short story takes the form of a letter from Claudia's freed Greek servant, recounting the effects of Pilate's condemnation of Jesus on Good Friday on Claudia and on her relationship with her husband. I won't spoil the end, but it is wondrous, as those words continue to echo: "Crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato, passus et supultus es . . ."