Off the Shelves 8

For our next extract we are pleased to introduce Hilda Graef (1907-1970), best known for her translations of the Church Father and works on Christian mysticism. In Modern Gloom and Christian Hope (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959) she examines the literature of those who "portray the dark sides of life and stress the meaninglessness of existence" such as Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir, Osborne and Mauriac. This extract is taken from the final chapter, contains some thought provoking lines on reason and human existence.

We are living in an age of wars and rumours of wars, under the threat of H-bombs, horrifying dictatorships, and general uncertainty. Yet, except for the wider technical powers for destruction, is our time so very much more insecure than other ages, do we have more reason for gloom and despair that former generations? There have always been wars, and they have by no means always been restricted only to the actual combatants- rape and arosn, murder of women and children, famine and disease have always been their horrible accompaniments. Even in he Europ of the Middle Ages, so often regarded as a paradise of Christian life and virtue, the daily life of the citizen was most insecure, the traveling merchant was always in dagner of being robbed and murdered, and the absence of medical knowledge made epidemics far more dangerous and widespread than they are now: In the midst of life we are surrounde by death," says the author of a medieval hymn. So it has always been and so it wil remain to the Last Day.

It is not therefore the greater insecurity of modern life that produces the pessimistic outlook of contemporary thinkers- and we must remember that the "Father" of existentialism and all its melancholy offspring lived in the extraordinarily secure atmosphere of nineteenth century Denmark. No. Political circumstances have little to do with it, and not even personal material circumstances- for nearly all the outstanding exponents of gloom are highly successful authors. The spiritual situation of these writers is similar to that of the ancient pagans before their conversion to Christianity, of whom St. Paul says in his Letter to the Ephesians that they had no hope and were without God in the world. For hope is inseperable from God; if we have lost belief in God, there is nothing left to sustain us in the trials and difficulties of our life. Yet it is true that there have at all times been many unbelievers who have not held the utterly black, despairing view of life which is prevalent in our own times, and, on the other hand, some of the pessimistic authors analyzed in thes epages such as Kierkegaard, Mauriac, Graham Greene, are believing Christians. There must be something that custs across even the demarcation line that separates believers from unbelievers. Here, too, we can trace the roots of "modern" pessimism back to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard had been disappointed in reason, which he more or less equated with the system of Hegel, and he had also been disappoined in love, in his broken engagement with Regine Olsen. Besides, his relationship with his stern, unbending father had had a very unhappy influence on his own life. That is to say the principal factors in human existence had gone wrong for him. Human Fatherhood is a reflection of the divine Fatherhood, human reason the created image of the Word of God, the Logos, Himself the image of the Father, and human love the earthly image of the Holy Spirit, the divine Person who is the bond of love between the Father and the Son. If all these become distorted in one way or another, the human mirror which was meant to reflect the divine life is broken, and what it reflects is not an image, but a caricature.

Perhaps the most serious distortion was brough about by Kierkegaard's depreciation of reason. Man is traditionally defined as the "rational animal", for his reason is the trait that distinguishes him most radically from all other living things. True, reason can be overestimated, as was done in the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century which resulted in the dethronement of the "goddess reason" in the French Revolution of 1789. In this case God will be denied, because He can never be fully comprehended by reason. But the human being will still be respected and the world will be seen as subject to man, this part of the creation account in Genesis will at least still appear to be valid. Nevertheless, rationalism carries the germ of its own destruction, because this is a fallen world, its subjection to man is no longer complete, and man himself is subject to death and suffering. This is why existentialism is so horribly plausible to our contemporaries, especially as the fallacy of an optimistic rationalism stands out very forcefully against a background of suffering and irrational destruction brought about by the social and political upheavals of our time. For, as Camus and Sartre have rightly seen, man's reason revolts against death and suffering, and as life necessarily ends in one, and contains a goodly amount of the other, they feel that it is governed by absurdity- as indeed is only to be expected if human existence is a "being thrown" from nought to nought, as Heidegger has it.

But man cannot deny reason with impunity. When he drives it out by the front door, it will return by the backdoor and play havoc with his most cherished beliefs- or unbeliefs. For the Genesis story about Adam, who was told by God to give names to the animals He had created, contains a profound truth. The earth was made for man, man can understand and use it, because he has been given reason; if he could not do so, if the world were wholly absurd and closed to all reasoning, man would long have perished, for he could never have subjected it as he has actually done. But there is, indeed, an irrational element in the world, there are powers that play havoc with man's labours, though far less so than our professional pessmists would have us believe. Christianity has never denied this- quite the contrary. The reason for this element of "absurdity", for man's very incomplete mastery of nature, for suffering and death, is Original Sin; that is man's failure to submit to God. Ma's revolt is the cause of nature's revolt and of death itself, of all the "dread " which henceforth is part and parcel of human life; precisely because man was not originally made for death and decay, but for eternal happiness.

The Christian is far from denying thes enegative elements in human existence; they are there, and they have their own part to play. But this does not invalidte reason nor does it permit us to consider human life and the world in which it is lived as absurd. And if the existentialists call for engagement, if they try to better the lot of the human race- however mistaken the means they may often adopt towards this end- does not just this make nonsense of all their assumptions? Sartre says "Hell is the others" (L'enfer, c'est les autres), and proceeds straighaway to join the communist party which has no room for the self-sufficient isolation expressed in this dictum. The old pagans, who, in St. Paul's words, knoew not God and were without hope in the world, would not have dreamt of engagement, and devotion to the betterment of the human lot. For how can despair and the belief in total absurdity lead to such an engagement, except to prove that the cult of the absurd is itself absurd; that man simply cannot live without a meaning to his life? We can deny reason on paper, in "clever" books and novels and plays- we cannot deny it in our own lives. Reason belongs inescapably to our human existence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born of Jewish and Protestant ancestry, she abandoned her faith as a child and became immersed in the political and social upheaval of her native Germany. At seventeen she visited a Catholic church, where she felt an immediate attraction to its ceremonies and devotions but she was still very much an unbeliever. After finishing school she studied English and religion at the University of Berlin, with hopes of becoming a fashion journalist, but her mother did not approve and she settled on becoming a teacher. The ascendancy of the Nazi party forced her to emigrate to England, where she was employed at a private school until offered a bursary to study Anglican theology. In her second year while studying the teachings of the Church Fathers she discovered the reasonableness of Christianity and absurdity of her German Lutheran teachers.

Taking her examination in 1940, she graduated with a first class degree, conferred by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, but owing to her nationality could not find any work. Forced to live off charity, she found plenty of time to immersed herself in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. John of the Cross, GK Chesterton and RH Benson, interspersed with the Spiritual Exercises. Naturally such reading led her to accept the Catholic faith and she was received into the Church in 1941. To support herself she began writing articles on mysticism in Blackfriars and on German affairs in The Tablet. Her knowledge of Greek also led to an appointment as assistant to the editor of a lexicon of Patristic Greek.

Approached by Mercier Press to submit a manuscript for publication, she edited and expanded her articles in Blackfriars, which was published as The Way of the Mystics. This was followed by yet another request to write on the stigmatist, Therese Neumann, who had recently been in the news. At first sceptial about Neumann, she agredd to the work and to assist in her research made a trip to Konnersreuth. There she interviewed her but was unable to observe the stigmata owing to the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Returning to Oxford she worked on her first translation from the Church Fathers, St. Gregory of Nyssa's sermons on the Beatitudes and Lord's prayer. While working on the translation she received two letters, one from a Dominican nun, the other a Capuchin priest, enquiring if she knew of Edith Stein. This led to yet another pilgrimage to places associated with the future saint and the result was The Scholar and the Cross.

At the prompting of her mother, who had joined her in England, she wrote her autobiography, From Fashions to the Fathers, and a few years later her monumental two volume history of Marian doctrine and devotion. However her greatest interest continued to be mysticism and she explored it in greater depth in her works Mystics of Our Times, The Light and the Rainbow, and The Story of Mysticism.

Off the Shelves 6

From philosophers of the past, we turn to one from the present, Professor Peter Kreeft.

Peter Kreeft is a convert from Calvinism, professor of philosophy at Boston College, author of more than 45 books and one of the best known Catholic apologists today. He has also been an influential figure among younger Catholics with his ability to present and refute relativism, secularism and scepticism in an engaging and entertaining style, calling to mind another great apologist, GK Chesterton. In A Refutation of Moral Relativism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999) Kreeft uses a dialogue between Isa, a "Muslim fundamentalist" absolutist, and Libby, a "Black feminist" reporter to decide if there are any moral absolutes in the world. The following extract is from chapter 2.

Libby: So can you define relativism for us, Professor?
Isa: Yes. Relativisim is the philosophy that denies absolutes. Any absolutes. Everyone believes there are many relativities, that some things are relative; but relativism claims that all things are relative.
Libby: That seems very clear.
Isa: Except that there a different kinds of relativism. I cna think of at least four important kinds that we have to distinguish: metaphysical relativism, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, and religious relativism. You can claim there are no absolutes anywhere in reality- that's metaphysical relativism. Or anywhere in human knowledge- that's epistemological relativism. Or anywhere in morality- that's moral relativism. Or anywhere in religion- that's religious relativism.
Libby: So is religious relativism the same as atheisim?
Isa: No. Metaphysical relativism is the same as atheism (assuming "God" means the "Absolute Being"). Metaphysics is about being. Religion is about relationships with the Absolute Being. So religious relativism says there's no absolute religion, no absolutely best or truests religious relationship with God. Atheism says there's no God, no Absolute Being, no absolute anywhere in reality.
Libby: What's epistemological relativism?
Isa: It says, "Perhaps there is a metaphysical absolute, an Absolute Being, somewhere; but it can't be known. There's no absolute in human knowledge.
Libby: So epistemological relativism means scepticism.
Isa: Scepticism about the Absolute, at least, or agnosticism. Or it could be total scepticism, scepticism about all reality.
Libby: And now where does moral relativism fit in?
Isa: Well, metaphysical relativism says, "No absolute in reality", and epistemologicla relativism says, "Perhaps in reality but not in knowledge", and then moral relativism says, "Perhaps there are absolutes in nonmoral knowledge, like 'two plus two makes four', but not in moral knowledge: we know no moral absolutes. And then, finally, religious relativism says, "Perhaps in moral knowledge but no in religious knowledge. Perhaps love, or the Golden Rule, or justice can be known to be absolute, but no religion can."
Libby: And why do we need to define these three relativisms to talk about moral relativism?
Isa: So we can distinguish it from them and confine ourselves to it.
Libby: All right. So now let's focus more exactly on what you mean by moral relativism and moral absolutism.
Isa: We need to define the two words moral and absolute. Let's take moral first. How do we use the word? It's used to refer to a quality of people and their deeds, interior and exterior, hat we express by the words good and bad, or good and evil. But not all good is moral good: a good car, for instance. So more specifically, moral good and bad means right and wrong. Even there, we have to be more specific, since something can be "right" without being morally right: the right answer to a puzzle, for instance. So let's say morality is about what we ought to do and ought not to do. Another word for ought is n imperative, or an obligation. I think everyone understand what moral mens, from ordinary language usage, so I'd rather not go any deeper into questions philosophers have about defing that term now. I'd like to stick to ordinary language and talk to ordinary people.
Libby: That you, Professor Extraordinaire. And now what about defining absolutism and relativism?
Isa: As I said, relativism says there are no absolutes. Absolutely no absolutes. Absolutism says there are some absolutes. At least one absolute. Absolutism is relatively absolutistic, and relativism is absolutely relativistic.
Libby: Ah, we're going to refute relativism by a brilliant word juggling trick, I see.
Isa: No, we're not. We're going to give ordinary language meanings, that's all.
Libby: Then what does relative mean, and what does absolute mean?
Isa: Relative is always "relative to something else", contingent upon something else, conditional upon something else. Absolute means "not relative", not contingent but necessary, not conditioned but unconditioned. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Libby: Could you give eaxmples?
Isa: Certainly. "Don't steal if it hurts anybody" is a relative moral imperative. "Don't steal, period" is an absolute one.
Libby: What Kant called a "Categorical Imperative".
Isa: Yes. But "Be good to others if and when you want them to be good to you" is not a moral absolute. "Be good to others always" is.
Libby: So absolutes are unchangeable.
Isa: Yes, and universal, and objective. Those are the three characteristics that distinguish an absolute. It is not relative to time, so it doesn't change. And it's not relative to place or nation or class or culture or race or gender or any group - it's universal. Third, it's not relative to opinion or thought or belief o desire or feeling or any subjective consciousness. It's objectively real, objectively true, whether I or you or anyone else knows it, or believes it, or likes it, or cares bout it, or obeys it.
Libby: So personal opinions and beliefs and feelings and motivations and intentions- they don't change morality.
Isa: No ...
Libby: So intentions aren't important, only the rules?
Isa: No, that's not right. Some moral rules are about intentions. Others are about external deeds. For instance, "don't be greedy" is about intentions, and "don't steal" is about deeds. But both are absolute. Greed and theft are both wrong- always wrong, for everyone. No exceptions.
Libby: So a good intention doesn't make a deed good?
Isa: It doesn't make a bad deed good.
Libby: So love isn't enough? A sincere, loving intention isn't enough? Is that what you're saying?
Isa: That's what I am saying. If I kill you because I'm sincerely trying to help the poor but killing the rich, that's still a bad deed.
Libby: So only deeds count, not intentions?
Isa: No, both count. You need good deeds and good intentions. Neither one can substitute for the other. A good deed doesn't change a bad intention into a good one, so a good intention doesn't change a bad deed into a good one either.
Libby: And what about situations? Changing situations don't change morality either, according to your absolutism?
Isa: No, they change how you should apply the rules, but they don't change the rules.
Libby: So its just as wrong for Jean Valjean in Les Miserables to steal a loaf of bread to feed his starving family as it is for Blackbeard the Pirate to steal the King's gold to make himself rich? Is that what you're saying?
Isa: No, I say Jean Valjean did not steal at all. He had a right to that food. Blackbeard had no right to the gold.
Libby: I see. So the situation doesn't ever change stealing from wrong to right, but it sometimes changes taking from stealing to not stealing.
Isa: Very well put, Libby.
Libby: I'm not your student, Professor, I'm your interviewer.
Isa: Oh. Sorry.
Libby: Let's be sure I understand this. You're a moral absolutist, but you'd say it was morally right for a Dutch family who were hiding Jews from the Nazis to lie to the Nazis when they came to search the house, right? I mean yu'd say that wasn't lying at all, because the Nazis had no right to know. Is that right?
Isa: Yes. The Nazis had no right to know that truth, and the Jews had a right to conceal it, and the Dutch had a right to deceive the Nazis about it- an obligation, even. So it wasn't wrong. Lying is always wrong, and that wasn't wrong, so that wasn't a lie, just as Jean Valjean stealing the bread wasn't a theft. So the absolutes remain: never lie, never steal.

Off the Shelves 5

In a break from our philosophical ponderings, we present an extract from Fr. Romano Guardini's Prayer in Practice (London: Burns & Oates, 1957), which gives an insight into the relationship between personal prayer, liturgical prayer and popular devotion.

Liturgical and personal prayer do not completely exhuast the possibilities of religious life. There is a third form which, for want of a better term, we shall call popular devotion. To it belongs Matins and Vespers, family prayers, saying of the Rosary and the majority of religious folk customs.

This kind of devotion cannot easily be defined. It is best described by saying that it lies between liturgical and personal prayer, but it is distinct from both. Compared with personal prayer it has a communal character because in it the attitude and necessity, not of the individual but of the group, comes to the fore. It is ordered by custom and rules and thereby commands a certain authority. On the other hand, it is much more private than the Liturgy because the various forms of popular devotion are not the same for the whole Church nor even for a whole country, but may hold good only for a particular diocese. They may even vary from parish to parish. Thus they reflect the change of time, the local peculiarities, the diversities of daily life and general variety of conditions much more directly than does the Liturgy, which changes much more slowly and whose scope is much more wide.

Popular devotion is less strict than liturgical. Its phrasing is looser and more expansive; imagination plays a greater part in it and the whole atmosphere is one of warmth and immediacy. On the other hand, it lacks the wide sweep of the Liturgy, its austerity and power. It tends towards the emotional and occasionally lapses into the sentimental or the bizarre.

It is fond of repetition. In liturgical prayer the principle that the identical thing should never be done twice holds good. In popular devotion, however, the same words re-occur continually. The object of popular devotion is, of course, to abide in the presence of God; however, conditions in many of the smaller parishes are such that the proper liturgical prayers- for instance, the Psalms- cannot be used to much purpose. Their place is taken by certain simple texts such as the Lord's Prayer or the Hail Mary, in which anyone can take part but which are, of course, open to the dangers of monotony and of being recited without much feeling or thought.

Restricted in its range, popular devotiuon has a strong local or parochial flavour. The Christian 'we' is more vivid and more reassuring to the individual than in liturgical prayer. The local and intimate atmosphere which one feels in its devotion does, in fact, come not only from the more emotional character of the texts and songs, but from the much closer communal bonds hich carry it. The form of these songs or hymns is popular rather than liturgical. They express with greater directness the religious impulses of the people at the expense, however, of a certain lowering of musical value and spiritual meaning ...

The same could be said for popular devotion hich, whenever the liturgical life is not properly understood and cherished, undergoes a peculiar deterioration. The pitfalls of poular devotion are poverty of intellect, unchecked fantasy, the lack fo proportion and disorder of sentiment. If popular devotion is left to the free play of direct religious impulse, the contents of its faith tends to become inadequate and its affirmations unreliable, while the repetitions accumulate and the feeling becomes spurious and sentimental. The religous life of a parish in which the Liturgy does not play its proper role and which therefore draws its nourishment mainly from popular devotion must inevitably be impoverished.

All this should not make us forget the other side of the picture. There is a form of liturgical zeal which looks upon all popular devotion as inferior or at least superfluous. It springs from the same attitude which regards personal prayer as a mere encroachment upon the Liturgy. This ia a wrong and dangerous point of view. In its own way, it resembles the attitude of the person who says: 'All that is necessary is humanity as a whole. There is no need for a people. I am content with the world, I do not need a homelan.' Popular devotion is to religious life what the link with people and family, country and home, is to the natural life. A good afternoon service worthily and piously performed, a rosary in the evening said in the proper spirit, are beautiful, profound and intimate- something which the Christian mind needs to remain healthy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Romano Guardini (1885-1968) was one of the most important Catholic intellectuals of the 20th century, whose writings on contemporary problems in both the Church and society continue to influence Catholic thought. After his ordination in 1910 he was assistant priest in several parishes and during this period continued studying at the University of Freiburg, receiving his habilitation. [1] It was also during this period he first encountered authentic liturgy at the Abbey of Beuron, which became one of his life long interests and led to the publication of his work The Spirit of the Liturgy.

Following two years of millitary service as a hospital orderly he was appointed to the chair of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Berlin, where his ability to relate Christian truths to contemporary life and culture gained him a considerable following. At this time he also became director of the Catholic youth movement, Quickborn, to which he dedicated his spare time instilling in its members a deep appreciation for Western culture and traditions.

In 1935 he wrote an essay critical of the Nazis portrayal of Jesus and emphasising his distinct Jewishness. Four years later they dismissed him from the university and dissolved Quickborn, but he remained in Berlin in the parish of a priest-friend. There he would write such works as The Church and the Catholic, Meditations Before Mass and his spiritual classic, The Lord. After the war he resumed lecturing in Philosophy of Religion first at the University of Tubingen and then at the University of Munich, from which he retired in 1963 because of ill health. Despite this, he continued lecturing, writing and even found time to coach the German Olympic polo team.

[1] Habilitation is a post-doctoral qualification in certain European countries, without which one cannot attain to a professorship at university. Like a doctorate, its requirements are several years of research and publication of a dissertation, which must be reviewed and defended before an academic committee. It is interesting to note that both Romano Guardini and Pope Benedict received their habilitation for dissertations on St. Bonaventure, the former on his theology of salvation, the latter his theology of history.

Off the Shelves 4

From two Frenchmen we now consider three Englishmen: an artist, a philosopher and a historian.

Eric Gill (1882-1940) was an engraver, illustrator, sculptor and typographer. He was also an influential member of the Distributist movement and founder of a community of Catholic workmen, which combine the poverty of St. Francis and the rule of St. Dominic. In his book The Necessity of Belief (London: Faber & Faber, 1936) Gill gathers together "an impressive body of convergencies" to lead the reader "to admit the necessity of belief."

We can now proceed to argue the necessity of belief. And the necessity is a double one. It is not only necessary that men should be able to believe; it is also necessary that the should have something to believe in. Let us attack the first thing first. It is necessary to men that they should be able to believe.

We call a person 'matter of fact' when we mean that he accepts nothing except upon proof. It is rightly a term of reproach. Such a person is wanting in a faculty which other persons possess. But it is probable that no one is wholly incredulous. It is impossible for anyone to prove everything. Some people are more cautious than others, but no one can prove everything and believe nothing. On the lowest ground of human life such a state of mind would be impossible.

And when we come to examine the matter we find that even the evidence of our sense involves belief at the last. For I am not capable of proving with certain proof that the evidence of my sense is trustworthy. To see, to hear, to touch, to taste, to smell. How can I prove that what we seem to see, to hear, to touch, to taste, to smell is really what it seems to be, or is really there or anywhere at all? I am not asking anyone to deny the evidence of sense impressions or even to deny the validity of conclusions argued from that evidence. I am simply pointing out that it is ultimately by a kind of faith, by the use of the faculty of believing, that we accept the evidence of our senses, and that it is by another act of faith that we accept the conclusions of our arguments.

For it is not possible to prove the laws of thought, the law of contradiction and all the rest. Either thos elaws are true laws or they are not; we cannot prove them positively. And when we say that we are so constituted that we cannot doubt the laws of thought, we are saying that at least that elementary belief is a necessity. We must at least be able to believe that much. To be unable to accept the self-evident is absurd. We believe it to be absurd. We cannot prove it to be absurd, we can only believe it. It is no use arguing that unless a man accepts the self-evident he cannot hope to 'get on' and make money, or to live a decent life and see good days. For in such a case all argument is absurd and there is no meaning in meaning. Therefore, to start with, we start with an act of faith: belief in the self-evident is a necssity to man, and it is a necessity that he should have the ability to believe. The very ground of thought is unprovable, therefore, it we are to think, we must start by believing. The ability to believe is a necessity in the sense - sine qua nihil.

Fr. Martin D'Arcy (1888-1976) entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1906 and was ordained in 1921, having completed his studies at Oxford. Sent to teach at Stonyhurst, he returned to Oxford as Rector and Master of Campion Hall, before being appointed Provincial for England in 1945. Dismissed from the post five years later, he returned to a life of teaching and writing. Fr. D'Arcy is perhaps best known as one of the leading Catholic philosophers of his day and as an art collector. As a complement to Gill's work we present an extract from D'Arcy's The Nature of Belief (London: Sheed & Ward, 1931)

From belief through interpretation we can pass to another use of the term "belief", as something distinct from "vision"- this will be used from now onward, unless the context makes another sense clear: fides ex auditu; belief on another's word, on authority and written testimony. This implies that we have not the evidence directly before us, that we are not compelled by what we see. I do not say that this distinction is free from ambiguity- there are some who would maintain that an assertion about the future must be a belief, and that communicated information may, if the medium be pure, deserve the name "direct- but it will serve. We shall never be in a position to see the correct solution to the problems involved, if we prejudge the matter and assume that belief is necessarily a form of knowledge inferior to vision. It has been the fashion for some time to extol experience and decry belief, and the result, as we shall see, has been unfortunate. To counteract the effect of this fashion it is necessary to begin with an apologia for belief.

In any community of men and women, large or small, both belief and experience are necessary for the continuation of life. The well-being of civilization depends on a well-adjusted balance between these two; and therefore the plea for belief which follows must not be understood as an attack on experience as such. Obviously the end and consummation of human activity is vision and enjoyment, and Christianity with its promise of the Beatific Vision in the hereafter has no other purpose than to prepare man for that beatitude. It comes into conflict, indeed, with secular ambitions, but this conflict is caused not by a denial of experience, but in its teaching that, so far as the supreme ideal is concerned, we must live by faith in this present life. This faith is, of course, religious and supernatural, but what is said of the highest can be applied also to mundane beliefs. The majority of men have always lived under authority and taken their belief from others. It is their right and duty at times to question customs, laws, authority and beliefs, but it certainly is not normal or wholesome to question everything. There may be a few who in the full vigor of their extraordinary powers are capable of doing this, but the average man and woman have neither the capacity nor the time. The danger is that we may feed them false hopes of so doing. Two results generally follow, conceit and cheap sophistry, with an aftermath of skepticism. The false hopes are encouraged by those in responsible positions, with the best of intentions and the vaguest of principles. Whereas, it is their part to have clear conceptions of the end in view, its possibilities and consequences, they trust to a good will and the shibboleths of the day. The policy and outlook of men who are otherwise level-headed have been weakened by a romantic conception of human nature, a conception dangerous in its consequences and apt to foster a spirit of unreality and even hypocrisy at meetings and conferences where the welfare and destiny of civilization are discussed. I say "unreality" because the weaknesses of human nature are slurred over or ignored, and it is taken for granted that a modicum of education and freedom are a divinely discovered means of rescuing man from the temptation to do wrong, to pursue selfishly ambitions and to judge intemperately and foolishly. The unreality of this cannot, however, be hidden altogether, and that is why hypocrisy enters in. The gibe intended for the church-going businessman, that he kept his piety for Sundays and his impiety for weekdays, recoils on those who having excited undue expectations have to spend most of their time frustrating them.

The truth surely is that men are a compound of strength and weakness, and so various in character and talents that it is madness to demand of them all the same critical judgment on the questions which have troubled even the greatest intellects. We all start life with beliefs which we have learnt from others, and we all need a discipline to mould our character and our thought. Nor does this cease at some adult stage. We never cease to rely on community life and to lean on good friends, to give of the one talent which may be ours and to gain by the gifts and talents of others which we do not possess ourselves. We stand on the shoulders of the past and learn to the end of our lives from the accumulated experience of mankind. Socrates discovered wherein he was wise when he looked into himself and said that at least he knew he was ignorant. Such wisdom is allied with modesty, and if he did question all it was in no spirit of self-assertion, no joy of eristics. The sophists, on the other hand, show a love of questioning for its own sake, and take a pride in their own astuteness. They represent an extreme, no doubt; but the constant encouragement to all members of a community to think for themselves, to regard personal opinion and not truth as the end of education, to consider their own right to judge as equal to that of no matter whom- this has for result the production of a type which is not far removed from that of the sophist.

E I Watkin (1888-1981) was a convert and close associate of Eric Gill, with whom he founded the pacifist movement, Pax. He is best known for his historical, philosophical and religious writings, in particular on mysticism. The following is from The Balance of Truth (London: Hollis & Carter, 1943) a study of modern errors and the search for the triune Godhead.

The decline and fall of metaphysics since the Middle Ages has been due to a false epistemology, and its falsity has consisted in its partiality, in the refusal to admit as valid knowledge what does not belong to a favoured category of knowledge, what has not passed an epistemological tests imposed a priori. What is evident has been rejected because it cannot be provd by the sole criterion the critic will acept. The result has been philosophies true only to a portion of the total experience it is the province of philosophy to interpret. Consciousness has been declared the sole relaity. Matter- that is to say, the reality existing in time and space and quantitively measurable- has been declared the sole reality with equal confidence. Finally, when no evidence is accepted save the unit consciousness of the moment, isolated from its context, a complete scepticism is reached which denies the possibility of knowledge.

Against these and all other partialities we must accept the testimony of all forms of experience- that is, of all human contacts with reality, of every category and at every level. On examination these contacts are found to be intuitions of truth. Some are clear but abstract- pre-eminently the clearest and most abstract intuitions, the apprehensions of measurable quantity of which the positive sciences rest. Others are concrete but obscure. Such as intuitions of moral value, of beauty, and fater a different fashion of God.

Others, again, are both abstract and obscure. Such are the metaphysical intuitions of being, visions of an intelligence focused on the remote depths of what is at once closest and most distant; closest on its surface, most distant in its centre- namely, being as such. It is, in fact, impossible to establish a rigid line of demarcation between dim and concrete intuitions of truth and those clear and abstract intuitions to which belong the conclusions of scientific demonstration. I term these intuitions dim or obscure because they cannot be rigorously defined and their content demonstrated in terms of the definite apprehensions proper to the positive sciences. But they can be equally cogent and powerful. Their obscurity is neither weakness nor uncertainty.

This is shown by the correlation between aesthetic beauty perceived by aesthetic intuition and embodied in works of art, and harmonious mathematical forms and relations. The mass-and-line analysis of pictures as undertaken, for example, in Mr Harold Speed's "The Practice and Science of Drawing", reveals as the skeleton of the masterpieces analysed such mathematical forms and relations. The perception of these is intermediate between the pure aesthetic intuition which is expressed by the unanalysed pciture and functions in its appreciation and the clear intuitions of the mathematician. Indeed, a mathematical demonstration is often invested over and above its strictly mathemtical evidence with an aesthetic quality It is apprehended as beautiful.

Music is essentially an harmonious arrangement of sounds, the dance of motions. Poetry depends for its beauty on correlations of accent, quantity, tone, pitch and verbal quality. The mathematical substratum of architecture is obvious.

Off the Shelves 3

Today we present two French Thomists, Fr. A.D. Sertillanges OP and Jacques Maritain. The first extract is from the formers’ book The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods (Cork: The Mercier Press, 1948)

Contact with genius is one of the choice graces that God grants to humble thinkers; we should prepare for it as according to the Scripture we should prepare for prayer, as we pull ourselves together and assume an attitude of respect when we are to meet a great personage or a saint.

We think too little of the privilege of this bond with the greatest minds. It multiplies joy and profit for living, it enlarges the world and makes it a nobler and more precious place to live in, it renews for each man the glory of being a man, of having his mind open on the same horizons as the greatest, of living on high levels and of forming with his fellows, with those who afford him inspiration, a society in God. “Next after men of genius come those who recognize their worth,” said Therese Brunswick, speaking of Beethoven.

To recall from time to time the names of those who shine with special brilliance in the firmament o the intelligence is to dip into the record of our titles to nobility; and this pride has the same beauty and efficacy as the pride that a son takes in an illustrious father or a great ancestry.

If you are a man of letters, do you not appreciate the advantage o having behind you Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, Pascal? If you are a philosopher, would you be without Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas of Aquin, Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, Bergson? As a scientist, do you realize all that you owe to Archimedes, Euclid, Aristotle again, Galileo, Kepler, Lavoisier, Darwin, Pasteur? As a religious man think how much poorer all souls would be if they had not, along with St. Paul, saints Augustine, Bernard, Bonaventure, the author of the Imitation; St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa, Bousset, St. Francis of Sales, Newman.

The Communion of Saints is the support of the mystical life; the Banquet of the Sages, perpetuated by our assiduous cult, is the invigoration of our intellectual life. To cultivate the faculty of admiration and because of it to keep constantly in familiar touch with illustrious thinkers, is the means, not of equaling those whom we honor, but of equaling our own best self; and that, I repeat, is the objective to be visualized and pursued.

Contact with writers of genius procures us the immediate advantage of lifting us to a higher plane; by their superiority alone they confer a benefit on us even before teaching is anything. They set the tone for us; they accustom us to the air of the mountain-tops. We were moving in a lower region; they bring us at one stroke into their own atmosphere. In that world of lofty thought, the face of truth seems to be unveiled; beauty shines forth; the fact that we follow and understand these seers makes us reflect that we are after all of the same race, that the universal Soul is in us, the Soul of souls, the Spirit to whom we have only to adapt ourselves in order to burst into divine speech, since at the source of all inspiration, always prophetic, there is “God the first and supreme author of all one writes.”

Our second extract comes from Maritain's essay "God and Science" in On the Use of Philosophy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1961) .

To conclude, let us remark that our knowledge of the created world naturally reverberates in the very reverence and awe with which our reason knows the Creator, and on the very notion, deficient as it is and will ever be, that we have of His ways.

By the very fact that science enlarges our horizons with respect to this world, and makes us know better - though in an oblique way - that created reality which is the mirror in which God's perfections are analogically known, science helps our minds to pay tribute to God's grandeur.

A number of the most basic notions and explanatory theories of modern science, especially of modern physics, recoil from being translated into natural language, or from being represented in terms of the imagination. Nevertheless a certain picture of the world emerges from modern science; and this picture (unification of matter and energy, physical indeterminism, a space-time continuum which implies that space and times are not empty pre-existing forms but come into existence with things and through things; gravitational fields which by reason of the curvation of space exempt gravitation from requiring any particular force, and outwit ether and attraction; a cosmos of electrons and stars in which the stars are the heavenly laboratories of elements, a universe which is finite but whose limits cannot be attained, and which dynamically evolves toward higher forms of individuation and concentration) constitutes a kind of framework or imagery more suited to many positions of a sound philosophy of nature than that which was provided by Newtonian science.

Furthermore, at the core of this imagery there are a few fundamental concepts which, inherent in modern science and essential to it, have a direct impact on our philosophical view of nature.

In the first place I shall mention all the complex regularities (presupposed by statistical laws themselves) and the mixture of organisation and chance, resulting in a kind of elusive, imperfectly knowable, and still more striking order, that matter reveals in the world of micro physics. It makes our idea of the order of nature exceedingly more refined and more astonishing. And it makes us look at the author of this order with still more admiration and natural reverence. In the Book of Job, Behemoth and Leviathan were called to witness to divine omnipotence. One single atom may be called o witness too, as well as the hippopotamus and the crocodile. If the heavens declare the glory of God, so does the world of micro particles and microwaves.

In the second place comes the notion of evolution: evolution of the whole universe of matter, and, in particular, evolution of living organisms. Like certain most general tenets of science, evolutions is less a demonstrated conclusion that a kind of primary concept which has such power in making phenomena decipherable that once expressed it becomes almost impossible for the scientific mind to do without it. Now if it is true that in opposition to the immobile archetypes and ever-recurrent cycles of pagan antiquity, Christianity taught men to conceive history both as irreversible and as running in a definite direction, then it may be said that by integrating in science the dimension of time and history, the idea of evolution has given to our knowledge of nature a certain affinity with what the Christian view of things is on a quite different plane. In any case, the genesis of elements and the various phases of the history of the heavens, and, in the realm of life, the historical development of an immense diversity of evolutive branches ("phyla"), all this, if it is understood in the proper philosophical perspective, presupposes the transcendent God as the prime cause of evolution - preserving in existence created things and the impetus present in them, moving them from above so that superior forms may emerge from inferior ones, and, when man is to appear at the peak of the series of vertebrates, intervening in a special way and creating ex nihilo the spiritual and immortal soul of the first man and of every individual of the new species. Thus evolution correctly understood offers us a spectacle whose greatness and universality make the activating omnipresence of God only more tellingly sensed by our minds.

Off the Shelves 2

In our second selection from the Library’s collection we present the conclusion of Fr. Bernard Lonergan’s essay “The Absence of God in Modern Culture” from A Second Collection: Papers by Bernard J.F. Lonergan S.J. edited by William F.J. Ryan SJ and Bernard J. Tyrell SJ (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974)

Today the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. Whatever is old, is out. Whatever is new, is in. But a mere swing of the pendulum, while it involves plenty of novelty, falls far short of aggiornamento. For aggiornamento is not simple-minded rejection of all that is old and some breezy acceptance of everything new. Rather it is a disengagement from a culture that no longer exists and an involvement in a distinct culture that has replaced it. Christians have been depicted as utterly other-worldly, as idly standing about waiting for the second coming of Christ without any interest or concern or commitment for the things of this life of ours on earth. But the fact of the matter is that the ancient Church set about transforming Greek and Roman culture, that the medieval Church was a principal agent in the formation of medieval culture, that the Renaissance Church was scandalously involved in Renaissance culture. If the modern Church has stood aloof from the modern world, the fact is not too hard to explain. On the one hand, the Church’s involvement in classicist culture was an involvement in a very limited view that totally underestimated the possibilities of cultural change and so precluded advertence to the need for adaptation and zeal to effect it. On the other hand, modern culture with its many excellencies and its unprecedented achievements nonetheless is not just a realm of sweetness and light. The suffering, the sins, the crimes, the destructive power, the sustained blindness of the twentieth century has disenchanted us with progress and made us suspicious of development and advance. Aggiornamento is not desertion of the past but only a discerning and discriminating disengagement from its limitations. Aggiornamento is not just acceptance of the present; it is acknowledgement of its evils as well as of its good; and, as acknowledgement alone is not enough, it also is, by the power of the cross, that meeting of evil with good which transforms evil into good.

Besides its interpretation of man in his world, modern culture transforms man’s control over nature and in consequence involves a reordering of society. The new scene is one of technology, automation, built-in obsolescence, a population explosion, increasing longevity, urbanism, mobility, detached and functional relations between persons, universal, prolonged and continuing education, increasing leisure and travel, instantaneous information, and perpetually available entertainment. In this ever changing scene God, when not totally absent, appears an intruder. To mention him, if not meaningless, seems to be irrelevant. The greatest of financial powers, the power to increase gross national income by taxing and spending for worthy purposes, is restricted to non-religious ends, so that pluralism is given lip-service while secularism is the religion – or, perhaps, the anti-religion – by law established. At the same time, a rigorously codified religious organization finds itself ever less capable of moving with ever fluid situations, to enter meaningfully into people’s lives, significantly to further all good causes, effectively to help the weak, heal the hurt, restore and reinvigorate the disheartened …

Besides a reinterpretation of man in this world, a transformation of man’s control over nature, and consequent reordering society, modern culture has generated a new sense of power and responsibility. Superficially the sense of power might be illustrated by space-exploration, and the sense of responsibility by concern over nuclear bombs. But the matter goes far deeper. Modern culture is the culture that knows about itself and other cultures. It is aware that they are man-made. It is aware that the cultural may sustain or destroy or refashion the social. So it is that modern man not only individually is responsible for the life he leads but also collectively is responsible for the world in which he leads it. So modern culture is culture on the move. It is not dedicated to perpetuating the wisdom of ancestors, to handing on the traditions it has inherited. The past is just the springboard to the future. It is the set of good things to be improved and of evils to be eliminated. The future will belong to those who think about it, who grasp real possibilities, who project a coherent sequence of cumulative realizations, who speak to man’s longing for achievement more wisely than the liberal apostles of automatic progress and more humanly that the liquidating Marxists.

Now this concern with the future of humanity is a concern for humanity in this world; so it has been thought to be purely secular. Such a conclusion is, I believe, mistaken. It is true that concern for the future is incompatible with a blind traditionalism, but a blind traditionalism is not the essence of religion. It is true that concern for the future will work itself out by human means, by drawing on human experience, human intelligence, human judgment, human decision, but again this is quite compatible with a profoundly religious attitude. It was St. Ignatius Loyola who gave the advise: act as though results depended exclusively on you, but await the results as though the depended entirely on God. What is false is that human concern for the future can generate a better future on the basis of individual and group egoism. For to know what is truly good and to effect it calls for a self-transcendence that seeks to benefit not self at the cost of the group, not the group at the cost of mankind, not present mankind at the cost of mankind’s future. Concern for the future, if it is not just high-sounding hypocrisy, supposes rare moral attainment. It calls for what Christians name heroic charity. In the measure that Christians practice and radiate heroic charity they need not fear they will be superfluous either in the task of discerning man’s true good in this life or in the task of bring it about.

St. Thomas on Devotion

St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae writes:

Devotion is derived from "devote" [The Latin 'devovere' means 'to vow']; wherefore those persons are said to be "devout" who, in a way, devote themselves to God, so as to subject themselves wholly to Him ... Hence devotion is apparently nothing else but the will to give oneself readily to things concerning the service of God.

But a vow is an act of religion. Therefore devotion is also an act of religion ... Now it is evident that to do what pertains to the worship or service of God, belongs properly to religion. Wherefore it belongs to that virtue to have the will ready to do such things, and this is to be devout. Hence it is evident that devotion is an act of religion.

The extrinsic and chief cause of devotion is God ... But the intrinsic cause on our part must needs be meditation or contemplation. For it was stated above that devotion is an act of the will to the effect that man surrenders himself readily to the service of God. Now every act of the will proceeds from some consideration, since the object of the will is a good understood ... Consequently meditation must needs be the cause of devotion, in so far as through meditation man conceives the thought of surrendering himself to God's service.

ST II-II, q. 82, a. 1-3

Having read these words of St. Thomas one might ask how do they relate to devotion (s) as commonly understood by the faithful? To answer this question let us turn to one of the great spiritual writers of the nineteenth century, Fr. Frederick William Faber. In his work Growth in Holiness, or the Progress of the Spiritual Life he devotes an entire chapter to the subject of devotion. The following is a selection of the most pertinent sections of the chapter.

In theology, devotion means a particular propension of the soul to God, whereby it devotes itself to the worship and service of God. This it may do by vow, by oath, or by simple sentiment. Thus an author, who once passed under the name of St. Augustine, says that devotion is the act of turning ourselves towards God with a humble and pious affection, humble because of the consciousness of our own weakness, and pious because of our confidence in the divine compassion. But St. Thomas more accurately as well as more clearly defines it as the will to do promptly whatever belongs to the service of God ... Perhaps I may then be permitted to call devotion 'spiritual agility'.

Theologians go on to divide devotion into substantial and accidental, and accidental they again subdivide into spiritual and sensible. Substantial devotion is that intelligent promptitude of the will to serve God, which rests on no attraction of the affections or imagination, but on the principles of the faith, and fixes the soul in a solid resolution to serve God, under whatever circumstances. Spiritual devotion is in reality only a state of substantial devotion, to which God is pleased to add his gift of sweetness. This adds to the agility of substantial devotion and gives it more force to overcome difficulties, and a certain pleasure in overcoming them. Sensible devotion is also a state of substantial devotion, wherein God condescends still further by allowing his sweetness to not only to inundate our spirits, but also to flow into our sensitive appetites.

It is thus of great importance to distinguish the effects of devotion from devotion itself; and St. Thomas helps us to do this in a very simple and clear manner. He says the devotions causes a light in the soul, and that the effects of this light vary according to the objects on which it falls. If it brings the beauty of God close to the soul so that it has a certain enjoyment of Him, the result is joy and gladness. If it shows God far off, beyond the reach of our nothingness and the attainment of our weakness, then it causes anxiety and longing.

We have already seen in what devotion consists: but how are we to know it? It is know by the strong practical will, which without relying upon itself puts forth every effort, and does not spare itself. It is known by a promptitude or agility of action which fears no kind of work and limits itself to no degree, which has no reserves with God, and does not stipulate for its reward. Perseverance shows it. It shows itself in suffering and self-violence. It is manifest in the sanctification of our ordinary actions. It shows itself in unselfishness and the renunciation of our own interests. In speaking of its signs, however, we must remember that it is an essentially interior thing. Moreover, it is a habit, and habits do not commonly become sensible except in acts.

What then, it may be asked are special devotions, and how do they fit in with what has been said of devotion in general? I must repeat somewhat, in order to make this plain. Devotion is a devoting of ourselves to God, a loving promptitude of the will in all that concerns His worship and service; in fine, a spiritual agility. Moreover, substantial devotion rests on the principles of the faith ... Now devotion is a practical acting out of belief in spiritual things and in an unseen world; and Christianity is a worship not of things, but of Divine Persons, disclosing themselves to us in certain mysteries. Every such mystery, circumstance [in the life of Our Lord, Our Lady, the saints] and feature [of the Church] becomes in its degree the object of a special devotion.

Every man who is a friend of God is in a state of habitual or sanctifying grace, in which his friendship with his Creator consists. Upon this habitual grace God is endlessly sending down the impulses of his actual grace, illustrating the understanding in every circumstance of life. In addition to those two kinds of grace, every baptised person has infused into his soul seven supernatural gifts of the Holy Ghost ... Of these gifts four belong to the intellect, Wisdom, Understanding, Science, and Counsel; and three to the will, Fortitude, Piety and Fear. Devotion is the fruit of the gift of piety, which may be defined to be the divine ray that illuminates the mind and bends the heart to worship God and to help our neighbour as his image. But devotion of its own nature specialises, that is, singles out an object and magnifies it, and for the time excludes other objects from its loving attention ... Different devotions are connected with different virtues, and have special gifts for the attainment of those virtues. The Holy Ghost also leads different souls, either by natural character or supernatural attraction, to different devotions and gives them various lights. Thus we have special devotions to our Lord's infancy, his Passion, his Cross, his Precious Blood, his Sacred Heart, to his Mother, his Angels, his Apostles, and the various orders of his saints. The unity of our faith hinders one-sidedness of our special devotions and the devotions of all the children of the Church may be considered a single worship of the Holy Trinity.

Such is the account to be given of special devotions, which are, as it were, developments of the worship of the sacred humanity of the Eternal Word. They are essentially doctrinal devotions, and therefore we should always jealously ascertain that they have had the approval of the Church. But, say some, they change and grow, and this is a difficulty ... It must be admitted then that devotions grow. History is too clear to allow of a case being made out on the other side. If devotion were not grounded on dogma, it would be unreal. We have no business to be devoted to an untrue thing, or a fanciful mystery ... The mind and heart of the Church, her doctors and her people, work and move together so that devotions almost represent the turn theology is taking in their day. Sometimes they run ahead of the schools; sometimes the schools run ahead of them. The schools and the people are never found far apart. The history of the doctrine and devotion of the Immaculate Conception is an illustration of this. Now the Church is pre-eminently a soul-saving institution; and doctrine has as much to do with the saving of souls as sacraments, jurisdiction, discipline, hierarchy, and ceremonies, or perhaps even more; and devotions are the application of doctrine to the souls of the people.

David Kehoe's editorial in the newsletter contained an important reference to the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Patrimony of the Church's letter Ecclesiastical Libraries and Their Role in the Mission of the Church, which readers can view here.

Pope John Paul II in an address to the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress said, "The patrimony of human thought, cultural achievement and religious truth contained in the world's libraries is not only a monument to past human endeavor; it is the solid ground on which each new generation can strive to build a better future. To ignore this treasure would be for humanity to condemn itself to existing and working in a wasteland. Our own age particularly needs to recover the accumulated wisdom of the past."

Reiterating these words, the President of the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Patimony in a letter to Religious wrote, "Libraries not only gather dusty material destined to be forgotten. In them are hidden treasures of Christian experience lived out and communicated through the written word. It is not so much a matter of filling up shelves but of fulfilling the heart while dipping into the wisdom of the fathers and the mothers of the faith - the lymph of a new life - in an itinerary of cultural deepening which is an integral part of the path of individual and communal updating for the growth of the individual and the entire family."

It is for this reason the Library exists: to preserve and propagate the knowledge and wisdom of the Church, and ultimately to proclaim Christ, the Word made Flesh, who is also the Truth.

Off the Shelves 1

Our first stop in the collection is works on philosophy and psychology. This extract comes from Fr. Aegidius Doolan's Philosophy for the Layman (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1954) and is taken from the introduction, an essay on St. Thomas Aquinas. It is particularly appropriate since it points to the end of all knowledge, which is God.

St. Thomas insists that there is an order - and consequently a law - founded on nature itself, which no power on earth can alter or affect. Such is the relationship between effects and their cause - for instance between the world and God, or between children and their parents; or again between means and ends, between body and soul, between functions and their objects, between property and human life. Over and above, but not dissociated from, this natural order or these natural relationships there is the order of grace, the mysterious relationship established between men and God, so intimate that they may call Him "Father" and may look on one another as his children. The union established by this relationship between all men - however different from one another in race or colour or social station - St. Thomas conceived to be the very bond of peace in what Our Lord called the "kingdom of the children" - because those who belong to it are born again, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of men but of God.

It is at this point that for St. Thomas as for St. John the Evangelist "the last heaven opened" and he discerned what he so gloriously sung in his hymn Verbum Supernum, of which the conclusion O Salutaris is familiar to all Catholics. He saw the Supernal Word of Truth coming into this world, yet never ceasing to be at His Father's side. He saw Him hanging on the Cross. He saw Him in the triumph of the first Easter morning. And he saw Him again during the whole course of ages, and from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof, offering Himself as a victim of that Love of Truth which is His very Life, poured forth in the chalice of His Blood.

It is St. Thomas' realization of all this that is expressed throughout his writings. Everything spoke to him of the glory of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, which is the very end and meaning of all creation, and especially of human life. "Every creature," he writes, "as it is a created substance represents the cause and principle, and shows forth the Father. As it has form and species it represents the Word .. According as it bears the relation of order, it represents the Holy Ghost inasmuch as He is love."

How Thomas Knew It Was The Lord

Finally, Thomas saw the risen Lord. We are perhaps a little too critical of Thomas because he doubted. But there was something rather commendable about that man, because Thomas was not going to surrender himself to any king but Christ. He could be a teacher; he could be proclaimed as a king; he could be a wonder-worker; he could do anything. But there was one kind of love that Thomas knew to be the test, and that was the love that was victimal, the love that went to death for another.

That is the way that Magdalen recognized Jesus too. "In the place where they crucified him there was a garden", says St. John - a place where new life springs up. As Magdalen fell at his feet, through tear-dimmed eyes, she saw the two red marks of nails and knew that it was he. And when the Lord appeared to Thomas, he satisfied his demand for sacrificial love by saying: "Thomas, put your finger here into my hands and your hand here into my side. And be not incredulous but believing." Thomas had the test, the test of a resurrection presence. Blessed are they who have not seen but believe.

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We've almost gotten away from the concept of sacrificial love in our modern world. We succumb to Jesus Christ Superstar and rejoice and sing songs to someone attired in Reynolds Wrap, to make him forget that he's dying without a resurrection. So we teach our young that he's a superstar. Superstar! Who's a star? Someone who has a star over his dressing room door; the communications media are mad about him. Our Blessed Lord had no star over his dressing room door. He was driver out of a city, out to a garbage heap and there crucified. Thomas did not want this superstar, he said, "Unless I can put my finger into his hand and put my hand into his side I will not believe." I want a God who goes to death. "For greater love than this no man hath." What Thomas wanted was not Christ the superstar but a super scar.

From Through the Year with Fulton Sheen: Inspirational Readings for Each Day of the Year edited by Henry Dieterich

Witnesses of the Resurrection [2]

"Him God raised up the third day, and showed Him openly; not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us who did eat and drink with Him after He rose from the dead." Acts x. 40-41

IT might have been expected, that, on our Saviour's rising again from the dead, He would have shown Himself to very great numbers of people, and especially to those who crucified Him; whereas we know from the history, that, far from this being the case, He showed Himself only to chosen witnesses, chiefly His immediate followers; and St. Peter avows this in the text. This seems at first sight strange. We are apt to fancy the resurrection of Christ as some striking visible display of His glory, such as God vouchsafed from time to time to the Israelites in Moses' day; and considering it in the light of a public triumph, we are led to imagine the confusion and terror which would have overwhelmed His murderers, had He presented Himself alive before them. Now, thus to reason, is to conceive Christ's kingdom of this world, which it is not; and to suppose that then Christ came to judge the world, whereas that judgment will not be till the last day, when in very deed those wicked men shall "look on Him whom they have pierced."

But even without insisting upon the spiritual nature of Christ's kingdom, which seems to be the direct reason why Christ did not show Himself to all the Jews after His resurrection, other distinct reasons may be given, instructive too. And one of these I will now set before you.

This is the question, "Why did not our Saviour show Himself after His resurrection to all the people? why only to witnesses chosen before of God?" and this is my answer: "Because this was the most effectual means of propagating His religion through the world."

After His resurrection, He said to His disciples, "Go, convert all nations" [Matt. xxviii. 19.] this was His especial charge. If, then, there are grounds for thinking that, by showing Himself to a few rather than to many, He was more surely advancing this great object, the propagation of the Gospel, this is a sufficient reason for our Lord's having so ordained; and let us thankfully receive His dispensation, as He has given it.

1. Now consider what would have been the probable effect of a public exhibition of His resurrection. Let us suppose that our Saviour had shown Himself as openly as before He suffered; preaching in the Temple and in the streets of the city; traversing the land with His Apostles, and with multitudes following to see the miracles which He did. What would have been the effect of this? Of course, what it had already been. His former miracles had not effectually moved the body of the people; and, doubtless, this miracle too would have left them as it found them, or worse than before. They might have been more startled at the time; but why should this amazement last? When the man taken with a palsy was suddenly restored at His word, the multitude were all amazed, and glorified God, and were filled with fear, saying, "We have seen strange things today." [Luke v. 26.] What could they have said and felt more than this, when "one rose from the dead"? In truth, this is the way of the mass of mankind in all ages, to be influenced by sudden fears, sudden contrition, sudden earnestness, sudden resolves, which disappear as suddenly. Nothing is done effectually through untrained human nature; and such is ever the condition of the multitude. Unstable as water, it cannot excel. One day it cried Hosanna; the next, Crucify Him. And, had our Lord appeared to them after they had crucified Him, of course they would have shouted Hosanna once more; and when He had ascended out of sight, then again they would have persecuted His followers. Besides, the miracle of the Resurrection was much more exposed to the cavils of unbelief than others which our Lord had displayed; than that, for instance, of feeding the multitudes in the wilderness. Had our Lord appeared in public, yet few could have touched Him, and certified themselves it was He Himself. Few, comparatively, in a great multitude could so have seen Him both before and after His death, as to be adequate witnesses of the reality of the miracle. It would have been open to the greater number of them still to deny that He was risen. This is the very feeling St. Matthew records. When He appeared on a mountain in Galilee to His apostles and others, as it would seem (perhaps the five hundred brethren mentioned by St. Paul), "some doubted" whether it were He. How could it be otherwise? these had no means of ascertaining that they really saw Him who had been crucified, dead, and buried. Others, admitting it was Jesus, would have denied that He ever died. Not having seen Him dead on the cross, they might have pretended He was taken down thence before life was extinct, and so restored. This supposition would be a sufficient excuse to those who wished not to believe. And the more ignorant part would fancy they had seen a spirit without flesh and bones as man has. They would have resolved the miracle into a magical illusion, as the Pharisees had done before, when they ascribed His works to Beelzebub; and would have been rendered no better or more religious by the sight of Him, than the common people are now-a-days by tales of apparitions and witches.

Surely so it would have been; the chief priests would not have been moved at all; and the populace, however they had been moved at the time, would not have been lastingly moved, not practically moved, not so moved as to proclaim to the world what they had heard and seen, as to preach the Gospel. This is the point to be kept in view: and consider that the very reason why Christ showed Himself at all was in order to raise up witnesses to His resurrection, ministers of His word, founders of His Church; and how in the nature of things could a populace ever become such?

2. Now, on the other hand, let us contemplate the means which His Divine Wisdom actually adopted with a view of making His resurrection subservient to the propagation of His Gospel.—He showed Himself openly, not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God. It is, indeed, a general characteristic of the course of His providence to make the few the channels of His blessings to the many; but in the instance we are contemplating, a few were selected, because only a few could (humanly speaking) be made instruments. As I have already said, to be witnesses of His resurrection it was requisite to have known our Lord intimately before His death. This was the case with the Apostles; but this was not enough. It was necessary they should be certain it was He Himself, the very same whom they before knew. You recollect how He urged them to handle Him, and be sure that they could testify to His rising again. This is intimated in the text also; ''witnesses chosen before of God, even to us who did eat and drink with Him after He rose from the dead." Nor were they required merely to know Him, but the thought of Him was to be stamped upon their minds as the one master-spring of their whole course of life for the future. But men are not easily wrought upon to be faithful advocates of any cause. Not only is the multitude fickle: but the best men, unless urged, tutored, disciplined to their work, give way; untrained nature has no principles.

It would seem, then, that our Lord gave His attention to a few, because, if the few be gained, the many will follow. To these few He showed Himself again and again. These He restored, comforted, warned, inspired. He formed them unto Himself, that they might show forth His praise. This His gracious procedure is opened to us in the first words of the Book of the Acts. "To the Apostles whom He had chosen He showed Himself alive after His passion by many infallible proofs; being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God." Consider, then, if we may state the alternative reverently, which of the two seems the more likely way, even according to a human wisdom, of forming preachers of the Gospel to all nations,—the exhibition of the Resurrection to the Jewish people generally, or this intimate private certifying of it to a few? And remember that, as far as we can understand, the two procedures were inconsistent with each other; for that period of preparatory prayer, meditation, and instruction, which the Apostles passed under our Lord's visible presence for forty days, was to them what it could not have been, had they been following Him from place to place in public, supposing there had been an object in this, and mixing in the busy crowds of the world.

3. I have already suggested, what is too obvious almost to insist upon, that in making a select few the ministers of His mercy to mankind at large, our Lord was but acting according to the general course of His providence. It is plain every great change is effected by the few, not by the many; by the resolute, undaunted, zealous few. True it is that societies sometimes fall to pieces by their own corruption, which is in one sense a change without special instruments chosen or allowed by God; but this is a dissolution, not a work. Doubtless, much may be undone by the many, but nothing is done except by those who are specially trained for action. In the midst of the famine Jacob's sons stood looking one upon another, but did nothing. One or two men, of small outward pretensions, but with their hearts in their work, these do great things. These are prepared, not by sudden excitement, or by vague general belief in the truth of their cause, but by deeply impressed, often repeated instruction; and since it stands to reason that it is easier to teach a few than a great number, it is plain such men always will be few. Such as these spread the knowledge of Christ's resurrection over the idolatrous world. Well they answered the teaching of their Lord and Master. Their success sufficiently approves to us His wisdom in showing Himself to them, not to all the people.

4. Remember, too, this further reason why the witnesses of the Resurrection were few in number; viz. because they were on the side of Truth. If the witnesses were to be such as really loved and obeyed the Truth, there could not be many chosen. Christ's cause was the cause of light and religion, therefore His advocates and ministers were necessarily few. It is an old proverb (which even the heathen admitted), that "the many are bad." Christ did not confide His Gospel to the many; had He done so, we may even say, that it would have been at first sight a presumption against its coming from God. What was the chief work of His whole ministry, but that of choosing and separating from the multitude those who should be fit recipients of His Truth? As He went the round of the country again and again, through Galilee and Judea, He tried the spirits of men the while; and rejecting the baser sort who "honoured Him with their lips while their hearts were far from Him," He specially chose twelve. The many He put aside for a while as an adulterous and sinful generation, intending to make one last experiment on the mass when the Spirit should come. But His twelve He brought near to Himself at once, and taught them. Then He sifted them, and one fell away; the eleven escaped as though by fire. For these eleven especially He rose again; He visited them and taught them for forty days; for in them He saw the fruit of the "travail of His soul and was satisfied;" in them "He saw His seed, He prolonged His days, and the pleasure of the Lord prospered in His hand." These were His witnesses, for they had the love of the Truth in their hearts. "I have chosen you," He says to them, "and ordained you that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain." [John xv. 16.]

So much then in answer to the question, Why did not Christ show Himself to the whole Jewish people after His resurrection. I ask in reply, what would have been the use of it? a mere passing triumph over sinners whose judgment is reserved for the next world. On the other hand, such a procedure would have interfered with, nay, defeated, the real object of His rising again, the propagation of His Gospel through the world by means of His own intimate friends and followers. And further, this preference of the few to the many seems to have been necessary from the nature of man, since all great works are effected, not by a multitude, but by the deep-seated resolution of a few;—nay, necessary too from man's depravity, for, alas! popular favour is hardly to be expected for the cause of Truth. And our Lord's instruments were few, if for no other reason, yet at least for this, because more were not to be found, because there were but few faithful Israelites without guile in Israel according to the flesh.

Now, let us observe how much matter, both for warning and comfort, is supplied by this view. We learn from the picture of the infant Church what that Church has been ever since, that is, as far as man can understand it. Many are called, few are chosen. We learn to reflect on the great danger there is, lest we be not in the number of the chosen, and are warned to "watch and pray that we enter not into temptation," to "work out our salvation with fear and trembling," to seek God's mercy in His Holy Church, and to pray to Him ever that He would "fulfil in us the good pleasure of His will," and complete what He once began.

But, besides this, we are comforted too; we are comforted, as many of us as are living humbly in the fear of God. Who those secret ones are, who in the bosom of the visible Church live as saints fulfilling their calling, God only knows. We are in the dark about it. We may indeed know much about ourselves, and we may form somewhat of a judgment about those with whom we are well acquainted. But of the general body of Christians we know little or nothing. It is our duty to consider them as Christians, to take them as we find them, and to love them; and it is no concern of ours to debate about their state in God's sight. Without, however, entering into this question concerning God's secret counsels, let us receive this truth before us for a practical purpose; that is, I speak to all who are conscious to themselves that they wish and try to serve God, whatever their progress in religion be, and whether or not they dare apply to themselves, or in whatever degree, the title of Christian in its most sacred sense. All who obey the Truth are on the side of the Truth, and the Truth will prevail. Few in number but strong in the Spirit, despised by the world, yet making way while they suffered, the twelve Apostles overturned the power of darkness, and established the Christian Church. And let all "who love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity" be quite sure, that weak though they seem, and solitary, yet the "foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men." The many are "deceitful," and the worldly-wise are "vain;" but he "that feareth the Lord, the same shall be praised." The most excellent gifts of the intellect last but for a season. Eloquence and wit, shrewdness and dexterity, these plead a cause well and propagate it quickly, but it dies with them. It has no root in the hearts of men, and lives not out a generation. It is the consolation of the despised Truth, that its works endure. Its words are few, but they live. Abel's faith to this day, "yet speaketh." [Heb. xi. 4.] The blood of the Martyrs is the seed of the Church. "Fret not thyself" then "because of evil doers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb. Trust in the Lord and do good … delight thyself also in Him, and He shall give thee the desires of thy heart; commit thy way unto the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass … He shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, and thy judgment as the noon-day … A little that a righteous man hath is better than the riches of many wicked. For the arms of the wicked shall be broken, but the Lord upholdeth the righteous … I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay-tree, yet he passed away, and, lo! he was not; yea, I sought him, and he could not be found." [Ps. xxxvii. 1-6, 16, 17, 35, 36.] The heathen world made much ado when the Apostles preached the Resurrection. They and their associates were sent out as lambs among wolves; but they prevailed.

We, too, though we are not witnesses of Christ's actual resurrection, are so spiritually. By a heart awake from the dead, and by affections set on heaven, we can as truly and without figure witness that Christ liveth, as they did. He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself. Truth bears witness by itself to its Divine Author. He who obeys God conscientiously, and lives holily, forces all about him to believe and tremble before the unseen power of Christ. To the world indeed at large he witnesses not; for few can see him near enough to be moved by his manner of living. But to his neighbours he manifests the Truth in proportion to their knowledge of him; and some of them, through God's blessing, catch the holy flame, cherish it, and in their turn transmit it. And thus in a dark world Truth still makes way in spite of the darkness, passing from hand to hand. And thus it keeps its station in high places, acknowledged as the creed of nations, the multitude of which are ignorant, the while, on what it rests, how it came there, how it keeps its ground; and despising it, think it easy to dislodge it. But "the Lord reigneth." He is risen from the dead, "His throne is established of old; He is from everlasting. The floods have lifted up their voice, the floods lift up their waves. The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea. His testimonies are very sure; holiness becometh His house forever." [Ps. xciii. 2-5.]

Let these be our thoughts whenever the prevalence of error leads us to despond. When St. Peter's disciple, Ignatius, was brought before the Roman emperor, he called himself Theophorus; and when the emperor asked the feeble old man why he so called himself, Ignatius said it was because he carried Christ in his breast. He witnessed there was but One God, who made heaven, earth, and sea, and all that is in them, and One Lord Jesus Christ, His Only-begotten Son, "whose kingdom (he added) be my portion!" The emperor asked, "His kingdom, say you, who was crucified under Pilate?" "His (answered the Saint) who crucified my sin in me, and who has put all the fraud and malice of Satan under the feet of those who carry Him in their hearts: as it is written, 'I dwell in them and walk in them.'"

Ignatius was one against many, as St. Peter had been before him; and was put to death as the Apostle had been;—but he handed on the Truth, in his day. At length we have received it. Weak though we be, and solitary, God forbid we should not in our turn hand it on; glorifying Him by our lives, and in all our words and works witnessing Christ's passion, death, and resurrection!

From "Witnesses of the Resurrection" in Plain and Parochial Sermons by John Henry Newman

Witnesses of the Resurrection [1]

Christ's appearance behind locked doors by Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1308-11)

In the earliest days of Christianity an "apostle" was first and foremost a man who claimed to be an eyewitness of the Resurrection. Only a few days after the Crucifixion when two candidates were nominated for the vacancy created by the treachery of Judas, their qualification was that they had known Jesus personally both before and after His death and could offer firsthand evidence of the Resurrection in addressing the outer world. A few days later St. Peter, preaching the first Christian sermon, makes the same claim - "God raised Jesus, of which we all are witnesses". In the First Letter to the Corinthians St. Paul bases his claim to apostleship on the same ground - "Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen the Lord Jesus?" ...

The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection ... [Now] it is very important to be clear about what these people mean. When modern writers talk of the Resurrection, they usually mean one particular moment - the discovery of the Empty Tomb and the appearance of Jesus a few yards away from it. The story of that moment is what Christian apologists now chiefly try to support and skeptics chiefly try to impugn. But this almost exclusive concentration on the first five minutes or so of the Resurrection would have astoinished the earliest Christians teachers. In claiming to have seen the Resurrection they were not necessarily claiming to have seen that. Some of the had, some of them had not. It had no more importance than any of the other appearances of the risen Jesus - apart from the poetic and dramatic importance which the begnnings of things must always have. What they were claiming was that they had all, at one time or another, met Jesus during the fix or seven weeks that folowed his death. Sometimes they seem to have been alone when they did so, but on one occasion twleve of them saw Him together, and on another occasion about five hundred of them. St. Paul says that the majority of the five hundred were still alive when he wrote the First Letter to the Corinthians.
The "Resurrection" to which they bore witness was, in fact, not the action of rising from the dead but the state of having risen: a state, as they held, attested by intermittent meetings during a limited period. This termination of the period is important, for there is no possibility of isolating the doctrine of the Resurrection from that of the Ascension.

Extract from Miracles in The Joyful Christian by C S Lewis

The Alleuia: Song of Gladness and Life

What a relief it was to hear the bells once more on Holy Saturday, what relief to wake up from the sleep of death with a triple "Alleluia". Easter, that year, was as late as it could possibly be - the twenty-fifth of April - and there were enough flowers to fill the church with the intoxicating smell of the Kentucky spring - a wild and rich and heady smell of flowers, sweet and full. We came from our light, five hours' sleep into a church that was full of warm night air and swimming in this rich luxury of odours, and soon began that Easter invitatory that is nothing short of gorgeous in its exultation.

How mighty they are, those hymns and those antiphons of the Easter office! Gregorian chant that should, by rights, be monotonous, because it has absolutely none of the tricks and resources of modern music, is full of a variety infinitely rich because it is subtle and spiritual and deep, and lies rooted far beyond the shallow level of virtuosity and "technique", even in the abysses of the spirit, and of the human soul. Those Easter "Alleluias", without leaving the narrow range prescribed by the eight Gregorian modes, have discovered colour and warmth and meaning and gladness that no other music possesses. Like everything else Cistercian - like the monks themselves - these antiphons, by submitting to the rigour of a Rule that would seem to destroy individuality, have actually acquired a character that is unique, unparalleled.

Taken from The Seven Storey Mountain: An Autobiography of Faith by Thomas Merton

Merton's thoughts on the Easter "Alleluia" as chanted in the monastery call to mind the words of Pope Benedict XVI in his work Dogma and Preaching:

Now singing finds its climatic form in the Alleluia, the song in which the very essence of all song achieves its purest embodiment ... In fact we are dealing here with something that cannot be translated. The Alleuia is simply the nonverbal expression in song of a joy that requires no words because it transcends all words. In this it resembles certain kinds of exultation and jubilation that are to be found among all peoples, just as the miracle of joy manifests itself in every nation ... What does it mean to sing with "jubilation"? It means: to be unable to express in words, or to verbalize, the song that sings to you in your heart. As the harvesters in field or vineyard experience an increasingly jubilant sense of joy, they become incapable, it seems, of find words to express this overflowing joy. They abandon syllables and words, and their singing turns into a jubilus or cry of exultation. A jubilus is a shout that shows the heart is trying to express what it cannot possibly say. And to whom is such a jubilus more fittingly directed than to him who is himself ineffable?

Taken from Benedictus: Day by Day with Pope Benedict XVI edited by Peter John Cameron OP

The Alleuia: Song of Hope and Joy

Resurrection of Christ and Women at the Tomb by Fra Angelico c. 1440

If each year, we are faithful in sharing Christ's sufferings during Lent and Holy Week, each year, too, the celebration of Easter, the contemplation of the glory of Jesus triumphant over death, makes up participate more fruitfully amd more abundantly in the state of Our Risen Lord; it increases our detachment from all that is not God, and, by grace, faith and love it makes the divine life grow within us. At the same time, it enlivens our hope: for, says St Paul, when at the last day Christ, Who is our Life and our Head, shall appear, then we also, because we share inHis life, "shall appear with Him in glory."

This hope fills us with joy, and it is because the mystery of Easter, being a mystery of life, strengthens our hope, that it is also super-eminently a mystery of joy.

The Church shows this by multiplying, throughout Paschal time, the Alleluia, the cry of gladness and felicity borrowed from the liturgy of Heaven. She had banished it during Lent in order to manifest her sadness and communicate in the sufferings of her Bridegroom. Now that Christ is risen, she rejoices with Him; she takes up again, with new fervour, the joyous acclamation wherein is summed up all the ardour of her feelings.

Never let us forget that we make up only one with Christ Jesus. His triumph is ours, His glory is the principle of our joy. With the Church our Mother, let us, too, often repeat the Alleluia so as to manifest our joy to Christ in seeing Him triumphant over death, and to thatnk the Father for the glory that He gives to His Son. The Alleluia that the Church unweariedly repeats, during the fifty days of the Paschal season, is like the ever renewed echo of that prayer with which she ends Easter week: "Grant us, we bessech Thee, O Lord, ever to rejoice through these Paschal mysteries; that the contniual work of our regernation may ensure to us perpetual joy in heaven."

Taken from Christ in His Mysteries by Dom Columba Marmion OSB

The Gospel (Mt 16:13-19) recalls the scene at Caesarea, where Jesus, for the first time, proclaimed Peter as the foundation stone of the Church: "I say that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church," words which have had a magnificent repercussion down through the centuries, and which, even today, bear witness to the primacy of Peter and his successors over the whole of Christianity - not over a number of small churches, but over one great, unique Church, the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church. One only Church, whose sole Founder and Head is Christ, who chose Peter to represent Him. "Where Peter is, there is the Church" (St. Ambrose) This means that wherever the Pope, Peter's successor, is, there the Church is. Rightly, then, should we consider the feast of St. Peter as the feast of the Church, the feast of our Holy Father, the Pope, and one which should awaken in every Christian soul a profound sense of belonging to the Church and of devotion to the Sovereign Pontiff. At the moment of her death, St. Teresa of Jesus repeated: "I am a daughter of the Church!" After having laboured so much for God and souls, this was the only title that made her sure of the divine mercy. To be a child of the Church! This is our title to salvation, this is our glory, after that of being a child of God. Or rather, not after, but together with, for as the Fathers of the Church say, "He cannot have God for Father who does not have the Church for Mother" (St Cyrian) He is not a true Catholic who does not feel the joy of being a child of the Church, whose heart does not vibrate for the Church and for the Vicar of Christ upon earth, who is not ready to renounce his own personal views in order to "sentire cum Ecclesia", to think with the Church, always and in all things.

The Communion antiphon repeats again the memorable words by which Jesus constituted Peter the foundation stone of the Church. "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church." It is a renewed expression of honour to the Prince of the Apostles, but is also a summons to us. Every Christian, in fact, ought to be a firm, solid rock which Jesus can use to sustain His Church. Evidently, the living rock, the cornerstone par excellence is Christ, and next to Himself, He has placed His Vicar; next come all the faithful, from the Bishops down to the last person to be baptized. We are all, as St. Peter says in his first epistle, "living stones built up, a spiritual house, a holy priesthood." (1 Pt 2:5)

Whoever you may be - priest or lay person, religious or father of a family, simple Christian or humble nun, you also are called to support the Church, just as in a building not only the big blocks of granite, but also the smallest bricks help to solidify the whole edifice. This profound apostolic sense must not be wanting in any soul; it must make us conscious of our degree of responsibility for the growth of the Church. We must fulfill our part, first of all, by our obedience and submission to the directives of the Hierarchy; but this is not enough. If we are true children of the Church, we cannot be indifferent to her needs, her interests, and her sufferings. The Church today suffers more than ever: she suffers in her Vicar, who placed as a sentinel for the whole Christian world, knows and estimates better than anyone else the dangers and struggles threatening her on all sides; the Church suffers in her Bishops, in her persecuted martyred priests, who are rendered powerless; she suffers in her children, abandoned and dispersed like sheep without a shepherd; she suffers because of errors, because of the calumnies which are hurled against her. And you, her child, can you remain indifferent? Suffer with your Mother; pray, work and use our strength to serve and defend her. Lay aside your own little personal interests and consecrate yourself - your life, yours works, your prayers, your silent, hidden sacrifices - to the great interests of the Church.

Taken from Divine Intimacy: Meditations on the Interior Life for Every Day of the Year by Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen OCD.

As a way to unite ourselves to the suffering Church readers may wish to join the Day of Prayer and Fasting for Missionary Martyrs in remembrance of those who have died for the faith throughout the world. This annual event occurs on March 24th, which this year coincides with Easter Monday.