Days of Grace

It has become a tradition with many of us to give up something during Lent. That, surely, is what fasting means? And, if for one reason or another, the holy season finds our breakfast-tables no less generously spread than they were wont to be, we make compensation for it by doing without some little luxury. The effect of this is to produce a gratifying sense of irritation; such is our human make-up that the grasshopper can become a burden, and a deliberate abstention, though it be only from sweets or the cinema, pricks like a hairshirt. Which is why the forty days of Lent seem to pass so slowly; will it never be Easter Day? And no doubt it is good for us.

Only, in a curious way, this impression of Lent makes on us is the exact opposite of what the Church intends. Lent ought to pass like a flash, with a sense of desperate hurry. Good Heavens! The second Sunday already, and still so little to show for it! Lent is the sacramental expression of the brief life we spend here, a life of probation, without a moment in it we can afford to waste. That is why it begins with St. Paul's metaphor of an ambassador delivering an ultimatum; we have only a few "days of grace" to make our peace with God. Ash Wednesday recalls our ignominious, earthly origins, Easter looks forward to our eternity. The space between is not, if we look at it properly, a sluggish declension; it is a mill-race.

Why is why, saving the better judgment of the Church, I always encourage my friends, when Lent comes round, not to do without something but to get something done. For many of us, it would be something if that pile of unanswered letters on the writing table - with all their background of disappointment, distress and inconvenience - could disappear by the time Easter comes. The manuscript we promised to read, the aunts we promised to visit - if only we could cheat ourselves into the feeling that these forty days were our last chance, how quickly we would run their course!

Taken from Lightning Meditations by Msgr Ronald Knox

SPECIAL EDITION OF THE NEWLSETTER

The October edition of the Library newsletter is dedicated to Monsignor Ronald Knox, featuring an article by Br. Christian Moe fsc on the fiftieth anniversary of his death and a book review of Ronald Knox as Apologist. Also included are copies of the flyer advertising the Ronald Knox Seminar and the brochure from the Classic Catholic Author's series, which has a biography and list of recommended works available in the Library. For those who would like a copy of the newsletter, please contact the Library and we will post one out to you.

Finally a reminder to pencil into your diaries the Ronald Knox Seminar and Dinner on Saturday 6th October, commencing from 2pm at St. Francis' Hall. Entry is via the car park on the corner of Elizabeth and Little Lonsdale Streets, Melbourne. The cost for the seminar is $15 for adults, $10 for library members, pensioners and students.

For those unable to attend the seminar, there is always the dinner at the Stork Hotel on the corner of Elizabeth and Therry Streets from 6:30 pm. The Stork offers very reasonably priced entrees and main courses including camarones al ajillo (prawns in garlic oil), pollo saltimbocca, NY cut porterhouse steaks, risotto romana, fish & chips and chilli beef salad.

We look forward to seeing you on Saturday for what promises to be a most edifying yet entertaining day.

To commemorate the anniversaries of Monsignor Ronald Knox's conversion to Catholicism in 1917 and his death in 1957, the Caroline Chisholm Library will be hosting on Saturday 6th October a day full of the wit and wisdom of one of the Church's finest apologists, preachers and writers.

Proceedings will commence at 2pm with a seminar at St. Francis' Hall featuring Br. Christian Moe FSC, author and educator, and Fr. Shane Hoctor, parish priest of Reservoir and Master's candidate. This will be followed by dinner at the Stork Hotel with an after-dinner speech by Mr. Anthony Krohn, barrister and secretary of the Library.

The cost of the seminar will be $15 for adults, $10 for pensioners, students and library members. The dinner features a range of very reasonably priced entrees and main courses.

To book for this event or for further information please contact the library by telephone on (03) 9670 1815, by email at cclibrary@bigpond.com or simply pay us a visit.

"If I have written well, that is not because Hobbs, Nobbs, Noakes and Stokes unite in praising it, but because it contains that interior excellence which is some strange refraction of your own perfect beauty; and of that excellence you alone are the judge. If it proves useful to others, that is because you have seen fit to make use of a weak tool, to achieve something in them of that supernatural end which is their destiny, and your secret." – from Proving God: A New Apologetic, an unfinished work published posthumously by Evelyn Waugh

Two Allrounders

The twentieth century has brought with it an expansion of Catholic literature in English-speaking lands that still bears on, and out, our thesis that Catholicism is a mental and moral force no less enlarging and energising than conservative and constructive. An array of names be cited from almost every quarter of the globe that is bewildering - not only from numbers, but still more from the great variety of literary fields in which individuals have achieved distinction. One or other will range from poetry to metaphysics; from preaching to parody; from archaeology to fiction; from politics to mysticism. We shall prefer, then, to consider names rather than genera, but we have but little plan in our survey, and no desire to assess degrees of merit.

If the most versatility ought to claim our earliest notice, then surely Fr. Martindale and Mgr. Knox should stand in front. With the serious zeal that has marked the work of both in the pulpit and has not forsaken their printed word, with the advantages derived from high educational opportunities, they have combined creative gifts of imagination and humour. Hence the complex charm of such a production as Fr. Martindale's "Goddess of Ghosts" and Mgr. Knox's "Spiritual Aeneid". Both men are earnest in scripture study, in controversy, and in pushing social reforms.

From the Story of Catholicism in English Literature by Rev. G. O'Neill SJ, published by the Australian Catholic Truth Society

Remembering Ronald Knox

Portrait of Ronald Knox by Howard Coster

Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

As a belated tribute to Monsignor Knox for August 24th, the 50th anniversary of his death, we offer the following words from his sermon on St Edward the Confessor, which could easily have applied to Knox himself:

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Man's happiness lies in devoting himself; his success is the offering he can make. And [he] was a successful man, yes, even in this world, because in his simple piety, in the unaffected geneorsity of his nature, he set himself to serve the men about him, by easing their burdens, by relieving their necessities, by confirming them in their allegiance to the Faith.

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And from his Retreat in Slow Motion is the following passage which could well apply to the rest of us:

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And now that it is all over, because death has come; and we wrap it all up in a parcel, as it were, and throw it woards Him, like a bad peice of knitting for his acceptance. "Take it, Lord; I know I've made a mess of it again and again, this life you gave me to live; the pattern hasn't been your pattern, and there have been lose edges everywhere. But it was meant to be like your Son's life, a sacrifice; take it, please, and make what you can of it; I have come to the end of the skein now."

More on the Ronald Knox Seminar

We can confirm three of the four papers to be delivered at the seminar:

1. Br. Christian Moe FSC will be presenting an overview of A Spiritual Aeneid, providing an insight into Knox's life and conversion


2. Fr. Shane Hoctor PP will be presenting an overview of his master's thesis on Knox's Eucharistic Theology, with particular reference to his Corpus Christi sermons and the place of the Eucharist in his conversion.


3. The Blogger will be presenting an overview of Knox's works and his place in the Catholic literary revival which began with the Oxford Movement and Newman and flourished during the first half of the twentieth century.

The President Knox

The Library's president has returned from her historical and literary adventures in England, which also provided a much needed break from her day job as Dean of Mannix College. Inspired by walking in the footsteps of Knox and Newman, she is busy finding a suitable venue for the Ronald Knox Dinner, which is in its final stages of organisation. To date we have confirmed as speakers Br. Christian Moe FSC, Fr. Shane Hoctor PP and the blogger, though the latter is still deciding on a topic.

A Sacramentality of the Body

I suppose any partial observer, comparing the religious ceremonies of the Jews with ours, would be struck by this fact - that the Jews expressed their religion n sacrifices, and we in sacraments. And he would notice this, that whereas sacrifice means the destruction of the body ... our Christian sacraments do not mean the destruction of the body at all. They mean, rather, the consecration of our bodies to God, with the understanding that such consecration symbolises, and effects, a consecration of our souls as well. God in Christ has abolished the old, destructive sacrifices; e has prepared for us instead a redeemed body in which and through which the sanctification of our souls can take place. The body is washed, and the soul is made clean; the body is anointed, and the soul is strengthened; a little circle of gold is put round one finger, or the hands are tied with a plain strip of linen, and the soul enter, thereupon, into a new state of life.

Consider how, at the three most solemn moments of his career, the ordinary Christian comes before God to receive the sacramental grace which those moments require, and can take upon his lips, without irreverence, the very words which our Lord himself uses in the greatest of all his sacraments, Hoc est corpus meum - This is my body.

The infant presents itself before God at the font with the words, Hoc est corpus meum, this is my body. What other words can it use? There is no other thought of which it can be directly conscious. The troubled eyes, looking out on a world altogether strange to it, are already beginning to isolate one set of phenomena from the rest, those white things, its own hands and feet. If one of those white things comes in contact with the edge of the cradle, feeling results, feeling that communicates itself to the mind; somehow then, these white things are part of itself. The first judgment we are capable f making is simply the identification of the body as something belonging to us; hoc est corpus meum. Soul is there, to be sure, as well as body, in the newly born infant; but the soul has not yet found its own means of expression, has not yet begun to grasp life by experience; it is dumb, inarticulate, has not reached the knowledge of itself. The body is something that has already begun to be known; that, then, must be offered to God, and that is enough; God will cleanse and sanctify this new soul, enable it to partake of eternal life, through the body which he has prepared.

Man and woman present themselves before the altar to dedicate their lives in mutual fidelity; and once gain it is the body that is uppermost in our thoughts. Hoc est corpus meum, the bridegroom says to the bride; with my body I thee worship. For here it is, in the fullness of its powers, that body which was carried, years before, tiny and helpless to the font. It is strong enough to work, now, and to make a livelihood for itself; and not for itself only, but for a household. It is strong enough to defend others besides itself against attack. And it is capable now, if God so wills, of continuing its kind, of begetting new life. With all these powers the bridegroom does worship to the bride; yet these are only the symbol of that love whose true sphere is in the soul. And the bride in her turn puts out her finger to receive the ring: hoc est corpus meum, she seems to say, here is my body, for you to hold; yet her soul goes out with it. As they offer the bodies he has prepared for them to him and to one another, God finds his opportunity to breather sacramental grace into their souls.

And once again, at the last scene of all, when a man lies on his death-bed, it is through the body that sacramental grace comes to heal him. His body is closer to him than ever; he is conscious of little except its labouring breath, its fevered pulses - this body of which he must take leave so soon, this body which now means so little. Hoc est corpus meum, he says, this is my body, still mine for a little, before it returns to its parent earth. This is my body, in which I have taken such pride, to which I have devoted so much attention, in which and through which I have sinned. This is my body; come, holy oil, and anoint it - these eyes that have seen and coveted what was unlawful, these ears that have been open to evil communications, these lips that have lied, detracted, blasphemed, these hands and feet that have been the ministers of my wicked passions. This is my body, which will be soon cold clay, now giving access to my soul, for the last time, through the gateways of sense; let these last sense-impressions of mine be all of holy things, seal them, holy oil, and shut them against the echoes of earth. So God's grace comes to him, for the last time, through his body and his soul is healed.

From The Mass and the Ritual in the Pastoral Sermons of Ronald A Knox

Ronald Knox and the Eucharist

Readers of Mr Evelyn Waugh's Life of Ronald Knox will not be surprised to notice that the largest single section of this book is devoted to the Eucharist. This is not due merely to the accident that from 1926 he was asked every year to preach at Maiden Lane on the feast of Corpus Christi: rather he agreed to the repeated request because, for him, the Eucharist was the central, inexhaustible and unifying mystery of his priestly life. It will be recalled that as an Anglican the Eucharist was the inspiration of his ministry; and that only when he began to be tormented with doubts about the validity of his priesthood did he take the first painful step in the direction of Rome. "I never celebrate", he wrote at this time, "without wondering whether anything's happening"; and again, "I have to set my teeth to consecrate, and make my thanksgiving after communion or confession with a mental reservation." The Catholic priesthood gave him the assurance that he was indeed offering the sacrifice of the New Testament; and the Mass became not merely the central act of his own life, but the unifying mystery of the people of God. It is striking how the social aspect of the Eucharist, a theme seldom developed by modern writers, recurs in many of these sermons, and each time in a different context. The same food, handed round like the bread in the miracle of the barley loaves, draws each man to his neighbour, and make each feel his human interdependence. Here, and in innumerable places, Mgr Knox calls attention to precisely those things that Catholics forget, insisting always that the Eucharist is instituted as much for a social as for an individual purpose. If others receive Holy Communion at the same time as we do, it is not to save the priest trouble: it is a sacramental assertion of the bond of fellowship that unites the faithful to Christ, and through him to one another.

The habit of thought on the Eucharist makes Mgr Knox quick to notice all the hints of the mysterious union of Christians in the Gospel narratives and parables. The wedding feast of Cana, for instance, has its lesson of union for the communicant as much as the feeding of the five thousand, and both, moreover, illustrate the need of our co-operation with God's grace. In both miracles our Lord leaves something to be done to the human assistants. "Give them to eat", he orders them n the one case; "Fill the water pots", on the other occasion, Mgr Knox concludes, "he does ask for co-operation; he does invite us to correspond by our own devotion with the grace we receive.

In this group of sermons there are many examples of the manner in which meditation on the Eucharist directed his reflections on certain theological or spiritual problems which are commonly considered in isolation from it. A striking example is the passage in the sermon entitle Prope est Verbum. Here Mgr Knox faces the problem that intermittently teases the Christian mind - how God can care individually for the souls he has made, for the thousands of our fellow human beings whom we see passing in crowds downs the streets to their daily work with "faces hardened by money-getting, faces impudent with the affectation of vice, faces vacant with frivolity, faces lined with despair". It seems impossible that each of these faces can represent a human being for whom God cares as he cared for Zaccheus or Mary Magdalen. But it is the mystery of the Eucharist that allays the scruple, for the universality of its application makes it possible for us to imagine the universality of the divine love.

With much profit to himself the reader of these sermons can study the central place occupied by the Eucharist in Mgr Knox's spiritual life. The subject and its implications in our daily work is so well developed that the central portion of the books forms a most valuable and modern treatise on the Blessed Sacrament.

From the Introduction to the Pastoral Sermons of Ronald A. Knox edited by Fr. Philip Caraman.

NB In the final paragraph Fr. Caraman refers to sermons previously published in a separate work entitled The Window in the Wall and Other Sermons on the Eucharist.

Towards the Ronald Knox Seminar

On Saturday October 6th 2007 the Library will be hosting a seminar to commemorate the life and literature of Msgr. Ronald Arbuthnott Knox: apologist, essayist, novelist, poet, scholar and translator.

Monsignor Knox believed the common man "has been standing at a point in the road where modernism opens out on one side, and, if you like, intellectual suicide on the other. He is looking nervously down each of these in turn; the one thing that never seems to occur to him is ... to go straight on. Let him trust orthodox tradition to determine what he is to believe, and common sense to determine what is orthodox tradition."

"Common sense", "orthodox tradition" - if you detect in these words an echo of GK Chesterton, then you might like to know that for Monsignor Knox "He had been my idol since I read the Napoleon of Notting Hill as a schoolboy" and "Chesterton's philosophy, in the broadest sense of that word, have been part of the air I breathed, ever since the age when a man's ideas begin to disentangle themselves from his education. His paradoxes have become, as it were, the platitudes of my thought."

Likewise Chesterton regarded Knox as having done the most to help him decide to become a Catholic and had written to him requesting instruction. It was only because of scheduling difficulties that Chesterton was instructed and received by Father John O'Connor, the inspiration for Father Brown. One wonders what might have been had it been Father Knox, especially since both were founding members of the Detective Club.

Thus it seems very appropriate for the Library to follow last year's seminar with one on this eloquent and original writer, whose name is forever immortalised in a poem written, incidentally, by Chesterton:

Mary of Holyrood may smile indeed,

Knowing what grim historic shade it shocks,

To see wit, laughter and the Popish creed

Cluster and sparkle in the name of Knox

FURTHER INFORMATION ON THE SEMINAR

WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE IN THE COMING WEEKS.

University Education

If there is anybody here who belongs to the teaching staff of the University, I hope they will not my saying - what is, after all, hardly better than a platitude - that the things we learn in such places are not the things that are taught us. What is handed on to us by our lecturers is taken down in a note-book, and languishes there until examination time comes round; it has not become a part of our mental furniture. It is sealed off; for the most part, even from memory. What we are learning at the University is something quite different; we acquire it by a kind of unconscious absorption. Arguments we have had over a cup of coffee, points of view we have been introduced to at a debating society, or in reading the reviews - serious reviews, such as we feel bound to read now that we are intellectuals; stray pieces of information we have picked up on the radio, or even at the cinema; all these penetrate under the skin, or say, if you will, they are the germs floating in the air which we breathe in without knowing it. You make heroes among your fellow students, and copy their handwriting, their dress, their behaviour. You go on your travels in the vacation, attend conferences, meet people who impress you by their greater knowledge of the world. All that is, in the larger sense, your education. Your friends say, at the end of three years, how altered you are. But they are not thinking of lectures.

Ronald Knox (1888-1957) in a sermon to Catholic undergraduates on the feast of St. Therese. Over the years Knox was a student, tutor and chaplain at Oxford.

Modern Times

The whole tendency of the human race is away from consecutive thought. The brain is being sacrificed to the senses, as the cinema replaces the theatre and broadcasting obviates the necessity for conversation. The literature which sells is literature which involves a minimum of thought for its digestion; the religion which appears to commend itself to the masses is a sort of pulpy morality from which all intellectual considerations are jealously excluded. Cross-word puzzles have replaced the search for Truth by an endless chase after synonyms. Any challenge to abstract thought or reflection upon first principles is met by a torrent of catchwords and ready-made journalism which either obscure thought or obviate the necessity for it.

Ronald Knox (1888-1957) in Other Eyes Than Ours