Suchergebnisse

Issue 19.3 of the Review for Religious, 1960. ; Councils in Lay Institutes Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. THE LAW of the code and especially that of the constitutions confers an important role on the councils in religious institutes. Almost all constitutions describe thoroughly the duties of tho general council but are unsatisfactory in their treatment ~f the provincial and local councils. This article is an effort to explain simultaneously"th~ principles that govern all councils in lay in-stitutes. The more common name for this office in such institutes is councilor; but many others are found, e.g., assistants, discreets, and consultors. 1. Necessity of councilors (c. 516, § 1). This canon obliges-all superiors general, presidents of federations and confederations, provincial and local superiors at least of formal houses to have councilors. A formal house in a lay institute is one in which at least six professed religious reside (c. 488, 5°). The canon recom-mends that superiors also of smaller houses have councilors. From analogy of law and the enactment of the particular constitutions, superiors of vice-provinces, quasi-provinces, regions, vicariates, missions, and districts should also have councilors.~ The canon does not specify the number of the councilors. From the practice of the Holy See in approving constitutions, there are four general councilors, although a few lay congregations have a greater numberi four or two provincial councilors; two councilors in a formal house, but a few congregations have a larger number; and more frequently one councilor in a smaller house. Monasteries of nuns ordinarily have four councilors. Federations and confederations of nuns have four or six councilors, and regions within such a confederation have two. ~ 2. Manner of designation and requisite qualities of councilors. The general councilors of a congregation and the councilors of a con-federation, federation, region, or monastery of nuns are elected in the respective chapters. The provincial councilors of a congregation are appointed by the superior general with the consent of his council, but in a small number of congregations they are elected in the provincial chapter. Local councilors are appointed by the ILarraona, Commentarium Pro Religiosis, 9 (1928), 418. 129 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious superior general or, if the institute is divided into provinces, ordin-arily by the provincial, with the consent of the respective council. The constitutions sometimes enact that this provincial appoint-ment is to be confirmed by the superior general with the delibera-tive vote of his council. The quality universally demanded by constitutions for all ex-cept local councilors is that they be professed of perpetual vows. The age usually required for general councilors of a congregation and those of a confederation, federation, or region of nuns is thirty-five complete years; thirty years is the more frequent norm in monasteries of nuns; and thirty or thirty-five years are often prescribed for provincial councilors. The constitutions rarely enact a determined age for local councilors, and very many do not affirm that perpetual vows are necessary. A few make it clear that perpetual profession is not an absolute requisite by stating that the local councilors are, if possible, to be professed of perpetual vows or that such vows are required at least for the first local councilor. It is incongruous that a religious still in the state of probation and formation should be the councilor of a house. 3. Residence. According to the practice of the Holy See in approving constitutions, all the general councilors should reside with the superior general; but two of them, with the exception of the as-sistant general, may live elsewhere for a just reason, e. g., because of their other work. These must be stationed in houses from which they can .be readily summoned and can attend the meetings. The evident purpose of the practice is that the superior general may have no difficulty in consulting his councilors. Many constitutions contain no prescriptions on the residence of the provincial counci- .lots. At least the assistant provincial and the provincial secretary should reside with the provincial. Some constitutions have the same practice for a provincial council of four members as that described above for the general council. If there are only two provincial councilors, the constitutions frequently state that both or at least one of the councilors must reside with the provincial. The councilors of a confederation, federation, or region of nuns reside in their respective monasteries. 4. Incompatible duties. The general principle of the practice of the Holy See forbids a general councilor to be assigned any employment that would prevent the proper fulfillment of the duties of a coun-cilor. The present practice forbids in particular merely that the first general counc.il0r be bursar or secretary general. The former practice forbade any general councilor to be bursar general, and 130 May, 1960 COUNCILS IN LAY INSTITUTES the Normae of 1901 extended the prohibition to the master of novices (nn. 285, 300). Some constitut!ops~ ~ave the same pro-hibition with regard to the offices of provincial or local superior, any bursar, local councilor, and master of junior professed. A provincial will rarely in fact be a general councilor; but, outside of the case of the assistant general, it is difficult to see how the offices listed above are necessarily incompatible with that of general councilor. A general councilor is very frequently the local superior of the generalate. The judgment of the incompatibility is to be made on facts, i. e., the amount of work in each of the offices and the ease or difficulty with which the other office would permit the religions to be summoned and to attend the ordinary and extraordinary sessions of the general council. Few constitutions mention incompatible duties with regard to the provincial coun- .cilors, but some forbid the uniting of this office with that of pro-vincial bursar or master of novices. 5. Nature of a council (c. 516, § 1). In the constitutions of pontifical lay congregations, the general council is nsually stated to consist of the superior general and the four general councilors. Other parts of the same constitutions repeat frequently that particular matters requirethe consent or advice of the general council. All such expressions are ambiguons. The superior alone governs the con-gregation, province, or house; the councilors as such have no authority. Canon 516, § 1, makes it clear that a councilor is only an adviser of a superior, not an associate in authority. The superior votes in a council but he is not a member of the council; he is the superior, or sole possessor of authority, who has councilors or advisers. In a general chapter the authority is that of the collective body; the chapter itself and as such possesses the authority. All the members of this chapter are on the same level; all are co-possessors of the same authority and co-authors of the enactments of the chapter. Not the presiding superior general, but the general chapter places an act. A council is not a governing body; it possesses no collective authority. The councilors are not co-authors of an act. It is not the council but the superior who places an act, with the consent or advice of his council. It is possible for a particular canon or law of the constitutions to prescribe that the council is to act in the same manner as the general chapter. This mnst be certainly proved, since the contrary is the general principle of canon law. The only canon of this type that can affect lay religions is canon 650, which treats of the dismis-sal of a male religions of perpetual vows. If the majority of the 131 JOSEPH F. CrALLEN Review for Religious council vote for dismissal, it is probable that the superior general must issue the decree of dismissal in a pontifical congregation or forward the matter to the local ordinary in the case of a diocesan congregation. Therefore, the act in this case would be of the general council, not of the superior general. However, this sense is only probable; and it is at least equally probable that the wording of the canon is merely another way of expressing the deliberative vote of the council. Consequently, since it is not certain that canon 650 is an exception, this case also would in fact be handled in the same way as that described above (cf. also n. 16). These same principles apply not only to the councils but also to chapters of monasteries of nuns in the cases for which law demands that the superioress secure the consent or advice of the chapter (cc. 534, § 1; 543; 575, § 2; 646, § 2).2 6. Duties of councilors (c. 516, § 1). The primary duty of the councilors is to cast a deliberative or consultive vote when these are demanded by canon law or the constitutions. When asked to do so by the superior, they are to express their opinions with all freedom, courage, respect, sincerity, and truth (c. 105, 3°). They are likewise to bring to the attention of the superior whatever they sincerely consider to be to the good or detriment of the institute, province, or house. The superior, not the councilors, decides the matters that are to be treated in the council, as is clear from the principle stated in number 5. Councils were introduced to prevent what could degenerate into arbitrary government on the part of the superior. An equally evident purpose was to satisfy the need that all, and perhaps especially those in authority, have of securing advice and obtaining information. In an age that emphasizes ren-ovation and adaptation, the councilors should also be the principal source of progressive ideas to the superior. 7. Obligation of secrecy. According to the practice of the Holy See, an article of the constitutions states that the general councilors must observe secrecy concerning all matters confided to them as councilors in or outside the sessions.3 Another article is usually included that extends this same obligation to all others who have attended any session of the general council. A secret is the know-ledge of something that at least ordinarily should not be revealed. ~Cf. Vromant, D~ Bonis Ecclesiae Temporalibus, n. 39; Vermeersch, Per-iodica, 15 (1927), (61)-(63); Goyeneche, Quaestiones Canonicae, I, 183-89; Michiels, Principia Generalia de Personis in Ecclesia, 494-95; Larraona, Commentariurn Pro Religiosis, 6 (1925), 429-30; Bender, Norrnae Generales de Personis, nn. 376-77,1; Jone, Comrnentarium in Codicem Juris Canonici, I, 121. ~Normae of 1901, n. 280. 132 May, 1960 COUNCIL~ IN LAY INSTITUTES A natural secret arises from the very matter of such knowledge, since its revelation would cause injury or at least sorrow and displeasure to another. A promised secret has its source in a prom-ise, made after the matter was known, not to reveal the matter, whether or not this matter of itself demands secrecy. The confided or entrusted .secret arises from an agreement, given and accepted before any disclosure, that the matter will not be revealed. The agreement may be explicit or implicit. The latter is true of all who possess a confidential office, e. g., doctors, lawyers, priests consulted outside of confession on things appertaining to their ministry, religious superiors, novice masters, councilors, etc. There are degrees in the confided secret. The lowest is the revelation made to a private individual from mere friendship. The next is the revelation to a private individual to secure counsel. The third and highest is the official secret, i. e., a revelation made to a person possessing a confidential office, such as those listed above, and made to him because of this office or learned in the practice of the office. Matters confided to all councilors thus constitute official secrets and are often also natural secrets. Even the official secret may be revealed to prevent a serious injury to the institute, province, or house, or to any individual. The councilors may also reveal such matters to a prudent and learned or experienced person for the purpose of consultation, e. g., to a confessor, a priest skilled in a subject such as canon law or moral theology, or to another prudent and experienced religious. In seeking counsel, the identity of the person concerned is always to be concealed as far as possible. Even if the matter becomes public, the councilors may not reveal what occurred in the council with regard to it, e. g., the opinions or votes given by individual councilors. They are to acquiesce, at least externally, in the judgment of the majority and in the action taken by the superior. This is necessary for the efficient functioning of the council and for effective and peaceful govern-ment. They are not to imply or hint to others that they disagreed with a decision made in council. This is a shirking of the responsi-bilities of an office. The article inserted in constitutions by the Holy See adds that a general councilor who violates this obligation of secrecy is to be seriously admonished by the superior general. If he does this repeatedly, he is to be given a severe admonition and a penance. A violation of secrecy is not in itself a sufficient reason for de-position from office; but, if the violations are very serious, flagrant, a source of lack of confidence, discord, or scandal in the corn- 133 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious munity, the councilor may be deposed from his office.4 These principles apply to all other councilors. Canon 105, 2°, empowers the superior, if he believes this prudent and demanded by the sbriousness of the matter, to oblige the councilors to take an oath to preserve secrecy on a particular matter. ~. Frequency of sessions. The almost universal practice of the Sacred Congregation in approving constitutions is that an or.dinary session of the general council is to be held every month. The article adds that more frequent sessions are to be convoked when necessary. A very small number of constitutions prescribe less frequent meetings, e. g., every two or three months. It is very difficult to reconcile such infrequent sessions with the obligation of having all the councilors reside in the motherhouse and with the insistence that they be free of all duties incompatible with the office of general councilor. An ordinary session every month is decidedly the pref-erable norm. An extraordinary session should be called by the superior general for any matter of greater moment. He should consult his councilors frequently, since the practice of the Sacred Congregation places marked emphasis on the office of councilor. These principles are true of all other councils. A monthly ordinary session is also the usual norm for the councils of provinces, houses, and monasteries of nuns. 9. Convocation of the council (c. 105, 2°). When either the delibera-tive or consultive vote is required by canon law or the constitutions, canon 105, 2°, commands the superior to convoke ~11 the councilors who can be present.5 He must therefore, sufficiently ahead of time, inform all the councilors of the place, day, and hour of the session. A convocation is not obligatory when the constitutions or customs determine the place, day, and hour of the meetings. Obviously all other sessions that the superior institutes on his own authority must also be convoked. The secretary may and often in fact does convoke the council at the order of the superior. The councilors should at the same time be given a list of the important matters to be discussed, so that they may properly prepare for the meeting. Unprepared sessions are usually both unsatisfactory and unduly prolonged. 10. Number of councilors required. (a) By the code (c. 163). By the code, a superior has the right to act when at least one councilor is present after all have been properly convoked (c. 163). The 4Cf. Vermeersch, De Religiosis, II, n. 121; Battandier, Guide Canonique, n. 466; Bastien, Directoire Canonique, n. 324. sCf. Vromant, op. cir., n. 40; Jone, op. cir., 120; Michiels, op. cir., 530. 134 May, 1960 COUNCIL~ IN LAY INSTITUTES superior may not act when he alone is present, since there would then be no consent or advice of the council. Therefore, if the constitutions do not demand the presence of a definite number for a session of the council, the superior may act validly and licitly when only he and another councilor are present, The same is true when the president of a session is the assistant or vicar in virtue of a provision of the co~.~titutions or delegation from the superior. It is clear that a session should ordinarily be postponed when only one of four councilors is present. According to the law of the code, the superior has no obligation to substitute other religious for absent councilors. It is not certain: that he may do so licitly or even validly, since the rights of the council devolve after convocation on those~ who are present and these are to be considered juridically as a full council.~ However, because the code does not expressly nor certainly forbid substitu-tion, it is probable that the superior may summon such substitutes. 7 He may use an analogous norm from the code (c. 655, § 1) and select the substitutes with the consent of his council; or he may follow one of the norms of substitution admitted in the practice of the Holy See, explained in (c) below, e. g., by taking the local superior as the first substitute and then, with the consent of his council, selecting the other substitutes from the professed of perpetual vows of the house in which the session is held. (b) By the general law of constitutions. The constitutions of lay congregations very frequently demand the presence of the superior general and two councilors for any session of the general council, and a few require a unanimous vote when only this number is present. Other specifications are also found, e. g., two-thirds of the general council, and three general councilors. The Normae of 1901 (n. 273) seem to suppose that the superior general and at least two councilors are present at any session. These constitutions do not demand that the absent councilors be replaced by substi-tutes, i. e., outside of the matters listed in the following paragraph; and substitution is accordingly regulated by the norms given above. It is not the practice to summon substitutes in such cases. (c) By the law of the constitutions [or appointments and other de-termined matters. Most constitutions of lay congregations, following the Norrnae of 1901 (n. 273), require a full general council for ap- ~Cf. Can. 163; 165; Goyeneche, De Religiosis, 47-48; Quaestiones Can-onicae, I, 26-27; Bastien, op. cir., n. 327; Schaefer, De tteligiosis, n. 586; Pejska, Ius Canonicum Religiosorum, 233. 7Cf. Coronata, Institutiones Iuris Canonici, I, 658, note 3. 135 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious pointments to offices. A small number extend this to other matters, e. g., admission to the noviceship and first and fihal profession, dismissal of professed religious, matters that require recourse to the Holy See or the local ordinary, and even for all matters that demand a deliberative vote. Full membership is required in such constitu-tions for the liceity, not for the validity, of the superior's action. If all the members of the council are not present, the ap-pointment, if possible, should be postponed. If it cannot be deferred, the substitutes prescribed by the constitutions are to be summoned. The most common norm of substitution is that the local superior is to be called and, if a second substitute is necessary, the superior general, with the consent of the councilors present, is to choose him from the professed of perpetual vows of the house where the session is being held. If the local superior is already a general councilor or cannot attend, a religious of perpetual vows is to be chosen in this same way as first substitute. Many other norms of substitution have been admitted by the Holy See. For example, the second sub-stitute need not be of the house where the session is held; the first substitute is the secretary general, or the secretary or bursar general; the superior general, with the consent of the councilors present, chooses as substitutes religious professed for at least ten years; one or two professed of perpetual vows; and, finally, a pro-fessed of perpetual vows, preferably the bursar general. It is pos-sible to find constitutions that demand a full council for determined matters but do not provide any norm of substitution. In such cases the superior is to summon substitutes according to one of the norms given above (c. 20). Constitutions rarely mention the necessity of the presence of a minimum number of provincial councilors, of a full council for determined matters, or give norms of substitution for this council. Such provisions, when found, follow those described above for the general council. (d) Non-councilors" attending sessions. The constitutions usually state, at least of the superior general, that he may summon religious who are not councilors to sessions of the council to give information or advice but that he is forbidden to grant a vote to anyone who is not a councilor. Any superior has this same right. Those most likely to be called are the bursars, masters of novices and of junior professed, and supervisors of schools, hospitals, and studies. It is evident that no one has a right to vote in a council or to act as a councilor unless he is such by election, appointment, or by a provision of law. Some constitutions contain the strange provision that persons summoned as above "have only a con- 136 COUNCILS IN LAY INSTITUTES sultive vote." The same is more frequently said of the secretary general, e. g., "If the secretdr~y general'is,not a councilor, he has only a consultive vote." All such persons give information or advice only when requested and merely to help the superior and the councilors to form their opinions, and this may be the sense of the constitutions in question. They do not vote nor act as councilors; this appertains only to the superior and the councilors. Further-more, a secretary of a council is not by that fact a councilor nor should he act as such. He is in the same position as any non-councilor who is summoned to a session. Therefore, he has no right to give an opinion in a council unless this is at least implicitly requested by the superior. 11. Common deliberation (c. 105, 2°). The proper and primary canon on the obligatory consent or advice of a council or chapter is canon 105. The literal translation of this canon is that the coun-cilors or capitulars "are to be legitimately convoked and to manifest their opinions" (c. 105, 2°). The evident translation of the sense of this clause is that "they are to be legitimately convoked and to manifest their opinions in a common deliberation." The canon thus commands absolutely that the councilors or capitulars are to express their opinion in a common deliberation. It is therefore difficult to understand the reason for the statements of some authors that canon 105 does not forbid a councilor to vote through a proxy or by letter or that these are forbidden only for a canonical election (c. 163). From the wording of canon 105, 2°, it is illicit, but not certainly invalid, for a superior to secure an obligatory consent or advice outside of a common deliberation, e. g., through a proxy, by letter, or by interrogating the councilors or capitulars individually and separately and securing in this way their oral consent or advice. 8 The obligation of a common deliberation ceases and the consent or advice may be requested separately when the matter is urgent and a common deliberation is impossible or at-tainable only with unusual difficulty. It is possible for an institute to have a privilege from the Holy See permitting an obligatory vote to be asked separately, 8Vromant, op. cit., n. 40; Vermeersch-Creusen, Epitome Iuris Canonici, I, n. 229; Wernz-Vidal, Ius Canonicum, II, De Personis, n. 33; III, De Religiosis, n. 155; Coronata, op. cir., n. 154; Ojetti, Comfnenta}'ium in Codicem Iuris Canonici, II, 182-83; Fanfani, De Religiosis, n. 66; De Carlo, Jus Religiosorum, 82; Goyeneche, Quaestiones Canonicae, I, 180-82; Cappello, Summa Iuris Canonici, I, n. 201,'4; Pejska, op. cir., 233; Bender, op. cir., n. 417; Bergh, Revue des Cdmmunautds Religieuses, 20 (1948), 78; Chelodi-Ciprotti, Ius Canonicum de Personis, n. 102; Brys, Juris Canonici Compendium, I, n. 296, 2; Sipos, Enchiridion Iuris Canonici, 82. 137 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious e. g., by letter. Several authors maintain that the particular law or custom of an institute may permit separate voting.9 The opinion of these authors may be followed, even though it is not easy to perceive the foundation for the opinion. Canon 105, 2°, does not contain a clause permitting the continuance of contrary laws or customs, and it is difficult to see how a contrary immemorial custom or one of a century's duration could not-be prudently removed in this matter (cc. 5-6). The attempt to prove the same doctrine by recurring to canon 101, § 1, 1°, is equally obscure. It is true that this canon explicitly permits particular law to prevail over the common law, but it is a canon that only secondarily and analogously applies to an obligatory consent or advice of a council or chapter. The primary and proper canon is canon 105, 2°, which demands a common deliberation absolutely. The value of the com-mon deliberation is that the reasons and facts adduced by some will clarify the issue in the minds of all. A common deliberation also lessens the difficulty in proposing an opinion Contrary to that of the superior. The superior proposes the matters for discussion. He should give an objective description and explanation of each case, without revealing his own opinion. He then asks the opinions of each of the councilors. It is sometimes enjoined by the constitutions and is often customary for the last in precedence to speak first. The superior is to strive to secure a sincere and complete expression of opinion from all the councilors. Canon 105, 3°, obliges the councilors to express their opinions respectfully, sincerely, and truthfully. The superior should take care lest any more aggressive and vocal members dominate the council. These are not necessarily the most able or prudent. The councilors are to consider all matters objectively; they are not to be motivated by partisanship, faction-alism, anger, pride, stubbornness, or blind adherence to their own opinions. The councilors have full liberty to express their opinions. Their norm is the objective merits or demerits of the question, not what the superior wants. To assure this liberty, it is better for the superior to give his opinion last. The superior must be careful lest his attitude intimidate or discourage the councilors from a sincere expression of opinion. He may never consider the council as a mere "rubber stamp" for his own ideas. ~Maroto, Institutiones Iuris Canonici, I, 556, note 1; Michiels, op. cir., 530; Jone, op. cir., 120; Schaefer, op. cir., n. 582; Cocchi, Commentarium in Codicern Juris Canonici, II, 44; Geser, Canon Law Governing Communities of Sisters, n. 395. 138 ~VIay, 1960 COUNCILS IN LAY INSTITUTES The amount of time given to each matter will evidently vary with its importance and the :ease or difficulty in reaching a decision. The superior determines the duration and the number of times each councilor is to speak. Some constitutions state that an interval is to be allowed, at least on the petition of the majority of~the council, between the session in which a matter is proposed and that in which it is to be decided, unless the matter is urgent. This will o~dinarily occur only in important matters, but it is a norm that prudence itself will frequently demand or counsel. Some constitutions specify the interval as of one day or more, three or more; and three or eight days. 12. Manner of voting. Canon 105 does not impose any determined manner of voting, i. e~, orally, in writing, publicly, or secretly. The code requires a secret deliberative vote for alienations and the contracting of debts and obligations (c. 534, § 1) and for the dismissal of professed of temporary vows in pontifical congregations of men or women (c. 647, § 1). Very few constitutions of lay institutes contain any provision on the manner of voting, even though the Normae of 1901 stated that the deliberative vote was to be secret (n. 273). The varying provisions on the necessity of a secret vote in constitutions are: for all matters; whenever the deliberative vote is required; only for appointments; councilors may request it for an important matter; and when demanded by canon law, the constitutions, or requested by two councilors. The preferable norm is a secret vote whenever the deliberative vote is required. A secret vote is ordinarily taken by means of black and white beads or beans or in some similar manner. 13. Necessity of voting. Whenever the deliberative vote is required, the councilors are actually to vote; and the result of the voting is to be announced to the council. Otherwise the superior could not be certain that he had the consent of his council. The superior also votes. Actual voting may be done but is not necessary when only the advice or consultive vote is demanded. The superior is not obliged to follow even a unanimous consultive vote and he can reach his decision merely from the opinions proposed by the councilorS.1° 14. Number of votes required (c. 101, § 1, 1°). Unless the constitu-ti0ns specify a different norm, the votes are computed according to canon 101, § 1, 1°, i. e.~ a matter is settled by an absolute ~°De Carlo, op. cir., 82. On the fact that the superior also votes, cf. Bastien, op. cir., n. 326; Battandier, op. cit., n. 453; Lanslots, Handbook of Canon Law, n. 394. 139 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious majority, which is any number thdt exceeds half the valid votes cast. The constitutions do not contain, either for affairs or ap-pointments, the norm of canon 101, § 1, 1°, that a relative majority suffices on the third balloting. In appointments one person is voted for at a time; and all affairs are so proposed that they can be voted on affirmatively or negatively. Since the superior and the councilors ordinarily constitute an uneven number, a tie is scarcely possible unless one of the members is absent. Canon 101, § 1, 1°, commands a superior to break a tie after the third balloting, and this norm is to be observed when the constitutions are silent on this matter or do not contain a different norm for breaking a tie. In the former practice of the Holy See in approving constitutions, The superior was given the right or was commanded to break a tie after the first balloting. The recent practice gives this right or imposes the obligation only after the third balloting. In breaking a tie, the superior merely declares which side he favors; and he is not obliged to break the tie in favor of the side for which he had already voted. If the constitutions command the superior t~o break a tie after the first or third balloting, he must do so. He is not permitted to put the matter to another vote. The constitutions almost universally demand a full council for appointments and deny the superior the right of breaking a tie in this matter. In this case, a tie proves that the person concerned has not secured the vote of the council. 15. Appointments to office. The council should have a list of those qualified for office. This list is to be renewed at fixed intervals, e. g., every two or three years. Such a method will expedite the selection of superiors and officials and will also help to prevent the constant appointment of the same religions as superiors. In making a par-ticular appointment, the superior proposes the names for discussion. He decides when the discussion is sufficient and then proposes the names individually for voting. 16. Deliberative and consult~ve vote (c. 105, 1°). (a) Deliberative vote. There is no ambiguity in the expression of this vote. It is required whenever the code or the constitutions demand the consent, de-cisive or deliberative vote of the council. The necessity of the vote is also perfectly clear from canon 105, 1°, i. e., a superior acts invalidly when he acts without or contrary to the majority vote in any matter for which the deliberative vote is required. The 140 May, 1960 COUNCILS IN ~.~AY INSTITUTES consent of the council is a necessary positive element for the validity of the act of the superior.~1 Two important distinctions are to be kept in mind. Let us take as an example the erection of a new house, for which the con-stitutions require the deliberative vote of the general council. The superior general is not obliged to propose or to admit the proposal of this matter, since it appertains to the superior to determine whether a particular matter is to be submitted to the council. If he does propose it, the superior general must have the consent of his council validly to erect the house. If he secures this consent, he may erect the house; but he is not obliged to do so. He may abstain from such an action. The law commands him to have the consent of his council to erect the house; it does not oblige him to act according to the consent of the council.12 The second distinction is that canon 105, 1°, commands consent for the validity of an action of a superior when the consent is that of an inferior or inferiors, not when the law commands the consent of a higher authority, e. g., of a higher superior, the local ordinary, or the Holy See. The consent of a higher authority is required for validity only when this is expressly stated in the law in question; otherwise it is demanded only for the liceity of the superior's act.13 (b) Consultive vote. Consultive vote means that the superior is to listen to the opinions of his council. It is clearly stated in the following expressions: with the consultive vote, or with the advice, of the council; having consulted or heard the council; and according to the counsel or advice of the council. The expressions "with the council" and "with the vote of the council" are ambiguous but are to be interpreted in themselves as demanding only a consultive vote. Since the necessity of a vote is restrictive of the rights of a superior, it is to be interpreted strictly. Therefore, if it is doubtful whether any vote is necessary, no vote is necessary; if it is doubtful whether the vote imposed is deliberative or consultive, it is only consultive (c. 19). In constitutions it is preferable to use uniformly ~Can. 1680, § 1; Vromant, op. cir., n. 45; Michiels, op. cir., 504; Larraona, op. cir., 9 (1928), 422; Naz, Traitd de Droit Canonique, I, n. 367. Cf. De Ritibus Orientalibus de Personis, can. 35, § 1, 1°. 1~Michiels, op. cit., 500; Goyeneche, De Religiosis, 47; Quaestiones Can-onicae, I, 185; Jone, op. cit., 118-19; Larraona, op. cit., 9 (1928), 422, note 686; 424; Bender, op. cir., n. 377, 1; Berutti, De Personis, 58; Abbo-Hannan, The Sacred Canons, I, 153; Beste, Introductio in Codicem, 167. ~aMichiels, op. cir., 495; Berutti, op. cir., 56; Jone, op. cir., 118; Bender, op. cir., n. 377, 2; Regatfllo, Institutiones Iuris Canonici, I, n. 206; Scho.enegger, Periodica, 31 (1942), 120~21. 141 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious the expressions "with the consent" and "with the advice." Both are clear and brief. 1° An act placed without consultation, i. e., the act requires the advice of a council and the superior does not even request this advice. Such an act of a superior is almost certainly invalid from the wording of canon 105, 1°;~4 but it is still solidly probable that the act is merely illicit, not invalid, until the Holy See has author-itatively decreed otherwise. Therefore, a superior acts validly but illicitly if he acts without seeking the advice of his council when this is required by law. The previous consultation is required for validity whenever a determined law demands the consultation under the expressed sanction of invalidity. This is true of some canons, e. g., 2152, § 1; 2153, §.1; 2159; but no such canon is found in the section on religious. The same sanction is possible but in fact is not imposed by the law of the constitutions of lay institutes. 2° No obligation to follow the consultive vote. The code does not oblige a superior to follow even the unanimous consultive vote of his council; but it is recommended and he is counselled ordinarily to do so, i. e., he is to consider seriously and should not depart from a unanimous vote unless he has a reason that prevails over the vote. The superior is the judge of the existence and weight of such a prevailing reason. It is evident that a superior is always to give due consideration to the advice of his council, especially but not only when it is unanimous; otherwise the office of a councilor and the obligation of seeking advice in such matters would be mere formalities. 17. Matters that require the deliberative or consultive vote. The con-stitutions contain an article that lists what are called the more important cases in which the deliberative vote of the general council is necessary. This article is usually unsatisfactory. It does not list all nor the more important or practical cases of such a vote. The constitutions most rarely include a list of the matters that demand the consultive vote. The list below is based on the present practice of the Holy See and is intended to be complete. This prac-tice is not invariable. In different approved constitutions, the same matter sometimes demands a deliberative vote, a consultive vote, or no vote at all. The list therefore will not be in complete agree-ment with all constitutions, even if they have been recently ap-proved by the Holy See. Some of the matters listed below demand 14Cf. De Ritibus Orientalibus de Personis, can. 35, § 1, 2°. 142 May, 1960 COUNCILS IN LAY INSTITUTES the deliberative or consultive vote from. the law of the code, but in most cases the vote is imposed only by the law of the constitu-tions. It would unnecessarily complicate the question to include this distinction in the list. Some also require recourse to the Holy See or the local ordinary, but this is stated in the chapter of the constitutions that treats of the particular maiter. (a) The superior general must have the deliberative vote of his council in the following cases. 1° The condonation in whole or in part of the dowry of those having degrees or compensating abilities, if such a faculty is contained in the constitutions. 2° The investment of the dowry. 3° Dispensation from an entrance impediment of the constitu-tions. 4° Admission to the noviceship and first profession. 5° The establishment or transfer of a novitiate. 6° The dismissal of a professed of temporary or perpetual vows and the sending of a professed religious immediately back to secular life. 7° The convocation of an extraordinary general chapter for reasons other than those specified in the constitutions, the designation of the place of a general chapter, and the forma-tion of groups of smaller houses for the election of delegates to the general chapter. ' 8° The transfer of the permanent residence of the superior general or provincial. 9° To give a formal precept of obedience to an entire house, province, or to the entire congregation. 10° To appoint a. visitor for the entire congregation or an entire province, at least if the visitor is not a member of the general council. 11° The choice of a substitute for an absent general councilor. 120 The acceptance of the resignation, removal, and deposition of a general councilor, secretary general, bursar general, procurator general, and the appointment of a si~ccessor in these cases. 130 The appointment, transfer, and removal of provincial, regional, and local superiors, their councilors, secretaries, and bursars, of a master or assistant master of novices, the master of the junior professed, instructor of tertians, supervisors of schools and studies, principals of schools, and administrators of hospitals. 143 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious 14° Approval of the accounts of the bursar general. 15° The imposition of an extraordinary tax, the alienation of property, contracting of debts and obligations, the making of contracts in the name of the congregation, extraordinary expenses, and other matters of a financial nature according to the norms of canon law and the ordinances of the general chapter. 16° The erection of new provinces; the union, modification, or suppression of existing provinces; the formation, change, and suppression of regions; and the erection and suppression of houses. 17° All matters for which recourse to the Holy See is necessary. 18° All matters remitted to the deliberative vote by the general chapter. (b) The superior general requires the Consultive vote of his council in the following cases. 1° The dismissal of novices. 2° The prolongation of the noviceship and temporary profession. 3° Admission to renewal of temporary profession, to perpetual profession, and exclusion from the renewal of temporary profession or from perpetual profession. 4° The declaration of fact for the automatic dismissal of a pro-fessed religious. 5° Approval of the quinquennial report to the Holy See. 6° Approval of the reports of the superior general to the general chapter. 7° To give a practical interpretation of a doubtful point of the constitutions. 8° All matters remitted to the consultive vote by the general chapter. There is very little in many constitutions on the part of the provincial superior and his council in the acts listed below. There is even more variety in the constitutions that do treat this matter. The admission to the noviceship and professions, the dismissal of novices, the appointment of local superiors, local councilors and bursars, and of the master and assistant master of novices are often made by the provincial with the consent of his council but require the consent or especially the confirmation, ratification, approbation, or approval of the superior general with the deliberative vote of his council. (c) The provincial superior requires no vote of his council for admission to, prolongation of, or dismissal from the postulancy. 144 .May, 1960 COUNCILS IN LAY INSTITUTES (d) The provincial must have the deliberative vote of his council: For the following acts: 1° Investment of the dowry. 2° Admission to the noviceship. 3° To send a professed religious immediately back to secular life. 4° The designation of the place of the provincial chapter and the formation of the groups of smaller houses for the election of delegates to this chapter. 5° To give a formal precept of obedience to an entire house. 6° To appoint a visitor for the entire province, at least if the visitor is not a provincial councilor. 7° The appointment of local councilors and bursars, principals of schools, and administrators of hospitals. 8° Approval of the accounts of the provincial bursar. 9° The alienation of property, contracting of debts and obliga-tions, the making of contracts in the name of the province, extraordinary expenses, and other matters of a financial nature according to the norms of canon law and the ordinances of the general chapter. 10° Other matters according to the enactments of the general chapter. For the following requests to the superior general and his council: 1° The condonation in whole or in part of the dowry of those having degrees or compensating abilities, if such a faculty is contained in the constitutions. 2° Dispensation from an entrance impediment of the constitutions. 3° Admission to first temporary profession. 4° Dismissal of a professed of temporary or perPetual vows. 5° Erection and transfer of a novitiate and erection and suppres-sion of houses. 6° The removal, deposition, and replacement of a provincial councilor, secretary, or bursar; and the appointment, transfer, and removal of local superiors, the master and assistant master of novices, the master of the junior professed, the instructor of tertians, and provincial supervisors of schools and studies. 7° All matters for which recourse to the Holy See is necessary. 8° Other matters according to the ordinances of the general chapter. (e) The provincial superior requires the consult~ve vote of his council: For the following acts: 145 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious I° Prolongation of and dismissal from the noviceship. 2° Admission to renewal of temporary profession. 3° The declaration of fact for an automatic dismissal of a professed religions. 4° Other matters according to the ordinances of the general chapter. For the following requests to the superior general and his council: 1° Prolongation of or exclnsion from renewal of temporary pro-fession and exclusion from perpetual profession. 2° Admission to perpetual profession. 3° Other matters according to the ordinances of the general chapter. The treatment of the local council in constitutions is far more varied and unsatisfactory. Canon 653 states: "In the case of grave external scandal or of very serious imminent injury to the com-munity, a religions may be immediately sent back to secular life by a higher superior with the consent of his council or even, if there is danger in delay and time does not permit recourse to a higher superior, by the local superior with the consent of his council and that of the local ordinary." This extraordinary case is the only one in which canon law demands the consent of the local council in a lay institute. The following typical article is a practical summary of what is found in constitutions at the present time. The local superior shall convoke his council every month, or oftener if necessary. Outside of the extraordinary case of canon 653, the local councilors have only a consultive vote except in matters for which the general chapter or the superior general with the consent of his council has decreed that the vote mnst be deliberative. The superior is to discuss with his council the appointment of religions to the local offices and duties not :reserved to higher superiors, the monthly approval of the accounts of the local bursar, financial matters according to the ordinances of the general chapter, the ~material condition and all important matters of the house and its works, the observance of the constitutions, the progress of the religions spirit among the members of the house, and the means to be used to correct abuses and defects that may have crept into the house. Several constitutions impose a deliberative vote for all financial matters. 18. Monasteries of nuns. A monastery is different from a congrega-tion in that the superioress may be obliged to seek the vote of either the council or the chapter (cc. 534, § 1; 543; 575, § 2; 646, § 2). To give again merely a practical summary of what is stated 146 May, 1960 COUNCILS IN LAY INSTITUTES in constitutions, the vote of the chapter is deliberative for ad-mission to the noviceship and temporary profession and consultive for admission to final profession, solemn or simple, and in some monasteries for all the more important affairs of the monastery. The vote of the ,council is deliberative for the dismissal of a novice, investment of the dowry, dismissal of a professed of temporary or perpetual vows, the sending of a professed religious immediately .back to secular .life, appointment and removal of officials of the monastery, alienations, the contracting of debts and obligations, extraordinary expenses; and in some monasteries there is a de-liberative vote previous to that of the chapter for admission to temporary profession. The vote of the council is consultive for the dismissal of postulants; the prolongation of the postulancy, noviceship, or temporary profession; all other important matters of the monastery; and' in some monasteries there is a consultive Vote previous to that of the chapter for admission to perpetual profession, solemn or simple. 19. Federations of nuns. The mother general (president) requires the consent of her council in such matters as the designation of the place of the general chapter; the convocation of an extra-ordinary general chapter; acceptance of the resignation, deposition, and appointment of a successor of a general official; and the erec-tion and suppression of monasteries. The regional mother is obliged to consult her council on such matters as the erection and suppres-sion of monasteries and the possible erection of a common novitiate. It is evideat that the council of a confederation, federation, or region should also be consulted in other important matters. 20. Minutes. There should be a council book, in which the minutes of each session are recorded by the secretary. These are to contain the date, names of the absentees and of any substitutes, all affairs that were discussed, the decisions reached, and the number of votes for and against each decision. The minutes are read and approved by the council at the beginning of the following session. The secretary should add a notation of the vote by which the minutes were approved. The minutes are then signed by the superior and the secretary or, according to some constitutions, by all the councilors. In many congregations the minutes are signed by the superior and the secretary before the approval of the council, and there are also congregations in which this approval is not prescribed. The reading and approval of the minutes are an or-dinary practice in both secular and religious bodies of this nature. 21. The assistant and vicar. The constitutions of lay institutes 147 JOSEPH F. GALLEN ordinarily determine that the assistant takes the place of the superior, whether general, intermediate, or local, when the latter is absent or for any reason whatever is unable to exercise his office. They prescribe with equal frequency that the assistant, as vicar, succeeds immediately but provisionally to the office of superior on a vacancy by death, resignation, removal, or deposition. A vicar has all the powers of a superior, as has also an appointed acting superior. The right to convoke and preside over a council appertains to the superior, vicar, and an acting superior. A few constitutions enact that the general or provincial assistant con-yokes, and presides over the council when the respective superior is sick, absent, or otherwise impeded. Unless expressly forbidden by the constitutions, any superior may also give even general delegation to his assistant to do this (c. 199, § 1); and this power is explicitly stated in some constitutions. It is not the practice of constitutions to make provision for sessions of the local council in the absence or incapacity of the local superior. Any vicar or acting superior, whether general, intermediate, or local, should hold the sessions prescribed by the constitutions, sinve he pos-eesses the authority of a superior. Because his office is provisional and temporary, he should avoid innovations of moment unless these are demanded by the urgency of the matter. 148 The Dictionary of Spirituality R. F. Smith, S.J. THE DICTIONARY OF SPIRITUALITY (Dictionnaire~ de I spiritualit~) is a French reference work devoted exclusively to matters concerned with spirituality. The Dictionary is still in process of being published; three volumes have already appeared, and a large part of the fourth volume has been issued in separate fascicles. The purpose of this article will be to give some idea of the contents of the latest fascicles (nos. 26 and 27; Paris: Beau-chesne, 1959). No attempt will be made here to indicate all the articles included in the two fascicles, but a number of them will be summarized so that readers of R~.v~Ew Fo~t RELm~OUS may have some knowledge of the type of subject matter treated in the Dictionary. As is evident, statements of fact or of opinion are the responsibility of the authors of the various articles in the Dictionary and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of the REw~.w. Elevations English spiritual literature does not as a rule use the term elevation as the name of a certain type of meditation book, but both the name and the type have been popular in France; the history of this form of spiritual writing is detailed in the Dictionary from column 553 to 558. The term elevation is actually an ancient one in the history of thought, going back to Plato and other pagan Greek philosophers, the aim of whom was to secure the ~a¢~, or the a~a~7~ (both words mean equivalently elevation or ascent) of the soul to God or at least to spiritual realities. These words were then taken over by Christian writers, and all the more readily since parallel ideas are found in the Bible (see Ps 123:1; 141:2; Col 3:1-2). Hence it is that the traditional description of prayer has always been that of an elevation (or an ascent) of the mind to God. Since the seventeenth century, howev.er, the term elevation has been used in French spiritual literature to denote meditations in which the beauty of the thoughts, the ardor of the feelings, and a certain magnificence of style join forces to lift the soul more easily and gently to the thought of God. Passages of this kind of 149 R. F. SMITH Review for Religious writing are to be found even among pagan writers (for example, the monotheistic hymn of. Aton, some of the passages in Plato and Plotinus); and large sections of the Bible also partake of the nature of elevations (see Jb 36:22-39:25; Tob 13; Is 60-62; Jn 17; Rom 8). So too throughout the course of Christian spiritual literature elevational passages have not been absent, but it was not until modern times that elevations became a separate and self-conscious type of spiritual writing. Cardinal B~rulle gave the greatest impetus to the new form with his frequent elevations, the purpose of which was to bring the spirit of the liturgy into private devotion, The greatest example of elevations is Bossuet's work, Elevations to God on All the Mysteries of the Christian Religion. This type of writing is still frequent among the French, Vandeur and Guerry being, two of the foremost exponents of it today. Elijah Two Carmelite authors (col. 564-72) examine the validity of the traditional association of the prophet Elijah with religious life and with the Carmelite order in particular. The first section of the article remarks that although the Carmelite- tradition of~ the prophet Elijah as the father of monastic life has. not always been based on the soundest reasons, yet the intuition incorporated into the tradition is basically sound; for Elijah is presented in the Bible as a remarkable combination of contemplation and action. Thus, for example, in his dispute with the priesis of Baal on Mount Carmel there is manifested the zeal of Elijah for the worship of the one, true God, even at the possible danger of his. own life. So, too, Elijah shines forth as a man of action in his constant and frequent opposition to the kings whom he regarded as a source of moral corruption for the Israelites. The contemplative aspect of Elijah is shown in the scriptural presentation of him as a man of mystery, removed from other men. His appearancesand disap-pearances are sudden; he lives in solitude, nourished by food pro-vided for him in a supernatural way; the distance between Elijah and other men is strikingly accentuated by his final ascent in a fiery chariot. Finally Elijah is presented as a man who has spoken with God and to whom God has spoken in that small, still voice which is a symbol of God's intimacy with him. The next section of the article considers Elijah and the mo: nastic life. Before the foundation of monastic life, .Greek and Latin fathers rarely referred to Elijah as a model for Christian living; 150 May, 1960 DICTIONARY OF SPIRITUALITY but the fathers of the desert found in him a forerunner of their own way of living, It is in fact in the Life of St. Anthony that is found the first explicit appeal to the example of Elijah as a model of a life lived in the presence of God. This linking of Elijah and the life of perfection continued to grow in the Eastern Church; and in the liturgical feast which was finally accorded Elijah he was hailed with the title usually given to a monk-saint: "terrestrial angel and celestial man." In its beginnings western monasticism did not appeal to the example of Elijah. Later, however, St. Ambrose and St. Jerome expressed the opinion that Elijah could be legitimately considered a forerunner of monastic life; and gradually the monks of the West came to see in the prophet a model for their own virginity, purity of heart, solitude, and life of prayer. Nevertheless there .are but few indications of a liturgical cult to the prophet, and even among the Carmelites the feast of Elijah was a late introduction. It is to be noted that the new preface approved for the feast of the prophet says of him that "he laid the foundations of monastic life." The last part of the article examines the relationship between Elijah and the Carmelite order. During the crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, not a few of the crusaders were drawn to a life of preyer; and some of them settled on Mount Carmel in pursuit of this aim. In 1209 a group of monks living on Mount Carmel re-ceived a rule of life from Albert, patriarch of Jerusalem; later the rule was confirmed in 1226 by Pope Honorius III. These monks became the Carmelites. It is not certain, however, that the monks had come to Mount Carmel out of veneration for the prophet; and their rule does not refer to the prophet as a source of inspiration. It seems more probable that the monks' presence on Mount Carmel gradually led to a devotion to Elijah which eventually became an integral part of the traditions of Carmelite spirituality. The legend of a continuous eremitical life on Mount Carmel from Elijah to the crusaders is alluded to in the Constitutions of the Chapter of London of 1281; and in the fourteenth century the figure of the prophet was linked with the strong Marian tradition of the Carmelites. Elizabeth of the Trinity and Anne Catherine Emmerich Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880-1906) and her life lived in the praise of the glory of the Trinity have been of considerable interest to modern spiritual writers; the Dictionary's brief article 151 R. F. SMITH Review for ReligiOus on her (col. 590-94) delineates the stages of her spiritual progress, At nineteen she found in the writings of St. Teresa of Avila the central orientation of her life: intimacy with God living within her. From that time the aim of her life was to live always in the "cell" which God had built in her heart and one of the most characteristic phrases of her spirituality became that of the "heaven of my own soul." Later the Dominican Father ValiSe taught her to realize the Trinitarian aspect of the divine presence within her, and the reading of the works of St. John of the Cross gave her a full awareness of the transforming effects of the Trin-itarian presence. Meanwhile God Himself had been directing her, leading her through a long, continuous period of aridity and de-pression meant to purify her soul for its final ascent to God. At the end of this period on November 21, 1904, she was led to compose her famous prayer to the Trinity that synthesizes her entire spiritual doctrine. For Sister Elizabeth the fundamental condition of the spiritual life was the ascesis of silence and recollection, a separation from all things that could prevent one from praising God. The essential duty of the spiritual life was to believe in the God who is love and to give Him an adoration of love expressed in an absolute fidelity to His least desire. The model of this life she found in the Incarnate Word, for He is the perfect praise of the glory of the Father. And her final desire in her spiritual life was to join the unceasing praise of the blessed in heaven as that is described in the last chapters of the Apocalypse. Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824) is known today chiefly for the lives of Christ and our Lady attributed to her, but she was also a stigmatist; it is this latter aspect of Anne Catherine that is first discussed in the Dictionary (col. 622-27). Although she possessed a partial share in the stigmata as early as 1799, it was not until 1812 that all the stigmata became apparent in her. Soon after their appearance she was given a full medical and ecclesiastical investigation. The wounds of Anne Catherine, however, yielded to no medical treatment; moreover' continuous medical surveillance established the fact that she fasted from everything except water. Later a governmental examining, board investigated the case and could find no evidence of deception or fraud. In the opinion of the author of the article the stigmata of Anne Catherine must be judged to have been of supernatural origin; a.n.d he quotes with approval the remark of Alois Mager, O.S.B., that the records of the stigmata of Anne Catherine constitute "a rare source for the 152 May, 1960 DICTIONARY OF SPIRITUALITY psychological, religious, and medical study of stigmatisation and other analogous phenomena." The case is not quite so clear, however, with regard to her visions. At the command of her spiritual director, Anne Catherine related her visions from 1818 to 1824 to Clement Brentano; from the notes he took from his almost daily interviews with her, he later published three works on the lives of our Lord and our Lady. Although Brentano himself admitted that Anne Catherine never attributed more than a human value to her experiences, he himself insisted on the historical accuracy of every detail in the works, claiming that Anne Catherine in her visions was actually present at every scene described. Critical study, however, has proved that Brentano actually incorporated into the works he published ac-counts borrowed from other writers. Accordingly in 1927 the Congregation of Rites refused to accept as the writings of Anne Emmerich the volumes published under her name. With regard to the visions actually experienced by Anne Emmerich, the author of the article concludes that it is impossible for anyone today to say whether or not they had a supernatural origin. Devotion to the Infant Jesus The Dictionary's article on devotion to the Infant Jesus (col. 652-82) details the history of that devotion from the earliest times down to our own day. The patristic period of the Church did not in general possess what we would call today a personal devotion to the Infant Savior. Even the liturgical feasts of Christmas and Epiphany did not express such a devotion, for they were primarily instituted to stress religious ideas "and dogmas, and not to com-memorate historical events in the life of Christ. In the earliest history of the Church, the closest thing to a manifestation of a devotion to the Infant Jesus is to be found in the nun~erous pil-grimages to the Holy Land and especially to Bethlehem. With the Middle Ages, however, devotion to the Infant began to grow and to flourish; medieval man, with his taste for the con-crete and his desire for affectivity in his religious life, was led quite naturally to a display of ardent devotion to the appealing figure of the Infant of Bethlehem. The devotion received its first major impulse from St. Bernard; it is in his sermons on the Nativity cycle that are given the first detailed contemplations of the Infant, and there for the first time is His charm described at length. Afterwards St. Francis of Assisi, with his predilection for the 153 R. F. S~I Review for Religious mystery of the Nativity, continued and enlarged the popularity of the devotion to the Infant Jesus. This Franciscan love for the Nativity scene also marked a step forward in the technique of meditation; it was at this time and on the occasion of meditations on the Nativity scene that the Franciscans introduced the method of entering into and becoming a part of the scene meditated on, The ardor with which the devotion was practiced during the Middle Ages can be judged by various indications. It is then that for the first time in the history of Christian sanctity., saints and mystics are given visions of the Infant Jesus. Painters began to depict the adoration of the Infant, thus making the Babe the center of their artistic works. At the same time the use of individual statuettes of the Infant came into existence. Finally, towards the end of the sixteenth century, the Carmelite Francis of the Infant Jesus became the first known person to choose the Infant as his special model. Tl~e frequency with which this title was afterwards used is a dear sign that devotion to the Infant Jesus had assumed the role of an orientating point for the conduct of the spiritual life. The seventeenth century saw another great growth in the devotion. The Infant Christ was a special object of devotion for Cardinal B~rulle who loved to insist that a person interested in the spiritual life could learn from the Infant innocence, dependency, humility, purity, and especially silence. Under B~mlle's influence, the French Carmelite nuns became advocates of the devotion; it was these nuns who popularized the notion that a person must become an infant in order to honor the Infant Word. St. John Eudes introduced a special feast of the Infant (February 6) and composed the oi~ce for it. Olier received a vision of our Lady bidding him to honor the infancy of her Son, and from him the devotion spread throughout the Sulpicians. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, however, devo-tion to the Infant began to decline, possibly because of the con-demnation of Madame Guyon, who had practiced an extreme form of the devotion. In the eighteenth century the devotion was not very prominent, though there was a growth throu~ghout the world in the devotion to the Infant Jesus of Prague. The religious revival of the nineteenth century, however, led to a new growth in the devotion; the extent of this growth can be judged from the number of congregations of religious who placed the name of the Infant Jesus in their official title. The devotion to the Infant Jesus con, tinues to be prominent in the modem Church. St. Teresa of Lisieux practiced the devotion as did the spiritual writer, Dom Vital 154 May, 1960 DICTIONARY OF SPIRITUALI~ Lehodey, whose whole spirituality was centered around the Infant of Bethlehem. Spiritual Childhood The article that is devoted in the Dictionary to a consideration of spiritual childhood or infancy (col. 682-714) is chiefly interesting for the scriptural data that it provides. Spiritual childhood is defined at the beginning of the article as an act of abandon into the hands of the Father made by a soul conscious of its own smallness and radical powerlessness. It is composed accordingly of humility and the consciousness of the divine fatherhood with all the limitless confidence implied by these two elements. This concept of spiritual childhood is to be found in the Old Testament but expressed in different phraseology. It is expressed first of all in the Old Testament theme of poverty. In the early books of the Bible poverty means only the lack of possessior&; but with Isaiah and Sophoniah it adds to this a spiritual meaning, denoting an attitude that is the opposite of pride. This poverty is the theme of some thirty of the Psalms where the poor man is shown to be one whose only wealth is God and who regards himself as an infant in the hands of God. The spiritualisation of this concept of poverty re-ceived its final form in the sapiential books, where the idea of spiritual poverty is completely isolated from its sociological mean-ing and made into a moral-ideal applicable to all, whether rich or poor. This poverty of spirit is a voluntary and total submission to Yahweh with a special emphasis on the smallness and powerlessness and misery of man with regard to his Creator. Poverty in this sense became an essential element in the Jewish religious attitude; it is to be noted that Zechariah (9:9) presented the coming King- Messiah as one who is poor in spirit. The constituents of spiritual childhood are also to be found in another major theme of the Old Testament, that of the father-hood of God. The idea of a divine fatherhood had deep roots in Semitic history; all Semite peoples regarded their national god as the father of the nation. Hence too Yahweh is the father of the Israelites, but in a special sense; since Yahweh is not a national god, but the Ruler of all peoples, His fatherhood of Israel is a special favor given to the Israelite people. Accordingly the prime duty of the Israelites is to honor Yahweh as their father, and He on HIS part must love and protect HIS sons. This loving relationship between God and the Israelite nation is emphasized by another figure of the Old Testament, that of God as the Bridegroom of 155 R. F. SMITH Review for Religious Israel; this figure accentuates the tenderness and intimacy of the union of God with Israel. When we come to the New Testament, it is to be noted that all the elements of spiritual childhood (including the vocabulary) are to be found in Christ's own personal teaching. He makes poverty (in the sense of the Old Testament) the fundamental attitude of His disciples; they must be joyfully aware of their own radical powerlessness with regard to the kingdom and must expect their salvation only from God. At the same time they must address God in their prayers as their Father, and their love for God as their Father demands of them an absolute confidence (see Mk 11:34; Mt 7:7-8; Lk 11:9). Christ also introduced the word child into the vocabulary of the spiritual life. In Matthew 11:25-26 Christ thanks the Father that He has made His revelation not to the wise and prudent, but to little children. The term "little children" is a translation of a Greek word meaning an infant still unable to speak; the doctrine of God, then, is given to those aware of their helplessness and receptive to help from outside of them-selves. Again in Mark 10:14 Christ says that the kingdom of God belongs to children; in this passage Christ's consideration is not directed toward the innocence or simplicity of children, but to their humility, receptivity, and confidence. The kingdom of God is a gift and a grace, and it must be received in the same spirit of de-pendence as the child receives his natural needs from his parents. It is to be noted that in the Gospels two groups of persons are said to possess the kingdom of God: the poor in spirit (Mr 5:3) and children (Mk 10:14). Thereby is made an identification of the poor man of the Old Testament and the way of spiritual childhood.' The poor man of the 01d Testament becomes the child of the Gospel. In the Pauline epistles there is given a sort of negative com-mentary on the word child, as Christ understood it. In his writings St. Paul always gives the word child a pejorative sense, implying childishness and lack of maturity. By so doing, St. Paul is not to be understood as rejecting the way of spiritual childhood, but as forcibly underlining the fact that spiritual childhood or infancy must be carefully distinguished from infantilism, which is not worthy of a Christian. The rest of the article on spiritual childhood or infancy does not add much to the above scriptural teaching. Three things from this section can, however, be noted here. First, growth in the understanding and practice of the way of spiritual childhood 156 May, 1960 DICTIONARY OF SPIRITUALITY developed in the Church under the impulse of devotion to the Infant Jesus. Secondly, it is again emphasized that spiritual child-hood is not childishness but is rather full Christian maturity. And thirdly, the way of spiritual childhood is but the development of the grace given in Baptism by which man is made into a son of God. Education for Sanctity The article (col. 714-27) on the spiritual life of the infant and the pre-adolescent child points out that a child becomes capable of exercising the supernatural powers that were given him in baptism when he reaches the age of reason, that is, when he is capable of an attitude of love and adoration towards God and hence of moral discernment. In many cases, says the author, this period may come quite late, but in well-endowed children who have received good training the age of reason may be reached at the early age of two and a half or three. The presence and growth of the spiritual life in the child can be judged by three signs based on the teaching of St. Thomas in Summa theologiae, 1-2, 112, 5c. These signs are: the child's aptitude for silence and interior recollection; his aptitude to do things for others without expecting a recompense .for himself; and a certain quality of peace and joy in the child's way of acting. The author next considers the various modes in which the child exercises his life of grace. The first way is that of a conversion process, as indicated by St. Thomas in Summa theologiae, 1-2, 89, 6c and ad 3. So St. Teresa of Lisieux experienced a conversion to God at least by the age of three; and Anne de Guign~ at the age of four experienced a conversion from a life of jealousy, anger, and pleasure to a life of love for her neighbor and intimacy with God. Generally this process of conversion takes place on the occasion of the symbols of God that are presented to it. Gradually the child begins to sense the presence and reality of a mysterious Being who is at once very powerful and very lovable and whose name is always uttered by his parents with respect and reverence. The life of grace in children is also expressed in contemplation, and the beauties of nature may well be the means by which the spirit and exercise of contemplation is aroused in them. Children also experience vocation, that is a particular orientation of their life as intended by God. Frequently the exact goal of this orienta-tion remains closed to them, but their life begins to take on a special comportment in accord with God's designs for them (for example, interest in thinking about God or in helping others), and 157 R. F. SMITH they develop a special spiritual climate (for example, joy or com-punction). Finally in this section the author inquires into the possibility of sin. in the infant and small child, concluding that grave sin is rare and practically impossible in children until they reach the ages of seven or eight. In the next part of the article the author considers how a child may be trained so as to allow him to develop the gifts of grace within him. The first requirement is to provide the child with a climate of silence and peace; hence in those training the child there must be calmness and a lack of nervousness, haste, and febrile agitation. The child must also be given a climate of joy, and this will be best achieved if he perceives that those around him regard their Christian life not as a burden but as a privilege. Hence too all religions duties must be presented to the child in a context of gladness. Parents and educators cannot afford to forget that the spiritual life of the child develops largely out of imitation of them. He knows God in the resemblance of those who speak to him about God. From the love of his parents he derives his first idea of the love and providence that God has for him; and the way in which parents and educators pronounce the name of God will be the child's first initiation into the mystery of God. From the beginning the child must be introduced to the fundamental and central truths of the Christian religion: God is great, and He loves us as a father. The communication of religious truth to the child must be made concrete and personal, for the child must be introduced into a living world of reality. Finally the child must be introduced to prayer and must gradually be made a participant in the prayer of his parents and educators. He should be taught the Our Father from the beginning and then other prayers -- short and dense -- drawn principally from the Bible and the liturgy. It is hoped that the above pages will furnish some indication of the kind of article to be found in the Dictionary of Spirituality. The work will be found useful both on the level.of information and on that of inspiration. It should be noted in conclusion that each article of the Dictionary provides bibliographical references for further study and investigation. 158 The Director of the Retreat Hugh Kelly, S.J. ANY PRIEST who has a tree understanding of the Spiritual Exercises will feel a movement of resentment, a desire to protest when he hears himself described as "preaching" a retreat. He can accept "giving" a retreat because the phrase carries the traditional meaning, but he knows that to consider him as preacher is to misunderstand the nature of the Exercises. He has, of course, to deliver conferences; but he must not be merely the preacher. He knows that if he is to be tree to the essential conception of that most distinctive ministry, he must be a director and director even more than preacher. But here a difficulty presents itself to the modem retreat master. There are certain circum-stances in the modem retreat which reduce -- if they do not suppress -- the role of the director. If these are not considered and countered, there is a grave danger that the director may be entirely replaced by the preacher and as a result the value of the Exercises seriously diminished. Before considering the problem presented by modem retreats, it will be necessary to have a clear idea of the role of the director in the Exercises as St. Ignatius understood them. It can be said without exaggeration that the place and function of the director are indicated or supposed in every stage of the retreat. A detailed page-by-page proof of this assertion would occupy too much space ¯ and moreover is not necessary. It will b~ sufficient t9. refer to those parts where the work of the director is most clearly indicated. First of all in position, and even in importance fdr our purpose, come the twenty Annotations, which are a set of practical instruc-tions meant to indicate what. the Exercises are and which are intended t~ help both the director and the exercitant, but chiefly the former. By far the greater part of these twenty are meant for the director. From the beginning they make it clear to him that he is in charge of the retreat, that he is to conduct and control it to such a degree that it can scarcely be conceived without him. He is given detailed instructions as to the manner in which he is to give The Reverend Hugh Kelly is presently stationed at Rathfarnlmm Castle, Rathfarnham, Dublin, Ireland. 159 HUGH KELLY Review for Religious his conferences, to propose the spiritual truths. He is instructed that he is to watch the exercitant so as to get to know his interior reactions, that he is to visit him every day to find out how he is following the meditations, that he is to protect him against those temptations or illusions that will trouble him at certain stages, that he is to impart to him some criteria that will enable him to deal with spiritual experiences, like consolation or desolation. He is also to enlighten and encourage and comfort him. In all this we are very far from the idea of one who merely preaches a set of spiritual conferences; we have a very definite sketch of one whose work is not at all finished when he has ceased to address the exercitant. It is made quite clear that his more important function is to see to it that his message has been received, that it has produced a definite fruit, and that it is carrying the hearer forward on a planned line. Moreover, throughout the course of the retreat, the work of the director is indicated. He is to administer the doctrine ac-cording to the capacity of the exercitant. He is to control the elaborate method and system which constitute a great part of the whole process of the retreat; he has the duty and power to modify, change, omit, retard', hasten, according to the needs of his hearer. This watclfful attention is especially commanded in the business of the election which is the chief work of the whole retreat. The preparation for this decision is the most subtle and delicat~ part of the director's work. He must shepherd the exercitant to this decision in such a way that the latter will be in the most favorable condition, spiritually and psychologically, to make the decision which is most for God's glory. He must enlighten him gradually and skilfully; he must guard him against illusions and errors; he must submit him to strong selected influences; he must dispose him, as it were, in every department of soul; and finally he must instruct him how to manipulate the complex method of election. But in all this elaborate, delicate work the director is, if he is to be true to his proper function, not to impose himself; he is not to urge nor drive nor even to lead. His work is essentially to bring it about, by his skill and prudence, that the exercitant is in the most favorable condition of soul to know the will of God, to feel most surely the attraction of grace, to be freed from inordinate affections in his choice. Hence the director must keep himself in the background; he will arrange the setting, regulate the tem-perature, so to speak, ward off interruptions, induce a suitable 160 May, 1960 DIRECTOR OF THE RETREAT atmosphere. He will then leave the soul face-to-face with God; he will not enter the ring when the decision is being made. This role of the director is clear in the genesis of the Exercises. We know that they record the process and method of St. Ignatius as he passed through the different stages of his conversion and vocation. When he was convinced that he was called to be an apostle, he set about that work in a characteristic way. He was not a preacher, either in natural gifts or with canonical authority. His method was to converse simply with a few hearers in a con-versational tone, to show forcibly and concretely what they were to do to live good Catholic lives, His talks were quite practical: how to examine their conscience, how to distinguish mortal sin from venial, how to make the commandments a living influence in their daily lives. He was concerned that his hearers should apply what he had said to their individual needs. He was primarily a director and not a preacher. When he. came to write down the fruits of his experience, he maintained the chief features of his apostolate: he gave the director the place he himself had played in his work for souls. That distinct place was recognized from the beginning;, and several manuals expounding that role -- called directories -- were composed, one of them by St. Ignatius himself. The chief official directory was drawn up at the desire of Father Aquaviva within forty years of the death of St. Ignatius and was meant to gather up and make permanent the practice and tradition of those who had learned from him. Its purpose is -- as its name indicates -- to lay down what is the function of the director. It is a practical manual, a method of procedure, a set of rubrics, for the conducting of the retreat. Thus the place of the director is fixed as an essential part of the Exercises. The director thus understood has been accepted in the tradi-tion and practice of the reinstated Society of Jesus as well as in the old. But with the lapse of time has come a new kind of religious retreat which does not seem to afford such a place to the director. The type of retreat specifically envisaged by St. Ignatius is one of thirty days, made by a man who probably had no previous exper-ience of spiritual things, for the purpose of coming to a decisio~a about his state of life -- an individual vocation-retreat. The place of a director in such a retreat is obvious and has been described. But the almost universal type of retreat in our time is something quite different; it is given to a religious community, as a prescribed periodic exercise, to those who may have long ago given themselves 161 HUGH KELLY Review for Religious to the service of God and who may well have considerable experi-ence of the spiritual life. The question then arises immediately, Is the traditional role of the director possible or how far is it possible in such aretreat? The question is one that cannot fairly be evaded. We are convinced of the value of the Exercises for the modern apostolate; and this conviction is strongly reinforced by the com-mendation given by Pins XI --' the most splendid testimony given by the Holy See to them. We are convinced of the place the director, that it is something substantial in them. But is a place possible in the modern retreat? The very considerable differences which mark. off the modern retreat from that envisaged by St. Ignatius must inevitably to considerable differences in the manner of giving the Exercises. There will be some obvibus modifications demanded by the conditions. For instance, some of thedoctrines proposed, especially in the beginning of the book, are of an elementary nature --how examine one's conscience, how to prepare for a general confession, and so forth. In our modern community retreat more mature deeper instruction will be expected. In the Directory in Chapter Nine, a considerable freedom is allowed to those who are practiced "in spiritual things." They are allowed to meditate on the subjects which they think useful for themselves or for the purpose they before them in the retreat. In his book La Spiritualit~ de la Com-pagnie de J~su, Father de Guibert discusses some of the changes which the new kind of retreat involves. He points out that those who make a retreat every year the Exercises must be quite familiar and that there is a danger of tedious monotony. overcome that mood of overfamiliarity in the audience and present the Exercises with some measure of freshness, a retreat giver of our day will need to introduce certain "adaptations enrichments." These will generally be the development of basic spiritual ideas of the Exercises, which are capable of hfmite application and development. The question of the director is no less important a problem. The measure and kind of direction prescribed by St. Ignatius an individual inexperienced in the spiritual life and seeking will of God about his state of life would not be appropriate: modern community retreat. That is at once obvious; the problem is to find out how much direction can be given in such a retreat and in what form. The retreat master is dealing with people who have been religions for many years and who may have reached high level of prayer and union with God. The first point to 162 ~Iay, 1960 DIRECTOR OF THE RETREAT noted then is that such people do not need the direction of be-ginners. There could be no need for detailed step-by-step direction, of constant inquiry into" the movements of grace, of warning against temptations and illusions. The stage for such treatment has passed long ago. The second point to be made is that direction need not be continuous. A soul finds itself perhaps at a minor crossroad, about to make a decision which may have considerable consequences; or it may feel attracted to some new method or degree in the spiritual life. Or again a soul needs confirmation, assurance, and encouragement. Such a soul knows that the mere fact of manifesting one's aims, attractions, failures to a sympathetic and competent director will bring light or a warm sense of gratitude and security. The situation of such souls can be easily explained to an experienced director and valuable help derived from such a procedure. That is a true and fairly normal process of direction with souls well advanced. These do not feel the need of constant direction; they will get the help they need with such occasional interview, s. How often does one hear a priest or religious say that a certain retreat marked a stage in their life; and on inquiry it would be explained that the 'deciding influence did not come from what was said at the conference table but from an interview in the confessional. The priest giving the retreat was a trained director; he understood the situation, the needs and capacity of the soul; he gave the advice and enlightenment which the occasion demanded; his help constituted direction in the truest sense. It follows from this that in a retreat according to the method of the Exercises the place of confession is of great importance. It is through the confessional that the director will. do his work; it is there that the general instructions of the conference are applied to the needs and dispositions of the individual. We may have heard retreat masters say that all their work was done at the conferences and that consequently the retreat confession meant for the exer-citant merely the usual weekly confession of rule or at most a brief review of the year since the last retreat. Such an opinion shows a very naive idea of the complexity of the individual soul. It also shows that the director has been replaced by the preacher and that the traditional way of giving the Exercises has been abandoned. That this traditional view is not merely a venerable tradition but still very much a matter of practice is clear from recent works on the Exercises. One article begins by correcting a mistaken view as to the strong point of the whole scheme of the Exercises, the view 163 HUGH KELLY Review for Religious that the value lies primarily, if not entirely, in the rigorous con-nection, the studied progress of ideas. The author points out that such a view takes no account of the interior activity which is suggested and controlled by the director.~ Another article describes in detail the work of finding the will of God pursued by the com-bined efforts of the exercitant and the director. This treatment is not merely historical, but obviously envisages the modem retreat.2 We may take it then that to secure the tree distinctive fruit of a retreat a certain cooperation with the director is generally nec-essary. The soul that is responding more sensitively and generously to the interior movement of the Spiritual Exercises will see the value, ff not the need, of some contact with a skilful director. That contact may be brief, just one or two interviews in the confessional; but such briefmeetings will be truly helpful. They will be sufficient to give assurance about the general direction of the spiritual life and also perhaps sorely needed encouragement to continue to struggle against the paralyzing monotony of fervor maintained. No doubt the experienced soul will be quick to see the application of what the director says in his conferences; but if the troth is one which may have a considerable effect on the spiritual life, then it will be grasped more firmly and fruitfully if discussed with the director. In such a situation it is clear that the preacher has not taken over full control. The influence of the director is felt; it permeates all the stages; it is discreetly active behind the conferences. The director has not merely preached spiritual doctrine; he has tried to apply it. He has not merely instructed; he has actually guided. He has kept in touch with the individual exercitant -- at least with those who have realized the need or benefit of direction. He has a certain idea of how the Holy Spirit is working in that section of his audience, of how His inspirations are being received. In the sixth Annotation St. Ignatius points out that the entire absence of spiritual movements might constitute a suspicious sign. It might well indicate that the exercitant is not doing his duty, is not cooperating by his fidelity to the conditions of the retreat. Consequently he should be questioned with a view to discovering if his aridity is the result of negligence or is due to the action of God. If a retreat consists of a series of lectures, then the work of the preacher is done when he stands up from the table. He is 1Jean Laplace, "L'Expdrience du discernement dans les Exercices de Saint Ignace," Christus, 4 (1954), 28-49. 2Charles Jacquet, "Le rSle de l'instructeur de la retraite," Christus, 10 (1956), 208-24. 164 May, 1960 DIRECTOR OF THE RETREAT not expected to interest himself in the effect of his words on individual hearers. But in .such a situation there is no meaning in the Annotation of St. Ignatius. From what has been said it is clear that in a retreat according to the tradition of the Spiritual Exercises the confessional will play an important part because the work of direction will be done there. From the beginning then the director should make that fact evident. He should do what he can to get the exercitant to speak freely about his interior life. Whether .because of a certain natural reserve or because of a want of practice, many people find it very difficult to open their souls. The skilled director should have acquired means of dealing with these inhibited souls who have been locked up in themselves. There are certain leading questions which may help to split or melt the shell of reserve they have built around their interior life, questions which may set them thinking that the occasion may mean more than the telling of their sins and that there might be some benefit in revealing their state of soul to the gaze of a skilled and sympathetic director. "Are you satisfied with your progress after so many years .of religious life? Do you realize practically what your vocation de-mands of you? Have you been disappointed with religious life? Could you describe your way of prayer? Have you noticed a change in your prayer since the noviceship? What do you think is the strongest attraction which God exercises on you? Are you satisfied with living the daily routine superficially without much advertance to the general purpose of your religious life, which is perfection? Do you realize that perfection consists in charity? What is your idea of being a saint?" Questions like these will often come with a kind of revelation to certain souls. These questions are perhaps a new approach to the spiritual life; they may show a fresh aspect of what had seemed dull and uninteresting. They will often loose tongues which have been atrophied and open up interiors that will benefit greatly by light and air. We may take it that every religious is interested in his spiritual life, that he is prepared to talk about it if he knows how to do so and if he sees that another is taking an interest in him and is prepared to help him. This power of unlocking consciences is a part of the endowment of the director. It will, of course, be possessed in unequal measure; but every priest who gives the Exercises should try to cultivate it. There is another aspect of this attention to direction in a retreat which is worth emphasizing. The obvious handicap which the giver of the Exercises has to start with is the fact that they 165 HUGH KELLY Review [or Religio~8 are well known to his hearers. Most of these have made the Exer-cises before, perhaps many times. The foundation, sin, the kingdom, the standards -- they have been over that road before and know every step of it well. The strategic value of surprise, so sought after in warfare, must necessarily be sacrificed; there can be no surprise -- substantially -- in the Exercises. One who gives a retreat not based on the Exercises is free from this disadvantage. His hearers live in an atmosphere of expectancy. They troop to every new lecture as travelers to a mystery tour. Such a retreat may well be a series of unexpectancies and even surprises. The director of the Exercises, who has to forego this strategic pedagogic advantage, must try to compensate some other way. What he loses on the swings he must make up on the roundabouts. He will, of course, try to give what freshness he can to his meditations; but it is the Exercises he is giving, and for all his ingenuity most of what he says will be well known to his hearers. But he has another resource in his difficulty; a resource that may well make the retreat something really personal and appealing. He must remember that he is a director. He must try to bring the Exercises home to the needs of the individual soul. He must see to it that the retreat is not merely a set of entertaining instructions; but that the exercitant cooperates with the light and grace that are offered. This is the work of direction which, if skilfully per-formed, can more than make up for the familiarity of the matter. The truest benefit and even interest of a retreat will not come so much from the originality of the conferences as from the degree in which the truths have been assimilated and experienced. This statement is but a free translation of the well-known second Annotation of St. Ignatius which states a principle of the highest importance for prayer: "for it is not to know much, but it is to understand and savor the matter interiorly, that fills and satisfies the soul." This savor or taste of spiritual truths, this personal appreciation of the ways of God, does not come as a matter of course with the hearing of a discourse; it presupposes a distinctive personal effort. It will come from a sensitiveness of the exercitant, to which the action of the director will greatly ~ontribute. When it comes it is the true measure of the value of the retreat. It has made new and fresh some truths which were thought to be old and worn. The truths which St. Ignatius strung together in the pattern which constitutes the Spiritual Exercises and which had such an astounding effect on men like Xavier and Faber and Canisius 166 May, 1960 DIRECTOR OF THE RETREAT were not new truths; they belonged to the general Christian tradi-tion. The originality of St. Ignatius is that by means of the pattern and system he has given to these truths he can communicate to others something of the force and power that he himself got from them. His presentation of these truths presupposes the cooperation of the director. A person might read the book without feeling any particular enlightenment or enflaming of soul. The Exercises, if they are to produce their effect, must be given, administered; delivered, not merely read or heard. If that cooperation which St. Ignatius and tradition assigned to the director ceases to be forthcoming, then the Spiritual Exercises will lose one of the chief conditions of their efficacy. Without the work of the discernment of spirits in which the director has a necessary role, the Exercises are nothing, says P~re Laplace. "They will perhaps furnish an occasion for prayer in silence, for learning how to examine one's conscience and make a good confession. These advantages are not to be despised, but it is not necessary to go ~o St.~ Ignatius to get them.''~ The Exercises promise a greater, rarer spiritual benefit, but on condition that they are made in their true conditions. 80p. cir., p. 48. 167 Survey of Roman Documents R. F. Smith, S.J. THIS ARTICLE will give a survey of the documents which appeared in the December, 1959, issues of Acta Apostolicae Sedis (AAS). All page references throughout the survey will be to the 1959 AAS (v. 51). Encyclical on the Missions Under the date of November 28, 1959 (pp. 833-64), John XXIII issued the encyclical Princepspastorum. The new encyllcalwas occasioned by the fortieth anniversary of Pope Benedict XV's apostolic epistle on the missions, Maximum illud; to a large extent the encyclical of the present Pope is a reiteration and confirmation of the mission principles laid down in Benedict XV's document. The first principal division of the encycEcal is concerned with the need of a native hierarchy and clergy in mission lands. John XXIII recalled with gratitude the great increase in native clergy since the publication of Maximum illud. The Pope noted that the first Asian bishop was consecrated in 1923 and that Vicars Apostolic were taken from the native African clergy in 1939. Up to the year 1959, 68 Asian bishops had been consecrated and 25 African bishops. Statistics re-garding native clergy are even more impressive. In 1918 there were 919 native priests in Asia; by 1957 that number had increased to 5,553. In the same year, 1918, Africa had 90 native priests, while by 1957 their number had increased to 1,811. John XXIII then went on to urge the present members of the native hierarchy and clergy in mission lands to exercise their priesthood faithfully. He exhorted them to preach to their people about the dignity and greatness of the priesthood and to urge them to pray the Lord of the harvest to send more laborers into the field. The Vicar of Christ also noted that missionary lands stRl need the help of priests from other countries; such priests are not to be regarded as strangers, because every priest finds his fatherland wherever the kingdom of God is beginning or flourishing. The second principal part of the encylical emphasizes the necessity of a thorough training for the native clergy of missionary lands. This training, the Pope insisted, must first of all provide for the sanctity of the native clergy, for it is chiefly by sanctity that a priest becomes the light of the world and the salt of the earth. After sanctity, the most important thing is a solid and complete intellectual training of the native clergy. In this connection the Pope noted that the seminary training should not take place in localities too distant from the society of other 168 I~OMAN DOCUMENTS men, for the native clergy must be led to understand their people and should be trained to take over their leadership. The seminary training of the native clergy should give adequate time to the study of missiology, according to the wishes and directives of Benedict XV and the following pontiffs. The native clergy should be encouraged to baptize the native culture; like Matthew Ricci, they should be so educated in an under-standing and appreciation of the native culture that they will attract their countrymen to the truth of Christianity. The native clergy should be trained to use all means of mOderu communication for the spread of Christianity, and they should be given studies of social matters so that they will be equipped to establish a Christian social order in their countries. In concluding this part of the encyclical, John XXIII warned the native clergy that like all priests their first love must be for the whole world and not for their own country; otherwise they will be tempted to love their earthly fatherland more than their heavenly one. The third part of the encyclical is concerned with the native laity of missionary countries. It is not sufficient, the Holy Father emphasized, to convert and baptize large numbers of persons; they must also be trained to work for the present and future increase of the Church. The number of Christians, he said, is insignificant if their quality is low and if they do not bear fruit. Christian education must show the laity the greatness and grandeur of their faith so that they will be inspired to the practice of virtue and of the apostolate. A true Christian must realize that his first and fundamental duty is to be a witness to the truth that he believes and to the grace which has transformed him. It is in the light of this, remarked the Pope, that one must understand the words of St. John Chrysostom: "No one would be a pagan, if we were worthy Christians" (Tenth Homily on i Timothy, Migne PG, v. 62, col. 551). This testimony of the laity, the Pope added, must be given not only by individual Christians but also by the Christian community as such. This will be done especially by a manifestation of that Christian charity which surpasses all distinctions between nations and languages and embraces all men, whether friend or enemy. The fourth principal part of the encyclical considers the training of the laity in the apostolate. This training, the Pope said, should begin from the earliest moments with special emphasis on it at times like the occasion of the administration of the sacrament of confirmation. The Pope praised the work of lay catechists, saying that their work is perhaps the most important apostolate exercised by laymen. He also called for the establishment of Catholic Action on the missions, but warned that it must be adapted to the conditions and necessities of each country. He also noted that Catholic Action does not exclude the possiblity that laymen themselves have varying degrees of direction and administration in it; indeed members of the laity who show signs of leadership should be educated for such direction and administration. The laity must be taught that the influence of Christian doctrine must be manifested in 169 R. F. SMITH Review for Religious the area of public questions, especially those concerning schools, as-sistance to the poorer classes, and the administration of public affairs. The Pope also called for the formation of lay groups in missionary countries to study doctrinal, social, and apostolic matters. In con-cluding this section of the encyclical the Pope urged laymen of the entire Christian world to give serious consideration to means and methods of helping their fellow laymen of missionary countries who have just been converted; and he exhorted bishops to give adequate care to laymen from the missions who may be studying in their dioceses. In the fifth and concluding part of the encyclical, the Holy Father asked the entire Christian world to continue and to increase their aid to the missions. He also urged bishops to allow priests who have a vocation to the missions to follow their desire, even when there is a scarcity of priests in the diocese. In the same way bishops should be ready to let outstanding laymen of their dioceses go to the missions. The final paragraphs of the encyclical are devoted to encouraging missionaries in those countries which are presently persecuting the Church. Allocutions and Messages On November 22, 1959 (pp. 903-7), the Holy Father addressed a gathering of Italian seminarians. In the course of his speech to them the Pontiff offered them a three-point program of life. As future priests they must be characterized first of all by purity of heart. This, he said, has an attractiveness that is irresistible for souls. This purity ofheart, he continued, is the atmosphere in which every serious vocation lives. It is an indispensable conditon for a disinterested service of one's neighbor; .it prepares the incomparable joy of long periods of prayer at the foot of the tabernacle; and it adorns the priest with the attrac-tiveness of Christ Himself. The second need for the priest, the Pope continued, is strength of character. The priest, he pointed out, requires a steellike quality of character and will, for he must engage in a con-tinuous struggle against his passions and his egoism. Future priests must be able to resist the attractions and seductions of the world, and they must be masters of themselves in every situation. Finally, the Pope said, the last mark of a priest must be the ardor of his charity. Charity, he noted, is the fulfillment of the law; hence it is necessary for the faithful fulfillment of one's daily duties, whether these be large or small Charity sustains a priest's obedience to his bishop and makes him Serve his diocese without thought of earthly and human returns. It is also this charity, he told his audience, that will keep a seminarian from giving way in the face of the difficulties he finds in his life of prayer and study. On November 18, 1959 (pp. 867-70), John XXIII add~ressed a gathering of ecclesiastical censors of books. He told them that their work was directed to the discovery of genuinely human and Christian 170 May, 1960' I~OMAN DOCUMENTS values and to the rejection of error and the danger of error. Accordingly their work is a real .pastoral: occupation, participating in the solicitude of the Church to guide and instruct her children in truth. The Pontiff told his listeners, that they must possess a sane realism as well as an apostolic sense and told them to avoid an intransigent severity which scourges but does not encourage. Finally he'suggested to them that their motto in their work should be the ancient phrase: Unity in necessary things; liberty in uncertain things; charity in everything. On NoVember 29, 1959 (pp. 909-11), the Vicar of Christ radioed a message~ to the First National Congress of Cuba and the General As-sembly of the Catholic Apostolate. He told his listeners (who had just received Communion in a body) that since they had just taken the Bread which is Christ, they must have but one heart and one soul, being conscious of themselves as the sons of the one Father. The face of the earth, he continued, would be changed if true charity reigned in the hearts of men. Hatred, he added, brings only the bitter fruits of death, while love establishes social peace. On November 10, 1959 (pp. 865-67), the Pontiff addressed members of the Food and Agriculture Organization. He told his listeners that they were engaged in a true work of mercy, for their purpose is to assist the most unfortunate of human beings -- those who are hungry. He also told them that theexistence of their organization is one of the great signs of the awakening of social consciousness and responsibility in the modem world. The Pope concluded his allocution by praising the combination of realism 'and optimism that marks the work of the organization. On December 6, 1959 (pp.' 908-9), the Pope gave a short address to President Eisenhower, then visiting the Vatican. Miscellaneous Documents Under the date of May 29, 1959 (pp. 871-74), the Sacred Congrega-tion of Rites approved the introduction of the cause of the Servant of God, Guido Maria Conforti (1865-1931), archbishop-bishop of Parma, founder of the Pious Society of St. Francis Xavier for Foreign Missions. By a decree of the Sacred Congregation of the Council issued on Decem-ber 3, 1959 (p. 918), the privilege was granted to all Catholics to change the fast and abstinence of December 24 to December 23. On November 23, 1959 (p. 921), the Sacred Apostolic Penitentiary announced that a partial indulgence of three hundred days could be gained once on the wedding day only (cf. 1960 AAS, v. 52, p. 62) by married couples who with contrite heart kiss the marriage ring 6f the wife and say the follow-ing prayer or one similar to it: Grant, O Lord, that loving You we may love each other and that we may live in accordance with Your holy law. On August 8, 1959 (pp. 915-18), the Sacred Consistorial Congrega-tion published the list of faculties and privileges which have been granted to the Church in Latin America and in the Philippine Islands. 171 VIEWS, NEWS, PREVIEWS Review for Religious The privileges and faculties listed in the document will be in force until December 31, 1969. On November 17, 1959 (p. 920), the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Studies declared that a university entrusted to the diocesan clergy or to a religious family depends on the same congregation, even if the university has not been granted canonical erection. Finally the Secretary of State issued on November 16, 1959 (pp. 875-76), the statutes which are to regulate the activity of the newly founded Vatican Film Library. The purpose of the library will be to collect movies and television films concerning the following topics: the Pope, his representatives, and the Roman Curia; apostolic and charitable activity in the Church and cultural works promoted b~ Catholics; the religious life of the world; all works of high artistic and human quality. Views, News, Previews Correction: Missionary Servants AN,V, EieDwIsT, ONRewIAs,L P EreRviReOwRs, ,p iang teh 2e 8J,a oncucaarsyi oisnseude t hoef tfhoell oRw~i.nvgx ~in.w- , formative letter from Fathe~ David O'Connor, M.S.SS.T.: "Surprise and laughter, mixed with a little downright masculine indignation, was the response to our Congregation being referred to as the Missionary Sisters of the Most Holy Trinity! Actually, our oi~cial title is Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity (M.S.SS.T.). We have 230 priests and brothers engaged in missionary works and activities in fourteen states (mostly in the Southern dioceses), the District of Columbh and Puerto Rico. Our motherhouse is now in Silver Spring, Maryland. Our sisters community, Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity (M.S.B.T.), has its motherhouse in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Over five hundred sisters labor in missionary, hospital and charity work throughout the United States, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They have a modern, distinct habit without the customary veil. The sisters have charge of the charity bureaus in many dioceses and arch-dioceses in the eastern section of our country. It was never the inten-tion of the founder, Father Thomas A. Judge, C.M., to establish two religious congregations. His interest and attention were given to foster~g the lay apostolate among souls who wished to dedicate themselves to this type of work for the Church. When some of these began to live a community type of life, they asked him to petition the proper ec-clesiastical authority to erect them as a religious community. Along with his two religious communities, the lay apostolate group in our Missionary Cenacle family continues to grow and expand. There are well over 1,500 members active in many sections of the country." 172 May, 1960 VIEWS, NEWS, PREVIEWS Summer Institutes and Courses Catholic University of America: The Mari~logy Program will be offered for the fourth time in the 1960 summer session. Registration dates are Jtme 22 to 25; classes begin June 27 and end with examinations, August 4 and 5. Courses are open to both undergraduates and graduates, with credits applicable towards degrees inthe field of religious education. A certificate is awarded those who complete a full two-summer program in the theology of our Blessed Lady. The lectures are under the direction of the Reverend Eamon R. Carroll, O.Carm, assistant professor of sacred theology at Catholic University and past president of the Mariological Society of America. Scheduled for 1960 are: "Advanced Mariology" (two credits) covering privileges of the Virgin Mary such as freedom from inherited and personal sin, fullness of grace, assumption, queenship, and the current question of the Mary-Church relationship; and "Marian Doctrine of Recent Popes" (two credits) covering analysis of papal statements of the past century, such as the Ineffabilis Deus of Plus IX, on the Immaculate Conception, the major rosary encyclicals of Leo XIII, the Ad diem illum of St. Pius X on spiritual motherhpod, the LUX veritatis of Plus XI on divine maternity, the Munificentissimus Deus of Pius XII on the assumption, and the Grata .recordatio of John XXIII on the rosary. A folder with full informatioK is available from the Registrar, The Catholic University of America, Washington 17, D.C. Dominican College, San Rafael, California: Registration for the summer session will take place on June 25 and 26. The session will close on August 3. An extensive undergraduate program leads to the Bachelor of Arts degree. The degree of Master of Arts may be gained in the fields of education,_ English, biochemistry, history, and religion. The graduate program in theology is under the direction of the Domin-ican Fathers of the Holy Name Province. The classes are open to grad-uate students who wish to benefit from them as well as to those who are taking the full program. For the summer of 1960, Father P. K. Meagher, O.P., S.T.M., will give a course in the Epistles of St. Paul; Father J. P. Kelly, D.P., S.T.M., courses in liturgy and ascetical theology; Father John Fearon, O.P., S.T.L., a course in canon law. Four courses will be available for those interested in the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. Workshops are planned in drama, children's literature, music, and physical education. Religious who wish an M. A. degree from the Catholic University of America may take courses and satisfy all requirements at the Pacific Coast Branch on the Dominican College campus. Three large dormitories are available for sisters, and a new dining room for sisters, priests, and brothers. For the summer session announcement, write to Sister M. Richard, O.P., Dominican College, San Rafael, California. For~lham University: The Tenth Annual Institute on Religious and Sacerdotal Vocations will be held on the campus of Fordham University 173 VIEWS, NEWS, PREVIEWS Review for Religious on Wednesday, July 13, and Thursday, July 14. Priests, religious, and the laity interested in stimulating, encouraging, and promoting voca-tions to the priesthood or religious life are invited to be present. The Fifth Annual Workshop for the Mistresses of Novices, Postulants, and Junior Professed will be held from Monday, July 18, until Friday, July 22, inclusive. The lecturers will be the Reverend Martin J. Neylon, S.J., Novice Master, St. Andrew-on-Hudson, Poughkeepsie, New York; Reverend Edmund J. Hogan, S.J., Chairman of the Department of Theology, Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut; Reverend Joseph G. Keegan, S.J., Department of Psychology, Fordham Uni-versity. The topics to be discussed will be: The Adjustment of the Novice, Prayer, Emotional Maturity in Religious. The Fourth Annual Workshop for Local Superiors will be held from Monday, July 25, until Friday, July 29, inclusive. The lecturers will be Reverend Edmund J. Hogan, S.J., Reverend Joseph G. Keegan, S.J, and Reverend John F. Gilson, S.J., Vice-Chairman, Division of Educational Psychology, Measurements, and Guidance, School of Education, Fordham Uni-versity. The topics to be discussed will be: Prayer, Emotional Maturity, The Spiritual Ideal of the Local Superior. Address all communications to: Reverend John F. Gilson, S.J., Director of Institutes and Workshops, Fordham University, New York 7, New York. Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington: The summer session for 196o will include three two-week institutes for sisters: "Writings of St. John of the Cross" conducted by Fathers Louis Haven, S.J., and Michael McHugh, S.J., from June 20 to July 1; "Understanding Human Nature," by Fathers Van Christoph, S.J,, and John Evoy, S.J., from July 5 to July 15; "The Last Things," by Fathers Joseph Conwell, S.J., Leo Robinson, S.J., and Vincent Beuzer, S:J., from July 18 to July 29. There will also be a two-week institute for priests from July 18 to 29 in the mornings, on psychological guidance, conducted by Fathers John Evoy, S.J., and Van Christoph, S.J. 'For information about the second year of the Master of Arts program in Sacred Theology (five summer cycle) write to the Reverend Joseph Conwell, S.J., Chairman, Gonzaga University, East 502 Boone Avenue, Spokane 2, Washington. Immaculate Conception Seminary, Conception, Missouri: A pastoral institute will be held this summer for priests and clerics in major orders, both diocesan and religious. The full coursewill'run for eight weeks, June 19 to August 14; however, any number of two-week periods may be attended. The institute is designed to furnish instruction beyond the regular four-year course in theology. For the religious who attend, the days of class may count toward the days of formal instruction required by the apostolic constitution Sedes sapientiae and the annexed Statuta generalia. For information on the institute write to: Director of the Pastoral Institute, Conception Seminary, Conception, Missouri. 174 May, 1960 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Saint Joseph's College, Rensselaer Indiana: An Institute of Liturgical Music, largely modeled after,the Corso Ordinario of Gregorian Chant of the Pontifical Instittite 6f Sacred Music in Rome~, has been initiated. The institute will be held every summer; this year, from June 20 to July 30. The program is open to priests, brothers, sisters, seminarians, lay men' and lay'women. It will offer a comprehedsive program of theory, chant, polyphony~ organ, and so forth, leading to the Bachelor of Arts d'~gree in Liturgical" Music for those students Who have a bachelor's degree from a recognized college or university, or to a Certificate in Liturgical Music for tho~e who do not have a bachelor's degree. All courses in chant and polyphony will be taught by instructors who have been schooled in the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome. The faculty Will include Fathe~ Lawrence Heiman, C.PP.S., of St. Joseph's College and chah~nan of the Institute;, Father Eugene Lin-dusky, O.S.C,, of Crosier Seminary, Onamia, .Minnesota; and Mr. Noel Goemanne, choir director and organist'at St. Rita's Church, Detroit, Michigan. Fathers Heiman and Lindusky hold degrees from the Pon-tifical Institute in Rome, Mr. Goemanne, a former student of Flor Peeters, holds a Laureate from Lemmens Institute in Mechelen, Bel-gium. Further',Inform~tion may be obtained by writing to Father Lawrence Heiman, C.PP.S., St. Joseph's College, Rensselaer, Indiana. ( uestions and Answers [The following answers a~e given by Father Joseph F. (~allen, S. J., professor of canon law at Woodstock College, Woodstock, Maryland.I The following questions and ariswers are a continuation of the series on local houses and local superiors which was begun in the March, 1960, issue of the RsvI~.w. 15. We are a clerical exempt order. We have a parish, high school, and'college under the one religious superior. Therefore, there is only one canonically erected house and only one moral person. What permissions do we need to transfer the college classrooms to a location two miles distant from the present location but within the same diocese? Must we have a further permission later when the college faculty begins to reside at the new location while re-maining, however, under the authority of one and the same local superior as at present? This is a question of a separated establishment (c. 497, § 3). Sep-arated establishments, whether built or opened, that is, to be constructed or used as such in a building already constructed, demand for validity the special written permission, of the ordinary of the place of the estab-lishment. For validity, the permission must be in writing; and the argument is the same as that given in Question 11. This permission 175 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Review for Religious of the ordinary is sufficient for any institute, even if exempt (cf. Question 13). The permission is special in the sense that it must be distinct from that given for the canonically erected house to which the establishment is attached. These establishments may be for any purpose whatever, for example, all types of schools; hospitals; clinics; orphanages; homes for the aged, the poor, or delinquents; recreation centers; places for the education of candidates for the institute, and so forth. Their two distinctive notes are that they are separated from and are part of the canonically erected houses to which they are attached. If they are not separated, for example, to be located on the same grounds, no permission of the local ordinary is necessary, unless such a work was excluded in the permission for the religious house. Separation was defined in Ques-tion 2. If they are to be canonically erected houses, all the formalities described above in Questions 11-13 are necessary. All strictly filial houses obviously come under the. present heading, since they are merely separated establishments in which the religious reside. Authors frequently presume that all such establishments are filial houses, that is, that the religious reside in them. This is not always true, for example, as in the present question, religious have begun colleges at a distance from their house without residing in the college for a considerable period after its opening. No added permission would be necessary to begin residence in such a case, since this is not a formal external change in the establishment nor in itself anything that demands an immediate change of the establishment into a canonically erected house. If a small school is opened by a parish or diocese and sisters residing in another house are engaged simply to teach in it, the special permission of canon 497 is not required, because the institute itself did not build or open this establishment. The special permission will be necessary if and when the sisters are to reside in the small house as a filial house. It is more probable that a separated establishment or filial house should be located at least within the same diocese as the canonically erected house of which it is part, since the canon demands a special written permission for either of these, that is, one distinct from that given for ,the canonically erected house, and thus appears to state that the same local ordinary is to give both permissions. Several' authors exclude a long distance between the canonically erected house and its dependencies. They argue that otherwise the dependence would be apparent rather than real and that the members of the filial house would not be able to exercise their rights in the canonically erected house (cf. Question 6). Neither of these arguments appears to be certain. The dependence of the filial house is less when the authority of the one in charge is delegated by a higher superior, as may be done and is the practice in centralized institutes. It is certainly the practice of religious institutes to locate especially filial houses at a distance and in other dioceses, and constitutions approved by the Holy See contain no general 176 May, 1960 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS norm contrary to this practice. When a separated establishment or filial house is to be located in

Issue 16.5 of the Review for Religious, 1957. ; A. M. D. G. Review for Religious SEPTEMBER 15, 1957 God's Living Sermon . Bonaventure Balsam Dismissal in Lay Institutes . Jo,eph g. ~,allen Our Supernatural Organism . Daniel J. M. Callahan Book Reviews Questions and Answers Roman Documents VOLUME 16 NUMBER 5 RI::VII:::W FOR RI:LIGIOU.S VOLUME 16 SEPTEMBER, 1957 NUMBER, 5 CONTENTS GOD'S LIVING SERMON AND MYSTERY-- Bonaventure Balsam, O.P . 257 DISMISSAL OF RELIGIOUS IN LAY INSTITUTES-- Joseph F. Gallen, S.J . 265 SOME BOOKS RECEIVED . 292 OUR SUPERNATURAL ORGANISMu Daniel J. M. Callahan, S.J . 293 OUR CONTRIBUTORS . i99 SURVEY OF ROMAN DOCUMENTS--R. F. Smith, S.J . 300 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS: 29. Professed of Temporary Vows and Return to Motherhouse for Perpetual Profession . " . '.309 30. Adaptation and Renovation and New Laws on Poverty . 310 31. Last Gospel According to the Simplified Rubrics .312 32. Masses. Permitted on the Saturday of Our Lady . 312 33. Personal Gifts and Poverty . 312 BOOK REVIEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS: Editor: Bernard A. Hausmann, S.J. West Baden College West Baden Springs, Indiana . 313 REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, September, 1957. Vol. 16, No. 5. Published bi-monthly by The Queen's World, 3115 South Grand Blvd., St. Louis 18, Mo. Edited by the Jesuit Fathers of St. Mary's College, St. Marys, Kansas, with ecclesiastical approval. Second class mail privilege authorized at St. Louis, Mo. Editorial Board: Augustine G. Ellard, S.J.; Gerald Kelly, S.J., Henry Willmering, S.J. Literary Editor: Robert F. Weiss, S.J. Copyright, 1957, by The Queen's Work. Subscription price in U.S.A. and Canada: 3 dollars a year; 50 cents a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Please send all renewals and new subscriptions to: Review for Religious, 3115 South Grand Boulevard. St. Louis 18, Missouri. God's Living Sermon and Myst:ery Bonavent:ure Balsam, O.P. WE CANNOT LOVE, reverence, and respect what we do not know: A religious priest, brother, or sister will never love and appreciate his life and vocation as much as it is lovable unless he first sees and tastes the indescribable nobility of that vocation. We begin to evaluate a thing rightly only when we begin to see it, to understand it, rightly. Misguided love follows on misguided and false knowledge, detestation often follows on the footsteps of ignorance. To a very great extent, the intensity' and scope of our love will depend on the genuineness and grasp of our knowledge. All religious preach God. They do so, not so much by word of mouth as by their whole life. Their preaching--and this is the judgment of the great minds of the Church- since it is by action, can make a far deeper and more lasting im-pression on the world than any or all the sermons preached in Notre Dame Cathedral. For religious are their own sermon and their own cathedral. In preparing and preaching .their sermon to the world, they must study, not so much the spoken word, as the far more powerful and vocal deed. If .we could summarize in a few words the influence which it is the role of a religious to have on the world about him, it is this: it is his vocation in life to teach the whole world this v~ery important lesson, "We have here no lasting city, but we look for 6ne which is to come." By their life, religious must preach that lesson to the world. It is the holy and privileged task of every religious to make the world unworldly, to teach the world to be divine, and to lift up the mind and heart of the world to God in one great offertory. The vocation of a religious is brought home to him every day in the Preface of 257 BONAVENTURE BALSAM. Review for Religious the Mass; he is to lift up the heart of the world to God in love, "Sursum Corda.'" And where a religious does not find love, he must see to.it that God puts love there. As St. John of the Cross says: "~ 'here there is no love, you must put love." To preach that sermon with its double element of detachment from the world and clinging to God is the vocation, par rxcellence, of every religious brother and sister. In a special way, and by special right, religious can apply to themselves the words of the same St. John: "The life of every religious sho~,ld be a complete doctrinal sermon." The life of every religious is one continuous paradox, a divine anomaly. Religious must love the whole world and everyone in it; yet they must ceaselessly try to keep it dis-satisfied with itself, discontented. Their life is one of opposi. tion to the spirit of the world and its maxims, one of constant disagreement and protest. That is a most unenviable task; and, like all opposition and protest, it brings with it much enmity and misunderstanding. That is why the-world often and in many ways misunderstands religious and scorns them. That is why, too, religious sometimes misunderstand them-selves and their role in the salvation of the world. In walk-ing down the street, every step a religious takes is a sort of step of protest, of admonition. He protests to the world and warns it that the glitter and tinsel meeting the eyes on all sides are all too ephemeral and passing and petty and that the only One worth living for and loving with every fibre of one's being is God. The way that they teach this to the world which they live in, but away from, is a most efficacious one. Religious preach to the world by the daily living of their vows which make their life unearthly because heavenly. By their vow of poverty religious lecture on the unending wonders of divine Providence. They lecture on that subject though they may never actually utter a word about it; they do not have to, for they live their subject. By the mere fact that they have freely and gladly relinquished all claim and aspira- 258 September, 1957 GOD'S LIVING SERMON tion to this world's goods, religious proclaim to the world that they trust in God's divine providence with an unshakeable confidence and that "possessing nothing, they have all things." For they have learned to "cast your care upon the Lord, who cares for you." Religious daily experience the truth of St. Paul's words: "As needy though enriching many; as having nothing and possessing all things." By that childlike confi-dence in divine Providence, a confidence solidified andmade a very part of their life and reridered inamissible, as it were, by their vow of poverty, religious take at face value the loving promise of our Lord that, if God is ever careful to feed the birds of the air and clothe the grass of the fields, will He not take infinitely greater care of a religious who is of much more value than they and the rest of the material universe combined? Moreover, by their vow of poverty religious te.ach a materialistic world an important lesson in divine economics, for they teach the world a proper sense of values, a divinely wise and exact evaluation of all creation. Religious appraise things for what they are--and are not--and proper ap-praisal of a thing is indispensable for its true appreciation and enjoyment. One can never love a thing rightly until one knows its true value; j~ust as one can never know its worth unless one knows the value God places on it. All of which means that we can never love a creature rightly except in and through God Who makes it worth whatever it is. In teaching mankind all this by ~he daily living of their vow of poverty, religious are teaching a most wise lesson. In so doing, they themselves become more wise and share their wisdom with others. For it belongs to the wise man to order and evaluate things rightly. By their vow of chastity, religious teach the world another saving lesson; they teach a selfish and unsacrificing world the value of sacrifice. Religious teach the world the fruitfulness of unfruitfulness. They teach the world that in order to win more of the children of God they have given them up. Relig- 259 BONAVENT~JRE BALSAM Review for Religious ious teach a grasping world that, in order to gain what is really worthwhile, one must lose what is really not worthwhile. They teach the world that oi~ten the only way to conquer is to surrender and that everything that one gives up for God he gains back again in God, and "pressed down, in good measure, and flowing over." And God besides. Religious give up a lesser privilege t~or a .greater one; they t~orego the privilege of bringing children into the world because to that privilege they pret~er the greater privilegi~ of bringing God into the world. So, in actuality, the chaste brotherhood or sisterhood of a religious is far more fruitful and noble than wedded t:ather-hood, or motherhood. There is something more that religious can do t~or the world and for God's children which often goes unappreciated even by themselves. Religious should realize the element of personal reparation and vicarious atonement inherent in their vow of chastity./ Vices are not only expelled, but are most fittingly atoned for, by. their opposite virtues. Religious are God's "chosen pedple." They stay the avenging hand of God by the purity of their lives. God, in looking upon the un-earthly purity of His religious, is moved to forgive the morass of impurity in which a great part of mankind is floundering and to give it grace to repent and change its evil ways. Here, again, the life of religious is a living protest to a "wicked and adulterous generation." The protest they lodge against the world is the silent protest ot~ their unassuming though uncon-cealable modesty and purity which, "like a city seated on a mountain top, cannot be hid." By their entire and absolute chastity, religious work to make this carnal world into a holy and pure generation. They must offer up their chastify, which makes them akin to the angels, as a protest to the world and and as a propitiatory sacrifice for its unspeakable impurities. Only the pure o~ heart will ever see God,. and they alone will be able to show God to others. God makes use o~ the conse-crated purity ot~ a religious to sterilize the world ot~ its in~ection 260 September, 1957 GOD'S LIVING. SERMON of impurity. Thus the~ freely chosen childlessness of religious is, .indeed, most fertile of good--their holy barrenness begets countless children of God. By their vow of obedience, religious proclaim to the world that the root of all sin lies in inordinate self-love and inordinate self-will. And they teach the world the remedy fo~ this ill. By their obedience, religious tell the world that the only way to escape out of the maddening labyrinth "of self and selfish-ness is to take one's will in both hands and exchange it for the #111 of God by riveting it to His most Sacred' Heart. The o~nly way to be truly free is.to serve m to serve God without stint. In this exchange of wills one's own narrowness and smallness are exchanged for the infinite generosity of God. The stagnate pool of selfishness ,is displaced by7 the restless sea of love which is God's holy will. And since the will of God is the cause of all good; since, too, religious have exchanged their will for His by vow, then they too will bring into the world and into the lives of men unlimited good. Religiods, by the life they lead, will diffuse through the universe some of the infinite goodness of God. In this vowed exchange of wills with God, religious be-come more and more sinless. For the more God's will dis- 'places theirs and becomes the motive force of their life and actions, the more religious approa.ch the state of impeccability --the impeccability of God's holy will. Hence, the more and longer God's. will works in them, the less will they fall into daily sins and faults, and the more they will do, and diffuse, good about them. The world seeing this transformation in religious, their own fellowmen, will first wonder at them, then admire them, and finally imitate them. And when the world imitates them, religious thus renew the face of the earth. They and the life they live. Besides being a living sermon on G~d, every religious is a living mystery also. Religious must have all the elements 261 BONAVENTURE BALSAM Review for Religious about them of a true mystery of faith. They must be thor-oughly supernatural. They must think, will, and act always on a supernatural plane. They must survey the whole of their own life and every event that befalls them from that super-natural ~vantage point, from the loft~; peaks of faith. Their viewpoint, their perspective of everything will always and every-where be determined by faith. Nothing will be purposeless; everything will be judged according to a divine pattern. All their assignments, and the minutest details and circumstances surrounding those assignments, must be looked upon and judged with the eyes of faith. The hardships and crosses of a par- ' ticular assignment, the trials and difficulties attached to an act of obedience, the misunderstandings and false accusations that may dog their steps, all these must be seen in their supernatural light. They must be seen as~having a definite .place in God's plan for their sanctification and salvation. Never will religious live on the merely natural level mthe level of those who have no faith. Rather, they must, under all circumstances, "live in such a way that their life would not make sense if God did not exist." God and their great faith in God must determine every decision religious make, must be the heart in every one of their motives for acting. By profession, and even more by religious consecration, religious belong to God and are familiar with God's ways. But religious are a living mystery for more reasons than that. As in the case of every' mystery, their life is one of im-penetrable paradox. Religious are in the very midst of the wo~ld, though they can never claim any of it as their own. By profession, they are consecrated down to their fingertips. Though they are vowed to seek after that peace which only God can give, still they are ever stirring up discontent and dissatisfaction. They are ever fomenting a rebellion against the ways of the world. A religious is an aposde of elevation; his whole life tends to. raise the general worth and standards of. mankind by the 262 September, 1957 GOD'S LIVING SERMON unearthliness and loftiness of his own life. He is the divine yeast in the rather inert and formless mass'of humanity without God. He is what the priest has been called, "the minister of restlessness." In looking upon his life, the world is wounded with a sort of tormenting longing for the divine. A religious may be rightly called "an apostle of the abso-lute." He is ever on a relentless search, a quest, not for that which is merely good, but for that which is God, for the Per-fect. His very religious consecration makes him ever a pilgrim, ever a foreigner to this wor/d, and en route to see the face of God. Whatever he finds, good, whether in himself or in others, he must ever try to make better. He is gripped by a continu-ous and divine unrest, which, oddly enough, is the great source of the profound peace which surrounds his life. That unrest takes the form of a hunger to be more united to God, though he knows full well that divine union must entail the painful surrendering of deep-seated attachments. It entails turning a deaf ear to the unending call of the flesh to pla~ riot in the warm fields of its pleasures; it entails purging out of one's spiritual organism the multiplicity of sins which plague it and keep it undeveloped, ~tunted, and impede its more complete union with God. All this means pain, struggle, denial, sacri-fice, and death. But the religious is equally aware that in the midst of all this struggle to embrace his God and never to let Him go there is a joy that makes all this tremendous effort and strife insignificant, short-lived, accountable as nothing at all. He knows that the more he peels away the outer bark of bitter self, the more he sees and tastes of the fruit of God with-in. He knows that the sufferinss of these times are like seasoning, sharp and bitter, but necessary to taste one's God, indeed to consume Him in love. Like ev.ery mystery, the religious .must remain beyond. the ken and grasp of the generality of mankind. He will be misunderstood, his actions misconstrued. So lofty and extra-ordinary is his life that those who see only with a fleshly eye 263 BONAVENTURE BALSAM will say that it is impossible or a huge deception. He will be considered a cowardly fugitive from the world, from reality; 'whereas, in truth, he pursues thd world in its flight from God, takes it in his arms as a father does a recalcitrant child, and offers it up to God in love. Instead of being a dreamer, as he is accused of being, he is the world's greatest realist, for he knows and appreciates God, the cause of all reality, and claims Him as his very own possession and gift to the world. Since he is a sort of special creation of God, the religious must remain unknown; he must n~ver become profane. When his life becomes common, banal, vulgar, a byword among the people, he is no longer a living and sacred mystery; he is now common knowledge. He has then lost that necessary quality of' super-naturalness. He must ever remain like a beautiful tree with its roots hidden in the earth and its head and heart in the heavens. Every religious is a living mystery. Like every divine mystery, he must be accessible to all those who ai, e seeking God. He and his life must ever be a source of awe for the world. Being a pilgrim and an apostle of the absolute, of perfection, he must keep the world dissatisfied, discontented with its smug and mediocre ways. He must be .the tangible and living expres-sion of the life of God and the degree in which it can be shared by grace. His life must be one of elevation, of an offertory. Sworn to pursue perfection, he must make himself and the world one grand host of love offered up to God in adoration, thanksgiving, petition, and atonement. From ttie rising of the sun even to the going down thereof, the religious must be a liv!ng mystery and sermon of God. 264 Dismissal ot: Religious in Lay Insfit:u es Lloseph g. Gallen, S.,J. 1. Definition. Dismissal is the compulsory departure from a religious institute during the time of the vows of the religious. Any religious, whether of solemn or simple vows, perpetual or temporary, may be dismissed. Dismissal is effected by the de-cree of the competent superior and by law, ipso facto, or automatically because of the commission of any of the crimes specified in canon 646. The present article is confined to the dismissal of religious in lay institutes. However, the norms are the same in other institutes for the dismissal of a professed of temporary vows and also for men of perpetual vows in a clerical non-exempt institute. The canonical prescriptions for the dis-missal of a clerical or lay religious man of perpetual vows in a clerical and exempt institute are likewise the same as in a lay institute of men except that in the former the crimes, admoni-tions, and incorrigibility must be proved in a judicial process. The provisional return to secular life is essentially the same in a clerical exempt institute (cc. 653; 668). The laws of the code and of the particular constitutions must be accurately' and sincerely observed in a dismissal. They were enacted to protect the rights of both the institute and the individual religious. It is very likely that an unusual number of highly unsatisfactory religious justifies a complaint against facility of admission and retention during the probationary periods rather than against the difficulty of dismissal. It is evident, also that the age of the religious is to be considered before deciding on the formalities of a dismissal, even though this is not mentioned in the code. Older religious should be dismissed only for most serious reasons. Their adjustment to secular life, especially in the case of a religious woman, is obvi-ousl'y more difficult. A religious whose conduct merits serious 265 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious thoughts of dismissal should practically always be first encour-aged to ask for an indult of secularization. Those who are found certainly unsuitable at any time during temporary pro-fession are to be counseled to ask foi: an indult of secularization rather than to wait until the voluntary departure or exclusion at the expiration of temporary vows. I. Competent Authority for Dismissal by Decree and for Final Adjudication of Provisional Sending Back to Secular Life . 2. In pontifical congregations. (a) For professed men and women of temporary vows (c. 647, § 1). The competent authority is the superior general with the deliberative and secret vote of his council. In the few constitutions where his part in any dismissal is mentioned, it is prescribed that the pro-vincial should consult his council before proposing a dismissal to the superior general. The provincial will usually, in fact, initiate a dismissal by proposing it to the superior general, Since the matter is one of greater importance, in prudence he should at lea~t ordinarily consult his council before doing so. (b) For professed of perpetual vows. 1° In congregations of men (c. 650, § 2, 2°). The superior general with the consent of his council is competent to decree the dismissal, but his decree has no effect until it is confirmed by the Sacred Congregation of Religious. 2° In congregations of women (c. 652, § 3). The Sac/ed Congregation of Religious alone is competent to decree the dismissal. 32 For professed of temporary or perpetual vows in diocesan congregations of men or women (cc. 647, § 1; 650, § 2, 1°; 652, § 1). The competent authority in all cases of men or women is the ordinary of the diocese where the house to which the religious is attached is located. The ordinary of the diocese of the generalate is competent only for religious attached to houses' in his diocese. In virtue of canon 647, § 1, the local ordinary may certainly initiate the dismissal of a professed of temporary vows. He probably possesses the same .right with regard to professed men or women of perpetual vows.' If the 266 September, 1957 DISMISSAL IN LAY INSTITUTES ordinary initiates the dismissal, he is obliged to inform the superior general before dismissing the religious. He is also obliged to give consideration to the reasons the superior gen-eral proposes against the dismissal and is forbidden to dismiss a religious, if this superior ha~ just reasons against it. If he does so, the superior general has the right of recurring to the Sacred Congregation of Religious. 4. Societies living in common without~ public vows (c. 681). The norms of dismissal for pontifical and diocesan religious congregations ~pply also to these pontifical and diocesan socie-ties, i. e., the norms for the professed of temporary vows apply to members whose bond is temporary, those for religious of perpetual vows to members whose bond in such a society is per-petual. 5. In monasteries of nuns. (a) For professed of temporary vows .(c. 647, § 1). If the monastery is not subject to regu-lars, the competent authority is the local ordinary of the mon-astery. If the monastery is subject to regulars: two opinions are probable, i. e., the competent authority is either only the regular superior or, the more probable opinion, the regular superior and the local ordinary acting conjointly. (b) For professed of perpetual vows (c. 652, § 2). The competent authority is the Sacred Congregation of Religious, but all the documents and acks of the case are to be transmitted to the congregation by the local ordinary of the monastery with his own vote and that of .the regular superior, if the mon-astery is subject to regulars. 6. Obligation of competent authorities. The competent au-thorities, as well as the superior and his council who propose a dismissal to such authority, have a grave obligation in con-science to observe the norms for dismissal imposed by canon law (cf. c. 647, § 2). ~ Tabera, Corntnent,~rium Pro Reli]io$i$, 13-1932-124-25; 14-1933-35; Schaet:er, De Religiosis, n. 1602; Quinn, Relation of t/~e Local Ordinary to Religious o/ Diocesan/l$/~ro¢,al, 103-105. 267 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious . II. Dismissal by Decree of a Professed of Temporary Vows (cc. 647-48) 7. Sufficient" reasons for dismissal. (a) ' General principles (c. 647, § 2, 1°.3°). The authority dismissing a religious of tem-porary vows must have. moral certainty, i. e., a judg,ment that excludes a founded doubt, of the existence and sufficiency of the reasons. The reasons must be external to the extent that they are known by others. They mu~t also be ~sekious'or grave, which does not imply serious moral culp~ibilit~ or any culpa-bility at all. The general principies on the sufficiency 0f the reasons are that it is to the good of the institute not to retain the subject; the institute will suffer a notable harm or serious incon;cenience in retaining him; there is no hope that ~he reli-gious will be able to conform his life in a creditable or praise-worthy manner to the demands of .the constitutions; "lie lacks the general aptitude for the religious life or the special aptitude requisite for the spiritual life or works of. the particular insti-tute; and any reason is sufficient that is of the same or greater import than that stated by way of example in canon 647, § 2, 2°, i. e., a defect of religious spirit that 'is a cause of scandal to others. It is probable, as under exclusion from a further profession,~ that after more than six prescribed years in tem-porary vows a religious may be dismissed or~ly for reasons that are sufficient to dismiss a professed of perpetual vows. (b) Particular sufficient reasons (c. 647, § 2, 2°). A sufficient reason on the part of the institute is the lack of aptitude stated in the preceding paragraph. Sufficient-reasons on the part of the religious himself can be reduced to intelledtual defects, which is included under aptitude above, to health, which will be explained below, and to moral defects. Moral defects constitute" tl~e principal motive for dismissal. The code mentions only one sufficient cause of dismissal by way of ex-ample, and this is a habitual moral defect, i. e., a defect of 2Cf./IEwsw FOg RELXG~OL~S, July, 1957, 216-18. 268 September, 1957 DISMISSAL IN LAY ]INSTITUTES religious spirit that is a cause of scandal to others. This defect can be ascertained from the conduct and motives of the religious and from the effect of his conduct on others. Such a religious seems to lack all supernatural motives, and' acts almost constantly from those that are purely natural. He is de~oid of love, attachment, and devotion to the religious life and its duties. His transgressions arise from habitual negligence, sloth, weariness, perversity, and ill will, not from accidental weakness and frailty. He ,manifests little care or effort for per-sonal sanctification. In his conduct he "habitually violates the constitutions, rules, customs, and usages of the.institute, even if not in relatively serious matters. He obeys superiors with diffi-culty in matters that are not strictly commanded. He habitually omits, performs carelessly, or places little value on religious exer-cises. In its effect on others, the conduct described above is already scandalous in a person consecrated to God. Such conduct and the fact that .the motives and state of his will externally manifest themselves decrease in others respect and 'devotion to the religious life and its duties and make observance of religious disci-pline by others more difficult. Often there, is added the direct insti-gation of others to violations of religious duties and discipline. Among the equivalent habitual moral defects are the follow-ing. 1° Obedience. Habitual, unwilling, and grudging obedience; .habitual murmuring against and criticism of superiors; habitual negligence in fulfilling duties assigned by superiors. 2° Poverty. Repeated violations of the vow and of common life, even if not in serious matters. 3° Anger. One who is habitually quarrelsome or has an" ungovernable temper that~ breaks out in frequent and serious fitsof anger and causes frequent disturb-ance of the peace of the community, loss of peace of soul, insults, and injuries to companions, .and dissensions in the community. 4° Charity. One who is addicted to faults of the tongue that annoy, disturb, or provoke others to quarrels, Or that consist of frequent calumnies, detractions, imprudenc~e in speech or violations of secrets. 5° Disturber of the peace. A 269 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious habitual disturber of the peace of the community who creates or fosters dissatisfaction, dissensions, factions, or provokes to quarrels. 8. Necessity of repeated admonition and salutary penance with-out effect (c. 647, § 2, 2°). Any habitual moral defect is a sufficient reason for dismissal only when a repeated admonition together with a salutary penance has produced no effect. The code demands only that the subject should have been admon-ished at least twice, orally or in writing, secretly or in a manner /hat can be proved, by a local or higher superior, to reform his conduct. Canon law does not require here that the admoni-tion be given in virtue of a mandate from a higher superior or that a threat of dismissal be. added to the admonition. The salutary penance to be added to each admonition i~ one suitable for effecting the reform of the religious and the reparation of the scandal" already given. It will consist of the penances in use in the particular institute, e. g., recitation of determined prayers, an act of humility, or a public acknowledgment or reprehension of defects. A sufficient period of time is to be allowed to pass "after the second admonition to permit the religious to reform his conduct. After this period, if he has ¯ nbt reformed his conduct to such an extent that it can no longer be considered a sufficient cause for dismissal, he may be dismissed. Both for the reform of the religious and proof in the eCent of dismissal and recourse, the more secure and prudent ¯ dgctrine is to be followed in practice, i. e., a threat of dismissal is to be added to each admonition and the admonition and penance are to be given in such a way that there will be proof that both were given and received. This can be accomplished b'y¯giving the admonition and penance before two witnesses or in writing. A copy of such a document is to be retained. by the institute. 9. A single act as a sufficient reason. A religious of temporary vows may be dismissed because of a very serious single act, 270 September, 1957 DISMISSAL IN LAY INSTITUTES e. g., a grave external s_in against chastity; formal contempt of the authority of superiors; violation of a formal precept .of obedience; an act that creates a danger of notable harm or infamy to the institute; serious scandal given once or twice in the community, or what is more serious, to seculars, when there are indications that the same thing will happen again.-~ A pro-fessed of temporary vows who becomes a fugitive from religion or does the same thing as an apostate from religion, even though he cannot technically be called an apostate because he is not in perpetual vows, may be dismissed because of either of these acts. :~ 10. Insul/icient reasons (c. 647, ~ 2, 2°). The statement of the religious that he never possessed or has lost a religious vocation or the mere agreement of the institute and the religious that he be dismissed are insufficient reasons. In either case, the religious, giving all the reasons that actually exist, may ask for an indult of secularization or may wait and depart at the expiration of temporary vows. Ill health is a sufficient reason for dismissal only if it was certainly fraudule.ntly concealed or dissimulated before the first profession of temporary' vows. Everything said under exclusion from a further profession because of ill health, lack of ability arising from ill health, ailments such as hysteria and neurasthenia, and insanity apply here also.~ 11. Procedure (c. 647, § 2, 3°). No special process is pre-scribed for attaining certainty of the existence and sufficiency of the reasons for dismissal nor for decreeing the dismissal. If it is d~cided to proceed to dismissal, the .necessary preliminary data should be written out first, i. e., the religious and family name of the subject, age, date of entrance into the postulancy and noviceship, date or dates of temporary profession, and the houses and employments to which the religious had been assigned. To this should be added a brief and accurate descrip-tion of the previous conduct of the religious. The formalities 3 Cf. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, May, 1957, 162-63. -1 Cf. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, July, 1957, 219-20. 271 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious of dismissal are practically always preceded by a protracted period o'f most unsatisfactory conduct. The decision on dis-missal is then to be studied and obviously with the greatest care. The matters to be decided are whether certain proof is had of the existence and sufficiency of the reasons, of the admonitions given privately and of those given in writing or before witnesses with a threat of dismissal, and of the lack of effect, of these admonitions. Proof of the existence of the reasons will ordinarily be from signed statements of local superiors and councilors, principals of schools, companions in religion, etc. Canon 647, ~ 2, 3°, prescribes that all the reasons for dismissal, not the proofs nor the names of the witnesses, be manifested to the religious orally or in writing before dismissal. The proposal of the reasons in writing is preferable for proof. The religious must be given full liberty and a su~cient amount of. time to reply to the charges. He is .to be counseled to reply in writing. If his replies are given orally, they are to be taken down immediate!y in writing and he is to be requested to sign them. If he refuses, this is to be noted in the document on which his replies are given. His replies are to be submitted fully to the authority competent for dismissal. Everything given above in this number should have been followed also by the superior general and his council in a diocesan congregation and the superioress and her council in a monastery of nuns before tl~e written petition for dismissal is forwarded to the competent authority. The vote of the council should be given in writing to this authority. In a monastery of nuns, this vote must be deliberative.~ In a diocesan .congregation, the superior general will present the petition for a dismissal to the local ordinary; but the constitutions will frequently require the con-sultive or deliberative vote of his council for such a petition. The local ordinary and the regular superior must have certainty ~Cf. Tabera, Commentarium Pro Religiosis, 12-1931-372-73; Larraona, ibid., 2-1921-364-65; Schaefer, 010. cir., n. 1584. 272 September', 1957 DISMISSAL IN LAY INSTITUTES of the existence and sufficiency of the reasons alleged in the representations of the superior. They accordingly have the right and duty of investigating the existence of the reasons, although this is usually proved in the proposal of the superior, and of weighing the seriousness of these reasons. 12. Dismissal. If the decision is for dismissal, a decree" of dismissal should be drawn up containing the date, name of the religious, the reasons for dismissai, and the statement that the religious is therewith informed of his right of suspensive recourse against the decree to the Sacred Congregation of Religious. The decree should either be read to the religious or he should be given a copy of it. Either the original-or a copy of the decree and of all the proofs and documents in the case is to be retained in the files of the institute. It would be well to give the religi-ous a written statement to the effect that he was l~gitimately dismissed from the institute and freed of all his vows and obligations. In the presence of two religious as witnesses, the dismissed religious is to be asked to sign the following or a similar docu-ment after it has beenread to him. "I realize that I am hereby informed that'I have the 'right of recurring to the Sacred Congregation of Religious against this decree of dismissal and that, if I make this recourse within ten days from this date, such a recourse will suspend the effect of this decree until offi-cial notification is received that the decree has been confirmed by the same Sacred Congregation." The two religious witnesses are also to sign as such. If the dismissed religious will riot sign, this refusal is to be noted on the document; and the two religious witnesses ard also to attest on the document to this refusal. This document also is to be retained by the institute. If the religious has already left the institute illicitly, th'e notification of the decree and of the right of suspensive recourse is to be sent to him by certified mail, which provides for a receipt, to the sender and a record of delivery at the offi~ce of the address. 13. Suspensive recourse (c. 647, § 2, 4°). The one who 273 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious communicates the decree of dismissal is counseled in a reply of the Sacred Congregation of Religious to inform the religious of his right of recourse.° This should always be done; and several authors advise that this information be included, as above, in the decree of dismissal. The religious has the right of making a suspensive recourse to the Sacred Congregation of Religious against the decree of dismissal within ten days from the date on which he was informed of the decree. The first day is not counted. If the religious was informed of the decree on June 1, the time begins to run on June 2 and expires ~it midnight of June 11-12. The time does not run for any period during which the subject is ignorant of his right or unable to act, e. g., because of illness. The recourse is to be made by letter, either immediately by the subject or mediately through the superior who communicated the decree to him. The subject is to give his reasons againsf the dismissal. Proof that he had made the recourse is had by the authentic document of his own letter or the testimony of two trustworthy witnesses. The recourse within ten, days suspends the effect of the decree, which is completely ineffective until the authority that issued the decree is notified of its confirmation by the Sacred Congre-gation of Religious. While the recourse is pending, the subject is not dismissed and remains a religious with the same obligations as any other professed of temporary vows. He has the right and obligation of dwelling, under obedience to superiors, in the religious house assigned by them. If the religious does not wish to make recourse but to leave the institute immediately after the. decree is communicated to him, he may do so. Superiors may oblige him to leave immediately only if he has declared in writing that he will not m~ike recourse.7 Otherwise the religious is to remain until the ten days have elapsed without recourse having been 0 Bouscaren, Canon Law Digest, 1,329. ¢ Cf. c. 1880, 9°; Coronata, Manuale Practicum luris Discipli~iaris et Criminalis Regularium, n. 248. 274 September, 1957~ DISMISSAL IN LAY INSTITUTES made. A subject may als6 make recourse after the lapse of the ten-day period, but such recourse does not suspend the effect of the dismissal, 14. Effects of dismissal (c. 648). Canon 648 frees a professed of temporary vows, as soon as the decree of dismissal is effective, from all the vo~,s of his religious profession. There is no need of a dispensation from the vows. The ~ther effects are the same as explained under secularization in the REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, September, 1956~ 233-36. III. Dismissal. By Decree of a Professed of~ Perpetual Vows (cc. 649,52; 669, .~ li 672, ~ 1) 15. Sufficient reasons. (a) In institutes of men (cc. 649; 656, I°). Three grave and external crimes of the same or different species in the proper sense of canon 2195, § 1, two admonitions, and incorrigibility a~e necessary. A violation of any positive law accompanied l~y special gravity or scandal is also a crime (c. 2222, § 1). The following are examples of sufficient ¯ reasons:' serious sins against common life, external si~s against chastity, disobedience to formal precepts, formal contempt of authority, rebellion against superiors, seriously impeding the government of superiors, creating or fomenting factions in the community, drunkenness, striking companions in religion, seri-ous diffamation of others or 0f the institute, apostasy or flight from religion, as also violations of the vows or of the ~onstitutions that constitute a specially grave offense or give rise to~ grave scandal in or outside the institute. These acts must be seriously sinful objectively and subjectively. Crimes of different species should be such as to reveal, when viewed collectively, a will obstinate in evil (c. 657).s (b) In institutes of women (c. 651, § 1). The same reasons are required for the dismissal of any religious woman of per-petual vows, whether solemn or simple. The reasons must be s Cf. Creusen, Religious Men and Women in the Code, n. 353; Bastien, Directoire Canonique, n. 634, 1, 1°; Tabera, op. cit., 14-1933-267; Beste, Introductio in Codicem, 443,448. 275 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious external, culpable, serious, and joined with incorrigibility. The reasons have to be external to the extent that they are known by others. The code requires culpable but does not certainly demand seriously culpable reasons. Inculpable reasons, e. g., lack of aptitude and physical and intellectual defects do not suffice for the dismissal of a perpetually professed religious. The reasons must be serious or grave. Finally, the reasons must be joined with incorrigibility, i. e., attempts at correction were made and their lack of success proves that there is no hope of amendment. ~The following are general examples of sufficient reasons: violations of the vows, constitutions, and religious dis-cipline that are considered more serious, even though in them-selves they are not mortal sins, or that cause serious scandal in or outside the community; and conduct that causes a notable spiritual or temporal harm to the community. The following are examples of particular sufficient reasons: repeated violations of~the vow of poverty, even after admonitions, reprehensions, penances, and even though the matter in itself does not consti-tute a serious sin; repeated and more serious acts of disobedi-ence; exciting others to rebellion and insubordination; arousing others against superiors by word or conduct; impeding the authority of superiors; disturbing the peace of the community by constant murmuring and complaints; causing dissensions and factions in the community; and the diffamation of the institute or its members among seculars. The reasons given above for men also evidently suffice for the. dismissal of women, since less serious reasons are required for the dismissal of women. Incorrigibility supposes repeated or habitufil actions. There-fore, one violation does not suffice for the dismissal of a per-petually professed religious woman. As in the case of religious men of perpetual vows, there must be at least three violations or one continued violation which, after a double admonition, becomes vi'rtually three violations. These three violations may all be of the same species, e. g., all against poverty; they may be of different species, e. g., one against poverty, the second 276 September, 1957 DISMISSAL IN LAY INSTITUTES against obedience, and the third contrary to charity. The one continued violation is verified in such things as apostasy from religion, being a fugitive from religion, and a refusal to obey. The apostate who has been admonished twice to return to religion and refuses commits virtually three violations, the original act of apostasy and the two refusals to return (c. 657). 16. Attempts at correction and 'incorrigibility (cc. 649; 656- 62; 651, § i). Everything below on the admonitions and incor-rigibility is of obligation 'from canon law in lay institutes of men. The code does not determine just what' 'the attempts at correction are to consist of in the case 'of religious women but leaves these and the judgment of the incorrigibility to the supeiioress. However, the doctrine that is more probable :in itself and to be followed in practice is that the canons on religious men should be extended to women, i. e., there should be two admonitions coupled with suitable corrections and penances. When these produce no effect, the religious wom£n may be judged in-corrigible. 17. Admonitions (cc. 658-62). (a) Prerequisite certitude of first violation (c. 658). Before the first admonition may be given, there must be certitude, not mere suspicion, probability, or conjecture, of the commission of the first violation. If cer-titude is not had, a further investigation of the conduct of the religious may be. made. If the investigation does not give certitude, an admonition may not be given. (b) Matter of the admonitions (c. 661). The' essentialnotes of an admonition are three: the superior reprehends the religiou~ for the violation already committed; warns him to avoid slich conduct in the future; and adds a threat of dismissal if the religious should persist in such conduct. The thi:eat of dismissal is always to be added to the admonition in the case of a per-petually professed religious man or woman (c. 661,. § 3). 9 Statuta a Sororibus Externis 8er~anda, n. 119; Coronata, lnstltutiones luris Canonici, I, n. 651; Palombo, De Dimissione Religiosorum, n. 179; Tabera, o~. cit., 13-1932-123; Bastien o/,. tit., rt. 639, 3. 277 JOSEPH ~. GALLEN Review for Religious The superior is also to add to the admonitions: 1° an apt exhortation, i. e., to give motives to the religious for the reform of his conduct; 2° an apt correction, i. e., to show the religious the disorder of his past conduct, its effect on himself and .others, on the community and the institute; 3° preventive measures against a future violation. Almost necessarily these will imply putting the religious under the vigilance of a superior. Other such measures that the particular case demands are also to be employed, e. g., changing the employment or house of the religious and, in general, removing and lessening the occasion of a future violation. 4° apt penances. These are to be added to each admonition. Their aptitude is to be judged from their suitability for effecting the amendment of the religious and the reparation of the scandal already given. (c) Number and form of the admonitions (c. 660). There must be two admonitions, one for each of the first two viola-tions. In a continued violation, at least three full days must elapse between the first and second admonition. The admoni-tions are to be given in such a way that there will be proof that ' they were given and received. They are accordingly to be given before two witnesses or in writing.When given before witnesses, it is better to have the admonition also written out, to retain a copy, and have the two witnesses sign this copy to the effect that they witnessed the giving of the admonition. If given in ¯ writing, the religious is always to be made to sign a document to the effect that he received the admonition, a copy of the admonition is always to be retained, and two witnesses are to attest that the copy agrees with the original. If the religious is'outside the institute, e. g., as an apostate or fugitive, the admonition is to be sent to him in writing by certified mail (cf. n. 12). (d) Competent superior for admonitions (c. 659). In institutes of men, the admonitions should be given by the immediate higher superior personally or through another authorized for the purpose. An authorization given for the first admonition 278 September, 1957 DISMISSAL IN LA~ INSTITUTES suffices also for the second. From analogy, the same principles are to be followed in an institute of women. (e) Interval and violation after the second admonition (c. 662). After the second admonition, there must be a third vio-lation or a refusal to obey the second admonition in the case of a continued violation. An interval of at least six full days is to elap, se between the second admonition and any further action in a continued violation.'° After the third violation or the lapse of the six days without sincere repentance, the religious is canonically incorrigible and may be dismissed. If he sincerely repents within the six days, ¯ he is not incorrigible and may not be dismissed. If such repen-tance is verified only after the third violation or after the six days, action on the dismissal may be continued, since the religious is canonically incorrigible; but it would be better to discontinue such action provisionally, because the religious is not in fact incorrigible,n If the religious later commits another violation, the formalities of dismissal may be continued unless the reforma-tion of thereligious was sincere and complete. Such a reforma-tion excludes the computation or inclusion of past violations and admonitions and requires that the formalities of dismissal be begun anew. A sincere and complete reformation demands that the religious, e. g., have avoided the occasions of violations, have been willing to repair scandal by public penance, and have been more than ordinarily faithful to religious observance. The common doctrine is that such an amendment of conduct should have continued for three years, but a lesser space of time, e. g., a year, will su~ce in the case of extraordinary repentance.12 l°Cf. Tabera, 0p. cit., 14-1933-273; Toso, Commentaria Minora, II, II, 268; Chelodi-Ciprot~i, lus Canonicura de Personis, n. 291; De Carlo, Jus Religiosorum, n. 587. 11Cf. Goyeneche, De Religiosis, 217; De Carlo, oiO. cir., n. 587; Schaefer, oil: clt., n. 1629; Palombo, 0/~. cir., n. 113; Coronata, 0/L cir., 867; Beste, 0/~. cir., 450; Jone, Commentarium in Codicem Iuris Canonici, I, 586. ~2Cf. Goyeneche, op. cir., 217; De Carlo, oiO. cir., n. 587; Schaefer, o/,. cir., n. 1629; Palombo, op. tit., n. 114; Beste, oiO. cit., 450; Jone, o~O. tit., 586; Coropata, op. cit., 864. 279 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious 18. Procedure (cc. 650-52). (a). Intervention of the superior general and his council. In pontifical or diocegan lay institutes of men, canon 650, §§ 1-2, not only require that- the dismissal of a professe~ of perpe~tual vows be submitted to th~ superior gen-eral but also demand a deliberative vote of his council for such a dismissal. Canon law "does not clearly demand the interven-tion of the mother general nor of her council in the dismissal of .a professed of perpetual vows. However, from analogy with the law on the dismissal of religious men of perpetual vows and the constant practice of the Sacred Congregation of Religi-ous in the approval of constitutions, the dismissal of a professed woman of perpetual vows in both pontifical'and diocesan congre-gations is to be referred to the mother general and h'er council and the council is to have a deliberative vote.la For the same reasons, the deliberative vote of the council is required in a monastery of nuns. The remarks on the provincial and his council in n. 2 (a)apply here also. A proviricial should prac-tically never initiate the formalities of dismissal except after having consulted the superior general. The superior general and his council should have the pre-liminary data on the' religious drawn up, as stated in n. 11. To'this document are to be added a description of the three violations, proof of their existence, and proof that the admoni-tions Were properly given and received. As explained in n. 11, the reasons for the dismissal are tg, be fully manifested to the religious; and his replies in writing are to be submitted to the authority competent for dismissal. The matters .to be decided are whether certain proof is had of the three violations, of the giving and reception of the admonitions, and of the incorrigi-bility of the religious. (b) If the decision is for dismissal. 1° In a pontifical congre-gation. The mother general is to transmit all the acts and a:~Cf. Larraona, Commentarium Pro Religlosis, 2-1921-364-66; Ta~era, op. cir., 14-1933-53-54; Schaefer, op. cit., n. 1608; Jone, op. cit., 578; Muzzarelli, Tractatus Canonicus de Congregationibus Iuris Dioecesani, 175; Goyeneche, op. cit., 219; Bastien, op. cir., n. 640. 280 September, 1957 DISMISSAL IN LAY INSTITUTES documents of the case along with the vote of her council to the Sacred Congregation of Religious (cf. n. 2). In a congregation of brothers, the same things are to be sent to .the Sacred Con-gregation. However, the brother general,, with the deliberative vote of his council, decrees the dismissal; but this has no effect until it is confirmed by the Sacred Congregation (cf. n. 2). A superior who transmits a case to the authority competent for dismissal may include further information from himself or the members of the council in, addition to the latter's vote. 2° In a diocesan congregation, of brothers or sisters. The same things are to be forwarded to the local ordinary (cf. n. 3). The matters to be decided by the ordinar~ are the same as those stated above. He may summon the religious, defer the dis-missal and prescribe further attempts at correction, deny the dismissal, or issue the decree of dismissal. 3° In a monastery of nuns. The superioress is to transmit the same things to the local ordinary and the regular superior (cf. n. 5). 19. Dismissal. The religious is dismissed only at the moment that he or she receives legitimate notification of the decree of dismissal or of the confirmation of the Sacred Congregation of Religious in the case of religious men.~ Before that time he may neither leave the institute nor may the institute eject him. He is then to leave the institute, unless he is a member of a diocesan congregation, as will be immediately explained. 20. Recourse. (a) In any pontifical lay institute of men or women. The religious may recur io the Holy See against the decree of dismissal, but this recourse does not suspend the effect of the dismissal. The code gives no such right, and the Holy See has both examined ihe reasons of the religious against the dismissal and has itself effected or confirmed the dismissal. (b) In any diocesan congregation of men or women. The code says nothing on the right of the religious to recur to the Holy See against a dismissal effected by the local ordinary. a4 Palombo, op. cit., nn. 144, 187; O'Leary, Rdi.oious Dismissed after Perpetual Profession, 47-50. 281 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious However, it is admitted that the religious has the right of recur-ring. to the Sacred Congregation of Religious against the decree; and, if made within ten days from the date on which the religi-ous was informed of the decree, this recourse suspends the effect of the dismissal. This right to a suspensive recourse follows a fortiori from the fact that such a right is granted to a religious of temporary vows dismissed by the local ordinary (c. 647, ~ i, 4°). Therefore, everything said in n. 13 under ¯ the dismissal of a professed of temporary vows applies here also. 21'. Effects of dismissal (cc. 669, § 1; 672, § 1). (a) If dis-missal frees from the vows. The code itself (c. 669, § 1 ) does not free a dismissed religious of perpetual vows from the vows of religious profession by the very fact of the dismissal. Such a liberation may be effected by a provision of the particular constitutions, or the Holy See may append a dispensation to the dismissal, or the dismissed religious may petition the Sacred Congregation of Religious in the case of pontifical institutes or the local ordinary in that of diocesan institutes for a dispen-sation. 1~ The religious is to be most earnestly encouraged to make such a petition, and the superiors are willingly to aid him. Constitutions of lay congregations submitted to Rome in the earlier years after the Code of Canon Law became effective, May 19, 1918, uniformly do not provide that legitimate dismis-sal of a perpetually professed religious frees from the vows; tho~e submitted in more recent years frequently contain this provision. The latter practice should be followed in any revis-ion of pontifical or diocesan constitutions. Ill such a provision is contained in the constitutions, the dismissal frees from all the vows of religious profession as soon as the decree is effective. There is no need of a dispensation from the vows. The other effects are the same as explained under secularization in the REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, September, 1956, 233-36. (b) If the dismissal does not free from the vows (c. 672, § 1). Canon 672, § 1, prescribes that a religious of perpetual is Cf. Muzzarelli, o~. cir., 306. 282 September, 1957 DISMISSAL IN LAY INSTITUTES vows who has been dismissed without being freed of his vows is obliged to reform his.life so that he will be worthy .of being received back into the institute. If the dismissed religious has manifested a complete reform during a period of three years, he is obliged to return to the institute and the la'tter~ is obliged to take him back. Howe.ver, it is the far more probable interpre-tation that this canon applies only to a religious in sacred orders (priest, deacon, subdeacon).'6 If the dismissed lay religious will not voluntarily petition a dispensation from the vows, the practical remedy is to submit the case immediately to the Sacred Congregation of Religious. A professed of~ perpetual vows is also to be given an official statement to the effect that he had been l~gitimately .dismissed, and mention should b~ made as to whether he had been freed of the vows by the dismissal or a concomitant or subsequent dispensation. IV. Dismissal By Law (c. 646) 22. Definition. This dismissal is effected automatically by canon 646 itself by the very fact and at the instant that any of the three crimes specified in the canon is committed. Therefore, the law itself, not the decree or declaration of a superior, effects the dismissal. In its nature, the dismissal is a punishment in-flicted for the crime and also a means given to religious, insti-tutes to free themselves immediately of members who have perpetrated most serious crimes against the religious life. 23. Subject. The subject of the il~so facto or dismissal by law of canon 646 is any professed religious, man or woman, of solemn or any type of simple vows, whether perpetual or tem-porary, and the members who have been aggregated perpetually or temporarily in societies living in common without public vows (c. 681). A postulant or novice is not the subject, but the commission of any of these three crimes is certainly more 'than a sufficient reason for his dismissal by the decision of the competent superior. ~6 Cf. Fanfani, De lure Religiosorum, 703-705. 283 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Religious 24. "Religious who have publicly apostatized from the Catholic faith" (c. 646, § 1, 1°). The crime is simply public apostasy from the Catholic faith. (a) Simply. The canon does not demand that the religi-ous have joined a non-Christian sect, e. g., Judaism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism. The crime can be" verified either in or out of such a sect. "(b) Public (c. 2197, 1°). In the case of a religious, a crime is public when it is actually known or is in serious and immediate danger of being known by at least a notable part of the mem-bers of the religious house to which the delinquent is attached.1~ It is not necessary that such knowledge or danger extend.to the province, institute, or to externs. External apostasy that has not attained this publicity does not effect dismissal by law. (c) Apostasy from the Catholic faith (c. 1325, ~ 2). Apos-tasy is the act of a baptized person who formally" denies or positively doubts about the entire Christian-faith. The unbap-tized are infidels, not apostates, heretics, or schismatics. Formally means that there must be a subjective mortal sin in the act. A doubt is the suspension of the acceptance of the intellect. A positive doubt is had when the intellect judges that there are sufficient reasons for affirming and denying the proposition, that the reasons on neither side are convincing, and therefore the intellect suspends assent to the proposition. In a negative doubt, the intellect suspends assent because it does not p~rceive reasons either for affirming or 'denying the proposition. This is to be classed rather as ignorance. As in heresy, /~ positive doubt constitutes an injury to the faith and is sufficient four apostasy.18 The one who so doubts has had the truth suffi-ciently proposed to him, but he positively judges that the truth is not sufficiently proposed and that contrary reasons make it uncertain. ~ Cf. Michiels, De Delictis et Pornis, 117-18. ~8 Ciprotti, De Consummatione Delictorum, 15; Coronata, o,O. cir., IV, n. 1856. 284 Septe,~be~', 1957 DISMISSAL IN LAY INSTITUTES Apostasy is a denial or positive doubt concerning the entire Christian faith, e. g., the existence of God, the fact or possibility of the Christian revelation, the fact or possibility of the supernatural order. Apostasy is therefore distinguished from heresy or schism. A heretic is a baptized person who formally denies or positively doubts about one or some dogmas of faith. A schismatic is a baptized person who formally refuses to submit to the spiritual authority of the Roman Pontiff or to communicate with the other members of the Church (c. 1325, ~ 2). Canon 646 mentions only apostasy and thus inflicts dis-missal by law only on apostates, not on heretics or schismatics. (d) Excommunication (c. 2314). An apostate incurs by the very fact of the apostasy an excommunication reserved in a special manner to the Holy See. An excommunication demands merely that the act be external and not that it be public. 25. "A religious man who h~as run away with a woman or a religious woman who has run away with a man" (c. 646, ~ I, 2°). The crime will be explained with a religious man as the subject. Four notes are required to constitute this crime. The last three are only probably required in theory but are certainly necessary in fact to effect the dismissaI (cc. 15, 19). (a) The religious man must be united physically or morally in flight from one place to another with a woman. It is not required that the r.eligious be an apostate or fugitive from religion in the canonical sense of canon 644J" Flight in canon 646 has the common and ordinary sense of running away with a woman. The crime, is completed as soon as this notion is verified, without any consideration whatever of the length of absence from the religious house. The intention of returning or not returning, of contracting or not contracting marriage has nothing to do with the crime. Both must flee, since the canon demands that the religious man have run away with a woman. This is verified physically if both start out from the religious house; it is verified morally. 19 Cf. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, May, 1957, 155-64. 285 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for "Religious if the religious alone flees in virtue of a previous agreement to meet the woman. The moral union is caused l~y the previous agreement; if such an agreement does not exist, there is no flight. In a doubt, this agreement is'to be presumed if.there was an illicit attachmehr or familiarity beforehand and union shortly after the departure of the religious; otherwise the agree-ment must be proved. The dismissal is effected at the begin-ning. of the flight. The flight described above is always neces, sary. Without such flight, neither concubinage nor the illicit leaving of the. house to sin with a woman, even though done frequently and furtively, constitutes the crime. When tlqe flight of this canon is difficult to prove, as is often true, an investiga-tion is to be made as to the existence of a marriage ceremony. It is rare in such cases that the woman does not insist on some form of marriage ceremony. (b) Probably the motive of the ,flight must be the satisfaction of lust. The iaecessity of such a motive is implicit in the text of the law and is part of the common notion of running away with a woman. Ordinarily this motive is to be presumed as soon as the other notes are verified.2° (c) Probably the woman must have attained puberty and not be a relative by blood or marriage in the direct line (mother, grandmother, etc.) or in the first degree .o~ the collateral line (sister) of the religious man. Puberty in a girl is attained can-onically on the day after the twelfth birthday, in a boy on the day after the fourteenth birthday (c. 88, § 2). The correspond-ing relatives will apply in the case of a religious woman, i. e., father, grandfather, brother. The necessity of this note is founded on the extrinsic authority of several authors. It has little foundation in the text of the law. The sense of the law is rather that the lustful motive is presumed not to exist with such persons but, if proved, the crime exists. Otherwise, the state of the woman is indifl:erent. It is of no import that she z°Cf. Tabera, Ol~. cir., 11-1930-416; Goyeneche, oil. cir., 209; Vermeersch, Periodica, 19-1930.122". 286 September, 1957 DISMISSAL IN LAY INSTITUTES is married, unmarried, capable or incapable of contracting marriage validly;. (d) Probably proof must exist of the preceding, requisites. The probability of this doctrine arises from the fact that the other two crimes of canon 646, public apostasy and marriage, are of their nature capable of proof and from the extrinsic authority of some authors. If the religious has verified the other notes but the crime is so secret that this fourth note is not verified, he is not dismissed by law."~l Any proof that gives moral certi-tude suffices, e. g., the testimony of reliable witnesses. (e) Excommunication (c. 2385). Obviously the flight described above will usually also imply apostasy from religion if the religi-ous has perpetual vows and thus the incurring i/)so fdcto of an excommunication reserved to the ordinary.-~" 26. "A religious who attempts or contracts marriage, even the so-called civil marriage" (c. 646, § 1, 3°). The crime is the contracting (validly) or the attempting (invalidly) of marriage by any type of Catholic, non-Catholic, or civil ceremony pro-vided both parties gave a naturally valid consent. The form of celebration of a civil marriage must be valid according to the civil law of the place of celebration. A solemn vow of chastity renders marriage invalid; a simple vow forbids but does not invalidate marriage. The crime presupposes a marriage consent valid" from the natural law and is not verified if the consent is vitiated in either party by an essential defect, e. g., ignorance, simulation, physical violence, grave fear. However, it is to be presumed that true consent was given; and this pre-sumption is sufficient to declare the religious~dismissed. In itself, the invalidity of the marriage does not exclude the crime, i. e., the crime is still verified if the marriage is invalid because it was attempted outside the Church or because of a diriment impedi-ment. ~lGoyeneche, Quaestiones Canonicae, II, 153; Schaefer, op. cir., n. 1578; Bas-tien, op. cir., 446, note 2; Jone, o~0. tit., 572; Jombart, RevUe des Communautets Religieuses, 6-1930-148. 22 Cf. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, May, 1957, 158. 287 JOSEPH ~. GALLEN Review for Religious Excommunications (cc. 2388; 2319, § 1, I°~; 2385). By presum-ing to attempt marriage, both a solemnly professed religious and the other party incur an excommunication reserved simply to the Holy See (c. 2388, §.1); if the vows of the religious are simple but perpetual, the presuming to contract or attempt marriage is punished in both parties by an excommunication reserved to the ordinary (c. 2388, § 2). If the marriage is attempted before a non-Catholic minister, the punishment of a Catholic is an excommunication reserved to the ordinary (c. 2319, § 1, 1°). A marriage ceremony implies an intention never to return to the institute and thus results in an excommunication for apostasy from religion reserved to the ordinary in the case of a religious of perpetual vows (c. 2385). A civil ceremony is not punished by the code, but in some dioceses of the United States it is punished by an excommunication reserved to the o~dinary and in some others it constitutes a reserved sin. 27. Effects (c. 646, ~ 1). Upon the commission of any of the three crimes, the religious is immediately an.d i~pso facto dis-missed, by canon 646. This dismissal by law is a legitimate dis-missal and produces all the effects of the ordinary dismissal by decree. Therefore, in the case of a professed of temporary vows, the effects are ~he same as those described in n. 14; if the religious is. of p.erpetual vows, the effects are those of the'ordinary dismissal exp!ain~d in n. 21. 28. Declaration of fact (c. 646, ~ 2). This canon commands the higher superior with the consultive vote of his council to make a declaration of fact concerning the crime. Some con-stitutions restrict this right to the superior general, and some also demand a deliberative vote of the council. In monasteries of nuns, the declaration is to be made by the superioress of the monastery with the consultive or deliberative vote of the council or chapter as commanded by the constitutions. The declaration of fact is merely a description of the pertinent points of the case, the headings of the proof, e. g., a copy of the marriage record, statement of witnesses, etc., and the conclu- 288 September, 1957 DISMISSAL IN LAY INSTITUTES sion that the religious ~was dismissed in virtue of canon 646. The local superior is ordinarily in the best position to secure these proofs, e. g., the statements of witnesses. Frequently a trustworthy man such as a lawyer or priest should be deputed to secure some of the proofs in the case of an institute of women, e. g., the copy of the marriage record. The declara-tion and proofs are to be retained in the secret files of the house of the higher superior who made the declaration. The pur-pose of the declaration is to possess proof of the automatic dismissal and to prevent future doubts and difficulties, particu-larly for the eventuality of a recourse by the subject to the local ordinary or the Holy See. V. Provisional Sending Back to Secular Life (c. 653) 29. Subject. The subject of thi~ provisional return is any pro-fessed religious, man or woman, and any aggregated member of a society living in common (c. 681). Canon 653 speaks explicitly only of the perpetually professed; but afortiori, from afialogy of law, the common opinion of authors, and the practice of the Holy See in approving constitutions, the same canon applies to the professed of only temporary vows and to the aggregated members whose bond with the society is only tem-porary. 30. Reasons required. The reason must be either of the fol-lowing: (a) Grave external scandal. This is a culpable defamatory act, committed within or outside the religious house, which is well known outside the house or known only to a few externs, who, however, will not keep the matter a secret, e. g., a sin against good morals. (b) Very serious imminent injury to the community. This is an extraordinary injury or harm certainly and proximately threatening at least reductively, not merely one or some individ-uals but the religious house, province, or institute. The religious must be the cause of this harm but it is not certain that he 289 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for" Religious must be a culpable cause. Examples of this reason are the proximate judicial accusation of a defamatory crime in either the moral or political order; sexual actions with students in an institute devoted to education when it is foreseen that these wil][ become public and bring infamy on the house, province, or institute; a serious threat to set the house on fire or against the life of a superior or another member of the institute; and a serious loss of temporal property of the house, province or institute. (c) Three conditions required in both cases. Since such an extraordinary action should not be taken against a religious because of mere probability, conjecture, or suspicion, the ex-istence of the cause must be certain; it must also be impossible to avoid the scandal or harm in other ways, e. g., by transferring the religious to another house; and there must be at least prob-ability that the scandal or harm can be averted or appreciably diminished by the provisional return to secular life. 31. Competent authority. (a) Ordinarily. Canon 653 gives the right for such action in lay institutes to the higher superior with the consent of his council. The right is therefore given by the ~ode also to provincials, even though the constitutions may affirm it only of the superior general. In prudence and if possible, the provincial should refer the case to the superior general or at least consult the latter. In a monastery of nuns, "the competent authority is the superioress with the consent of her council. (b) In a more urgent case. In a case in which the time re-quired for recourse to the superior general or provincial would imperil the avoidance of the scandal or injury, the competent authority is the local superior with the consent of his council and also the consent of the local ordinary. If it is impossible to have recourse to the local ordinary and the case will not admit _.3 Berutti, De Religiosis, 349; Bouscaren-Ellis, Canon La~w, 319. 290 September, 1957 DISMISSAL IN LAY INSTITUTES o~. delay, it is.safely probable that this action may be taken by the local superior with only the consent of his council.'~4 32. Final adjudication of the case. (a) Report. A report of the case should always be made out without delay and submitted to the authority competent for a final decision of the matter. The report is to contain the religious and family name of the subject, date, age, date of entrance, date of temporary or perpetual profession, house to which he was assigned at the time of the return to secular life, cause of this return, proofs and present state of this cause, a brief record of the past of the religious insofar as it is pertinent to the cause 6f his return and dismissal, the name and rank of the superior who effected the return, the fact that the consent of the council and of the local ordinary, when prescribed, was obtained; and, if the latter was not secured, the report is to state the reasons that'justified its omission. (b) Authority competent for a final decision. Canbn 653 states that the case is to be referred to the Holy See without delay. This canon, however, is to be interpreted in the light of the other canons on the competent authority for dismissal; and it is admitted doctrine that the authority competent for an ordinary dismissal by decree is competent also for the final decision in the case of a provisional return to secular life.~'~ Therefore, the case is to be referred, according to the nature of the institute and the vows of the subject, to the authority competent for dismissal by decree stated in nn. 2-5. 33. Effects. As soon as the provisional return is decided, the re-ligious puts off the religious habit and leaves the institute. The return to secular life is a provisional measure. It is not a dismissal and does not produce the effects of a dismissal. The competent authority mentioned above decides for or against dismissal and 24Cf. Tabera, 0p. tit., 14-1933-58; Goyeneche, De Religiosis, 221, note 31; Palombo, op. cir., n. 192; Schaefer, 0iL cir., n. 1609; O'Neill, The Dismissal of Religious in Temporary l/o~vs, 104. 25Cf. O'Neill, op. cir., 103-104; Schaefer, op. cir., n. 1636; Wernz-Vidal De Religiosis, 490, note 13; Bastien, o~0. cir., n. 645, 4; Palombo, op. cir., n. 195; Tabera, op. cir., 14-1933-57; Vermeersch-Creusen, Epitome luris Canonicl, I, n. 807. 291 JOSEPH F. GALLEN decrees the dismissal in the t~ormer case. The charitable subsidy is to be given to a religious woman who is provi~ionally sent back to secular lithe.2° SOME BOOKS RECEIVED [Only books sent directly to the Book Review Editor, West Baden College, West Baden Springs, Indiana, are included in our Reviews and Announcements. The following books were sent to St. Marys.] The 1957 National Catholic Almanac. Edited by Felician A. Foy, O.F.M. St. Anthony's Guild, Paterson, New Jersey. $2.00 (paper cover). Does God Exist? By Alfred M. Mazzei. Translated by Daisy Corinne Fornacca. Society of St. Paul, New York, N.Y. $3.50. St. Bernadette Speaks. By Albert Bessi~res, S.J. Translated by The Earl of Wicklow. Clonmore & Reynolds Ltd., 29 Kildare St., Dub-lin. 10/6. Queen of Heaven. By Ren~ Laurentin. Translated by Gordon Smith. Clonmore & Reynolds Ltd., 29 Kildare St., Dublin, 12/6. Le Ciel ou l'Enfer. II. l'Enfer. By Chanoine G. Panneton. Beau-chesne et ses Fils, Rue de Rennes, Paris. Methods of Prayer in the Directory of the Carmelite Reform of Touraine. By Kilian J, Healy, O. Carm. Institutum Carmelitanum, Via Sforza Pallavicini, 10, Rome. Some Philosophers on Education. Edited by Donald A. Gallagher. Marquette University Press, 1131 Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee 3, Wis-consin. $2.50 (paper cover). Wellsprings of the Faith. By Most Reverend John C. McQuaid, D.D. Clonmore & Reynolds Ltd., 29 Kildare St., Dublin. 18/-. The Reluctant Abbess. By Margaret Trouncer. Sheed and Ward, 840 Broadway, New York 3, New York. $3.75. Quadalupe to Lourdes. "By Frances Parkinson Keyes. Catechetical Guild Educational Society, St. Paul 2, Minnesota. $0.50 (paper cover). The Mystery of My Future. By Jean De Larhove. Society of St. Paul, 2187 Victory Blvd., Staten Island 14, New York. $2.50. Of the Imitation of Christ. By Thomas a Kempis. Translated by Abbot Justin McCahn. The New American Library of World Literature, Inc., 501 Madison Ave., New York 22, New York. $0:50 (paper cover). The Caiholic Booklist 1957. Edited by Sister Mary Luella, O.P. Rosary College, River Forest, Illinois. $0.75 (paper cover). ¯ _,6 Cf. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOt;S, September, 1956, 235-36. 292 Our Supernat:ural Organism Daniel J./~. Callahan, $.J. GOD IS THE author of all things. The more science ad-vances, the more does it disclose the wonders of His crea-tion. Even a superficial reading of a manual of biology or physics or chemistry or astronomy wrings from us the words of the Psalmist: "How great are thy works, O Lord. Thou hast made all things in wisdom; the earth is filled with thy riches" (Ps. 103:24 ). These divine masterpieces, especially as mani-fested in man, qualify us by analogy for the marvels of the supernatura! order. God gives life in the embryonic state and with it an or-ganism capable of developing the tiny creature into the pleni-tude of its specific perfection. The fundamental natural prin-ciple of this evolution is the vital principle within it, which energizes it and is the source of its least activity. Its separation from the bodily element would mean the termination of growth, deterioration, death. In us the human soul is the basic source of our natural life; its faculties or powers are the immediate cause of our vital activities and these in turn bring to perfec-tion our human life. To all this the supernatural is closely analogous as will appear from a brief study of the components of its organism. Sanctifying Grace Appropriately this may be styled the soul of the higher life in us. Only from divine revelation do we know its exis-tence and nature, and it will be useful to recall here what rev-elation tells us about this precious endowment. It is something most real; a spiritual quality inherent in our soul and of such an excellence'that only God could be its principal cause; it is a stable quality, an adornment abiding in the soul till forfeited through mortal sin; it is a totally free gift to which no one of us could lay claim and which transforms us into God:like 293 DANIEL J. M. (~ALLAHAN Review for Religious beings resembling our eternal Father and enabling us to share, in a finite manner, in His life. That life comprises the infinite contemplation;, love, and possession of His uncreated perfec-tion. To this no creature by its native powers could aspire. By a privilege entirely gratuitous God destines us for the immediate visiofi of Himself in heaven and adapts us ~or it through sanctifying grace. Attended by faith; hope, and charity such grace equips us to know, love, possess God, imperfectly, of course," as He knows, loves, and possesses Himself; and thus we enter into the divine life and become truly His children. And while this life is distinct from our natural life, it is not merely superimposed on the latter: it penetrates it through and through, elevating and transforming it. Leaving intact all the natural goodness that is ours, sanctifying grace imparts a new orientation to everything within us, establishes new relations to the Blessed Trinity, and inaugurates on earth the life of the blessed. To aid us in the apprehension of this prerogative, writers resort to many comparisons and illustrations. They liken the soul to a living image of the adorable Trinity., divinely impressed on the soul as the seal leaves its image on the wax, lavishing on it an entrancing beauty since the prototype and the artist is no other than God. Again such a soul is compared to a trans-parent body receiving the sun's rays and, all aglow" itself, radiating them in all directions; to a bar of steel plunged into a furnace and sharing the heat, brightness, and pliancy of the fire; to a branch engrafted into a plant, maintaining its identity while partaking of the life of the plant; to the union in us of soul and body where the soul quickens and energizes the body even as grace communicates a new life and effects our most intimate union with God. Finally, an analogy with the hypo-static union in Christ is introduced; and, though the soul's union with God is only accidental, yet it is the union of a substance with a substance; and, while the hypostatic union results in the God-man, the union through grace issues in a God-like being, 294 September, 1957 OUR SUPERNATURAL ORGANISM whose actions are performed at once by the Creator and His creature, even as in Christ His actions were shared in by both His divine and human nature. And though our union with God is neither hypostatic nor substantial in the proper sense, for we always retain our personality and the union is only accidental, it is not merely the intimacy of two friends, for it rests on a/physical quality abiding in the soul and on physical bonds intensifying and safeguarding that union. The three Divine Persons are immediately presefit to the soul in a com-pletely new way and are possessed and enjoyed by it. Though the precise nature of this extraordinary inhabitation continues to exercise theologians, we are assured that it is capable of indefinite expansion up to the last breath of life here below, and this in p.roportion to our surrender to the Holy Spirit through the removal of all barriers and the cultivation of the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Ghost. The Infused Virtues In the natural order our soul functions through its faculties or powers. It thinks through the intellect; .it loves through the will; it senses through our different senses. These faculties bestowed on us together with the soul, by means of their varied activities, are susceptible of tremendous development. In the supernatural order grace parallels the soul, and the infused virtues are its chief faculties. These emanate from sanctifying grace, elevate our mind and will, enable us to perform supernatural, meritorious deeds. Virtue may be described as a good habit designed for action. It is natural if it has been acquired through the repeti-tion of the same specific act and communicates facility in doing so; if directly granted by God and if it confers the ability to do something, it is called infused. The natural virtues facilitate nat-ural righte6usness; the infused confer the power to act on a superhuman level. These latter are usually divided into theologi-cal and moral. The former have God for their formal and principal material object; in the concrete they are faith, hope, and charity and unite the soul directly to God. The moral 295 DANIEL J. M. CALLAHAN Review for Religious virtues have for their objective some moral good distinct from God, serve to eliminate the hindrances to divine union and to stabilize it, and are commonly listed under the four cardinal vi£tues. The theological virtues certainly accompany sanctifying grace and integrate the process of justification, and it is the generally accepted doctrine that the moral virtues also are then bestowed. ¯ All of these virtues are susceptible of increment and 'do increase proportionally with the increase of grace, just as the branches of the tree ke~p pace with the expansion of the trunk. Apart from the complete loss of the virtue, may they diminish? In general, any activity that is discontinued or exercised bnly rarely tends to decline or even to cease. Venial sins, especially when frequent and deliberate, considerably impede the practice of virtue and thus diminish the facility previously attained. Neglect of actual graces may likewise occ~lsion the privation of such helps as notably conduce to acts of virtue and add vigor and polish to them. And though venial sins do not directly decrease or destroy the infused virtues, it remains true that such failings open the way for serious lapses and the destruction of th.e virtues. Do all grave sins deprive us of these? Faith is destroyed only through a mortal sin of infidelity, hope through the same and that of despair; charity and the infused moral virtues, through any mortal sin. Relative to the duration ot~ all such virtues, in the lost none of them persists; the theological remain in the souls in purgatory; in heaven there will be neither acts of faith nor of hope relative to God, and most probably not relative to objects distinct from Him. And whereas neither the moral virtues nor those of faith and hope will endure in the blessed, these will retain the virtue of charity and live a life of the purest actual love. The Gifts of the Holy Spirit There is unanimity among Catholic theologians about the existence of such gifts, but their specific nature is widely contro-verted. In accordance with the doctrine of St. Thomas (Summa, 296 September, ~957 OUR SUPERNATURAL ORGANISM I-II, q. 68, a. 3), the most prevalent opinion is that they are supernatural habits, distinct from the virtues, implanted in the soul conjointly with sanctifying grace, which impart a recep-tiveness, a docility to the impulse of the Holy Spirit, a more prompt and more generous cooperation with His grace. They would appear to be, at least in the early stages, not operative habits like the virtues, but rather dispositive, adjusting the soul for a better reaction to the divine intervention. Their func-tion, then, is that 0f perfecting the exercise of the virtues. There is no certainty about their number; and, while conferred simultaneously with grace, a more copious outpouring may be the fruit of the sacrament of confirmation. The docility issu-ing from these' gifts improves perceptibly through prayer for fidelity to grace, through a life of faith and recollection, through the cultivation of the moral virtues and due control over our passions, for unless these latter are consistently mortified, the inordinate attachments in the soul will hamper us in discerning, accepting, and responding to the inspirations of grace. We must combat the spirit of the world which is diametrically op-posed to the divine and school ourselves in prompt, magnani-mous compliance with God's will. The more complete our surrender' to Him, the more will He be pleased to enlighten and inflame us. Actual Grace just as in the natural order we cannot bring power into motion without the concurrence of the Almighty, so also in the supernatural. Such cooperation is known as actual grace to distinguish it from habitual grace previously considered. It is a transitory aid imparted by God, consisting in the illumina-tion of the mind and the urge of the will for the performance of a supernatural act. It sets the intellect and heart in motion and enables them to function on a superhuman level. In the concrete, it is a holy thought, a salutary incitement of the will, produced by God who directly influences our rational faculties, stimulating them to operate, and cooperating with them to 297 DANIEL J. M. CALLAHAN Review for Religious elicit a good thought and a salutary desire in keeping with the special need of the moment. The thought is most real and comes directly'from God; it is a holy thought, designed for the spiritual benefit of the individual. When we say "salutary desire," we understand any good act of the will, for instance, the love of good, hatred of evil, fear of divine punishment, sorrow for sin, joy 'in well-doing. It is a real act of the will. Antecedent to our activity God lovingly takes the initiative and continues to act within us and with. us for the accomplishment of a deed that will conduce to life eternal. This assistance is not permanent; it persists only while its purpose lasts; and it influences us in a moral way through attraction and persuasion and physically by adding energy to our intellectual faculties too weak to act of themselves. As religious we are to be profoundly penetrated with the conviction of our need of such divine assistance. It is necessary for the achievement of every supernatural act: for the prelim-inary acts of faith, hope, sorrow requisite for the remission of sin. The constant endeavor to resist temptations which assail even the just, as well as our steadfastness in good living, are the fruits of actual grace. Obviously, then, we have not the power to persevere in religion and even to reach perfection through our unaided strength. Christ's memorable words, "Without Me you can do nothing" (Jn. 15:6), are pertinent to the natural and supernatural levels. Everyone who attains the use of reason needs this grace and all such receive it. It proceeds from the love of God; the ordinary channels for its dispensation are the sacraments, prayer, and'our meritorious deeds; and the more generous our cooperation with grace received the more will be granted, for here, as in the entire economy of salvation, God takes the initiative, awaits our free reaction, and assures us that He will" bestow th~ necessary help for the completion of our project. Conformity to the divine will, consequent peace of soul, trust, and magnanimity are supremely important in the struggle for real sanctity. 298 September, 1957 OUR SUPERNATURAL ORGANISM Appreciation "If thou didst know the gift of God" (Jn. 4:19) spoke Jesus to the Samaritan woman, referring to the supernatural life which He communicates to us through His vivifying action, here compared to water springing from an unfailing source. Religious have totally consecrated themselves to God; to Him they belong entirely; and there must be in them the life that is His. In them the supernatural must always be dominant. It is a treasure to be courageously safeguarded even at the cost of sacrifice; it is an endowment to be zealously augmented; it is a life and life is essentially progressive. Cessation of growth soon induces recession. In the wake of tepidity and lethargy spiritual death follows closely. The law of spiritual gravity is to be counteracted through p.urity of intention at all times, through earnestness even in small affairs, through fervent, per-severing prayer, and through the frequent reception of the sacraments of penance and Holy Communion. "Walk in a manner worthy of the calling with whic'h you are called," wrote 'St. Paul to the Ephesians (4:1 ff.), "with all humility and meek-ness, with patience bearing with one another in love, careful to preserve the unity of the. spirit iri the bond of peace; one body and one 'Spirit . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is above all and .throughout all and in all." Surely a relevant injunction for all religious. OUR CONTRIBUTORS BONAVENTURE BALSAM is engaged in parish work at St. Anthony's Priory, 4640 Canal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana. JOSEPH F. GALLEN is professor of canon law at Woodstock Col-lege, Woodstock, Maryland. DANIEL J. M. CALLAHAN is profes-sor of ascetical and mystical theology at Woodstock College, Wood-stock, Maryland. 299 Survey ot: Roman Documen!:s R. ~. Smil:h, S.J. IN THIS survey only those documents will be considered which appeared in the ./Iota/lpostolicae Sedis (AAS) during the months of April and May, 1957. Hence all page references throughout the survey are to AAS of 1957 (v. 49). The African Missions On Easter Sunday, April 21, 1957 (AAS, pp. 225-48),. the Holy Father issued a new encyclical letter which is entitled Fidei Donum (TheGift of Faith) and which treats of Africa and its missions. After noting that man'.s gratitude for the gift of faith is best shown by spreading the light of Christ's truth, His Holi-ness remarks that while he is not unaware of the grave and pressing problems attending the spread of the Faith in all parts of the world, yet special attention is needed in the case of Africa, for this continent now finds itself on the threshold of its political and cultural maturity and faced with circumstances the import-ance of which is rivaled by nothing in the previous history of /~frica'. The Vicar of Christ then begins the first of the four sections into which the encyclical letter is divided. This first section is devoted to an over-all picture of the missionary scene in Africa. Most of the countries of the continent, the Pope says, are in the midst of profound social, economic, and political changes which will have a lasting effect on the fut.ure lives of these nations. The Church which has seen the rise and growth of so many nations cannot but be intensely interested in the peoples of Africa who are now attaining their civil rights. It is at this point that the Holy Father exhorts the coloniz-ing nations to grant civil rights to peoples who are prepared for them; and at the same time he urges the colonial peoples of 300 ROMAN DOCUMENTS Africa to be grateful .for .~vhat they have received from the vari-ous countries of Europe. Only such a harmonious attitude will exclude prejudice and exaggerated nationalism and will permit the peoples of Africa to experience the entire range of benefits which flow from the religion of Christ. Pius XII is especially concerned that in many countries of Africa atheistic materialism has been spreading the seed of its doctrine, thereby arousing jealousy between nations, inducing false perspectives in the matter of temporal prosperity, and excit-ing to rebellion. The presence of this atheistic materialism in Africa, thinks the Pontiff, is particularly grave owing to the fact that the peoples of Africa, because they wish to accomplish in a few years what ~he peoples of Europe took centuries to achieve, are psychologically vulnerable to the specious .promises which materialism offers. The H01y Father continues by remarking that of all the missionary regions of the world, Africa is the one with the greatest needs. African mission posts which have been estab-lished in the last ten or twenty years cannot expect a sufficient number of native clergy for a long time, while the missionaries in such stations are few and widely scattered throughout large regions where, moreover, non-Catholic religions are also spread-ing their doctrines. The gravity of the situation can be illustrated by one region of Africa where there are 2,000,000 inhabitants but only 50 priests whose energies, moreover, are completely absorbed in the care of the 60,000 persons already converted to Catholicism. Twenty more missionaries in such regions at the present time would mean, the Vicar of Christ sadly comments, the spreading of the banner of the cross in places which twenty years from now will be impossible of access. Moreover, twenty more missionaries would mean that the Church could educate in such regions a corps of African Catholics equipped to meet the social and political needs of the continent. Nor are difficulties lacking in African missionary centers which have long been established. Such centers too feel the 301 R. F. SMITH Review for Religious extreme lack of missionaries. Moreover, the bishops and vicars apostolic of Africa are obliged to provide for their flocks a full Catholic life; and this necessitates in turn schools, colleges, social institutes, all the modern communication arts. Such needs can be met only by a great flow of material and apostolic help to the continent of Africa where 85,000,000 human beings are still attached to the practice of paganism. The Holy Father centers the second part of his encyclical around the theme that the problems of the Church in Africa are not merely local difficulties, but are of vital concern to the entire Mystical Body. Bishops, those preeminent members of the Mystical Body, should have a special concern for the Church in Africa, for they as the legitimate successors of the apostles retain the duty of preaching to all nations. Moreover, continues the Holy Father, there ig not a Catholic in the world who should not be interested in the problems of the Church in Africa. Nothing that is characteristic of the Church should be absent from the mental outlook of the individual Catholic. If then catholicity or universality is one of the characteristics of that Church which is the mother of all nations, breadth of outlook must also mark the individual Catholic. In the third part of the encyclical the Holy Father dis-cusses the means by which Catholics can aid the missions of Africa. ~The first means is that of continual and earnest prayer. The best prayer, of course, will be that which Chris~, our High Priest, daily offers on our altars. And while the faith-ful should be instructed that it is good to offer Mass for their private intentions, still they should also be taught to give atten-tion to those petitions with which the Mass is primarily and neces-sarily concerned and "which include the we~Ifare and propaga-tion of the entire Church. To prayer must be added alms or material help, for present needs far exceed the help now being given. The faithful in other parts of the world should compare their conditions with the 302 September', 1957 ROMAN DOCUMENTS situations of missionary countries and see who are the real need~i of the Church. Hence the Vicar of Christ urges that each Catholic make an examination of conscience to consider if there is not something tl~at can be given up in order that material aid might be given to the missions. The third way of helping Africa is through the fostering of vocations to missionary work.~ Bishops should train their flocks in such a way that there will always be members of that flock ready to heed the Lord's command i~ Genesis 12:1 to leave one's land and the house of one's father. Dioceses with a suffi-ciency of priests should give of their workers to the missions; and even dioceses which themselves suffer from a scarcity of priestly workers can still offer their mite as did the widow in the gospel story. The problem of missionary recruitment, however, can be met only by the ~oncerted work of all the bishops who should encourage the Missionary Union of the Clergy, foster the work of pontifical missionary associations, and be aware of the needs of those religious institutes which do missionary work but which cannot increase the number of their vocations without th~ under-standing assistance of the local ordinary. Finally, the Holy Father approves the practice of a diocese lending some of its priests to missions for a limited time. The fourth part' of the encyclical consists of a brief conclu-sion in which the Holy Father repeats that he is as interested in all the missions as he is in those of Africa. To all missionaries of the entire world he extends his gratitude and his congratula-tions and exhorts them to labor fervently in the work to which they have been called. Lenten and Easter Messages On March 5, 1957 (AAS, pp. 208,15), the Holy Father gave his usual Lenten allocution to the parish priests and Lenten preachers of Rome. The present year, begins the Holy Father, marks the fifth anniversary ot: the inauguration of the movement 303 R. F. SMITH Review for Religious "Fora Better World." After detailing the work accomplished in the diocese of Rome during that period and after noting the things yet to be done, His Holiness then urges his listeners to sow the seed that is the word of God. To preach anything but the word of God, he warns them, is to sow destruction. He gives special attention to the matter of Sunday preaching, insist-ing that nothing can achieve so much as this regular and familiar custom so long in use in the Church. Finally,. he recalls to his listeners the fact that the true sower of the good seed is God and that they are but instruments in His hand; what changes then would sweep the world if all who preached did so as ones truly coming with the power of God. The Holy Father's Easter message, delivered on April 21, 1957 (AAS pp. 276-80), was a meditative reflection on the phrase "O truly blessed night" of Holy Saturday's E, xultet. The night preceding the Resurrection, His Holiness begins, was one of desolation, tears, and darkness: Christ is dead; His flock is scattered; all is apparently in ruin. Nevertheless, even in that night there are signs of the dawn to come: the body of Christ suffers not the slightest taint of corruption and Mary prays in quiet confidence and expectation. That night before the Resurrection is also a symbol, adds the Vicar of Christ, of the night in which modern men find themselves: they must live in fear; their intelligences are cap-tured by error; immorality has reached a new depth. Neverthe-less, there are signs of a new day dawning. Science is provi-dentially multiplying the means to a fuller and freer life, while technology is providing the way to make these means available on a large scale. Moreover, men are now beginning to realize that the night of modern times is here because Christ has again been betrayed and crucified. Day will finally come to modern man when Christ restores grace to the individual soul and takes His rightful place in human social life. The Holy Father con-cludes his Easter message to mankind with a prayer that Christ may send the angel of the Resurrection to remove the obstacles 304 September, 1957 ROMAN DOCUMENTS which men have built up :but which they are now powerless to remove. To Hospital Sisters On April 24, 1957 (AAS, pp. 291-96), Pius XII spoke to some 2,000 Italian hospital sisters who had met for the first time in a national meeting to discuss their common problems. The Pontiff began with a forceful statement of the part that religious women play in the life of the Church today, remarking that many branches of the Church's apostolate, especially those concerned with education and with works of chariiy, would be inconceivable without the existence of religious sisters. This said, the Holy Father then began to discuss with them the ideals of their relig-ious life. It is.a truth of our faith, he notes, that virginity is higher than the married state; for through virginity the soul achieves an immediate relationship with God that is one of absolute and indissoluble love. The virginal soul takes everything that God has given her to be a wife and mother and offers it back to Him in a complete and perpetual holocaust. In order to love God, the vi,rginal soul does not reach Him through other loves: noth-ing is interposed between such a soul and God. Hence it is that a religious must be a true spouse of our Lord, uniquely, indissolubly, and intimately united with Him. Hospital sisters then must take care that their assistance to the sick does not interfere with their spirit of absolute and perpetual devotion to God, guarding against all disordered activity which leaves them neither time nor repose for prayer to Christ. They must also guard themselves against long and frequent withdrawals from common life, that strong protection of the interior life. And they must watch carefully over their spirit of individual and collective poverty, making certain that their hospitals do not assume the character of merely money-making organizations. Turning now to their work for the sick, the Vicar of Christ notes that the existence of special institutions for the care of the 305 R. F. SMITH Review for Religious sick stemmed historically from the charity of the Church. Even today, when so many are interested in the care of the suffering, the Church will never abandon her task of caring' for the sick, for no one can take the place of the Church at the side of one who besides a body also possesses a soul whose needs and claims are often greater than those of the body. It is for this reason that the Holy Father urges hospital sis-ters to continue their work. Besides being perfect religious, they must also know and use the latest scientific methods and ap-paratus. They must train themselves to a motherly kindness that is linked with a strong element of firmness. They must lead a fully dynamic life and still retain their calm and serenity. Here the Holy Father adds that superiors must see to it that community time-schedules and practices do not make the sisters' work ineffi-cient and more difficult. In conclusion the Holy Father dwells at some length on the recommendation that the sisters train themselves always to see Christ in each of their patients. If they do so, he notes, then it will be easy to pass from the chapel to the sick room; religious observance and care for the sick will not interfere one with the other; and there will be no interruption of the sisters' union with Christ. The Holy Father then blessed the assembled sisters and concluded ~ith a remark that all hospital sisters will treasure: "The Church, the Pope, are depending on you: on your complete dedication, on your abilities, and on your spirit of love." Miscellaneous Matters Under the date March 19, 1957 (AAS, pp. 176-77), the Holy Father issued the rnotu proprio Sacram Co~nmunionern in which he provided that henceforth local ordinaries (with the exception of vicars general) may permit daily celebration of after-noon Mass provided the spiritual good of a notable part of the faithful warrants such a permission. His Holiness also further mitigated the Eucharistic fast. The drinking of water does not 306 September, 1957 ROMAN DOCUMENTS break the fast'; and the time element for the Eucharistic fast is the following: Before the celebration of Mass in the case of priests and before the reception of Communion in the case of the faithful, solid food and alcoholic drink must be abstained from for three hours, while non-alcoholic drink must be abstained from for one hour. These time regulations extend both to morning and afternoon celebration of Mass and reception of Communion; and they must also be observed by those celebrating Mass at midnight or at the early hours of the morning as well as by those receiving Communion at such times. Finally, the Holy Father grants to the sick, even those not confined to bed, the .permission to take non-alcoholic drinks as well as liquid or solid medicine at any time before the celebration of Mass or the reception of Communion: Three documents of April and May of this year concerned the saints. The first of these is an apostolic letter of the Roman Pontiff which is dated June 8, 1956 (AAS, pp. 199-200), and which appoints St. Dominic Savio the patron of all choir boys. The other two documents are decrees of the Sacred Congre- - gation of Rites, both being dated January 22, 1957 (AAS, pp. 251-56). In the first of these decrees the congregation affirms the heroic virtue of the Venerable Servant of God Sister Mary Celine of the Presentation, professed nun of the Second Order of St. Francis (1878-97); the second decree affirms the heroic virtue of the Vdnerable Servant of God Sister Teresa of Jesus Journet Ibars, foundress of the Congregation of Little Sisters of the Indigent Aged (1843-97). Priests will be interested in the Holy Father's letter, dated March 25, 1957 (AAS, pp. 272-75), and sent to Cardinal Feltin of Paris on the.occasion of the 300th anniversary of the death of Jean-Jacques Olier, founder of the Society of St. Sulpice. - Olier, the Holy Father notes, recalls to the present generation the truth that the greatness and power of a priest consists in being a man of God and a man of ihe Church. As a man of God the priest must have two indispensable qualities: prayer 307 R. F. SMITH Review for Religious exercised especially through meditation and the Divine Office; and asceticism, manifested principally by a perfect chastity of heart and body. The priest then must always be aware that union with God is the indispensable prerequisite for apostolic fecundity and that the cross is the only instrument of salvation: evil is still cast out only by prayer and fasting. As a man of the Church, concludes the Holy Father, the priest must realize that all personal sanctity and apostolic effectiveness must be founded on constant and-exact obedience to the hierarchy. ¯ Several documents of the period surveyed are concerned in one way or another with matters educational and intellectual. On March 24, 1957 (AAS, pp. 281-87), the Holy Father addressed a group of 50,000 college students of Rome and gave them some detailed advice on their studies, urging them to dedicate them-selves completely to the pursuit of truth. A month later on April 25, 1957 (AAS, pp. 296-300), His Holiness spoke to the members of the eleventh plenary assembly of Pax Romana, telling them that no Catholic can be indifferent to the new world com-munity now in process of formation. This is especially true, he says, of Catholics engaged in intellectual work, for it is their task to spread Catholic truth and to give it practical application in all areas of human activity. Educational and intellectual matters also figure in two decrees issued by the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities. In the first of these decrees, dated-November 4, 1956 (AAS, pp. 219-20), provision is made for the canonical erection of a faculty of theology in Sophia University in Tokyo. In the other decree, dated December 20, 1956 (AAS, p. 308), . a faculty of philosophy was canonically erected in the Catholic University of Quito. Thre~ documents of April and May of this year pertain to political matters. On February 16, 1957 (AAS, pp. 201-5), a c-onvgntion was ratified betweeri the Holy See and the German Federal State of North-Rhine-Westphalia concerning the estab-lishment of a new diocese of Essen. On March 28, 1957 (AAS, 308 September, 1957 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS pp. 287-88), the Pontiff:addressed a group of young Berlin Catholics, telling them that the state must always respect the rights of individuals and of families and adding a plea for a united Europe and for the moral conditions without which such a union can never be realized. On Aprii 28, 1957 (AAS, pp. 300-301), the Pope gave a brief address on Communism, empha-sizing that the events of the last fdw months have clearly shown' to all men the aberrations of that way of life. Two other documents may be mentioned by way of conclud-ing this survey. On March 6, 1957 (AAS, pp. 215-17), the Holy Father sent a radio message to the school children of the United States exhorting them to be generous in contributing help for the needy children of other countries. And on Apri'l 23, 1957 (AAS, pp. 289-90), His Holiness spoke to a small group of Paris lawyers, extolling their° dignity as men devoted to the defense of law and of humanity and remarking that their profession is noteworthy as showing the value of humanism in a world where technical and scientific education is at a premium. Questions and Answers [The following answers are given by Father Joseph F. GaIlen, S.J., professor of canon law at Woodstock Coll~ge, Woodstock, Maryland.'] 29 Are the professed of temporary vows obliged by canon law to return to the motherhouse two months before perpetual profession, remain there, and prepare for this profession? No. You are applying to the professed of temporary vows what an instruction of the Sacred Congregation-of Religious, November 3, 1921, had commanded only for novices employed in the external works of a congregation during the second year of noviceship. The code does not even command a retreat before perpetual profession. The constitutions almost universally prescribe such a retreat, and the usual duration is eight full. days. A shorter retreat is also found, for" 309 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Review for Religioue example, five or six days. It seems evidvnt enough that the constitu-tions or customs should command a retreat before perpetual profession. It would also be reasonable and profitable to prescribe a longer period of greater recollection .before perpetual profession. REVIEW FOR RE-LIGIOUS, September, 1953, 267; November, 1955, 313. --30-- Hasn't the movement of renovation and adaptation suggested any new laws whatsoever concerning poverty? This movement is primarily spiritual, theological, educational, formative, and apostolic. It is only very secondarily canonical or legal. Therefore, in the matter of poverty the emphasis of the move-ment is on the striving for detachment that. leads to an intensified love of God (REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, November, 1955, 302; September, 1956, 269-70). No new laws on poverty have been enacted by the Holy See, and no important suggestion for a new law has been made by authors with regard to the poverty of solemn profession. In the 'matter of the poverty of institutes of simple vows, suggestions have been.maple for inclusion in constitutions that are being origitxally approved or revised. The purpose of these suggestions is to make the poverty of simple p*ofession at least approach that of solemn profession. They are founded on the principle that in itself it is more in accord with evangelical poverty to give away one's property than to retain it for life and to be deprived or restricted in the right of acquiring property for oneself than to retain this right in an almost unlimited manner. The su.ggestions are thus reducible to two headings. 1. Right of acquisition. A limitation of the right of acquisition is according to the mind of the Sacred Congregation of Religious. In new or revised constitution~, congregations of men or women may in-clude an article of the following type: "After profession, whether of temporary or perpetual ~,ows, the religious acquire for themselves only property received as an inheritance or legacy from relatives to the second degree. All other temporal goods are acquired for the con-gregation." This practice may be followed only by institutes that have such a provision in their approved constitutions. An article of this nature would effect a purer poverty and would also eliminate some practical 310 September, 1957 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS difficulties and abuses. The meaning of relativ.es may be confined to blood relatives or extended also to relatives by marriage. The degrees would be computed according to canon law. 2. Giving away or renouncing one's property. New or revised con-stitutions of women may contain an ~rticle of the following type: "A professed sister, whether of temporary or perpetual vows, may not alienate the ownership of her property by a free gift effective during her lifetime. However, the professed of perpetual vows may (or, are counselled to) give all the property they own to the congregation under the form of a dowry." The similar article for institutes of men would be: "A professed religious, vShether of temporary or per-petual vows, may not alienate the ownership of his property by a free gift effective during his lifetime. However, the professed of perpetual vows may (or, are counselled toI give all the property they own to the congregation under the condition that the capital sum will be restored to them if they should leave or be dismissed." Either of the practices of the preceding paragraph, since they are not contrary to the code, may be ~ollowed even if not contained in the constitutions. The second sentence in Zither article may be introduced by an apt spiritual phrase, e. g., lCor their greater sancti-fication, for their greater poverty, for the greater purity of their evangelical poverty. There would be no difficulty also in applying either practice to the professed of temporary vows. In both cases the capital sum of the property will be restored to a religious who leaves, is excluded from further profession, or is dismissed. This fact would pro.tect the right of the religious to leave, if he wishes to do so, aad ,~iould also prevent want in the case of a departure, both of which constitute the purpose of the retention of property in congregations. Neither practice would prevent the religious from applying part or all of the income oa his property to other good purposes, e. g., to needy relatives, nor, with the permissioa of the Holy ~;ee, all or part of the capital sum of his personal property. However, it does not seem contrary to the mind of the Sacred Congregation for new or revised constitutions not merely to permit or counsel but to impose either practice with regard to all the personal property of a religious (REvIsw FOP, RELIGIOUS, September, 1953, 258-59; Escudero, /Iota et Documenta Congressus Generalis de Statib'us Per[ectionis, I, 377; Muzzarelli, ibid., 430-31). 311 ~UEsTIONS AND ~NSWERS ~31m What is the law for the last Gospel according to the simplified rubrics? The last Gospel is always that of St. John except in the third Mass on Christmas and low Masses on Palm Sunday at which the palms are not blessed. Cf. Bugnini-Bellocchio, De Rubricis ad Sira-pliciorem Formam Redi#endis, 69; Bugnini, The Simpli/ication of the Rubric, s, 113; J. B. O'Connell, Simpii[yin# the Rubrics, 71; The Cele-bration o[ Mass, 178. What Mass may be said on the Saturday of Our Lady (S. Maria in Sabbato)? The Mass of the Saturday of Our Lady; the Daily Mass of the Dead and any votive Mass that is not of the BlesSed Mother, but both of these, if low, are forbidden during the three periods of January 2-5; January 7-12; and Ascension-Vigil of Pentecost; and the Mass of an occurring simple feast or mere commemoration, e. g., on Jan-uary 5, 19; July 13, 27; August 3; September 28; October 5, 26 in the ordo of the Universal Church for 1957. As stated above, the only Mass of the Blessed Mother permitted is that of S. Maria in Sabbato. Cf. Wuest-Mullaney-Barry Matters Liturgical, n. 252. --33-- What should be done if a check in a small amount is received for your own personal, use? Endorse the check and drop it in the treasurer's box. The inten-tion of such a donor is certainly not that the religious should sin by using the money without permission. Neither are we to presume that a donor intends that the religious should make use of the gift in a way that is contrary to the greater perfection of the religious. Externs are fully conscious that the religious is in the state of perfection and that his life should be distinguished by renunciation and self-denial. They are readily scandalized at the lack of these qualities. If you have any material necessity, the more perfect time to ask for it is not on the occasion of receiving a gift. Cf. gEVlEW FOg gELIG~OUS, January, 1949, 39. 312 Book Reviews [Material for this department should be sent to Book Review Editor, REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, West Baden College, West Baden Springs, Indiana.] THE ROMAN CATACOMBS AND THEIR MARTYRS. By Lud-wig Hertling, S.J., and Engelb~rt Kirschbaum, S.J. Translated from the German by M. Joseph Costelloe, S.J. Pp. 224. The Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee I. 1956. $3.50. It is a pleasure to ir~troduce this excellent hook to readers of the REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS. The subject is nowhere so well presented, to my knowledge, within the compass of one modest volume. It is com-petent; it is well ordered; it is readable; it is warm with the sympathies of the Christian tradition of culture. Archaeology, in all its branches, has a remarkable appeal to many people today, no doubt becauseit brings to them a new and vivid revelation.of the community of human nature with itself. The catacombs of Rome, with their touching expression of the pi.eties of our forefathers in the faith, reveal to Christians the communion of saints. A Catholic feels wonderfully at home in these ancient resting places of our dead. The authors are professors of ecclesiastical history and of achae-ology, respectively, in the Gregorian University and scholars of estab-lished authority in their fields. Father Kirschbaum was one of the four commissioned by Pius XII to investigate the reputed site, under the high altar of St. Peter's, of the apostolic tomb. A brief account of the results Of their quest is among the points of major interest in this book. Father Costelloe'meets with ease the two great exigencies of the translator's art, faithfulness to the thought of his author and to the idiom of his reader. A skilled initiate in Roman archaeology, he can write so clearly about these matters which he understands so well. With the praiseworthy permission of Fathers Hertling and Kirsch-baum, he has added his own notes to theirs and some quite new matter in the body of the book, known through the advance reports of explorations yet unpublished. By this positive contribution, he gives to English readers a welcome revision as well as a sound version of the original. 313 BOOK REVIEWS Review' for Religious The scope of the book may be indicated by running down the titles of the chapters: The Exploration of the Catacombs;. The Ceme-teries; The Tombs of the Popes; The Tombs of the Martyrs; The Tombs of the Apostles; The Persecutions; On the Way to Martyrdom; The Eucharist; Baptism; The People of God; The Art of the Cata-combs; The Creed of Catacombal Art. Forty-five plates and eight figures make an important complement to the text. By some fault of printing, twoor three of them, in my copy, are rough to the touch. Generally, the publisher has done 'a good job, and at a remarkably low price.--ED~;~,g R. SMOTH~P,S, S.J. FRANCIS OF THE CRUCIFIED. By Myles Schmitt, O.F.M.Cap. Pp. 152. The Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee 1. 1956. $3.00. Father Myles Schmitt, of St. Francis Capuchin College, Washing-ton, D. C., offers his readers a series of conference-chapters on the Franciscan way of perfection. Writers of general treatises on spiritual theology, such as Tanquerey and de Guibert, can present a .particular way of perfection only in skeletal form. Father Schmitt develops at suitable length the Franciscan way. At the same time, he is constantly concerned to relate it to the Christian way. For, at root, all Christian perfection is one, no matter the diversity of ways proposed for arriv-ing at it. In a way reminiscent of Gerald Vann's The Heart of Man, Father Schmitt organizes the life of perfection around the Beatitudes. His book is not as complete and detailed as Theodosius Foley's Spiritual Conferences for Religious Based on the Franciscan Ideal. Nor does it follow the life of St. Francis as closely as de Tour's Franciscan Perfection. But his choice of the Beatitudes as an organizing principle keeps the main line of argument simple, strong, and progressive and still gives him room enough to touch on a variety of subjects. Father Schmitt is especially good at describing the spiral move-merit of growth in perfection. Not only must ofie try to live more and more in accordance with his vision of the ideal; but, at the same time, one's vision must grow correspondingly in depth and p~netration. This spiral movement is particularly clear in St. Francis's religious life which began with what might be called an "inaugural vision" and grew as that vision' deepened and matured. Father Schmitt takes great pains .to delineate the initial vision of the Franciscan way, to map out 314 September, 1957 BOOK REVIEWS the s~ag'es of progress of that vis~ion, and to relate to it all growth in perfection. Basically, then, the Franciscan must focus his attention on the imitation of Christ crucified through a living out of the gospel life as envisaged by the Beatitudes. The foundation of this life is poverty leading to that poverty of personality called humility. Keeping before his eyes his nothingness in the presence of God, the~ Franciscan makes a sacrifice of himself and .thus fulfills simple justice. With mercy and simplicity, he takes on the role of peace-maker, courageous!y overcoming the opposition of a world set against Christ and at war ,with itself. His is a life of love, of devotion to the Eucharist, of love of Mary sorrowful. And oil such is his .vision, his necessary response will be apostolic action. Obviously the book's usefulness is not limited to Franciscans. Inasmuch as all the means proposed are the common heritage of Christi

Issue 12.1 of the Review for Religious, 1953. ; Review t:or ~eligious Volume XII January December, 1953 Publlshed'at ~ THE COLLEGE PRESS Topeka, Kansas , "Edited by THE JESUIT FATHERS SAINT MARY'S COLLEGE St. Marys, Kansas REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS is indexed in ÷he CATHOLIC PERIODICAL INDEX ¯ The C rt:husi ns Jerome Breunig, S.J. ~"HE centuries-old Carthusian Order is breaking ground in the | NewWorld and the eyes of America are watching with interest. Through the generosity of a benefactress and with the approval of the Bishop of Burlington, the Most Rev. Edward F. Ryafi~, a pio-neer band, consisting of two Carthusian priests and two lay brothers with some Americancandid~ates, has established the first ~ommunity at Sky Farm near Whitingham in the Vermont hills. The very name Carthusian is pronounced, with reverence on Catholic lips, and in .many minds it represents the ultimate in austerity and deep spiritual-ity. The coming of the Carthusians brings many questi~ons to mind. Is there place for them today? Aren't they passe, a respected' relic of the past? Just how old are they? Who founded them and why? Do they differ from the Trappists? What do they do? What did they do? How do they live? Is it true that they do not eat meat, that they do not heat their rooms, that they always wear a hairshirt? Are there Carthusian nuns? Many of these and similar questions are answered in the Apos-tolic Constitution of Pius XI, Umbratilem, in the booklet, The Car-thusian Foundation in America, and in tw~o recent books that com.- plement each other: The Cartbusians, which gives a detailed factual' description ,of their life, and The White; Paradise, which is a glowing account of his visit to the chartethouse ~it La Valsainte in.Switzer-land by the gifted autho£-conv~rtI, Peter van der Meer de Walcheren. Mo~t of the information in this article is taken from these four sources. Any questioning of the validity; and modern relevance of the Carthusians should be cut short by Umbratilem, the Constitution issued on July 8, 1924, when the Statutes of the Carthusian Order were. approved in conformity with the new dode of Canon Law. This important document on the contemplative life states clearly at the, outset that Carthusians h~ive chosen the better part, and holds up their life to the, admiration and imitation of all. ".All those, who, according to their .rule~ lead a life of solitude 'remote from the din and follies of" the world, and who not only ~3 JEROME BREUNIG Reoiew for Religious assiduously cbntemplate the divine mysteries and the ~ternal truths, and pou~ forth ardent.and continual prayers to God that his king-- dom may flourish and be daily spread more widely, but who also atone for the sins of other men still more than for their own by mortification, prescribed or voluntary, of mind and body--such indeed must be said to have choser~ the better part, like~ Mary of Bethany. "For no more perfect state and rule of life than that *can be pro-posed for men to take up and embrace, if the Lord calls them to it. Moreover, by the inward holiness of those who lead the solitary life in the silence of the cloister and by their most intimate union with Gbd, is kept brightly shining the halo of' that holiness which the spotless Bride of Jesus Christ holds up to the admiration and imita- ~tion of all." The document also mikes it clear that there is need for Carthu- .sians today. "For, if ever it was needf_ul that there should be ancho; rites of that sort in the Church of God it is most specially expedient nowa'days "when we see so (nany Christians-living without a thought for the things of the next world and utterly regardless of their eter-nal salvation,° giving rein to their desire for earthly pelf and the pleasures of the flesh an'd adopting and exhibiting publicly as well as in their private life pagan manners altogether opposed to the Gospel. ¯ . . It is, besides, easy to understand how they who assiduously fulfil the duty of prayer and penance contribute much l~ore to the increase of the Church and the welfare of mankind than those who labo~ in tilling the Master's field; for unless the former drew down from heaven a shower of divine graces to water the field that" is being tilled, the evangelical laborers would reap forsooth from their toil a more Scanty crop." The Founder An authentic hunger for God led a diocesan priest-educator in the eleventh century to formulate a" way of life that h'appily blends community life with thelife of solitude and keeps the advantages of each form. This life was first put into practice in 1082 by the same priest and six companions at Chartreuse in the Alps of Dauphin~, in Southern France, and endures to our day. From the extant r~cord of tributes after his death, this priest, whom we know as St. Bruno, was one of the great men of his time. Besides noting Bruno's talents as a preacher, writer, and educator, these tributes single out three vir-tues for which the saint was conspicuous: spirit of prayer, extreme January, 1953 THE CARTHUSIANS mortification, and filial devotion to Our Lady, virtues also conspicu-ous in his Order. Born in Cologne, St. Bruno (1030-i l~J)'studied at the episco-pal school at Rbeims. After his ordination he remained at this school for 25 Years as '.teacher~, principal, and "diocesan superintendentl) of schools. After a short term as chancellor of the diocese he evaded the efforts of the clerg~ to make him their bishop by "~scaping" to Chartreuse in 1082. In .I090 Pope Urban II called his former teacher, St. Bruno, to Rome to be his counsellor. The orphaned community wavered in their vocation for a time and later even deserted by.following their founder to Rome, but after a year they returned to their hermitages at Chartreuse. Though Sty. Bruno made the ground plan for the Carthusian Order, it was the fifth general, Guigo the Venerable (1109-1136) wh6 xvrote the Consuetudines, the first Statutes of the Order. "The Consuetudines are the Carthu-sian gospel, Guigo our evangelist and Saint Bruno our founder and lawgiver" (The Carthusians, 17). The Life of Solitude In Rome is a famous statue of St. Bruno by~Houdon. It is so lifelike, the comment is: "It would speak if his rule did not compel him to silence." Silence and solitude, so essential to the Cartbusian life, are insured by providing each monk with a separate hermitage consisting of four distinct rooms and an enclosed ghrden plot. There is a storeroom and work shop, usually on the first floor, and, above, an ante-chamber called the Ave Maria, because it honors a statue of, Our Lady, and an "'inner chamber" or living room. A private wash-room is also provided. In the cell proper the monk has a prayer-stall, desk and book cas~, a bed, and a small table for meals. Except on Sundays and feast days the meals are brought to an opening in each cell. There is never any breakfast and m~at'is never permitted even in sickness. From September 14 to Easter the evening meal is cut down to a collation of dry bread and whatever is the most com-mon drink of the country. Penitential as it is; the diet seems to insure longevity rather than shorten life. The cell is the monk's "living toom." Except for community exercises and the occasional recreation periods the monk never leaves his hermitage. He lives for God and God alone. Here he devotes whole hours to study, to spiritual reading, and to prayer, including mental prayer, the part of the Divine Office not said in choir, the JEROME BREUNIG . Reoieto for Religious Office of Our Lady. and sometimes the Office of the Dead¯ Since "the harp needs a rest,", th~ monk relaxes from time to time with light manual work such as sawing wood for his fire, cultivating his gar-den. making religious articles, and caring for the hermitage. No siesta is permitted and the night's sleep is always broken into two periods of about three and a half hours each by the night Offce. The Comrnunit~ Life The community life which tempers the solitude provides a~ frame-work with a fixed daily'order and sustains the courage of each monk by mutual good example. 'jBrother helped by brother-makes a strong city." The main daily communal exercises are the chanting of the night Office and of Vespers and the conventual Mass. On Sundays and feast days the rest of the Office except Compline is-chanted, meals arc taken in the refectory, and there is a recreation period. Besides there is a weekly walk outside the enclosure.- ,This period is called, the spatiarnenturn and lasts about three and a half hours. Dom I.e Masson an outstanding general of the order'(1675~- 1703). says of this exercise: "It is only with the greatest reluctance that I excuse from the spatiarnentum, and then. on!y to tbe aged. So great, it appears to me. is the utility of this walk for good both of body and soul . More easily and willingly would I exempt a car-thusian monk from the night Office for some days, or from fasts, of th~ Order. than from the spatiarner~tum." (The Cartbusians. 62.) What They Did Onl.y eternity will unfold the~ contribution of the Carthuslan Order to~ the glory, ~: God- and .the salvation of souls. Even in recorded history the order is eminent in providing the Church with saints, beati, and saintly bishops, archbishops, and a few cardinals. Perhaps the greatest s!ng[e contribution is the'treasure of writings in ascetical and m~stical theology. The only wealth of any kind in a charterbouse was to be found in the library. Scbolarship'was always held in high esteem and the monks helped enrich other libraries as well as their own ldy providing both copyists and eminent writers. Besides St. Bruno,' who is said to have written bi~ famou~ commen~ ¯ tary on the Epistles of St. Paul when at Chartreuse, the list of writers includes Ludolf of Saxony, whose Vita Cbris~ti was so influential for centuries~ Dionysius the Carthusian called the Ecstatic Doctor, who has written more than St: Augustine; John Lansperg, who ~_~te of Devotion to the Sacred Heart before St: Margaret Mary l and Lau- danuar~t, 1953 THE CARTHUSIANS rentius Surius, whose Vitae still help supplement the work of the ~3011andists. The official document of the Church Ur~bratilem is quite articu-late about the contribution of the Carthusians to the. religious life. "In his great kindness, God, who is ever attentive to the needs and well-being of his Church, chose Bruno. a man of eminent sanctity, for the work of bringing the contemplative life back to the glory of it~ original integrity: To that intent Bruno founded the Carthusian Order. imbued it thoroughly with his own spirit and provided it with those.laws which might efficaciously induce its members to ad, ,vance speedily along the way of inward sanctity and of the most rigorous penance, to the preclusion of every sort of exterior, ministr) and office: laws which would also impel th~em to persevere with steadfast hearts in the same austere and hard life. And it is a recog-nised fact that through nearly nine hundred years the Carthusians have 'so wel! retained the spirit of their Founder, Father "and Law- , giver that unlike other religious bodies, their Order has never in'~o long a space of time needed any amendment, or, as they say, reform." The badge of the order is appropriate. It is a globe surrounded by~ a cross and seven stars, with the motto: Star crux dum votoitur orbis terrarum The cross remains firm while the world keeps spinning around. If, persecution is a mark of Christ's followers, the Carthusians can certainly, be identified. "They have persecuted Me. they will also persecute you.'" Three Carthusian priors .were among the proto-martyrs of Henry VIII: fifteen more mohks died on the scaffold or starved to death in prison during the English persecution which practically suppressed the order in that country.~ Spain pre-vented a Carthusian foundation in Mexico in 1559, compelled the charterhouses to separate from the order in 1784, and suppressed them in 1835. The, French Revolution was the greatest blow. In ",1789 there were about 122 charterhouses. Almost all,of-them were suppressed, first in France and then throughout Europe as the French armies over-ran the continent. The restored houses in France were again disrupted in 1901 as a result of the Association Laws. Tile. Italian houses were suppressed during the course of the Risorgimento. The Carthusian Order in 1607 had about 260 houses with 2,500 choir monks and 1,300 lay brothers and donn~s. At the pres-ent time there are 18 established charterhouses witil a total of over 600 members. There are four charterhouses in France, five in Italy and Spain, and one each in Switzerland, Jugoslavia, Germany, and England. 7 January, ) 953 The Carthusian Nuns In 1245 Blessed John of Spain,, Prior of,the Charterhouse of Montrieux, was ordered to adapt the Carthusian Rule for a group of nuns at the Abbey of Pr~bayon in Provence. Since then there have never been more than ten convents for Carthusian nuns. The nuns; live in private rooms not separate buildings, have two recreations a day, eat in a common refectory, and are not obliged to wear the hair-shirt. They spend eleven hours a day in prayer, meditation, and work, and are allowed eight hours, sleep. The nuns have always been distinguished for their austere sanctity and strict observance. Out-standing among them ar~ Blessed Beatrix of Ornacieux and St. Rose-line of Villaneuve. Both lived durin'g the fourteenth century. The body of the latter is still incorrupt. At present there are four con-vents for nuns, two in France and two in Italy. BOOKS ABOUT THE CARTHUSIANS The following can be obtained from The Carthusian Foundation, Sky Farm, Whitingham, Vermont: The'Church and the Carthusians. The teaching of Pope Plus XI as contained in the Apostolic Constitution Umbratilem; Introduction, translation and Latin text. Pp. 18. $.10. The Cartbusian Foundation in America. Pp. 24. With pictures and illustrations, $.25. The Carthusians: Origin --- Splrlt--Familg Life. First p~inted in 1924. Re-printed in 1952 by the Newman Press, Westminster, Maryland, Pp. 107. $1.75. The White Paradise. The Life of the Carthusians. By Peter van der Meer de Walcheren. Witha preface by ~Jacques Maritain. David McKay Co., New York, 1952., Pp. 91. $2~00. THEOLO~Cf DI~EST Theglogy Digest, a new publication edited by ' Jesuits at. St. Mary's College, St. Marys, Kansas, is for priests, religious, seminarians, and laity who are interested 'in present-day theological thought, but who perhaps find it hard to maintain and cultivate this interest. The Digest aims to help such readers to ke~p informed of current problems and developments in theology by presenting a concise sampling of current periodical writings in America and Europe. The digests-deal with the vari-ous branches of theological learning--Apologetics. Dogmatic Theology, Scripture, Moral Theology and Canon Law, Ascetics, Liturgy, and Church History--with emphasis on the speculative rather tbar~ the pastoral aspects of theology. Published three times yearly. Subscription price in U,S.A.] Canada, and coun-tries of Pan-American Union, $2~00. Foreign, $2.25. Send subscriptions to: Theology Digest, 1015 Central, Kansas City 5, Missouri. "So Trust in God as it:. ," Augustine G. Ellard, S.J. ! [AUTHOR'S NOTE: For nearly everything in this brief account I gladly and grate-fully acknowledge my indebtedness to the article by C. A. Kneller, S.J., "'Ein Wort cleshl, lonatius oon Logola,'" in the Zeitschri?t t~uer Aszese und M~stil~, 1928, 253-'257. There one will find a fuller treatment of the matter and the original texts.] ONE could hardly be familiar with modern spiritual literature and not have encounfered one or the other, or both, of these sayings attributed to St. Ignatius: "So trust in God as if all success depended on yourself, and not at all on God; but take all pains' as if you were going to do nothing, and God alone every-thing"; and the other: "S~ trust in Go.d as. if all success depended on Him, and not at all on yourself; but take all pains as if God were going to do, nothing, and you alone everything." Both rules have become commonplace. The firsl~, more paradoxical, form occurs in various editions of the Thesaurus Spiritualis Soci~tatis desu, an official collection of documents of prime importance in the spiritual formation of mem-bers of the Society and in the hands of all of them. This version was first published by the Hungarian Jesuit Gabriel Hevenesi (d. 17i5) in a little book entitled lgnatian Sparks. For every,day of the year he proposed an aphorism of St. Ignatius. They were to have some-thing of the effect, if we may use an anachronistic cgmparison, of a spark-plug upon one's daily life and fervor. The book rhust have been excellent: it went through dozens of editions, one of them being ~s late as 1909. This di'ctum, "So trust . .," is put down for January 2, a fact which suggests that in' Hevenesi's opinion it was one of the best of the maxims which he' found in St. Ignatius. The dictum has been censured as contrary to the Catholic doc-trine of grace. It implies, the objection runs~ that man carinot do anything, not even merit, toward his eternal salvation. But the maxim is not concerned with how divine and human activities are united. I~t purports to give a working rule on how to combine one's expectations with one's exertions. It has.also been argued that the saying does not make sense, and that therefore it could not have been uttered b'y St. Ignatius. In an article on "The Tensions of Catholicism" in ThoughtI 1. Thought (December, 1950), 630-662. AUGUSTINE ~. F.LLARD Reoieuv/'or Religious Father Andr~ Godin.states that Catholic hope can deteriorate in two different vfay:~. The first is.by way of "the rationalizing tendency: to march toward salvation with assurance and in a spirit of con-quest." The secohd is the "affective tendency: to attain salvation ~hrough fear and tremblirig.'; The true "Catholic equilibrium of "the two tendencies" is "to act as though all depends on God and to pray as though all depends on us." He notes that ."the formula is sometimes r~versed, but then it ,s~ems extremely banal.''~ Father Godin takes "this celebrated formula" to mean that in Christian action there should be both humility and hope, and in pra, yer anguish as wellas ardent appeal. It excludes both Quietism and Pelagian-ism. One's life becomes a unified whole, in which there are both "the tranquil certitude of Christian hope 'and the. anxiety of invocation in .prayer." . If one were perfectly united with God and as it' were identified with Him, one might well trust in God as if all success depended on oneself, that is, really, on God, and tak~ all ~pains as if. God were going to do everything, that is again, God and oneself co-operating with Him. ~Father Pinard de la Boullaye, in his Saint Ignace de Logolq Directeur d'Ames, quotes it in French translation. He ~ays that it was inspired.by the doctrine of St. Paul: "I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth" (I Cor.3:7). It should warn us, he adds, not to be negligent in any way on the-plea that after all it is reallyGod who accomplisl~es things. But Father Pinard de la Boullaye seems to betray a sense that there is something wrong with this direction by supplementing it immediately with another "quota-tlon from St. Ignatius (and Hevenesi also) strongly emphasizing foresight and constant self-correction: "To plan in advance,, what one is going to do, and then to examine what one has done, are two of the most.reliable rules for acting r.ightly,''~ The counsel to trust in God as if nothing depended on Him, and to exert oneself as if one's efforts were to have no effect, seems indeed to be more than a paradox or an oxymoron: how understand it as something other than a perfect absurdity? One so advised might ask, "How am I to go about formulating such a trust? What is the point in doing something expressly acknowledged to be of no avail ?" Although this first form of the maxim is in every Jesuit's 2.Ibiil~, p: 64~. 3. Thesaucu~"Spiritualis Societatis Jeiu (Bruges, 1897); No. 9, p. 604.~ 10 ~la'nua~'~ 1953 So TRUST IN G6D Tbesaurus~ oddly enough it is not the one more Commonly heard, or encountered. One is more, apt~ to meet, substantially this advice:. "Trust in God as if everythifig depended on Him, and exeft yourself as if you were'doing everything by' yourself." Given "this contrary and more intelligible .turn, the principle is said to ha;ce been a favorite guiding rule of the late eminent Arch-, bishop John I~eland of St. Paul. However, with him it underwent a further minor change: "We ought to act as if everything depe'nded on us, and pratt as if everything depended on God." Praying is sub-stituted for trusting. One of the most famohs pulpit-orators of the last century, namely, the French Jes6it Xavier de Ravignan, distin-guished for the conferences he used to give in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, in advising some of his younger religious brethren how to prepare themselves for preaching, said: "Listen to St. Ignatius, " who gives us this'meaningful counsel, 'One must do all as if one were alone in acting, and one must expect everything from God as if one ¯ had done nothing.' " This form of the saying is very common' on leaflets given to .retreatants, on :religious-calendars, holy cards, and so on. Another slightly different turn given to it is this: "Let Us ;act as bravely as if we could d6 everything, and still abandon ourselves to Providence as if we ~ould do nothing." A person who hears, that St. Ignatius advises one to act a~ if everything depended on ~ne's self and then again 'as-if nothing at all depended on one's self, may rightly '.wonder what St. Ignatius really said. Reason for wondering is enhanced when one notices the long interval of time that elapsed between Ignatius and Hevenesi, namely, .150 years. If, too, one should try to. find the' original 'words of St. Ignatius in hi~ printed works or in other first-class sources, one's wonderment could become still greater. Neither the first nor the second form of this saying is a direct~ quotation from the saint. However, the substance or idea of toe ~econd form does occur repeat-edly in the documents written by him or by his contemporar{es about Hevenesi gives, as his authority the Bologna Jesuit Carnoli (d. 1.693), Who published a life.of St. Ignatius at Venice ~n 1680. In a chapter on the faith and hope of the saint he relates the follow-ing incident. Off a certain occasion Ignatius, accompanied by Riba-' deneira, a confidant and frequent companion of his, called on~ the Spanish ambassador in Rome, the Marquis de Sarria, ~nd met with a cool reception. Ighatius's suspicion ~as that the M~rquis was piqued AUGUSTINE (3. ELLARD . . Review for Religious because~ his influence with the Pope was not considered great and his intercession was not much in demand. Then Ignatius explained to Ribadeneira that thirty years earlier the Lord had taught him to employ all permissible means in the divine service, but not to build his hope upon them. Hence neither upon the noble Marquis nor upon any other creature would he base his confidence. Carnoli does not give his source. In fact at that time it was not in print. Now it is, namely Ribadeneira's work, De Actis P. N. lgnatii.* In No. 108, the pertinent place, Ribadeneira writes: "He said to me that he thought of telling him that thirty-six [sic] years ago our Lord had given him to understand that in. matters of His holy servic'e, he ought to use all the possible legitimate means, but then to place his confidence in God, not in those means." Ribadeneira himself wrote a biography of St. Ignatius, and in the account of this visit quotes him as saying: "I shall tell him [the Ambassador], an'd I shall say it plainly, that thirty years [sic] ago I 'learned from God that in doing the work of God, I should seek all helps, but in such a way that I consider my hope to rest, not in those aids, but in Godralmselr. . s In a letter to St. Francis Borgia St. Ignatius gives expression to the same thought: "Looking to God our Lord in all things . considering it wrong to trust and hope merely in any means or efforts by themselves, and also not regarding it as secure to trust entirely in God without using the help He has .given, since it seems to me in our Lord that I ought to avail myself of all aids . I have ordered . "6 I The same Ribadeneira wrote a treatise entitled "On the Method of St. Ignatius in Governing," and in it he says: "In the matters belonging to the service of ou~ Lord that he undertook, he employed all human, means to succeed in them, with as-much care and efficiency as if success depended on them, and" he confided in God and kept himself dependent on divine Providence as if all those other human means that he took were of no effect.''7 Pinard de la B'oullaye gives several other .references to old writings which witness to St. Igna-tius's use of the sam~ principle.8 4. Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu, Monumenta lgnatiana, Set. ,~, v. 1. 391 ; cf. 400. ¯ 5. Pedro de Ribadeneira, Vitq lgnatii Loyolae (Cologne, 1602), Lib. 5. cap. 9, 615ff. 6. Monumenta'Ignatiana, Set. 1, t~. 9 (Sept. 17, 1555), 626. 7. Ibid., Set. 4, v. 1, 466. 8. Pinard de la Boullaye, Saint lgnace de Loyola Directeur d'Ame~, p. 299. 12 January, 1953 So TRUST IN GOD This principle is also characteristic of the spirit that animates the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. In one of the most important parts of them, after stating that, to preser;;'e and perfect the Society, supernatural means should be given the priority, the Founder says: "This foundation having been laid . natural means also . . . are conducive to the same end; if however they be learned and used sin-cerely and only for the service of God, not that our trust should rest upon them, but rather that, in accordance with the order of His supreme providence, we should in this way co-operate with divine grace.''9 The very same idea, in almost identical words, is proposed in the rules for priests.1° Perhaps the latest development in the long and complicated record of this aphorism :is the,following. About the beginning of 1951 Father Joseph De Lapparent, editor of Vari~t~s Sinotogiques~ wrote to Father John B. Janssens, the General of the Society, com-plaining'that the text of this dictum as it occurs in all the different editions of the Thesaurus Spiritualis was defective. In reply Father Janssens says: "Although that form of.the saying is not without -some sense~ it must be confessed that it is twisted and far-fetched, and does not perfectly correspond to very many sayings of St. Igna-tius, as one can see in the notes already published by your Rever, encen and in the study of Father C. A. Kneller, S.J., "Ein Wort des hl. Iqnatius yon Loyola.' "'~ Father Janssens goes on to say that in getting out the Spanish edition of the Thesaurus pubiished at San-tander in 1935 the'editor did well to change th~ text to: "So trust God as if all success depended on Him, not at all from, yourself; however, exert yourself as if God were going to do nothing, and you alone.everything."~3 ~ Before the times if St. Ig.natius the well known theologian, spir-itual writer, and chancellor of the University of Paris, John Gerson (1363-1429) had said something very. similar: "Presumption re-fuses to co-operate with God, and despair will not wait for ~he co-operation of God with it. The middle course is so to act that everything may be attributed to divine giace, and so to trust in grace 9. Constitutiones Societatis desu, Pars X, n. 3. 10. Regulae Societatis desu (1932), No. 14. 11. Nouvelles de la Mission de Shanghai, Sept. 15, 1944; Oct. 31, 1947; Dec. 30, 1948. 12. Zeitschrift fuer Aszese und M~stik (1928), 253-257. , 13. Acta Romana Soc&tatis desu (1952), 137-138. 13 AUGUSTINE G. ELLARD as not to give up one's own activity, doing what one can.'°14 Bossuet's conception of the matter was thus expressed: "One ought to expect everything from God, but nevertheless t0 act also. For one ought not only to pray as if God alone should do every-thing, but also to do what one can, and use one's own will with. grace, for everything is done through this co-operation. But neither should we ever forget that it is always God who takes'the initiative, for there precisely lies the basis of humility.''is St. Vincent de Paul puts it ~hus: "I cons,ider it a good maxim to avail oneself of all the means that are licit and possible for the glory of God, as if God should not help us~ provided that one expect all things' from His divine Providence, as if we did not have any human means."16 An Englishman, who like St. Ignatius, has a name in history as a military 'man and a religious leader, but was~ very unlike him in other respects, namely, Oliver Cromwell, is said to have given his followers this admonition: "Put your trust in G6d; but mind to keep your powder dry!" 14. "'De Si~nis Bonis et Malis;'" Opera (Ed. Dupin)~ III, 158 d. 15. Meditations sur l'Etaangile (40e jour).: cf. Pinard de la Boullaye, op.cit.29.9. 16. Letter t6 Markus Cogl~e (April 24, 1652), Oeuvres (Ed. P2 Coste, Paris, 19.21) ,rlV, 366. EXAMINATION OF THE PAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS" , Proposed for Superior.s General 1. Has the love of God grown in proportion to the graces offered: daily Com-mumon, develop~ent.'of liturgical life, deeper study of Holy Scripture, increased de-vouon to Our Lady, doctrine of the Mystical Body, and way of spiritual childhood? Are there more souls of prayer in our communities? Is there a deeper sense-of God? 2. Has true charity increased within our communitie~ in thought, word, and deed? 3. Is tension caused by the quantity of work undertaken, to the detriment of patience and humility which ,should win hearts and draw them, to the religious life? -4. Has motherly charity in government rather than mere administration given a true idea of the holocaust of charity? '5. Has the pursuit of technical and p~ofessional progress obscured ~he need fo~ poverty, disinterestedness, a, nd0great lo~;e for the poor? / 6. Is the Gospelspirit of self-denial, penance, and reparation not only unques-tioned but stronger~to defend religious holiness against the spirit of the world? 7. Is more consideration given to religious who are tired and over-strained, and ".what means are taken to guard against that conditibn? 8. Have fi'iendliness between congregations, collaboration in work, the "spirit of the Church," increased? 14 Lengt:h ot: Lil:e of Religious Men: Marianist:s, 1820-195! Gerald J. Schnepp; S.M~ and John T. Kurz, S.M. ~'JHAT is the average age at death of male religious? Has their W~ length ~o~ life increased, decade by decade, with the rest of the population? Are there differences by country? Finally, how does the average age at de~ath of religious' compare with that of males in the general pdpulation? Answers to these questions are now availhble for 2,380 Marian-ists who died in the Society of Mary between 1820 and 1951. Source of the st~atistics is the latest edition of the Necrolo~g of ibe Societg of Marg which lists the name, age at death, and year and place of death of each religious who persevered.1, The Soci~ety of Mary was founded in 1817 in Bordeaux,-France, "by Very Reverend William Joseph Cha~inade: during the decade 1820-29, seven religious2 were called to their eternal reward and in succeeding decades, increasing numbers died. The congregation comprises three categories of persons: Priests, Teaching Brothers, and Working Brbthers. For the present study,s no breakdown by categories is given because, first, the Necrol-ogo does not distinguish the two types of Brothers, and secondly, the number of Priests is too small (perhaps ten per cent of the total) tO supply an adequate sample over the 130-year period covered.4 Let us take up, in order, the answers to the four questions posed. The mean or average age at death of the entire group of 2,380 Marianists is 55.7 years, with a standard deviation of 22.4 years: 1purpose of, the Necrology (Dayton, Ohio: Mount St. John Press. 1952), which also lists the exact day of death, is to recall to the li~'ing members the names of the deceased, for remembrance in their prayers: the list for the following day is read in community after the evening meal. 2Here and throughout the article is included the first Marianist to die, Brother An-thony Cantau, who passed away in Bordeaux in 1819. 3The present article is based on John Kurz, S.M., Length of Life of Male Religious (Unpublished M.A. thesis, Saint Louis University, 1952). 4Research on the lengih of life of religious priests' w~uld be of interest in the light of one study which shows that, the average age 'at death of Catholic priests in Eng-land is five per cent above the average for the general population. See Louis J. Dublin, Alfred J. Lotka, and Mortimer Spiegelman, Length of Life (New York: The RonaldPress Co., 1949), p. 219. '. 15 GERALD J. SCHNEPP and JOHN T. KURZ Ret~iew for Religious this means that approximately two-thirds of the ages at death fall between 33.3 years and 78.1 y~ars. The median age, or mid-point ¯ in the distribution, is 61.5 years. A total of 844 Marianists, or 35.5 per cent, lived out the traditional "thr~e score and ten" 70 years or beyond. These figures, it should be kfiown, are weighted by com-paratively low ages at death in the earlier years of the S'ociety. Even so, they indicate a fairly "respectable" life span. Measured in terms of service, assuming that each Marianist began his active life at the age of 18, this represents 89,726 years of service which the Society of Mary has given to the Church from 1820 to 1951.5 Concerning the second question, it is known that life expectancy all over the civilized world has been increasing during the past 130 years, the period of time covered by this study. Improved living con-ditions, better nutrition, and advances in medical science undoubt-edly all played a part in this development. Likewise, the extraordi-nary development of science and industry, along with the improve-ments in agricultural and processing techniques c6mbined to improve the quality, quantity, and variety of food. These factors had an in-fluence on the lives of all who lived during this period, including the religious who are the subjects of.this study. The facts concerning the 2,380 Marianists are presented in Table 1. During the first three decades, all deaths (except one) occurred at age 54 or less, and hence the mean ages at death are very low 23.9, 25.9, and 28.1 years. This is to be expected in a young society, since, if any deaths are to occur, they are likely to be deaths of rela-tively young religious. The length of time involved is not sufficient to enable men who joined at the usual age 15 to 25 to reach much beyond 50. But there is a steady upward progression through-out the series, with slight breaks during the 1910-19 and 1940-49 decades. The explanation ~eems to be that both were decades in which world wars occurred; in some European countries, religious in the younger age brackets served in the armed for~es, and some of them were killed. Further, during the '1910-1919 decade, the influenza epidemic interfered with normal life expectancy. In general, then, Table 1 indicates that Marianist life expectancy,has increased, decade by decade, reaching a high of 67.2 years during the 1930-39 decade. In order to make comparisons with the general population, how-ever, it is necessary to consider~ the figures for each country separately; SThis figure would be considerably larger, of course, if the services of those still living were included. Z TABLE I--Ageat Death and Decade of Death (1820-19Sl) for 2,380 ,Mar;an;sts 1820-29 1830;39 AGE GROUP 1 3 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 7 23.9 3 8 2 0 1 ~1 1 0 0 O 0 0 0 " 0 0 0 16 25.9 1840~49 12 14 13 2 4 4 1 1 0 0 °0 0 0 0 0 1 52 28.1 -- 1850:59 12 21 17 9 6 5 5 3 I 3 2 0 1 0 1 0 86 32.4 14.8 1860-69 5 I0 18 I1 6 8 4 8 6 5 '5 4 1 0 0 0 91 40.7 16.4 1870:79 14 28 19 I1 I0 6 10 I0 10 13 14 15 5 3 0 0 168 44.3 19.5 1880-89 1.7 22 13 10 15 8 12 10 22 17 I~ 16 8 5 ,,3 1 193 48.2 20.4 1890-99 18 34 ~20 9 5 ~,6 13 13 17 23 29 32 22 13 1 0 255 :51.8 "21.6 1900-09 5 28 I0 '4 8 "12 5 11 '17 26 32 37 30 18 8 5 256 59.2 20.6 I~10-'19 12 34 18 19 16 l0 8 16 12 23 39 46 41 30 10 3 337 57.1 20.1 1920-29 6. 23 7 . 7 4 7 I1 15 22 19 28 37 35 25 13 3 262 61.1 20.2 1930-39 2 lO 14 ll 9. 1 8 14 19 ~l 34 52 56 36 34- 14 345 67.2 18.0 1940-49 3 II 21 7 lO 6 3 8 ll 20 17 37 46 60 15 13 288 66.1 20.6 1950-51 1 .2 0 0 0 0 2 3 0 5 3 2 2 2 2 0 24 61.2 Total 111 248,175 100 94 74 83 112 137 185-217 278 247 192 87 40 2380 55.7 22.4 GERALD J. SCHNEPP and JOHN T. KURZ ¯ Reoiew for Religious this will help~to answer the third question. °World-wide figures, even if available,¯ would be misleading, since the f~ctors affecting length of life do not operate uniformly all over. It is also necessary to consider tbh figures for males 'only, since female.life expectancy is generally greater; for example, in the United States at the present time, male life expectancy is about 66 years, whereas femal~ life expectancy is about 71 years. Ten countries are represented as places of death for the 2,380 Mafianists.included in this study bui~ com-parative figures can be presented only for' France (1,314 deaths) ; Switzerland (171) ; United States (370) ; Belgium (141) ; ~and Austria (11i6) ' Statistics for .Spain (175 deaths) are unavailable in regard to the male population; smallness of sample rules out com-parative figures for the'other four countries: Japan (52) ; Italy (22) ; Russia (17) ; and C~na (2). TABLE 2 I-ireExpectancy o~r Males af Age 17 ~n France, Swlfzerland, United States, Belgium, and Austria Compared to Age at Death of MaHanlsts, by SpeciRed Time Intervals MARIANISTS WHO DIED IN FRANCE Years Average Age I. FRANCE Life Expect. atAge 17(1) ~861-65 63.4 1877-81 62.9 1891-00 63.8, 1898-03 63.3 1908-13 64.4 1920-23 65.9 1933-38 66.9 II. SWI'I'ZERLAN D 1910-11 65.5 1921-30 68.4 1931-41 70.0 I939-44 71.3 III. UNITED STATES 1930-39 70.1 1945 72.1 IV. AUSTRIA 1930-33 68.4 V. BELGIUM 1928-32 69.2 Years at Death 1860-69 42.0 1870-79 45.6 1890-99 55.2 1900-09 62.8 1910-19 " 53.3 1920-29 66.0 1930-39 ~ 71.0 MARIANISTS WHO blED 1910-19 ' 66.6 1920-29 67.5 1930-39 70.8 1940-49 74.9 No. of Deaths During Decade 77 ,153 223 129 1'99 97 116 IN" SWITZERLAND. 30 40 MARIANISTS WHO DIED IN THE UNITED STATES 1"930-39 - 70.3 ~' 87 1940-49 68.6 MARIANISTS', WHO DIEDIN AUSTRIA 1930-39 71.4 27 MARIANISTS WHO DIEDIN BELGIUM 1920-29 70.0 32 (1) Life Expectancy at Age 17 computed by interpolation from Dublin, Lotka, and Spiegelman, Length of Life and here expressed, for comparison, as expected age at death (li{e expectancy at 17, plus 17). References for the various countries: France, p. 346 ; Switzerland,' p. 348 ; United States, p, 324 ; Austria and Belgium, p. 346. January, 1953 LENGTH OF LIFE As is noted from Table 2; the comparisons are not perfect, "be-cause statistics from the various countries are not always available by decades. Since it may be assumed that all the Marianists had sur-vived at least the first 17 years of life (17 is the ordinary age for taking first vows), the figures, for the various countries are presented on the basis of life expectancy at age 17. A cursory examination of the tables will bear out this general conclusion: Mariani~t life ex-pectancy is about the same as, or somewhat more favorable than, that of the general male population of each country in the years since 1900; prior to' that time,. Marianist life .expectancy was somewhat lower, and in the early years of the Society; considerably lower, than the general male life expectancy. Another way of looking at this is to return to the figures in Table I. If only the 1,512 Marianists who died since 1900 are considered, it is found that 712 or 47.1 per cent lived to age 70 or beyond. Another matter of interest is the average length of life by coun-try. Tbis is available for our study but not for the male population of the ten countries over the span of years that Marianists have been working in those countries. The figures, in' order from highest to lowest, are: Belgium, 69.2 years; Switzerland, 65.8 years; United States, 60.5 years: Italy, 58.4 years: Spain, 57.5 years;: France, 53.6 years: Austria, 52.9 years: Japan, 46.8 years; Russia, 39.8 years; and'China, 22.5 year~. It should again be pointed out that these averages are b;]sed on a small number of cases in-,regard" to Japan, Italy, Russia, and China. For the rest, cautious comparison with the over-all average of 55.7 years seems to be justified. The only couff-tries with a large number of deaths which fall below this. general average are France and Austria. Compulsory military service and war undoubtedly are factors in both cases; and, for France, the cradle of the Society, it must be remembered that figures extend back to 1820 when general life'expectancy was not so high as it became in later years. The over-all conclusion, from this study is that life expectancy of Marianists for the past 50 years has been about the same as that of the general male population. Since the unmarried population has a lower life expectancy than the general population,6 ~tbese Marianist figures demand some explanation. Why do these Marianists-- 6"Among white males at ages 20 and over in the United States in 1940, the single had a death rate just 1 2/5 times that of the married." Dublin, Lotka, and Spiegelma~, op. cir., p. 140. 19 GERALD J. SCHNEPP and JOHN T. KURZ Ret~iew for Religious all unmarried of course--have a higher life expectancy than 'other unmarried males in the population? Explanations readily suggest themselves: the screening process by which only healthy persons are accepted in'to the congregation; the fact that most of these men were male teachers, an occupational classification with a higher than aver-age life expectancy? lack of financial and dbmestic worries; regular-ity of life, i~ncluding regular hours for prayer, work~ recreation, meals, and sleep; easy access to good medical care; and, in the United States, exemption from military service. Less certain as a factor is the loss, through defection, of individuals who, if they had perse-vered, might tend to decrease the average age at death. Although it is impossible to state, from the present study, that these are the factors at work, they are mentioned here as suggestions for a more ambitious project which might be undertaken in the future. It would also be profitable to make similar studies of other religious orders and con-gregations of men and of women; to consider Priests and Brothers separately; and to make some inquiries int.o the causes of death. The general value of such studies is to provide an answer to the recurring criticism that religious life, from a physical and/or psycho-logical point of view, is unnatural and harmful. For the particular order or con. gregat!on, such studies are valuable in guiding the ad-ministration in such matters as recommendation of religious for ad-vanced studies; appointments to serve as superiors: .policies on diet and medical care; adaptation of religious life to modern conditions; and provision for the aged members who, according to all indica-tions, will be progressively more numerous in the future, propor-tionately, than ever before. Since these considerations may seem to put too much emphasis on the natural, it must not be overlooked that the Will of God in regard to the death of each religious is a fact; however, we may be certain that God does not prohibit but rather commands that all natural means be used to prolong that life as long as possible. 7Ibid, p. 219. OUR CONTRIBUTORS THOMAS SULLIVAN, the designer of a special Communion card for patients (REVIEW, Sept. 1952, p. 248),is chaplain at St. Luke,s Hospital, Aberdeen, South Dakota. GERALD J. SCHNEPP and ALBERT MUNTSCH are-professors of sociology at St. Louis University, St. Louis, ,Missouri; the latter has been teaching 49 years. JOSEPH F. GALLEN teaches canon law at Woodstock College, Wood-itock. Maryland. AUGUSTINE G. ELLARD and JEROME BREUNIG are members of' the editorial board. 20 Canonical oVisi!:at:ion ot: Nigher Superiors ,Joseph F. GaIlen, S.J. THE visitation of the houses 9f a religious institute by the higher. superiors and the local Ordinary, since it is prescribed by canons 511-512, is called the canonical visitation. The pur-pose of this article is to explain the visitation of higher superiors. 1) Frequencg of visitation. The Code of Canon Law does not determine the frequency of the visitation of higher superiors. In the practice of the Sacred Congregation of Religious in appro',;ing the constitutions of lay congregations, which is and should be closely imitated by diocesan institutes, the far more common norm is ~hat the superior general, personally or throug~ anothe~ religious, visits the entire congregation at least every three years, even in congrega-tions that are divided into provinces. Many institutes not divided into provinces, realizing that they lack the customary annual visita-tion of a provincial; prescribe a greater frequency of visitation by the superior general, for example, every second year, at least every second year, or annually. This desirable greater frequency cannot be pre, scribed in many congregations because of their large number of sub-~ jects, the great territorial extent of the institute, or both, A much lower number of congregations command a visitation by the superior general only once every six years, but at least this is commanded in the .practice of.the Holy See for lay institutes, even in those that are very extensive and large. By far the greater number of institutes im-pose an annual visitation by the provincial; a small number limit this obligation to one visitation in three years or two in three years. The annual visitation' is the much more preferable norm and it may always be made, even when not commanded by the constitutions. Some constitutions permit the provincial ~o omit the visitation during the year that the house has been or is to be visited by the supe-rior generhl, but a prudent provincial will hesitate to use this privi-lege unless some rare business of greater moment demands or counsels the omission of the visitation. A provincial cannot make the annual appoint.ments satisfactorily to himself or to others unless he knows both his subjects and the facts. 2) Moral oblioation of making the visitation. Canon 511 per- 2.1 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Review for Relfgious mits .the particular constitutions to determine the frequency and even to omit any prescription, as to the frequency of the visitation. If the constitutions have 'commanded a determined frequency, canon 511 imposes an obligation immediately in conscience on the higher supe-riors to make the visitation according to this frequency. The omis-sion 'of the visitation, without a justifying, reason, is thus a sin. Many canonicalauthors hold that this obligation is grave.1 The~sin .is certainly.grave if the culpable omission of the visitation is the ~:ause of the existence or continuance of a serious relaxation of reli- :gious discipline or of any another seriously harmful situatio'n.2 3) The obligation is personal. Canon 511 permits a higher :superior to designate another to make the prescribed visitation only when he is l~gitimately prevented from doing so himself. Legitimate impediments are the following and others of about the same import: sickness, infirmity, old age, the great territorial extent or large num-ber of subjects of the institute or province, other business 'of serious mom, ent, and long or frequent absences on visitation that impede the proper government of the institute or province. It is evident' that such reasons will frequently excuse from only part of the visitation': Houses omitted from a visitation should ordinarily be given the pref-erence in the following visitation. A few of the excusi.ng reasons will lose" some and even all of their cogency if the higher superior is given an efficient secretary and freed from the work of a typist' and clerk. The lack of proper "courtesy is also a time-consuming element in the lives of higher superiors. Matter~ that fall within the compe-tence of local superiors should not be brought to higher superiors. Subjects should ordinarily not seek an interview for matters that can be despatched by letter. Whgn an interview is necessary, proper courtesy demands that a subject request an interview by'l~tter. The telephone should be used only when a request or a matter is urgent. It.is obviously inconsiderate and discourteous to drop in on a higher superior at any time and to expect an interview. We can .all al~o render the lives of higher superiors more useful, fruitful, and peace-ful by coming to the point quickly and sticking to it. Reasons ex-cusing from making the visitation are to be interpreted more liberally for the superior general than for the provincial. 1. Beste, 335; De Carlo, n~ 92: Fanfani, n. 70; Fine, 981: Gerster, 263; Geser, q. 364; Piatus Montensis, ,,L 636; Pruemmer, q. 170; Schaefer, a. 558; Vromant, n, 396, 2); Wernz-Vidal, III, n. 145. ¯ 2. Cf. Wernz-Vidal, III, n. 148. 22 danuar~lo 1953 : CANONI~U., VISITATION The'.understanding of the constitutions in a particular institute may be that the higher superior has full liberty either to make the visitation personally or to delegate another as visitor. This interpre-tation is more likely to be verified if the constitutions omit the.clause of candn 511, "if legitimately impeded," and is far more readily ad-mitted for the superior general than for the provincial. Aliteral in-terpretation of canon 511 leads to the conclusion that a higher supe-rior must delegate another for any visitation that he cannot make personally. This is also the: teaching of authors and is at least gen-erally true. However, if a personal visitation is mostrarely omitted, I do notbelieve that there exists a certain obligation to delegate an-other as visitor unless a, situation in the institute, province, or house clearly demands a visitation. Higher superiors are to be slow to ex-cuse themselves and to delegate a visitor. Su,bjects quite generally find it difficult to talk to a-delegated visitor. 4) Constitutions that do not prescribe ~isitations. Canon 511 does not directly command higher superiors to make visitations; it merely enforces any obligation of visitation imposed by the constitu-tions., If the particular constitutions do not impose a visitation, the higher superior has no.obligation but he always has the right of making a visitation. Some constitutions do not oblige the superior general to make visitations, but this would be unthinkable in the case of a provincial and also in that of a superior general of an institute not divided into provinces, , Canon ~I 1 is principally concerned with centralized institutes and thus with general and provin'cial superiors, who are the higher superiors in such institutes. These institutes can also have superiors of vice-provinces, quasi-provinces, regions, missions, districts, and vicariates, who should, as a general principle, follow the same norms-of visitation 'and of frequency as provincials. The canon also extends to the superiors of monastic congregations and confed.erations and ac-cordingly now affects the superior general or president lind regional superiors in federations and confederatiohs of nuns established cording to the counsel of the apostolic constit.ution, Sponsa Christi. ~,The constitutions of some institutes of ,religious. women factu-' ally consisting of many houses and engaged in the active life., contain no prescriptions on visitation, because by law they, are nuns or.con-. gregations of sisters whoseconstitutions.have been,taken from orders of nuns. The mothers superior of such institutes should make visita-tions according to the norms detailed-abo~e for .superiors general. 23 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Reoieto for Religious Theseinstitutes are factually centralized, and the purpose of a visita-tion is at least as necessary in them as in a canonically centralized in-stitute. 5) Designation of a delegated oisitor. The usual norm of con-stitutions of brothers and sisters permits a superior general to appoint -a visitor for a particular matter or an individual house but demands the consent of the general council for the delegation of a visitor for the entire congregation if this visitor is not a member of the general council.3 Some constitutions extend the necessity of ~his consent to any delegated general visitor and to a visitor designated by the supe-rior general for an entire province. The same norm ordinarily regu-lates the nec, essity of the consent of his council in the delegation of a visitor by a provincial superior. 6) Companion of oisitor. The constitutions of brothers and sisters almost universally prescribe that a superior general, provincial, or delegated visitor is to have a religious of perpetual vows as com-panion. 4 The companion can be of great assistance to the visitor by handling the latter's correspondence. He could also be delegated for the visitation of' pl.aces, i.e., the chapel and sacristy, cloister, refectory, kitchen, recreation or common room, library, and the living quarters of the religious. The whole house shofild be visited'. The general or provincial bursai would frequently be an apt companion. He could examine the books and investigate thoroughly the financial and material condition of the house. 7) Purpose of ~isitation. The 'importance that the Church places on the visitation of higher superiors and the seriousness with which canonical authors consider its obligation manifest evidently that the visitation is not to degenerate into a mere ~egal formality. The primary purpose is to learn and correct defects of religious dis-cipline, s "This includes the observance of the vows, "the laves, decrees, and. instructions of the Holy See, the constitutions, legitimate cus-toms, ordinations of the general chapter, and the regulations of higher superiors. Such a purpose implies the encouragement, of the fervent, the prudent correction of delinquents, and the prescribing of apt means to restore, preserve, and increase fait.hful and constant ob-servance. Higher superiors are to ax;oid the energy of the reformer but they-are also to shun the passivity of the quietist. Some people 3. Cf. Normae, nn. 256: 271, 9*. 4. 'Cf. Normae, n. 257. 5. Cf. Wernz-Vidal, III, n. 148. 24 January, 1953 VISITATION hold that the least government is the best government; others incline to the view that the worst government is no government. If a local Ordinary finds a serious situation in any house in his canonical vis-itation, the conclusion is almost infallible that higher superiors have been derelict in their duty. A paternal or maternal government does not exclude in religious superiors,, as it does not in our Holy Motherl the Church, decisive action when this is demanded by the circum-stances. The higher superior is~also to learn the spiritual and tem-poral needs and desires of subjects and to grant these according to the principles of the religious lifel the common good, and prudence. The purpose of the visita,tion is also to investigate the govern-ment of provincial and local superiors and the administration of the temporal property of the house and province. Defects of govern-ment and administration are to be prudently corrected. There is a general need of clarity and emphasis on the fact that the investigation of government is only a secondary purpose of the visitation. Too many religious prepare for an interview with a superior general or provincial with only one principle in mind: what is wrong with the superior and with the officials? The primary norm of the prepara: tion should be: what is wrong with me? Higher superiors should protect the good name and authority of local superiors, they should remember that in a doub~ ~he presumption favors the superior, bu~ they cannot follow the principle that a local superior never errs. Mi, nor, accidental, and occasional mistakes should be overlooked; the local superior also must be given the forbearance due to a son, or daughter of Adam. However, habitual and serious dei:ects that are ob-structive of the spirituality, efficiency, and peace of the community should be studied, and the local superior is to be admonished of them, but with appropriate consideration. It has been remarked that we can often justifiably apply to a superior the principle of what was said of a conspicuous historical character: the scrutiny fastened on him detects many flaws but entitles him to be. judged free of any-thing of which he is not charged. ~ An important purpose of the visitation is that the higher supe-rior acquires a knowledge of the Capabilities and deficiencies of sub, jects. This should be of great assistance in making the annual ap-pointments for both the common and the individual good. 8) Extent ot: the t~isitation. The visitation extends to all houses, persons, places, and things. Both superiors general and provincials should strive to visit the missions at least once during their term of ,JOSEPH F. GALLEN office. The religious on .the missions are those making the greatest sacrifice and they should not be the most neglected. Both in law and in fact it is the presumption that perfect observance is more °difficult in small houses, and yet higher superiors are inclined to make only a cursory visit of a few hours iii~such houses. Canon 511 commands a higher superior to visit all bbuses subject to him. Therefore. a provincial does not visit a house immediately subject to the superior general unless he has been delegated to do so by the" latter. Canon 513, § 1 obliges a visitor ~to interview only the determined religious and the number in a house that he judges necessary for the purpose of the visitation, but¯ the particular law or custom of an institute will almost universally oblige a higher superior to interview all the reli-gious, This is also demanded by paternal government and the pur-pose of knowing the individual religious. As stated in n. 6, the visitation extends to all places in the house. A visitor is to be sensi, tire not o.nly to the irregularities of worldliness, luxury, softness, and sensuality but also to the adequate and et~icient furnishings of the living quarters of the religious. The cell of stark monastic sim-plicity may be suitable neither for sleep nor work. The visitation extends to all'things, for example, the furnishings of the house, the chapel, the sacristy, the proper care of the sick in the infirmary, the clothing, the heating, light,- food, to the books and documents of temporal administration, and to the book of minutes of the council. A fastidiousness, over-interest, and preoccupation with food is evidently alien to the state of perfection, but the food of religious ~hould be simple, substantial, well-cookedl appetizing, and sui~cient. Religious poverty implies privation, not indigestion. Highe{isuperiors should not omit a quite careful visitation of the li-brary and should investigate the number and quality of the' books purchased during the year. It would be interesting to learn what percentage of the budget, if any, is allotted to the purchage of books in some religioushouses. The visitation covers the whole external life of the community. The suitability of the horarium to the work and climate of the community is to be studied. Some institutes, especially of women, appear to follow the l~rinciple that the religious may die but the horarium must go on. In this era of enlightened and pru.dent adaptation the higher superior is to look carefu11~r'into the matter of customs. Some of these are meaningless, antiquated, originate from the self-interest of the few, or serve only to imprison the soul of the religious life in a labyrinth of formality and detail. It - danuar~l, 1953 CANONICAL VISITATION would be unwise to conclude that the need of a~laptation extends only to religious women, not to religious men and priests. 9) Opening of the visitatiqn. A visitation customarily begins with an exhortation to the community by the visitor. "Fhe topic of this exhortation should ordinarily be a virtue or principle distinctive of the religious life, a virtue especially necessary for the particular in-stitute, or a present problem of the religious life or of the institute. 1 O). Precept of the vow of obedience. Some institutes oblige the visito~ at the opening of the visitation to.imi~ose a precept in virtue of the ",;ow of obedience on the members of the community to reveal serious offenses. A few institutes extend the precept to anything else the religious may think necessary for "the good of the community. This precept does not extend to conduct that has been completely re-formed and obliges only with regard to matters that are external, certain in fact, and serious.6 11 ) Prelirninar!/interviews. It would be profitable for the visi-tor to have a preliminary interview on the state of the community alone with the superior, with the entire group of councillors, at which the superior is not present, and for their respective fields with such officials as the bursar, the master of novices, of postulants, of junior professed, and of tertians, with the dean, principal, adminis-trator, or director of the school, hospital, or institution. In these preliminary interviews the visitor should cover such topics as the gen-eral religious discipline of the community, fidelity to spiritual exer-cises, silence, cloister, observance of pove, rty, whether necessities are obtained from the community or externs, whether material necessities are adequately supplied by the community, whether the quan.tity and quality of material things are. observed according to the tradi-tions of the community, the possession of. money by individual reli-gious, excesses or imprudences in contacts with externs, the more common defects of religious discipline, the general level of spirituality and charity in the community, the success in general of the com-munity in its work, obstacles to this success, whether all the activities. of the community are profitable, activities added or dropped, whether the community is overworked, the material and financial state of the house, state of the community in relation to the superior and:~fficials, whether the council is properly consulted, the s~.ate of the external relations of the community with the local O~dinary, the parish clergy, diocesan director of schools, hospitals, or., other institutions, 6. Bastien. n. 302 ~" JOSEPH F. GALLEN ReView for Religioud 'with the chaplain~ the confessors, and with secular authorities and agencies. Inquiry is to be made about the adjustment of the junior professed to the active life, their formation, care, direction, instruc-tion, and education. In a novitiate, an even more diligent inquiry is to be made on these headings about the novices and postulants. 12) Interoiews with indiuidual religious. The following is a suggested outline of topics for the interviews with the individual' re-ligious. It.is b~; no means necessary that all of these be covered with each religious. The visitation will be more helpful if the visitor suc-ceeds in getting the religious to talk spontaneously and if he directly and indirectly suggests topics rather than adheres to a formal ques-tionnaire. The visitor should, make a notation of any important matter. A notation is of great efficacy in mollifying a, tempestuous soul. a) Health. Sufficient rest? recreation? food? any particular ail-ment? it~ nature? care? the opinion of the doctor.?. b) Work. Success? progress? difficulties? sufficient time for preparation? according to the system and traditions of the institute and directions of' tho~e in authority? overwork? direction of extra-curricular activities? relations .with head of school, hospital, institu-tion? the level of moral and Catholic life among the students? the influence of the community and the individual on these? c) Studies. Studies taken during the year or the summer? in what? how profitable and practica.l? what success? What work is the individual inclined to?. thinks he will do his best in? Is there an~" time to advance by private study and reading during the year? , d) Companions. Getting along with them? Making an effprt to do so with all? Any particular difficulty with anyone or any type? Neglecting some and associafing with only a few? Any coldness, antipathy, anger? Divisions, factions, cliques in 'the com-munity? Their cause? Any cause of 'lack of peace, harmony," happi-ness, charity in the community? " e) Religions life. Any difficulty in attendance at common spir-itual exercises or in performing those prescribed? Any dispensatio, ns necessary? Why?'Any obstacle to profi.t from religious exercises? Any .problem in the observance of poverty?~ Any difficulty in securing ma-terial necessities from the communi.ty-? How is obedience going? With the superior? With officials? Sufficient opportunity for confession? Supply of spiritual books adequate? Does work, community duties, domestic duties interfere with the interior life? Sufficient opportunity 28 danuar~l, 1953 CANONICAL VISITATION to deepen and intensify the dedication to the interior life? Days of recollection, tridua, retrea~s profitable? f) Superiors and officials. Any external obstaCle to a spirit of faith towards superiors and officials? Any misunderstanding? Any hesitancy or diffidence in approaching them? g) Anything else? Any suggestions? complaints? difficulties? permissions? Everything he needs spiritually and temporally? Any-thing, else he wishes:to say? 13) Some principles for the individual interviews. The visitor , must cultivate the dexterity of giving each subject sufficient but not excessive time. The ability to end an interview promptly bui gra-ciously is an enviable gift for the life of a superior. All of us have to beware of the natural tendency to find greater truth in the story first ¯ told or greater force in the argument first presented. Fairness, judg-ment, patience, and prudence are necessary for any visitor who ~ishes .to be objective and to learn the objective truth. The fact that the subject is a friend, the possession of an attractive personality or man-ner, or a facile and orderly presentation is not an infallible criterion of truth. Our enemies and the unattractive and inarticulate are not always wrong.' The passing of the poetry of life teaches' us that man, and woman also, .too often knows only what.he desires to know, too often sees only what his inclinations want, and all too frequently finds in the objective oi~der what exists only in the desires or rebellion of his own heart. The visitor is,to ascertain the individual state of each subject. He is not to conclude too readily that a problem is. exactly the same as something in his own past life or that it possesses no distinctive note. The constant pronominal subject of the visitor's thought'should be ¯ you, nbt I. We rarely solve another's problem by the history of our own lives. The subject.should be made to feel that there is a sincere interest in him, An,interruption, exclamation of surprise, or calm remonstrance should be used to restrain any flow of words that is outracing the mind. Reluctant and forced replies, especially with re- ~gard to oneself, are very frequently suspect,in their objectivity. This is the suitable and expected time for the higher superior to administer necessary correction to individuals. The visitor should first make certain of the facts, hear all sides patiently, and correct calmly. A higher superior who never corrects should not be too quick to thank God for the fervor of his institute. The omission of correction is sometimes prudence. Sometimes it is sloth, or lack of courage, or 29 JOSEPH F.,GALLEN Reo~eto for, Rehgtous, human respect. Many a higher superior has prolonged his sleepless ~ nights by exclaiming: "Oh, if the,generals or provincials had onIy~ done something about him (or her) years ago! Now it is impossible to do anything." But now also is the time for him to do for futu're higher, superiors what he would have had done for himself: 14) The field of conscience and of religious government.~ The" forum or fieId of conscience consists strictIy of actions that are in- 'terior, or external but not readily knowable by others, provided eil~her is the type of action that one V~uld not care to reveal to an-other except under a-pledge of secrecy. The field of conscience thus consists of all completely interior acts, such as .graces: lights: good desires, inclinations, "attractions, affections, and motives; interior progress; consolation; desolation; desire of progress; conquest of self; acts and habits of virtue; interior acts of prayer; imperfect and evil attractions, propensities, aversions, and motives; interior trials ¯ and dangers; imperfections, sins, and habits of sin; and lack of in-terior effort in prayer and spiritual duties. All external actions not readily knowable by others are also restricted to the forum of con~ science. Such interior matte'rs as the ,knowledgeof. how to pray, to make the examen of conscience, the difficulty or ease in usin'g par-ticular methods of prayer or examen, the attraction or repulsion for particular types of spirituality, people, or occupations are not strictly matters of conscience, since one would not hesitate to speak of these to a friend .without a pledge of secrecy? Unless the Institute is Clerical and has the privilege of imposing the obligation of a manifestation.of conscience~ the visitor is forbid-den to inquire about any matters that appertain strictly to the forum , of conscience. If such interrogations are made, thesubject riaa.y lic-itly reply by a mental reservation. However, a subject is not forbid-den to reveal any of these matters voiuntarily to a visitor, even if the latter is a brother, ntin, or sister. All religious ale even counselled by canon 530, §'2 to manifest their consciences to superiors. If the superior is not a priestl this counsel does not extend to sin, tempta-tion, and any other matter that demands the knowledge and trair~ing of a priest. The. subject is not forbidden to reveal these n~atters also ~ to a visitor or any superior who is a brother, nun, or sister. The field of religious government consists of all external and 7. Bastien, n. 212, 3; Beste, p. 350: Creusen-Ellis, n. 128; Jone, 444; Schaefer, n. 684; Verrneersch-Creusen, I, n. 650. 3O danuar~,1953 CANONICAL VISITATION readily kriowabl~'conduct of a religious. Superiors may legitimately question a subject about such personal conduct, and the subject is obliged to answer truthfully,s Religious may therefore be questioned by the visitor or any superior on such matters as rising on time, ex-ternal performance of spiritual duties, prompt attendance fit common 'exercises, observance of silence, external charity, neglect of study, external neglect of the duties of one's offic.e, whether one went out of the house without permission, or without a companion, mailed .l~t-ters without permission, etc. 15) Denunciation of the conduct of a companion. Denunciation is the technical term that signifies the revealing of the conduct of a comp.anion to a superior." Religious do not and should not revealthe petty and purely personal defects of companions. This alone is to be classified as talebearing. Religious may certainly reveal the faults and defects of others that are of no serious malice but are disturbing, interfere with. one's own work, peace, or happiness, or with those of some others, or of the.entire.community. A religious is not obliged to lose a great deal of sleep or suffer headaches because a companion nearby tyl6es most of.the night and whis~tles most of the day. ,The door slammers, radio addicts, midnight bathers, corridor and cubicu- .lar orators and vodalists, and the nocturnal religious who flower into the life of work and talk only at night fall under this principle. A visitor or any superior may inquire and subjects are obliged to ankwer truthfully about an offense in external r~hdily khowable con-duct of ~/companion: a) if the religious by the particular law of their institute have re-nounced the righ't to their reputations to the extent that any sin or defect may be immediately denounced to the superior.9 Such a re-nuncxation is practically never found in the law of lay institutes. .b) if there exists a rumor or founded suspicion of the commission of the offense by the particular religious.I° c) if a truthful answer is necessary to avoid the danger of serious harm to the institute, the province, the house, an innocent third 8. Berutti. 109: Beste, pp. 336: 350: Creusen-Ellis, nn. 89, 2: 128: Geser. q. 510: Jombart. I. n. 839. 3°: Van Acken. q. 164; Vromant. n. 402. 9. Cf. Summary of the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. nn. 9-10: Com-mon Rules, n. 18. 10. Augustine. VIIi,: ,~19-520: Coronata I, n. 540: Fanfani. n. 72: Geser. q. 377; Pruemmer. q. 110: Sipos. 339. 31" ¯ JOSEPH F. GALLEN~. Revie~o fdr Religious party, or the.delinquent himself,n This reason alone permits the revelation of the matter of an entrusted secret of counsel or official secret. 12 A religious maq reveal the offense of a companion spontaneously or in answer to the question of the visitor, since in the religious life the offense of another may always,, practically speaking, be immedi-ately denounced fo a superior without the necessity of a .previous fra-ternal- correction.13 Conduct that has been completely corrected is not to be revealed, and it is evident that a ~ubject has no right to in-ves'tigate the conduct of his companions.Subjects should be prayer-fully attentive/to the case listed above under c). In practice such a matter should be~revealed.to the superior as soon as possible. Reli-gious are apt to excuse themselves from such a revelation lest even "their own conscience accuse them of talebe.aring. Later they may painfully and shamefully hear their consciences condemn them as the cause of a human disaster and of the suffering of many or all of their fellow-keligious. Whenever the name of a companion oCcurs in a conversation with a superior, conscience should immediately signal the red warning of truth. The facts and their source should first be studied, not in the imaginative and exciting glow of the evening, but in the cold and gray stillness of the early morning. Any denunciation to a superior should also be preceded by a searching examination of conscience on one's purity of motive. An impure motive stains the soul and als9 discolors fZct. Superiors should remember that the voice, the.face, and even the bristling hair of the criticism of others often bear a.striking resemblance to those of defense of self. 16) The visitor rna~t use u2hat he has learned in the visitation. The purpose of the visitation is not mere spiritual direction but gov-ernment and evideritly gives the visitor the right of using what he has learned in the Visitation. The visitor may therefore do such things as instruct, reprehend, correct, change the employment, office, or house of a religious, or place him under the vigilance of a local supe-rior because of what he has learned in the visitation. ~ In the use of information on an~" matter that is not commohly known~in tlie 11. Abbo-Hannan, I, 523; Augustine, III, 139-40; Bastien, n. 236; Beste, p. 336; Cocchi, VIII, n. 302 b) ; Creusen-Ellis, n. 89, 2; De Carlo, n. 95; Fanfahi, n. 72; Gerster, 264; Geser, q. 377; Pruernmer~ q. 110; Sipos, 339; Vroraant, n. 402 ¢). 12. Vromant0 n. 402. '~ 13. Coemans, n. 231; Fine, 1067; Regatillo, I, n. 658; Wernz-Vidal~ III, n. 149. 32 danuary, 1953 CANONICAL VISITATION community the visitor is to be careful to protect the reputation of the subject. He is forbidden to use, outside of the interview itself, any-thing learned in a voluntar~l manifestation of conscience without the express consent of the subject. 17) Revelation of things learnedin "the visitation. To reveal is . to tell others. In general, the visitor is forbidden to .reveal secret matters learned in the visitation. This obligation of secrecy clearly does not extend to matters that are commonly known in the. com-munity, but a prudent superior avoids indiscriminate conversation on anything that even appears to have been learned in virtue of his office. Some superiors could foster a greater intimacy with secrets. The visitor is to keep secret the identity of the one who gave the in-formation, but the importance of the matter to be corrected Can in some cases prevail over this obligation. Evidently the superior should not apologize for his duty of correction by even obscurely and guardedly hinting the name of' the one who gave the information, This would be to imitate the soldier who had enlisteti for the music of the bands but not for,the whine of the bullets. .Neither should the superior strive to make it appear that the sole reason for the c0r. rection is that the matter was reported to him. The mere mention of this fact often destroys any effcacy that the correction might have had. The visitor may reveal secret matters learned in the visitation, to a higher superior or to his councillors if this is jhdged necessary for a more permanent and efficacious correction. It is always forbidden to reveal anything learned ~in a manifestation of conscience without " the express consent of the subject.14 18) Closing of the visitation. The visitor frequently gives an exhortation also at the close,of the visitation on a topic of the same nature as that used to open the visitation. 19) Instructions and regulations. The visitation will be par-tially ineffective unless means are taken to further the good that the community is doing, to bring it to dffect the good that is being left undone, and to correct abuses. The visitor should write out instruc-tions on these points. It will usually be sufficient to reaffirm existifig obligations without enacting new regulations foi the community, New laws are to be regarded at mo~t asa se'asonal delicacy, not as our daily bread. The visitor should retain a copy. of the instructions. According to the custom of the institute, these instructions may be 14. Cf. Coemans, n. 501 b): Voltas. CpR. I. 85, nota 6; Wernz-Vidal, III, n. 210, nota 57. ~ 33 JOSEPH F. GALLEN Reoieto t:oc Religious the topic.of the closing talk of the visitor, be.given only to the supe-rior, who is always charged with their enforcement, or at least part of them may be read to the community, preferably .after the visitor has left. The initructions should begin with something sincerely complimentary, which can always, be found. The defects listed should be frequent and quite common violations of religious disci-pline. Other defects are to be taken care of by individual correction. The visitor is also to strive in the instructions to further positively the spiritual life and the work of the house or province and is to avoid concentration on the negative aspect of the correction of defects. 20 Pertinent canons on visitation. Canon 51 I. Higher superior~ of religious institutes who are obliged to visitation by the constitutions must visit personally or, if they are legitimately impeded, through a delegate, all the houses subject to them at the times determined in the constitutions. Canon 513, §' 1. The visitor has the right and the duty oi: ques-tioning the religious that be thinks should be questioned and of ob-taining information on matters that appertain to the visitation. All the religious are obliged to reply truthfully to the visitor, Superiors are forbidden to divert them'in any manner whatever from this obli-gation or otherwise to binder the purpose of the visitation. Canon 2413, § I. Superioresses who after the announcement of a visitation have transferred religibus to another" house without the consent of the visitor; likewise all religious, whether superioresses or sub jerrY, who personally or through others, directly~,or indirectly, have induced religious not to reply or to dissimulate in any way or not sincerely to expose the truth when questioned by the visitor, or who under any pretext whatever have molested, others because of an-swers given to the visitor shall be declared incapable by the visitor of holding any office that involves the government of other religious and, if superioresses, they shall be deprived of their otffce. § 2. The prescriptions of the preceding" paragraph are to be ap-plied also to religious institutes of men. Canons 513, § 1 and 24.13 apply to the canonical visitation also of the local Ordinary or his delegate. The hindering of the purpose of the visitation prohibited by canon 513, § 1 can be effected in many ways, for example, by concealing objects or falsifying records or documents. The great importance that the Church places on the canonical danuarq, 1953 CANONICAL VISITATION visitation is manifest in all these canonsbut especially in the penal canon, 2413. The permanent or temporary transfer forbidden to any superior is one whose purpqse is to separate a religious from the visitor and thus to prevent the revelatibn or interrogation of the reli-gious. This purpose is presumed if made after the announcement of the visitation and without the consent of the visitor. The interference with' iegitimate interrogation' prohibited to all religious includes that done pe.rsonally or through anyone else, whether directly, by inducing or commanding others expressly to conceal the truth, or indirectly, by praise, promises, special attention or .treatment intended for the same purpose but. without expressly mentioning this purpose. To be' punishable the interference must cause the religious actually to be silent, to dissimulate, or to be insin-cere when questioned by the visitor. . The forbidden molestation can be accomp!ished in various ways, for example, by transferring a religious, changing his employment, by punishment, public or private reprehension, or by other signs of displea.sure because of replies given to the visitor. Recourse against false replies is to be made to th~ visitor or a highei superior. The offices referred to in the penalty as involving the ,government of others are, for example, general, provincial, or local sup~erior, mas-ter of novices, of junior professed, of tertians, of postulants, probably_ also deans, principals, administrators, and directors of schools, hos-pitals, or other institutions. Such a punishment demands;a serious violation of the law. The natural tendency is to conclude that this penalty, enacted by canon law, is a canonical penally and that it can be inflicted only by one possessing jurisdiction in the external forum.Is However, Larraona gives the at least probable and safe opinion that this penalty is not strictly canonical and that it may be . inflicted also by" visitors who possess only dominative power in clerical non-exempt and lay institutes and thus also by visito)s who are brothers, nuns, or sisters with regard to those subject to them either habitually or by reason of the Visitation.16,x7 15. Cf. ~'anon-2220, § 1; Augustine, VIII, 521 and note 9. 16. :L~rraona, CpR, X, 369, note 4; 370 and notes.7, 8; Bowe, 64-65: Jombart, IV, n. 1323; Reilly, 169-170. Cf. the same opinion in the interpretation of canon 2411 in: Brys, II, n. 1091: Cloran, 313: Cocchi, VIII, n. 298 d). 17. The authors and documents cited are: Abbo-Hannan, The Sacred Canons; Augustine, A Comme.marg. on Canon Law; Bastien, Directoire Canonique; Berutti, De Religiosis; Beste, lntroductio in Codicem; Bowe," Religious Supe-rioresses; Brys, Juris Canonici Compendium; Cloran, Previews and Practical 35 BOOK NOTICES BOOK NOTICES In LENGTHENED SHADOWS, Sister Mary Ildephonse Holland, R.S.M., records in considerable detail the hundred-year history of the Sisters of Mercy of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In a style that in all reverence might be called "chatty," the author, a former mother-superior, tells (1) of the founding of the'Sisters of Mercy by Mother McAuley, .(2) of the motherhouse, (3) of the twenty-eight other houses, (4) -of some senior Sisters. The book has an unusually large section of glossy prints and useful appendices,, includin~ one of chronology and lists of the living and the dead. In his foreword, the Archbishop of Dubuque, His Excellency Henry P. Rohlman, speaks of the fivefold purpose of the book. It should be of interest to the Sisters of Mercy, to Other Sisters, to pastors, to the laity, and a challenge to many young women. It certainly should. (New York: Bookman Associates~ 42 Broadway. Pp. 337. $4.50.) Some years ago Sister Mary Berenice Beck, O.S.F., R.N., ~ub-lished a little book entitled The Nurse: Handmaid of the Dfofne Ph~.tsician. The object of the book was to cbver all the various as-pects of the spiritual care of patients, as well as to offer the nurse some practical helps for her own spiritual life. That first edition was good. But the revised edition, entitled simply HANDMAID OF THE DIVINE PHYSICIAN, is s.uperior to it in every way. Content, arrange-ment, printing, and binding--all are excellent. (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1952: Pp. xviii + 31~I.: $3.00.) ' Cases; Cocchi, Commentarium in Codicem ~luris Canonici: Coemans, Com-mentarium in Regulas Socletatis lesu; Coronata, [nstitutiones Juris Canonid; Creusen-Ellis, Religious Men and Women in the Code; De Carlo, dus osorum; Fanfani, De lure Reliqiosorum; Fine, lus Regulate Quo Regitur So-cletas lesu; Gerster a Zeil, lus Religioso~um; Geser. Canon Lau~ concerning ,Communities o[ Sisters; Jombart. Trait3 de Droit CanOnique: Jone, Com-mentarium in Codicem luris Canonici; Larraona, Commentarium Pro Religi-osis; Normae Secundum Quas S. Congr. Episcoporum et Regularium iOrocedere Solet in Approbandis Novis lnstitutis ,Votorum Simplicium. 28 iun. 1901: Piatus Montensis, Praelectiones duris Regularis. ed. 2; Pruemmer, dus Re,u-latium Speciale; Regatillo, Institutiones luris Canonici; Reilly. Visitation ~Religious; Schaefer, De Retigiosis; Sipos, Enchiridion luris Canoni6: Sum-marg of the Constitutions of the Societg of Jesus: Van Acken. A Handbook for Sisters; Vermeersch-Creusen, Epitome [uris Canonici: Voltas, Commen-tarium. Pro Religiosis; Vromant, De Personis; Wernz-Vidal, Ius Canonicum, HI, De Religiosis. 36 The ,reat:es!: Moment: in !:he Hospit:al Day Thomas Sullivan, C.S.V. SEVEN A.M. is the dawn of another busy day in the hospital. A hustling corps of hospital personnel stream into the hospital entrances, crowd the elevators, and soon swing into action¯. A burst of activity greets the quiet hallways. Ni~rses hurry to the chart desks~ to relieve their weary sisters; laboratory technicians fan out to. all parts of the hospital; nurses' aids begin their chore.s; tray girls and surgery personnel are on the move. At this time of greatest activity, there;is in our Catholic hospitals a momentary pause. The sound'of the silver bell is heard and all stop in reverent prayer. A patient or stranger who hears it for the first time will naturally ask, with the blind man of the Gosp~l who heard a crowd passing on the road to Jericho, "What might this be?" , He will be rightfully told, as the blind man was, "Jesus of Nazareth is passing by." He has but to view the respect and courtesy of every-one to know a great Visitor is passing by. Truly this is the greatest moment of the day. Each of our hospitals is greeted by the Eternal Word: "Today salvation has come to this house." More especially for the Catholic patient who receives is this the greatest moment. We all have need of the food of eternal life, but for the sick this need is acute. And' therefore the 'invitation of the Lord is more pressing. His sacred banquet is especially prepared for them, for He says, "Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in the poor, and the crippled, and the blind, and the lame.'" "Come to me,," 3esus says, "all you who labor and are bur-dened, and I will give you rest." Most frequently our patients need to be reminded of the Lo~d's invitation. They should desire to receive every day while at the hos-pital. To arouse this desire, it is not sufficient that they be conscious in an. abstract way of the Catholic ,doctrine of the Holy.Eucharist, that Christ is present, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. They must have the truth of faith alive and.real, and be convinced in a practicai way that here is the Food of the Soul, that this is the Bread come down from heaven. And this on the authority of the Great Physi-cian who prescribes: "He who eats .my flesh and drinks my blood 37 THOMAS SULLIVAN abides in me and I in him." In the first place the devoted nurses and chaplains should arouse in themselves a zeal for better disposed communicants among their patients. Let them meditate upon the marvelous effects of this Sacr,a-menl~ whose effect is in part conditioned by the dispositions of the recipient. Scripture and spiritual books provide ~ wealth of material., ~ The bread the angel fed the prophet .Elias prefigures the effects of the Eucharist. Most patients find themselves in a predicament simi-lar to tha~ of the p~ophet of the Old Testamen't, who was worn out with trials, tortured by his enemies, wandering weak and sick through the.wilderness. In desperation Elias prayed, "Lord, it is enough for me, take away my soul." He fell asleep under the shadow of a juniper tree, and an angel awoke him, s~ying, "Arise an'd eat.'" He ate and drank and fell asleep again. The angel of the.Lord came to him a second time, "Arise, eat, for thou bast yet a great way to go." Elias .arose and ate, and the Scripture states, "He walked in the stre.ngth of that food forty days and forty nights, unto the mount of God, Horeb." (Kings 19:1-8.) What a fitting parallel to the "living bread that has come down ¯ from heaven," and how like Elias is the person in sickness! In his misery and anxiety' be may be moved t'o exclaim with the prophet, "Lord, it is enough for me, take away my soul. The angel of the sick, the nurse., is at hand to arouse him, "Partake of the bread of life." In this bread he will have strength to continue his journey to the mount of God; to heaven, for-be will have "life everlasting~ and I will raise him upon 'the last day~" ViatIinc ugmiv iinn gd athneg efra iotfh fduela tthh,e tphree C.cheuprtc ohb tleiagcinhges t htheem i mtop roerctaenivcee. tohfe having Christ with us on the journEyfrom this earth. "This Sacra~ ment is called the'Viaticum by sacred writers, both because it is the spiritual food by which we are sustained in our pilgrimage ,through this life, and also because it paves our way to eternal glory and hap-piness" (Catechism of 'the Council of Trent, McHugh and Callan, p:215). Next ~ve are reminded of the health-giving properties of the Eu-charist, since it is called an eternal ~emedy of body and soul. ~If the woman suffering twelve years from h.emorrhage was restored to health merely by touching the tassel of our Lord's cloak, '~hat is the blessed effect upon the pbrson who takes Christ's body upon his tongue and receives Him into his heart? For "this is the Bread that .,38 , danuarg, 1953 COMMUNION IN HOSPITALS comes down from heaven, so that if anyone eat of it he will not die." In the prayer beforehis Communion the priest :s.ays, "By Thy mercy, may the partaking of Thy Body, O Lord'3estis Christ, be profitable to the safety and health both of soul and body." After Communion he prays, "What we have taken with our mouth, O Lord, may we re-ceive with a pure heart; and 6f a temporal gift may it become to us an everlasting healing." (Roman Missal.) And recall the prayer of the priest as he gives Communion to the faithful, "May the Body of Our Lord 3esus Christ preserve thy soullunto life everlasting." In the OffiCe of Corpus Christi we read in the second noc.turn., "of all, the Sacraments none is more health-giying, for by it sins are washed away, virtues are'increased, and the soul is fedwith an abundance of all spiritual gifts." In comparison with this health-giving food all the scientific medications and treatments available in the ~nodern hospital pale into significance. The so-called "miracle drugs" are at the best but temporary helps to better ,health. The Eucharist 'is the only real, permanent, miraculous medicine. Other medicines and treatments merely postpone the inevitable death; this keeps the soul for life ever-lasting. The great philosopher, St. Augustine, describes tile riches of this Gift of God, in these words: "God, all-wise though He be, knows nothing better; all-powerful though He be, can do nothing more excellent; infinitely rich though He be, has nothing more pre-ciou~ to give, than the Eucharist." Now, how may these truths enter into the thinking of the patient and dispose him to receive Holy Communion? This will haveto be achieved through the usual routine procedures. Neces'sarily there must be rputine, otherwiseduring the busy evening and the more busy, Morning there wo.uld be nothing done. But judgment and intelli-gence, faith and zeal, will put, Christian value in what otherwise is merely mechanical. For instance, the simple detail of drawing up the Communion list, can be done with a faith and enthusiasm that will make the patient realize the 'Lord's invitation. This can be done without catechizing or giving a discourse on the Sacrament. Tl~e initial step is most important because it involves the decision of the patient; it is the mofft delicate because people so easily miscon-strue our interest and concern ~ibout their religious'practice. The more ¯ objective and impers0n~il the nurseis in explaining the opportunity for Holy Communion the less chance there is to draw resentment from the sensitive who feel that ",it is none of your business." In 39 THOMAS SULLIVAN Reoiew for Religious giving expression to the Lord's invitation, the nurse, like St. Paul, must be all things ,to all people. This simple routine is the first step in what might be called the remote preparation of the patient for Holy Communion. The next might be notifying the chaplain, should the patient want to go to -confession. Especially in the case of a patient who is to have surgery~ the next morning is this very necessary. If the patient is not in a. private room, the nurse should arrange for con'fession in a place where there can be privacy; and, too, she should advise the ch~plai'n of the best time to come so as to avoid the rush of surgery proce-dures. The chaplain will want to take greater pai.ns with his patient~ penitents, and it will be his absolution in the Sacrament :of Penance that will make ready the "large upper room furnished." The Master says, "Make ready the guest chamber for.Me'." Do we need another reminder? Then, reflect on the care and pains of the hospital procedures before surgery.' The success of surgery depends much on the proper preparation of the patient and his physical and mental condition. For this it is necessary that the patient be in the hospital the night before, that all tests and precautions,be taken. There is a striking parallel in the reception of Holy Communion, counseling us to exercise some care to make ready the patient-com-municants. A contrary parallel follows. Surgery at the hands of even the most skilled surgeon is a great risk to the life of a person in poor physical condition. So likewise this most health-giving Food can mean eternal death to the one. not proper!y disposed. Remem-ber the severe words Of the Lord to the guests who had not on the ,wedding garment. Think; too, of what St. Paul says of those who eat and drink condemnation to themselves. Ther~ is an immediate preparation for Holy Communion that is also very important. At an early hour of the morning the nurse will awaken the patient; and, while she is tidying up the room, seeing that things are clean and in order, and a fresh sheet on the bed, she. has the opportunity to explain the reason, the coming of a great Visi-tor. All. must be clean and neat, especially the soul of the recipient. If 'the patient has a prayer-book and rosary, place them conveniently at his reach. Many hospita.ls hav.e a special card with prayers before-and after Communion. If the patient is unusually drowsy, as is the case so often with those who have taken sedatives, the night nurse should see that the patient is again aroused shortly before the priest comes. The priest 40 danuarv, 1953 will often hesitate, except in the~case of Viaticum, abofitgiving Holy Communion to a person who is too sleepy to keep awake. It goes without saying that the patient should not be ~listurbed for some ten minutes to allow for s, uitable thanksgiving. Tests and trays and shots can be delayed a few minutes; these moments after Holy Communion belong to God. The patient should be alone with His Gbd. , Language cannot express adequatery the great benefits of Hol.y Communion and the hospital cannot do too much to help the patient profit by each Communion. But even the most zealous efforts in establishing p~oper hospital procedure to assure worthy recipients of the Sacrament are not sufficient. Human efforts are necessary, but it "is God's grace that is more so. Our Blessed Lord in His famous dis-course on the Eucharist in St. ~ohn's Gospel reminds us, "No one can come to me unldss he is enabl.ed to do so ~by the Father." This is why we must invoke the angels and the saints t0 assist our weak human efforts to help patient-communicants be better dis- ~posed. St. John the Baptist could well be selected as the patron for worthy reception of Communion, since it was his vocation to "make ready the way of the Lord." Such is the mind of the Church in the Liturgy, as in the Confiteor we pray, "the Blessed Mary ever Virgin, the blessed John the Baptist, the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and all the saints, to pray to the Lord our God for me." The priest fore distributing Communion begs God to send His angel down from" heaven "to guard, cherisl~, protect, visit,, and defend all that,assemble in this dwelling." MEDICO.MORAL PROBLEMS Part IV of the series of booklets entitled "Medico-Moral Problems, by Gerald Kelly, S.J., contains the article, "The Fast Before Communion," formerly pub-lished in REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS,. March, 1'945. Other topics treated in the book-let concern the consent of the patient, the need of having and 'following consulta-tion, the relationship of doctor~ and department supervisors, induction "of labor, unnecessary surgery, the papal teaching on rhythm, and so forth. The booklet also contains a critical list of recommended readings for doctors. Taken together, the four b~oklets cover most of the practical ethical and reli-gious problems that confront doctors and hospital personnel. For the most part, the articles are commentaries on various sections of the Catholic hospital code, Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Hospitals. Price of the code, 25 cents: of 'each part o~ Medico-Moral Problems, 50 cents: of the complete set of five booklets, $2.00. Reductions on quantity orders. Order from: The Catholic Hospital As-sociation, !438 So. Grand Blvd., St. Louis 4, Mo. 41 Congress in Rome THE first International Congress of Mothers General was held in I. Rome September 11 to 13, 1952. The address" of the Holy Father to the delegates in a special audience on Sdptember 15 was printed inthe November number of the Reoiew (pp. 305-308). The present incomplete report on the congress itself is based on notes sent us by some of the delegates and on the newspaper accounts of the event from-L'Osseroatore Romano (September 11, 12, and, 14, 1952). Perhaps other delegates can supplement this material by sending communications with their own impressions. The congres.s of mothers general of pbntifical institutes was con-vened by the Sacred Congregation of Religious to discuss and co-ordinate more efficiently the religious and technical training of mem-bers of the apostolate. The papers prepared for the congress described the conditions and needs at the present time, gave helpful suggestions, and put forward the idea of establishing at Rome a pontifical, uni-versity for religious women and a commission of mothers:general to facilitate communication and liaison betw.een ecclesiastical superiors and individual institutes. The latter, it was said emphatically, is not to be a kind of "super-government.". The superiors general and tl~ose who represented and accompan-ied them came in Such large numbers that the, meetings v~ere trans-ferred from the assembly room of the Sacred Congregation of Reli-gious to that of the Gregorian L'lniv~rsity. after the first morning. An eye witness writes of the first afternoon session: "I counted the num-ber of Sisters in the Gregorian assembly room, since I didn't u~nder-stand the .Italian. My count was 800." Of these, 200 were dele-gates representing 800 religious institutes for women. Countries represented inelude~i Italy, Australia. India, France, Germany, Eng-land. Spain; Canada, and the 'United States. The opening address was given by the Most Rev. Arcadio Lar-raona, C.M.F., the secretary Of the Sacred Congregation of Religious. He pointed out that the purpose of the meeting was not "reform-- for which, thank God, there was no need but improveme'nt, by bringing up to d~te the ideals 6f the founders and foundresses with a willing, intelligent adaptation of means to the end. "We. r~ust do today what our founders would do if they were alive." The next speaker, the Rev. Riccardo Lombardi, S.J., stressed the grave~ resp6nsibility of superiors general to make the best use of their 42 CONGRESS IN ROME subjects' talents. To waste them or leave them unused is a fault just hs much as wasting one's own talents through carelessness or sloth. Natural capabilities and qualities of heart, and mind, which would have given a Sister considerable influence in the world had she not entered religion are to be cultivated by good training. The general subject introduced by Father Lombardi, the training for the apostolate, was next developed in four talks which indicated specific modifications for different parts of the world. The Rev. A. PlY. O.P. "the editor of La Vie Spirituelle. reportedon the training of religious in France. The representative for Spanish-speaking peo-ples. Father Leghisa. C.M.F., made a special plea for a better local distribution of various apostolic efforts. Mother Bernarda Peeren-boom. 0.S.U.' spoke for Germany, and Mother Magdalen Bellasis. O.S.U. for English-speaking countries. 'Mother Magdalen pointed out that some prevailing conditions in English-speaking countries .would call for greater emphasis on cer-tain aspects of training. Greater temporal prosperity (not i~ Eng-land since the war) underlines the need to stress poverty of spirit: "They must learn to want to be poor, to prefer to have less rather than more." The spirit of self government and the earlier emanci-pation of women reqmres more stress on-and explanation of the principles of religious obedience. The fact that Catholics are a mi-nority is a spur to.zeal, but it demands of faith. "There is a certain danger selves in a small minority, will suffer which, prevents energetic action. They that they have something splendid to solid instruction in the truths that.Catholics, feding them-from an inferiority compl~x must be given the conviction offer to the world and that their religion is something to be proud of." Monsignor Giovanni Battista Scapinelli,.under-secretary of the Shcred Congregation of Religious, gave a long, documented account of the co-operative efforts and .the movements toward federation in various countries and then proposed the formation of a central" and international co-ordination of forces. 'As an example of a co-operative effort, he proposed the foundation in each country of a hos-pital reserved for sickSisters. (It seems that in some countries Sis-ters- have to be cared for in pfiblic.hospitals.) The study of u'nit~- was continued in the three talks the fol-lowing morning. D6n Secur~do de Bernardis, S.D.B. ~poke of the need of gr.eater mutual knowledge and complementary co-operation among the different institutes. Then Mother M. Vianney, O.S.U., read a pap,r on the advantages of having a permanent Commission 43 CONGRESS IN ROME Review for Religious of Superiors General a[ Rome. The third speaker, Monsignor Luigi Pepe. the General Secretary of the Congress, spoke of the need of higher studies in religion. He urged provision for such studies in each country and proposed a financial plan for founding a faculty of religious studies at Rome for nuns and women' engaged in apostolic work.~ An auditor 'called the afternoon talk by the Rev. l~mile Bergh, S.3., "a soul-stirring conference." The heart of this talk was a,n examination of conscience for the past twenty-five years. This examination is given in the present number on page 14. He also gave some suggestions for the future. For instance, he mentioned that real days of recollection and retreat be organized that would provide a rest for the body too so that the soul might be ableto profit more from these exercises. After this, Father Larraona gave some practical directions of the Holy See for apostolic work in the field of education, re-education, care of the sick, and social wbrk. On Saturday morning he met with the superiors general while the other religious held group discussion in their own language groups. The congress was then closed with a brief address by His Eminence Cardinal Pizzardo, the secretary of the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Studies. , Observations . , The foregoing is a running, factual account of the congress as we. have been able to piece it together from our sources. To this we might. add a few of the more personal observations made by some Ameri-cans who attended the congress. ¯ Several have noted that there seemed to be very little realization in Italy of what we already have in this country. For example, we already have a splendid system of Catholic schools providing higher st.udies for women, not excluding religious. Also, many of our hos-pitals provide special care'for Sisters. As was noted in the Holy Father's address, previously published in the Review, he recommended modifications in the religious habit when this is necessary for hygiene or the better accomplishment of the work of the institute. We have not yet' obtained a copy of Father Larraona's address, but we have heard that when he mentioned this question of modifying the habit, he said that permission would readily be granted if the iequest was sponsored by amajority of the members of. an institute, and if the change could be made without ,]anuarg, 1953 CONGRESS IN ROME loss of harmony. The main thing, he said, is to keep peace in the family. (Not his exact words, but a good English equivalent.) And this reminds us bf another observation made by an Ameri-can delegate. "Looking at the habits that garb som~ of these dear, good religious,, we can't wonder that the Father of us all would like to see us clad in less grotesque and more unostentatious dress! Ours is surely the simplest here.'" Then she added: "'But it may be that everyone else, thinks tbe~same of hers!" (We have supplied the italics.) We c~onclude with another observation from an American mother ger~eral: "It was a grand and glorious assembly, and since we were there in obedience to the wish of our Holy Father, our being in Rome was grand and glorious too. However, the language q(~estion was a great drawback. We realized that it was international, but we felt that we lost too much since we, so many of us, had no knowl-edge of Italian. We were generally given a resum~ of the talk in the various languages, but that wasn't too satisfactory." SUMMARY OF THE CONGRESS ~ The superiors general, reunited in Rome, 'in response to the de-sires and directives of the Holy See, consider it opportune to sum-marize the work and conclusions Of the Congress as follows: The superiors general with their council will ~ollaborate in the holy movement of revitalizing the religious spirit, conforming to the needs of the Church and of the world in this historic moment. This revitalizing of the religious spirit must be basedon the spirit of our founders and fo~ndresses and of their outstanding disciples, while adapting itself to present needs and utilizing the immense resources at band in order to reach hearts and minds with the same broad vision and courage which the holy founders and foundresses would have bad today; Points for the Ascetical Life 1. Particular care must be taken to develop the personality of each religious in the exercise of Christian virtue and in the generous. dedication to religious virtue. 2. Maternal care must be taken of the health of the' religious; the work of each must be 'orderly and moderate; each religious must have time for her exercises of piety. 3. The schedules must always be reasonable and adapted to the various regions and apostolic ministries today confided to religious; 45 ¯ CONGRESS iN ROME Review for Religious 4. Care must be taken of the sick with promptness and exquisite charity. , Superiors must co-oper~lte in the organization of hospitals and s~anatoriums for religious. 5. In their individual houses, the superiors general will make it possible for al~ religious to lead a Christian life, by giving ample bp-portu. nity to receive the sacraments, and to carry out the duties im-posed on them by their consecration to God, by providing time for days of retreat, Spiritual exercises, and devotional practices common to the individual institute. Points regarding Government , I. It must. be remembered that we have need of superiors arid of teachers W.ho are well~balanced, nobl~-minded, refined holy souls or those strongly resolved to become so. They m!~st be ,well pre-pared for their sacred mission and, forgetful of themselves, give gen- ¯ erousI~ to their offide, striving to evaluate justly the natural and supernatural gifts of their subjects. 2. S.ubjects gifted With prudence and foresight should be chosen for superiors and for such offices as mistress ~)f novices and postu-lants. Young religious should not be excluded from higher office if they have the necessary natural and spiritual qualifications. Care must be taken not to ask more than canon law exacts nor should we be obstinate in the question of re-election. It is the mind of the Church that her laws and the cons'titutions of the institute be ob-served, both of-which prescribe the change of superiors so that no religious superior may be deprived pf the blessing of obedience. ,.' It is to be noted that when conditions are equal between a superior in office and a new carJdidate, preference should.be given to the new candidate. In :this way unpleasant situations'can be avoided and a greater num-ber of religious will be formed for governing. 3. In governing, in making the necessary decisions, such as changes, transfers, the equal distribution of work, one must "be guided by wisdom and charity. ' 4, In making ;¢isitations all the necessary time should be taken to examine well everything regarding the subjects, the houses, the registers, and the like. Each religious should be given an opportunity to speak freely and privately. The superiors and religious charged with various offices should enjoy a certain amount of' trust, while they sh0t~ld always remember that they are religi0u,s, subject to dis-cipline according to their respective offices. 46 d~nuarg, 1953 CONGRESS 'IN) ROME Special, Training 1. The creation of institutes of" higher education similar to those already existing for religiousorders of men. In these institutions the religious will study at least the essential' elements of Christian asceti-cism, of the religious li~e, of theology, of philosophy, of pedagogy, of psy~chology, of canon and civil lav~, and other subjects necessary for the direction of cofisecrated souls. 2. The introduction of a cours~ in orientation. This course may be given in the individual institute or tothe religious of various con-gregations grouped together. The. aim of this course is to acquaint religious with the needs and the trends .of the times in their various fields of activity. ~= 3, The diffusion among the religious of reviews of general and specific interests that may be of value'to them in their apostolate.~ 4. An intelligent, study of the documents of the Holy See. The Apostolate 1. It must 'be remembered that the apostolate is a grace, a voca-tion to which one must correspond, faithfully fulfilling the new ob-ligations which have been aisumed. The spiritual values must be main.tained,"tbe spirit of. prayer must be re-awakened, and the tell- ¯ gious'must be given 'the opportunity of making their spiritual re-treats. They must have the benefit of courses an'd have access to lit-erature that will enrich' their spiritual life. 2. It must b~ remembered that the apostolate is also a science and an art and that the Holy S~e ir~sists on high standards in literary, .technical, and profession.al training of religious, on the necessity of degrees required for the exercise of the various prbfessions; on the ne-cessity of aspiring to a greater degree of proficiency, never thinking that one's training is adequate for the present need. 3. It must be remembered what great profit can be derived from the formation of secretariates for apostolic works" both in the single provinces and in the entire congregation. Collaboration' It is sad to say. that religious frequently are indifferent to one an-other in their apostolic work. Perhaps this is more noticeable among superiors than among the members. There is a tendency to act and to think as though we were not perfect Christians bound fraternally to those who like ourselves are, striving for religious perfection. Milch harm is done to the Church and to souls by this indifference and 47 danudr~,1953 many worthy apostolic works are hindered in their development by this deplorable lack of union. By fraternal collaboration we can in-tensify our common actions for the greater glory of God and ,thus realize works which would be impossible to the individual congrega- ,tions. , The superiors general conforming to the designs of the Sacred Congregation and following the example of the superiors of the reli-gious orders of men, will constitute a committee to provide a com-mon center of information, of co-ordination, and of collaboration. General Aims of Committee 1. To gather in accordance with the Secretary of the Central Commission, already existing .at the Sacred Congregation of Reli-gious, that information which could be useful to the congregation ,regarding. various problems such as questions of the apostolate, ori-entation, defense, propaganda, administration, and authoritative reports. 2. To promote congresses, conferences, and courses of general and particular interests which are deemed necessary or useful and to organize them, after having informed the proper authorities. 3. To. reply to questions that may be asked by the Holy See. 4. To present to the Sacred Congregation of Religious any in-formation that might reflect the needs and the desires of the various~ congregations. 5. To serve as a secure and rapid means of t.ransmitting~com-munications of importance to the religious 'congregations. 6. To organize works of common interest and benefit or, at leasi~, to study the concrete projects that may be presented. Particular Aims of the Committee i. To create a pontifical institute of higher religious education. 2. To suggest the organization in various countries of courses for the ascetical and pedagogical formation, both for the religious in general and for specialized groups such as superiors, mistresses of novices, and prefects of study. ;. 3. To collect sVatistics regarding the distribution' of work, ,vari-ous apostolic needs, the fruits obtained, the difficulties encountered, ~and the like. 4. To formulate conclusions on common problems to be sub-mitted to the Sacred Congregation of Religious. 5, To promote the organization of schools for higher education by groups of congregations. ' 48 Shunfing Facilities Albert Muntsch, S.3. RAILROAD yards possess shunting facilities which enable the yard-master to move quickly a row of cars ~to a siding to make room for incoming or outgoing trains. The more complete such provisions, the less danger of collision at times of heavy traffic and travel. As we go thrdugh life we all need, at times, facilities, of escape-from spiritual or moral dangers that threaten ruin 1~o the immortal soul. We need them also to find relief from the worry, depression, and disappointments that beset every traveler through the pilgrimage of life to the eternal homeland. We may regard such avenues of escape as spiritual shunting facilities. Fortunately we have them in abun-dance. Like the "rare day in ,lune" they are free to all. And what is more, these "shunting facilities" have a beneficent effect. They will surely work if we do not place an obstacle in the way. Some of the great heroes whom we honor in the calendar of (he saints tell us that a reverential glance at the crucifix was to them a source of courage and of spiritual strength in the hour of trial.~ It is easy, to imitate them. We carr~y,the cross on our rosary. How easy ¯ ¯ to look devoutly and with confidence at the sweet symbol of salva-tion! Surely there is always hope and healing for the troubled soul in the cross of Christ. Pragers consisting of three or four words--prayers which may be uttered on the crowded street, as well as in the quiet of the home, are an easy way to gain new strength and much-needed hope. Let us try to cultivate this practice of utteri,ng such ejaculatory prayers. "My 3esus, mercy," is a familiar example. We shall become the richer s~iritually for forming this excellent habit. It can provide a good avenue of escape from many of the little'worries, that eat into the~ heart and make the soul unfit for larger efforts in God's Kingdom. A brief visit to the chapel--what a wonderful means for fighting . off weariness in well-doing and for laying up new resources against the,.hour of temptation! We are in God's house.Perhaps we see other souls praying for the same graces we need in the spiritual journey. It is always edifying to enter St. Peter's Church, near the D~ar- 49 ALBERT MUNTSCH born,Station in Chicago, at any hour of the day, and become one of the man,y dev6ut clients of the Sacred' Heart. There ~ill be scoies of men and women frbm all walks of life who have turned aside from the busy street and the roar of commerce to find hea!ing for the soul. Rich and pgor, young.and old, saint and ~inner, native son and im-migrant all on the same high quest. They needed a spiritual siding so they turned into God's holy house~to avoid some snare or spir-itual danger or to lay up strength for the day's, ceaseless conflict. With a song of g.ladness from the heart we may take up anew life's daily burden. We are not like those who are without hope. We see a light ever-shining. There are many beacoi~ lights even in the darkest hour. For a loving Providence has providedus weary pil-grims, with many a station at which to stop for second wind while press!ng forward to the goal. Now such spiritual shunting facilities are of immense value to, and even of great necessity for r~li~ious. Many are engaged 'in the splendid work o~ Catholic hospitals, following in the footsteps of Christ, the Divine Physician. But both patients and nurses may. at times become wearied and their hearts may become oppressed with bitterness. They need a spiritual._siding. Religious persons should often dwell on one of the g[eatest prob-lems the problem 9f human suffering. It is contemplation on the su.fferings, of Christ which will enable them to find thoughts of hope and inspiration for their suffering patients who are about to give up the struggle, abandon ~hope, and listen to the tempter'of souls. An eminent physician refers to the immense value of the "simple habit of prayer" for those who are nervously depressed. This simple habit of prayer and an act of faith in the divine value of suffering patiently borne may provide spiritual shunting facilities.for both the nurse and heb patient. "The drudgery of the classroom" has become, almost a proverbial expression. When the duties of teaching seem hard, it would'be well for teachers to realize that in ten or twenty years the boys or girls, who~ are now often a sourde of trouble, will be young men and women. They will be on the front line and may be exposed to seri-ous temptations. Under the tutelage of the Catholic teacher, they fnust prepare themselves now for victory in that critical hour. T~his vision of the future will help provide shunting facilities for the tem-porary snarl of discouragement. The vision should prove an inspi-ration to persevere .faithfully in the Christian apostolate of teaching. 50 ( uestdons an.cl Answers When H01y Saturday services are held in a convent chapel on Satur-day evening, terminating with the Mi.dnlght Mass, what is the correct order for the Divine Office on Holy Saturday, and what versicles, re-sponses, and prayers should be used for' grace at the noon and evening meal? Should the Alleluia be omitted at grace when the Holy Saturday services take place in the-evenlng? The answers concerning'the Office are contained in a Decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, dated January 11, 1952 (Acta Apos-toticae Sedis, January 25., i§52, pp. 50-63), giving_ directions for the c~lebration of the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday evening with the Easter Mass followiiag about midnight. Regarding the grace at ~able, which is not covered by the Decree, confer below. The pre-scriptions for the Divine Office are as follows: MATINS and LAUDS are not anticipated-.on Friday ev,ening, but are said Saturday.morning at.a convenient hour. At the end of Lauds the antiphon Christus factus est is ~epeated with a Pat'-'r Nos-ter, but the psalm Miserere is 6mitted. and the following prayer is substituted for the Respice quaesumus: Concede, quaesumus, Omnipotens Deus: ut qui Fitii tui resurrec-tionem devota expectatione praeuenirnus; ejusdem resurrectionis glo-riam- consequamur. The conclusion Per eundem Dorninum is said silently. SMALL HOURS are ~aid as on Holy Thursday, en~ling with the antiphon Cbristus factus est and a Pater Noster. The psalm Miserere is omitted, but the new prayer Concede is said as indicated above at Lauds. VESPERS are 'said at a.convenient h6ur in /he afternoon as on Holy Thursday, with the following changes: Antiphon 1: Hodie agtictus sum valde, sed cras solvam uincula Antiphon for the Magnificat: Principes sacerdotum et pharisaei munierunt sepulcrum, signantes lapidem, cure custodibus. The antiphon for the Magnificat is repeated and the Christus factus est, Pater Noster, and Miserere are omitted. The prayer noted above for Lauds is said: This concludes ~espers. COMPLINE is omitted on Holy Saturday evening. 51 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Revietv ?or Religious Until the Sacred Congregation of Rites issues an official text for grace at meals,, the f,ollowing, which keeps the parallel between the Office'and the meal prayers to be found in t'he Breviary at present, is suggested as a form which may be used on Holy Saturday: AT THE NOON MEAL: Cbristus factus est pro nobis obediens usque ad mortem, mortem autem crucis and a Pater Noster. Then recite the new prayer Concede, given above at the end of Lauds, ter-mmat! ng it with Per eundem Dominum "to be said silently. AT THE EVENING MEAL: V. Principes sacerdotum et pharisaei munierunt sepulchrum. R. Signantes lapidem, cure cus-todibus. Then a Pater Noster and the prayer Concede as given abo~e with its silent ending. The Alleluia will not occur in the Office or grace at table on Holy Saturday because it has not yet been su.ng officially. This will occur during the Easter Vigil. ~2m Throughout ~he year we chant the Little Office of Our Blessed Lady in choir. During the last three days of Holy Week we replace this¯ by the Office of the Roman Breviary. However, at Matins on these days we spy only the first nocturn. Is this a proper'and permissible omission? In his Hol~l Week in L. arge and Sm~ all Churches, Father Law-rence J. O'Connell states the following: "Tenebrae.services may be .held not~0nly in cathedral, collegiate, conventual, and parochial churches,.but also i,n chhpels of convents and other institutions where the Blessed Sacrament is habitually reserved . If all three nocturns of Matins cannot be sung, it is sufficient to sing the first nocturn and the Benedictus.'" (See also W'apelhorst, n. 360, 6!). The custom of replacing the Little Office of Our Lady with the Divine Office during the Sacred Triduum seems reasonable and jus-tifiable. In a congent where the Holy Week services are not held, when is it proper to uhcover the crucifix on Good Friday? There does not seem to be any special legislation on the .subject. Hence it is suggested that the crucifix be uncovered after the services held in the parish church in whose territory it is situated. Our constitutions state that if anythlncj is left over it is to be sent to the provincial house. Sometimes we have to send our salaries before we 52 Januarg, 1953 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS pay our food and book bills. We have to make so many excuses when the collector comes. This cjives us a bad local reputation, and our credit is not good. Hence firms expect us to pay cash. Is it proper to

Issue 7.1 of the Review for Religious, 1948. ; Review 'for Religious JANUARY 15, 194.8 Emotional Maturity . Gerald Kelly ~ Re~asons forRememberlng Mary . T.N. Jorgensen Litufejical and Private Devotion,.~, ¯ ¯ J. Putz (~)uestlons Answered ~Gommunicafions Adam C. ElliS, B~ok Reviews VOLUME" VII NUMBER 1 ro R R ,L-I GI 0 US VOLUME V-II JANUARY. 1948 NUMBER CONTEN'i:S EMO~TIONAL MATURITYr--Gerald Kelly, S.J . EDITORI, AL ANNOUNCEMENT . 9 COMMUNICATIONS . 10 REASONS FOR REMEMBERING MARYmT. N. Jorgensen, S,J. . "17 LIT~URGICAL AND PRIVATE DEVOTION J. Putz, S.J, . GIFTS TO RELIGIOUS--II. COMMON LIFE AND PECULIUMm Ada~ C. Ellis,.S.J. . . 33 OUR CONTRIBUTORS 45 . BOOK REVIEWS-- The Spiritual Doctrine of Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity; Queen of Mili-tants; Mother F. A. Forbes; The Greatest Catherine; God's Own Method 46 , BOOK NOTICES " 51 QUESTIONS AND AIqSWERS-- 1. Standing during Angelus not Required for Indulgences . 52 2. Scapular Medal Blessed for Five-fold Scapular .53 3. Secretary General as Secretary of General CoUncil .53 4. Powers of Vicar in Absence of Superior .53 5. Retreats before Clothing and First Profession " 54 6. Closing Parochial-school "religious house" . . 54 BOOKS AND BOOKLETS . 55 REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, January; 1948. Vol. VII, No. 1. Published bi-monthly: January, March, May, July, September, and November at the College Press, 606 Harrison Street, Topeka, Kansas, by St. Mary's College, St. Marys, Kansas, with ecclesiastical approbation. Entered as second class matter January 15, 1942, at the Post Office, Topeka, Kansas, under the act 6f March 3, 1879. Editorial Board: Adam C. Ellis, S.J., G. Augustine Ellard, S.J., Gerald Kelly, S.J. Editorial Secretary: Alfred.F. Schneider, S.J. Copyright, 1948, by Adam C. Ellis. Permission is hereby granted for qnotatlons of reasonable length, provided due credit be giyen this review and the author. Subscripffon price: 2 dollars a year. Printed in U. S. A. Before writing to us, please consult notice, on Inside beck ov~r. Review ~:or Religious Volume VII January~December, 1948 Published at THE COLLEGE PRESS Topeka, Kansas Edited by THE JESUIT FATHERS SAINT MARY'S COLLEGE St. Marys, Kansas REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS is indexed in ~he CATHOLIC PERIODICAL INDEX I::mot:ional h at:uri!:y Gerald Kelly, S.3. pSYCHOLOGISTS seem to agree that one of the principal causes of failure to make the adjustments required in married life is emotional immaturity Qn the part of husband, or wife, or both. An expert marriage counselor is expected to give each prospective bride and groom at least some simple, but effective, maturity test: and if he finds any notable deficiency from the accepted standard of emotional adulthood, he is to warn his client that until the defect is remedied marriage would be inadvisable. Similarly, when called upon to give advice concerning a marriage that is already being strained by maladjustments, one of the first things an expert coun-selor looks for is the personality defect of immaturity. The present 'article is based on the supposition that emotional maturity is requirdd in the religious life no less than in marriage, and that immaturity explains many of the failures to make necessary adjustments to the demaiads of the religious life, just as it explains similar failures in marriage. If this is true--and I have no doubt that it ismthen we can profitably avail ourselves of the psycholo-gists' excellent studies on maturity in examining candidates for the religious life, in the guidance of other religious, and in the self-examination and self-reformation necessary for our own growth in perfection. It is with the last point that I am particularly concerned now. believe that professed religious can gain much fob their own souls, much help in developing a Christlike personality, by studying and applying to themselves "g'hat the psychologists say about emotional maturity. The ordinary examinations of conscience tend to become dull; and many of the expressions used fail to grip the mind and to provide the proper incentive for improvement. New light and new inspirationi can be infused into these self-examinations by occa~ sionally, at least, going over a list of questions developing this one theme: "Am I the adult I should be, or am I, despite my years in religion, still childish in some things?" The word "childish"- is used designedly. For Our Lord Himself has told us that we must all become as little children in order to gain the kingdom of heaven; hence there must be some sense in which the 3 GERALD KELLY Reoieto t~or Religious truly spiritual man must always be a child. On the other hand, we have the words of St. Paul to the effect that we must grow up and put aside the things of a child. There can be no conflict between the words of Christ and the inspired words of Paul; and I take it that these two meanings are .perfectly harmonized by distinguishing between "childlikeness" and "childishness." Even one who is fully grown in Christ must be Childlike; he must possess the simplicity, the candor, the humility, the sweet trust in God that come so naturally to the child. But the adult should not be childish. What is this childishness that conflicts with true adulthood? I can best explain it~ I think, by a running survey of signs of emo-tional immaturity culled from a number of psychological treatises. For instance, here are the test questions of immaturity that struck me as occurring most frequently: Do you indulge in angry outbursts? nurse grudges? dwell on what you consider injustices? Are you hesitant in m~king decisions? Do you dodge responsibility? Do you explain failures by giving alibis? Are you unable to face reality? DO you act mainly for personal pleasure and for some immediate good? Are you unable to make reasonable compromises? unwilling to make an effort to see the point of view of those who disagree with you? Are you one ,who wants much, but gives little? Do you think you are always misunderstood, yet never misunderstand others? Do you react vehemently, even explosively, to ordinary emotional stimuli? Are you overly depen-dent on others? much given to fear? and to daydreaming? Do you shrink from and avoid self-sacrifice? Are you impatient of dis-tressing situations? The foregoing is but a partial list, but it is enough to make a serious-minded religious catch his breath. For very likely most of us can find something of ourselves in the distressing portrait. For-tunately, the psychologists themselves add a consoling word; they allow for occasional lapses into some of these faults even for the mature personality. In fact, some of them use a system of grading which might well supplant numbers in the marking of a particular examen. They list faults such as these (or the opposite positive qualities) and ask the client to grade himself according to this scale: a) Never b) Occasionally c) As often as not danuar~ o 1948 ]~MOTIONAL MATURITY d) More often than not e) Always--or almost always. Any of the faults listed in the previous paragraph that occurred with a relative frequency (for example, as often as not) would indicate the personality de~ect .9f immaturity. It helps to examine ourselves occasionally and to see if we pos-sess any of these marks of childishness. Really to face the fact that a certain habit is childish is a step towards correcting it, for no one wants to be or to be considered childish. However, I do not wish to delay here on the negative side of the picture; I prefer to dwell on the characteristics of maturity. Just what is emotional maturity? In general, it means the attainment of "sweet reasonableness"; it means a well-integrated personality; it means the possession of certain qualities that enable one to preserve peace within himself and to live and work harmoni-ously with others. I would not pretend to give a definitive list of these qualities; but from my reading and personal observation I should say that they can be fairly well summed up as follows: (a) unselfishness; (b) a sense of personal responsibility in a com-mon enterprise; (c) temperate emotional reactions; (d) ability to profit by criticism; (e) ability to face reality; (f) a well-balanced attitude toward sex; and (g) decisive thinking. I have not attempted to arrange the qualities in any definite order. But it seems safe to assert that anyone who, upon honest self-examination, can say that he oenerallt~t manifests all these qualities is truly mature. He may see great possibilities of progress, but he can take courage in the fact that he is at least in the realm of adulthood. It would be impossible to make practical suggestions on all these characteristics in one short article. On the other hand, it seems almost equally impossible to comment on any single characteristic to the exclusion of all the others, because a person could hardly pos-sess any one of them without at the same time possessing other.~. Nevertheless, just to give my introductory remarks about maturity a practical bearing, I am selecting the last-named quality--decisive thinking--for further comment in this article. ¯ What do the psychologists mean by decisive thinking? It seer;as that a description of a person who possesses this quality would run somewhat as follows: "He is able to make calm and reasonable prac-tical judgments, without wasting time in making them, andwithout GERALD KELLY Review for Reliyi~us disturbing regret, or the shifting of responsibility once they are made." A practical judgment concerns action: it is'a decision concerning something to be done; for example, to clean one's desk, to practice a certain mortification. It. includes such trifling things as °deciding what shoes to wear and such important things as choosing a.voca-tion. Life is full of things to be done, and it is obvious that an adult must possess a certain facility in deciding.such things, for himself according to sound principles, He must-not be.,overly, dependent on. others; must not waste time deciding trifles; must make his: decisions, even the. smallest, according to some reasonable stand~ird. All this, and more, too, I have tried to compress into this brief description 0f mature thinking. The ability to make a reasor~able decision supposes the. abi!ity to make some decision. Ther~e are people who never make a decision, fo~ themselves if they can avoid it. When they are faced with a practical decision, they immediately think of getting advice, of. getting someone else to make the decision for them. Left to themselves they flounder helplessly, unable to choose between two possible courses of action, even, when mere trifles are concerned. This indecisiveness can become a pathological condition known as abuIia (ina~bility to make up one's own mind). In this connection I am reminded of an incident, ~hat happened several years ago. "A friend of mine cam~ ~o me ~and to.!d me somewhat mournfully, " "You.know,, I think I'm getting abhlia." ~ "Why,'~' I. asked, "what's wrong with you?" "Well," he replied, "i just stood in the center'of my" room for iSalf ~fi~ hour ffyin~ to n~ake up my mind whether.I'd'sweep it:" Tl~.e exampl~ may sound, and'is, absurd'; '~et I wonder how many of us could say thai we h~veso trained ourselves to decide t~ifles that We ~aever qose time~ nor peace "of mind, in' making" such decisions. Whether to sweep one's room, to make one's bed, to make~a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, to do withot;t butt(r for one meal, to study this or that these are~ examples of countless small things that a mature person ought to be able .to. decide promptly, without loss of time, and without seeking adwce. The psychologists do n~t inter;d to frown upon the habit of asking advice. The prud~n~ man seeks counsel but not in every-thing, only in thi~ngs 9f~ some'moment, or when there is some special reason for mental confusion. And even in things of moment the 6 danuar~lo 1948 EMOTIONAL MATURITY ~ortident man will try to form some judgment of his own; he will not leave.all the thinking to his counselors. ~- '~ ~ ~ The childish fault of excessive advice-seeking is indulg~ed in not merely by those who ~vill form no judgment of their own, but also by others who do indeed form a judgment of their own (in fact, a very obstinate judgment), but who feel within themselves a certail, inseCurity. These advice-for-security-seekers,-having made,up their own minds, frequently consult many others--all to one purpose. namely, to get confirmation of the plan already settled on. : The mere fact that one can make up one's own mind promptl~ and with a certain degree of independence 'is not in itself a sign .of' maturity. Indeed, this can be very childish, unless the decision is a reasonable one: that is, based on sound principle, and not On mere feelings or impulses. Every mature decision, even the tiniest, even one made'with the utmost despatch, should upon analysis reveal the fact that a choice was made according to sound motivation, with an appreciation of the value of the thing chosen and of the thing rejected. On this point; as is usual, Catholic asceticism, i~ in perfect agree-ment "with the soundest psychology. For instance, .the purpose of the Spiritual .Exercises, in the words of.their author, is to enable one to come ~ decision" Without being influenced by inordinate attach-ments. The exercises themselves are very long; made in their ~ntirety they take approximately tbirty';days. Bht it should nbt be forgotten that they were planned primarily to help one choose one's vo~htion.: this is a momentous decision, and it should consume much time. The lesson of the Exercises, however, once learned is supposed to be applied all through llfe in due proportion: namely, ,that:' every prac-tical decision should be made on principle and independently of excessive likes and dislikes. The underl~ring principle is the same for Small things and: for great things--God's will. To mhke all one's choices according to" that standard'iis to be Christlike, is to be a saint, is to be perfectly mature. ~ ~,, ., . Examining one for mature judgment, the psychologist is almost sure to ask: "When you make a deci~ior~, do you rest i'in it, or do you keep going over it in your mind~ °regretting it, wofidering if it Shouldn't have been otherwise, wondering if you shouldn't re,on-sider it, and so forth?" They are ~qot infe~rin'g that it is~ not the part of a prudent and mature person tO change a declsi6n ~hen cir-cumstances indicate that a change .should' be made. They are referring rather' to an attitude' of unrest, of regret, of insectirity, of GERALD KELLY Reoieto~for Religious changeableness, that seems to characterize almost all the practical decisions that some people make. We see this at times in young religious (and occasionally in some not so young) in the matter of their vocation. Today they feel fine, and they have a vocation; tomorrow they have the blues, and they have no vocation. One wonders if they really chose their voca-tion on principle. Was it the will of God or their dwn feelings that they chose to follow? I would not pretend to explain a11 the reasons for this spirit of unrest that seems to characterize many practical decisions. However, one reason may be that the original choice was 'never made wholeheartedly, with a clear appreciation of the values involved. Hence the unrest comes from the fact that one is constantly wondering if the decision was worth making. I might i11ustrate this by referring to a very significant picture I noticed recently in a voca-tional booklet. In the picture are two girls, one holding a hat, the other holding five dollars, and the caption reads: "Five dollars or the hart" The lesson doesn't have to be explained; any girl who reads the booklet can immediately catch the application: if she wants the hat badly enough, she will pay the five dollars--and if she wants the advantages of a religious vocation badly enough, she will pay the price. But the price has to be paid: she cannot have the advantages of both the religious life and life in the world any more than she can have both the hat and the price of the hat. The appreciation of this notion of relative values is essential to all really mature thinking and for all intelligent practice of virtue in the religious life. The decision to sweep one's room should be based on the appreciation of the advantages (natural and .super-natural) that are attached to this action, as well as on the apprecia-tion that the making of this precise choice involves a wholehearted "giving up" of the advantages (whatever they may be) of not sweeping the room. A choice made thu~ is reasonable, and it should not take a half an hour. Similarly--but on a higher plane--a reso-lution to practice.a certain mortification or toexercise onself in a cer-tain virtue ought to be made with a realization of the benefits one hopes to gain from keeping such a resolution as well as with the realization that certain other advantages .have to be rejected., This idea of value for value, of paying the price, should be clearly applied in every decision, and should be resolutely recalled when one tends to weaken in following out such a decision. This haay be a sort of doubling on my tracks, but I should like 8 January° 1948 EMOTIONAL MATURITY to mention here a rather recent book that created quite a commotion in this country. I am referring to Their Mothers" Sons, by Doctor Edward Strecker. Doctor Strecker is a Catholic psychiatrist who had extensive experience "scri~ening" young men who were drafted for the armed forces. This experience convinced him that a large percentage of our young men are afEicted by an emotional disease known as "momism." In other words, despite physical maturity, they are still tied to their mothers' apron strings; their mothers-- or someone else--have no~ allowed them to grow up, to live their own lives ~vith any real independence. Exaggerated dependence on their parents has made it impossible for them really to leave home and to stand on their own feet. This is one reason why.!arge num-bers of men failed in the acid test of military service, one reason why many marriages fail. One may well wonder just what influence it has on religious. It is not inconceivable that young men and women might enter religion without having accomplished any real separation from the parental apron-strings. It is possible, too, that this" exaggerated dependence on parents might spoil an otherwise promising vocation, Or that ingrained dependence will be merely transferred from par-ents to a kindly superior, confessor, or spiritual director. In fact, even for those who are not unduly dependent, the religious life of its very nature contains certain dangers to proper growth in maturity. This type of life calls for much more dependence than is normall7 had in adult life; 'if this is pressed too far it can readily change child-likeness into childishness. It is a wise superior or director or other person in aut.hority who encourages a salutary self-confidence and a wholesome spirit of initiative in his subordinates. Before closing, I should like to refer to a notion that I recently came across in my reading. The author, speaking of a mature mind, said that it is a "hospitable mind." It welcomes new ideas; and this is the sine qua non of progress. And of course, being hospitable, it is also companionable. Need I say what a boon this is in a religious community ? EDITORIAL ANNOUNCEMENT Because of continually rising costs, we have reduced the number of pages per issue. We hope this will be a merely temporary measure. By using smaller type. for articles, we have actua!ly increased the volume of material. " orn mun ca ons Reverend F~thers: In the September 15, 1947 issue of REVIEW FOR REL.IGIQUS, a Sister writes, her ideas regarding Vacations for t~etigious. -Allow me to submit mine? According to Webster's~ dictionary, a vacation' means- freedom from duty for a given period of time; 'an intermission-in employ-ment; a period of rest or leisure; a holiday; an intermission in educa-. tional .work. How do. these .various meaningsapply to religious? . We who. are religious, know that our life is a stclteowhich is fixed and unchangeable according.to our vows. No .matter whether we are on .duty or off duty, sick or weli, young or old, ~active or.con-templative nuns, once we have consecrated ourselves to a lif~ of love and service to God by our vows, we are always~ r~ligioi~s. Fro~ our ~eligi0us, state there can'be no vacations. R~ligi0us women being human, and not angelic beings .without bodies, can .'become fatigue.d, ill, disabled, either wholly or partially unfitted for a full measure of labor in the life chosen above all others. If all religious were in an .equal measure healthful, had the same nervous make~up, the same mental or physical power, s of endurance, none-,would perhaps need vacations. This is not so. ~ Wise superior who .re.cognizes l~er responsibility for the sp~iyitu~a~l, and. physical, welfare of her' subjects, individ.ually as well as,co!lectively., will know when a certain Sister needs a rest, a chan~ge, a bit of leisure, a freedom from .d.uty for a few hours, a few days or for a longer, time.,_ This:freedom from duty for a shor~ time, or even longer, does not'imply a ~worldly excursion, for ,the good religious, but. a means for .vacating one duty to take up another for the better health of her body and soul. Very often only a wee bit of fun, a little gaiety. a good laugh, the healing that God's beautiful world can give, will restore balance and do an infinite amount of good. The mind needs rest, the nerves need it too, the body requires it, and the soul needs the chance to be at rest in God. To people of the world, no one seems so idle or leisurely as the Contemplative nun in her cloister; while no worldling ever worked so hard, with suchconcentration of mind and soul as the contemplative 10 COMMUNICATIONS Sister. The point is, the world is outside, and it is the world that creates all the hurry, the bustle and hustle' that wears nerves~ thin, and weakens the spirit in the supernatural life. It is quite certain that so-called vacations are unknown among the Trappistines, .the Car-melites, the Poor Clares and other such wholly enclosed or~ders~ It is'a different matter with~ the active" orders doing teaching, nursing, social service visiting, and other forms of institutional~ work. "For the most part such religious are laboring early and late, often weary unit footsore. No doubt, vacations they never expected when they entered religious life, but not the need of vacations when pro-vided by obedience and proper authority~. This need can come from overworl~, and then the soul suffers as well as the body, Whether vacations appl~r to the saints of old is not the question. All and eoer~thing in their lives~has not been written: and one can find many incidents described that could be recognized as rest times, or leisure. The Saints were occupied with beir~g saints, and not so much with the vast amount bf labor accomplished. Certainly life in the present century ha~ a tempo hard to match with" any previous centtiry. We must judge of the need of rest, relaxations, intermis-sions, in terms of-present-day tempo, not that of other times. This worldly pace has seeped into convent life here and there to some extent and to some degree. Religious deplore this. And since every community, of whatever kind, in any order, has to fight to stem the wiles of Satan as well as the influence and intrusion, of the world, tl~e individual welfare, spiritual and physical, of each member must be guarded. It is not going back to the world, or even to one's family (unless in the wisdom of superiors this is best) that will help the fatigued Sister most; their best vacation will be in. a safer retreat from the world. Whatever the vacation may be the main point is how it is spent. The plan of one community can be mentioned who enjoy a two weeks vacation every summer, This vacation period is for all, and in the Convent. The planning costs the superior much concentrated thought~ .Since the Divine Office is said in choir and nothing of this is to be omitted, or other spiritual exercises mitigated, it is not easy to meet all the requirements. Only the most necessary household work is done, so that there will be sufficient hours for all to have some free time. Few visitors, or parlors, are encouraged. As far as possible all have an equal chance for reading some good books, for writing, for rest, and for enjoying their own chapel and ~ardens. In 11 COMMUNICATIONS the later afternoon a general recreation is held for all, and the day finishes with an early retiring. ~ All seem to enjoy this simple and profitable vacation and are grateful for this yearly event, It is not a time for idling,, nor useless wandering about, or negligence; in fact,' it is a time for retrieving past. negligences and to build, in a united way," their player life. At recreation time they are a united community with many enjoyable things to say and hear. This vacation time helps fraternal charity to reigfi and makes and keeps the community a family group. ¯A SISTER. Reverend Fathers: In your Comrfiunications Department for the September issue a Sister writes: "Our present day religious are imbibing the spirit~Of the world:bit by bit." It is probably undeniabl~ that the world is at the convent door-step. Thlough various, devices it will force an entrance if the,,door is even slightly ajar.: The avenue of approach is~,connected: in one way or another with the community's external wbrk--nursing, teaching, or whatever it niay be. Devotion to a work so readily leads,to absorption in it that the work is likely to become art end in itself. In their activities, hospitals, schools 'and other institutions "'must keep up with the times" if they are to retain their clientele and if they "are to spread their apostolate. "Nevertheless, it may be just at this point that the time-honored slogan of r~ligious life becomes distorted and the members begin to be of the world'as well as in it, and that con-vent :life may begin to take on the attitudes and manneris,ms of worldly living. ' ~ Whether "vacations" for religious would open a new channel to divert members 6f religious ~communities from close following of their primary objective is a question to be considered. One might doubt the validity of the argument, "We do not read that Our Divine Lord or His Immaculate Mother ever took a vacation." For, neither do we read that they did not do so, or that periods of rest 'and relaxa-tion were not allowed. Would it be heretical to stippose that Our Lord made His visits to His friends at Bethany serve some such pur-pose? The Gospels tell us that Jesus had compassion on the mul-titudes, and that He went about healing the sick--proving that He was ever sympathetic to physical needs. Presuming, then, that a vacation is a good means to physical well-being as an aid to spiritual 12 Januar~t, 1948 COMMUNICATIONS progress, may we not think that Our Lord would have advocated it provided, of course, that all things are in keeping? That all things are in keeping in other words, that a vacation planned for Sisters would not resemble, even remotely, a house party for worldlings or a secular summer resort. The editor who replied to . Question 17, REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, 3uly, 1947, makes timely sug-gestions to forestall such possibilities when he proposes specifically, "a place that's private, where many Sisters could go together and rest and play games and, above all, get to know one another." The same editor also states. "There's no vacation from the spiritual life ¯ . . hence, I make allowance for spiritual exercises in my plan for the ideal religious vacation." Now, if we grant that the "teach-summer-school-retreat-dean house-teach" schedule of teachers and parallel programs for other types of religious institutes demand some form of definite relaxation; and if on the other hand we admit that worldliness might readily gain entrance to the convent through the vacation medium, is t1~ere a third alternative? In reply, we suggest cornmunit~ recreation---community recrea-tion as it should be. That last clause is inserted because some of us remember when the regular period of "Rule Recreation," supple-mented by a full two weeks' Christmas holiday of wholesome enjoy-ment and happy relaxation (uninterfered with by attendance at con-ventions, meetings, conferences, and so on) did actually supply the rest vitamins which made a vacation unnecessary or a rarity. Those nurderous activities, already mentioned, off our present, complex life are crowding more and more into our daily order and they are crowding out of it that which is necessary to it. In conse-quence, what is happening to that daily hour of simple: nerve-soothing relaxation where each member contributed something and received more--some with hobbies, other at games, all participating as leaders or listeners in conversation which rested, entertained, and uplifted the tired mind and body? May it be possible too that rela-tions with the exterior have tended to re:form community life to the extent that our recreational gatherings are becoming facsimiles of woridly fiestas; in which the restorative simplicity and horniness of convent recreation are lost? -A SISTER. Reverend Fathers: May I submit a few thoughts regarding the subject "Vacations 13 COMMUNICATIONS Reoiew [or Religious for Sisters." My thoughts are in agreement with those of the priest quoted in the 2uly number, p. 241: and in disagreement with the communication in ,the Septembe~ issue, written by "A Sister." In Father's talk to the astonished Mother General, to whom he suggested a vacation for the Sisters, he reiterated what were evidently the sentiments of our sainted Superiors-General, both living and dead. For we have a, large Community house, formerly a hotel,, m an isolated section of'a seashore resort, and directly on the ocean front, which we use for retreats and vacation. Each Sister is per-mitted about two weeks there; six days of which are spent in the silence and recollection of retreat. The. remaining time is our vaca-tion period: and by vacation, I mean relaxation, change,-rest; walks in the fresh air°and sunshine: reading, knitting, crocheting; and, of course, chatting: becoming better acquainted with each other; sharing views about our life work; and,! as Father'said, "fostering a good community spirit." What of out spiritual exercises? They are exactly the same, and in common; though they begin at six, instead of at five A:M. And I might say here that during these vacation days there is never a time that Our Lord.in the Blessed Sacrament has ~not some adorers; that there is not someone making the Stations: someon~making,.a little extra visit. Our rule of~silence is dispensed with except at breakfast: but, of course, the sacred °silence is strictly kept. Who does the work? We do, lovingly,and generously, our .tiny tasks assigned by obedience. Who pays-the bills? Each local superior--a certain amount to a common fund and I-suppose, Divine Providence; . We love it; we are grateful for it: and I know I speak for all when I. say, "God bless those who are ~ responsible for our ideal religious vacation from which we return to our work renewed in mind and body and soul." And why do I disagree with "A Sister" whose communication I referred to. My opinion, Sister, is that you do not really know your Sisters. Probably your position and y.our work have kept you from close intercourse with them." I speak as one of the "rank and file" of a large community which has labored in this country for over a hundred years, and almost three times that many yea.rs in other countries. am teaching school, and have been doing so for over twenty-five years. During these happy years of my religious life I have come in 14 January, 1948 COMMUNICATIONS dose contact with many of our own Sisters; and through teaching and studying with many Sisters of other communities. Therefore, I think I am speaking for "us," the many hundreds of teaching and nursing and otherwise busy Sisters. No, Sister, we do hot forget that we entered religion to take up our eros~ daily and to follow our Crucified Spouse." We don't talk about that fact every'moment of our lives; nor wrhe.books about it; nor 6therwise publidze it; but it is ever in our hearts as we go about bearing the he~t and the burden of the day. Yes, we vowed for life, and on that vow day, so dear to our hearts, we promised our undying love to our Spouse. Each day since, we have kept that promise, whether we were sick or tired or discouraged or Unhappy. The work has grown more dii~cult with the years, as even "those grand religious who have gone before us" would testify were they here today. I like to' think that it is they, in heaven, who have procured for us the many blessings which we now enjoy. You say we are frequently ¯asking, "When may I visit my rela- " tires?" Most of our rules, I am sure, forbid us tO visit our relatives unless they are seriously ill, or very' aged. Hence our visits, neces- .arily infrequent, are usually no joy to us: they are rather a great anxietY and a source of worry. We go, not for our own benefit, but to give our parents the comfort and consolation which God prom-ised them as-part of their hundredfold for having given us to God years ago. And on our return, as we kneel in our chapels and renew, our vows, when the nails are really hurting, can't we truly say that' we have "died" to our relatives and have left "all things" to follow Christ. One more thought, dear Sister. Do you think for one moment that St. Joseph "toiled day inand day out" and never took a vaca-tion? I don't. I'm not a scholar of Scripture, but I think his life was not "all work and no play." I like to think that since Christ Him- Self was like us in all things, save sin, that the Holy Family did relax sometimes. I'm sure that on some days They packed a littl~e lunch,. took a fishing net or a rod, perhaps, and spent the day at the lake, fishing and rowing. I am sure St. Joseph taught the Christ Child to fish; since He Himself gave instructions in the art to .th~ Apostles later on. And was He not perfectly at home in a bo~t teaching the multitude and crossing back and forth over the Lake 0f .Galilee, so much so that He even fell asleep one day? And how did St. Jbhn the Baptist and the Christ Child become intimate during those early 15 COMMUNICATIONS years if they did not visit each other? So, Sister dear, have no worry that your Sisters are so much imbibing the spirit of the world that they will be soon asking for a . "forty hour week." If anything, we are victims of the age in which we live and its surrounding circumstances. Maybe we are different; but we are not less generous, I hope. We will, with God's grace, continue "to give and not to count the cost; to fight, and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labor, and to ask no reward" save Christ our Spouse, and eternal life with Him. -~ SISTER Reverend Fathers: No doubt you have already received instances to demolish the universal negative~about the saints and vacation. But if you can use another, all Jesuit saints took their weekly day off and their annual vacation, according to rule. The Sister seems to have missed the point of the original suggestion, and can't conceive of that kind of a vaca-tion.-- A JESUIT MISSIONARY. Reverend Fathers: With a little interest and a great deal of confirmation of.my alarm over the low state of religious in general, I have been noticing the remarks in your REVIEW on vacations. My convictions must have been working in my sub-conscious when I picked up the Novem-ber issue. For I looked at the signature on page 330 and said, almost aloud, There, I told you so. But I had not read aright. I mean I had not read the signature. I had read my own thought; and it told me that Some Sisters Who Had a Vacation were Some Sisters Who Had a Vocation. I apologize for putting them out of the Convent so soon; but I am sure they will understand, unless they are worse than my sub-conscious makes them, and think only those act With "wisdom and foresight" who purchase homes in the mountains. I am not opposed to vacations, as such. I think there are a num-ber of things we should vacate. If the superior sends you on a vaca-tion, go. And if the superior does not send you on a vacation, and you do not consider (other things being equal) the wisdom and fore-sight to be equal in either case, look out for your own sub-conscious. Another worthy comparison is with our worthy brethren, the wiser children of the world, who say so often that they have no time for [Continued on p. 56] 16 Reasons [or Remembering Mary T. N. Jorgensen, S.J., LONELINESS can bring one of man's most poignant griefs: the right kind of companionship can bring his greatest joy. Psy-chologists claim that having a friend one can th.oroughly trust is a great protection against mental and nervous breakdown; and, on the contrary, the feeling of having no one really interested in one's joys or ready to share one's sorrows often preys upon the mind until both body and mind collapse. Mere association with others will not remove loneliness. We must love and trust our friends: they must know and love and.be faithful to us. A man whose beloved bride has just died is bitterly lonely in a crowded room: a hermit miles from the nearest visible person can live in great peace because of his communion with God. Ia his book, Europe and the Faith, Belloc calls Protestantism a religion of loneliness, the "prime product of t1"ie Reformation being the isolation of the soul." Certainly much of today's disintegration in public and private life is' due to that unh~ippy revolt. One of its great mistake~ was its strange rejection of the glorious Mother of God. We can find peace again by a wholehearted return to her love.i Catholics have never entirely lost her:-but we live so intimately with non- Catholics, so surrounded by their enervating atmosphere, that we naturally have been unable to resist the contagion fully or even mainly. Faber writes of devotion to Mary in Protestant England: Mary is not half enough preached. Devotion to her is low and thin and poor. It i~ frightened out of its wits by the ~neers of heresy. It is always invoking human respect and carnal prudence, wishing to make Mary so little of a Mary that Protes-tants may feel at ease about her. Its ignorance of theology makes it unsubstantial and unworthy. It is not the prominent characteristic of our religion which it ought to be. It has no faith in itself. Hence it is that .~esus is not loved, that heretics are not converted, that the Church is not exalted; that souls, which might be saints, wither and dwindle; that the Sacraments are not rightly frequented, or souls enthusiastically evangelized. $esus is obscured because Mary is kept in the back-ground. "Fhousands of souls perish because Mary is withheld from them. And that is England, a land once proudly called "Mary's Dowry." Our country has received the Protestant tradition from England; ~t has not received from her the traditions which were hers 17 T. N. JORGENSEN Reoieto ~.or Religious under Venerable Bede, Alfred the Great, Thomas ~ Becket, Chaucer, ThOmas More, and her many other great lovers of the Virgin Mary. In the September issue of REVIEW FOR. RELIGIOUS I spoke of the way in which Mary i's truly and fully present in our lives. In this article I shall give some motives for increasing our devotion to her. And while the flight from loneliness is not one of our chief motives, it is a great one. It is not good for man to be alone. This was God's thought as He made Eve to be Adam's companion. Eve failed; but in this companionship, as in all other things, Mary brings all that Eve was' supposed to bring, and more. This is very '"much. Human nature as originally created by God in the Garden of Eden was a glorious thing. Mary from the beginning has this great glory. By her Immaculate Conception she came forth the ideal of our race, "Our tainted nature's solitary boast." Hers is human nature at its best. Virgin, mother, queen, whatever position or virtue one can seek-in a~ perfect woman, Mary has to the fullest degree. She is patieny, loving, kind, beautiful, considerate, wise, prudent, powerful, active, unselfish. One can make the list as long as desired and always find reasons for her perfection in the virtue, ex.amples of her exercise of it. She is the strength of the weak, the health of the sick, the refuge of sinners. She is the joy of the martyrs, the confessors, the virgins, the angels. God Himself delights eternally in being with her, in lavishing His attention and gifts and love upon her. Surely it is a wonderful favor to be invited to live with such a person,° and we are invited to do just this--to live with her, talk to her, trust in her, .love her, work with her, act and feel and think and be at one with her at every moment of our lives. Her love is ours to enjoy, her power ours to use, her presence ours to rejoice in if we but wish it. She wishes it. God wishes it. The saints understood and rejoiced to accept this glory. If we find her and accept her and liv~ with her, we also shall be saints. Sanctity, union with God, peace, success in the spiritual life--all these come to us when we fully accept with St. 3ohn the gift Christ formally gave us from the cross, the gift which was prepared for us long before, the gift which actually came into our possession at our baptism--Mary's spiritual mother, hood. The spiritual life is not hard or sad or unnatural. G~d wishes us to love the good, the joyous, the beautiful things of time and eternity. We blunder gravely when we think that sin or the fruits January, I~48 REMEMBERING I~'IARY of sin are more lovable than God or the gifts of God. God is the perfect Being; the more like Him that others are, the more closely they unite us to Him, the more lovable and satisfying they are. Mary is most like Him; her companionship, therefore, brings us the deepest . joy. That it is an unseen presence does not make it less .valuable. When Christ was about to end His visible presence upon earth, He said to His apostles, "It is expedient that I go, for if I go not I can-not send ttie Paraclete." The visible presence of Christ meant very much to the apostles, but He knew and they soon learned that the invisibile presence of His Spirit in their souls meant more. We, too, shall learn eventually from experience what we already know through faith, that Mary's loving help is none the less potent for being unseen by physical eyes. Love of Mary conquers the evils of materialism. It is a noble and spiritual love, built entirely upon faith, directed toward one whom we have never seen with bodily eyes, fostered mainly by the fact that God wishes it. All this makes it the natural stepping stone to love of God. It is in direct opposition to modern materialism, which is a love of earthly things. Another obvious need of our day is patience amid sufferings. persevering calm and steadiness amid world-wide storms. But all the turmoil of our times is just another phase of the age-old struggle between good and evil, between the woman and her seed on one side, Lucifer and his on the other.~/~brlst and Mary on Calvary stood at the very center of the storm winds; we live in comparative calm. They have won the victory for us; we face but a lesser trial to enjoy its fruits. Lucifer cannot reach Mary directly, and he seeks her Achilles' heel in the chil~/ren on earth, whom she loves. But if we are faithful, children, trusting entirely in her, it will not be a vulnerable heel after all, but the heel which crushes the serpent's head. Her strength is our strength if we are one with her. Today's pagan world like the pagan world of old '~drinks down sin like water." Those who walk with an ever-present conscious-ness that their heavenly mother walks with them will not sin. This sentence puts much in few words, summarizing a host of arguments for seeking to develop a fuller consciousness of Mary's loving care. But~avoidance of sin is negative. A good positive summary of the value of this practice is that strong, persevering love makes one grow like to the loved one. Living constantly, willingly, lovingly with M/try will increase our likeness to her. Her nobility will ~.'N. JORGENSEN Reoieto for Relipiotts become ours. This ihaitation is not a mere external likeness; it is deep and abiding, for it brings us the same sanctifying grace which gave God's own life to Mary. We cannot deeply love one whom we do not know, one of whom we seldom think, one to whom we refuse to speak. But if we start asking Mary's advice ~t every decision, trusting in her at every diffi-culty, following her example at every oportunity, we will quickly discover how wonderful she is. Countless millions have called to her: not one has been left unanswered. God blesses abundantly all who honor His Masterpiece, His best Beloved. His Mother, the Queen of His heavenly home. One of God's reasons for living a full life on earth was to teach us how to live. "His life surely teaches us devotion to Mary. We have but to recall the Annunciation, the days of Mary's pregnancy, of Bethlehem, Egypt, and Nazareth to see how fully He gave Him-self to her. The baby Christ and the young boy Christ would look to her at all hours of the day, doing the things she wished, rejoicing in her smile, trusting in her virtue. Nor did He ever repudiate this first and deepest.love. Christ's humility in subjecting Himself to a mere creature for love of God undid the harm of Adam's pride in following Eve's wish in defiance of God. Our humble giving of ourselves to Mary in union with Christ makes the undoing of Adam's fall complete for us. As Eve shared with Adam in the fall of man, Mary shares with Christ in man's redemption. The Eve-Mary parallel is interesting, but it is too often discussed to need repetition here. But the struggle between good and evilbegan before Adam and Eve. Long before Adam's creation, "before the hills were made" (Proverbs 8:25), ,lesus and Mary were God's predestined King and Queen of the good angels who followed Michael and conquered Lucifer and his followers. Mary is Satan's archenemy, the one in God's plans who is to crush his head. Lucifer and his followers hate and oppose Mary with all their strength because they hate God: we should love and serve her with all our devotion for love of God. If we follow Christ's example and are devoted children of Mary, we feel at home in the spiritual world. Then the communion of saints means what it is supposed to mean. All other wayfarers on .earth are close to us, for they, too, are children of Mary. The souls in purgatory, the saints in heaven, the angels, even God Himself are all one with us in calling her "Beloved." When we visit Christ in 20 danuar~t, 1948 REMEMBERING MARY the Blessed Sacrament, we have one more thing to talk about, for His mother is our mother. When we turn to our guardian angel, we have one more argument in our plea for help, for his queen is our queen. Queen of apostles, martyrs, confessors, virgins--the Litany of Loretto reveals host after host of glorious souls who are united to ' us through Mary by the closest of bonds. The graces which she poured forth to give them triumph and joy and God's own life, sh~" gives us in our fight against the same foes. She rejoices to make us "other Chrlsts," to conceive Christ "again and again in the souls of all the just. We should love Mary truly because she is truly our mother. The Annunciation was an unfathomable moment, not only affecting the eternal destiny of all men and bringing the angels a queen, but also giving God a human nature and a mother. This mother-son rela-tionship was unlike any other in that the Son consciously chose and accepted Mary for His mother. And because He is changeless eter-nally, because the whole plan of the redemption was for heaven rather, than for this earth alone, He accepted her forever and accepted her for us. Father Rickaby (Waters That Go Softly, p. 74) has an interesting list of scriptural references which run thus: And she brought forth her first-born son and wrapped him up in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger (Luke 2:7). For whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be made conformable to the image of the invisible God, the first-born amongst many brethren (Rom. 8:29). Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature . And he is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn (Col. 1:15, 18). And the dragon was angry against the woman and went to make war with the rest of her seed, who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ (Apoc. 12:17). God in choosing Mary the Mother of Christ, chose her mother of all the "other Christs." She is the mother of the Head and of all the other members of the Mystical Body. AS she was mother of the Holy Home at Nazareth from which the Church grew, she is the mother of the Church. Christ's dying bequest "Behold thy mother" revealed and e~tablished this universal motherhood; the history of the Church confirms it. The first to come to Christ, "going into the house, found the Child with Mary his mother" (Mt, 2:11). All since who have entered Christ's house, the Church, find Him with Mary His mother. And heaven will find her still His mother and ours. But the best reason for remembering Mary is simply this, God 21 REMEMBERING MARY Ret~iew for Religious wishes it. He chose to come to us through Mary. He asks us to come to Him'through her. Our only toad to the Father is through Christ; our n~tural road to Christ is through Mary. That God has ordained this is clear from the unwavering teaching of His Church as well as from the lives of the saints. We might give many reason~ for this choice of His, for we can see that it increases "our humility, that Mary's blessing on our prayers increases their worth, that faith in Mary's presence necessarily implies faith in God's greater presence, and so forth. But it is sufficient here to recall that God wishes it, and He is our wise and lbving Father. We should be eager to honor Mary at all times, for at all times'she is helping us, watchifig over us, offering her loving help. It is only just that we should make as adequate a response as we can, and the closest we can come to making a fair return is by accepting her gifts lovingly at all times. Mary suffered heroically for us on C~Ivary when she was revealed as our .spiritual mother. Gratitude demands that we make the most of this spiritual life, and this is done by accepting the help she is constantly offering us. And again, she is so perfect and lovable in herself that natural good sense should make us glad to recall her presence often. One might go on much longer enumeratihg reasons for this devo-tion to Mary, but for the moment I shall be content wlt!q a summary of those already given. It conquers loneliness, confusion, and despair by bringing companionship, peace, joy, hope, inspiration. It gives strength and light to bear sufferings in the best possible way, that is, in union with the sufferings of ,lesus and Mary on Calvar'y. It helps us to conquer sin completely. It fills our hearts with the noblest love and makes us noble like unto Mary. It makes us Christlike, more fully unitin, g us to Him and giving ias a greater share in His life. It makes 'our rise from Adam's sin and our opposition to Lucifer and evil more complete. It gives the communion of saints the vital share in our lives which it sl:iould have. Truth and justice and gratitude demand it, for Mary is our mother, loves us deeply, and is most lovable. And these reasons are all true or truer because of the final great reason: It is God's most urgent will. He gives His grace to the humble. We must be meek and humble of heart as He is and become thd children of Mary as He did if we wish to please Him. If we are humble and childlike all this will be clear to us. Although the father of the family supports it, a little child naturally runs to his mother for help when he is in need, knowing his cause 22 January, 1948 LITURGICAL AND PRIVATE DEVOTION stronger if his mother pleads for him. God, our Father, has put the disposal .of His riches in our regard in the hands of Mary by making "her the Mediatrix of All Graces. If she were not our mediatrix, it would still be a great pleasure to be devoted to her. Now it is as necessary as it is natural. It is as profitable as it is pleasant. Li!:urgical and Priva!:e Devotion J; Putz, S.J. [EDITORS' NOTE: This article is reprinted with permission from The Clergy Momfily (Vol. VIII, pp. 293-305), a magazine for the clergy published in India. :,The article derives special timeliness from the fact that it discusses some of the doc-trines of the ~ncycllcal Mystibi Corporis which the Pope found it advisable to reiterate in his most recent encyclical Mediator Dei.] ~4~ACK to the liturgy!" is one of the watchwords of our age. D During the last thirty years the liturgical movement has beer/ steadily growing and has contributed its share towards the revival of a more integral Catholic spirit. However, like most good tthioinngs;s ,a nitd i st haep tR toom leaand Peonnthtiufsfsia, swtihci fleo lelonwcoeursra tgoi ncger. ttahien mexoavgegmerean- t, have occasionally felt obliged to rais~ a warning voice against the danger of one-sidedness. "There is no doubt," Plus XI wrote in 1928, "that an a~voidance of the exagl~erations Which are noticeable of late will enable liturgy to contribute much towards progress in spiritual life." Plus XII in his encyclical Mystici Corporis (June 29, 1943) warned against three particular.exaggerations connected with the liturgy. A few months later he again returned to this subject in a letter to the Bishop of Mainz, who had requested the Pope "to raise the whole [liturgical] matter out. of an atmosphere of apprehension into one of confidence." Plus XII replied: In this connection We can only repeat what We have already said on other occa-sions, namely that the question is being dealt with here in a calm and broadminded manner by the cardinals charged with its clarification, and that the Holy See is prepared to meet as far as is possible the needs of spiritual mlnistrarion in German)'. Concern has been expressed in the first place amongst you yourselves and in fact, as you know, by the bishops. It cannot be said that such concern is altogether without found~tlon. It is certainly not related excluslvel); to the liturgical question, but it affects the whole devotional and ascetic llfe of the faithful. 23 J. PUTZ ' Ret~ieto [or Religiotis ~ The ;Holy"Father~,then, refers :to an article in the Kl~gusblatt of July 14, 1943,'~vbich confirmed anew the concern felt in Rorfie. "It can therefore only be salutary to make a clear distinction nbw; hrhen the liturgical question is. beir;g dhalt with, 'between'whag~is ~¢hole-some and what.i~' unwholesbme." The Pope then points out that this has already been done to some extent in the encyclical Mgstici Corporis. The letter continues: On three points We feel that emphasis should be placed: (1) That the liturgical movement doris-not, by_a, 0nd;sided emphasis~n their l~sychological effect, push into tl~e'b~ackgroun~l the meaning o~ and e~teem fc~i~the grace-giving effect of the Sacred Mysteries. (2) That the consciousness of the fundamental significance of the eternal t~uths and the struggle of the individual against sin, the striving of the individual for virtue and holiness are not marred by exaggeration of the lithrgical side. (3) Finally, that a!ongside the task in the liturgical sphe~r,~ oth.er task~ are not overlooked. What is liturgy? In this article it is taken in its strict sense, as distinct from private prayer. We must therefore exclude~ the broad meaning given it by some recent writers, who would make it embrace a.ll prayer,"public and private, and even the whole life of the Mystical ¯ Body. In its proper meaning liturgy is equivalent'to punic official worship as defined by canon 1256, that is, worship offered in the name of the Church through acts which by her institution are to be offered only to God, to the saints, and to the blessed by persons law-fu!. ly'deputed for this fhnction. ' : Its center is the Mass. This is surrounded, as .it were, by two circles which are an exp.ansion or prolongation of the Eucharisti~ Sacrifice: ~he I~ivine'Office by which the Church throughout the iday offers to God the laas perennis, and the sacraments (and: sacramentals } which spread God's grace and blessings throughout the life of~ the Church. These essential dements by their daily and~seasohal varia-tions form the wonderful rhyth~ of the liturgical year, with the sanctoral cycle integrated into the temporal cycle. Public worship calls for an appropriate edifice with its various appointments, particularly the altar. It requires c~rtfiin vestments and an adapted mode of singing. This ':setting" of the liturgy has its obvious importance; but it must remain secondary, though extremists and faddists at times seem to take the husk for the kernel. The real problem inherent in the liturgical movement is a ~spir-itual one. It concerns the relation of the liturgy to "private" devo-tion- which is but one aspect of a more geneial problem, namely. the relation of the individual to society. The "polar tension" 24 danuar~ , 1948 LITURGICAL AND PRIVATE DEVOTION existing between these two has been the object of many studies in recent years. Like all such tensions, it cannot be solved by stressing one side at the expense of the other. Individualism and absorption of the individual in society are equally to be avoided. A full and healthy Christian life r.equires the union of liturgy with private prayer and personal endeavor. 1. The liturgy has a twofold function. Its primary purpose is found in its intrinsic, objective, supernatural value. Liturgy is essentially the public exercise of the Church's priesthood, the con-text and prolongation of the sacrifice of the altar. It is both God-ward and manward. It is the "voice of the Spouse" expressing to God the worship owed by the Church as a visible society and,calling down upon men the blessing of the Almighty. Its 'power is not due to the d~votion of the minister, but to the opus operantis Ecclesiae: and in the primary rites--the opus operaturn of the Mass and the sacraments--Christ Himself communicates His own sacrifice to be offered on the altar and His life to be received into souls. As the prayer of the Church and the action of Christ, the litu.rgy clearly ranks higher than private piety. Its objective excellence is further enhanced by the inspired character of most of its formulas a~ad by the fact that the Churdh in creating .the liturgy has been guided by the Holy Ghost. We should note, however, that the liturgy pos-sesses its essential character and value only when performed by those officially empowered and delegated to act in the name of the Churcfi. The ordinary layman, it is true, shares in the Catholic p.rlesthood by his baptismal character; but his part in the liturgy is strictly limited. His character enables him to receive the sacraments and to offer the sacrifice by his spiritual union with the celebrant. To exercise this power on certain occasions is his only "liturgical" obligation. He may, of course, recite the prayers of the missal, breviary, or ritual; but on his lips they will be "private" prayers (excepting those parts which are officially assigned to the congregation). Even so their use is to be recommended, for such use effectively serves the second pur-pose of the liturgy. Besides its intrinsic purpose and essential value, the liturgy has a subjective or pedagogical efficacy: it is meant to instruct the faithful and to train them in the true Christian spirit. Union with the Church's liturgy is a wonderful education of mind and heart. It teaches the truths of our faith by enacting and living them; it devel-ops the Christian spirit by making us exercise it: Plus XI, when 25 J. PUTZ Retqew for Religious instituting the feast of Christ the King, remarked: "People are in-structed in the truths of faith and brought to appreciate the 'inner joys of religion far more effectually by the annual celebration 6f the sacred" mysteries than by any. official announcement of the teaching of the Church." Pius X declared that "active participati.on in the sacred and solemn mysteries of the Church is the primary and indispensable source of the genuine Christian spirit" (Motu proprio, November 22, 1903). Father Meschler, S.3., in his Catholic Church Year, states: "In order to obtain holiness and salvation, we have ohly to follow, willingly the invitations of the liturgical year." The Mass, the sacraments, the feasts, and the seasons eloquently put before us the Christian ideal and supply the necessary inspiration and motivation in constant Variety. Religion as taught by the liturgy has a definite spirit or style, which is the norm of genuine and healthy religion, a safeguard against all deviations. If we were to characterize it in one word, we would point out its sense ot: proportion which putsall things in their proper place. Hence its dominant theocentrism, which stresses adoration, praise, and self-oblation as the primary duties of religion. Rich in devotions, it never allows these to overshadow the essential devotion. It is solidly "objective," stressing dogma; facts, and realities rather than subjective feelings, the latter flowing naturally from a realiza-tion of the truth. Thus it is free from emotionalism, yet capable of the highest ~enthusiasm and the deepest grief. It satisfies the needs of the individual soul (chiefly in the Eucharist), but at the same time. takes one beyond,the narrowness of individualistic piety by fostering social consciousness, a sense of oneness with the community. The individual is always made to feel a part of the whole, a member Of the family, a cell of the Body; even (or especially) at the moments of his most personal union with God (in Holy Communion) he cannot forget his union~ with his fellow men. The liturgy thus tends to shape or "inform" man's total spiritu~l life. "Liturgical piety" consists in consciously making the liturgy the center, the chief object, and the inspiration of one's inner life. It is clear that a dose of this liturgical spirit is not only useful but neces-sary for all on account of the part which~ the Mass, the sacraments, and public worship have to play in the life of a Catholic. 2. But it is no less evident that the public prayer of the Church can in no way be opposed to individual prayer and endeavor. It not only leaves room for the latter, but requires it and stimulates it. The 26 danuary, 1948 LITURGICAL AND PRIVATE DEVOTION liturgy by itself, as official worship, is' something exterior and imper-sonal, regulated by the Church and faithfully executed by the litur-gist. It is distinct from the interior life that animates the Church and each member; it only expresses this life and devotion. It is fruitful and sanctifying only in the measure of the understanding and fervor which the individual brings to it. Liturgical prayer, to be more than lip service, must become interior, that is, personal, "pri-vate." Even the opus operatum does not work mechanically; but its effect is proportioned to each one's personal devotion. Personal prayer and endeavor must also prolong the liturgy. The Mass must be lived, the spirit and the ideal taught by public worship must shape individual lives.1 Thus liturgy invites the co-operation of mental prayer, self-examination, and all the methodical exercises of tradi-ditional asceticism. It would therefore be fallacious to oppose "liturgical piety" and ."ascetical piety" as though they were two distinct ways to perfection, the former being considered the more excellent, if not the only truly Catholic, way. There is but one way. Liturgy implies private prayer and must pass over into asceticism; 13rivate prayer and asceti-cism in turn must keep in contact with the liturgy, chiefly the~ Mass and the sacraments. The proportion of the two elements will vary according to each one's tastes and needs; but neither can be separated from the other, or even unduly stressed at the expense of the other, without serious dangers. Private and popular piety without the liturgy is exposed to the danger of deviating from fundamentals~to accessories, from genuine devotion to emotionalism and subjectlvism, from trust in God's grace to reliance on natural methods (semi- Pelagianism). Liturgy without private prayer and endeavor becomes formalism, aestheticism, semi-quietism. Too much stress on public, exterior worship fosters in the liturgist a tendency to be more con-cerned With forms than with life. Hence there arises an excessive attachment to ancient forms and a lack of appreciation for new forms and feasts, the liturgy of the first four centurieg being proclaimed as the standard for all times. Ye~; those aricient forms were new in their time: nor has the Holy Ghost ceased to direct the Church since the lit must also guide personal piety. But individual prayer has laws and character-istics of its own. The Church not.only tolerates but encourages non-liturgical and "popular" devotions, such as visits to the Blessed Sacrament, the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, devotions to the Sacred Heart, and so forth, which, like the liturgy, have grown out of the life of the Church and correspond to the spiritual needs of the faithful. 27 J' PUTZ Reuietu fi~th century. "There is still a continuous development of dogma; a [ortiori there must be a development and progress of liturgy. The fashionable underrating (or contempt) of "popular". devotions is also rooted in lack of understanding of the laws of life and is clearly contrary to the mind of the Church. Both corporate life and individual" life in the Church have the same source, Christ. Together they constitute Christ'~ life in His Mystical Body. It is necessary that both be intensely cultivated and that the correct tension between them be maintained. After these general considerations we shall briefly analyze the doctrine of M~Cstici Corporis concerning some particular exaggerations connected with the liturgy. At first sight, the mention of these "errors" might seem out of place, unrelated to the general theme of the encyclical. In reality it is closely connected with the rest. In the dogmatic part, while explaining the theology of the Mystical Body, the Pope has been at pains to show how in this Body the personal and the social, the interior and the exterior, the spiritual and the juridical elements are united in one common source and purpose. He then con-demns two errors ~vhich tend to obliterate the permanence of the individual person in the Body and the need for personal endeavor; and now he vindicates the rights of the individual in his devotional life. I, Frequent Confession The same [disastrous] result follows from the opinions of those ~vho assert that little importance should be given to the frequent confession of venial sins. Preference is to be given, they say, to that general confession which the Spouse of Chris~: surrounded by her children in the Lord makes each day through her priests about to go up to the altar of God. The confession of sins at the beginning of the Mass is an impres-sive act, very appropriate before the celebration of the sublime mys-teries. It purifies the soul and disposes it to offer the sacrifice of expia-tion with greater fervor. The absolution after the Confiteor, though not efficacious ex opere operato as in the sacrament of penance, is a sacramental. Through the intercession of the Church it tends to arouse in those present true sorrow by which they merit the remission of their venial sins. Though in its present form it is of late origin, yet some such confession seems to go back to the earliest times. Even the Didache or'Teaching of the .Twelve Apostles mentions it: "On the Lord's day being assembled together break the bread and 'make Eucharist,' having first confessed your offences that your sacrifice may be pure." 28 Januar!l, 1948 LITURGICAL AND PRIVATE DEVOTION However, zeal for this venerable practice may become indiscreet and weaken the esteem of frequent private confession. The sacra-ment is of course necessary in the case of mortal sins; but frequent confession of venial sins may seem to diminish our devotion for the daily public confession in which the Church wants each one to join wholeheartedly. This may have been the reasoni.ng of those of the "younger clergy" whom the encyclical mentions as belittling frequent confession. "It is true that venial sins can be expiated in many ways, which are to be highly commended," for example, by acts of charity~ public confession before Mass, and particularly Holy Communion; "but to insure a more rapid and daily progress along the path of virtue we wish the pious practice of frequent confession to be earnestly advo-cated." There are two reasons why this should be done: (a) The practice was introduced by the Church under the guidance of the Holy Ghost. Leaving aside the obscure question of its origin, it was approved by the Council of Trent and by Pope Plus VI. When the Synod of Pistoia expressed the wish that con-fession of venial sins be less frequent, on the principle that fa;niliarity breeds contempt, Plus VI cerlsured this declaration as "temerarious, pernicious, and contrary to the practice of saints and pious Christians approved by Trent." Plus X, in his Exhortation to the Catholic Clergg, deeply deplored the laxity of those priests who but rarely frequent the sacrament of penance and thus blunt the delicacy of their consciences. Canon Law wishes religious and seminarians to confess "at least once a week." A number of saints used to confe~s every day. St. Bonaventure recommended daily confession to the novices; and Father Louis Lallemant, to all who are especially desirous of perfection. However, these writers recommend the practice only to souls who can maintain a habitual fervor which is capable of resisting the tendency to routine and of daily making the spiritual effort required for a fruitful confession. (b) Frequent confession is an efficacious means of spiritual progress. The encyclical enumerates its advantages, both pedagogical ¯ and sacramental: "By this means genuine self-knowledge is increased, Christian humility grows, bad habits are "corrected, spiritual neglect and tepidity are resisted, the conscience is purified, the will strength-ened, salutary direction is obtained, and grace is increased in virtue of the Sacrament itself." 29 J. PUTZ Review [or Religious 2. Priaate Prager "There are some, moreover, who deny to our prayers any impetratory power, or who suggest that private prayers to God are to be accounted of little value. Public prayers, they say, prayers made in the name of the Church, are those that re'ally count, a~ they pro-ceed from the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ." In reply to this objection, which he characterizes as "quite untrue," the Pope stresses thre~ points: (a) The dignitg of private prager.--To those who depreciate private prayer by extolling the liturgy as "the praying Christ," the prayer of Christ Himself in His Body, the Holy Father opposes the fundamental truth concerning Christian prayer/ all prayer is the prayer of Cb'rist in His body. "For the divine Redeemer is closely united not only with His Church, His beloved Spouse, but in her also with the souls of each one of the faithful, with whom He longs to have intimate converse, especially after Holy Communion." Public prayer is only one part of the Church~s prayer, the most excellent because it "proceeds from Mother Church n rseir. However, every prayer, even the most "private," has "its dignity and efficacy." It is the prolongation of the soul's eucharistic communion with Christ. It is the prayer of Christ praying in His members and as such is never an "isolated" prayer but is part of the Catholic prayer of the Mystical Body, united with those of all the other members and ~benefiting the. whole Body. "For in that Body no good can be done, no virtue prac-ticed by individual members which does not, thanks to the Com-munion of Saints, redound also to the welfare of all." Every prayer thus has a social value. (b) P?age~ ot: petition.--Quietism rejects all prayer of petition as" meaningless, since God knows better than we what is good for us and He desires our good more than we do ourselves. Some liturgists belittle prayer for one's own individual needs as fostering individual-ism. They argue that we should always pray as members, according to the teaching of Christ ("Our Father. give us this day our daily bread.") and the practice of the liturgy which prays in the plural for the needs of all. To pray in the plural ~s no doubt a beautiful practice which keeps us conscious of our union with God's fancily and Christ's Body; but within this Body the members remain "indi-vidual ~0ersons, subject to their own particular needs." Hence it can-not be wrong for them "to ask special favors for themselves, even temporal favors, provided they always submit their will to the 30 Januarg, 1948 LITURGICAL AND PRIVATE DEVOTION divine will." ¯ (c.).Uti!it~t o~: rnedtiff pra~ter.--"As for m~ditation on heavenly things; not only the prbhduncements Of the Church but also the example of' the saints are a proof of the high esteem in which it must be held by all." Liturgical prayer must be vivified by personal medi-tation, and prdgress towards perfection requires an intimate con-sideration of the truths of our faith and frequent communing with the Spirit working in the silence of the soul. Pius X, who praised the liturgy as the" indispensable source of the Christian spirit, had' equal praise for daily meditation; which he declared necessary for a priestly life (Exhortation to.the Catholic Clergy, 1908). Pius XI, who in Divini cultus (1928) extolled liturgical piety, wrote a special ency-clical to recommend the methodical prayer of the spiritual exercises, particularly those of St. Ignatius (Mens nostra, 1929); and the Church wants her priests to practice daily meditation and to make ¯ frequent retreats (canons 125, 126). 3. Prager to Chrisi "Finally, there are some who say that our prayers should not be addressed to the person of Jesus Christ Himself, but rhther to God, or to the Eternal Father through Christ, on the ground that our Savior as Head of His Mystical Body is only 'mediator of God and men.' " " Of course no Catholic denies that Christ is also God and that we may pray to Him. But we are often told by liturgists and even by theologians that we should rather pray to God the Father through Christ Our Lo~d if ov~e want to conform our p~ivate prayer to the . spirit of the liturgy, to the mind of Christ and of the Church, and to sound theology. To a "christocentric" piety, which at present is supposed "to d6minate private and popular devotion, these w~iters oppose a "theocentric" piety. The difference between these two is well explained by, D. yon Hildebrafid: "In christocentric piety, Christ so to speak stands before us and looks at us, while we at the same time look into His visage. In theocentric piety, Christ also stands before us, but He is turned towards the Father, on the summit of humanity, so to speak, leading us to the Father and preceding us on that way." In christocentric piety we adore Christ and pray to Hirfi. In theo-centric piety, we pray to the Father through Christ and with Christ; . ChriSt is the mediator, the head of humanity, our brother,u UIn his original article, Father [Sutz developes at some length the argumerits "in favor of prayer through Christ . " We give them in brief summary in the section in brackets which follows.--ED. 31 LITURGICAL AND PRIVATE DEVOTION Reoieto for Religious [The arguments in favor of prayer through Christ look impres- "sive. It is said that Jesus Himself always addressed His prayer.to the Father; that He emphasized His mediatorial function when He taught the disciples to pray; and that in early Christianity the solemn prayer of the Church was directed to the Father through Christ. This prayer through Christ is said to be theologically preferable because it brings out the fundamental truth of Christ.ianity, namely, that Christ is truly man--our Brother, a Mediator between men and God, our High Priest who is like unto us and who offered Himself for us, our Advocate with the Father, our Head who li;¢es and prays in us. Prayer of this kind keeps the humanity of Christ from being obscured and the Mystery of the Blessed Trinity from becoming a dead dogma; it makes us conscious of our union with the other members of Christ, prevents us from concentrating on the "dreadful" inaccessibility of God, and keeps a balance in our veneration of the saints.] Such is a brief sketch of the arguments. They do bring out the need of keeping alive the consciousness of Christ's humanity, His mediatorship and union with the Mystical Body~the encyclical on the Mystical Body Was written for that very purpose. But they are one-sided because they stress Christ's humanity so much that the-¢ unconsciously obscure His divinity and suggest that prayer to Christ is less perfect, less Christian, less conformed to the mind of Christ and of the Church. This, the encyclical declares, "is false, contrary to the mind of the Church and to Christian practice." The theological argument implies that Christ, as Head of the Mystical Body, is to be regarded only as our brother and mediator, that is, as man. This is incorrect, "for strictly speaking He is Head of the Church adcording to both natures together." The uniqueness of Christ consists precisely in this inseparable union of the divine and the human. He is the mediator because the extremes are united in His person; and when we look on Him as our brother, we cannot forget that He is our God. This is why both forms of prayer are necessary: through Christ and to Christ. They are mutually corn-plementary. The two aspects of Christ are clearly brought out in the prayer of the early Chtirch: they prayed not only to the Father, but equally to Christ following His own invitation. Indeed both the first pub-lic prayer and the first private prayer that have been preserved are addressed to Christ. "It is true," the encyclical states, "that prayers were more commonly addressed to the eternal Father through His" January, 1948 GIFTS FOR RELIGIOUS only-begotton Son, esp.ecially in the Eucharistic Sacrifice; fbr: here Christ as Priest and Victim, exercises in a .~pecial m~inner His office of mediator. Nevertheless, prayers .dir,ect.ed .t9 t~e Red.ee~yr ale. not rare, even in the liturgy of the Mass " though they are naturally,more frequent in private devotion. . _ " Hence pray, el through Christ arid pra.y,e.r to CI~ris~ "are eq~ialIF Christian[ The two together consmute- the complete, Christian prayer; "for every Christian must clearly~ ufiderstand that the man Christ Jesus is truly the Son of God and Himself t~uly. God." The Catholic doctrine, which excludes all one-sided views, is admirably summed up by St. Augustine: Christ (our Head) is Son of~God and Son of man, one God with the Father, one man with mankind. Hence when we speak to God in supplication we do ~not separate from Him His Son, nor does the Son's Body when it prays separate from itself its Head. Thus the same Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God and only savior of His Body, prags for us and in us and is praged't9 bg us. He prays fbr us as our priest; He prays in us as our Head: He is prayed to by us as our God . We pray therefore to Him, through ~Hiro, in Him.a " Git s Religious Adam C. Ellis, S.l~ II. Common Li{e and Peculium THoEf vowte mofp poorvael rtthyi nisg sn. oBt yt hpeo sointilvye n porremsc rfoiprt iroenli gthioeu Cs hinu rtchhe huases provided additional norms intended to safeguard the vow and to foster the spirit of poverty. The'~most important of these is the precept obliging all religious to observe common life, that is, to receive everything they need in the line of food, clothing, furnishings,, and so forth from the community in which they live. These needs are to be supplied from a common fund to which the .religious contribute whatever they earn or whatever is given to them because they are religious. Common life is of apostolic origin. It. was observed in the primi-tive Church by all the faithful, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles: SEnarratlo in psalmurn 85, n. I. (P~L. 37, 1081). 33 ADAM (2. ELLIS Reoiew [or Religiot~s And all the believers were tbgether, and had everything in common: and selling their possessions and belongings they distributed the proceeds to all, according to the needs of each one (2:44, 45). Now the multitude of the believers were of one heart and one soul: and not one claimed any of his property as his own, but everything was common to them (4:32). None among them was in need: for all who were owners of lands qr houses sold 'them, and bringing the proceeds of the sale hid them at the apostles' feet: and a distribution was made to each according as anyone had need (4:34, 35). As the number of the faithful increased, ~ommon life disappeared among the laity but was continued among the clerics, who lived in the city with their bishop and shared in the common fund provided by the faithful for their support. Gradually, however, as Chris-tiani~ y spread from the titles to the countryside, many of the clergy' left the bishop's community to live~among the faithful near their churches, and community life was confined to the clergy of the cathedral churches. Even this form of common life°eventually fell into disuse, but the~ apostolic tradition of common life was still per-petuated by the religious orders whose founders had incorporated it into their rule, ~.nd finally the Church prescribed common life for all religious. For a better understanding of canon 594, which prescribes com-mon life for all religious, it will be well to give here the more impor-tant sources of legislation upon which it is based, beginning with the Council of Trent. " Document I In its twenty-fifth session (December 3, 1543) the Council of Trent legislated for the reform of religious. At that time all reli- ~gious had solemn vows in an order, and there were no religious con-gregations with simple vows. Here are two selections from the first two chapters regarding common life. I. Since the ho!y Synod is not ignorant of the splendor and utility which accrue to the Church of God from monasteries piously instituted and rightly administered, it has--to the end that the ancient and regular discipline may be the more easily and promptly restored where it has fallen away, and may be the more firmly main-tained where it has been preserved--thought it necessary to enjoin, as by this decree it does enjoin, that all regulars, men as well as women, shall order and regu-late their lives in accordance with the requirements of the rule which they have pro-fessed: and above all that they shall faithfully observe whatsoever belongs to the perfection of their profession, such as the vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity, as also all other vows and precepts that may be peculiar to any rule or order, respectively appertaining to the essential character of each, and which regard the observance of a common mode of living (comm~nera oitara), food, and dress. II. Superiors shall allow the use of moveables to the religious in such wise that their furniture shall be in conformity with the state of poverty which they have 34 ~anuarg, 1948 GIFTS FOR RELIGIOUS professed; and there shall be nothing therein superfluous, but at the same time nothing shall be refused which is necessary for them. But should any be dis-covered 9r be proved to possess anything inany other manner, he shall be deprivi:d during two years of his active and passive voice, and also be punished in accordance with the constitutions of his own rule and order. Document. II In some places the reforms i~f the Council of Trent were intro- ¯ duced with great accuracy and fidelity, notably by St. Charles Bor-romeo in the archdiocese and province of Milan. In other places only a halfhearted1 attempt at reform was made, while some monasteries made no effort whatsoever to carry out the decrees of the Council. Fifty years after the close of the Council, Clement VIII determined to enforce its laws regarding the reform of religious and to that end issued a forceful decree entitled Nullus omnino, (July 25, 1599). We quote the paragraphs regarding common life and its observance. 2. In order that the decree 'of the Council of Trent regarding the observance of the vow of poverty may be more faithfully observed, it is orderdd that none of the: brethren, even though he be a superior, shall possess as his own or in the name of the community, any immovable or movable goods, or money, income, pension (census), alms . . . no matter under what title they may have been acquired, even though they be subsidies given by relatives, or free gifts, legacies, or donations, but all shall at once be given .to the superior and incorporated in the community, and mixed with its other goods, income and monies, so that from it [the common'fund] food and clothing may be supplied to all. Nor is it allowed to any superior what- . soever to.permit the same brethren, or any one of them, stable goods even by way of usufruct or use, or administration, not even by way of a deposit or custody.~ 3. The clothing of the brethren and the furniture of their cells is to be pur-chased with money from the common fund, and should be uniform for all the breth-ren and for all superiors. It should conform to the state of poverty which they have vowed, so that nothing superfluous may be admitted, nor anything which is necessary be denied anyone. 4. All, including superiors, no matter who they may be, shall partake of the same bread, the same wine, the same viands, or, as they say, of the same "pittance" (pitantia)l in common at the first or second table unless they be prevented by illness; nor may anything be provided in any manner whatsoever to be eaten pri-vately by anyone; should anyone sin in this matter, let him receive no food on that day, ~xeept bread and water. Document III A century later Innocent XII was obliged to take a vigorous hand in suppressing abuses which still existed or had newly come into being. He tried also to remove the cause of these abuses which lay 1The word "pittance," derived from the late Latin pietantia shortened to pitantia, mea.nt (1) a pious donation, or bequest to a religious house, to provide an addi-tional allowance of food or wine, or a special dish or delicacy on particular feast days: (2) The allowance or extra portion 'itself, as in our text. 35 ADAM C. ELLIS Reoieto [or Religious principally in the lack of sufficient funds to support the monasteries. 3. Let superiors carefully see to it that" eyery~hing which pertains to food and clothing, as well as to all other needs of life, be promptly supplied to each religious, and especially in time of sickness that nothing pertaining to the recovery of health be wanting to anyone. 6. For this reason no more religious should be allowed to dwell in the same house than can be conveniently supporte~l by its income, and by the customary alms, including those given to individuals, or by any other revenue accruing to the common fund. 9. For the future n9 monasteries; colleges, houses, convents, or other places of religious men may be founded, erected, or established in any manner except under the express obligation that common life be exactly obsert~ed perpetually and invio-lately by all dwelling there; and therefore no such foundations are to be permitted hereafter unless, in addition to other requisites,~ it shall be first lawfully established that the annual revenues, or a certain hope of alms, will be sufficient to provide decent support for at least twelve religious living in the exact observance of com-mon life. Document IV To repair the ravages caused to religiou~ orders by the French Revolution and by the Napoleonic wars, Plus VII issued an impor-tant instruction through ~he Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, on August 22, 1814, from which we quote two paragraphs pertinent to our subject. VI. Superiors shall carefully see to it that in those houses in which at least twelve religious are to dwell, eight at least shall be priests. All who desire to be received into these houses shall make their request in writing, and in their own hand shall promise that they will observe the rule proper to their order, especially that regarding common life; which, in those places where it has collapsed, is by all means to be restored, at least according to the norms laid down in n. X. X. In those monasteries and houses in which the practice of common life was in vogue, it shall be retained in the future. In all other houses, of whatever kind or name, let common life be restored in matters pertaining to food, clothing, medicines for the si~k, and for journeys undertaken by command of the order. Document V Similarly, after the revolution of 1848 in the Papal States, Pius IX issued an oraculuro oioae oocis to all superiors general of orders. This was communicated to them by the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars under date of April 22, 1851. 1. In all novitiate houses perfect common life shall be introduced regardless of any indult, privilege, or exemption obtained by any individuals who are members of the community. 2. The perfect observance of the constitutions of each institute regarding pov-erty is to be restored in all houses of professors, of training, and of studies. 3. In every house there shall be established a common fund with the customary precautions, into which all the religious shall deposit ali monies, all privileges to the contrary notwithstanding; tior may they retain in their possession more than what is allowed'by their respective constitutions . And His Holiness reserves to danuar~t, 1948 GIFTS FOR R~ELIGIOUS himself for the future the right to make further disposition regarding indults to religious for the use of money. Document 'VI Some of our re~ders may remark at this point that all the docu-ments cited refer to members of religious orders, but hot to congre-gations with simple vows. To show that even before the Code reli-gious with a simple vow of poverty in a congregation were also bound by th~ obligation of common life, we shall quote two docu-ments. The first is a letter of the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, dated December 30, 1882, and addressed presumabl.¢ to one or more bishops in Italy, since the introductory part of the letter is in Italian. We quote here the one number pertaining to our subject. The following rules concerning the-simple vow of poverty have been adopted by this Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, and it is customary to pre-scribe that they be inserted in constitutions which this Sacred Congregation approves: 7. Whatever the professed religious have acquired by their own industry or for their society (intuitu societatis), they must not assign or reserve to themselves, but all such things must be put into the community fund for the common benefit of the society'. Document VII The second pre-Code document referring .to common life for religious with simple vows in a congregation is made up of three articles contained in the Normae of 1901,, which were inserted in all constitutions of religious congregations approved by thh Sacred Con-gregation of Bishops and Regulars after that date. Art. 126. After taking their vows, whatever the Sisters may acquire by reason of their own industry or for their institute may not be claimed or kept for them-selves: but all such things are to be added to the goods of the community for the common use of the institute or house. Art. 127. In the institute let all things concerning furniture, food, and clothing be called and actually be common. It is becoming, however, that clothing for strictly personal use be kept separately in a common wardrobe and be distributed separately. Art. 128. Let the furniture which the Sisters use with the permission of superiors be in conformity with their poverty; and let there be nothing superfluous in this matter: and let nothing that is needed be denied them. It seems to be evident from the documents quoted that, at least since the Council of Trent, the Church has desired that all religious should practice common life according to the norms laid down in these documents. We are now prepared to study the present legisla-tion as contained in canon 594. ~anon 594, § 1: In every religious institute, all must carefully observe com-mon life, even in matters of food, clothing, and furniture. 37 ADAM C. ELLIS Review for Religious § 2. Whatever is acquired by the religious, including superiors, according to the terms of canon 580, § 2, and canon 582, 1°, must be incorporated in the goods of the house, or of the province, or of the institute, and all money and tides shall be deposited in the common safe. § 3. The furniture of the religious must b~ in accordance with the poverty of which they make profession. I. In every reliqious institute," According to the definition of canon 488, 1°, a religious institute means "every society approved by legitimate ecclesiastical authority, the members of which tend to evangelical perfection, according to the laws proper to their society, by the profession of public vows, whether perpetual or temporary." Hence all true religious--whether bound by simple or by solemn vows in an order, or by simple vows, either temporary or perpetual, in a diocesan or in a pontifical congregation--are bound by the obli-gation of common life as laid down in the canon. 2. All must carefull~t observe common life. By reason bf his profession of vows a religious is incorporated, that is, becomes a member of his religious institute, subjects himself to the authority of its superiors, and promises to live in accordance with the prescrip-tions of the rules and constitutions. Strictly speaking, to be a reli-gious only the foregoing conditions need be fulfilled; and in the early centuries of the Church hermits, solitaries, and the like actually were true religious by reason of their subjection to the same rule and to the same superior. For many centuries now, however, the Church requires by positive law that religious llve a community life, that is, that they be united under one roof where they live, and pray, and work in common. This is the meaning of the words "the firmly established manner of living in community" in canon 487, which defines the religious state. Again, canon 606, § 2 supposes the obli-gation of living in community when it forbids superiors "to allow their subjects to remain outside a house of their own institute, except for just and grave cause and for as brief a period as possible according to the constitutions." This living and working .and praying in community may be called common life in general. 3. Even in matters-of food, clothing, and furniture. Here we have the specific meaning of the term "common life" as ordinarily used in canon .law. Supposing always that religious are subject to the same superior and that they observe a common rule and live in community, the Church obliges them to have everything in common as regards their daily needs. Food, clothing, and the furnishings of dormitories and cells must be the same for all and must be supplied 38 Januarg, 1948 GIFTS FOR RELIGIOUS by the community from the common fund. (See documents I, I; II, 2; III, 3; IV, 10; V, 1; VII, 127). A special diet for the sick, warmer or additional clothing for the aged, provided by the com-munity, are a part of common life, since all such necessities will be supplied to all the members of the community who need them. (See documents II, 4; III, 3; IV, 10). We shall not go into detail here, since this matter has already been explained in an article on Com-mon Life in this I~vlEw (II, 4-13). For our present purpose, which is to explain the obligation of common life in relation to gifts to religious, it will be sufficient to state the principle: Food, clothing, and lodging is to be supplied to all the religious by the community according to this standard: "Let there be nothing superfluou.s in this matter, and let nothing that is needed be denied." (See documents I, 2: II, 3; VII, 128). 4. Whatever is acquired bg the religious, including superiors, according to the terms of canon 580, § Z, and canon 582, 1% must be incorporated in the g6ods of the house, or "of the province, or of the institute. This second paragraph of the canon on common, life deals with the sources of income which constitute or augment the common fund that is necessary to provide the members of the corn-munity with everything they need. (See documents II, 2: V, 3; VI, 7; VII, 126). A religious who has taken a solemn vow of poverty has lost his right to ownership, hence everything he receives personallg goes to his order, province, or house, according to the constitutions (canon ¯ 582, 1°). A religious with a simple vow of poverty retains the ownership of his property and the capacity to acquire other property (canon 580, § 1) as was explained in the article "'The Simple Vow of Poverty" (Review for Religious, VI, 65). Such property is called the personal property of the religious, in opposition to the common property which constitutes the community fund. A second source of income is that derived from the recompense for services rendered by the religious, such as salaries, honoraria, sti-pends, and the like; and a third from the free-will offerings of the faithful given either directly to the community, or to a religious because he is a religiousi hence, for his community. Canon 580, § 2 tells us that "whatever the religious acquites by his own industry or in respect of his institute, belongs to the institute." All such monies must be turned in to the community, and must be incorporated in the goods of the house, or of the province, or of the institute (as the con- 39 2LDAM C. ELLIS Review for Religious stitutions,shall determine). To "incorporate in the goods of the house" m~eans that all such monies become a part of the community fund, that the religious to whom they were given has no right to them. Hence a superior may not put aside any such monies in a separate fund to be drawn upon later for the benefit of the religious who received it. The administration of tl~e community fund is entrusted to the superior and to the officials empowered by the constitutions (canon 532). They should remember that they are not the owners of the community fund, but that they merely administer: it for the benefit of the community. Hence they are not allowed to derive any personal benefit from this administration. 5. All the mone.tl and titles shall be deposited in the common safe. Therefore no religious, not even the superior, may habitually keep money on his person, or in his room, or anywhere else. All must be kept in the common safe or treasury, which in a small com-munity may be a locked drawer in the treasurer's office, or the pocket-book of the superior. Modern commentators allow superiors to give religious engaged in the ministry or teaching or other occupations which require frequent trips through a large city a small sum of money for car or bus fare to last for a week or so at a time. Titles here means any paper representing money: stocks, bonds, mortgages, and so forth. As a matter of fact in practice the Sacred Congregation of Religious approves keeping such papers in a safety deposit box in a reliable bank. Surplus cash may also 15e kept in a bank. 6. The "furniture of the religious must be in accord with the poverty of which they make profession. (See documents I, 2; II, 3; VII, 128). In the first paragraph of the canon the term "furni- 'ture" included all moveable articles which a religious needs for his personal use as well as for the performance of the work assigned to him. Paragraph One stresses the fact that all these things are to be supplied to each member of the community by the community, which is the essence of common life in regard to poverty. Here in paragraph three the term "furniture,"' while including the moveable articles just mentioned, refers especially to the furnishings of the religious house; of the dormitories or ceils of the religious, of the refectory, community room, and so forth. A norm is laid down regarding the quality and quantity of such equipment, namely: "the poverty of which they make profession." The spirit of poverty pro- 40 danuaqlo 1948 GIFTS FOR RELIGIOUS fessed by each institute will be determined by the rule and the con-stitutions, and by custom. Institute will differ from institute in this matter, and what may be considered a necessity in one institute, may well be looked upon as a superfluity in another. Some religious communities use table cloths, others do not; in some the religious wear shoes, in others they do not. Still the Church approves all of them, provided they observe common life in accordance with the poverty which they have vowed. Adoantages of cbmmon life. Common life is a great help to an easier and more perfect observance of the vow of poverty; it develops the spirit of poverty by detaching the heart from temporal things and from the comforts of life, leaving peace and tranquillity of soul in their place. Common life ensures perfect equality among all the members of the community because it forestalls any preference being shown those who have been favored by the accident of wealth. Regrettable dif-ferences of treatment are thus avoided, as well as the resultant dis.- satisfacti6n and discontent which are an enemy to union and charity, and which harm the religious spirit. Sanction for common life. The first sanction for the law of common life may be gathered from the report which must be sent to the Holy See every five years by all superiors general of institutes approved by it (canon 510). On March 25, 1922, the Sacred Con-gregation of Religious issued a detailed questionnaire which must be followed in making out this report. Question 84 reads as follows: Is common life everywhere 6bserved; are the necessaries, especially as regards food and clothing, supplied by the superiors to all the religious in a manner becoming paternal charity, and are there any who perhaps procure for themselves these things from outsiders? (Official English text, "Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 1923, p. 464). The second sanction which emphasizes the importance of com-mon life in the eyes of the Church is contained in the special penal-ties she has seen fit to impose upon those who do not observe this law. Canon 2389 of the Code reads as follows: Religious who, in a notable matter, violate the law of common life as pre-scribed by the constitutions, are to be given a grave admonition, and if they fall to amend are to be punished by privation of'active and passive voice, and, if they are superiors, also by privation of their office. A third sanction concerns ordination: "In houses of studies perfect common life should flourish; otherwise the students may not be pro-moted to orders" (canon 587, § 2). 41 ADAM C. ELLIS Retqew for Religious Peculium Delinition. For practical purposes we may define peculium as a small sum of money (or its equivalent) distinct from the common fund, Which is given .to an individual religious to keep for his personal use, and which is something over and above "what is required for his immediate needs. Distinct/Yore the common t:und. This money may come from any source: from thepatrimony of the religious, if he has any; from gifts or pensions received from relatives or frien~ls; from the recom-pense given for work done by the religious '(in all three cases it has never been a part of the common fund) ; or it may be given by the superior out of the common fund. Once it is gls, en the religious or set aside for his use, it is no longer, part of the common fund, but distinct from it. Given to an individual religious. This excludes what some authors call peculium in common, which is permitted by some con-stitutions or by custom, whereby the superior may give an .equal amount from-the common t:und to all'the members of the com-munity for the same purpose: for food, or clothing, or for other necessities. Though. not violating the essentials of common life in so far .as t.he money is given from the common fund and in an equal amount to all, still it derogates from the perfection of common life,. which requires~ that all necessities be supplied directly by the ~om-munity and that no religious keep money in his possession. Further-more it exposes the religious to the danger of being frugal in the use of, his allowance in order to have some mo~ey for other, perhaps even superfluous, things. In our definition we are considering only money .0.r.its equivalent which is.given to religious as individuals for personal needs. This is what authors term vita privata as contrasted with vita communis. '. To keep for his personal use. It is to be used by the religious for h~'mself, for food or clothing, or for other necessary or u~eful ~rticles he may require. But if the money is given him for pious ~auses, for instance, to distribute to the poor, it Would not constitute a peculium. Over and above what is requii'ed for his immediate needs. The clothes a religious wears, the books given him for his use, the money given tO go on a journey, do not constitute a peculium. These are .for immediate use. The idea of peculium ~s to have a sum of: money in reserve for future needs. ¯ . 42 GIFTS FOR RELIGIOUS Canonists distinguish two kinds of peculium: perfect or inde-pendent, and imperfect or dependent. Perfect or indeloendent peculium is money acquired by a ,religious with the intention of using it independently of the superior, that is, Without supervisiqn of any kind and without other action on the part of the superior. Irnpe.rfect or dependent peculium is that which is employed by the religious with the consent, either implicit or explicit, of' his superior, who may 'curtail or revoke it at will. History of Peculiur,. There is no doubt about the fact that the use of pec.ulium was customary.in many religious houses before the Council bf Trent. It was asserted by many that the Decretals of Gregory IX allowed dependent peculium, while others maintained that these Same Decietals expressly forbade even a dependent peru; lium. There seems to be no positive proof in favor of either con-tention in the Decretals themselves. The Tridentine legislation (see document II, 2) provided for' the restoration of perfect common life in all religious houses, Some' contended that it forbade .only perfect peculium, not the imperfect kind. Clement~ VIII, however, made it clear that. imperfect peculium was also forbidden, if not by the Council, then. certainly by hi.~ 6wn decree Nullus ornnino (see document II, 2, .3, 4). A century later Innocent XII renewed the prohibition of,peculium and endeavored to remove one of its common causes, insufficient community funds, by forbidding all religious houses tooreceive more subjects than. they could support (see document III). ~ . ~ The French Revolution, the. Napoleonic wars, and the Revolu~ tion in the Papal States .wrOught havoc with religious, orders 'and houses and all but exterminated them. Marly religious were dispersed' and their houses despoiled. They were, obliged to seek their living wherever they could find it: by begging alms and by ~accepting char-itable subsidies from relatives and friends, and so forth. When peace was restored, and the. religious were ~llowed ~to reoccupy their old monasteries or open new ones, relatives and friends continued to send in gifts and Pensions: and since the religious had grown accus, tomed to keeping such funds for their private use, it is not surprising that the custom of allowing a dependent peculium arose in some reli-gious houses, and that in one or other case the use of dependent pecu-lium was written into the constitutions and received the approval of the Holy See. These are, however, the exceptions which prove the 43 ADAM C~ ELLIS Review for Religious rule. As we saw earlier, after each of the three catastrophies men-tioned above, tl~e Holy See carefully recalled to mind the obligation incumbent upon all religious to observe the law of common life and upon superiors.to eradicate all forms of peculium. Is peculium ever allowed? An independent pqcutium is directly contrary to the vow of poverty, since it grants an independent use of the peculium to the religious in such wise that his superior may not limit it in any way, much less revoke it. Hence the religious uses the money as his own which is an act of proprietorship contrary to the vow of poverty, ~[ dependent peculium, received with the permission of' the superior and subject at all times to recall and limitation on his part is not per se contrary to the vow of poverty~ since the religious .~s always dependent upon his superior in the use of it, and does :not use it as his own. It is clear, however, from what has been said above about ¢ofiamon life, that even a dependent peculium is directly con- ~rary to common life. By its very nature it is destined to be used for the personal needs of an individual religious; but common life demands that such needs be supplied by the community from the common fund. .Even after the Code of Canon Law was promulgated in 1918 with the strict provision for common life laid d~wn in canon 594, it is still possible that peculium may continue to exist in some reli-gious institutes, either by provision of the constitutions (by way of exception which proves the law), or by reason of custom. This latter ¯ case, however, will be circumscribed by the provisions of canon 5 of the Code regarding customs contrary to the Code. Canon 5 pre-scribes that only centenary or immemorial customs may' be tolerated by the ordinary if, in his prudent judgment, they cannot be stipo pressed, taking into consideration the circumstances of places and per-sons. Otherwise, even a centenary or immemoriaL custom is to be suppressed. Peculium is the enemy of common life, and the Church would gladly suppress it entirely if that could be done conveniently. She tolerates it under certain conditions, but at the same time she has stated in no uncertain terms her opposition to and her disapproval of all such private funds. To conclude with a statement of an eminent Dominican canonist: Experience has shown that the use of peculium, even when dependent on supe-riors, always brings great harm to religious discipline. Hence the obligation upon 44 ¯ ~anuar~o 1948 GIFTS FOR RELIGIOUS all, and especially upon superiors, of watchfulness~ and care lest such a pernicious custom be introduced into religious families, and in case it has already been intro-duced, of eradicating it if that be possible.2 Summary 1. The use of temporal things on the p.a, rt of religious is limited not only by the vow of poverty but by positive regulations on the part of the Church, notably by the obligation to observe common life, which is imposed on all religious by canon law. 2. The law of common life requires two things: (a) that all the needs of the religious, especially food, clothing and lodging, shall be supplied by the community from the common fund, according to a standard of living that is consistent with the spirit of poverty proper to each institute; (b) that the religious on their part con.- tribute to the common fund all the fruits of their industry as well as all gifts they receive by reason of the fact that they are religious. 3. While all luxury, excessive comforts, and prodigality are to be avoided in providihg for the needs of religious, it will be well for superiors to be generous and to avoid parsimony. Thus they Will insure a happy and contented community in which all reasonable religious are satisfied with the common fare and are not tempted to seek necessaries outside the community. 4. "Superiors shall not refuse the religious anything which i~ necessary, and the religious shall not demand anything which is superfluous. Hence charity and solicitude are earnestly recommended to superiors, Leligious moderation to subjects" (Vatican Council). [EDITORS' NOTE: The first article of this series on gifts to religious appeared in Volume VI, pp. 65-80.] OUR CONTRIBUTORS 2. PUTZ is a member of ~the theological faculty of St. Mary's College, Kurseong, D. H. Ry., India. T.N. JORGENSEN is a professor of English at Creighton Uni-versity, Omaha, Nebraska. ADAM C. ELLIS and GERALD KELLY are professors of canon law and moral theology respectively at St. Mary's College, St. Marys,,Kansas. Both are editors of this Review. 2Fanfani, De lure Retigiosorurn, n. 225, dubium I, b., p. 250. 45 t oo1 Reviews THE SPIRITUAL DOCTRINE OF SISTER ELIZABETH OF THE TRINITY. By M,. M. Philipon, O.P. TranSlated by a Benedictine of Sfanbrook Ab.bey. Pp. xxiil -I- 2S5. The Newman Bookshbp, Wesfmlhster, Maryland, 1947. $3.7S. Sister ]Slizabeth of the Trinity is one who in our own age was made perfect in a short time and whose spiritual life was to a very remarkable extent thoroughly permeated with Catholic dogma. This work is a study, so to speak, of theology in a living person. Sister Elizabeth was born Elizabeth Catez at Bourges, France, in 1880. As a .little girl she had a furious temper. At the age of eleven apparently, when she made her first confession, she experienced what she later called her "conversion." From then until she was eighteen she struggled courageously against her two great faults, irascibility and excessive sensitivity. In her t~ens she used to write verse and in these outpourings manifested a desire to join the Carmelites. This ambition she could not achieve until she reached twenty-one. Mean-while her exterior life was like that of other girls of her age and con-dition. But not the interior. During a retreat when she was only eighteen she began-to have mystical experiences. In 1901 she did become a Carmelite at Dijon, and in 1906 she died. Many people in the English-speaking world will already have some firsthand acquaintance with her from her book In Praise of Gtor~l, translated and published some thirty years ago. The work under review is not a biography. The first words of tl~e author indi-cate its nature: "A theologian views a soul and a doctrine" (p. xvii). Father Philipon first gives a brief account of Sister Elizabeth's life and then shows by very copious quotations from her writings how she exemplifies a holy soul whose spirituality was most pro-foundly dogmatic. He .~ilso 'shows ~how her words can be used t6 illustrate certain theological opinions. Hence part~ of the bdok, fo~ instance, the sections on the gifts of the Holy Spirit, or in general the positions taken in mystical theology, will be r~ad by those who are wary with a wholesome bit of restraint. The author does not dis-tinguish'between Catholic theology and Thomistic doctrines. As her name suggests, Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity had a most ardent love for the ]31essed Trinity. Devotion to the Three Divine ., BOOK REVIEWS Persons was, so to speak, the very heart and center of her whole spir-; itual life. She could never do or say enough to give adeqo~ite expres-sion. to her'singularly deep and affectionate attachment to this the most sublime aspect under which Goi:l.can be thought of. Hence it was natural for her to,concentrate effort upon living alone, in silence and recollection, ~vith the triune God dwelling within the depths of her~soul. She had a special fondness for the Epistles of St. Paul and she became so fascinated with one idea in them (see Ephesia,ns 1:12: '.'predestined. ourselves to further the praise of his glory'i), that she adopted the corresponding Latin words laudern gloriae as a secon~ da.ry name.° In her five short ye, a~r~s, in the Carmelite monastery she. had much to suff~r from ill health. Thisshe bore with the most hLroic dispositions to show her love for Cl~rist crucified and to become like Him even in His hardest trials. Father Philipon concludes his st0r~ of Sister Elizabeth with the.s,e words of hers: "I bequeath to you this vocation which was mine in the bosom of the Church Militant, and which I shall fulfill unceas-ingly in the Church Triumphant: The praise of glory of the'o~ost" holy Trinity." -G. AUGUSTINE, EELAi~r~, S.3. QUEEN OF MILITANTS. By Emil Neuberf, S.M. Pp. ~'ili'-]- 135. The , . Grail, Sf. Meinrad, Indiana, 1947:$1.25 (paper); $2.00 (clofh).~. Originally written in Fren'ch, Queen of Militants is addressed' primarily to the 3ocists, Ja~ists, and similar militant group~ of 3;dung European workers who are actively seekidg to bring. Mary to her rightful place in daily social, ~polltical,. and religious life. 'But its lines are directly applicable to all those working in America for the. same noble purpose of restoring all things m Christ, through Marry. The book is colloquial in tone, at times wi'th .almost the insist-, ence and patronizing manner of a sales tfilk or a"magazine advertise-ment; but it is saved from loss o~'dignity by i~s deep sincerity a'~d clear forceful statement of im. por.tant truths. The too~insistent style is also saved by an abundance of¯ quotation, often fromSt. Montfort and Father Chaminade, and by the many stories which frequently recount the activities of the militant Marian organizations of present-day Europe. The book is divided into three sections. The first part, "Mary's Place in the Life of the Militant," gives convincing arguments to show that Marian devotion is vital in. the life of the Christian worker of today. Title second part, "Mary Forming Her Militants," 47 BOOK REVIEWS Revieto for Reliyious shows how Marian devotion develops the zeal, courage, and other virtues which an apostle needs. The third part, "Combat Under Mary's Banner," faces the difficulties which the Marian apostle~ must. meet and gives the means--mainly the "prayers, works, and suffer-ings" of the" morning offering--with which to conquer them. The book should be a gold mine of ready-to-use material for those giving talks to sodalities or similar organizations. Father Neu-bert has evidently spent many years in reading and meditation upon the fundamental Marian truths, and at the same time has kept in touch with the youth of today. The following quotation is typical of any page in the book and will reveal both the weakness and power of the style. The passage is from the chapter, "Combat by Prayer," and foll0ws the simple but vivid retelling of the prayer of Moses on the mountain while Josue fought King Amalec's soldiers. There are thousands who imagine that success in their apostolate depends on their ability tb speak, to pin down their opponents, to'sell their magazine, to set up displays, to organize grand processions, or to hold enormous congresses. And why not, they ask? Aren't these the means socialists and communists and all our opponents use to draw souls away from Christ? Why don't these sa~ne means suffice to lead souls back to Him? If you reason thus, you are surely mistaken. With a knife you can slash a marvelous picture, or you can take the life of a man. But can you, with the same i.n.str.ument, restore a masterpiece or bring back the dead to life? To pervert souls is a natural work in the worst sense of the word. To lead them back to Christ is a superhatural work, the most difficult of all. Can you achieve something super-natural with merely natural means? If you gave a piece of lead to a jeweler to have him fashion a gold ring. or if you took a marble block to a sculptor and asked him to chisel a living person out of it,wouldn't they exclaim, "This man has lost his mind!"? For something of gold can be made only from gold; and a living being must come from a living source. Similarly, a supernatural end can be achieved only by supernatural means .'. Mary did not preach: she did not write: she did not found churches or apos-tolic works. She was content to pray and to suffer. But by her prayers and her sufferings she has contributed more to the salvation of men than Peter and Paul and all the other Apostles, and all the legions of Popes, bishops, and priests, diocesan and regular, who have announced the word of God to civilized nations and to barbarian peoples. ¯--T. N. JORGENSEN, S.J. MOTHER F. A. FORBES: Religious of the Sacred Heart. Letters and Short Memoir. By G. L. Shell. Pp viii ~ 246. Longmans, Green and Co., New York, 1947. $2.75. Margaret T. Monro did not overstate the case of Mother Forbes 48 ,lanuary, 1948 BOOK REVIEWS when she wrote several years ago: "At the time of her death in 1936 she could have been called, without exaggeration, the best-loved woman in Scotland." Born of an illustrious Scottish family, Alice Forbes (she later added Frances) was educated according to the highest standards of the day. During her middle twenties her enthusiastic interest in his-tory led her to regard the Protestantism of her forebears with a criti-cal eye, and after earnest prayer, study, and instructions, she embraced Catholicism. At the age of thirty-one she presented herself as a pos-tulant at Roehampton, where Janet Erskine Stuart was Reverend Mother Superior. If it is possible for the sp!rit of a religious institute to be inherent in anyone, that"possibility was actualized in Mother Forbes. The spirituality and manifold interests of the Religious of the Sacred Heart became her spirituality hnd her interests. She was a gifted writer, publishing over a score of varied works, histories, biographies, plays, anthologies; she was a poetess of insight; she was a teacher; most of all, she was a friend. Her interests, were as wide as the horizon and her enthusiasm as long as life itself. The greater portion of Mother Shell's book contains the corre-spondence of MOther Forbes to one of her sister religious, covering a period of twenty years. She reports with fidelity the many projects that are keeping her busy, the undertakings going on in the com-munity, the kind of impression they are making on their Protestant surroundings, as well as the arrival and departure of each of nature's beautiful seasons, t~ut it is the spiritual content of these letters which provides the greatest interest. Sacrifice, suffering, detachmentm and all for the love of the Sacred Heart--such was Mother Forbes' program. When Our Lord marks out for us th~ path of detachment and renunciation, He will have us to walk in it . It is a great consolation to think that . . ~ our cowardice will not be, through His mercy and His love, the means of thwarting His will in us . Is it too much to expect of us to say to Him: Ask, O Lord, and You shall receive, at every moment of the day, all and everything You ask? Her health was never strong. As early as 1913 she had been anointed, the first of many receptions of the last Sacrament; and in 1931 she writes, "Here is a letter from a poor thing crawling back from the gates of eternity. 'No admittance' again! Oh when? I thought this time I had eyery chance, and so did the doctor . " But no matter what the condition of her health, within the cloister of 49 BOOK NOTICES Craiglockheart College (Edinburgh) there emanated from Mother Forbes and spread throughout Scotland a ~weetness, a cheeifulness, a lightheartedness, a peace, and a devotion for others which was.Christ-inspired in every way:~--F. 3. GUENTNER, S.J~, " THE GREATEST ~CATHERINE: The Jife of Ca+herlne Benlncasa, Saln+ ,of S~ena. By Michael de la Bedoyere. Pp. viii, + 248. The Bruce Pub-lishlng Company, Milwaukee, 1947. $3.00. Saint Catherine of Siena, described by Ludwig Pastor as "one of ,the most marvelous figures in the history of. the world/' continues to be very fortunate in her biographers. All admirers of Catherine enjoyed Jorg~nsen's "virile" presentation of this Jo'an of Arc of th~ Papacy, and, .perhaps even more so, Alic'e Curtayne's deft. and delicate portrait of.the same great heroine.~ Some have thought that Enid Dinni~' gift for seeing the world invisible would, be the ideal, medium for delineating this valiant woman who so towered over her four-teenth century contemporaries, from the highest to the lowest. But one sees now that what was wanted was the telling of her story by a hard-headed British editor, one yiel~ling to none in .his admiration for Catherine in her hundreds of letters and the,classic Dialogu'es, yet at all stages of her story disengaging her from the fir~'reaiities of that "edifying" legend spun about her after her death. Tiie resulting Cathdrine lacks not a whit of the vibrant charm, or whole~souled service of Christ, especially in the service.of the. Pope, ~vhom she invariably styled "the Christ on earth," but she is also seen to be a guileless novice in politics, and a public figure whose one ~great triumph (restoring the Pope to Rome) Was surrounded with countless minor failures and tragedies. So; too, ~as Calvary. --GERALD ELLARD; S.J. GOD'S OWN METHOD. By Reverend Aloys;us MeDonough, C.P. (preface by 'Most Reverend Richard J. Cushlncj):~ Pp. 161. The Sign Press, Union City, N.J.,.1947. $2.00. "In quest of what is worthwhile, there is no sounder stratagem than to go to so

Issue 3.1 of the Review for Religious, 1944. ; /'lfl~ No L no ecr j .I. " ~Pr~a~e~for Travelers -.Devotion ÷o the Holy Famil ¯ . Encyclical on the Mystical Body. G.~ Augustine Ellard . James A. Klelst , ~ ~UAIl~cjro . ~ ' Fr,~ncls J. McGarr!gle [ , :' Genuine~ Mysticism . Robert e. Communications. Book Reviews Oue~fic~ns Answered Decisions 6f .the H?ly See NUMBER RI::VII W :FOR :RI::LI .G,IOUS , VOLUME IIl JANUARY 15. 1944" NUMBER ! CONTENTS "IT IS NO LONGER I . . . "--G. Augustine Ellard. 8.J . 3 THE CHURCH'S PRAYER FOR TRAVELERS--James A. Kleist. S.J. 9 BOOKL~ET NOTICES~ ~: 17 THE DEVOTION TO THE HOLY FAMiLY--Francis L. Filas, S.J.18 THE FAMILY ROSARY . 24 RELIGIOUS AND THE ENCYCLICAL ON THE MYS;FICAL BODY-- Patrick M. ReRan. S.J . 25 L'ALLEGRO --- Francis 3. McGarrigle. S.J . 35 OUR CONTRIBUTORS . . 47 GENUINE MYSTICISM: WHAT SHOULD WE THINK OF IT?---: Robert B. Eiten. S.J . 48, COMMUNICATIONS (On Vocation) . SAINT TERESA OF AVILA--G. Augustine Ellard, S.2 . BOOK REVIEWS (Edited by Clement DeMuth. S.J.)-- Pius Xll on World Problems: A Book of Unlikely Saints; An American Teresa: The Best Wine; Men of Maryknoll: Maryknoll Mission Letters; Action This Day: Life with the Holy Ghost; Small Talks for Small People; God's Guests of Tomorrow . " BOOKS RECEIVED . 66, DECISIONS OF THE HOLY SEE OF INTEREST TO RELIGIOUS.,, 67 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS-- I. English Hymns at Benedic~io'n ¯ ,. " 68 2. Lighted Candles on,Side Altars during Benediction . ~. 68 3. Changing Constitutions of Pontifical Institute ' 68 4. Poverty and Private Stamp Collections . 69 5. A Hymn entitled "~e Matrem" . . 70 "6, Superiors and Confessors . ". " . 70 7. Use of Crucifix for Way of Cross .~. . 70, 8. Sale of Several Pieces of Property . 71 9. Posture of Faithful at Mass . 72 REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, danuary, 1944. Vol. IIL No. 1. Published hi,, month'ly : January. March. May, July, September. and November at the Coliege Pre.~i~ 606 Harrison Street. Topeka, Kansas. b~' St. Mary's College, St. Marys, Kansas, with ecclesiastical approbation. Entered as second class matter 2anuary 15, 1942, at the Post Ot~ce, Topeka, Kansas, under the act of March 3. 1879. E ttonal Board: Adam C. Ellis, S.2., G. Augustine E11ard, S.J., Gerald Kelly', 8.2. Copyright. 1944. by Adam C. Ellis. Permission is hereby, granted forquotations of reasonable length, provided due credit be given this review and the author. Subscription price: 2 dolla, rs a y.ear. Printed in U, S. A. Before writing to us. p!ease consult ~notlce on Inside back cover. / Review t:or Religious ~ ~olume III January--December, 1944 Published at THE COLLEGE PRESS Topeka, Kansas Edited by THE JESUIT FATHERS SAINT MAR~'S COLLEGE St. Marys, Kansas "1t: Is No Longer I . . " G. Augustine Ellard, S.,J. ONE of the most magnificent and highly inspiring sentences in the writings of.St. Paul is the following" "With Christ I am n~ailed to the cross" it is no'longer I that live, but Christ that liveth in me. So far as I live now ¯ in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and delivered, himself for me (Galatians 2:20),I Among the ancient Galatians in Asia Minor to whom these words were first addressed, there must have been some who wondered what in the world St. Paul meant by them. It was evident that he had not been crucified with Jesus and ' the two thieves, and that he was still among the living and very"active in fact, anything but dead. Nor was it clear how it could be Said that Christ was livi.ng in him. There are--perhaps there are many--good Christians today who could repeat this proud boast of St. Paul with respect to themselves if only they understood it. But it seems so far from the truth to them that they feel that, whatever it means, it cannot be more tlsan some farfetched , oriental~igure of speech. Not understanding it, they can-not use it or draw inspiration from it. Perhaps.a brief consideration of the text will contribute to a wider under-standing of it, and open out .some of the immense inspira-tional possibilities that it contains. Baptism involves a certain mystical death, as well as the beginning of a new life. "Know ye not', that as many of us as were baptized unto Christ Jesus, we were baptized unto his death? We were buried therefore with him through this baptism unto death, that as Christ was raised ~New Testament texts in this article are from the Westminster Version. G. AUGUSTINE ELLARD Review' [or Religious from the dead thro.ugh the glory of the Father, so we also should walk in newness of life . For this we know, that our old man hath been crucified with him, in order that our sinful body may be brought to naught, and our-selves no longer.be slaves to sin . Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we.shall also live with him. Even thus do ye reckon yourselves to be dead to sin, but living to God in Christ Jesus,' (Romans 6:3-11). Suppose that one of those old Galal~ians, after being a sinner "from among the Gentiles;"' was converted midw~ay through life, and that previously his moral character had :been that of a typical.pagan of those times. Then from birth he had been infected with the taint of origina.1 sin, and presumably, as the years progressed~ he added to that many p~rsonal sins of his own. Such was his old life, at. best alienated from God, and merely natural or human; and at the worst, quite sinful and corrupt. When he ~was converted and baptized, that kind of life came to anend. It gave way to a new form of life, that char]acteristic of the regenerated, engrafted, upon the true vine and vivified by it, incorporated into the Mystical Body of Christ and vitalized by it, a'nd sharing in that participation of the divinit~y which leadsto life and bliss eternal in heaven, lD~uring his later years our ancient Galatian could say that his old moral and spiritual self had been replaced by a new one, given to him by Christ and regulated by Christ. In this minimum sense every Christian in the state of grace can say that he no longer lives his o~vn life, that is, a merely, natural and sinful one, the only life that is all his own, and that now Christ infuses into him somethi.ng of His supernatural and divine life. At least in the essentials of his moral and spiritual life,-hi~ judgments and attitudes of will agree with those of Christ. Of the circulation, so to speak, of the divine life-giving sap from the vine into 4 ~anuar~, I "'IT IS NoLoNGER I . . ." ¯ the branch, he cannot be conscious; of his deliberate assimi-lation of Christ's ways of thinking and willing he will of course be quite aware. In a much richer and more m~aningful sense the perfect Christian has ceased to live his own°old life, .and lets Christ live in him, determining, like a new vital principle, the .course of his activities. For with him "to live is Christ and to die is gain" (Philippians 1 : 21 ). In the first place, the perfect Christian lets Christ guide his thoughts and judgments as completely as possible. "As a-man thinks in his heart, so is he." .He makes Christ's out-look upon all things his own. He has "the mind of Christ" (I Corifithians 2: 16). He appropriates the sentiments of Christ Jesus: "Let that mind be in you, ,which was also in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 2:5). His ideas and views are. not those of the worldling, nor those of the mediocre Chris-tian who shows more or less of the secular mentality about him. His constantendeavor is that there be total harmony between his mind and that of Christ. His faith he makes as, full and vivid and realistic as possible, sharing thus i~ some sense in the vision, of Christ: "So far as I live now in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and delivered himself for me" (Galatians 2:20). He cultivates the intellectual virtues of Christ. In his wisdom heviews all things, persons, and extents in relation to God, and he tries to see them as God sees them. His prudence enables him promptly, and accurately to discern the divine plan and to decide practically what he should do in accordance with God's Wishes. In a word, he makes his own, as far as pos-sible, the mentality and ideology of Christ. Mindful of that supremely important practical prin-ciple of Christ, "Where thy treasure is, there shall thy heart be also" (Matthew 6:21), the perfect Christian will be careful above all about his value-judgments. He knows it G. AUGUSTINE ELLARD Review [or Religfous is these that the will tends to folloW. He will earnestly strive realistically to appreciate what Christ .values, and to regard all else as worthless or worse. Christ's hierarchy of values will become his. Like St. Paul, he w, ill be able to ¯ say: "But such things as were to my gain, these for Christ I have come to count as loss. Nay, more, I count all things loss by. reason of the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in l'Jim . that so I may know him,. what the power of his resurrection, what fellowship in his sufferings, and become one with him in his death, in the hope that I may attain to the resurrection.from the dead" (Philippians 3:7-11). In accordance with the mind of Christ and in opposition to the thoUght-fashions of the world, he will rate poverty as having a certain higher value .than wealth, humiliations as being better than honors, mor-tification as superior to gratification; and suffering as pref-erable to pleasure. Where Christ.finds truth, goodness, beauty, peace, beatitude, and glory for the infinite goodness of the Blessed Trinity, there also he will find his supreme values and aims. Judging and evaluating things according tothe stand- - ards of Christ will help the pe~fgct Christian to imitate Him also in His emotional or affective life: Feetin~l like Christ is a great and, tosome extent, a necessary, aid toward willing like Christ. He will strive to reproduce in himself as far as he can that happy emotional balance, harmony, and stability which characterized the interior of Christ. "Peace I leave to you, my peace I give to you: not as the worldgiveth, do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be dismayed" (Johni27). His likes and dislikes, his fears and hopes, his joys and sorrows ' Will follow the model set by the Heart of Christ. danuar~t. 1944 "'IT IS NO LONGER I'.'" It is most of all in the attitudes and activities of his ~¢ill that the Christian in whom Christ lives fully will manifest, as fa.r as is humanly possible, assimilation to Christ, union with Him, transformation into Him, and 'mystical identification with Him. Above all, he will let Christ determine his free actions. The norm according to which Christ Himself inflexibly chose or rejected was the will and plan of the Eternal Father: "I am come down from heaven, not tb do mine own will, but the will of him who sent me" (John 6:38) ; "My food is to do the will of him that sent me, and to accomplish his work". (Ibid. 4:34) : "My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away from me: yet not as I will, but as thou wilt" (Matthew 26:39) : "The things that please him, I do.always" (John 8:29). The same norm will be the rule for one in whom Christ lives and whose moral and spiritual life He moderates. He lets Christ decide what he will decide: Christ's decisions he makes his own. The dominant influence in the will-life of Christ was a supreme and invincible love and charity for the Infinite Goodness. The same affection will completely absorb and control the will of one pe~:fectly identified with Christ. Christ's love extended from God to God's crea-tures, though tl~ey were little worthy of it; so will the love of one united with Christ. Charity to the Father led Christ to the most heroic obedience, "he humbled himself by obedience unto death, yea, hnto death upon .a cross" (philippians. 2:8). Complying with God's wishes, one whose life Christ informs and. guides will endeavor like-wise to show the utmost obedience. With all his interior acts thus dominated by Christ and made to resemble His, it is only natural that the exterior activity and work of the perfect Christian should also be like Christ's. "Ever we bear about in our body the dying of Jesus, so that the life, too, of Jesus may b~ made mani- ~7 G. AUGUSTINE ELLARD fest in our bodies. For we who live are ever belong- deliv-ered up to deatti for Jesus'. sake, so that the life, too,. of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh" ('II Corin-thians 4:10-11). In general, Christ's work was to glorify the Father and to save men by fulfilling the task which was assigned to Him. "I have glorified.thee upon earth, having accomplished the work which' thou hast given me to do" (John 17:4) ; "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly" (Ibid. 10:10). Christ went about teaching, helping others, and giving the noblest, example; He founded the Church; and finally He redeemed men to their super-natural destiny by.His sacrificial death on the Cross. His good disciple, whether priest or religious or layman, par-takes in that work and extends it. He carries on the teaching office of Christ, at least privately 'and by example. He eagerly seizes opportunties to give aid to hi~ neighbor. He helps with the work of the Church, perhaps nowadays in some form of Catholic action~ Daily, oil possible," he sl'iares in offering again.to God in the Mass the sacrifice by~ which all men were redeemed; through the Mass als~ he contributes toward actually applying to individual souls ¯ the merits of the sacrifice of Calvary. In a word, he co~operates wholeheartedly with Christ in all the grand purposes and achievements of the Incarnation. Thus, the good Christian who dies to sin and lives as a vital branch of the true vine, as a vigorous m~mber of the ~Mystical Body of Christ, and as a participant in the nature of God, and who lets Christ determine all his thoughts, appraisals, affections, volitions, and external activities, will be "another Christ," and will be prepared to share eter-nally with Christ in the beatific intuition and-love of the most blessed Trinity. The Church's Prayer t:or Trave-lers James A. Kleist, S.J. THE Church's prayer, or collection of prayers, for tray- " elers, known as ~he Itinerarium, was originally intended for tbe reverend clergy. This seems evic]~nt from the use of the Versicle Dorainus vobiscum and the Response .Et curn spiritu tuo. The rest, however, is so broad and elastic in its wording that any person may derive i3rofit and consolation from its recital. It may not be. amiss, therefore, if I propose, for the benefit of religious not acquainted with the Latin tongue, to present an.English rendering and follow it up with a few words of comment. " ~Text ot: The ltinerarium Antiphon: Into the way of peace. .~ The Canticle of Zacharg: St. Luke 1 : 68-79. 68 Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, o for He has kindly visited us." His People, and brought about Our redemption: 69 a Tower of Salvation He has raised up for us in the House of His servant David. 70 He bad promised as much through the mouth of His holy Pr.ophets of old, 71 and has sent us a Savior to deliver us from our foes and from the, hands of all that hate us. 72 He has dealt in mercy with our fathers, ¯ " mindful of .His holy covenant 73 and of the oath He had made to our father Abraham; for He bad sworn to enable us 74 --rescued from the clutches of our foes-- to worship ~im without fear, JAMES A. KLEIST /. in holiness and observance of the Law, in His presence, all our days. . 76 And for your part, my little one, you will be hailed "Prophet of'the Most High"; for you are to run before the face of the Lord to 'make ready His roads, 77 to impart to His People knowledge of salvation through forgiveness of their sins: 78 thanks to our God's sweet mercy in which He so graciously visited us, descending from Heaven-- a rising Light 79 to shine upon those settled in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide our steps into the path of petice.1 An.tipbon: May the omnipotent and Merciful Lord direct our st~ps into the way of 'peace and prosperity, and maythe Angel Ra-phael be our escort on the way, so that in peace, in safety, and in joy, we may return to our homes. Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, have rrfercy on us. Lord, have mercy on us. Our Father . And lead us not into temptation. ]1 But de-- liver us from evil. Versicles and Responses: Save Thy servants I that trust in Thee, my God. I I Send us help from Thy Sanctuary. O Lord. I and from Sion guardus. I! .Oh, be to us, 0 Lord, a Tower of Strength I impregnable to all our fdes. I1 Let not the enemy gain the best of us, [ nor wicked men succeed in harming us. II Blessed is the Lord from day to day. I May God, our Savior, make our journey prosperous. 11 0 Lord, show us Thy ways: I reveal to us Thy paths. I[ Oh, may our steps be directed I toward the keeping of Thy Commandments. II What is crooked-ihall be straight I and the rough roads ~mooth. I[ On His Angels God has laid a charge in thy regard: I they are to keep thee in all thy ways. }1 0 Lord, do grant my prayer, I and let my cry come up to Thee. The Lord is with thee, I and with thy spirit. 1This is Father Kldst's own translation of the Benedictus.--ED. 10 d'anuary, 1944 PRAYER FOR TRAVELERS Let us prag 0 God, who didst enable the children of Is'rael to pass, dry-shod. through the depths of the .Sea, and by a beckoning Star show the Three Magi the way to Thee: grant us, we beg, a tranquil time an.:l a prosperous.journey. With Thy holy Angel for companion, may we be able 'happily to arrive at our destinatibn, and, in the end, at the Haven of Eternal Salvation. O God, who hast led Thy servant Abraham out of Ur in Chaldea and preserved him unharmed through all his travellings in a foreign land: we beg Thee graciously to preserve us, Thy servants. Be to us, O Lord, a Support ever-ready in need, a Solace by the way, a Shade in heat, a Cover in rain and cold, a Vehicle in weariness, a Shield in adversity, a Staff on slippery ground, a Haven in shipwreck. With Thee for a Guide, may. we successfully arrive at our destination, and; in the end, return safe and sound to our' homes. A ready ear, 0 Lord, lend to our humble iprayers. Direct and speed Thy servants' course that they may reach the blessings Thou hast in'store: so that amid all the vicissitudes of this life's pilgrimage they may ever be protected by Thy help. Grant, we beg, 0 Lord, that the family of Thy Children may walk in the way of Salvation, and, by closely following the exhor-tations of Blessed John, the Precursor, securely come to Him whom he foretold, our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who lives and reigns with Thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ages and ages to come. Amen. Let us proceed in peace, [ in the name of the Lord. Amen. II Commentary . The Antiphon, as Usual, sounds the key note of all that follows: "into the way of peace." When we go some-where, we are, in the Church's language, in via, "on the way." It matters not whether our "way", takesbut a few hours, or requires whole months to accomplist'i. Nor does it matter by What conveyance we travel, whether by bus or auto or street-caror train or ship orairplane. It may be a short trip for business, an excursion to. some point of 11 JAMES A. KLEIST ~ interest, a journey to a distant place for any purpose what-ever, a voyage across the Atlantic, a cruise in the Mediter-r~ inean, a march along Burma Road, a military expedition to North Africa, a transcontinental flight, a pilgrimage to Lourdes. We are simply "on the way," and our object in reciting the Itinerariam is to obtain the blessing of God so that our "way" may turn out "a way of peace --a phrase, by the way, in which the word pax is as elastic as t~ia. It means, of course, freedom from any kind of disturbance, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. We want to enjoy ~all the happiness (for that is what pax means) which our friends wish us when they bid us "A happy journey!" A happy ~journey is one that is crowned with "success." That is what the Latin word prosperitas means; only, since "suc-cess" is capable Of a certain worldly connotation, I choose to render it "prosperity." The idea is developed both negatively and positively in the Canticle of Zachary;. for instance, we beg for "salvation from oui: enemies"; we want to travel ."without that sense of fear" which kills all joy. Above all, we wish to travel "in holiness and justice (that is, the observance, of the Commandments) oall our days." We can see, then, what wonders the Antiphon and the Canticle are doing for us at the very outset, even before we cross the threshold. As if by magic, we are charmed away into the region of the supernatural. The liturgy would not be true to itself if it did not lift us Off our feet, so to say, above mere worldly considerations, above those thousand and one petty purposes which so engross the minds of worldly people. The liturgy is at its best in.imparting to our humdrum life this supernatural trend. Nothing is so wholesome for us poor mortals as the Sursum corda which - comes to us from the Altar. How life could be beautified if this exhortation were always heeded! As a matter of fact, 12 Ja.rluary, 1944 PRAYEI~ ~:OR TRAVELERS ' all our life is v~orthless unless all life's doings, all-life's "ways," big or little, issue into that great superhighv,;ay that makes oflife a progressive pilgrimage to Heaven, our Holy Land. Only so considered will our "way" b~ a "way of peace and pr6sperity," a "way of salvatlon." " It is clear, then, why th~ Canticle of Zachary Was iiacor-porated in the Itinerarium. Its great centre piece is Zach-ary's words addressed to his little John, who was destined to be "great'" in the eyes of the Lord. He was to be the Precursor of Christ, to direct the steps of his contempo-raries "into the way of peace," to "prepare the way of the Lord." And we know how bluntly he spoke to the 3ews: "You vipers' brood! You need a complete change of heart and mind if you would enter into the Kingdom of God." We, too, shall take his exhortation to heart and hold our-selves convinced that the one absolutely needful prepara-tion for a "way of peace" is the state of grace. With this, we can reckon on God's help.Death and danger, it is true, lurk everywhere; and the enemy of human nature goes about roaring like a lion; but, somehow, he may be more " active When we are away from home. The Canticle is followed by the complete Antiphon, which reminds us, to our comfort, that God is Omnipo-. tent and Merciful. His Omnipotence and Mercy are our safest guides, our best travelling companions. In His Mercy He assigns to us one of the blessed Spirits, the Archangel Raphael, who proved so pleasant and helpful an escort to young Tobias. It is a delightful story, which we migh~ read from time to time in its entirety. It will beget in us-a vivid sense of God's Presence and ever-watchful P/ovi-dence-- a devotion, by the way, which is one of the Sweetest and most heartening to cultivate in this vale of tears. Since the days of Tobias, St. Raphael is the patron saint of travelers. Iia Christian devotion, he _shares this 13 JAMES A. KLEIST Re~ieto~ trot Religious honor, of course, with the holy Guardian Angels. In this. respect, the life of Blessed Peter Faber, 9f the .Society of 3esus, is particularly instructive. He felt Constantly sur-rounded by, and actually lived, in their sweet presence. They were his comfort on his numerous trips through Spain, France, Germany, and Italy. Before he entered a town or district, he would greet, the Guardian An'gels of. that locality, and put into their hands the business he had come to transact. And when the time for leaving came. he would say Good-bye to them in the most affectionate man-ner and thank them for their help. Incidentally, this .same manof God had a quite special devotion to ,John the Bap-tist, as is clear from one of the entries in his Memoriate: "On the day of 3ohn the Baptist I had and felt in my soul .a notable sense of the greatness of Saint ,John, and experi-enced profound grief because of the fact that, in this Ger-many, he was .not made so much of as in other countries." The Vei:sicles a~d Responses which follow are good illustrations of ejaculatory prayer. They are lively cries. for help, intensified by a deep trust in God. The first Collect takes us back to the story of the Chil-dren of Israel whom ~he Lord led, dry-shod, through the Red Sea, and to that of the Three Magi, whose trip across the desert to Bethlehem reads like a romance. These examples from sacred history animate our faith and trust in God. If need be, God will even work miracles to save us. The second Collect shows God's Mercy in leading, Abraham out of his heathen native land. It is rather cir-cumstantial in. its details, contrary to the usual style of the Collects; but it makes us realize that no detail on our trip escapes God's wat~hf.ul eye. The third Collect, the classic Church's Prayer for Travelers, is terse and straightfor-ward in tone. God directs and arranges our course, and is ever at hand to help. The last Collect again confronts us 14 January, 1944 PRAYER FOR TRAVELERS. with the heroic figure of John the Baptist. The Itiner-arium begins and ends with a reference to him.2 The Itinerarium closes, with this pregnant ejaculation: "Let us proceed in peace, in the Name of the Lord." Since this is a prayer, its sense can only be: "Since we are under-taking this journey in the Name of theLord, may We, assisted by the grace of God, firmly and confidently pro- - ceed so as to accomplish our purpose." Both the Latin word procedere and its English equivalent proceed con-note, a certain firmness of step.a This firmness rests upon the grace of God.Wbuld that we could, in performing. any and all our tasks, firmly "proceed in the Name of the Lord." It is obvious, also, that this Versicle and its Response will do very well as a renewal of our "good intention." If we accustom ourselves to its use in everyday life, it will naturally spring to our lips when w'e prepare for our last journey, the journey in, to Eternity: "Let us proceed in peace, in the Name of'the Lord." It is worthv o of note that, as the Itinerarium opens with "into the way of peace," so it closes with "Let us proceed in peace." -Peace, the possession of happiness, is the great goal of life's pilgrimage. To the old Hebrews "peace" meant the ful-ness of the blessings which they expected from the Messias: on the lips of our Lord (as in the words "Peace I leave you") it means the sum total of true happiness both in this life and in bliss everlasting. The opening "into the way of peace" foreshadows the gist .of the Itinerarium; the closing "Let us proceed in peace" sums it all up in retro- ¯ spect. -°I may mentio.n, in.passing, that the Missal has a special Mass for travelers (Pro peregrinantibus" et iter agentibus) and three Collect~ for Those at Sea (Pro naai- 9antibus). ~Note the vigorous sense attaching to the word in the Vulgate rendering of Psalm 44:5, Intende, i~rosloere procede, et regna: "Bend Thy bow, ride on victoriously. and conquer." 15 JAMES A. KLEIST Review for Religious" May I close,these reflections with a suggest.ion? All the prayers in the Itiner~rium are couched in the plural number. This is significant, though not at all surprising to one who knows the liturgy. We are never alone. We maynot have a travelling companion on. any particular trip; still, even. then millions of persons are, like us, "on the way" somewhere in the world. And even when we stay at home, others are journeying along the highways and byways of this" great world. The suggestion I would make, therefore, is that we accustom ourselves to say the Itinerarium as a regular part of our. daily devotions. We are all united by the strong tie of the Mystical Body. The value of such an exercise comes home to one at this time particularly when our men in the service need the special protection of God on tt2eir numerous and dangerous "ways." How .delighted they would be to know that there is some one at home .who remembers them by this special appeal to God's Providence. By a fervent recitation of the Itinerarium we.have an efficacious means of, as it were, making ourselves their travelling companions, of following them whithersoever their military commanders order them to go, of bringing down on them the very bles-sing of God which theymay stand in need of at an.y par~ ticular moment. There is another reason for adopting this salutary prac.- tice of the daily recitation of the Itinerarium. We may not be leaving home; and yet, we are "on the way" all the time. Between our private room ~nd the.chapel and the refectory and the classroom and the attic and the cellar and the gar-den and the rest 0f the premises, we are "on our feet," upstairs, downstairs, all day long, are we not.?- Eveh in the quietest community there are endless goings and comings. We are in constant" need of God's protection. Psalm 120 reads almost likd a commentary on the Itiner- 16 PRAYER FOR TRAVELERS arium: "I lift mine eyes toward the hills. ~ Whence shall help come to me? My help is from the Lord~the Maker of ¯ Heaven and earth. He'tvill not suffer m~ f~t to stumble: thy guardian will not slumber. Behold,':~He:~whb guards Israel slumbers not nor sleeps. The Lord is thy Guardian; the Lord is thy Shelter on thy right hand. The sun-shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall protect thee from all evil. The Lord shall protect thg going and coming henceforth and for ever." The Itinerarium, deeply Understood in its significance for our spiritual life and daily uttered as a hearty cry for help, will save us many an unpleasant experience to Which we might otherwise be exposed, and will enable us tO travel through life's desert "in holiness and justice all our days." BOOKLET NOTICES Almightg Magic, by R. E. Southard, S.J. An account of some of the marvels of nature. Of interest to all; of special utility to writers, teachers, lecturers, -preachers, and retreat masters. 63 pages. 25 cents a copy. Published by: The . " Catechetical Guild, St. Paul, Miinnesota. ~ ' '" Reporter in Heaven, by R. E. Southard, S.J. An imaginary,visit to heaven. ~ ~ 5 cents a copy: Published by: St: Anthony's Guild, Paterson, N.J. "~,.~" ¯ His Favorites, a little book of reflections for the sick, by Rev. Joseph Lii~a's, P.S.M.~To Troubled Hearts, selections from the spiritual letters of Venerable Vincent Pallotti, translated from the Italian by Rev. George Timpe, P.S.M. Both pamphlets may be obtained from: The Pallottine Fathers, 5424 W~ Bluemound ¯ Road, Milwaukee,W~sc~nsin. No price given. Histo?g O~!ihe°Chu?cl~ of Christ, by Rev. Julius Grigassy, D.D., translated by ¯ Rev. Michael B. Rapach. ~ A texf book for Greek Catholic Parochial Schools. 114 pages. May be obtained from: Rev. Julius Grigassy, D.D., Braddock, Penna. No. price given. 17 The Devotion to the. Holy gamily Francis L. Filas, S.J. AMONG the major devotions of the Church one of the most recent is the devotion to the Holy Family. ~er- ¯ haps the most striking feature of its history is the fact that its growth paralleled the growth of the veneration of St. 3oseph. This phenomenon is easily understandable, for ,Jesus, Mary, and ,Joseph could not be honored together until each of them received due honor separately. We can. not here present the detailed reasons why ,Joseph's glorifica-. tion on earth was postponed; suffice it to say that after the Church firmly established in the world's consciousness the basic facts of our Lord's divinity and Our Lady's virginal motherhood, St. Joseph emerged from centuries of obscu-rity to take his place of honor as the recognized vicar of the Eternal Father on earth, the chaste husband of Mary, and the head of the Holy Family. The devotiofi to the Holy Family, as we now know it, explicitly came to the fore in the mid-seventeenth century, but its fundamentals ~had always been implicitly recognized in the Church. From the very beginning the accounts of St. Matthew and St. Luke testified that the divine Redeemer of mankind spent the greater part of His earthly life in the midst of a true family circle. The recurrence of such phrases as "the Child," "Mary His mother," "Joseph her husband," "His parents," and '.'He was subject to them," could leaqe no doubt of that. However, in the interpretation of these Gospel passages ecclesiastical writers chiefly_dwelt on the marvel of Christ's obedience rather than the parental virtues of Mary and Joseph which wel- 18 THE DEVOTION TO THE HOLY FAMILY corned the Child Jesus in the holiest atmosphere this world could provide. Thus, St. Ambrose stated, "Jesus' subjection is a lesson in human virtue, not a diminution of divine power.- Will those Who dezlare that the Son is less than the Father and unequal to Him because He is subject to Him as God, declare also that He is less than His mother because He was subject to His mother? For we read of Joseph and Mary, 'and He was subject to them.' The truth is that such obedience to parents brings no loss to any one of us but rather gain. Through it the Lord Jesus has poured faith and grace ir~to us all, that He may make us also subject to God the Father in the spirit of faith.''1 In demonstrating that the virginal union of Joseph and Mary was a true marriage St. Augustine more cl0selv approached our concept of the Holy Family, but even here .he failed to touch on that oneness of the trinity of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph which we venerate. "Every good of. marriage," he wrote, "was fulfilled in the parents of Christ --offspring, loyalty, and the sacrament. We see the off-spring in our Lord Jesus Christ Himself; the loyalty, in that no adultery occurred; and the sacrament, because no dissolution of the marriage followed.''2 ~ The first writer to join the three, holy names, appears to have been the ninth-century abbot, Walafried Strabo, who commented, "The shepherds found Mary, Joseph and the Child; t/~rougfi tl~ese tfiree the world was healed.''~ IAater, St. Bernard added more to the recognition of the dignity ot~ Mary.and Joseph as the divinely chosen intimates of Jesus on earth. "Who was s.ubject? And to whom? God to man; God, I repeat, to whom the angels are subject, whom 1Ambrose. Enarr. in Ps. 6l; 2Augustine. De Nup. et Concttp., 1, 13--ML 44, 415. 8Walafried Strabo, In Luc. Z, 16--ML 114, 896. 19 FRANCIS L. FILA$ Reoieto /:or-Re!igious principalities and powers 0.~bey, was subject to Mary, and not only to Mary, but t0~ose~h also because of Mary. Marvel, therefore, both at God and man, and choose that which gives greater wonder--whether it be the loving con-descension of the Son dr the exceedingly great dignity of His parents. Both amaze us, both are. marvellous. That God should obey man is lowliness without parallel, but that man should rule over God is elevation beyond com-parison.- 4 The first public commemoration of the Holy Family-- .far too incidental to be called "a devotion"--occurred at Nazareth in the fourth century. Here churches were built on the traditional sites of the house of St. Joseph and the house where the Angel Gabriel appeared to Our Lady. The Hidden Life was indeed honored, but never under that explicit title whereby " just as Abraham saw three persons~ and adored one, so holy mother Church ~ees three persons and honors one fact.''5 " Perhaps more noteworthy because more explicit is the .veneration which sprang up along the route of the flight .into Egypt. At Faramah on the boundary of Egypt facing Palestine a chapel was built (about 800 or earlier) in honor of the Holy Family, who supposedly entered Egypt at the spot. Traditions of a half-dozen other localities claimed that the three pilgrims tarried in each plate. Some of these traditions still live it; Coptic calendars of the eighth and ninth centurie~ which list a feast called "The Flight of the Holy Family" for November 6, and another feast that also commemorates the entire Holy Family on the 24th of the month P~isons (May 31), "The Entrance of 3esus into Egypt.''° 4Bernard, Homilia I in. Missus Est. .SMariani, De Cultu Sancti dosephi Arnplit~cando, 44. 6Nilles, Kalendariura manuale utriusque ecclesiae orientalis et occidentalis, Oeniponte, 1896, II, 693, 702, 719. " 20 ,Ianuar~, 1944 THE DEVOTION TO THE HOLY I::AMILY The great awakening otcurred in Europe .during the twelfth century and thereafter. A wave of special lov.e of 'jesus and Mary swept ovxr the faithful who sought to follow the course of these two lives down-, to the last d~tail, including, of course, their dependence on St. 'joseph. Since the canonical Gospels deliberately screened the period of the Hidden Life, the common folk fell back on the apocryphal legends to fill-the gap. The acceptance of the.se ,spurious (though well-intentioned and charming) legends was most uncritical, but it was done in a spirit of deep piety. Thus, in. the popular rhyming legends, in the por- .traits by the masters, and in the many.widespread Miracle Plays, the Gospel story of ,Jesus, MarY, and Joseph was Set forth with imaginative coloring that made the Holy Fam!ly a vivid reality for the medievals. If is from this period that we must date the tender contemplation of life at Nazareth, as instanced in the writings of St. Bernard, St. Bernardine of. Siena, and the Meditations on the Life of Jesus Christ of Pseud.o-Bonaventure. During the middle of the seventeenth century the devo-tion ~o the Holy Family appeared as we now know it. Through the~efforts of Francis de Montmorency-Laval,. first Bishop of Quebec, it was propagated in Canada after its diffusion throughout Italy, France, and Belgium. At the samb period Mine. de Miramion, a friend of St. Vincent de Paial, established (1661) a religious community, the Daughters of the Holy Family, to do charitable work in France. This was the first of the religious congregations ,to be placed under-the special patronage of the Holy Family. In 1844 a Belgian officer, Henri Belletable, founded the "]krchconfraternity of the Holy Family" in order to organ-ize working-men against socialism. At Lyons .in 1861 Father Phillip Francoz, S.J., established another group .21 FRANCIS L. FILAS Reoieu~ ~or Religious somewhat different in scope from BelletabIe's archconfra-ternity~ This was the "Association of the Holy Family," whose members were families rather than individuals. They were dedicated to the ideals of the Holy. Family. and recited special family prayers in common in their homes. It was in connection with Leo XIII's approval (i892) of this association that the .Pope issued the letters which present the nature and purpose of the devotionto the Holy Family so excellently that excerpts from these documents have been selected, by the Church as Lessons for the Second Nocturn of the pre.sent feast of the Holy Family. In 1893 Leo permitted the feast to be celebrated on the third Sunday after Epiphany and himself composed the hymns for its new office. However, owing to conflicting rubrics the Con-gr. e~ation of Sacred Rites in 1914 changed the date of the feast to January 19. Seven years later, ~Benedict XV extended the feast tothe universal Church, ordering that it be observdd on the Sunday ~ithin the Octave of the Epiphany. 7 In what does the devotion to the Holy Family con-sist? It is more than a mere combination or accumulation of the honors paid separately t6 Jesus, Mary, and Joseph; rather, in the words of Leo XIII, "in the vdneration ofthe Holy Family the faithful rightly understand that they are reverencing the mystery of the hidden life which Christ led, together with His Virgin. Mother and St. Joseph." The purpose of this joint veneration is that Catholics might be drawn "to increase the fervor of their faith, and to imitate the virtues which shone forth in the divine Master, in the Mother of God, and in her most holy spouse.''s There is no doubt, Leo affirmed, that God in His providence estab- 7Pauwels. Periodica de Re Morali et Canonica, 10, 373; decree dated October 26, 1921, AAS, 13, 543. gAuthent. Collect. Decret. S.R.C., n. 3740. 22 Januar~t, 1944 THE DEVOTION TO THE HOLY FAMILY lished the Holy Family in orderthat Christians of all walks o~f life might be' provided with attractive exemplars of absolute perfection. "In 3oseph heads of the household have an outstanding model of fatherly watchfulness and-care. In the holy Virgin Mother of God mothers possess an extraordinary example of love, modesty, submission, and perfect faith. In Jesus, who 'was subject to them.' children have the divine picture of obedience to admire, reverence, and imitate.''~ Benedict XV called attention to the striking unity of the devotion to the Holy Family. when he wrote: "With the increase of devotion to St. Joseph among th~ faithful there will necessarily result an increase in their devotion toward the Holy Family oi~ Nazareth, of which he was the august head, for these devotions spring spontaneously one from .the other. By St. Joseph we are led directly to Mary, and by Mary, to the "fountain of all. holiness, Jesus Christ, who sanctified the domestic virtues by his obedience toward St. Joseph and Ma~y. Religious communities have always been foremost .in imitating the charity, obedience, and spirit of work and of prayer that pervaded the Holy.House of Nazareth. How-ever, in addition to this method of practicing genuine devo-tion to the Holy Family, there is a most urgent need to utilize.the devotion in another respect. .The Holy Family is the exemplar and patron of the family, which is the cor-nerstone Of society, and which is today being attacked by a most destructive campaign. For the go.od of the Church and for the good of our nation, the apostolate to save the family calls for prayer and action. Probably in most cases. thi~ requirements of the state of life of religious prevent aibid., n. 3777. ldBe~ediet XV, Motu Proprio, "St. Joseph and Labor," July 25, 1920, AA$ ~2, 313. 23 FRANCIS L. FILAS direct external labors in this regard; but each and every religious can offer a life of generous prayer and fidelity to rule in order that the intercession of St. 'joseph and Our Lady will," through the merits of ,Jesus of Nazareth, bring down God's special graces to protect our families from the baneful principles of modern paganism. May they be led to imitate lovingly the family life of,Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. THE FAMILY ROSARY Father Patrick Peyton, C.S.C., who has been working zealously ~for two years to reestablish the salutary devotion of" the Family Rosary, some time ago sent usa lengthy report of the success of this work. We are giving here a brief summary of the facts in the report that seem to be especially pertinent to our readers. A nation-wide campaign to restore the Family Rosary was begun in 3anuary, 1942, to provide families with an easy but effective means of coml~atting the evils that beset the American home and. to provide the. young people of those homes with a weapon'of self-defense against the temptations with which they are faced. Ecclesi-astical authorities and lay leaders have joined enthusiastically and effectively in the campaign. Bishops, in particular, have preached on the Family Rosary: have writ-ten pastorals and editorials about it; have suggested radio programs that would make it easy for families to get,down on their knees and unite with the broadcasts: have inaugurated definite campaigns to promote the devotion in their dioceses; and have asked for and promised prayers for the success of the campaign. Two especially efficacious ways of getting the Family Rosary started in a home are: (1) to urge members of the armed forces to write home and ask that the Rosary be said for them; and (2) to get children to make the suggestion to their parents. Chaplains have the most favorable opportu.nity of ut(lizing the first method, though ~.~ey can b~ greatly aided by all who correspond with members of the armed forces: religious, no "doubt, have the best opportunity of in'spiring the children. At the time the report was issued, religious had already begun to join wholeheartedly in the campaign. A. Superior General of a congregation of men had promised to address a circular letter to his congregation on the Family Rosary. The Mother General of a congregation of women had been giving tfilks on the Family Rosary in the schools iri which her Sisters were re.aching. ~he reported that in every classroom she entered she found some children whose families had already been won over to the commbn recitation of the Rosary. The foregoing are but a few of the facts in the report. Perhaps we can publish more later. --Father Peyton's. address is: The Reverend Patrick Peyton, C.S.C., 923 Madison Avenue, Albany, New York. 24 Religious and :he I:::ncyclical on. :he h ysfical Body Patrick M. Regan, S.J. IN RECENT years Catholics have often been accused, and h~ive often accused themselves, of neglecting the papal encyclicals. Frequently. they excused themselv.es on the pretext that "the encyclicals were concerned with world problems or with ecohomic matters and like subjects which held no particular interest for ordinary individuals. Many of the faithful felt these subjects were'far beyond the grasp of their intellects and so held themselves excused. Be that as it may, in recent months a new encyclical has come from our Holy Father on the Mystical Bodyof Christ, which is the personal concern of every single member of the household ~of the faith. No examination of c~nscience can ever return the verdict: this en~ycli~cal is not for me. Its subject matter touches our whole Catholic life in practice from cradle to grave. Moreover the tenor of the papal document and, in fact, explicit statements in every para-graph of certain portions of it, almost command us: take and read, study deeply and assiduously. The Pope seems to have anticipated our usual indifferent attitude toward his pronouncements and to .have "forestalled every lame excuse. Of Such universal concern is the teaching of this encyc-lical that Plus even declares: "Moreover, we trust that the following exposition of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ-will be acceptable and useful to those als0 who are without the fold of-the Church." He then a~signs as the reasons for this acceptability "not only the fact tha~ 25 PATRICK M. REGAN Review ~or Religious their gobd will toward the Church seems to grow from day - to day, but also that, while before their eyes today nation rises up against nation, .kingdom against kingdom, and discord i~'sown everywhere with the seeds of envy and hatred, if they turn their gaze to the Church,-if they con-template,. her divinely given unity--by which all men of every race are united, to Christ. in the,bond of brotherhood -:-they Will be forced to admire their fellowship in charity, and, with the guidance and assista.nce of divine grace, . will long to share in the '~same union and charity " If the encyclical concerns even tho~e outside the fold, still more .does it concern every member of the .Church1 itself. Since this is so, what shall, we say of the interest of religious in this doctrine? Surely it is not too mu~h to assert that each one should feel .personally obligated to make himself master" of the doctrine according to the tal-ents and pos!tion God has assigned him. The very opening. ~ar~graph 0f the letter seems to insinuate this: "Illus-trating, as it does, the grfind and inestimable privilege of our intimate union with a Head so exalted, this doctrine is certainly calculated by its sublime dignity to draw a.11 sPiritual-minded men to deep and serious study, andto give them, in the truths which it unfolds to the mind, a strong incentive to such Virtuous conduct as is conformable to its lessons." Religious have given up all things to follow chiist. Who, then, should have a deeper interest in what concerns intima.te union with Christ? Who more sincerely appreciates strong incentives to Virtuous conduct? Reli-gious too enjoy many more opportunities than people of the world to be spiritual-minded; in fact they should be that by the very nature of their vocation. They above all. then, should be attracted by the sublime dignity df the doctrine, and s16ould exhaust to the full the special advan-tages they enjoy for serious study of it. 26 danuarg, 1944 ENCYCLICAL ON THE MYSTICAL BODY For tbeSpiritudl-Minded A few paragraphs further on the Pontiff explains the appeal of the doctrine to the spiritual-minded.~ Remarking that in the present world crisis the faithful are of necessity drawn more to spiritual things and are ~hus in a position to draw more profit from the lessons, he voices the hope "that the~e our instructions and exhortations will be the more helpful to t~he faithful . . . For we know that, if all painful calamities of this turbulent period that cruelly tor- .ture almost countless men are accepted as from God's bands with calm and submissive spirit, they naturally lift souls above the passing things of earth to those of heaven that abide .forever and stimulate a certain thirst and keen desire forspiritu, al things." If these remarks aretru~ of the faithful in general, how much more true are they" of religious, who imitate Christ in seeking the kingdom of God~ not only in adversity, but always and everywhere, as their only call in life? Still more pertinent are the following sentencesin ¯ which the Pope notes the conditions specially favorable to the study of the do~trine: ~because of the present-day calamities "men are moved and, one might say, compelled to be more thoughtful in seeking the Kingdom of God. The m6re men are withdrawn from the vanities of this world and from the inordinate love of temporal things, certainly tl~e more likely it is that they will perceive the light of heavenly mysteries." Religious did not have to wait for World War II to see the vanity and emptiness of worldly riches. "When kingdoms and states are crumbling, when huge piles of goods and all'kinds of wealth are sunk in the measureless depths of the sea, and cities, towns, and fertile fields are strewn with massive ruins and defiled with the blood of brothers," then men will see that all is vanity; th~n they will be prepared to study the mysteries that per- 27 PATRICK M. REGAN ~ Review for ~Religious tain to life everlasting. Surely religio, us, whose one prin-ciple of life is that nothing matters but God's service, will find that the study-of God's mysteries fits into their main interest in life. Reasons/:or the Encyclical All the reasons assigned by the Sovereign Pontiff for addressing the world on the subje~t of the Mystical Body affect religious, but some of these reasons are especially perti;aent. For example, it is particularly true of religious "that many today are turning with greater, zest to a study that delights and nourishes .Christian piety. This, it would seem, is chiefly because a revived interest in the sacred .lit-urgy, the more widely spread custom of rece.iving Holy Communion, and the more fervent devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus practiced to.day have brought m.any souls to a deeperconsideration of the unsearchable riches of Christ that are preserved in the Church." ~ With this vision before him of the multitude zealou~ for a study that nc~urishes Christian piety, our.Holy Father himself assumes the task of teaching this difficult, yes, mys, terious doctrine. At the last moment, however, just before he begins his explanation of the doctrine he calls to our attention other weighty reasons. There are many errors prevalent concerning this doctrine, not only outside the Church but among the faithful also. And it might be added that many religious, too, have been affected by these errors. These are the words of the Pope: ".Nevertheless, while we can derive legitimate joy from all this, we must confess that grave errors in regard to this doctrine are being spread among those outside the true Church, and that~ among the faithful, too, inaccurate or thoroughly false ideas are entering that turn minds aside from the straight path of truth." 28 danuarg, 1944 ENCYCLICAL ON THE MYSTICAL B~)DY Setting aside the errors outside the Church as less per-tinent to our present subjecti we cannot fail to recognize in .the fol!owing the description of. some religious: "As a result of these conflicting and mutually antagonistic schools of thought, Some, through empty fear, look upon so pro-found a doctrine as something dangerous and. so they fight shy of it as of the beautiful but forbidden fruit of Para-dise." We must rather flee the danger Of the "false mgsti-cism creeping in; which, in its attempt to eliminate ~the immovable frontier that .separates creatures from their Cre-ator,, garbles the Sacred Scriptures." This false mysticism, together .with the false rationalism and popular naturalism rampant outside the Church, is the really dangerous for-bidden fruit. Pius reassures us with regard to the true d0c- .l~rine: "Mysteries revealed by God cannot be harmful to men ;. nor should they remain as treasures hidden in a field-- useless, They have been given from on high precisely to help the spiritual:progress of those who study them in' the spirit of piety." Deep and Serious Studg The Holy Father not only assigns the reasons for writing on the doctrine of the Mystical Body; he also, a's a-skilled teacher, sounds the keynote for his class. -This is not a "fresh air" course he offers, not a course to be merely audited, not a course that can be mastered with no further effort than paying strict attention in class. From the out-set. we are implicitly warned against thinking that the course might¯ be entitled: "Doctrine ot~ the Mystical Body Made Easy"; for the very second sentence of the Encyc- ¯ lical states that "this doctrine [of our intimate union with the Head] is certainly calculated by its o sublime dignity to draw all spiritual-minded men to deep and serious study. '.' 29 PATRICK M. REGAN Reoietv for Religious That the Holy Father envisions the reception of his teaching in an atmosphere of deep thought is brought out also in the outline of his plan immediately preceding the first or'explanatory part of the Encylical. Speaking of the lessons he will draw from the doctrine, he explains that these lessons "will make a deeper study of the mystery bear yet richer fruits of perfection and holiness." He seems" to ieassure us that, though we may never fully plumb the "depths of the mystery, yet the deeper our understanding, the richer will be the fruits of holiness. Surely, that is a ~trong incentive forthe religious to study the mystery. . Since deep study involves.reflectio, h, it is quite to expected that the explanation of the doctrine should begin with the words: "When one reflects on this doctrine . " Thus the Pontiff continues his lecture, punctuating it throughout with, similar observations. For example, he concludes the section on Christ, the Founder of the Body, With! ."One who reverently considers this venerable teaching will easily discover the reasons on which it is based." Perhaps the religious will take the cue and repair to the chapel to make some. reverent considerations of the Encyclical there in the presence of the Founder of the Body. Meditation Yes, the doctrine is an appropriate subject of medita-tion. Of this we are assured in the Encyclical: "Deep mys-" tery this, subject o'f inexhaustible meditation: That the salvation of many depends on the piayers and voluntary penanc.es which the members of the Mystical Body of Jesus ~Christ offer for this intention and on the assistance of pas-. tors of souls and of the faithful, especially of fathers and ¯ mothers of families, which they must offer to our Divine Savior as if they were His associates." Plus returns to this idea later when treating the topic, ' 30 January, 1944 "ENCYCLICAL ON THE MYSTICAL BODY "Christ, the Savior of the Body." Adverting to the fact that "we have already treated this subject clearly enough, when treating of the Church's birth on the cross, of Christ as the source of light and principle .of sanctity, and of Christ as support of His Mystical Body," he goes on to sfiyl "there is no reason why we should explain it further.'.' However he adds as a sort of afterthought: "but rather let us all, giving perpetual thanks to God, meditate on it with a h"umble and. attentive mind." No matter how clearly the subject has been treated, and despite the fact that there is no reason for further explanation, much still remains to be learned concerning this doctrine. But for this further mas; tery, Pius "turns us over to Christ, the Great .Teacher,. exhorting us at the sa~me time to listen to Him with humil,. ity and attention. Study o[ Mysteries Naturally many religious will be taken aback at the thought of studying quite formally a deep mystery of our faith. That is the work of skilled theologians, we reason: while our part isto share in the fruits of their labors by reading their books, or listening to their sermons or lec-tures. But no, the Holy Father would have us take up the direct study of the mystery of the Mystical Body fgr our-selves. In fact, over and over he insists on this idea of study. On the other hand he anticipates our reluctance to undertake Such a task; or, it may be, even our consterna-tion at thevery thought of facing a mystery in the hope of penetrating it. Hence he cites a declaration of the Vatican Council, which will not only allay all fears but even indi-cate a method of studying the present Mystery: "Reason illumined by faith, if it seeks earnestly, piously, and wisely, does attain, under God, to a certain knowledge and a most helpful knowledge of mysteries by considering their anal- 31 PATRICK M. REGAN Review [or Religious ogy with what it knows naturally and their mutual rela-tions and their common relation with man's last end." What an insPiring thought it is, that the very least among us may go directly to tl~e official enunciation of this doetrineby the Supreme Pontiff himself. What an encour-aging thought that we can be certain, on no less an authority than the Vatican Council itself, of attaining with God'sgrace ~o a sure and helpful knowledge,of the mys-terious doctrine of the Mystical Body. Many of us per-haps must accuse oursel~ces of being content to know only the a-b-c's of our holy Faith. One would almost suspect that.Plus had such in mind as he seems to strive to arouse us from our lethargy and get .us to study the Church, the hope of salvation. What an intellectual.and.spiritual°ban, quet a~aits the religious who approaches the study of this doctrine with eager and humble spirit! We leave the reader tO ~enjoy that banquet for him-self. Meanwhile we would exhort him to keep in mihd, as he studies, thaf foryears he himself has bedn a living mem-ber of this mystery, the Church; that all i~s mysteries, its doctrines, sacraments, hnd graces have touched his. life at every point along the way. In other words he has lived this life of mystery for many a year: surely it is high time to meditate it long and well. Exhortations Although we leave most of the work of teaching to the Encyclic.al itself, still we feel obliged to call attention to certain exhortations particularly appropriate to. religious. Outstanding among these, one that the very name ."Mysti-cal .Body" will bring to mind is this: "When, therefore, we call the body of Jesus Christ 'mystical,' we hear a solemn warning in .the very significance of the word. It is a warning. that echoes these words of St. Leo: 'Recognize, O Christian, 32 danuarv, 1944 ENCYCLICAL ON THE MYSTICAL BODY your dignity, and, being made a sharer of the divine nature, go not back to your former worthlessness along the way of unse.emly conduct. Keep. in mind of what head and of .what body you are a member.' " Again there is the paragraph exalting charity for our imitation: "Charity, then, more than any other virtue, binds us closely to Christ. On fire with this flame from .heaven, how many children of the Church have rejoiced to s~ffer insults foi Him and to face and overcome the hardest trials, though it cost their lives and the shedding of their blood. For this reason our Divine Savior earnestly exhorts us in these words: 'Remain in my love.' And as .charity, if it find no outward expression and effectiveness in ,good work, is something jejune and altogether empty, He added at once: 'If you keep .my commandments, you will remain in my love; as I also have kept my Father's com-mandments and remain in His love.' " The exhortation that follows on love of neighbor may be summed up in the. pointed question of the Holy Father: "How can we claim to love the Divine Redeemer if we hate those whom He has redeemed with His precious blood so ¯ that He might make them members of His Mystical Body?" Rejecting the "opinions of those.who assert that little importance should be given, to the frequent con~ession of venial sins," the Pope implies a special exhortaion to reli-gious in these words: "to. hasten daily progress along the path of virtue, we wish the pious practice of frequent Con- , fession to be earnestly advocated. By i.t, genuine self-knowledge is increased; Christian humility grows; bad habits are corrected; spiritual neglect and tepidity are con-quered; the conscience is purified; the will strengthened; a salutary self-control is attained; and grace is increased in virtue of the sacrament itself." Again, the following words, nothing more than a mere PATRICK M. REGAN statement of fact, are nonetheless a powerful exhortation for any religious: "Moreover, the common practice of the saints as well as ecclesiastical documents demonstrate hov~ highly everyone should esteem mental prayer." Puzzled perhaps by the teaching¯ of those who "would spread abroad the idea that prayers offered to God in private should not be considered worth very much," the religious might have wavered in his loyalty to his mental prayer: .What more encouraging ¯than to hear the foregoing words from the Holy Father himself on this subject, so dear to the heart of everyone dedicated to God. in the service of ~e.ligion! ,Fin'all,y, this whole doctrine of the Mystical Body teaches one lesson above all--love, of the Church. Nat-urally then we expect, to hear: "The vastness of Christ's love for the Church is equalled by its constant activity. With the same charity let us show our devoted active love .for Christ's Mystical Body.;' May we as'r~ligious measure ,up to the high standard of dedication attributed to us in .th~se words: "And so we desire that all who claim, the Church as their mother should seriously consider that not ¯ only the sacred' ministers and those who have consecrated themselves to God in religious life, but .the other members as well of the Mystical Body of ~lesus Christ have the obli-gation of working hard and constantly for .the upbuilding ~and increase of this Body." May our deep study and fer-vent meditation of the Encyclical help us to a deeper real-ization of our obligations as religious to the Mystical Body of, ~lesus Christ) 1For the study of the encyclical, we recommend the edition published by the Ameri-ca Press, which contains an Introductory Analysis, Study Outline. Review Questions. and a Selected Bibliography prepared by Father ylo, seph Bluett, 34 L'Allegro Francis 3. McGarrigle, S.3. AMAN'S duty of joy and cheerfulness is the state of mind, emotion, and will, that should result from his awareness of the great purpose and worth of his. existence. Man can and should be constantly cheerful only if he is convinced that "life. is worth living. '° His cheerful-ness must be essentially the "joy of living." 'joy .grows and flourishes only in the cheerful garden of belief in God's infinitely wise and good purpose for man. Consequently, sadness has its habitat in the dark and dank swamp of atheism andvice. It is ~/mephitic weed that will effectually choke out all fragrant plants of happiness and virtue, if it is allowed to grow in the soul. The best way to extirpate it is to get at its roots. ,Joy and suffering are not by any means incompatible. The one who loves is joyful to suffer f6r the beloved. The laborer who suffers in his labor has joy in the thought of a high wage. A~ surely as man has instincts that are opposite to one another, so surely his life must contain suffering: some form of frustration. For the satisfaction of any one of man's tendencies usually involves the frustration of another .tendency; and thus pleasure always casts the shadow of suffering. For instance, the fatiaer of a family may satisfy his parental instin& by bard labor in caring for his family: butby that very fact he frustrates his tendency to ease and amusement. The soul would have no rainbow Had the eyes no tears. --3. V. Cheney, "Tears." 35 FRANCIS J. MCGARRIGLE Reoie~o [or Religious Nor is cheerfulness the aloof, self-centered, touch-me-not withdrawal from sorrow-laden surroundings and' per-sons, in order to indulge in a sort of Nirvana of emotiom ¯ with studied indifference to the woesof others. Cheerful-ness is bes( fostered in sympathy and interest in others' mis.- fortunes. "Blessed are the comforters; for they shall be comforted"; and the comforters' blessedness or joy is not merely eschatological; it is this-worldly joy as well as other-worldly joy. The cheerfulness of the poor who are not envious of their more fortunate neighbor, while., sympa-thetic with their less fortunate one, isa matter of inspiring experience. Frequently both the smile and the sympathy lessen on the face of man and woman as the money increases in their swel.ling purse. ¯ The reality of life is shocking and crudeonly for those who do not know the wondrous meaning of life. The pes- .simists of humanity are not the oneswho have most to suf-fer; they are often persons in relative ease, but mentally :children who do not see the worth of the schooling of life; Especially literary and socialite professionalsufferers believe that self-knowledge and worldly wisdom consist in abnormal talent for discovering reasons for boredom, unhappiness, and criticism. -Tolstoi, a disillusioned man, quarrels bitterly with the whole scheme of the universe, and finds nothing of joy in life.but to dig the ground for" the sake of digging the ground. The reason is that he does no.t know what life is about. Two other Slavs, Poushkin and Lermontoff, sadly~labored over the reason for human, existence and in their poems and other writings found only" pessimistic replies. Poushkin, father of Russian lyric poetry, addresses life thus dolefully: Useless gift, gift of chance. What unfriendly power Has drawn me from the darkness? . . . There is no goal for me . . . ~6 Saturnine Byron, in "Euthanasia," sums hp.in two lines his lugubrious views of tlde worth Of living: 'And know! whatever thou hast been; 'Tis something better not to be. Pessimism, chronic discontent and sadness, is essentially the convicti6n that life is not worth living. Many amongst the best known German philosophers are pessimists fol-lowing the conviction of Sophocles, the Greek tragedian: "Not.to have been is past all prizing best'" (OedilOUS" Co-lonnus) . Schopenhauer calls life a sh~m, an annoying and point-less interruption of the steady calm of eternal nothingness: "The knowledge that it. is better not to be, is not only the most important of truths£ but also the oldest of wisdom,.'.~o. (Werke, ed. Deussen, III, .693). For Schilling, life is a farce, an absurd romance; for Feuerbach it is a madhouse and a jail. Eduard von Hart-rn'ann tells us that the genius sees through the" illusion of life. and finds it unendtirable, Whilst the.generality of mankind labor on in wretched contentment, slaves of the error, and delusion that they can be happy. After perceiving the ill,u.- ¯ sions of life, man sees the conclusion to be drawn: Nirvana, painless nothingness (Ausgetoal~tte Werhe, dd. Copeland, !II, 76). Most European pessimism likewise borrows its Views from the Buddhism of India, and like it, more or less logically and veiledly draws the conclusion of the blessed-ness of self-annihilation,, suicide. There have been weird societies for the promotion of suicide, on,e in Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth cen-tury. The members placed their names in an urn; and as their nameswere periodically drawn, they killed them-selves in the presence of the other members as the tetric expression of the worthlessness of living. In Italy, with other so-called thinkers, Leopardi. FRANCIS "J. McGARRIGLE laments that¯ no one can be intelligently happy. Life according tothis moping poet, by its very nature is infe-llcita, unhappiness: "I cannot imagine a use for life; nor any fruit of it" (Canto Nottttrno). In his self-pity he speaks to his heart: Be quiet forever; you ha.ve beaten enough; the earth is not ¯ worthy of your sighs. Life is nothing ~but bitterness and :. ycearzness; there is nothing else in it. The world is nothing ¯ but mire. Be quiet;.be in despair forever. Destiny holds ngthing to us but death. Despise henceforth yourself and nature, and the shan~eful hidden power which decrees the ruin of all and the infinite variety of all. (Poesies et oeuvres morales. French Transl. 1880, p. 49.) D'Alembert, amongst French pessimists, aligns himself With such "strong" men as Leopardi thinks himself to be: "Be great," he says, "and you will be unhappy." ' Disbelief" in the immortality, of man can see only dis-heartening frustration and deadening sorrow as funda-menial and final, involved in the very nature of man and his environment. Life for such disbelievers is inherently and utterly "a business that does not pay expenses," a thing far better if it were not. When the godless or materialis,tic philosopher does pro-pose optimism as a principle of life, hi does so on patently insufficient reason, in mere bravado, whistling in the dark. 'Some others are cynical, such as Oscar Wilde ("The Pic, ~ture.of Dorian Gray") saying that the basis of optimism is Sheet terror in facing life. Wrong in their valuation of living, materialists are n~c.e~sarily wrong as to the basis of optimism and joy, as is Herbert Spencer (The Data oF Etbics III) : There is on~ postulate on which pessimists and optimists agree. Both their arguments ~issume it to be self-evident '~ . that ,life is good or bad, according as it does or does not !. brinl~ a surplus of agreeable feeling. : 38 danuarg, 1944 L'ALLEGRO Optimism that ,is sound and ~pessimism that can give some. account of its source, are founded, not on feeling, but on the primary conviction that life. is, Or is not, worth living that the purpose of life is, or is not, worth the suf-fering it entails. -~. -- Quite a number df self-estemed intelligentsia: and worldly-wise hold that there is so little joy possible .in life that we must prove our right to it at all. "What fright have we to,napplness. , .(Ibsen, Ghosts I.) 3oy, they ~thinki is only for simpletons; Great and experienced minds~ among, whom they class themselves, must appear, bored, cynical, and disgruntled with life and with. everything in it. Sophocles~ however,~ says .of them in his Ant(qone: "The man for whom the joy of lif~ is gone, lives no~more~; he should be counted among the dead.~' ._" Many modern novelists, and~ssayists hav~ frankly abandone~ the possibility of happiness as a goa:l. The be~t they can offer as an ambition is. the empty shadow of piness without its soul-filling substance, the panting.quest for happiness without the possibility oL its acquisition, t.he ¢arrot dangled before the eyes of the silly donkey whom.s.ly -nature thus dupes into dragging with much labor the back~ breaking load of living. _ The deluded donkey, they tell :us, will never reach the luscious-looking carrot; and t,~here .is no welcoming manger awaiting.him at his weary journey's end. At last he will buckle under, ~ollapse and fall, the carrot still unattained. Anyway; they add.as a footnote, the carrot, agreeable as it looks; would prove disagreeable: if reached at last. Together with this defeatist attitude toward lif.e, strangely enough, there is~joined a. feverish longing forjo'~ and an amazingly mad chase after it; and all the while the~e same disillusionists assume a contemptuous superciliousne~} towards cheerfulness. They think itbefitting their elevated ':FRANCIS J. MCGARRIGLE :mentality to pQrtray on their grim countenances the cosmic boredom of living. .~ ~ It can be, too, that there are some lopsidedly pious Souls who.scent an insidious enemy of piety in every ~joy. Gaiety is to them always something .ribald. As Macaulay writes in his History of England (vol. III, c. II): "The ¯ Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but.because it gave pleasu[e tO the spectators." On . the other hand, there are still simpler sduls to whom all religion and piety are repulsive because they scent in it the sworn enemy of every joy. However, one would gather from the writings of G. K. Chesterton that it was largely his sense of humor anal joy that established his belief in God and in the Church. The truth is that joy is an essential nutrition of human life, a greater necessi~ty than bread, a power of life, and an immense worth of life. The troUble with the pessimikts, philosophical or social, is that they are the simpletons, who look for hap-~ piness and joy outside their own minds, in riches, pleasure-hunting, social or political notoriety--all and any of which, by themselves, wipe off the human faceits smile of joy. Condition, circumstance, is not the thing; Bliss is the same in.subject or in king. --Pope, Essay on Man. They have not realized that to increase one's toys is not to increase one's joys. They seek joy from all sources but the true one: and finally, with Francis Thompson (in The Hound o[ Heaven), they say by the constant tedium of -their faces and the constant bitterness of their tongues: And now m'y heart is as a broken font, Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever From the dank thoughts that shiver Upon the sightful branches of my mind. ¯40 danuar~l, 1944 L'ALLEGRO All the bright~ lights of care-society, all the tom-tomming of jazz, all the social fir.ew0rks, all the scurrying of business, all the flitting from one place to another, .are mainly din and distraction for the stunning of joyless minds. So-called-modern art and so-called modern music-are the most joyless ever. excogitated,, because they 'iecede farthest from thought of God and His providence .for mani. More atheist than the Roman and Greek paganism, they see man and his life only with the unsmiling eyes of the animal and interpret him only in the fate and destiny of an animal. Modern art and music, are the saddest ot~ all art and music ,because they are the "most inhuman of all. They cannot smile; and the definition of man-is anirna( risible: '."the' animal that smiles." To study an exp0si; tion of modern art or tO listen tO moderri mi~sic is to dreriCh one's spirit with cold watermmuch ot~ it- dirty. ' -The joy of the theist is the only possible joy, for he alone knows wl-iere human lithe is going and has the assur~ ance that, it~ he So will it, nothing can hinder him.fr0ni reachinghis exCeedingly desirable destination. A ChriS-tian optimist sees an opportunity in every calmity; a pagan pessimist sees a calamity in every opportunity:. Successl is getting what you.want; happiness is wanting wl'iat you get. The reason is that happinessdepends on one's own outlook and dispositions. No one can make us happy or' unhappy;we do it ourselves, and we alone can do As Publius Syrus tells us in his Sententiae, "No man is happy Unless he believes he is." Enviroriment gives us the opportunity for happiness or unhappiness; but our own attitude of mind to our environ; merit constitutes our happiness or unhappiness. Humor and cheerfulness anddeep joy are by no means correlatives of comfort, riches, ease, learning or notoriety. FRANCIS J. MCGARRIGLE " Review for Religious ¯ Because nobility is not idependent on exterior things, bkcause it is an attitude of mind and will, nobility nor-mally has joy and cheerfulness as its distinguishing trait. Small souls are sad souls;.great souls are glad souls. There is no question but that one must be noble in character to be cheerful constantly; for only "out of the strong shall come the sweet." Nobility causes cheerfulness; but there is also the mutual causality of constant cheerfulness in generating and increasing real nobility, with its necessary discipline of mind. Great minds alone have lea~rned, great heart.s alone have lived, the truth that duty is the only joy and joy is a fundamental duty. Joy and cheerfulness promote social intercourse and lubricate all contacts of" family, business, and general society. Alone one can sorrow; but none can be joyful alone. The cheerful man is sought as the best promoter, seller, and leader of men. All naturally admire the man who does not show the weakness and self-centeredness of sadness. In fact, no one is interested in sad accounts of our misfortunes, but all are attracted by our joy of living, as insects are attracted by light. Hence the jingle runs: Be always as merry as ever you can, For no one delights in a sorrowful man. The cheerful gospel of joy is brought to us by Christ, .who presents Himself as the Divine Model of correct human pS~rchology. To perfect human nature He teaches that man, His brother and sister, children of God the Father, should be joyous in living. "These things I have spoken tO you that my joy may be in ~ou, and that your joy may be fu.lfilled" (John 15:11 ) "and your joy no one shall take from you" (John 16:22).1 Christianity is essentially the religion of cheerfulness. 1The New Testament texts used in this article are taken from the Westminster Version.--ED. danuar~lo 1944 L'ALLEGRO Christ's messianic coming is foretold, as the coming of joy to the human race. "Many shall rejoice in his coming" (Luke 1 : 14). He is announced on the winter hills of Beth-lehem as the arrival of joy: "Behold, I bring you glad tidings of a great joy that shall l~e to all the people" (Luke 2: 10). In His divine masterpiece of psychology, the Ser~ mon on the Mount, He explains the reasons for the peace~ ful joy of living: "Rejoice and exult, for your reward is great in .the heavens" (Matthew 5" 12). Naturally Paul of Tarsus .emphasizes 'this dominant note of joy sounded by His.Master, "joy of faith" (Philippians 1:15). Hi~ greeting and wish for his Christian flock is "pdace and joy in the Holy Spirit" (Romans 14:17); may "the God of h.ope fill you with all joy" (Roman.s 15: 13) ; even though they have much to suffer: "rejoicing in hope, bearing tribu.- lation in patience." His ~o-apostle and Primate, St. Peter, teaches the same: "Inasmuch .as ye hax~e fellowships ih the sufferings of Christ, rejoice" (I Peter 4: 13). "~ The Church of Christ inculcates through its liturgy th~ joy of living. Its "Alleluia," the exclamation of joy, rings throughout its worship of the Mass and Office. Even in the season of sorrow, the exhortation .to r~joice, "Lae-tare!," begins the Massof the Fourth Sunday of Lent. Its official prayers are those of cheerfulness: the BenediCtus) Magniiicat, and Te Deum; and prayers of rejoic!ng are heard even in its funerals. The Church celebrates the death of her most notable children as their joyful birthday. "Merry Christmas" is essentially a Christian greeting; and Christmas, or any other day, can be merry, only when it is what it says "Christ's Mass," rejoicing over the life of Christ begun in Bethlehem, continued in the Bethfehem of every heart, and to be consummated in Christ's eternal happiness. The "Prince of Peace" means the "Prince of cheerfulness." 43 FRANCIS J. MCGARKIGLE The conflict of selfishness is practically all that is wrong with the world and human life, whether socially, politi-cally, commercially, nationally, or religiously; and selfish-ness is manifested invariably by lack of joy and cheerful-ness. . . Characteristic, tber, efore,.of.those who are most Chris-tian, the saints, is constant cheerfulness; so much s-o that xhe French express it thus: "Un saint triste est .un triste . saint" (a sad saint is a sad [specimen of] saint.) The real ",Christian lives up fully t_o the tranquilizing "principle: '~God is, and all is well" .(Whittier, "My Birthday"). Father Faber observes that "Perhaps nature does not contribute a gr.eatei, help to grace than. gaiety~' In this he but paraphrases the early Christian document, "Pastor,", written before the death of St. John the Apostle, namely, thai sadness leads to sin and joy to good. The most joyful of persons are, on an average, the me.mbers of religious orders; and they have the youngest of hearts, ahhougb they have renounced .the pursuit of revel, wilfulness, honor, and possessions, in which the imbecile world thinks to find joy.~ They honor God, theoGod of their hearts, in a very special way by the alacrity and cheer- .fulness of their service. Hence, too, their magnetic power , in drawing others to the service of God, whose burden of ~"~"~"l[fe they prove by their cheerfulness to be' sweet and light. Their joy is one explanation of their perseverance; for What we do with joy, we do to the end. ¯ Wise St. Teresa of Avila instructs her Sisters: Try, my Sisters, to be affable wherever you can with-out giving displeasure to God. Behave so that all with whom you converse will be pleased with your manner and company, and may never be rendered afraidof virtue. The more holy a r~ligious is, the more simple and gracious she should be in conversation. Never must you separate.your-self from your Sisters, however much difficulty you may L'ALLEGRO~ feel with them, and however little their ¢on~rersat~o~_ may please you. We must make every, effort to be affable and ¯ to please those with whom we deal, and especially our Sisters. : The joyous mood of St. Francis of Assisi, so popularL with Catholic and non-Catholic alike., arose from his intense spirituality; and this reassuring ~haract~ri.stic" undoubtedly was most potent in the engaging attraction., which he exercised over others in leading them to enthusi~. astic Christian life. Thomas of Celano tells us of St, Fran~: cis: "The saint Constantly, endeavored to persevere; in gladness of heart . With utmost, solicitude he avoided, the great evil of ill-humor." . . Ready and steady the Christian gazes into. the hollo~. eyes of Death. Despite his instinctive revulsion fiom thi~: death of the body, the Christian's joy is strengthend by: th_.e. thought of death, not the end for him, but the beginning of life; and with thisknowledge, his joy arises from,the correct evaluation of the things of time. He does not. live. in tile uneasy dismay of. wa!kirig over life's treacherous glacier, in the dark, without a guide, at the risk of being. engulfed at every sFep. He does not undergo the bitter dis~. appointment of placi.ng all his expectan.cy of happiness-in,. creature goods, which.were not made. to last or to sail.sly; for that which makes these spectral goods is, as in the case of bubbles, that which explodes them. The Christian has shorn grisled death of its fearful,¯ hess; and eq.ually sufferjng's barb has been cleansed of its venomous poison of hopelessness, the sensethat suffering.i.s of no avail, dead loss, The Christian grasps the nettle of suffering and ddath with firm hope and its sting is gone, Chamisso writes of a peasant woman, singing:at the door of her whitewashed cottage, while .with her own hands she stitched her shroud, so that when she should die, it would be ready: 45 I~RANCIS J. MCGARRIGLE " I wouldI were as wise as she Life's cup to. empty never sighing " .And still with joy like hers to see The shroud made ready for my dying. :. ~,Joy is.indispensable to physical as well as to spiritual i~fticiency. Sadness deadens; joy quickens. "Cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a Steady and. perpetual serenity" (Addison, The Spectator, May 17, 1712). What sunlight is tO the metabolism, of ~the. plants, joy is tO spiritual metabolism . and general health. It has a most profound effect on the ease of recov- :ery from illness and.even on the amount of inconvenience and suffering felt in sickness. Physicians know this fact weii: and an important factor of the "bedside manner" is _ the development.of a cheerful outlook in the patient. Nerve spedalis.ts make gr~at account of it in their treatments. Ancient Ecclesiasticus also knew it several millenia ago: "The joyfulness of the heart is the life of man., and the joy of a man is length of life" (30:23). It is a commonplace amongst doctors that the joyful patient, other things being equal, is the one who has the most favorable prognosis, especially in somediseases, such as tuberculosis. An English physician in his book on "The Prolongation of Life," observes that joy and hope, ¯ "-by quickening respiration, increase the flow of blood to the .brain and the supply of nourishment to the nerve cells. Psychic depression retards respiration and heart action, he says, and lessens the blood-flow to the brain, causing first ¯ .functional and then organic derangement. 3by is a sort of gymnastics of the soul whose health is always shared with the body. "The fear of the Lord shall delight the heart and shall give joy and gladness and length of days" !(Ecclesiasticus 1 : 12). The great philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, tells us January, 1944 L'ALLEGRO in this regard: Sadness does more harm to the bddy than the other passions ~ of the soul, because it interferes with'the.vital action of the heart. Sadness at times causes even the loss of reason, as may he seen in cases where it-has led-tO deep . o melancbqly and madness. (Summa Theolo~ica, 2a, 2ae, 28, '.'On.Joy.") And inspired writers express the same concretely and pungently: . ~ Sorrowful heart drieth up the" bones" (Proverbs 17, 21). "For sadness hath killed many and there.is no profit in it . Of sadness cometh death; and it overwhelmeth" " the strength; and sadness' of the'heart boweth do~rn the neck" (Ecclesiasticus 30; 25; 38; 19). The observance of the laws of Christianity is i.n gen~ eral the m~st conducive factor to healthy living. Especially is it t1~e best preventive and curative treatment for mental health. Chief amongst the laws of Christ in this, and'in every regard, are acquiescence to God's Will and interest in the happiness and welfare of others. An old English proverb runs: "A man Of gladness cometh not tomadness,'.' OUR. CONTRIBUTORS G. AUGUSTINE ELLARD is a member of our editorial board and Professor of Ascetical and Mystical Theology at St. Mary's College, St. Marys, Kansas. ,IAMEg A. KLEIST is the editor of The Classical Btdletin and Professor of Classical Lan, guages at St. Louis University. FRANCIS L. FILAS is a student of Theology ~t West Baden College, West Baden Springs, Indiana, and. has written a book on tile history of the-devotion to SL ,Joseph. PATRICK M. REGAN is Professor of Apolo2 getics at St. Mary's College; St. Marys, Kansas. FRANCIS 2. MCGARRIGLE i's Graduate Dean at Seattle College, Seattle, Washington. R.OBERT B. EITEN. le.ctu~e.s in,Mathematics at the University of Detroit, and has given much special study to questions of Ascetical and Mystical Theology. 47 Genuine h yst:icism What Should We Think Robert B. Eiten, S.J. SO MUCH is written, t.oday on mysticism that it is scarcely possible for anyone interested in the spiritual life to avoid taking a stand on the subject. The stand whicb"all should begin.with ought tO be based on the common teaching df mystical theologians. Of ~ourse in mystical theology as in nearly all other sciences, we may reasonably expect to find some problems which have .not been settled to the satisfaction of all authorities. There are differences of opinion on some questions. Nevertheless there is agreement on nearly, all fundamental questions, at least in so far as they would concern either our spiritual life or spiritual direction. Let us now consider what the proper attitude, of a reli- ¯ -gious.should be toward mysticism. This proper and safe attitude, as .we said before, can be derived from mystical theologians in those points where there is agreement among them. What, then; is the common teaching of mystical " theologians in g~neral? First of all, we surely would like to know the connec= tion between mystical graces and high sanctity.' Although mystical theologians admit that mystical graces are a great aid to sanctity, still they hold that these graces do not con-stitute sanctity, be it heroic or ordinary. Sanctity is meas- 'ured by the amount of sanctifyinggrace onehas. Its further 9rowtl~ too is determined by.the perfection of the life that one leads. Ultimately,then~ mystical graces help our sanc-tity in so far as they help these bther elements. For a high degree of sanctity and perfection, mysticM 48 GI~NUINE MYSTICISM theologians agree that special graces are not only helpful but necessary. These graces must be more abundant and more stimulating than those which are required to lead an ordinary life of sanctity. Likewise they would require a greater cooperation and docility on the part of the soul receiving them. These graces thus can dominate completely the actions of the soul. This constant fidelity to grace or this proficient life of grace, mystical theologians would admit, will bring an ever greater union of mind and Will with God. Finally, over, a period of time such constant fidelity to grace will bring about a habitual union with God. ~rith a habitual union "present, supernatural truths and, in general, the mysteries-of faith, are clearly perce.ived. .- But what is this habitual union with God if not an intense prayer-life or life of r~collection? Thus all'along r~orr~ally there has been.progress ir~ prayer. Most likely in the beginning the soul passed from meditation [o affective prayer where affections are usually many and varied, and reflections few and short. After using this latter type of prayer for a while the soul gradually passed into simpff[ied affectit2e prayer or the prayerof simplicity. In this prayer the soul immediately and, as it were, intuitively grasping a supernatural truth or mystery, experienced a repose and relish in resting therein without much change or variety of. affections over some considerable period of time. Within," thislatter degree of prayer there was much opportunity for -the soul to make progress up to the very borderline of infus-ed contemplation. And if some mystical theologians place the prayer of simplicity beyond ordinary prayer and within the realm of infused prayer, at least they will agree that there has l~een a progressive prayer-life in such a soul. Mysti~a~i'' theologians do not conceive of the passing from acquired prayer into infused or mystical prayer as a necessarily sud-. 49 ROBERT B. EITEN Reoiew ~,or Religious den and great hiatus.or jump; .rather they admit some con- . tinuity between these states of prayer. " The importance, then, of a progressive prayer-life-- a life of intimacy with God--should be at once rather evi-dent. Any carelessness here normally precludes one frorn the hope of enjoying mystical graces. We said before that special graces are needed to reach high sanctity. We have also pointed out the importance .of ¯ a recollected life. Now, infused contemplation happens to fi~ in very well in this list of special graces. It is one of the most select graces. And it is certainly a big factor in leading a deeply recollected life. It is not st,range, therefore, that mys-tical theologians would further admit that mystical grace~ or infused contemplation are in themselves most desirable be, cause they can be a great .factor in tea, ching high sanctity. True, there may be-some difference of opinion among mys-tical theologians on the opportuneness of exciting such a desire in allsouls on account of certain disadvantages it ~ay ¯ bring about in some souls or in unusual circumstances. The desire can be abused. But, just as with any other means of sanctification, mystical graces can be desired and prayed for under certain conditions.1 How strange and unfortunate. then, it is to find that there are still those who on princ.iple not only fear mystical prayer, but discourage it! Perhaps . they do not realize that they are trying tO make void a great grace and an important factor in the matter of spiritual progress. Perhaps they act this way because they think of mystical contemplation only in terms of visions, revela-tions, internal locutions, ecstasies, levitations, stigmatiza, tion, and so forth. But no mystical-theologian holds lThe eminent and prudent author, Tanquerey, has the following excellent remarks on the desire for mystical prayer: "It is permissible to desire infused contemplation. since it is an excellent means of perfection, but it must be done httmblyoand condi-tionally with a hol~ abandonment to the will of .God." (The Spiritual Life. p. 665.) 50 ~lanuary, 1944 GENUINE MYSTICISM "today that these pertain to the essence of mystical,praye~. They .are merely the accidental phenomena sometimes con-nected with mystical prayeL Mystical prayer can. exist apart from them. Even those who truly desire the grace of infused prayer should not ask for, but should ratherlshuni these extraordinary external experiences. All or nearly all authorities admit that God grants the gift of infused prayer when and in the way He pleases, and even to beginners, though this latter is rare. Usually. infhsed contemplative prayer is granted primarily for. one's increase in personal holiness, after years.of earnest .striving for sanctity,-and secondarily that others may be prevailed upon to lov~ God more intensely. Authorities further agree that temperament, proper direction, envirqn-ment, vocation, and so forth, are noteworthy factors in disposing oneself to receive this gift. Although infused contemplation¯ is a precious gift,yet one w.hb desires it for its.sweets is apt to be disappointed; for usually there is much suffering connected with .it and the suffering may even outweigh the sweets. It is generally admitted that there is no high sanctity withouk a rigorou~s purification of the soul. In this regard God ordinarily intervenes personally by means of interior and exterior trials, since personal efforts, even the most generous, are hardly enough. These divine purifications are similar to the nights described by St. John of the Cross. Mystical writers also agree 6n the great means.leading to the gift of mystical graces. They are usually classed as follows: (1) an intense prayer-life, or recollection; (2) uncompromising self-abnegation, or self-renuncia-tion; (3) continual mortification of self, or the apostolate of the cr6ss.2 Other means, such as the practice of charity, '2These means seem rather obvious. Contemplation is one of the higher types of psychological union with God. But all progressive union with God consists in ROBERT B. EITEN deta~hment, and so forth, are sometimes listed, but these can readily be reduced oto-the former.° Since, then,there is in general .an agreement among mystical theologians on wl~atare the best means to be used to dispose ourselves for infused contemplation, there oug.bt not be on our part too much - concern whether there is a general or only a restricted call tb infused contemplation-- a matter on which mysticaltheologians do not. agree. Let . :us-live our lives in accordance with. these means and leave it to God to grant us this gift if He so chooses. Mystical prayer, indeed, is. a great gift, a great means of ¯ sanctification, and one worth asking for and working for by our lives of personal holiness. It is a gift that makes us in some way consdous of the divine and brings us into contact with the divine. It is in some way; at least in its ¯ higher stages, a prelude to heaven. It is, therefore, most desirable in itself, and we act wisely in dlsposing oursel.ves .and others for it by ,lives of recollection, self-effacement, and suffering. Today, the feast of the great mystic doctor, St. John of the, Cross, as I write ihese lines, I am reminded, of an inci-dent in the life of this great saint. Once when asked by Christ what reward he would seek for his many labors, St. John replied: "Lord, to suffer and be despised for you." ~"~This is. the disposition to be cultivated by those desiri'ng infused contemplation. Above all else it should be our aim to live holy, Self-effaciiag lives, realizing that if we do this ¯ God. will. take care Sf all the rest with His sweet Providence --and this includes the bestowal or refusal of infused con-templation. (1) becoming detached from all,creatures, and (2) becoming as attached as pos-sible to God. Self-abnegation and continual mortification accomplish the first ele: merit, detachment from creatures; while a life of fervent recollection takes care of the'. second element, attachment to God. 52 ommunica ions Reverend Fathers:. I am followin~ the vocation discussion with interest. Here is a suggestion based on experience. Do religious who are unfaithful in seemingly small points of rule realize how often they are to blame for the failure of girls to follow a .vocation? This is particularly true in boarding schools aad acade-~ mies. Postulants disclose how they were shocked when, as students, they were asked to mail letters, etc., for religious who.wished to avoi'd censorship by the superiol. Others tell how the worldliness of some religious, their want of reserve, and the ease with which they excuse themselves from assisting at Mass on week days during summer vaca-tion have done much to shatter their ideals and made them Wonder if ~ ¯ they should rehily embrace the religious'life. The lack of vocations . c~iTf~ten' b~ ~raced to religious themselves. Mistress of Postulants Reverend Fathers: My interest in the matter of vocations lies in the problem of per-sever~ ince rather than in the initial fostering of vbcatlons; and my suggestions are, I suppose, more applicable to religlous.men than to. religious women. I would ~uggest a better psychological handling .of young reli-gious iri regard to these two problems: restlessness and chastity/ Restlessness, ~lways largeamong the problems of active young ¯ . Americans, is a double-barrelled source of trouble during the time of war. The young religious see their brothers and sisters winning medals, piloting bombers, visiting distant places, while ~hey are told to thank God that they can continue their training-in quiet. It's not that easy. I would suggest: (a) a sane article on this matter, explaining in what this restlessness is common to all young people and .not someth_ing peculiar to the religious state; and (b) some practical work, requiring physical energy if possible, to aid in the war effort-- for example, volunteer farm labor. Secondly, there is the matter of chastity. Here, as in the foster- 53 COMMLrNICATION~ ing of vocations, the true dignity of the ~arried state should be incul-cated. Some novitiate superiors create the impression that the religious.life is the only life for a true friend of Christ; with the result that the reaction is sometimes overwhelming in young religious when, later on, they acquire a more balanced Unpsychological passages on this matter should be omitted from old-time spiritual writers in required reading for religious. Prac-~ tical spiritual reading on the subject, attuned to the findings of mod-ern .psychology should be made available for religious of various ages. A Priest Reverend Fathers: Perhaps you and the readers of REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS recall the controversy that waged some time ago in the "Communications" of America, concerning the influence of the Sisters' habit on vocations. One letter asserted rather strongly that the habit is a deterrent to many American girls who might otherwise embrace the religious life. The reply was equally emphatic that if girls would be deterred by such a trifle, then it was good riddance to them. I suppose most people took this controversy as a good joke; but I was seriously interested in it, and I know a number of other priest's who were also-interested~ True, we did not favor discussing the sub-ject in a magazine for. the general public, but we did wish to know the honest opinions of Sisters and of modern girls. There may be no truth in the assertion that likely candidates are deterred by the bulki-ness of the habit. ¯ If it is not true, then it is well for us to know that. But if it should, prove to be true then we are confronted with a fur-ther problem. Can we solve the problem by simply shrugging our shoulders and saying: ."Good riddance to such candidates"; or should we conclude that there may be need today of some modifications in traditional habits or of new institutes with more simplified habits. Is it not true that many of the traditional habits are merely modifica-tions of a style of dress worn by women at the time of the found-resses? Certainly they differ radically from the clothing worn by the modern American girl. A P~iest 54 Teresa Avila' G. Augustine Ellard, S.J~ ~N ALL the long and varied history of the Church there do~s not seem to be a feminine leader who can ' outshine Teresa of Avila. Nor in the whole galaxy of Catholic saints does there appear to be one, whether man or woman, in whom the divine and human were united in a more lovely and attractive fashion. Some of those saints had a more eventful external life, and perhaps some of them had a nobler interior life and were holier inGod's sight, but there are few among them whose life, taken in both its interior and.exterior phases, was, as far as we know, conspicupusly, and demonstrably, so rich and intense. As a little child Teresa ran away from home inorder to become a martyr among the Moors. A second time she ran away from home to enter the convent. Soon her health was wrecked and she had to leave for.a time, during which she converted an unworthy priest. She became worse, seemed for a while to have died, survived a funeral service, and narrowly escaped being buried alive:, as if that was not enough, while she-was waiting to be buried, a candle set her bed afire. It pertains to her active life that during the first twenty years or so in the convent she excelled rather at entertaining in the parlor .than at conversing ~rith Almighty God. During her later years she Was busy in the extreme and was constantly battling wi~h difficulties and obstacles of every sort. She led in the reform of her order--a task far more arduous than that of founding a new order. In fifteen yea/s she established seventeen convents and several monasteries. A foun-dation usually cost her so much trouble, opposition from various sources, high and low, and 'bitter suffering, that once when she was asked how one could become a saint, she replied, "We are about to make another foundation: just watch and see!" Shd stiffered from the terrible Spanish Inquisition, and was persecuted by a visitor of her own order. She was revered as a saint, but also referred to by a Car-melite provincial as "an excommunicated apostate." She was quite. expert in dealing with men of every rank, f/om the aristocratic zSaint Teresa of Avila, a Biography. By William Thomas Walsh. Pp. xiv q- 592. Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee. $5.00. -5-5 G. AUGUSTINE EI~LARD .Philip II down to foul-mouthed muleteers. She could accor~modate herself in the palaces of princesses and duchesses, and also in cheap inns with coarse men.whom she called "infernal people." It is not surprizing thatl she knew well how to manage women. Physical vio-. lence was almost needed to install her as prioress at the Incarnation in, Avila--city .officers were .present, fearing a riot but before long .she. bad that. house of 130 nuns reformed, liking the reform, and .loving .the reformer. Teresa was also an authoress, and.one of remarkable m~rit: her .works in the critical Spanish edition fill nine large volumes; and two of her mystical treatises stand foremost among the. greatest mystical classics., . In general, few women of any walk in life have left a better record for efficiency. The interior life of St. Teresa was still more intense and exciting. She knew the misery of having fallen from a higher to a lowei con-dition of soul, In a celebrated vision she descended to the depths of hell, and during the last ten years of her life she lived amidst the sub-limities and grandeurs of the highest pinnacles of mysticism. She felt the indescribable joys and pains of a heart literally laid open' by a ~raph's dart. She was familiar with ecstasies in which "one learned mysteries." In one momentary flash she understood, as she said, "more truths about the highest things of God than jf great theo-~ ;lc~gian.s had taught her for. a thousrind years." It was no strange experience for her to enjoy a certain vision of the Blessed T~inity. HerIove of th~ Cross was so great that she could take the attitude, "the more we suffer, the bett~r it will be." For many years she Observed the seraphic vow, that is,-always to do the more perfect ~"thin~. Her love and longing for the Divine Spouse was so great tlsat it broke out into expression in a famous poem "I die because I do not die." Her prayer-life too was fertile and efficient: "this is the end of prayer: to give birth to works, always works!" A major problem of the twentieth-century religious is how to effect the right combination between the contemplative and the active elements in his life. Walsh's new and outstanding biography of the great "'Doctora'" of Avila is recommended as an aid toward solving it. 56 eviews PlUS XII ON WORLD PROBLEMS. By James W. Naughton, S.J. Pp. xxlv -I- 199. The America Press, New York, 1943~ ~ $2.00. World problems today intimately touch the life of every.indi: vidual. Hence the eager welcome to a volume that gives us the. jhdg-ment of our Holy Father on these problems, along with hi~ solu-tions. Encyclicals, radio broadcasts, addresses, Christma~ and Easter messages, sermons, peace plans, .letters to public men, totaling twenty-six in all, carried the words of Pius to the world. For most of.us this formidable array of documents is an insuperable obstacle to acquiring .knowledge of the papal teachings. .However, Father Naugh~on has made them conveniently available to all within the narrow ~ompass of this one volume. Through exhaustive study and.careful selection. he has given a compilation that contains all the .pronouncements substantially. The resul~ is a reference book that is.a real treasq~e. A glance at the table of contents .at the beginfiing .shows 'the. wide variety of.general topics treated. Another glance at the seventeen pages of index at the end makes one realize that here is a ready refer-ence to every subject treated in papal pronouncements, no matter how cursorily. ¯ ': Religious in particular, as leaders of thought, will find the book most useful. With its help they will be enabled to direct others in the modern.crucial probl~ems, whether in sermon or lecture, whether in class or study club, whether in informal talk or in. private conversa-tion. They will also be equipped to maintain their position as Cath-olics who are better informed on the struggle of Christ's Kingdom in the world today. But this is not only a reference.book. Indeed if one expects a dry-as-dust collection of ponderous papal pronouncements .0n.:ipter-national problems the ordinary mind cannot grasp, he is'doomed to a pleasant disappointment. It is not merely a compilation,.it is a work of planned order, that rivals many.in its absorbing interest. The passages directly quoted from the Holy Father 'are joined by para-phrases of his words in these same or related contexts. These para-phrases not only make for Unity and readability, but also throw ifu.r-ther light on the Pope's mind. Best of all they save tiresome repe- 57 BOOK REVIEWS .Review for Religious tition of the same idea which has been expressed several times in vari-ous utterances. The author exercised especially good taste in furnishing us many gems of thought in the exact words of the Pontiff. In these, religious will find an abundance of inspiring matter for meditation. Thus the section, "Trust in G6d" (p. 26 ft.), offers material for sublime mental prayer that may well occupy the soul for weeks, even months. From this moving passage on Trust, we select just one sentence as a sample: "However cruel may seem the hand of.the Divine Surgeon when He cuts with the lancet, into the live flesh, it is always active 'love that guides and drives it in, and only the good of men and Peoples makes Him interfere to cause such sorrow." The following section, "Meaning of Suffering," will also spontaneously lift heart and n~ind to God, saving us the customary agony of trying to stir our own train of thought in the early morning. The solemn conse-cration of the whole world to Mary Immaculate (p. 33) is another example, to which may be added: "A Prayer for Consolation" (p. 35), "Readiness for Suffering" (p. 140), "Eucharistic Union with Christ" (p. 141). These are but a few choice selections taken at random; there are many others .throughout the book, which the reader will appreciate the more for having discovered them for him-self. Finally; the religious who uses this book for meditation or 'mas-ters it for ready reference will realize in his life the following from the "encyclical Supreme Pontificate: "The Christian, if he does honor to the name he bears, is always an. apostle; it is not. permitted, to the soldier of Christ that he quit the battlefield, because only death puts an ,end to his military service."--P. REGAIq, S.J. A BOOK OF UNLIKELY SAINTS. By Margaret T. Monro. Pp. 220. Longmans, Green and Company, New York, 1943. $2.50. "No saints are really likely. But some are unlikelier than others." With these words, Margaret Monro shows us her vivid sketches of five saints. These Unlikely Saints are pictured in their relation to their fellow men. It is the author's idea that "a great public wrong lies in the background of several Unlikely Saints; their function is to restore the lost moral equilibrium for the sake of the whole commun-ity. When sin has abounded, it is only fitting that grace should more abound." St. Aloysias becomes "Machiavelli's Prince gone good." St. Rose 58. ~anuary, 1944 BOOK REVIEWS of Lima, "granddaughter of Conquistadores," washes away in her penance the cruel stains of injustice committed against (he native Indians. St. Benedict Joseph Labre, "the great unwashed," revolts "against the cult of Hygeia--'.'not, of course, that there is anything holy about the louse. But there can be something very unholy about men's attitude to the lou~y." St: Gemma Galgani, "a sign' to be spoken agaifist," is pictured as a victim offered in reparation for the comfortable mediocrity of her surroundings. It is difficult to hang the portrait of St. Th~r~se of Lisieux in the artist's G~llery of Unlikely Saints. Even .the author felt that Thir~se is there "really as a sort of appendix, not as part of the book." There is danger, in writing this sort of "life," of over-painting the background and distracting the reader's eye from the central figure of the Saint. That is es.pecially true where one is not dealing with full-length biography: The-second sketch, for instance, leaves one with the rather unsatisfactory, notion of having read a treatise on expiation illustrated by incidents taken from the life of St. Rose of Lima. The Note on Sources, in which the author ventures ~nto the field of hagiology, will seem unnecessary to the plain reader, and to the critical one unsatisfactory to a degree. The book will have a special appeal for religious women. Already ¯ in the p.reface the author copes with the problem of frustration-- a.social ill intensified by the unnatural conditions of war. Itis this feminine interest, too, th;~t makes her discover the "minx-like" quality of St. Rose of Lima's sanctity: that makes her speak under-standingly of Donna Marta, St. Aloysius' mother. Nor will the feminine interest annoy the male reader. Hewill perhaps see, in Margaret Monro's choice of two Unlike!y men Saints to three Unlikely women Saints, a sort of hint at the proportiohate unlikelihood of sanctity among men as compared with that .among women[--C. T. HUNTER, S.J. AN AMERICAN TERESA. By Margaret M. Conklln. Pp. ix + /;7. The Eastern Observer, MunhaJl, Pennsylvania, 1942. $.25 (paper). Her name, her hidden life of love and zeal, her early death are among the many similarities to the Little Flower that have caused Teresa Demjanovich (1901-1927) to be called "An American Teresa." Baptized and confirmed in the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Rite, 59 BOOK REVIEWS Review for Religious .-she rdceived from her parents an excellent religious education. At school in Bayonne, N. 3., she wrote prize winning .poems and essays. She was remarkable for.her attend~nce~at Mass; her exact obedience and hidden s~crifices. Teresa matriculated at the College of St. Elizabeth. Although she mixed in the full student life, her deepening spirituality cofild not escape notice. It was during her sophomore year, as we read, that she was fhvored with a vision of our Blessed Mother. Soon after graduating with highest honors, Teresa joined the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth, at Convent Station, N.J. Her favorite brother was already a priest. From the very start of her novitiate she was noted for fidelity to [u!e and. charity to others. But before the full two years were com-pleted, her pure soul Went home to Christ. Because of her spiritual acumen and literary ability the spir-itual, director had commanded the young novice to write a series of conferences, which he then gave week by week to the community. Published post~umuously under the title Greater Perfection, this work was selected by the Catholic.Press Association as the best.spir-itt~ al book of the year 1928. Widely acclaimed from the start, the book has since been translated into Dutch,. French, German, and. 'Arabic. Through Greater Perfection Sister Miriam Teresa's prayer is :being fulfilled: "Oh, if I could only shake some life into souls! "If I could be heard all o,ber the earth . my whole soul would spend i~self in giving testimony to ~he Word that dwells within it." Written by an intimate friend and college classmate, An Arneri- .~can Teresa will serve to make more widely known an inspiring model for religious and laity. One would wish to find in it more quotations from Teresa herself, more about her transfer to the Roman Rite, more of the "secrets" revealed in personal letters. --J, V. SOMhERS, S.J. THE BEST WINE. By the Reverend Paul'Bussard. Pp. 64. Catechetical Guild, St. Paul, 1943. $.50; six copies, $2.40. In the words of Father Bussard, "The reason why a thing is done is as complicated as an ~atom and as far reaching as a family tree." This holds for every human choice; but to the highest degree is it true of choosing a religious vocation. Hence, this personal, inspirational, 60 Januarg, 1944 ' BOOK REVIEWS aid poetic presentaton of the motives involved in religious vocation is a very valuable aid in.drawing more laborers into the vineyard of Christ. , In faet,'the little "book's actual appeal and effectiveness in inspiring vocations to the various sisterhoods has been proved since its first publicaton in 1936 under the title, The Living Source. Thdse who knew it under that title and appreciated it will be glad to.find it still ready for the lips that thirst for The Best Wine. Others will surely find it suited to their taste.--R. E. SOUTHARD, S.J. ' MEN OF MARYKNOLL. By the Reverend ~James Keller and Meyer Berger. Pp. 191. Charles Scrlbner's Sons, New York, 194:~. $2.00. MARYKNOLL MISSION LETTERS: Volume I, 1943. Pp. viii -1- 55. Field Afar Press, New York, 1943. $.50. ~ A Ma~yknoll priest and and a feature ~vriter of the Neto.'York Times have collaborated in writing a most engaging narrative of the experiences of Maryl(noll missionaries in th~ Orient and in. South America. The small volume contains more of interest than many books three times its size. Herein are recounted the heroic deeds of young American priests who left home arid country to bring, the goo, d news of Jesus Christ. to unmindful millions. Young men from Manhattan, young men from the farms of the Midwest, . young men from our country's western shores, all fired with a common zeal, tramp across the Chinese terrain carrying the life-giving Body of Christ to starving .souls. Men oF Mar~jknotlshould hold high interest for those who peruse today's war accounts. These soldiers of 'Christ felt the tight-ening bonds of Japanese captivity. Father J6e Sweeney, a Connecti-- cut Yankee, ran a Japanese blockade to get provi.sions to his lepers. Father William Cummings, after valiant service on Bataan, is now a prisoner of the Japanese. There need be no hesitation in placing. these Men of Maryknoll alongside the military men of note when "citations for heroism are pre~ented. The new volume of Mission Letters covers, in time, slightly more than the first half of 1943. The period was one of transition; many of the letters picture, the missions in the Orient struggling for survival in the midst of war; others raise the curtain on Maryknoll activity in South America. Friends of the mission will appreciate these.!etters, and will welcome further news of never-ending spir-itual drama.---3. B. GUERIN, S.J. 61 BOOK REVIEWS ACTION THIS DAY. By Archbishop Francis J. Spellman. Pp. 255. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 194:L $2.75. During the d.ays wl~en Rommel was being cornered in Tunisia, Archbishop Spellman, Military Vicar of the U. S. armed forces. traveled 46,000 air miles through countries of Europe,. Asia, Africa, and South America to visit his chaplains on the fighting fronts. The many interesting experiences of the journey are told in this book of letters written by His Excellency to his father from various ports of call. The author tells bf the many hours he spent with Pope Plus XII, of the gracious welcome given him by Winston Churchill, of his visits with Generals Eisenhower and Clarl~, King Farouk of Egypt,. President Inonu of Turkey, General Smuts of South Africa, antl scores of others. In the course of his.trip he could say: "Wherever I roam, I see America and Americans, striving, struggling, suffering and dying, d, estroying lives to save lives, all wth the intent ahd hope of serving our country and saving our civilization." The Archbishop lived for weeks with our chaplains and soldiers at the front, going from bed to bed in military hospitals to talk with the wounded, kneeling in prayer at the graves of our valiant dead, visiting American missionaries who were blazing the trails of peace long before the advent of our armed forces. And he was convinced that "our soldiers are doing more for us than defending our land, offr lives, and our ideals. They are, inspiring us to a renewal of faith in our country." They inspired him to write an American creed that expresses the very soul of America. ¯ This important book sboulld be read by every American because iUis a specialist's diagnosis of our war-stricken world. The Arch-bishop found himself journeying through a civilization starving because it has lost its Christian heritage of faith in God. The crisis of our "one world" is summed up in these words: "Either God will be in the victory and in the minds of the peacemakers, or the peace will be a mockery; the home a shell; and all human beings, material-istic automatons, pawns and targets.'.' Yet optimism prevails in the Archbishop's Catholic patriotism and devotion to victory: "In this America, I believe; for this America, I live; for this America, I and millions of others stand ready to die:" ---G. VAN ACKEREN, S.,J. danuar~, 1944 BOOK REVIEWS LIFE WITH THE HOLY GHOST. By the Reverend Hugh Francis Blunt, LL.D. Pp. xiil -I- 130. The Bruce Publishing Company,~Mil-waukee, 1943. $1.75. This book, in general a very excellent work, treats of the Gifts 0f the Holy Ghost and the part they should have in the sanctification of every Christian. The non-technical, vocabulary, conversational style, and wealth of homely, concrete examples and comparis6ns should make it acceptable to many who would shrink from a more scholarly work, especially to teachers in search of new ways of pre-senting old truths. The very quality which is this book's greatest asset is also its greatest weakness. Departures from the technical language of the-ology and attempts to clothe dogma in the language of every-day life always involve the risk of loose and inaccurate expression and lop-sided presentation. The author does not entirely escape these pit-falls. At times, too, his efforts to be informal lead to awkward sen-tences and obscurity of thought. An example of confused thought and inexact expression is the following: "Thus the Sacred Humanity of Jesus ~ . . was filled with the Divine Life which subsists in God, that Life communicated from all eternity to the Son by the Father, and in time communicated by the Son to the humanity which He united to Himself" (pp. 14-t5). Accepted at their face value, these words seem to ignore the impas-sable gulf between creature and Creator and to attribute the uncre-ated perfection of God to the created humanity of Christ. Equally confused is the following: "And since His humanity is the humanity of God's own Son, God gives it what it has a right to, being God, every possible Divine Perfection .' . . " (p. 15). Jesus Christ, the God-Man, i~ correctly said to have all the divine perfections in as much as He is the Incarnate Word, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, and therefore God. But not everything which may be predi-cated of the Incarnate Word may likewise be predicated of Christ's human nature. His humanity is not God bu~ a creature and, in itself, has the essential limitations of creaturehood. A creature .of abso-lutely infinite perfection is a contradiction. A theologian might objdct to calling Adam a "son of God by nature" (p. 8), a term generally restricted to the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. One wonders what the author means by calling the Holy Ghost the "ultimate Cause" of things (p. 16), or, again, 63 BOOK REVIEWS Review [or Religious by speaking of the "legal way" in which we are made the sons of God (pp. 17, 37). The reviewer finds himself in the embarrassing necessity o,f having to point out incidental defects of a book that is otherwise most excel-lent, of. calling attention to shortcomings which the superficial reader might skim over without advertence and which, often enough, have little to do with the general trend of the thought. Yet it is just such blemishes which keep this book from being an entirely satisfactory cgntribution to the popular literature on the Holy Ghost and force one to withhold one's unqualified recommendation. --A. H. BACHHUBER, S.J. SMALL TALKS FOR SMALL PEOPLE. By the Reverend Thomas J. Hosfy, M~A., S.T.B. Pp. 136. The Bruce Publishing Company, Mil-waukee, 1943. $1.7S. This book has already been reviewed by children of twelve nationalities, who live in the stockyard district of Chicago. The forty "small-but-not-little" sermons in this book are made up of material that. Father Hosty found "will work" with his best "pub-lic"~--" small people." " "The story behind this book," writes Father H'osty in his Fore-v~ ord, dates back to a "pet peeve" he had as a youngster at hearing "adult sermons at the children's Mass." He offers this book not-as "the last word in preaching to children," but as a stimulus to fellow priests to write "asermon book for children." The author is a member'of the Chicago Archdiocesan mission band and has had eight years exp.er!ence in giving retreats, days of .~rfic~llection, novenas, and sermons. During this time, not the least among his accomplishments has been to learn the language of chil-dren- while shooting marbles or playing second base. This is the language of Small Talks for Small .People. There is no attempt at literary style. "The language," admits the author, "is a far cry from the style of Lacordaire or Fulton Sheen, and at times verges on downright slang." But it is the lively, catchy, humoroias. familiar, concrete language of children, replete with their ideas and their connotations. Questions to be actually answeredmare introduced as a new. feature in preaching tO children, owing to the author's "conviction that there is no better way of getting and keeping the children's 64 danuary: 1944 BOOK REVIEWS attention during a sermon.;' This is sound child psychology and a real merit of the book. Much of Father Hosty's cbarm'is probably lost because of the inadequacy of the written word to convey the spontaneity of the spoken. " Perhaps the "moral" of the stories or illustrations is not.~always pointed enough. Priests will find these 5-m~nute ~mall Talks very handy, and an incentive as well as a challenge to expand this neglected field . --A. LEVET, S.~I. GOD'S GUESTS OF TOMORROW. 8y

Issue 68.2 of the Review for Religious, 2009. ; Mission and Ministry Renewing Religious Traditions Reviewing Outward Signs QUARTERLY 68.2 2009 Review for Religious fosters dialogu~e withGod, dialogue with ourselves~: and dialogue with one another about the holiness we try to live according ~ iocharisms of~Catholic religiouslif¢. As Pope Paul Vl said, our way of being Church is todqy the way of dialogue. Review for Religious (ISSN 0034o639X) is published quarterly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393 Telephone: 314-633-4610 ¯ Fax: 314-633-4611 E-Mail: reviewrfr@gmail.com ¯Web site: www.reviewforreligious.org Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ° St. Louis, MO 63108-3393 Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McDonough OP ¯ Pontifical College Josephinum 7625 North High Street ¯ Columbus, Ohio 43235 POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ¯ Duluth, MN 55806. Periodical postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©2009 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any inaterial (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribution, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. ~ gournalof Catholic ~pir~ual~y Editor Associate Editor Canonical Counsel Scripture Scope Editorial Staff Advisory Board David L. Fleming sJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Elizabeth McDonough OP Eugene Hensell OSB Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Judy Sharp . Paul Coutinho sJ Martin Erspamer OSB Margaret Guider OSF Kathleen HughesRSCJ Louis and Angela Menard Bishop Terry Steib SVD QUARTERLY 68.2 2009 contents prisms 116 Prisms 118 132 144 mission and ministry ~ ~_ Paul's Dynamic Mission Principle,s: A Missioner's Reflection James H. Kroeger MM shares with us ten "mission principles" valid for Paul of Tarsus and for today's Pauls as well--the result of his own reflections as a missionary and a meditative reading of St. Paul. Personal Reflection and/or Group Discussion A Franciscan Approach to Ministry Daniel P. Horan OFM ~eflec~s on Francis of Assisi's life and writings and suggests that the five characteristics that emerge provide a helpful parad!grn for all pastoral ministers in the church. Personal Reflection and/or Group Discussion Discipleship and Walking by Faith Damian C. Ilodigwe, along with Abraham and the apostle Thomas, shows that discipleship needs deep faith daily. Review for Religious 152 168 renewing religious traditions Reparation and the Sacred Heart: A New Intrepretation Virginia M. Herbers ASCJ suggests a new understanding of reparation which speaks to the lived reality of the Body of Christ in a global community as well as to the Christian mission to live a life of service. Being Heard, Being Healed: Learning from the Quaker Tradition James H. Schimelpfening SM shares his refreshing experience of community that came from a series of six seasonal retreats based on the Quaker tradition and the work of Parker Palmer. Personal Reflection and/or Group Discussion 181 192 reviewing outward signs Religious Habits Reconsidered Doris Gottemoeller RSM looks over changes of habit and other changes and raises some thoughtful questions about what is now past, having been passed with a view to the future. On Wearing a Habit, from My Perspective Patricia McCarthy CND shares her experience of responding to God's grace in giving witness to her religious consecration in order to help us all to question our freedom in responding to God's grace in our own call. departments 204 Scr.ipture Scope: The Gospel of St. Paul 208 Canonical Counsel: Response to the Role of Law in the Church 214 Book Reviews 68.2 2009 prisms 116 T celebration of the Pauline Year has stimulated a large number of books on the person and writings of St. Paul. As a theologian I have been most taken by the importance of the Holy Spirit in Paul's Letters. In dogmatic development, it will take a few centuries before the church can articulate a theology of the Trinitarian God, and so Paul's writings about the working of the Spirit are all the more arresting. One of the titles that we give to the Holy Spirit in our Nicene creed is "Giver of life." That title is one of the best summaries for how Paul describes the Spirit in the life of the individual Christian and of the Christian community. In his Letter to Titus, Paul makes a summary statement about how much the Spirit is truly the Giver of life. "[God] saved us through the bath of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he richly poured out on us through Jesus Christ our savior." Through the image of the Spirit being poured out, all the specifics of this new life find their font. Early on in his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul asks "Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?" He then goes on to say "for the temple of God, which you are, is holy." But Paul becomes more creative and copious in his description of the Spirit's gifts when he employs the image of the human body. That we all are members of the Body R~vie~ for Religious of Christ receives its most detailed description in this Letter of Paul's. We are all baptized into the one Body in the one Spirit. The Spirit is the Giver of the many different kinds of spiritual gifts, and at the same time "to each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit" (1 Co 12:7). What we might take for granted, Paul assures us, is the Spirit's gift. Paul's example is "No one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit" (1 Co 12:3). Surely our sacramental words, "I absolve you," "this is my Body," "I baptize you," are Spirit-filled and Spirit-given words. But more simply, our expressed desires--"teach me to pray," "Lord, for-give me," "Lord, here I am"--are the continuing daily pouring out of gifts of the Spirit. That the total health of the Body depends on each and every one of us being open to the gifts of the Spirit and so sharing this divine life remains central to Paul's theology of the Spirit's gift-ing both to the individual Christian and to the Christian community. In Paul's Letter to the Romans we receive the rich-est understanding of our prayer as Christians. "The Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings" (Rm 8:26). Our very effort to pray--sometimes feeling so dry and empty--is always a gift of the Spirit. Perhaps our own sense of futility in praying excites the gifting of the Spirit's groans within us all the more, and within the groanings of the community praying as well. Paul's insight gives us consolation in our daily effort to pray. From these few examples, perhaps we will be stirred to greater gratitude for Paul's own gift of in.sight into the Spirit as the Giver of life as we celebrate.the Pauline Year. David L. Fleming SJ 117 68.2 2009 mission and JAMES H. KROEGER Paul's Dynamic Mission Principles: A Missioner's Reflection ministry The apostle Paul is considered the greatest missionary of all time. He is called the Apostle of the Gentiles since he was mainly responsible for the spread of Christianity into the Gentile world. The church owes much to Paul for its growth; he pioneered its early expansion by his mission labors and his theological reflection. A brief synopsis of Paul's life includes the following approximate chronology: 5-10 (birth at Tarsus), 15-20 (studies in Jerusalem), 36 (conversion), 36-39 (Damascus, Arabia, Jerusalem), 39-43 (Tarsus), 43-44 (Antioch), 44-48 (first missionary journey), 49-50 (Council of Jerusalem; Antioch confrontation with Peter), 49-53 (second missionary journey), James H. Kroeger MM, a missionary in Asia (Philippines and Bangladesh) since 1970, is professor of systematic theology, missiology, and Islamics at the Loyola School of Theology; Ateneo de Manila University; Katipunan Avenue, Loyola Heights; Quezon City 1108; Philippines. jkroeger@admu.edu.ph 53-58 (third missionary journey), 58-60 (prisoner in Caesarea), 60-63 (voyage to Rome, prisoner in Rome), 64-66 (Spain? Rome? elsewhere?), 66-67 (prisoner in Rome), 67/68 (death in Rome). This brief chronology provides the context from which Paul's dynamic mission principles emerge; they are the result of both mission praxis and deep theological reflection. Paul's letters and the Acts of the Aposdes provide much insight into Paul's missionary thinking and methods. Over the centuries many authors have tried to digest Paul's mission thought and praxis, emphasizing the "central ideas" of this aposde. This effort may be admi-rable, but can result in a certain selectivity. Thus, this author is chary of claiming to capture the "essence" of Paul's insights. One cannot compose a "CliffsNotes" or abbreviated version of Paul's thought. His letters were written over a span of ten years; they were based on a lengthy ministry of preaching the gospel message in an extraordinary variety of circumstances and to diverse groups of people. Readers, consider this pie.ce a long-term ad gentes missionary's :personal reflections based on a medita-tive reading of St. Paul. Through an interaction of this writer's personal experience and the profound thought of Paul, ten "mission principles" took form. Emerging from Paul's life and refracted through the experience of a contemporary missioner, these insights are, I think, valid for the church's missionary activity today, twenty centuries after Paul's birth. Depth Awareness of Vocation. In Paul's mind there was no iota of doubt about his calling, his vocation; for Paul and all missioners, mis-sion originates in the call of God. Several passages in the 68.2 2009 Kroeger ¯ Paul's Dynamic Mission Principles book of Acts portray this: "The Lord said to [Ananias], 'Go, because this man [Paul] is my chosen instrument to bring my name before Gentiles'" (Ac 9:15). "The God of our ancestors has chosen you . . . because you are to be his witness before all humanity, testifying to what you have seen and heard" (Ac 22:14-15). "I have appeared to you for this reason: to appoint you as my servant and as witness of this vision in which you have seen me" (Ac 26:15). In addition, the majority of Paul's letters begin with a firm assertion of his identity as a chosen instrument of God. "From Paul . . . an apostle who does not owe his authority to men or his appointment to any human being, but who has been appointed by Jesus Christ and by God the Father who raised Jesus from the dead" (Ga 1:1-2). "From Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus who has been called to be an apostle, and specially chosen to preach the Good News" (Rm 1:1). Several other let-ters begin with almost the same words: "From Paul, appointed by God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus" (2 Co 1:1); see also 1 Co 1:1, Ep 1:1, Col 1:1, Ph 1:1, and others. Writing to the Corinthians about Christ's resur-rection, Paul categorically states: "I am the least of the apostles; in fact, since I persecuted the church of God, I hardly deserve the name apostle; but by God's grace that is what I am, and the grace that he gave me has not been fruitless" (1 Co 15:9-10). Radical Commitment to Christ. Paul's experience on the Damascus road was, in fact, only the starting point of a lifelong relationship; mission envisions a totally Christ-centered life. Paul expresses this in various ways: "Life to me, of course, is Christ" (Ph 1:21). "None of us live to ourselves, and none of us die Review for Religious to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (Rm 14:7-8). "I have been crucified with Christ, and I live now not with my own life, but with the life of Christ who lives in me" (Ga 2:19-20). All of Paul's writings speak of his love for Christ, his identification with Christ. So intimate was his rela-tionship that he could even advise the Corinthians: "Imitate me as I imitate Christ" (1 Co 11:1). Paul tells the Thessalonians that they can follow his example: "You observed the sort of life we lived when we were with you, which was for your instruction; you were led to become imitators of us and of the Lord" (1 Th 1:5-6). Paul, writing to the Philippians, makes a moving com-parison of his previous life to his newfound existence in Christ: "I believe nothing can happen that will out-weigh the supreme advantage of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For him I have accepted the loss of everything, and I look on everything as so much rubbish if only I can have Christ and be given a place in him" (Ph 3:8-9). Voluntary Acceptance of Suffering Not relying on words alone, the apostle Paul preached the gospel by his life and example. In a par-ticular way, vulnerability and acceptance of the cross authen-ticate mission. In imitation of Christ who gave himself up to death even for sinners (Rm 5:8), Paul considers his suffering for the sake of the gospel to be a participa-tion in Christ's sufferings (2 Co 1:5-7). Paul saw him-self as sharing in Christ's kenosis (Ph 2:6-11). Writing to Timothy he says: "Join with me in suffering for the gospel, relying on the power of God, who saved us and called us with a holy calling" (2 Tm 1:8-9). 121 68.2 2009 Kroeger ¯Paul'$ Dynamic Mission Principles Paul recounts his numerous trials in the service of the gospel; he mentions his imprisonments, beatings, shipwrecks, travels, robberies, hard labor, sleeplessness, hunger, thirst, and nakedness (see 2 Co 11:23-27). Paul also mentions that he had to bear "a thorn in the flesh" (2 Co 12:7). Yet, he notes, "I am quite content with my weaknesses, and with insults, hardships, persecutions, and the agonies I go through for Christ's sake. For it is when I am weak that I am strong" (2 Co 12:10). Of course, this vulnerability is intimately linked with the paradox of the cross: "Continually we carry in our bod-ies the.dying of Jesus, so that in our bodies the life of Jesus may also be revealed" (2 Co 4:10). Like Paul, all missionaries need to say, "May I never boast of anything but the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Ga 6:14). Insightful Mission Methods One can affirm that all Paul's energies were mission-focused, yet one can also point out that he employed dis-tinct methods to achieve his purposes. Mission demands creative, inculturated, ever-renewed approaches to evange-lization. Paul sought various occasions which would facilitate his proclamation; he attempted to connect his preaching with people's daily lives and worldview. Paul's approach at Ephesus (Ac 19) is exemplary; he would preach in a synagogue or a nearby house and attempt to link th~ Jewish faith with Christian revelation (see Ac 13:5 & 14, 14:1, 17:1). Acts 17:22-31 narrates Paul's famous speech in the Areopagus, the central assembly place in Athens, the cultural capital of the Greek islands. Paul mentions their altar to an unknown god; he refers to the philoso-pher- poet Epimenides (vv. 23 & 28). Although many mocked Paul, his intelligent method won some followers Revie~v for Religious for Christ. Paul, the "practical" missioner, moved from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the unknown to the known. Pope John Paul II has exhorted missionaries to move into new mission frontiers, "the modern equiva-lents of the Areopagus" (Redemptoris missio, §37). Paul's missionary sensitivities are manifested in his conviction that adaptation (inculturation, in today's parlance) is essential when mission meets a new situa-tion (Ac 15). He vigorously opposed the imposition of Jewish legal traditions, cultural observations, or external religious practices on Gentile Christians; these could hinder the spread of the gospel into the Gentile world. Paul even withstood James in Jerusalem (Ac 15) and Peter in Antioch (Ga 2:11-14). Paul articulates his "inculturated" method of becom-ing "all things to everyone" (1 Co 9:19-23). He adapts himself to the Jews, to those outside the law, and to the weak. His vision is crystal clear: "I have made myself the slave of everyone so as to win as many as I could. ¯. I made myself all things to everyone in order to save some at any cost; and I still do this, for the sake of the gospel, to have a share in its blessings." Urgent Gospel Proclamation ~. Paul did not understand "preaching" as giving a spir-itual reflection in a liturgical assembly. Integral procla-mation means heralding an urgent message from God that profoundly affects the destiny of all humankind. Mission has lost none of its urgency in the contem-porary world. Paul's words possess an authentic ring-- even in our ears today: "For, if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!" (1 Co 9:16). For all Christians, evangelization must be a 123 68.2 2009 Kroeger ¯ Paul's Dynamic Mission Principles "daily preoccupation" (2 Co 11:28). As Pope Paul VI noted, "the presentation of the gospel message is not an optional contribution for the church. It is a duty incumbent on her by the command of the Lord Jesus" (Evangelii nuntiandi, §5). This Pauline "mission principle" is actually a call for an examination of conscience on the part of the church. Have many local churches placed too much emphasis on administrative efficiency, pastoral management, eco-nomic accountability, liturgical practice, canonical and catechetical orthodoxy--all to the detriment of dynamic programs of renewed evangelization? Have inward (ad intra) concerns vitiated the church's outward (ad extra) mission commitments? Paul's words contain a challenge to all churches and religious communities: "All the way along, from Jerusalem to Illyricum, I have preached Christ's Good News to the utmost of my capacity" (Rrn 15:19). Paul wrote these encouraging words to Timothy: "Make the preaching of the Good News your life's work, in thoroughgoing service" (2 Tm 4:5). 124 Deep Love of the Church In examining Paul's apostolic methods, it is enlight-ening to probe his view of the church. Paul primarily understands the church as a local community of baptized followers of Jesus Christ; he was not opposed to a uni-versal church, but in his day the local congregation was central to his experience. Mission and love of the people who constitute the church go hand in hand. This principle echoes the thought of an elderly Maryknoll missioner who never tired of repeating: Mission is people. Paul had great love and concern for the ecclesial com-munities he founded with painstaking effort. His writ-ings frequently and spontaneously express his affection: Review for Religious "It is only natural that I should feel like this towards you all, since you have shared the privileges which have been mine: both my chains and my work defending and estab-lishing the gospel. You have a permanent place in my heart, and God knows how much I miss you all, loving you as Christ Jesus loves you" (Ph 1:7-8). When the churches Paul established with patient apostolic ministry were in trouble, he shared their pain; he speaks of his "daily anxiety" for them (2 Co 11:28). He wonders aloud: "I am afraid that my work for you may have been wasted" (Ga 4:11). "My children, I must go through the pain of giv-ing birth to you all over again, until Christ is formed in you" (Ga 4:19). Although the Corinthian community had many internal problems (divi-sions, immorality, idolatry, etc.; see 1 Co 1:10-13, 5:1-5, 10:14- 22), Paul, the affectionate missionary, loved them dearly: "You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all" (2 Co 3:2). "Keep a place for us in your hearts . As I have already told' you, you are in our hearts--together we live or together we die. I have the very greatest confidence in you, and I am so proud of you that in all our trouble I am filled with consolation and my joy is overflowing" (2 Co 7:2-4). His writings frequently "and spontaneously express his affection. Close Collaboration with Coworkers The apostle Paul, though a strong personality, was a team worker in the task of evangelization. He under-stood that all apostolic ministry is enhanced through collab-orative efforts. Some few examples show that Paul saw 68.2 2009 Kroeger * Paul's Dynamic Mission Principles great advantages in working together with other apos-tles. On his first missionary j6urney, Paul was accom-panied by Barnabas and Mark (Ac 13-14). Timothy and Silvanus were his trusted coworkers in Corinth and else-where (2 Co 1:19). Titus was his appointed deputy in dealing with difficulties in the Corinthian community (2 Co 8:23), Among other coworkers and fellow aposdes were Luke, Erastus, Aristarchus, and Tychicus. Paul considered teamwork and collaborative minis-try important for a variety of reasons. Apostles working in partnership presented a visible image of the church as community; it gave the people an example of common witness. A variety of apostles working for a common goal presented a more balanced picture of the church than Paul alone could have given. In addition, the gifts of vai'ious individuals were put at the service of gospel proclamation. Paul frequendy expressed his admiration and appre-ciation of his collaborators; he called Timothy his "coworker" (Rm 16:21) and tenderly describes him as "my dear and faithful son" (1 Co 4:17) whose "worth you know, how like a son with a father he has served with me in the work of the gospel" (Ph 2:22). Paul referred to Titus as "my brother" (2 Co 2:13) and "my partner and coworker" (2 Co 8:23). Even if disputes occasionally arose, Paul sought to promote communion in mission. Paul offers contemporary ministers a model of cooperative ministry. Commitment to Social Transformation Paul preached a gospel of freedom and liberation along with his manifest concern and love for the poor and the suffering. The gospel message of human dignity and equality, if embraced, leads to social transformation. Revie~v for Religious Paul firmly believed in the transforming power of the gospel message, and he proposed to his communities the model of Jesus Christ: "Remember how generous the Lord Jesus was: he was rich, but he became poor for your sake, to make you rich out of his poverty" (2 Co 8:9). And, for gospel credibility, Paul himself imitated Christ. Though he possessed citizenship in the Roman Empire, to show his social concern and commitment he chose the lot of ordinary working-class people and labored with his own hands for his livelihood (1 Th 2:9, 1 Co 4:12). Paul challenged many of the social, racial, religious, cultural, and economic barriers of his times. One brief example illustrates Paul's social message. In ancient times, there were three great blessings pronounced in the Jewish synagogue: "Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, . . . who hast not made me a Gentile, . . . who hast not made me a slave,., who hast not made me a woman!" Paul certainly had these barriers in mind when he expressed the new unity of those baptized in Christ: "There are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Ga 3:28). All, without dis-tinction, are to gather around the Eucharistic table, that great center of unity. Numerous additional examples of Paul's social con-sciousness readily come to mind. He struggled to alleviate the suffering of the Christian communities in Jerusalem and Judea during a severe famine (1 Co 16:1-4). Paul laid down ~a clear apostolic principle: "The only thing insisted on was that we should remember to help the poor, as indeed I was anxious to do" (Ga 2:10). Paul converted the runaway slave Onesimus and then demanded that he be accepted "no longer as a slave but something much bet-il, 27 68.2 2009 Kroeger * Paul's Dynamic Mission Principles ter than a slave, a beloved brother" (Phm 16). In a word, Paul preached authentic liberation: "When Christ freed us, he meant us to remain free" (Ga 5:1). 128 Effective, Exemplary Lifestyle The apostle Paul was always careful that .his per-sonal life would encourage and facilitate the spread of the gospel and never become counterproductive. The witness of a Cbristian life is the first and oj~en most effective proclamation of the gospel. When Paul speaks of imitation in his letters (he is not being arrogant), he believes that Christians can encourage one another through their Chrisdike words and deeds. An exemplary lifestyle is a very effective mode of proclamation. "Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ" (1 Co 11:1). Paul commends the Thessalonians because "you were led to become imita-tors of us and of the Lord" (1 Th 1:6). Paul, the exem-plary missioner, is seeking to draw people to Christ, not to himself, through his encouragement to imitate model Christians: "I have sent you Timothy. he will remind you of the way that I live in Christ" (1 Co 4:16). Several of the foregoing sections of this presenta-tion refer to key elements that coalesce to form Paul's life-witness as an apostle: Christocentric spirituality, voluntary vulnerability, innovative mission approaches, evangelical urgency, collaborative ministry, social engagement. To these elements one could add additional virtues, as Paul himself does in his lists of spiritual gifts (see 1 Co 12 & 13, Ga 5:22). In a theology of mission today, the holistic approach to mission that Paul's life shows would be termed "inte-gral evangelization." Paul consistendy strove to run the race successfully and fight the battle successfully (see 1 Co 9:24-27). He kept his eyes fixed on Christ; he told Revie~v for Religious the Philippians: "I am still running, trying to capture the prize for which Christ Jesus captured me" (Ph 3:12). Total Reliance on God's Providence Paul had full confidence in God's everlasting love and fidelity; the guarantee of God's salvific love is Jesus Christ. Paul asks: "If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with him?" (Rm 8:31-32). Mission always remains "God's project" and evangelizers seek to be God's faith-filled, humble instruments. Paul cooper-ated with God's grace so willingly and generously because he was firmly convinced that he was doing God's work. He asserts that he is only a servant of the gospel: "I did the planting, Apollos did the watering, but God made things grow. Neither the planter nor the waterer matters: only God, who makes things grow" (1 Co 3:6-7). Paul lived his apostolic life with great confidence and full trust in God, whom we can call "Abba" (Rm 8:15, Ga 4:6-7). His life wasfilled with many sufferings, hardships, and challenges; he even faced Spirit-given "roadblocks" in his missionary journeys (Ac 16:6-10). Fully convinced that his life and mission were dependent totally on God and the Spirit's guidance, Paul labored unceasingly, always ascribing any missionary success to God. "By the grace of God I am what I am . I worked harder than any of them--though it was not I, but the Paul labored unceasingly, always ascribing any missionary success to God. 129 68.2 2009 Kroeger * Paul's Dynamic Mission Principles grace of God that is with me" (1 .Co 15:10). Paul asserts: "The love of Christ urges us on" (2 Co 5:14), "I can do all things in him who strengthens me" (Ph 4:13), "The Spirit comes to help us in our weakness" (Rm 8:26). Paul was a man of faith. The dynamic aposde Paul is undoubtedly the great-est missionary of all time. Based on his mission experi-ence and profound theological insights, this presentation has proposed ten "mission principles," valid for Paul of Tarsus and for today's Pauls as well. Paul burned' with the flame of God's love that was enkindled in his heart at his conversion; that flame pervaded his whole existence, even to the final hour of his martyrdom in Rome. It is good for us to notice that, even in the face of all the afflictions and sufferings he endured, Paul was a fulfilled, joyful, Spirit-guided missioner. Paul over-flowed with the Good News, and spread God's saving love everywhere. His awareness of God's transforming grace given to him in abundant measure enabled him to joyfully proclaim Jesus as Lord (see 1 Co 15:10). Paul, exemplifying a genuinely missionary attitude, was filled with deep joy, not because of personal grati-fication or external success, but because he saw many communities accept the person of Jesus. He wrote to the Philippians: "My brothers and dear friends, do not give way but remain faithful in the Lord. I miss you very much, dear friends; you are my joy and my crown" (Ph 4:1). To the Thessalonians Paul wrote: "What do you think is our pride and our joy? You are; and you will be the crown of which we shall be proudest in the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes; you are our pride and our joy" (1 Th 2:19-20). The Corinthians received this message from Paul: "I have the very great-est confidence in you, and I~ am so proud of you that in Review for Religious all our trouble I am filled with consolation and my joy is overflowing" (2 Co 7:4). Paul's exhortations need to be heard by the mission-ary church today: "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say rejoice" (Ph 4:4). "Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances" (1 Th 5:16- 18). "My brothers, rejoice in the Lord" (Ph 3:1). "Shine in the world like bright stars, because you are offering it the word of life" (Ph 2:15-16). Pastors, missionaries, catechists, religious, all ministers of the church, imitate Paul, the joyful evangelizer. Selected Resources Alien, R. Missionary Methods: St. Paul's or Ours? Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1962. Grassi, J. The Secret of Paul the Apostle. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1978. Grassi, J. A World to Win. Maryknoll: Maryknoll Publications, 1965. Matera, E Strategies for Preaching Paul. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2001. Murphy-O'Connor, J. Jesus and Paul: Parallel Lives. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2007. Smyth, B. Pauk Mystic and Missionary. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1980. Srampickal, T. "The Secret of Paul's Missionary Success," Third Millennium 10 (2007): 41-66. Witherup, R. I01 Questions and Answers on Paul. New York: Paulist Press, 2003. Personal Reflection and/or Group Discussion What principle(s) of Paul, identified by Kroeger, most caught your attention for use in your own mission? If you were to list your own mission principles, how would they compare with Paul's? 131 68.2 2009 DANIEL P. HORAN A Franciscan Approach to Ministry 1321 During his final days St. Francis of Assisi reflected on how he had lived his life and spent God's time. To preserve his recollections of the birth of his new religious order and leave a record of his hopes for the future, he dictated his Testament to some of the fri-ars who were caring for him. In it he recalls his conver-sion to follow Christ and shares what it means to be a Franciscan: to live the gospel. Today Francis continues to inspire people in all parts of the world and every faith tradition. His Testament is the last of a series of writings by Francis that reveals his vision of ministry. Beyond what people often call "Franciscan spirituality" stands his vision of ministry in the church. It is a manner of living in the world, being in relationship with God, and serving our sisters and brothers. The year 2009 marks the eight-hundredth anniver-sary of the order's founding. As we celebrate this mile- Daniel P. Horan OFM has written on Franciscan theology, philosophy, and spirituality. His address is Holy Name College; 1650 St. Camillus Drive; Silver Spring, Maryland 20903. horandp@gmail.com Review for Religious stone, it is good to consider Francis's example and reflect on his vision, which serves as inspiration and guidance. In this article I will highlight five themes that emerge from Francis's writings to form a ministerial ethos that is particularly Franciscan. One does not need to be a Franciscan, a Poor Clare, or a secular Franciscan to adopt a Franciscan approach. Any pastoral minister can benefit from the insights of one of the greatest saints and reformers in Christian history. Everything Done in Humble Service When Francis started his work for God, having renounced his worldly possessions and aspirations, he did penance and followed the gospel as he felt led by God.~ Soon others sought to imitate his efforts and fol-low him in what Franciscan scholar Thadd~e Matura calls the "Franciscan project." This project, while ini-tially not the goal of Francis himself, quickly grew to include thousands of friars and hundreds of sisters,z What made them follow in the footsteps of this medi-eval man and renounce property and adhere to a life of obedience and chaste celibacy? One element of the Franciscan project that emerged early was radical adherence to subordinate positions in society. Francis's early followers saw the humility of a man who left behind the life of a wealthy merchant to live among lepers and outcasts. In his Earlier Rule, Francis had instructed them where among the social strata they should strive to live. He says, "Let no one be called 'prior,' but let everyone in general be called a lesser brother. Let one wash the feet of the other." Francis continued by enjoining his brothers to be "lesser ones" always "subject to all.''3 This spirit of humility is the foundation for all the 133 68.2 2009 Horan ¯ ~ Franciscan ~pproach to Ministry characteristics of a Franciscan ministry. Francis was less concerned about what someone did in the world than about how someone did it. Here we see his admiration for Christ's humility as central to his spirituality: to be Francis was less cbncerned about what someonedid in the world than how someone did: a Franciscan is to live the gospel by following in the footprints of Jesus Christ. Michael Blastic summarizes this well: "As Jesus turned toward those around him, so Francis and Clare in contemplation and com-passion incarnate the praxis of Jesus as they follow him in their world by turning to those around them.''4 From his incarnation and birth to his death on the cross, Jesus' life served as Francis's model for humble service. Perhaps the most succinct articulation of Francis's image of humble service is found in Admonition XIX. Here Francis says: Blessed is the servant who does not consider himself any better when he is praised and exalted by people than when he is considered worthless, simple, and looked down upon, for what a person is before God, that he is and no more. Woe to that religious who has been placed in a high position by others and [who] does not want to come down by his own will. Blessed is that servant who is not placed in a high position by his own will and always desires to be under the feet of others,s 134 Humility is a virtue of ministry, being of service to and among people, that Francis often wrote about. Besides being a reoccurring theme in his Admonitions, humility becomes a constitutive characteristic of the Franciscan way of life when it appears three times in his Review for Religious Later Rule. In chapter 3 we read, "I counsel, admonish, and exhort my brothers in the Lord Jesus Christ not to quarrel or argue or judge others when they go about in the world; but let them be rrieek, peaceful, modest, gende, and humble, speaking courteously to everyone, as is becoming." Two chapters later in the same document, Francis exhorts his followers to always work humbly as servants of God and disciples of poverty. Toward the end of the Rule, Francis again reminds his followers that even amid persecution, hardship, and infirmity they are to have humility and patience while loving those who persecute them.6 Francis echoes the theme of humility at every opportunity because in this way Christ served his brothers and sisters and in this way he desired to serve. Thaddte Matura makes a keen observation about the importance of humility in Francis's way of life and in the movement he gave rise to. Matura believes that Francis was.well aware of the temptation, perhaps within him-self, for pastoral ministers to consider themselves better or above those whom they served.7 It is possible that his concern about friars judging others and seeking special privileges was rooted in his own experience as the son of a wealthy merchant, a well-off young man who was disgusted by lepers and people of lower social status. Regardless of Francis's initial motivation, we are the inheritors of a vision that inspires ministers to always put others before themselves.8 In a world that is fraught with self-centeredness and material accumulation, where even devoted ministers are tempted to seek personal reward, a humble approach to ministry remains prophetic. Relationship Takes Priority Francis's way of being-in-the-world followed the example of Jesus Christ. Michael Blastic insightfully 68.2 2009 Horan ¯ A Franciscan Approach to Ministry connects the divine humility that Francis recognized in the incarnation with God's outward movement toward humanity.9 It was in humility that God incarnate, Jesus Christ, entered into relationships with the people around him. All four Gospels tell of Jesus' encounters with many people: the marginalized, outcast, wealthy, powerful, average, violent, peaceful, and so on. Because he lived a perfectly humble existence among his sisters and brothers, Jesus could meet people as they were, rec-ognizing the inherent dignity of each human person. For Francis, this became a major component of his way of life and remains a Franciscan characteristic today. Vv'hile most of the preserved writings of Francis are letters, prayers, and admonitions or guidelines addressed to large numbers, we have one letter that was written to a particular minister. His identity remains anonymous, frustratingly so for many, but the anonymiW allows us to stand in his place and receive personally from Francis his wisdom concerning ministry, a touching wisdom straight from his heart. Francis is concerned about this friar's attitude and disposition, and he says: I wish to know in this way if you love the Lord and me, his servant and yours: that there is not any brother in the world who has sinned--however much he could have sinned--who, after he has looked into your eyes, would ever depart without your mercy, if he is looking for mercy.~° Mercy trumps justice. Relationship remains the pri-mary way for people to understand all their encoun-ters. Vghile this observation may appear obvious, the reason is that we are already familiar--if only subtly and indirecdy--with the Franciscan way of seeing ministry. This was not always the case. The Franciscan historian Joseph Chinnici describes the early Franciscan move- Review for Religious ment as a radically new form of "penitential human-ism." He applies this term to the Franciscan movement's effort to bring people together peacefully amid "social discord and violence." This approach to ministry puts relationship and com-munity above per-sonal journeys of faith and conversion. One's own conversion, if it is a Franciscan one, should lead toward others and away from one's own self.~ It ~ is for precisely this reason that Francis insisted that the friars be mendicants, not monks, and live with the whole world as their cloister, not limiting it to a monastery's four walls. Franciscan ministries are not simply good methods, skillful implementations of model practices. Rather, they are a project that seeks to unite those who are separated by the violence of social, political, and ecclesial dissent.12 To stress relationship as the primary approach to minis-try, Francis often used familial terms. In his Earlier Rule, he says, "Let each one love and care for his brother as a mother loves and cares for her son."13 In Francis's spirituality, such a familial understanding of relation-ship extended even beyon.d human relationships to include all of God's creation. In his most famous work, The Canticle of the Creatures, he addresses all elements as brother or sister. In an age of heightened ecological awareness, our relationship with the earth and the rest of creation can influence our ministry positively. We are called to minister to all with a deepened sense of our One's own conversion, if it is a Franciscan one, should lead toward others and away from one's own self. 137 68.2 2009 Horan ¯ ~l Franciscan ~pproacb to Minisl~ interdependence and relatedness as children of God and brothers and sisters of all God's creation. Avoid Attachment There is great wisdom in a mendicant model of life. In a life of detachment from personal property, pasto-ral ministers become less preoccupied with their status, their control, their "things." If a particular ministry does not "belong" to a particular minister, one becomes a curator, a caretaker, one who takes good care of some-thing of value not one's own. This contrasts with the oligarchic approach, a small group's limited vision often preventing a ministry's expansion or creativity. Francis was quite convinced that appropriation of anything, including one's work as a minister, would lead to other problems. His Earlier Rule is filled with admonitions and warnings about the danger of attachment. In chap-ter 7 he says, "Wherever the brothers may be, either in hermitages or other places, let them be careful not to make any place their own or contend with anyone for it." He goes on to say, "Guard yourselves against the anxieties of this world and the cares of this life," and summarizes by saying: "Let all the brothers strive to follow the humility and poverty of our Lord Jesus Christ, and let them remember that we should have nothing else in the whole world except as the Apostle says: "Having food and clothing, we are content with these" (1 Tm 6:8).14 While today most ministers, including professed Franciscan women and men, would find it difficult to live in this world strictly observing the instruction above, the key to Francis's insight is found in the word "strive." We understand this as a more perfect vision of an imperfect manner of living in this world. It is the Review for Religious model that pastoral ministers should have in their work, striving in humility and poverty to not appropriate the work as their own. Thy Will Be Done Naturally, the divestment of property and ownership of even one's ministry leads to the question: Then to whom does it belong? For Francis the answer is simple: M1 good things come from and belong to God. It is in the perfect prayer of Christians that we find the source and purpose of our ministerial endeavors, "Thy will be done." When our efforts in ministry become more about our will, our ambition, or our desires, then we have left the realm of ministry and entered some level of self-centeredness. Closely linked to Francis's view of attachment is his understanding that all ministry is the work of God for God. This understanding affirms and renews people's vocation to service. It directs the gaze of ministers from themselves back to God as the source of their inspiration to follow their ministerial vocation. Francis often wrote about God's will in connection with his own ministry and that of the Friars Minor. In his Letter to the Entire Order, Francis reminds his broth-ers of their vocation and its connection to God's will. He writes: "Give praise to him because he is good; exalt him by your deeds; for this reason he has sent you into the whole world: that you may bear witness to his voice in word and deed and bring everyone to know that there is no one who is all-powerful except him.'ns Matura highlights this thought of Francis when he says, "Anything good that we have or do, no matter how personal it is, comes to us from God, and we are only administrators of that good, as it were.'n6 In addition to the proper attribution of our gifts and vocation to 139 68.2 2009 Horan ¯ A Franciscan Approach to Ministry God, this thought frees us of the weighty burdens of self-sufficiency and responsibility. Unhampered by the pressure ministers frequendy put on themselves, we are free to be God's instruments, working in partnership with Christ and others. In this way we leave the world of "lone rangers" and enter the community of Christians working toward the kingdom. I'40 Pray without Ceasing A Franciscan approach to ministry must always flow from a life of prayer. Those who adopt this approach are not just people who pray, but people whose words and actions are also prayer. This lived prayer is con-stant openness to conversion, allowing God to enter and transform lives from worldly concern and triviality to authentic gospel living--in Christ's footsteps, as God's instruments of peace today. In a brief letter to St. Anthony of Padua, Francis responded to his request for permission to teach the-ology. This was a new initiative, for up to this time Franciscans had largely avoided academic ministry. Francis was cautious of higher education because of the tendency of the educated to think better of themselves, look down on others, and move away from the charac-teristics of ministry we have examined above. Francis knew of Anthony's gifts, however, and knew that many friars had asked for his instruction in theology. Francis told Anthony, "I am pleased that you teach .sacred the-ology to the brothers providing that, as is contained in the Rule, you 'do not extinguish the Spirit of prayer and devotion' during study of this kind.''17 Even a ministry as basic as training other friars for pastoral ministry was viewed as secondary to prayer and devotion. Francis writes in his Earlier Rule that those who Review for Religious come after him are to love the Lord God, who has given everyone everything, with their whole heart, soul, mind, strength, understanding, powers, effort, affection, feel-ing, desire, and wish. This is not to be an occasional experience or portion of time apart from the rest of life, but the modus operandi of ministry. Later in the same text Francis writes: Wherever we are, in every place, at every hour, at every time of the day, every day and continually, let all of us truly and humbly believe and hold in our heart and love, honor, adore, serve, praise and bless, glorify and exalt, magnify and give thanks to the Most High and Supreme Eternal God, Trinity and Unity.'s This is another echo of the Franciscan understanding that one's entire life should be given back to God as prayer. Such a life naturally nourishes a vocation to service and ministry. When one's actions are directed back to God with humil-ity, with relationship as the priority, without encumber-ing attachments, and with recognition of everything as God's work, then life is transformed into prayer. Ministry then is not a person's self-motivated effort or effectiveness, but the outpouring of God's gifts received prayerfully and gratefully and sharbd with others. Eight hundred years after the first Franciscan began to do ministry in the small town of Assisi, we find our-selves inspired by Francis's example to continue the mission of God's work in our world. Regardless of our particular manifestation of God's work, all pastoral min-isters can find renewed life and purpose by reflecting A Franciscan approach to ministry must always flow from a 'life of prayer. 141 68.2 2009 Horan * .4 Franciscan AIqn'oacb to Ministry on a Franciscan approach to ministry. Humility keeps us approachable and ready to give loving service. The priority we give to relationship brings us to places where we can best foster loving unity among our sisters and brothers and grateful respect for all of creation. Detachment helps to seek the right things, without being distracted by worldly concerns. Recalling that God is the source of all our gifts and our personal voca-tion puts our work into perspective, while bolstering our purpose to work hand in hand with God. Finally, more than just say prayers, we strive to live lives that are prayers, lives that help bring God's love to our world. Notes i Francis of Assisi, "The Testament," verses 1 and 14, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 1, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, J.A. Wayne Hellmann, and William Short (New York: New City Press, 1999), pp. 124 & 125. Further citations of this first volume will be noted as FAED followed by page numbers. 2 Thaddde Matura, "Francis of Assisi and His Posterity Today," in Gospel Living: Francis of Assisi Yesterday and Today, ed. Elise Saggau (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 1994), pp. 263-267. Matura compares Francis to Jesus while explaining similarities of the Franciscan orders and the church. While Francis is held as the founder and model for the three Franciscan orders (much as Jesus is for the church), he is not credited with intentionally founding a new movement in the proper sense (see p. 264). ~ Francis of Assisi, "The Earlier Rule," 6:3-4 and 7:2, in FAED, p. 68. 4 Michael Blastic, "Contemplation and Compassion: A Franciscan Ministerial Spirituality," in Spirit and Life, vol. 7, ed. Anthony Carrozzo, Vincent Cushing, and Kenneth Himes (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 1997), p. 172. s Francis, "Admonition 19: A Humble Servant of God," in FAED, p. 135. 6 Francis, "The Later Rule," 3:10-11 (emphasis added), 5:4, and 10:7-10, in FAED, pp. 102-105. r Thadd~e Matura, Francis of Assisi: The Message in His Writings, Review for Religious trans. Paul Barrett (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 1997), p. 167. s St. Bonaventure, the Franciscan saint and doctor of the church, later wrote about the importance of humility in the evangelical life, beginning his treatise Disputed Questions on Evangelical Perfection with that topic. See Works of St. Bonaventure, vol. 13, trans. Thomas Reist and Robert Karris (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 2008). 9 Blastic, "Contemplation and Compassion," p. 153. 10Francis, "A Letter to a Minister," verse 9, in FAED, p. 97. 11 Joseph Chinnici, "Penitential Humanism: Rereading the Sources to Develop a Franciscan Urban Spirituality," in Franciscans in Urban Ministry, ed. Roberta McKelvie (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 2002), pp. 119-122. ~2 See Chinnici, "Penitential Humanism," p. 123. 13 Francis, "Earlier Rule," 9:1 I, in FAED, p. 71. ~4' Francis, "Earlier Rule," 7:13, 8:2, and 9:1, in F~IED, pp. 69-70. is Francis, "A Letter to the Entire Order," verses 8-9, in FAED, p. 117. 16 Matura, Francis ofAssisi, p. 132. 17 Francis, "A Letter to Brother Anthony of Padua," verse 2, in FAED, p. 107. 18 Francis, "Earlier Rule," 23:8 and 23:11, in FAED, pp. 84 & 85. Personal Reflection and/or Group Discussion 1. What model or approach do I currently use in my pastoral ministry? 2. In what ways do Francis's insights speak to me today? 3. What characteristics of a Franciscan approach to ministry do I live particularly well? Where could I strive to improve? 68.2 2009 DAMIAN C. ILODIGWE Discipleship and Walking by Faith God never deceives us. When we entrust our life to him and allow him to direct us, he ensures that all goes well. We may not know where he is lead-ing us. We only see the present, and nothing beyond it. Indeed, even the present is sometimes not clear, and in any case it reaches beyond itself into the future. The present invites to us to keep moving despite perplexity. Here our faith is our strength. Faith propels us forward. So long as we know that God is with us, we can afford to take the next step. We need not be apprehensive. We can be certain that we shall reach our destination even if we have to move slowly and sometimes with some frustradon. Without faith we do not see that God is leading us. If we step out into the unknown future at his bidding, it is likely that we will persevere to the end (see Heb 11). Damian C. Ilodigwe last wrote for us in early 2008. He is a priest and lecturer in philosophy at Ss. Peter and Paul Major Seminary; P.M.B. 5171; Secretariat P.O.; Ibadan, Nigeria. dammychuks2000@ yahoo.com Review for Religious We should trust God at each step, even when we do not know what lies ahead. He shows us his plan piecemeal. An aspect of faith is trust. We can think here of chil-dren and mothers. Usually young children are wholly dependent on their mother. She gives instruction, and the child wonders about it. But this wondering does not prevent the child from carrying out the mother's bidding. He may ask questions, of course, but unless he is simply seeking some clarification he will not get very far. He will not be permitted to ignore or resist what his mother asks him to do. Usually children know, for their own good, when they had better obey. Usually they carry out their mother's instruction even when they do not fully understand. What is true of the relation between children and their mother is true of our relationship with God. Like little children, we need to give God our utter trust (Lk 11:5-13; 18:1-8). Because our faith tells us that God acts in our best interest, we can afford to follow his bidding no matter the inconveniences we feel to be associated with it. A childlike simplicity in our relationship with God is an index of vibrant faith and of maturity in this relationship (Lk 12:22-31). The' Case of Abraham In the life of Abraham we find an example of this childlike faith. He is ready to do the Lord's bidding even when this involves a great deal of sacrifice. Many instances in his life illustrate his utter commitment to God. Consider the divine request to leave his country for another land: "Leave your country, your family, and your father's house, for the land I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name so famous that it will be used as a blessing. I will 68.2 2009 llodig'we ¯ Discipleship and Walking by Faith In the life of abraham we find an exa ple ff bless those who bless you; I will curse those who slight you; all the tribes on earth shall bless themselves by you" (Gn 12:1-2). How could God ask Abraham to do a thing like this?1 The demand appears extravagant and even ridiculous. Is it reasonable to leave his native place, where all his friends are? He is established here. He has security here. To leave means leaving good memories and property behind and beginning all over again. As the saying goes, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. It is foolish to abandon what has proved itself over the years without a good clear reason. That rea-son would be that the change will certainly make things better. But, for Abraham, the future is a clouded certainty. All that is certain is that he should leave and that he will be shown another land. Regarding the particulars of the promised land, he knows nothing. He is told, though, that from him will come a great nation. That promise appears less attractive than it might because of its general vagueness. Yet at another level it provides a certain motivation because it comes from God, from Abraham's faith in God. It is only faith that can quickly overcome the disenchantment pr0~oked by lack of information about this promised land. Abraham is certainly a man of faith. For, in spite of the obvious per-plexities associated with this directive, he. takes the bull by the horns. He understands that it is the Lord speak-ing and that he knows what he is doing. Consequently he sets out as the Lord has told him to do. Scripture tells us that Abraham is seventy-five years old when he Review for Religious leaves Haran. He takes his wife, Sarai, and the people they.have acquired in Haran. Their journey takes them to Canaan (Gn 12:4-5). Abram's age of seventy-five is significant, emphasizing the great inconvenience of this movement. He is not a young man eager to be off on his own. So in a sense it is a blind journey. God guides him. As is always the case, the Lord does not ask us to do something and then leave us to our own design. He does not leave us on our own. He provides for us one step at a time. The entire picture can never be available to us all at once. As Abram journeys, he comes to Shechem's Oak of Moreh, in Canaan. The Lord appears to him and says he will give this land to his descendants. Abram builds an altar there. He proceeds to the hill country east of Bethel and then to the Negeb (Gn 12:7-9). Although Abram has stepped out into the unknown, he is never alone. He knows in faith that the Lord is with him through all the stages of his journey. And so he is our father in faith (Heb 11:8). He is wholly sub-missive to God, and God does not fail him. Abraham becomes the father' of a multitude of nations. The Challenges of Discipleship and Our Contemporary Situation At this juncture we may ask what we can learn from Abraham's experience. We can learn much regarding the challenges of discipleship. Our life, too, is a journey, a journey of faith towards God's kingdom. God calls each of us out of our various backgrounds to pursue a special life journey, a pilgrimage to a distant destination. The fundamental truth about this is that God is with us all the time, even when we do not take cognizance of him. His presence empowers us to be what he wants us to be. '147 68.2 2009 Ilodig~ve ¯ Discipleship and Walking by Faith Without evidence we are likely to feel discdnnected, His providence sustains us and guides every.aspect of our life. We need to let this truth have an impact on the way we live our life each day. We need to entrust ourselves completely to that providence. "For those who --~ love God, all things work together unto good." We may not understand just how they fit together now or will fit together in the end, but we cannot doubt that they do fit together. God's love, acting as a redemptive principle, inte-grates every aspect of our experience, bringing every-thing into God's ultimate plan for us all. The practical implication of this truth, then, is that we must learn to walk by faith rather than by sight.2 There is a world of difference' between walking by faith and walking by sight. When we walk by mere sight, we are all the time looking for visible, tangible, measur-able evidence of what we should do or should have done. For many purposes and many aspects of reality, there is such evidence, but for other purposes there is none. We may feel that without that kind of evidence there is no reality. If so, we are likely to feel disconnected. We are likely to feel we are living within limited horizons, likely to have a vague feeling that we are missing something. Not enjoying that feeling, we give oursel~es a warrant to deny there is any reality behind our vague feeling. We decide not to let ourselves be affected by what we claim is unreality. We refuse to be open to it. On the other hand, our admittedly limited knowl-edge even of the physical world should persuade us to see and affirm that the fullness of reality is far broader 148] Review for Religious than, say, the empirical data we have of the astrophysi-cal universe or the jungles of Brazil. We may lack the resources to fully penetrate such real worlds, and the world of faith as well, but we do not have reason to deny their reality and the impact they can and should have upon us.3 We need not deny spiritual reality even though we lack tangible and visible data that serve as empirical evi-dence. Spirituality's reality is accessible to faith. Faith transcends the evidence of the empirical sciences. When we walk by faith, we find ourselves in some sense at home in all of reality. The experience of Abram challenges us. Because he walked by faith, he was able to see far beyond the lim-ited reality of his time and place. Ready to journey with the Lord, he stepped out into the unknown that in some way he could actually see. In time he realized much of the promise he had. received. Abram's faith was his sav-ing grace. In our dealing with the Lord, some tension remains between the way of faith and the way of mere sight. . Sometimes we may walk ahead of the Lord or far behind him, and thus miss some of what we would have received from him. When our faith is stronger, we are better able to synchronize our mind and heart with God. We see better what he sees; we dream better the dream that he dreams for us; we see a road even when our ordinary sight sees no road. In short, our world of possibilities becomes larger; we live our lives more abundantly. Thomas's Encounter with the Risen Lord Consider Thomas. He did not believe when the other apostles told him they had seen the Lord. He insisted that unless he touched Jesus' wounds he would 149 68.2 2009 llodigwe ¯ Discipleship and Walking by Faith 1501 not believe (Jn 20:24-25). His predicament is under-standable. He cannot transcend the inclination to walk by sight. He demands empirical evidence in a matter that requires faith. The reality of the risen Lord is not accessible to, cannot be contained in, the limited world of empirical evidence. This becomes clear to Thomas when the Lord grants his demand for evidence. "Put your finger here, and look at my hands; then stretch out your hand and put it in my side. Stop your doubting and believe." Thomas says, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus says to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe!" On 20:26-29). Thomas wants empirical evidence in order to believe, and he is granted the rare privilege of touching and seeing. But the Lord does not fail to make clear that this privilege is not really necessary. Indeed, it is argu-able that it is not the empirical evidence that generates Thomas's confession. Thomas could have touched the Lord and still not believed. There is another factor, the factor of grace. One cannot come into the presence of the risen Lord without being positively affected. That is what seems to have happened in Thomas's case. It is clear that what really matters is faith, not sight: "Happy are those who believe without seeing me." Without empirical evidence they believe, and this is what makes them blessed. The experience of the risen Lord is paradoxically a reward for their faith. It is their faith, not empirical evidence, that opens them to the reality of the risen Lord. Faith is a gift. through and through. God's gift, the presence of God, is received and perceived through faith. If we turn again to the experience of Abraham, we note that he avoids the tension between the way Review for Religious of faith and the way of sight. He does not ask for evi-dence as Thomas does. He is ready to step out into the unknown simply because he believes it is the Lord speaking. Faith sustains him on his travel. Faith brings him to the promised land. But before this ever comes to pass in time, faith has already enabled him to realize the promised land spiritually. The claim of faith is certainly one we cannot afford to ignore in our everyday struggle. We need to keep in mind the distinction between the way of faith and the way of sight. So as to realize our full destiny in the Lord, we must cultivate the habit of walking by faith rather than by sight, bringing faith into every aspect of our existence. It will enrich our vision of life and increase our ability to deal appropriately with all that occurs in our day-to-day living. In carefully fostered faith, the unthinkable becomes thinkable, the impossible becomes possible, and our entire life will be lighted by the glory of God. Notes I Even more extravagant is the later demand that he sacrifice Isaac, the child of promise. Here, too, Abraham's response marks him as a model of faith. See Genesis 22. z See Ralph C. Martin, Called to Holiness (Mumbai: St Pauls, 2001), pp. 101-117. 3 Faith and reason complement each other. Indeed, as Pope John Paul I! famously remarked, "Faith and Reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth" (Fides et ratio, §7). 151 68.2 2009 VIRGINIA M. HERBERS Reparation and the Sacred Heart: A New Interpretation renewing religious traditions The conciliar decree Perfectae caritatis was pro-mulgated in 1965 to guide renewal "in order that the great value of a life consecrated by the profession of the counsels and its necessary mission today may yield greater good to the church" (PC §1). Thirty years later John Paul II affirmed that "the consecrated life has not only proved a help and support for the church in the past, but is also a precious and necessary gift for the present and future of the people of God" (Vita consecrata, §3). In fidelity to the council's call and in response to the pope's call for authentic interpretation of founding charisms, the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus have in recent years striven to understand Virginia M. Herbers ASCJ is vocation director of the Aposdes of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and director of Queen of Apostles Spirituality Center; 800 Montebello Camp Road; Imperial, Missouri 63052. svhascj@yahoo.com Revie~ for Religious authentically the role and relevance of reparation within the Sacred Heart devotion. This effort has led me to believe that, just as religious consecration still has significance in the world today, so too does reparation. I affirm Karl Rahner's claim in 1966 that devotion to the Sacred Heart is not a dated, old-fashioned piety, but rather is quite relevant today. He later insisted that this devotion is indispensable "since the future of the church was decided by the love of the heart of Jesus in dying and depends on the final decision of Our own hearts."' I think Rahner is correct. I would add that consecrated life itself can be understood as a lived interpretation of Sacred Heart devotion, and that the religious profession of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart demonstrates the proper understanding of repa-ration in the Sacred Heart devotion. This community's charism illuminates a unique aspect of God's love, pro-viding for the entire church a renewed understanding of our baptismal vocation (see PC §1). To appreciate this charism of reparation, a brief look at the religious vows and the Sacred Heart devotion will provide helpful background. Let us take them in turn. The Evangelical Counsels Vita consecrata asserts that religious vows are not an initiative of the individual religious, but a response of the individual to God's call: "The experience of this gracious love of God is so deep and so powerful that the person called senses the need to respond by unconditionally dedi-cating his or her life to God" (VC §17). The profession of poverty, chastity, and obedience is the consecrated person's response of love to the One who loves her infinitely. Hearing the call and responding to God's love is not unique to those in religious life; it is implicit in 68.2 2009 Herbers * Reparation and the Sacred Heart baptismal consecration. Profession of the evangelical counsels does not set religious apart from the body of the faithful as holier, closer to God, or more perfect. It is not a consecration differing in essence from baptismal consecration. Rather, it is rooted in baptism. It is an intensification of baptismal consecration for mission; it is a specification of the baptismal call.2 As such, it is a sign to all the baptized of what and who we are called to become as followers of Christ and members of his Body. "Religious life 'clearly, strikingly, astonishingly' ¯ . . leads the church to see what the whole church is called to by baptism, to see it clearly and strikingly in a public and communal embodiment that helps people toward realization.''3 Profession of the evangelical counsels is thus a rec-ognition by religious of the fullness of God's love for all, and a response to that love with the gift of their entire lives. Through the vows of chastity, poverty, and obe-dience, religious center their lives on the "God-quest" and proclaim that "I commit my whole self, everything and forever, to the undying love that has claimed me for the transformation of the world." Profession of vows is thus "a unitary and unifying act, a solemn, formal, and public act, by which a person takes her whole life into her hands and freely disposes of it in self-gift to Christ and his Body within the congregation."4 Sacred Heart Devotion Devotion to the Sacred Heart has traditionally been understood as an icon of God's love for humanity, devel-oping direcdy from incarnational theology,s Humanity recognizes God's love in the love of the God-man, Jesus Christ, as shown specifically in his heart. The incarna-tion allows human beings to experience God's love in Review for Religious tangible human ways. The heart of Jesus reveals the heart of God, embodied and enfieshed. This capac-ity has implications for all who follow Christ, for "the only Son of God, in becoming incarnate, takes on a human heart [and] we are called to share in this love and to receive through the Holy Spirit this extraordinary capacity to love.''6 Devotion to the Sacred Heart, then, is not devo-tion to an abstract symbol, but devotion to the per-son of Jesus and his love for each human being. The incarnation gives humanity access to what was formerly inacces-sible, God's very self, during Jesus' earthly life and now in his Mystical Body, the church. In the heart of Jesus, God calls us to "become what we receive"7 and to incarnate God's love ourselves as members of Christ's Mystical Body. What, then, does the heart of Jesus teach us about the incarnate love of God? Devotion to the Sacred Heart encompasses four characteristics of God's love: (1) Christ's heart shows us that the incarnate love of God is a continuing, dynamic reality, not an abstract theory or historical event; the heart of God is enfleshed in the body of Jesus and continues to beat in his Body, the church. (2) Christ's heart is a heart wherein two natures--human and divine-~coexist in perfect harmony. (3) Christ's heart is on fire with love for all humanity, both in general and in particular. (4) Christ's heart is an Devotion to the Sacred Heart has traditionally been understood as an icon of God's love for humanity. 68.2 2009 Herbers ¯ Reparation and the Sacred Heart open, broken heart--opened by the soldier's lance after the sacrifice of his human life, and broken by human sin, weakness, and error. The Religious Vows: Returning Love for Love Given the understanding that religious vows are a response to love and a sign for all the faithful of our common call to share in Christ's mission, and given the understanding that Sacred Heart devotion is (a) an ongoing dynamic expression of God's incarnate love, (b) exemplified in the love of Jesus' heart, which is in perfect union with the Father and the Spirit, (c) con-tinually on fire with love for us, and (d) still wounded by humanity's rejection of divine love even while revealing through the open wound the ultimate gift of his life, we now turn to the modern relevance of the religious vows as a distinct and poignant means of living Sacred Heart devotion. The consecrated religious professes vows as a return of love for Love, as a response from her heart to the outpouring~of God's love upon her. The very act of con-secrated profession can be interpreted as a profound act of Sacred Heart devotion, as attested by John Paul II: "Through the consecration of the religious vows, you desire, through the love of total giving, to fill your souls and your bodies with the spirit of sacrifice . In this way the likeness of that love which in the heart of Christ is both redemptive and spousal is imprinted on the religious profession" (Redemptionis donum, §8). Acknowledging and accepting the love of God and responding "in kind" are not enough, however. The Sacred Heart of God incarnate is not a mere image to be worshiped or just a pious practice to be encouraged. The encyclical on Sacred Heart devotion, Haurietis Review for Religious aquas, quotes Thomas Aquinas on this point: "Religious worship is not paid to images, considered in themselves, as things; but according as they are representations lead-ing to God incarnate. The approach which is made to the image as such does not stop there, but continues towards that which is represented.''8 In a similar way, professing vows in the church as a response to God's love commits religious to loving service of the church and, not stopping there, to loving service of the incar-nate Word of God. Our acceptance of God's love in baptism transforms us; in religious profession this baptismal transformation shapes our likeness to Christ, compelling us to return his love by following his example of ministering self-lessly to all those in need. Pope Benedict XVI expresses this directly: "When we practice this devotion, not only do we recognize God's love with gratitude but we con-tinue to open ourselves to this love so that our lives are ever more closely patterned upon it . The experience of God's love should be lived by men and women as a 'calling' to which they must respond. Fixing our gaze on the Lord. helps us to become more attentive to the suffering and needs of others.''9 Interior devotion is thus manifested in ministerial outreach. The three vows constitute a unique expression of Sacred Heart devotion, corresponding to specific char-acteristics of incarnate love. The heart of Jesus is a heart both human and divine, the heart of a man and the heart of God. Within one heart, two natures coex-ist in a mysterious unity that leaves each distinct yet undivided. Jesus' human heart beats in rhythm with the heart of God; his human will is perfectly synchronized with the will of God. The desire of the man corresponds completely with the desire of God for the man. 157 68.2 2009 Herbers * Reparation and tbe Sacred Heart In this lies the kernel of religious obedience--to have our hearts beat in time with the heart of God. Consecrated persons who vow obedience strive to desire what God desires, to will what God wills, to attune their hearts to the heart of God. "To want the same thing, and to reject the same thing, was recognizeff by antiq-uity as the authentic content of love: the one becomes similar to the other, and this leads to a community of will and thought,m° Genuine obedience is not confor-mity to an external authority nor submission to a will foreign to our own. The vow of obedience "in its deep-est roots is a dedication to freedom, not to subjection or servitude . True freedom is to be found in union with the will of God."1' The vow of chastity expresses devotion to the heart of Christ by expressing his love for all people. Just as the Sacred Heart is "a heart on fire," so by vowing chastity do religious enkindle the fire of love in their own heart. Sandra Schneiders insists'that the vow of chastity "must be based on a deep religious experience of being loved by God in Jesus and an experienced per-sonaL fulfillment in returning that love." She adds that this vow "leads the person toward personal transforma-tion in love and allows the person to participate mean-ingfully in the emergence of a new, whole, and loving world characterized by equality, responsible intimacy, and mutuality."12 Clelia Merloni, the founder of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart, describes the "fire of love" kindled by the apostle's vow of chastity as holy zeal: "You see, daugh-ters, wherever the fire of divine love is, it cannot remain hidden or idle, but at once it manifests itself as the liv-ing flame of a holy zeal . Remember, daughters, that zeal must be active, untiring, gentle, and prudent: zeal Reuiew for Religio~.s does not inflame the heart without manifesting itself in works."13 By vowing lives of consecrated celibacy, reli-gious perpetually submit to the consuming fire Of God's love, which in turn impels them to share that love with everyone she encounters in an inclusive, not exclusive, way. Professing chastity enables religious to fan into flame a love that embraces all, recognizing in each face the face of God. As Benedict xvI wrote in Deus caritas est (§ 15), "The concept of 'neighbor' is now universal-ized, yet it remains concrete. Despite .being extended to all mankind, it is not reduced to a generic, abstract, and undemanding expression of love, but calls for my own practical commitment in the here and now." The vow of chastity calls us to embrace each while embracing all, to love particularly w~ithout loving restrictively, to love universally and specifically. Pierre Teilhard de Chardifi described the source .and the consequence of this type of loving as fire: "Under the symbol of the Sacred Heart, the divine assumed for me the form, the strength, and the properties of an energy, of a fire . Through its power to become universal, this fire proved able to invade and impregnate with love the whole atmosphere of the world in which I lived.''~4 By professing poverty, religious make yet another return of love for Love, mirroring the woundedness of Christ's heart. John Paul II says that "on Golgotha Jesus' heart was pierced by a lance as a sign of his total self-giving, of that sacrificial and saving love with which he 'loved us to the end'" On 13:1).15 By accepting death at the hands, of humanity, the God-man sacrificed all for love. "From the infinite power proper to God, the heart of Christ did not retain anything except the unarmed power of the love that forgives . In the heart of Christ are encountered divine riches and human poverty."~6 68.2 2009 Herbers ¯ Reparation and the Sacred Heart In the profession of poverty, devotion to the broken heart of Christ is made tangible also through responding to the suffering ofhis heart in the poor of .today's~worl~d. 160 This kenosis, this. self-emptying, is the expression of Love to which the vow of poverty responds. In accept-ing death Christ accepted all and gave all. In professing poverty religious do likewise--accepting all that is given them from the hand of the Father and giving all in a return of love for Love. This is devotion to the open heart of Christ. In the profession of poverty, devotion to the broken heart of Christ is made tangible also through respond-ing to the suffering of his heart in the poor of today's world. For vowed reli-gious, devotion to the Sacred Heart includes recognition that his heart remains broken, suffering as people continue to betray and reject love, to ignore and neglect the hurt-ing, to strike first. The world's physical, emo-tional, psychological, and mental pain con-tinually shows the heart of Jesus suffering in his Body. Clelia Merloni insisted that "The heart of Jesus, disguised as this particular sick person, calls you to a mission of charity, since the sick make up the very body of Jesus.''17 Clelia exhorts her sister apostles to recognize that where there is sickness, pain, or suffering, there is the open, broken heart of Christ. The profession and living of poverty expresses solidarity with all those who are wounded in and by society, and expresses union with Christ's broken heart suffering today. By professing evangelical poverty, con- Review for Religious secrated religious commit themselves "to eliminating structures of oppression and to promoting projects of solidarity for the benefit of the poor" (VC §89). Only as the poor can we hope to alleviate the suffering of the poor.~8 Through their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedi-ence, consecrated religious express their love with the entirety of their lives. This threefold consecration uni-fies all religious communities. Their distinctive charisms are demonstrated by their various ways of expressing this consecration. The founder of my congregation, Clelia Merloni, was entrusted with a particular charism within Sacred Heart devotion--a charism to be apostles of the Sacred Heart. Her apostles were to be characterized by zeal and charity, but more importantly by one aspect of Sacred Heart devotion: reparation. She pleads with her apostles to make their lives relevant to the church's mission in the world: "Our congregation needs subjects who are strong and robust in virtue, not pious statues!''19 Sacred Heart devotion, for Clelia and her apostles, always implies responding to the living heart of Christ through lives of reparation. Zeal and charity are insufficient for those professing vows as Apostles of the Sacred Heart. Only when we are motivated by a spirit of reparation can we be seen clearly as apostles of the Sacred Heart devo-tion. What, then, is the nature, meaning, and relevance of the reparation this congregation fosters? A New Interpretation of Reparation Theologically reparation has often been mistakenly equated with atonement and expiation. Atonement is "an act of divine love that effects a new state of things, the peaceful relationship between God and man. Man is reconciled to God. atonement is effected through the 161 68.2 2009 Herbers * Reparation and the Sacred Heart blood of the cross . man is placed in a new relation to God.''2° Atonement, therefore, is effected once and for all in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Christ's death and resurrection made humanity "at-one" with God, reconciling a broken relationship, correcting and reversing the effects, of human sinfulness, thus mak-ing humanity's "atonement" not only unnecessary but impossible. Expiation is closely related to. atonement in that it is appeasement by sacrifice, specifically the sac-rifice of Jesus' death, which appeased God's justice and "remove[d] the cause of the sinner's alienation from God in. order to restore him to holiness and divine favor.''2' Taken to their logical ends, these notions of atone-ment and expiation .seem to perceive "the love of God given us in Christ Jesus" as either correction of a rela-tionship gone awry or Christ's willing acceptance of the penalty of death due us. In this context, the practice of reparation seems to be about "repairing" broken-ness, "atoning for" sinfulness, and "making up" for wrongdoing as we model our life on Jesus Christ. This is the vision of reparation in Pius XI's 1928 encycli-cal Miserentissimus Redemptor (§18): "Whosoever of the faithful have piously pondered on all these things must needs be inflamed with the charity of Christ in his agony and make a more vehement endeavor to expi-ate their own faults and those of others, to repair the honor of Christ, and to promote the eternal salvation of souls." This "atoning" and "expiative" sense speaks of a need for humanity to repent, convert, and wor-ship, but nowhere does it speak of the invitation given to humanity to love in the face of brokenness, that the heart of God may be loved and not rejected. I propose that, in the context of Sacred Heart devotion, reparation speaks direcdy of this invitation: "The focus of God's Review for Religious ¯ forgiveness in Christ is less on a word that is spoken to assuage guilt and more on a transformation of relation-ships-- with God and with other human beings."22 As seen above, religious consecration is a response of love prompted by the recognition and humble accep-tance of the unconditional, sacrificial love of God. Each of the vows has been shown to uniquely manifest, in the light of devotion to the Sacred Heart, a particular aspect of our loving response. Reparation, as a dis-tinctive response of love, is a particular expression of Sacred Heart devotion. It is a response of love to the broken heart of Christ, as when we see someone we love (and also Someone) hurting, broken, bleeding, and in pain, and want to--need to, are impelled t0--respond in manners worthy of love. William Temple, archbishop of Canterbury during World War II, claimed that the motive for reparation is that we not "go on wounding one who accepts our wounds like that; we are filled with fear, not the old craven fear of punishment, but the fear of wounding the tenderest of all hearts.''23 Reparation does not necessar-ily seek to repair the wrongdoing (for we may not be responsible for it), but seeks to respond to the broken heart of our loved One by offering concrete, tangible acts of love. This authentic healing power of reparation '~"The focus of God's forgiveness in Christ is less on a word that is spoken to assuage guilt .and more on a transformation of relationships-with God andwith othe~r human beings." 163 68.2 2009 Herbers * Reparation and the Sacred Heart 164 was understood by Aquinas: "When one. is in pain, it is natural that the sympathy of a friend should afford con-solation., because, when a man's friends console him, he sees that he is loved by them, and this affords him pleasure. Consequently, since every pleasure assuages sorrow, it follows that sorrow is mitigated by a sympa-thizing friend" (ST I-II.38.3). To extend this idea to how human acts of love serve as loving reparation to Christ, John Paul II said in another place: "In the heart of Christ the human heart comes., to unite filial love for God with love for the neighbor. In this way--and this is the true meaning of the reparation asked for by the heart of the Savior--on the ruins heaped up by hatred and violence can be built the civilization of love so greatly desired, the kingdom of the heart of Christ.''24 For the Apostles of. the Sacred Heart, it is imperative that they understand rightly their mission in the church and their ministry in the world. Their witness of repara-tive love can show all the faithful what their response to the brokenness of our world must be. Reparation, far from being an obsolete relic, is an essential component of Clelia Merloni's charism, and a unique way for her apostles to live their vows of poverty, chastity, and obe-dience. Experiencing Jesus as God's incarnate love, they are called to respond as incarnate love to his open heart still broken in the woundedness of his loved ones. In respond-ing, they are not merely practicing their own personal spirituality; they are engaging in their ministry. As Pius XII said in Haurietis aquas (§112), "In show-ing devotion to the most Sacred Heart of Jesus, the external acts of piety have not the first or most impor-tant place; nor is its essence to be found primarily in the benefits to be obtained." Rather, reparation must be a dynamic response of love, reaching out to the broken- Review for Religious ness of humanity--at any given moment, in any given circumstance. "The practical good that emerges in the event [of reparative love] is seen not only in the inward realm of personal and spiritual values, but in the trans-formation of the material order through which the val-ues are expressed.''25 Living her congregation's motto, "Caritas Christi urget nos!" (2 Co 5:14), consumed by the love of God given her in Christ Jesus, an apostle the Sacred Heart "returns love for Love" by the gift of her life of vowed chastity and reaches out to ev.eryone in selfless service. By her vowed obedience she matches her heartbeat to the heart of God. By their vowed poverty she is free to give her all to the broken hearts around her. She accepts humbly the gifts she receives from the incarnate, inflamed, obedient, and open heart of Jesus and returns them as her gift to his Body, the church. The reparative value of these gifts lies in its heal-ing power for the broken heart of Christ in the church and in the world. Reparation from this n~w perspective is most assuredly, then, not merely valuable for those among the faithful who may be attracted to it as a pious practice, but a vital mission entrusted to each mem-ber of the church. Reparative love is the love of God poured out through us, incarnate in the members of Christ's Body, embodied in real hands and real hearts. Reparative love speaks a word of selflessness to a world broken by hatred and individualism. It lives a life of generosity in a world broken by selfishness and fear. It breathes a promise of forgiveness for a world broken by resentment and injustice and gives a hand of compassion to a world broken by suspicion and greed. Reparation is anything but old-fashioned piety entrenched in sen-timentalism or self-derogation. Rightly understood in the brokenness of our contemporary experience, repa- 165 68.2 2009 Herbers * Reparation and the Sacred Heart 166. ration is the tender answer of hearts on fire, yearning to express themselves boldly, so that brokenness and woundedness may always and only be answered with all-consuming love, centered in God, reaching out to every one of God's beloved people. Notes I Quoted in Annice Callahan, Karl Rahner's Spirituality of the Pierced Heart (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1985), pp. 108, 110-111. 2 See Patricia E Walter, "Religious Life in Church Documents," Review for Religious 51, no. 4 (July-August 1992), and Nadine Foley, "The Nature and Future of Religious Life," Origins 19, no. 13 (1989): 212. 3 Michael Himes, "Returning to Our Ancestral Lands," Review for Religious 59, no. 1 (January-February 2000): 18. 4 Sandra Schneiders, Selling All (New York: Paulist Press, 2001), pp. 108, 114. s It is important to be aware of this rich history as we examine Sacred Heart devotion from a modern perspective. For a more com-prehensive examination of the history of the devotion, see Timothy O'Donnell's Heart of the Redeemer (Manassas, Virginia: Trinity Communications, 1989) and Joseph Stierli's Heart of the Saviour: A Symposium on Devotion to the Sacred Heart (New York: Herder and Herder, 1958). 6john Paul II, "Letter to Bishop Raymond Seguy, Bishop of Autun, Chalon, and Macon, June 22, 1990," in Holy Father, Sacred Heart, ed. Carl J. Moell SJ (New York: Crossroad, 2004), p. 210. 7 Augustine, Sermons on the New Testament 7(7). s Thomas Aquinas, ST 1/-1/.81.3 ad 3. See Pius XII, Haurietis aquas (1956), §103. 9 Benedict xvI, letter on the fiftieth anniversary of Haurietis aquas, 15 May 2006. 10 Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est (2005), §17. '~ Sandra Schneiders, New Wineskins (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 109. ,2 Schneiders, New Wineskins, pp. 105, 106. ~3 Clelia Merloni, Spiritual Anthology, ed. Pierpaula de Farias (Rome: privately printed, 1992), pp. 167, t73. Review for Religious ,4 Quoted in Christopher E Mooney, Teilhard de Chardin and the Mystery of Christ (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Image, 1968), pp. 28-29. 15 John Paul II, "Homily during Sacred Heart devotions and beati-fication of Father Stefan Wincenty Frelichowski, at the Aviation Club in Torun, June 7, 1999," in Holy Father, Sacred Heart, p. 112. 16 John Paul II, "Homily at the Polyclinic of the Agostino Gemelli University Hospital in Rome, June 28, 1984," in Holy Father, Sacred Heart, p. 47. 17 Merloni, Spiritual Anthology, p. 167. ,s James Alison poignandy elucidates this idea with his concept of the "intelligence of the victim." See Knowing Jesus (London: Ashford Colour Press, 1998). 19 Merloni, Spiritual Anthology, p. 334. 20 Kenneth E Dougherty, "Atonement," in New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Gale, 2003), vol. 1, p. 837. 21 Lucien Richard, "Expiation (in Theology)," in New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., vol. 5, p. 565. 22 L. Gregory Jones, "The Craft of Forgiveness," Theology Today 50, no. 3 (October 1993): 356. 23 William Temple, The Faith and Modern Thought, quoted in Leonard Hodgson, The Doctrine of Atonement (New York: Scribners, 1951), p. 80. 24 See the letter of John Paul II to Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach sJ on the Canonization of Blessed Claude la Colombi~re SJ, in UOsservatore Romano, English edition, 27 October 1986, and referred to by Benedict xvI (see note 9 above). 25 G.W.C. Thomas, "Reparation: The Sevenfold Pattern of Redemption," Church Quarterly Review 158, no. 327 (April-June 1957): 165. ,167 68.2 2009 JAMES H. SCHIMELPFENING Being Heard, Being Healed: Learning from the Quaker Tradition We cannot change the world by a new plan, project, or idea. We cannot even change other people by our convictions, stories, advice, and proposals, but we can offer a space where people are encouraged to disarm themselves, lay side their occupations and preoccupa-tions, and listen with attention and care to the voices speaking in their own center. --Henri Nouwen1 168 Community is a word that is tossed around a lot, but is hard to define. My own religious order and those who share in the Marianist tradition embrace community as a constitutive part of our mission and identity, and thus we engage in countless conversations discerning its meaning, the place it has in our lives, and how it is to be an instrument of mission. After thirty-five years of religious life and after living in communities on four continents, my experience of community is all over the board. Sometimes I am most grateful for it, but other times it has been quite the opposite. James H. Schimelpfening SM lives at Marianist Community; Meyer Hall; 4435 East Patterson Road; Dayton, Ohio 45430. Review for Religious Recently I experienced community in an utterly refreshing and transformative way. I participated in a series of six seasonal retreats based on the Quaker tradition and the work of Parker Palmer. The Center for Courage and Renewal, partially funded by Lilly Endowment, offered these retreats for clergy and con-gregational leaders) The approximately twenty partici-pants represented a variety Of religious denominations, including a young Jewish woman and myself, the only Catholic. That in itself made the retreats interesting and delightful. These retreats, spread over eighteen months, opened up and stretched my idea and sense of community. I want to share with you something of the enriching, grace-filled, contemplative experience that the retreats were for me. Welcoming the True Self One of the principal resources for the retreats was Parker Palmer's A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey toward an Undivided Life. He portrays community as "one that knows how to welcome the soul"--or true self--and how to hear its voice within oneself. He refers to this kind of community as a circle of trust, a revealing name. Such a community, he writes, allows us to reach in towards our wholeness, out towards the world's need, while living at "the intersection of the two.''3 This intersection is sometimes a daunting place to be. One needs to be with others who, in the right sort of way, support and encourage each other in their moving inward and outward. Often, at least in my experience of community, issues and concerns are discussed, debated, and at times argued; then votes are taken, and there are winners and losers. Tensions, often subtle but barely hidden, may 169 68.2 2009 Scbimelpfening ¯ Being Heard, Being Healed remain. As a result, people keep trying to fix each other or straighten the others out. Advising and rectifying implies that one knows what is good for others if only they would acknowledge it. Community harmony and peace become elusive, and passive-aggressive behavior comes to the fore. Life in community has taught me that violence has many forms that give pain and raise suspicion and result in protective walls. Often persons are diminished and given less respect in favor of group-think or the institution itself.4 Life in community some-times fails to lead persons to wholeness or holiness, and when such failings occur the mission too falters. Touchstones In the series of retreats that I was part of, there was a quite different style of community and way of being present to one another and ultimately to oneself. I have experienced it also in other religious and church com-munities, but only rarely, and even more rarely as an intentional way of being together. In each retreat of this series, one of the first things we did was review the Circle of Trust Touchstones, the guidelines for all of our time together, not only when we were "sitting in the circle." We would: ¯ presume, extend, and receive welcome. ¯ be present as fully as possible. ¯ offer by invitation, not demand. ¯ speak our truth in ways that respect other people's ¯ not fix, save, advise, or set each other straight. ¯ learn to respond with honest, open questions. ¯ turn to wonder when the going got tough. ¯ attend to our own inner teacher. ¯ trus~t.and learn from and in the silence. ¯ observe deep confidentiality. ¯ know that it is possible to leave the circle with Review for Religious whatever you needed and that the seeds planted could and would keep growing. To live these touchstones intentionally takes work and demands attention, but something good happens and a different environment is created. These touchstones were practical and crucial for our community because we were so diverse. We were men and women, ordained and nonordained, Christian and Jewish, various races and ages, formed in different religious traditions with different doctrines and creeds, coming from all over the country, and having various personali-ties and committed relationships. It was only by living these touchstones that something new and deep could be born, so that we could move beyond differences that would normally keep us separate. Living these touchstones introduced ways of being together that led to deeper respect for persons and enduring bonds of friendship and trust. It is all too easy to focus on what is different and what is perceived to be "wrong," instead of expe-riencing what is right. This environment made it pos-sible to speak and listen in a gender and more attentive manner. It is all too easy tofocus on what is different and what is perceived to be "wrong," instead ,of experiencing what is right. Circles of Trust Parker Palmer calls such a community a circle of trust. The name, in my experience, is descriptive. We would sit in an unbroken circle with no one coming first or being 171 68.2 2009 Schimelpfening ¯ Being Heard, Being Healed 172j last, no beginning or end.In the center of the circle would be a small table with a candle and flowers that would serenely hold our attention, and hold us together like the hub of a wheel. When speaking we would "speak to the circle," not across the circle as groups may do and thereby tend to debate and break down the sense of the whole, of community. That happened to us once, and the feel of the group changed and became charged with something that we recognized as not helpful, not what we desired. We returned to speaking to the circle, not across it, and the environment healed. "Speaking to the circle" is speaking from one's own inner self to the center of the circle, where all that is said is held attentively and respectfully. There is no speaking from one ego to another, nor is it about try-ing to impress or persuade. It is simply about expressing oneself, a kind of sharing that is less stressful and much more peaceful,s Trust is what constitutes the circle; without trust there is no circle. Trust makes the space safe for sharing one's truth without fear of judgment or criticism. This trust grows deeper over time. As I share these reflections, I realize that a circle of trust can seem like avoidance of conflict, blind acceptance, lack of discernment, or some such idea. It might even seem "new age" and shallow. My experience, however, is just the opposite. A circle of trust and living the touchstones allow for something deep to emerge and grow and bear fruit. Circles of trust allow more truths to come to light and authentic relationships to form. It is interesting and even important to note that Quakers do not avoid diffi-cult situations, but instead are present to them differently. That is why historically Quakers have often been present where thorny social issues like justice, peacemaking, and reconciliation are being pondered and evaluated. Review for Religious A circle of trust forms a community that allows per-sons to be attentive to their inner self, what we often refer to as one's true self. This true self can surface in an enviroriment that is encouraging, one that is respectful, silent, attentive, and caring. As Parker Palmer points out, a circle of trust is focused on an inward journey and invisible yet very real pow-ers. The purpose of the circle is to support each person's inner journey. A circle of trust lives the paradox of "being alone together," of being present to one another as a "community of solitudes."6 Solitude and community, rightly understood, go together; they are not opposed. In truth, everyone needs both the interior intimacy that comes from solitude and the otherness that comes from life in community. The purpose of this community is to allow the true self, the self in God, to present itself. Unfortunately, however, too many "communities" do not provide this environment; instead, they scare the true self away. It withdraws into the shadows because it does not feel safe to come forward. We wear masks and do not share what is most truly our own. Too often we do not even know what is most true within us. A circle of trust community is made of people who know how to sit quietly and wait for the soul, the true self, to show its face. The relationships within it are "not pushy, but patient; not confrontational, but compassionate; they are filled, not with expectations and demands, but with abiding faith in the reality of the inner teacher and in each person's capacity to learn from it." In my experience, it is atypical to find a community that has people who have the capacity for this kind of presence to each other. "The people who help us grow toward true self," Parker Palmer writes, "offer uncondi-tional love. They don't judge or try to change us. They 173 68.2 2009 Schimelpfening * Being Heard, Being Healed do offer and hold hopeful expectancy, creating the space that safeguards and encourages the inner journey."7 This is an incredible gift to offer one another, and within this form of community we find, I believe, the greatest potential for growth and transformation. What most people desire is to be heard and honored. As one fellow retreatant commented, "To be heard is to be healed!" Too often in community and in conver-sation we do not feel we have been genuinely heard or respected, and this only deepens wounds and pro- ~_ duces greater alienation. In the circle of trust, deep ¯ .~.L listening to one another, as well as to oneself, is paramount and happens rather naturally. Listening deeply is a nonviolent act; it is an amazing gift to offer. Patient listening, and forming circles of trust according to the touchstones, moves against the .grain of our habitual culture--both secular, and religious. Circles of trust are about listen-ing, expectant listening. This kind of listening only goes deeper with time and is all about God. God is the one who makes such listening possible and who gives us the hunger and thirst for it. God beckons, and we soon dis-cover that all that is good comes from the hand of God. Ultimately, God is the goal of our listening, for in so doing we can discern and do the work of God.s The content is simple, and its purpose is to open us to deeper listening and reflection. We would use poetry, stories, songs, or reflection. Metaphor plays an important part in this kind of sharing because images, allegories, allow us to approach from a slant, not head- What most people desire is to be heardand honoredl , Review for Religious on; they bring into play much more than the intellect. Metaphor has a way of surprising, even seducing the heart and soul, while tricking the mind into taking another look and discovering mystery in the process. We all belong to numerous kinds of groups and com-munities, each offering something unique and respond-ing to different needs. Circles of trust, however, generate within me a longing for such a community within the church and in religious life. Such a community, it seems to me, creates an environment that encourages and sup-ports deep growth and leads to holiness. Circles of trust might not seem to be as useful or as practical and func-tional as other groups might be, and so one considers circles of trust idealistic, utopian, unrealistic, even for religious or church communities. I would disagree. If we strove towards such deep trust and respect, many of the functional things we now squabble about would sim-ply disappear, and other practical details of life would take care of themselves. If they had to be dealt with, conversation and decision making about them would be quite different. We too easily forget that even our busi-ness meetings have a spiritual component and, hope-fully, necessitate a listening for truth.9 The experience and outcome would be a lot healthier, and life together would be more amiable, more authentic, and even more reflective of the gospel and Christian living. Circles of trust and community are not about numbers, but about the quality of the space created and shared. As Parker Palmer notes in A Hidden Wholeness, we live divided lives. We live alienated from our true selves, and end up feeling depressed, aimless, anxious, or angry. We feel the pain of being alienated from our own truth. We yearn to be centered,1° and a circle of trust creates the space where centering can happen and foster wholeness. 68.2 2009 Scbimelpfening * Being Heard, Being Healed A Spiritual Experience Although not always described this way explicitly, circles of trust are a spiritual experience, and the retreats I participated in were, beyond doubt, retreats. They were days of communing with God, with the Spirit of God very much alive and present within us and among us. The retreats were distinctly reflective and contempla-tive, with time for being alone and time for sharing with another or with the entire circle. The environment of the retreat center itself was ideal,ll The Tibetan chime would draw us into silence and into the circle. I found it easy to recall that, where two or three are gathered in God's name, God is truly present. The entire environ-ment was charged with the holiness of God. It was an experience of the shekinah of God. Clearness Committees Those familiar with the Quaker tradition know that forming Clearness Committees is an important part of their life. Each of our retreats set aside time for the work of Clearness Committees. I found myself refer-ring to them as Quaker discernment, a way of listening for truth, truth that is .not imposed from outside, but arises from within. This was one of the most important experiences of discernment that I have ever engaged in, most especially with a group, and was for me a highlight of our time together. This discernment is not done fir us, as sometimes occurs. Instead, in a circle of trust, in a safe, reflective space, we are engaged in our own dis-cernment, in our own way and time, with the encourag-ing and challenging presence of people who really and truly care for us)2 Clearness Committees help the focus person (who has asked for its help)13 to walk an inner iourney. They do so by their presence, asking open and Review for Religious honest questions, not interpreting or offering advice, not judging or fixing, but treating the person carefully as he or she looks and listens deeply. There is no con-flict of agendas or egos; there is only one focus person with one agenda. Just as the circles of trust offer a new way of conceiv-ing community, so the Clearness Committees offer a new way of helping persons make decisions about the direction of their life. I found here an incredible respect for the person and belief in the action of God. Instead of decisions, especially the more personal decisions, being made by others, a Clearness Committee allows for a form of listening and obedience that holds promise of greater life for the person and also, in the long run, for others and for ministry. Clearness Committees were a primary factor in draw-ing me to the seasonal retreats, for I was doing discern-ment in my own life. A series of circumstances along with much that was moving within my own heart and soul had made me wonder where the Spirit might be leading me. I needed and desired some form of guidance, and I needed to enter more deeply into a process of discernment, but I did not want someone or a group telling me what to do. I was desperately seeking someone or a group willing to walk with me, providing the safe place where I could be open and vulnerable in my discerning reflection. In my own religious community this did not seem possible. My superiors were likely to approach my questions as an administrative concern and decision, but did not seem able to walk with me in the way I needed. The seasonal retreats, however, with the circles of trust and the blessed opportunity to be the focus person of a Clearness Committee drew me like a bee to nectar. I asked for a Clearness Committee to sit with me not 177 68.2 2009 Scbimelpfening * Being Heard, Being Healed Such d cision ,making; demands great patienee, and a strongcom i m n once but twice. The experience was powerful because of the safe, caring environment and the confidentiality, the love and faith, that were present. The immediate experi-ence was powerful, but I was surprised and delighted by how it continued to reveal truths in the following days, weeks, and months. Did I receive an immediate answer? No. Were there "aha" moments? More later, than at the time. Was clarity received? Yes, but much more came long after the experience was over. Such decision making demands great patience and a strong commitment to the process: it can take time for the truth to come to light. Quakers are good at waiting and supporting one another in this invest-ment of time and pres-ence, doing so in the belief that a truth can and will come to light and, when it does, can be embraced with one's whole self. One lets the work of God pro-ceed and reveal itself. This "Quaker discernment" takes as long as is needed. It is exceedingly countercul-rural in our quick-fix, fast-food, I-want-it-now culture. If, as religious communities, church, and church min-istries, we could learn to discern in this way, I believe that both community life and ministry would be a good deal richer. Going Home As a high introvert when I first began attending the retreats, I was uncertain about it, but, having read A Hidden Wholeness the year before, I was curious enough Review for Religious to give it a whirl and see what would happen. After the first couple of retreats, I felt completely at home, and, although I never knew what the experience of any particular retreat would be, I soon learned to trust the Spirit, believing that whatever would happen would be grace--and I was never disappointed. It seemed that each retreat was its own "peak" experience that helped me go deeper and deeper into my soul while being sup-portive of others doing the same. Many retreats, even when powerful, are one-shot experiences, but this series of retreats, organized accord-ing to the seasons of the year, allowed for sacred remem-bering of what happened previously and delving into it once again from a slightly different slant, so that further truth could be discovered. On top of everything else, this was a wonderful ecumenical and interfaith setting that opened many wonderful doors. The most difficult part of each retreat was returning home to community and ministry. Although I would return deeply renewed, I saw that my recent experience of community would not be present back home. Every three months, as the next retreat drew near, I would look forward to it with great anticipation. My challenge now is to live the expe-rience and find ways to invite others into these circles of trust so that they too may have the joy and benefit of entering them that I have had. As I noted earlier, there are many different forms of community and many different definitions of commu-nity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, "Community is not an ideal; it is people."14 1 believe that what the Quaker tradition and Parker Palmer offer is worth exploring and experiencing as a very practical way of forming and being community. "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" (Jn 13:35). r179 68.2 2009 Scbimelpfening ¯ Being Heard, Being Healed Notes ' As quoted in Mark Nepo, The Exquisite Risk: Daring to Live An Authentic Life (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005). z Center for Courage and Renewal, www.couragerenewal.org. 3 Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: TbeJourney toward an Undivided Life (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2004), pp. 22, 25.4 The word person is used intentionally; not individual. The distinction is critical. 5 Palmer, Hidden I~oleness, pp. 118-119. 6 Palmer, Hidden Wholeness, p. 54. 7 Palmer, Hidden Wholeness, pp. 59, 60. 8 Michael Waida, Expectant Listening: Finding God's Thread of Guidance (Wallingford, Pennsylvania: Pendle Hill ~ublicationsi 2007), p. 16. 9 Wajda, Expectant Listening, p. 22. ,0 Palmer, Hidden Wholeness, pp. 45-46. " Santa Sabina Center, San Rafael, California. 12 Palmer, Hidden Wholeness, p. 27. ~3 The focus person asks for Clearness Committee assistance regard-ing a question or issue that he or she is struggling with and seeking light about. ,4 Jean Vanier, From Brokenness to Community (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1992), p. 35. 180] Personal Reflection and/or Group Discussion What has been your own occasion of experiencing the kind of "words of trust" that animate community life? Have you or has your community developed your own special ways of deepening the trust and faith-sharing integral to religious community living? How would you describe it and how often is it used? Review for Religious DORIS GOTTEMOELLER Religious Habits Reconsidered Years ago, when we were just beginning to wear secular dress, a sister friend remarked to me that she never noticed what anyone else was wearing. The remark struck me because I thought she was missing an important commu-nication from others. But, upon reflection later, it seemed likely that she meant that everyone deserves our respect, whether clad in rags or riches, in style or out--a conviction that I share. Also, I thought, she ,was probably indi-cating she is less sensate than I. As the years passed, however, with religious habits less and less in ,evidence, I have occa-sionally thought of investigating the topic more deeply. Comments such as these persist: "If you wore a habit, you'd get more vocations" and "Real sisters wear habits." They imply that our Doris Gottemoeller RSM last wrote .for us in 2005. Her address remains Catholic Healthcare Partners; 615 Elsinore Place; Cincinnati, Ohio 45202. 1181 68.2 2009 Gottemoeller * Religious Habits Reconsidered transition in dress is symbolic of an abandonment of val-ues or identity. It is hard at times not to feel defensive. No doubt there is scholarly literature available about the significance of dress through the ages. Dress as an indicator of social class and status, the change from toga and tunic to trousers and dresses, the influence of climate and occupation, and the development of new fabrics and methods of production--all of this has prob-ably been studied. I have not consulted any of it. First, I want simply to recall and describe this period of change. Then I will reflect on the significance of a religious habit for women and of the many decisions to forgo it. I will close with some questions for reflection and dialogue. Some readers may assume that there is noth-ing to be learned from the decisions made so long ago, but I think that some reflection can bear fruit for our present and future. What a Habit Is Not A religious habit is not a costume, a dress that tempo-rarily provides a new identity, either for dramatic effect or for fun. Costumes are worn in stage productions and at Halloween parties. A disguise is another form of temporary identity, one intended to deceive people. A vestment is worn to temporarily designate that one is performing a sacred function. Nor is a religious habit a uniform. Commentators ask, "Vv'hy don't you wear a uniform like airline atten-dants, nurses, and police personnel?" These uniforms signify professional qualification and a certain authority. In given situations their wearers are entided to respect because of their official function. Note, though, that uniforms often admit of variations. The attendants on a plane may be wearing slacks, shorts, or skirts, with or Review for Religious without coordinating jackets or sweaters. They are all in uniform, but they choose different forms of it. Nursing uniforms, too, admit of variation, even within the same department or on the same floor of a hospital. In contrast to any of these options, the religious habit was a permanent and unchanging garb. The cloth-ing ceremony at the beginning of novitiate signified a new identity, which one intended eventually to make lifelong. As we dressed each morning, we said prayers specific to each item of clothing. For the habit itself we prayed, "Clothe my soul, 0 Lord, with the nuptial - - robe of charity that I may carry it pure and undefiled before Thy judgment seat," The prayer for donning the cincture was "0 Lord Jesus Christ, who became obedi-ent unto death, even the death of the cross, grant me the true spirit of religious obedience." In my experience there were no optional choices around color or design or style, very litde adaptation to climate or occupation. Permission to wear a white habit in nursing care and in the tropics is the only possibility I can recall. The clothing ceremony at the beginning of novitiate sig nified a new identity. The Mandate to Change Before the mandate of Vatican Council II to update, our habit was the only dress we wore. In my experi-ence each sister had two habits, a heavy pleated wool serge version for Sundays and feast days and an every-day version in a lighter fabric. Neither was really wash-able. We wore a knee-length black veil, inner and wide outer sleeves, a leather cincture to which was attached a 183 68.2 2009 Gottemoeller ¯ Religious Habits Reconsidered 841 long rosary, and a starched white cotton coif and guimpe which we changed on Sunday and at midweek. Heavy black stockings and black oxfords completed the ensem-ble. Going out in winter required a shawl or a long black cloak with a heavy black veil pinned over the house veil. This habit was worn 365 days of the year, from rising in the morning to retiring at day's end, in the convent, the classroom, or the hospital, at work or recreation, at home or abroad. The habit was everywhere recognizable and, when clean and pressed, somewhat graceful and attractive. It was also economical: the daily habit lasted several years and the Sunday habit for many years. Thus it was a witness to poverty. The design had remained essentially the same for over 130 years. But, despite its familiarity and attractiveness, the habit was unsanitary, unsafe, and ill-suited to the climate in many places. It was also impractical for many occupations such as housework or recreational sports. Furthermore, all of the parts had to be sewn by hand. Keeping perspi-ration from the starched linens which encircled the face in hot weather was another challenge. Considerations such as these prompted the conciliar directive: "Habits should be simple and modest, at once poor and becoming. They should meet the requirements of health and be suited to the circumstances of time and place as well as to the services required by those who wear them. Habits of men and women which do not correspond to those norms are to be changed" (Perfectae caritatis § 17). This directive prompted the first genera-tion of modified or updated habits. Chapters reviewed designs, and each congregation chose one which seemed to embody the desired improvements. For the Sisters of.Mercy of the Union, this transition occurred in the summer of 1968. The new habit was mid-calf in length Review for Religious and could be purchased from a manufacturer's catalogue in an array of sizes. A veil which came just below the shoulders was attached to a white cap which left some hair exposed in front. The habit was washable, and nothing was starched. From Modified Habit to Secular Dress Why didn't this updated habit, which responded to the conciliar mandate, last? Here the story becomes more complex. As the decades passed, most congrega-tions loosened or eliminated their requirements that everyone wear a habit, even for professional or formal occasions, I would suggest that the following are some of the f~ctors that led to this evolution. First, the change of dress coincided with other changes that brought us into new settings and new cir-cumstances. Permission to travel without a companion and to drive an auto-mobile were two sig-nificant changes. No longer~did we have to depend on employ-ees or volunteer lay-persons to chauffeur us to professional meetings, doctors' appointments, the library or grocery, or a museum, movie, or sporting event. Freedom from the need for a sister companion encouraged individual choices about where to go or what to do with one's discretionary time. Some outings were with only lay friends or relatives. Individuals did not necessarily want to stand out in such settings. The introduction of personal budgets was another change Why .didn't this updated habit, which re.sponded to the conciliar mandate, last? 68.2 2009 Gottemoeller ¯ Religious Habits Reconsidered that facilitated variation in dress, as individuals could choose where they wished to shop and what they wished to buy. Another limit to the success of updated habits was the matter of style. As long as we were in 18th- or 19th-century garb, there was no relationship to any contem-porary style. But an adaptation to "circumstances of time and place" suggests at least some relationship to what other people are wearing. Hemlines are a case in point. Should they be adjusted upward and downward with changing styles? What about the size and proportions of the individual sister? The traditional habit swathed her in so many yards of fabric that her figure was effectively concealed, but the modified habit was more flattering to some than to others. Does everyone have to wear the same color? Do you wear the same thing for scrubbing the kitchen floor, lecturing before a class, attending a board meeting, and playing tennis on Saturday after-noon? Considerations such as these meant that individ-uals almost immediately began modifying the modified habit and also acquiring supplementary wardrobes for occasions when a habit was deemed inappropriate. The question of a veil comes in for special consid-eration. Questions of comfort, ideology, and style inter-mingled. In the old habit, when no hair was visible, we usually cut it very short for comfort. As soon as some hair was visible, it had to be styled. And not every style looked good peeping out from a veil. Keeping a veil anchored on one's head was sometimes a challenge. More significandy, the veil signified for some a femi-nine subservience to men. (Around that time, women gave up wearing hats and veils in church, and nurses stopped wearing caps with their uniforms.) Some argued that the veil was intended to symbolize virginity. Well, Review for Religious if it did, then shouldn't male religious who take a vow of celibacy also wear them? As we began to experiment with lay dress, some continued to wear the veil for a time, leading to some unfortunate combinations of flowered dresses topped off with veils. (Interestingly, the appearance of Islamic women clad in burqas and veils in Western cities was still too rare to invite a com-parison.) Another circumstance that promoted individual choice of dress was the movement toward individual-ism overall in Western culture. This is a phenomenon that would require books to chronicle and critique both its lights and shadows, but the point here is khat we were not immune from its influence. Religious life is essentially a communitarian commitment, but in many ways--not only choice of dress--it has embraced, or at least permitted, a wider expression of personal choice. While we were experimenting with dress, we were also exploring new ministries, new living arrangements, and new prayer styles. Much of this was a healthy reaction to practices which had encouraged immaturity, but some of it has diminished our corporate identity and witness. Nevertheless, choosing how to present oneself on a particular occasion or in a particular setting can be a revelation of one's personal judgment and self-iden-tification. Looking Back on the Changes in Dress The first thing that can be said is that the changes described here proceeded without a lot of self-reflection. We lacked the critical distance necessary to analyze the consequences of our choices or their interaction with other choices we were making. At times we hesitated to raise the issue in community for fear of seeming

Issue 67.1 of the Review for Religious, 2008. ; Mission Praye~r Consecrated Life Spiritual Supports QUARTERLY 67.'I 2008 Review for Religious fosters dialogue with God, dialogue with ourselves, and dialogue with one another about the holiness we try to live according to charisms of Catholic religious life. As Pope Paul V! said, our way of being church is today the way of dialogue. Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published quarterly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393 Telephone: 314-633-4610 ¯ Fax: 314-633-4611 E-Maih review@slu.edu ¯ \Veb site: www.reviewforreligious.org Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, MO 63108-3393 Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McD6nough OP ¯ Pontifical College Josephinum 7625 North High Street ¯ Columbus, Ohio 43235 POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ¯ Duluth, MN 55806. Periodical postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©2008 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distrihution, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such perntission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. Editor Associate Editor Canonical Counsel Scripture Scope Editorial Staff Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Elizabeth McDonough OP Eugene Hensell OSB Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Judy Sharp Paul Coutinho sJ Martin Erspamer OSB Margaret Guider OSF Kathleen Hughes RSCJ Louis and Angela Menard Bishop Terry Steib SVD QUARTERLY 67.1 2008 contents prisms 4 Prisms 13 23 mission Conversation: A Brave New Way of Mission James P. McCloskey CSSP envisions creating an experience of "common ground" among people of goodwill within religious congregations about the many issues that cause division. Personal/Group Reflection Questions An "Asian" Meditation on the Gift of Mission James H. Kroeger MM reflects on the "mission motive" mentioned first by the Federation of Asian Bishops Conference: a deep sense of gratitude to God. prayer A Dream, Ash Wednesday, .and the Word Godelieve Theys OCSO shares a dream that has profound implications for finding God's Word alive and powerful, having always new things to say. Pedagogy of Prayer Jghn Carroll Futrell SJ reviews many aspects of our Christian prayer and suggests practical ways of making our lives more prayer-filled. Personal/Group Reflection Questions Pray Passionately Brendan Kneale FSC addresses the need to bring to our prayers a passion of the sort found in the wording of many Psalms. Revie~v for Religious 54 6O 67 consecrated life 0 The Institute of Impracticalities: The Financial Support of Monasteries Clifford Stevens cautions that, as soon as the mere support of the monastery becomes the primary concern, "practicality" takes over and Divine Providence goes right out the window. Enclosure and Other Ways to Widen One's Horizons M. Regina van den Berg FSGM argues that the experiences that travel and the media make possible are often escapes from reality, while the limited environment of the enclosure can widen our horizons. Religious Brotherhood Today Anthony Malaviaratchi CSSR sets. forth the challenges facing religious brothers' congregations, especially within the South Asian context. 74 85 spiritual supports Room for Sacramental Reconciliation? Vincent Genovesi SJ presents a solid theological and pastoral response to the questions raised about the usefulness or necessity of the rite of reconciliation. Personal/Group Reflection Questions Mentors Mentored: Spiritual Companionship with a Saint Lou Ella Hickman IWBS shares her experience of choosing St. Edith Stein to be her mentor as she mentors others on their spiritual journey. departments 89 Scripture Scope: Reading the Sermon on the Mount 94 Canonical Counsel: Personal Records of Community Members 100 Book Reviews 67.1 2008 prisms As we move eight years into the 21st century, we could well take stock of how we are measuring up to the vision and mission set before us by John Paul II's apostolic letter "At the begin-ning of the new millennium." As the pope noted, we are not in the peren-nial process of inventing a new program each year or even each century. The program consists in the plan found in the Gospel and in the liv-ing tradition of the church. "It has its center in Christ himself, who is to be known, loved, and imitated so that in him we may live the life of the Trinity and with him transform history until its fulfillment in the heavenly Jerusalem." But this Gospel program has to be translated into pastoral initiatives that are adapted to the circumstances of each local church and each local religious com-munity. That is the action call as we begin anew with the favor of another year. Where do we begin? There can be no other beginning than the challenge issued by Vatican II's Lumen gentium, chapter 5: the universal call to holiness. All our pastoral planning, all our religious renewal efforts, all our peace and jus-tice endeavors are measured by the clarity of our focus on holiness. In the way we live and in what we do, the question is most realistic and practical: Do we want to become holy? Is that our desire for others? There can be no growth in holiness without our entering more fully into a learning how to pray. While a widespread interest in spirituali- Review for Religious ties and spiritual practices is a contemporary phenomenon, the foundation remains a personal prayer life. Prayer, even in its most contemplative and cloistered forms, opens our hearts simultaneously to the love of God and to the love of our brothers and sisters. It is our Christian prayer that enables us to be shapers of movements and events in our local situation and sometimes even more widely in the world. It is prayer that roots us in the truth that "without Me, you can do nothing" (Jn 15:5). When we pray, we acknowledge the primacy of Christ and, in union with him, the primacy of the interior life and of holiness. Prayer itself needs to be nourished consistendy with a listening to the Word of God. As we continue to steep ourselves in Scripture, we find ourselves warming to the passion of sharing the Good News. This passion leads to a new sense of mission--mission not reserved to specialists or to lands different from our own. Yet witnessing to our faith vision must happen within a context of sensitivity to the differ-ent religious and value paths of our fellow citizens and to the diversity of cultures present within our own country in which the Christian message is expressed. In challenging all of us ordinary Christians, the pope writes: "A new apos-tolic outreach is needed which will be lived as the everyday commitment of Christian communities ahd groups." As Vatican II's Gaudium et spes §34 says, "The Christian message does not inhibit men and women from building up the world or make them disinterested in the welfare ofotheir fellow human beings: On the contrary, it obliges them more fully to do these very things." Review for Religious is privileged to play its part, through its many authors, in sharing insights and encouraging practices for this Christian mission. David L. Fleming SJ 67.1 2008 mission JAMES P. Mc CLOSKEY Conversation: A Brave New Way of Mission Ensnarled in traffic on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I began to listen to a radio talk pro-gram more intendy than usual. I'was searching for words of consolation on a long and tedious drive. What I found was a fascinating--and stirring--discussion about reconciliation. The topic was abortion, but the focus of the discus-sion was the search for "common ground." The hour-long program was a recapitula-tion of meetings that occurred during the past year. The meetings were organized by women who had opposing positions on the issue of aborti6n. Representatives of both groups described themselves as feminists. The partici-pants in the year-long discussion were women accustomed to the public forum. That is, they were intelligent and articulate spokespersons James P. McCloskey CSSp writes from Congregazione dello Spirito Santo; Clivo di Cinna, 195; Roma 00136; Italy. Review for Religious for "pro-life" and "pro-choice" positions. During the year there had been unsuccessful attempts by some to cancel the series of meetings, angry leaks to the press about the discussions, and genuine fearfulness on both sides. But the meetings took place. And the result was extraordinary. Women who did not accept the position of other women who, in their opinion, allowed the law to regu-late their bodies listened nevertheless with compassion as their colleagues recounted their religious-faith con-victions, their differing understandings of the human person, and ~their simple--and different--biological beliefs. Other women, who could not theretofore abide the notion that females could terminate what they believed to be a human life within them, responded with empathy towards women whose scientific and human-istic principles were simply different from their own. In the end, members of neither group changed their positions. But also, in the end, members of both groups grew in respect and compassion for their "opponents." They achieved a form of "common ground" that will serve as the basis for future relationship and conversa-tion between them. Not for discussion of abortion do I raise this exam-ple, but as a way of envisioning and creating a similar experience of "common ground" among p~ople of good-will within religious congregations that were founded for mission and for service to the poor. The existence of multiple cultures within congregations, mirroring the multiple cultures within the Catholic Church, is evident. These cultures are related to the different languages, tribes, national identities, and ages within the congre-gations, but they are not confined to them. The social scientist Edgar Schein defines culture as "the deeper 67.1 2008 McCloskey * Conversation: A Brave New Way of Mission level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously, and that define in a basic 'taken-for-granted' fashion an organization's view of itself and its environment."1 In Schein's view the most useful way to think about culture is to imagine it as "the accumulated shared learning of a given group, covering behavioral, emotional, and cogni-tive elements of the group members' total psychological functioning.''2 Since the publication of Schein's work, the under-standing and perception that most members of an orga-nization share the same cultural viewpoint has moved toward an awareness that many organizations contain multiple cultures or subcultures. Noting that some orga-nizations may have only fragmented, disjointed cultures, Joanne Martin has asked whether culture needs to be something internally consistent, or whether it can be inconsistent and expressive of difference. Can it incor-porate confusion, ignorance, paradox, and fragmenta-tion? What are the boundaries around culture, and how do cultures change?3 By multiple cultures within a religious congrega-tion, I mean the presence of differing and sometimes opposing worldviews under the umbrella of having been founded for a single purpose and with a single Rule of Life. Similarly, among Catholics in general, some define themselves as God's "pilgrim people," a term that implies moving towards the kingdom of God but not yet achieving it. Others think of the church as the kingdom of God here on earth. These different understandings translate into different understandings of morality, sac-ramental life, liturgy, and hierarchy. They are some-times called differences of "style," but they are more profound than that. Review for Religqous In religious missionary congregations, founded for "the spread of the gospel to those who have not yet heard it," it is no wonder that multiple cultures are the order of the day. On a large scale, those differences are racial, linguistic, ideological, generational, and ecclesi-astical. We make national and tribal attempts at "enculturation" of the life of our congregation and its values within a particular set-ting, translating ideals into prac-tice- often with success but not always. Within our congrega-tion's American subculture, mul-tiple differences of culture, are often experienced just as acutely and intensely as in international subcultures. Even in the "real 'life" of persons in one community, such as the same parish or school, different worldviews emerge that challenge common living. Recently, in a community-room conversation, a priest said, "It is impossible to be both Republican and Spiritan." He said it with the force of true conviction, and the Republican Spiritans in the room grew silent and began to seethe. In one prov-ince there are celebrations of the Tridentine liturgy, and there are those who question whether the celebration of daily Eucharist is ideal--or even spiritually healthy. The understanding and perception that most members of an organization share the same cultural viewpoint has moved toward an awareness ,that, many organizations contain multip!~e cultures or Subcultures. 67.1 2008 McCloskey * Conversation: A Brave New Way of Mis~ion There are liberals, conservatives, social activists, phi-losophers, and papists. A morley--and gracedmcrew! Undercurrents of cultural difference emerge in quiet discussions concerning the role of lay associates in the congregation; concerning the rising influence of the "southern" provinces, where candidates are many and new energy and vitality overshadow the elders of the "north"; and concerning members who choose to live and work in "untraditional" settings, interpreting "mis-sion" in a different way. Undercurrents rise to the sur-face during provincial elections or national assemblies, when stakes are high and the level of well-being is at risk. Sometimes an "elephant in the room" is studiously ignored during discussion of clergy sexual abuse, sexual orientation, financial accountability, or institutional assessments. In congregations with a missionary orientation and an international membership, the formal "cultural" training of members tends to be thorough and highly professional. Degrees in cross-cultural communica-tion, missiology, and anthropology abound. Experts in interreligious dialogue, ecumenism, and international development are fairly commonplace. Candidates in for-marion spend a period of ministry in another cultural context before definitive commitment, and most new members are assigned to countries not .their own. It is usual for members to achieve fluency in a second or even a third language. .Why, then, do we often find it difficult to talk among ourselves? Is it simply the human condition that the "traditionalists" will oppose the "progressives," that tribal alliances will win out over competence in choosing leadership, and that "turf wars" will decide who controls property and finance? We opted for more. Review for Religious And we know that the divisions are sinful reminders of our weakness. And so what is the solution to the dissolution? The solution is a simple one--a commitment to sustained and deliberate conversation for the purpose of achiev-ing "common ground." Following the model employed by the pro-life and pro-choice advo-cates, it is imperative to establish "rules" for dis-cussion. It is urgent to listen with care and real empathy. It is important to proceed with respect and humility. No one We know that the divisions are sinful reminders of . our weakness. person fully embodies the congregation's ideal mem-ber. Together, the members bear worldwide witness to the values espoused by its founders. No one perspective is to be eliminated or misjudged. The effort to engage in this conversation is fearful and intimidating. But it is the only way that differences can be respected--and, ultimately, that the persons expressing those different opinions will be respected and loved. The meaning of "mission" has changed since the foundation of the Spiritan congregafon in the 18th cen-tury. Far from an imposition of a foreign culture upon a people, mission is no less than sustained, purposeful, and respectful dialogue. It is a commitment to remain at the table, conversing honestly until the Spirit speaks. W-hat greater witness to the "mind of Christ" is possible than the example of a community determined to "linger at the table" and fully invest itself in genuine, honest conversation--for mission? 67.1 2008 McCloskey ¯ Conversation: A Brave New Way of Mission Notes t Edgar Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1985), p. 6. 2 Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership, 2nd edition (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992), p. 10. 3 Joanne Martin, Cultures in Organizations: Three Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 4. 2o o Personal/Group Reflection Questions Where does my sense 6f mission come from--directly from God, from superiors, from the community in which I live? What give me a continuing sense of confirmation and support for my mission? When do we talk about our mission-~our individual ministries or our corporate ministry together? What makes this conversation helpful? What makes it painful and contentious? Review for Religious JAMES H. KROEGER An "Asian" Meditation on the Gift of Mission ~/~y mission? This perennial, persistent question mits of a variety of valid responses. Asking why is fundamentally a question of "mission motivation." Why evangelize? Why be Jesus' disciple? Why concern yourself?. What ends does mission really serve? The bishops of Asia continually grapple with these questions as they explore the evangelizing mission of the church on this vast continent of four billion people, where less than three percent of the burgeoning masses are Christian. Although these leaders of the church in Asia have elucidated several reasons for engaging in mission, what is striking is the "mission motive" they James H. Kroeger MM has since 1970 served mission in the Philippines and Bangladesh. Currently he is professor of Mission Studies and Islamics at the Loyola School of Theology; Ateneo de Manila University; Katipunan Avenue, Loyola Heights; Quezon City 1108; Philippines. jkroeger@admu.edu.ph 67.1 2008 Kroeger * The Gift of Mission mentioned first during the fifth plenary assembly of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences (FABC). Collectively they forcefully asserted: "We evange-lize, first of all, from a deep sense of gratitude to God, the Father 'who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing' (Ep 1:3) and sent the Spirit into our hearts so that we may share in God's own life. Mission is above all else an overflow of this life from grateful hearts transformed by the grace of God" (FABC V). The Asian bishops vigorously affirm: "That is why it is so important for us Christians to have a deep faith-experience of the love of God in Christ Jesus (Rm 8:39), that love which has been poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has ,been given to us (Rm 5:5). Without a personal experience of this love received as gift and mercy, no sense of mission can flourish" (FABC V). Note some of the words and phrases that the FABC uses to describe this motive for mission: "gratitude to God," "grateful hearts," "spiritual blessing," "given to us," "love received as gift and mercy." Indeed, mission is viewed as a gi~, graciously given, gratefully received, and generously shared. Gratitude is a powerful motive for energetic evangelization. The Image of Gift All cultures and peoples give gifts, particularly on special occasions and at significant life events: birthdays, weddings, holidays, anniversaries. Gifts bond people together, they express gratitude and appreciation. Gifts are chosen personally and carefully, to please each recip-ient. Often gifts-are exchanged at the same moment, further cementing families together, and friends too. Asians have elevated gift-giving into an art. What would Chinese celebrations and the Lunar New Year Review for Religiot~ be without generous gifts offered in red envelopes (ang-pao)? In Korea the ritual celebration of one's sixtieth birthday (hwangap) is an occasion for lavish gifting. No Filipino feels comfortable without bringing some pasa-lubong-- large or small--when returning home. Probably it is the experience of giving and receiving gifts--so deeply human--that prompted Asia's bishops to see gratitude for abundant grace received as a fit-ting image and motive for mission. This gift image expresses Christian thankfulness for God's unique, gra-tuitous, gift--Jesus the Son. Each day in the Eucharist, a Greek word that means thanksgiving (eucha-ristein), we say "we do well always and everywhere to give you thanks." Frequently in the Mass the Prayer over the Gifts refers to the "holy exchange of gifts." To help in grasping the deep meaning in the image of mission as gift, this "Asian" reflection now presents three interrelated moments of what might be termed "gift missiology." Three "R" words capture mission-as-gift: Recognize, Receive, and Reciprocate. Recognize by being profoundly aware of the uniqueness of God's gift. Receive by personally appropriating God's gift. Reciprocate by sharing God's gift with others. :The first moment in hppreciatin g "gift missiology" is ~to become deeply conscious of th~ depths of God's love. Recognizing the Gift The first moment in appreciating "gift missiology" is to become deeply conscious of the depths of God's 67.1 2008 Kroeger ¯ The Gift of Mission love, the love of the Trinity. The mission decree of the Second Vatican Council (Ad gentes) noted: "The pilgrim church is missionary by her very nature. For it is from the mission of the Son and the mission of the Holy Spirit that she takes her origin, in accordance with the decree of God the Father. This decree [divine plan] flows from that 'fountain of love' or charity within God" (AG §2). Mission originates in the centrifugal love of the Trinity; our missionary God shares of his essence which is love. God the Father gifts us with his incar-nate Son and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. One can receive no greater gift. Prayer and contemplation facilitate a depth-awareness of this great gift. The New Testament is replete with expressions of God's magnanimous generosity. Paul reminds the Romans: "Adam prefigured the One to come, but the gift considerably outweighed the fall . Divine grace, coming through the one man Jesus Christ, came to so many as an abundant free gift. The results of the gift also outweigh the results of one man's sin . Jesus Christ will cause everyone to reign in life who receives the free gift that he does not deserve" (Rm 5:15-17). As one con-templates God's profound generosity, gratitude wells up in_the heart, leading one to proclaim "Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift" (2 Co 9:15). Recognizing God's gifts also means being pro-foundly aware that we do not earn or merit the gifts; they come from God's generosity, as Paul explains to the Ephesians: "This was to show for all ages to come, through his goodness towards us in Christ Jesus, how infinitely rich he is in grace. Because it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith; not by anything of your own, but by a gift from God; not by anything that you have done, so that nobody can claim the credit. We Review for Religious are God's work of art" (Ep 2:7-10). Paul encourages the Romans to humbly receive God's gifts: "I want to urge each one among you not to exaggerate his real impor-tance . Our gifts differ according to the grace given us" (Rm 12:3-8). As Jesus prepares to leave his disciples, he promises them: "I shall ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever, that Spirit of Truth. ¯ ." (Jn 14:16). Jesus' prom-ise is fulfilled at'. Pentecost: God's generous gifts are for all peoples, whatever their religious, ,ethnic, or cultural background. "They were all I ~ filled with the - Holy Spirit .The Spirit gave them the gift of speech [to] proclaim the marvels of God" (Ac 2:1-12). The early Christian community--and our church today--have been assured of God's continuous generos-ity: "You will not be without any of the gifts of the Spirit while you are waiting for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed" (1 Co 1:7). Paul notes that all gifts have one source: "There is a variety of gifts but always the same Spirit . All these are the work of the one and the same Spirit, who distributes different gifts to different people just as he chooses" (1 Co 12:1-12). God's generous gifts are for all peoples, whatever their religious, ethnic, or cultural background; thus, "the Holy Spirit came down on all the listeners . All were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit should be poured out on the pagans too" (Ac 10:44-45). Peter proclaims God's graciousness in Jaffa, saying: "I realized 67.1 2008 Kroeger * The Gift of Mission then that God was giving them the identical gift be gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, and who was I to stand in God's way?" (Ac 11:17). Mission originates in this profound consciousness of what the Father has graciously wrought in Christ Jesus and their Spirit, continually manifested in the church. St. Th~r~se of Lisieux expressed her awareness of God's gift when she concluded: "My vocation is Love! In the heart of the church, my Mother, I shall be Love. Thus, I shall be everything." Receiving the Gift A transformed consciousness that fully appreciates God's graciousness will receive the gift of faith with a joyful heart. One need only recall how this precious gift has been given and received. One could ask: Why of the four billion people in Asia have I been privileged to receive the gift of Christian faith? Who were God's instruments in transmitting the gift to me? What price did my parents or the missionaries have to pay so that I would have this great treasure? Who are the holy people in my life who have helped me appreciate God's gifts? Reflecting on these questions will facilitate a more per-sonal reception of God's gifts of grace. When Jesus engages the Samaritan woman at the well, he challenges her to have a deeper appreciation of the gift being offered: "If you only knew the giJ~ God is offering and who it is that is saying to you: Give me a drink, you would have been the one to ask, and he would have given you living water" (Jn 4:10). Writing to the Corinthians, Paul invites them to a more profound awareness of the gift of being a Christian; he says: "People must~ think of us as Christ's servants, stewards entrusted with the mysteries of God. Review for Religious What is expected of stewards is that each one should be found worthy of his trust . What do you have that was not given to you? And if it was given, how can you boast as though it were not?" (1 Co 4:1-2,7). Both the Samaritan woman and the Corinthian community are to appreciate that, since they have been recipients of God's gifts, they themselves are now able to be gifts to others. Precisely because one is loved, has experienced God's love, and has thus become lovable, one can reach out to others with the gift of love. This is the transformed ° - consciousness that God's gifting creates in receptive individuals. One is reminded of what the Asian bishops have said: "Without a personal experience of this love received as gift and mercy, no sense of mission can flour-ish" (FABC V). A deep reception of God's Trinitarian gifting will result in a further gift: a personal vocation to minis-try. This was the "conversion" experience of St. Paul; the Lord affirmed: "This man is my chosen instrument to bring my name before pagans and pagan kings and ¯ before the people of Israel" (Ac 9:15). Paul personally owns this gift: "I have been made the servant of that gospel by a gi~ of grace from God who gave it to me by his own power" (Ep 3:7). Paul celebrates God's choice, noting that: "God never takes back his gi)~ or revokes his choice" (Rm 11:29). Reception of God's gift is a continuous, ongoing '~ A deep reception of, -God's Trinitarian gifting will result in a further gift: a personal vocation to ministry. 67.1 2008 Kroeger ¯ The Gift of Mission process. Paul reminds his beloved Timothy (and us) to keep growing in receptiveness (appreciation, personal-ization, appropriation) of God's gift: "You have in you a spiritual gift which was given to you when the prophets spoke and the body of elders laid their hands on you; do not let it lie unused. Think hard about all this, and put it into practice" (1 Tm 4:14-15). Reciprocating God's Gift The New Testament passage that best captures this third moment of gift missiology is: "What you have received as a gift, give as a gift" (Mt 10:8). The logic is simple: if one truly appreciates a gift, one wishes to share it with others. The desire to gift others is the best and clearest manifestation of authentic gratitude. The New Testament letters of James and Peter add further insight: "Make no mistake about this, my dear brothers: every good gift, everything that is perfect, is given us from abtve; it comes down from the Father of all light" (Jm 1:16-17). "Each of you has received a special gift, so like good stewards responsible for all these different graces of God, put yourselves at the service of others . . . so that in everything God may receive the glory." (1 P 4:10-11). Pope John Paul II'S 1999 apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in Asia (EA) provides several insightful per-spectives on how the church in Asia is to "reciprocate" (return, repay) the gifts it has received. "The church's faith in Jesus is a gift received and a gift to be shared; it is the greatest gift which the church can offer to Asia" (EA § 10b). "Blessed with ~the gift of faith; the church [is to become] a community aflame with missionary zeal to make Jesus known, loved, and followed . The great Review for Religious question now facing the church in Asia is how to share with our Asian brothers and sisters what we treasure as the gift containing all gifts, namely, the Good News of Jesus Christ" (EA §19a & c). "Only if the people of God recognize the gift that is theirs in Christ will they be able to communicate that gift to others through proclamation and dialogue" (EA §3 If). The perspective of "mission as gift" contains sev-eral insights on the approach or manner of mission in Asia, which is necessarily dialogue. Christians treasure the gift of their trinitarian faith, offering it freely, even enthusiastically, to others. The gift is offered with a sincere heart, yet all evangelizers know that people are free to accept or reject the gift. The dialogue partners, such as Muslims and Buddhists, also have gifts to offer: the riches of their faith and their personal "God experi-ence." Thus, a wonderful exchange of gifts can result. All people who ha~e the gift of faith need to collaborate so that through sharing their gifts they can" enrich the poor and needy in their midst. The Asian bishops were indeed most perceptive in their reflection on a renewed motivation for mission, listing gratitude first among several possible motives. Recall what they said: "We evangelize, first of all, from a deep sense of gratitude to God. Mission is above all else an overflow of this life from grateful hearts trans-formed by the grace of God . Without a personal experience of this life received as gift and mercy, no sense of mission can flourish" (FABC V). Paul's well-worded exhortation to his co-evangelizer Timothy provides a fitting conclusion for these reflec-tions on the gift of mission (gift missiology). In Paul's words, Christifins can find a reprise Of their recognition, reception, and reciprocation of the gift Of faith. Paul writes: 67.1 2008 Kroeger ¯ The Gift of Mission "Fan into a flame the gift that God gave you when I laid my hands on you .Never be ashamed of witness-ing to the Lord . Bear hardships for the sake of the Good News . Accept the strength that comes from the grace of Christ Jesus . Proclaim the message and, welcome or unwelcome, insist on it . Do all with patience . Make the preaching of the Good News your life's work, in thoroughgoing service" (2 Tm 1:6, 8-9a; 2:1; 4:1,5). Mary Keeping Shabbat There would be nearly nine months ahead Of seventh-day worship in synagogue, Sitting with her sisters and her mother In the women's rows, opposite the minyun Of their men, her secret blossoming within her, Thrusting against the homespun of her gown. She hugged its warm folds, the warm hand Of her mother covering her own. For Jews Seeking signs to believe in, or to disbelieve, The signs were there every Shabbat - seventh- Month, eighth-month - that a daughter of righteous Parents was boldly with child, Her Joseph betrayed! Her betrayer someone here among us! Watch where She turns her eyes. But she only turns her eyes To heaven, while saying her Shabbat prayers, Singing the Shabbat psalms, a bright-haired Mary, keeping Sunday in her womb. Nancy G. Westerfield Review for Religious GODELIEVE THEYS A Dream, Ash Wednesday; and the Word In my fifty years of living in a Catholic mon-astery, an important element of my religious development has been to pay close attention to dreams. My daily life involves prayer, ritual, music, liturgy, silence, study, and work, while my nights, more than sleep, are often filled with religious imagery, prayer, and music as part of dreaming. In the Christian tradition there is a long, often neglected history of dreams pro-viding spiritual insight. John Sanford captures this in his book title: Dreams: God's Forgotten Language. Clearly much of the modern world has forgotten the significance of dreams~ as car-riers of spiritual teachings, and unfortunately, even in religious tradition, we often leave these divine messages of the night unattended. Godelieve Theys OCSO.came from Belgium in 1962 to help found her new Cistercian home at Redwoods Abbey; 18104 Briceland Road; Whitethorn, California 95589. prayer 67.1 2008 Theys ¯ A Dream, Ash Wednesday, and the Word It was in a dream that St. Joseph was warned by an angel to take the holy Child out of Israel for protection from a king who would kill the newborn King. Joseph knew the power of dreams and followed the instruction provided in the night. Where are we in our willingness to listen and follow the dream messengers? Growing older as I am, I recently recalled a dream in which I was told, "You should at least write a book to serve human-ity." This made little sense to me at the time. I did not see myself as an author, and I had no desire or inten-tion to write for others until recently. In the past year I was so deeply moved by a specific dream that I now find myself creating material that seems to want to be shared widely. Though I am not writing a book, I still hope that my experiences may help others realizer that dreams can give'insight into the mysterious reality we call the religious or the spiritual. Religion, while in gen-eral being about dogma and tradition, is also personal, being about the soul's movement towards God. Key to monastic living is to find the divine in all of life's experi-ences. Like St. Joseph, we are called to listen to angelic voices in the night, to listen to dreams as insights into religious living. Last year during Lent I had an indelible dream. For much of this year I have been trying to hear fully the message that it offers. The dream has changed me and continues to do so. The dream was this: It was Ash Wednesday. I was aware that the morning liturgy mate-rial was already typed, but that the evening material was not. I left the church and went for a morning walk outdoors, as I often do. There I saw something alive on the ground. I bent down and touched it. It was the Word for the evening liturgy, alive under my hand. I was moved to tears. It was a numinous experience. I Review for Religious wondered what to do? Should I keep this living Word with me until after lunch, protecting the Word so that it would not be destroyed or die before it was typed for the evening service, or should I return immediately to the community and get it typed right away? I was per-plexed. I awoke singing the refrain of the song "Deep Within." My words were: "Deep within I will plant my law, not on stone, but in your heart. Follow me, I will bring you back; be my own, and I will be your God." I could not recall making any decision. Besides the music, the thing that jumped out for me in the dream was the breathtaking feeling that in touching the Word I was experiencing the living pres-ence of God. In the dream ~- - - this experience of God . ¯ in the Word comes after I leave the church and take a walk amid some of nature's beauty. For me this confirms the church's i'~ life and traditional struc- ', tures and also my rela- , tion to our monastery's natural environment. Going outdoors, as in my dream image, reminds me of the evolution of consciousness itself. Awareness develops through our contact with the: outside world, through relationship with the world around us. Living in the heart of a forest, I am blessed in knowing the world as divine creation. For years I have walked daily in the beauty of our landscape to be restored. Walking and attending to nature is a way of quieting the mind and refreshing the soul. The wonder of the natural world offers my constant .mental activ-ity the opportunity to be touched by the realm of the In touching the Word I was experiencing the living presence of God. 67.1 2008 Theys ¯ A Dream, Ash Wednesday, and the Word senses. In this dream of finding the Word alive, on the ground before me, my senses seem to come fully alive and open me to the deeper experience of this religious moment. Might the Word be more available than we imagine if only we were more attuned to this possibility? Seeing with our eyes, hearing with our ears, touching with our hands---how much of life are we missing and how much spiritual potential lies undiscovered simply'because we are not aware? This dream calls me to greater attention because in it I saw the Word, alive, under my hand. I felt its pulse. It was like a little bird that could' not fly and was waiting perhaps for me to pick it up, hold it gently, quench its thirst, that it could recover its strength and fly again. It was truly an experience of the sacred to feel this life under my hand, to feel the living substance of it. In that moment there was an immediate relationship between God's Word and me. Eros, relatedness, was involved. I was deeply moved; my heart was touched to the point of tears. The Word needs to be seen, to be heard, to be spoken, to be listened to, and to be fol-lowed so that its message can get through and heal the depths of the heart. It is important to me that this Word was found, not only outdoors, but also on the ground, on the earth in front of me--not above, not in the air, not transcendent. Here a divine Word was putting itse!f right in front of me, like something that was lost. There it was, all by itself, needing my help, needing me to keep my eyes open or miss a divine manifestation. Iv am reminded of the story of the rabbi who was asked, "How is it that God doesn't speak to people as he did in the past?" The rabbi answered: "Because no one bows low enough any-more." Bowing low is a gesture of humility that we may Review for Religious lack. As modern people we seek the spiritual above and beyond, outside the world of matter, and perhaps are not humble enough to see what is right before us. But, returning to the dream, what is before me is the Word. Living in a contemplative community, I am regularly in touch with the Word of God in Scripture-- and in the Rule of St. Benedict as well. These are important for my daily life. In this tradition there is nothing more powerful than the teaching in the opening verse of St. John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Before the evangelist, the prophet Isaiah told us: "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of God will stand firm" (Is 40:58). And Jesus himself said: "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away" (Mt 5:18). In reflecting upon the Word as it comes in the dream, I am reminded that there are many words--vol-umes upon volumes filled with them--and there is the Word. This dream clearly reflects the power of the Word. As Heidegger said, "language is more than little puffs of breath." Words are wellsprings of energy, giving us the power to communicate with one another, to share our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Words bring us into relationship with the world around us and with our inner world as well. They put us in touch with our past, lead us into the future, and help us realize actual Words bring us into relationship with theWorld around Us and with, our inner world as well. 67.1 2008 Theys ¯ A Dream, Ash Wednesday, and the Word situations and attitudes in the present. They tell us what is in our mind and heart. Words both wound and heal. They are not only expressions of our conscious life, our ego identity, but also of our unconscious, as it comes through in dreams. They often have deeper meanings than what they stand for in ordinary life. They are chan-nels to our deeper and truer identity. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVl, in his book Salt of the Earth reminds us that "the word revealed in history is definitive, but it is inexhaustible, and it unceasingly discloses new depths. In this sense, the Holy Spirit, as the interpreter of Christ, speaks with his word to every age and shows it that this word always has something new to say.''1 The Holy Spirit, as the interpreter of Christ, who is God's definitive Word, "always has something new to say," but are we prepared to listen? Listening to my dream, I return to Ash Wednesday and sense the meaning of Lent, a meaning that tells me that, through deeper listening and closer attention to both dreams and daily life, we might come to greater awareness of the Word as it reveals itself to us. Nonetheless, I can-not help wondering why the Word, as it comes in this dream, does not address itself direcdy to me. Why does it not communicate what it expects me to do? I do not know what choice I made about taking care of the Word I was holding. It was only when I woke hearing the song "Deep Within" that I came to sense the message of the Word in this dream, the message of "Follow me." Turning.to the Gospels, I think of Jesus saying "Follow me" in several instances. The words of the song in my dream return: "Follow me, I will bring you back; be my own, and I will be your God." The Word will bring us back, will reveal our true selves, if only we are Review for Religious willing to follow the path of Jesus, the path of becom-ing a new being, with the only true name we have: I am. To follow Jesus as the enlightened one coming out of his baptism as the Son of God, the Beloved, involves living in relationship to the Word. We must entrust ourselves to the flow of life and consciously live the seasonal changes from death to new birth. Like the day that flows into night, we are always in transformation. Nothing remains static. Laziness, not striving to be con-stantly awake, locks us into one place and we stagnate and decay. Commitment to following the Word leads into the paschal mystery, the cycle of life, death, and resurrection. We are to let go of our attachments, not only to material possessions, but also to family, profession, social group, community, even to institutional religion. Like the rich young man who asked Jesus what he must do to have life, we must let go of what we have or who we think we are. We are to sell all and follow the path that leads to greater life, and, as Thomas Merton said when he was at Red, woods in 1968, "we have to stand on our own two feet." Along the same line, Elizabeth B. Howes wrote: "To sell all., means to renounce that right to choose the specificity of one's own desire and to let oneself be molded by the Patterning of the moment. Through such conscious choice, we give back to its true owner what we have been given. It is as if our life were on loan. We either take it and run away to shape it as we will, or we turn it back to its Source in a volitional act of choice, which makes us co-creators with the process of God.''2 To follow God's law planted in our heart is to find our true identity and to know the sacredness of the liv- 67.1 2008 ing Word, as in the image of my dream. This journey of which I write is the task of our lifetimes. Notes ~ Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), p. 62. 2 E.B. Howes, Jesus' Answer to God (San Francisco: Guild for Psychological Studies Publishing House, 1984), p. 89. Longing for Easter Give us Easter, the brilliant wine of the Kingdem, the days when He might appear at any moment and we in his presence become speechless with joy, shy with wonder. Give us Easter, when we can forget (not from shame) the dark pain that went before, or see it as one sees, from the bright rooms of home, the troubled road by which one traveled back Give us Easter and spring and the words of songs we always hoped to learn Give us always Easter. Kate Martin OSC Review for Religious JOHN CARROLL FUTRELL Pedagogy of Prayer HTan persons grow only through their relation-ips to the realities that enter into their self-awareness. This is a matter of integration, of becoming more and more whole rather than more and more dis-persed. Integrated selfhood is achieved only by free commitment to a life-meaning. People actualize their personal identity by faithfully choosing all their lives to express their identity in an authentic way. ~: The total human development of persons gifted with Christian faith calls them to integrate into their growth their relationships with other persons, with themselves, with things, and especially with God. Graced confessing that Jesus is Lord is recognition that the central rela-tionship of their life is their personal relationship with God. To bring this relationship into self-awareness is to pray. I shall suggest in this article a pedagogy of prayer. I shall offer reflections on what prayer is. Then I shall make some practical remarks on how to pray. Finally John Carroll Futrell SJ has written for this journal about ten times, beginning in 1958. His address is 3601 Lindell Boulevard; Saint Louis, Missouri 63108. 67.1 2008 Futrell ¯ Pedagogy of Prayer I shall respond affirmatively to the question "Can we pray?" What Is Prayer? When we pray we meet God. Perhaps the best description of prayer is that it is a loving, personal encounter with God. C.S. Lewis remarked: "Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person." Our problem is to verify this encounter. Encounter may take many forms. Close friends can encounter each other by talking or being silent, or even when they are physically far from each other, because they are always in personal commu-nion. It takes two to make an encounter. I can reach out to you, but, unless you receive me and give yourself to me on the personal level, we can have no true encounter. When you reach out to God, God is there to receive you. This loving personal encounter is prayer. God is present, whether we "feel" that presence or not. We know this is true because God has revealed it to us. We know it because we have the gift of faith. The Holy Spirit present in us enables us to confess that Jesus is Lord. We must insist with faith on the fact of God's constant, transcendent, loving presence, even when we feel nothing but dryness. Our own coming to encounter God is the human dimension of prayer. Prayer as a human activity is mak-ing ourselves present to the presence of God within us, so that we can recognize God's presence in everyone and everything around us. Prayer requires of us the labor to get ourselves together, body, feelings, imagination, intelligence, will, desires, place, time, environment--so Review for Religious that we can truly be present to the presence of God in loving, personal encounter. Our essential praying, then, is accomplished by the will to pray even in the midst of distractions or of total dryness. If we have the sincere desire to pray, then, at the bottom of our heart, deep within us, there is a loving encounter with God, even though it is not consciously felt at the top of our head. St. Paul put it perfecdy in his Letter to the Romans: The Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness. For, when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words, and God, who knows everything in our hearts, knows perfectly well what the Spirit means. (Rm 8:26-28) A problem for many people attempting to verify the encounter with God which is prayer is that they begin with their own idea of good prayer, as determined by lack of distractions, no dry-ness, a continuous feeling of consolation. A false notion of prayer makes true prayer unverifiable. The problem here may be that we are seeking God for ourselves rather than for love of God. Instead of welcoming God's personal presence personally, we turn God into an 0/~ect, a thing we can acquire to fill a need. Prayer must be openness, listening, welcome. Prayer leads us from self-centered need to other-centered love. This passage from need to love is illuminated by reflection with Freud on human growth toward matu-rity as a movement from need to desire2 As infants we all begin as quivering bundles of needs. We relate to Prayer must be openness, listening, welcome. 67.1 2008 Futrell * PedagoG of Prayer all the realities that come into our awareness--espe-cially our mothers--as objects there to satisfy our needs. Need seeks self-satisfaction, the absorption of the other into myself. Freudian body imagery is revealing. Need means self-affirmation of my own bodily presence only; this annihilates all that is not myself by consuming it bodily. As long as I am operating chiefly from my need, I affirm myself only as an object, a needy body-thing, just as I affirm others only as objects to satisfy my needs. Freud shows that it is in passing from need to desire that we come to human maturity. In his terminology, when I desire another person, I affirm the reality of the other as a subject, as a free mysterious person, with inalien-able rights and always beyond adequate representation in concept or image. In desire we recognize what is not ourselves and affirm its free otherness. It is only in affirming others as persons that we realize ourselves as persons, as free subjects open to personal relationships. VChen we pass from need to desire, we can say, "It is now for the first time that I truly experience myself as a person, for it is only in your presence that I am." The poet e.e. cummings put it perfectly: "i am through you so i." When we apply this Freudian model to prayer, it is dear that in its initial stages prayer would reflect as in a mirror the emptiness of our need for God. From expe-riencing this need we shall pass gradually to the desire for God in God's infinite otherness. Even on the human level, desiring the other as unique and thus infinitely different from me is the greatest love. "I love you" becomes "You exist!" To love others is to will their pres-ence as irreducible to me. In recognizing their unique-ness, I recognize an absence in their very presence, the inalienable freedom of their otherness. Review for Religious Thus, desire--love--is not a static, finished thing. It is an ongoing living thing. Because of this fascinating and wonderful presence-in-absence, even a moment of intense personal union opens upon a new frontier, a beckoning from beyond towards deeper union. Another person remains an unfathomable secret. I cannot know this secret through thought or images or even bodily union. I can know another person only through love. In The Art of Loving (chap. 2), Erich Fromm points out: "In love, I know you, I know myself, I know every-body-- and I 'know' nothing. I know in the only way knowledge of that which is alive is possible for man--by experience of union--not by any knowledge our thought can give." The only way to full knowledge lies in the experience of love. This experience transcends thought; it transcends words. Thus, if I can have no full knowledge of God in thought, if theology is at best negative, then posi-tive knowledge of God can be achieved only in the act of union with God. In prayer we know God by lov-ing God, by welcoming God's gift to us in the loving experience of God's presence-in-absence. Prayer always remains desire, opening ever more widely toward ever fuller union, as St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cr6ss powerfully attest. Ren~ Voillaume insists that we will be less satisfied with ourselves in prayer the more closely we approach God. This lack of satisfaction is a part of prayer, a proof of unfulfilled desire, which can only grow with growth of love. Far from satisfying thirst for God, prayer increases it. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote: God does not offer himself to our finite beings as a thing all complete and ready to be embraced. For us he is eternal discovery and eternal growth. 67.1 2008 Futrell * Pedagogy of Prayer The more we think we understand him, the more he reveals himself as otherwise. The more we think we hold him, the further he withdraws, drawing us into the depths of himself. The nearer we approach him through all the efforts of nature and grace, the more he increases, in one and the same movement, his attraction over our powers, and the receptivity of our powers to that divine attraction. (The Divine Milieu, pp. 119-120) As St. Thomas Aquinas put it, "by prayer we render ourselves capable of receiving." St. Gregory of Nyssa pointed out that the more we make progress, the more we discover that God infinitely transcends all that we can ever know of God. "To find God is to seek God without end." Thomas Merton noted that "progress in prayer is a continual burning of bridges behind us." Prayer, then, is faith, openness, listening, welcome, surrender. It is not through speculation or through study of theories of prayer and of love that we learn to pray and to love God, but only through the exercise of prayer and of love. We must sweep away all preconcep-tions and simply listen to God. Jesus told us in a parable what our attitude should be when we pray. We should be the good soil that nurtures the seed planted in it by the Divine Sower, accepting the word with faith. Just as we find Christ in the Eucharist under the appear-ances, so we must seek the reality of encounter with God under the words and gestures of our prayer. The soil where the word is sown is the heart, the center of our person. If we do not receive God here, our prayer is marked by boredom and routine and falsehood. We must be present to our own heart, where God is seek-ing us in spirit and in truth. All of our authentic prayer begins in our heart, in the activity of the Holy Spirit in our hearts.2 Review for Religious We have nearly two thousand years of reflection on the experience of Christian praying. The great masters of prayer always have seen as true prayer the "interior understanding and relish" that is born of the Holy Spirit's illumination of our spirit. This prayer may be very dry. Our prayer may often be quite simple: just a period of repeating the same thing to God over and over until it becomes part of us. Prayer can be a tor-ment until we are transformed into what we are say-ing. Christians who really pray have always known that "by their fruits you shall know them." The criterion of good prayer is not sensible consolation, but whether we continually live a more loving life by the power we receive even in very arid prayer. When we seem lost in our own confusion, distracted, and hardly present to God except in a prayerful word or two, there still may be in us, through the Holy Spirit's presence, a desire that we eventually experience as power, strength to serve God and our neighbor with our whole being, no matter what the cost. Thomas Merton's teaching on prayer emphasizes that the Holy Spirit is .seeking us in our hearts, where we come to ourselves. It is difficult to enter into the silence of our hearts, the place where no one else can enter, where we must put off our masks and no longer hide.3 This is where God calls us: "Give me your heart, your very self." Here we allow God to judge us, God who invites us to a full life. Here we learn to be at home We have nearly two thousand years of reflection on the experience of Christian praying. 67.1 2008 Futrell ¯ Pedagogy of Prayer with God, beyond our emotions and our intellectual life. We learn to overcome our fear of what is there and our temptation to go back to what is familiar. God is at home where we are truly ourselves. Merton put it, "Prayer does not consist in an effort to get across to God, but in opening our eyes to see that we are already there." The good that we seek through prayer is not the self-satisfaction of a "successful" prayer according to our own idea, but the formation of an attitude of total surrender to God in every detail of our daily life. This good God gives, through the more or less active coop-eration of our effort to pray. This is the pearl of great God is always calling us, speaking to us in all the events of our daily lives. price always to be sought in prayer. It is this which transforms us in Christ and prepares us always to say yes to the Word of God calling us at every moment of our lives. Brother David wrote, "Only life lived to the full measures up to the task of contemplation" (Gratefulness, p. 64). A life of ongoing prayer will draw us deeper and deeper into the presence of God, until we shall experience it in situations that do not immediately suggest God's presence. Then we are praying always, even though our conscious attention is elsewhere. This is what the masters of prayer mean by finding God in all things. God is always calling us, speaking to us in all the events of our daily lives. God comes to us in every situation we face: in our work, in our play, in the people we meet, in all our duties. All of these serve as invitations to welcome God here and Review for Religious now, to let God challenge us to live our Christian life perfectly. If we understand prayer this way, there are never places where prayer is impossible. Perhaps we need to change our way of understanding prayer. Louis Evely has said, "We're not asked to choose between God and world, but to discover God in the world and reveal God to it." It has been well said that there are no part-time human beings or part-time Christians Or part-time con-templatives. When we confess that Jesus is Lord, no sin-gle moment of our lives is outside this relationship.4 We can live prayer at all times, whether formally praying or not. What are we really seeking at all times during our life? What is our basic operational orienta-tion? What is our heart's treasure? This may be other people, egoism, money, pleasure, popular success, or it may be God. Whatever it is, it pervades all our actions, rules our individual choices and our spontaneous actions and reactions, constructs our world, without our being conscious of it all the time. If my basic existential ori-entation is to God, I am praying always, always having a loving personal encounter with God. Thomas Merton summed it up perfectly: "If I find God I will find myself, and if I find my true self I will find God. And the only one who can teach me to find God is God's self. So pray for your own discovery." How to Pray Since prayer is a loving personal encounter with our forever faithful God, our human effort during any period of our life must always be to make ourselves present to God: to enter into our own faith experience of the Spirit of the risen Jesus at the bottom of our heart, where God touches our life. This is the meaning 67.1 2008 Fuvrell ¯ Pedagog~ of Prayer of all human prayer, whatever the method or style. The criterion for judging which method or style to use is simple: "Does it work?" Does this method at this time bring us into God's presence? Is it enabling us to live a life of love for God, other people, and myself?. A particular method of prayer may meet this crite-rion for years. But normally there will be times when a method is no longer right for us. Then we must experi-ment with various methods. We must be open to all pos-sibilities: God can use anything as a way to encounter us. Our part is to discover a way of finding God now. It may be a hope-filled darkness in which we wait willingly for subde energies of faith and love to return. The best prayer for me now may be meditation on the revealed truths of faith. People sometimes reject this method as "talking to myself." Well, why not talk to ourselves if God, who can make use of anything, is there and listening attentively? At times the best prayer may be lectio divina: slow thoughtful reading of Scripture or of other spiritual writings, stopping sometimes where we experience some heartfelt understanding. God works with us incarnationally, and so the method of prayer that works usually fits our temperament and cultural climate. Some older persons may be drawn to slow recitation of the rosary or to reading set prayers reflectively. The method for other persons_ may be singing or playing a guitar or adopting various body positions. The criterion always is "What works?" The great contemporary master of prayer Brother David Steindl-Rast OSB proposes two excellent ques-tions for evaluating our current method of prayer: (1) Is my prayer truly an expression of my prayerfulness, gratefulness, sorrow, compassion, and so forth? and (2) Does my prayer make me more prayerful? Review for Religious Two millennia of Christian experience show that it is fairly normal for people to be led gradually from more active methods of prayer to quieter, more passive methods. The way of praying may become simply enter-ing into a deeply felt attitude and resting in it: being thanks, being open, being praise, being begging when we feel our radical poverty deeply. In this prayer, when we become aware of our mind or imagination running off in various directions, we simply let those distractions fall as we keep coming back to our deep attitude of being. The Psalms fit this form of prayer because they express deeply felt attitudes, often in just a line or half line. Just a few verses of a psalm may help for days or even weeks. For persons who are feeling far from God and overwhelmed with cares and anxieties, the first few lines of Psalm 40 can be of great help: I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Stop at words or phrases. Let them sink in, and let your own thoughts rise. Stay there until you feel that the Holy Spirit is leading you to the next word or phrase. Another important form of. prayer to learn, consider-ing our tendency to rush on, is repetition: coming back to interior movements we experienced during previous periods of prayer and letting the Spirit deepen these movements and draw us closer to God and away from what holds us back. There are times when we should simply "plough the rock until it bear." 41 67.1 2008 Futrell * Pedagogy of Prayer In Christian prayer there is no method more central than contemplation of t, he life of Jesus in the Gospels. In Christian prayer there is no method more central than contemplation of the life of Jesus in the Gospels. This contemplation can take many forms and range from fairly discursive reflection to simple presence to Jesus in a scene. The proof that our method of contem-plation of Jesus is right for us right now is the experi-ence of being more and more transformed into him in our daily living with and love of other people. We must be ready to recognize when the prayer to which God calls us now is simply to enter into the void and wait in darkness for God. We realize that for us at present God is nowhere else than in this purifying empti-ness. A Jesuit friend of mine once told me that the only way he had been able to pray for weeks was to stand holding his arms up in supplica-tion. There were no thoughts, no images, not even a deeply felt attitude-- nothing. Yet he knew that this body prayer of emptiness was what God wanted of him then, beyond any thought or feelings. Even in desolation we are called to pray by "remembering consolation." W-hen darkness overcomes us, our prayer must be a faith that remembers what we saw, felt, hoped, and loved when we were filled with light. It can be helpful to think about prayer as a place. Sometimes it is a garden, beautiful, full of flowers, sweet scents, and birds singing and fountains play-ing. Sometimes it is a mountaintop, where we would Review for Religious like to pitch a tent and stay. Sometimes it is a desert. Sometimes it is a "blah" place, where all we can say is "God, here I am in my blahness." Sometimes it is a rock that we cling to with bloodied hands. And sometimes it is an empty tomb. For me, sometimes, it is a boat, when I feel as exhausted as Jesus was when his disciples woke him to calm the storm. Then all I can say, before falling asleep, is "Jesus, I'm with you!" A friend of mine, a sister, returning very blue and worn from a day of apostolic work, composed a beauti-ful prayer out of this feeling of prayer as a place: Dear God, tonight I'm tired and discouraged. I want to just give up and walk away. I'm in the basement and I want to go to the attic. In the basement, I'm lonely. In the attic, I'm alone, all one. In the basement, I crouch in the dark damp coal bin and dig up bones from the past. In the attic, I quiedy open the trunk lid and think about the treasures of the past - some painful, some joyful - but treasures nonetheless. Rain in the basement beats me to the cold hard concrete and I feel suffocated. Rain in the attic has a restful pitter-patter, pitter-patter, as it softly sings, "I love you, I love you, I love you." In the basement, I'm closed off. The windows are darkened and covered with weeds. I cannot see the sun when it does shine forth. In the attic, there is no way to keep out the warm sun of your love as it shines through the leaves on the trees. It makes delightful patterns for my enjoyment. And so, dear God, I ask you to take me from the basement to the attic. I ask for aloneness, I ask for treasures, I ask for soft soothing rain 67.1 2008 Futrell ¯ Pedagogy of Prayer and warm loving sunshine. I ask to feel your love. I do believe., help my lack of belief. Prayer Flows out of Life Situations Whatever method of prayer we use, as body-per-sons in space and time, we must seek to compose our-selves interiorly and, if possible, to choose a place that will help us to be present to the presence of God. We know that our body conditions the state of our con-sciousness. And so it is vital to take the time, perhaps a long time, to compose ourselves before praying: to enter into a deep silence of the body and imagination and feelings. Methods like the Additional Observations in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola (§§73-86) or the preparations in the old meditation books or yoga or transcendental meditation or Zen or Sadhana can be helpful. The great 19th-century master of prayer Theophane the Recluse described prayer truly as "stand-ing before God with the mind in.the heart." If we are to pray, we must commit ourselves to make time for it: time to calm ourselves down, time to allow God to rise up in our awareness, to become God for us. We must discern the rhythm of prayer that we need at this time in our lives, and we must be faithful to it even when we do not feel like praying. We know that our most essential duties are not always those that we feel like doing. Nevertheless, we do fulfill them because of the importance they have for us, their priority in our lives. The operational proof of what our priorities are is the quality time that we give to them, not what we may verbally affirm about their importance. Time is the most precious possession of human beings, and what we do Review for Religious with our time is the behavioral proof of what we value in our lives. If we really put a high priority on prayer, we regularly give quality time to it. As in human love, there can and should be steadfastness even when we feel dull and lack spontaneity. And, of course, both love and prayer seek imaginative ways to transform routine and revivify themselves. Can We Pray? If we exercise our faith and our creativity and our common sense, we can pray. We can bring ourselves and take time and wait to encounter God. We can look to see whether our hearts have left space for God to come and meet us. For two thousand years the purpose of Christian asceticism has been to make space in our hearts for God to encounter us there. The difficulty of prayer is that it is the entrance into the bottom of our hearts. It places us before the wall of grace and the invisible. This involves going out of our selfish self, which makes prayer so diffi-cult. It is a true purgatory--a purification. This difficulty is overcome only by the Holy Spirit. To consent to pray is to consent to place ourselves before this wall and to wait with faith and hope for God to lower the wall. The lowering of the wall is the progressive coming of God to our deep self. Here only God can overcome. To believe that we have solved the problem ourselves is to show that we have lost the batde. Here, truly, we gain our life only by losing it. Our prayer should lead us to the still point of our being, the root of our existence, the center of our awareness of our unique individuality, where we are touched by the divine creative act and where, in silence and in darkness, we understand that God is God. At this point of our dependence upon God, we find God 67.1 2008 Futrell ¯ Pedagogy of Prayer in a presence that is absence, in an emptiness that is filled with God, in the knowing that is not knowledge but love. This, I think, is the command of God to the psalmist: "Empty yourself out and see that I am God." Descend to the depths of your own being, to the very point where you spring up out of my creative love, and there you will find me. Here God's presence is felt as breaking in on us, breaking down the wall of selfish self-love that limits our encounter with God. We see that this same wall keeps us from truly loving others as Jesus commands us to do, and that it keeps us from hearing and respond-ing to God's word in all the events of our lives. In this prayer we become filled with the light of the Spirit of the risen Jesus, who will illuminate all our experiences and will bring us at last to find God in all things. Often in this prayer we encounter God in his breaking in on us, and we feel no need or inclination to speak, because everything is understood in love. We simply surrender to God in his transforming action on us. But this is not a prayer of inaction. At no time do we feel more fully alive. For some people this is the habitual form of prayer. For others it happens only rarely. In all our prayer we should be listening to God, ready to welcome him, as God sometimes welcomes us, in a moment of great clarity or great joy.5 Notes i For this insight I am indebted to Jesuit psychoanalyst Dr. Denis Vasse, of Lyons, France. 2 "To cqntemplate means raising our eyes to a higher order that challenges us to measure up . Only the heart is high and deep enough to hold this vision." Brother David Steindl-Rast OSB, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), p. 64. 3 "The heart in biblical culture, and also in a large part of other cul- Review for Religious tures, is that essential center of personality in which the person stands before God, as the totality of body and soul, as T who is thinking, will-ing, and loving, as the center in which the memory of the past opens up to planning of the future . The significance [of] the heart., reaches the sanctuary of personal self-awareness in which is summarized and condensed the concrete essence of the person, the center in which the individual decides upon himself, in face of others, the world, and God himself." John Paul II, Audience at the Gemelli Clinic, 28 June 1984. 4 "Work should not make us stop praying. But when my work becomes my only prayer, it won't be prayer much longer. Its weight will pull me off center. We can hear it quickly when a clothes dryer spins unevenly. Why can't we hear it when our lives do the same? It may be time to stop and reload. It may be time for nothing but prayer, time to disengage ourselves, to find our center, and to re-engage ourselves from the heart. Then our work will truly be prayer, It will be contemplation in action." Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness, p. 195. 5 Listen to C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, near the end (p. 307): "He is coming . The air was growing brighter and brighter., as if something had set it on fire. Each breath I drew let into me new terror, joy, overpowering sweetness. I was pierced through and through with the arrows of it. I was being unmade. I was no one . The earth and stars and sun, all that was or will be, existed for his sake. And he was coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is, was coming . I cast down my eyes." Personal/Group Reflection Questions 1. Have I had the experience of trying to teach someone to pray? What did I find to be helpful in teaching someone to pray? What obstacles did I experience? 2. What is my favorite way of defining or describing Christian prayer? 3. How do I respond to Brother David Steindl-Rast's question, "Does my prayer make me more prayerful?" 67.1 2008 BRENDAN KNEALE Pray Passionately of we look at Roman liturgical practice as a form f prayer, it does not seem to encourage pray-ing passionately. Of course, there is a good reason for this--the litur~.¢ is a public, not a private, form of prayer. It expects us to bring to its formalities and rituals a preparation of intense personal prayer. Some devout Catholics, perhaps, find rich emotional con-tent in Gregorian chant if they bring to it a suitable background. Also, the Roman Liturgy does include an extensive use of the Psalms, which are full of passion-ate prayers that any of us can find to be deeply mov-ing. Consider such passages as these used in the official Liturgy of the Hours: Cry out with joy to the Lord, all the earth . . . For you my soul is thirsting--my body pines for you . . . My soul shall be filled as with a banquet., my soul clings to you . . . Brendan Kneale FSC, a retired professor from Saint Mary's College of California, is now on the staff of De La Salle Institute; 4403 Redwood Road; Napa, California 94558. His email address is bkneale@dlsi.org Review for Religious Let the faithful rejoice in their glory, shout for joy., let them praise his name with dancing. Tremble, 0 earth, before the Lord . I bow down before your temple, filled with awe. The Lord's voice flashes flames of fire. He sends fire and brimstone on the wicked. No one can escape his hand. Praise him with full voice . Ring out your joy to the Lord. There are dozens of passages like these. The Liturgy cites, also, some of the strong language of St. Paul, who certainly expressed himself with passion. We have intimations of how emotional and intense Christ's own prayer was, notably in the garden and on the cross, culminating in: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Likewise, when he declared that he came to "cast fire on the earth." He no doubt was reflecting the strong feelings of his previous prayer. At Pentecost the Holy Spirit communicated himself with the symbolic "sound of wind and tongues of fire." This ought to stir our emotion, as when we sometimes refer to "fire in the belly." It did so, surely, for canonized saints, many of them known for the intensity of their prayer life. Here, however, it seems fair to ask, "Where is the passion in the wording of the Our Father, the arche-typal prayer Christ left us?" Answer: It is certainly there for people who have no "daily bread," and for those of us acutely aware of our need for a. ~'supersubstantial bread." Similarly, if we are full of-faith and devout sen-sibilities, we will experience a yearning, in the words of the Our Father, for "forgiveness of sins" and a fear of being "led into temptation," and for a strong desire to be "delivered from evil." The same goes for other seem-ingly bland prayers of our tradition. If we but bring our 67.1 2008 Kneale ¯ Pray Passionately true situation to such prayers, they will become quite passionate. In older terminology, it is with "fervor" that we should pray. Later Traditions Many modern religious orders have a community spirituality which translates into language that seems at best to be sentimental rather than passionate. An example can be found in English translations of 17th-century texts on prayer. When one of its masters, St. John Baptist de la Salle, wrote "The Method of Mental Prayer," his language in translation was made to sound pallid. Thus, in English versions, we find him frequently urging us to pray with "sentiments of faith." It does not seem adequate to translate the French sentiment into a mild, neutral, and comfortable English word like "senti-ment." In fact, bilingual dictionaries would have allowed translators to use much stronger alternatives. The question arises: How does one bring passion to prayer? Soldiers in any kind of combat do not have to ask that question. Neither do we--if we let ourselves realize how abruptly death may come for us, if we really think about the greatness and goodness of God, if we realize our guilt, if we are at all sensitive to our inner longings, if our mortality weighs down on us as it should, if we are sensitive to our capacity for the infinite, if we admit a yearning for communion with the saints, if we feel deeply the needs of those for whom we pray, if we are persons of genuine loyalty, if we are aware of our past ingratitude and our utter vulnerability. In other words, as the masters of prayer have always taught, we must prepare for our prayer by realizing how desperate our condition and situation is, how great and good God is, how important prayer is, how linked we Review for Religious are to our fellow human beings. Many such deep con-victions are acts of faith and stem from insights aris-ing- out- of experience, meditation, and study--and, of course, from grace. "The Holy Spirit prays in us." We become a version of "deep calling on deep." After the effect of "cool" literature on prayer, one suspects that the rise of devotion to the Sacred Heart and other devo-tions helped compensate for prayer's lack of warmth, and even coldness, in this world of ours. It is evident that passion invigorates prayer, but also the converse holds. Prayer can stir spiritual pas-sion, which then often takes the form of zeal for various charitable works and also for personal discipline. Unfortunately, sen-timent and shallow many of us, since genuine emotion depends on deep convictions and full realizations about serious things. Where do deep feeling, passion, and genuine love come from? The source is true faith, real conviction, theological insights, realizations stemming from deep meditation--that is, things deep in the mind. There is always, however, a danger of self-deception and of artifi-cially stirred-up shallow feelings, ephemeral sentiments. St. La Salle, mentioned earlier, was a man of feeling. He lived in times when emotions were intense over serious internal church struggles. And he had his own battles with civil authorities and with incomprehension by his contemporaries, clerical and lay, so that his own prayer was challenged at a deeper level than most of us and thus felt more keenly. Where do deep feeling, passion, and genuine love come from? feelings may have to suffice for 67.1 2008 Kneale ¯ Pra~ Pa~ionatel~ Where, for us, do the occasion and quality for pas-sionate prayer come from? They arise from experi-ences eliciting fear, gratitude, desperation . . . feelings which call forth our faith and convictions. At the start of our interior prayer, we often include an introduc-tory exercise: making our situation "real," recalling viv-idly, stirring our faith and hope, gratitude and humility, awakening ourselves from somnolence. Frequently Repeated Prayers Prayers that are frequently repeated should not be perfunctory, but should be recited "once more with feel-ing." There is a danger that prayers like the rosary could plunge us into mindless rote. That is where the ancient admonitions about study and reading can be applied. Prayers like the ~'osary will be infused with emotion if we bring to them a rich background of gospel meditation and theological study. Thus in the rosary such insights may prepare as many as ten ideas or rousing images to accompany our recitation of the ten beads in each decade. Every one of us can become a "vas insigne devotionis," rich in insights that stir our emotions and direct our will. The rosary, then, can be prayed passionately. Of course, to recite vocal prayers poorly is often an act of faith and so has value. St. Thomas Aquinas is supposed to have written somewhere that one differ-ence between rote vocal prayers of petition and atten-tive and involving prayers of petition is not that one is answered and the other is not--rather, if both are prayed with faith and goodwill, one is more consoling than the other. That is one difference. There are oth-ers. A prayer that is passionate is likely to be extended, sincere, satisfying, richer in intention, fortifying of our faith and hope., instead of a routine burden. Review for Religious Dryness There is no such thing in this life as a perpetual emotional high. One experience that the saints have often undergone is spiritual dryness. Sometimes, it seems, such periods are imposed by God as trials, but could it be that sometimes they are self-imposed by our own neglect? If we fail to use the sources of inspiration and energy--such as attention, study, sensitivity, insight, consistency, solitude, detachment--then we can expect aridity. The Language of Prayer Perhaps, looking back at the word "sentiment" and recalling the passionate words of the Psalms, we can say that the language used in prayer is important. Paying attention to the stirring words of the Psalms can bring life back into our prayer. Depending on the occasion, .however, vocalized prayer should vary appropriately: ritualistic or hiero-phantic, informal or personal, intense or calm and reflective, importunate or resigned--adoring, grateful, repetitive, vivid, meditative. We do not want to over-dramatize our lives, but one suspects that prayers of petition, at least, do need heartfelt words--the more passionate the better. In any case we have the promise of St. Paul in Romans 8: "When we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words ¯ . . the pleas of the saints expressed by the Spirit are according to the mind of God." 67.1 2008 CLIFFORD STEVENS The Institute of Impracticalities: The Financial Support of Monasteries consecrated life G.K. Chesterton, before he created the Father Brown detective stories, tried his hand at the genre by writing a clever story called "The Club of Queer Trades," a tale of a fraternity of tradesmen who had managed to come up with unusual ways to make a living. In it a man makes his living giving excitement to people who lacked excitement in their lives and adven-ture to those who lacked adventure. He would send them sinister and intriguing messages, or leave strange objects on their doorstep, or send them secret packages, all designed to add some spice to an otherwise humdrum existence. I thought at one time if I had not become a priest I would set up a place called Chesterton Square with a number of odd shops and busi-nesses doing business there: a Bottle Shop, a Kite Unlimited Emporium, and imposingly on Clifford Stevens has written for us at intervals since 1975. His addres~ is Tintern Monastery; EO. Box 910; Kemmerer, Wyoming 83101. Review for Religious one corner of the square an Institute of Impracticalities, which would answer any need that was totally and clearly not practical, such as ordering an elephant for a wedding, or sending a truckload of balloons to a sick child. A monastery is and must be, if it is to be true to its character, a true Institute of Impracticalities. We exist for no "practical" purpose; we are useless, as far as most people are concerned, and there is nothing "practical" that we can mention as our particular achievement. We have to cultivate "unpracticality" almost with genius, or else that particular disease, fatal in some cases, called "practicality" takes over and everything is sacrificed on the altar of "practicality." This has been the bane of monasteries from time immemorial and has been responsible for the eclipse of the monastic life sev-eral times in history. I am thinking particularly of the monastery of Fountains in England, where "practicality" drove peasants off the land, made the monastery some-thing of an economic empire, built sumptuous build-ings, and got the monastery involved in the dynastic and ecclesiastical power struggles of the time. The greatest illusion in the contemplative life is the conviction that the financial support of the monastery is the key problem and the critical concern of community life. This has never been. true. The critical factor in con-templative life is the cultivation of intimacy with God and the fashioning of a pattern of life to enable every single member to do exactly that. As soon as the mere support of the monastery becomes the primary con-cern, "practicality" takes over and Divine Providence goes right out the windows. God blesses the monastery only to the extent that it is an oasis for leisure with God. Then blessings for the support of the life come 67.1 2008 Stevens ¯ The Institute of lmpracticalities in abundance, mysteriously, magnanimously, for God takes care of his genuine lovers, and they are never in want--for anything. The basic principle for the financial support of a monastery is this: Will the God for whom we have forsaken the world of business and commerce and the piling up of even legitimate wealth be any less gener-ous with us than the stock market and margin of profit would have been if we had devoted our lives to that? There is one answer: God will not only second our efforts by the action of his prov-idence; he will anticipate our needs. Those who doubt this usually are willing to sacrifice something of solitude, something of silence, something of contemplative tranquillity, and something of intimacy with God for so-called "practical" reasons. God usually gives them what they want, but that is all. The deeper gift for which they have forsaken all is denied them, for the simple reason that they have lost the hunger for it. A strange kind of practicality. The ancient monks made it clear that the treasurer of the monastery was the Providence of God. This does not mean that they did not work or made no provision for the morrow. It just means that they were not depen-dent upon their own efforts: even their own efforts had to be blessed by God. They simply did .not depend on bank accounts or huge commercial enterprises to sup-port their monastic life. God's providence, and their own efforts under that providence, were their only security. This is certainly "impractical" as far as the normal business of human life is concerned, but the monk is not in the normal business of living. He has made God his companion and his passion, and, while he works hard Review for Relig4ous to support his monastic life, he is not dependent upon the "economy." Monks work hard, but simply are not concerned about where their money will come from. It comes, when it is needed, from their own labor or from the action of Providence. As a matter of fact, the monk has become a monk to be free from those kinds of concerns, and, if he wants to get involved in them, God usually lets him have his way, but the intimacy with God that is - the heart of his existence and his chief preoccupation slips from his fingers. His hope and expectation are not really in God, but in the margin of profit, in the interest on stocks and bonds, or in the sale of the next crop. The treasury of Divine Providence never runs out, and God richly supplies his lovers with everything. Those who doubt that have all kinds of arguments to the con-trary, but what they do not have is that closeness to him for which they became monks in the first place. In this day of huge commercial enterprises, financial scandals in religion, and the juggling of stock portfolios and investment opportunities, we have to steer clear of anything that resembles the placing of our security in money. Every monastery needs money, and the financial support of the monastery has to be provided for. But the financial support of a monastery comes from God and his providence and not from the juggling of investments and the margin of profit. When a monastery truly needs money, it comes in bundles, from the most unexpected Monks work hard, but simply are not concerned about where their moneywill come from. 67.1 2008 Stevens ¯ The Institute of lmpracticalities places, and there is no need to buy mailing lists and carry on massive mail solicitations to accomplish this. If there is any choice between depending on a fat bank account and depending on Divine Providence, there is no doubt where the choice would have to be. Certainly not in the bank account, which can fail for all kinds of reasons, but Divine Providence never fails. We have only to look around us to see the disas-ters that occur from an opposite conviction. The clas-sical image is that of the wheeling-and-dealing Father Urban in J.E Powers's Morte d'Urban, who is convinced that hobnobbing with the rich and mighty is the sur-est way to. ensure the prosperity of his congregation. Or the tragic monsignor in John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions who found himself embroiled in scandals and political intrigues unworthy of his office because of his concern about money for the "good of the church." As Paul Evdokimov hasindicated, certain biblical truths get lost in centuries of overgrowth, and from time to time we have to be recalled to the startling dyna-mism of the gospel. It is no visionary enthusiasm that brings religious to their utter dependence upon Divine Providence and reminds them of God's loving care. But they forget that, as redeemed human beings, they are enfolded in his love, and that his benevolence is the very basis of their creation. What they need to recall is a profound metaphysical and theological truth: everything in human life is part of the philanthropy of God, and it is by the exercise of that philanthropy that the inacces-sible God makes himself accessible to our experience. From the generosity of the Godhead comes every gift with which we are endowed and every benefit of our human condition. That includes the margin of profit and whatever benefit we gain from economic prosperity. Review for Religious Even those who do not depend upon Divine Providence are dependent upon it. It is simply human shortsighted-ness that does not see the beneficent God behind the human drama. The wisdom of the saints ends up being the most practical of impracticalities. Some Texts "In building, we need not act as people in the world do. They first get the money and then begin to build, but we must do iust the opposite. We will begin to build and then expect to receive what is necessary. The Lord God will not be outdone in generosity." -- St. Alphonsus Liguori "The more you abandon to God the care of tem-poral things, the more he will take care to provide for all your needs; but if, on the contrary, you try to supply all your own needs, Providence will allow you to con-tinue to do just that, and then it may well hhppen that even the necessities will be lacking, God thus reproving you for want of faith and reliance on him." -- St. John Baptist de La Salle "Now is God not able to send, perhaps tomorrow, sacks of money to my door?" -- St. Camillus de Lellis And see Paul Evdokimov, The Sacrament of Love (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1985). 67.1 2008 M. REGINA VAN DEN BERG Enclosure and Other Ways to Widen One's Horizons Tfte practice and rule of enclosure in the convent is en misunderstood, by those who oppose it and those who defend it. It is misunderstood as a way of keeping the world and its evils out, of limiting contact with the world. Enclosure actually succeeds in doing quite the opposite: it enlarges the world. Rather than keeping the world out, it confronts us with it. Rather than keeping evil out, it forces us to face it. Rather than limiting our world, it expands our horizons. It is not only enclosure that expands our horizons: other prac-tices of the religious life do so too. The other practices include common meals, prayers, and recreation, limited use of television, internet, telephone, and email, and also limited travels and visitors as well. The reader may think I am playing with words, for it seems paradoxical at best that all the above-men- M. Regina van den Berg FSGM taught philosophy at Seminary Rolduc in Roermond, the Netherlands. She recently moved to Mater Ecclesiae Convent; 4510 Lindell Boulevard; St. Louis, Missouri 63108. Review for Religious tioned practices serve to widen our horizons. It is" not my intention, however, to play with words, but rather to point out a common mistaken notion that "experiencing the world" and "widening one's horizons" are incom-patible with enclosure and other such practices. In his essay "On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family," in Heretics, G.K. Chesterton makes the essential distinctions upon which I base this article.1 Chesterton uses the distinction to defend the institu-tion of the family; I apply it to the religious life. When people say that they want to "experience the world" or "widen their horizons," they commonly mean that they want to increase their knowledge of the world and the things in it. They want to do this by learning or by experiencing, virtually or firsthand. It is nearly super-fluous to point out that modern technology enables us to learn and experience all manner of things with the greatest ease and speed. We can experience the world in so many ways: by traveling, by looking at internet sites, by watching television, by communicating via the internet with people we have never met face-to-face, by joining clubs. It is obvious that enclosure and the other religious-life practices I mentioned allow at best a limited experience of the world in this sense. These various experiences of the world, however, have some common elements. For one, the knowledge we gain and the experiences we have often do not affect us as persons. They do not make demands on us as per-sons. We, after all, select the experience we want to have: the persons we want to be with, the places we want to go. We choose people who are agreeable to us, and when we travel we want to relax, not be challenged. Perhaps we look on the internet or watch television to learn, but often just to be entertained. However inter- 67.1 2008 van den Berg, * Enclosure and Other Ways to Widen One's Horizons However interesting the people we meet on journeys or through the internet, they may ieave our inner world untouchedl esting the people we meet on journeys or through the internet, they may leave our inner world untouched. They do not make us grow in Christian self-knowl-edge. When people truly want a life-changing event, Chesterton says, they could effect "a much more roman-tic and even melo-dramatic change if [they] jumped over the wall into the neighbor's garden. The con-sequences would be bracing.''2 We go on vacations or browse the inter-net because we Want a "change," because we want to escape from the everyday, but escapes may blind us to the here and now. The internet provides a fine example. How easily we become so immersed in it that we lose all sense of time, of the people around us, of duties awaiting us. Analogies limp, but this experience is like taking a photograph. To get as much as possible in the picture, we not only use a wide-angle lens, but we also back up. We become observers. Everything becomes small, and details disappear. There is a lot in thepicture, but we see very little. We do the same when we try to know and experience endlessly new things. Enclosure and the other religious-life practices zoom in, so to speak, on a select portion of the world. This new focus enables us to look more closely at the objects in the picture. We do not step back as observers to take the picture, but we get a vivid three-dimensional picture of a select part of the world by being a part of it ourselves. In a Review for Religious limited environment we begin to see in a different way. Confronted by the reality of the here and now, we begin to see details. We notice more of what is there to be seen. With enclosure and the other religious practices, we find ourselves in a special environment with companions we did not choose. They become real sisters of mine, and I cannot merely observe or ignore them; I must live with them. They are not all like me, even if we share a common vision. Some are of a different temperament than I am; I am irritated by some of their peculiarities. Enclosure makes me live with them, and in learning to love them I am enlarging my world. Once we are at home in our limited environment, the reality that is present to us, it encourages us to notice many details: the sunshine on my face as I sit here, the spider crawling up the wall, the sister next door coughing. Then we can respond to the details: to be grateful for the sunshine, to marvel at the spider, to see if my coughing sister may need something. The present reveals itself as fascinating once we see it from up close. Enclosure does not keep the evil things of the world out. Quite the contrary: in the wideness of the enclo-sure, evil has plenty of room to raise its head. I suspect I am not the only one who thought that my congrega-tion should be grateful that I was deigning to enter the community. Being so used to the company of people of like character and inclination, I had no idea that I could be anything but kind--until I was confronted with sisters who were quite unlike me. Then I began to become humbly grateful that the congregation accepted even someone like me. Those who think that enclo-sure somehow forms and preserves a comfortable space 67.1 2008 van den Berg ¯ Enclosure and Other Ways to W'uten One's Horizons where like-minded people can indulge their whim for a lifetime of silence have never lived in a religious com-munity. Enclosure is demanding. Enclosure has no intention of satisfying selfish desires for privacy, for a place where we can escape from the world. It is rather the case that we impose enclosure upon ourselves because we know our human weakness. Knowing that we sometimes would like to escape from the demands of the enclosed world, we bind ourselves to it as self-protection for our weak moments. There is a sense, of course, in which enclosure creates a certain "place apart," but not in the sense of privacy. Privacy in the sense of "my space" would not be compatible with the vows and total surrender of religious life. But the silent place apart is intended to widen horizons, to attune us to the reality of God's presence. As an aid to communion with him, enclosure widens our horizons beyond our imagining--into the wideness of his eternal being! If readers have agreed with everything so far, they may still maintain that enclosure, even if it opens the door to the world, still seems a terribly boring enter-prise. Imagine a life without travel, without television, without internet, without a change of companions. Is this not a recipe for boredom? At least, the reader may surmise, the apostolic religious still have the excitement of the apostolate, the possibility of being transferred, but the contemplative nuns must even forgo that. Add to enclosure the regular routine of the religious life, and the recipe for a dull life seems foolproof. But here, too, Chesterton makes an excellent point. People travel far and wide in search of adventure, but when they do so they by definition fail. They fail because "adventure" refers to something that happens to us (peradventure, Review for Religious by chance), not to something that we attain or that we can find. When we plan a vacation, we know what to expect and plan it often to the smallest detail. But in everyday life in enclosure, one never knows what to expect--here is adventure! And, to quote Chesterton once more, "the thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of these great plain limitations which force all of us to meet the things we do not like or do not expect.''3 Not only are there two divergent ways of experienc-ing the world, but, I maintain, one is better and truer than the other. The first way of widening our horizon often fails to touch and change us as persons. It tends to make us observers of life, not participants; we avoid the challenges that help us grow. It can more accurately be described as an escape from the world. The truer way to experience the world, the way of enclosure, widens our horizons and opens us up to the drama of good and evil, to the graces of the present moment. This reality is demanding and life-changing. Enclosure, the common life, a~d the limited use of media and communication all serve to reveal and enlarge our world--but not by logical necessity. People can enlarge their world through travels and narrow their world in the enclosure, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule. Those who run into the enclosure to escape from the world discover all too soon that they have run in the wrong direction. Their escape from the world is to be found elsewhere: in the often world-nar-rowing experiences of the media and in other self-selected experiences that do not demand much from us. It is not surprising that the practice of enclosure is paradoxical, that by limiting physical space and limiting our experiences we in fact enlarge our experience. The 67.1 2008 van den Berg * Enclosure and Otber Ways to V~ulen One's Horizons Christian faith is founded on paradox. Through Jesus' death we receive life. Through the seemingly world-nar-rowing experience of the enclosure and other religious practices, the horizons of our hearts and minds can be expanded to God and to his concerns and to his world. And that, precisely, is the point of enclosure. The Weaver Weave the threads. Brown for the earth, Red for the fire, Blue for the air, Silver for the water. Weave the threads. Brown for humus, Red for passion, Blue for reason, Silver for the spirit. Weave the threads. Brown the Father, Red for His Son, Blue His Mother, Silver the Comforter. Weave the threads. Fibre of God. Fibre of men. Fibre of life. Weave into harmony, One in the Cosmic dance. Sister Margaret Anne OHP Review for Reli~ous ANTHONY MALAVIARATCHI Religious Brotherhood Today I n attempting to say what it means to be a religious rother today, we must be clear about what broth-erhood is. To discover afresh the most effective way of being a religious brother today, we must look at the tradition of brotherhood in the church. The brotherhood of Jesus and his ordinary follow-ers (Mt 23:8) and the brotherhood of Jesus and his spe-cially chosen disciples, the apostles (Mk 3:13-15), are already two strands of brotherhood at the very outset. Both were meant for the proclamation of the kingdom of God. The brotherhood of the first Christian com-munity in Jerusalem was~ meant to give witness to Jesus' resurrection. The brotherhood of religious life started with cenobitical life. The lone hermits became com-munities of brothers receiving spiritual guidance from abbas (fathers, animators). This kind of brotherhood Anthony Malaviaratchi CSSR, a former theology professor and for-mator now doing retreat work, presented this paper at a brothers' convention in Sri Lanka. His address is Santa Maria; George E. Silva Ma~atha; Kandy, Sri Lanka. anthonymalavi@yahoo.com 67.1 2008 Malaviaratcbi ¯ Religlou~ Brotherhood Today was making a united and concerted effort to live the gospel radically. Brotherhood in History In the period that followed, brotherhood began a new phase. Penitents entered "monasteries" and gradu-ally became members or at least began to live the life of the community. There seems to be no historical connection between th~se "penitent brothers" and-the stream of brothers popularly known as "teaching broth-ers." In the 17th century St. John Baptist de la Salle brought together a group of teachers to educate the badly neglected children of poor working-class families. So did St. Marcellin Champagnat in. the 19th century. Disillusioned by the growing secularism in French soci-ety and its impact on youth, the founder of the Marist brothers established schools for the underprivileged. The Brothers of Charity came together to care for poor workmen, the sick, and the mentally handicapped. Brotherhood: A Prophetic Lifestyle Teaching the poor and marginalized is not an exci~- ing apostolate today. It does not hit the headlines of even Catholic newspapers. That is because so many religious congregations have been doing it for three hundred years. At their origin the education of the underprivileged was simply not being taken care of by anybody. When Edmund Rice, founder of the Christian Brothers, began his teaching, the education of Catholics was illegal in Ireland. Religious life as a prophetic move-ment was reincarnated through works of mercy. The brothers, influenced by St. Vincent de Paul's Daughters of Charity, did what the society of the time failed or refused to do. They brought a strange but nevertheless Review for Religious refreshing message that drew the attention of the world as Mother Teresa did in our times. That was the secret of their success. Congregations of brothers, therefore, need to ask: How can we be prophetic today? What must we do to convey God's message afresh? What is it that society refuses to do today and would convey a prophetic mes-sage if we did it? Today many works of mercy, including teaching, are no longer prophetic. Many others do them now. Governments have undertaken the tasks of teaching, nursing, running orphanages and technical schools, and so forth. ~ Congregations of brothers, But we need to remember that it was the example of religious con-gregations dedi- - cated to serving the earthly well-being of those in need that paved the way for governments and other secular organizations to take up welfare services. therefore, need to ask: How can we be prophetic today ? Institutions and Status Brothers' institutions do excellent work, much appreciated especially by the laity. But the institutions give the impression of material well-being, security, and status, especially in the third world. Brotherhood, of course, has less status than the priesthood, which is one of the reasons why brothers have fewer vocations. Nevertheless, brothers' institutions do have status. To all appearances the vast majority of those who want to join our communities come not because they have 67.1 2008 Malaviaratcbi * Religious Brotherhood Today heard Christ's call to radical discipleship but because they are attracted by the status and security of the insti-tutions. In factl congregations that do not have institu-tions have few vocations. Widespread unemployment and lack of talent for modern cutthroat competition seem to be the underlying reasons for the many "voca-tions" in the third world. Unfortunately, in too many instances the enjoyment of status and security continues to be the lifelong hidden motivation. As their numbers dwindle, the brothers are being for+ed to give up their apostolic commitments one by one. For various reasons such as pressure from bishops and priests, parents, and old boys [alumni] and because of understandable emotional attachments, the most prestigious institutions will be the last to be given up. This will worsen the image of the brothers and con-sequently the quality of the vocations they get. Since many hold on to their status and security, it is most unlikely that radical measures will be taken. And so the faster religious life in its present form dies, the better it is. For then God will be able to raise radical disciples for Christ from the stones of the earth (Mt 3:9). Congregations, Too, Die Part of the crisis of religious life is the probability, if not the certainty, of dying out and entering the annals of history. The reality of death looms over all reality except over the only Real One. Heaven and earth must pass away, the church must pass away (Rv 21:1-2, Heb 12:22). Even the kingdom of Christ must pass away into the kingdom of the Father (1 Co 15:24-28). If all this is true, then our congregations can hardly be eternal. We must pass away when we have adequately served God's eternal designs. If so, our dying as a group, Review for Religious with all its glory and achievements, will also be a ser-vice. Even the thought of it can be a painful, if not traumatic, experience. It is surely a historical moment when God calls us to bring our self-offering to a climax by embracing his plans in the darkness of faith. Like our Divine Master, we too may be called to give life to oth-ers by an unquali-fied submission to God's designs. In the glorious days of the brotherhood in the church, our faith may not have been so much in God as in our numbers, institutions, and achievements. Our group's willing submission to God's unknown ways will bring life to the world in an abundance which our congregational achievements could never even dream of matching. The history of salvation unequiVocally offers all believers a planofaction in time of crisis. The Remnant The history of salvation unequivocally offers all believers a plan ~of action in time of crisis. It may be new to us who have got used to large numbers, but it is a beaten path in salvation history. The faithful were often led by God to negotiate crises by means of the Remnant. The word remnant indicates how great the destruc-tion of God's people will be. "Only a remnant will remain" (Is 10:22). Surely Christ had in mind a remnant when he called his disciples "little flock" (Lk 12:32) and when he said "Many are called but few are chosen." In the Scriptures the remnant is a tiny minority of those 67.1 2008 Malaviaratchi ¯ Religious Brotherhood Today leading religious lives in the eyes of God. These few continue to believe and remain faithful in the midst of widespread infidelity. The concept shows punishment for sin and God's faithfulness, which remains untouched by human infidelity. The faith in the remnant is an essential aspect of hope in the Bible. The Remnant Today If, as religious, brothers are to have hope, they must first realize that it is to run institutions that large num-bers are needed, whereas to give witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ a few are more than enough. These few must turn back to their founders and rediscover that it is exclusively for Christ's gospel that they were brought together in the first place. Second, they need to adopt a prophetic lifestyle and thus become clearly visible signs: Their lifestyle will be visible: ¯ (1) if they have a community lifestyle that is tangibly religious, that is, God-centered with a strong contemplative dimension. ¯ (2) if they live this life not in legal rigidity but in evangelical fidelity. This needs special attention since post-Vatican II freedom has often resulted in Western permissiveness. As a part of this evangelical fidelity, those who fail to live this life should be asked to leave whenever the superior, with the com-munity, comes to that conclusion. ¯ (3) if they embrace a clearly visible life of poverty, that is,can external life of utter simplicity. In every reform movement within reli-gious life, there has been a return to radical simplicity. Our world in the clutches of consumerism is crying for a modern-day Francis of Assisi. ¯ (4) if they engage in a service that others do not do and reach out to people whom society does not care for. In this way, small groups of brothers will create a Review for Religious counterculture which the Union of Superiors General has described as one with "passion for Christ and pas-sion for humanity." They will give prophetic witness to the spiritual dimension of human life in a world of increasing secularism, to brotherly lives and work in a world of increasing individualism, to evangelical sim-plicity in a world of increasing consumerism, to God's preferential love for those that society does not care about in a world of increasing self-centeredness. In a word, religious brotherhood will be prophetic through and through, a transparently radical form of discipleship of Christ. Zen°Poem for Thomas Merton For Brother Anthony Weber OCSO Abbey of the Genesee A white cloud Near a picket fence Close to a white rose, Walked a white-habited Trappist Praying an ivory beaded rosary Ignoring a cawing crow Noticing a disappearing cloud; Flower petals falling, The fence rotting; His scapular, dusty With prayers ascending, Approaching darkness Amid a forested hermitage. William J. Bly 73 67.1 2008 VINCENT GENOVESI Room for Sacramental Reconciliation? spiritual supports We would quickly recognize the mockery made of love were lovers to ask each other only "What must I do to avoid hurting you?" We expect lovers to share a deeper ambition: "What more can I do to show my love for you?''l The same is true of our relationship with God. When our commitment to our spir-itual and moral growth is seen as a response to God's invitation to love, it would be rather insulting to play at love and revel in testing love's limits. As honest and true lovers, we do not spend time anxiously determining how far we can go before our love relationship with God is strained to the breaking point. Instead, our earnest desii'e is to discover how we can foster that relationship. It is in this context that we come to under-stand more fully the meaning of human sinful- V'mcent Genovesi sJ is professor of theology and campus minister at Saint Joseph's University; 261 City Avenue; Merion Station, Pennsylvania 19066. vgenoves@sju.edu Review for Religious ness. Sin is best understood not so much as an isolated act, but rather as a relational reality. It is deliberately breaking our love relationship with God (mortal sin) or knowingly straining that relationship (venial sin). Of course, our love relationship with God is played out largely in our human relationships. St. John reminds us that, if we profess to love God while failing to love our neighbor, we are liars; we cannot love God, whom we have never seen, if we do not love the neighbors whom we see every day (1 Jn 4:20). It is important, too, that we remember the testimony of human experience--that any love relationship can suffer from thoughtless neglect and eventually die without our notice. To grow as faithful Christians, we must ultimately make decisions for ourselves, but it is folly to believe we can or should make all decisions simply on our own, without any help. Yes, we entrust our moral life to the guidance of our conscience, provided, of course, that we have first honestly, carefully, and prayerfully sought to inform our conscience properly. Even when we do this, however, we do not always live as we know we should. We get off track, and it becomes helpful or even neces-sary to seek guidance, encouragement, and exhortation. At times like these the sacrament of reconciliation can offer assistance, especially when we are not in regular dialogue with a spiritual director. Behind Catholicism's centuries-old practice of sacramental confession, there is a wisdom whose depth can be more appreciated in light of Vatican Council II's theological insights and psychology's contribution to a fuller understanding of the human person. Still, many sincere Catholics, even priests and religious, question the usefulness or neces-sity of the rite of reconciliation. Such questioning must be addressed. 67.1 2008 Genovesi * Room for Sacramental Reconciliation? Doing Wrong versus Sinning As background for our discussion, it helps to recall that Catholics are expected to confess serious or mor-tal sins at least once a year.2 Significantly, the accus-ing is done by ourselves. ("Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.") Sins are committed only by sinners--people who freely decide to live in various ways that they know to be hurtful to their own well-being and/or the well-being of others, and so must judge themselves to be unloving and in the wrong. In acknowledging that entering into sin requires both knowledge and freedom on our part, Catholic tradition teaches that no one sins by accident--just as no one truly loves by accident. Both to love and to sin are choices or decisions. Interestingly, St. Thomas Aquinas did not think it likely that persons who are honestly trying to live as good Christians would easily or frequently rupture their love relationship with God by choosing to sin seriously: "Although grace is lost by a single act of mortal sin, it is not, however, easily lost. For the person in grace does not find it easy to perform such an act because of a contrary inclination." Aquinas means that it is pre-cisely our love for God and others that will make it difficult for us to sin, or deliberately do anything that would put our love relationship in jeopardy.3 In light of Aquinas's teaching, and in keeping with the true nature of love, we may conclude that, although it is possible to sin mortally in one particular act, it is not always a simple matter to isolate that act. It is not likely, in other words, that we would sin mortally in an act that is totally out of our character, or in an act that we have not predisposed ourselves toward. Rather, our relation-ship of love for God and others will probably change and deteriorate before there is any outright rupturing of Review for Religious the union, which is why we must be all the more atten-tive to the daily responsibilities of love. In essence, all sins of commission are expressions of "the one great sin of omission, failure to love.''4 While this failure offends God, we too suffer as a result of our sinfulness insofar as we come to find ourselves within the narrow confines of self-centeredness. It is a confinement that brings with it a death penalty, for in failing to love we become members of the living dead (1 Jn 3:14-15). Thomas Aquinas acknowledges the human destructiveness of sin when he says that sin is indeed an offense against God, but that "God is offended only by those things that we do against our own true welfare.''5 Although:.some of our actions may be undeniably hurtful and wrong, our tradition reminds us that we are not always or n, ecessarily morally guilty of sinning in doing these things. Indeed, the Catechism of the Catholic Church notes that "imputability and responsi-bility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors" (§1735). A similar idea appears later in the Catechism: "Unintentional ignorance can diminisl~ or even remove the imputability of a grave offense . The promptings of feelings and passions can also diminish the voluntary and free character of the offense, as can external pres-sures or pathological disorders" (§ 1860). We do well to All sins of commission are expressions of ",the one great sin of omission, failure to love." 67.1 2008 Genovesi * Room for Sacramental Reconciliation? remember, however, that if because of our insensitivity, lack of awareness, or curtailed freedom we are not guilty of sin when doing something that is in fact hurtful and wrong, we have no cause for self-satisfaction and com-placency. The less sensitive, aware, and free we are, the less we are fully human. Therefore, whatever stands in our lives as an obstacle to our free commitment in love is to be seen as something to overcome in our growth toward maturity as human beings and as Christians. In no way should this obstacle be relished as excusing us from sin, because the sad truth is that even without sin we may regrettably have done something hurtful to our-selves and others and are all too able to do so again. Three Reasons for this Sacrament In light of what it means to be a sinner--knowingly and freely failing or refusing to love God and others--it is clear that it is not the role of the priest-confessor, nor is it within his power, to determine definitively whether the penitent has or has not sinned, or how .serious that sin may be. In fact, no human being can rightly call another human being a sinner because reading another person's mind and heart is the prerogative of God alone. Thus the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that, "although we can judge that an act is in itself a grave offense, we must entrust judgment of persons to the justice and mercy of God" (§1861). And so it does us all good to remember that "God does not see as man sees; man looks at appearances but God looks at the heart" (1 S 16:7). Why, then, encourage the sacrament of rec-onciliation? I offer three reasons: the social nature of life and sin, the incarnational dimension of our Catholic tradition, and the moral growth that comes from hum-bly taking possession of our sinfulfiess. Review for Religious The Social Nature of Life and Sin: We need a deeper sense today of the social implications of our sinfulness. No sin is totally private, because in sinning we produce a change within ourselves that invariably influences our dealings with others. Thus no sin really remains "secret"; its effects will somehow leave a trail. Furthermore, whenever we hurt someone, we also hurt all those, including God, who love and care about that person. This means that an appropriate expres-sion of our sor-row should include seeking forgiveness and admitting publicly that our sinfulness has alienated or distanced us from both God and our neighbors. T.he sacrament of reconciliation serves this purpose, for through our encounter with the priest, who is both God's servant-representative to penitents and the people's minister before God, we testify to our desire to be reintegrated into the community of God's love and the company of his people. It is possible that appredation of the social nature of sin would be enhanced were parishes to pro-vide communal penance services more frequently. Catholicism's Incarnational Dimension: Moreover, pre-cisely as human beings who live as body-spirits, it is tremendously helpful for us to incarnate, "flesh out" or "enact," our sorrow and our need for forgiveness through recourse to sacramental confession. In addi-tion, God wants to "enact" his forgiveness of us through Whenever we hurt someone, we aiso hurt all those, including God, wh~; love and care " about that person. 67.1 2008 Genovesi ¯ Room for Sacramental Recondliation? the priest's guidance and comfort. And so, just as Christ puts flesh on our Father's love for us, so the words of absolution put flesh on Christ's forgiveness and mercy. Fortunately, too, I think, many priests today are deeply sensitive to the essentially social and incarnational dimensions of Christian living. As a result, in assign-ing a sacramental penance, they ask penitents to move beyond simple recitation of formal prayers and to seek reconciliation with God and neighbor through spe

Issue 59.1 of the Review for Religious, 2000. ; Vowed Life Featur~ Religious Mission ~ Finding God Living Celibat,ely Balkans Report JANUARY FEBRUARY 2_000 VOLUME 59 NUMBER I Review for Religious helps people respond and be faithful to God's universal call to bollness by making available to them the spiritual legacies tbat flow from the cbarisms of Catholic consecrated life. Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published bimonthly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Telephone: 314-977-7363 ¯ Fax: 314-977-7362 E-Mail: foppema@slu.edu Manuscripts, books for review, aud correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ° St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McDonough OP P.O. Box 29260; V~rashington, D.C. 20017 POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ¯ Duluth, MN 55806. Periodical postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©2000 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library, clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribu-tion, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such pertnission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. restrictions, in a world of hate and division, of civilian bombings and life-snuffing concentration camps, this iournal spoke about dialogue and intercommunication, about ministries of love and service, about vocations to align oneself with God's peaceable king-dom and to pray for that kingdom to come. I am thankful for the gift this journal has been to the church, to religious life, and to the spiritual-life developments of our times. I thank God for raising up and inspiring the founding editors to begin the dialogue--something not common in the 1940s--across the different spiritual heritages which are represented by Catholic religious congregations and which continue to feed the spiritual life of church members everywhere. I am grateful for all the writers who have shared their insights, raised questions, instructed in prayer and in ecclesial history, and inspired our ministerial efforts. For all that has been---Thanks! With this first issue of the year 2000 a new-look cover greets our readers, along with a revision of our secondary title. For the previous eight years, because of the creative contribution of the advisory board and the staff, the journal had this shorthand way of stating its content: Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living. After more discussion with current board members and staff, we now state our content even more simply: Living Our Catholic Legacies. Our mission statement, too, has found new expression for things our journal continues to have in view (see inside front cover). This is our way of saying Yes as we look to the future. While we say "To all that shall be--Yes," I have some con-cern about a shrinking subscriber list. We know that the primary readership--women and men religious--continues to grow less in number in the United States and in European countries. I would not like to say Yes to a declining subscription number without encouraging all of you tostir up your own efforts to increase our readers, hopefully even our subscribers, among your own congre-gation members and associate members if you are a religious, and among friends and colleagues who share spiritual companionship and ministry with you. Review for Religious remains a unique journal in the English-speaking world for our continuing educa-tion, formation, and inspiration in living the rich Catholic legacies that form our church spirituality. I hope that you, our readers, share in our appreciation and enthusiasm. "To all that shall be-- Yes!" allows plenty of room for our best efforts. David L. Fleming SJ Januaty-Februa~y 2000 MICHAEL HIMES Returning to Our Ancestral Lands feature I am a little more daunted than I usually am because you are vicars for religious and you bring me in, a dioce-san priest, to talk to you. I can plead two things. One, I lived, during my happy years at the University of Notre Dame, at Moreau Seminary in the company and with the hospitality of the Congregation of Holy Cross and came to have the greatest affection and respect for them. I am now living and working with the Society of Jesus at Boston College and have the greatest respect for the Society of Jesus. My brother, and sometime col-league, is a Franciscan. And so, though I am not a reli-gious, I shared a bedroom for years with a religious, my brother Ken. Besides these attachments to and connections with religious communities, I plead that your having a pas-sionate outside observer may be useful. That is what I come to you as--a concerned, passionate, outside Michael J. Himes, a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn and formerly on the faculties of the University of Notre Dame and of the Seminary of the hnmaculate Conception (Huntington, New York), is currently a professor of theol-ogy at Boston College. He presented this paper (here some-what revised) in March 1999 at the 32nd assembly of the National Conference of Vicars for Religious, in whose 1999 Proceedings it was originally published. His address is Boston College; Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467. Review for Religio us observer of religious life in the church. I am going to talk with you from the perspective of history. My field is the history of Christianity, with a particular interest in ecclesiology. I am going to be looking at both the history of religious life in the church and at its connection with the mission of the church at large. I took my title from Leviticus. The passage in Leviticus on the jubilee year says to mark the jubilee year by returning to our ancestral lands. In Leviticus the reason for doing this is appar-ently that, because every clan, every group, in Israel's history is of importance in God's plan and in the working out of the covenant, no family, no clan, should be allowed to disappear from the land of Israel. And so, if a clan or family gave up its land, within fifty years it would get it back again. I suggest that some of those same themes are true of religious life in the church today. There are too many important, vital, necessary experiences, images, sources of wisdom which have grown up in religious life in the Western church over the course of fifteen centuries to allow them to be lost to the life of the church. We need to go back periodically and reclaim those ances-tral lands, To do that, I want to discuss three issues--and so there will be three parts. Part One: I want to say something about the nature and pur-pose of religious life in the Catholic tradition, but I want to say it from a somewhat unusual perspective. I will explain what that is in just a moment. Part Two: I am going to offer you a thumbnail history--and it is very thumbnail history--of the development of religious life in the Western church. There is quite a distinct history to the development of religious life in the Eastern church, but up to the present moment in the Western church, I suggest, there have been three central moments in the development of religious life. We may be at the end of number three and the start of number four. In Part Three I am going to make some observations about what can be done to reclaim ancestral lands. How do you reclaim values without trying to resuscitate forms? How do you reclaim the value without saying we have got to replicate the history? Nature and Purpose of Vowed Life Let me say something about the nature and purpose of reli-gious life--of vowed life within the Christian community and espe- January-February 2000 Himes ¯ Returning to Our Ancestral Lands cially within the Catholic tradition--from a somewhat unusual perspective. That perspective I take from an immensely productive, distinguished, and influential figure in Protestant theology and philosophy of religion at the beginning of the century that is now ending--a man named Ernst Troeltsch, who died back in 1923. Before the First World War, Troeltsch produced his masterpiece, a thick volume titled The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. The tide may be misleading to us. You may say to yourself, "All this is well and good, but I do not see what bearing it has on the topic." Let me explain. Just when you least expect it, over the hill will come the topic. Just at the point that you have given up hope of ever hearing anything relevant to your interest, lo and behold, it will make its appearance. Today, when we hear a title like The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, we might expect that it is going to be about what we have come to call social teaching, namely, the teaching of the Christian community about the nature of political and eco-nomic justice within society. That is not what Troeltsch meant by his title. By the Christian churches' social teaching, Troeltsch meant what they taught about tl~eir own natures as societies. I mean, here you have different communities, different societies of Christians that have come together and organized themselves in very different ways. How did these various Christian societies explain themselves? What is their teaching about their own nature as a society? To trace the development of how different church communities and traditions in the history of the Christian tradition have structured themselves as churches, as communities, Troeltsch approached it in a very interesting and important way. He bor-rowed an idea from a colleague of his at Heidelberg, where he was teaching at the time: one of the great fathers that you may very well know if you have an interest in sociology, Max Weber. Troeltsch borrowed from him the notion of an ideal type. Weber's ideal type means this: You explicate different ways, different models of how a community could be organized with-out reference to any concrete existing community. Then you look at the existing communities--at the actual communities as you find them--and ask: Which of these communities is like type one? Which is like type two? Which is like three? He found this to be a particularly fruitful way of getting people" to look at com-munities and raise questions about them which they might not ordinarily raise. Review for Religious Well, Troeltsch took that notion of an ideal type and sug-gested two ideal types as ways of digging in, as tools for analyzing how different Christian communities have understood their own role, how they structured themselves. Those two ideal types he refers to as church and sect. Sect, let me emphasize, is for Troeltsch by no means a bad word. For us today in America it has come to have all sorts of bad connotations. He means none of those connotations. By sect, Troeltsch means a community of people who come together in fidelity to their under-standing of the gospel, who are united first of all by a powerful, dramatic, and deeply personal experience of conver-sion. So, for Troeltsch, one of the hall-marks of a sect type of community is (1) that all of its members are people who have personally experienced some deep and often strikingly dramatic con-version experience. You have to experi-ence being born again into Christ. You must personally "accept Jesus as your Savior," to use language that is familiar to us from some sect types of community in this country. Another hallmark is (2) that these communities see themselves as peculiarly and specially commissioned communities. There is a vibrant sense of mission. There is a kind of urgency about the fact that you have been called, you have been chosen, you have been commissioned to perform an extremely important work in the name of the gospel. So there is a striking and urgent sense of mis-sion in a sect community. Often a sect community (3) sees itself in terms of being over against the larger community. You are the people who have been called upon; you have been set up as a city on a hilltop, as a light for all the world. You are commissioned in a way that is not true of the community-at-large. You may be called to serve them, but you are different in some way from that larger community, and there should be a clear difference between you and that larger community. The sect community (4) is frequently radical in its vision of what needs to be done in the larger community. That is, it takes positions which the larger community may find to be too diffi-cult, too dangerous, too uncomfortable, too impractical. The Different societies of Christians that have come together and organized themselves in very different ways. Janual~-FebruatTy 2000 --10A Himes ¯ Returning to Our Ancestral Lands smaller sect community can advocate radical reform and radical movement. The problem with the sect community, however, as Troeltsch points out, is that it seldom survives beyond the second or at most third generation because the first generation (who have had this striking, personal experience) cannot guarantee that their chil-dren's or their grandchildren's generation is going to have that same striking experience. Very often, then, the sect begins to evap-orate or split up in various ways. My favorite image for that may be seen in one of Flannery O'Connor's letters. She has a wonderful description of why she liked to travel in the south on local trains, trains that made every stop. She said you could always, back in the 1940s and 1950s, see such interesting things. She says: "Why, you stop at one little town and you look out the window and there's a white clapboard church. And out in front of the church is a sign that says 'First Church of Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior of All Humanity, Coming Again in Glory to Save All People Who are Faithful to Him and Moved by the Holy Spirit.' The train goes five miles down and stops at the next little town, and there is a white clapboard church with a sign in front of it that says, 'Church of Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior of the World and of All Humanity, Coming Again in Glory to Save the Living and the Dead and MI Those Who are Faithful to the Gospel and Motivated by the Holy Spirit, Reformed.'" And she said, "You knew there was a history here somewhere even though you could not tell quite what it was." There's a tendency for sect communities to splinter or to evaporate. By contrast to the sect community, the church-style community is a community that (1) sees itself as incorporating all sorts of peo-ple into the Christian community. It does not claim that all of its members are equally, highly, or deeply motivated--depending on your point of view. It does not claim that all of its members have striking personal experiences. It allows for the fact that there are different levels of membership, not official membership perhaps, but in terms of involvement in the community. Not everyone is at every moment of her or his life equally fervent or actively engaged in the life of the church. A church (2) does not see itself as necessarily over against the world. There are all sorts of things in the world-at-large that the church wants to embrace and celebrate. You cannot imagine, for example, says Troeltsch, that a sect is necessarily going to embrace Review for Religious the world of the arts and sciences, whereas the church commu-nity will. It embraces the artistic values and the scientific hopes and dreams and goals and methods of a community at any given time. In comparison with a sect, there is a much greater sense of collaboration between people in the church and people outside it. It tries to build bridges. It is a community, therefore, that is much more stable than a sect community. You can be born into a church community; you have to be reborn into a sect community. The idea, for example, of an infant baptism or an infant initiation into a sect would be simply impossible, whereas it is perfectly possible for a church community. The church community sees itself as a process of lifelong nur-ture, whereas the sect community emphasizes radical, dramatic conversion experiences. The danger for church-style community, says Troeltsch, is of course that it can become too secular, it can end up being, as it were, a tool for social stability used by the soci-ety- at-large. Notice that he is not claiming one is better than another; he is setting up--and I am just giving a thumbnail sketch--he is setting up two types of community that he can use as tools with which to examine the history of various church communities. He wants to ask: What is this like? Is it more like a sect? Is it more like a church? In what ways is it like a sect? In what ways is it like a church? Now, why do I propose to you that this is an interesting way to think about religious life? Because Troeltsch makes, almost in passing, one of the most suggestive comments that I have ever seen about religious life in the Catholic tradition. The Catholic Church--certainly back in the first decade of this century when he was looking at it from his own vantage point--is one of the purest church types of organization. He says, however, that the Catholic community has had for many centuries a peculiar and brilliant way of incorporating into itself the most vital, most insightful, most valuable elements of sects that grow up within the ambit of the Catholic community. It makes them religious orders. I suggest to you that--if you think of a community gathering around Anthony in the desert, gathering around Benedict or Scholastica, gathering around Francis and Clare, gathering around Dominic or Ignatius Loyola--you certainly can see those groups as matching up very closely with what Troeltsch has to say about sect communities. You cannot be born into these groups, you have Janua~. -Feb~wa(y 2000 Himes * Returning to Our Ancestral Lands got to choose to join. It is a matter of discerning a vocational call. There is a radical break with a previous kind of life in order to enter one of these groups. They are marked by clear and certain images of what mission is and what goal is, and how you shape people to accomplish that goal. The goal includes seeing this com-munity as being very much over against the community-at-large. The group is not simply part of this world, and it is marked as not being part of this world by a kind of rejection of this world's dom-inant values. The danger here is that, if the group is not in some way stabilized by the structure of a church, it can melt away in two or three generations. Troeltsch, of course, pointed out the other danger too. The problem for the Catholic tradition is that, although the church model stabilizes the sect model by "turning sects into religious orders," in Troeltsch's phrase, it can suddenly turn the religious order into simply another branch of the church model--and thus lose the vibrancy of the sect model. I suggest that, if we are going to reclaim ancestral lands, one of the things we have to do is look to vital religious communities to be sects in the Troeltschian sense of sects. We have to look for communities of people who see themselves as personally called, called to a clear and decided mission, and who see themselves as in some way in contrast to the community around them, even in contrast to the church-at-large around them. Now, for how that happens, let me move to Part Two. Some History of the Development of Church Life I would like to make a hundred thousand qualifications, but, so that you can go to bed tonight, let me just give a very general description. I suggest to you that, up to the present moment, there are three stages to the history of religious life in the Western church. The first stage in the Western church--quite apart from the origins in Egypt and Syria and Asia Minor in the East--runs for about seven hundred years, from the middle of the 5th century to the middle of the 12 th century, roughly from A.D. 450 to 1150. If we are looking for an example of that first period, it is the Benedictine movement. What is religious life? Religious life for those first seven hundred years of the Western church is first and foremost a community of persons who have come together and Review for Religious pledged themselves to a life of poverty, a life of celibacy, a life of prayer and contemplation done in community. Why is it so important that it be done in community? Well, there are two versions of St. Athanasius's Life of Anthony of Egypt. We do not know which is the real one--whether the shorter one is due to somebody's cutting it down after Athanasius died or whether the longer one includes stuff that somebody added after his death. But the longer one, whoever wrote it, has a striking comment. It says: "Anthony went out to the desert to lead a life of radical devo-tion, deep prayer, and obvious poverty, and in doing so he became a source of wonder. But, when a community of others gathered around him, then he became a sign." That is a very perceptive comment. Living out your life in a radical gospel way makes you a source of astonishment, but what validates you as a sign to the church is that you can do this in a community. Let me put this another way (much less eloquently than the author of the longer life of Anthony does): It is possible to be poor, chaste, obedient, and nuts. We all know that. What guarantees that you are poor, chaste, obedient, and sane? Your ability to live with other people without either killing them or being killed by them. The community is what validates the vows. So this idea of living in community is very important and was very important in the Benedictine tradition from its outset. Clearly there are multiple variants of the monastic ideal throughout those seven hundred years, but that is the image of religious life that dominates the first stage. What is religious life? It is a community of people who come together to live lives of poverty, of celibacy, of devotion and prayer and contempla-tion- and often study too--and who do it in community. That is religious life. That reality has something brand-new added to it in the middle of the 12th century, and for a very practical reason. A whole new class of people emerges in Western Europe in the 12th century: the urban poor. One of the things that marked the end of the ancient world was the collapse of cities in Western Europe. In the early Middle Ages, society is essentially rural, A whole new class of people emerges in Western Europe in the 12th century: the urban poor. Janualy-February 2000 2 Himes ¯ Returnin~ to Our Ancestral Lands largely agricultural. There are no great cities for very obvious reasons: the barbarians. Let me remind you here, when we talk about the barbarians, not to picture Jack Palance with a mustache and a horned helmet swooping down to burn and pillage cities! That may have hap-pened along the way too, but, when we talk about the barbar-ians, all of us who are English, Irish, Welsh, or Scottish, Scandinavian, German, Polish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Sicilian, or northern Italian (from anywhere in Europe but a little piece of land stretch-ing from Naples to just north of Rome)--when we talk about the barbarians we are ta!king about grandma and grandpa. The bar-barians are our ancestors. As they moved into Western Europe, as the empire collapsed, these ancestors of many of us were not stupid. They knew stuff. They knew it takes a lot out of you to burn and pillage. A really good pillage takes a lot of energy. You are not going to waste your time burning and pillaging little one-horse towns. You are going to burn and pillage big cites--that is where the loot is to be got-ten. Since the inhabitants of the Roman empire in its last days were not stupid either, they quickly realized it is much safer living in the little towns than in the big cities: you are less likely to get sacked and pillaged. So, at the end of the ancient world, all over Europe, there is a sort of massive flight to the suburbs. Cities decline, lots of small towns spring up. In that world, how did the church care for people? Well, it was not a money economy. If you were going to found a parish, you were not going to do it with cash. Cash did not mean any-thing in the Middle Ages. Value was in land: it was the land's produce that could support a parish. So some wealthy donor says, "In this town I am giving this field to support the church. It can support two priests so that they can minister to the needs of the people of the town." The problem is, of course, that land is not easily transferable. At the start of the High Middle Ages, from around 1050 on, small towns began to decline in population as people moved back into big cities. In towns where once there were a hundred house-holds, now there were twenty, but there still were two priests for those twenty. Other towns were growing as centers. Where there used to be a hundred households, there were now five thousand households, but there was still only one priest, who was supported Review for Religious by the land donation from centuries before for that town. It is not easy to adjust parish boundaries and clergy resources. So there were growing numbers of people in the major cities of Western Europe who were largely unchurched. Nobody was preaching to them, nobody was teaching them, nobody was lead-ing them into the Gospels, nobody was celebrating sacraments for them. Who was going to tend to these people's needs? New reli-gious communities appeared, communities dedicated above every-thing else to the service of the urban poor. What do they need? Do they need evangelization? We preach. Do they need teaching? We teach. Do they need nursing? We nurse. Whatever they need, that is what we provide. If Benedict and Scholastica are the obvious figures of the first stage, Francis, Clare, and Dominic are the great figures at the start of the second stage, approximately I 150 to 1550. In the course of the Catholic reformation, both prior to and as a response to the Protestant reformers, the church realized that it was going to have to do much better regarding the challenges of a new world. One of the reasons that Luther had such an immense impact--besides the fact that he was immensely insightful--is that he wrote well. He wrote in German and, with the printing press available, turned out lots and lots of copies of relatively short books in the vernacular. Why was it that people like Cajetan and Eck did not have much luck responding to Luther? Because they were turning out thick books, in double columns, in Latin. Nobody was going to read them, even other professors, and so Luther had an impact, whereas initially much of the Catholic response did not. For this third stage we needed a new way to respond to people's needs. Although nobody calls it this, one of the ways was, in effect, the division of l~bor. What we needed was to streamline our styles of pastoral ministry. Instead of communities of people doing what-ever was needed, we were now going to have communities of peo-ple, both women and men, who specialized. We taught young women, we taught young men. We went to the foreign missions. We did nursing. We took care of the elderly. It became clear that different communities had unique apostolates. That model--and I think one can take the Jesuit~ as in many ways the example of this third stage, the embodiment of it--has lasted with great power and great success right down into our own lifetimes. Let me point out something that pertains ~o both the second and the third stages. Something enormously important shifted in Janua~:y-February 2000 Himes ¯ Returning to Our Ancestral Lands the course of the 12th century and, after more than eight hun-dred years, is still decisive for today's religious communities. It still affects what members do: we do this ministry to the urban poor. We do this particular kind of ministry for those who "need" it. What does this presuppose? It presupposes the situation during the second and third stages of Western religious life; it presup-poses people in need. It presupposes a world, and a church, in which the laity were essentially passive. Who was going to do the teach-ing, the preaching, the nursing, the caring, the evangelizing? It was going to be people in religious vows. The simply baptized members of the church--they were the recipients of ministry, they were not people who ministered themselves. An enormous shift happened when Vatican Council II called for a truly alive, energized, and ministerially responsible laity. Because of that shift, inevitably there was going to be some sort of identity crisis for religious life. If what makes me a religious is that I am one of group of people who perform such and such a ministry, and if nowadays other people who are not in vowed life, who are not celibate, and who are not living in community are doing the same ministry that I am doing, then what makes me a religious? Previously the identity of the religious--and I could make a similar case regarding the clergy--has been: "We are the people who do x, Y, and Z, and the laity are the people who have x, ¥, and Z done for them." The laity have been essentially passive recipients of ministry. The moment one begins to talk about the church as a community of people all of whom are called to some kind of ministry by baptism .(and not primarily by religious pro-fession or ordination), then everything shifts. That is why I suggest that we are at the end of the third stage and the beginning of a fourth stage. What does the fourth stage look like? Well, I have not a clu& Actually I may have a clue, but it is nothing more than a clue. Let me hasten to say that one of the occupational hazards of people who pretend to know something about the past is to think that they know everything about the future. With that caution in mind, I speak now with a good deal of self-suspicion, and you should hear it with even more suspicion. It is at least possible that a mark of the next great stage of development of religious life in the Western church--it may look more like the first stage than like stage two or three--is that there is a recentering on the nature of living vowed life in community rather than on any apostolate or mission of ours. That, perhaps, is Review for Religious the characteristic of the next stage of religious life. If that proves true, then a category that may be helpful for religious to consider more deeply and theologically is sacramentality. I am not referring to the great seven public and communal sacraments. I mean the much wider and in many ways much richer notion of sacrament, with a small s. And what is that sacrament called? What does sacramentality consist in? I give you Himes's handy-dandy definition of the sacra-mental principle. I have given it often, and it seems true. (After I hear myself say something long enough, it seems to me that it is true!) The definition of the sacramental principle is, I think, this: Whatever is always and every-where true must be noticed, accepted, and celebrated somewhere, sometime. Those things which are always true, those things which are constantly present to us, are almost always ignored. You do not pay attention to the oxygen in a room until it starts t6 go stale. While you have been reading this, you have surely been blinking periodically. Unless you have found my words altogether boring, you have not been counting your blinks. A couple of years ago ] got hit with a bout of Bell's palsy. I could not move anything on the left side of my face, and I could not blink. Throughout the day I had to periodically pull and hold my eyelid down, and tape it down at night. You become very aware of blinking when you cannot do it. When you can do it, when it takes care of itself, you do not pay any attention to it. In order to accept something that is there all the time and make it effectively present, to us, we have to learn to attend to it, to say yes to it, and to celebrate it. What is omnipresent to us? Well, God is: the self-giving of God. That self-giving of God we call, with the benefit of theological shorthand, grace: the self-gift of God's Trinitarian life outside the Trinity itself. It is everywhere. The whole world is just dripping with it; the whole thing is satu- A mark of the next great stage of development of religious life in the Western church is a recentering on the nature of living vowed life in community rather than on any apostolate or mission of ours. Himes ¯ Returning to Our Ancestral Lands rated with grace. But, precisely because that is true, it can be ignored. What is always present is seldom noticed. Whatever calls you, whatever person, place, thing, whatever sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, whatever experience leads you to he aware of, to attend to the reality of God's self-offering to you at that moment, to be able to say yes to it and to rejoice in it-- that is a sacra-ment. All told, how many sacraments are there in the world? How many things are there in the universe! That is what I mean by sacramentality. In that sense of the word--and this is where I am going to pick up the theme from Troeltsch in Part One--in that sense, religious life is a sacramental state within the church. We do not recognize that this is a sacramental state the way we recognize marriage as a sacramental state within the church. But it is in fact sacramental because, after all, religious are called to a deep sense of poverty, to a deep sense of responsibility toward and obedi-ence to the needs of those around us, to a responsible use of celibacy that recognizes our dependency on one another and on God. Is there anything there that everyone in the church is not called to by baptism? Why, then, do we need religious life so much? Because religious life "clearly, strikingly, astonishingly" (in the words of St. Athanasius's Life of Anthony) leads the church to see what the whole church is called to by baptism, to see it clearly and strikingly in a public and communal embodiment that helps people toward realization. Sacramentality is something that may be crucial for everyone's lively understanding of whht religious life is about and what its relationship to the church-at-large is and can be. How to Be More Sacramentally Aware How do you enliven this sense of sacramentality without repli-cating past forms? How do you rescue age-old values? How do you reclaim ancestral lands without simply going back to old build-ings or forms or structures? What can be done? I begin with a perceptive definition I learned from Jaroslav Pelikan, the distinguished historical theologian recently retired from Yale University. In his Jefferson Lectures at the University of Virginia a few years ago, he said: "We must be very careful to dis-tinguish between tradition ahd traditionalism. Tradition is the liv-ing faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." Review for Religious One is the continuing, living, vital faith that energized those who have gone before us; that is tradition. Traditionalism is faith main-tained by some among us that in fact is already ossified, entombed, embalmed; there is nothing left in it that is energizing. It is the dead faith of the living. How do we begin to reclaim the living faith of our ancestors? I know that this is going on in religious communities at this moment; it has gone on for a good deal of time. But I urge that it continue, and continue precisely in terms of sacramentality. How do we reflect on the meaning of the vows again? Is it possible that the fourth stage of religious life in the Western church into which I believe we are entering is more like religious life in the first stage than the second or third? As a word of preface, let me say that I have thought about this a good deal. Though I am not a religious, I do share with you a vow of obedience and I do share with you a vow of celibacy. I do not share with you living in community, although in fact I have lived in community. My brother Ken lives in a community of Franciscans with only six other people, and I lived in a house at the seminary in Huntington with fourteen other priests and sixty-five seminarians. I used to tell him: "You became a Franciscan and live in a rectory. I become a diocesan priest and live in a monastery." It is wonderful how God moves things around! The thing that has led me to think about this most is the vow I do not have, the vow of poverty. I find that the things I have vowed are not something I have to think about. I know what obe-dience means. The bishop calls me up and says, "I want to see you about doing x, Y, and Z." And I. say, "Okay, bishop, let me come and talk with you." There is'a structure to that. I do not have to get up in the morning and think: What does it mean to be obedi-ent today? That is taken care of. I do not have to think about what it is to be celibate. I know what means: that is taken care of. There is a structure to that too. What is not structured for me is poverty, and so it is a real problem. What does it mean for me as a university professor to talk Much as been written about poverty in recent years that is very powerful, but it is useful rhetorically more than actually real. Januat3~-Febrtta~y 2000 Himes ¯ Returning to Our Ancestral Lands about poverty when I do not have a vow of poverty? How, then, as a baptized member of the Body of Christ, do I incorporate poverty? That is a big issue, and I have thought about it. This is my pref-ace to what I am now going to say about the three vows. Much as been written about poverty in recent years that is very powerful, but it is useful rhetorically more than actually real. It assumes that poverty is about identification with the poor--I am convinced that it is not. I expect some people to say "Oh, but it is.t" I wish it were, but I do not think so. My reason is this: There is an enormous difference between my deciding "I will not eat today" and actually having nothing to eat. If I decide not to eat (even though there are tons of food in tt(e refrigerator) because I want to identify with the poor by going to bed tonight with an empty stomach, I am forgetting something. For me there will be break-fast tomorrow morning, but overnight the poor are thinking: "I would love to have eaten today and I couldn't, and God knows whether I will get anything to eat tomorrow morning." These are simply totally different experiences, and I think it is nothing but self-serving romanticism to say, "Isn't it wonderful that we have identified with the poor!" I think that is just false, and I think it is dangerously false because it is overly romantic. 20 What Is Poverty? I turn to my brother's tradition. Who is the wisest one to have talked about poverty in the Western church? Francis of Assisi. Nobody is wiser on it than Francis. And I suggest that what Francis saw is very much in a line that starts with Augustine. But Francis saw its implications in brand-new ways. What is the most famous line from Augustine? What line does everybody know from St. Augustine? "You made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You." (A pastor in a diocese not far from here famously used to get up on any saint's feast and say, "Ah, today we remember St. Cuthbert of Auxerre, who is famous for that wonderful statement of his, 'You made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless . '" According to this pastor, every saint had said it--or must have said it.) Well, what is Augustine saying? He is saying that all crea-tures- not just all human beings, please notice, but all creatures-- have one deep characteristic. That was what Francis saw so clearly. That deep characteristic is this: At our core, at our heart, we are Review for Religious empty. There is hunger, there is restlessness. The characteristic human experience is "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but more!" You have never known a human being who did not want more. The totally satis-fied, totally fulfilled human being is dead. If you want to see a totally filled human being, drop into your local cemetery. The fact is that what marks us as human beings is endless restlessness, end-less hunger--more, more, more, more, more. I say sometimes to students: "If somebody you know ever says, 'I have everything, I am everything, I know everything, I have experienced everything that I could possibly want, I am perfectly and totally satisfied,' ask the person this: 'Would you like it to last?'" If you had everything, what you would want is more time. There is never a moment when we do not want. That is the characteristic of being a creature. This is what Francis saw and recognized as uniting us with all of creation. That is what Francis saw in the mystical marriage with Lady Poverty, and it is what motivates the Canticle of the Sun. V~y is it Brother Sun and Sister Moon? VVhat is it that makes the moon and the sun, earth and water and air and fire, what makes everything my brother and sister? The fact that we all are marked by one great family resemblance: we are all poor. We did not make ourselves. We are all ultimately dependent. Nobody is fulfilled. If that is true, then poverty is what unites us with all other creatures. If that is so, then I suggest that poverty is the key value in the vows. My own reading of the relationship of the vows is that there are not three. There is one, and two further explications. The cen-tral vow is poverty. Celibacy and obedience are ways of being poor. But poverty is the central one. And the point about poverty is: It is not a social condition first of all, it is not an economic condition first of all. First of all, it is metaphysical; it is what makes you you. To embrace poverty publicly is to embrace, publicly, being a human being. Being poor is being human publicly. It is to embrace the human condition. It is to recognize that there are radical limits on me, limits of time, ultimately. A time is going to come when I will breathe out and think "Gee, I'd like to breathe in"--and it will not happen. There is going to come a time when I will say, "I would like just to get to tomorrow morning," and there will not be time for me to get there. There are limitations on time, there are limitations on energy, there are limitations on strength, there are limitations on courage, there are limitations on wisdom, there are limitations on knowledge. Ultimately I have to look at that and say, "And it is a good thing! I embrace it." Poverty is central. Januao,-Februa~y 2000 '-3! Himes ¯ Returning to Our Ancestral Lands Celibacy is a way of saying that very publicly. I told you that I think there is an overly romantic element in much that has been said about poverty in recent years. I think a huge amount of fatu-ous slop has been written about celibacy. I think that much of what has been done on celibacy in recent years is the most patent non-sense. We have all sorts of stuff saying it is perfectly possible to be celibate and a completely fulfilled and happy man or woman. Junk! The fact is that 99.999 percent of the human race has found, does find, and presumably always will find that the most significant relationship in their lives is being someone's spouse and someone's parent. If I come along and say: "Well, I am no one's spouse and I am no one's parent, and it does not matter a hill of beans. I am just as happy as can be. I am just as fulfilled as you can get. What 99.999 percent of the human race thinks is so important really is not important at all"--well, that is arrogance, stupid arrogance. The whole point of celibacy is, of course, that you are unfulfilled. But, if you can be publicly unfulfilled and still be an intelligent, free, responsible, loving, brave, wise, concerned human being, then your life suggests that maybe "fulfillment" is not what human-ity is about. Your life is a public witness to the fact that unfulfill-ment is what is characteristic of being a human being. To go around saying "Oh, we're all fulfilled" is to make hash of the whole of the Franciscan tradition. It is to make nonsense of Augustine's restless heart. Manifestly the human race is unfulfilled, and so, when some-body says "Here I am, a publicly vowed celibate," he or she loudly proclaims: "I am unfulfilled, and that is okay. We are all unful-filled. I am just publicly noting the fact. I am a reminder, a clear picture, of the fact that you are as unfulfilled as I am. I am just publicly acknowledging that fact in a particularly striking way." The same thing is true with obedience. Obedience has nothing to do--or almost nothing--with the submission of one person's will to another person's will. That is anti-Christian thinking. The whole point of our relationship to the will of God is that I do not subject my will to God's will. I discover that God's will really is my will, that God's will is what undergirds my will. It is not a question of "Gee, I want this and God wants that and, by hook or by crook, I've got to pull myself around to want what God wants." That is a misunderstanding of God; that is a destructive picture of God. What does obedience mean? Above everything else, it means poverty in the face of facts. Obedience is, above everything else, a responsibility to what is: not what you would like, not what you had Review for Religious hoped, not what you wanted, not what you wished, not what you feared, but what is. I used to tell my students that, when you are talking about obedience to a superior, when you are talking about obedience to a bishop, the point is this: You are newly ordained and you get assigned to a parish. You are just the best thing that ever happened to kids. John Bosco looks like a piker. This is just the best thing that ever happened to teenagers. You are gung-ho to work with kids. It happens, however, that at the moment you are needed in this parish. There are not a lot of kids; younger fam-ilies have moved out; it is, in fact, a very elderly neighborhood. If you say, "Well, I just don't work with the elderly, I work with kids," you are being disobedient. You are not being disobedient to the bishop, you are not being disobedient to the pas-tor, you are being disobedient to facts. The fact is that these are the people who are here. You are the person on the spot--serve them! If you find yourself saying inside, "Well, you know, I am not really good at serving them," let yourself hear them saying "Yeah, I know. We've noticed." And then notice that you are the only one there. If the Titanic is going down and you are the nearest ship, do not say, "Well, you know, it would crowd breakfast so terribly to take on these other passengers." The ship is going down. Get over and save them! That is obedience to facts, and it is poverty. It is the recogni-tion that, hey, there are some things I am good at and some things I am not good at. Sometimes I am in positions where what I am not good at is what is most necessary. Then I have to give it my best even though it is clear that I am not going to do very well at it. I may also have the responsibility to say, "Somebody else in here might be a lot better at this than I am." But until that happens I am here, and I will get to work. That is real obedience. It is, once again, poverty. It is a recognition of the limitations of our histor-ical placement. I have been given this time and this place. I would have been just a knockout in the 18th century. In the 18th cen-tury I would have been just wonderful. But there was a problem: I was not begotten until the middle of the 20th century. So, no matter how great you would have been in the 18th century, you What does obedience mean ? Above everything else, it means poverty in the face of facts. January-February 2000 Himes * Returning to Our Ancestral Lands were not there. Likewise, you might be the best thing that could ever happen to the church of the 24th century. But, unless you have really good genes in your family, you are not going to be there. This is the only century you have; this is the one you bet-ter relate to even though it might not always be the one you wanted. That is the experience of poverty. Celibacy, obedience--both variants of poverty! Why is it so important that religious life seize that value of poverty and be a sign of it for the whole church? Because it is the experience of being a human being. It is the deepest truth about us as human beings. It is what the rest of us, in all sorts of ways, come to grips with or else try to hide from ourselves. Amid all these human beings, there should be communities of women and men who say in the strongest, clearest, and most striking way: "I, too, am poor, and it is good. This is what it is to be a human being." Now, how do you convey that truth to people? Well, it will he different from person to person, from community to com-munity, and from place to place. You cannot replicate the past. If you had known Dominic or Francis, Scholastica or Teresa of Avila, if you had known Ignatius or Vincent de Paul or Jane Frances Fr~myot de Chantal, perhaps they would have said, "I never had a disciple as good as this." But, you see, they never said that. You are not a contemporary of theirs; you are a con-temporary of mine. Francis of Assisi does not need you, but I do. So do not try to relate to Francis of Assisi or Jane Frances, but make a good attempt of getting to me. When, by retaining or recovering important values we "return to our ancestral lands," we are not thereby called to sow the ances-tral crops. Ancient lands can bear new crops, and new crops are needed for a new generation of people. I predict that, in the next fifty years, religious life is going to experience an explosion of growth. It may look different than we expect. Some older com-munities may die or merge--or meld into newer communities. Not every community will experience an explosion, but there will be an explosion of people living publicly vowed lives in community as sacramental signs to the rest of us of how the Christian tradition understands genuine humanity. I predict that sects, in Troeltsch's meaning, will be powerfully witnessing to the church so that the church is not allowed to become a hidebound and ossified insti-tution. This explosion will happen because the church could not survive without it--and we have the Lord's word that the church Review for Religious will survive. But I do not know how it will happen. The how ques-tion has never been the forte of the church, which, in its own poverty, only just manages to keep going. These observations are those of a passionate religious watcher. In some new ways, religious life will still be there in the future, for the church needs you. I have no doubt that, if only I could live thousand years longer, I could write a whopping good book about that future. Questions for Reflection and Discussion 1. What elements of religious life have been eclipsed in recent years and need to be reclaimed? 2. How do we reclaim values without retreating to past forms? 3. Where do our particular religious communities fit in the development of vowed life in the church's history? 4. How can we establish community in religious life when the community is not its own center? Blink I like to think of thegn sledding, graceful, flying down some swift hill, the white in their hair only snow, bright gloves flashing in the wind above the aluminum board not as this aged couple she scarved in purple, taking careful steps in ankle boots, clutching a brown grocery bag, he shuffling two steps ahead, the long cool silver ironing board tucked beneath his arm. Doretta Cornell RDC January-Februmy 2000 religious mission JOHN KLEIN Transforming Mission: A Spirit of Adventure On 22 March 1999 a headline appeared in the New York Times reading: "Voyage End Brings Crew Back Down to Earth." The article recounted the voyage of the first two balloonists to circle the globe, aboard Breitling Orbiter III. The trip lasted nineteen days, twenty-one hours, and fifty-five minutes and covered a total of 29,054.6 miles. During their news conference one of the adventurers, Dr. Bertrand Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist, reflected upon their experience: "It was not a matter of setting records; it was a fabulous metaphor of life. To try is the only way to survive." His compatriot, Brian Jones, a former member of the British Air Force, added: "We are not heroes. We just proved that dreams could come true.m Later in the interview Dr. Piccard admitted that the journey posed significant risks, struggles, and sacrifices. Confined in their 16.5 foot-by-10 foot capsule, freezing cold, and often lack-ing water, the adventurers nearly abandoned their effort several times. Piccard said, "When one of us was about to give up, the other would support him." This Magellanesque journey offers us a fabulous metaphor for our lives as religious leaders. Like Piccard and Jones, we find ourselves on a journey demanding John Klein FMS gave this presidential address at the August 1999 assembly of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men (CMSM). His address is Marist High School; 1241 Kennedy Boulevard; Bayonne, New Jersey 07002. Review for Religious that we move beyond preconceived boundaries, one that forces us to tap into unsuspected personal and corporate resources, one that calls us to risk and trust and sometimes upset the status quo, one that invites us to dream of new possibilities and challenges, one that beckons us to move from the center to the margins. Religious leadership today is truly an adventure extending Jesus' mission to proclaim the kingdom and to make God known and loved. Mission is a description of Jesus, the Son of God, who invites us to be adventurers and dreamers with him. The daily realities of our work, however, do not permit us to escape being administrators, managers, fund-raisers, therapists, legal experts, and arbiters. Who has the time and the energy to dream and to participate in an adventure? How can we become "unstuck" and move forward the renewal of religious life? The church historian John W. O'Malley SJ has said, "It is more diffi-cult to reform a religious order than to found one.''2 Our expe-rience during the past thirty years certainly confirms this. Nonetheless, our role as leaders offers us a wonderful opportu-nity to influence and design the future, remembering that this project of religious life is God's work and not ours. With hope, like Jacob waking from his dream at Bethel, we can say of our time and our struggles, "Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it" (Gn 28:16). With confidence, like St. Paul in his Second Letter to Timothy (1:6-7), we can remind each other that "God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but rather a spirit of power and of love." It is in this spirit that we can face the future and set out on an adventure not of our design, but God's. John Gardner in his book Self-Renewal offers a sobering pre-diction if we opt to respond otherwise. He says: "If people are apathetic, defeated in spirit, or unable to imagine a future worth striving for, the game is lost.''3 We cannot lose this game. On the contrary, we need to see our present situation as opportunity. We need to articulate a high level of expectations for ourselves, the members of our congregations, and the institutions we own and sponsor. We are called to do this in a culture that does not share our values, but rather extols individualism, tends to privatize reli-gion, and fails to engender a true sense of community. Archbishop Rembert Weakland recently highlighted this challenge, asserting that "one of the most difficult pastoral tasks of our day., that has challenged the renewal at every turn is precisely how to overcome the cultural bias of our age toward the individualistic. ''4 Janumy-February 2000 Klein ¯ Tran~fomning Mission Our religious communities have not remained immune from these societal influences. On the contrary, society has tended to co-opt us and has led many religious to make private accommo-dations to religious life. This cripples our mission, diminishes a sense of esprit de corps and solidarity, and saps our energy and possibilities for the future. "The Nygren and Ukeritis study already warned that, despite their language of prophecy and sol-idarity with the poor, many religious in the United States may be far more accommodated and assimilated into the dominant cul-ture than they like to believe. The penchant for individualism and self-fulfillment so characteristic of this culture has found a ready berth in many religious communities. Self-determination has eroded communal and institutional commitments.''s Given this situation, how are we as religious leaders called to respond? I believe that we can discover the answer by reflecting on the example that Jesus provides us. The Letter to the Hebrews (12:2) refers to Jesus as the pioneer. He is the one who goes before us to offer the example and then returns to us to point the direction and to reassiire us that he is always present with us. Jesus is the adventurer calling us to join with him in mission and to fan the embers our commitment into a flame spreading new life and hope. Like us, Jesus found himself engaged in mission, searching for ways to engender new life, struggling and sometimes discour-aged with a disparate band of disciples, and confronting a society at best indifferent to his values and vision. How did he respond? What was and is Jesus' mission? How did he endeavor to foster new life? How did he pursue his mission and commitment? How did he accomplish the transformation of the lives of his disciples and the many others whom he touched as well? By probing these questions we will begin to perceive ourselves as part of a unique adventure that will transform our mission and foster new life. However, we do not probe the questions alone. This effort must be a collaborative and communal one. While we do not need everyone in our province or congregation to participate in this effort, we do need a "critical mass" of people to share the adventure. Only this will move our mission and our group for-ward. "What we dream alone remains just a dream, but what we dream with others can become a reality.''6 If we willingly dream together in faith, then our mission will be transformed and we will have the confidence that our best years are ahead of us. In all of Review for Religious our efforts together, Jesus, the pioneer, presents the lens through which we can discern our course of action and catch a glimpse of the religious life of the future. This is particularly true in three aspects of his mission that challenge us today: Jesus' deep spiri-tuality and relationship to his Father, his commitment to mis-sion at the margins of society, and, finally, his formation of an intentional community of disciples to carry his mission forward. Our following his response in these areas will, I believe, offer the compelling ways through which we will discover our unique role in society and the church. Jesus appreciated better than anyone that to be in close, intimate relationship with God inevitably makes people countercultural and dis-tinctive. It places them in a dangerous situation, making them as disciples part of a cultural minority. This minority cannot help seeing the world and society through different eyes, the eyes of Jesus. This vision encourages those who follow Jesus to choose new life by loving the Lord, our God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him (Dt 30:15-20). Seeing reality this way meant new life for Jesus also, for his profound spirituality caused him to turn society's values on their head and, in the process, made him a dangerous person. We see this clearly in Jesus' table fellowship. He ate with scribes and Pharisees, with the poor and destitute, with tax col-lectors and sinners. By breaking boundaries, risking disapproval, and "imaging" the reality of God for the people of his time, Jesus made his mission, the proclamation of the kingdom, tangible. It was in food-and-drink situations that he revealed the divine gifts of joy (Mt 9:15), pardon (Lk 7:47), salvation (Lk 19:9), and super-abundance (Mr 14:15-2 I). It is at table that we witness the trans-forming conversion of Zacchaeus, Jesus' example of servant leadership, and the opening of the weary disciples' eyes at Emmaus. It is therefore primarily at his table, at his Eucharist, where we religious will find new life for our mission. It is at his table that we will encounter him through the lives of sinners and outcasts, our brothers and sisters, realizing that the margin is our home too. In his message for the World Day of Peace, Pope John Paul II exhorted us to "recognize Christ in the poorest and the most marginalized, those whom the Eucharist--which is communion What was and is Jesus' mission ? Janualy-Februaly 2000 Klein ¯ Transforming Mission in the body and blood of Christ given up for us--commits us to serve. As the parable of the rich man, who will remain forever without a name, and the poor man called Lazarus clearly shows, 'in the stark contrast between the insensitive rich man and the poor in need of everything, God is on the latter's side.' We too must be on this same side.''7 The side of the poor and disenfran-chised is the side where the religious man and woman must be found. Whether or not we work directly with the poor, we can-not escape the imperative of seeing the world with the eyes of the poor. This attitude, then, will inform our prayer, our work, and our lifestyles. The Gospel of Luke reminds us that the sign that Jesus is "the one who is to come" is that the poor are having the Good News proclaimed to them. In this Jesus gave flesh to his kingdom and illustrated that the reign of God is now. Our mission as reli-gious leaders represents the continuing participation in his incar-nation. Our mission calls us to illustrate that economic and social boundaries are artificial, made by human hands. Our mission proclaims that, if "we truly want to see the glory of God, we must move downward with Jesus. This is the deepest reason for living in solidarity with poor, oppressed, and handicapped people. They are the ones through whom God's glory can manifest itself to us. They show us the way to God, the way to salvation.''8 To ignore the sorrows and needs of others is to ignore the flesh of Jesus and to deny the incarnation. For us to make the "option for the poor" a reality will mean a conversion of mind and heart. It is a conversion that will find its source in prayer, reflection, and Eucharist. It is a conversion that demonstrates itself through simplicity of lifestyle and sensi-tivity to those less fortunate than we. Too often we have claimed the adjectives prophetic and countercultural for ourselves. It would be far better that others attribute them to us after seeing the way we live and work and pray. They will do so if we make certain that our rhetoric and our reality coincide and that our lifestyles reflect charism rather than just personal choices. Johann Baptist Metz once wrote that "religious orders are a kind of shock therapy. ¯ for the church as a whole. Against the dangerous accommoda-tions and questionable compromises that the church . . . can always incline to, they press for the uncompromising nature of the gospel and the imitation of Christ. In this sense they ire the insti-tutionalized form of a dangerous memory within the church.''9 Review for Religious Our mission today is to be dangerous as Jesus was and to make Metz's description of us real. This mission is by its very nature a communal one, and I believe that new life for the mission of Christ will be found, not necessarily in endeavoring to enliven already existing local com-munities, but rather in forming new intentional communities within our groups. In addressing the obstacles to refounding a religious community, Gerald Arbuclde acknowledged that efforts to "move" or "change" a group inevitably encounter significant resistance. Hence, he says, "The new belongs elsewhere." These communities, similar to the one Jesus formed with his disciples, have mission at their center and heart. Mission conse-quently operates as their chief source of connectedness and energy. Members of an intentional community realize that they cannot minister to others outside unless they live in a community founded on inter-dependence and a mutuality informed by faith. This faith life sensitively balances the needs of the community and those of each individual and finds sharing of faith to be indispensable to its life. This inevitably leads to a high level of trust that allows mem-bers to challenge one another's behavior in light of a commonly accepted vision and goal. While these intentional communities meet some of the emotional, social, and intellectual needs of its members, they are in no way therapeutic support centers. An intentional community is "a group of religious living together who feel the need to be supported in their ministries and willingly commit themselves to develop a gospel-centered intimacy to be expressed in shared faith, ongoing conversation, and shared action."1° In short, an intentional community is one that has a clear and visible and easily identifiable way of life. Such a group offers the world what it does not find elsewhere: a community of faith, friendship, and mutual support engaged in an adventure larger than itself. In writing about his hopes for Dominican communities, Timothy Radcliffe OP, the master general, highlighted the impor-tance of such communities for the future of religious life. These groups, he maintained, carry within themselves seeds of new life. Communities similar to the one Jesus formed with his disciples have mission at their center and heart. January-Februaty 2000 Klein ¯ Transforming Mission "Unless a province plans the building of such communities, then it dies. A province with three communities where the brethren flourish in their Dominican life has a future, with the grace of God. A province with twenty communities where we just survive may well have none." it To say the least, we religious at the threshold of the new mil-lennium face significant challenges as we participate in Jesus' adventure. Allowing God to transform our mission and ourselves will not be a process devoid of risk and some pain. Nonetheless, to do otherwise would rob our religious families of the new life necessary to bring them into the future and, as a result, would put at risk our contribution to the mission of Christ. In the conclu-sion of Vita consecrata, the Holy Father asserts that religious "have not only a glorious history to remember and to recount, but also a great history still to be accomplished! Look to the future, where the Spirit is sending you in order to do even greater things" (VC §110). A real test of our faith and gospel hope is our belief in the truth of John Paul's words. Martin Heidegger once compared the journey of life to a person walking in a huge forest where it is pitch dark, where it is raining and thundering, and one has completely lost the way. There is a bolt of lightning and for an instant the way is clear. Then it is dark again. All one can and must do is keep going in the direction one saw illuminated by the lightning flash. This is our challenge and our opportunity: to keep going, to trust that God is faithful, to remember the way in the light of those key moments through which God intervenes in our lives. Most of our life we must move ahead in darkness, sustained in our faithfulness by what we once glimpsed when, if only for an instant, everything was clear.12 Notes ~ New York Times, 22 March 1999, p. 8. -' John W. O'Malley SJ, Tradition and Transition: H#torical Perspectives on Vatican II (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1989), p. 97. 3 Albert DiIanni SM, Religious Life as Adventure (New York: Alba House, 1994), p. 108. 4 Rembert Weakland OSB, "Liturgy and Common Ground," America 180, no. 5 (20 February 1999): 9. s Robert J. Schreiter, "Challenges and Directions of Religious Life at the Turn of the Millennium," Address given at the inauguration of the Center for the Study of Religious Life, 21 June 1998, p. 11. Review for Religious 6 Ronald Rolheiser OMI, "Religious Life in America Faces a Change of Epoch," paper prepared for the Inter-American Meeting in Toronto, May 1999, p. 13. 7 Pope John Paul II, "Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace," 1 January 1999, p. 21. s Robert A. Jonas, Henri Nouwen (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998), p. 35. 9 Gerald A. Arbuckle SM, From Chaos to Mission: Refounding Religious Life Formation (Strathfield, N.S.W.: St. Paul's Publications, 1996), p. 11. ~0 Arbuclde, From Chaos to Mission, p. 15 I. " Timothy Radcliffe OP, Pastoral letter "The Promise of Life," 2 February 1999, p. 3. ~2 John Fullenbach, Prodaiming His Kingdom (Manila: Divine Word Publications, 1992), p. 190. The Joys of January Beautiful month of the cold, clean slate: nothing mars its pristine glare. Starlings stare, perched on empty limbs shaking in their purity. The air bears thoughts of ice. Wind cuts through whispers. Walls show us where twigs scrape messages: deliver words, deliver us: bend, blow beautifully, winter stems. Wake us. The dark recedes, we see our breath, a flickering. Light. Mary Kennan Herbert Janua~. -Febmtmy 2000 A. PAUL DOMINIC Evangelization as Religious Mission of Joy Spurely, in the Indian experience, joy has not been a strong oint in religious life, in fact or in principle. This came to me as a rude shock twenty-odd years ago during a chat with a couple of sisters. As I was leaving their place, one of them made a particularly religious sort of request: "Father, will you please pray for vocations to our congregation?" I replied at once, though with some inner hesitation, "Why pray? If you are all happy, the girls will simply flock to you!" When I said this, I did not know I was echoing the mind of Pope Paul vI revealed in his 1971 apostolic exhortation Evangelica testificatio (§55). I must not have impressed them, for one of them said to me later, "But you must know we are religious!" Though that was not a recent event, attitudes of this type do not change in a single generation--though I would like to be proved wrong. Incidentally, the rumor of joyless religious life is not an exclusively Indian phenomenon: most of the religious con-gregations here have been transported from the West. Why, the very fact that a paper on consecrated life as anointed with joy was read in 1998 in San Antonio, Texas, at the annual confer-ence of vicars of religious implies that even modern American religious are not above the need of awakening to joy in their life of consecration.' A. Paul Dominic SJ last wrote for us in November-December 1995. His address is Satyodayam; 12-5-33, S. Lallaguda; Secunderabad 500 017; India. Review for Religiota This sad state of affairs in religious life is a reflection of Christianity in general, which has been accused of joylessness by both Westerners and Easterners. Nietzsche, for instance, has ridiculed the claim of Christians to have been saved by Christ. If it were really so, he argues, why could they not look joyful instead of appearing so remarkably gloomy? The Indian Shree Rajneesh, quite celebrated in his way, has been no less categorical in his attack on Christian attitudes. "Christians say that Jesus never laughed!" he alleges, and counters: "Now this seems to be the ulti-mate in stupidity. Jesus . never laughed? Then who else can laugh? . . They have made his picture very sad-looking, long-faced, burdened. This is not possible. This is utterly wrong.''2 All this non-Christian aspersion may well serve as a goad, particularly for us religious, to discover or rediscover the characteristic joy of Christ and enter into it (see Mt 25:21 and 23) and thus be evange-lized, that is, "gladdened by the good news" of our redemption. The Oil of Gladness It is heartening to observe that, in the biblical experience, there is a joyous anointing, besides several others. This joyous anointing is bestowed on the righteous king, that is, the king who loves justice, producing the pleasure of the people without seeking his own fortune (Ps 45:3-8). Who can this joyously anointed king be but him whose very name is Christ, meaning, of course, "the anointed one"? He is the one who, as no other, can witness to his joy in this fashion: "I was beside the master crafts-man, delighting him day after day, ever at play in his presence, at play everywhere on his earth, delighting to be with the children of men" (Pv 8:30-3 I). If, by virtue of baptismal consecration, every Christian shares in the life of the joyously anointed Christ, what may we conclude about those consecrated further by religious profession? Being anointed with the oil of gladness is no doubt a charism person-ally received; it is, however, not to be enjoyed as a private pos-session, but to be ever passed on for the surprise enjoyment of others. If religious are genuine enough, they will necessarily make their anointing evident, for the joyous enhancement of others. Leading lives of contagious joy" because their God is the joy of their never ending youth, they will liberate the masses from their oppressed lives and lead them into the same joy. January-Febrnary 2000 Dominic ¯ Evangelization as Religious Mission of Joy All truly enlightened persons, whatever their religion, would share in this lofty, uplifting, and truly religious sentiment of theirs. People's innermost recesses would be affected, and there-fore the social fabric too. For instance, among the Hindu Tamil saints was Tayumanavar, who prayed out of the abundance of his holy joy: "That all should be happy is my one wish, Almighty One! This is the only thing I know!" The Christian ashrams here in India have, in proper inter-religious spirit, followed suit in earnest and have introduced, somewhere at the beginning of Lauds, the singing of the Sanskrit sloka "Lokah samasta sukhino bhavantu," which means "May all the world be happy!" This vision of joy, flowing to us from God and necessarily flowing to others from us, is certainly wonderful. How do we make this vision vivid to ourselves and transparent to others in a practicable, communicable way? The Religious Way of Joy The way to experience joy in God is, first and foremost, to enjoy our life, basically and paradoxically, in its human and of course ecological dimension. There God will be available, not absent. For one thing, where joy is there will be no room for complaining. Complaining is a root of the atheist's mindset (see Ph 2:14-15). Habitually complaining persons construe everything as wrong, in sharp contrast to the divine intention exhibited in creation and providence (see Gn 1 and Mt 5:45), and so they can-not subscribe to any belief in God. Even if they claimed to believe, their belief would be the result of some psychological or religious conditioning and so only superficial, if not spurious. Rajneesh warns against such joyless nominal faith, advocat-ing an increasing enjoyment of life as the way to find God-given joy in ourselves. He says: Any small thing is full of God! So love this life . Eat, enjoy the food, and let God come to you as a taste. Listen to music, get lost in it, and let God come to you as sound ¯ . . as harmony. Let God descend on you slowly, without any hankering to catch hold of him . Just open yourself as much as possible--to the trees, to the birds, to the rains, to the sun, to the sands¯ Open yourself wherever you are; absorb, and gratitude will arise . And you will not know towards whom this gratitude is arising. When you don't know towards whom., it is towards God) Review for Religious Does this not read like a poetic rendition of the Contemplation to Attain love offered by St. Ignatius at the very climax of his Spiritual Exercises (§§230-237) to train people to find the joy of God no less outside their retreat than in it? Again, does this not evoke the following bold and originally controversial remark of St. Paul? "If I partake with thankfulness, why should I be denounced because of that for which I give thanks? So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God" (1 Co 10:30-31; see also Col 3:16-17). Again, does this not read like an expository commentary on the praxis and pronouncements of Jesus? He, whose mission was to make known the heart of God to humanity, did not speak explicitly about God as much as he spoke about the happiness people longed for. He assured them that they were des-tined for joy, and, to prove it, he went about doing good for them in ever sur-prising ways. He fed them in their hunger without being asked, and he sat-isfied them. In that way he led them to discover for themselves that it was God who fed them to their heart's content. He healed them of their many illnesses and gladdened them and in that way enlightened them about how God meant them to be healthy and happy. His teaching was new precisely in proclaiming that they were at the threshold of an altogether new blessedness, thanks to the unique intervention God was initiating in humanity. He declared a new law, the law of beatitude (see Mt 5:1-10), for all, but particularly for the poor, that is, for those who longed for blessedness (see Lk 10:23-24). All this would have been offensive to people who abided by their fixed religious ways without, however, conspicu-ous happy living. To those who made much of fasting, for instance, he declared himself against it unless times and seasons made sense of it and demanded it. Indeed, he approved of feast-ing before fasting, gladly characterizing himself as one who came in the spirit of God's new time, eating, drinking, and partying in marked contrast to his predecessor, and not fighting shy of the The way to experience joy in God is, first and foremost, to enjoy our life in its human and of course ecological dimension. .~anualy-Februa~y 2000 Dominic * Evangelization as Religious Mission of Joy nicknames "glutton" and "drunkard" that some hurled at him. Because he found the joy of God in feasting in God's name, he could also, paradoxically, find the God of joy while abstaining from any feast. Is it not quite revelatory, when we come to think of it, that the word feast denotes both a lavish meal (as at a wed-ding) and a periodic religious observance? Christ was persuaded . that God himself was feasting, and so he would urge people undertaking a fast to present an appearance of joy (Mt 6:16-18). Whatever delightful stories of God he told had invariably the magic spell of joy in life. The stories suggest that only those who have known the joy of a wedding feast, or a bumper harvest, or an unexpected catch of fish, or giving birth to a child, or finding a lost coin or son, or stumbling on a treasure, or seeing and being a child, and so forth, could understand and delight in God. They as much as say that anyone who has known none of life's ordinary joys would be unable to know, let alone enjoy, God in their life-- even though God, as the source of all other joys, is a joy well above life's mundane joys. So Christ's call to joy was constant and compelling, encouraging us to be open to unnoticed joys around us and then to greater joy: Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? . . . Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you--you of little faith? Therefore do no worry, saying, "What shall we eat?" or "What shall we drink?" or "What shall we wear?". Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. (Mt 6:26-32) All who have known and enjoyed God thus in life will hope-fully carry this, their basic thrill of happiness, all through their life and will further develop their happy character through life's tasks, trials, and temptations. Anointing Others with Joy Like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, the more we become what we are (namely, anointed with joy) by growing in the joy that abides in us from our looking at Jesus, the pioneer Review for Religious of our joy, the more we shall be able to anoint others with joy. Sensing this dynamic of joy, how does one move in this mission of joy (evangelization, translated literally)? Basic to any move in relation to others is openness to all so that all may have life. The joy within us, if genuine, will be free from all conditioning by others and will contrive to make every-one welcome indiscriminately. This is what Christ did. He who said "Let the little children come to me" in an age when they counted for little had much the same attitude of welcome towards all, Jew or gentile or Samaritan, Pharisee or Sadducee or rogue, man or woman, young or old, high or low, rich or poor, clean or dirty, learned or illiterate, virtu-ous or sinful, and so forth, irrespec-tive of all segregations prevailing in his day. When he did make choices, however, it was doubtless towards the poor of all sorts, showing compas-sion for the multitude that was like sheep without a shepherd, saying that he had come for sinners, not the virtuous, and that the Spirit had anointed him to bring good news to the poor, to prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed. And so they, the poor masses, who Jesus sadly foretold are with us always (more glaringly now than ever before), have the greatest claim on our mission of joy. How do we set about this privileged mission? Thefirst move must be to initiate or maintain solidarity with people in their joyless situation, following the incarnation's prin-ciple of bringing joy to the world. We need to be one with them as far as possible. Ideally, of course, we should be so much one with them that nothing differentiates us from them in sur-rounding society. Meanwhile every attempt we make in this direc-tion will be an opening of joy to the unfortunates with whom we seek to share our own joy. During my turn as chaplain at a home for the aged, the day I began eating with them at their own table (something they had never seen before) was a matter of undreamt-of joy for them, far more beneficial than my liturgical or homiletic performance. The ontological principle actio in distans repugnat is no less sociological and evangelical. When Jesus sent his disciples The joy within us will be free from all conditioning by others and will contrive to make everyone welcome indiscriminately. January-February 2000 Dominic * Evangelization as Religious Mission of Joy on mission, what was he doing but bridging the gap between the teaching tribe and the taught? In his clear instruction to them to stay and eat happily with their hosts, what was he aiming at but their insertion into their very midst? When he himself was at home in the company of the sick and suffering and sinful, what was he exhibiting but his identification with their milieu? The second move must be to respond to the felt desires of those whom we have chosen to serve foremost in the promotion of joy. The Bible has as much to do with this as with the worship of God (see Is 58:6-10, Am 5:21-24, Mi 6:6-8). However much we may have identified with various persons, we may be mistaken about their drives and urges. That is why we have not had in great numbers the likes of St. Peter Claver and Blessed Katherine Drexel in the history of slavery, or of Bishop Romero and Corazon Aquino (once president of the Philippines) in the much delayed popular struggle, or of Little Sister Madeleine of Jesus and professor-turned-preacher Peter Reddy pitching their tents on the fringe of society.4 To work today toward a better future, it would on our part be best if we had people spell out their desires and then responded to them. Though at times Jesus' benefac-tions were a surprise to the beneficiaries of them, often he led people to be aware of their needs and then proceeded to respond to those needs, and bring joy (see Mk 10:46-52, Jn 4:4-42, Jn 5:1-9, even Mt 20:20-23). Besides this, he was quick to sense and fill the deeper spiritual needs they felt in spite of, or along with, their physical or social ones (as in the cases of Mary of Magdala and Joanna, Bartimaeus, Zacchaeus, the Samaritan outcast, and the Gerasene demoniac). Unlike him was the North American priest working in a South American parish who, to his dismay, discovered from his old cat-echist that his people, whom he had raised economically to a sat-isfactory level, were leaving him for a newfound evangelical pastor because they wanted to hear the glad news of the gospel. The third move in our mission will be, therefore, to lay bare the hidden needs of the spirit, at whatever level people may be, and to bring them to a higher level that engages their own inner resources. There is a time and reason for attending to and filling their mate-rial needs, and also for sensitizing themto higher needs and, with the conviction learned from Jesus, inviting them to higher joy: "But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well" (Mt 6:33). Review for Religious Reality may seem to fly in the face of this assurance, but can-not negate it altogether. People like Paul, who by God's grace knew a deep joy in penury as well as in plenty (Ph 4:11-13), show the truth of Jesus' words. In declaring that God has a higher claim on people and fills a deeper need than ordinary earthly liv-ing makes them concerned about, Jesus was not being naive. Well aware of the problematic reverses of human life, he was aware too of the privileged reserves of the human spirit. And so he would train people in tested, mature happiness by his winning counsel: "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows" (Mt 10:29-31). This stance leads us to the fourth move, namely, to encour-age and fortify people caught in suffering to rise above it and emerge in joy. Would this work in life? It can and does, because it did in Christ's life. Even though all through his public life he encountered opposition from many quarters and faced threats to his life from authorities like Herod, he carried on his work with joyous determination and courage that were the mark of his unflinching faith in God. When his disciples were sorely troubled by his uncertain future, he reassured them emphati-cally: "Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy" (Jn 16:20). He urged them to ask the Father for any-thing in his name and to count on receiving it so that their joy might be complete On 16:24). The fifth move will be to witness to the revelation of how exceptionally suffering people may anticipate their joy in their very suffering (as Jesus himself did), and not in spite of it. At the end of his life, when the worst of his fears were to overtake him, he made a celebration of his last meal, carried himself with joyous strength of an unusual kind, and imparted to his dis-heartened disciples his sure vision of their future mission of suc-cess with words of comfort: "I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete" (Jn 15:1 I). He concluded by asking the Father that his distraught disciples might have his own joy made complete in their very selves (Jn 17:13). From his personal experience he could witness to the joy of the persecuted poor, not only in principle by declaring them Janumy-Februal~ 2000 Dominic ¯ Evangelization as Religious Mission of ,yoy blessed (Mt 5:10-12), but also in practice by bringing public recognition to people who were quietly but surely joyful, such as the poor widow who made an offering to God of all her sav-ings with sure, spontaneous, though unglamorous, joy (Mk 12:41- 44). The most moving story of this kind that I know is this: A woman took a priest to her home to" show him a secret of hers. Hidden in a corner was her bedridden eight-year-old son, with the body of a child and the head of an adult, with a darting tongue like a snake's. Seeing the sight he groaned; but she did not hear it, for she was saying, "Father, I have looked after this child for eight years now. He knows only me. I love him very much. Almost no one knows about it." In speaking thus warmly of her son, she did not hesitate to speak happily about her God as well: "God is good. God is our Father.,,s The more such secrets are known, the more joy will abound on the earth! The sixth move in evangelization is to declare, after due dis-cernment, how the good and glad program of God for humanity is being carried out even at the social level. Christ began his min-istry of joy at Nazareth, making precisely such a discerned dec-laration to his townsfolk. More than Jesus' proclamation of the good plan of God for their welfare, what pleasantly surprised them was the accompanying announcement of its effectiveness then and there in the very workings of their society (Lk 4:21). All through his later ministry, too, he was intent on making peo-ple recognize the growing social implementation of the divine plan carried on through the mediation of works of gladness done by himself (Lk 7:18-22 and 11:20) and like-minded others, whether among his explicit followers or unattached admirers (Mk 7:1-9, 9:11-12 and 38-40, and 12:34; Lk 10:i0-11 and 18-19). In our evangelization, therefore, we need to be on the watch to dis-cern and broadcast the divine reformation and revolution willy-nilly taking place in the world, thanks to our cooperative works, small or big, and those of many, many others, done--in the spirit of the Servant of Yahweh--quietly, steadfastly, and effectively (Mt 12:19-21). Even as we rejoice and lead others to rejoice in the magnalia Dei present in contemporary society, we also know and cannot deny the ungodly contradictions that afflict our web of life covertly and overtly. The best move in this situation--and this is the seventh and last move in our task of joy--is to channel into our world the spirit of the Book of Revelation, namely, a mood of Review for Religious faith and hope: faith in God revealed in the great works of joy already experienced, and hope in God preparing greater works, of which our mind has not conceived but of which there has been an earnest within our experience. One of the most fervent expres-sions of such an experience is the ancient song that nevertheless sounds new: "Though the fig tree does not blossom and no fruit is on the vines, though the produce of the olive fails and the fields yield no food,.yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation" (Hab 3:17-18). Mary, Mission of Joy What is the Magnificat but the above ancient hymn sung in a new melody? Surprised by joy, Mary celebrates God in her new song for all his works of gladness wrought in her and her society of the lowly, down through the ages. She rejoices in her own deeds of happiness, too, which God inspired her to perform for the benefit of the lowly and indeed of all humankind. She inspires and urges all those interested in similar works to become part of the hopeful, joyful movement to which God gives increasing momentum for his glory and our bliss. Following her Son in all matters of life, she precedes us religious like a wise guide in all matters, even in our evangelical mission. Notes ~ See Review for Religious 57, no. 6 (November-December 1998): 605-620. 2 Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, I Say unto You, Vol. 2 (Pune, India: Rajneesh Foundation, 1980), p. 172. 3 Rajneesh, I Say unto You, pp. 217-218. 4 Reddy (1895-1958), a convert, renounced his professorship in a Jesuit college in Tamil Nadu and became a pilgrim beggar and vagrant preacher. See J. Cherupallikat, Witness Potential of Evangelical Poverty in India (Immensee, Switzerland: Nouvelle Revue de Science Missionnaire, 1975), pp. 117-121. s See Leonardo Boff, The Lord's Prayer (Indore, India: Satprakashan Sanchar Kendra, no date), p. 88. January-Feblvtary 2000 finding God ROBERT % COSTELLO Discovering God in Gaps Joseph Cardinal Bernardin influenced millions of peo-ple. As I read accounts of his life and watched the tele-vision coverage of his death and funeral, I was intrigued by a paradox. Cardinal Bernardin wrote, shortly before his death in November 1996, that his last years were the best and worst of times. He said he loved being Joseph to his people and seeking to build bridges between diverse church elements. He told of struggling to free himself from a "need" for success, a "need" to avoid criticism; he told of struggling to trust. He said he was whipsawed by groups asking him to carry their diverse banners. Then came the shocking conspiracy to brand him for sexual misconduct. After displaying immense courage amid the harsh publicity, he gained a growing respect and influence during the slow onset of the cancer that brought his death. Joseph Bernardin's influence peaked in his vulner-ability to the plot to defame him, his care for his false accuser. His example suggests a paradoxical experience in leadership, one which raises engaging questions. Are there implications for church leaders in the cardinal's Robert T. Costello SJ, onetime professor of psychology at Rockhurst College and former provincial superior of his order's Missouri province, currently does retreat work at the Guelph Centre of Spirituality; Box 245, Station Main; Guelph, Ontario; N1H 6J9 Canada. Review for Religious behavior? Is there even a hint for a spirituality for others beneath the dramatic circumstances he found himself in? Several experi-ences of mine have suggested an answer. The Southdown Institute is a residential treatment facility for priests and religious and offers monthly workshops for provincials, diocesan chancellors, and council members return-ing for aftercare with former residents. Asked to be a party to those sessions while on staff, I found myself filtering their expe-riences through memories of previous ~:esponsibilities of mine. This led me to sense that Bernardin's curious enhanced power had meaning for other leaders in the church. The leadership participants spoke of their stress at having to make choices about subordinates while pulled between conflicting values and options. They had to decide between what was empathic and tolerant on the one hand and firm and objective on the other. So it seemed to them. I describe this situation as "being in a gap" between an objective managerial function and an empathic pas-toral inclination. It is as though there is no one to turn to when a decision must be made. The cardinal was in a contradictory sit-uation or gap between defending his personal reputation and addressing what he learned were the spiritual needs of his accuser. I believe that this experiential dilemma, this gap, is worth exploring. What is involved in a church leader's experience of the gaps in administration? What Is a Gap? I define the gap as the tension a leader experiences in choos-ing between opposing goods such as compassion and impartial-ity. Should one postpone a difficult decision until there is more information, follow an intuition, or get on with a community's organizational needs? I consulted journals to better understand a paradox I felt was present in gaps. I also shared my quandary with three peo-ple presumably well versed in gap pressures. A general's assis-tant said that the gap issue deals with a leader's spiritual sensitivity to find God in the stressful situations. An assistant to the late Pedro Arrupe likewise suggested that gaps involve the spiritual meaning one disc6vers in the ministry of leadership. The provincial of a large community recalled being pulled by uncertainty and yet needing to act with determination. These January-Februa~7 2000 Costello ¯ Discovering God in Gaps responses added to my interest in the paradox that unintended influence emerges when a leader experiences a "centrifugal" effect from weakness and strength. Church leadership is a hybrid role of prophet and executive, of inspirational guide and money manager, a role which is bound to involve the kind of gaps we are discussing. It is different from the role of a business or professional leader (Nygren and Ukeritis, 1993). Empathy is an obvious part of the job description, but so is resolute confrontation. Workshop participants at Southdown spoke of pride in their organization's history, joy in their work, but also pain in conflicted relations with members. They said the stress was to be patient and challenging with fragile personalities while remaining focused on pressing tasks like building commu-nity consensus. One participant recalled that a lawyer's advice about a personnel issue seemed heartless but persuasive. Such circumstances required taking valuable time to address inappro-priate behaviors, being supportive of the person but still pursu-ing larger organizational issues. The research data of Nygren, Ukeritis, et al. (1993) broad-ened my notion of the gaps church leaders encounter. The authors uncovered nearly a dozen pressures which both pull and restrain religious leaders. For example, there is a strain between cultural individualism on one hand and the gospel values calling to relationships on the other. They wrote that leaders should be partners in the process of renewal, not initiators. Leaders also needed to establish mutual relationships. Their research found that generosity in some members was being eclipsed by self-pre-occupation. They noted that fewer religious espoused a prefer-ential option for the poor because of responding to personal calls for self-determination, making assignment difficult. This litera-ture, however, did not address an aspect of the leader's experi-ence I sensed in the life of Cardinal Bernardin and recalled, in a way, from my own years as a provincial. I found myself curious about his power. Eventually I had a clearer sense that there were unique tensions or gaps in the power differentials of leaders and community members. I originally had an unexamined, even patriarchal, conception of power: it produces effects. Thus the religious leader buys or sells property, approves vows. She can influence events in for-eign countries. Power makes things happen for individuals and a community and can be a unilateral influence. I also mistakenly Review for Religious suspected that leadership's authority was in the office or person. I believed that ideally Bernardin's considerable power would leave him unaffected if he exercised it adroitly. In .other words, good leadership could, should, and would produce a win-win result. I recalled, though, having nagging doubts after making some deci-sions. Those are what I was coming to recognize and identify as my gap experiences. A second conception of power grew out of curiosity about how the cardinal remained so influential aJ~er the conspiracy to besmirch his reputation collapsed. There was power and influence in how he allowed himself to be unaf-fected. I could understand people admiring his humility, but the pro-found impact his dying had on people puzzled me because I thought media frenzy would stain his integrity and reputation. I finally saw that there was power in how he allowed himself be affected. Power was being both active and passive, doing and receiving. When a Southdown workshop participant recalled a member's death from AIDS and the scandal which developed, I found his empathic reaction powerful. Gradually I saw that this second conception of power was a pas-sive reality that makes church leadership both personally demand-ing and spiritually challenging because church structure expects spiritual meaning to be acknowledged. Authority, then, seemed somehow to be a mutual influence. As the publicity swirled about him, Bernardin's stature seemed to increase with each gentle assertion, of his innocence and his belief that somehow the truth would appear. He pressed on with his plan to develop greater harmony in the Catholic Church of the United States while continuing to empathize with his accuser. He was in a wrenching gap. After he was exonerated of sexual impropriety, he threw himself into work only to be diagnosed With terminal cancer, but that is another story and a different stressful situation. Nygren, Ukeritis, et al. say that leaders viewed their source of power as residing either in themselves or in others. A leader who assumes personal authority is able to be assertive, while a Church leadership is a hybrid role of prophet and executive, of inspirational guide and money manager. January-February 2000 Costello * Discovering God in Gaps leader who considers the source of power to be in others becomes more interdependent or tentative. Note here that these sources of power are not mutually exclusive and inevitably result in the internal struggles (gaps) that are at issue here. For example, a leader who stands on his or her own authority and is objectively assertive in dealing with members may generate resistance and be labeled autocratic. A leader who sees his or her power as derived from others can become paralyzed by members who disagree and resist consensus. A conception of passive power I found most enlightening was that of Bernard Loomer (1976). He described it as relational power. His concept helped me understand the paradox of Cardinal Bernardin: giving and receiving influence. This kind of. power is not an either/or capacity, like deciding to act or not act in a certain way. With Loomer's guidance I will digress on two faces of power: Power results from being influenced and Power preserves rela-tionships. Power as being influenced is not a contradiction. One workshop participant spoke of selling a building that had great symbolic value for her community and openly sharing the pain of it, thus leading the community to "get through it." A second par-ticipant spoke of compassionately confronting the stony silence of a member who violated a fiduciary relationship. Such gap expe-riences are clearly intense--but how are they powerful? The Challenge of Gaps Gaps challenge leaders to expand in "size," that is, to make room in their minds and hearts for opposing realities, such as the limits of human adaptability juxtaposed with situational demands. Gaps stretch leaders, and the power is displayed in the manner in which they embrace what is needed but only possibly achievable. Gaps pull for courage and commitment to the uncer-tain benefit of another, and this edifies and empowers. Cardinal Bernardin exercised power by being mortified on CNN over the accusation thrown at him of sexual abuse. He gent-ly absorbed the humiliation of being asked on television if he was sexually active. He also showed the size of his heart by refusing to countersue his accuser, while at the same time working (in what must have seemed another world) to build consensus among divergent elements in the church. Size is prodigal power because Review for Religious it demonstrates that stress is absorbed for the uncertain benefit of others. The cardinal's power was shown also by his refusing to unleash a legal assault on the conspirators with his available resources and by his believing that this conspiracy could not crush him. Size deals with the interior authority of the person; I find it godlike. A second face of power is manifest in someone who actively preserves relationships. In Loomer's view here, power is the capacity to sustain the mutuality of giv-ing and receiving. Individuals with per-sonal problems often refuse .such mutuality by erecting rigid boundaries as a way of securing whatever power they have. Bernardin's relational power consisted in the months of effort he spent trying to establish a vulnerable connection with his accuser, not in any brandishing of his status, with its vast legal resources that would only have cre-ated a wider gulf. In the end, both men contributed to and were nourished in the relationship because of thee inequalities of power. This was for me a surprising real-ization: one of the greatest influences anyone can have on another is being influenced by that person. Therein lies the power available in gaps. As I spent time musing about this issue, I came finally to a new understanding of some of my leadership experience. I grasped that my deep pain over the shrinkage of religious life was sad-ness over others' "poor discernment" or "lack of courage": "If only those departing had consulted more astute advisors, they could have fallen out of love and remain and resolve their issues" ¯ . . "If only they had more grit, things could be as they were-- and we have such need of their gifts!" I was helpless in the face of diminishment, but also hopeful there could be unimagined surprises in it. And yet I conceived these gap experiences as noth-ing more than stress due to my personal limitations. Cardinal Bernardin believed that meeting his accuser just might set the man free. He actually went to the man, faced his understandable resentment, brought about reconciliation while pressing on with the archdiocese's business. That demonstrated Gaps pull for courage and commitment to the uncertain benefit of another, and this edifies and empowers. Jannary-Februa~y 2000 Costello ¯ Discovering God in Gaps his size. The cardinal seemed detached from the scandal, and it appears his anchor was in spiritual meaning he attached to this ordeal. He "knew" the truth would appear, that he was innocent and it was possible somehow to be vindicated. He recalled that Jesus pledged his life in the interest of others in the face of their mis-understandings and abandonment. This was the quintessential experience of absorbing the stress in a gap for the benefit of a dream or a commitment. It was relational power. The paradox I sensed in Cardinal Bernardin's life connected with two other men whose conversions influenced me: C.S. Lewis and Ignatius Loyola. Lewis wrote that as a child he was "stabbed" by intense feelings of joy. He seemed obsessed with recapturing this experience and spent years trying to re-create it by exploring the riches of the arts and nature. He suspected he was trying to cook up emotional thrills. After years of frustration in this quest, he concluded he was seeking the wrong quarry. He had confused the affective experience of joy with its object. The sought-after emo-tion was only a cheap reminder or a footprint of a presence. An extraordinary realization. There was no other answer because all his introspection dissatisfied him until he accepted that the value of joy was in its object, in something else, in a presence--in God. While admitting I am on uncertain ground, for me Ignatian detachment means that in leadership as well as life we must hold ourselves in a kind of balance before all things, insofar as we have a choice. In the present context, whether a gap ended with pos-itive feelings would not be the issue; rather, it would depend on which alternative led the cardinal to greater self-donation and compassion. This detachment, no matter how experienced inter-nally, calls forth a more loving response to life's circumstances, which is a presence even if experienced as stress. In my view, this interpretation describes the experience of gaps religious leaders often have when detachment produces negative feelings which demand that they increase in size. My mistake was to attribute stressful feelings to the "cost" of leadership, nothing more. I had focused on my experience of stress, not its object. I think, as well, that Ignatius considered the actual feeling in spiritual consolation to be unrelated to a venture's success or failure. This was enlightening in the face of how hard it is to associate the stress or occasional bitterness in gaps with anything like God's confirming presence. I had supposed that God is sup-posed to be present in consolation (involving joy), not in uncer- Review for Religious tainty or regret (due to my painful limitations). I recall a con-soling sense of satisfaction after a community meeting that went well--who would not feel deep joy in a win-win situation? But sit-uations of angry conflict that emphasized one's own poverty in coping with it seemed altogether different, as they did for par-ticipants at the Southdown meetings. As I was learning, though, Ignatian consolation can coexist with stress and uncertainty when there is a conviction of possible benefit for others. The conflicted stress that people in leadership positions experience seems to be located between what is possible for them and what is unimaginable. Leadership routinely deals with possibil-ities and constraints in people or situa-tions, and so gaps are inescapable. My own experience and comments of others at workshops convince me that Ignatian detachment and consolation give these gaps further meaning: gaps are a time of the Spirit's presence in the stress. Ignatian consolation is an affective experience directed toward God and the world and away from self, an experience that can be stressful--as when one hopes that one's own experience of a difficult interpersonal exchange may just possibly be for the good of the person and the situation. No person in history staked as much as Jesus on the merest possibility that fidelity to his convictions could be redemptive for people, notwithstanding experience to the contrary. The stakes were so high because one side of the gap meant Jesus could be deluded while the other side presented only a flimsy possibility that the kingdom he desired would ever eventuate. The stake seemed to involve the exhilaration of wagering it all, staying in the gap, believing and hoping in the possible. From this perspective, the continuing power of Jesus is the unbounded size he mani-fests because there is room in his heart for all. More humbling than finding oneself in such a gap is a sus-picion that some leaders get about themselves. They wonder whether they seek to walk this way of possibility or rather are sought by God to walk it. In my reflection I admitted, without comprehending why, the possibility of their being sought. And Ignatian consolation can coexist with stress and uncertainty when there is a conviction of possible benefit for others. January-February 2000 Costello ¯ Discovering God in Gaps that makes all the difference when they make their stake to walk the way of possibility to the end, because they believe this service will be redemptive., for someone. Just like Christ's stake. References Bernardin, Joseph Cardinal. The Gift of Peace. Chicago: Loyola Press, 1997. Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956. Loomer, Bernard. "Two Conceptions of Power." Process Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring 1976). Nygren, David J., CM, and Miriam D. Ukeritis CSJ. "The Religions Life Futures Project: Executive Summary." Review for Religious 52, no. 1 (January-February 1993): 6-51. Nygren, David J., CM, Miriam D. Ukeritis CSJ, et al. "Religious- Leadership Competencies." Review for Religious 52, no. 3 (May- June 1993): 390-417. Ordinary Time Hoarfrost ages the discarded Christmas trees. Fog mutes the soul, and dampness chills the heart. In ordinary time we wait, like puffed-out birds, upon a frozen limb of time and seek for solace in the hearing of the Word. Ed Block Review for Religious DENNIS J. BILLY Devotion to God the Father in Religious Spirituality Ln some parts of the Catholic world, this article may draw w readers and perhaps outright protest. Among some reli-gious today, "Father" as referring to God might well be under-stood as an ideological catchword linking a speaker or writer, regardless of his or her intentions, with a slew of suspected atti-tudes (clustered around "patriarchy") about which questioning and disapproval would likely arise. Confronting Our Experience In such situations the anger evoked by an uncritical refer-ence to God as Father can be intense and highly vocal. A reaction to such anger could itself be a mirror image of the original--but in the opposite direction. "Every action has an equal and oppo-site reaction," as the saying goes. If care is not taken, this coun-tervailing process of action/reaction can spiral out of control and leave members of the believing community "poles apart." In such instances, division and animosity replace the dialogue and mutual respect that should characterize the believing com-munity. We should be saddened by such results, but not surprised. Human beings are weak and fragile. Even with the best of inten- Dennis J. Billy CSSR delivered this paper (here somewhat revised) in spring 1999 at the Institute of Spirituality of the Angelicmn in Rome. His postal address is Accademia Alfonsiana; C.P. 2458; 00100 Roma; Italy. Janua~y-Febrt~my 2000 Billy * Devotion to God the Father in Religious Spirituality tions, they can easily allow rancor and strife to get the upper hand in their lives. The same holds true for the communities people form, even religious ones. As the world gets smaller and smaller, I would not be surprised if the local Christian commu-nity and the local religious community reflect more and more of these complex and highly charged emotional tensions. Such is the nature of a world where technological advances have made mass communication practically instantaneous and where the communication media purvey religious sentiment for a society increasingly definable as a consumer market. Anything goes, if it will sell--better still if it will sell quickly. Package it well enough and you will get a large enough following to support your ideas. Besides, everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion. Right? If so, then we can call God whatever we please. Why not? I would be astonished if, among the readers of this journal, there is not a wide spectrum of strong emotional responses to my topic. Indeed, some of us may experience the full range of these intense emotional reactions in our own hearts. Some of us may have no problem whatsoever about referring to God as Father. Some of us may feel a certain ambivalence about the term and not quite understand why we feel the way we do. Some of us may feel guilty for feeling that way. Some of us may be confused and uncertain and may wonder h6w a simple phrase like "Our Father" can evoke such strong and conflicting emotional reac-tions. And some of us may be dead set against using such a term, regardless of what we say at Mass and regardless of what Scripture and Tradition, the pope, the magisterium, and even Jesus have to say about it. A reason for the vast array of reactions may be the ambiva-lence (and, in some cases, outright hatred) some people harbor toward their own fathers. Social historians speak of the weak-ened role of fatherhood in Western society due to tremendous upheavals brought about by the Industrial Revolution. As Western society became industrialized during the 19th and 20th centuries, the population gradually shifted from rural, agricultural areas to the cities and their outlying areas. Fathers went off to work in fac-tories, sometimes traveled long distances to get there, and returned home tired and hungry at the end of a long day with little energy for anything else. Over the years.this resulted in a culture with largely absent and disengaged fathers, who spent most of their time away from home and who had little direct Review for Religious contact with the inner workings of family life. Their job was to provide shelter and to put bread and butter on the table. Nothing more; nothing less. The image of the distant and detached father reading his evening paper, smoking his pipe, sipping his evening pint, oblivious to the needs of those around him, especially his children, is deeply embedded in many people's minds. In this century, advances in technology alleviated the situation some-what, but have created new demands on people's time and energy. These same advances, moreover, have brought much of the world under the sway of both the positive and the negative influ-ences of Western culture? If that is not enough, some people had fatherless childhoods because of war and disease. Imagine growing up without a father. People may not show it externally, but some of them have grown up feeling devastated, feel-ing abandoned by their fathers and perhaps even by God. Today households exist where the father or at least a strong fatherly influence simply does not exist. One wonders what calling God "Father" might mean in such a home. Of course, when fathers fail to take their roles seriously, when they neglect their children or abuse them with physical and psychological violence, even sexual misconduct, there is another problem about calling God "Father." Tensions grow and family situations worsen. No wonder that some people find it difficult to address God as their Father. Why should they think God would be anything but detached or remote or even violent toward them? How would you feel if you were in their shoes? Perhaps you already are. This is just a sampling of the wide range of feelings our topic can evoke. If we wish to understand what devotion to God the Father means for religious spirituality today, we need at the out-set to recognize and confront the wide range of sad experiences of fatherhood that people have had and do have. If we do not handle these problems regarding human fatherhood, theologians may look into possible new names for God and talk about them engagingly, but the names will very likely fail to make that all- We need to recognize and confront the wide range of sad experiences of fatherhood that people have had and do have. January-February 2000 Billy * Devotion to God the Father in Religious Spiritlutlity important journey from the mind to the heart. Proposed names that seem "theologically accurate" and "politically correct" are not likely ever to fit the mystery which sustains us and the world we live in from one moment to the next. If the words we use for God in prayer are somehow false, then the images they call up and our prayers themselves are likely to go awry. Defining Our Terms What does devotion to the Father mean in religious-life spir-ituality today? We have looked at various tensions to which use of this name for God gives rise in different people. Now we will clarify some of the terms of the discussion. To begin with, I follow Thomas Aquinas's understanding of "devotion" as "a ready willingness to give oneself to the service of God"; it is an act of religion, one of the allied virtues of jus-tice, and manifests itself in people's deep desire to serve God in whatever way asked of them (see ST2a-2ae.82.1 and 2). I use the word Father not in the Roman sense of paterfamilias (that is, "the patriarchal head of a household"), but in the Aramaic sense of "Abba" (that is, "Pap'a") that Jesus used to express the loving, compassionate face of God. This term has deep roots in the Christian psyche and expresses what experts in male spirituality refer to as "the deep masculinity" of God.2 Jesus himself explains this v.ery well in the Gospel of Luke when he says, "Be compas-sionate as your Father is compassionate" (Lk 6:36). By religious I refer to the way of life recognized by the Catholic Church that seeks to follow Christ through life in community and by the pub-lic profession of the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience.3 This way of life has deep roots in Christian history, belongs to the charismatic dimension of the church, and forms an integral part of its life and holiness. By spirituality, in many ways the most elu-sive of the terms I am dealing with, I mean "how individuals or groups understand and carry out the ultimate meaning of their life." It can be discussed on three levels--the experiential, the doctrinal, and the analytical--and embraces both theoretical and concrete, practical issues.4 To quote a circular letter of Joseph W. Tobin, the Redemptorist superior general, "spirituality is con-nected with basic and often unsettling questions: Who are we? Why are we? How are we to live?''s Having clarified 'my terms, I can now express the question Review for Religious posed by my topic in the following way: What are the practical consequences of lifestyle and identity for those of us in the church who seek to give ourselves in service to God, our merciful and compassionate Father, through life in community and the public profession of the evangelical counsels? This question yields no simple solution. It is very difficult and complex, one that holds no instant solution, but must be pondered and contemplated by each community of religious and by each individual religious over and over and over again. I offer some guidelines to help in this process. Naming the Mystery Before we begin to do that, however, we must note the lim-itations of human language and its inability to exhaust the mys-tery of the divine. Language conceals as much as it reveals, perhaps even more. As Pseudo-Dionysius reminds us in The Divine Names: "God is . . . known in all things and as distinct from all things. He is known through knowledge and through unknowing. Of him there is conception, reason, understanding, touch, perception, opinion, imagination, name, and many other things. On the other hand he cannot be understood, words can-not contain him, and no name can lay hold of him.''6 The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§370) affirms this when it reminds us that we are created in God's image and not vice versa: "God is pure spirit in which there is no place for the difference between the sexes. But the respective 'perfections' of man and woman reflect something of the infinite perfection of God: those of a mother and those of a father and husband." In other words, the names we give God express something of who God is, but also fall infinitely short. Kataphatic (or "posi-tive") theology and apophatic (or "negative") theology go hand in hand. God is "Abba, Father," as Jesus teaches us, but also "our loving Mother," as the 14th-century anchoress Julian of Norwich reminds us in her Showings, and "inmost ground," as Meister Eckhart proposes in his German works.7 God can be referred to by these and a host of other religious appellations, some of which we can readily identify with, others not so readily. Perhaps it is only the "coincidence of opposites" which best expresses the mystery of God, who is known in the midst of our unknowing and who cannot be confined by our meager attempts to express the inexpressible. Janua~. -February 2000 Billy ¯ Devotion to God the Father in Religious Spirituality Theological language is fundamentally analogical in nature. That is to say, any word we use when speaking about or naming God expresses, at one and the same time, both a proportional likeness and difference. This holds true even for the word which the Word made flesh himself used to address God. Jesus calls God "Abba, Father," not to tie God down, define him, create an image of him in our heads, or (worse yet) exhaust his mystery, but to assure us that compassion and love rather than confusion and chaos lie at the heart of existence. This is precisely what the Spirit tells us when it cries out "Abba, Father" deep within our hearts and intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words (see Rm 8:15-27). Something rings true in our hearts when we call God "Abba, Father." We know that God is very much more than this two-syllable word can convey, but somehow it seems all right. We sense that God hears us, understands us, and assures us that all shall be well. A Revealed Religion Why is this so? We already have a received a glimpse of the reason above when, referring to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (§370), we noted that we are created in God's image, and not vice versa. Notice the passive voice. We are created. It is not we who do the creating. God is not a function of our language and systems of thought. We do not somehow "create" God by the names we give him or the theologies we concoct to express his divine mystery. If this were true, then theology itself would just be a sophisticated form of anthropomorphizing. In fact, God takes the initiative and reveals to us the nature of the divine. The ini-tiative is not for us to take; we are receivers. God uses human instruments, of course, which themselves are weak and fallible, but he takes the initiative. We must not forget that Christianity is a revealed religion. When it comes to naming God, it recognizes that human reason and human imagination can only go so far. On our own, all we can come up with is the recognition of the weakness of human lan-guage to express the inexpressible and the necessity of using many names so as to

Issue 54.4 of the Review for Religious, July/August 1995. ; Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published bi-monthly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Mis'souri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Telephone: 314-977-7363 ¯ Fax: 314-977-7362 Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ° 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McDonough OP ¯ P.O. Box 29260 ° Washington, DC 20017. POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ° Duluth, MN 55806. Second-class postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©1995Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library, clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for com~nercial distribu-tion, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. for religious Editor Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Editorial Staff Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Regina Siegfried ASC Elizabeth McDonough OP Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Jean Read Joann Wolski Conn PhD Iris Ann Ledden SSND Joel Rippinger OSB Edmundo Rodriguez SJ David Werthmann CSSR Patricia Wittberg SC Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living JULY-AUGUST 1995 ¯ VOLUME54 ¯ NVUMBER4 contents 486 499 5O8 mission Twenty Inner-City Years Joanna Bramble, CSJ explores feelings, questions, and insights from her effort to revitalize an inner-city neighborhood and empower its people. Corporate Sponsorship: The 1990s and the Fruits of Our Labor Margaret MaW Knittel RSM raises some questions which suggest a fluidity of vision and a loosening of ties in regard to corporate sponsorship and the fruits of our labor. Retirement's Wisdom Years Catherine M. Harmer MMS proposes that retirement for religious may be a time of deepening wisdom and individuation and a time for a greater spirituality to emerge. 519 531 guidance The Enneagram Tad Dunne examines understandings of the enneagram and suggests ways of moving to a larger world of meaning and values. Imaging Spiritual Direction Mary Vginifred CHS discusses guidelines for spiritual direction and presents three images illustrative of the relationship between director and directee. 535 56O heritage The Brazier That Is My God: Teresa on True Prayer's Dispositions, Gifts, and Signs Mary C. Sullivan RSM highlights the prayer of personal conversion wi{h its many gifts as captured by Teresa of Avila in her rich metaphor of "dwelling places." Playing with Edged Tools Donald Macdonald SMNI allows the thought of John Henry Newman to enter us into a richer appreciation of vowed public profession as a part of radical gospel living. 482 Review for Religious spirituality 566 How Am I Doing? Signs of a Healthy Spirituality Melannie Svoboda SND suggests some indicators for checking on how healthy our spirituality is. 573 Appreciating God through Creation Roderick Payne OFM illuminates the heritage of St. Francis to draw attention to some aspects of prayer through creation. 585 589 594 6OO religious life Individualism and Rel!gious Life John Gallagher CSB reflects on three options dealing with the compatibility of contemporary individualism in relation to religious life. Psychological Screening for Religious Life Kevin E. McKenna reviews the help given by the Code of Canon Law for religious congregations attempting to form a consistent policy regarding psychological reports at the time of admission and the maintenance of personnel records. Reformulating the Religious Vows William Reiser SJ reviews the meaning of vows in religious life and suggests that an option for the poor might be a promise for our times. Let's Talk Again about Poverty Richard J. DeMaria CFC probes the meaning of poverty for religious-life practice today. ¯departments 484 Prisms 615 Canonical Counsel: Cloister for Nuns: From the Early Centuries to the 1917 Code 622 Book Reviews ~tuly-August 1995 483 prisms Pope John Paul's two recent docu-ments offer vision and direction: the apostolic letter Orientale lumen (The Light of the East) and the encyclical Ut unum sint (On Commitment to Ecumenism). More than helps to enter into the third millennium, they issue a call to conversion. In Orientale lumen the pope emphasizes that our Eastern Catholic and our Orthodox brothers and sisters are earnest bearers of a venerable and ancient tradition integral to the church's heritage. He calls for all members of the church's Latin tradition to become fully acquainted with this treasure. He desires us all to be fired by a pas-sionate longing that the church's catholicity become man-ifest to church members themselves and to the world, a catholicity comprising the several traditions together rather than in opposition to one another. John Paul uses monasticism as a special vantage point from which we can identify values important today for expressing the contribution of the Christian East to the journey of Christ's church towards the kingdom. In the East, monasticism, which did not experience the differ-ent kinds of apostolic life as in the West, is seen not merely as a separate category of Christians, but rather as a refer-ence point for all the baptized, according to the gifts offered to each by the Lord. John Paul singles out the common traits uniting the monastic experience of the East and the West and forming a bridge of fellowship, "where unity as it is lived shines even more brightly than may appear in the dialogue between the churches." lie empha-sizes the splendid witness of nuns in the Christian East: "This witness has offered an example of giving full value in the church to what is specifically feminine, even break- 484 Review for Religious ing through the mentality of the time. During recent persecu-tions, especially in Eastern European countries, when many male monasteries were forcibly closed, female monasticism kept the torch of the monastic life burning. The nun's charism, with its own specific characteristics, is a visible sign of that motherhood of God to which Sacred Scripture often refers" (9). Among the values reflected in monasticism for the life of the church, the pope highlights 1) a balance in Christian life lived as a personal response to an individual call and as an ecclesial and community event; 2) a liturgy revealing the proper harmony of the baptized-in-Christ and the eucharistic meaning of all creation; 3) a maturing journey in terms of knowing self and being free and able to love as Jesus loves; 4) a tradition of spiritual guidance from brothers and sisters to whom the Spirit has granted this gift; 5) a community showing us a life of communion and service beginning in the family and extending to the wider community; 6) a unity of theology and spirituality deriving from the triune God--the principle and foundation of the Christian understand-ing that the human person is meant for and made for relation-ship; and 7) an all-pervading mystery, enveloped in awe, with which the face of our God presents us. In still wider ways the encyclical Ut unum sint continues the call to deepen the unity we seek with one another and with God. Insisting that the unity of all Christians is God's will and is at the heart of the mission Christ entrusted to his followers, John Paul begs forgiveness for times when Catholics and the papacy itself have contributed to the divisions among Christians and calls for discussion about ways in which the pope can exercise power and authority in a reunited church. He notes that a heritage of saints belonging to all communities provides hope for the dialogue of conversion. "When we speak of a common heritage, we must acknowledge as part of it not only the institutions, rites, means of salvation and the traditions which all the communities have pre-served and by which they have been shaped, but first and foremost this reality of holiness" (84). The urgency of building for the future out of the strengths of Christian heritages marks both of these papal writings. We, like the pope, need to set our sights on this unifying and evangelizing mission of all Christians, thereby living up to religious life's own spiritual heritages. David L. Fleming sJ a~uly-August 1995 485 rnissJon JOANNA BRAMBLE Twenty Inner-City Years After almost twenty years of working towards the revital-ization of West Oakland, a depressed inner-city neigh-borhood, I took a year's sabbatical of travel and spiritual enrichment. In the middle of that year, I decided not to return as director of Jubilee West, the Community Development Corporation I had helped to create. I real-ized that I had unresolved feelings about my years in West Oakland, feelings and questions that I needed to work through before I could move on to the next steps in my work for justice. The reflections below document my liv-ing with those questions. What are my usual feelings about Jubilee West? I feel proud of what it has accomplished, but often I feel deep sadness for the people whose lives have changed very lit-tle, especially the ones I knew well and tried the hardest to help. I feel deep sadness at the unemployment, the drugs, the depressed people, and the piles of garbage that are evident with only a brief drive through the neighbor-hood. I often have an overwhelming sense of failure and powerlessness: so much of my life, love, work, anxiety, joy, hope . . . and so many people still with such con-stricted lives! I feel sadness and grief that the neighbor-hood where I worked for so long was worse after twenty Joanna Bramble CSJ is a consultant to nonprofit organizations in management and program analysis and a member of the provincial council of the Los Angeles province of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. Her address is 529 Jean Street; Oakland, California 94610. 486 Review for Religious years than it was before. It is not that our work did not change anything or made it worse; it just could never do enough. But the main cause of continuing disintegration in that neigh-borhood is not my and others' lack of effort or creative ideas. It is high unemployment and the increasing sale and use of drugs, along with other systemic oppression. How do I keep aware of the interrelatedness of many situations and people and things and somehow see my place as both important and unimportant? What was the situation I came to in 1973? And what did I want to achieve? The 1970 census and the Oakland 701 Study gave the following statistics about the West of Cypress area: ¯ 80 percent black and 18 percent Mexican American ¯ median family income: $3,941 ¯ unemployment rate 26.3 percent for men, 35.7 percent for women ¯ 50 percent of families on welfare; mean welfare income $2,110 ¯ 90 percent of the houses had been expected to be unusable by 1969 (most of these houses are still standing in 1995) ¯ median number of school years completed: 8.4 ¯ 24 percent of people over twenty-five years of age were high school graduates Residents listed their major problems as limited incomes and a high rate of unemployment, extremely poor housing, and poor-quality education. All of these problems still exist and are complex and interrelated. I chose to come to this depressed environment from eleven years of teaching English in white, suburban Catholic high schools. I had interest, concern, compassion, energy, enthusiasm, high hopes . . . and two months of training in community orga-nizing. I remember walking through the neighborhood and mentally singing the words to "Anatevka" from Fiddler on the Roof, newly popular then. The song speaks of the nothingness of the town: "people who pass through Anatevka do not even know they have been here., someone should have set a match to this place years ago." That is what West Oakland looked like to me. But the song goes on to describe Anatevka as home: "where else could Sabbath be so sweet., where I know everyone I meet." That too was West Oakland. It did not take me long to get to know friendly people, many of whom had lived there for years. I walked the streets and .~ly-August 199~ 487 Bramble ¯ Twenty Inner-City Years sat in people's kitchens to discuss neighborhood problems. Soon some longtime residents and I started the West Oakland Improvement Association. What did I want to achieve? Mainly, I did not want a repeat of Anatevka; I did not want people displaced to make room for gentrification or other forms of development. In 1974 I wrote that my major goal was to help increase the peo-ple's awareness of their power to direct their own lives. Over the next twenty years, I became more deeply aware of the immense problems in people's lives and in the physical neigh-borhood. What I wanted to do both stayed the same and evolved, as did the strategies we used. Always there was the goal of empow-erment. As a community organizer I wanted us to win on issues that people had chosen as urgent concerns. More importantly, I wanted to build an organization that could continue to empower people and revitalize the neighborhood. We won on many issues. Our victories brought pride and increased self-confidence to a number of neighborhood people. But building an organization never really happened. People seemed too concerned with per-sonal survival to stay involved very long. It became more and more difficult to talk with people about community problems when they were concerned with getting enough food for their kids, paying the rent, and dealing with drug problems. These survival issues prompted me and my good friend Sister Pat Sears to start St. Patrick's Center at the Campbell Village Housing Project, where we saw to basic necessities, providing food, clothes, counseling, and a youth program. But decent afford-able housing remained the most urgent problem. Concern about people who were being displaced or were living in substandard housing, inspiration from Jubilee Housing in Washington, D.C., lots of participation from neighborhood people and suburban friends, and awillingness to step into the unknown with faith and hope led me and Pat to start Jubilee West as a nonprofit Community Development Corporation in 1980. We immediately began to buy and fix houses for poverty-level people even though we knew nothing about real estate or construction and had almost no money. Jubilee West also continued and expanded the com-munity services and youth programs begun at St. Patrick's Center. What successes can Jubilee West celebrate over the last fifteen years? Eighty units of scattered-site housing, most of it perma-nently affordable to poverty-level families: five million dollars in property assets removed from speculation and able to be con- 488 Review for Religious trolled by the community far into the future; hundreds of children helped with tutoring and enrichment; many others helped with mentoring and private scholarships to attend college; hundreds of adults placed in jobs, coming to literacy and ESL classes, or receiv- .ing emergency food, clothing, and needed counseling; and an his-toric building rehabilitated to accommodate various community events and to house the offices for other services. When I left, Jubilee West had a committed board of directors, a staff of varying degrees of competence, and a good funding base, although financial crises were and continue to be frequent. So why do I frequently feel like a failure? Mainly because I very much wanted to do something "for the people in the houses" more than just fixing houses and lowering rents and because I feel that most people's lives are not changed very much from what they were before. As I grew to know West Oakland people, I came to be most concerned about what I experienced as the "typical" resident. She is a woman about thirty years old, never mar-ried, with three or four children from different fathers. She has about a tenth-grade education, has never held a paying job, has very poor nutrition, and probably has an alcohol or drug problem. If she is not in JW housing or other subsidized housing, she may pay as much as 60 or 70 percent of her AFDC income in rent, leaving her less than $200 per month for all other expenses. She has no car, and so her experiences and those of her children are mostly limited to the West Oakland neighborhood. She appears depressed and apathetic or else quite hostile. So what did I wantJW to do for this woman? I wanted us to empower her to enrich her own life. What did I mean by this? How would I hope to be able to describe her after a .few years? I have thought a lot about my hopes for her, and I recently became aware that they are similar to my unrealistic goals for myself: As I grew to know West Oakland people, I came to be most concerned about what I experienced as the "typical" resident. She is a woman about thirty years old, never married, with three or four children from different fathers. .~uly-/lugust 199~ 489 Bramble ¯ Twenty Inner-City Years I want her to have succeeded in or be in the process of get-ting off drugs, getting more education, finding a job and then a better job, stabilizing her family, getting enough income to move out of subsidized housing, deepening her spiritual values, becoming more psychologically whole, building community with her neighbors, keeping her house clean, taking care of her kids, and working for change in the neighborhood through participating in JW and other organizations. I want her to stay in the neighborhood or come back after she succeeds in order to help the commu-nity work for justice. As I write this, it seems so unrealistic that I want to add face-tiously that she should also be thin and beautiful, but not care too much about her looks. Obviously, one reason I feel like a fail-ure is that I had very unrealizable expectations. Only a few peo-ple could achieve the hbove, and only with superhuman effort or lots of good luck. I wanted my "typical" person to be aware of her power to change and control her own life. That sounds like a good goal. But perhaps my biggest mistake was that I did not give enough conscious acknowledgment to the reality of systemic oppression. When she tries to change in other than very small ways, she runs up against huge obstacles that make it exceedingly difficult if not impossible for her to "control her own life." Only a few really "win" in her situation; but, because those few do win, she feels that she too should be able to win. She blames herself and society also blames her, telling her in many ways that it is her fault. In some ways I contribute to this when I talk about "self-help" without at the same time talking about systemic oppres-sion. Her self-blame does not give her more energy to "fight the system" and to make small and then larger changes in her life; instead it leads to depression, apathy, or hostility. Similarly my self-blame, my feeling myself a failure for not being able to empower her, does not give me more energy to fight the system; in me also it leads to depression, apathy, and sometimes hostility. Issues of injustice in economics, politics, and education are profoundly interrelated. A minimum wage that inserts working people into the poverty level without enough money to pay the rent, a business economy dependent on a certain percent of unem-ployment, thousands of job layoffs so that even many people with good educations are unlikely to keep their jobs that pay a living wage, unjust distribution of wealth including "hidden" subsidies 490 Review for Religious for the rich (whereby more money is "spent" on tax write-offs for interest on home-ownership loans than on all the housing programs for the poor), drug traffic that brings huge profits to a few wealthy people, a welfare system that discourages work, the worst schools usually in the poorest areas, housing thought of as an investment for profit rather than a home to live in, pervasive discrimination against minorities, especially African-American males--these are only a few examples of the interconnected sys-tems that cause my "typical" person's situation. I have known all this for a long time. Did I fail to keep it in my awareness because I felt I could do little about it and I like solvable problems? In any case, I concentrated on self-help pro-grams-- how soon I found that often they do not succeed either! Each person in any self-help program must "choose life" for her-self, of course, and begin to act on her own behalf while at the same time society, "the system," must stop oppressing her. Both are interrelated. But as I reflected on my Jubilee West experience, I still heard the same familiar inner voices of my own self-blame. If only I had been smarter, worked harder, tried something more creative, then I could have made a bigger dent in solving these problems. At this point I was fortunate to come across the book Surplus Powerlessness by Michael Lerner. Lerner first talks about real pow-erlessness, the reality of an unequal distribution of power in this society: If a small number of us try to change things, we will run up against a brick wall. In fact, even if millions of people were to engage in activity to change things, in the short run we would find our society very difficult to change. The brick wall is not just a subjective illusion. The basic fact is this: American society is a class-dom-inated society. A small number of people have vast eco-nomic power while the overwhelming.majority has almost no power in the economic realm. Economic power gives that small group a huge amount of political power. While the rest of us have some political power, it takes vast expen-ditures of energy and time to win small victories. But to say that the elites of wealth and power have over-whelming power is not to say that they have absolute power. Things could be quite different if many people were to engage in the struggle for change. It would be a real strug-gle- and there would be many difficult defeats.~ After talking about realpowerlessness, Lerner describes surplus ~uly-Augus~ 199Y 4.91 Bramble ¯ Twenty Inner-City Years powerlessness as "the set of feelings and beliefs that make people think of themselves as even more powerless than the actual power sit-uation requires, and then leads them to act in ways that actually con-firm them in their powerlessness." He is describing me when he shows how many activists continually manage to redefine the con-ditions of success in such a way that they always feel "one down" for not having accomplished enough; they redefine their victo-ries as failures and do not credit their own real accomplishments. I certainly do that often. Lerner reminds us that when society claims it is set up in a fundamentally fair way, in which people can make it if they really try, powerlessness is seen as a product of the individual's personal failures. Thus self-blame becomes the central element in surplus powerlessness. It grows stronger every time we blame ourselves for having failed in some important way and have no compassion for ourselves in view of all the ways that reality pushes us to be less than we want to be. Taking responsibility for one's own life works only for the part of the population and for the societal issues where objective conditions allow for real change. People need help to distinguish between factors out of their control about which they could be legitimately angry and factors that would change if they changed how they thought about themselves and how they lived their own lives. Surplus powerlessness, self-blame, deflects attention from the real problems and hence from any real solutions. The anger that might be reasonably directed against a social order which gener-ates personal unhappiness is instead directed inwards and becomes depression or a dangerous buildup of repressed violence. But Lerner's next point is also part of my" experience. Once people are no longer disempowered by self-blaming, they are in a better position to change their environment. Surplus power-lessness can be lessened by supportive group interaction and by developing compassion, showing people that the problems they face do not come from personal inadequacies, but are faced by others as well, and that people need one another's help in facing these problems. My reflection on Lerner's concept of surplus powerlessness shows me that I have been blaming the victims, both my typical West Oakland person and myself. I have definitely internalized the American way that tells me that, if I have a problem, I should take care of it, work to change it, and not blame someone else. 492 Review for Religious But, to avoid the extreme of blaming others for my problems, I frequently go to the extreme of not giving much acknowledg-ment to the real powerlessness in my life, to the real systems that are oppressing me as well as my typical West Oakland person. At this point in my reflection, I read Joanna Macy's books Despair and Personal Power and World as Lover, World as Self about the need to feel pain, experience it, work through it: my pain and the pain of others. I see that as a big clue for me. I went back to my sabbatical journal written in Washington, D.C., in 1992. One of the questions in Mary Cosby's class on "call" was "What is your deepest pain?" I wrote, "I'm not aware of very much personal pain. Actually my greatest pain seems to be feel-ing the pain of others: so many homeless people on the street, so many hurting children, so much violence in the world., and feel-ing powerless to do very much about any of this." A few days later at a creative-movement session I felt overcome by sorrow and tears. I kept feeling, saying, crying to myself: "I didn't know how to make it better for people. I am so sad about that ¯ ¯ . sad because people were not helped, not so much that I couldn't help but that they weren't helped., thinking of Sylvia, Spring, Connie, Deedee, Charetta, Pat, A1, Brenda . . . tears because I couldn't do it, but more because life did not change for them . " I remember feeling that I must be avoiding some deeper personal pain if the major pain I was aware of was pain for the world, for other people. Now I see that a major need for me is to feel my pain, which greatly includes pain for the world. Joanna Macy says in Despair and Personal Power: "We have trouble cred-iting the notion that concerns for the general welfare might be acute enough to cause distress., but pain for our world touches each of us, and this pain is rooted in caring., our apparent pub-lic apathy is but a fear of experiencing and expressing this pain, and once it is acknowledged and shared it opens the way to our power." 2 I have definitely internalized the American way that tells me that, if I have a problem, I should take care of it, work to change it, and not blame someone else. July-August 199Y 493 Bramble ¯ Twenty Inner-City Years During that semester in 1992, I picked up an old journal from 1988, specifically looking for how I dealt at that time with my pain over the distressing situations I experienced daily at Jubilee West. A pattern seemed to be: I would run into a small or large problem that was usually a symptom of a larger systemic problem; feel frustrated and ptwerless; think I should be able to solve it; blame myself because I could not; go to bed depressed, wake up with somehow more energy ready to try again, to think up some new way to address the problem . . . but rarely allow myself to really feel my own pain and sadness. Although many people were involved in Jubilee West, I always felt myself ultimately respon-sible. I also frequently neglected my deep need to gift myself with beauty and nourishment for my soul. I have always felt a great desire for silence, solitude, beauty, prayer--for finding ways to experience the sacred in all of life. But I often let compulsive efforts to solve problems rob me of the centeredness necessary for living and acting from a contemplative way of being. As a step in the process of"living the questions" and of writ-ing this article, I walked around the West Oakland neighborhood visiting some of my longtime friends. I had not been able to do this since leaving Jubilee West three years ago; when we moved away last fall, I just disappeared without telling many people that I was going. So this walk was a pilgrimage for remembering and finding cause to grieve and cause to rejoice. What do I learn for myself from all of this reading and reflec-tion and from my recent pilgrimage of walking in West Oakland? What does my inner wisdom tell me? What follows are some exploratory answers as I live the questions: 1. Feel your pain, take time for it. your personal pain and that of the West Oakland people that you care about, and the world that 'faces the possibility of total destruction. Allowing myself to feel pain is hard to do; I am more used to giving thirty seconds to pain and then moving on to possible solu-tions. But, on my walk through West Oakland, I was more able to be with the pain of what I experienced: my own fear when I went into Campbell Village by myself because of what I know of the violence, drugs, and crime that are always there; the usual mounds of garbage everywhere, especially in front of my friend Sally's apartment; Sally's son in jail for using and selling drugs--I remem-ber him as a cute, loving eight-year-old; the fifteen or twenty men on the corner of 14th and Peralta as they always are--drink- 494 Review for Reh~ious ing and buying drugs; Trisha's house boarded up because she was evicted for drug activity, when she had been one of Jubilee West's most promising tenants. 2. Feelyourjoy also and others' joy as well: celebrate small suc-cesses, continue the lifelong task of dealing with your inner judge that says, "but it isn't enough." My walk through West Oakland gave me many opportunities for experiencing joy. It felt good to remember all the times I have been in people's houses having coffee and conversation. My friend Joanne greeted me with a big hug, and we laughed over old times together. Two of her children are doing very well, she is enjoying her job taking care of hand-icapped people, she still feels empow-ered by the victories we achieved together many years ago, and her sense of humor is still spectacular. Annie also greeted me with open arms; she is an elderly woman who owns her own home and several oth-ers in the neighborhood, though all of them are in various stages of disrepair. As I sat in her tiny kitchen, she asked me who she could get to help her change her will, and I remembered how hard it was, many years ago, to convince her to make a will at all. My last stop was Charles Garcia, who because of our orga-nizing efforts scraped up $1,700 twenty years ago to buy the falling-apart house he was living in--a small amount, even in 1974, but monumental to him. Although he was not home, his pride of ownership was evident everywhere: lots of beautiful roses in the front yard, a stained-glass window over the door; his daugh-ter spoke of wanting to. move her own growing family back to that neighborhood. I was pleased to see that there was only one burned-out house on Chester Street, when there had been many a few years ago, and I felt pride as always at Jubilee West's twenty-two new-con-struction apartments on Goss Street, definitely the ~best-looking housing anywhere in the neighborhood. My experience of joy on my walk through the West of Cypress neighborhood brought home to me the truth of Joanna Macy's Celebrate small successes, continue the life-long task of dealing with your inner judge that says, "but it isn't enough." jUuly-August 199Y 495 Bramble ¯ Twenty Inner-City Years words: "When we open our awareness to the web of life, we con-nect not only with the sufferings of others, but to the same mea-sure, with their gifts and powers . . . if we can grieve with the griefs of others, so, by the same token, by the same openness, can we find strength in their strengths, bolstering our own individual supplies of courage, commitment, and endurance."3 3. Acknowledge real powerlessness and systemic oppression. Deepen awareness of this as a reality check, as the main reason for not continuing self-blame, as a step to determining at which point to try to intervene. Catch yourself when you are blaming the vic-tim, whether that victim is yourself or someone else. 4. Acknowledge surplus powerlessness in yourself and in others, and try to find ways to deal with it, mainly by group sharing and by compassion for yourself and others. 5. Give up the myth that there is one key to changing the world. I have had the fantasy hope that there is one key to changing oppres-sive systems and that, if I could just find it, I would know what to do. Now I am more aware that transformation is happening on many levels at once and that it is not necessarily more important to work on one rather than another; I have lots of options for where I can best use my gifts to work for change. 6. Give up the myth that I am totally responsible (even when and if it is my job to be in charge), that I necessarily have the power to create the changes I want. Sometimes I have that power, often I do not. Any transformation will take many people working in many ways. A friend told me recently that she has become passionately committed to nudging the world toward justice and ecological san-ity. The idea of nudging shows a good grasp of reality and the pos-sible, and many people are doing this all over the world. 7. Give as much time as possible to the beauty, silence, and soli-tude that I so long for and know is essential to the life of my soul. My greatest desire is to act from a deeply contemplative stance. I do not always live that way, but I become more and more con-vinced that it is the only way to be who I am, to be at peace with myself and the world. Many questions remain as I come to the end of these reflec-tions, but hopefully every deepened insight leads to new possi-bilities and changes in my way of being, feeling, and acting. My questions will take more than my lifetime to answer. I am reminded of a vivid memory from a few years ago. I was in the midst of a crisis at Jubilee West, and I went to walk around the 496 Review for Religious lake to try to think of what to do. As I walked, I would come up with an idea about a next step, bu~ a voice in me kept asking, "What if you can't solve the problem?" I would be with that ques-tion for a few minutes and then start again to plan strategies. But the voice was persistent: "What if you can't solve the problem?" I have been brought up to believe that, ifI have a problem or see a problem, I should try to solve it. In fact, I very frequently have been able to find solutions to problems, to achieve what-ever I put my mind to achieve. Similarly, in World as Love~; World as Self, Joanna Macy quotes Lyndon B. Johnson as saying during the Vietnam War: "Don't come to me with a problem unless you have a solution." She tells of some colleagues in France who, ridi-culing our American culture for demanding instant solutions to problems, said we should "let the difficulties reveal themselves first before rushing for a ready-made solution, or else you will not understand them.''4 And so, as I walked around the lake struggling with the com-plexities of my crisis, the persistent voice asking "What if you can't solve the problem?" was actually a blessing. It pushed me to experience that often I cannot solve the problem. What is needed then is not more strategies, but waiting in openness: openness to the unfathomable presence, power, energy, connectedness in the universe, in me, in other people, and in all situations--which I call God. What is needed is sitting with open hands and open heart in deep silence and solitude, or dancing with abandonment to powerful music, or walking on the beach feeling the immensity of the ocean, or remembering my redwood tree. What is needed is anything that brings home to me the sacredness of all beings. I am remembering also the poem by Wendell Berry that I first saw on the kitchen wall at Genesis Farm, the environmental study center where I spent six weeks in the spring of 1992. It moved me deeply then and still does, giving me a powerful image of commitment to the possible in the darkest of times: "In the dark of the moon, / In flying snow,/. / The world in danger. / I walk the rocky hillsides / Sowing clover." I wonder what forms my clover will take? In looking through my 1991-92 .journal, I rediscovered another powerful image, a dream I had on 1 February 1992 and had forgotten. The image of wholeness in my dream links with Joanna Macy's wisdom about the interconnected whole in Despair and Personal Power: "What is it that allows us to feel pain for our Bramble ¯ Twenty Inner-City Years world? And what do we discover as we move through it? What awaits us there on the other side of despair? To all these ques-tions there is one answer. It is interconnectedness with life and all other beings. It is the living web out of which our individual, sep-arate existences have risen, and in which we are interwoven."s Deep implications of this dream are gradually surfacing as I continue to reflect on it more than three years later: I am in a house with many people., much chaos., there is a cupboard with a lot of jigsaw puzzles., suddenly they all fall out and come crashing down . . . so there are hun-dreds of puzzle pieces all over the floor., all from differ-ent puzzles . . . instead of feeling hopeless, like I would never be able to sort out the pieces and put each puzzle together again . . . in the dream I feel hopeful . . . like what was individual puzzles is now one big whole . . . and the challenge is to make a new picture in a new way. Soon after I wrote the pages above, my friend Sister Pat, cofounder of Jubilee West, died unexpectedly while we were vaca-tioning in Vermont. We had worked, argued, dreamed, planned, and enjoyed life together in West Oakland for nineteen years of a longer close friendship. Pat was "home" to me; now I feel like a homeless person. In my grief I have felt that God is burning himself into my soul, in intense pain and intense beauty. Was it in another lifetime that I wrote, "I'm not aware of very much per-sonal pain"? I am amazed that "Feel your pain" was one of my "exploratory answers." It has helped me take time for the sadness of my loss. I am hopeful that my pain will give me strength and wisdom to respond to the world's pain in new ways. My under-standing of my own "answers" is deeper than when I wrote them. Hopefully, I am more ready to keep working to create a new pic-ture, a new wholeness. Notes ~ Michael Lerner, Surplus Powerlessness (Oakland: Institute for Labor and Mental Health, 1986). These and other quotations from Lerner are a combination of a variety of pages in this book. 2 Joanna Macy, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age (Baltimore: New Society Publishers, 1983). These quotations are a com-bination of a variety of pages in chapters 1 and 2. 3 Macy, Despair, p. 32. 4 Joanna Macy, World as Love~; World as Self(Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1991), p. 18. s Macy, Despair, p. 24. 498 Review for Religious MARGARET MARY KNITTEL Corporate Sponsorship: The 1990s and the Fruits of Our Labor I alternate between thinking of the planet as home--dear and familiar stone hearth and garden--and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. --Annie Dillard, "Sojourner" Mey mother had lived in this home, built by her father, ver since she was eighteen, and now sixty years later she was selling the stained-glass windows, the hardwood floors, everything. All went well but for that last moment holding all the pain. We walked away bearing the image of strangers in that beloved doorway, frame of four generations. Doorways of insti-tutions, too, owned and operated by generations of women reli-gious, hold countless emotionally freighted moments, and near the close of the 20th century the terms "corporate sponsorship" and "fruits of our labor" have become and remain inextricably bound. In one ethical frame come three questions that are relevant to these two realities, corporate sponsorship and fruits of our labor. The three questions suggest a fluidity of vision, a loo'sening of ties. The questions are: Who are we? Who are we becoming? Who are we called to be? Who Are We? Over successive generations the corporately sponsored institutional ministry increasingly became for Catholic women religious in the United States their "hearth and garden," Margaret Mary Knittel RSM served as director of personnel services at Saint Xavier University in Chicago from 1981 to 1987. Presently, as a consultant for nonprofit organizations, she writes to us from I 1 Simpson, H; Geneva, Illinois 60134. ~uly-Aug~st 1995 499 Knittel ¯ Corporate Sponsorship the consummate fruits of their labor, our labor. Hospitals, nurs-ing homes, orphanages, .high schools, and colleges together form a litany of dedicated achievement, of the brick-by-brick accom-plishments of many dedicated women. Annie Dillard's feelings about this planet as hearth and garden and land of exile help identify three groups or generations of women religious who for a hundred years have owned and operated those institutions.1 These generations we shall call the exiles, the arrived, and the The first generation, the exiles, traveled from countries like Ireland, Germany, and Italy to North American mission lands. The second generation, the arrived (or arriv&s), lived in an at-homeness within their institutions in the burgeoning years. Now, in these closing years of the 20th century, we have a third gen-eration, the sojourners, seeking a new way to live their profes-sional commitments and their personal lives as vowed women religious upon finding themselves living in smaller and smaller groupings on a planet presenting challenges and opportunities their pioneering sisters in exile--their grandsisters--would not recognize. For the exiles--pioneers, all of them--the missions of the late 19th and early 20th century meant lives of physical sacrifice and economic deprivation well beyond the virtue or vow of poverty. Those women pieced together budgets, scraping their ingenuity for survival. Having come intent upon working hard, they strove to build hearths and gardens and kept striving and struggling, remaining and reminding themselves to be exiles at heart, women in a foreign land. Echoing the economy at large, the institutional ministries they had founded and maintained boomed after the lean years of the Great Depression. The second generation, the arrived, brought forward personal and corporate energies to build up edu-cational, social-service, and healthcare institutions surpassing the dreams of the earlier immigrant generation, the exiles. With increased settling in, this hearth of the religious women's profes-sional lives, this sponsored work, began for some to take on near-salvific powers. This hospital, this academy, began to hold terrestrial hopes and dreams, promised a salvation, and hinted of a this-side immortality. Plaudits, awards, and status were afforded to this generation of women who had arrived, who in some cases had left a humble family circle for what was increasingly becom- 500 Review for Religious ing an educated, secure middle-class community. They, we, by one definition indeed had arrived. For the arrived, their hospital or academy chapel began to localize the garden of the spirit. Here each morning and evening, all, regardless of professional status, gathered together at prayer. Here the contemplative "side" sought nourishment as the apostolic "side" waited just outside the chapel door. Hearth of work and garden of spirit, these became fix-tures within the corporate institu-tions cared for by the members of this second generation. Who Are We Becoming? In the movie "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" the central figure, an exceedingly obese mother of four, says to her teenage son in a moment of reconciliation, "I never wanted to be like this." She had eaten her way to virtual immobility after her husband walked away from her and their children. Do we women religious, as this 20th cen-tury of ours draws to a close, gaze at our corporate body and say to ot~rselves, "We never wanted to be like this"? The founders of mis-sions here in the United States began on an inspiration to do good The second generation, the arrived, brought forward personal and corporate energies to build up educational, social-service, and healthcare institutions surpassing the dreams of the earlier immigrant generation, the exiles. in the sight of the God, and now, one or two hundred years later, their legatee corporate body has perhaps come to he something overly substantial: substantial hearth and garden, substantial fruits of our labor. These places, these institutions, became the symbolic body of our corporate identity within the church and the symbolic immortality within our destinies. Boards, philanthropic individ-uals, committees, friendships have been cultivated in the name of a hospital, an orphanage, or a school, and individual women's identities have been formed by and dedicated to bricks and steam pipes and windows. And then, as a distant window opened in the early 1960s and Vatican Council II convened, the corporate body ~ly-August 1995 501 Knittel * Corporate Sponsorship began to be looked at and came into question: "Is this who we are becoming?" For some women and men, in and out of religious life, the signs of the times appealed to in the council documents began to replace the signs of success. The prophet Jeremiah's call to voca- Women religious know that an additional thirty years, like those since the council, will not be afforded them. A sizable amount of post-Vatican time has quickly become history, and religious can recite lists of classrooms already vacated, hospital beds unused, and doors closed. tion describes a people God observes burning incense to strange gods and "adoring their own hand-iwork" (Jr 1:16). The prophetic began to ease itself forward. The work of our hands, the fruits of our labor, came into question. Now, in these late days of the 20th century, the hearth lies gray with embers and the garden shows signs of late-summer exhaustion. Women religious know that an additional thirty years, like those since the council, will not be afforded them. A sizable amount of post-Vatican time has quickly become history, and religious can recite lists of classrooms already vacated, hospital beds unused, and doors closed. Worse, we know in our aging the lists of needs more acute, more violent, than our grandsisters might have dared imagine. With abuses crowding our culture into corners that seem to offer no choice, we acknowl-edge there has to be more to this journey. Who Are We Called to Be? Our third generation, the would-be sojourners, wonder at this late-20th-century hour: "Is this our time of exile? Shall we be graced to select to become sojourners. Selecting to be sojourners, to move from being securely settled to securely unsettled, recalls the, sweep of the Hebrew Scriptures showing us a people finding centers other than God. The king-dom, the temple, the land--here was the answer. No, not here, there. No, not there, here. Efforts to restore the earthly kingdom kept centering on realities other than God. But Yahweh contin-ued to insist. 502 Review for Religious Selecting to be sojourners calls us to know how to go into exile, how to travel. Traveling, what shall we pack? Timing, how to schedule transportation, stopovers? And we cannot forget those allowances of minutes and hours, those sponges of time, to absorb this unfamiliar territory, this plan, these new connections. We will not know the language, but will need to interact and relate with others in order to continue on the journey and will have to search our imaginations for ways to communicate constructively. Life will move more slowly even as we continually need to cope with myriad details. Knowing exile, we will know ourselves anew. A clock continues to tick, and while many individual women religious hear it, the instinct to muffle its sound remains. "Enough!" we hear. Our alternative thoughts drift to sojourning, but graying embers say "Enough." We lived through the changes of the 1960s and '70s immediately after the council. No more traveling, turning, leaving, remembering, forgetting, previsioning, refashioning, or paradigm shifting for us! Just leave me alone. Enough. Give me the basics for survival and let me live out my life, here. Give me my job, my position, my power. Give me space. But a clock continues to tick. Learning to Mourn Henri Nouwen has said, "Yes, we must mourn our losses. We cannot talk or act them away, but we can shed tears over them and allow ourselves to grieve deeply. To grieve is to allow our losses to tear apart feelings of security and safety and lead us to the painful truth of our brokenness. Our grief makes us experience the abyss of our own life in which nothing is settled, clear, or obvious, but everything constantly shifting and changing.''2 At issue here is whether or not women religious have the energy to mourn. There have been deaths--countless funerals, remembered rejec-tions, and downright hostilities and hatreds. Yes, death seems to have been an integral part of this life once so much idealized--the youth and the joy! But, through all of these deaths, have we short-circuited a certain human pathos, admixing theologies and spiri-tualities, being at times more stoic than Christian? Several weeks after the death of my mother, an acquaintance asked, "How are you doing?" An incident, fresh that day, helped me to describe a way of being that I would later learn is common to us and may be where the corporate person of religious life .~ly-Auguyt 1995 503 Knittel * Corporate Sponsorship finds itself today. I told him of my standing in the middle of a room that morning, about to clean, but not knowing what to do next. My emotional energy was somehow separated from me as a person. As women religious, do we stand in the middle of a room and not know how to clean it, with our individual and corpgrate emo-tional energy elsewhere? Solneone has said, "Leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right.''3 Is there a sense that somehow our corporate energy has separated itself from the corporate body so that with our corpo-rate leadership we continue doing things right rather than doing the right thing? Walter Brueggemann has observed that "reli-gious practitioners are often easy and unwitting conspirators with such denial. We become the good-humor men and women, for who among us does not want to rush in and smooth things out, to reassure, to cover grief?.''4 Rush in, smooth out, reassure--sounds familiar. What and where are the deep-down places in which we will individually and corporately rejoin our emotional energies, find ourselves? While sometimes we feel sublimely practiced in the various forms of grief, having experienced death in many forms, have we mourned? Have we cared enough about ourselves individually and corporately to let in the slow, mysterious loneliness, the ever changing healing of life after a death, a shocking, numbing death, has occurred? This work of mourning looks not only to the past but also to the future, fully realizing that new steps must be taken. The ability to bear wholesome and healing grief is every bit as much a fruit of our labor as the most imposing achievement of our corporate endeavors. Who are we called to be in this late 20th century, and is God directly and immediately in charge? Given our status and our connections, have we--women religious who have arrived--cor-porately capitulated to others' being in charge, someone else's agenda. "The task of the prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord.''s We come through the numbing to learn from a God in charge that the fruit of our labor may be "only" to know Jesus the Christ once again as way, as truth, as life. In this late 20th century, the fruits of our having arrived carry the exotically sweet flavor of success taken for granted and of 504 Review for Religious controlling power. In some instances we think it necessary to cling to these fruits with an even tighter grip. What sadder use of our time than participating in meetings with unseen forces with a view to reconstituting yesteryear rather than working with hope for tomorrow! Is there true conversation within our communi-ties, or merely some talk while waiting for followers to follow? Whether we would speak with Brueggemann's "prophetic imagination" or Philip Keane's "moral imagination," can we imag-ine imagining? Keane has said, "Communities as well as persons need t6 develop moral character and exercise moral imagination as they seek to address the great issues of our times.''6 When a loved one dies, a significant part of our grieving may involve imagining the future without them. We have known and loved them, but deep down we grieve for ourselves in an unknown future--a birthday or a Christmas--without their presence. We deeply miss this lost past. The exile has begun, with or without us. We need to acknowl-edge it, learning more and imagining more about what it means to mourn. We will be sojourners, like our grandsisters before us, leaving the comforts of home, however we currently define and hold on to them. "A number of factors can hinder persons from being genuinely reflective and playful in their moral thinking," says Keane; "power or force is one such factor.''7 Shall we become more reflective, more playful, and imagine leaving our present "homes" of wrongfully constructed political power, of oppressive behaviors? What prevents us from asking: Who are we? Who are we becoming? and Who are we called to be? The answer from some, if not all, may lie in these processes of the prophetic, these questions. Land of Exile: Corporate Sojournership "Fairly often," says Keane, "I run into persons whose image of God is that God is out to get us. Such persons want to be told what to do, and they are afraid of using their moral imaginations. Their religious or prayer lives will often be quite limited because their fear keeps them from really being open to the power of the Gospel stories.''8 As women religious we seek the courage to imag-ine and do corporately what many individual women and men have already wrestled with in their lives. We need, corporately, to turn in the keys, have a good cry, and move on. 3~uly-Al¢g'ust 199Y 505 Knittel * Corporate Sponsorship Turning in the keys does not necessarily mean a wholesale closing of eacli and every institution. Some would like that, but it could indeed prove shortsighted and definitely unimaginative, even though some say the community's need for money is a good reason for selling this hospital or that academy and others say, "If we sell, we would be doing something holy." Abandoning an inner-city hospital without recourse to imaginative possibilities of how this long-cared-for space--the land's square feet and the buildings' cubic feet--could now serve the poor better might well become a new urban tragedy. We will need to go after anew, with all the civic clout that our years of being respectable arrivges can muster, the neighborhood's endemic and systemic problems. The friends of our institutions of the past may not choose to be the companions of our sojourning in the years ahead. But, together with those who would stay with us, we n~ed to find out who we are called to be. In any new land such as the future, there will be questions, then some answers, and then new questions. Our bequest, the fruits of our labor--whether embodied in our present corporate buildings and our present apostolic endeavors or not--must always be directed towards common goods that our corporate resources and corporate energies can hope to accomplish. People reflecting on the conversion to which all of us are called expect that the hearth and garden that halve come down to tis from a former time, these substantial signs of our having arrived, will increasingly suggest to us new common and corpo-rate lives of sojourning exile. These and similar questions will keep occurring to us: How will we use the power and influence we have? What could the prayer of our community be like? How will we imagine and live appropriate ways of coming together and being together--or of being together and going out together? What can we do most effectively for the coming of the kingdom? Shall we be women of vision, corporately attending to the good? Shall we corporately prepare in earnest to live in exile, to be sojourners, persons consciously and deliberately ready for the journey that begins and ends in God? Notes l Annie Dillard, "Sojourner," in Teaching a Stone to Talk (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1988), p. 150. 506 Review for Religious 2 Henri J.M. Nouwen, With Hearts Burning (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1994), p. 27. 3 Warren Bennis, Why Leaders Can't Lead (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1989), p. 18. 4 Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic hnagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), p. 49. s Brueggemann, p. 49. 6 Philip S. Keane, Christian Ethics and Imagination (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), p. 104. 7 Keane, p. 107. 8 Keane, p. 107. Tourist Your T-shirt's stamped in letters large across your chest: KATMANDU. Your bike is labeled with a hundred road resorts. Your car is dotted round with all your touring triumphs . So, why not take another route today? A low-cost tour to that other inner world inside. Stay quiet by that vast unbounded inner ocean in your mind. Dive, swim and surf. Fly free. Ride high the inner waves of thought and feeling endlessly exhilarated, or delve into the dark and secret untrod cavern of your soul. Discover now the mystery of creation; confront the abyss unending of your own nothing-self becoming. And meet in that remote mysterious empty temple, far inside, your God. Cothrai Gogan CSSP .y~uly-August 199Y 507 CATHERINE M. HARMER Retirement's Wisdom Years One of the recurring discussions at assemblies and chap-ters of religious revolves around the rising median age, the need to care for our elderly, and more subtly the growing costs of such caring. The issue is an important one in that most United States congregations have median ages over sixty. An examination of congregational budgets shows that increasingly large amounts of money are dedicated to the care of the elderly. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops has been sponsor-ing a special collection for aging religious that people contribute to with great generosity, but it covers only a small part of the actual costs. A visit to the motherhouse of almost any group of sisters will show that a large part of what was housing for novices in the past is now dedicated to the aging members. Some motherhouses have very fine infirmaries for the sick elderly. There is no question that religious leaders are making great efforts to provide the best they can for their members through all stages of life. I would like, however, to examine two aspects of that effort. The first has to do with the nursing-home care that many of the sick elderly need. The second has to do with the concept of retirement for religious and the way it has been handled over the last twenty years or so. The Sick Elderly The first topic is the simpler one and will get less treatment in this article. In the care of our sick elderly, the emphasis has Catherine M. Harmer MMS wrote "Election: A Call to Service" for our September-October 1994 issue. Her address is Medical Mission Sisters; 300 W. Wellens Street; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19120. 508 Review for Religious been changed from the simple caring for them "at home" that was possible when the median age was much lower and the num-ber of elderly religious was either smaller or relatively smaller. When that was the case, at the motherhouse a small staff assisted by novices and postulants could care for them in much the same way that a family could take care of any sick or elderly member of it. Gradually, as the numbers increased and the sick elderly lived longer, a more professional model, that of the nursing home, became more common. As this was happen-ing, the percentage of vigorously active members was decreasing. At present, in most of the retirement facilities I have visited over the years, the staff is largely lay with very few religious among them. In some very large congrega-tions, with several hundred sick elderly members, the facilities com-pare well with any licensed nursing home, often providing much better care and definitely offering more loving care than in the average nurs-ing home for the laity. In smaller congregations the attempt to pro-vide quality nursing care results in Some small congregations in a given area are studying the feasibility of establishing an intercon gregational nursing home. A few religious leaders are looking at ways to provide for their members in general nursing homes in their area. small facilities that are as expensive to maintain as considerably larger ones would be. In some cases a nursing staff (composed mainly of nurse aides) that could care for thirty patients is taking care of ten or fifteen, sometimes fewer. As congregations face the heavy financial drain, there is a movement toward collaboration among the congregations in a geographic area. This is a positive development that could lead to good care for the religious and lower financial costs. Some groups that have larger facilities are opening them to other congrega-tions. Some small congregations in a given area are studying the feasibility of establishing an intercongregational nursing home. A few religious leaders are looking at ways to provide for their mem-bers in general nursing homes in their area. All of these steps are difficult. Often the members of a con-gregation are very unwilling to have their elderly cared for away .~dy-August 199Y 509 Harmer ¯ Retirement's Wisdom Years from their own motherhouse. At times the elderly themselves feel that they are being mistreated by being separated from their tra-ditional homes. Only a few consider it a good thing to be in a nursing home of mixed patients, men and women, religious and lay, in spite of the pastoral potential of such a model. The efforts of leaders and the combined efforts of congrega-tions to deal with both the physical realities and the psychologi-cal and religious values are important ones. Key for the leaders will be understanding, patience, and collaborative stances. For the members, those who are elderly and those who are not, it is important to develop an acceptance of the reality they face and a willingness to keep their last days congruent with what has gone before. I suggest that this requires ongoing education for every-one and a spirituality that looks at one's last days as continuous with the dedication of earlier days. Religious Retirement In our efforts to prepare one another for "retirement," we may have bought into a model that was emerging after World War II and continues to develop in terms of what aging and retir-ing are all about. This brings me to the second topic, the one which will constitute the major portion of this article. It is all the more important because it bears upon the first as well. It has to do with how we are viewing retirement. I believe that we have accepted a way of looking at retirement which is increasingly being challenged in the population at large and that we need to study it in the light of what our entire religious life is about. Several aspects of this model of retirement raise new questions. The current model in the United States assumes that people will retire at sixty-five if not earlier. When Social Security became a reality in the 1930s, life expectancy was lower, many people did hard physical labor and had relatively poor nutritional histories, and their hope was simply that at retirement they could stop working without worry about becoming dependent on their chil-dren or "ending up in the poorhouse." Today life expectancy is much higher, and the reality is that many people stay active, healthy, and alert for twenty years and longer after they retire. A second aspect, then, is that retirement is a time of not work-ing and, instead, spending one's time and energy at play of one sort or another. (Married women often have less of the play since 510 Review for Religious they are still expected to do the work of keeping up the home.) A problem here is that many retired people soon become bored with the play aspect. Some move toward part-time jobs or vol-unteer work, while others become captives of the television or the endless bingo games of our less creative senior centers. A third aspect of the current model that deserves examina-tion is the tendency to move away from the place where most of life was spent. This sometimes has to do with seeking a warmer climate or more economical housing. The result is that, as peo-ple age, they are out of regular con-tact with their family and must develop new friends. Even the elderly who manage well on their own in their original home are often under pressure from relatives and friends to find a smaller place-- which often takes them away from the community in which they have close ties and away from some sig-nificant activities that they could otherwise keep up. People are living longer while remaining physically and mentally vigorous, and yet the model of retirement continues to treat them as if they cannot do anything but play. What is being lost is the opportunity for them to contribute to family, to friends, to com-munity, in a different way than during their working years, but a way that is significant and needed. What is being lost to society at large is the accumulated wisdom of the elderly, a loss our soci-ety cannot afford. It would be a shame for religious congregations to follow the national model for retirement too closely. While few if any con-gregations have fixed ages of retirement from major involvement in ministries, there has been a subtle movement over the last few decades to start "thinking about retirement" while the religious are in their fifties. Without necessarily meaning to do so, this has too frequently led to a mentality that places retiring somewhere in the sixties, even if there is no real reason to do so. I have vis-ited motherhouses where some of the sisters appear to have retired Although the idea that play is the major activity of the retired has not taken hold so completely in religious congregations, what has developed is a sense that this is my time to do with as I wish. J-uly-dugust 199Y 511 Harmer ¯ Retirement's Wisdom Years far too soon and are desperate for some way to be involved in ministry. Mthough the idea that play is the major activity of the retired has not taken hold so completely in religious congregations, what has developed is a sense that this is my time to do with as I wish. Especially in motherhouses, which tend to be out in the country or relatively isolated, this leads to a combination of small tasks around the motherhouse, activities that mimic the senior citizens' centers, and some increased emphasis on the spiritual life without much attention to how that might be different at this stage of life. Often when I talk with the retired themselves I find a deep longing for two things: to find some meaningful part-time min-istry and to explore what spiritual life means at this latter stage of life. When retirement takes place at a motherhouse, you find the same isolation from community that the lay elderly experience who move to Florida. While most religious have lived and worked in a number of places, there was always the parish, the school or hospital, sometimes the neighborhood, as a framework for involve-ment and support. This is now gone, and the beautiful grounds of the motherhouse, the special facilities, and sometimes the large numbers (for those, notably, who were used to smaller groups) are no substitute for what has been lost. Religious do not, on the whole, do a lot of complaining, but the sense of loss is often heard in the undertones of a conversation. We hear ". everything is so nice here., everyone is so kind . . . but."--and the long-ing is very real. I am increasingly convinced that elderly religious should, whenever possible, have the same choices as the younger members. This stage of life is important, and it needs to be rec-ognized as such. In the remainder of this article, I want to address two impor-tant things about aging and retirement for religious: (1) the sec-ond half of life as a time of deepening wisdom and individuation, a time for a greater spirituality to emerge, and (2) the role of elderly religious in continuing the mission of Jesus. For many ideas here, it will be evident that I am indebted to Carl Jung, but also to a fascinating book by Jane R. Pr~tat on the croning years (1994). As I read her book, I found myself dwelling on several ideas: that our society wastes the wisdom of the elderly at a time when we need it most; that aging is not just something that hap-pens, but a part of the whole picture of life; and that much of 512 Review for Religious what is wrong in contemporary ways of looking at and dealing with aging in general are found also in regard to aging among religious, especially in how we treat the reality we call "retire-ment." The Second Half of Life Some years ago a large number of articles, workshops, and counseling programs focused on a particular transition seen as noteworthy, the "mid-life crisis." This concept seems, from a Jungian point of view, relevant to the developmental model's tran-sition from the first to the second half of life. This division into two halves does not have a chronological point, just ~s mid-life cannot be tied to a specific number of years of life. The first half of life is devoted to infancy, childhood, and young adulthood inso-far as these parts of life have to do with coming to know the world around ourselves, coming to an understanding of who we are as separate from our parents, learning, developing a working career, and moving to success within that career. At the midpoint, we might wake up in the morning and ask: Is this all there is to life? How we answer that question may indicate if the second half of life is about to begin. If the answer is "Yes, this is it!" we could spend the rest of our life simply as a continuation of the first half until death. If the answer is "No, there is something more!" we could enter into the second half of life. In the second half of life, the tasks shift to integration of the parts that have been separated during the first half, the move-ment toward individuation, coming to know ourselves in a dif-ferent way, and the decision to move toward wisdom. The "wise old man" and "wise old woman" archetypes begin to emerge dur-ing the early part of this second half of life. I believe that many people make the shift to the second half of life without ever hear-ing about Jung or his developmental theories. They recognize that something is changing in themselves, and they move with those changes. Some of the "play" elements of retirement--the programs for senior citizens that involve bingo, excursions, and hobbies--could be considered a return to an early part of the first half of lifel Now that we have done our work, earned our pension, we can again become the children whose task is play. For people with a limited field of interests, this may mean watching television for ffuly-August 1995 513 Harmer ¯ Retirement's Wisdom Years As we age; there is often a longing for a deeper understanding, a greater closeness to God. It is a normal part of the second half of life. long hours of the day and night. This is to remain in the first half of life, possibly until death, without ever taking the step into the second half. For other people, the leisure activities are part of their under-standing of where they are in terms of age, but other aspects also begin to emerge. Spending time with their children and grand-children can be a way of being the elder who is communicating the lore and the wisdom of life. This is a second-half activity and one much needed in today's culture, in which single-parent families and families with both parents working are becoming the norm. Contact with the older generation, with grandparents, . uncles, and aunts, which for long years was the norm, now is the excep-tion in many families. Wisdom also has to do with com-ing to a deeper knowledge of God, a greater and deeper integration of the spiritual life. For many people, life has been so busy, so full of duties, that the spiritual life was relegated to a set of rituals honored on a daily, weekly, or yearly basis. As we age, there is often a longing for a deeper understanding, a greater closeness to God. It is a normal part of the second half of life. In some cases it is connected with daily Mass for people who during their working years were quite con-tent with the Sunday Mass; it may mean a return to some of the religious practices of childhood; sometimes it is :a search for deeper intimacy with God. This longing belongs to the wisdom quest of this second stage. Religious, hopefully, have not stinted on their attention to the spiritual and to God's presence all through the active first half of their life. Yet the sense that the latter half of life has some-thing special to offer is found among them as well. One cannot deny, though, that some religious at this stage seem to put i:he haain emphasis on play. Their way of playing may be different, but it is still play and may involve television, novel reading, trips to the casino with the senior citizens' group, and considerable family visiting. 514 Review for Religious As a country we have to explore how to make the wisdom of the elders available to our children and to our busy adults. In the extended family of the past, this happened very simply. At one time in my childhood, I went every Friday after school to my grandparents' home so that on Saturday morning I could help .my grandmother with some of the cleaning she found difficult to do. What I remember most is conversations after supper on Friday with my grandfather, who told me the stories of his youth when he was an organizer of the unions in the steel mills of Pittsburgh. I also remember listening to music on the radio, and all three of us reading our separate books or magazines. Elderly religious off in motherhouses and retirement centers lose their easy contact with yoilnger religious, lose casual opportunities to share their wisdom with them, just as grandparents nowadays are often in other states where spending time with their grandchildren is no longer 'possible. In some motherhouses there are now prayer centers and renewal centers that give workshops and courses for sisters and lay people who are interested. At one point I had a constant flow of their catalogues coming across my desk. Fine as many of these centers are, I rarely saw anything that addressed the need for exploring the spirituality of the latter half of life, of the retirement years. Yet in those same houses I often met older sisters who longed for scripture study, for prayer assistance, for some way of understanding and developing the spirit life for this special part of their earthly sojourn. Some Strategies for the Second Half of Life It seems to me, then, that there are two things leadership would do well to do~ (1)to make it possible for elderly religious (granted their varying degrees of diminished energy) to continue to be involved in meaningful ministries that connect with the congregation's charism and mission and (2) to make conscious efforts to help the elderly religious move through the integrative work of the second half of their life in a way that is just as appro-priate as the novitiate training was for the first half. ., I live in a parish at present where more than half of the sis-ters in the local convent are well into the second half of their life and thus are no longer able to be involved full-time in the min-istries of their congregation. The congregation is a teaching one, jg~uly-August 1995 515 Harmer ¯ Retirement's Wisdom Years staffing many parish and,diocesan schools. A few of the sisters teach in the parish school, others commute to diocesan high schools, and the older sisters are engaged in time,limited but very vital ministries, These include teaching and tutoring in the adult literacy center, tutoring children from the grade school, and vis-iting elderly shut-ins 'in the neighborhood. None of these are full-time involvements. In some cases the sisters go to the school, in others the students come to them in the convent. Whenever I meet with these women, I am struck by the joy and peace that are obvious in them. Not everyone can be placed in a parish convent. Some of our elderly need to be in places like motherhouses where their greater physical needs can be provided for. It is sometimes possible to bring ministries to these motherhouses and at the same time pro-vide a wonderful service to others. I have been to motherhouses where there was day care for children in some parts of the build-ing and day care for ~he elderly in other parts. Two wonderful things happened there daily. The children and the elderly spent some time together every day, and both benefited by the experi-ence. The staff of both facilities had "assistants" from among the retired sisters who, like the women in my parish, could not work full-time, but could be counted on for blocks of time on .a regu-lar basis to help with both groups of day-care clients. o To keep our religious involved as long as possible has another imp.ortant benefit. Most o£ the research on the aging process shows that, if people stay physically and mentally active, they stay healthy longer and age more slowly. We have wonderful examples of very elderly people maintaining their mental and physical capacities long past the expected time and making contributions to art, 'literature,. and the commonweal. Even more important, this is a time when .religious can begin to share the wisdom that has come to them with age, experience, and deep reflection on the meaning of life. This is a wisdom that is very much needed in our culture, a wisdom that too often the children and young peo-ple do.not find around them. Religious can become, in~ a very real way, the grandparent figures ifi their parishes, neighborhoods, and institutions. This is the wisdom of experience joined with reflec-tion upon that experience. 0 The second thing needing attention from leadership is the effort to help religious .use their latter years creatively in order to move toward the union with God that has been such a part of our 516 Review for Religious thinking throughout life. Many of the forms of prayer and spiri-tuality that are helpful to members of active religious congrega-tions during their early and middle years are apostolically oriented. Appropriately, the religious appreciate seeing a close connection between their ministry and their spirituality. The inner life and the outer life are integrated, ideally, in a rich and vibrant way. Changes take place as religious move through the early years of the second half of life. Spending less time and energy in direct apostolic efforts, they have more time for more leisurely ways of praying. They are ready for the next stage of devel-opment of their inner life. Their focus at this stage is somewhat different from that of their early and middle years. It has within it many of the same elements, but also some new ones. In this stage the elderly may desire to recall or renew some of the things they learned in earlier years, but did not have time to savor and assim-ilate. Frequently they speak of their desire for scripture classes, for prayer workshops. These can be useful, but they need to be focused clearly and carefully on the latter years. Now the emphasis is not on quantities of information, but rather on depth, on quiet composure and integration within each individual's inner reality. The wisdom years are the time when the. "wise old woman" and "wise old man" archetypes come to the fore. While the wis-dom can be for oneself, it is even more for others. At this stage there is not likely to be any necessity to go out and preach or teach, but there should be a simple and peaceful realization that the wisdom being garnered is also for others. This is why it is important during these years: for religious to have two areas of concern: one for the continuing development of the wisdom that has been growing in them over the years, and the other for shar-ing that wisdom, very simply and directly, with others. As religious move along through this final stage of life, it is essential that they have the assistance they need to foster the growth of their inner life, to be more open to wisdom, and that they have opportunity to share it with others. Thus, the ending of Most of the research on the aging process shows that, if people stay physically and mentally active, they stay healthy longer and age more slowly. ~uly-August 199Y 517 Harmer ¯ Retirement's Wisdom Years life can be as full and as rich spiritually as any of the earlier stages, and it can be lived out in a truly mission-centered way. This will enrich the lives of the elderly religious themselves, but also of those who are yearning for that wisdom and do not yet know where to find it. It will bring a fullness to the lives of the "retired" and of those around them. It will be a far happier period than one given to play, television, and various excursions. Religious have frequently been the pacesetters in ministry. Perhaps it is time for the "retired" religious to begin to model to other retirees a richer, fuller, and more outwardly directed wisdom retirement. References Johnston, Charles M. Necessary Wisdom: Meeting the Challenge of a New Cultural Maturity. Seattle: ICD Press, 1991. Pr~tat, Jane R. Coming to Age: The Croning Years and Late-Life Transformations. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1994. Exposition Bless you, caress you~ enfold and possess you. Blessed by you, caressed by you, enfolded within you. Possessed. Chris Mannion FMS 518 Review for Religious TAD DUNNE The Enneagram Since the. early 1970s, religious educators, spiritual men-tors, retreat directors, and, most recently, management trainers have been talking about the "enneagram." 1 The theory proposes that each person is hooked by one of nine psychological compulsions--similar to the seven "capital" sins in classical Christian literature? Dozens of authors. and lecturers nowadays are teaching the theory to help people discover which of the nine compulsions is theirs and bow to accomplish their psychological liberation from it. The nine types are often referred to in caricatures: the Perfectionist, the Helper, ~he Status Seeker, the Sensitive Artist, the Observer, the Accuser, the Planner, the Bully, and the Slug.3 To edch of these descriptions, enneagram teachers attach longer descriptions of phobias, ambitions, expectations, learning style, sexual dynamics, management style, virtues, prides, blind spots, fixations, senses of time, and so on. The r~lations among the com-pulsions are represented by a circle whose circumference is numbered, at nine equidistant points. Within the circle is a triangle drawn from points three to six to nine. Also within the circle is a folded hexagon drawn through the Tad Dunne is an adjunct professor of medical ethics at Marygrove College, Detroit, and a management consultant for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan. He has published Spiritual Mentoring (HarperSanFrancisco) and Lonergan and Spirituality (Loyola University Press). He may be addressed at 2923 Woodslee; Royal Oak, Michigan 48073. guidance July-August 199Y 519 Dunne ¯ The Enneagram cycle 1-4-2-8-5-7-1. This strange figure has become the logo of the enneagram system. Enneagram and Myers-Briggs People often compare the enneagram to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which classifies sixteen personality types accord-ing to one's preference for ways of noticing experience and mak-ing decisions. The chief difference between them is that the Myers-Briggs instrument indicates personal preferences, all of which are psychologically normal, while the enneagram indicates pathologies. That is, in the Myers-Briggs'all the types are healthy, while in the enneagram all the types are sick. So the Myers-Briggs is useful for accommodating one's own thinking style with col-laborators'; it helps groups identify the preferences for ways of learning and evaluating that exist,among their members and to deploy their relative .strengths accordingly. The enneagram, in contrast, is useful for identifying neuroses, mostly in oneself. The Myers-Briggs indicator, rooted in Jungian psychology, carries a positive attitude toward human consciousness, whereas the ennea-gram, rooted partly in Freudian psychology, takes a more suspi-cious stand. Few psyqhologists, however, rely on either tool for diagnostic purposes, because of an absence of empirical studies that correlate with validated' tests. Among other helping professionals, the Myers-Briggs indi-cator enjoys a wider and less controversial reputation than the enneagram. The sixteen preferences are easily understood; one can readily find Jung's comments on people's preferences between extraversion and introversion, between sensate observation and intuition, and between thinking and feeling.4 The enneagram, in contrast, has sources shrouded in arcane knowledge from a cor-ner of the Sufi tradition unknown to most Sufis and from George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a self-styled visionary from Russia with dubi-ous credentials. The many enneagram books and tapes that have been published in the last decade tend to describe each of the nine compialsions in dogmatic terms--a style of presentation that allures some but alienates others,s 520 Some Positive Aspects of the Enneagram One of the most disturbing claims made by enneagram devo- Review for Religious tees is that these nine types cover the total human range of com-pulsions. Not ten, not eight.6 There are subsets among the nine, but these supposedly cover all possibilities. Devotees base this claim on an unfamiliar model of personality and on the ennea-gram logo, whose origins are untraceable.7 But what is really dis-turbing is that, despite the dogmatic claims of the theory and an absence of experiment-based research, it is difficult to find any-one who fails to fit one of the types. Enneagram fans in the help-ing professions, after years of working with the tool, feel that these nine are just about right. And individuals claim that the enneagram has helped them to reach a deeper understanding of their personal compulsions than any other self-help system has, In other words, this weird, unempirical, upsetting, gnostic, and mys-tifying map of the psyche seems to work. In 1990 Claudio Naranjo MD published Ennea-Type Structures: Self-Analysis for the Seeker. Enneagram students were eager to read what he had to say, since he led the development o_f the the-ory among English-speaking publics. His book, the smallest I know of on the subject, builds the theory on much more solid ground. That book is now out of print, but has been incorpo-rated in Naranjo's new and expanded volume, Character and Neurosis, published in 1994. Naranjo lends legitimacy to the theory in several ways. Unlike most other enneag.ram authors, who tend to pile adjective upon adjective and style upon style to cover the many variations possi-ble within each compulsion, Naranjo,keeps the set of descriptors limited. He wants these descriptors to function the way they func-tion in clinical manuals such as the DSM tli, namely, as a list of discreet phenomena sufficient to distinguish one type from another? By describing diseases with as little overlap as possible, he enables therapists to spot the core problem more quickly and waste less time on manifestations of the problem shared with other compulsions. Naranjo also takes pains to make a distinction between pas-sions (anger, envy, gluttony, and so forth) and the cognitive errors that underlie each passion. These errors amount to uncrit-ical assumptions about what life is like--the kind of oversimpli-fied worldview (and subsequent inappropriate adaptive routines) that Ellis deals with in his rational-emotive therapy.9 By pin-pointing cognitive errors, Naranjo believes, a person can iden-tify and dissolve his or her pet myths in order to rob the j~uly-August 199~ 521 Dunne * The Enneagram corresponding passion of its rationale and thereby weaken its grip on the psyche. Another contribution Naranjo makes to the theory is that he consistently explains the psychological dynamics at work in each compulsion, rather than just stating them. By appealing to his readers' understanding rather than their memory, he invites them to consult the workings of their own psyches to verify the pres-ence of certain subconscious routines. This is no small achievement. The mind is easily content with a notional familiarity with terms. Only under the whip of intel-lectual desire will we push forward to uncover for ourselves some of our psychic gremlins that have never seen the light of con-sciousness. Likewise the heart is easily comforted with comfort-able feelings; it takes an inner discipline, responsible to no one but oneself, to face up to the discomforts of acting responsibly. In my limited experience of teaching the theory, I found that many students find it too difficult to allow the teaching to break through their automatic defenses and deal with their hidden fears and cravings. The enneagram doctrine just feeds a ravenous compul-sion. So the Status Seeker uses the enneagram to advance her own reputation. The Observer uses it to gather yet further infor-mation before he ventiares out into the world. And so on. Enneagram work is particularly difficult for teachers. They are tempted to devour the lore with teaching in mind, not learn-ing. The work, however, is for people on a personal mission-- those who possess enough self-knowledge to know they are learners in the school of self-knowledge. Much of Naranjo's prose envisions a therapeutic setting in which a seeker looks to a men-tor for guidance. The aim of the therapy is not to settle what our basic compulsion is, as if from that point on we know what box we are in. The therapeutic outcome is not to identify a conceptual scheme that sometimes describes our behavior. The desired out-come is to understand specific experiences of being not our best selves, using conceptual schemes as initial indicators of what may be causing the trouble. This is why it is important to hold the enneagram types at arm's length. Although some people seem to fit a single type per-fectly, others seem to fit several types. Are these latter persons-- whose self-deceit eludes everyone's analysis--all the while being victims of only a single compulsion? Or have they really developed several distinct alternatives to authentic living? Practically speak- 522 Review for Religious ing, it makes no difference so long as users rely on the ennea-gram as nothing more than clusters of fixations and behaviors that logically hang together. Their conceptual consistency is merely a model to help people raise relevant questions about the inner events that possess a slippery logic of their own. Besides his economy of description and his reliance on per-sonal understanding, a further significant contribution Naranjo makes to the theory lies in how he has analyzed the connection between psychological difficulties and exis-tential decisions about being human. Going beyond Oscar Ichazo, from whom he first learned the theory, as well as beyond the people who had already published his enneagram material, Naranjo bases each psychological dynamic in a fundamental spiritual crisis he calls "ontic obscuration," which is a kind of a deafness to our inner drives to be authentic persons. He proposes that, just as certain cognitive errors under' lie each passion, so certain existential fail-ures underlie each cognitive error. This is significant because it puts the focus directly on the inner work of being fully human. Other authors settle for cate-gorizing people by behavior patterns or look to childhood trau-mas to explain present weirdness--the kinds of analyses commonly found in popular psychology. Indeed, popular psychology usually lacks the words and ideas with which to reflect on that innermost work of authenticity. But, by paying direct attention to "ontic obscuration," individuals can discover that a major driver behind their compulsive responses lies in how seriously they take those quiet impulses to be fully human or else how consistently they have avoided the inner work involved in staying human. This "ontic obscuration" underlies each compulsion in its own manner. The Slug stands at the center, having thoroughly obscured inner voices about how to be one's truest self. The Bully and the Perfectionist hear the voices dimly, but respond through a focus on externals, especially through various forms of anger they feel because things are not what they should be. The Helper, the Status Seeker, and the Sensitive Artist hear the voices, but they divert their desire to become fully human persons into Enneagram work is particularly difficult for teachers. They are tempted to devour the lore with teaching in mind, not learning. ~uly-Augtwt 199Y 523 Dunne ¯ The Enneag'ram becoming just persons whose image carries clout in the lives of o.thers. The Planner, the Accuser, and the Observer also hear the voiceS, but they divert a fear of not becoming fully human into strategies designed to protect the little bits of personhood they believe they possess.l° ¯ Naranjo refers to this approach as his "Nasruddin" theory. The story goes that this mullah was crawling around in an alley near a marketplace, searching for the key to his house. A friend joined in the search and, after finding nothing, asked the mul-lah, "Are you sure you lost the key around here?" The mullah responded, "No, I lost it at home." The friend naturally asked, "Then why are you looking for the key here?" The mullah replied, "The light is much better here." 1, The point is that we often look for the key to our house out under the sun, where everything seems clear. But the key is in the house, an~l the house is dark. The Existential Questign: How Should I Be? For all the benefits ofNaranjo's "ontic obscuration," he does not explain in precise terms what being human involves; he set-tles for a description of some effects of"obscuration." For exam-ple, "loss of a sense of I-am-ness" and "something missing inside.''12 At times he presumes that deep down people really know the experience of "ontic obscuration." At other times he claims that the obscuration itself prevents people from realizing that any kind of obscuration has occurred. So, while it is appro-priate for him to recommend that the seeker find a mentor to help recognize a compulsion, the theory would benefit also from a positive understanding of just what it is that "ontic obscura-tion" obscures. To uncover this prize, we need to reflect on how being human happens to be obscured ifi the first place. Most psychologists agree that the intellect of children develops not only in the amount of information they learn but, more significantly, in whether or not they learn certain higher-level intellectual skills for understanding their experiences. So Naranjo's "ontic obscura-tion'? indicates, not a breakdown in mental development, but rather an unfinished development. It is not a matter of having obscured what once was clear; it is a matter of having been born blind and gradually learning how to see. 524 Review for Religious The developmental problem is how to move from a world of images, behaviors, symbols, and external sensations to the larger world of meaning and values. As children we were able to pose questions about being human only by using images. Should I be pushy? Compliant? Generous? Teacherly? Observant? Like a lion? A turtle? A bird? A monkey? Early successful functioning of one of these styles sets up a habit and provides evidence that the world around us must be of such and such a nature--the one that matches our chosen strategy. To the Bully, then, the world is dog-eat- dog; to the Accuser, the world is ridden with crooks. We build up a behavioral style and support it with a cognitive belief in a par-ticular strategy like one of those described in .the enneagram: being correct, being related, being impressive, being the victim, being retentive, being wary, being pleasing, being pugnacious, or being deaf. We become capable of noticing our compulsions as such only later, when we learn that proper use of our minds and hearts is more important than proper behavior and that intelligent analy-sis and reasonable judgment put us in touch with the real world far better than myths and symbols can. Only p~ople who have learned to think about inner acts of meaning can make a statement such as "There I go again" as they catch on to unreal thinking and feeling. ~ .~ This learning represents a major jump in thinking skills. A person discovers that the world is not just "already out there.''Is The real world is also the invisible world made up of the acts of meaning that occur in people's minds and hearts: the agreements, the plans, the guiding ideas, the reigning values, the loyalties, the spites, the memories, the laws, and the internalized language of the place. Former precepts such as Be corre'ct~ Be connected, Be suc-cessful, and Be the martyr were established in the mind of a~child who had no alternative but to think with pictures and symbols. Bht, in the world of meaning and values, learning how to be human ought to transcend these image-based precepts and adopt precepts based on the functions of the mind and heart. Bernard Lonergan, the late Canadian philosopher whose Insight and Method in Theology have influenced many practitioners in the human and natural sciences, has identified five such func-tion- based precepts. They are: Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible, Be in love.'4 These voices are in all of us. They are active long before we notice them as distinct July-August 199Y 525 Dunne ¯ The Enneagram impuls.es. Although they still escape the notice of many psychol-ogists as being the most fundamental impulses that make us fully human, they are the living source of our ability to notice, under-stand, realize, take responsibility, and love, For Lonergan, these five precepts support a highly-structured method for the human sciences. But, for people seeking to under-stand their inner compulsions, they can also provide a normal way of referring to the task of being fully human. They can rep-resent the very operations that "ontic obscuration" obscures. These are the events that promise to bring a person to what Naranjo, in a more descriptive and less precise mode, calls "the integrated wholeness of one's experience"; "true aliveness, a sense of existing, a plenitude"; "finding value in the present and the actual.''ts These function-based ~precepts not only transcend image-based precepts; they also enable people to transcend who they are and to rise toward being who they are to be. Lonergan refers to these precepts as "the transcendental precepts." A Therapy of Love The question of how we should be does not end there. While people might rely on a diagnostic tool such as the enneagram to recognize self-defeating thoughts before they become actions, they also need a therapy to help recognize self-transcending thoughts and feelings. This means learning firsthand the differ-ence between the transcendental precepts and their opposites: between being attentive and being oblivious, being intelligent and being stupid, being reasonable and being silly, being respon-sible and being irresponsible, and being loving and being hateful. While anyone can recognize abstractly the contrast between these words, the right-hand members of the pairs conspire quite suc-cessfully to obscure their own functioning right behind our eyes. Fortunately, this conspiracy can be caught in the act. By know-ingly paying attention to the transcendental precepts, we can be more attentive to inner experience. We can be more intelligent about how certain cognitive errors and existential decisions sup-port our compulsions. We can be more reasonable as we admit the truth of how thoroughly our fixation may have dominated our psyches. We can be more responsible in accepting guilt that belongs to us, in shunning guilt that is unreasonable, and in sup-pressing what compulsions we can as they arise. Most wisely, we 526 Review for Religious can let our love for others take the lead more often, including and especially our love for God. When a person falls in love, he or she suddenly sees the exter-nal world as more beautiful, more full of potential, more worthy of respect and care. What has occurred, though, is not a change in the external world one views; it is a self-transcending change in the viewer. Being in love heals much of ~' what was crippled in the other four levels of the person's self-transcendence. That is, being in love gives courage to respon-sibility, realism to reason, insight to intel-ligence, and acumen to attention. The person has risen above the imprisoned self and realized something of the profound marvels of life, nature, and the friendly character of the universe. Love's healing power is evident in the love between friends, within a family, and among fellow citizens and members of a group. It is also evident in the love of God. People who have undergone a religious conversion, whether in a sudden inner revolution or a gradual takeover, experience three new powers. The~y see goodness where the unconverted see only evil. They feel a power to reach out to others at a higher risk to themselves than self-protecting reason would allow. And, after the worst setbacks, they find themselves soon on their feet, mys-teriously alive and submissive to the impulse to love again26 More can be said about the healing effects of religious love, but this milch illustrates how an analysis of our self-transcending acts clar-ifibs'what "being human" means and reveals the available powers that "o'ntic obscuration" obscures. Further analysis along these lines would complement any instance of healing with a thera-peutic theory consistent with religious love. Notice especially how the addition of this account of self-transcendence avoids the typi~cal trap of self-help psychologies. It makes clear that people do not help themselves all by them-selves. When i't is the self that needs help, "self-help" is a con-tradiction in terms. Genuine help must be imported. We rely on each other and we rely on God. In order to let go of our worries that our failures will be someh6w held against us, we rely on the fact that we are loved. Being in love gives courage to responsibility, realism to reason, insight to intelligence, and acumen to attention. Ju~-August199y 527 Dunne ¯ The Enneagram The work of making all this real for oneself is long and hard. It might go something like this: Suppose I typically play the Sensitive Artist, envious of the personas of others and absorbing my injuries in quiet melancholy. I should first keep a diary to log the times I notice my compulsion at work, in order to grow in the habit of noticing, t~nderstanding~ and gradually realizing how precisely my frustrated desire to be a notable person works. (Naranjo suggests that this work on autobiography may take three or four months.) ~7 At the same time, as I grow in self-realization, I should grow in self-responsibility. When I hear the inner voice saying "Be sensitive, be like so-and-so," I should say "Shut up!" and then bend an ear to the quieter voices of authenticity whis-pering, "Just be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and in love. Being that is a quite good enough way to be your best." Then, alongside the inner work of self-reflection, I should let myself connect with others. Although Naranjo believes that his book can help a person avoid high-minded and patronizing therapists, I find it hard to imagine people really benefiting from it unless they talk about this inner work with others. Being con-nected to others means obeying the transcendental precept to Be in love. That means letting my love for others be the light that revdals what is truly worth doing, rather than mere consistency or some private ethical principle. Because genuine love heals irre-sponsibility, silliness, stupidity, and inattention, the test of genuine love will be just that: Does it make me more responsible, more ready to face truth, more functionally intelligent, more on the lookout for what really counts? If it does not, it is not love. The inner work also means letting myself be loved. For most of us, with our distorted self-images, this means facing the fact that despite our faults, despite the injuries we have caused others, the person who claims to love us is telling the truth. It means dropping the flimsy defense that "you don't really know me" and admitting that the point is not whether we are fully known, but whether we are appreciated and valued for ourselves. It means realizing that we will never be perfect, that we do not need to expend that much energy defending ourselves, that we do not even need to "fix" ourselves through diligent self-therapy. Unless we rely on God and other people for forgiveness, tolerance, and patience, no pathology or self-help therapy will work. This is only an example of finding our way home. Different people will find different paths. But at least knowing what being 528 Review.for Religious human is about shows us what our home looks like. Gradually-- never fully being, but always becoming, human--we will have returned. We can come in and go out as we please. We will have found our home's key: the house is no longer dark. Notes ~ Enneagram, coined from Greek, means "ninefold marking." 2 Capital means that the sins are principal or "head" (capita) sins from which people's other sins flow. Althofigh the enneagram seems to have arisen independently of the Christian tradition, seven of its compulsions match the seven capital sins. The remaining two are bogus morality (Accuser) and bogus success (Status Seeker). 3 No two authors agree on these generic names, but there is general agreement about the descriptions of each type~ Devotees often refer just to the number, as in "She's a raving Two!" (a Helper). 4 See C.G. Jung, Paychological Types (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1926), chap. 10. Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine C. Briggs, developed the fourth pair of preferences, judging and perceiv-ing, based on further observations made byJung. Note that they realize that its usefulness applies mainly to the young. See Isabel Briggs Myers, Introduction to Type (Gainesville, Florida: Center for Publications' of Psychological Types, 1962), p. 8. s The works on which I have based my remarks are: Maria Beesing et al., The Enneagram: A Journey of Self Discovery (Denville: Dimension Books, 1984); Kathleen Hurley and Theodore Dobson, What's My Type? Use the Enneagram and My Best Self (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991 and 1993); Claudio Naranjo, Ennea-Type Structures: Self-Analysis for the Seeker and Character and Neurosis: An Integrative View (Nevada City: Gateways, 1990 and 1994); Helen Pahner, The Enneagram (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988); Don Richard Riso, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). I have also relied on various notes taken by students participating in workshops given by Naranjo and others who derive the substance of their doctrine from him. 6 An exception'is Hurley and Dobson, My Best Self, identifying two distinct compulsions in both the Status Seeker and the Accuser, making a total of eleven compulsions. In .any case, there are no enneagram the-orists I know of who have dealt with the fundamental problem of how to set a limit to types. If there is such a limit, then the types will have to be defined by a set of psychological conditions that are limited and verifiable. For example, Karen Horney's division of three reactions to conflict (against people, toward people, away from people) might be matched against three I-world comparisons (bigger than, equal to, smaller than) to generate exactly nine types. Or against the trio Denial, Overconfidence, Underconfidence. The trio Ignorance, Craving, and Fear seems to under-lie Naranjo's thinking. There are many possibilities. This kind of work will 3~ly-August 1995 529 Dunne ¯ The Enneagram be necessary if the professional psychological community is ever to give credence to the theory and, more to the point, if the theory is ever to be shown to explain the actual range of human compulsions. 7 Gurdjieff, the teacher of this model of personality, claims to have discovered the enneagram in the Sufi tradition, but there is little evi-dence in Sufism of any of the heavy interpretative overlay that it now carries. Gurdjieff's confidence in the diagram seems based on numerol-ogy rather than experiment, and he expected that the diagram could rep-resent any human or natural process. 8 Diagnostic and Stat#tical Manual of Mental Disorders III (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1987). 0 9 See Albert Ellis, Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1963), chap. 3, "Irrational Ideas Which Cause and Sustain Emotional Disturbances," pp, 60-88. l0 The reader should note inconsistencies in the enneagram designs. In Naranjo's Character and Neurosis, pp. 199 and 245, and throughout his Ennea-Type Structures, the triangle arrows run clockwise. Everywhere else in Character and Neurosis, they run counterclockwise. tt Naranjo, Ennea-Type Structures, pp. xix-xx, and Character and Neurosis, p 36. Hereafter page references will be to Ennea-Type Structures, with corresponding references to Character and Neurosis in italics. ~2 See pp. 30/61 and 63/219. He also describes ontic obscuration as: "obscuration . . . of the natural, original, and truest support for one's sense of personal value" (45/196); "the universal pain of fallen con-sciousness, beyond type-bound characteristics" (45/196); "lack of ground-ingin being" (107/197); and "loss of wholeness and sense of being" (138/150). o 13 Walter Burghardt SJ notes that John Courtney Murray relies on this distinction to clarify how weak the old Catholic reliance on dogma-tism really was. See "The Richness of a Resource," in A Spirituality for Contemporary Life, ed. David L. Fleming SJ (St. Louis: Review for Religious, 1991). Murray may well have relied on Lonergan's Insight (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958) for this notion (for which, see real in its index). 14 See Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), pp. 53, 55, and passim. I have developed these notions more at length in Lonergan and Spirituality (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985) and Spiritual Mentoring (HarperSanFrancisco, 199 I). Is Naranjo, pp. 47/197, 92/94, and 125/173. 16 These powers are traditionally called faith, charity, and hope. I have avoided the traditional terms in an effort to avoid conceptualism and to make clear how religious love heals the injured psyche. 17 Naranjo, p. 158/275. 530 Review for Religious MARY WINIFRED Imaging Spiritual Direction Ipn spite of a plethora of spiritual direction programs pur-orting to train those who would be spirithal directors, it remains a fact that gifts of direction are just that--gifts, not learned skills. Spiritual direction involves listening and hearing, discernment, clarity of vision, and assistance in the development of a relationship between an 'individual and God. While learned skills may assist a spiritual director, it is only deep sensitivity devel-oped through years of personal prayer that enables true spiritual direction. It is often easier to say what spiritual direction is not, than to describe what it is. For example, spiritual direction is not psychotherapy; it is not life skills taught by a social worker; it is not catechistic training for specific church membership. " In a pamphlet entitled Spiritual Direction, Henri Nouwen says: "It is of great value to submit our prayer life from time to time to the supervision of a spiritual guide. A spiritual director in this strict sense is not a counselor, a therapist, or an analyst, but a mature fellow Christian to whom we choose to be accountable for our spiritual life and from whom we can expect prayerful guid-ance in our constant struggle to discern God's active presence in our lives, A spiritual director can be called 'soul friend' (Kenneth I2eech) or a" 'spiritual friend' (Tilden Edwards). It is important that he or she practice the disciplines of the Church and the Book and thus become familiar with.the space in which we try to listen to God's voice. The way we relate to our spiritual director depends very much on our needs, our personalities, and external circum-stances. Some people may want to see their spiritual director Mary Winifred CtlS is the Sister-in-Charge of St. Cuthbert's Retreat House; Federal Hill Road; Brewster, New York 10509. ¯ July-August 199Y S31 Winifred ¯ Imaging Spiritual Direction biweekly or monthly, others will find it sufficient to be in touch only when the occasion asks for it. Some people may feel the need for a more extensive sharing with their spiritual director, while others will find seeing him or her once in a while for a few short moments to be sufficient. It is essential that one Christian helps another Christian to enter without fear into the presence of God and there to discern God's call" (8-9). Because the singular aim of spiritual direction is to assist in growth toward God, there are no set guidelines, no conventional measuring sticks, no right or wrong answers, and no concretely attainable goals. While training in prayer and meditation may certainly make one a more articulate spiritual director, neverthe-less spiritual direction remains a vocation unfettered by rules and regulations, by industry standards, or by a financial fee scale. Most spiritual directees practice St. Paul's suggestion in the Letter to the Galatians, "Those who are taught the word must share in all good things with their teacher" (6:6), by making some gift to their directors: homemade bread, flowers from the garden, a book or tape, or some other item; money does not usually enter into a spiritual direction agreement, nor should it. Unlike therapy or counseling, which are professional relationships between a ther-apist or counselor and a client, spiritual direction is a relation-ship of charity and generosity between fellow Christians. Spiritual gifts cannot be purchased; they are not for sale. Three images of the spiritual life may help to indicate ways in which the presence of a director (or mentor or soul friend) may effectively aid us in our growth Godwards. The first image, offered by Thomas H. Green, is :that of a marketplace. The marketplace--or, as Green also labels it, the ldtchen!--is the part of our lives that encompasses a multitude of small, necessary, sometimes tedious tasks which can seem to draw us away from the richness and quiet of our interior lives. "Frequently," Green says, "the demands and frustrations of the apostolate, or of raising a family and earning a living, seem to be merely obstacles to a genuine and deep prayer life. But if I am right in explaining the way the Lord works through these exter-nal activities and events, then we should see them quite differ-ently. Far from being obstacles to our interior growth, they become for us the very sandpaper of our sanctification, at least as important to our growth as what happens in the solitude of for-mal prayer" (121). 532 Review for Religious These are not particularly comfortable thoughts, especially for those of~us who would like to discover a large block of unin-terrupted quiet. Often it is only with the help of a wise spiritual director that we can begin to uncover and acknowledge the wealth of spiritual graces hidden in our routine daily tasks and to see opportunities in what have earlier appeared to be only obstacles. Another, who listens with detached concern, will not only listen to the occasional frustration, tiredness, or boredom in our every-day tasks, but will also hear the voice of God calling to us from what may, on the surface, seem to be 'merely dull routine. As surely as God works in this world, God is also available to us in our work, however .tedious and distracting our marketplace--or kitchen--may feel at times. Another ancient and popular image for the spiritual life is that of a journey or pilgrimage. John Gorsuch describes such a spiri-tual journey as a moving out from a place of assumed comfort, beckoned on by God into the unknown. The image of a journey is particularly apt if considered in its various stages: there is a beginning, with its preparations and planning; the travel itself; and the goal of the journey. In the early stages of beginning a journey, there may be excitement and feverish planning--a guide is helpful here in focusing our attention and helping us to leave behind our unnecessary baggage. I once watched my sister prepar-ing for a backpacking trip: with the advice of an experienced back-packer friend, she was encouraged to take only the essential objects, leaving her backpack light enough to carry and yet stocked with exactly what she would need. But traveling, no matter how well it is planned and prepared, is nevertheless an adventure into the unknown. Often we must stop to ask for directions or other help. In traveling this may be as simple as "Yes, you're on the right road" or "Two more blocks Because the singular aim of spiritual direction is to assist in growth toward God, there are no set guidelines, no conventional measuring sticks, no right or wrong answers, and no concretely attainable goals. July-August 199Y 533 Winifred ¯ Imaging Spiritual Direction and then turn left"; on a spiritual journey, as simple as "Keep lis-tening in your prayer" or "Look in the mirror every morning: you will see a person God loves profoundly." If we are fortunate enough to have a good and reliable guide or director, we are soon back on track. At times, too, the journey's route may seem long and wearisome--turning aside or even giving up altogether may look like the most positive option. Then a wise mentor's word of encouragement may challenge and enliven us to continue with new energy and zeal. And then there is the goal to our journey. Sometimes we are so caught up in the travel itself that we lose sight of the goal. A friend and I once planned to spend a restful week together; iron-ically, we also planned too many sight-seeing activities, with the result that the true goals of the week--to ,rest and enjoy each other's company--were lost. So, on a spiritual journey, it is easy to be distracted by circumstances and surroundings from our true goal of knowing God. We need a wise and discerning director to help us in maintaining a clarity of vision about our goal. A third image is that of epiphany. Adrian van Kaam, from whom I have borrowed this image, describes an epiphany as the "shining forth of eternity in daily people, in often unnoticed events and things" (8). It is an epiphany that comes through in the openness and vulnerability of spiritual direction. Van Kaam goes on to say: "The risen Lord is our life now. Our life must become a hymn of praise to Jesus rising in us . Jesus tells us that the kingdom of God is at hand in each of us. It is already here and now, for we are called to share his resurrection in humanity and history" (65). And surely this is the heart of spiritual direction, that one Christian shares freely with another a word of help, a message of encouragement, a glimpse of eternity. Bibliography Gorsuch, John R An Invitation to the Spiritual Journey. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1990. Green, Thomas H. Darkness in the Marketplace. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1981. Nouwen, Henri. Spiritual Direction. Cincinnati: Forward Movement Publications, 1981. Van Kaam, Adrian. The Music of Eternity. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1990, 534 Review for Religious MARY C. SULLIVAN The Brazier That Is My God: Teresa on True Prayer's Dispositions, Gifts, and Signs It is 2 June 1577. Teresa of Avila is, in effect, under house arrest in the convent of the Discalced Carmelites in Toledo, Spain--a community she founded in 1569.1 She has been on the road for almost ten years, establishing reformed monasteries of Carmelite women and even of Carmelite men committed to the poverty, silence, soli-tude, penance, prayer, and detachment she believes are envisioned in the primitive Rule. But now for the last year she has been ordered to remain in one of her convents (she chooses Toledo) because of political tensions between the Calced and Discalced Carmelites. She is regarded by the Calced as a ringleader who must be kept out of cir-culation. To add to her isolation, on 18 June 1577 the papal nuncio Nicol~is Ormaneto, who has been friendly to the reform, will die, and his successor, Felipe Sega, will come to Spain in August already prejudiced against Teresa and her work. He will later call her "a. restless gadabout woman, disobedient and stubborn, who under the cloak of devotion invented wicked opinions, going about breaking enclosure, contrary to the decree of the Council of Trent and the orders of her superiors, teaching as if she were a doctor, in contempt of the teaching of St. Paul, who com-manded women not to teach."2 Mary C. Sullivan RSM works in the College of Liberal Arts of Rochester Institute of Technology. She may be addressed at Sisters of Mercy; 18 Upton Park; Rochester, New York 14607. heritage j~uly-August 1995 535 Sullivan ¯ The Brazier That Is My God Prologue But now, in early June 1577, during her enforced reclusion, Teresa is in Toledo, writing a book on prayer at the request of her confessor, Jer6nimo Gracifin, a Discalced priest. By the end of July, after one month of work on Las Moradas (The Interior Castle, or The Dwelling Places3), she will be recalled to Avila, where against her own desire she has again been elected prioress of Incarnation, the Carmelite convent she entered as a young woman and from which in 1562 she will found San Jos4, the first convent of the Reform, across town in Avila. But the Carmelite authorities do not want Teresa to be the prioress of Incarnation. They will call for a second vote, and when fifty-four sisters at Incarnation persist in electing Teresa, these sisters will be ex-communicated and denied the sacraments. On 3 December of this same year, John of the Cross, the confessor and spiritual director at Incarnation, will be abducted from Avila at night by Calced friars and taken to the windowless closet cell in the Toledo monastery of the Calced Carmelites where he will remain impris-oned for six months. Simultaneous with all this, the modern form of the Spanish Inquisition is in full swing in Seville, having been operating as a powerful ecclesiastical tribunal for almost a hundred years. The manuscript of Teresa's Life has been in the Inquisition's possession for two years, after being denounced to it by the dis-appointed and vindictive Princess of Eboli.4 In the midst of all this difficulty, most of which deeply dis-tressed her, in the six-month period from 2 June to 29 November 1577 (which will actually amount to only two months of writing time), Teresa will start and complete her masterwork, The Dwelling Places, the treatise on prayer and virtue which more than any other of her writings led Pope Paul VI in 1970 to declare her a doctor of the universal church. Not once in this volume does Teresa refer explicitly to the external affairs which weigh so heavily on her mind and heart, though her letters of this period amply demon-strate her concern, and dismay. Rather, in this magnificent book about a human person's gradually increasing communion with the God dwelling within her, Teresa speaks about the prayer of per-sonal conversion, the prayer of reordering and reordered charity within the human heart. And so The Dwelling Places is a book which may contribute immeasurably to the present-day conversion of the church, of religious life, and of the hearts of individual Christian women and men. 536 Review for Reli

Issue 51.2 of the Review for Religious, March/April 1992. ; Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published bi-monthly at Saint Louis University, by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Telephone: 314-535-3048. Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Correspondence about the "Canonical Counsel" department: Elizabeth McDonough OP ¯ 5001 Eastern Avenue ¯ P.O. Box 29260 ~,¥ashington, D.C. 20017. I}OSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ¯ Duluth, MN 55806. Second-class postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional offices. SUBSCRIPTION RATES Single copy $5.00 includes surface mailing costs. One-year subscription $15.00 plus mailing costs. Two-year subscription $28.00 plus mailing costs. See inside back cover for subscription information and mailing costs. ©1992 Review for Religious for religious Editor Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Assistant Editors Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Michael G. Harter sJ Elizabeth McDonough OP Jean Read Mary Ann Foppe David J. Hassel SJ Mary Margaret Johanning SSND Iris Ann Ledden SSND Se;in Sammon FMS Wendy Wright PhD Suzanne Zuercher OSB Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living MARCH / APRIL1992 ¯ VOLUMES1 ¯ NUMBER2 contents 166 182 191 2O6 217 229 236 ministry and ministries The Spiritual Exercises as a Foundation for Educational Ministry Walter J. Burghardt SJ reflects on the vision and values given to educational ministry when it is permeated by the spirituality of Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. Going the Distance, Sustaining the Gift Melannie Svoboda SND suggests some concrete ways that people can joyfully exercise their ministry over the long haul. Newman's Living the Oratory Charism Halbert G. Weidner CO explains the Oratory foundation of Philip Neri in order to highlight values significant to John Henry Newman's life. theology and spirituality The Resurrection Kernel Dennis Billy CSSR outlines the basic principle of the doctrine of the resurrection in order to show its influence in our way of living. The Fragile Connection between Prayer and Suffering Matthias Neuman OSB speaks from his own experience of how human suffering affects our prayer. To Choose Jesus for My Heaven Donald Macdonald SMM finds Julian of Norwich's insights into the maternal love of Jesus expressed in the Blessed Sacrament. religious life and renewal Seeing in the Dark Janet Ruffing RSM finds light in John of the Cross's description of the Dark Night for understanding the current turmoil in reli-gious life. 162 Review for Religious 249 260 267 Memories of the Future Thomas McKenna CM shows how eschatology as a style of thinking provides understanding for the renewal efforts in reli-gious life. Integrating Postmodernity and Tradition Reid Perkins OP encourages the greater use of narratives in reli-gious life to connect us to the tradition and at the same time to help us overcome the obliviousness of postmodern life. Religious-Life Issues in a Time of Transition John A. Grindel CM and Sean Peters CSJ summarize the results of various studies of U.S. religious life funded by the Lilly Endowment and point to issues still to be dealt with. living religiously 276 Cultivating Uselessness Rose Hoover RC proposes that in the very experience of useless-ness and foolishness lies the gift of religious life to a pragmatic society. 282 Therapy for Religious: The Troublesome Triangle Joyce Harris OSC offers some suggestions for a collaborative rela-tionship among therapist, the individual religious, and the com-munity and its representative. 289 294 Prenovitiate: Theory and Practice Anthony Steel SSG believes a prenovitiate program can help meet the challenges of contemporary cultural attitudes toward religious life and outlines the plan for his community. report U.S. Hispanic Catholics: Trends and Works 1991 Kenneth Davis OFM Conv reviews the various events and writ-ings in the Catholic Hispanic experience. departments 164 Prisms 303 Canonical Counseh Hermits and Virgins 309 Book Reviews March-April 1992 163 prisms Teilhard de Chardin in The Divine Milieu observes that the larger half of our lives is made up of what happens to us. His observation comes home to us each year as we celebrate the great high holy days of Christianity-- Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. Paradoxically Jesus accomplishes the work of redemption, his life's purpose, in what happens to him in his suffering, death, and resurrection. We enter into this paradox by our celebration of these days. We cannot change history, we cannot undo what has happened. Our celebration allows us in our own time to enter into what happened to Jesus and to be with him, to stand alongside, to feel com-passion- as helplessly as we listen to someone tell of being tortured by a totalitarian regime or as we sit at the bedside of a dying loved one. No activity of ours changes the event; compassionate presence is the difficult but precious gift we can give. Of course it is also our privilege to share in some-one's joy and happiness, as we do when we celebrate the res-urrection victory of Jesus. Despite the fact that so many of us are spectator-sports people, whether in the stadium or in front of the TV set, we are not comfortable being spectators of an evil we can-not eliminate and sometimes even of a happiness which lit-tle touches our lives. We may find other people's parties empty of fun for ourselves, and we may dread visiting a neighbor in the hospital.We would rather not drive through derelict inner-city neighborhoods, we would brush past the homeless person sleeping over heating grates in our down-towns, or we would switch TV channels if the images of starving Sudanese children with distended stomachs are too graphic. The problems seem too large for our efforts to make a difference. Our activity and our emotions seem 164 Review for Religious frozen. Even though we are members of the Body of Christ, we often choose not to see and not to hear. When hostages return exuberantly to waiting families, when a comatose girl revives to the joy of her parents, when government agencies extend unemployment benefits for those hurting in a reces-sion economy, how often do we feel a thrill and utter a prayer of thanks to God? Too often we keep ourselves emotionally distant even from the joys of others around us, probably because they just "happen" and leave us personally unaffected. St. Paul could state, by analogy with our human bodies, that if one member suffers all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members share its joy. The Easter events challenge us always in what we do and in what happens to us. If God is truly the God of our life, then we find the opportunity of meeting God both in what we set out to do and in what happens to us. Jesus' crucifixion confronts the activist in each of us to question our judgment about our most valued "work." All of our dyings become not the entropy of exhaustive waste, but graced moments of freedom to embrace another givenness of life from our God of life. When St. Paul challenged death--"Where is your sting?"--he did not close his eyes to the evils and losses which all the forms of dying represent. He trumpeted the Easter message that the Christ-redemption event changes not only our attitude but also our ability to value the whole of our life--its successes and accomplishments, its apparent waste matter of sin and failure. As Gospel models, Mary Magdalene (who may have confused sex and love) and Peter (who has grabbed for success and lied for survival) are the first among the evangelizers of this new creation event. Pope John Paul's appeal for a new evangelization takes form in us by our renewed attempt to integrate the active and passive aspects of our daily life. By living faith-lives as "other Christs" we make a dif-ference in what we do and in what we suffer. The call to a new evan-gelization invites us to explore further the struggles of justice and poverty and human living both at our doorstep and in our larger world. Making a difference often seems like planting seeds and hav-ing to wait for things to happen. Easter faith stirs us up in hope, moves us out in action, and integrates us in a compassionate patience. This Easter may the risen Lord embrace us anew with the grace of his passion for life. David L. Fleming sJ March-April 1992 165 WALTER J. BURGHARDT The Spiritual Exercises as a Foundation for Educational Ministry ministry and ministries To speak of basing an educational ministry on the Spiritual Exercises is something of a paradox, an apparent contra-diction. Two things simply do not seem to fit. Are not the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola an experience of the spirit, a thirty-day or eight-day retreat centered on the movement of the Christian soul to heaven, conducted in solitude, far from hustle and bustle, and preferably in silence? And is not a university or college a citadel of the intellect, where the stress is on knowledge, on books, where minds meet in constant conflict, where ideas clash, where noise is in the air, where silence is reserved for a corner of the library? I am not saying that the Spiritual Exercises and the groves of academe are interchangeable terms, that a col-lege or university is a retreat experience, that the class-room is a chapel, that learning is worship. My thesis is that the Spiritual Exercises can be, indeed should be, an exciting foundation for education Jesuit-style. More specif-ically, I see the Spiritual Exercises as a process of conver-sion which in an educational institution aims at altering in students, faculty, and staff (1) their world of learning, the Walter J. Burghardt SJ is director of the Woodstock Theo-logical Center Project Preaching the ffust Word. This article retains the flavor of its original oral presentation made at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, in April 1991. Father Burghardt's address is Manresa-on-Severn; P.O. Box 9; Annapolis, Maryland 21404. 166 Review for Religious life of the mind; (2) their world of loving, their human and reli-gious imagination and affection; (3) their world of living, the life of social realities. Let me explain what I mean in each of these three cases. First, the Spiritual Exercises should alter your world of learn-ing, that is, the life of your mind. You see, basic to the life of the mind, at the root of a university's existence, is a momentous mono-syllable: Why? Why study art and the arts, physical science or political science, law or business or medicine? Now Ignatius does not ask that question in those terms. But "spiritual exercises" he defines as "every way of preparing and disposing" ourselves to remove "all disordered attachments and, after their removal, of seeking and finding God's will in the way we direct our lives.''1 And there definitely are disordered approaches to the life of the mind, strange reasons why some go to college or university or professional school. I am not thinking of the more superficial reasons--college as a four-year Hammer dance2 interrupted by class. I am thinking of an approach to business education guided by a powerful principle: what makes the world go round is economics, and what makes the economy work is greed, the almighty dollar. I am thinking of gifted music and drama students whose aim is fame, the lust for applause, even the TV laugh machine. I am thinking of political-science students whose primary purpose is political power, the thrill in manipulating other men and women. A heart-rending example in this area is Lee Atwater, the manager of George Bush's 1988 presidential campaign who almost single-handedly turned the tide against Dukakis. Not long before his death at forty from a brain tumor on 29 March, this gifted man~ with an incredible instinct for the jugular made this poignant confession: The '80s were about acquiring--acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know, I acquired more wealth, power and pres-tige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.3 Not that money, fame, power are immoral in themselves; they are not. Without money a university would have little to offer to anyone. Fame makes it easier for the deprived to know you, to beg for the crumbs that fall from your table. Political power makes March-April 1992 167 Burghardt ¯ The Exercises for Educational Ministry possible not only a Persian Gulf war but legislated housing for the poor. Ignatius forces on the retreatant that insistent mono-syllable: Why? Even more radically, the Spiritual Exercises can keep you from segregating learning into a pigeonhole of its own, divorced from the thrust of the spirit towards God. I do not mean that all of learning becomes a religious enterprise. Vatican II made that quite clear. With Vatican I, it distinguished "'two orders of knowl-edge' which are distinct," declared that "the Church does not indeed forbid that 'when the human arts and sciences are practiced they use their own principles and their proper method, each in its own domain.'" In consequence, the council "affirms the legiti-mate autonomy of human culture and especially of the sciences.''4 My point is, the life of the mind is perilously impoverished if knowledge does not lead to wonder. Not sheer questioning: I wonder if Israel should continue populating the West Bank. In the grasp of wonder I marvel: I am surprised, amazed, delighted, enraptured. It is MaW pregnant by God's Spirit: "My spirit finds delight in God my Savior" (Lk 1:47). It is Magdalen about to touch her risen Jesus: "Master!" (Jn 20:16). It is doubting Thomas discovering his God in the wounds of Jesus. It is Michelangelo striking his sculptured Moses: "Speak!" It is Alexander Fleming fascinated by the very first antibiotic, America thrilling to the first footsteps on the moon. It is Mother Teresa cradling a naked retarded child in the rubble of West Beirut, a crippled old man in the excrement of Calcutta. It is the wonder of a first kiss. Such, sooner or later, should be your reaction to the life of learning, such the wonder that should permeate the life of your mind. Not a new methodology for biology or psychology; simply awe in the presence of a fascinating four-letter reality: life. The multifaceted, myriad miracle of life. Amazement at what breadths and depths there are to being alive--from the architectural artistry of the ant and the grace of a loping panther, through the blind-ing speed of a white marlin and the majestic flight of the bald eagle, to the beating heart of a unique fetus, the inspired imagery of Shakespeare, the fantastic forty-eight measures of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker," the transforming insight of Einstein. With such wonder you may hope to touch the pinnacle of knowledge. For, as philosopher Jacques Maritain discovered, the height of human knowing is not conceptual; it is experiential. Man or woman feels God. Yes, feels" God. 168 Review for Religious Am I ignoring Ignatius? Have I been distracted from his Spiritual Exercises? Quite the contrary. The Spiritual Exercises are an adventure in experience, in wonder. With all the power of your mental faculties, you enter the kingdom of contemplation--what contemplative William McNamara called % long loving look at the real." The real: all there is--the things of God, the people of God, God's very self. And the high purpose of all this? To be struck, surprised, stunned by the wonder of it all--from the ecstasy of Eden unspoiled, through sin's rape of the earth and earth's dwellers, to the unique love of God-in-our-flesh pinned to a cross, and our rebirth in his rising from the rock. The net effect? Ignatius's final contemplation, the acme of the Exercises: Learning to Love Like God. Here you touch the heart of Ignatius, his awareness of the ceaseless presence of Christ to our earth--now. "Consider," he counsels, "how [Christ] labors for me in all creatures.''s Not a vague, ultrapious generality. Christ behaves like a worker, a laborer, in each and every creature of his creation. How is it that the Rockies still rise in breathtaking splendor, Venus shines brighter than any star, and oil gushes from the fields of Nebraska? Because a risen Christ gives them being. Not once for all; continuously, day after day. How is it that forsythia can herald the approach of spring, corn turn into hot buttered popcorn for your theater, giant red-woods stalk the California sky? Because an imaginative Christ gives them life. How is it that your Irish setter can smell the game beyond your ken, gulls scavenge your ocean, the shad ascend the waters? Because a sensitive Christ gives them senses. How is it that you, this wondrous wedding of molecules and spirit, can shape an idea or send a skyscraper soaring, unveil mystery in a microscope or telescope, join with another--man or woman or God--in deathless oneness? Because Christ labors in you to give you intelligence and love--intelligence that mimics the mind of God, love that stems from a cross on the outskirts of Jerusalem. A thing of beauty and a joy for ever, this life of the mind. But only if the arts and sciences, if professions like law and medicine and business, that legitimately engross you open you to the still richer reality that surrounds you, invades you, transcends you, gives fresh life to the mind you treasure so rightly, the mind you The life of the mind is perilously impoverished if knowledge does not lead to wonder. March-April 1992 169 Burghardt ¯ The Exercises for Educational Ministry accept so lightly. Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises are not the only "way to go." But for openers in two senses--a beginning and an opening--as a basis, a foundation, for the life of the mind, the Spiritual Exercises are an experience difficult to exceed. Second, the Spiritual Exercises should alter your world of loving, that is, your human and religious imagination and affec-tion. Basic to this affirmation is a realization: The life of the human spirit is not circumscribed by reason, by your ability to grasp ideas, to draw conclusions from facts and premises. If your intellectual existence is simply a model of Cartesian clarity, you are limping along on one leg. What is the lamentable lacuna? Imagination. What is this strange creature we call imagination?6 To begin with, what is imagination not? It is not the same thing as fantasy. Fantasy has come to mean the grotesque, the bizarre. That is fan-tastic which is unreal, irrational, wild, unrestrained. We speak of "pure fantasy": It has no connection with reality. It is imagination run wild, on the loose, unbridled, uncontained.7 What is it, then? Imagination is the capacity we have "to make the material an image of the immaterial or spiritual.''8 It is a cre-ative power. You find it in Rembrandt's self-portraits, in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, in the odor of a new rose or the flavor of an old wine. You find it in dramatists like Aeschylus and Shakespeare, in poets from Sappho to Gerard Manley Hopkins, in storytellers like C.S. Lewis and Stephen King. Now, when I say "capacity," I do not mean a "faculty" like intellect or will. I mean rather a posture of my whole person towards my experience.9 It is a way of seeing. It is, as with Castaneda, looking for the holes in the world or listening to the space between sounds. It is a breaking through the obvious, the surface, the superficial, to the reality beneath and beyond. It is the world of wonder and intuition, of amazement and delight, of fes-tivity and play. How does imagination come to expression? Let me focus on specifically religious imagination. I sketch five ways. 1. A vision. I mean "the emergence either in dreams, trance, or ecstasy, of a pattern of images, words, or dreamlike dramas which are experienced then, and upon later reflection, as having revelatory significance." 10 Examples? Isaiah's vision of the Lord in the temple (Is 6); Moses and Elijah appearing to Jesus and the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration (Mt 17:1-9); Joan of Arc's "voices"; St. Margaret Mary's vision of the Sacred Heart. 170 Review for Religious 2. Ritual. The form of ritual is action--public, dramatic, pat-terned. A group enacts the presence of the sacred and partici-pates in that presence, usually through some combination of dance, chant, sacrifice, or sacrament.11 3. Story. I mean a narrative, a constellation of images, that recounts incidents or events. As Sallie TeSelle put it, "We all love a good story because of the basic nar-rative quality of human experience: in a sense any story is about ourselves, and a good story is good precisely because somehow it rings true to human life . We recognize our pilgrimage from here to there in a good story.''12 For the religious imagina-tion, three types of stories are particularly impor-tant: parable, allegory, and myth; the parables of Jesus, Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia," and the Creation myth.13 4. The fine arts. I mean painting and poetry, sculpture and architecture, music, dancing, and dra-matic art. I mean da Vinci and John Donne, the "PietY" and Chartres, Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis," David whirling and skipping before the Ark of the Covenant, the mystery dramas of the Middle Ages. I mean films. 5. Symbol. What symbol means is not easy to say, for even within theology it does not have a univocal sense. Let me define it, with Avery Dulles, as "an externally perceived sign that works mysteriously on the human consciousness so as to suggest more than it can clearly describe or define." 14 Not every sign is a sym-bol. A mere indicator ("This way to the art museum") is not a symbol. "The symbol is a sign pregnant with a depth of meaning which is evoked rather than explicitly stated.''is It might be an artifact, a person, an event, words, a story--parable, allegory, myth. The importance of symbols, of imagination, in a university? I make three points. First, imagination is not at odds with knowl-edge; imagination is a form of cognition. In Whitehead's words, "Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts; it is a way of illuminating the facts.''16 True, it is not a process of reasoning; it is not abstract thought, conceptual analysis, rational demonstra-tion, syllogistic proof. Notre Dame of Paris is not a thesis in the-ology; Lewis's famous trilogy does not demonstrate the origin of evil; Hopkins is not analyzing God's image in us when he sings Imagination is not at odds with knowledge; imagination is a form of cognition. Marcb-April 1992 171 Burghardt ¯ The Exercises for Educational Ministry that "Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men's faces.''17 And still, imaging and imagining is a work of our intellectual nature; through it our spirit reaches the true, the beautiful, and the good. Second, imagination does not so much teach as evoke; it calls something forth from you. And so it is often ambiguous; the image can be understood in different ways. Do you remember the reporters who asked Martha Graham, "Miss Graham, what does your dance mean?" She replied: "Darlings, if I could tell you, I would not have danced it!" Something is lost when we move from imagining to thinking, from art to conceptual clarity. Not that imagination is arbitrary, that "Swan Lake" or the Infancy Narrative or "Hamlet" or the Transfiguration is whatever anyone wants to make of it, my gut feeling. Hostile to a valid imagina-tion is "the cult of imagination for itself alone; vision, phantasy, ecstasy for their own sakes; creativity, spontaneity on their own, without roots, without tradition, without discipline.''1~ Amos Wilder was right: "Inebriation is no substitute for paideia.''19 And still it is true, the image is more open-ended than the con-cept, less confining, less imprisoning. The image evokes our own imagining. Third, religion itself is a system of symbols. As sociologist Andrew Greeley saw, "religion was symbol and story long before it became theology and philosophy and., the poetry of religion was not inferior to its prose but rather anterior to it and, in terms of the whole human person, in some ways superior to it.''2° Biblical revelation is highly symbolic. Skim the Hebrew Scriptures: a burning bush, the miracles of the Exodus, the theo-phanies of Sinai, the "still small voice" heard by Elijah, the visions of the prophets and seers. Scan the New Testament: the circum-stances surrounding Jesus' conception and birth, the descent of the Spirit in the form of a dove, the transfiguration, Calvary, the res-urrection. Take key themes like the kingdom of God, its expres-sion in Jesus' proverbial sayings, in the Lord's Prayer, in the Gospel parables. The kingdom is not a clear concept with a uni-vocal significance. It is a symbol that "can represent or evoke a whole range or series of conceptions or ideas.''21 Turn from Scripture to the Catholic-Protestant problematic. Greeley's research persuades him that "the fundamental differ-ences between Catholicism and Protestantism are not doctrinal or 172 Review for Religious ethical" but "differing sets of symbols.''22 Take the central symbol: God.23 The classical literature of the Catholic tradition assumes a God who is present in the world, disclosing Himself in and through creation. The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be somewhat like God. The Protestant classics, on the other hand, assume a God who is radically absent from the world and who discloses Herself only on rare occasions (especially in Jesus Christ and Him cruci-fied). The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be radically different from God.24 Even more concretely, Greeley insists, their different images of God account for different religious behavior between Catholics and Protestants. In the Protestant imagination God is perceived as distant (father, judge, king, master); in the Catholic imagination God is perceived as present (mother, lover, friend, spouse).2s Another crucial example: two approaches to human society shaped by different imaginative pictures. The Catholic tends to see society as a "sacrament" of God, a set of ordered relationships, governed by both justice and love, that reveal, however imperfectly, the presence of God. Society is "natural" and "good," therefore, for humans and their natural response to God is social. The Protestant, on the other hand, tends to see human society as "God-for-saken" and therefore unnatural and oppressive. The indi-vidual stands over against society and not integrated into it. The human becomes fully human only when he is able to break away from social oppression and relate to the absent God as a completely free individual.26 A final example from Greeley's sociological research: The image that most sharply distinguishes the Catholic tradition from other Christian traditions is Mary the mother of Jesus. No one else has Madonna statues in church. MaW is essen-tial to Catholicism, not perhaps on the level of doctrine but surely on the level of imagination, because she more than any other image blatantly confirms the sacramental instinct: the whole of creation and all its processes, especially its lifegiving and life-nurturing processes, reveal the lurking and passionate love of God.27 Once again, have I been distracted from Ignatius and his Spiritual Exercises? Not really. The Exercises, for all their appeal to the Christian intelligence, are not a head trip. They are first and foremost an experience. An experience of Catholic symbols: Adam and Eve and Eden, angels and Satan, hellfire, a virgin and a crib, March-April 1992 173 Burghardt ¯ The Exercises for Educational Ministry The events of Jesus" earthly existence must be seen as a 'today." Egypt and Jerusalem, the transfiguration, bread and wine, blood and water from the side of Christ, nail marks in risen hands, an ascension into heaven. But the experience is not cold reason. Take the experience of sin's devastating impact on angels and humans, sin's ravishing of God's good earth. When you go through the Spiritual Exercises, you do not simply define sin, recall a traditional definition: any thought, word, or action against God's law. Your senses get into the act: you smell sin's stench. Even more importantly, you see sin's cost, image it, weep over it; for sin's cost is a cross, the pierced hands of a God-man. The God-man. The Exercises are a constant contemplation--contemplation of Christ. Never abstract theology, though theology informs it all. In Bethlehem's cave you are a servant; you not only listen to Mary and Joseph, you "smell the infinite flagrance and taste the infinite sweetness of the divinity.''28 You flee with that unique family into Egypt, feel what it means to be a refugee in the Middle East. In a decisive meditation you not only contrast "two standards," two scenarios for orienting your life. The standards take flesh in two persons: in a Satan who inspires "horror and terror," who makes you lust for riches, for honor, for pride; and in a living Christ who attracts you to poverty, insults, and humil-ity.: 9 It is not only Jesus who is tempted in the wilderness; you wrestle with your personal devils, sweat through the temptations that jolted Jesus: Use your powers, your gifts, your possessions just for your own fantastic self, for the sweet smell of success. Like the sinful woman, you wash our Lord's feet with your tears, feel your sins forgiven because you too have "loved much" (Lk 7:47). And so into Christ's passion, which you no longer study with scholarly detachment, comparing different traditions, reconcil-ing inconsistencies. Ignatius wants you to feel: grief and shame indeed, "because the Lord is going to his suffering for [your] sins,''3° but even, if possible, the kiss that betrayed him, the nails that held him fast. And finally, joy in the risen Christ. Not sim-ply a sense of relief; rather your whole being bursting with new life, his life, as you share his rising with his Mother, try to touch him with Magdalen, munch seafood with him and the Eleven. This is not simply your own picture show, on a level with 174 Review for Religious Kevin Costner "Dancing with !/Volves.''31 Ignatius playing with your capacity to imagine is attempting something terribly signif-icant psychologically and spiritually. This "application of the senses" goes back to a medieval tradition that reached Ignatius through a book he read while convalescing from cannon wounds back at Loyola.32 The unknown Franciscan author had written: If you wish to draw profit from these meditations., make everything that the Lord Jesus said and did present to your-self, just as though you were hearing it with your ears and seeing it with your eyes . And even when it is related in the past tense you should contemplate it all as though pres-ent today. VChy is this highly significant for an intelligent spirituality? Because you are no longer looking at the life of Christ sheerly as history, something that took place in the past. The events of Jesus' earthly existence must be seen as a "today," the historical hap-penings drawn into your own world here and now. That is how you achieve not abstract knowledge but what the medievals called "familiarity with Christ," an understanding that takes hold not only of discursive reasoning but of the whole person. Imagination leads to love--a direct experience of love. Ignatius films in living color what Aquinas phrased in attractive abstraction: There are two ways of desiring knowledge. One way is to desire it as a perfection of one's self; and that is the way philosophers desire it. The other way is to desire it not [merely] as a perfection of one's self but because through this knowledge the one we love becomes present to us; and that is the way saints desire it.34 Third, the Spiritual Exercises should alter your world of liv-ing, that is, the life of social realities. Here three facets call for clarification: social realities, the Exercises, and you. What do I mean by social realities? I mean the life of a soci-ety, the life that moves beyond the individual in isolation to com-munity, people interacting, impacting one on another, human persons depending on one another. How do the Spiritual Exercises touch social realities? After all, did not Ignatius himself describe the Exercises as "every way of preparing and disposing" ourselves to remove "all disordered attachments and, after their removal, of seeking and finding God's will in the way we direct our lives"?3s This sounds rather indi-vidualistic, does it not? Or, at best, quite vague. March-April 1992 175 Burghardt ¯ The Exercises for Educational Ministry I am aware that in 1975 the 32nd General Congregation of Jesuits declared, "The mission of the Society of Jesus today is the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement.''36 And it went on to assert a bit later: Every sector of our educational works should be subjected to constant review, so that they will not only continue to form young people and adults able and willing to build a more just social order, but do so ever more effectively. Especially should we help form our Christian students as "men [and women]-for-others" in a mature faith and in per-sonal attachment to Jesus Christ, persons whose lively faith impels them to seek and find Christ in the service of their fellow men [and women]. Thus we shall contribute to form-ing persons who will themselves multiply the work of world-wide education.-~7 But our specific question remains: Granted that our colleges should prepare women and men to construct a more just social order, how do the Spiritual Exercises lay a foundation for the social-justice component of Jesuit education? Almost a half century ago, a young Jesuit who had not yet taken his final vows in the Society was asked by his provincial to direct the annual eight-day retreat for the Jesuit theology stu-dents at Alma in California. In the course of the retreat, director Father George H. Dunne reflected on a number of social issues. Dealing with the Sermon on the Mount, for example, and the two great commandments, he "talked about poverty, peace, war, not in the abstract but in the concrete." He "talked about anti- Semitism, Hitler's holocaust, racial segregation, the rat-infested tenements in New York, the exploitation of migrant farm work-ers, the Spanish Civil War, the anguish of the world's poor . -38 Not long after, he received a letter from the representative of the Jesuit superior general for the American provinces during World War II. Father Zacheus J. Maher charged Father Dunne with substituting for the Spiritual Exercises a series of "brilliant talks on social subjects." "Such subjects," he declared, "have no place in the Spiritual Exercises.''> Let us make an admission: Our neighbor, the wider society, is not explicit in the text of the Exercises.4° Not surprising; for the Exercises "are addressed to individuals, and they seek to enable a person to have the interior freedom to serve God . -41 But if you delve more deeply, you discover how profoundly social, societal, the Exercises are. 176 Review for Religious You see, the Ignatian meditations point you ceaselessly to Christ, to the Christ of the Gospels, in that way to absorb the mind of Christ. And so you focus on the programmatic scene in Nazareth's synagogue, where Jesus makes his own the announce-ment in Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me. He has sent me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release for pris-oners and sight for the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the Lord's year of favor" (Lk 4:1 8-1 9).42 Through the Exercises that program ceases to be pecu-liarly Jesus'; it becomes your own. What Second Isaiah announced to the people of his day Jesus announces to the poor and impris-oned, the blind and deprived of his day. And this is what Christians in the mold of Ignatius announce to the downtrodden of their day. With Ignatius in the final Contemplation for Learning to Love Like God, you ponder profoundly how Christ "labors for [you] in all creatures on the face of the earth, that is, he behaves like one who labors. In the heav-ens, the elements, the plants, the fruits, the cattle, [man and woman], he gives being, conserves them in existence, confers life and sensation, and so on.''43 And you ask to labor with Christ as he ceaselessly creates, recreates, redeems a fallen world. Last Easter a Catholic professor of history ended his regular column in a diocesan newspaper with two puzzling sentences: "When Jesus rose from the dead, he did not go about lecturing on the social problems of his day. Instead he manifested himself in glory to his disciples in a manner that empowered them to go forth as his courageous emissaries.''44 But neither did the risen Jesus go about celebrating the Eucharist and fingering his rosary. And what did he empower them to go forth to do? To baptize indeed; to preach what he preached. But did he not preach loving your sisters and brothers as Jesus loved you? Does such loving have nothing to do with war on the womb or war in the Middle East? Nothing to do with inhuman poverty or child abuse? Nothing to do with racism or the rape of the earth? What you should experience through the Exercises is that by God's design and initiative human existence is fundamentally social, societal:4s we are "we" before we are "I" and "thou." This By God's design and initiative human existence is fundamentally social, societal. March-April 1992 177 Burghardt ¯ The Exercises for Educational Ministry is central in Christian revelation and of primary importance for our contemporary culture of individualism, where we think first of self and then how we can join with others in community--as though community did not precede the individual genetically, psychically, socially, and spiritually.46 Even Catholic social teach-ing frequently fails to position this fact front and center, because it lays down as primary in its social ethics the "dignity of the human person, who is made to the image of God." From there the teaching argues to the God-invested rights of the individual which other individuals and institutions must respect. This misses the point of the Genesis story (on which it is often based) that the "Adam" who is given such dignity is not an individual but "the hmnan," our whole race in personification.47 How does all this touch us? Very simply, a university or col-lege ought to be not only the seedbed of learning and imagination; it should be the boot camp of our societal existence. The Jesuit educational ideal is not the intellectual mole who lives almost entirely underground, surfaces occasionally for fresh air and a Big Mac, burrows back down to the earthworms before people can distract him. No. A college is where young men and women who may one day profoundly influence America's way of life touch, some for the first time, the ruptures that sever us from our earth, from our sisters and brothers, from our very selves. Not simply in an antiseptic classroom, for all its high importance for under-standing. Even more importantly, experience of rupture: experi-ence not only of ecology but of an earth irreparably ravaged, not only abstract poverty but the stomach-bloated poor, not only the words "child abuse" but the vacant stare of the child abused, not only a book on racism but the hopelessness or hatred in human hearts. To yearn for such experience, I know no better introduc-tion than experiencing the Christ of the Spiritual Exercises, the conversion consequent on seeing Christ more clearly, loving him more dearly. Can you get a 4.0, be learned, a scholar, without such a con-version? Undoubtedly. Can you make megabucks in business or law, in medicine or government without such a conversion? Undoubtedly. Can you marry well, raise two and a half children, treat them to an Ivy school education without such a conversion? Undoubtedly. Can you be deliriously happy without such a con-version? Undoubtedly. Can you live an integrated human and Christian existence without such a conversion? I doubt it. 178 Review for Religious Notes i Spiritual Exercises 1; translation partially mine. 2 Reference to a type of dancing currently in high favor with the young and involving amazing hyperactivity. 3 Thomas B. Edsall, "GOP Battler Lee Atwater Dies at 40," Washington Post, 30 March 1991, 1 and 7. 4 Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, no. 59. s Spiritual Exercises 236. For Christ as the "creator and Lord" of this contemplation, see Hugo Rahner SJ, Ignatius the Theologian (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968 / San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), p. 134. 6 Here I am drawing largely, but not entirely, on material in nay book Preaching: The Art and the Craft (New York/Mahwah: Paulist, 1987), pp. 19-25. 7 I am aware that fantasy does not have to mean the bizarre; I am speaking of a com~non current usage. The development was concisely expressed in l/Vebster's New International Dictionary of the English Language (2nd ed. unabridged; Springfield, Mass.: Merriam, 1958), p. 918: "From the conception of fantasy as the faculty of mentally reproducing sensible objects, the meaning appears to have developed into: first, false or delu-sive mental creation; and second, any senselike representation in the mind, equivalent to the less strict use of imagination and fancy. Later fan-tasy acquired, also, a somewhat distinctive usage, taking over the sense of whimsical, grotesque, or bizarre image making. This latter sense, however, did not attach itself to the variant phantasy, which is used for visionary or phantasmic imagination." See also Urban T. Hohnes III, Ministry and Imagination (New York: Seabury, 1976), pp. 100-103. ~ Holmes, ibid, pp. 97-98. Here Holmes is a&nittedly borrowing from Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, n.d.). 9 See Holmes, ibid, p. 88. 10 Theodore W. Jennings Jr., Introduction to Theology: An Invitation to Reflection upon the Christian Mythos (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), p. 49. 1~ See ibid, p. 52. 12 Sallie M. TeSelle, cited by Holmes, Ministry and Imagination, p. 166, from the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42 (1974): 635. ~3 Lest the reader be unduly disturbed, myth is not opposed to fact or to fancy. Its raw material tnay he fact or it may be fancy; in either case it intends "to narrate the fundamental structure of human being in the world. By the concreteness of its imagery, the universality of its intention, its narrative or stoW form, the myth evokes the identification and par-ticipation of those for whom it functions as revelatory" (Jennings, Introduction to Theology, pp. 51-52). ~4 Avery Dulles SJ, "The Symbolic Structure of Revelation," March-April 1992 179 Burghardt ¯ The Exercises for Educational Ministry Theological Studies 41 (1980): 55-56. Dulles studies the five dominant approaches to revelation: the propositional, historical, mystical, dialecti-cal, and symbolic--with greatest stress on the symbolic. He asks how in each theory revelation is mediated and what kind of truth it has. He con-cludes that in Christ the five aspects coalesce in a kind of unity, but insists that the first four are reconciled and held in unity through the symbolic facet. ~s Ibid, p. 56. 16 A. N. Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 139. 17 Gerard Manley Hopkins, "As kingfishers catch fire. ," Poem 57 in W. H. Gardner and N.H. Mackenzie, eds., The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford University, 1970), p. 90. ~ Amos Niven Wilder, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), p. 57. ~') Ibid, p. 67. ~,0 Andrew M. Greeley, The Catholic Myth: The Behavior and Beliefs of American Catholics (New York: Scribner's, 1990), p. 37. 21 Norman Perrin, Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), p. 33. ~2 Greeley, The Catholic ~Vlyth, p. 44. 23 Here Greeley (p. 45) admits his dependence on David Tracy's The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1981). 24 Greeley, The C)ttholic Myth, p. 45. ~5 See ibid, p. 55. 26 Ibid, p. 45. Hcre, too, Greeley is indebted to David Tracy. Note Greeley's warning to his readers that the word "tend" is "used advisedly. Zero-sum relationships do not exist in the world of the preconscious" (ibid). -,7 Ibid, p. 253. See p. 254: "I argue., that the obvious functional role of Mary the mother of Jesus in the Catholic tradition is to reflect the mother love of God." For detailed presentation of the origins and func-tion of the Mary symbol, see Greeley's The Mary Myth (New York: Seabury, 1977). 2~ Spiritual Exercises 124; text from Louis J. Puhl sJ, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius (Chicago: Loyola University, 195 I), p. 55. 29 Spiritual Exercises 140, 146 (Puhl, pp. 60, 62). 30 Spiritual Exercises 193 (Puhl, p. 81). 31 A current fihn that made off with a number of Academy awards. 3~ The book was Meditationes vitae Christi, long attributed to St. Bonaventure but actually composed by an unknown Franciscan of the fourteenth century; see Rahner, Ignatius the Theologian (n. 5 above), pp. 192-193. Quoted from Rahner, ibid, p. 193. 180 Review for Religious 34 1 have not been able as yet to document this text. 3s Spiritual Exercises 1 ; translation partially mine. 36 Documents of the Thirty-second General Congregatio,z of the Society of Jesus, 2 December 1974--7 March 1975 I, 4 (Washington, D.C.: Jesuit Conference, [1975]), p. 17. 37 Ibid, I, 4, pp. 35-36. 38 King's Pawn: The Memoirs of George H. Dunue, s.J. (Chicago: Loyola University, 1990), p. 70. 39 Ibid, pp. 69, 70. q0 See useful material in Dean Brackley SJ, "Downward Mobility: Social Implications of St. Ignatius's Two Standards," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 20, no. 4 (January 1988): 53; also in Thomas E. Clark SJ, "Ignatian Spirituality and Societal Consciousness," ibid, 7, no. 4 (September 1975): 127-150. 4~ Brackley, "Downward Mobility," p. 12. 42 On this episode see Joseph A. Fitzmyer SJ, The Gospel according to Luke (I-IX) (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981), p. 529: "Luke had deliberately put this story [4:16-30] at the beginning of the public min-istry to encapsulate the entire ministry of Jesus and the reaction to it." 43 Spiritual Exercises 236; translation partially mine. 44james Hitchcock in St. Louis Review, 29 March 1991, p. 11. 4s See Clarke (n. 40 above), pp. 128-129, for the advantages of the adjective "societal" over "social" in reference to apostolate and ministry. "Social" efforts "seek immediately and personally to alleviate the misery of those individuals who are deprived." "Societal" activity "concerns itself immediately with the healing and transformation of those human struc-tures, institutions, processes, and environments which draw persons into misery or make it difficult for them to emerge from it." 46 See Matthew Lamb, "The Social and Political Dimensions of Lonergan's Theology," in Vernon Gregson, ed., The Desires of the Human Heart (New York/Mahwah: Paulist, 1988), p. 270. 471 owe this paragraph to notes of James L. Connor sJ, director of the Woodstock Theological Center, Washington, D.C., prepared for the inau-gural retreat of my project Preaching the Just Word, an effort to move the preaching of social-justice issues more effectively into the Catholic pul-pits of the United States. March-April 1992 181 MELANNIE SVOBODA Going the Distance, Sustaining the Gift an one of her newspaper columns, Ellen Goodman describes pheno~nenon called "compassion fatigue." This occurs when people who are normally sensitive and generous get "tired of caring." Most Americans, Goodman maintains, are very caring in emergencies. She writes: "We are great at performing the one-night stands for causes. Christmas dinner for the poor, collec-tions for victims of fire or flood or famine." But if the emergency situation becomes chronic, many of us find it difficult to sustain our initial level of concern. When compassion fatigue sets in, says Goodman, "A gift can begin to feel like an obligation, generosity can turn into resentment, and sympathy can turn hard." I think Goodman's article has definite implications for those of us involved in ministry in the church. Let us face it: most of us are in ministry not for a one-night stand. We are in it for years, maybe even for life. The problems we deal with every day--igno-rance, poverty, injustice, sickness, violence--will not go away overnight--or even in a matter of a few years. So the question we have to ask ourselves is: How do we keep our compassion alive over the long haul? How do we fan the flame of enthusiasm for a lifetime of service in the church? Before I suggest some ways of doing this, I would like to say a few words about why. For everything I say is based on the premise Melannie Svoboda SND, with whom our readers are well acquainted, resides at Notre Dame Academy; Route One, Box 197; Middleburg, Virginia 22117. 182 Review for Religious that coinpassion and enthusiasm are essential for ministry in the church. Without them, ministry is at best a mere show and at worst a perversion of the very Gospel we claim to proclaim. To illustrate this fact, I tried to come up with an image of ministry as compassionate, generous, and enthusiastic--and not something performed out of a sense of obligation and even with resentment. The image I came up with may appear an unlikely one: feeding chickens! But let me explain. Feeding Chickens I was born and raised on a small goose farm in Willoughby Hills, Ohio. That rural "initial formation" continues to influence my outlook on life. On our farm we had hundreds of white Emden geese. It was my father and brothers who had the job of feeding them. But we also had a couple dozen chickens, and the task of feeding them usually fell to my mother, my sister, or me. Now what is the connection between feeding chickens and ministering in today's church? Simple. The way I see it, there are three essential elements to proper chicken feeding (and, I might add, to proper church ministry). First, there is the feed itself--the corn, the mash, whatever. The feed is the gift we bring to the chickens. More than that, it is their source of nourishment, of life itself. Without too much of a stretch of the imagination, we can say that the chicken feed is the "good news" we bring each day to our chickens. The second element of chicken feeding involves calling the chickens. We have to get their attention, alert them to the feed we have for them. But a good chicken feeder goes beyond merely calling the chickens. He or she establishes a relationship with them. The feeder talks to the chickens, even thanking them for the fine eggs they have been laying. For a good chicken feeder (like a good church minister) is always aware of being a receiver as well as a giver. The third element of chicken feeding (and of ministry) is the actual broadcasting of the feed. How does an experienced chicken feeder broadcast the feed? Eagerly, generously, unsparingly. Now that is an image of ministry at its best, ministry with compassion and enthusiasm. Ministry at its worst would be the person who sets out to feed the chickens grumbling and mum-bling the whole way to the chicken coop. "I have got to feed those March-April 1992 183 Svoboda ¯ Going the Distance stupid chickens--again. I just fed them yesterday. They're never satisfied. All they do is eat, eat, eat. What good are they, any-way?" Such a feeder might not even call the chickens, thinking: "If I don't call them, maybe they won't come, and then I won't have to feed them." But, of course, the chickens do come, called or uncalled. And how does this kind of feeder broadcast the feed? Perhaps sparingly: "A kernel for you, a kernel for you . " Or angrily, throwing handfuls of feed down on the ground in dis-gust. Or hastily, dumping the whole pail of feed in one spot, just to get the job over with. That is an image of ministry when compassion fatigue has set in. I maintain that ministering in such a way is a contradiction of the Gospel. For we are called to proclaim the good news, not the "ho-hum" news, not the "halfway decent" news. We are called to love the people to whom we minister, not "put up with" them or view them as a nuisance. If we can no longer minister with gen-uine compassion or with vibrant enthusiasm, then maybe we should not be ministering. Years ago I had a Scripture teacher who made this point very clear. He said that on a given day we might wake up crabby, dis-couraged, depressed, mad at the whole world and every human being in it. On such a morning, maybe we should call the office, the school, or the parish and say in all honesty and humility, "I won't be in. I cannot in conscience represent the Gospel today." The suggestion, though perhaps a little extreme, does make a salient point: an anti-sign to the Gospel is probably worse than no sign at all. In other words, if our words, attitude, and whole bear-ing contradict the Good News we represent, then maybe we should not be representing it. Compassion and enthusiasm are requisites for effective min-istry. What, then, are some ways we can "go the distance" and "sustain our gift" of ministering? There are, no doubt, many ways. Here, I suggest four. Retaining the Big Picture The first way is to retain the big picture. Sometimes we lose enthusiasm for our ministry because our perspective becomes too narrow, our vision myopic. We lose sight of the big picture and get enmeshed in the near at hand, the petty, the nitty-gritty. In his book The Art of Choosing, Carlos ~Galles SJ reminds us how impor- 184 Review for Reli~4ous rant it is in life to have a sense of direction. He describes "a lovely little habit" that Ignatius had of stopping himself physically in the middle of a hall and asking himself, "Where am I going? And what for?" That habit was one way Ignatius had of connecting a seemingly insignificant action--going to the dining room to eat, heading for chapel to pray, or walking down the hall to a meet-ing-- with the bigger picture of ministering to God's people. The practice is a good one: regularly and consciously to make ourselves see our daily small actions as part of a greater whole. Recently I watched an artist painting a large mural of a sunrise. I noticed how frequently she stepped back from her work to gain a broader perspective. Then she would step forward, add a few more strokes with the paint roller, and step back again for another look. We must do the same thing in our ministry. Sometimes God seems to provide us with opportunities to do this: after a suc-cessful activity, after an apparent failure, at the time of a transfer or change in ministry, or during a serious illness. But we can also do this more regularly: during an annual retreat or a monthly day of recollection, in the morning before we begin our day, or in the evening before we crawl (or fall) into bed. The habit of ask-ing "Where am I going (or where have I been today) and what for?" will put us in touch with the real zvhat and v:hatfor of our ministry, thus enabling us to catch at least a glimpse of how our "daily chores" fit into the big picture of God's grand design. Seeing Babies A second way of retaining our compassion and enthusiasm I call: seeing babies and not diapers. A priest told me once that a young mother came to him very discouraged and worn out. "I'm sick and tired of changing diapers," she cried. The priest thought for a moment and then gently suggested, "Next time don't change the diaper. Change the baby." He was not being "celibately sar-castic." He was pointing out to her a lesson in perspective. We have to see the tasks we do in relation to the individual human beings for whom we do them. During a retreat another priest told this true stoW. A teenage boy was seriously injured in a car accident. When the parish priest was notified, he immediately went to the hospital to see the boy. When the priest walked in, the boy said, "Father, if you've come here for God's sake, then for God's sake, get out! But if you have March-April 1992 185 Svoboda ¯ Going the Distance come here because you think I am worth it, then please stay." The priest stayed. Maybe for too long we overemphasized "All for the greater honor and glory of God." That phrase certainly encapsulates a marvelous truth, but, like most truths, even that one needs another truth to balance it. In our ministry we do not bypass the human beings we serve. We do not overlook them. We do not use them to win God's favor. We must remember, we minister not to parishes, schools, hospitals, or dioceses. We minister to individ-ual human beings--to Vera, Frank, Carlos, Heather--and each of them is worth it. Getting Support A third way we sustain our gift of ministry is: We get sup-port. The venerable tradition of rugged individualism that helped found this great nation will not "cut it" in ministry. The truth is, we cannot "go it alone." Fortunately, our contemporary times, with its emphasis on support groups, reminds us of this truth. I came to appreciate the importance of support groups when I became a flee-lance writer. Before that I had been a full-time high school teacher for many years. As a teacher I had a built-in support group: the other teachers on the faculty. But when I seri-ously began to write as part of my ministry, I suddenly felt terri-bly isolated and alone. It became difficult for me to sit in front of my typewriter (and later tny computer) for two or three hours a day and write, for I would recall working for hours on a piece only to have it fizzle into nothingness. Or I would send out arti-cles and stories enthusiastically only to have them lost, mutilated, or rejected. Finally I knew I needed support in my ministry--and more than the occasional acceptance letter offers. So I attended some writers' conferences and hooked up with a few other people who write for publication. I rely on these friends for the under-standing and encouragement that only a fellow writer can give. In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis writes beautifully about the origin of a friendship. He says a friendship originates when two people, often engaged in a common task, disclose some-thing of their inner selves to each other. They turn to each other in amazement and say, "You, too?" We in church ministry need to experience that "you-too?-ness" with others who are engaged in the same or similar ministry. 186 Review for Religious Being More than a Minister A fourth way we can go the distance in our ministry is to be more than a minister. We probably all agree that we are more than we do, and that we are far more valuable than what we pro-duce. But an effective minister does more than give intellectual assent to that truth. He or she makes decisions based on it. He or she takes time to be more than a minister, knowing how pathetic it is if a minister's identity is restricted to a particular job or title. There is always a danger of turning even church work into an end in itself. Workaholism is alive and well in most business organizations and (we have to admit with sadness) also in our church. The problem is, workaholism, though a real addiction, looks a lot like dedication. If a minister in the church is addicted to alcohol or gambling or food or sex, chances are someone (or someones) sooner or later will intervene to help that person. But if a minister is addicted to work~staying up all hours of the night, never taking time for a break or vacation, never socializing with people in a nonwork setting--we sometimes let him or her go on. Or even worse, we praise that person, thus encouraging the addiction. In this regard, we should recall that the primary biblical image of heaven is not an office, not a school, not a parish. It is a party, a banquet. If all we do our whole life is work, work, work, chances are we are going to feel extremely out of place in heaven. We will not know what to do, how to let go, how to have fun. No, we ministers should learn how to be party people while we are still here on earth--even as we minister. We work hard, yes, knowing full well that our ministry cannot always be restricted to certain office hours. But we also know how to get away, how to enjoy people and have fun. The Cross, the Cost So far we have looked at four ways to help prevent compas-sion fatigue in our ministry. But there is one more word I wish to say about compassion fatigue: sometimes it is the cross we bear, the cost we pay. Our fatigue is not always a sign that we are doing something wrong. Sometimes it is a sign that we are doing some-thing right. Our periodic fatigue and occasional discouragement put us in touch with our limits. And experiencing our limits is vital to effective ministry. Otherwise we run the risk of living in March-April 1992 187 Svoboda ¯ Going the Distance illusion, of beginning to think that we are responsible for the good we do or that we are the "good news" we proclaim--and not Jesus. Our ministry, in order to be authentic, must cost us some-thing-- in time, in energy, in love. I am reminded of that seem-ingly insignificant incident in the story of David at the end of the second book of Samuel. David, nearing the end of his life, goes to a man named Araunah and asks to buy his threshing place in order to build an altar there for the Lord. Araunah tells David, "Take it, Your Majesty." And he offers to give several oxen, too, all free of charge. But David refuses to accept Araunah's gifts. He insists on paying for everything, saying, "I will not offer the Lord my God sacrifices that have cost me nothing." At times we all get weary in our ministry. Our fatigue, loneliness, or discouragement are part of the cost of our love and service of others, part of the sacrifice we make regularly to God for the privilege of serving in the church. The Ministry of Jesus How does all of this relate to the person of Jesus? How did he remain loving and alive throughout his ministry? First of all, Jesus had the big picture. He possessed an amazingly expansive view of reality. He looked at a crude fisherman and saw a great leader. He observed the birds in the air and comprehended God's provident care. He beheld a sinful woman and recognized her as a woman who loved much. Jesus was always ready to adjust his perspective, to align it ever more closely with that of the Father. Nowhere is that more clearly seen than in Gethsemane. Jesus' initial reaction to his impending crucifixion was "Please let this pass!" But by let-ting go of his limited perspective, he could say, "Your will be done"; in other words, "I embrace your point of view." Jesus saw babies and not diapers. That is, he focused on indi-vidual people and not on the immense task he had to perform. The Gospels show Jesus speaking to large crowds, of course, but more often they show him relating to individuals: the twelve apos-tles, the man with a withered hand, a centurion, a demoniac, Simon's mother-in-law, a particular deaf man, a grieving widow, an epileptic, Jairus, Nicodemus, Mary and Martha, and so forth. The clear impression is that Jesus ministered to individuals. Even more important, individuals were his legacy. Jesus did not leave 188 Review for Relig4ous behind a spiral notebook on how to run a church. He did not write a curriculum nor even one encyclical. Instead, he left behind people--individuals--whose lives he touched and radically altered. Maybe we have to ask ourselves: How do we measure the effectiveness of our ministry? By the number of reports we fill out? By the neatness of our office? By the thick-ness of our files? Or by the individuals we have ministered to and with--and those we have allowed to minister to us? Jesus liked support groups. In fact, he even started one: the apostles. He also went outside that group for the kind of support that those dozen men could not give him. He seemed to need and appreciate the feminine encouragement of a Mary and a Martha, the unique devotion of a Mary Magdalene. The Gospels show Jesus enioying people. He was not always preaching or teaching or giving workshops. He was relaxing in the company of his friends and colleagues. Even in his darkest hour in Gethsemane, he did not "go it alone." He took part of his support group with him: Peter, James, and John. They disappointed him, yes, as people sometimes disappoint us, too. But Jesus understood their weakness and forgave them, knowing his ultimate support group was the Father and the Spirit. Lastly, Jesus was more than a minister, much more. Van Gogh supposedly said, "If you want to know God, love many things." One reason Jesus was so close to God was because he loved so many things, so many varied aspects of life. Jesus was perhaps a carpenter. What can we deduce from that simple fact? He had a "good eye," a highly developed aesthetic sense. He had a steady hand and knew and appreciated wood. Jesus was a storyteller, too, and a fine one. His "Good Samaritan" and "Prodigal Son" are masterpieces. 0nly a person in touch with the core of life could have spun such magnificent yarns. Jesus was well acquainted with other components of life: bread baking, barbecuing, wine making, and farming, to name but a few. He was keenly aware of the political situation of his times. He was in touch with the prejudices of his day as well as the hopes and dreams of his people. He was something of a naturalist, too, sen-sitive to the changing seasons and to the flora and fauna of his Our ministry, in order to be authentic, must cost us something.- in time, in energy, in love. March-April 1992 189 Svoboda ¯ Going the Distance immediate environment. Little wonder Jesus was so effective as a minister--for he was so much more than one. He was a person fascinated by life, and thus he became a source of fascination--and salvation--for others. Yes, Van Gogh said it: "If you want to know God, love many things." But Jesus lived it, leaving an example for all of us who would follow in his footsteps: "If you want to minister, love many things!" The Long-Distance Runner When I taught high school in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the late 70s, I had a senior girl who was a top-ranking long-dis-tance runner. Julie taught me that there is a world of difference between the sprinter and the long-distance runner. The training and techinques are vastly different. The sprinter's goal is near, often clearly visible. He or she relies on a quick burst of energy to reach that goal within a matter of seconds. Because the dis-tance is so short, the sprinter runs side by side, neck and neck, with other runners who provide an impetus for the sprinter to run hard and fast. Not so with the long-distance runner. This runner's goal is miles away, not even visible. He or she must take steps all along the way to conserve energy for the long haul. Pacing becoInes critical. Although the runners in a marathon start out together, toward the end of the race they often find themselves running alone and forced to rely on deep inner resources and not the near-ness of fellow runners to keep them going to the end. The image of the long-distance runner is an appropriate one for those of us engaged in ministry. For most of us are in ministry for the long haul. We do not want our loving service to deterio-rate into a stoic sense of duty, but to remain a joyful gift. We do not want resentment to contaminate our pool of selfless giving. Instead we want our generosity to be alive and well, our com-passion tender and strong. And we wish to carry our enthusiasm for the Good News all the way to the finish line. Thank God, we do not run alone: God, our God, goes with us--the whole distance. 190 Review for Religious HALBERT WEIDNER Newman's Living the Oratory Charism As the biographical approach to writers and thinkers pro-liferates, so does the controversy over its historical worth. I am taking a biographical approach to John Henry Newman with some trepidation because of the length of his life, his great contributions to thought, and the complexities of the issues. Still I am encouraged in the enterprise by Newman him-self, who insisted on the validity of personal influence in the pur-suit of truth) I intend in this essay first to introduce readers to the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, which Newman brought to England, and then to discuss the Oratory as important for understanding certain values in Newman's life. Newman arrived at these values and maintained them at some personal cost. That cost represents for this author, another Oratorian, the personal drama of grace and conversion of a founding father among English-speaking Oratories. The Nature of an Oratory of St. Philip Neri The first thing that should be said about an Oratory is what it is not. It is not a religious order. There are no vows, no oaths, no promises of any kind public or private. There is no Rule. You will see a Rule mentioned in the time of Newman, but actually what you have are constitutions representing the practice of the Roman house in the latter part of the sixteenth century.2 Philip Neri was a reluctant founder who refused to write a Rule or con-stitutions. Halbert Weidner CO sends these reflections from the Spiritual Life Center; 2717 Pamoa Road; Honolulu, Hawaii 96822. March-April 1992 191 This irregular founder lived from 1515 until 1595, coming to Rome as a young Florentine in 1533. He was not ordained until he was thirty-six years old. He had been a student, a hermit and mystic, and a member of a reforming confraternity which served sick pilgrims, that is, the poor who became ill while visit-ing Rome. He lived in a set of apartments with other priests as part of a complex named San Girolamo della Carit~. It was in a prayer room at this church that the crowd who could no longer fit into Philip's rooms began to gather daily at the siesta hour for prayer. It was this afternoon gathering of laity which was the first Oratory.3 Perhaps the best description of St. Philip's intent is given by Newman himself in The Idea of a University: He [Philip Neri] was raised up to do a work ahnost peculiar in the church--not to be a Jerome Savonarola, though Philip had a true devotion towards him and a tender mem-ory of his Florentine house; not to be a St. Charles, though in his beaming countenance Philip had recognized the aure-ole of a saint; not to be a St. Ignatius, wrestling with the foe, though Philip was termed the Society~ bell of call, so many subjects did he send to it; not to be a St. Francis Xavier, though Philip had longed to shed his blood for Christ in India with him; not to be a St. Caietan, or hunter of souls, for Philip preferred, as he expressed it, tranquilly to cast in his net to gain them; he preferred to yield to the stream, and direct the current, which he could not stop, of science, literature, art, and fashion, and to sweeten and to sanctify what God had made very good and man had spoilt.4 Those who gathered around Philip found a mystic, a reformer, and a humanist, but they did not find him in a cloister or in any religious order. They found him in his rooms with the doors wide open to the public and surrounded by laity. This is why the Oratory is first and foremost secular. It was this laity that formed the original gathering for prayer in a place of prayer (that is, an oratory) and these same laypersons who preached, led prayers, sang in the vernacular, and studied together each afternoon under Philip's guidance. The Congregation of the Oratory is a secondary group of secular priests and laity which gathered around Philip as the Oratory became less of a movement and more of an institu-tion. But before this, Philip carried on the ministry of prayer and reflection from 1551 until 1575, more or less activating the laity as the leaders. It was in 1575 that a secondary group of priests and brothers had gathered sufficiently to be formally organized 192 Review for Religious with papal approval. But this Congregation was without any con-stitutions and was still primarily organized for the initial group of laity,s Constitutions for the Congregation were not finished until 1612, seventeen years after Philip's death. Later the institution of the congregation became more clericalized as not only the pri-mary group of laity disappeared, but even the brothers were no longer accepted, leaving a congregation of secular priests who lived together in community. While the Oratory is unique within Roman Catholicism, its values represent a mind-set present among many reformers of the early sixteenth century. This reforming spirit is symbolized by the values St. Jerome came to represent within a church loaded down with religious orders heavy on structure and low in spirit. Erasmus had noted that, in the days of St. Jerome, "the profession of a monk consisted in no more than the practice of the original, free, purely Christian life.''6 The summary of Erasmus's thinking about the ideal religious given us in Eugene Rice's St. Jerome in the Renaissance could also be a description of the spirit animating the early Oratory of St. Philip: Monks then were men who wished only to live with willing friends in liberty of spirit close to the teachings of the Gospel. Their lives were sweetly leisured. No ceremonies or man-made regulations fettered them. No single dress was prescribed. No deference was paid to total abstinence. They studied, they fasted, and sang psalms as the spirit moved them. They took no vows.7 This being said, we can note some positive elements in the Congregation of the Oratory: A. It is a center of prayer by nature. The classical form that this prayer takes dates back to the more intimate group that gath-ered in the evening around Philip. This amounts to about a half hour of silent prayer or meditation concluded with vocal prayers. The two-hour prayer sessions led by and for the laity at the time of St. Philip have been the casualty of time. Likewise the primary group of laity called the Oratory has also passed away except for a remnant often called "the Little Oratory." This name is quite ironic since what has become "little" was in fact the biggest and the first of the founder's works, not to say the very reason behind it all. Except for a directive to somehow maintain the secular or "Little Oratory," the ministry of the Congregation is otherwise unspecified and unspecialized. Each house tends to the work at 21/larch-April992 193 The life of an Oratory is said to be built on a deep regard for "well-known faces.' hand, and assignments tend to reflect the talents of the members. Philip Neri was against centralization and so put on its own every house that wished to follow on his general pattern. He believed that duplication was impossible and that each situation called for its own approach. B. Face-to-face association is essential to the Oratory. In a phrase going back to the community's origins, the life of an Oratory is said to be built on a deep regard for "well-known faces.''8 There were no fears to be engendered in an Oratory over friendships, and such a pol-icy militated against large sizes and the anomaly of "communities" of religious who have to resort to books with mem-bers' pictures for help in identification. C. Relative permanence is an ideal even though there are no vows or any-thing else holding a person to an Oratory. Perseverance is a fundamental aspect of the house spirituality and is often prayed for aloud at community prayer. Note that members cannot be transferred from one house to another and that, if they leave a house to go voluntarily to another that has freely accepted them, they must usually transfer membership as well. This means that problems with and among members must be worked out within the house since, obviously, transference cannot be the solution. Dismissal from a house is a rare and difficult pro-cedure. D. Small numbers, then, are the consequence of Oratorian living. The Constitutions of the Congregation go so far as to say that the power of an Oratory resides in such a small membership. Large numbers would weaken a house, which is supposed to be built on interpersonal relationships. When Newman wrote The Present Position of Catholics in England, he was addressing the men of the secular or Little Oratory. Towards the end, he applies this Oratorian principle of strength despite small numbers when he tells them: Your strength lies in your God and your conscience; there-fore it lies not in your number. It lies not in your number any more than in intrigue, or combination, or worldly wisdom. God saves whether by many or by few; you are to aim at 194 Review for Religious showing forth His light, at diffusing "the sweet odor of His knowledge in every place": numbers would not secure this. On the contrary, the more you grew, the more you might be thrown back into yourselves, by the increased animosity and jealousy of your enemies. You are enabled in some mea-sure to mix with them while you are few; you might be thrown back upon yourselves, when you became many? The Oratory, then, exists to embody the ideal of koinonia, liv-ing together as a fruit of the Holy Spirit and a sign of God's rule. The Oratory is very conscious that only the Spirit can keep it together faithful to the charism and that a life of prayer and open-ness is the only way to persevere with any kind of fruitfulness. Community in this context is not a utility, but an end, the pres-ence of each person's final destiny in the communion of saints somehow present now. E. The Oratory is collegial to a unique degree. All major pol-icy decisions are made by the entire congregation of members who have finished six years. Personnel and financial decisions on a smaller scale are decided by a deputed congregation elected by the membership. The provost is the title of the "superior" who holds the office as first among equals. He is chiefly an adminis-trator and his authority rests in moral persuasion. His only clear power is that of proposal since neither the general congregation nor the smaller deputed congregation can discuss or vote on any-thing without this proposal. Since the provost serves only three years, any provost resisting the majority can only hold out for a certain time. E The Congregation of the Oratory is also juridically pon-tifical. Today each house is now part of a very loose confederation, but each is still a complete pontifical congregation. Each superior is a major superior. In Newman's time there was no confederation at all, and so each house was directly involved with the Roman Curia. This gives each small house a double relationship. They are rooted in their diocese and have a special relationship to the local church and the bishop on one hand, and yet on the other look to the Holy See for the preservation of the charism. We shall see how each of the elements of the Oratory Congregation played a role in the life of Newman. Newman and the Oratory I have chosen five aspects of Newman's life where I believe the March-April 1992 195 Oratorian charism was arrived at and purchased at some cost to him. These are: (1) the elasticity of the Oratory and Newman which was tested in his assumption of the rectorship of the Irish Catholic University, (2) the choice he had between a university apostolate and the Oratory during the Irish Catholic University founding, (3) the promotion of the laity in fields rightly theirs that had been co-opted by clericalism, (4) the resistance to foreign cultural aspects of Roman Catholicism in favor of an indigenous English religious life, (5) fidelity to community life in one place and one people. 1. The Elasticity of the Charism I have said that each Oratory has a great deal of elasticity to it as the congregation has no specific work to which its members are bound. This elasticity is from time to time tested within an individual Oratory, and Newman's assumption of the rectorship of a yet-to-be-founded university in Dublin was a very grave exper-iment in just how flexible an Oratory can be. But the flexibility had a true Oratorian origin. First, it was the result of consultation with both Birmingham and the not-yet-independent London house. Father Faber's letter indicates that the London community thought it good for the congregation that Newman assume the rectorship rather than anything less demand-ing, but less powerful.~° Secondly, it took a papal brief confirm-ing the arrangement before the attempt was made to do the impossible, that is, allow Newman to bilocate as provost in Birmingham and rector in Dublin.11 Thirdly, it was specifically for the purpose of starting a Dublin Oratory, and Newman's build-ing plans indicate he gave priority to the Oratory in that the uni-versity church built there was for the sake of a potential foundation.12 But Newman knew how precarious it was for an Oratorian to be away from his house. In a letter to Ambrose St. John he says, "I trust we shall have an Oratory in Dublin--which is the only thing I can bribe St. Philip with for coming here.''13 That it was a disaster emotionally for Newman and a serious drain on the Birmingham Oratory does not make it any less Oratorian for all that. Because of its lack of structure, it is typical of an Oratory to try to do too much rather than too little. It is easy enough to document other Oratories trying to stretch too thin. Thus we have the Oratory of Goa, India, sending Joseph Vaz to Sri Lanka at a time of persecution and in the clothing of a Hindu 196 Review for Religious holy man. There he labors with other Oratorians scattered around the countryside more like clerks regular than sons of St. Philip.14 My own Oratory in South Carolina had members scattered throughout the state during half of its history and only recently and with great difficulty has been able to return all of the mem-bers to a community life.Is During the time of St. Philip, the Oratory took on dependent missions for a while until St. Philip and the community abruptly called a halt to this development.Is So it is Oratorian to push the Oratory to the extreme and perhaps beyond. It is also Oratorian to eventually return to saner limits and the grace of a life closer to the original charism. 2. The Preference for Obscurity If Newman's acceptance of the rectorship pushed the Oratorian charism beyond limits, his fidelity to an Oratorian voca-tion is demonstrated by his resistance to a classic temptation against the life to which he believed God called him. The asceti-cism of the Oratory is a rigorous egalitarianism. Each member has one vote and all are equal and most aspects of the life are governed by the majority when not regulated by the constitu-tions. It was not uncommon among the best and brightest of St. Philip's followers to leave the Oratory, usually under papal "obe-dience," for higher positions in the church. That St. Philip him-self managed to escape or refuse such offers does not seem to be a grace extended to many of his followers. One of St. Philip's aphorisms was "love to be unknown,''17 but it is a hard saying. And it was a grace extended to Newman. Simply put, when presented with a full-time rectorship of the Irish university, Newman chose the small, obscure Oratory of Birmingham, England.I8 He was consistently resistant to any compromise on this point even though the choice seemed impenetrably obscure to both friends and foes. This disregard for the existence, rights, and potential of the Birmingham Oratory was one of Newman's great crosses. Newman complained, "Me they wish to use--me they wish to detach in every way from my own Fathers.''19 Separating an Oratorian from his community has not always been difficult, and there is evidence to indicate that some of these peo-ple thought they were doing Newman a favor by trying to detach him from the Oratory. Another fear of Newman's was the bad effect an absent provost would have on attracting new members to the Birmingham Oratory. This made the arrangement with the March-April 1992 197 university and Archbishop Cullen finally untenable.2° From inside the Oratory, the sacrifice of an outside position seems to be the heart of a vocation that embraces the asceticism of simply being one among many. 3. Maintaining the Preference for Laity The University episode also exemplifies another Oratorian principle, the importance of laicity to church and Oratory. As I have said, in the nineteenth century much of the lay character of the Oratory was atrophied. Only the little Oratory existed in some places and in some forms. Within some of the Congregations there were lay members or "brothers," for want of a better word, but as in most societies defined as congregations of priests, these brothers had no vote and seniority depended on holy orders first and seminary status second; only third came the brothers, who followed the youngest seminarians. But at a time when brothers in clerical communities of priests were treated as second-class members and even much like servants, Newman wrote to the act-ing superior of Birmingham the following directive: I am somewhat pained, my dear Edward, to hear you speak of us as 'Gentlemen--' We are not Gentlemen in con-tradistinction to the Brothers--they are Gentlemen too, by which 1 mean, not only a Catholic, but a polished refined Catholic. The Brothers are our equals . The Father is above the Brothers sacerdotally--but in the Oratory they are equal2~ This is indeed the spirit of St. Philip, whose esteem for the lay members of the congregation as well as of the religious orders was well known. But making this point about equality is still a struggle today within the congregations. In my opinion, if you ask many Oratorians what the Oratory is, they will simply say that it is a community of priests, without communicating at all the possibility of full lay membership and, since the Second Vatican Council, full voting rights. Newman's second contribution as an Oratorian to laicity was his emphasis on the secular Oratory or the Oratory as a lay move-ment. The revival of the secular or Little Oratory was "more important than anything else," at least in his own eyes. He real-ized that this was not a burning isst.e among the other Oratories, but he himself believed that, if the secular Oratory was not estab-lished, then the Congregation of the Oratory should be consid- 198 Review for Religious ered a faih~re.22 It was, as I said, for the secular Oratory that Newman wrote the lectures now called The Present Position of Catholics, and it is this volume I would call Newman's literary con-tribution to laicity. Perhaps Newman would agree with me, as he believed it in his old age to be his "best written book.''23 It is at any rate, in the opinion of Ian Ker, a popular, even Dickens-like piece of wit and rhetoric introducing the grander themes later developed in his explorations of the nature of a university.24 And, finally, it must be noted that for Newman laity meant men and women. Women had not been his-torically part of the secular Oratory, and so he petitioned Rome for a secular Oratory for women. Even though it did not develop, the rescript obtained estab-lished a new precedent.2s It was this regard for laity as essential to the religious enterprise of the Oratory that informs Newman's Idea of a University, where laicity is central to the educational enterprise. In my reckoning, this is his third contribution to laicity, but probably the best-known outside the Oratory. Newman believed that it was his struggle to appoint a lay vice-rector, to define the university as the province of the laity, and to develop self-moti-vated students with a minimum of authority which led to the ruin of the project.26 It was such "dreadful jealousy of the laity," Newman also believed, which led to the rejection of another planned Oratory at another university, this time no less than Oxford itself.27 Secularity and laicity, principles at the heart of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, made it impossible for Newman to spread the congregation when both such principles were feared and rejected by church officials who felt the church to be under siege. That the ability to act and to be respectful of church author-ity were compatible seems to be exemplified in the life of the very independent personality Philip Neri. But, when Newman wished to prove the principle by anecdote, he very cleverly chose the most authoritarian of religious societies, the Jesuits, to make his point: "Nothing great or living can be done except when men are self governed and independent: this is quite consistent with a full maintenance of ecclesiastical supremacy. St. Francis Xavier wrote Regard for the laity as essential to the religious enterprise of the Oratory informs Newman's Idea of a University. March-April 1992 199 to St. Ignatius on his knees; but who will say that St. Francis was not a real center of action?''-'s 4. Preference for the Local Culture Around an Oratory Besides preserving laicity, Newman desired also to preserve English culture within the Roman Catholic Church. St. Philip Neri's emphasis on autonomous houses or congregations was rooted in his belief that each locale had its own culture and that the needs of the place had to be met through this culture. There could be nothing more contrary to the spirit of the Oratory than for any of the congregations to see themselves as the importers of foreign customs. The Italian devotionalism of such an Oratorian figure as the famous Father Frederick Faber of London was really a misguided attempt to re-create not only another culture but also another time. Ironically, the culture and time chosen by Faber was the Baroque era--when the Oratory was spreading through Europe, but a century later than Philip's own time and work. The extravagances of Faber and some other members of the London Oratory would not have been as effective as they were without the backing of the Dublin Review (seen to be the voice of London's Archbishop Manning)29 and W.G. Ward. When Newman had a chance to defend Roman Catholicism against some charges of his old Anglican friend E.B. Pusey, there was also the possibility of distancing that same Catholicism from the foreign enthusiasm of converts like Manning, Ward, and Faber. Newman could declare: "I prefer English habits of belief and devotion to foreign, from the same causes, and by the same right, which jus-tifies foreigners in preferring their own. In following those of my people, I show less singularity, and create less disturbance than if I made a flourish with what is novel and exotic.''3° "What is novel and exotic" to many English Catholics was for the London Oratory the true renewal of Catholicism and of the Congregation of the Oratory at the same time. Father Bernard Dalgairns left the Birmingham Oratory for the London house with a condemnation of Newman and his fellow members who had adopted a position paper which has been called an "Apologia pro vita sua--Oratoriana." 3~ Newman had insisted earlier that an Oratory is "the representative of no distant or foreign interest, but lives a~nong and is contented with its own people.''~-~ The con-troversy with Dalgairns assisted the Birmingham house in defin-ing itself against the London clai~n to be normative)3 200 Review for Religious Birmingham did not issue a counterclaim as the true measure of Oratorian life, but it did insist that its own very English adap-tation to education and culture in its own time and place was cer-tainly an authentic version of Oratorian life. The Idea of a University, with its marvelous panegyric of St. Philip Neri, is the public version of these private Oratory position papers which were worked on at the same time. In short, the Birmingham com-munity saw the idea of the Oratory and the idea of the university as complementary and consistent with each other. That authority within another Oratory, authority in the English Catholic hier-archy, and authority in Rome saw this as dangerous eventually prevented Newman from a university ministry and the founding of two Oratories, the one in Dublin, the other in Oxford. If he had not been thwarted--we can ask not only what effect this would have had on the Catholic Church's presence in higher education, but also what kind of model the Oratory would have become for that presence. ~. Fidelity to One Place and Community If Newman's devotion to the Oratory as a humanistic Christian community making the best of its own time and place cost him considerable loss of influence, it also explains why Newman was always hoisted between the limitations of the local hierarchy and Roman authority. As small as an Oratory usually is, it is nevertheless a community of pontifical right. But, because the members never move out of this small community, it is inti-mately involved in the local church and becomes specially related to the bishop. This arrangement was meant to allow the Oratory to serve both worlds best, but it also means that the Oratory is vulnerable to the worst of both. And it was the worst that Newman often had to suffer. Suffering at the hands of both local officials and Curial bureaucrats was the fate of the Oratory's founder, St. Philip Neri, but it took Newman some time to realize that such was his own unavoidable fate.34 In 1856 he could be sanguine about Roman love of an English house of St. Philip ("Be sure," he wrote, "that, if we are really doing work, Rome will never be hard on us, even if we are informal, imprudent, or arbitrary").35 By the 1860s he had suffered enough to be afraid of Rome calling him to the Curia for trial of his opinions and judgments. He was so afraid that he considered such a prospect as the threat of death.36 The March-April 1992 201 bishop of Birmingham was of no help in the face of Roman threats. Newinan wrote privately in 1867 that Ullathorne "wishes to be kind to me, but to stand well with people at Rome super-sedes in his mind every other wish. So he is a coward.''37 We can be considerably grateful that the insight into the abuses of church power led him to write in 1877 the great preface to the ¼"a Media in which he developed a theology of abuses in the church. He asks us to contemplate the implications of Matthew 13 and to choose the complexities and shortcomings of a world church rather than the narrow confines and perfection of a sect. That is, for the sake of Catholicity, we must realize that sanctity will not always be an equally prominent mark of the church.3s Conclusion The burden of this short paper has been to indicate some areas where Newman cannot be completely understood without a direct reference to the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. I would say several areas have been directly touched on. First, there is the mystery Why Birmingham? Why would such a talented person remain faithful to this city when he had been born in London and had adopted Oxford and its university? If living in Birmingham is of any consequence in understanding the mystery of Newman, then only the Oratory suffices for an explanation. Newman consciously rejected the London option because his absence from Birmingham would have been the death of a community wishing to live around him.39 And it is within the mystery of a providence that settled the Oratory in Birmingham that we have the mystery of Newman's fidelity to St. Philip, a fidelity which certainly shaped the field of Newman's activities which we have now inherited. Secondly, knowing the Oratory helps us understand how Newman was able to function as pastor and theologian. He had no official standing in a seminary or a university, and his membership in the Oratory cut him off from preferments in the diocese. Yet, despite the fragility of the Oratory and Newman's vulnerability to his enemies with real power bases, he was able to accomplish much. As a pastor he was perpetually available to a local people, and as a teacher he could, in the Congregation, exercise his tal-ents and find reinforcement of his values. Thirdly, the prophetic stands which he brought to the Roman 202 Review for Religious Catholic Church found a congenial place within the tradition of Philip Neri and the Oratory. Laicity, education, and culture were not feared in the Oratory, but promoted. Certainly the Oratory could accommodate the interests of such a person as Newman, and this I think says a lot for the Oratory. Finally, the Oratory provided an emotional complementarity for Newman. Newman had written that he had "never liked a large Oratory. Twelve working priests has been the limit of my ambition. One cannot love many at one time; one cannot really have many friends.''4° The rather intimate expression of this is found in the well-known conclusion to the Apologia, but I would beg an indulgence to cite a lesser-known example found in Meriol Trevor's Life. Late in life some parishioners brought Newman a portrait of himself as a gift to the Birmingham Oratory. Newman replied to them in these words: You ask for my blessing and I bless you with all my heart, as I desire to be blessed myself. Each one of us has his own individuality, his separate history, his antecedents and his future, his duties, his responsibilities, his solemn trial, and his eternity. May God's grace, His love, His peace rest on all of you, united as you are in the Oratory of St. Philip, on old and young, on confessors and penitents, on teachers and taught, on living and dead. Apart from that grace, that love, that peace, nothing is stable, all things have an end; but the earth will last its time, and while the earth lasts, Holy Church will last, and while the Church lasts, may the Oratory of Birmingham last also, amid the fortunes of many generations one and the same, faithful to St Philip, strong in the protection of our Lady and all Saints, not losing as time goes on its sympathy with its first fathers, whatever may be the burden and interests of its own day, as we in turn now stretch forth our hands with love and awe towards those, our unborn successors, whom on earth we shall never kFIow.41 From the Oratory of Birmingham, England, Newman gives a blessing because he believed his life as an Oratorian was itself a blessing. For this reason the Oratory might merit a considera-tion when we think of Newman and what it cost him to be a Catholic and what it was like for him to rejoice as an old man after a long time not only in the Catholic Church but in the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. March-April 1992 203 Notes ~ NewInan's classical exposition of this is found in University Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 75-98, and elucidated very well by Stephen Dessain in The Spirituality offfobn Henry Newman (Minneapolis, 1977), pp. 31-55. But see this theme repeated in an Oratorian context in Newman's Oratory Paper No. 6 in Placid Murray, Newman the Oratorian (Leominster, England, 1968), pp. 215-216. -' For the documentation of the constitutional development of the Congregation, see Antonius Cistellini CO, Collectanea Vetustorum ac Fundamentalium Documentorum Congregationis Oratorii Sancti Philippi Nerii (Brescia, 1982). ~ The more detailed history of this development can be found in Louis Ponnelle and Louis Border, St. Philip Neri and the Roman Society of His Times (London, 1932), pp. 166-173. 4 Idea, Discourse 9, no. 9. ~ Ponnelle and Bordet, pp. 287-381. 6 Erasmus, Ep. 164, in Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmii Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, H.M. Allen, and H.W. Garrod (Oxford, 1906-08), quoted in Eugene Rice Jr., Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1985), p. 133. 7 Rice, p. 133. 8 The 1969 Constitutions of the Congregation read in no. 15: "The Congregation follows the primitive Christian community that its char-acteristic power consists not in the multitude of its members, but rather in mutual knowledge--so that there may be a regard for the well-known faces--and in the true bond of love, by which those of the same family may be bound together through the practice of daily customs." See Newman the Oratorian, p. 329, for Newman's familiarity with the con-cept of well-known faces or countenances. ~ Prepos., p. 388. ~o Autobiographical Vt~ritings (AI/V), p. 281. 11AW, p. 286. ~2 Ian Ker, John Henry Newman (Oxford, 1988), p. 433. 13 Letters and Diaries (LD), vol. 14, p. 377. ~4 See S.G. Perera SJ, Life of the Venerable Father Joseph Uaz, Apostle of Ceylon (Galle, 1953). Newman indicates a long-standing knowledge of this special case in a letter written in 1867. ~s There is no history written of this first of the Oratories in the United States, and the archives of the house are very sketchy. There is no written rationale of the house for the scattering of the members, but some effort was made to rotate them back to Rock Hill if they were some distance away. There is an article describing the Rock Hill house written by Edward YVahl, one of the earlier members, in Oratorium, Ann. III, S.I-N. 1, Ian-Iun. 1972, pp. 23-32. ~' Ponnelle and Bordet, pp. 471-474. 204 Review for Religious 17 E A. Agnelli, The Excellencies of the Congregation of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri (Venice, 1825), translated and abridged by F.A. Antrobus, London 1881, chapter 1, section V. is LD, vol. 18, pp. 478,483. 19 LD, vol. 17, p. 447. '-OLD, vol. 18, pp. 114-115. z1 LD, vol. 16, p. 267. 22 LD, vol. 14, p. 274. ,~3 LD, vol. 26, p. 115. 24 Ker, pp. 365-372. 25 LD, vol. 17, p. 137. See Newman the Oratorian, p. 311, for his appre-ciation of the Oratory and women. 26 A~17~ p. 327. 27 LD, vol. 21, p. 327. 28LD, vol. 21, p. 331. ~'9 Ker, p. 579. 3o DiffT, ii, pp. 20-21. 31 Placid Murphy calls these papers another apologia (Newman the Oratoria~l, p. 299). -~'~ Newman the Oratorian, p. 196. 33 Newman the Oratorian, p. 358. 34 The 1848 paper in Newman the Oratorian lists the persecutions Philip suffered (see p. 163). In 1862 he can compare his troubles to the founder's (see AW, pp. 256-257). 35 LD, vol. 17, p. 151. 36 LD, vol. 20, pp. 445-448. ~7 LD, vol. 23, p. 296. 38 See R. Bergeron, LesAbus de L'~glise d'apr& Newman (Paris, 1971), and the annotated edition of Newman's ~a Media (Oxford, 1990), ed. H.D. Weidner. 39 LD, vol. 13, pp. 51-52. 40 Newman the Oratorian. p. 387. 4~ Meriol Trevor, Newman, Light in I:Vinter (New York, 1962), p. 582. March-April 1992 205 DENNIS J. BILLY The Resurrection Kernel theology and spirituality Is there a fundamental principle of the resurrection? The answer to this question depends on the way in which one understands the relationship of history to the reality of the risen Christ. This relationship, in turn, depends on the stance one takes towards the possibility of a transhistorical event and the type of impact it would have on the continuities and discontinuities of historical change. However understood, the impact itself would have vast ramifications for the whole of theology. Resurrection: Distinguishing Idea from Reality At the outset, it may be helpful to distinguish between resurrection (1) as a particular item in the history of ideas and (2) as the reality experienced among the earliest fol-lowers of Christ. The former may be separated from the viewpoint of faith, compared with other ideas about the nature of the afterlife, and evaluated on a rational basis for its various strengths and weaknesses as a viable expla-nation of the nature of life after death. As a transhistori-cal event with historical consequences, the latter is intricately bound to the faith of the primitive Christian community and cannot be studied in such a detached, ana- Dennis J. Billy CSSR continues his reflections on various cen-tral tenets of our faith and their relationship to the vowed life of religious. His address is Accademia Alfonsiana; Via Merulana, 31; C.P. 2458; 00100 Rome, Italy. 206 Review for Religious lyrical manner. Any effort to formulate a fundamental principle of the resurrection must be careful to take both sides of this dis-tinction into account. The Idea of Resurrection. A well-grounded discussion of an idea should begin with an attempt to identify its most distinctive char-acteristics. With respect to its general mean-ing, one could accurately describe the term "resurrection" as a belief common among Christians that, at some point after death, an individual is transformed by the power of the Divinity on every level of his or her anthro-pological makeup--the corporeal, the psy-chological, the spiritual, and the social--and thus raised to a higher level of human exis-tence in a way that always remains in funda-mental continuity with his or her historical, earthly life. The most distinctive marks in this short yet exact account of the idea of resurrection include: (1) personal life after death, (2) in a The idea of resurrection alone safeguards the inviolate dignity of each human being on every level of existence. transformed state, (3) embracing all the anthropological factors of human existence, and (4) in a way continuous with an individual's concrete, earthly life. Each of these elements is essential to the idea of resurrection as it is used in this essay and as it exists in the major Christian traditions. These characteristics also set the idea of resurrection apart from the related idea of bodily resuscitation (for example, the raising of Lazarus, Jn 11:44), as well as from the other major philosophical and religious explanations of the nature of life in the hereafter (for example, the immortality of the soul, reincar-nation, nirvana). When these are compared, the idea of resur-rection distinguishes itselfi (1) from bodily resuscitation, in its emphasis on a transformed existence in life after death; (2) from the immortality of the soul, in its inclusion of all of humanity's anthropological factors in the nature of that existence; (3) from reincarnation, in its rupture of the cycle of time and its insistence on the fundamental continuity of life in the hereafter with a per-son's earthly existence; and (4) from nirvana, in its avowal that final beatitude does not involve the extinction of individual con-sciousness. The greatest strength of the idea of resurrection is March-April 1992 207 that, of all of the ideas about the nature of life after death, it alone safeguards the inviolate dignity of each human being on every level of his or her existence. That is to say that it alone keeps human nature eternally intact while, at the same time, saving the individual from ultimate personal extinction. Its greatest weak-ness is that, in representing the fulfillment of one of the deepest and most profound hopes of the human heart, it seems almost too good to be true, an attractive but highly unlikely possibility. For this reason, of all the ideas of life in the hereafter, resurrec-tion is the one most difficult to accept on the simple basis of faith. The Reality of the Resurrection. Rooted in the hopes of Jewish apoc-alypticism during the centuries just prior to the appearance of Christ, and promulgated during Jesus' own lifetime by the reli-gious elite known as the Pharisees, the idea of resurrection devel-oped to its present form as a result of theological reflection on the nature of the Christ event, most especially in the primitive Christian community's interpretation of the meaning of the apos-tolic experience of the risen Lord. This reflection is intimately tied to the trust that community placed in the validity of the apos-tolic witness and to the experience of faith upon which it rested. It is also the context within which one may speak of the resur-rection not as an idea, but as a reality and a hope. \Vhat precisely happened on the first Easter morning remains shrouded by the subjective awareness of the earliest followers of Jesus. That awareness probably ran the gamut of several emo-tional states--from depression and fear, to suspicion and isola-tion, to incipient faith and the lingering yearning for the retrieval of lost expectations--and most likely varied in each of the persons involved. That is not to say that the event had no basis outside the experience of Jesus' followers, but only that there is no way to determine what it is with any accuracy. It is for this reason that, down through the centuries, the Easter event remains primarily an experience of faith in the lives of Jesus' followers. A distinction must still be made, however, between the faith of those who witnessed the Easter event personally and those whose faith relies on the testimony of the apostles. The procla-mation of the church rests upon the eyewitness accounts of the apostles, that is, on those who made the startling claim to have experienced for themselves the reality of the risen Lord. Their experience of faith remains qualitatively different from that of 208 Review for Religious the believer in the pew, for they claim to have experienced a real-ity outside of themselves, rooted in the objective order, distinct from their own subjectivity, and identified with the person of their Master, Jesus of Nazareth. Without the unprecedented bold-ness and resiliency of these claims, the Christian project would have nothing distinctive in its message and probably would never have gotten off the ground. These apostolic claims emerge from one of two possibilities: the experience of the risen Christ was with or without a basis in the person of Jesus in the external order. That is to say that the experience of the apostles corresponds to a reality outside of themselves or remains entirely subjective in all respects. If the former is true, then the further question must be asked regarding the nature of this basis in the external order. If the latter be true, then the only conclusion to be drawn is that the apostles suffered from self-delusion, that their testimony is false, as is the religion to which it gave rise. The fact that neither of these possibilities can be proven highlights the underlying quality of faith inherent in the conclusions of both the believer and non-believer alike. Still more can be said about the position of the believer. If the apostolic experience of the risen Christ does have an external basis in the person of Jesus, then this affirmation, when combined with the idea of resurrection developed earlier in this essay, nec-essarily points to an event of singular historical significance. Indeed, this event could be measured by the instruments of his-torical observation only by its effects (for example, a missing body) and, for this reason, must be placed in a category unique to itself and understood as a transhistorical event with historical conse-quences. This is so precisely because the risen Christ, existing in a transformed state but in a way continuous with his earthly life, does not lead "a historical existence" in the way in which the phrase is commonly used. That is to say that space and time no longer set the limits for his physical existence. In his resurrected state, Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, a singular dimension unique unto himself, who recapitulates, both now and forever, all The Easter event remains primarily an experience of faith in the lives of lesus" followers. March-April 1992 209 of creation within himself, into the love of the Father and the joy of their Spirit. The Resurrection Kernel From all that has been said, a sound formulation of the fun-damental principle of the resurrection (the resurrection kernel) would consist in the affirmation of faith that the idea of resur-rection has become a reality in the risen Christ. This reality is rooted in the transhistorical nature of the Christ event, whose historical consequences linger even to this day in the ongoing proclamation of the church. Based on the testimony of its apos-tolic forebears, the church has, in its ministry down through the centuries, kept alive for humanity the fervent hope that the deep-est yearnings of the human heart will one day be fully realized. That is to say that the transformation wrought by God in Christ promises to extend itself to all who are incorporated into his body, the church. In this respect, a sharing in the life of the risen Lord may be looked upon as the ultimate destiny of all of humankind and will be impeded only by a stubborn individual or corporate persistence in the life of sin. Given the above formulation, a number of important obser-vations arise: (1) To affirm that an idea has become a reality is to utilize the well-known philosophical distinction between the internal (that is, subjective) and external (that is, objective) orders. The limitations of this distinction are well known, and care must be taken not to stretch the analogy beyond its avowed usefulness. Indeed, special care must be taken not to project the concerns of the so-called critical problem back to a time before its signifi-cance was entirely known. (2) God the Father is the primary agent in bringing about this realization in Christ. Since idea and reality are intimately connected in the Divinity's vision of itself, the resurrection of Christ may be viewed as a providential movement on the part of the Father to bring the plan of redemption in accord with the working of the Divine Mind, that is, the Logos. In this respect, Christ's resurrection is that event which, touching upon history but transcending time, initiates the ultimate return of all created things back to God. (3) This view of Christ's resurrection also sheds light upon 210 Review for Religious the development in the early church of the doctrine of the incar-nation. If it is true that, in Christ's resurrection, flesh has been divinized and lifted up into the reality of the Word, it follows that, at some point prior to this momentous occasion, the Word itself had descended into the reality of human flesh and had become a human person. Putting aside for the moment the vari-ous intricacies involved in discussing the Christological contro-versies in the early centuries of the church, it seems quite appropriate to say that the doctrines of Christ's incarnation and resurrection form two aspects of a single salvific event which, if one were to borrow the Neoplatonic exitus/reditus structure adopted by Aquinas, represents the recreatio,z of all things going out of (exitus) and going back (reditus) to God. It is in this sense that all things are recapitulated in Christ, the New Adam. (4) As described above, the resurrection is not merely the state of Christ's postmortem existence, but an intricate part of the whole process of redemption. If Christ's exitu} from the Father reaches its furthest extension in his passion and death on the cross (described in the Creed as his descent into hell), his reditus is ush-ered in by the events of Easter morning, and his Spirit is the prin-ciple by which all things continue to be gathered into his body and thus into the presence of the Father. (5) As a transhistorical event with historical consequences, the resurrection of Christ exists outside of but in relation to the realm of historical inquiry. In this regard, it lies beyond the realm of scientific investigation and can be affirmed only through faith in the testimony of those claiming to have actually experienced Jesus after his death. That is not to say that the apostles did not experience outside of themselves in the exter-nal order, but only that the basis for their experience cannot be verified. (6) Indeed, probably the only historical consequence of mea-surable scientific value would have been the disappearance of Jesus' body at the actual moment of his resurrection. Since the precise whereabouts of the body was a point of contention even in the initial aftermath of the Easter proclamation (Mt 28:13), one must conclude that, although its disappearance could have been verified, if not scientifically, then at least through pagan eyewitness accounts, it obviously was not. (7) On all other points, the detached observer would not be able to separate the subjective experience of the apostles from March-April 1992 211 the reality of the risen Christ. There would, in other words, have been no way of determining whether or not they were actually experiencing anything beyond their own intensified inner aware-ness. The singularity of this experience would be expected if a transhistorical event were to occur and be experienced in its his-torical consequences. (8) To the extent that it is not based on direct experience but on the testimony of others, the faith of the church is qualitatively different from the faith of the apostles. Not only does it point to the conviction of those who claimed to have experienced the risen Lord, but, in one respect, it is even a purer experience of faith: "Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe" (Jn 20:29). (9) Belief in the risen Christ keeps alive in people the hope that, after death, their lives will not end, but merely change. Because of Christ's resurrection, they look forward to a trans-formed existence in the hereafter, one in continuity with their own lives on earth. Sustained by a believer's prayerful response to the contetnporary challenges of Christian discipleship, this hope forms the basis upon which life in the resurrection is anticipated even in the present. (10) Through their participation in the ministry and life of the church, people receive a foretaste of this transformed exis-tence, especially when they partake of the sacraments around the table of the Lord. It was at the Eucharist where Jesus' disciples recognized him in the breaking of the bread (Lk 24:30). It is there where Christians, even to this day, gather to do the same. This is especially true for those who dedicate their lives to Christ through the following of the evangelical counsels. Religious and the Resurrection In their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, religious strive to center their lives upon the reality of the risen Christ. They seek to do so by virtue of their firtn conviction that they are called to share in the life of the resurrection by making the idea of the vows a lived reality in their day-to-day existence. Christ, who exhibited both before and after his resurrection a life dedicated to the Father through the eschatological signs of the evangelical counsels, asks religious to do the same. The strength to do so comes from Christ and is mediated by his Spirit through his church and its ministry of the sacraments. While such dedi- 212 Review for Religious cation is never fully realized in the present, religious are called to imitate Christ throughout their entire lives. It is for this reason that, at the end of their earthly lives, they hope to share in the full-ness of his transformed existence. In their vowed life in common, religious pledge to give them-selves over entirely to the life of the risen Lord. In their vow of poverty, they seek both physical and spiritual detachment from material goods, doing so not out of a suspicion about the fundamental good-ness of creation, but from the convic-tion that it too will undergo a transformation in the fullness of Christ's kingdom. In their vow of chastity, they promise to forgo the goods of marriage, children, and sexual pleasure, thereby accepting Christ's Gospel declaration that there will be neither husband nor wife in the life to come (Lk 20:35) and that, even in the realm of relationships, all who abide in him will live a trans-formed existence. In their vow of obe-dience, they promise to accept the will of their superiors as a manifestation of God's plan for their lives, thus hoping to estab-lish within themselves a continual movement of accord between their own wills and that of the their risen Lord. Finally, in their communal existence, they hold each other accountable for the way of life they have chosen and seek to reflect in their mutual relations that dignity and care appropriate to those who are called to be members of Christ's body. By means of their individual and communal dedication to the evangelical counsels, it is clear that religious seek, even in this present life, a deeper share in the life of the resurrection. Through their vowed life in community, religious thus provide a faithful witness for themselves, the rest of the church, and the entire world that the idea of resurrection has not only been made a reality in Christ but that it is striving, at this very moment, to be realized in the lives of those who believe. In this respect, their witness affirms the movement of Christ's Spirit in the life of the church and provides a foretaste of the life to come. That is not to say that religious embody this charismatic dimension of the church better or more faithfully than any of the other vocations within the Belief in the risen Christ keeps alive in people the hope that, after death, their lives will not end, but merely change. March-April 1992 213 church (for example: single, married, priestly states), but only that their way of life is especially suited to it. Of its very nature, the religious life forIns a part of the charismatic dimension of the church. Indeed, to the extent that religious communities do not manifest to both others and themselves the gentle yet challenging presence of the Spirit, they fall short of the explicit nature of their call to center their lives entirely around the reality of the risen Christ. He it was who first imparted the Holy Spirit to his body, the church. He it is who continues to do so even to the present day. Through their faithfulness to the vows, lived in community and in the Spirit, religious seek mainly to nourish their relation-ship with the risen Christ. This personal relationship to the Lord motivates all of their activity for the establishment of God's king-dom; it is also what draws others to follow their particular way of life. Indeed, the care with which they tend this relationship is itself a sign that the reality of Christ's resurrection is meant for all to share and experience in all its fullness. In this respect, reli-gious must be ever conscious that their vowed life in common has little meaning if it is separated from life in the Spirit of the risen Christ and seen as an end in itself. To be sure, there is noth-ing sadder in the life of the church than to see individual reli-gious and, at times, entire communities lose sight of the meaning of their vocation. When people of such great promise and poten-tial compromise themselves and begin to believe that the Spirit is no longer active in their lives and that things will never change for the better, when men and women, who are called to be signs of hope, begin to believe in the voices of hopelessness, then the time is ripe for a prophet to arise within their midst to challenge them to come back to the Lord and to live the life to which they have been called. At the same time, there is nothing more joyful in the life of the church than to see men and women who, out of love for their Lord, renounce the very things for which they most actually strive during their sojourn on earth. To live in poverty, without children or spouse, and without full personal liberty provides oth-ers with the constantly needed reminder that the fullness of riches, family life, and freedom is ultimately found only in one's rela-tionship to him whom the apostles acclaimed to be truly risen. 214 Review for Religious Conclusion This essay has sought to outline the basic, underlying principle of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection. It has done so, on the one hand, by describing in as precise detail as possible the mean-ing of the idea of resurrection as under-stood in the church's teaching and, on the other hand, by looking into some of the fundamental presuppositions regarding the resurrection of Christ as experienced by his earliest followers. Bringing these two currents of inquiry together, the funda-mental principle of the resurrection (the resurrection kernel) was described as the affirmation of faith that the idea of resur-rection has become a reality in the risen Christ. Seen as a transhistorical event with historical consequences, the acclaimed res-urrection of Jesus of Nazareth lies, for all practical purposes, beyond the scope of scientific verification and remains inti- Through their faithfulness to the vows, lived in community and in the Spirit, religious seek mainly to nourish their relationship with the risen Christ. mately tied to the internal, subjective event of faith to which it gave life. That is not to say that Jesus' resurrection has no ground in the external order, but only that it ultimately lies beyond the scope of controlled observation. In this respect, the faith experi-ence of those who experienced the risen Lord is qualitatively dif-ferent from that of those whose faith rests upon their testimony. Blessed precisely because they believe without seeing, today's believers share in the hope of their own transformed existence which, through their experience of the Spirit in the church com-munity of the faithful, may be experienced even now in the quiet anticipation of the fullness of a reality yet to come. They bring their hearts' deepest yearning for the fullest presence of the risen Christ to the table of the Lord, where they are blessed with a glimpse of

Issue 48.3 of the Review for Religious, May/June 1989. ; R~z,.'n~w vor R~.t~3~oos (ISSN 0034-639X) is publishcd bi-monthly at St. Louis University by thc Mis- ¯ souri Province Educational Institute of the Society of Jesus; Editorial Office: 3601 Lindcll Blvd. Rm. 428: SI. l.x~uis. MO 63108-3393. Sccond-class postagc paid at St. Lxmis MO. Single copies $3.00. Subscriptions: $12.00 pcr year: $22.00 for two years. Other countries: for surface mail. add U.S. $5.00 per year; for airmail, add U.S. $20.00 per year. For subscription orders or changc of address, write: R~,.'u~w voa R~t.~Gous: P.O. Box 6070: Duluth. MN 55806. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Rv:vtv:w v(m REI.I(;IOtJS; P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, MN 55806. David L. Fleming, S.J. Iris Ann Ledden, S.S.N.D. Richard A. Hill, S.J. Jean Read Mary Ann Foppe Editor Associate Editor Contributing Editor Assistant Editors Ma\'/June 1989 Volume 48 Number 3 Manuscripts, books fnr review and correspnndence with the editor should be sent to REvtEw wm Rr:t,t(;mt~s; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. la~uis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the department "Canonical Counsel" should be addressed to Rich-ard A. Hill, S.J.; J.S.T.B.; 1735 l~eRoy Ave.; Berkeley, CA 94709-1193. Back issues and reprints shnuld be nrdered from R~:\'t~:w vo~ R~:~,nntms; 3601Lindell Blvd.; St. la~uis, MO 63108-3393. "Out nf print" issues are available frnm University Micrnfilms International; 300 N. Zeeb Rd.; Ann Arbor, MI 48106. A major pnrtion of each issue is also available on cassette recordings as a service for the visually impaired. Write to the Xavier Snciety fnr the Blind; 154 East 23rd Street; New York, NY 10010. PRISMS . Color plays an important role in our human lives. Before modem psy-chological studies were done about color and its effect upon our human psyche, the Church emphasized color to highlight liturgical seasons and to enhance individual feast-day celebrations. Both the colors for deco-rating altar, tabernacle, and sanctuary and the colors for priestly vest-ments and stoles conveyed a mood or feeling of the season or feast. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS over the past ten years has distinguished its is-sues within any one volume by color. Willy-nilly, whether by foresight or only upon reflection, color for us, too, tends to have a certain sym-bolic relationship to the seasonal and liturgical placement of an issue. An obvious point can be made with the blue cover of this issue--a blue which is associated with Mary, Mother of God and Mother of the Church, and with her special identification with the month of May. In more recent times, the popular place of Mary in the devotional lives of Catholics has dimmed. The Vatican II renewal of our liturgy and sacramental celebrations necessarily focused our attention and re-education upon the central mysteries of our faith-life. Devotions in their myriad forms of litanies, novenas, vigils or holy hours, and various other pious practices--whether in honor of Mary or of any of the saints-- naturally received less attention during this period. Our time and ,our en-ergies were being re-directed so that we could recapture the Eucharistic celebration and the other celebrations of sacraments with all the fervor and participation that marked our popular devotions. It sometimes appeared that, with popular devotions less emphasized, Mary and the saints were also losing their place in Catholic life. Instead, this has been a time of nurturing fresh growth, with new insights and em-phases to invigorate and renew our faith-lives. The recent Marian year stands as a proclamation of the renewed understanding of Mary's place in the life of the Christian faithful. In this issue, we look through four different prisms at Mary. The first article is "Mary in Contemporary Culture" by Father Stan Parmisano, O.P. Just as Mary has played a distinctive role in the various ages of the Church, for example, in the "lady" ideal of the Middle Ages culture, so we need to ask how our relation to Mary facilitates our Christian re-sponse to.the issues and values prevalent in culture today. The author 321 399 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 stimulates our own thinking about the hidden ways in which Mary might be said to be prevalent in our culture. The second article in this issue is "Through Mary" by Ms. Hilda Montalvo. As wife, mother, and teacher, Ms. Montalvo calls us all into a personal reflection upon what the dogmas about Mary mean to us. She points the way to seeing how Marian dogmas are necessarily Christian dogmas, helping us to clarify our own relationship with God and to en-rich the meaning of our human lives. Sister Mary Eileen Foley, R.G.S., writes the third article on Mary, raising the question in her title, "Reflections on Mary, Bridge to Ecu-menism?" In view of an existing Reformation tradition in which the honor given to Mary continues to divide Roman and Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Christian from the majority of other Christian churches, Sis-ter Mary Eileen suggests ways of seeing how a new understanding of Mary may well be in our day a true ecumenical bridge. The fourth article allows us all to pursue further at our leisure the most recent writings on Mary. Father Thomas Bourque, T.O.R., pro-vides us with a selected bibliography of writings about Mary which have been published between the time of Paul VI's exhortation, Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and John Paul II's encyclical, Mother of the Redeemer. Hopefully this compact bibliography can serve as a helpful resource for a fresh and renewed understanding of Mary's role in the lives of Christian peoples. Finally, I will note that in a newly added section to our Book and Cassette Reviews area, called "For the Bookshelf," we have briefly noted the contents of a few books about Mary just recently published. I hope that you will find the occasional addition of this section to Re-views a help in highlighting those recently published books, which we want to note and can often group around certain themes or issues. David L. Fleming, S.J. Mary In Contemporary Culture Stan Parmisano, O.P. Father Stan Parmisano, O.P., is Regent of Studies for the Western Dominican Prov-ince. He teaches at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California in the area of Religion and the Arts. His address is 5877 Birch Court; Oakland, California 94618. ~ have been asked to specify the difference Mary, the Mother of Jesus, makes or can make in our contemporary culture. Let me first propose some principles, or basic thinking, that may help toward a fruitful dis-cussion of the complex of issues and subjects involved in the question. Afterwards, we may consider some of these particulars in terms of Mary and her possible role within them. We think of the presence or absence of Mary, as of Jesus, in terms of visibility or of imaginable or intelligible content. Thus if there is a dearth of "thinking" about Mary or of images of her, we would say that she is absent in our time; on the contrary, we would say that she was pre-sent in former times, especially in the medieval and early renaissance worlds, when she was quite "visible" in the content of theology, art, architecture, poetry, music. But there is another kind of presence: invis-ible, unconscious, the presence of form rather than content, the kind of presence we are asked to look for, say, in non-representational art or in music, or in poetry where the music or rhythm precedes idea and image and helps create them. t This is a presence of thrust, of dynamic, of spirit ¯ . . like that of the Spirit of God (ruach Elohim) hovering over the yet unformed waters of chaos and warming them toward visibility and life. I want to suggest that perhaps Mary is present here and there in our time in this last manner, and that we should strive to promote her more universal presence in this direction as well as in that of visible content. In fact, this is the direction in which we should seek to define culture 323 324 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 itself. Culture is not a matter of any one specific content or subject or activity nor of all taken en masse. Rather, it is the inherited dynamism or spirit or form that produces each of them in all their various nuances, though it itself is affected and reshaped by them.z The same is true with regard to God and Jesus: it is not so much the content of our thought about them, not the images we have of them that is telling, but what un-derlies these, beyond thought and image, inspiring and shaping the con-tent of our belief. I would regard Mary in a similar way. In the earliest Church there was not, perhaps, much content or visibility of Mary, at least when com-pared to Jesus and his male disciples, to Paul and his entourage. But, to borrow an image from one of her later lovers, I would suggest that she was there from beginning to end as "atmosphere," as "world-mothering air, air wild," as form or spirit shaping the emerging thought and action of the Church.3 Certainly it was in her modest context, her "atmosphere," that Christ was preserved from mere myth and acknowl-edged as substantially and earthily human (so Paul's almost casual aside: "born of a woman"). By the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance that spirit had blossomed into a fullness of content. Then that content be-gan to harden till in some instances and locales it quenched the moving spirit and became identified with Mary. And could it be that Vatican II tried to recover her spirit, the "form" of Mary? If so, we must not mis-take what it had to say about Mary for the fullness of Mary but, with its beginnings, refocus on the thrust of Mary in our time and beyond. In speaking of Mary's presence in this way I would hope to suggest another presence, that of the Holy Spirit. Saint Maximilian Kolbe spoke boldly of Mary as the quasi-incarnation of the Holy Spirit, emphasizing the latter part of this hyphenation. Since then, less venturesome theolo-gians have accentuated the quasi.4 In any case few Catholic theologians will deny Mary's special and intimate relationship with the Spirit. They go hand in loving hand, indissolubly Wedded--not only because they were cooperatively together at the conception of Christ and later at the birth of the Church, but because they have a kind of natural affinity. Both are hidden, in the background as it were, but dynamically so, strik-ingly reemerging at critical moments in Jesus's adult years--as when the Spirit leads Jesus into the desert to prepare him for his ministry, and when Mary, waiting for Jesus "apart from the crowd," inspires in him the revolutionary declaration as to his true and lasting kindred (Mk 3:31 - 35). There are other shared characteristics. These are discoverable in cer-tain movements or thrusts of our time, and I suggest that we look here Mary in Contemporary Culture / 395 for the presence of Mary/Spirit in our time as well as in any explicit Marian theology or devotion. Some of these revelatory movements are as follows. The interiorization of religion. Certainly emphasis today is on the sub-jective aspect of belief and morality. Even those who rightly uphold the objectivity of belief and morals are concerned more than ever with lib-erty of conscience, personal and cultural limitations of understanding, the virtue of prudence and its largely intuitive functioning, the unique-ness of a given "situation," the restoration in one form or another of casuistry(the individual case). But interiorization, subjectivity, intuition are of the unpredictable Spirit "who blows where he wills" and of the traditionally feminine rather than of the predictably and predicting ra-tional and the traditionally masculine. Purged of all excess and distor-tion, they are, in other words, of the Holy Spirit and Mary. Contemplative prayer. In the last twenty to thirty years there has been in the western world a mounting interest in and practice of medita-tive prayer, sparked by eastern imports such as TM, Zen, Yoga, and now developed along lines of traditional Christian contemplation. This prayer is seen now to be not just for the select few, mainly among nuns and monks, but for all in whatever walk of life. Here is obviously another aspect of interiorization and the letting go of content in favor of a poised and expectant darkness. It is not a looking to what is outside (image, word, symbol, creed) but to what is within, to the private, personal "reve-lation," to what God is "saying" to me here and now--like a pregnant woman turned inward, quietly aware of the mystery growing within her. Here again is the Holy Spirit praying within us when, as St. Paul tells us (Rm 8:26-27), we do not know what to pray for (that is, when all con-tent is surrendered) and here is Mary, the silent, surrendering contem-plative par excellence. Unseen, unfelt, they are at the heart of so many today who are trying to pray such prayer, and so many others desper-ately in need of it if only to avoid being torn apart and scattered by the noise and confusion of a world off-center. Ecumenism. Another mark, and need, of the contemporary Church is ecumenism, conceived now as the unification not just of the various Christian churches but of the worldreligions as well. Again we may see here the stirring of.the Spirit who is the bond of love, the vinculum cari-tatis, uniting Father and Son, the one hovering over the deep bringing, at the Father's Word, order out of chaos, the one forming and securing the one Church in the beginning. And as Mar~,, with and in the Spirit, brought to birth the one undivided Christ, so is her labor today with re- 326 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 gard to the Church. It is the opinion of many Catholic theologians that Mary should be downplayed today so as not to offend our Protestant broth-ers and sisters and thereby impede ecumenism. I should think it would be just the opposite, providing the depth of Mary is presented, which is her spirit, her form more than her traditional content; yet the latter, in the purity of Church teaching and practice, is of marked importance, too, for itself and for what it reveals of her spirit and the new directions that spirit may take, for all the churches, in the future.5 Social Justice. Whereas in former times we would speak of charity and the works of charity, now the cry is for justice and the doing of jus-tice: we do for the poor not so much out of our love and their need as out of our sense of justice and their rights. Again, in the past justice has been in the main the province of the male, the one actively engaged in the world, in politics, business, civil defense, and so forth. But women are more and more coming to the fore in it, seeking justice for themselves and for the marginal and oppressed in general. Here we may note a fresh dynamic of Mary--the seed of which, however, was there from the be-ginning. Thus those writing of Mary today, particularly women, view her in the context of the women of justice in the ancient Hebrew world-- Esther, Deborah, Judith--and see a whole theology of social justice in Mary's Magnificat.6 And if the movement toward social justice is of the Holy Spirit, who as creative Love seeks balance, harmony, substantial peace and concord, then, yes we can find, if we look, the Spirit's spouse at work with the Spirit toward the same goal. Mary, while drawing us within in contemplative stillness, also directs us outward to the Christ who lived and lives in our objective, tangible world and identified him-self with the quite visible poor and needy. She points to this Christ dwell-ing outside us as well as within, just as does the Holy Spirit who, as the gospel tells us, is there to remind us continually of all Christ has visibly done and audibly spoken. Perhaps part of the new "content" of Mary today is this visibility of the woman in works of justice and peace, not as having lost the interiorization, the contemplative spirit, the gentle, mothering love of her past, but as gaining something in addition: the hid-den life while, paradoxically still remaining hidden, come forth openly to help heal the world. Mary remains what she was in the past and there-fore under the press of current need becomes someone new for the pre-sent. When considering Mary in her relationship to women, past and pre-sent, we must be cautious. Christ is male; his maleness is part of his his-tory, and history is important in the religion known as Christianity. But Mary in Contemporary Culture / 327 his maleness is meant mainly as a means of access to his humanity and person which are neither male nor female. Christ is equally for both men and women, though, of course, in different ways according to different psychologies and cultures. However, the h~stoncai fact of Christ s male-ness has often dominated our thinking about him, with regretful results; as when, in spite of changes in psychologies and culture it is used to jus-tify an ongoing exclusive male ecclesiastical leadership. Similarly with Mary. Her femininity is a providential part of her history, but it is as a human being and person that she is of greater moment. Accordingly she is for the man as well as the woman; she serves both equally and both are equally to learn from her, though, again, in different ways. Yet her femininity has had its influence, for good and bad. For bad." it has tended to limit our ideal of the Christian woman to what it was in Mary's own day and to which, accordingly, she herself was in good measure bound. For good: it has softened our conception of God and so made our ap-proach to God easier, more inviting, loving rather than fearful. In and through the gospels, past art and poetry and drama, seeing God in the arms and in the care and "power" of this then insignificant Jewish woman--quiet, gentle, lowly, we find some of that same womanhood rubbing off, as it were, on Father God. A fair part of the accessibility of Jesus himself, his merciful compassion, is the fact that he has Mary as his flesh and blood mother. Without her, would we be altogether con-vinced of the mercy of God and the understanding compassion of Jesus? Here is one way in which the "content" or dogma of Mary has affected us in the past, with its mark still upon us, thankfully. In the present thrust of woman toward justice, with Mary behind (and before) her, it would be tragic if this content were surrendered in favor of one that is hard, merely active, superficially and imitatively masculine. Eventually God himself might regress into the terror and cruelty of past and present dark religions. Mary, the Spirit, and Christ Above I recalled the bold but, to my mind, accurate Mariology of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Mary is the spouse of the Holy Spirit in a unique way, such that we can speak of her as the very incarnation of the Spirit, with some reservation (quasi). As indicated above, some Catholic theo-logians are embarrassed by this as by much else in the Church's past the-ology and practice concerning Mary. They think it an exaggeration of the biblical teaching and find it an impediment to union with our Protes-tant sister churches. As to the first objection we must insist that Scripture was not meant Review for Religious, May-June 1989 to stand alone: it sprung up out of the Church (community of believers) and its seeds are meant to grow within the Church under the care of the same Spirit who once inspired it. There was an initial content, to be re-spected as the Spirit's word through all time; but there were also drives, dynamisms within the original word, forms yet to find their specific con-tent or matter. Thus the gospels' powerful presentations, lovingly and carefully lingered over, of the relationship between Mary, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit cry out for meditation and penetration and so the revelation of truths beneath the surface. Thus we have the doctrines of the Immacu-late Conception, Assumption, the Queenship of Mary, and so forth; and her quasi-incarnation of the Spirit. This last is not to make a god of Mary. The gospels are clear on this score: Mary is the handmaid of the Lord, his lowly servant. Rather it is to point up something in God--the femininity, womanhood,, motherhood of God. Mary can be looked upon in two ways: as an historical person, flesh and blood, the daughter of Anna and Joachim (or of whomever), the physi-cal, natural mother of Jesus. Here she is all and only human. But she must also be seen as symbol, but the special kin~ of symbol that makes what is symbolized present in very reality. Thus as the Eucharist does not simply remind us of Christ but makes him really present upon our altars, so Mary does not simply recall the Holy Spirit to our minds and point us in the Spirit's direction; she makes the Spirit. really present among and within us. Seeing her we see the Spirit, as seeing the Eucha-rist we see Christ himself. This is a good and legitimate reason for ad-dressing the Spirit as feminine--not as a sop for the marginal woman but simply because as there are reasons for addressing God as Father or Son there is this equally cogent reason for addressing God as Mother.7 As in time, in the mystery of the Incarnation there is eternal Father, mother Mary, and Son Jesus, so in eternity there is Father and Son with mother-ing Spirit as their bond of Love. As for the difficulties such teaching may hold for ecumenism, they may be only initial difficulties. As suggested above, if we view Mary and present her in terms of form, thrust, spirit, and not just as already shaped content, and if we continually move deeper within this content in context of present needs and lawful desire, perhaps Protestants will eventually come to see what Catholic belief and theology have long since held as truth and will thank us for having led the way back home, as we have reason to thank them for having helped bring us back to much that had been lost. One final remark before considering some of the specifics of our sub- Mary in Contemporary Culture / 329 ject: it has to do with Mary's relationship with Christ. Again, in sensi-tivity to Protestant criticism and in reaction to exaggerated statements about Mary and misguided devotion to her, Vatican II and ecclesiastical documents and theology since have been most careful to insist upon the subjection of Mary to Christ. Salvation is through Christ alone; he is the one mediator between God and humankind. There is little if any talk about what formerly there was lots of talk about, namely of Mary as co-redeemer and mediatrix of all graces. Such theologizing, it is believed, and the devotion arising from (or producing) it detracts from the power and mission of Christ. But I wonder if we are not here misconceiving power and the whole matter of Christ's redemptive work. We seem to be equating Christ's (God's) power with power as we ordinarily think of it: dominating rule, often exclusive. But Christ's power is not univo-cal with ours, and he himself quite literally took the greatest pains to turn the tables in the matter: "You know how those who exercise authority among the gentiles lord it over them . It cannot be like that with you. Anyone among you who aspires to greatness must serve the rest . Such is the case with the Son of Man who has come, not to be served by others, but to serve" (Mt 20:25-28). And what about the power of love, which is Christ's power, or that of helplessness: the power of the sick to draw upon the strengths of oth-ers to heal and console, the power of the ignorant to create scholars and teachers, and so forth? I have often observed that the one with most power in a family is not the father or mother but the newly born baby, the whole life of the family revolving around the child precisely because of its powerful helplessness. If this seems farfetched relative to God, we have only to think of the Christ child in the crib at Bethlehem and the adult Christ upon the cross on Calvary. And what of the power of one who knows how to share his or her power, which requires greater strength, ability, "power" than to keep it all to oneself? I should think the great power of Christ, of God himself, is most manifest in the power to empower, to raise others to his very life and level. Jesus at the Last Supper remarked: "I solemnly assure you, the one who has faith in me will do the works I do, and greater far than these" (Jn 14:12). Not ex-clusive but inclusive--such is the power of Christ. Though our Holy Father in Redemptoris Mater follows Lumen Gen-tium in insisting upon Mary's subordination to Christ, h~, together with the Vatican II document, reiterates an old principle we ought to consider with equal care: "The maternal role of Mary towards people in no way obscures or diminishes the unique mediation of Christ, but rather shows 330 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 its power" (emphasis mine). Why not assert this aspect of Christ's power and see Mary as true queen "at the side of her Son," as the encyclical expresses it? Indeed, for centuries and still today, at least in our Christ-mas liturgies and devotions, we see the King rather in the power of his mother and in her arms, enfolded by her who gives him to the nations: "and so entering the house, (they) found the child with Mary his mother. Who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me . He went down with them then, and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them . Figlia del tuo figlio, queen of heaven" (Mt 2:1 I ; Lk 1:43; Lk 2:51; T. S. Eliot, Dry Salvages, after Dante's Paradiso, xxxiii). In one mariological conference that I attended the speakers were in-sistent that we not view Mary apart from Christ. I kept thinking yes, but might not the reverse also be true: we must not view Christ apart from Mary. In Redemptoris Mater, John Paul several times reminds us of the indissolubility of the bond between Mary and Jesus and explicitly de-clares that "from the very first moment the Church 'looked at' Mary through Jesus, just as she 'looked at' Jesus through Mary." Christ does not want to be viewed in splendid isolation with everyone insisting that everything and everyone else is subordinated to him. His own image of himself is of one who serves, just as Mary's self-image is of the Lord's handmaid, neither thought less of their dignity for that: "Behold, all gen-erations shall call me blessed" (Lk 1:48). Mary is the first-fruits of the redemption, the Church in promised fulfillment, the Mother of the Re-deemer, of God himself, the spouse of the Holy Spirit and the effective symbol of the Spirit's presence and action in the world--this woman who embodies the very motherhood of God holds the new creation in her arms and nurtures it, just as she did her divine Son centuries ago. She has a greater, more powerful (loving) role in the work of redemption than much of our present theology is prepared to concede or any of us begin to imagine.8 At the conclusion of Redemptoris Mater we read: ". the Church is called not only to remember everything in her past that testifies to the special maternal cooperation of the Mother of God in the work of salva-tion in Christ the Lord, but also, on her own part, to prepare for the fu-ture the paths of this cooperation. For the end of the second Christian millennium opens up as a new prospect." Our Holy Father also calls for "a new and more careful reading of what the Council said about the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, in the mystery of Christ and the Church . " Renewed thinking about Mary and action relative to her Mary in Contemporary Culture / 33"1 are called for.9 But we are to do our thinking and acting in the context of both Scripture and the wider tradition, and of current need. We are to listen to the living Spirit as "she" shows within this treasure, Mary, both the old and the new. Mary and Some Specifics of Culture: Psychology In light of the above generalized reflections on Mary and contempo-rary culture I would like to comment briefly upon several segments of our culture in terms of Mary's possible role within them. In the area of psychology, so overwhelmingly influential in the shaping of our contem-porary culture and such an intimate part of it, it depends on what psy-chology we are talking about. If it is Jungian depth psychology, we need not look long or far to find Mary's place within it. Much of the work has already been done by the master and his disciple. Jung maintained that ideas and archetypes such as the anima, the intuitive, the dark, the yin--in general, the feminine--are underdeveloped in our western cul-ture, with disastrous results. His psychology must go even further today and add they are also on the wane in much of the eastern world in com-petition now with the west in its masculine drives toward action and domi-nance, rational knowledge and acquisition. This psychology's percep-tion, then, of the need for Mary or some equivalent dynamic is evident. Jung himself expressly spoke of the need in terms of Mary. He rejoiced over the definition of the doctrine of Mary's assumption, declaring it to be "the most important religious event since the Reformation." At last the feminine was given the exaltation it requires and deserves.~° However, as suggested above, and as Jungian psychology insists, we must not think of the feminine exclusively in terms of the woman. In the past maybe so, and in our present world still many women may be said to possess more of the "feminine" than do men. But feminine charac-teristics are meant to be part of the male psychology as masculine ones of the female, and cases abound where dominance in one or the other is reversed. I think of the two great sixteenth-century Carmelites. Both Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross had the organizational skills and drives and other "masculine" traits appropriate to founders and reform-ers of religious orders, and in these Teresa, as evidenced in her numer-ous religious foundations and governance thereof, may be said to have surpassed John. Again, both were richly passive, intuitive, contempla-tive, steeped in dark and mystery and in cleaving, passionate love, all notable feminine characteristics. Yet it is John, at least as revealed in his poetry, who appears the more feminine: he is the anima, the woman pas-sive under the strong and passionately active love of a quite virile God. 332 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 To what extent, therefore, the feminine characteristics are de facto ¯ found in women more than in men may be moot. But they are definitely the major component of the psyche of the woman Mary as she appears in the gospels. Mary's strong, paradoxically active passivity (she brings .forth the Word as she receives it), her alert and watchful hiddenness, her concern and compassion for those in need (Cana) and for the suffering (Calvary), her motherhood (of Christ and the Church), her deep, loving fidelity (from thefiat of Nazareth and before to that of Calvary and be-yond) are purposely emphasized that both men and women might real-ize their indispensability in each life that would be Christ's. They are also underscored to draw our attention to the feminine in Christ, whom oth-erwise we might tend to view simply as masculine: visibly out front, ac-tive in his preaching, teaching, healing, immersed in religious contro-versy-- a male among a world of males. In the context of his mother (and the other women who surround him), Jesus is still masculine but we are forced to attend to the deep roots of his masculinity, which is his femi-nine Spirit: his passivity (his prayer and passion), his hidden life even as he actively encountered the world, his cleaving love and compassion unto death, his motherhood (Mt 23:37; Lk 13:34). In Mary's presence, her "atmosphere," such qualities of Christ are not simply seen, but they are seen to be the best of him. Jesus was so powerfully and creatively masculine--such a leader for his time as for all time--because his mas-culinity was rooted in and suffused by the feminine, the Spirit. It is Mary who as his mother nurtured him in this, and who helps draw our atten-tion to it. It is she, then, who as our mother nurtures us in the same Spirit and in a similar way. As for other psychologies suffice it here to say that Mary should be looked for behind and within any therapy working toward healing and wholeness. Again, it is Christ who is the healer, but it is Mary who in-itiates the process by bringing Christ to birth, in the world at large and in each individual. Mary, one with the Spirit, struggles and groans in each of us to bring us to the wholeness, the sanity of Christ. Like her, and with her, we concentrated on the activefiat that allows it all to hap-pen. Politics, Economics, Sociology In the political, economic, and sociological concerns of our time Mary points up the need for the hidden, the contemplative, and for uni-versal justice (as in her Magnificat), and, though unnoticed, she is be-hind and within all creative efforts toward these ends. The absence of the contemplative, of the feminine in general, in contemporary politics Mary in Contemporary Culture / 333 is evident, and results have been tragic. Because they lack roots, our poli-tics, both domestic and foreign, change even as they are being formed; and this condition is aggravated by lack of goals other than immediate and pragmatic. But it is the contemplative spirit that gives depth and con-stancy and lights up the future and beyond. Also, our current concentration is upon superficial differences and divisions (my need, my race, my country, my self) rather than on our deeper oneness, which only contemplation, in the one God-centered form or another, can reveal and promote. Further, the disturbance we experi-ence within and among nations may well have as its root cause the fail-ure of the contemplative, the fruit of which is "the peace that surpasses understanding." And so we find divisions among us, the growth of fear, the expan-sion of military might to safeguard our "own" war or the cold threat of war. We look, then, to Mary, universal Mother and Queen of peace, for political healing. She is already there, in this felt social need, but also in those religious orders of men and women whose main concern is con-templation. One of the concrete ways in which the state might help work its own remedy, and so implicitly acknowledge Mary in its functioning, is itself to encourage and promote contemplative communities within its boundaries. These would help make up for the failure of prayer else-where and would be invitation and incentive for the rest of us to unite ourselves with them, at least from time to time, and so help bring our nation and the world to greater depth, unity, and peace. If the need for Mary and what she represents is obvious in politics, it is more so in the field of economics. Here the masculine dominates to the complete exclusion of the feminine, and material concerns have been so isolated from the spiritual that never the twain do meet. This is especially disturbing when we realize that it is economics that determines even our politics. Science too, as technology, is subordinated to it and dominated by it. Indeed, economics has become the dominant factor of our culture or a-culture; it is our pseudo-religion, often becoming, in fact if not in theory, the determining force in more legitimate and traditional religion. If, then, Jesus needs to be born into our world today, it is cer-tainly here in our economic systems and practice. And if born here, he may begin to penetrate the rest of our world. So once again we look to Mary to mother Jesus where he is most needed and we do what we can to help her in the birthing. To see sociology in terms of Mary is to reconsider love. Whatever the other theories as to the origin of society, from the Christian perspec- 334 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 tive it is love that first brings us together and, accordingly, it is love that is society's fundamental problem. So from its beginnings Christianity has taught that the basic unit of society is not the individual but the family which (ideally) is the product of love; and social workers, I believe, would readily agree that it is the lack of love, with the resulting fear and loneliness, that is their chief concern. But today love which is meant to unite is itself fragmented. Sex, in-tended to be integral with love, has been divided from it and made to function alone with all the consequent evils, both mental and physical, that plague our society. The inward-outward directions of love have also been severed, so that now it is either love of self (inward) to the exclu-sion of others or the love of others (outward) to the neglect and loss of self. One of the results of this is the breakup (further division) of the fam-ily which, accordingly, is now challenged by sociologists as the de facto basic unit of society. Mary can and, in secret ways, does have a curative place in all of this. Her love was integral. It reached out to others in and through Christ's large love; indeed, she brought that very love to birth. But she also reached deep within herself to the Spirit of love wherein she found her personal growth and happiness: "All generations will call me blessed." True, she "knew not man." But this does not mean her love was sexless. It is the myopia of our time that sees sex as having but one kind of expression. Mary can alert us to look for the depth in sex and sexual love and so open to us new possibilities of love. And love restored to wholeness should work toward the restoration of the centrality of fam-ily with consequent diminution of fear and loneliness. The Arts and Sciences Mary can have, and has, her place in those areas of our culture known as the arts and sciences. In any presentation or exercise of the hu-man, as in the arts and sciences, we are to see Christ, of course, but also Mary who, in her Immaculate Conception and her conception and birth-ing of Christ, was the first to bring the human to perfection. But as in Christ the human is perfected in and through the divine (Christ's person and divine nature) so also we find Mary bringing the human to perfec-tion in, through, and toward the divine. Again, it is a matter of whole-ness, which our contemporary world tends always to divide. Apart from the divine the human can only degenerate into the inhuman; but with the divine all of its gifted potential is realized. It is in this sense that the only true humanism is Christian humanism. Thus in the arts and sciences Mary is present as they express and promote the human, and she is dy- Mar), in Contemporary Culture / 335 namically present, moving them forward and deeper into the divine to become divinely human. Christ alone might be said to suffice for this: he is the one who in his very person brings the human to perfection. But Mary gives assurance of and added emphasis to Christ's humanity (he is of herflesh) and his divinity (she is Mother of God) and is responsible for the becoming of these in our world (she conceives and nurtures the perfect human being). She is behind the process of the arts and sciences. Here, then, as elsewhere in our contemporary world, Mary, together with her Son, may be found, not just as a possibility, but as actively engaged in shaping a reemerging culture. Our concern ought to be to look for them together and, having found them, enter into their work. NOTES ~ "I know that a poem, or a passage of a poem, may tend to realize itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words, and that this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the image; and I do not believe that this is an experience peculiar to myself." T. S. Eliot. "The Music of Poetry" in On Poetry and Poets (New York: 1957), p. 32. z Eliot again: "Culture cannot altogether be brought to consciousness; and the cul-ture of which we are wholly conscious is never the whole of culture: the effective culture is that which is directing the activities of those who are manipulating that which they call culture." Christianity and Culture (New York: 1949), p. 184. For Eliot's summary definition of culture see p. 198. 3 Gerard Manley Hopkins in "The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air We Breathe." 4 Ren~ Laurentin, indeed, disapproves of the expression altogether, reserving the term "incarnation" for that bf Christ alone~ However, he proceeds to speak of Mary as "pure transparency for the Spirit . . . she is wholly relative to the Spirit; this indeed is at the very core of her deep relationship to Christ and the Father." "Mary and the Holy Spirit," in Mary in Faith and Life in the New Age of the Church (Ndola- Zambia: 1983),"pp. 287-288. 5 See note 9 below for C. Jung's defense of Mary, precisely as in Catholic dogma, as a remedy for a defective Protestantism. In a letter to The Tablet, Sept. 5, 1987, p. 944, Dora Bede Griffiths, writing from his ashram-in Tamil Nadu, South India, suggests a rapprochement, between eastern religions and Christianity through the femi-nine. He notes that in Hebrew the "word for the Spirit (ruach) is feminine and in the Syrian Church, which spoke a form of Aramaic, which is close to the Hebrew, reference was made to 'our Mother, the Holy Spirit.' " The same for the Hebrew word for Wisdom (hokmah): it too is feminine and "this Wisdom is described as 'coming forth from the mouth of the Most High' as a feminine form of the Word of God." He suggests the possible enrichment of our Christian tradition by contact with Hinduism which "has no difficulty in calling on God as 'My Father, my Mother' and with Mahayana Buddhism which conceives of the highest form of Wis-dom as a feminine figure. Dora Bede does not mention Mary here, but it is my sug-gestion that she it is who concretizes the divine feminine, gives it flesh. Thus she 336 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 is the one who, rather than impede universal ecumenism, is meant to help in its re-alization. 6 There are the fine women theologians writing on Mary, such as E. S. Fiorenza and E. Moltmann-Wendel. But I am also thinking of the poets who perhaps do even more to deepen and broaden our knowledge and appreciation of Mary: a Caryll Houselan-der of the past generation and an Ann Johnson of the present. For the Magnificat especially, see the latter's Miryam of Nazareth: Woman of Strength and Wisdom (In-diana: Ave Maria Press, 1984). 7 In his essay "Sur la maternit~ en Dieu et la feminit6 du Saint-Esprit," Escritos del Vedat !I (1981), Yves Congar argues from Scripture and Tradition to the femi-ninity of the Holy Spirit, but is here silent as to Mary's role in the "sacramentiz-ing" of it. The essay may also be found in Theology Digest 30:2 (Summer, 1982) pp, 129-132. 8 Solus Christus, as solafides and sola scriptura, requires severe qualification. For centuries Catholic theologians have argued vigorously against ~he two latter formu-lae. They have been rightly suspicious of such exclusivity in view of the fullness of Christian revelation. For the same reason, perhaps, they should also challenge the solus Christus, this time in view of the fullness of Christ who is our revelation. 9 In an interview carried in America (June 6, 1987), pp. 457-458, Cardinal Suenens stressed the incompleteness of Vatican II's declaration on Mary. "I felt we needed to say more . She is not merely an historical figure; from the beginning she has been given an ongoing mission to bring Christ to the world." ~0 C. G. Jung, "Answer to Job," in Psychology and Religion: West and East, trans. by R. F. C. Hull, Bollinger Series XX (Pantheon Books, 1958), p. 464. Jung goes on to criticize Protestantism for its criticisms of the dogma. "Protestantism has ob-viously not given sufficient attention to the signs of the times which point to the equal-ity of women. But this equality requires to be metaphysically anchored in the figure of a 'divine' woman, the bride of Christ." Jung realizes that the dogma does not give Mary "the status of a goddess," still "her position (now) satisfies the need of the archetype." 1 don't know how this last can be, however, unless it is in and through Mary that we recognize that within the godhead itself the feminine is real-ized in the Person of the Spirit. Through Mary. Hilda S. Montalvo Hilda Montalvo is currently teaching at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary in Boynton Beach, Florida. She is a wife and mother, currently a candidate for a Doc-torate in Ministry. She has completed the graduate program in Christian Spiritual Guid-ance from the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation in Washington, D.C. Her ad-dress is 7151 Pioneer Road; West Palm Beach, Florida 33413. The other day at a Lay Ministry workshop there was a spontaneous burst of applause when I shared my way of praying Mary's life. From the be-ginning of my spiritual journey over twenty years ago I have had an in-tuitive knowledge that the objective "facts" and titles about Mary were important not only because they honored and revered the mother of God but also because they spoke of my reality as a human being and a Chris-tian. These Marian dogmas have helped me to clarify and understand my basic assumptions of myself, my relationship with God, and the mean-ing of my life. I have always had a problem with original sin. To inherit Adam's sin is simply not fair, and so at seven I became an agnostic. The idea of a God that punishes and condemns innocent people--and I experi-enced myself as innocent--was repulsive and frightening. Christianity was not good news. If I was good, if ! kept the commandments, then God would love me. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception simply meant that God had wai.ved that evil from one person. To be born with original sin was bad enough but at least it was a shared human experi-ence and it explained (somewhat!) evil and death. But if Mary was born without it, not only was she not totally human but her "fiat" was pre-destined and she had no actual freedom. Christianity became good news when I realized that the fall/ redemption concept of original sin was simply one way of understand- 337 331~ / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 ing the Genesis story. The traditional interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve posits a paradise lost because of disobedience and the conse-quent punishment of suffering and death. But modern biblical interpret-ers such as Brueggemann are recognizing that the fundamental revela-tion of Genesis is that God's creation is good and that God is constantly gracing and blessing it. God made man and woman in "our" image and it was very good. That has to be the most important assumption of our spiritual life. Each person must come to a personal conviction of this truth that is not only an intellectual response but a lived, grounded ex-perience. The story of Adam and Eve is now being understood as that moment in history when human beings first become self-consciously aware, the first truly human act. Before that there was simply undifferentiated ex-istence; total unconscious dependence on environment and relationship, such as each baby.lives through his or her first year. The process of be-coming self-conscious, of becoming autonomous, in a child can be de-scribed a bit facetiously as the "terrible two's," in humankind, as the Fall. Original sin is not a 'thing' that we are born with: it simply de-scribes in mythological language our natural tendency for independence. Catholicism has always affirmed that grace builds on nature. Crea-tion spirituality, which has its origins in the earliest writer of the Bible, the Yahwist, emphasizes the constant presence and blessings of God in spite of the seeming sinfulness of his creatures. The main thrust of the whole Yahwist Saga which culminates in that beautiful and simple story of Balaam and the talking ass (Nb 22:25) is to celebrate God's refusal to curse his people and his insistence of unconditional love and bless-ing. We, like Balaam, are blinded by our needs and expectations. Per-haps .the Immaculate Conception is yet another reminder of our innate gracefulness? Could not this be the fundamental celebration of baptism? Jesus experienced the unconditional love of his Father at his baptism; we celebrate this same unconditional love and our acceptance into a lov-ing community at our baptism. Mary's Immaculate Conception could be the reminder of God's unconditional covenant with each one of us and the celebration of his covenant through one individual. It is not a nega-tive gift--but a positive statement: God is with us and for us. Original sin (and now I can begin to forgive God and Adam!) is the mythical explanation of our desire for independence from God and his creation--autonomy--with the inevitable consequence of alienation and death. Baptism is the celebration of the fact that God not only loves us unconditionally but is present within us and among us; it effects what it Through Mary / 339 signifies. The truth and hope beyond individualization is unity with God and interdependence with others--co-creators of the parousia, paradise, but now conscious and mature and in freedom. Mary is the archetype of this truth which has been named as Immaculate Conception. At the experiential level I resonate with Mary's "fiat." I also have experienced, am experiencing, the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit and have been afraid and anxious. I also wrestle with the "how" and "why" and the "why me." I also (carefully and tentatively) have said "fiat" and Christ has become incarnate, is now conceived, and contin-ues to be conceived in my life moment by moment. I also have felt com-pelled to go forth and share this good news with others. I give birth daily to Christ in my family, in my ministry. I also sing daily "My soul mag-nifies the Lord, my spirit exalts in God my savior." Mary's story is my story and every Christian's story. She is the ar-chetype of the Disciple as well as the archetype of Woman and Mother for both men and women. An archetype, in Jungian terms, is an image in thepsyche that when recognized and owned can serve to integrate be-liefs, feelings, and behavior. Unless one allows the Word to be con-ceived within one's very being, Christianity remains barren and lifeless, a moral code. It is onlywhen I become willing to accept the transform-ing gracefulness of God's love and presence in my life that I become ca-pable of writing my own Magnificat. As I journal the events of my life I become aware that God "has done great things for me," not least of which is to radically change my values and priorities. Mary is both virgin and mother. If this is understood only in the physi-cal sense, it is simply a faith statement that speaks exclusively of Mary. Mary "undefiled" stands above and beyond created reality, sexuality, and life itself. By implication, then, all persons who express their love sexually, even in stable and committed relationships, are impure, cor-rupted, polluted, tainted, or unclean. The list of synonyms in Roget's Thesaurus is much longer. But dogmas and doctrines speak of the truth of our nature and our relationship with God and with one another. Thus it behooves Catholic Christians to question what God is revealing through this dogma. Might it not mean that "perpetual virginity" means a life of integrity and innocence in any walk of life? Every disciple must conceive and birth Jesus; must be reborn; must be both virgin and mother regardless of his or her sex or sexuality. This way of perceiving Mary's virginity and motherhood can be especially fruitful for men who, in Jung's terms, project their ideal image of woman instead of accepting and owning their own femininity or anima. Mary Review for Religious, May-June 1989 within, for all disciples, symbolizes openness, receptivity, gentleness, gracefulness--many of those feminine virtues that have been lacking in our contemporary society. As a wife and mother I recognize and celebrate both the gift of moth-erhood and the wholeness and purity of my own life that is bespoken of through virginity. In and through motherhood I continue to be uncon-taminated, unprofaned, spotless, unblemished, andchaste. As I pray this dogma I become more comfortable with the paradoxical reality of my own inner being; I begin to name and own my authentic self; I become more open and vulnerable to the healing presence of Christ within. To meditate on the dogmas of Mary in this fashion helps us come in touch with the paradoxical nature of creation. It helps us to see be-yond the either/or stance that divides, judges, and creates conflict and war. It helps us to accept that much broader vision of both/and that is so freeing and encompassing. It helps us to see and understand the dif-ference between facts and Truth, between knowledge and wisdom. It is an invitation to live and enjoy mystery, to be surprised by newness and resurrection and Presence. Meditating on the dogma of the Assumption can be especially help-ful for us in recognizing our projections of the categories of time and space unto life after death. We were taught that heaven and hell were places for all time---eternity. Purgatory was a transient place of purifi-cation. The time and place one went to depended on one's choices. All very neat and logical--and totally contradictory to Revelation. The mag-nificence and mystery of the Spirit's presence in the Church is especially obvious in this dogma of the Assumption. Again we must take it seri-ously and symbolically--in the deepest sense of symbol which is to point beyond the literal sense to the mystery of which it speaks. Mary, the Dis-ciple, is assumed, taken up into heaven, body and soul, after her death. In mythological language she passes into timelessness and spacelessness. She simply is. Westerners tend to equate rational thought with knowledge, thus de-nying intuitive, imageless wisdom. The Assumption--as the Resurrec-tion- is revealed knowledge that goes beyond rational logical thought into mystery and Truth. But as finite human beings we factualize and ex-teriorize the nameless, misunderstand symbol, and live mystery as if it were actuality. The invitation of the dogma of the Assumption is to .let go of our need to understand, to know, to control, and simply trust the goodness and kindness of God. The invitation is to live this life to the fullest and trust that God will take care of our future--name it resurrec- Through Mary / 341 tion or assumption. The invitation is to experience beyond imagining and to live with the paradox of knowing but not understanding. My skepticism/agnosticism has served my faith in the sense that by doubting, questioning, and mistrusting religious experience I have not succumbed to superstition or fanaticism. On the other hand--as was pointed out to me by a wise fellow-traveler--skepticism was also an "ego defense, behind which lies a fear of change and loss of control that giving in to the religious experience may bring." Gifted with this insight I have consciously approached the dogma of the Assumption with as much of an attitude of "letting-go" and an open mind as possible. This has allowed me to see beyond the constricting barriers of space, time, matter and form. It has encouraged me to become open to mystery and surprise and to think in other terms than those of classical theology which comes to logical and rational conclusions about the mystery of God: "It is fitting and right." The Assumption means that when I die I become present. The.As-sumption means no more time, space, dualism, paradox. The Assump-tion means no more becoming. All the barriers to fullness of life that I have struggled with either because of environment or because of genes will disappear and I will become--I am, one with Christ. Catholics have traditionally prayed "through Mary to Jesus." This archetypal way of praying Mary, in fact, allows Jesus to become incar-nate in our very being. As I "ponder" the Immaculate Conception I be-come aware of the goodness of creation and my innate gracefulness; I conceive Jesus' within me by the power of the Holy Spirit; I give birth to him daily and discover him in others; I slowly let go of my need to control through power and knowledge. Through Mary belief statements become faith experiences; factual knowledge becomes lived Truth. I can then say with Paul: "I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me." Some Reflections On Mary, Bridge To Ecumenism? Mary Eileen Foley, R.G.S. Sister Mary Eileen Foley, R.G.S., has been teaching courses in Scripture in a par-ish and to her own Sisters, in addition to her free lance writing. She has been princi-pal and teacher of special needs of teenage girls. Her address is Convent of the Good Shepherd; Cushing Hill Drive; Marlboro, Massachusetts 01752. The hopeful days of ecumenism following Vatican Council II in the 1960s highlighted a maj6r difference between Catholics and Protestants, namely, devotion to Mary. For a long time after the Reformation in the sixteenth century, there was an absence of any productive or even respect-ful communication between us, and consequently there was little under-standing of each other's point of view, especially regarding the mother of Jesus. Historical Background Devotion to Mary, an outstanding characteristic of most Catholics, became the dividing line, with symbolic rather than logical origins. Mary represented Catholicism, against which the Reformers were protesting on the Continent. About the same time in England, the suppression of Catholicism un-der Henry VIII was more specifically directed against the papacy. The destruction of monasteries, however, depri red the people of religious in-struction and centers where Mary was honored; as a consequence, devo-tion to her almost died out. Elizabeth I, motivated politically rather than religiously, continued her father's efforts to dominate Ireland, capitalizing on the anti- Catholic movement by implementing the policy of "Anglicization 342 Mary, Bridge to Ecumenism? / 343 through Protestantization." In Ireland, the mere possession of a rosary was sufficient evidence of treason against the Crown, and was punish-able by death. Under Cromwell's dictatorship in England, Anglicanism, as well as Catholicism, was repressed, and even the celebration of Christmas was forbidden. "Where was the Blessed Mother in thought and practice if her son's birthday was repudiated by the law of the land?"~ Divinity vs. Discipleship Influenced by the history and the politics of the times, misunderstand-ings grew in regard to the Church's attitude toward Mary. Protestants were disturbed about the apparent centrality of devotion to Mary; it seemed to be taking something away from Christ. Non-Roman Catho-lics balk at giving Mary the title of "Co-Redemptrix," fearing that Christ will be displaced as unique mediator of salvation.2 In time, Catholics were able to hear Protestants voice their concern about our apparent "divinization" of Mary, yet countless explanations to the contrary did not seem to convince them, either to put their fears at rest or to allow them the comfort and friendship of the Mother of God. The Council actually approached the subject of Mary with the concerns of non-Catholics in mind, even over the objections of some of the bish-ops, who felt that ecumenism should not be the focus of a document on Mary. Some wished her to be declared Mediatrix of All Graces, but this did not happen at the Council. Actually no separate document on Mary materialized. In the final analysis, Mary appears in the context of the document on the Church. In a discussion of Christ (the Redeemer) and the Church (the Redeemed), she is very clearly identified with the Church, the people of God, rather than with Christ, the Son of God. The document portrays her, not as Christo-typical but as Ecclesio-typical. The implications of this decision were far-reaching indeed. First, this is a very different focus from that to which we have been accustomed. We have tended to see Jesus and Mary together, and while Mary was by no means deified, we did tend to .pray to them together. We looked up to them. Her stance now, however, is with us, the re-deemed, the beneficiaries of the passion and death of Christ. Discipleship Part of the reason for the change seems to be the emphasis on Mary's role in Scripture as disciple. As a hearer of God's word, she is an out-standing disciple of Christ, and she is logically first among his disciples :344 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 and members of the Church. The concept of disciple, clearly presented in .the Scripture, seems to be more acceptable to our Protestant brethren and carries with it no overtones of divinity. All four Evangelists as a matter of fact paint her portrait as the faith-ful disciple, and in so doing, they reflect this role as seeming to surpass her title of Mother of God. "Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you," cried a woman in the crowd, to whom Jesus responded, "Yea, blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it" (Lk 12:27-28). "Your mother and brethren are outside, awaiting you," he was told, and he deftly responded with a question: "Who is my mother? Who are my brethren? He who does the will of my Father, is mother, brother, and sister to me" (Mk 3:31-35). Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother and the disciple whom Je-sus loved. "Woman, behold thy son," he said; then to John, "Behold thy mother" (Jn 19:25-27). Jesus is speaking to his ideal followers, who henceforth will model discipleship for all who desire to follow the Mas-ter. It struck me while comparing these Gospel passages that the Evan-gelists are at great pains to demonstrate that Mary's dignity comes from the fact that she was a woman of faith, which is the outstanding charac, teristic of a disciple. She was open to the word of God and completely obedient in carrying out whatever it called her to do. Whether it was ac-ceptance of the angelic message ("be it done unto me according to thy word," Lk i:38) or responding to the call to go to Bethlehem, then Egypt, and finally Calvary, she modeled clearly for us what the disciple of Christ should be. Grace and Discipleship No one, it seems, could be faulted for honoring one who followed Christ so perfectly. Yet, here again, differing beliefs on grace playa part. Protestants believe that salvation is effected by God alone, that hu-man nature plays no role. Protestants tend to view human nature as totally corrupted by sin, and grace as the merciful disposition of God to forgive and to treat the sin-ner as justified . To speak of human cooperation is to underestimate either the radical nature of human sin or the absolute gratuity of grace. In this perspective (from the Protestant point of view) the use of Mary's fiat becomes a primary example of Catholic presumption of God's sov-ereignty, making God dependent on humanity or making a creature mu-tually effective with God in the work of redemption.3 Mary, Bridge to Ecumenism? / 345 Resistance to the title "Co-Redemptrix" is related to this belief also. The Catholic point of view has been adequately stated, and to quote Tambasco again: "Mary's life simply reflects the fullest effects of grace which enable a faith-filled freedom that responds to and engages in the sovereign work of God in Christ .F.reedom does not substitute for grace, or grace, freedom."4 Because she is preeminent in carrying out his word, Mary's signifi-cance lies, according to the synoptics, in this characteristic of disci-pleship, more than the fact that she is Jesus's natural mother. At the foot of the cross, howe~,er, the beloved disciple, John, and the faithful disci-ple, Mary, seem to be called to discipleship in terms of a family rela-tionship, specifically that of mother and son. The role of disciple now seems to be expressed best in terms of mothering! Discipleship And Motherhood Actually, Mary conceived Jesus by means of an act of faith, the mark of the disciple: When the invitation to be Christ's mother is proposed to her, she says, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done unto me according to thy word" (Lk 1:38). And then the Word becomes flesh . Faith comes first, and then motherhood. John, too, is to carry out his discipleship in similar terms. In his First Letter, John's words are as tender as any mother's: "Remain in him now, little ones . See what love the Father has bestowed on us in letting us be called the children of God! Yet that is what we are' (1 Jn 2:28; 3:1). Mothering is what disciples do. Whatever our ministry is, we hope to bring to it compassion and caring. As a teacher l felt honored to be involved in nurturing the intellectual and spiritual growth of students. The Scriptures are full of mother images that apply not only to a disci-ple but were, in fact, chosen by the Lord for himself. The scriptural im-age of Christ weeping over Jerusalem is very explicit: "How often have I wanted to gather your children together as a mother bird collects her young under her wings, and you refused me!" (Lk 13:34). The disciple of Christ shares in his life-giving approach to those to whom he has been sent. Life-giving calls up images of motherhood, and lately it has been very popular to speak of God as Mother. Julian of Nor-wich often prayed to "Mother Jesus." Mary images motherhood for us, not only her own, but the motherhood of Christ as well. Even the Apos-tle Paul says: "You are my children, and you put me back in labor pains until Christ is formed in you" (Ga 4:!9). Finally the God of the Old Testament speaks through Isaiah: "Can 346 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 a mother forget her infant, or a woman be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Yet even if she should forget, I will never forget you" (Is 49:15). It looks to me that, although Protestants accept the fact that Mary is the mother of.Jesus, they do not seem to see her as their mother, too. While we sometimes see ourselves in the role of mothering, at other times we, too, need to be nurtured or affirmed. The mother of Jesus seems to be a natural one to turn to, especially since we understand that she has been given to us in the words spoken to John, "Behold thy mother" (Jn 19:27). The motherly qualities so ~befitting a disciple are surely present in a special way in Mary, the paramount disciple of all. Doctrine, Scripture, And Tradition Another possible ecumenical barrier regarding Mary is the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (Mary conceived without sin) and the dogma of the Assumption (Mary taken into heaven, body and soul.) A dogma is a doctrine that has been presented for belief, and the idea of the evo-lution of dogma is an enlightening one for many, Catholics included. A doctrine emerges from tradition, which has been explained as follows: Tradition is the living faith experience of the Church which preserves the truths enunciated in the Scriptures but also explicates these truths, draws out what is hidden, and develops more fully insights consistent with but not wholly expressed in the biblical text.5 As has been better expressed above, sometimes a dogma affirms what was not known in complete form from the beginning, but devel-oped from reflections on, for example, the mystery of the Incarnation, and has been the constant teaching of the Church for centuries. Dogma may appear to have been imposed exteriorly, in a context that is a-historical. The vagueness of its scriptural basis is difficult for Protestants, who are biblically, and therefore, historically, oriented. Rootedness in history and Scripture, sources that are being mined assiduously by Catho-lics today, may well provide the undergirding necessary to place devo-tion to Mary in properperspective for all. The aforementioned dogmas on Mary were defined during what we now call the Marian Age (1850 to 1950), although they have been part of the tradition of the Church since the sixth century. Belief (in the Assumption) originated not from biblical evidence nor even patristic testimony but as the conclusion of a so-called argument from convenience or fittingness. It was fitting that Jesus should have res-cued his mother from the corruption of the flesh and so he must have Mary, Bridge to Ecumenism? / 347 taken her bodily into heaven.6 At the end of the sixth century, they began to celebrate the Immacu-late Conception in the East, but it remained unknown in the West until the eleventh century . To eastern ears, which had a different under-standing of original sin, it meant only freedom from mortality and genu-ine human weakness.7 Such doctrines are based on what has been described as "theology from above," or an understanding of the Incarnation as originating in the Trinity. When the Father sent his Son to earth to be born of the Vir-gin Mary, it was incompatible with his nature that the Son would inherit original sin, taught to be transmitted through birth into the human race. Therefore, it was appropriate that Mary be conceived immaculate. The honor is for the sake of Jesus, not Mary. The Communion Of Saints An understanding of the communion of saints, a belief shared by both Catholics and Protestants, may be helpful in seeing Mary's role more clearly. The idea seems to have originated with the martyrs who gave their lives for Christ, and, as a result, were believed to be enjoying his presence and the rewards of their sacrifice. Obviously, they would be in a unique position to be allowed by God to hear the prayers of those still struggling on and would be willing and able to offer these petitions for help to Christ himself, in whose presence they now live. The idea of intercessory prayer is accepted by most people, who pray not only to the saints who have distinguished themselves in the service of God, but to their own friends and relatives who led good lives on earth and as-suredly are still mindful of the needs of those they have left behind. Peo-ple who are still living are also asked to pray for the intentions of oth-ers! That people should present their petitions to Mary in order that she might intercede with her Son for them follows logically in this tradition. It would seem that he would be especially attentive to one who was his model disciple on earth, to one who spent, her life hearing his word and accomplishing it, especially if she were interceding for one who was ask-ing her help to be an effective disciple also. - In ordinary life we often speak to someone with influence in order to present our case. Such is the nature of intercessory prayer, not to be confused with praying directly to Mary,'as if she were able to grant these petitions herself. Protestants dislike seeing Mary in the role of Media-tor, since Jesus Christ is the one Mediator. A movement at the Council to declare Mary Mediatrix of all Graces was scrapped, although this be- Review for Religious, May-June 1989 lief has been part of the tradition of the Church since the eighth century. The ecumenical dimension of the Council reflected the Church's percep-tion of herself now as a world church, with respect for the truth possessed by all churches. Theology -From-Below The contributions of Karl Rahner to contemporary religious thought seem to have great value for the ecumenical movement. Rahner, consid-ered to be one of the greatest theologians of our time, is especially im-pressed with the sacramentality of creation--the fact that God himself is revealed in his works. When creation first came from the hand of God as recorded in Genesis, it was seen to be good--to be holy. God was in his creation from the beginning. Although it was good, it was not com-plete, and in the p.rogress of time, all creation moves to fulfillment, which is finally achieved in Jesus Christ. Rahner's idea is that Christ emerged naturally from God's creation, rather than emphasizing his "being sent down from heaven." He says things often like "the more one is like Christ, the more he is truly him- ~elf." To be like Christ is to approach being a perfect human being. Rahner's ideas allow for experiential learning on the part of Jesus, like any human person going through the normal stages of growth and de-velopment. This Christology is very attractive to a Catholic today, and perhaps it has been better known to Protestants all along. This Christology does not deny his divinity, of course, but the em-phasis is very different from the implications of the theology:from-above design, which seems to emphasize his divinity more, although it does not deny his humanity. One argument advanced was that since one is the mother of a person, rather than a nature, it seemed logical to em-phasize Mary as Mother of God. "In 451," writes Charles W. Dickson, a Lutheran pastor who has served as Chairman of the Commission on Ecumenical Relations of the North Carolina Council of Churches: the Council of Chalcedon dealt with the subject of dual natures by af-firming the inseparability of the two natures, each nature being pre-served and concurring in one person (prosopon) and one subsistence (hy-postasis). 8 Reverend Dickson continues: If this Chalcedonian formulation is given serious attention in contem-porary Protestant thought, some feel the human nature of Christ will not continue to suffer the devaluation of the past, nor will, therefore, its pre- Mary, Bridge to Ecumenism? / 349 cursor in the Incarnation--the Virgin Mary.9 The title, Mother of God, does seem to imply that Mary is divine, and although Protestants accept Mary as the mother of Jesus, tradition-ally they seem to resist the title of "Mother of God." In pagan mythol-ogy, the mother of the god or gods was considered to be a goddess. There seemed to be anxiety in New Testament times from the beginning not to equate Mary with the pagan goddesses, and although this distinc-tion has always been understood by Catholics, it may have looked to Prot-estants that we were divinizing Mary. Popular Religion - An Aid To Ecumenism? In view of the ecumenical dimension, the relationship between sym-bol, basic human need, and religion is very important. Clifford Geertz says that religious symbols provide not only the ability to comprehend the world but to endure it. Man depends upon symbols and symbol systems with a dependence so great as to be decisive for his creatural viability and, as a result, his sen-sitivity to even the remotest indication that they may prove unable to cope with one or another aspect of experience, raises within him the grav-est source of anxiety. ~0 In worship, people tend to clothe God with attributes that will meet their innermost needs. Sometimes in the past the abstract definitions of the theologians left people cold. God was oftentimes seen to be a dis-tant, transcendent God, and a judging God, who dispensed rewards and punishments in strict accordance with one's deeds. People were longing to see him as loving and compassionate, like a mother. If ordinary Catholics had been accustomed to reading the Scripture for themselves, as they are beginning to do now since Vatican II, they might have experienced firsthand the motherly concern of Jesus for the poor, the sick, and the scorned. Probing the Bible now, one is touched, for example, by his attitude toward women, especially disgraced women, regardless of the disapproval of males present. I do understand, however, that Bible reading for Catholics was sharply curtailed at the time of the Reformation due to so many people leaving the Church because of pri-vate interpretation of the Scripture. We understand now that in God there is a perfect balance of so-called masculine and feminine qualities; thanks to insightsfrom psychol-ogy, we are more theologically sophisticated than our predecessors. How-ever, in the early centuries of Christianity, people turned to the feminine Mary, in whom they felt that they had a ready-made mother who cared 350/Review for Religious, May-June 1989 about them. Based, no doubt, on the idea of the communion of saints and the practice of asking for the intercession of the martyrs, who were surely with God, there was a normal development of devotion to Mary, who, as the mother of Jesus, w,a_.,s seen to be more than willing to help those for whom her Son died such a cruel death. Popular Religion And The Apparitions When Catholics finally turn to the Scripture for news of Mary, they are amazed at how little is there! The immense body of material that is available on Mary derives from tradition and also from popular religion, which is based on Mary's relationship to Jesus ~nd the needs of people. Our knowledge of her has been shaped also by .accounts of her various appearances throughout the world. However, as Tambasco comments: ". (the) return to biblical and ecumenical considerations has rightly reduced these devotions to a minor role (p. 71)." Their value is in the Gospel teaching that each affirms. The Church moves very slowly in granting approval for belief in ap-paritions, and even when approval is received, there is no obligation to believe. The one important guideline in regard to any appearance is the fact that nothing is presented or ordered that is contrary to the constant teaching of the Church. An example would be when Mary reportedly appeared to Catherine Labour6 in France in 1830 and to Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes, also in France, in 1858, she said, "I am the Immaculate Conception," a tra-dition in the Church since the sixth century. At LaSalette she insisted on the observance of the Lord's Day, which the people were ignoring, treating Sunday as any other day. She also re-proved them for blasphemy and taking the Lord's name in vain, thus un-derscoring the second and third commandments. At Fatima she asked them to do penance and to pray for peace. In 1879 at Knock, in County Mayo in Ireland, she said nothing at all! She appeared with St. Joseph and St. John, beside an altar sur-mounted by a lamb and a cross, over which angels hovered. The Irish saw in her appearance a message of comfort for the persecution they had suffered for their faith, dating back to the sixteenth century. They iden-tified the symbols with those of the heavenly liturgy in the Book of Reve-lation, seeing in them an affirmation of their fidelity to worship. Priests had risked their lives to offer the Sacrifice of the Mass, symbolized by the Lamb. St. John the Evangelist is holding the Gospel book in one hand, with the other hand raised, as if he is making a point in a sermon. Mary, Bridge to Ecumenism? / 35"1 The theme or instruction accompanying each visit was not a new teaching in any way, but an old teaching which needed a new emphasis, depending on the times. When I was at Knock in 1987, I remember think-ing to myself: it really doesn't matter whether Mary actually appeared here or not! All around me at the shrine there was evidence of faith, as people prayed, participated in the liturgy, reflected on the passion of Christ at the stations, or were merely kind and friendly to each other. I felt a renewal of my own spirituality in such a faith-filled atmosphere. The element of pilgrimage is, of course, very strong at Knock, and pil-grimage from the earliest days has been a vibrant expression of popular religion among people. Pilgrimage Pilgrimages stemming from the apparition at Lourdes are legendary. According to Victor and Edith Turner (Image & Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1978), who did an anthropological study on popular religion, people do not necessarily go on pilgrimage for the cure, but for the atmosphere in which their spiritu-ality is nourished. People see a pilgrimage, or a journey, as a symbol of the journey of life, and they value their association with fellow trav-elers oriented toward God in the service of neighbor. There is a leveling of classes on a pilgrimage; kings travel with ordinary folk, as will be the case in heaven. They volunteer as stretcher-bearers or wherever there is a need, and are energized in the role of service to their fellow human be-ings. In writing about pilgrimages to the shrine of Our Lady at Guadalupe, Segundo Galilea says that here the rich can discover the world of the poor and become sensitive to their need for justice and reconciliation. The movement towards Mary obliges the rich to go out of themselves and to meet the poor. It gives the poor a sense of security and allows them to meet the rich without apology, on an equal footing. Mary is, then, one of the rare symbols of integration in Latin America . ~ The apparition at Guadalupe in i 53 I, perhaps one of the first appa-ritions on record, is said to to be a large factor in popular religion in Latin America, and as a result, has given impetus to the liberation theology movement there. It has touched the hearts of the oppressed, making them feel that they are loved by God, and consequently raised in their own self-esteem, to the point where they are seriously struggling for self-determination in their living situation there. 352 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 Mary and Liberation Theology A new reading of Luke's gospel, which emphasizes salvation his-tory, yields much that is pertinent today in regard to saving, or liberat-ing, the oppressed. Accustomed as we are to seeing Mary as queen, it is a new thing for us Catholics to see Mary as a peasant woman as she was at Guadalupe, and, indeed, at Nazareth. It is a challenge for us to take another look at the Magnificat, which we sing every day in the Liturgy of the Hours. There are places in South America where the recitation of the Magnifi-cat is forbidden, as being subversive. Mary's song begins with the praise of God. "My soul proclaims the glory of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior." The use of the word Savior emphasizes her stance with us, in need of salvation. She re-fers to herself as his lowly handmaid, on whom he has looked with fa-vor. All generations will call her blessed because he, the mighty one, has done great things for her. In countries where there is no middle class, but only the poor and the rich, who possess all the wealth of the land, the poor hear Mary's Magnificat message in the Virgin of Guadalupe: He has shown might in his arm; he has scattered the proud in their con-ceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty (Lk 1:51-53). They look to God for the mercy he promised to "our fathers,"-- and here all peoples sharing the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of Christ, unite in looking back even to the patriarchs, to whom God prom-ised mercy and liberation, which was accomplished first through Moses and eventually through Jesus Christ. And now there is hope for these poor also. The Exodus and Exile theme of liberation fit the situaiion to-day. A new look at Scripture will allow us to see Mary as homeless and as an exile, driveh out of her homeland to Egypt for the safety of her child. Popular religion often forges ahead of the theologians, and the hier-archy has only recently given its approval to the liberation theology move-ment in Latin America. A Latin American theologian says that the Mariology of Vatican II was more preoccupied by dialogue and relations with Protestants than with the simple people and popular Mariology. What is important now is to prolong the'deep and rich Mariological affirmations of Vatican II by a popular Mariology, a renewed Mariology . ~2 Mary, Bridge to Ecumenism? / 353 The basic idea of this renewed Mariology is that Mary is the sign and sacrament of the motherly mercy of God towards the poor, of the ten-derness of God who loves and defends the poor (Puebla, no. 291). ~3 (ital-ics mine) How will these considerations serve as an ecumenical bridge for us? By recognizing the need among peoples for freedom of conscience, free-dom from oppression, freedom of religion, justice for all. It is said that the problem with the doctrines presented for belief in former days was not with the dogmas themselves, but with authority. (Belief in the Im-maculate Conception predated the Reformation.) The wording was that he who did not believe, let him be anathema! Even Martin Luther did not deny the doctrines themselves, but pronounced them pious opinions. John XXIII insisted that there be no condemnations! He condemned no one. Evangelization itself must be an invitation, even a lure, to Christi-anity. No one is to be coerced in this matter in any way. John Paul II in Mother of the Redeemer.says that the Church's jour-ney now, near the end of the second Christian millennium, involves a renewed commitment to her mission. In the words of the Magnificat, the Church renews in herself the awareness that the truth about God who saves cannot be separated from his love of preference for the poor and humble, expressed in the word and works of Jesus. These points are di-rectly related to the Christian meaning of freedom and liberation' (p. 51 ). One must be free from oppression in order to respond to the call of Christ to do one's part toward the building up of the kingdom of God. In discussing Mary's role at the wedding feast at Cana, when she ad-vised Jesus that "they had no wine," the Pope sees this as expressing a new kind of motherhood according to the spirit and not just according to the flesh, that is to say, Mary's solicitude for human beings, her com-ing to th'em in the wide variety of their wants and needs (P. 30-1). I feel that the orientation toward ecumenism observed at Vatican Council II, especially in regard to Mary, has borne fruit and hopefully will continue to do so in the future. I am intrigued by the interpretation offered by Edward Yarnold in regard to reconciling Protestants and Catholics in regard to the Immacu-late Conception and the Assumption. It is possible that Christians disagree over the symbolic form of doctrine, while not disagreeing over the theological meaning. Thus, Roman Catho-lics could take literally that Mary was immaculately conceived and then assumed into heaven, but that is just the symbolic meaning. Protestants might not agree with that, but could accept the ultimate theological mean- 354/Review for Religious, May-June 1989 ing that says God's grace requires response, providers conditions for re-sponse, and results in sanctification even after death. There would thus be theological unity with a plurality regarding symbolic meaning. ~'~ When the late Rev. Arthur Carl Piepkorn, was professor at Concor-dia Seminary, St. Louis, he explained that "other Christians" (he did not refer to them as non-Catholics) have taken hope from references to Mary at Vatican II as follows: It may yet happen in our time that there will come about a happy bal-ance between excess ardor in the veneration of the Mother of God and in excessive coldness to the role that God himself has given her in the drama of human salvation. If it does, as I pray it will, we shall see in our time what the "Mag-nificat" placed on the lips of the mother of God--'All generations will count me blessed.' Other Christians feel that the more we esteem Mary, the more we honor her Son; when men (sic) refuse to honor Mary, they really do not believe in the Incarnation.~5 NOTES ~ William L. Lahey, "The Blessed Virgin Mary in the Theology and Devotion of the Seventeenth-Century Anglican Divines," Marian.Studies,,XXXVlll (1987), p. 143. 2 Anthony J. Tambasco, "Mary in Ecumenical Perspective," What Are They Say-ing About Mary? (Ramsey, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1984), p. 54. 3 lbid, p. 57. '~ lbid, p. 58. 5 lbid, p. 60. 6 Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism (Minneapolis: Winston Press Inc., 1980), p. 873. 7 Ibid. 8 Charles W. Dickson, Ph.'D., "Is a Protestant Mariology Possible?" Queen of All Hearts (Vol. XXXIX, No. 4) Nov./Dec. 1988, p. 26. Quoted from Willison Walker-- A History.of the Christian Church, p. 139. 9 lbid, p. 26. ~0 Clifford Geertz, "Religion as a Cultural System," Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (London: Travistock Publications, Ltd., 1968), p. 13. ~ Segundo Galilea, "Mary in Latin American Liberation Theologies," ed. Bertrand de Margerie, S.J., Marian Studies, XXXVIII (1987), p. 57. ~2 Victor Codina, "Mary in Latin American Liberation Theologies," ed. Bertrand de Margerie, S.J., Marian Studies, XXXVIII (1987), p. 49. ~3 Ibid. 14 Quoted in Tambasco, What Are They Saying About Mary? p. 64. ~5 "Lutheran Hails Mary in Vatican ll's Words," The Boston Pilot (June 29, 1973), p. 2. Prayer and Devotion to Mary: A Bibliography Thomas G. Bourque, T.O.R. Father Thomas Bourque, T.O.R., is Chairperson of the Philosophical and Religious Studies Department of St. Francis College in Loretto, Pennsylvania. He has been involved in youth ministry, parish ministry, and the ministry of Catholic education and adul( education. His address is St. Francis College; Loretto, PA 15940. The Marian Year is meant to promote a new and more careful reading of what the Council said about the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, in the mystery of Christ and of the Church . We speak not only of the doctrine of faith but also of the life of faith, and thus of authentic "Marian spirituality," seen in the light of tradition, and especially the spirituality to which the Council exhorts us. Marian spirituality, like its corresponding devotion, finds a very rich source in the historical expe-rience of individuals and of the various Christian communities present among the different peoples and nations of the world. John Paul II Mother of the Redeemer, #48 ~,lohn Paul II invites all of us to reflect upon our.journey of faith with our Lord in light of our relationship with his Mother Mary. As many Catho-lics and Christians continue to question the role of Mary in the Church today, the Pope's encyclical is very timely. Solid devotion to Mary can only spring from an authentic knowledge of her role in salvation history. The Mariology of John Paul lI's encyc-lical, Mother of the Redeemer, as well as the Mariology of Paul Vl's ex-hortation, Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, can truly be summed in the words of Paul VI: "In Mary, everything is relative to Christ and de-pendent upon him." Both pontiffs remind us that Mary is never to be 355 356 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 considered in isolation. She must be seen in relationship to Christ, the head, and to his Body, the Church. Both Paul VI and John Paul II con-tinually link Mary to Christ, and not only is Mary Mother of Jesus, but also to the Church. The basic principle of Mariology is that Mary is Mother and Associ-ate of the Redeemer. She is a woman of faith, simplicity, loving avail-ability, and a disciple of faith. As a follow-up to the Marian year, the following selected bibliogra-phy is offered as an aid for reflection and prayer. This selected bibliog-raphy can serve as a guide to study and reflection on the contemporary devotion to Mary. The concentration of this work is a modern approach to Mariology from the time of the apostolic exhortation, Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, to the time of promulgation of the encyclical let-ter, Mother of the Redeemer. The selected bibliography is divided into four sections. The first sec-tion consists of books which deal with Marian prayer, devotion and spiri-tuality. The second section lists articles from periodicals from the years 1974 to 1987. Encyclicals and pastoral letters are cited in the third sec-tion, while typescripts and tape cassettes of value are cited in the fourth section. Books and Pamphlets: Ashe, Geoffrey. The Virgin. London: Routledge and Paul, 1976. ¯ Bojorge, Horacio. The Image of Mary: According to the Evangelists. New York: Alba House, 1978. Branick, Vincent P., ed. Mary, the Saint and the Church. Ramsey, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1980. Brown, Raymond E., ed. Mary in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978. Buby, Bertrand. Mary: The Faithful Disciple~. New York: Paulist Press, 1985. Callahan, Sidney. The Magnificat: The Prayer of Mary. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Carberry, John Cardinal. Mary Queen and Mother: Marian Pastoral Reflections. Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1979. Carretto, Carlo. Blessed Are You Who Believed. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1982. Carroll, Eamon R. Understanding the Mother of Jesus. Wilmington, Delaware: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1979. Cunningham, Lawrence and Sapieha, Nicolas. Mother of God. San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982. A Mary Bibliography / 357 Deiss, Lucien. Mary, Daughter of Zion. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1972. Flanagan, Donal. In Praise of Mary. Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1975. --. The Theology of Mary. Hales Corner, Wisconsin: Clergy Book Service, 1976. Flannery, Austin P. The Documents of Vatican II. New York: Pillar Books, 1975. Graef, Hilda C. Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion. New York: Sheed and Ward, Two Volumes, (Volume I, 1963 and Volume II, 1965). --. The Devotion to Our Lady. Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1963. Greeley, Andrew M. The Mary Myth: On the Femininity of God. New York: Seabury Press, 1977. Griolet, Pierre. You Call Us Together." Prayers For the Christian As-sembly. Paramus, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1974. Guste, Bob. Mary At My Side. Mystic: Twenty-Third Publications, 1986. Habig, Marion. The Franciscan Crown. Chicago: Franciscan Her-ald Press, 1976. Harrington, W. J. The Rosary: A Gospel Prayer. Canfield, Ohio: Alba House, 1975. Haughton, Rosemary. Feminine Spirituality: Reflections on the Mys-tery of the Rosary. Paramus, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1976. Hertz, G. Following Mary Today. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1979. Houselander, Caryil. Lift Up Your Hearts to Mary, Peace, Prayer, Love. New York: Arena Letters, 1978. Hurley, Dermot. Marian Devotion For Today. Dublin: C. G. Neale, 1971. Jegen, Carol Frances. Mary According To Women. Kansas City: Leaven Press, 1985. Jelly, Frederick. Madonna: Mary in the Catholic Tradition. Hunt-ington, Indiana: Our Sunday .Visitor Press, 1986. Johnson, Ann. Miryam of Judah: Witness in Truth and Tradition. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1987. --. Miryam of Nazareth. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1986. Jungman, Joseph A. Christian Prayer Through The Centuries. New York: Paulist Press, 1978. 351t/Review for Religious~ May-June 1989 Kern, Walter. New Liturgy and Old Devotions. Staten Island, New York: Alba House, 1979, 119-184. Kung, Hans and Moltmann, Jurgen. ed. Mary in the Churches. New York: Seabury Press, 1983, Concilium, volume 168. La Croix, Francois de. The Little Garden of Our Blessed Lady. Ilkley, England: Scholar Press, 1977. Long, Valentine. The Mother of God. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1976. Maestri, William. Mary: Model of Justice. New York: Alba House, 1987. Malinski, Mieczslaw. Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious Reflections on Life and Rosary. Chicago: Claretian Publications, 1979. Maloney, George A. Mary: The Womb of God. Denville, New Jer-sey: Dimension Books, 1976. Moloney, John. Pilgrims With Mary. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Messen-ger, 1976. Obbard, Elizabeth Ruth. Magnificat: The Journey and the Song. New York: Paulist Press, 1986. Pelikan, Jaroslav. Flusser, David. Lang, Justin. Mary: Images of the Mother of Jesus in Jewish and Christian Perspective. Philadelphia: For-tress Press, 1986. Pennington, Basil. Daily We Touch Him. Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, 1977, 135-148. Rahner, Karl. Mary, Mother of the Lord. New York: Herder and Herder, 1963. Randall, John. Mary, Pathway To Fruitfulness. Locust Valley, New York: Living Flame Press, 1978. Ratzinger, Joseph. Daughter Zion: Meditations On The Church's Marian Belief. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983. Rosage, David. Praying With Mary. Locust Valley, New York: Liv-ing Flame Press, 1980. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Mary, the Feminine Face of the Church. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977. Schillebeeckx, Edward. Mary, Mother of the Redemption. London: Sheed and Ward, 1964, 164ff. Sheed, Frank. The Instructed Heart--Soundings At Four Depths. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1979. Stevens, Clifford. The Blessed Virgin: Her L~]'e & Her Role In Our Lives. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1986. Tambasco, Anthony. What Are They Saying About Mary? New A Mary Bibliography / 359 York: Paulist Press, 1984. Unger, Dominic J. The Angelus. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1956. Viano, Joseph. Two Months With Mary. New York: Alba House, 1984. Wright, John Cardinal. Mary Our Hope. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984. Articles: Abberton, J. "On the Parish: Marian Devotion." Clergy Review. 63 (April 1978), 147-150. Albrecht, Barbara. "Mary: Type and Model of the Church." REvtEw ~oR REt~tG~Ot~S. 36 (1977), 517-524. Alfaro, Juan. "The Marioiogy of the Fourth Gospel: Mary and the Struggles for Liberation." Biblical Theology Bulletin. 10 (January 1980), 3-16. Barrionveuo, C. "For A Better Rosary." Christ to the Christian World. 18 (I 979), 304-307. Billy, Dennis J. "The Marian Kernel." REview ~oR R~t.~ous. 43 (May/June 1983), 415-420. Blackburn, Robert E. "The Reed of God Continues To Flourish." U.S. Catholic. 47 (May 1982), 2. Browne, Dorothy. "Mary, the Contemplative." Spiritual Life. 23 (Spring 1977), 49-60. Buby, B. "The Biblical Prayer of Mary: Luke 2:19-51 ." R~v~w RE~.tG~Ot~S. 39 (July 1980), 577-581. Buono, Anthony M. "The Oldest Prayers to Mary." Catholic Di-gest. 48 (August 1984), 111-113. Burns, Robert E. "Don't Let Sleeping Devotions Lie." U.S. Catho-lic. 52 (January 1987), 2. Carberry, John Cardinal. "Marialis Cultis: A Priestly Treasure." Homiletic and Pastoral Review. 78 (May ! 978), 7-13. Carroll, Eamon. "A Survey of Recent Marioiogy." Marian Stud-ies. 36 (1985), 101-127. b. "A Survey of Recent Mariology." Marian Studies. 35 (1984), 157-187. --. "A Survey of Recent Marioiogy." Marian Studies. 31 (1980), 11-154 (Similar surveys may be found within volumes 24 to 31 of Marian Studies). b. "A Woman For All Seasons." U.S. Catholic. 39 (October 1974), 6-11. 360 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 --. "In the Company of Mary." Modern Liturgy. 9 (May 1982), 4-10. -- "Mary After Vatican II." St. Anthony Messenger. 91 (May 1984), 36-40. --. "Mary and the Church: Trends in Marian Theology Since Vati-can II." New Catholic World. 229 (November-December 1986), 248- 250. --. "Mary, Blessed Virgin: Devotion." New Catholic Encyclope-dia. 9 (1967), 364-369. -- "Mary: The Woman Come Of Age." Marian Studies. 36 (1985), 136-160. --. "Prayer and Spirituality: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Catholic Prayer-Life." Today Catholic Teacher. 12 (March 1979), 40-41. Chantraine, George. "Prayer Within the Church." Communio. 12 (Fall 1985), 258-275. Ciappi, L. "The Blessed Virgin Mary Today and the Contemporary Appeal of the Rosary." Origins. 44 (October 30, 1975), 4. Clark, Allan. "Marialis Cultus." Tablet. 228 (April 6, 1974), 354- 356. Colavechio, X. "The Relevance of Mary." Priest. 36 (June 1980), 14-16. Coleman, William V. "A Peasant Woman Called to Guide the Church." Today's Parish. 13 (May-June 1981), 7. Coiledge, E. "The Church At Prayer: To The Mother of God." Way. 19 (July 1979), 230-239 and 19 (October 1979), 314-321. Conner, Paul. "The Rosary Old Or New?" Sisters Today. 59 (Oc-tober 1986), 108- I 10. Curran, Patricia. "Women Reclaim the Magnificat." Sisters Today. 55 (August-September 1983), 24-30. Daly, Anne Carson. "A Woman For All Ages." Homiletic and Pas-toral Review. 86 (May 1986), 19-22. Davies, Brian A. "Mary In Christian Practice." Doctrine and Life. 26 (June 1976), 403-407. Deak, Mary Ann. "Mary's Faith: A Model For Our Own." Catho-lic Update. UPD 108 (I 978). Dehne, Carl. "Roman Catholic Popular Devotions." Worship. 49 (October 1975), 446-460. Demarco, A. "Hail Mary." New Catholic Encyclopedia. 6 (1967), 898. Donnelly, Dorothy H. "Mary, Model of Personal Spirituality." A Mary Bibliography / 361 New Catholic World. 219 (March-April 1976), 64-68. Emery, Andree. "On Devotion To Mary." New Covenant. 11 (May 1982), 12-14. Finley, Mitchel. "Rediscovering The Rosary." America. 148 (May 7, 1983), 351. Fischer, Patricia. "The Scriptural Rosary: An Ancient Prayer Re-vived." Catechist. 20 (October 1986), 21. Flanagan, Donald. "The Veneration of Mary: A New Papal Docu-ment." Furrow. 25 (1974), 272-277. Frehen, H. "The Principles of Marian Devotion." The Marian Era. 10 (1971), 34-36 and 272-277. Foley, Leonard. "Mary: Woman Among Us." St. Anthony Messen-ger. 94 (May 1987), 12-16. Gabriele, Edward. "In Search of the Woman: Reformulating the Mary Symbol in Contemporary Spirituality." Priest. 42 (February 1986), 28-29. Gaffney, John P. "APortrait of Mary." Cross and Crown. 24 ~Spring 1975), 129-138. h. "Marialis Cultis: Guidelines to Effective Preaching." Priest. 38 (December 1982), 14-18. Galligan, John Sheila. "Mary: A Mosaic Joy." REw~wFoR R~L~G~Ot~S. 43 (January-February 1984), 82-92. Galot, Jean. "Why the Act of Consecration to Our Lady?" Origins. 3 (January 18, 1982), Galvin, John P. "A Portrait of Mary In the Theology of Karl Rahner." New Catholic World. 229 (November-December 1986), 280- 285. Gordon, Mary. "Coming To Terms With Mary." Commonweal. 109 (January 15, 1982), 1. Green, Austin~ "The Rosary: A Gospel Prayer." Cross and Crown. 28 (June 1976), 173-178. Grisdela, Catherine. "How May Processions Began." Religion Teacher's Journal. 18 (April-May 1984), 28. Gustafson, J. "A Woman For All Seasons." Modern Liturgy. 9 (May 1982), 4-10. Hamer, Jean Jerome Cardinal. "Mary, Our Foremost Model." Con-templative Life. 10 (1985), 173- i 74. Hanson, R. "The Cult of Mary as Development of Doctrine." Way ,Supplement. 51 (Fall 1984), 8-96. Hebblethwaite, P. "The Mariology of Three Popes." Way Supple- 369/Review for Religious, May-June 1989 merit. 51 (Fall 1984), 8-96. Herrera, Marina. "Mary of Nazareth in Cross-cultural Perspective." Professional Approaches For Christian Educators. 16 ( i 986), 236-240. Hinneburgh, W.A. "Rosary." New Catholic Encyclopedia. 12 (I 967), 667-670. Hofinger, Johannes. "Postconciliar Marian Devotions." Priest. 37 (January 1981), 43-45 and 37 (February 1981), 15-17. Hogan, Joseph. "Hail Mary." Sisters Today. 57 (January 1986), 258-261. Jegen, C. "Mary, Mother of a Renewing Church." Bible Today. 24 (May 1986), 143-166. Jelly, Frederick M. "Marian Dogmas Within Vatican II's Hierar-chy of Truths." Marian Studies. 27 (1976). --. "Marian Renewal Among Christians." Homiletic and Pastoral Review. 79 (May 1979), 8-16. --. "Reply to 'Homage To a Great Pope and His Marian Devotion: Paul VI.' " Marian Studies. 31 (1980), 96-98. -- "The Mystery of Mary's Meditation." Homiletic and Pastoral Review. 80 (May 1980), 11-20. Johnson, Elizabeth A. "The Marian Tradition and the Reality of Women." Horizons. 12 (Spring 1985), 116-135. Karris, Robert J. "Mary's Magnificat and Recent Study." REVIEW ~OR REt~G~OUS. 42 (November-December 1983), 903-908. Keolsch, Charity Mary. "Mary and Contemplation In the Market-place." Sisters Today. 54 (June-July 1983), 594-597. Kerrigan, Michael P. "The Beginnings Of A New And Prosperous Way of Life." New Catholic World. 229 (November-December 1986), 251. Kleinz, John P. "How We Got The Hail Mary." Catholic Digest. 50 (May 1986), 55-57. Koehler, A. "Blessed From Generation to Generation: Mary In Pa-tristics and the History of the Church." Seminarium. 27 (1975), 578- 606. --. "Homage To A Great Pope And His Marian Devotion." Marian Studies. 31 (1980), 66-95. Krahan, Maria. "The Rosary." Mount Carmel. (Autumn 1977), 124-131. Kress, Robert. "Mariology and the Christian's Self-Concept." REVIEW ~OR RELiGiOUS. 31 (1972), 414-419. Lawrence, Claude. "The Rosary From the Beginning To Our Day." A Mary Bibliography / 363 Christian World. 28 (July-August 1983), 194-201. Leckey, Dolores. "The Rosary Time of My Life." Catholic Digest. 47 (October 1983), 57-58. Leskey, Roberta Ann. "Ways To Celebrate Mary." Religion Teacher's Journal. 17 (April-May 1983), 28-29. Lewela, M. Pauline. "Mary's Faith-Model Of Our Own: A Reflec-tion." Africa Theological Journal. 27 (April 1985), 92-98. Low, Charlotte. "The Madonna's Decline and Revival." Insight. (March 9, 1987), 61-63. MacDonald, Donald. "Mary: Our Encouragement In Christ." REviEw FOR REt.tG~Ot~S. 44 (May-June 1985), 350-359. -- "Our Lady of Wisdom." REvtzw FOR REt.~G~Ot~S. 46 (May-June 1986), 321-331. Main, John. "The Other-Centeredness of Mary." R~w~w FOR RELIG~Ot~S. 38 (March 1979), 267-278. Maloney, George A. "A New But Ancient Mariology." Diakonia. 8 (I 973). 303-305. -- "Do Not Be Afraid To Take Mary Home." Catholic Charis-matic. 1 (October-November 1976), 30-33. --. "Mary and the Church As Seen By the Early Fathers." Diakonia. 9 (1974). Marino, Eugene A. "Mary: The Link Between Liturgy and Doc-trine." Origins. 14 (December 27, 1984), 467-471. Marshner, William H. "Criteria For Doctrinal Development in Marian Dogmas." Marian Studies. 28 (1977), 47-97. "Mary and the Saints." National Bulletin on Liturgy. 12 (Septem-ber- October ! 979), 178-183. Mary Francis. "Blessed Mary: Model of Contemplative Life." Homi-letic and Pastoral Review. 8 i (Mary 1981), 6-12. Mary of the Sacred Heart. "Remember the Rosary." Religion Teacher's Journal. 20 (October 1986),39-40. McAteer, Joan. "What the Rosary Means to Me." Ligourian. 72 (October 1984), 16-20. McCarry, Vincent P. "Mary, Teach Us To Pray." Catholic Digest. 50 (May 1986), 40-43. McDermott, John Michael. "Time For Mary." Homiletic and Pas-toral Review. 83 (May ! 983), I i- 15. McHugh, John. "On True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary." The Way Supplement. 25 (Summer 1975), 69-79. McNamara, Kevin. "Devotion to The Immaculate Heart of Mary." 364 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 Furrow. 36 (October 1985), 599-604. -- "Mary Today." Furrow. 31 (July 1980), 428-450. Miller, Ernest F. "Why We Honor Mary?" Liguorian. 63 (August 1975), 13-15. Montague, George. "Behold Your Mother." New Covenant. 10 (May 198 I), 4-7. Moore, M. and Welbers, T. "The Rosary Revisited." Modern Lit-urgy. 9 (May 1982), 4-10. Motzel, Jaqueline. "Growing Through the Rosary." Liguorian. 73 (October 1985), 28-3 I. NC News Service. "Mary: An Image of Obedience and Freedom." Our Sunday Visitor. 75 (April 12, 1987), 17. Nienaltowski, Mary Ellen and Metz, Kathleen. "How Do We Pray The Rosary?" Religion Teacher's Journal. 21 (March 1987), 17-18. Noone, P. "Why Catholics Hail Mary?" U.S. Catholic. 44 (May 1979), 47-49. Nouwen, Henri J. "The Icon of the Virgin of Vladimir: An Invita-tion to Belong to God." America. 152 (May 1 I, 1985), 387-390. O'Carroll, M. "Recent Literature On Our Lady." Irish Theologi-cal Quarterly. 45 (I 978), 281-286. Offerman, Mary Columba. "Mary, Cause of Our Joy: A Bibliogra-phy On Mariology." REvl~.w ~oR RE~.~lous. 35 (1976), 730-734. Palazzini, P. "The Exhortation Marialis Cultus and the Rosary." Origins. 27 (July 4, 1974), 9-10. Pellegrino, M. "Comments on the Apostolic Exhortation: Marialis Cultus." L'Osservatore Romano. 35 (August 29, 1974), 3-1 I. Pennington, M. Basil. "The Rosary: An Ancient Prayer For All Of Us.'" Our Sunday Visitor. 72 (October 23, 1983), 3-ff. Peter, Val J. "Marian Theology and Spirituality." Communio. 7 (Summer 1980), 100-178. Puzon, B. "All Generations Shall Call Me Blessed." Sisters Today. 45 (May 1974), 533-537. Quinn, Jerome D. "Mary the Virgin, Mother of God." Bible To-day. 25 (May 1987), 177-180. Rasmussen, Eileen. "Accept Devotion To Mary." National Catho-lic Reporter. 11 (January 3 I, 1975), I I- 14. Rausch, Thomas P. "The Image of Mary: A Catholic Response." America. 146 (March 27, 1982), 231-234. Roberts, William P. "Mary and Today's Classroom." Catechist. 18 (April-May 1985), 28-29. A Mary Bibliography / 365 Schreck, Alan. "Devotion To Mary." New Covenant. 13 (July- August 1983), 14-18. Senior, Donald. "New Testament Images of Mary." Bible Today. 24 (May 1986), 143-166. Shea, John J. "Mary's Melody of Amazing Grace." U.S. Catho-lic. 47 (May 1982), 6-10. Smith, Herbert. "Mary: Mother and Disciple." Liguorian. 73 (Oc-tober 1985), 52-53. Smith, Joanmarie. "Re-Seeing the Rosary." Professional Ap-proaches for Christian Educators. 16 (1986), 12-15. Smith, Patricia. "Images and Insights: Mary In A Modern Mode." New Catholic World. 229 (November-December 1986), 269-273. Smolenski, Stanley. "Rosary or Chaplet?" Homiletic and Pastoral Review. 86 (October 1985),9-15. Snyder, Bernadette. "Who's Praying the Rosary Today?" Liguorian. 74 (October 1986), 2-6. Speyr, A. "Prayer In The Life Of The Blessed Virgin." Commu-nio. 7 (Summer 1980), 113-126. Stahel, Thomas H. "Redemptoris Mater." America. 156 (May 2, 1987), 353-354. Tambasco, A. "Mary: A Biblical Portrait For Imitation." New Catholic World. 229 (November-December 1986), 244-271. Tannehill, R.C. "The Magnificat As Poem." Journal of Biblical Lit-erature. 93 (1974), 263-275. Tutas, Stephen R. 'Who Is Mary For Me?" REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS. 43 (September-October 1984), 778-780. Unger, Dominic J. "Does the New Testament Give Much Histori-cal Information About the Blessed Virgin or Mostly Symbolic Mean-ing?" Marianum. (1977), 323-347. Van Bemmel, John. "How To Pray The Rosary." Religion Teacher's Journal. 17 (April-May 1983), 29-30. Ward, Jack. "The Rosary-A Valuable Praying and Teaching Tool." Catechist. 19 (October 1985), 24-25. Ware, Kallistos, Timothy. "The Jesus Prayer and the Mother of God." Eastern Churches Review. (Autumn 1972), 149-150. Zyromski, Page. "Rosary Meditations Especially For Catechists." Catechist. 20 (October 1986), 20-22. Church Documents, Pastoral Letters and Addresses: John Paul II. "Address to a General Audience About the Rosary As An Opportunity of Pray With Mary." Origins. 44 (November 2, 1981 ), 366 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 --. "Address to the Faithful About Mary and Her Spiritual Testa-ment." Origins. 30 (July 25, 1983), 2. --. "Address to the Faithful Saying That With the Rosary We Are Armed With the Cross and the Word." Origins. 41 (October 10, 1983), I. --. "Address to the Faithful Saying That Mary Is Present In Every Liturgical Action." Origins. 8 (February 20,, 1984), 10. --. Address to the Faithful Stressing Devotion to Mary Our Mother." Origins. 880 (April 9, 1985), 12. ~. "Address to the Faithful Urging Honor to the Infinite Majesty of God Through Mary." Origins. 891 (June 24, 1985), I. --. "Homily Announcing A Fourteen Month Marian Year To Be-gin Pentecost Sunday." Origins. 16 (January 15, 1987), 563-565. --. Mother of the Redeemer. Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1987. --. "Renewal of the Act of Consecration of the World to the Mother of God." Origins. 14 (April 2, 1984), 9-10. --. Redemptoris Mater. Tablet. 241 (March 28, 1987), 355-359. National Catholic Conference of Bishops. Behold Your Mother: Woman of Faith. (Pastoral Letter on the Blessed Virgin Mary). Wash-ington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, November 21, 1973. Paul VI. "Apostolic Exhortation: Marialis Cultus." L'Osservatore Romano. April 4, 1974. ~. "Mary, Model of the Church." REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS. 34 (March 1976), 161 - 164. ~. "Renewal of Devotion to Mary." The Pope Speaks. 20 (1975), 199-203. --. Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1974. Poletti, U. Cardinal. "Significance, Value and Practice of Devotion to the Rosary." Origins. 42 (October 16, 1975), 9. Transcripts, Lectures and Tapes: Clark, Alan. "The Holy Spirit and Mary." Mary's Place In Chris-tian Dialogue. (Occasional Papers and Lectures of the Ecumenical), 1982, 79-88. DeSatage, John and McHugh, John. "Bible and Tradition in Regard to the Blessed Virgin Mary: Lumen Gentium." Mary's Place In Chris-tian Dialogue. (Occasional Papers and Lectures of the Ecumenical), 1982, 51-60. Dimock, Giles. "Practical Devotion to Mary." Marian Conference A Mary Bibliography / 367 at the University of Steubenville, 1986, (Cassette). Hutchinson, Gloria. Mary, Companion For Our Journey. Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1986, (Cassettes). Peffley, Bill. Prayerful Pauses With Jesus and Mary. Mystic: Twenty-Third Publications, 1987, (Audiocassettes). Pittman, Robert S. "The Marian Homilies of Hesychius of Jerusa-lem." Ph.D. Thesis. Catholic University of America, 1974. Powers, Isaias. Quiet Places With Mary: A Guided Imagery Retreat. Mystic: Twenty-Third Publications, 1986, (Audiocassettes). Scanlan, Michael. "Prominence of Mary: The Time of Visitation." Marian Conference at the University of Steubenville, 1986, (Cassette). Ware, Kallistos. "The Mother of God in Orthodox Theology and Devotion." Mary's Place in Christian Dialogue. (Occasional Papers and Lectures of the Ecumenical), 1982, 169- ! 81. An Ignatian Contemplation on the Baptism of Our Lord Michael W. Cooper, S.J. Father Michael Cooper, S.J., teaches in the Theology Department and the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University of Chicago. His address is 6525 N. Sheri-dan Road; Chicago, Illinois 60626. Baptism has once again become an integral part of the Christian experi-ence. Instead of simply an individual event between God and the bap-tized, the sacrament once more celebrates a person's entrance into the community of believers. Moreover, with the renewal and expansion of the understanding of ministry, it is baptism that now offers the founda-tion for the call to mission and service for every member of the People of God. Even with all these rich theological and liturgical developments, I have still found it difficult to make any vital connection between them and my own baptism. In part, I simply have no sentiments or recollec-tions to explore or deepen. Like many other pre-Conciliar born, I was rushed to the local parish on the Sunday following my birth to save me from a sudden case of limbo. Nor does my mother have any spiritual re-membrances of my baptism to share with me, since on that day she was still in the hospital recuperating from my worldly entrance. Thus until very recently the experiential and spiritual sense of my own baptism re-mained in a limbo of its own. The meaning and power of my own baptism finally came alive, how-ever, as I shared Jesus' experience of his own baptism during several pe-riods of prayer on my recent thirty-day retreat. The thrust of contempo-rary spirituality reminds us to pay close attention to our human experi-ence- whether in prayer, in ministry, or in the rest of life--and to ask 368 Contemplation on Baptism / 369 what the Lord might be saying or how he might be inviting. Often these moments become actual revelations of God's living Word for us-~either individually or collectively. Through these experiences we realize the Gos-pel no longer as. a onetime event in the past but as always happening-- and now most immediately to us. From this perspective of the ongoing Gospel I share the fruits of a very transforming experience of the baptism of our Lord. Though admit-tedly the very personal encounter of one individual, maybe my experi-ence will contribute to our collective efforts to reclaim the experiential and spiritual roots of our baptismal call to community and ministry with God's people. I entitled this article "An Ignatian Contemplation . . ." to highlight a very definite approach to praying the Scriptures. Instead of methodi-cally plodding through the Gospel, I contemplated, that is, I watched at-tentively and receptively the scene of our Lord's baptism, letting it touch my mind and heart. I began by reading through the scripture text (Mt 3:13-17) several times, then I put down my Bible, closed my eyes, and let the event come alive before the inner eye of my imagination. Following Ignatius' instructions in the Spiritual Exercises (no. 114), I then took my place in the scene, so that I would be experiencing the baptism as an engaged participant and not as a disinterested spectator. Paying attention to the persons, their words, and their actions, I contem-plated the event as if it were happening now for the first time. On the banks of the Jordan, Jesus steps out from the crowd and pre-sents himself to his cousin John for baptism. His voice filled with emo-tion, John protests saying, "I should be baptized by you, yet you come to me!" But Jesus responds very straightforwardly. "Let it be for now." Then in a very powerful moment of the contemplation, I hear Jesus go on to explain himself, "I'm no different from the rest of the people gath-ered here. We're all struggling to gain our human freedom and whole-ness. With all the fear and unfreedoms we carry around from growing up plus all the pressures and demands on us today, it's a wonder we're not more wounded than we are." For Jesus, this very heartfelt experience becomes his baptism into a deep identification and solidarity with the rest of the human family united together in the struggle to become more human and free. Jesus' words to John then cannot be taken as some sort of pious self-effacement. Rather, our brother Jesus is experiencing his baptism as a deep, deep bond-edness with the human family gathered at the healing waters of rebirth and wholeness. 370/Review for Religious, May-June 1989 As I continue to contemplate the baptism unfolding before me, I am drawn to even closer physical proximity with Jesus by the magnetism of his human compassion and tenderness. At the same time I begin to feel close again to several friends from whom I have parted company because of certain decisions on their part that hurt me very deeply. Along with this new feeling of closeness comes the realization that despite the pain and darkness that have separated us, there exists a deeper bond of soli-darity in the human struggle that binds us together. We are no different from each other or from the rest of the people on the face of the earth. In one way or another we are each carrying around within us parts of our wounded child and of our stressed adult. The shadow of our fuller human potential and psychic wholeness always seems to lie just beyond our reach. With this realization a lot of the bite to my pain and anger subsides and I hear myself saying very serenely, "In our choices and endeavors, we really do try to give as much as we can at the moment. Sometimes our responses aren't adequate or all that the situation might call for or that we or others might hope for. Because we will always be carrying around our wounded and unfinished selves, we at times end up creating pain and darkness--for others as well as for ourselves--despite our best and freest possible intentions at that moment. I am no different from the rest of mortals. We are all in our own way longing and strug-gling for our human freedom and wholeness as daughters and sons of the living God." These intense feelings of solidarity with my friends that ac-company these reflections free me to let go of a lot more of the pain and misunderstanding in our relationship. And almost immediately these peo-ple actually appear on the banks of the Jordan and, ecstatic and teary-eyed, we embrace one another. By this time Jesus and John are sitting off to the side talking intently to one another. I am savoring the wonderful feelings of reconciliation and the pure joy of this moment when all of a sudden my attention switches. Several close friends for whom I had initially been either .teacher, spiritual director, or mentor become present to me. These new feelings of solidarity in the human struggle now bring a different sort of bondedness with them. Any leftover images of being in some way "the expert" or "the helper" or simply the one who is a couple of steps ahead of the others seem to disappear forever. I am just acutely aware of'how similar our journeys and struggles have been at such a profound level. A marvelous celebration of deep friendship and belonging to each other takes place as they, too, appear on the banks of the Jordan and I jump up to embrace them. Contemplation on Baptism / 371 This first moment of the baptism climaxes as I join hands with my friends who have come to the Jordan. Together with Jesus and John we dance in circles and zigzag chains across the sands. Then we run into the water to splash and frolic like little children and truly we are, because so many of the hurts and wounds of growing up and of adult life are be-ing healed. This wonderful moment comes to a close when with ecstatic reverence we take turns baptizing one another in these life-giving wa-ters of human compassion and solidarity. The second major moment of the baptism begins as Jesus steps out of the water. This time the heavens open and a voice proclaims, "This is My Son, the Beloved, on whom My favor rests." Along with his sense of profound solidarity with the human family, Jesus now experiences most intensely his deep, deep solidarity with God. Because the baptism has become not only Jesus' but mine as well, I feel myself being drawn into that same solidarity with God. I now hear a voice from the heavens addressed to me, "You, too, are My son, the beloved, on whom My favor rests." Initially, I simply rest in this deep sense of belonging to God. Though still feeling very much the earthen vessel, chipped and bro-ken in so many ways, I receive nonetheless a strong assurance in the prayer that I will have whatever I need by way of resources for my per-sonal journey and for my ministry. With God's favor there will be enough of hope, courage, and justice, of human and psychic energy, and of whatever else needed for today with more to come tomorrow. The Lord has spoken . Rather than end a prayer that is really only be-ginning to unfold, I simply thank the Lord from the depths of my spirit for sh.aring the baptism with me both in contemplation and in life. This Ignatian contemplation of the baptism of our Lord invites sev-eral brief comments. First of all, we realize that the foundations for a renewed understanding of Christian baptism do not come so much from our own sacramental initiation as from sharing the experience of baptism with Jesus. Like the Lord, we are baptized into covenantal solidarity with both our brothers and sisters and with our gracious God. From this perspective, baptism loses much of its static notion as sim-ply a once-in-a-lifetime event. Especially for adults being baptized or re-claiming their baptismal call, as we did in this contemplation, the cele-bration of baptism becomes a dynamic initiation into a lifelong process that continues to open up new levels of human and divine solidarity as our Christian existence unfolds day by day. This sacred bondedness with the human family confronts the blatant Review for Religious, May-June 1989 barriers and subtle alienation that separate us from each other. Baptism invites us to embrace the human family--both near and far--as "my peo-ple" and not just God's people. Our experience is meant to mirror that of Jesus: "I am no different from anybody else." The heart of the mat-ter remains this recognition that we are all struggling with varying de-grees of success for our human freedom and wholeness--two of the gate-ways to encountering the divine in ourselves. Here, too, our experience follows the pattern of Jesus in discovering his own divinity. In facing the forces that would shrink, wound, or destroy these most precious gifts of God to us, we plumb the depths of our human resources and discover the wellsprings of the divine energy in us as well. Second, this baptism into human solidarity against the enemies of our humanity celebrates our entrance as adults into the Christian com-munity. We now recognize and claim for our own this community both broken and healed yet always struggling for greater wholeness. Third, this very sacred experience of human solidarity becomes the foundational stance for each Christian's involvement in ministry as part of our baptismal commitment. It is only from a vital sense of bonded-ness to each other that we can enter into the.joys and struggles of one another without pretense or feigned empathy. By the Lord's design we are in this human struggle together. Baptism then celebrates our call to be companions to one another and to all our brothers and sisters in the unfolding of the kingdom of God in our time. Fourth, the divine bondedness solidifies as we hear the voice from heaven address us withthe same love and promise offered to Jesus: "You are My beloved on whom My favor rests." This proclamation then nurtures our heartfelt sense of belonging utterly to God. Moreover, this divine connectedness touches all the dimensions of who we are, so that we begin to look and feel more and more with the eyes and heart of our gracious God on our~e, lves, others, and our world. In the face of our human wounds and inadequacies, this sense of di-vine favor sustains Christian perseverance and empowerment for life and ministry. We can be stretched to the limits of our understanding and of our physical and psychic energies, yet we now know deep down that no matter what comes God's favor will sustain us this day and there will be more of what we need tomorrow. From the Lord we need only ask with Ignatius in the Suscipe of the Spiritual Exercises: "Give me only Your love and Your grace; that is enough for me" (no. 234). For those hungry to deepen their commitment to Christian commu-nity and ministry, an Ignatian contemplation of the baptism may be the Contemplation on Baptism I 373 occasion to nourish those desires as they share this moment with Jesus as though it were happening for the first time. We never know whom or what we might meet on the banks of the Jordan! the woman with the hemorrhage i was tired of their pity and their prayers now for how many years each face became compulsive to be good with kindness--their helpful helplessness i've seen their looks that worried into silence "i'm so sorry" drove me to distraction until they learned my shame would last God only knowswperhaps forever then they disappeared like frightened children and the very thing

Issue 48.5 of the Review for Religious, September/October 1989. ; R~:.vn~w voa R~:.t.~c,~ous (ISSN 0034-639X) is published bi-monthly at St. Louis University by the Mis-souri Province Educational Institute of the Society of Jesus: Editorial Office: 3601 Lindcll Blvd. Rm. 428; St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Second-class postage paid at St. Louis MO. Single copies $3.00. Subscriptions: $12.00 per year; $22.00 for two years. Other countries: for surface mail, add U.S. $5.00 per year; for airmail, add U.S. $20.00 per year. For subscription orders or change of address, write: Rl~v~'0,, ~:o~ Rl-:t.~c;ous; P.O. Box 6070: Duluth, MN 55806. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Rt:v~t:w roa RELIGIOUS; P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, MN 55806. David L. Fleming, S.J. Iris Ann Ledden, S.S.N.D. Richard A. Hill, S.J. Jean Read Mary Ann Foppe Editor Associate Editor Contributing Editor Assistant Editors September/October 1989 Volume 48 Number 5 Manuscripts, books for review and correspondence with the editor should be sent to Rv:vt~w you R~:~.~;~otJs; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the department "Canonical Counsel" should be addressed to Rich-ard A. Hill, S.J.; J.S.T.B.; 1735 LeRoy Ave.; Berkeley, CA 94709-1193. Back issues and reprints should be ordered from Rv:\'~v:w voa Rr:~.~;~o~JS; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. "Out of print" issues are available from University Microfilms International; 300 N. Zeeb Rd.; Ann Arbor, MI 48106. A major portion of each issue is also available on cassette recordings as a service for the visually impaired. Write to the Xavier Society for the Blind; 154 East 23rd Street; New York, NY I0010. PRISMS . We Christians come to know our calling to a certain kind of minis-try in the Church through our fidelity to prayer--a continuing dialogue in our relationship with God. By way of analogy, those in the vocation of married life know that the sacramental celebration of matrimony rep-resents only the start of a new relationship together with God. It will take a married lifetime of dialogue with each other and with God and of so living to make the reality of the sacrament come true. Similarly, those in the vocation of religious life signify in some way (commonly through some kind of vow-taking) that they are professing and aiming at a spe-cial relationship with God with the wholeness of their lives. Again re-ligious are well aware that vow or profession day is only the beginning of the dialoguing and of the living out of this "aimed-at" relationship. In these vocations of married and religious life, the Christian prayer of both the individual and the community (marital or religious) is a neces-sary part of the continuing dialogue which keeps alive and nourishes the particular vocation undertaken by our first responding to God's initia-tive. The call to minister in the name of Christ and officially authorized in the service of the Church also remains grounded in the prayer-dialogue. Ministry, not rooted in prayer, is no ministry at all. Good deeds done may represent admirable humanitarianism which we honor and appreciate, but we do not grace it with the identity of ministry. Min-istry flows from a consciousness of God and God's ways of acting and from a sense of responsibility in acting in the name of Christ's Body, the Church. The pervading consciousness of God and the connatural way of acting as God acts are the fruit of a prayer life, which is consistently fostered "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health." This dialogue pei'meates and empowers our Christian life as well as our ministry whatever it may be. In this issue, we highlight two aspects of this continuing dialogue so necessary for our vocation and for ourmin!stry. The passion or fire in our Christian way of praying is reflected in the articles "The God of the Scriptures: An Invitation to Passionate Prayer" .by Anthony Wieczorek, O. Praem., "Romantic Relations with the Sacred" by Richard J. De- Maria, C.F.C., and "A Joyful Supp!ication for Justice" by A. Paul 641 642 Review for Religious, September-October 1989 Dominic, S.J. The passion--meaning self-emptying and often a sense of dying--is also a part of our Christian experience of growth in prayer; the articles "Negative Floating" by Barbara Dent and "Spiritual Dryness: Some Practical Guidelines" by Eamon Tobin give some insight into these always difficult moments. Three articles, viewing various aspects of our religious life vocation, are written within the specific prayer context of our lives. "Religious Formation: A Contemplative Realignment" by Jane Ferdon, O.P., con-siders the formation task. "Discernment and Elections in Religious In-stitutes" by Marcello De Carvalho Azevedo, S.J., focuses the very spe-cial moments of leadership choice and policy-making in religious in-stitutes. Finally, "Rituals of Death, Denial, and Refounding" by Ger-ald A. Arbuckle, S.M., reflects on the importance of religious celebrat-ing in a truly Christian manner the dying and death moments in their con-gregational life if revitalization or refounding is to occur today. In the northern hemisphere, the summer months are coming, to an end, with the traditional vacation time behind us for another year. We move on to another "work" year and whatever our ministry may be. With the help of God's grace, .we find ourselves at an opportune time to assess again how our lives, our ministries, and our prayer truly form one healthy and supportive ecological system. May our various authors in this issue contribute to our insight and give us perspective in our quest. David L. Fleming, S.J. The God of the Scriptures: An Invitation to Passionate Prayer Anthony Wieczorek, O.Praem. Father Anthony Wieczorek, O.Praem., is currently chaplain of the Sign of God Deaf Ministry office which serves the Deaf and Hearing Impaired community of the Green Bay diocese. He also directs the Theological Institute, a summer program at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin. He continues to write a weekly article for the local diocesan newspaper. His address is St. Norbert Abbey; De Pere, Wiscon-sin 54115-2697. We all have them. Most of us have learned to control, even ignore them. But for some, they appear unasked for and when they do they are toler-ated with all the patience we have for a head cold. They are our emo-tions, our deep seated emotions, the dark and passionate side of our hu-man nature. We enjoy them when, at sports activities, we give ourselves permis-sion to act outraged or triumphant and they suit our moods. We like it when they sneak out quietly in the form of tears at the end of a touching movie. They may also try to make their presence known during prayer, but here they are often considered most distracting and least desired. And yet, if there is a time for emotion, if there is a time for passion at all, it is during prayer. Prayer is a naturally revealing activity. Ii is natural that passionate emotions should arise within us during.prayer. They are conduits to the parts of ourselves God wishes most to go. It is little wonder we should find them straining to emerge. Could it be that they are even called forth by a God eager to touch this part of ourselves so seldom shared? Unfortunately, they are the parts of ourselves we least of all like. Most often, they are corridors to the side of ourgelves we fear. They lead 643 60,4 / Review for Religious, September-October 1989 into the cauldron of emotion we have not yet learned to control. We may not be really sure what lurks there but we are fairly confident that God has no part of it, that it is best shielded from God,-that what surges there is best atoned for in secret, not something to be proud of and shared openly with God. But are passionate emotions like anger and jealousy and lust called forth during times of prayer so that we can "confess" to them? Or are they summoned at God's own invitation? Can it be, might it be, that God can desire a passionate prayer as well and as much as a prayer that is con-templative, tranquil, and serene? Might it be that the God who appears ¯ throughout the pages of the Bible speaks to us best and can identify with us most through the part of ourselves we keep most hidden? The God of the Scriptures is indeed a passionate God. This article is an exploration of that theme and of the constructive relationship that exists between passion and prayer. The Passionate Nature of God Pascal was right when he said that there seemed to be two Gods: the God discussed by philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the Scriptures. Most people prefer the philosophers' God. That Being is reasonable, controlled, logical. The God of the phi-losophers thinks, plans, orders, foresees. There is, of course, a "feel-ing" side to this God too. God does, after all, feel compassion and love for creation. But those "feelings" are held well in check and are dis-pensed cooly and properly. This God seems to resemble a fine Victorian gentleman/scholar. And, very often, especially here in the Western world, that is the image we would like to have of ourselves. That is the standard and goal we set for ourselves. The point is not that this image of God is false. But is it all there is? Is it only one side of a much more complex personality? Do we, with a too exclusively philosophical model of God, lose some of God's mys-tery because we fail to pay proper attention to God's emotion and pas-sionate nature? Perhaps such a theology is no more complete than an anthropology that deliberately ignores the emotional and passionate side of human be-ing? The point of human growth is to integrate and harmonize the parts of our nature i'nto one. To ignore our emotions is to ignore half of our selves. In addition to being rational, thinking creatures, human beings also love, feel anger, jealousy, crave revenge, desire, and feel pity. We are indeed complex beings. Can we dare imagine a God who is any less? Moreover, if we are so thoroughly emotional and if we were made in The God of the Scriptures / 6t15 God's own image and likeness, what can we conclude about God? Scripture tells us that "God is love." Love is, to be sure, more than an intellectual attitude or disposition toward life. Love is an emotion. Peo-ple in love are known sometimes to do strange things, spontaneous things, unpredictable things. Or so they seem to us. But to them, fol-lowing the "logic of love," their actions have a rationality, a purpose, an order. Finding it, though, and seeing the reasoning behind such ac-tions can be almost as hard as finding the sense and reason behind some of God's actions in our lives. God is not illogical nor is God emotion-ally unstable. God is simply love. God is simply in love with us "and with ¯ all of creation. God is a Being of great and passionate emotion. That, at least, is what the Scriptures tell us. Perhaps, to beg the question a bit, that is why God chose the Jews in the first place as recorders of divine revelation. The Jews, and all Near Eastern people for that matter, were extremely emotional and passionate people. Check the papers--they still are. But if you were God, would you have chosen them to write the record of your revelation? Many people would probably have preferred the Greeks. Their philo-sophical bent would more likely have appealed to us. And indeed, they would probably have done an admirable job at revealing God's mind. But could they have matched the Jewish brilliance for revealing God's heart? The Jewish passion for life was a most fitting medium for the man-ner of God's message. For the Scriptures reveal in emotional and pas-sionate imagery and terms the heart as well as the mind of God. Maybe, we argue, the Jewish people were simply transferring their own emotional nature onto God and that God no more has passionate feel-ings than God has legs withwhich to walk around in the garden of Eden. Yet, even though they were not meant to be read literally, all the images and words do reveal and communicate something about God. To glean this, though, the Scriptures must be read with an open mind and heart. God's Emotional Involvement in Life What do the Scriptures tell us about God? The Bible reveals a God who is very much alive and near. The biblical God does not observe the glories and follies of creation from afar. This is not a God who aloofly administri~tes creation and human history. Rather, this is a God who min-isters, to it and within it. The God of the Bible is pastorally involved in human life. We know that because the Scriptures reveal a God who is emotionally involved in human life. There are levels and degrees of involvement in community, in fam-ily, in politics, in everything regarding life. One criterion for measuring 646 / Review for Religious, September-October 1989 or determining the depth of involvement is the amount of emotional in-vestment shown. In community living, for example, it is easy enough to state one's involvement in community affairs. One may even show up at community meetings and functions. But does that person's words and presence communicate an active involvement or a benign disinterest? Does body language alone, for instance, tell the others present that, "I am here to observe. Really, I couldn't care less what happens. It is some-what interesting, even humorous though. Just continue and pretend I'm not here." No words may communicate that. But the message is made, communicated through posture, through sleepy eyes and flacid facial e~- pression. On the other hand is the person very much involved in the pro-ceedings. Like the other, thi~ person says not a word. Yet through all the same means the message communicated is much different. This per-son exhibits interest through a tense body, through a face that while si-lent is red with anger or aglow with satisfaction. The eyes hold an inter-est, the palms sweat, a leg fidgets nervously. This person is truly and pastorally present and alive. Why? Because the person is visibly emo-tionally involved. And that is what we want from each other and from God. Similarly, why do we become upset with the "professional" pastor who runs the office well and administrates the parish efficiently but who cannot feel his people's pain, who cannot rejoice at someone's birth or mourn at another's death? Why do we feel cheated? Why does the per-son seem pastorally out of touch and somehow less a priest than the pas-tor who is able and willing to be emotionally present to the people? Why does the emotionally uninvested pastor seem to communicate less God's presence? Why do we feel disappointed? For what reason do we feel we should be able to expect and receive more? All of this speaks to an image or a set of expectations we have about God. Because God cares, God's ministers should also care. Because God is able to and does feel with the people, so should God's priests and pas-toral workers. We want and need to feel God present in our lives and feel cheated by those who serve in God's name if somehow we cannot sense from them a deeper presence of God than the merely physical. We want and feel a right to expect an emotional presence and involvement. We want our pastoral workers to be passionately present and active. We want and expect that because we feel God is passionately present and ac-tive. But why? Does that expectation and feeling originate within us alone? Or is that the image Of God that is mysteriously and boldly com- The God of the Scriptures /647 municated through almost every page of the Bible? Indeed, God is most emotionally present and involved in the lives of the Jewish people. That is true from exodus to exile, from restoration through resurrection. God communicates through the Scriptures a presence and involvement that is intensely passionate. The Passionate God of the Prophets Nowhere is this more evident than in the writings of the prophets. Within the prophetic books we see a picture of a God at wits' end. The people had rebelled from God's love and were running headlong toward destruction. We hear a response from God that is the emotional equal of what is politically, socially, and spiritually at stake. Read with the emotion befitting the texts Amos 8:4-8 or 4:!-3 or Hosea'l !:1-11 or Jeremiah 7:i-20 or Isaiah 54:78 or any of the other prophets, and you find the words of a person on the edge, the words of a person who is not at all detached or even mildly interested. In those words and so many others we receive a message of a God filled with pas-sion for the welfare of his people, a God who is truly emotionally in-volved in the life, past and future, of his people. If there is anger in God's words, it is the anger of a parent or lover, the passion of someone who cares tremendously about another. It is an anger born of frustration and love. Who has been in love without feel-ing anger? Love is a powerful emotion that opens us up to other equally powerful feelings. And what of the energy invested in both love and an-ger? Passion has a high price in emotional energy that is paid only by those truly sincere about what they feel. The quality and quantity of God's emotion so naked and strong throughout the prophets is testimony to the sincerity of God's passionate love. Moreover, it is a passion and sincerity that God expects in return. Love that is deep and intense expects a return in kind. One of our ways of showing love is through our prayer, both private and liturgical. Note, then, in Isaiah I:11-16 and Amos 5:21-25 and Jeremiah 7:21-28, the re-action of God to worship that is liturgically correct but void of sincerity and feeling. God expects a worship from the heart, a worship that is a reflection of our love. To be proper and true to the rubrics is not enough, not even the most important thing. What God seeks is what God gives, a prayer that is emotionally sincere. What God "hates" and "detests," what is "loathsome" to God is prayer empty of affect. That does not mean that worship must be a wild and ecstatic affair. However, it must be sincere; it must reveal an authentic human warmth. Worship, prayer, is more than so many words or lack of them. We can 648 / Review for Religious, September-October 1989 meditate quite correctly and all without opening our hearts in love. A prayer that is emotionally fl~t.and cold is the sacrifice displeasing to God. Perhaps that is why Paul tells.us that because "we-do, not know how to pray as we ought, the Spirit makes intercession f~or us with groanings that cannot be-expressed in speech" (Rm 8:26). That is an invitation to pray our feelings, to pray from and with our emotions. That is what God asks for and longs to share, for it is that which is most truly in our hearts. The Spirit helps us to raise what we are feeling in prayer, even if it can be expressed in no other way than by a groan. Since we are to live as we pray, God expects from us a life that is emotionally honest and open. How often we repress our feelings and hold in check our passion. We refuse to allow ourselves to feel and that pre-vents us from being as effective and compassionate as Jesus was and calls us to be. The "cry of the poor" is too painful to hear so we learn to close to the poor not only our ears but also our hearts. We dull our abil-ity and willingness to feel and so lose a major motivating force behind Christian action. Pity is not the issue here, rather compassion and jus-tice. Perhaps it was because Jesus was a man of such strong emotions that he was as compassionate and sensitive as the Scriptures say. Yet not only did Jesus have strong feelings, he was willing to live with them and feel them. Because he did not repress what he felt but lived what he felt he could be moved enough to touch and heal the leper (Mk 1:41) and raise the widow's son (Lk 7:11-17). If Jesus was the troublemaker and law-breaker the Pharisees claimed, it was because he allowed his emotions to so move his charity and inspire his faith that he saw not simply the law but the people the law did not and could not serve. God's Call for a Passionate Faith Jesus' emotion is most manifest in his faith. Many people were raised to believe that faith is something we do with our minds, that faith is an intellectual act of agreement or obedience to a tradition or set of beliefs. While it may be that, it is not only that. This is clear from the way Jesus lived and how he believed. For Jesus, faith was an emotion that gripped not only his mind, but his heart and body as well. Oftentimes one emotion is held in check by another. A boy, for in-stance, may want to introduce himself to a girl. The "love" he feels for her is held in check, though, by his "fear" of being rejected. He de-cides to say nothing. Fear has overruled his young love. Similarly, a per-son may feel inclined to speak out on a justice issue. That person too feels fear. But this time the person's convictions on the matter, the per- The God of the Scriptures / 649 son's belief, is the stronger of the two and bids the person to speak out. Here faith overruled fear. All of us know what fear is, all of us have felt it. Reflect for a mo-ment what happens when you feel fear. The mind freezes, it becomes difficult or even impossible to think. The entire body is also affected. Knees shake, palms sweat, the mouth runs dry. If the fear is sharp enough we may even close our eyes and prefer to block out the cause of our fear. Fear, to be sure, is a powerful emotion. It would require, then, an equally powerful emotion to counter it. Only two emotions give us the courage to overcome fear: love and faith--although the two are intimately related. A mother stands terrified at the sight of her burning home when she hears the cry of her child from within. Her fear of the flames and smoke cause her to stand for a mo-ment paralyzed until love for her child overpowers the fear and forces her in to rescue him. Jeremiah the prophet stands equally terrified be-fore the people gathered at the Temple. He too, however, hears--or rather feels--an inner voice, the call of God bidding him to speak in God's name. For a moment his fear prevails before the faith within his heart overwhelms it and causes him to cry out. . How many of us have had our faith compromised by fear? By clos-ing ourselves to our feelings, by repressing our emotions, we have been eliminating a source of strength that could well empower our faith to ri-val that of tl~e prophets. If our faith is solely intellectual it is but half, at best, of what it could be. Faith is authentic when it flows from our hearts, when it flows from our love for God. Jeremiah, for example, and Jesus after him, may have seemed like people without faith because they spoke against the traditions and cus-toms of the people. They could rightly be asked, "Have you no faith, Jeremiah, in the Temple and the promise God made to dwell in it always? Why is it so hard for you to have faith in what our traditions teach.? Why can't you agree with them?" Faith in this sense is an act of the intellect. But for Jeremiah, for the other prophets, and for Jesus, faith was an act of love; its motive force was an intuition of God's abiding presence within. They felt God's love and returned it as they could (that is, they believed) and it was that faith in God's love that enabled them to stand up and say what their hearts could not deny. The love they felt empowered them, gave their faith the spirit of cour-age. All of us are given the gift of that love. All of us have within our-selves the courage to truly use our faith. But so often in closing ourselves to our emotions, in denying them, we deny ourselves the grace, the love, Review for Religious, September-October 1989 that gives us the courage to truly believe. Jesus and the prophets before him were not ashamed of their emotions. Indeed, they prayed with them (Jeremiah's lamentations, for example) by bringing them before God in-stead of hiding them in the dark recesses of their spirits. By so doing, they provide an example for all us of authentic living and prayer. Praying with our Emotions Oddly enough, it is the emotion of fear that most inhibits us from bringing our.other emotions to prayer. As mentioned earlier, prayer is a naturally revealing activity. In prayer, the love and union we share with God is revealed and made known to us. We may receive the revelation of truths and intuitions about questions and problems we may have, as well as insights into God and ourselves. It is this that often scares us into emotional and spiritual repression. In the quiet, centering communion of prayer with God, we forget to maintain many of the blocks and barriers we place between our conscious selves and our more disquieting emotions. Suddenly and quite unexpect-edly we can find the composure of our prayer compromised by unwel-comed feelings. The person whose thoughts continue to center upon feel-ings of passion for a lover, the religious whose heart is suddenly filled with anger and resentment toward a superior, the person who becomes aware of his or her jealousy and envy--all of these people find the re-warding calm of prayer ruined by the onslaught of emotions. In each of these cases, whether or not prayer has been ruined de-pends upon whose agenda is being followed. Prayer is a dialogue. How-ever, especially with meditation, prayer can become a monologue of si-lence. Our meditation can be but another way of saying, "Listen God, there are just some things I'd sooner not think about. Why don't we just sit here quietly and ignore them together." Our prayer agenda calls for some peace and quiet, a bit of reprieve, a break in the action of confron-tation. Yet we find ourselves continually pestered by thoughts and feel-ings we've decided not to share. Might it be, however, that their contin-ual interruption is an effort on God's part to make it part of our prayer? Might God have an agenda too? And might that agenda include the very feelings we are so desperate to ignore? It might do well, then, since prayer is a dialogue, to "ask" God about what should be shared. One way of doing so is by beginning our prayer with a bit of soul searching journaling. We might record what and how we are feeling, any significant encounters we have had with peo-ple, good and bad. The point is not to dwell on any of them. Rather we acknowledge what is already inside of us. We acknowledge it to God and The God of the Scriptures / 651 to ourselves. Then, having done that, we set it aside and open ourselves to God. Yet, the very action of having been honest with ourselves about what we arefeeling has already opened the doors to our deepest selves to God. We have laid everything bare and have effectively told God, "Well, now that you know, what do you say?" Then if our prayer is quiet, perhaps God is saying, "Let it rest for now," and so we should. If, however, we find the emotions returning, perhaps we should pay them some prayerful attention. It is one matter to continually harp on a feeling and another tO at-tend to one that finds its way to the surface. Yet it is here that fear can overcome all else and totally inhibit our communion with God, not to mention any communion with ourselves. We are afraid of what may come if we allow our emotions to flow. We are afraid of what God may think if we stood before God with emotions bare. Perhaps most of all, we are afraid of what we would have to admit about ourselves if we al-lowed our spiritual vision to focus upon our feelings. Especially in times of stress, when we need prayer most, we are most reluctant, most afraid to pray because the emotions we so fear are so close to surface, so hard to dispel. In such cases the fear and shame we so strongly feel should be the opening movement of our prayer. But here is the test. Have we the faith to share what we fear? Here we become the shy person struggling to talk to a friend. Here we become the mother rooted in fear or stirred by love into action. Here we find the revelation, not of God but of ourselves, that prayer so powerfully conveys. Here we find a truth about ourselves. Prayer is a dialogue. Has God been speaking, shouting through hands pressed tight against our ears, trying to get through? Summary We can repress our prayer and weaken our faith because we are un-willing to face the passion of our own emotions. Why? Is it God's rejec-tion or wrath that we fear or is it facing the truth about ourselves? Some people are simply ashamed that they are emotional people at all. Some-where many of us have learned that we should be rational at the expense of being emotional. Emotions are something to master, signs of weak-ness, occasions for sin. To be holy is to be emotionally controlled. Pei-haps. To be sure, some emotions need to be held in check. Some need to be confessed. But not all. Our emotions are occasions for grace, provided we let our God work through them. They can be conduits leading to deeper prayer. They can be the means for facing and overcoming our fear of living. For indeed, 652 / Review for Religious, September-October 1989 without emotions we are less than human. We were made in the image and likeness of a living, feeling God who is revealed in the pages of Scrip-ture as a truly passionate lover, a God who, for example, is quite honest about being "jealous." We were made to have feelings and to use our emotions to feel and act alive. If Jesus was not ashamed of the force of his emotions, why should we? As Christians we are called to become fully alive. That means learn-ing to live with and harness our emotions. Truly, our emotions are gifts from God, gifts to be enjoyed, gifts for which we can be grateful. But before any of that can happen, our emotions must first be accepted. The Dancer Is falling in love with you autumn leaves swirling in the wind, fish swimming in the flooded ,,;hallows after a heavy rainfall? Is this love a meditative symphony, where the listener is impelled to pause, be attentive to the secret voice talking with his heart? Is this love a walk without fear into the forest of Solitude, where I go to plant my tree of hope? Is this love an ancient la Jota, sometimes graceful and slow, at other moments fast and exciting? How do I overcome my reluctance? Become like David, who danced before the Lord because it was pleasing to him? Brother Richard Heatley, F.S.C. De La Salle Centre 45 Oaklands Avenue Toronoto, Ontario M4V 2E4, Canada Romantic Relations with the Sacred Richard J. DeMaria, C.F.C. Brother Richard DeMaria, C.F.C., currently serves as Executive Vice President and the Vice President for Academic Affairs at lona College. His address is lona Col-lege; New Rochelle, New York 10801. In the recent, surprisingly successful film, Th~rOse, based on the life of St. Th6r~se of Lisieux, there is a scene that has remained with me for months. Th6r~se's sister visits her during what was to be a terminal ill-ness, and noticing that Th6r~se has pinned a small crucifix to her pil-low, observes: "So you two are back together again." To which, as I recall it, Th6r~se blushes and nods in agreement. The audience--a New York City audience--to my amazement did not laugh here or at any time during a movie which portrayed Th6r~se as a woman engaged in a ro-mantic relationship with Jesus, a relationship characterized by falling outs, jealousies, reunions, disagreements, and coquetry. And by love. And by passion. The film places Th6r~se in a very old tradition of spirituality, a tra-dition which uses the language and ways of romantic love to describe a person's interaction with the sacred. The romantic poem "The Song of Songs" comes immediately to mind: the longing of a bride for her bride-groom is used as an image of the human experience with the sacred. Ap-parently that image was found sufficiently apt among the Hebrew peo-ple for the poem to be included and preserved in its canon of sacred litera-ture. We find in other religions similar spiritualities linking sexual im-agery and prayer, the link sometimes explicitly recognized and cele-brated, at other times, we assume, camouflaged and unrecognized but fairly apparent to those who read between lines. As R. Zaehner, the Oxford authority on mysticism, observes: 653 654 / Review for Religious, September-October 1989 There is no point at all blinking at the fact that the raptures of the theis-tic mystic are closely akin to the transports of sexual union, the soul play-ing the part of the female and (~od appearing as the male. ~ In the history of religion, one finds many spiritualities that approach life as if there were two lovers involved. In Hinduism, one finds among the different paths by which one can yoke himself or herself to God, the path of bhakti in which one takes on the Lord as lover. Kabir, the fif-teenth- century Indian mystic, as translated by Bly, uses the term "the Guest" to name the inner lover: My body and my mind are in depression because you are not with me. How much I love you and want you in. my house! When 1 hear people describe me as your bride I look sideways ashamed, Because I know that far inside us we have never met. Then what is this love of mine? I don't really care about food, I don't really care about sleep, I am restless indoors and outdoors. The bride wants her lover as much as a thirsty man wants water. And how will I find someone who will take a message to the Guest from me? How restless Kabir is all the time! How much he wants to see the Guest!z The existence of a relationship between mysticism and sexuality is clear and widespread in the historical record. The question is: how shall we interpret and understand the presence of romaritic and sexual lan-guage in religious writing? More to the point are the following questions: Is it possible to carry on a love relationship with an invisible, non-human lover? Does this spirituality find any basis in the way things are? Is there someone there to love? Is this use of romantic language healthy? Unless we at least advert to these questions from the outset, they stand as obstacles to our ability to approach this tradition with openness. There are many analysts who interpret experiences of romantic spiri-tuality as situations in which sexual energy, having been denied its usual outlet, finds a (distorted) outlet in the religious arena. Accordingly, mys-ticism is in reality sexual energy that is misdirected. Although this sub-limation is usually unrecognized by the person involved, its true nature can be readily recognized by the perceptive observer. In sum, people in-volved in religious romanticism are victims of misplaced energy; their lives are based upon an unreal perception of the way things are. Other analysts suggest that the situation is quite the opposite: a ba-sic drive, a basic need within humans, is for union with the transcendent. Romantic Relations with the Sacred / 655 According to this theory, the mystic is a person who is responding quite directly to this basic drive. Other humans respond to this drive by en-gaging themselves in sexual, romantic relationships with other humans. This is a valid way of fulfilling this need. The power of human, inter-personal sexuality, and the way that relationship is experienced and de-scribed, derive from the more basic desire of the human to interact with the sacred. Because the inter-human sexual experience is one form of the more general mystical experience, it should not surprise us that the lan-guage of human love and the language of mystical 10ve are quite simi-lar. Alan W. Watts, in Myth and Ritual in Christianity makes the fol-lowing observation: But a sexually self-conscious culture such as our own must beware of its natural tendency to see religion as a symbolizing of sex, for to sexu-ally uncomplicated people it has always been obvious that sex is a sym-bol of religion. That is to say, the ecstatic self-abandonment of nuptial love is the average man's nearest approach to the selfless state of mys-tical and metaphysical experience. For this reason the act of love is the easiest and most readily intelligible illustration of what it is like to be in "union with God," to live the eternal life, free from self and time.3 Perhaps it will never be possible to prove convincingly which of these two theories is true. Some look to an epistemology which concen-trates its attention not on questions about the way things are but rather on questions about what ways work. Such an approach considers a the-ory to be true, or a path to be true, when it works. Pragmatic approaches to understanding our lives can reflect a careless and shallow attitude about truth, but not necessarily so. The form of pragmatism discussed here, recognizing the complexity of the human psyche and the mystery of the sacred, and recognizing the inability of the human mind to under-stand these with any clarity, reasons that if a particular construct or the-ory works, it works because it approximates the way things are. This is an epistemology often used in the physical sciences. Consider, for ex-ample, the solar system model of the atom. No one has seen an atom. Serious scientists do not think that the atom is composed of electrons, circling a nucleus of neutrons and protons, like a solar system. Scien-tists, however, have used the construct of a solar system when thinking about the atom, because when they have followed out the implications of that model, they have been able to explain many past experiences (ex-periments). And, even more importantly, when they devised new experi-ments and applications suggested by the model, these led to important new discoveries. Science has done well, then, to think of the atom as if 656 / Review for Religious, September-October 1989 it were a solar system. Even if the atom is not a solar system, the solar system picture predicts how the atom will work. And it is not unreason-able to conclude from this that in many ways the solar system model ap-proximates the reality of the atom. In sum, while recognizing that a con-struct is an imagined picture, a person follows it because she believes that it will lead her close to the way things are. Against the background of this epistemology, we can now turn our attention to those paths in which a person is involved in a relationship with a person who is not physically present but who is perceived to be real, important, and worthy of ~ittention; a relationship which according to the person herself and according to observers, gives direction and strength. Whether the other is perceived as guru, teacher, patron, guide, angel, patron saint, or--as in the particular spirituality we are discuss-ing-- as the romantically loved one, the relationship has a real effect upon the growth and behavior of the participant. In his play Big Shot, Jack Gelber portrays the positive, powerful influence which two "imagi-nary" persons--a wise, aged prophetic man, and a seductive woman-- have upon a young man's ability to make decisions about his life and to move toward maturity. (Interestingly, these two visitors never appear to-gether in the boy's thoughts; the appearance of one signals the exit of the other. At the play's end, however, they interact with one another and exit together, perhaps symbolizing something of an integration of the re-ligious and the sexual in his consciousness.) According to what was said above, one should evaluate the tradition of romantic spirituality by asking: What happens to persons when they act as if there were an inner sacred person there? Does it lead to desir-able ends? In this approach one judges a religious path worth consider-ing if it has "worked" for many people, in many religions, in many dif-ferent ages. What is meant by "worked"? The validity of this or any path is established by its ability to lead practitioners into that special con-sciousness which is called "religious." In the Christian faith, people in that consciousness are said to be in the state of sanctifying grace and ex-hibit characteristics such as love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Ga 5:22). History attests that the path of devotion, of romantic love, is a path that has led many to that consciousness; the way works. The seeker of God who utilizes the con-struct of romantic love does not need to know for certain whether there is a real person with whom she can interact in love. She does know that when she acts as if there were such a person, wonderful things do hap-pen. In Bhakti Yoga, the author writes: Romantic Relations with the Sacred / 657 All our attitudes, moral or emotional, as well as religious are due to the objects of our consciousness: the things which we believe to exist whether really or ideally along with ourselves. Such objects may be pre-sent to our senses or they may be present to our thought; in either case they elicit from us a reaction and the reaction due to things of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to sensible presences. It may even be stronger . 4 How does one follow this path? By undertaking the same practices which a man or woman utilizes in establishing a love relationship with a human being. By conversing. By sharing feelings. By trying to please. By actions of union. By admiration. By efforts to merge into one an-other. By writing poems of love. By singing songs of love. By making sacrifices. By exchanging gifts. By establishing rituals, special places, and special times. By secrets shared. By anger expressed. And by hurts told. By arguing. By compromising. How does one advise or counsel a person on this path? As one would advise or counsel a person struggling with any experience of love. The spiritual director will help him to recognize the stages of love. The di-rector will lead her to expect periods of doubt, of loneliness, of seeming neglect, of loss of attraction--the dark nights of the soul. He must be assisted in learning the art of conversation, and especially the art of lis-tening. (For let there be no doubt about it: the person does experience conversation, responses and answers that surprise by their unexpected-ness. Where do these answers come from? Suffice it to say that when questions are asked of this inner lover, this inner guest,' one "hears" answers.) The director will need to counsel the practitioner about the im-portance of fidelity, to help recall the good times in moments of dark-ness, and to point her to better times ahead. The person engaged in this path does experience another actor in his life. Outside observers may wish to interpret this experience as the ef-fects of the "alter ego," or the "subconscious," or the "repressed self." These interpretations should not be allowed to discourage the lover, if forhim the experience of this other is real, and if the effects of carrying out a relationship of love with that "person" are beneficial and if they are leading her into grace. This path does not work for everyone. In New Wineskins,5 Sandra Schneiders observes that in earlier times it was assumed that all women entering into the religious life would find in this romantic spirituality a comfortable and effective path. Women religious, on their day of pro-fession, came to the altar dressed as brides, as the choir sang "Veni Review for Religious, September-October 1989 Sponsa Christi," in a ceremony that was designed to imitate in many ways that of a marriage. Schneiders suggests that in fact many Sisters did not find this path to be effective for them. For many, it was a kind of play.acting, which in later years---especially if they were influenced by Freudian thinking--they came to regard as a childish effort to subli-mate energies better redirected in other ways. Today, almost all traces of this bridal spirituality have been removed from the rituals and from the language of contemporary religious women. Women who have en-tered religious life in recent years may not even be aware of this spiritu-ality. By way of conclusion, two questions about this path of spirituality suggest themselves. First, in this relationship, does the soul always take the role of the feminine to the masculine God, a role in which the hu-man seeks to be filled, empowered, or taken over by the other? The male poet, Kabir, cited before, who wrote in a culture which knew of both male and female gods, always--at least in translation--describes him-self as feminine in relationship to the sacred. Listen to the following poem: I played for ten years with the girls of my own age, but now I am sud-denly in fehr. I am on the way up some stairs--they are high. Yet I have to give up my fears if I want to take part in this love. I have to let go of the protective clothes and meet him with the whole length of my body. My eyes will have to be the love candles this time. Kabir says: Men and women in love will understand this poem. If what you feel for the holy one is not desire, then what's the use of dressing with such care, and spending so much time making your eyelids dark.6 Can one approach the sacred as masculine? Or must one utilize the feminine side (the anima) in one's relationship with the sacred (assum-ing of course that every person, regardless of gender, is both animus and anima)? And if this is true, will this path of spirituality come more natu-rally to women than to men? Or, again if it is true, would the fact that a person has a gay or lesbian orientation affect the attractiveness and ef-fectiveness of this spirituality? A second questign.: what (if any) is the connection between this spousal spirituality and celibacy? Clearly, spousal spirituality does ap-peal and does work for non-celibates as well as celibates. Does celibacy enable one to pursue this path more quickly or more deeply? Does the fact that one is not pursuing the path of romantic human love dispose one Romantic Relations with the Sacred / 659 toward this path more urgently? Or, to take the quite opposite position, would familiarity and experience with human romantic love give one the lexicon and the understandings that enable one to move more quickly into this more interior love? To conclude: the spiritual path of romantic relationships with the sa-cred has been neglected in recent years, perhaps because twentieth-century psychology has called into question so many of the foundations upon which it was based. There is, however, a way of understanding our ways of knowing, consonant with contemporary science, which gives 'permission' to those so attracted to follow this path, to see whether it leads them into grace. While the path will not attract, nor work for, eve-ryone, a knowledge of its history and dynamics should be made avail-able to those who are searching for ways into the world of the sacred. NOTES ~ R.C. Zaehner, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane, (New York, 1961), p. 151. 2 Robert Bly, trans., The Kabir Book, (Boston, 1977), p. 20. 3 Alan W. Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity, (Boston, 1968), p. 104. 4 "Bhikshu," Bhakti Yoga, (Chicago, 1930), p. 19. 5 Sandra Schneiders, New Wineskins, Re-imagining Religious Life Today, (New York, !986), p. 116. 6 Bly, p. 42. Negative Floating Barbara Dent Barbara Dent, mother and grandmother, has been for eigthteen years a Secular Carme-lite. She published "The Floating Prayer" in our issue of March/April 1988. The current article is a part of a book-in-process called Floating in Endless Love. She may be addressed at Poustinia; 7A Cromwell Place; Pukekohe, New Zealand. In this article I use the word "floating" to indicate the kind of detach-ment and freedom that is attained once we have ascended a certain dis-tance up the nada path. When I write of "floating in endless love," 1 mean the traditional self-abandonment to divine providence as exemplified by holy people of any age, and written about by such recognized saints as Teresa, John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, Jane Frances de Chantal, Caussade, Th~r~se. Our Lady is, of course, the supreme exemplar, and her "Be it done unto me according to your word," a succinct summary of the doc-trine. Divine providence is God's endless love. It had no beginning and will never have an end. It is conterminous with his Being and expresses itself throughout his creation. When he made us in his own image, he gave us the ability to be ef-fortlessly immersed in this love, borne along in the currents and eddies of its movement in time and space, as it ordained and controlled the cir-cumstances of our lives, and we rejoiced in its faultless wisdom and ten-derness. At that beginning-time we had our Creator's discerning Spirit within us, and joyfully cooperated with the process of floating in the divine will, for through it the perfection of his love for us expressed itself, and we were fully open and receptive to it. We were in the state of innocence, which means single-mindedness and wholeness of heart. 660 Negative Floating / 66"1 Then came the "aboriginal catastrophe"--in one, or many, of a num-ber of possible forms. Its basic effect was to confuse, divide, and mis-lead us about the nature of our relationship with our Master. We were, and are, no longer in that original state of love-union's positive, effort-less floating. Instead, we are too often thrashing about in protest at being in the water at all. We persist in struggling to reach some imaginary shore, strik-ing out against the current, gulping water, feeling terrified that we are drowning, pushing away Love's hand held out to draw us to safety, and generally being at odds with our spiritual environment. Our innocence lost, we have become acquainted with sin--actual or potential, deliberate or involuntary. Floating in endless love does not any longer seem to be the obvious, healthy, joyous thing for us to do. We have lost the art, and have to be taught all over again by grace. And because we no longer learn the mys-teries of God effortlessly through direct infusion, the Spirit's modes of teaching us often register on us as nay-saying, destructive, painful, and incomprehensible. This is because God's endless love flowing into us is constantly encountering obstacles of self-love and self-will within us. These cause the flow to be interrupted, dammed up, diverted, and im-peded in numberless ways. We now have to re-learn what we were fashioned to know without even thinking about it. This learning is painful and arduous, and regis-ters on us as a state of negative floating. It entails erasure of all those obstacles against floating--whether personally manufactured, handed on to us by our families and social milieu, or inherited and buried so deeply in our mysterious inner being that we shall never even catch sight of them, let alone drag them up and free ourselves from them, unless the Spirit helps us in a very special way. We are weighted down so that we are more likely to sink to the ocean bed than to float in delight in the surface currents of God's purpose, rev-elling in their effortless, exact progress towards our ultimate fulfillment in him. Positive and negative floating are part of the normal cycle of conso-lation and desolation in the spiritual life. If we persevere in floating in God's loving purpose for us, there comes a time when, just as his crea- ¯ tive energy evolved birds out of fish, he somehow dispenses altogether with the metaphorical liquid element in order to lift us up so high in the Spirit that we are suspended in midair. We usually think of such suspension as bodily levitation and miracu- 662 / Review for Religious, September-October 1989 IOUS. But the essence of free-floating in the atmosphere, metaphorically speaking, is entirely spiritual and interior, a flight of the spirit that usu-ally has no physical, exterior signs at all. It is the result of an opening up to God's love that on our part includes the complete abandonment of our whole selves to his usage, and on his part such lavish infusion of his grace that its energy elevates us temporarily into his own Being. This is the ultimate in positive floating. It mysteriously and paradoxi-cally also includes the ultimate in negative floating, for in order to give ourselves up to it, we need to have renounced all the not-God elements so that there is now nothing at all in us or our lives opposing his desire to take full possession of us. God is non-corporeal. When this moment of total possession takes place, he draws up our non-corporeal spirit to merge with his own. This merging, can be accomplished in both, or either, of the positive and nega-tive floating states. After about six months of intensely positive floating immediately af-ter my reception into the Church in 1956, I was gradually translated into the negative floating state and remained there without any remission for nearly twelve years. During my conversion year, 1955, I had already learnt to enter Christ's passion with him by uniting my personal suffering with his in Gethsemane and throughout the various aspects of his passion, especially his cross-carrying and crucifixion. At one particular time in 1958 when I vividly experienced what I came to call the crucifixion of my heart, something extra happened within me that I could at the time define only as "entombment." Yet the crucifixion did not cease. I was somehow still on the cross with Christ even while I was lying dead with him in the cave tomb's cold darkness. I cannot explain how this was. I only know it happened, and was spiritually and interiorily real in an agonizing way. I think I was able to endure these years of intensely negative float-ing only because, during most of them, I was fully occupied being a daily Mass-goer, solo mother, housekeeper, teacher, breadwinner, writer, and student. There was not much opportunity for what my mother disparag-ingly used to call "navel-gazing"--adding, in exasperation, "Why don't you go out and have a good game of tennis!" In spite of immersion in an undoubtedly and unavoidably active life (my form of a good game of tennis!), I yet received insights from time to time that infused some sense into the non-sense of my relationship Negative Floating / 663 with God. For this was where the nonsense, the absurdity, occurred. My rela-tionship with Jesus in his incarnational work of suffering redeemer and crucified Lord made very good sense to me, and gave me the courage to go on enduring. It was from God and his ways that the conundrum originated. Once more he had become for me the "cruel, sadistic mon-ster" who, during the early war years, had caused my rejection of my personal and inadequate version of the Christian religion. One of the key insights I received in the earlier of these negative float-ing years of the 1960s came about as follows. I can visualize clearly where it happened, just as I can vividly recall .where other significant, instant comprehensions occurred, for example, those about "the abyss of corruption" and the self-love involved in my mechanism of setting out to "fascinate" certain people. Such instant dis-cernments come to me like a crystal globe enclosing the truth, and put whole and clear in my mind all at once. The experience is completely different from arriving at a similar conclusion by the laborious process - of ratiocination. It is a matier of immediate comprehension received as a whole and in passivity. In fact, in a floating state, as it were. On this particular occasion I was sitting one morning at the desk in the home of my eldest daughter and her husband, alone in the house ex-cept for a sleeping child. Then in one instant the insight came whole-- just like a very bright light being turned on in my mind, then extin-guished almost immediately, yet leaving behind it the vivid impression of a particular mystery made plain in its illumination. In this case, I "understood" what caused Jesus to cry out, "My God, my God, why have you rejected me?" Just as I had become one with him in other aspects of his passion at various times, now I had become one with him in his cry of derelic-tion. His cry was one with the cry of my own heart to an alien, absentee God, whose face was turned away from me in contempt. Jesus' despair-ing question was to do with his having consented to be "made sin" for us. This was the central point-of the illumination given me. I had bought my Knox bible in 1956 and used it until I obtained the Jerusalem version in 1969. The texts I have marked in the Knox were the ones that had very special meaning for me personally during these darkest years of the cry of dereliction. I have underlined, "Christ never knew sin, and God made him into sin for us, so that in him we might be turned into the holiness of God" (2 Co 5:21). I "saw" that sin was absolutely abhorrent to and automatically re- 664 / Review for Religious, September-October 1989 pudiated by God because it was the antithesis of his own unblemished holiness and purity. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to him-self, establishing in our hearts his message of reconciliation, instead of holding men to account for their sins" (2 Co 5: 19), and "In Christ the whole plenitude of Deity is embodied." Hanging on the cross, dying for us, "made sin," Jesus, though God himself, consented to be relegated in his manhood to the furthest possi-ble distance from God--as f~ir as pure sin must be, of its nature, dis-tanced from pure holiness. It must have been the most elemental, cata-clysmic, schizoid split of all time. In and through this alienation Jesus endured, "the world"--all of us sinners of all time--could be "reconciled" to God instead of being eternally severed from him in self-induced banishment. In effect, Jesus willed to go through the experience of damnation as our proxy, as vic-tim instead of us. This meant knowing God only through the aching void of his ab-sence; submitting to the punitive action of the total recoil of pure holi-ness from pure unholiness; being invaded by a sense of rejection so ab-solute as to know what the hell-state meant, and to be engulfed in it. There is impenetrable mystery here, a paradox so extreme that the human mind cannot encompass it. How could Christ, in whom "the whole plenitude of Deity" remained unimpaired, yet experience himself as "the totality of sin" rejected by that Deity? The how, the mystery, is beyond our human comprehension. The paradox is mind-blowing. I cannot explain fully what I "saw" in the illumination. At the time, I knew it without intellectual explication. This came later, as I meditated upon what I had received, and thought more about what Paul said, out of what was obviously his own personal experience and given insight. Enli/~htenments about this mystery hidden within Christ's dereliction cry have continued to come spasmodically to me up to this present time. "All alike have sinned, all alike are unworthy of God's praise. And justification comes to us as a free gift from his grace, through our re-demption in Christ Jesus. God has offered him to us as a means of rec-onciliation, in virtue of faith, ransoming us with his blood" (Rm 3:23- 25). I had already understood how the solidarity of the human race was such that the salvation or damnation of any one of us must involve and concern all of us. In pouring out in his shed blood his "free gift of grace" for us, Jesus excluded no one, for none of us is sinless. We are all inevitably born programmed for possible disaster by the racial accu- Negative Floating mulation of wrong turnings made while trying to reach a destination whose nature and location we are confused about. Our tendency to get lost is in our genes. ~ "In sin my mother conceived me," is not a reference to the sexual act as such, but to the fact that the whole of humanity is in a state of at least partial alienation from God and can be reconciled only through Christ. Jesus entered the furthest reaches of this alienation when, as the vic-tim for our sins, he uttered his cry of dereliction on the cross. I saw in my moment of illumination that, once I had in 1957 told God he could have me as a victim for the salvation of souls (if he wanted me), I had implicitly consented to enter in some way into this dereliction of Jesus, and keep him company. At the same time, I was not certain God had accepted my offer, for no one had yet confirmed that I was indeed a victim, and I was not to have that assurance for several years yet. It was only then that everything fitted together coherently. But I did see in that moment of revelation that here was the meaning and purpose of the annihilating experience of my-self as spurned and rejected by God, even while at the same time, in my will, I refused to let go of him, and clung on with all my strength. Much later, I realized that even while God "rejected" me, he gave me that very grace I needed to cling tenaciously to him. At the same time, the illumination did not bring me any comforting reassurance, for I could not really believe it applied to me. This may seem a contradiction, but the grace of comfort is an extra grace, and for those years of torment God chose to withhold it from me, no matter what insights he gave my intellect. That I already had a well-established, deep-seated rejection syn-drome as part of my emotional makeup made it simpler and easier for all of this to happen. Grace had only to activate and utilize what was al-ready there, so deeply rooted in my inner being. I believe that God did this in order to use me for others as I had pleaded with him to do. In the terms I have since evolved for myself, I was "floating". in the negative way with Jesus on the cross, as part of "the Dali image." I was there tb help my neighbor, any neighbor--it was for God to choose whom, I never asked to be shown who, how, or where. "Enemies of God, we were reconciled to him through his Son's death; reconciled to him, we are surer than ever of finding salvation in his Son's life. And, what is more, we can boast of God's protection; al-ways through our Lord Jesus Christ, since it is through him that we have 666 / Review for Religious, September-October 1989 attained our reconciliation"(Rm 5:10-1 I). "We who were taken up into Christ by baptism have been taken up, all of us, into his death . We have to be closely fitted into the pat-tern of his resurrection, as we have been into the pattern of his death" (Rm 6:3, 5). Sin and salvation, death and life, crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus and all of us--inseparable. It is all mingled together like the confluence of two mighty rivers flowing as one towards the ocean of eternity and infinity. We have to "share his sufferings if we are to share his glory" (Rm 8:17). Some refuse the suffering and do not believe in the glory. Proxies must, in their stead, agree to be immersed in the passion with Jesus, so that the glory will permeate them, too. He came to save all. His will to redeem the whole of humanity can-not and will not be thwarted, but we are all one with him, and so those who are willing must help him save those who are unwilling. He expects and requires this of his lovers, though not necessarily as explicit victims, for this must be a given vocation. "For thy sake, we face death at every moment, reckoned no better than sheep marked down for slaughter. Yet in all this we are conquer-ors, through him who has granted us his love" (Rm 8:36-37). In the "inscrutable judgments" and "undiscoverable ways" of God is hidden the mystery of the redemption of the human race, in which all participate, consciously or unconsciously. The willing "offer up their bodies as a living sacrifice" because "though we are many in number" (trillions and trillions of us back to the beginning and on to the end of time), we yet "form one body in Christ and each acts as the counter-part of the other" (see Rm 12). Paul insists we are "Christ's body, organs of it depending upon each other" (1 Co 12:27), and therefore "the sufferings of Christ overflow into our lives"--together with divine comfort (2 Co 1:5). For Paul, shar-ing in the sufferings of Christ in order to bring forth spiritual children for him, is a fundamental Christian vocation. He writes, "It makes me happy to suffer for you, as I am sufferi.ng now, and in my own body to do what I can to make up all that has still to be undergone by Christ for the sake of his body, the Church. I became the servant of the Church" (Col 1:24-25). All these teachings of St. Paul, marked in my Knox bible, had had dynamic personal meaning for me ever since 1956, the year of my re-ception into the Church. They had been fortified and elucidated by stud-ies of such theological works as The Whole Christ by E. Mersch, S.J. Negative Floating / 66"/ (Dobson, London, 1956). They were in the very fiber of my interior life, yet, though I knew, believed, and lived what Jesus exemplified and Paul taught and lived, no felt comfort and consolation resulted. I was given strength to endure (while experiencing myself as weak and destitute) and that was all. But to endure and to persevere is at the very basis of the nada path journey, and the grace given me to do this was among the supreme ones of my life. Father Basil had now become my director, though, as he had been transferred, we seldom had the chance to meet. What he wrote to me in a letter of July, 1963, is relevant to the above. I quote: God does love you very dearly. Think of the tremendous graces that you have received from him. Your desire to give him everything in return is all that matters. You give, generously, only to the One whom you love . I am not so much concerned about the aridity and difficulty that you are experiencing at your prayers and the seeming loss of God. What I am concerned about is your loss of peace and near panic, because of the difficulties. The temptation to discouragement is one of the most insidious and dangerous for an interior soul. If you are patient and do not allow this temptation to dictate any change in your program of the day, you have nothing to fear. In his own good time he will give you the light and the warmth that seem to have disappeared. There is noth-ing in your day that is not worthy of being offered to him. This means that you are every hour united more intimately with him. You are grow-ing in charity and all the virtues, without being conscious of the growth. The increase in charity is all that matters. His reassurance was a blessing, calming me until the next spasm of self-doubt and apparent rejection by God afflicted me. Then I would re-read what he said, and be comforted again. In a queer way it was as if God himself was telling me, "Don't worry. Everything's all right-- even though it seems to be all wrong." Again he was loving me through "a soul in which he had established himself," just as he had promised as I lay so ill and weak in the hospital. One or two entries in my journals record various aspects of my nega-tive floating at this time. In the following, I think my way through to a grace-enlightened conclusion in faith, hope, and trust. It was not given to me in~stantaneously as a crystal globe. I quote from a 1963 rare entry: It is the risen Lord who permeates the whole of creation. 1 have been experiencing the suffering Christ. The climax came in the crucifixion of my heart. Then entombment and silence. Only the dead Christ there, un- 668 / Review for Religious, September-October 1989 stirring~ and myself numb and seemingly dead with him year after year, waiting and praying and longing for the resurrection. Now I see the the Lord is risen. He fills my soul and the whole of his Mystical Body. He has risen as he said he would, even while I mourned him dead in me, and I dead with him. He is risen. How can this become more real to me, so that I too rise with him? Let me think . It is the risen Lord who permeates the whole of creation. Therefore he is not dead in me~ for his resurrection truly hap-pened. But something did die in me and was entombed. What was it? The overwhelming sense of entombment. Christ dead and in the tomb. And it was a significant turning point. What died? My attachment to and need of natural love? But the process of purgation through hu-man relationships still continues. Yet it is different. How? What died and was buried? "You have undergone death, and your life is buried and hidden away with Christ." I made a heartbreaking renunciation of my own free will, and I gave up--what? What died? My heart died. Yet I found other loves. "Christ, having undergone death, cannot die any more . He is not here; he has risen as he told you . We have to be closely fitted into the pattern of his resurrection, as we have been into the pattern of his death . We'know that Christ, now he has risen from the dead, cannot die any more. Death has no more power over him . " It was not Christ who died in me, for he cannot die any more. It was something in myself that died. And all the while I have been entombed, he has been living in my soul the life of the risen Lord. His resurrection is continuous just as much as his passion is. Somehow I have to become united with this.risen Christ. Like La-zarus called forth from the tomb, I have to shed my grave clothes and answer the call of the Lord, but "how? How? I don't know how. He has to say, "Come forth," and then I shall be able to move. Yet he eternally says, "Come forth," inviting me to share his life of glory in the Trinity, the life he is already living in my soul all the time I am in a state of grace. Only somehow I cannot unite myself with it, because the tomb wall seems in the way. What is the tomb wall? My compulsion to suffer psychologically in a certain way? Perhaps. Lord, give me light. Holy Spirit, whom he sends, lead me forth. Pray in and for me. I have been in a state of inertia, feeling I could do nothing till Christ rose in me--but he has never been dead in me. It was a part of myself that died, not he. All the time he has been waiting for me to come to him. Perhaps he has already said, "Come forth," only I have been so busy with my self-inflicted mourning, that l haven't heard him. My anguish was the death of some form of self-love, the crucifix- Negative Floating / 669 ion of some kind of seif-will, some aspect of the "world" that I clung to. "The people that lived in darkness have seen a great light . And he shall reign forever and ever . Come and bring forth from the dungeon the prisoner sitting in darkness and the shadow of death . " The shadow of my death. Just one of the excruciatihg deaths one must die before one can mount to a higher level on the nada path. Death and renewal. Part of his passion, but the passion is always inseparable from the resurrection, and the resurrection is. I don't have to wait for it--it is. 1 am already in it by the power of g~:ace and the presence of God in my soul. How then do I.realize and live consciously this risen life? That is the question. The "how" was to remain unrealized by me for some years yet. In the meantime I had to live in pure faith the reality of the crucified, en-tombed, but already risen Lord in me and in the whole of creation. 1 had to stay on the cross and in the tomb till God himself chose the time and way for my personal resurrection. I could not raise up myself. It had to be a work of pure grace. The words I use in another brief entry near the end of 1964 all re-veal a state of unalleviated negative floating. They are: Emptiness. Noth-ing. Waiting. Search. No finding. Grief. No.comfort. Dryness. Frigid-i'ty. Impotence. Waiting. Alone. Loneliness. Wa, iting--on and on. Dead-ness. ~umbness. Insensibility. No tears . . . too dry . . . But I believe. I hope. I suffer. I love. I wait. He loves. 1 know he loves. I believe he loves. Amen. In her Life Teresa of Avila tells of a spiritual state that reminds me of what I call "negative floating." First she mentions how St. Paul wrote about "being crucified to the world." Then she comments on how this reminds her of the soul that is receiving comfort from neither heaven nor earth, nor from any other source either. She says that in such a/ state of suspension and denial the soul is "crucified between heaven and earth; and it suffers greatly, for no help comes to it either from the one or from the other." It is "sus-pended by (its) distress, just as in union and rapture (it is) suspended by joy . It is a martyrdom." She records that when she is not physically occupied so that her mind is on something else, she is "plunged into these death-like yearnings." The "pain is so excessive that (she) can scarcely bear it"; she feels as though she has "a rope around (her) neck, is being strangled, is trying 670 / Review for Religious, September-October 1989 to breathe . . . and crying out for help to breathe." She longs and longs to be able to talk to someone "who has passed through the same torment, for she finds that, despite her complaints of it, no one seems to believe her." (See Life, Ch. XX.) It was not till my own darkest years were past that I came across the above and was forcibly struck by its similarity to what I myself had ex-perienced. When actually immersed in that suffering, I remember having read that one of the worst sufferings of Jesus on the cross must have been be-ing stifled by his inability to breathe. This was caused by the constric-tion of lungs, heart, and ribs in his hanging posture. To ease it he must have had to heave himself up repeatedly on his nailed feet--an extra ag-ony. I think Teresa is describing the spiritual equivalent of this condition for those in the negative floating state of union with Jesus hanging on the cross. John of the Cross, using different metaphors, writes of what I take to be a similar state. He says it is caused by "purgative contemplation" during which the inflowing of God's presence into the soul "in order to renew it" reaches down into its depths, into its very "spiritual substance." The soul seems to itself to be "drowned in darkness," to be "melting away" and to be enveloped by "a cruel spiritual death." Metaphorically it is like Jonah in the whale's belly. (In relation to this present article, it is worth recalling that Jonah's ordeal has been accepted as a scriptural symbol for Jesus' entombment.) John writes that "in this sepulcher of dark death (the soul) must needs abide until the spiritual resurrection which it hopes for." It is consumed by "the lamentations of death., the pains of hell ¯ . . the clear perception that God has abandoned it, in his abhorrence of it, and has flung it into darkness." It feels "itself to be without God, and chastised and cast out, and unworthy of him; and it feels he is wrathful With it." John also speaks of spiritual stifling and "afflictive suffering" that consists of the soul's feeling as though it "were suspended or held in the air so that it could not breathe." The state is intensified by the fact that the sufferer cannot find help or understanding from any human be-ing. He concludes by writing, "Of such are they that in truth go down alive into hell" (purgatory). (See Dark Night H, Ch. VI.) Negative Floating / 671 I do not know whether what I experienced during these years was the same as what is described by Teresa and John. I only know that when I read them now, as in the above passages, I feel I understand exactly what is being reported, because I myself have been through it. Shall it be N or N plus I lamN. I accepted that. I buried deep in my mind My mathematical knowledge Of what N could really be. Not satisfied with status quo But dreading the pain That moving might mean, I embraced N-fixed, safe and therefore undemanding. Memory would not be stifled. Knowledge that N can be expanded Would twist and turn and peek out Coming to the surface unexpectedly And at times unwanted. There is more. Why not N plus one? Expanding toward potential Could hurt, could be dearly bought. Surely, only here is progress, Expansion toward great goals. Why else do I exist? Except to know N is not complete Without Him as plus One. Sister Marjorie Sweeney, S.S.J. St. Joseph Convent 734 Willow Street Lebanon, PA 17042 Spiritual Dryness: Some Practical Guidelines Eamon Tobin Father Eamon Tobin, having completed the Master's degree in Formative Spiritual-ity at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, is currently pastor of a parish in Cocoa Beach, Florida. His address is Church of Our Savior; 5301 North Atlantic Avenue; Cocoa Beach, Florida 32931. The Lord, your God, will circumcise your hearts., that you may love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and all your soul, and so may live (Dt 30:6). Blessed. is the person who can call the darkness holy, who can desire its purification, who can rest in its presence. Such a person will grow rapidly because the process of purification is facilitated by generosity (Source Unknown). [~'very praying person sooner or later experiences what is called dryness in prayer. In spiritual dryness we have no felt sense of God's presence. We may,even think we have lost our Beloved or feel abandoned by him. In the sch~)ol, of prayer, few things are more important to understand than the nature and role of spiritual dryness, I intend to deal with this impor-tant dimension of the spiritual life by responding to five important ques-tions that one can ask about prayer in the desert. Question 1: What is it that praying people experience during the desert periods of the spiritual"jou~rney? The actual desert experience of praying persons will vary depending on the level of faith and spiritual maturity. For example, for the beginner in prayer spiritual dryness fre-quently means not just the absence of a felt sense of the presence of God 672 Spiritual Dryness / 67'3 but also feelings of what Saint Ignatius calls desolation--that is, feel-ings of anxiousness, sadness, or lo.ss of peace flowing from the thought, "I have lost God," or "God has abandoned me." On the other hand, for the person who is more mature in faith and advanced in the ways of prayer, spiritual dryness may not be an experience of desolation. The ex-perience will be one which lacks a felt sense of God's presence but may be accompanied by the conviction: "Even though I can't feel his pres-ence (at least on the external level), I do believe he is close and active in my life. Even though I cannot feel his presence (that is, spiritual dry-ness), I don't feel anxious, sad, or abandoned (that is, desolation). In fact, I feel peaceful." ~ To believe that God is present and active despite his apparent absence can be considered one of the greatest blessings of the spiritual life. For most of us, particularly in the early years of prayer, spiritual dryness usually includes the experience of desolation ("I have lost God; God has abandoned me"). Usually it is a time of spiritual suf-fering. We think we are getting the "silent treatment" from God. We "call out to him all day long, but he never answers" (Ps 22:3).2 Spiri-tual dryness is like journeying in the desert with no water in sight. Prayer is no longer exciting; rather, it is a weary struggle. Spiritual exercises that once nourished us now are empty, and we have little or no desire .to do them. Another dimension of the desert experience may be a feeling of dis-couragement as we become keenly aware of our own sinfulness. (We may not yet know that one of the surest signs of growth in the interior life is a growing awareness of our own sinfulness.) We may begin to think we are regressing rather than progressing. We may begin to expe-rience one of the great paradoxes of the spiritual life: the closer we come to God the further it seems to us that we are away from him. As we get closer to the all-piercing Light of God, the more our own darkness will show itself. Our lives will appear to be hollow and mediocre. The Scot-tish priest, the late Father John Dalrymple, writes: "It is as if I were to bring the sleeve of my coat toward the window of the room, and as I move into the light, the dust and dandruff on the sleeve become more obvious. It is not that as I moved the coat got dirtier, but that the light got brighter.''3 All in all, the thing that scares us most and even hurts us is the thought, "I have lost my Beloved; he has abandoned me" (See Song of Songs, Chapter 3). This thought or feeling is the experience of desolation described above. To sum up, we can say that while the actual experience of the desert will be different for different people, for all of us it will mean a felt sense 6"/4 / Review for Religious, September-October 1989 of the absence of God. And for those of us whose faith in God is still fragile, it will frequently involve the experience of desolation (the "I have lost God" feeling). In reading the above description of spiritual dryness, one may think that it is something only experienced by monks, religious, and the ex-ceptional lay person~ Yet spiritual directors tell us that this experience is quite .common in the lives of many average, prayerful people who dis-cover somewhere in the midst of their spiritual journeys that spiritual ex-ercises that once nourished them spiritually now do nothing for them. Question 2: Why is an understanding of this dimension of prayer so important? There are at least three reasons why some understanding of spiritual dryness is important. First, if we do not know the role of the times of dryness, we may think that we have "lost God" and that our prior, positive feelings in prayer were not a gift from God but the crea-tion of our own imaginations. This frequently happens. Many people who have a genuine conversion and get all excited about prayer quit when the well runs dry. This is sad because it is now that God wants to do his real work in such persons. Second, lack of knowledge about the purpose of spiritual dryness may cause us to continue praying in a way that, at this particular stage in our spiritual journey, may be more of an obstacle than a help to our spiritual growth. Many people are unaware that at some stage in the spiritual journey God calls us to become less active in prayer so that he can be more active in our spiritual transfor-mation. Third, the experience of spiritual dryness may be something caused by ourselves or something permitted by God. When it is permit-ted by God, it is meant to purify us and bring us closer to him. Such dry-ness is a gift to be accepted and embraced. When spiritual dryness is our doing, we need to work at removing the causes of such dryness. Lack of knowledge about the nature and role of spiritual dryness may lead us to believe that a particular experience of dryness in prayer is authentic and God-given when in fact it is something brought on by our own infi-delities. So the time of spiritual dryness is a critical time in the spiritual jour-ney. How we respond to it will determine whether we move forward spiri-tually or stagnate. Question 3: Why does God permit us to experience desert peri-ods in the spiritual journey? So I will allure her 1 will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart (Ho 2:16). Spiritual Dryness / 675 God permits us to experience spiritual desert periods in order to pu-rify us of those things that hinder our spiritual transformation and to teach us some important lessons about the spiritual life and how it works. In our answer to this question we will look at some specific purifications that God works in us and lessons that he teaches us in the desert. Purifications of the Desert In the desert God will want to purify us of any excessive attachment we may have to consolation in prayer. If in prayer God blesses us with a lot of consolations (or "spiritual highs" as we often say today), there is a danger that we may seek and love "the consolations of our God more than the God of our consolations" (Saint Teresa of Avila). In time of spiritual consolation it is easy to pray. The challenge is to remain faith-ful to prayer when we experience little or no felt sense of God's pres-ence or action in our lives. During such dry periods God is asking us to love him for himself and not just for the spiritual highs or consolations he offers us in prayer. He is asking us to show that we are not just fair-weather friends but all-weather friends. And he is teaching us the im-portant lesson that he is to be found more deeply in the desert than in the garden of superficial delights. Secondly, in the desert God purifies us of spiritual vanity. John Dal-rymple explains sp!ritual vanity in this way: Someone taking to religion in all zeal, becoming caught upI in a cam-paign of prayer, fasting, spiritual reading, liturgical practice, and retreat weekends might be indulging unawares in one big ego-trip. Conversion of the soul from a worldly life to a spiritual life is at first s, uperficial only. The convert has been given new, spiritual goals; but the conver~- sion is only external. In itself the sofil is as full as it ever was of unre-generate tendencies to vanity, arrogance, acquisitiveness, the only dif-ference being that after conversion these tendencies are now attached to spiritual instead of worldly objects . The zeal of such a person is infectious, but it is, as yet, chiefly the expression of the person's vanity or self-centeredness, dressed up in Christian clothes.4 For God to do his work of spiritual transformation in us, he must pu-rify us of such spiritual vanity. God often brings about this purification in us by bringing to naught our best efforts to change ourselves and eve-rything and everyone around us. As we sit on the ruins of our self-made temples and projects, we are purified of spiritual vanity and arrogance, and we learn the meaning of spiritual poverty, which is realizing our com-plete dependence and need for God to bring about any spiritual growth 676 / Review for Religious, September-October 1989 in others or in ourselves. In the desert, God's intention is not to punish us but to purify us. In the journey of life we consciously or unconsciously become overly-attached to persons or things--so much so that they become idols (that is, more important to us than God). This happened to Israel after she lived in the Promised Land for some time. She became so enamored with the blessings of the land that she forgot the One who gave her the land. To purify her of this idolatry God led Israel into the desert for a second time where she would be free of all her attachments and free to listen anew to the Word of God (See Hosea, Chapter 2). Lessons to Be Learned in the Desert Now let us briefly look at some of the lessons that God wishes to teach us in the desert. When God takes away consolation in prayer (that is, the felt sense of his presence), he wants to teach us the important lesson that he can be encountered at a deeper level than our emotions. He wants to teach us that we are no longer dependent on emotional returns to know we have encountered him. As we grow in our relationship with God, the more we will "learn to be at home in the dark because we are sure, in faith, that the potter is truly shaping the clay, even though the clay sees nothing of what is happening."5 An example about eating food might help to illustrate this point more clearly. Sometimes we may immensely enjoy eating a delicious meal. We may savor every morsel of the food. All in all, it is a delightful ex-perience. On another occasion we may not enjoy at all another type of delicious meal. We may not be feeling well, or the food may not appeal to us. Yet from a nutritious point of view, both meals are equally good. Our lack of enjoyment of the second meal in no way diminishes its nu-tritious value. The same principle is at work when it comes to prayer. Sometimes when we pray we really feel and savor God's presence and love. At other times the prayer is empty and dull. Who are we, though, to say that the latter time is of no benefit to our spiritual growth or is less pleasing in God's sight? A second lesson God teaches us in the desert is that spiritual conso-lation is his p.ure gift to us and not something we can earn by being good or by praying :in a particular way. In prayer God teaches us this impor-tant lesson by "dropping in" on us when we least expect him and by "failing to show" when we very much want to experience his presence. A third lesson that God wishes to teach us in the desert is that spiri- Spiritual Dryness / 677 tual growth is totally dependent on his work in us and not on anything we do. Our task is simply to be flexible and cooperative with the move-ment of his Spirit. In the spiritual life, "working at it" often means "be-ing still," "just being there" and exercising discipline over our doing and achieving self which so often wants to run the show. This is a diffi-cult lesson for us because so much of our training for the outer journey of life has told us to be "take-charge" and self-sufficient persons. It is not easy for us to switch gears in the inner journey. In the spiritual life God is the Chief Actor; we are the acted-upon. Mary, at the Annunciation (Lk 1:26-38), is our perfect model. When God mysteriously breaks into Mary's life and invites her to become the mother of Jesus, she doesn't respond, "Sure, Lord, I'll do it!" Rather, she says, "I am your maidservant; work in and through me as you want." Mary's response was, "Fiat, be it done unto me," not, "I'11 do it." This attitude is one of active receptivity, and it is the secret of Christian spirituality and spiritual growth. Active receptivity is charac-terized by the effort to place our energy, will, and freedom at the dis-posal of God so that he can do with us and in us what he wills, Finally, when God our Father allows our prayer to run dry, he is in-viting us to participate in the cross of Jesus. In times of dryness we are experiencing the thirst of Jesus on the cross. If the cross was Jesus' way to the Father, then surely we, the disciples of Jesus, cannot expect to travel the scenic route free of all pain and hardship. When we experi-ence darkness in prayer or in the marketplace, we are being invited to identify with Jesus in his suffering, in his experience of feeling aban-doned by the Father. Also in the desert we are being invited and chal-lenged to trust that our God will not abandon us but will come to rescue us and redeem us (See Exodus, Chapter 16). Question 4: How can I tell when a particular desert experience is caused by my own infidelity or is something permitted by God to help me to grow in my relationship with him? When dryness occurs in prayer, particularly in the early stages when God is giving alternating periods of dryness and consolation, wemay tend to blame ourselves for dryness. We may wonder what latest infidelity we committed to bring about this dryness. The fact may be that we have done nothing wrong . to occasion the dryness. God may be allowing us to experience the dry-ness bechuse he wants to teach us some lesson and/or purify some as-pect of our relationship with him. On the other hand, we may think the dryness is from God when in fact it is caused by our own laxity and sin-fulness. Therefore, it is important that we be able to discern the true 6711 / Review for Religious, September-October 1989 cause of the dryness because our response to it will differ, depending on whether the dryness is permitted by God or is something brought on by ourselves. Let us now identify several ways that we can bring about our own spiritual desert. ( 1 ) Indifference to a Sinful Pattern of Behavior: If we are indifferent to some sinful pattern of behavior in our lives, then we can expect diffi-culty in prayer. In a human friendship a negative pattern of behavior (for example, a critical or lying spirit), which we make no effort to ,change, will have a destructive effect on the whole relationship. Likewise, if in our relationship with God, we are deliberately ignoring a sinful pattern of behavior (for example, involvement in an illicit relationship, unfor-giveness, unethical business practices), then we can rightfully expect ten-sion in our relationship with God. When we do the above, we are delib-erately excluding the Lord and his influence from some area of our lives. In such a situation we should not be surprised that we do not feel God's presence very much in prayer. Here it is important to note that I am not referring to a sinful pattern of behavior that we are trying to change and that we are bringing before the Lord in prayer. In this case we are rec-ognizing sin and struggling with it. Instead of keeping us from God, our struggle with a particular sin or weakness may be the very means that God will use to allow us to experience his love, mercy and power. (See 2 Co 12:7-10 for Paul's famous example of how his thorn in the flesh became the very means of God's power.) In the former case, we are not even confronting our sin or seeking God's help with it. Instead we are deliberately ignoring its existence or trying to rationalize its O.K. 'hess. In the latter case, our sin grieves us and we are doing what we can to remove it from our lives. (2) Repressed Anger at God: Two highly-respected spiritual direc-tors, Fathers William Connoily and William Barry, write in a co-authored book: "When prayer flattens out, or appears tO be facing an iron wall, the director must always suspect the presence of unexpressed anger."6 To add to this problem, many of us were raised in a culture where appropriate expression of anger was socially unacceptable. "Hence resentments, holding a grudge or subdued rage, when they are present, are all likely to be given other names like indifference and ra-tional analysis."7 When someone hurts us, our relationship with that per-son will diminish, even if we decide to present an affable, friendly front; but in reality we will distance Ourselves emotionally from the person. In a similar way, if we become angry with God about something, we may Spiritual Dryness / 679 continue to be faithful to our prayer time, but on an emotional level we can be fairly sure we have distanced ourselves from him. (It is impor-tant for us to be aware that if life is handing us a raw deal, we may well be unconsciously blaming God, the Source of all things, for our lousy situation.) (3) Separation of Prayer and Life: The spiritual life is all of life and not just one segment of it. The Lord refuses to be a compartmentalized God; he wants to be a part and parcel of our whole life. When we try to keep God in church or in our prayer closet and not allow him to guide all the activities of our day, we can be sure that we are setting ourselves up for dryness in prayer. If we exclude God from the activities of our day, then we should not be surprised if he is missing from our prayer time. Even on a human level, no one likes to be a "tag-along" in some-one else's life. (4) Overwork: When our prayer life dries up, it is good for us to ask if we are pushing ourselves too much on the vital and functional dimen-sions of life. "Am I overworked? Am I over-tired? Am I coming down with the flu? Am I neglecting physical exercise? Do I have a tendency to make leisure time work? Or do I have leisure time--period?" These are important questions to ask. These things affect our prayer life. If we fail to care properly for our bodies, then we are neglecting a dimension of ourselves that we depend on to help us to pray. When we are very tired and overworked, prayer may well be seen as just another duty or thing to do. (5) Lack of Honesty in Prayer: Just as shallow or dishonest sharing dulls human relationships, it also dulls the Divine-human relationship. If our prayer is no more than "sweet talk" to "sweet Jesus," we should not expect Jesu~ to be too interested in our conversation. We must learn to talk to the Lord about the real stuff in our lives. (6) Halfhearted Efforts at Prayer: On a human level two friends may fail to really connect with each other because their conversations are "just words," words that fail to express what they are truly thinking and feeling. The problem may be that deep down they don't want to or are scared to encounter each other in a deep way. When a relationship is char-acterized by this type of communication, then we should expect it to be empty and unfulfiiling. In a similar vein, when our prayer time mainly consists of the rote recitation of certain prayers or of inattentive spiritual reading--if beneath the "saying of prayers" and the acts of piety there is no real desire to encounter God and grow in relationship with him-- then we should expect little or no satisfaction in prayer. In fact, our spiri- Review for Religious, September-October 1989 tual exercises may become a substitute for a real relationship with God. If we discern that we are the cause of our spiritual dryness, we should do all we can to remove the particular obstacle. For example, if the problem or obstacle is that we are holding onto a grudge and doing nothingto let it go, then we may need to pray for forgiveness for that person and/or we may need to have an open chat with the person with whom we are having a problem. If we discern that our experience of spiri-tual dryness is due to our tendency to separate prayer and life (see ob-stacle number three above), then our solution will be to work at allow-ing the Lord to walk with us in all the activities of our day. In short, when we discern that we are the cause of the spiritual dryness, then we ought to do something to remove the obstacle. It is the experience of most, if not all, disciples of the Lord that once they begin to struggle with an obstacle, prayer again becomes alive and they experience a new closeness to God. Finally, it should be noted that in trying to discern the cause of our spiritual dryness we would be well advised to seek the coun- ¯ sel of a good spiritual director. When we experience spiritual dryness most of us have a tendency to think that it is due to some infidelity on our part. The truth may be that God is permitting us to experience the desert so that he can continue his purifying work in us. This brings us to the second part of our response to Question 4: "How might we know that it is God and not us who is calling us into a spiritual desert?" While we can never be absolutely sure--since we live by faith and not by clear vision--when spiritual dryness is being per-mitted by God, we can say that the following are good indicators that the dryness is the purifying work of God: --If during the time of dryness we remain faithful to prayer. --If our prayer is honest and flowing from the real stuff of our lives. --If we are trying to integrate prayer and life. --If we are trying to live a life of charity; if our prayer is helping us to be more loving. --If we are genuinely trying to avoid sin and live our lives accord-ing to God's Word. --If we thirst for God as we walk in the desert. (It is crucial that we, remember that our desire for God is in itself a tangible sign of his pres-ence in our lives. We couldn't even desire God if he didn't place that desire in our hearts.) You will notice that the above signs are pretty much the opposite of the ways that we ourselves bring about our own spiritual desert. Prayer, like so many other things in life, is a series of "arrivals" Spiritual Dryness and "starting points." We arrive at a point where we feel good. We ex-perience the grace of consolation. But that only lasts a little while and then a certain discontent (a kind of desert) sets in--a discontent that may be caused by ourselves or permitted by God. Then we are faced with the challenge of discerning who is causing the discontent: "Is it God or me?" The purpose of the discontent caused by him is to create in us a longing for more, to create in us a desire to move closer to God. In the spiritual journey God brings us to a particular point or state; he lets us rest there and enjoy that plateau for a little while, and then he says, "O.K. Let's move ahead and seek for more" (see Ex 40:36-37). Of course, it is not easy to move when we are not sure where he is leading us. All he says is, "Move and trust that I'll take you to a new and bet-ter place." Finally, if we are in doubt about the cause ofour discontent or dry-ness, then we should talk to a spiritual guide or, if that is not possible, simply say a prayer like this: "Lord, if this dryness I am experiencing is due to some failing of mine, please reveal it to me. Until you do I am going to assume that I am not the cause of the dryness." Question 5: What are some resources available to us to sustain us in the desert? Four resources that will sustain us in the desert are: --a wise spiritual director; --a strong faith; --fidelity to prayer; --the support of fellow pilgrims. Our first help is a wise spiritual director. By wise I mean one who understands the role of the desert in the spiritual life and hopefully one who has experienced and grown through the desert in his or her own spiri-tual journey. Many people whom God led into the desert for purifica-tion have suffered much at the hands of well-intentioned but misinformed spiritual guides. Saint John of the Cross reserves some of his harshest words for such misinformed guides.8 For example, a misinformed guide may insist that a directee continue to meditate and do a lot of spiritual reading when God is calling her to the prayer of contemplation. In the desert a good spiritual director will be a source of guidance, encourage-ment and inspiration. When we are in a spiritual desert, it is important that we learn to place our trust in a good spiritual director. But, as most of us know, wise spiritual directors are nearly as scarce as palm trees in the northern states of America. The truth is that the road to authenticity is dangerous, hard, and narrow, and few decide to travel it. In the ab-sence of a wise spiritual director (and there is really no substitute for such Review for Religious, .September-October 1989 a person), one may receive some guidance from books that are written or recommended by people who are recognized guides of the inner jour-ney. A second important resource is a strong faith--a faith that enables US" --to believe that God knows what he is doing when he allows us to ex-perience the desert (Rm 11:33-36); --to believe that in the desert God is not punishing us but is purifying us (Dt 30:6); --to believe that God grows his best flowers (virtues) in the desert (Ho 2); --to believe that God works in us while we rest in him (Mk 4:26-29); --to believe that in the struggles of life God is on our side fighting our battles (Ex 14:13-14 and Dt 1:30-33); --to believe that in the desert God's seeming absence is just a different type of presence, one that we may not as yet have recognized (Ex 16); --to be secure with insecurity (Rm 8:28); --above all, to generously abandon ourselves to the purifying work of God (Lk 23:46). A third important resource as we struggle in the desert is fidelity to prayer. In the desert, prayer is usually dry and therefore all the more dif-ficult to remain faithful to. When it comes to praying in the desert, spiri-tual guides counsel us to avoid two extremes or temptations. The first temptation is to quit prayer, thinking that our best efforts are leading us nowhere. The second temptation is to "junk up" our prayer time with extra prayers, rosaries, Scripture reading, and so forth, thinking that if we only try harder maybe we will feel the presence of God. This second temptation needs to be resisted not only because it blocks what God is about in the desert but also because it is (usually unconsciously) our at-tempt to stay in or get back into the driver's seat. In general, prayer in the desert will become much less active, more passive--less us, more God. The challenge will be to learn to sit quietly in the presence of God, trusting that he is at work in us while we rest in him. Le~.rning to "waste time doi.ng nothing" in prayer is, without a doubt, one of the most difficult lessons we have to learn in the school of prayer. Unfortunately, most of us never learn to waste time gracefully in the presence of God. Such a practice goes completely against our west-ern, work-ethic nature that is usually driven to do, to achieve, and to pro-duce-- that likes to see tangible results for its efforts. Because of this need in us, most of us fill the vacuum that we feel in the desert with read- Spiritual Dryness ing or prayers of some sort. For those of us who are willing to try and do less (that is, to be less active) in prayer so that God may do more in us, the following suggestions might be helpful. -Spend some time just "being there" with the Lord, aware that as "we rest in him he is at work in us." We put aside all effort to achieve because now we are learning that achievement (growth) is God's work. By periodically spending some time "doing nothing" in the presence of the Lord, we are expressing our faith in an important spiritual dictum: "God's activity in prayer is more important than my activity." -Spend some time slowly repeating prayers like: "Incline my heart to your will, O Lord." "Make me want you, O Lord, more than anyone/ thing in my life." -Take a phrase of Scripture like "You are my beloved Son" and dwell on it. -Simply take one word like "Jesus" or "love" and repeat it gent-ly and slowly, letting God work in us, leading us beyond conceptual thoughts, images, or feelings to wordless depths. -Image and be present to Mary in the Temple after she lost Jesus (Lk 2:41-50) and at the foot of the cross (Jn 19:25-27) which must have been a real dark night of the spirit for her. Ask Mary to intercede for you so that you may have something of the faith which she had when she thought she had lost Jesus. -Finally, you may want to read something on spiritual dryness. By simply reading and rereading portions of a book like When the Well Runs Dry, I am encouraged to persevere in the desert. Personally, I need to hear over and over again the teaching and encouragement that a book like Father Green's offers. In prayer our role is to be faithful in coming aside, to be at God's disposal. What actually happens in prayer is God's business. For me this piece of wisdom has always been very consoling. It helped to free me from thinking that it was up to me to make things happen in prayer. Now I am more relaxed, knowing that my role is to be faithful in coming aside, to do what I can to eliminate distractions from within and with-out, and to pray as I feel led. ("Pray as you can, not as you can't.") The rest is in God's hands. If he chooses to bless me with a deep sense of his presence, I am indeed very grateful. If he chooses to bless me with his seeming absence (God is always only seemingly absent), then I try to be grateful for that, also believing that God knows what will best help me to grow. "Our prayer is good when our hearts are fixed on God, even if it is filled with boring aridity or passionate turmoil.' ,9 Review for Religious, September-October 1989 A fourth resource in the desert is the prayer and personal support of fellow pilgrims. While each person's inner journey is very personal and unique, still we can learn much from the journeys of co-pilgrims. Only the foolish try to travel the inner jou~rney alone. In the desert we are all beggars sharing morsels of bread with each other. Also, if we are blessed enough to be a part of a small, faith---sharing group, then we have avail-able to us an excellent resourc_~e for the dry times. In the dry times the prayers of'fellow pilgrims are usually a big help. I wbuld like to conclude our discussion on spiritual dryness with a prayer that I have found to be a source of great encouragement during times of spiritual desolation. Dear Lord, in the midst of much inner turmoil and restlessness, there is a consoling thought: maybe you are working in me in a way I cannot yet feel, experience, or understand. My mind is not able to concentrate on you, my heart is not able to remain centered, and it seems as if you are absent and have left me alone. But in faith I cling to you. I believe that your Spirit reaches deeper and further than my mind or heart, and that profound movements are not the first to be noticed. Therefore, Lord, I promise I will not run away, not give up, not stop praying, even when it all seems useless, pointless, and a waste of time and effort. I want to let you know that I love you even though | do not feel loved by you, and that I hope in you even though I often experi-ence despair. Let this be a little dying I can do with you and for you as a way of experiencing some solidarity with the millions in this world who suffer far more than I do. Amen.~° NOTES ~ See Thomas H. Green, S. J., Weeds Among the Wheat (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1984), Chapters 6 and 7. Also see Thomas H. Green, S.J., When the Well Runs Dry (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1979), p. 92. 2 Some other Psalms that reflect darkness in the prayer of the psalmist are Psalms 60, 69, 74, and 88. 3 Father John Dalrymple, Simple Prayer (Wilmington, Delaware, 1984), p. 69. '~ lbid, p. 93. 5 Thomas H. Green, S.J., When the Well Runs Dry (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1979), p. 119. 6 Fathers William Barry. and William Connolly, The Practice of Spiritual Direction (New York, 1982), p. 73. 7 Ibid. 8 Saint John of the Cross, The Collected Works of John of the Cross, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D. (Washington, D.C., 1979), pp. 620-634. 9 Father John Dalrymple, Simple Prayer, (Wilmington, Delaware, 1984), p. 66. ~0 Henri J. M. Nouwen, A Cry for Mercy: Prayers from the Genesee (Garden City, New York, 1983), p. 102. That God Might Be Father .Laurel M. O'Neal Sister Laurel O'Neal, a solitary (hermit), is familiar to our readers. Her address is Stillsong Hermitage; 80 Lafayette Circle; Lafayette, California 94549. Perhaps the only question more problematic than that of the possibility of prayer is the question of its, genuine significance and necessity. Sur-prisingly, however, this is also a question we generally fail to consider explicitly or face squarely. More typically, the meaningfulness and re-quisiteness of our prayer are matters we tend to take for granted, even though the notion of prayer may lie at the heart of important or even fun-damental expressi6ns of self-understanding and definition. But the ques-tion is an important one, and one we cannot easily afford to avoid or care-lessly dismiss, if we intend to take prayer seriously or maintain a proper sense of its place and role in our daily lives. After all, why really are we called to pray? What, if anything, is truly and uniquely at stake in our prayer? Is there any reason to regard our own personal prayer as a matter of compelling urgency and real ne-cessity, or is the matter really more nugatory? Clearly, as Christians we are called to believe that our prayer is a meaningful, even indispensable activity, vital to the transformation and healing of all we know, and the realization of all we are made and hope for. But how do we justify such a belief? What is it about prayer that makes such claims credible? The answers to all of these questions are based in our recognition that in prayer something deeper and even more fundamental is at stake, some-thing in which all healing and human growth in wisdom and sanctity are rooted, and upon which all our hope depends. Like Christianity in general, and like God himself, prayer is pro-foundly paradoxical, and this is particularly true of the question at hand. 685 Review for Religious, September-October 1989 Although we must acknowledge that prayer is the gift and activity of God attended to by sinners (that is, by persons whose lives are fundamentally marked and marred by fragmentation and alienation), we must also af-firm that the deeper truth is the paradox that prayer is primarily some-thing we undertake on God's own behalf, insofar as prayer is the experi-ence of God as the One he wishes to be for us. Quite simply, what is truly and uniquely at stake in our prayer, at each and every moment we pray, is nothing less than the life and destiny of God himself. As Chris-tians, as persons who pray--that is, as persons who share as heirs of God in the obedient Sonship of Jesus Christ, we do so primarily that God might truly be the Father he has willed to be from the beginning. This insight is easy to lose sight of, something that occurs particu-larly whenever God's paradoxical nature is obscured or forgotten, and an immutable or even (as commonly misunderstood) "triune" God is substituted for a Living One. Most of us are well aware that on the one hand, our God is the "High and Holy One," the one who reveals him-self in sovereignty and self-sufficiency. Indeed he is Yahweh, "the one who will be who (he) will be," ~ in absolute authority and awesome auton-omy. But this dominant Old Testament image is just one side of the para-dox whom we Christians know as God; and if on the one hand he is the High and Holy One who is absolutely self-sufficient, he is also the one who has determined not to remain so, but rather has resolved to make his own destiny subject to the responsiveness of his creation. Our God is on the one hand without beginning or end, absolutely self-sufficient, in need of no one and no thing. Yet on the other hand he has willed from all eternity not to remain alone but to turn to another--a person who will be his counterpart. He is the eternal decision to speak to this other and to hearken to the word which this other speaks. He is the eternal deci-sion to love this other and to accept this other's love. [The God of the New Testament] who is eternally self-sufficient wills not to be; God who is eternally of and for himself wills to be for another.2 This means quite simply that God has determined to be for us as well as dependent upon us. We must allow this determination to be realized, and let God be who he wills to be for us. This is indeed the most human thing we can do, just as it is the most loving. Those who truly appreci-ate that our own destiny is dependent upon the proper exercise of human freedom should not be surprised that God too is dependent upon it. In fact, we should be aware that the Christ event reveals that it is human freedom which is the true counterpart to divine omnipotence. For many, this will be an astounding assertion. However, if we reflect on precisely That God Might Be Father / 687 what occurred in the Christ event, perhaps this critical point will become more acceptable to most people. Certainly such reflection is necessary if we are to truly appreciate the importance and urgency of our prayer. It is true that in the Christ event--in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus--God drew near to every moment and mood of his creation. This is truth but the truth cuts far more deeply than even this awesome reality. In the Christ event something absolutely s'ingular and unsurpassable occurred. For the first time in human history someone, in this case Jesus of Nazareth, in living a life wholly responsive to the God who would be Father, accomplished two things. In the first place, he lived the first genuinely human existence ever known in the history of humankind, and secondly, in his proper exercise of true human freedom he allowed God to become the Father he had willed to be from the be-ginhing. In the dialogue which existed between Father and Son, both hu-man and divine life reached a fullness for which they had yearned and groaned through time and eternity, the realization of human and divine destinies were forever linked, and divine omnipotence and human free-dom were inextricably wed as counterparts of one another. Nor is this all. In Jesus' resurrection from the dead, this abundant life was made a continuing and unconquerable reality in our world. It is in prayer that we enter most deeply into participation into this abundant life, and in prayer that Jesus' Sonship becomes our own and the Fatherhood of God is further realize~t. Through our participation in the Sonship of Jesus, we come to know genuine human life, and we become aware that it is a life characterized and constituted by an ongoing and all-consuming dialogue with the Fa-ther, who is in turn constituted as Father in this dialogue. In the Christ event Jesus responded to God as Son. He allowed God to be the author of his life, and he allowed God to be authored as Father in the process. Truly human existence is nothing less and nothing other than daughter-ship or sonship to the Living God whose own inner truth and dynamism is realized in Fatherhood. Prayer is simply and always the mutual out-working of these inextricably linked divine and human destinies. God is Father neither before, nor apart from, the response of Jesus as Son; neither is he our Father apart from our participation in that de-finitive Sonship which we call prayer. (Note well, in all of this it is im-portant that, according to the prologue to John's gospel, we are very clear that it is not the Logos that is Son; rather it is Jesus as Son in whom the Logos is incarnate. The two realities are quite different, and are often tragically confused. As the term is commonly but perhaps naively used, Review for Religious, September-October 1989 the Logos is "preexistent"; the Son is not, and whenever this confu-sion occurs, it becomes impossible to appreciate the true significance of the obedient Sonship of Jesus or of our own prayer.) Although he is the one "who will be who (he) will be," the God of the New Testament turns to the world as the one who would be Father, that is, as one who would find his counterpart and true completion in those who would turn in response as daughters and sons (that is, as those who are of him and from him) and, as one whose deepest identity would remain unrealized and unrealizable apart from this response. What are the implications of all this for our prayer? In the first place, we must concede that our prayer has real meaning and urgency, not only and not even primarily because we are saved through God's activity in our lives, but because in our prayer we concern ourselves with the very life of God. Whether or not prayer is a profound experience for Is, it is a significant experience for God since it is in prayer that he is allowed to achieve Fatherhood and truly realize himself. Whatever we perceive happening or not happening in our prayer, we must not lose sight of the fact of what does occur there. In prayer God is given the chance to love fully, and thus to fully be. It is not simply the'case that God is love; it is also true that in loving, God is (and it is this fact which allows us to speak of prayer in terms of the glorification or magnification of God). Prayer is possible only to the extent that our God has willed not to remain remote, that is, only to the extent that he has drawn near. But prayer is meaningful and necessary for the most part because the God who has refused to remain remote has also willed not to remain self-sufficient and has, in a very real way put his own destinyinto the hand of those to whom he would be Father, and whom he has thus willed re-spond to him as daughters and sons. Without our prayer, God remains the High and Holy One who has drawn near to us in all of life's moments and moods, but who remains deprived of real presence, and thus whose deepest will and identity remains unrealized and frustrated in our regard. It is particularly telling that the first word and entire Lord's Prayer is contained in the invocation "Father." Jesus' whole life and prayer, which were essentially synonymous, were devoted to allowing God's will to Fatherhood to be accomplished. Claiming this realization of the Fatherhood of God is the heart of all prayer. Allowing him to love us in the way he wills is the heart of all truly human activity. It is impor-tant that our prayer remain the God-centered activity it is meant to be. This is the reason Jesus gave his life and his way of praying as a "para-digm of perspective," and in fact, in what is most essentially and pro- That God Might Be Father 689 foundly the lesson of the New Testament, taught his followers to pray. We lose proper perspective if we forget that God has drawn near, but it is at least as tragic to forget that prayer is the way nearness is transformed into real presence. We said in an earlier essay3 that prayer begins, ends, and is sustained by our concern for and commitment to the life of God. Let us remember why we are present to him and what our appreciation of his nearness means for him, and may this knowledge sustain us in even the driest of moments. NOTES t The usual translation of "Yahweh" in Exodus 3:14 as "I am who am," or even the more cryptic "'I am" is inadequate insofar as it disregards the dynamic element, and promise of active and effective presence also contained in the Hebrew (see Ex 3:12). A better translation is "I will be who I will be". 2 Dwyer, John C., Son of Man attd Son of God, A New Language For Faith, (New York: Paulist Press, 1983). 3 O'Neal, Laurel M., "Prayer, Maintaining a Human Experience": R~.vl~.w R~.~.~¢~ous; Nov/Dec 1987, p. 883. Musing Fragile as a crisp autumn leaf, Hard as flint on flint, Soft as nestling down, Resilient as blue tempered steel-- You and I--this planet ours-- Cradled in God's tender arms Of Grace. Walter Bunofsky, S.V.D. 1446 E. Warne Avenue St. Louis, Missouri 63107 Mary of Bethany-- The Silent Contemplative Carlos M. de Melo, S.J. Father Carlos de Melo, S.J. is professor emeritus of Canon Law and Spiritual The-ology at the Pontfical Athenaeum of Pune, India. His address is Papal Seminary; Nagar Road; Ramwadi; Pune 411 014 India. Teresa of Avila, that incomparable mistress of the spiritual life--"Mater spiritualium" as she is called in the inscription at the foot of her statue at St. Peter's, Rome--was never tired of repeating to her daughters of the Reformed Carmel that prayer is not so much a matter of much think-ing as of loving much.~ The soul of prayer is faith and love. Going through the gospels ! found this basic truth or principle beautifully illus-trated in the attitudes of Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, vis-~t-vis our Lord. Bethany is a small hamlet about three kilometers southeast of Jerusa-lem, separated from the capital by the Mount of Olives. Mary of Bethany appears in five places in the gospel narratives: I) Luke 10:38-42; 2) John 11 : 1-53; 3) John ! 2: i - l l ; 4) Mark 14:3-9; and 5) Matthew 26:6-13. The last three references cover one and the same episode, that of the supper at Bethany, in the house of Simon, the "leper." True, the material is not over abundant, yet it is sufficient enough to give us a fair idea of the personality, the mind and heart, the ways and attitudes, the character of this well-known biblical figure. However, I wish to bring out in this es-say one particular trait that distinguishes her, and that is her contempla-tive attitude of life, as it comes across to us in a striking manner in two of those passages--Luke i0 and Matthew 26 (see Jn 12; Mk 14). Symbol of Contemplative . Indeed, in these passages, Mary stands out before us as a symbol and 690 Mary of Bethany / 69"1 teacher of the contemplative life particularly inspiring and helpful to per-sons "consecrated to God," whether they live in convents and monas-teries or elsewhere in the world. She thus becomes our guide, silent yet sure, to a simple, intimate relationship with our divine Master, such as will not only bring us true fulfillment but can even radically transform our life. For, as the saying goes, tell me with whom you walk and I shall tell you what sort of a person you are. When did Mary first meet Jesus? In Luke 10 the new Rabbi figures as an already familiar guest in the house of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, one whom they all highly esteemed, loved and revered, a dear friend whose visits were eagerly looked forward to and whom they welcomed with undisguised joy and profound satisfaction, as though they could never have enough of him. From him they held no secrets; they could share with him their every thought or sentiment, every joy or sorrow, and in him they were always sure to meet, in any life situation, under-standing, sympathy, guidance. First Meeting Decisive True, the gospels do not tell us when it was that Mary first met Je-sus. One thing, however, seems to be certain. Whatever might have been the time, place or occasion, that first meeiing was decisive in Mary's life; it made a lasting and ineffaceable impression on her youthful, sensitive nature. It reminds us of another such decisive encounter narrated in an-other gospel--that of the Master with the beloved disciple (Jn 1:35-39)-- one of those unforgettable events that make an impact for good and give a new turn to life. Like that of John, Mary's life, too, was deeply touched by her meeting with Jesus, for, from then on, that mysterious guest became as it were everything for her, the center of her thoughts, sentiments, deeds. It was as though interiorly taught from on high, Mary sensed in Jesus of Nazareth not only a new rabbi, or a great religious leader who taught as one having authority (Mt 7:29), who spoke as no man ever did (Jn 7:4-6), or even a worthy prophet like Moses, Isaias or Jeremias of old, but--in a way she herself was not able fully to under-stand or explain--the very incarnation of the Father of Israel, of Yah-weh himself, and at the same time, her own personal friend and guide-- her 'guruji' we might say, with all this term, and the reality it represents, means in Indian life and tradition. This explains Mary's unconditional surrender to him, her loving contemplation of him, her total openness and docility to his word, her silent "adoration"--attitudes proper to a creature before its God, its divine Lover. 692 / Review for Religious, September-October 1989 Lovable Character Mary is a lovable character--lovable because she is so

Issue 48.1 of the Review for Religious, January/February 1989. ; R F.vu-'.w FOR RF.uG~OUS (ISSN O034-639X) is published bi-monthly at St. l_x~uis University by thc Mis-souri Province Educational Institute of the Society of Jesus: Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Blvd., Rm. 428: St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Second-class postage paid at St. Louis MO. Single copies $3.00. Subscriptions: $12.00 per year: $22.00 for two years. Other countries: for surface mail. add U.S. $5.00 per year: for airmail, add U.S. $20.00 per year. For subscription orders or change of address, write: REviEw FO~ REt.~GOUS; P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, MN 55806. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to REVtEW ~'oa RE~ol~;totJS; P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, MN 55806. David L. Fleming, S.J. Iris Ann Ledden, S.S.N.D. Richard A. Hill, S.J. Jean Read Mary Ann Foppe Editor Associate Editor Contributing Editor Assistant Editors Jan./Feb. 1989 Volume 48 Number I Manuscripts, books for review and correspondence with the editor should be sent to REVIEW FOR REI.IGIOUS; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the department "Canonical Counsel" should be addressed to Rich-ard A. Hill, S.J.; J.S.T.B.; 1735 LeRoy Ave.; Berkeley, CA 94709-1193. Back issues and reprints should be ordered from R~:vtEw r'oa REU~aOUS; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. "Out of print" issues are available from University Microfilms International; 300 N. Zeeb Rd.; Ann Arbor, M! 48106. A major portion of each issue is also available on cassette recordings as a service for the visually impaired. Write to the Xavier Society for the Blind; 154 East 23rd Street; New York, NY 10010. Review for Religious Volume 48, 1989 Editorial Offices 3601 Lindeil Boulevard, Room 428 Saint Louis, Missouri 63108-3393 David L. Fleming, S.J. Iris Ann Ledden, S.S.N.D. Richard A. Hill, S.J. Jean Read Mary Ann Foppe Editor Associate Editor Contributing Editor Assistant Editors R~:vIEw FOR RELIGIOUS is published in January, March, May, July, Sep-tember, and November on the twentieth of the month. It is indexed in the Catholic Periodical and Literature Index and in Book t~e te~I Index. A microfilm edition of R~:v~Ew FOR RELIGOUS is available from University~ Microfilms International; Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. Copyrighl© 1989 by R~vmw FOR RELiGiOUS. A major portion of each issue of REvmw FOR RgL~G~OUS is als~o regu-larly available on cassette recordings as a service for the visuallyl' im-paired. Write to the Xavier Society for the Blind; 154 East 23rd Street; New York, NY 1 O010. PRISMS . Religious life today presents a varied landscape of images. Some would see the landscape more in the fading light of autumn colors or, perhaps, far more somberly in the gray bleakness of a barren wintertime. Others look out and observe a springtime of new growth, with tender fresh green shoots and small delicate blossoms just visible above the ground level. All the various ways we have of picturing religious life have some basis in reality. For there are various prisms through which we view all life, including religious life. Prisms are very important because they do provide a way for us to see, to highlight and to emphasize, to reject and to ignore. As others share their prisms of vision with us, we gain en-trance to worlds of different colors and new life. Of course, if we main-tain our vision only through our own prism, our world begins to take on a singleness of color and a frozen artificiality of life. REVIEW FOR REL~C~OUS, from its first January issue in 1942, has tried to provide various prisms through which we might view the whole worldscape which must be a part of a vibrant Christian spiritual life and so necessarily a part of religious life. As newly appointed editor of this journal, I intend the variety of insights into the consecrated lifeform, tra-ditionally called religious life, to remain an essential contribution of REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS. This contribution seems all the more necessary at our particular moment in the Church when often more time is spent in defining and establishing one's own position than in listening or learn-ing of another's. I do not want to wear out an image, but there is another important pointer for us in the kaleidos6ope. The prisms of a kaleidoscope only pro-duce their beauty because of their relationships, one to another. I find that the prisms through which we view life only present us with adequate truth, new life, and fresh ways ofacting if we maintain the relationship of various viewpoints. That is the great strength of the Church who pos-sesses various pictures of Jesus in her gospels, who allows differing phi-losophies and theologies to provide understanding to her faith, and who approves the charisms of vastly differing forms of religious life to be le-gitimate icons of Christ for all the Christian faithful and for the world. It is in the maintenance of relationship that we possess the criteria of le-gitimacy, continuity, and true creativity. 4 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 In our current issue, the usual variety of articles gives indication of the richness of interests which help form the context of religious life. In subsequent numbers I intend to take the opportunity to highlight one or other article because of the importance of its issue or the insight or un-derstanding it provides. Sometimes I would like to reflect more broadly about certain key concerns of religious life as it is being lived in our Churc,h and world today. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS in this way will continue to provide prisms as well perspectives on the relationships of the many prisms that make up our religious lives. David L. Fleming, S.J. What Do You Want?m The Role of Desires in Prayer William A. Barry, S.J. A frequent contributor, Father Barry wrote "God's Love Is Not Utilitarian" for our issue of November/December 1987. His address is Jesuit Community: Boston Col-lege; Chestnut Hill, MA 02167. know: you're going to ask what I want. "As I was driving up to the retreat house, I thought of your perennial question: 'What do you want?' and here's what l~came up with." I have often noticed that peo-ple who see me for some time for spiritual direction or directed retreats say things like this. It even becomes a bit of humorous byplay, as though they want to beat me to the punch. Clearly, one of my favorite questions for directees is the one Jesus put to the two disciples who began to fol-low him: "What do you want?" (Jn 1:38). If directees pick up on this predilection and start asking themselves the question, then, I believe, a good deal of my work as spiritual director is done. If we know what we want in prayer, we are going to find our way. After a practical belief that God wants an intimate relationship with each one of us and that God is directly encountered in our experience, nothing is more important for the development of our relationship with God-~-for our prayer, in other words--than knowledge of what we want and of what God wants. In this article I want to discuss the role of desires in prayer. Anyone familiar with the Spiritual Exercises knows that among the preludes to every meditation or contemplation is: "I will ask God our Lord for what I want and desire." In the various stages or weeks of the Exercises, Ignatius states what the desire is in each case. For example, in the First Week I "ask for a growing and intense sorrow and tears for my sins," and in the Second Week I "ask .for an intimate knowledge 5 Review for Religious, January-February 1989 of our Lord, who has .become man for me, that I may love him more and follow him more closely." In an earlier article in the R~v~Ew, l tried to show that each of the desires of the Exercises is a desire for some par-ticular revelation by the Lord. ~ On the face of it, it looks as though Ignatius is saying: "Here is what you should desire at each stage of the Spiritual Exercises." One conclu-sion might be to take a person through the four Weeks and just put be-fore him or her what Ignatius gives as the desire. In fact, this has been the procedure in preached retreats, including the preached thirty-day re-treats we older Jesuits and other religious made in novitiate and tertian-ship. But what happened if, as a matter of fact, I did not really desire to know Jesus more intimately when the Second Week was presented to me. Suppose, for example, I was still too afraid of what he thinks of me. In most instan(es, I would guess, we just presumed that we had the de-sire if it was Second Week time. But I would contend that without the real desire we never got very intimate with Jesus. Indeed, I believe that "what we really desire" is diagnostic of the stage of the Exercises we are actually in. To demonstrate this thesis we need to look at the role of desires in any relationship. If you get a call from someone asking for a.meeting, is not your first question, at least to yourself, "What does she or he want?" In fact, many meetings between people come off badly because the individuals involved have mistaken ideas of what each other wants. For example, I want to become your friend, and you believe that I want help with home-work; you want to help me, but are not even thinking of a deeper friend-ship. At the end of the meeting both of us are going to be pretty frus-trated unless we talk about our different desires and come to some understanding. Often enough, too, relationships become frustrating be-cause of ambivalent or incompatible desires in one or both parties. For example, I want to get closer to you, but I am also afraid of you. Or I want a friendship with you (a happily married woman), but I also want to goto bed with you. Every intended encounter with another person is accompanied by a"desire or desires'. We are not always aware of our de-sires, but they are present, and they condition our behavior in the encoun-ter. Now suppose that I want to befriend you and you do not want my: friendship. Will my efforts :at befriending get me or you anywhere? Only to frustration and resentment, probably. But let us say that I persist in trying to do nice things for you. What will happen? You will probably get more and more irritated and thus less and less likely to become my Role of Desires in Prayer friend. And like many a "do-gooder" whose good deeds are rejected, I may eventually wash my hands of you and call you an ingrate who de-serves his fate. Friendship is possible only when the desires are mutual, when you freely desire my friendship and I freely desire yours. Friend-ship cannot be coerced. "But," someone may object, "we often do things that we don't want to do. Because of my friendship for you, for example, I will go to a movie I don't like." But what do you want? If it is because of friend-ship with me that you go to the movie, is not your deepest desire to please me or to be with me? The friendship is more important than the movie. I believe that the centrality of desire for the developing of a rela-tionship cannot be denied. Now let us look at the importance of desires for the relationship with the Lord. In the first chapter of John's gospel, the two disciples of John are intrigued by this Jesus whom John has just pointed out as the lamb of God. So they start following Jesus. When Jesus asks them what they want, they say, "Rabbi, where are you staying?" They do not yet have strong desires, it seems; curiosity seems to be the desire. Jesus does not disdain this desire. "Come," he replies, "and you will see." Unless we have some attraction toward God, some curiosity or hope or desire, we will not take the time to begin our side of the relationship. If I be-lieve in my heart and feelings that God is an ogre, ready to pounce on any infraction, then I may try to placate him, but I will never want to get close to him. And God, as it were, does handstands.to convince us that he really is benign, that he is, as Jesus asserted, Abba. The p.rofli-gate wonders of nature, our own creation and life, the words of Old and New Testaments, Jesus himself, and other loving, caring people in our lives--these are all signg of God's desire that we find him attractive and let him come close. But he cannot force himself on us, or will not. We must have some desire to get to know him better. Sebastian Moore af-firms that God's creative touch which desires us into being arouses in us a desire for "I know what," that is, a desire for the Mystery we call God.2 This experience (understood as the experience of one's creation and continued creation) can be seen as the affective principle and foun-dation for the development ofone's relationship with God. The desire for "I know what" is what makes' our hearts restless until they rest in God. Many people need help to recognize that they have such a desire. Be-cause of life's hurts they may not recognize any other desire but to be left alone, or not to be hurt any more. Telling such people that God is Review for Religious, January-February 1989 love has little or no effect. They may need help to admit to God that they are afraid of, him and desire to be less afraid. Indeed, they may need help to voice some of their anger at life's hurts which seem to them to have come from the Author of life. The fact that they have not completely turned away from religion indicates that they may still want something from God, even if only an acknowledgment that he knows what hap-pened to them in life. Like Job some may cry out: "Then know that God has wronged me and drawn his net around me. Though I c~'y, 'I've been wronged!' I get no response; though I call for help, there is no justice." Only after he has poured out his sorrows, seemingly, can he say: "I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth" (Jb ! 9:6-7.25). In other words, it may take a great deal of pas-toral care and patient spiritual direction for some people to come to the point where they can trust life and the Author of life enough to let into their consciousness the desire for "'I know what.'" Job's friends have tried to derail him from expressing his desires to God: In his misery he wants God to speak to him. He will not lie and say, as his friends insinuate,, that he deserves his calamities because of his sins. Hewill not accept the just-world hypothesis proposed by his friends according to which anyone's sufferings must be deserved. No, he knows~that he does not deserve the awful fate that has befallen him and desires to speak directly .to God and to hear God's answer. Often enough we Christians are like the friends of Job. To a mother who has just.lost her only child we might say, "God knows best." and thus make it difficult for her to voice her outrage at God and her need for God's own answer to this awful loss. Sometimes we feel that we have to de-fend God against the anger directed at him by people in pain. Yet the anger may be the most authentic way for a person to relate ~o God and to ex.press a desire to know God's response. Finally in chapters 38 through 41 God does answer Job out of the whirlwind. The response may not sound very comforting or apologetic to _us, but apparently Job is satisfied, for he says: "My ears had heard of you but.now, my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in ~du.s.t and ashes." Moreover, then God speaks to Job's friends, "I am angry with you and your two friends, because yQu have not spo-ken of me what is~right, as my servant Job has" (Jb 42:5-7). Whatever else God's speech from the whirlwind means, it certainly does not mean that Jg~bohas lost God's friendship by voicing so strongly his desire to have God answer him. Another biblical instance of an attempt to derail a desire directed to- Role of Desires in Prayer ward God comes in the first chapter of the First Book of Samuel. Han-nah, one of the two wives of Elkanah, is barren and miserable. She wants a son. Her husband, seeing her weeping and fasting, says to her, "Han-nah, why are you weeping? Why don't you eat? Why are you down-hearted? Don't I mean more to you than ten sons?" In other words, Elka-nah wants Hannah to forget her desire and be satisfied with what she has. In the story we do not hear Hannah's reply, but her actions tell us that she is not put off by Elkanah's entreaties. She goes to the temple and "in bitterness of soul., wept much and prayed to the Lord." Indeed, when accused of drunkenness by Eli, the priest, she says, "Not so, my lord, I am a woman who is deeply troubled. I was pouring out my soul to the Lord." Hannah knows what she wants and is not afraid to tell God over and over what it is (I S 1:8, 10, 15). Often we tell ourselves or are told to quell our desires, to look at all the good we already have. We can be made to feel guilty and ungrateful for desiring what we want. But if we do suppress our desires without be-ing satisfied that God has heard us, then, in effect, we pull back from honesty with God. The result for our relationship with God often is po-lite distance or cool civility. Perhaps God cannot or will not grant what we want, but for the sake of the continued development of the relation-ship we need to keep letting him know our real desires until we are sat-isfi~ d or have heard or felt some response. In 2 Cbrinthians Paul says, "There was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to tor-ment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' " Now Paul could stop making known his desire because now he knew God's answer. "Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. :For when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Co 12:7-10). Convictions such as Paul's come not from theological or spiritual nos-trums, but from the experienc~ of growing transparency between a Paul and the Lord. Too often we use the hard-won wisdom of a Paul to short-circuit a similar transparency in our own relationship with the Lord. A woman may, for example, be experiencing the "dark night of the soul" and not like it at all. Her desire may be for it to be removed. She may be helped by the knowledge that others have experienced the same thing before her and been the better for it, but such knowledge does not have to satisfy her desire to be rid of the "dark night." A short circuit in the Review for Religious, January-February 1989 relationship might occur if she is told by her spiritual director or tells her-self to squelch her desire "because the experience is good for you." What she needs to experience is God's response, not a theorem of spiri-tual theology. She needs to know (really, not notionally) that God does want this darkness for the good of their relationship. Such real knowl-edge comes only through mutual transparency. Most of the healing miracles of the New Testament depend on the desire of the recipient for healing.The example of the blind beggar Bar-timaeus (Mk 10:46-52) stands out, but is not unusual. "When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, 'Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.' Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, 'Son of David, have mercy on me.' " Obviously Bartimaeus will not be hindered from expressing his desire by any num-ber of voices trying to quiet him. These "voices" can come from within us as well as from without, by the way. "Jesus won't have time for the likes of me; other people have more important problems; things aren't so bad." These interior voices may be expressing our ambivalence about being healed. Just as Bartimaeus had made a way of life out of his blindness, so too we may have made our own physical or psychological or sPiritual limitations a way of life and be afraid of what a future without them might be. One person on a retreat thought that he desired healing from a kind of dark-ness that seemed to rule his life. But then he heard the Lord ask, "Do you want me to heal you of this?" and he had to admit that he was not sure. Interestingly, he felt that God approved the honesty of his response. The inner voices may also express our fear of arousing strong desires for healing only to have them dashed. "Suppose I really want to be healed and I hear the answer Paul got? What a disappointment!''3 Desires are complex and often contradictory. However, once we have allowed the ambivalence and complexity of our desires to surface, we have some-thing else to ask the Lord about. In the Bartimaeus story Jesus calls him over and asks, "What do you want me to do for you?" Bartimaeus is quite clear and unambi-valent, "Rabbi, I want to see." "Go," says Jesus, "your faith has healed you." I have italicized Jesus' words. Without the faith of Barti-maeus, apparently, this miracle could not have occurred. The miracle re-quires a. partnership between Jesus' healing power and desire to heal and Bartimaeus' faith and desire to be healed. Indeed, Bartimaeus' desire is his faith in action. An example may help to illustrate this point. Once I was filled with Role of Desires in Prayer anger and self-pity about the turn a friendship had taken and thought that I was praying for healing. I was contemplating the story of the two blind men in Matthew 9:27-30. When Jesus asked them, "Do you believe that I am able to do this?" I knew immediately that I was not ready to give up my self-pity and anger. If I did desire healing, it was with the same "but not yet" desire with which Augustine at one time desired chastity. I did not have the "faith" found in the two blind men and in Barti-maeus, a faith that showed itself in unambivalent desire. Another exam-ple that shows how desire is faith in action is provided by the father of the boy with the evil spirit reported in Mark 9: 14-29. Instead of asking directly for a healing, the father said to Jesus, "But if you can do any-thing, take pity on us and help us." Because he did not believe in Jesus' power to heal, he could not desire the hea!ing directly. "If you can?" said Jesus. "Everything is possible for him who believes." To which the father replied, "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief." In effect the man is saying, "Help me to desire healing." This last example brings us close to the hub of why desires are the raw material out of which relationships are made. In order for the heal-ing to occur, there must be a meshing of desires. Bartimaeus's desire for healing meets Jesus' desire to heal; without both desires there is no rela-tionship, at least no mutual relationship. This point is beautifully illus-trated in the story of the leper. "A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, 'If you are. willing, you can make me clean.' Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. 'I am willing,' he said. 'Be clean!' Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cured" (Mk 1:40-42). Clearly desire meets desire. The kind of relationship Jesus desires is a mutual one', where desire meets desire. The need for a partnership of.desires becomes even clearer when we look at friendship. In John 15:15 Jesus says, "I have called you friends," and then goes on to indicate what that means from his side, "for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you." From his side the desire has been to be fully transparent, to com-municate to them all that he is. His desire meets their desire to know him as fully as possible. Of course, full mutuality of friendship means that they desire to be fully transparent before him and he desires to know them fully. Take away one side of these desires and there no longer is a mutual relationship. Of course, on the apostles' part (and on ours) the mere desire for mu-tual transparency does not carry it off. "Between the cup and the lip . " Our desires are ambivalent and complex; we are fearful crea- 12 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 tures, as well, and our fears get in the way of what we most deeply want. We need help and healing to grow toward mutual transparency with the Lord. But that help is available if we want it. If we notice, for example,, that we want to know Jesus better, but are afraid of the consequences, we can ask Jesus for help to overcome our fears. But again we notice that desire is the key to developing the relationship. The retreatant mentioned earlier who told God that he was not sure that he wanted healing of the darkness that ruled his life provides another example of the reciprocity of relationships. Later in the same day he be-came more sure that he wanted healing and asked the Lord to heal him. The Lord's response was perplexing; "I can't," he seemed to say. The retreatant was enraged at such a response when his own reluctance had been overcome, and he let God know in no uncertain terms. Yet still later in the day, out of the blue, as it were~ he heard the Lord say, "But we can." He knew immediately that the Lord meant that he could live more out of joy than sadness if he kept desiring the Lord's helpful presence rather 'than withdrawing into himself. "We can" meant partnership. At the beginning of this article, I stated that the real desires a person has are diagnostic of where the person is in terms of the four Weeks of the Exercises. Let me now return to that point. If retreatants do not have a real trust in God's loving care and providence, they will not desire that God reveal to them their sinfulness. Without an experienced-based be-lief in God's goodness and 16ve, without, in other words, what I have called earlier an affective principle and foundation, people are too fright-ened of God to be able to say and mean the last words of Psalm 139: "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting" (23-24). If there is no such real desire, then the First Week of the Exercises is not on. And, it seems, at this point God's desire is not so much to reveal sinfulness as to convince the person that he is "Abba." Similarly, if a retreatant voices the desire to know Jesus in or-der love him more and to follow him more closely, yet in his prayer con-tinually identifies with those who need healing, perhaps his real desire is to be healed. The desire of the Second Week to know Jesus shows it-self in an interest in Jesus himself, his values, his emotions, his dreams, his apostolate. If the retreatant is not really interested in these matters, but continually focuses on his own needs and weaknesses, then the Sec-ond Week is not. really in progress. Jesus himself may at this time desire more to heal than to call to companionship. The difference between the First and Third Weeks also comes down to a difference in desire. In the Role of Desires in Prayer First Week I desire to know that Jesus forgives me (and us), that he died for my (and our) sins; the focus is on desiring to have a deep experience of how much Jesus loved us even though he knew how sinful we were. The desire of the Third Week is more to share the passion with Jesus in-sofar as this is possible. The focus is on what Jesus felt and suffered, and the desire is that he reveal that to me. Retreat directors, I believe, do their most important work when they help their directees to discover what they do in reality want. And so every retreat could begin with a con-templation of Jesus as he turns and says, "What do you want?" As re-treatants hear these words and let them penetrate their hearts, they will come to know better what they desire; in other words, they will know better who they are at this time in their relationship with the Lord. NOTES ~ "On Asking God to Reveal Himself in Retreat," REVIEW FOR REI.IOWOUS 37 (1978): 171-176; reprinted in David L. Fleming (ed.), Notes on the Spiritual Exercises of St. ignatius of Loyola (St. Louis: REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, 1983), pp. 72-77. 2 Sebastian Moore, Let This Mind Be in You: The Quest for Identity Through Oedi-pus to Christ (Minneapolis: Winston-Seabury, 1985). 3 In another context I have discussed the courage of Bartimaeus. See "Surrender: Key To Wholeness," REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 46 1987): 49-53. Perspectives on Parables and Prayer Donald Macdonald, S.M.M. Father Macdonald's most recent contribution to our journal was "A Pathway to God" (May/June 1988). His address continues to be: St. Joseph's; Wellington Road; Todmorden, Lancashire; 0L14 5HP England. A sister said that her annual retreat was less than satisfying because "the priest, who shall be nameless, seemed to spend a fair bit of time telling us how good he was. I nearly offered him a trumpet." My response was and is to wish that he could come for my annual retreat, if only to exer-cise my sense of humor, even though, as I suspect, he may be speaking tongue in cheek. If not, so much the better! This is not meant to be flip-pant, for it seems to me in recent years that retreats and such like are becoming more technical, esoteric, and managed. So often there has to be a title with content specified, ra~nging from privately directed to Bet- .ter World and charismatic, by way of the Spiritual Exercises, Inigo, Sadhana, Progoff, Zen, Yoga, and so much else; it seems a prudent step, therefore, to first inquire before one enters. The seeker for silence and stillness, for example, is likely to find an all-action organized retreat not a little off-putting. But it all seems so terribly earnest, with little humor. A retreat is undeniably important when seen as a chance for inspira-tion, encouragement, and vision, particularly if the opportunity comes only once a year. It is important that the Gospel is preached; arguably, over the years, some vocations may have gone by default, even among those who die as religious, inasmuch as the Good News, as the New Tes-tament would understand it, might not have been heard. It is sometimes asking much of a preacher during a retreat to try and shore up a creaking building on the verge of collapse when the day-by-day support has not been given. But what seems to happen today is a grasping for technique 14 On Parables and Prayer which is expected to provide the key to the Gospel. The search for the philosopher's stone is endemic. This, of course, may not be quite fair to someone who senses per-haps that "Thou [God] hast made us for thyself and our hearts are rest-less till they rest in thee" (Confessions 1:1).~ But expectation is not God, nor is disappointment nor, indeed, sat-isfaction. To set one's all on technique or the competence of the preacher or the receptivity of the audience is to risk losing everything. Humor will spare us that and much else. The late John Main, O.S.B., told a friend, a Ramakrishnan monk, who had asked him how he proposed to teach meditation, "Sit down, sit erect, say the mantra, and that's it.''2 His friend said that such an approach would never work with Westerners. It is so simple they will not believe you. His advice was to deliberately com-plicate it, saying you have esoteric knowledge which you can give only after they have been coming for at least ten weeks. Only then can t.hey be initiated. Throw in the name John Cassian for good measure. That should attract them. This raises a smile, as it is so close to reality as some of us observe it. A Greek Orthodox priest spoke similarly of students coming to his monastery asking to be initiated into the Jesus Prayer. "Say it." "But. ? . No, just say it." As you advance you need guidance. It is all rather deflating, for someone seeking the heights, to be told to begin at the beginning. It will be recalled that Peter L. Berger identified humor as one of his "signals of transcendence," a marvelous way out from all which might tend to dominate and frighten us in a seemingly locked-in world. It is crucial for perspective. "Laughter can show that power is ultimately' an illusion because it canno( transcend the limits of the empirical world. Laughter can--and does every time it relativizes the seemingly rocklike necessities of this world.''3 There is such a thing as gallows humor. Laughter can be a link with the divine and all that is, not just all that is here. How could a preacher or a community ever take themselves wholly seriously again after hearing this little story about a retreat director? He impressed a community as an obviously saintly man. His reputation grew as the week progressed--until he asked for meat on Friday. No saint would ever do that! On such are reputations built and lost. Favorite humorous authors such as P. G. Wodehouse or James Thurber can provide permanent links to God and reality. Once in their friendly and familiar company, we find space to simply relax and enjoy ourselves. We smile at Walter Mitty as we see ourselves in him. Our prob- 16 / Review for Religious,'January-February 1989 lems lessen in the face of what some of the Wodehouse characters have to meet. A Sergeant Bilko on black-and-white television can do as much. Holding on to the relative like this may help us see that there is always another chance--and if the Go.spei is to be believed, the time is now. I am far from underplaying the need for a properly prepared retreat or suggesting that one can laugh off whatever happens. Nor would I dis-count the value of any particular technique or approach. I would but say that everything here is relative and humor can help us see it. Father Enomiya-Lassalle once gave a day's Zen retreat to forty Korean novices, whose reaction was that "Up to now we used to have a scriptural text in our daily meditation to meditate on. Today for the first time we have felt that to meditate is to pray."4 One is grateful;for the sisters' experi. ence, but even if the priest had neve.r set foot in Korea, the providence of God would not have neglected them. Everything then can help, but nothing is essential. When the retreat .disappoints, all need not be lost. This is particularly so for those who know how to interpret their life in terms of Scripture. A fairly comprehensive experience convinces me that few can. If there is one cause of failure both in preacher and audience, it lies in the inability to do that. I would be astonished if novices knew how to do it, and very surprised to find it in the great majority of their senior brothers and sisters. One simple test is to listen for the Gospel when religious speak of what is happening to them and how they see it. The Gospel is the common coin of the Catholic Church, but many use it gingerly like a foreign currency. They do not know its value, or what to do with it. Authentic Sources 'Religious have been authoritatively urged that to genuinely live their calling they should draw "on the authentic sources of Christian spiritu-ality., in the first place they should take the Sacred Scriptures in hand each day" (Perfectae Caritatis, no. 6). Here faith and life are meshed as one. What a Jewish commentator, W. G. Plaut, said of the Torah, the Christian can wholeheartedly endorse for Scripture in its.entirety. "We hold that the Torah is a record of Israel's striving to meet God and un-derstand his will. In centuries of search, of finding and forgetting, of in-spiration and desperation, God touched the soul of his people and the sparks of these meetings burn in the pages of the Torah.' ,5 The "sparks of these meetings" are found in the pages of Scripture, and once prop-erly kindled they produce an enduring, not fitful, flame. In each meet-ing with God, which really means now, the religious by profession would wish his or her mind to be at one with the will of God, faith and life re- On Parables and Prayer flecting the one reality: "That man is Your best servant who is not so much concerned to hear from You what he wills as to will what he hears from You"(Confessions 10:26). That distinction is crucial, and none knew better than Augustine how hard it was to really make the transi-tion. All of us are innately self-centered, easily deceived. It is, then, prac-tical to go to the authentic sources of the Church's tradition, where "in the centuries of search, of finding and forgetting. God touched the soul of his people." Even Augustine intuitively seems to have felt this in his search for God. "I absolutely refused to entrust the care of my sick soul to the philosophers, because they were without the saving name of Christ. and whatever lacked that name, no matter how learned and excellently written and true, could not win me wholly" (Confessions 5: 14; 3:4). So while the attraction for God in Christ and authenticity was there, Augustine could not at first bring himself to find this, least of all in Scripture. He tells us honestly why: "So I resolved to make some study of the Sacred Scriptures and find what kind of books they were . My conceit was repelled by their simplicity, and I had not the mind to penetrate into their depths" (Confessions 3:5). He lacked "sincerity, openness of mind and that fundamental rev-erence which is a willingness to be commanded" which one who went deeper than most saw as minimum requirements before the Bible can do anything for a person.6 It is so hard to change one's mind radically, and that lovely quality of fundamental reverence before Scripture Js rarely found, especially in those who like to do things their own way--which means all of us, but for the grace of God. ~ Augustine was later to envy the Church's faithful whom he had once patronized as ignorant and unlettered. Once he himself had discovered the treasure which they so nonchalantly possessed, how his perspective changed: "Of what great harm to Your little ones was their far slower intelligence: since they strayed not far from You and so could fledge their wings in safety in the nest of Your Church, and nourish the wings of char-ity with the food of solid faith?" (Confessions 4:16). In thus moving from inauthentic to authentic existence as he saw it, he now realized that his "superior" stance was only that of the man with the empty stomach who does not know where to find food, in his case, "the food of solid faith." The search, tension, and struggle are perhaps heroic and the stakes are life or death, but nothing is gained by patronizing those who sit down each day at a full table. He finally knocked at their door and asked to come in and share what they had. Again his perspective changed: "It is with utter certainty that I love You. You have stricken Review for Religious, January-February 1989 my heart with Your word and I have loved You" (Confessions 10:6). It is well known that an appar.ently chance reading of Romans 13 and 14 finally enabled Augustine to see. Now from within the heart of the Church he is convinced that "Thou [God] didn't touch me, and I have burned for thy peace" (Confessions 10:27). This is not notional knowl-edge enabling him to speak to his intellectual peers, but the real insight given him by the word of God from within the Church enabling him to see faith and life as one. The sparks of the earlier meetings with God are now aflame in re-sponse to his word. His life and perspective are transfigured. It is per-haps not without its underlying humor to see this gifted man, with many of the gli~tering prizes within his grasp, now held enthralled by the faith of his mother and her nurse (see Confessions 9:8). He had traveled for miles and years searching for what he had left at home. If religious had this innate feeling of fundamental reverence before Scripture, always subordinating themselves to the word, never dominat-ing it, they might more easily warm to the sparks of the meetings with God in their own daily life, and so find a flame which they could never leave. Even among the trumpet calls of a preacher's self-proclaimed ex-cellence, the word of God isthere if one knows how to listen, but it is unlikely to be heard unless one is habitually doing this. That perspec-tive is all-important. A practical illustration may perhaps make the point. A Treasure Found Parables form much of the Gospel, and few strike a cord with the religious vocation more than "the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field" (Mt 13:44). Taken from life, it is meant to make us think. What is being said here? We under-stand what is being said, of course, but we are meant to assimilate its implications. Its dynamic is as powerful as Christ is real. Insofar as I be-lieve that God in Christ is here speaking to me, I shall respond and so attempt to make the Gospel my own. In fact, that parable, for many, is little more than an interesting analogy. It is a helpful example, an exter-nal, verbal, and indeed visual aid, as useful in the junior school as in the religious community. Precisely because that may not unfairly be de-scribed as the most usual understanding of the parable, the true perspec-tive is little known, and so those words scarcely ever spark into a flame. If that is compared with the approach to parables of T. W. Manson in a fine book first published over fifty years ago and often reprinted, we will find ourselves in another world where the sparks of the meeting On Parables and Prayer between Christ and ourselves can really catch fire. He says: Jesus is not concerned to demonstrate that God exists but rather to show the nature of the God whose existence is common ground for him and his audience. His aim is not to make God an article of faith but the ob-ject of faith. We are often concerned to make God probable to man; .he set out to make God real to them. It is this fact which makes parable the inevitable form in which the teaching of Jesus on the nature and ways of God should be delivered . The true parable., is not an illus-tration to help one through a theological discussion. It belongs to the same order of things as altar and sacrifice and prayer, the prophetic vi-sion and the like . It is a way in which religious faith is attained, and, as far as it can be, transmitted from one person to another. It is not a crutch for limping intellects but a spur to religious insight. Its object is not to provide simple theological instruction but to produce living re-ligious faith.7 This is Scripture seen from the inside. How many readers of this page honestly think like that? If religious habitually think in those terms, it seems to me that they keep it well hidden. Could the average reader echo, from experience, all that Manson sees--parable, the obvious teach-ing medium to make God real . . . a mode of religious experience on the same plane as altar, sacrifice, prayer, and insight., a way in which faith is attained, not a crutch for limping intellects., producing living religious faith? The easiest way to answer such questions is to ask: What did we feel when the parable was first quoted--' 'the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field."? If Manson was articulating what we have long known and felt, the resonances first produced by the par-able will still be there on the level of faith, not necessarily feeling. His comment would then simply buttress what we know to be true. Is our faith like a treasure found? Is this what has brought us to religious life? Is it a superb insight into reality? Is any sacrifice worthwhile to really possess it? What do we give in view of what we ~et? Can this treasure in any sense be found through the medium of an imperfect preacher? Do these words hold us up as they obviously show us up? One has to ask questions and link details together for the purposes of writing, but if the parable is properly assimilated to any degree, it is better to be silent and still and let the image absorb us and lead us where it will. We are then on the level of altar, sacrifice, prayer, and insight, willingly or even grudgingly, in view of the demands, letting ourselves be drawn into God through his Word. Perspectives that we perhaps know notionally are opened up to limitless horizons. Faith, not feeling, is seek- 20 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 ing to really understand. For years we have known the parable by heart. Have our hearts ever got the point and made it our own? Only silence and wonder stemming from fundamental reverence will do that. Fundamental Reverence For some years now virtually all religious communities have the for-mal daily prayer of the Church as their morning and evening prayer. In-variably, individuals or groups are given charge of liturgy and prayer, which generally means that coming to daily prayer one has to first find out what has been rearranged. Pages have to be marked, hymns noted, and alternative readings attended to. The pattern is rarely predictable. All this is done, one hears, because the community wants it, for the ordi-nary daily office is boring and repetitive. This constant adaptation is then seen as a practical attempt to engage the community in really meaning-ful prayer. In view of what has already been said, much of this suggests that those who foster or want this, apart from the risk of choosing only what-ever has personal appeal, may have no real feeling for Scripture, which may be why continual rearrangement is felt to be necessary to hold at-tention. This is, of course, the technique of the junior school, .where the children's attention span is limited and meaning has to be immediate. Yet if one receives~a line, phrase, sentence, or sentiment of Scripture on the level of altar, sacrifice, prayer, or insight, one just cannot keep chang-ing the focus without fragmenting the reality. Even to move, pick up a hymnbook, attend to alternative prayer or reading, or in general to be .never quite sure what is happening next, can be to break concentration. There may be some gain in alertness but, arguably, loss in continu-ity and assimilation. The Psalms and readings from the daily office have not yet been heard for the first time as Augustine, Manson, the Jewish commentator Plaut, and others would understand it, and will never be if one constantly changes the focus of attention in terms of relevance. One is all the time being brought up to the surface, never left long enough to go down to the depths. Ideally, the Psalms and readings could be so predictable that one almost knows them without turning the page. Only then do they have a chance of becoming part of ourselves so that we can truly listen, not just hear. Fundamental reverence would ask no less. But, however well intentioned, when one has to scan the board for the next item on .the agenda of prayer, or wait for the inspiration of a colleague, one is perhaps paying too high a price for spontaneity. The seemingly prosaic parable as a "spur to religious insight" must be in-vited to speak, not ordered to. On Parables and Prayer When Scripture is approached like this in the context of prayer, what one hears matters little. In time, perhaps less and less comes to mean more and more. It has not been and cannot be quite assimilated. Occa-sionally its relevance may be all too clear, as when, on the morning fol-lowing news of the horrific deaths of the seven astronauts in January 1986, one read: "Naked I came from my mother's womb, naked I shall return. The Lord gave, the Lord has taken back. Blessed be the name of the Lord. If we take happiness from God's hand, must we not take sorrow too?" (Jb 1:21, 2:10). Even if the words appear as dull as a school textbook, it does not matter. Nor does immediacy or surface mood. On the level of prayer, altar, sacrifice, and insight, it is one's faith responding to God that makes the connection. In time the words will peel away and matter less and less as one is held in faith, just as a smile or wave from a friend has a mean-ing out of all proportion to the action. It is a perspective on reality for which one is grateful. NOTES t The Confessions of St. Augustine, translated by F. J. Sheed (London: Sheed and Ward 1944). All references to The Confessions are from here. 2 John Main, O.S.B., "Christian Meditation," The Grail, 1978, p. 19. 3.Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels (Penguin Books, 1971), p. 91. 4 The Tablet, London, January I 1, 1986, pp. 31-32. 5 The Torah, W. G. Plaut and B. J. Bamberger (New York: Union of American He-brew Congregation, 198 I), p. 1294. 6 C. H. Dodd, The Authority of the Bible [1929] (Fontana Paperback, 1962), p. 269. 7 T. W. Manson. The Teaching of Jesus (CUP, 1931; paperback, 1963), pp. 72-73. The Gift of Not Giving Jane Kammer C.S.Bo In our issue of January/February 1983, we published Sister Jane's "Three Times I Asked: Reflections on Weakness." She is a pastoral associate at St. Benedict Church in San Antonio. She may be addressed at 5107 Ozark; San Antonio, Texas 7820 I. So Jesus said to them, 'Well, then, pay to the Emperor what belongs to the Emperor and pay to God what belongs to God ' (Mt 22:21). "Jesus exclaimed, 'You ask me for a miracle? No! The only mir-acle you will be given is the miracle of the prophet Jonah' " (Mt 12:39). "As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had had the de-mons begged him, 'Let me go with you!' But Jesus would not let him"(Mk 5:18-19). A popular Christian saying and song is "God loves a cheerful giver." Giving has been exalted as a hallmark of Christianity, and so it is. Didn't our leader, Jesus, give his very life to show us God's great love? Giving has also been extolled as the virtue of the ideal Christian woman. For most of her life, my mother gave. She waited on my father; she gave of herself for her children. For all but the last few years of her life, I never heard her say no to anyone who asked a favor. But after she had grieved over my father's death, a change took place in my mother. At sixty-two she learned to drive a car; she went on vacations; she joined groups and clubs; and she began to say no to requests she really did not want to fulfill. She had discovered another dimension of giving. Giving is not always healthy for the giver or for the receiver. It is not true respect when I continually do for another what the person can do for him/herself. I am beginning to learn the gift of not giving. Teilhard de Chardin said, "Your essential duty and desire is to be 22 The Gift of Not Giving united with God. But in order to be united you must first of all be --be yourself as completely as possible. And so you must develop yourself and take possession of the world in order to be. Once this has been ac-complished, then is the time to think about renunciation; then is the time to accept diminishment for the sake of being in another. Such is the sole and twofold precept of complete Christian asceticism" (The Divine Mi-lieu [New York: Harper and Row, 1960], pp. 70-71). I believe that part of developing myself is learning, through practice, the gift of not giving to everyone who seems to ask. If I continually place my focus on others, then I cannot really give myself in love to them, for I do not have a self to give. It is my task to discover and develop the unique person God intends for me to be. I am codependent. To me that means I tend to place my center out-side of myself. I am inclined to seek affirmation and validation from some-one else. I feel safest when giving, not receiving. I am a people pleaser who fears rejection. Taking things personally and blaming myself for whatever seems less than perfect are aspects of my codependence. I have lived with many "shoulds" from the past which I have interiorized. In many ways my life repeats the story of my mother. But it is not too late to refocus my center within myself. I can learn to allow the true "me" to emerge from within. In time I can become a self-validating, self-affirming person whose peace is permanent and whose happiness does not depend on the mood of another. If I stay with myself, I can learn to love and accept myself as I am, even while want-ing to change some things about myself. I can give myself the gift of not giving up on the real, beautiful, and exciting "me." Moreover, I can learn to give the gift to others of responsibility for themselves. By re-fusing to absorb and carry the emotions of others, I will gift them with the faith that they are capable of living their own lives, making their own decisions, and caring for themselves. One morning I attended a meeting of four people who work in the same field. One of the workers continually griped and complained. Ne-gativity flowed out of her every word and facial expression. At the end of the session, I felt depressed, oppressed, and.burdened. I had absorbed into myself the flow of her negativity. But I can give myself the gift of not taking responsibility for other people's feelings, for others' pleasant or unpleasant feelings. I can maintain my joy, peace, and positive out-look if I am aware of my tendencies and if I give myself the gift of not giving in to codependence. I can learn to trust other people to run their own lives. I can deepen my trust in God. Review for Religious, January-February 1989 As codependent I also try to control others, though I may not be aware that I am doing so. I have not seen my friend for quite a while. I miss him or her. I may long with emotional intensity to see and be with my friend again. This is all right; this is me~ I fall into codependence, however, when I expect my friend to feel the same emotions that I do, the same strong loneliness. Because he/she feels differently does not mean that we are no longer friends. We are still connected by the bonds of love and the union of our spirits, but my friend is entitled to his/her own emotional swings. Occasionally we may both experience the same feelings, but that just happens; it cannot be programmed. By giving the gift of not giving my friend the task of living up to my expectations, I free him/her to be a unique self, and I free myself from the frustration of unmet expectations. As I grow, I learn the gift of n6t giving allegiance to everything that is said about,~me, even when it is said by significant others in my life. Opefiness to consider feedback is good and necessary for growth, but I can take the comments offered, test them sincerely against what I know of my true self, and decide to allow them to influence me or reject them as not fitting. More and more I stand free: receptive but able to make choices and.changes for myself. Each of us operates out of a specific personality type. I know that those "unacceptable" aspec.ts of myself, my "shadow," can become for me sources of undreamt growth and expansion. If I am introverted, recognition' of the shadow invites me to promote the development of more assertiveness, more sociability. By taking up the challenge of my "opposites," I give myself the gift of not giving in and becoming com-pletely immersed in my dominant qualities. I also give to others the gift of my expanded personality., my versatility to be reflective and quiet, and to be spontaneous and outgoing. I then realize that I have the potential to grow in all qualities of personality. Giving the gift of not giving can be risky. This is especially so if one is looked upon as a professional "helper." 1 am supposed to rescue peo-ple, or so it is often assumed. But the divine in me nudges me to grow and to foster my own "undependence" so that I do not need to rescue in order to feel worthy or worthwhile. I can then rejoice with the other in his/her efforts that lead to confidence, success, self-esteem, and de-victimization. When I encourage the other to look within her/himself for the indwell-ing God, the source of strength and goodness, then the other's success in dealing with difficulties is truly authentic and lasting. I become, not The Gift of Not Giving a rescuer or savior, but a real companion and friend. Recently a friend said to me, "I am upset over certain events that have taken place lately. I feel I can share with you about those situations because you are concerned and will give your support and prayers, but you won't take on my problems and become as upset as I am, and so be-come an added problem and burden to me. And you won't smother me with sympathy either." I consider those remarks a confirmation of the rightness of the gift of not giving and an uncovering of the true meaning of compassion. Jesus gave the gift of not giving. He refused to give direct answers to the Pharisees who were trying to trap him. He did not allow them to control him or his mission. Jesus did not perform miracles for those un-believers. He refused to compromise himself in order to please them. He did not even accept the adoration of the man who was cleansed from evil. Jesus will not allow us to follow him out of coercion or ignorahce. We must make up our own minds. He gave us the gift of not giving easy answers; he taught in parables. Jesus leaves us free and invites us to re- .sponsible living and loving. He refuses to take on our responsibility for ourselves and our world even though we often try to put on him th~ blame for our misfortunes and our mistakes. o Christ's peace was from within. He was "self-centered," anchored in the depths of his love springing from deep within. We too are chal-lenged to anchor in the gift of self that we find within, put there by God. One way to self is through the gift of not giving. Chapters and Structures William F. Hogan, C.S.C. Father Hogan wrote "The Cross Reconsidered" for our issue of March/April ! 988. His address remains: Fratelli Cristiani; Via della Maglianelli, 375; 00166 Roma, It-aly. Postconstitution chapters in most congregations take a very different form from those in which much labor was directed to working out, concept by concept, word by word, texts of constitutions to be submitted for ec-clesiastical approval. If there was perplexity in some institutes as to what a chapter would do when there were no more constitutions to write, the wonderment soon dissolved as attention was focused on the principal calls of the times: justice, peace, preferential option for the poor, sim-plification of lifestyle, apostolic spirituality, and so forth. Less legisla-tion emerged from the chapters; the accent was on setting immediate goals for administrations and planning steps for implementation of di-rection by the community: simple documents of challenge for reflection, inspiration, action. A variety of formulas, techniques, and approaches have been used to provoke a deep listening to the Spirit during sessions and to share the chapter's reflections and concerns with the larger con-gregation. Our times have seen much effort and creativity to make chap-ters meaningful experiences, and more will be needed in the future be-cause there is no magical formula that can cover every set of concerns or apply to all chapter circumstances. The uniqueness of each chapter will demand an approach suitable to its particularity: what works for one may very well not be beneficial to another. The experience of many congregations would advocate that it is not necessary for chapters to go over every element of the life of a congre-gation, as ordinarily done in the past, because there are so many other 26 Chapters and Structures participative structures in place between chapters. More effective results emerge when one topic is pursued in depth and the congregation's ef-forts are channeled in a particular direction. At the same time it is im-portant that a chapter and other community organs related to a chapter devote some attention to important points other than the principal topic. The 1983 code of Canon Law determines a number of issues to be treated in the particular law of religious congregations, and these fall under the responsibility of a general chapter. Most of these matters have been leg-islated in the constitutions; there is widespread reluctance to touch them after experiencing the difficulties of having constitutions approved, even when a group intellectually acknowledges the need for modifications. Oth-ers are taken up in the secondary book and should be reviewed by the chapter, even though its primary thrust is not concerned with the particu-lar law as such. There are ways of accomplishing this so as not to dis-tract from the major chapter consideration--for example, through the use of an ad hoc committee reviewing the legislation and making recommen-dations to the assembly. Without this review there is always the possi~ bility of a gap developing between living and the calls of the Spirit to move forward in mission. One of the most basic areas not to be overlooked is that of the struc-tures of government, where there are many questions deserving ongoing congideration even though structures are usually treated in the constitu-tions and considered of more permanent nature than rfiatters'of the sec-ondary book. Frequently the particular law of a congregation will state that structures are for the mission:, that the participation of the institute in the continuing mission of Jesus is the determining factor for structures of authority and government and the division of a congregation into life-promoting and mission-serving units. It .is far too easy to let the concept of structures for mission become a dead letter, since the mission is not staticbut constantly undergoing variables. Reflective vigilance is needed to take into account the changing factors of the mission of Jesus today and be at the service of the mission in fact and not just in word. This is especially true in international congregations with their divi-sions into provinces, regions, sectors, and so forth, but finds application also'in national and diocesan groups. Religious institutes are experienc-ing decreases in some of their internal divisions because of aging, loss of members, and other factors with the result that some previously sta-ble units no longer appear capable of maintaining the autonomy neces-saryto function as a unit in the same way. In not a few instances there is occurring a reversal of what have up to this point been geographical Review for Religious, January-February 1989 central and peripheral areas in congregations; then, too, there often is dis-persion of individuals and communities, along with new forms of com-munity. New foundations in third-world countries being made by differ-ent provinces of the same congregation point to a need for a networking among them to provide for sharing of experiences and insights, even if situations are not yet sufficiently clear to establish more permanent struc-tures. And surely, sufficient reflection on the units of a congregation will give rise to other situations in need of monitoring. Canon law and practice leaves the regulation of internal divisions to the individual institute and the authority therein determined, as long as the basic points of the approved constitutions are followed. These latter often allow for more flexibility than seems apparent at first glance; where there may be lacking the necessary suppleness, recourse should be had to the appropriate Church authority. A desire for survival may force the issue of restructuring in some congregations rather than a more overt con-cern that structures serve the mission; whatever be the motivation in fact, watchfulness is called for and the occasion of a chapter provides an op-portunity to exercise a healthy vigilance. Reflection on structures is not meant to pull religious in on them-selves, but outwards to furthering the work of Christ and promoting the qualitative dimension of ministry, life, and contribution to the local Church--lest there be a discrepancy between what we say of ourselves in principle and the reality of what we live. Connected with this reflec-tion is the issue of identity and charism, in the sense that the question at times arises whether to bolster the presence of the congregation in one part of the world through bringing new members from countries where vocations are still in abundance or simply to let the presence eventually fade out of existence. The tendency is to give an answer in terms of the works the religious are doing and whether the apostolates should be con-tinued; yet there is a deeper element than simply the works: Are the re-ligious bringing anything different in terms of witness to the local Church that others cannot effect? Not just a question of doing, but the reality of being: How are we in wha~ we do? No simple answers can be given to this; much soul-searching about the identity to which we witness is en-tailed. And if there is nothing .particular being shared with the local Church in terms of charism, it may be that the Spirit is saying that the congregation's presence is no longer gifting the local Christian commu-nity. A number of other matters concerning authority structures deserve periodic consideration, such as terms of office, interimsbetween chap- Chapters and Structures / 29 ters, and whether chapters are the only or best vehicles to accomplish the promotion of the mission and life. Many congregations have gone through a number of changes during the last two decades concerning the duration of offices because of concern with people being in positions too long, the need for freshness of vision in monitoring change and the cur-rents of the times, and the promotion of participation and development of individuals' gifts and talents. Sometimes in addressing one set of val-ues and making decisions in accord with them, experience shows that other values suffer and perhaps there is conflict in trying to integrate all the facets. Thus some congregations have gone full circle and returned to their original terms of office after various experiments; others have opted for a longer nonrenewable mandate; and still others have deter-mined upon several shorter terms. It would be idealistic to think that the workable formula reached for the present should not be open for recon-sideration if changing circumstances would indicate the need for another solution. Frequently religious Speak of the amount of energy that is expended in preparing chapters and implementing their decisions and orientations; also of the insufficiency of time between chapters for a congregation to realize the implications of chapter decisions before being moved on as a group to other subject matters. The frustrations sometimes expressed in this regard, in conjunction with fatigue over the number of meetings in which religious at times have to participate on different levels, raise the issue of whether there are other ways to accomplish the goals with-out the mechanism of chapters so regularly and all that is entailed therein, and still preserve and foster the principles of members working together toward policies of life and mission. Creativity of thought is needed here to safeguard the values intended by the structure of chapter and at the same time to prevent excessive use of energy that could be more directly channeled toward mission. Further, it might prove opportune from time to time to reflect on some of the points brought over into religious structures from corpora-tion models to assure the rights of individuals and promote participation. Some were needed to correct abuses or remedy problem areas at a par-ticular time. Are they still needed? Has something been lost from the com-munity- of-faith dimension while stressing organizational approaches? Where is the congregation now in the balance of values? Some benefi-cial insights could be gained by a congregation relative to structures for mission from treating these and similar questions. Not to be overlooked either would be the number of people involved :30 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 in community administration full time: too few? too many? enough for the needs of mission on the part of the congregation? How do we under-stand these needs now, taking into account the concept of community for mission and the need for good government and sufficiently broad-based decision making? The answer given at one time will apply only as long as circumstances remain basically the same: hence the need for periodic review. To look at some of these issues of structure from the viewpoint of service of the mission and the community's growth for mission may ap-pe. ar as an invitation to furiher instability in religious life; perhaps it would involve furthe~r unsettling, but in terms--hopefully--of the unset-tling aspe~zts of Jesus' message and mission a~d of the mentaJity of foun-ders and foundresses. Their primary passion, in following Jesus,,was to reveal the Father's love and assist others to experience it in their lives; institutionalization of religious life and structures as such generally arose after the founders' times. Stability of life is an important aspect of relig-ious life; it is expressed in the Church's definitions of consecrated life (see can. 573,1). However, stability must not be equated with no change, especially when the mission that gives meaning to the consecrated life demands change. Stability demands serious prayerful reflection on the whole issue of change, keeping our vision focused 'on the person of Je-sus arid his mission today. And while we concentrate our ,energies and attention on the great sweeping calls of the Spirit of Jesus as reiterated through the Church, we must also keep alert to whether internal struc-tures are enabling for response to mission. Meta-Expectations and the General Chapter J. Roberta Rivello, S.S.J. Sister J. Roberta Rivello is a Sister of Saint Joseph of Philadelphia. She is currently Dean of Graduate Studies Division at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia; prior to that she was research analyst for the Department of Army where she worked for the past seven years. This paper is about the difference between expectations reasonably held and "meta-expectations," and what happens when "meta-expecta-tions" are part of the agenda for a general chapter in religious institutes. Having to deal with these meta-expectations in the general chapter may be a part of the reason why so many religious institutes find themselves, in the years immediately following a general chapter, in the midst of a good deal of frustration, anger, even~outright rejection of some of the mandates of the general chapter. I believe this occurs because many of the expectatio.ns explicitly ex-pressed by the members of an institute are clearly not the substantive con-tent for the general chapter to consider. When a religious institute re-quests from the membership proposals, recommendations, and sugges-tions prior to a general chapter, it may be of some benefit to explain at the same time what is reasonable for the members to expect from the chap-ter, and to provide some criteria for arriving at the proper methods for expressing those expectations to the chapter delegates. Part of this edu-cation could include guidance into what constitutes "reasonable expec-tations," and how to differentiate between these and what I term "meta-expectations." I use the term rneta-expectations as a phenomenological description for the kinds of aspirations and expectations which are not structurally 31 Review for Religious, January-February 1989 . and substantively significant to the issues ~hich h~ive been identified as chapter material. Persons who express such "meta-expectations" through their proposals and letters certainly do not perceive them as meta-expectations-- or they would not submit them. I believe it is the job of the prechapter committees to communicate to those who submit such pro-posals, even personally if possible, why it is that their expectations are not reasonable for the chapter to include in its portfolio of proposals. Do-ing this would eliminate some of the postchapter frustration, even if in-itially the explanation is quite difficult to accept. A general chapter may, for example, need to deal with spirituality and prayer as they relate to the charism of the institute, and proceeds to invite proposals to that effect. When the proposals are reviewed, how-ever, it is found that some members have expressed a variety of expec-tations which~ are, not substantive.ly identifiable with the charism and spiri-tuality of the institute. If these .expectations were to become content for the~delegates' consideration during the chapter, they could seriously im-pair the effectiveness of chapter deliberations and could ultimately erode the charis~n itself of the institute. The "mandates" of a general chapter are simply directives with en-forcement p.ower. These mandates deal with matters which have an im~ pact on the~members' sPiritual development, community life, prayer, ap-ostolic works, or other important areas which are integral to the life of a religious.The precise direction which the general chapter should take is undergirded by the constitutions and charism of the institute. Whatever else, a chapter accomplishes, it ought to accomplish the ful-fillment of its members' first-order reasonable expectations. These rea-sonably held expectations, in turn, ought to flow from the institute's spiri-tuality and charism. Ageneral ch.apter,, however, need not attend with great detail to ful-filling second-order expectations since these do not necessarily consti-tute the ne'cessary and sufficient matter for a general chapter to entertain. It is these latter which I term meta-expectations. Meta-expectations are something which a newly elected leadership might need: to consider sometime soon after entering into their term of office. But religious institutes which choose to concern themselves with such non-reasonable expectations during the general.chapter frequently find that there are.significantly sharp differences between the way the dele-gates perceive of the proposals presented to them and the way the pro-posing me,.mbers perceive the resulting chapter mandates. They will ac-cept the mandates accord.ing to what their expectations were prior to gen- Meta-Expectations and the Chapter eral chapter. Even in the Church today there is a growing sense that religious in-stitutes are experiencing very serious differences in the way the mem-bership perceives the outc0me of general chapters. This is partially due to the way general chapters often conduct their prechapter preparations and the way that Chapters of Affairs are conducted. These differences in perception and interpretation area result of the failure to differentiate between the reasonable expectations and the meta-expectations of the in-stitute's membership. This failure further fragments the members and their acceptance of the mandates and authority of the chapter. In this paper I will try to clarify what are reasonable expectations for a general chapter, and to show the difference between reasonable expec-tations and meta-expectations and how they influence the general chap-ter, Conflict between these two kinds of expectations can exist whenever expectations of any kind are elicited and aroused. For example, if one is invited to dinner, it is all right to expect something to eat but it is not reasonable to expect filet of beefi That is a meta-expectation, and while it may not be wrong to hold such a meta-expectation, it certainly is not reasonable; nor need the host meet it. Neither should the one holding such a meta-expectation be disappointed or offended if the host does not ~erve filet! More relevant to our discussion are the expectations religious have about their general chapters especially when preparations for them evoke strong expectations among the members as well as among the delegates. As I gtated above, two. of the things which ought to be simultane-ously evolving in the months prior to a chapter are how to identify and clarify the proper content for consideration and how to prepare both dele-gates and members to be able to differentiate between meta-expectations and reasonable expectations. It is reasonable for members of a religious institute to e£pect its gen-eral chapter to ~nandate programs for renewal, for spiritual development, for apostoli6 works, and for good community life. But it is not.reason-able to (xpect it to'decide how the membership ought to rest and relax, even thou'gti such matters are very important and time arid thou~ht~ought to be given to their consideration. It is as unreasonable for the member-ship to expect this to be considered as it would 'be for the general chap-ter to consider it---even if some of the delegates want it added to the agenda. The business of a general chapter is to redesign the future of the institute as it finds itself called to reveal Christ to the world in its con-temporary situation. This is its first-order work and is the only claim any- Review for Religious, January-February 1989 one can reasonably make on a general chapter. If the institute is true to its charism, the general chapter will succeed in fulfilling reasonable ex-pectations, and a newly elected leadership, or a reelected leadership, will be confirmed and authorized in working together to find ways and means to carry out what the chapter has mandated. In doing so, general administration should act in such a way that it further clarifies the difference between reasonable expectations and meta-expectations. Acting thus after the chapter assures continuity as well as flexibility in the institute's lived-out charism, since it preserves the in-tegrity of the institute's constitutions even while assuring versatility in their application to the reality that presents itself here and now.~ After all, it is in the real world that the institute exists, and its contemporary situation should be the focus of the institute's energies if it is to survive. If, however, the general chapter takes into consideration everything sub-mitted to it, the real essence of the institute's life becomes obscured. In addition, every proposal presented to the chapter contains its own par-ticular character and language which force the delegates to unpack its meaning before addressing the issue it contains. By sifting out the recta-expectations from the agenda, the delegates will be freed to concentrate on the constitutions and charism of the institute and to interpret the con-temporary situation in light of the Gospels for the world the institute is called to serve. There is good evidence that the bishops did this in Vatican II docu-ments. The document Lumen Gentium shows that they were aware of their .responsibility to separate out the recta-expectations from the rea-sonable ones.2 Their emphasis was on common-good considerations. Common-good considerations evolve from whatever the community has in common, not from things incidental to it. I believe this is why the docu-ments are clearly and straightforwardly parousial (expectant), so fitting for a Church in labor to reveal Christ to the world. For religious insti-tutes, the emphasis should also be on the common good, that is, on what the institute holds in common and what it shares as an institute in labor to reveal Christ to the world. For religious, this is found in their consti-tutions and in the charism of its founding. The document Perfectae Cari-tatis expresses the expectation of the Church about what it believes re-ligious institutes are called to be: Religious should carefully consider that through them, to believers and nonbelievers alike, the Church truly wishes to give an increasingly clearer revelation of Christ. Through them Christ should be shown con-templating on the mountain, announcing God's kingdom to the multi- Meta-Expectations and the Chapter / 35 tude, healing the sick and the maimed, turning sinners to wholesome fruit, blessing children, doing good to all, and always obeying the will of the Father who sent him.3 Rather than stating the expectations of religious, the document states what it is the Church expects of the religious institutes. This sense of expectation is not alien to either the Old or New Tes-taments. Scriptures retell the sacred history of a people filled with ex-pectation for a Messiah. For some, that expectation was misplaced or mis-focused so that when the Messiah came, when the expectation was ful-filled, they did not recognize it. Likewise, the message of Christ was clearly a statement of what it was he expected of us as we await his sec-ond coming. It is this same degree of expectation which is the ground-ing for religious institutes coming into being in the first place, that is, to reveal Christ to others even as we await (expect) his second coming. At this time some institutes are preparing for their chapter. A great deal of preparation will take place, I am sure. Included in that prepara-tion should be some education on what constitutes reasonable expecta-tions for the membership to have and how to express those expectations in proposals, letters, and prechapter committee work. I believe that some of the meta-expectations expressed prior tochapter in proposals to the general chapter are the result of excessive reliance on congregational and personal self-analyses which, in turn, rely too heavily on current statis-tics, social analysis, and popular trends. This tendency is best described as the historicist versus the historical view of events.4 Both views are needed but if they are not balanced, the religious institutes are robbed of either their historical tradition and dynamism (charism) or of insights derived from knowledge of the cultural and intellectual shifts occurring in society. Needless to say, I believe the omission of either is wrong. In fact, one of the tasks of the general chapter is to ensure that the bal-ance between both perspectives is maintained. Furthermore, an advan-tage to holding the Chapter of Election after the Chapter of Affairs is to ensure that the elected leadership is committed to carrying out the man-date of the general chapter and to the mission of the institute visible in its charism. The business of meta-expectations derailing expectations occurs daily in society--in the system of justice, in education, in government and other natural systems. It ought to occur less frequently in religious institutes if they are open to the Spirit unfolding in them. One other example of the distinction between meta-expectations and Review for Religious, January-February 1989 expectations might clarify what I am saying. In a religious institute mem-bers may experience some dissatisfaction with the missioning process, and all kinds of proposals expressing both meta-expectations and expec-tations emerge. The dissatisfaction is with the process and not with the people doing the job. Instead of focusing on the dissatisfaction, the dele-gates begin, as a result of some meta-expectations, to design new roles and functions for the persons charged with missioning when they ought to have seriously looked at the process and analyzed the cause of dis-content. The process is in need of change; failure to redesign it changes nothing, and future chapters will find themselves still dealing with dis-content about the process. Sometimes an issue is finally resolved but only after it has resurfaced in several chapters. One cannot be sure, however, that the ultimate resolution flows from reasonable expectations or not. What is certain is that if it is the result of meta-expectation something of the institute's charism is diminished. A model for expectations showing the process involved in discern-ment of the kinds of things which happen as a result of responses pro-vided in proposals follows: -Perception: dissatisfaction with missioning process -Response: a change is needed in the process In this model the response is a ~reasonable expectation for members to have. The model also lends itself to scrutiny by the delegates who will then test various recommendations made in the context of chapter to see how they relate to the charism and spirituality of the institute. In doing this, no special interest or meta~expectation will drive the final outcome. After chapter, the information and proposals not used in chapter can be given additional study and perhaps even be used for input into some ad hoc trial period of experimentation. A second model based on meta-expectations follows: -Perception: dissatiSfaction with missioning process -Response: establishment of new roles for persons charged with process The response in this case is the fulfillment of a meta-expectation since it begins to deal with m'any different aspects of the dissatisfaction. The issue is clearly defined as dissatisfaction with the process; then the charism and spirituality of the institute should dictate the solution. The response in this model is expressive of one of the many meta-expecta-tions expressed, all of which are not substantively, relative to the insti-tute's charism and spirituality. This model is provided as example; it is not a definitive model. Religious institutes can substitute ever so many examples which violate their own particular charism. This is not to say Meta-Expectations and the Chapter / 37 that it is wrong to have the vision to redesign the institute or to follow "paths unknown." What this paper is addressing is the growing aware-ness among religious that somewhere things are going amiss and worse, that it is becoming increasingly more difficult for the institute to recog-nize its own charism and spirituality at work in the Church for which it is called to reveal Christ and through him the Father. In this brief essay I have tried to make a distinction between the jus-tifiable and reasonable expectations one might have for a general chap-ter and the meta-expectations one might have, which are not reasonable for a general chapter to consider in its deliberations, no matter how at-tractive or relevant those meta-expectations appear. NOTES ~ Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J., Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. London. 1958. passim. 2 Walter M. Abbot, S.J. (ed.), The Documents of Vatican !!, p. 225, n. 26. All ref-erences to the Documents are taken from here. 3 Documents, p. 77, n. 46. 4 For an insightful account of the distinction between historicism and historicalism, read Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J., Method In Theology: London, 1971. pp. 323- 326, 239, 318. See also the works of Wilhelm Dilthey and Ernest Troeltsch; Maurice Mandelbaum. Enc. Phil., 4:22-25. Thomas Merton and His Own Cistercian Tradition M. Basil Pennington, O.C.S.O. Father Basil's most recent article in this journal was "Simple Contemplative Prayer" (March/April 1987). He now resides at Assumption Abbey; Rt. 5, Box 193; Ava, Missouri 65608. I presume most of the readers of this essay are fairly familiar with the life and development of Thomas Merton. In the last pages of the Secular Jour-nal, Merton sums up his spiritual journey towards the Church and mon-astery: From Gilson's Spirit of Medieval Philosophy I learned a healthy respect for Catholicism. Then Ends andMeans taught me to respect mysticism. Maritain's Art and Scholasticism was another important influence, and Blake's poetry. Perhaps also Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism, though I read precious little of it. I was fascinated by the Jesuit sermons in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man! What horrified him, began to appeal to me. It seemed to me quite sane. Finally G. F. Lahey's Life of Gerard Manley Hopkins; I was reading about Hopkins's conver-sion when 1 dropped the book and ran out of the house to look for Fa-ther Ford. ~ It is not surprising that this author would be influenced primarily by authors and their books. In a preface to A Thomas Merton Reader, published in 1962, six years before his tragic death, Merton summed up his monastic years: I would say that my life at Gethsemani has fallen roughly into four pe-riods. First, the novitiate. I was a novice in 1942-1944. Those were hard years, before the days when radiators were much in favor during the win-ter, when the hours of communal prayer were much longer, when the 38 Merton and Cistercian Tradition fasts were much stricter. It was a period of training, and a happy, aus-tere one; during which 1 wrote little. The best Gethsemani poems be-long to this period. At the end of the novitiate my health broke down and I was ap-pointed to write and do translations of French books and articles. I was also studying philosophy and theology in preparation for ordination to the priesthood. This second period extends from 1944, my first vows, to ordination in 1949. At first the writing was very bad . In 1946 I wrote Seven Storey Mountain, in 1947 Seeds of Contemplation, and in 1948 The Waters of Siloe. After ordination, in 1949, there was an-other brief period of poor health and nervous exhaustion. I was almost incapable of writing for at least a year and a half after I became a priest. Then after a rest period in the hospital, I wrote The Ascent to Truth and Bread in the Wilderness (both about 1951) and finished The Sign of Jonas, 1952. In 1951 1 was appointed the Master of Scholastics, that is, of the young monks studying for ordination in the monastery. This en-tailed a fair amount of work preparing conferences and classes. Books like The Living Bread and particularly No Man is an Island and The Si-lent Life belong to the end of this period. Finally, a fourth stage. In 1955 I was made Master of the Choir Nov-ices. This is an office involving considerable work and responsibility. No writing of any account was done in ! 956, but after that it was possi-ble to produce short books or collections of essays, and some poetry. Disputed Questions, The Wisdom of the Desert, The Behavior of Titans, and New Seeds of Contemplation belong to this last period. So too do more recent essays on nuclear war, on Chinese thought, on liturgy, and on solitude.2 It is notable that in all of this literary reminiscing, Merton does not mention specifically any Cistercian Father or any of the work he did con-cerning them. Actually he does not seem to have had any contact with the Cistercian tradition prior to entering the monastery. But, in fact, once he entered the Cistercian life he so immersed himself in it that it became the very matrix of his life and .thinking. In his early days as he was as-similating Cistercian spirituality, Merton wrote about the Cistercian Fa-thers explicitly. When he served the community as Master of Scholastics and as Novice Master, he spoke about them constantly; his notes and his taped conferences are full of them. Later they cropped up spontaneously in his writings, the paradigm against which he evaluated what he was then absorbing. One of his favorites would find his place in the final talk Merton gave a few hours before his sudden death.3 When Merton first entered the monastery, there was, as he said in the epilogue of The Spirit of, Simplicity,4 little of the Cistercian Fathers 40 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 available in English.5 But this did not hinder him. He not only found no problem in reading the Latin texts in Migne, he strongly believed that translations always lacked something of the origin~il.6 How carefully he studied these texts is witnessed not only by his frequent use of quota-tions from them in his early writings and the talks he gave his scholas-tics and novices, but also by the .und.erlinings and annotations found in the voit]mes of the Fathers which he used. One of Thomas Merton's-- or Frater Louis, as he was then called-- earliest assignments was to translate a.report from the CisterCian Gen-eral Chapter, entitled The Spirit of Simplicity,7 and provide a suitable in-troduction for it. He'not only did that but gathered a complementary selection of texts from St. Bernard on interior simplicity in its fullness. He translated these and commented on them, turning the report into a full book. This part of the The Spirit of Simplicity has recently been published in a volume in the Cistercian Studies Series with two other early Bernar-dine essays of Merton.8 He wrote a five-part study of Bernard and St. John of the Cross for Collectanea which expresses his concern of that period when he was writing The Ascent to Truth .9 We can detect in these essays a certain struggle Merton was experiencing in trying to respond both to the rich, fully human patristic heritage Bernard offered him and the exciting, stimulating, scholastic approach which John of the Cross was able to integrate with a high mystical theology. It wbuld be Ber-nard's approach that would win him over. In the prologue to The Sign of Jonas he would write: "I found in writing The Ascent to Truth that technical language, though it is univer-sal and certain and accepted by theologians, .does not reach the average man and does not convey what is more personal and most vital in relig-ious experience. Since my focus is not upon dogmas as such, but only on their repercussions in the life of a soul in which they begin to find concrete realization, I may be pardoned for using my own words to talk about my own soul." ~0 The third piece in the Cistercian Studies volume witnesses to another early concern of Merton--the superiority of thecontemplative life. In an extensive essay which was first published serially in ~Collectanea and later appeared as a volume in French,~ Merton is at pains to establish that the apostolic life, though it may have a fullness beyond the purely contemplative life, as Bernard ,acknow!edges,.has true:value only inso-far as it flows out of contemplation. And thus the contemplative life is in itself more important or of greater dignity. Merton's~argumentation Merton and Cistercian Tradition here is not all that easy to follow, nor that cogent. Later he himself would comment negatively about such preoccupation.~2 The eighth centenary of Bernard's death led to a spate of publishing on the saint. Merton translated the papal encyclical produced for the oc-casion and wrote an introduction to it. ~3 He was invited to introduce other works. His preface to Bernard de Clairvaux, a collection of studies pub-lished by the Historical Commission of his order and edited by its chair-man, Father Jean-de-la-Croix Bouton, shows the increasing influence of Bernard on Merton.~4 The piece is filled with scriptural texts and allu-sions. We might.say it is a very Bernardine piece about Bernard. In line with his earlier concentration, Merton sees that Bernard added to the Cis-tercian reform "an emphatic call to contemplative union with God." ~5 At the same time Merton begins to reveal a more integral understanding of Bernard as a "man of his times . . . a many-sided saint." 16 This is further in evidence in the next piece. His .introduction to Bruno Scott James's translation of the letters of St. Bernard, he considered important. ~7 At his behest it was included in A Thomas Merton Reader in the section ".Mentors and Doctrines."~8 It revealed Thomas Merton's growth in his appreciation for Bernard in line with his own personal growth. Merton had had his experience on the cor-ner of Maple and Fourth. He now beheld all with a greater integrity. He had a new .appreciation for Bernard the man. H~e appreciated the letters because they so well brought out the human dimension of the great saint: They [the letters] show the man as he is, and because he is so much a man, readers who forget that saints must be men may sometimes be in-clined to question his saintliness . Bernard is sent to instruct us how human a saint must be to forge'out the will of God in the heat of the affairs of men . He had the humility to be himself in the thick of a silly argument. He had the good grace to admit that a saint might pos-sibly have to bicker with another saint . The angry Bernard, the pas-sionate Bernard . . . the merciful Bernard, the gentle long-suffering monk who could be as tender as a mother . 19 As Merton noted in his brief literary biography quoted above, liturgy came more to the fore in a later period of his life. In Seasons of Cele-bration he published one of his most beautiful pieces on St. Bernard: "The Sacrament of Advent in the Spirituality of St. Bernard.' ,20 It is undoubtedly St. Bernard, the "Theologian of the Cistercian Life" (as Merton's friend Jean Leclercq would name him), who received the most attention from Merton. Besides Bernard's prominence as the mas-ter of the Cistercian school, there would be the influence of Gilson. As 42 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 we have seen above, Gilson was one of the first to open the way for Mer-ton towards Catholicism. Merton's respect for him never diminished, and his masterful work The Mystical Theology of Saint BerndrdZ~ was most carefully studied and wholly accepted by Merton.22 But Merton read all the significant Cistercian Fathers, and spoke and wrote on them as occa-sion offered. The "Bernard of the North," Bernard's disciple, the abbot of Rievaulx, Aelred, received special attenti.on. Merton has an extensive un-published piece on him, which looks like it was on the way to becoming a book. We can hope it will. soon appear in Cistercian Studies. It is an important piece, and I shall return to it later in this esgay. As one of his first projects for Cistercian Publications, Merton wrote an introduction for Father Amfd6e Hallier's Monastic Theology of Aelred of Rievaulx. Here again we see the later Merton rejecting earlier attitudes: Let us be quite clear the monastic theology of Aelred is not a partisan "theology of monasticism." It is not an apologia for .the life of the monk, and not a kind of gnostic system organized to prove some sup-posed superiority of "the contemplative life," urging a flight to ineffa-ble convulsions,z3 He saw that "the Christian life is, for Aelred, simply the full flow-ering of freedom and consent in the perfection of friendship. Friendship with other human beings is an epiphany of friendship with God." Mer-ton notes that "Not so long ago, some of Aelred's books were kept un-der lock and key in Trappist libraries. ,,24 Merton never wrote a particular essay on Bernard's closest friend, William of Saint Thierry, but he considered him "a profound and origi-nal theologian and a contemplative in his own right."25 He dedicated one of his first books to him, "one of the saints and mystical theologians of the Golden Age," and quoted him extensively in the foreword.26 In regard to the fourth of the evangelists of Citeaux, Guerric of Igny, we have the opportunity to get a sampling of Merton's more ordinary treat-ment of the Cistercian Fathers in his talks to the juniors at Gethsemani. Sister Bernard Martin of Chimay transcribed two of Merton's talks which had been taped and published the transcription in Cistercian Studies in 1972.27 For Merton, "Guerric was really deep and very spiritual and very mystical."28 And as Merton.opens him up for his novices, he is also very much alive, very practical and down to earth. It is in these intimate talks that we best see how the Cistercian Fathers reverberated in the mind and heart of this twentieth-century Cistercian Father. Merton and Cistercian Tradition There is a more formal treatment of Guerric of Igny and his liturgi-cal sermons in Merton's introduction to the Gethsemani Christmas book for 1959: Sister Rose of Lima's translation of Guerric's Christmas ser-mons. 29 Other Cistercian Fathers turn up in Merton's published writings. There are poems about St, Alberic3° and St. Malachy.3! When Cister-cian Studies began publishing Sister Penelope's translation of the ser-mons of Isaac of Stella, Merton provided an introduction for this "not the least interesting of the Cistercian writers."32 He found him a "more independent thinker and less subject to the dominant influence of Saint Bernard''33, whose writings reminded him "at times of Eckhart in their tone."34 Merton's spirit resonated with this abbot who withdrew from a large and important Cistercian abbey to an erernus, a poor and lonely island foundation. Merton provided an introduction for another Cistercian Father, one of his favorites, Adam of Perseigne.35 Earlier he had written about Adam's theory of monastic formation in an essay that was published in Charles Dumont's French translation.36 Adam was for Merton something of a mentor in his duties as novice master, and his admiration for the ab-bot of Perseigne remained till the end. In his final talk at Bangkok he brings him forth to illustrate a basic monastic theory.37 When the earlier essay was further developed, Merton gave it a new title, one that wit-nessed to his own development: The Feast of Freedom. Adam, Aelred, all the great Cistercian Fathers led Merton in the same direction. But Merton did not have an unbounded admiration for all the twelfth-century Cistercian writers, Here is an example, Gamier of Langres: Gamier was not deep and not spiritual and not mystical. He was a literal-minded person with a lot of learning. As a matter of fact he is quite in-teresting, On the liturgy, he has a lot of little statements about what they did at the time and what they thought they were doing and why they did it. But these are just little statements of historical fact. Today Gamier would be a scientific-minded critic. "But a scientific-minded critic in the Middle Ages is just about zero, because he has nothing to work on . He's finished, he's dated, he's way back. He is no more modern than 'a twelfth-century concept of the universe.38 He goes so far as to say: "His work., is not in English at all, and if it never gets translated into English that won't be too soon.' ,39 This does, though, give, us another indication as to the extent to which Merton worked his way through the pages of Migne4° and ex-plored all the published writings of the early Cistercian Fathers. 44 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 Above I have mentioned the monograph that Merton was working on entitled "Saint Aelred of Rievaulx." This is a significant piece of work. In placing Aelred in context Merton gives a fine synopsis of Cis-tercian history and especially literary history from the foundation in 1098 up till the death of Becket (+ 1170). But I think one of the valuable ele-ments of this work is the insight that Merton has as a later Cistercian writer into these early Cisterclan writers. Indeed, as I read the pertinent section I ask.myself if this is not a candid insight into Merton himself as a Cistercian writer: ¯ . . the rich and elegant vitality of Cistercian prose--most of which is sheer poetry--betrays an overflow 0( literary productivity which did not even need to strive for its effects: it achieved them, as it were, sponta-neously. It seemed to be second nature to St. Bernard, William of St. Thierry, Adam of Perseigne, Guerric of lgny, to write with consummate beauty prose full of sound and color and charm, There were two natural explanations for this. The first is that the prolific Cistercian writers of the Golden Age were men who had already been thoroughly steeped in the secular literary .movements of the time before they entered the clois-ter. All of them had rich experience of the current of humanism that flow-ered through the twelfth-century renaissance . There is a second explanation for the richness and exuberance of theo-logical prose in twelfth-century monasteries of Citeaux. If contact with classical humanism had stimulated a certain intellectual vitality in these clerics, it hlso generated a conflict in their souls. The refined natural ex-citements produced by philosophical speculation, by art, poetry, music, by the companionship of restless sensitive and intellectual friends merely unsettled their souls. Far from finding peace and satisfaction in all these things, they found war. The only answer to the problem was to make a clean break with everything that stimulated this spiritual uneasiness, to withdraw from the centers in which it was fomented, and get away somewhere, discover some point of vantage from which they could see the whole difficulty in its proper perspective. This vantage point, of course, was not only the cloister, since Ovid and Tully had already be-come .firmly established' there, but the desert--the terra invia et inaquosa in which the Cistercian labored and suffered and prayed . The tension generated by the conflict between secular humanism and the Christian humanism, which seeks the fulfillment of human nature through ascetic renunciation and mystical union with God, was one 6f the proximate causes of the powerful mystical writing of the Cistercians. , However, once these two natural factors have been considered, we must recognize other and far more decisive influences, belonging to a higher order . It is the relish and savor that only experience can Merton and Cistercian Tradition give, that communicates to the writings of the twelfth-century Cister-cians all the vitality and vividness and impassioned sincerity which are peculiarly their own . The White Monks speak with accents of a more personal and more lyrical conviction that everywhere betrays the influence of an intimate and mystical experience . It is the personal, experiential character of Cistercian mysticism that gives the prose of the White Monks its vivid freshness . Since the theology of the Cistercians was so intimately persona! and experiential, their exposition of it was bound to take a psychological di-rection. All that they wrote was directed by their keen awareness of the presence and action of God in their souls. This was their all-absorbing interest.4~ Many scholars have noted that Merton's writings show a rather su-perficial knowledge of the Eastern religions. But when I traveled in the East and spoke with the spiritual masters there who had come into con-tact with Merton on his last journey, they said they had never met any-one from the West who had so fully understood their ways. I think the same might be said of Merton and the Cistercian Fathers. Certainly many scholars know more about the Fathers and the early history of the Cis-tercian order. But few, if any, so fully understand their spirit as does this twentieth-century Cistercian Father. Moreover, no one has been able to express so fully and clearly, and in a way that communicates to our times, what these Fathers have to say to our times and to the renewal of the Cistercian order. Cistercians cannot but profit from choosing Tho-mas Merton, their F.ather Louis, for their lectio, from spending time with him and letting him lead them into a deeper, fuller understanding and appreciation of their Cistercian Fathers. NOTES ~ Thomas Merton, The Secular Journal ofThomas Merton (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1959), pp. 268f. 2 A Thomas Merton Reader, ed. by Thomas McDonnell (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), pp. viiif. 3 Adam of Perseigne. See The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1973), p. 333. 4 The Spirit of Simplicity: Characteristic of the Cistercian Order (Trappist, Ken-tucky: Abbey of Gethsemani, 1948). 5 Ibid., p. 137. Merton played an important role in remedying this situation in the part he played in the founding of Cistercian Publications, which has now published more than forty volumes of the Cistercian Fathers in English. 6 Reader, p. 317. 46/Review for Religious, January-February 1989 7 See note 4 above. 8 Thomas Merton on Saint Bernard, Cistercian Studies Series (hereafter CS), vol. 9 (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1980), pp. 103-157. 9 New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951. ~0 Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), pp. 8f. ~ Marthe, Marie, et Lazare (Bruges: Desclee de Brouwer, 1956). ~2 In the preface to A Thomas Merton Reader he would write: ". it would be a still greater misapprehension to say I am simply trying to prove that the contempla-tive life is 'better than the active life,' . Not only am I not trying to prove these propositions, but stated in this bald and unqualified manner, I do not even hold them. It is true that fifteen years ago I was able to get excited about such theses, but I have come to see that controversy about speculative matters of this sort is not only a waste of time but is seriously misleading. We are all too prone to believe in our own pro-grams and to follow the echo of our own slogans into a realm of illusion and unreal-ity"( p, viii). 13 The Last of the Fathers (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954). ~4 Bernard of Clairvaux (Paris: Editions Alsatia, 1953). It was later published in The Tablet and Cross and Crown and in Disputed Questions (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960),.pp. 260-276, under the title "St. Bernard, Monk and Apostle." ~5 Disputed Questions, p. 263. 16 Ibid., p. 262. ~7 Bruno Scott James, St. Bernard of Clairvaux Seen Through his Selected Letters (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953), pp. v-viii. ~8 Reader, pp. 315-319. 19 Reader, pp. 316f. zo Seasons of Celebration (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), pp. 61-87. z~ New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955. 22 There is a copy of Gilson's work in the Merton Center at Columbi~ University with Merton's underlining and marginalia which indicate the care with which he stud-ied this book. 23 Am~d~e Hallier, The Monastic Theology ofAelred ofRievaulx, tr. by Colum-ban Heaney, CS 2 (Spencer, Massachusetts: Cistercian Publications, 1969), p. viii. 2,~ Ibid., pp. xif. 25 "Saint Aelred of Rievaulx," MSS, p. 20. ??26ft2The Spirit of Simplicity, pp. vf. 27 Thomas Merton, "Guerric of lgny's Easter Sermons" in Cistercian Studies, vol. 7 (1972), pp. 85-95. 28 Ibid., p. 85. 29 The Christmas Sermons of Blessed Guerric of lgny, tr. by Sr. Rose of Lima (Trap-pist, Kentucky: Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, 1959), pp. 1-25. 30 "Saint Alberic" in Selected Poems of Thomas Merton (New York~ New Direc-tions, 1959), pp. 44f. 3~ Ibid., pp. 75ff. This poem is reproduced in the Reader, pp. 177f. 32 Louis Merton, "Isaac of Stella: An Introduction to Selections from his Sermons," in Cistercian Studies, vol. 2 (1967), p. 243. 33 Ibid. 3,~ Ibid., p. 244. 35 "The Feast of Freedom: Monastic Formation according to Adam of Perseigne," Merton and Cistercian Tradition in The Letters of Adam ofPerseigne, vol. 1, tr. by Grace Perigo, Cistercian Fathers Series, no. 21 (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1976), pp. 3-48. 36 "La formation monastique selon Adam de Perseigne," in Collectanea Ordinis Cisterciensium Reformatorum, vol. 19 (1957), pp. 1-17. 37 The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1973), p. 333. 38 "Guerric . . . Easter Sermons," pp. 85f. 39 Ibid. 40 He read Garnier in Patrologia Latina, vol. 205. 4~ MSS. pp. 10-17. Liturgy of the Hours: A Canticle for Canticles Three canticles encompass all our praise: Three sacred songs of trusting love and hope. At dawn there breaks upon us like the sun, Old Zechariah's paean to God's work. At dusk, like Vesper star, young Mary sings Magnificat for mercy to us all. Then at day's end in darkness gently fall Old Simeon's thankful words, as clear and bright As Compline candles glowing in the dark To mark the end of day, perhaps of life: To let God's servants go in peace to him. Three son~s that with their jeweled antiphons, Like winking diamonds, daily bring delight As we lift hearts at dawn, at dusk, at night. Maryanna Childs, O.P. Ohio Dominican College 1818 Sunbury Road Columbus, Ohio 43219 The Challenge of Church Teachings: How Do I Respond? Lucy Blyskal, C.S.J. Sister Lucy Blyskal, C.S.J., has a doctorate in canon law and is a diocesan judge on the Tribunal of the diocese of Rockville Centre, New York. Her article is the fruit of her canon law dissertation on the Church's teaching authority. Her address is Tri-bunal of the Diocese of Rockville Centre; 50 North Park Avenue; Rockville Centre, New York 11570. In view of the increasing number of official Church pronouncements on many debated issues, how can today's religious keep informed and re-flect intelligently on such statements? How does one discern and listen to the Spirit of the teaching Church and the Spirit within oneself? The purpose of this article, comprised of two parts, is to help us to respond appropriately to papal and episcopal documents. The first sec-tion discusses three main aspects of the Church's teaching authority: (I) the truths of the faith as given to the ff.hgle.Church; (2) the concept of infallible Church teaching; (3) the noninfallible teaching and the response owed to it by the faithful. The second part offers the reader a practical method for analyzing doctrinal statements, and then applies this method to evaluate three somewhat controversial doctlments issued recently. Hopefully, this information will lead to a deepened knowledge and love of the faith which ought to transform our hearts and impel us to serve justice and peace in the world. Part I: Church Teaching Authority Revelation as Given to the Whole Church To set the correct context for'a discussion of teaching authority, it is important to keep in mind that the Church is fundamentally a commu- 48 Challenge of Church Teachings / 49 nity of faith and witness which worships God in Jesus Christ and bears witness to the Church's divinely given message throughout the world. Because Christ handed over the deposit of revelation to the whole Church, it is in the possession of the whole body of Spirit-empowered people, not just the hierarchy. While Scripture calls Peter the "rock" on which the Church was to be built, it never refers to him or the twelve apostles as "the Church." Thus, to speak of "the Church" as having done something when in fact an office or official is the source is theo-logic. ally incorrect; one should name the office involved, for example, "the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stated . "~ In its doctrine on infallibility, Vatican I carefully and explicitlyaf-firmed that the deposit of revelation is with the whole Church. The text of Vatican I names the Church as the primary subject of infallibility in stating that: "the Roman Pontiff. enjoys the infallibility with which the divine Redeemer wanted his'Church to be endowed in defining doc-trine concerning faith or morals."2 Vatican II in The Constitution on the Church (article 12) clearly reitera.ted that, thanks to a supernatural sense of faith which characterizes the People of God, "the body of faithful as a whole, anointed as they are by the Holy One (see Jn 2:20, 27) can-not err in matters of belief." Since all believers possess, can perceive, and have insights into the Christian revelation, what is the specific task and charism of the hierar-chy? By Christ's will, the disciples were commissioned: (I) to be his "witnesses. to the end of the earth" (Ac !:8); (2) to "go and teach all nations" (Mt 28:19) his full revelation, under the guidance of his Spirit. (1) The chief vocation of the disciples and their successors is "to witness" to the integrity and truth of the evangelical doctrine. This call to witness does not necessarily include the capacity to have and to ar-ticulate the deepest insights into the meaning of the mysteries of our faith,3 which is a special gift. It is noteworthy that this gift has produced some of the most significant developments in the understanding of the faith not in members of the hierarchy but in such persons as Thomas Aqui-nas, honored as the common teacher of the Church, and Teresa of Av-ila, named doctor of the spiritual life. (2) Because of Christ's command to his disciples to "teach all na-tions," the Christian community from its earliest days has also recog-nized the importance of an authoritative teaching body to maintain inner unity as the gospel was being spread. By Christ's will, this teaching authority, termed the "magisterium," belongs to the hierarchy who are 50 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 sacramentally empowered and assisted by the Spirit to speak in the name of.Jesus Christ. Therefore, Catholics are to trust what pope and bishops teach, not because of their personal learning or stated reasons for their teaching, but precisely because of the spiritual authority of the office they occupy.4 Infallible Teaching Authority Vatican Council I first defined the infallible teaching authority of the Church as an article of faith in promulgating the dogmatic constitution Pastor Aeternus in 1870.5 While it reaffirmed this dogma of Vatican I, Vatican Council II integrated it into the doctrine on the collegiality of the bishops united with the pope and the doctrine of the Church as the People of God (Constitution on the Church, articles 12, 18, 25). Article 25 of this constitution6 states that when the pope or the episcopal col-lege (pope and bishops together) solemnly,proclaim matters of faith and morals, they are protected by the Spirit of Christ from misleading the peo-ple by teaching erroneous doctrine; hence their teaching is infallible. Several conditions need to be fulfilled for a teaching to be consid-ered infallible. First, the doctrine must deal with a matter of faith or mor-als. Second, it must be proclaimed by a duly authorized Church teacher as binding on the universal Church. Finally, it must be proclaimed "to be definitively held" by all Catholics as a dogma of faith. This infalli-ble teaching authority has been exercised only rarely since its cautious and circumscribed definition by Vatican Council I. More recently, the Constitution of the Church and the 1983 Code of Canon Law7 describe three ways in which this infallible magisterium can be exercised. (I) The pope may issue a solemn or ex cathedra pronouncement. Ac-cording to Vatican Council I, popes possess and can articulate the infal-libility with which the Divine Redeemer endowed his Church for defini-tive decisions in matters of faith and morals. For example, Pope Pius XII proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption by the bull Mun~ficentissimus issued November i, 1950. (2) The episcopal college may act solemnly in ecumenical councils. In ecumenical councils, the episcopal college, assembled in one place, acquires a special clarity and efficacy. Here the corporate episcopate can act in a solemn manner to define an article of faith; for example, Vati-can Council I promulgated the doctrine of infallibility in Pastor Aeter-nus in 1870. (3) The episcopal college may exercise its "ordinary and universal magisterium." In their ordinary and universal magisterium, the same bish- Challenge of Church Teachings / 51 ops, without coming together in one assembly, and with each remaining at his post, can definitively set forth some doctrine for the absolute ac-ceptance oLthe entire Church. In practice it is not always easy to ascer-tain whether or not the magisterium in a given case is exercising infalli-bility through this "ordinary" manner. It has been suggested that a pos-sible example of this level of Church doctrine is the common and con-stant teaching of pope and bishops throughout the world on the moral evil of abortion. How is an infallible doctrine to be received by the faithful? Vatican II's Constitution on the Church and the 1983 Code hold that infallible teaching must be accepted with obsequium fidei, translated as the 'as-sent of faith." This assent of faith is to be absolute and unconditional because it involves divine authority which utteriy excludes the possibil-ity of error. Consequently, the obstinate denial of truths proclaimed as infallible would constitute heresy. However, various Church documents warn the faithful to receive a teaching as infallible only when it has been definitively proclaimed as such. Vatican II, for example, declared that its statements on faith or morals should be seen as binding on the Church only when the council expressly declared them as such.8 Like'vise, the new Code cautions that no doctrine is understood to~ be infallibly defined "unless this is manifestly demonstrated. ,,9 From this review of the meaning of infallible teaching, it is obvious that the great majority of doctrinal statements issued on a day-to-day ba-sis do not fit into this category. Rather, most documents seem to belong to the nondefinitive level of authority--which makes the accurate under-standing of this noninfallible teaching crucially important today. Noninfallible Church Teaching The noninfallible magisterium is the term used to refer to the follow-ing exercises of the Church's teaching office: (l) the pronouncements of the pope when he is not teaching ex cathedra; (2) the declarations of an office of the Roman See with the special approval of the doctrine by the pope as his own; (3) the declarations of a curial office with routine but not special papal approval; (4) the promulgation of a doctrine by the pope toget, l~er with the college of bishops in council; (5) the teachings of an individual bishop; (6) the pronouncements of a grouping of bishops in an episcopal conference or a particular council. In order to respond appropriately to the numerous doctrinal state-ments issued by these official teachers, one needs to understand: (I) the nature of noninfallible teaching; (2) gradations among nondefinitive teach-ings; (3) inherent difficulties. Review for Religious, January-February 1989 ( I ) The Nature of Noninfallible Teaching. Three basic principles un-derlie this exploration of the noninfallible magisterium. (a) The concepts of noninfallible Church teaching and the response owed to it are evolving concerns whose complete meanings are not yet in the Church's consciousness. ~0 Recall that the definition of infallible teaching authority (1870) took place only within the last one hundred twenty years of the Church's two thousand year existence, (b) The issues of nondefinitive Church teaching and the response owed to it are being examined and applied by a Church that is itself an evolving reality as a community and an institution. ~ (c) With the spread and evolution of the Church, there has been a concomitant growth and development of doctrine, for example, "a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down" (Constitution on Divine Revelation, article 8). Vati-can II reiterated in its Decree on Ecumenism that: "If there are deficien-cies in the formulation of doctrine . these should be appropriately rectified at the proper moment" (article 6). More recently, the Congre-gation for the Doctrine of the Faith for the first time officially acknowl-edged that even the Church's expression of a truth of revelation at a par-ticular age may need to b~ reformulated in a subsequent era. ~2 These of-ficial statements on the growth possible in dogmatic teaching can be ap-plied afortiori to the noninfailible level of teaching. ,Basically, it is difficult to categorize the precise nature of nondefini-tire teaching. According to Orsy, noninfallible teaching is composed of two types of doctrine in an organic unity: some changeable h~uman thoughts (often of a particular school), and incorrupt expressions of the deposit of revelation. For this reason, simplistic statements such as "non-infallible statements by ecclesiastical authorities are binding," or, "dis-sent from noninfallibly stated doctrine should be always permissible" do not recognize .the complex content of the body of noninfallible beliefs. Orsy also makes the important observation that a particular document may, and. usually does, contain a mixture of infallible and noninfallible teachings without any indication of the different levels involved. ~3 In 1967, the German bishops referred to another significant aspect of noninfallible teaching authority when they pointed out that this level of magisterium "can, and on occasion actually does fall into error." 14 Francis Sullivan, a theologian, comments that it seems impossible to fault the reasoning of the German bishops: if the nondefinitive teaching of the magisterium is not infallible, it can be erroneous and can stand in need of correction. ~5 Here the basic principle of the development of Challenge of Church Teachings doctrine comes into play. Indeed the Church has corrected or reversed its stance on a number of occasions. 16 For example, the Decree on Ecu-menism of Vatican II clearly departed from previous papal teaching re-garding the Church's negative stance on relationships with non-Catholic Christians. Another obvious example is the final lifting of the condemna-tions imposed in the celebrated "Galileo case." ~7 In their pastoral letter, the German bishops point out that the Church has always been aware of the possibility of error. They conclude, how-ever, that in order to maintain the true and ultimate substance of faith the Church officials must, even at the risk of error in points of detail, "give expression to doctrinal directives which have a certain degree of binding force." (2) Gradation Among Noninfallible Documents. The weight or gra-dation of importance of a noninfallible statement can be indicated either by the person or body issuing the teaching, or the type of literary genre of the document itself that is utilized to promulgate the teaching. (a) As noted earlier, noninfallible statements can be issued by the pope or the bishops. Since the formal authority o.f the pope and the epis-copal college exceeds that of the bishops acting individually or con-jointly, there are obviously gradations among the various teachings prom-ulgated. (b) The second criterion for ascertaining the weight of a particular ~ondefinitive pronouncement is its literary genre, or, "the nature of the document" that is utilized (Constitution on the Church, article 25). Ap-ostolic constitutions, for example, are considered the most solemn form of papal documents. Then come papal acts in the form of letters in two categories, encyclical epistles and encyclical letters, the latter form be-ing less solemn than the former. The ordinary magisterium of the pope is also found in doctrinal dec-larations of the curia, for example, of the Congregations for Doctrine and for Seminari

Issue 45.4 of the Review for Religious, July/August 1986. ; Volume 45 Number 4' July/August, 1986 REVIEW FOR REt.~G~OUS (ISSN 0034-639X), published every two months, is edited in collaboration with the faculty members of the Department of Theological Studies of St. Louis University. The editorial offices are located at Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. REVIEW FOR RELiGiOUS is owned by the Missouri Province Educational Institute of the Society of Jesus, St. Louis, MO. © 1986 by REVIEW FOR REI, IGIOUS. Composed, printed and manufactured in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at St. Louis, M O. Single copies: $2,50. Subscription U.S.A. $11.00 a year; $20.00 for two years. Other countries: add $4.00 per year (postage). Airmail (Book Rate) $18.00 per year. For subscription orders or change of address, write REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS: P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, MN 55806. Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Dolores Greeley, R.S.M. Iris Ann Ledden, S.S.N.D. Richard A. Hill, S.J. Jean Read Editor Associate Editor Review Editor Contributing Editor Assistant Editor July/August, 1986 Volume 45 Number 4 Manuscripts, books for review and correspondence with the editor should be sent to REVIEW FOR RELtGtOUS; Room 428; 3601 Lindeli Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the department "Canonical Counsel" should be addressed to Richard A. Hill, S.J.; J.S.T.B.; 1735 LeRoy Ave.; Berkeley, CA 94709. Back issues and reprints should be ordered from REVtEW FOR RELtCtOUS; Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. "Out of print" issues and articles not published as reprints are available from University Microfilms International; 300 N.Zeeb Rd.; Ann Arbor, M! 48106. A major portion of each issue is also available on cassette recordings as a service for the visually impaired. Write to the Xavier Society for the Blind; 154 East 23rd Street; New York, NY 10010. A Letter to Priests: The Example of St. John Vianney John Paul H As he has done each year of his pontificate, Pope John Paul addressed a letter to priests for Holy Thursday, which is, par excellence, the Feast of Priesthood. The text is taken from L'Osservatore Romano, 24 March, 1986, pp. 1-3. Here we are again, about to celebrate Holy .Thursday, the day on which Christ J.esus instituted the Eucharist and at the same time our ministerial priesthood. "Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end."~ As the Good Shepherd, he was about to give his life for his sheep,2 to save man, to reconcile him with his Father and bring him into a new life. And already at the Last Supper he offered to the apostles as food his own body given up for them and his blood shed for them. Each year this day is an important one for all Christians: Like the first disciples, they come to receive the body and blood of Christ in the evening liturgy that renews the Last Supper. They receive from the Savior his testament of fraternal love, which must inspire their whole lives, and they begin to watch with him, in order to be united with him in his passion. You yourselves gather them together and guide their prayer. But this day is especially important for us, dear brother priests. It is the ¯ feast of priests. It is the birthday of our priesthood, which is a sharing in the one priesthood of Christ the mediator. On this day the priests of the whole world are invited to concelebrate the Eucharist with their bishops and with them to renew the promises of their priestly commitment to the service of Christ and his Church. As you know, I feel particularly close to each one of you on this 481 482 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 occasion. And, the same as every year, as a sign of our sacramental union in the same priesthood and impelled by my affectionate esteem for you and by my duty to confirm all my brothers in their service of the Lord, I wish to send you this letter to help you to stir up the wonderful gift that was conferred on you through the laying on of hands) This ministerial priest-hood which is our lot is also our vocation and our grace. It marks our whole life with the seal of the most necessary and most demanding of services, the salvation of souls. We are led to it by a host of predecessors. The Matchless Example of the Cur~ of Ars One of those predecessors remains particularly present in the memory of the Church, and he will be especially commemorated this year, on the second centenary of his birth: St. John Mary I"ianney, the Curb of Ars. Together we wish to thank Christ, the prince of pastors, for this extraordinary model of priestly life and service which the saintly Cur~ of Ars offers to the whole Church, and above all to us priests. How many of us prepared ourselves for the priesthood or today .exer-cise the difficult task of caring for souls, having before our eyes the figure of St.John Mary Vianney! His example cannot be forgotten. More than ever we need his witness, his intercession, in order to face the situations of our times when, in spite of a certain number of hopeful signs, evangeliza-tion is being contradicted by a growing secularization, when spiritual disci-pline is being neglected, when many are losing sight of the kingdom of God, when often even in the pastoral ministry there is a too exclusive concern for the social aspect, for temporal aims. In the. last century the Cur~ of Ars had to face difficulties which were perhaps of a different kind but which were no less serious. By his life and work he represented for the society of his time a great evangelical challenge that bore astonishing fruits of conversion. Let us not doubt that he still presents to us today the great evangelical challenge. I therefore invite you now to meditate on our priesthood in the pres.- ence of this matchless pastor, who illustrates both the fullest realization of the priestly ministry and the holiness of the minister. As you know, John Mary Baptist Vianney died at Ars on August 4, 1859, after some forty years of exhausting dedication. He was seventy-three years of age. When he arrived, Ars was a small and obscure village in the Diocese of Lyons, now in the Diocese of Belley. At the end of his life, people came from all over France, and his reputation for holiness, after he had been called home to God, soon attracted the attention of the universal Church. St. Plus X beatified him in 1905, Pius X1 canonized him in 1925 and then in 1929 declared him patron saint of the parish priests of the A Letter to Priests / 483 whole world. On the centenary of his death, Pope John XXIII wrote the encyclical Nostri Sacerdotii Primitias, to present the Cur6 of Ars as a model of priestly life and asceticism, a model of piety and eucharistic worship, a model of pastoral zeal, and this in the context of the needs of our time. Here, I would simply like to draw your attention to certain essential points so as to help us to rediscover and live our priesthood better. The Extraordinary Life of the Cur~ of Ars Preparing for the Priesthood The Cur~ of Ars is truly a model of strong will for those preparing for the priesthood. Many of the trials which followed one after another could have discouraged him: the effects of the upheaval of the French Revolu-tion, the lack of opportunities for education in his rural environment, the reluctance of his father, the need for him to do his share of work in the fields, the hazards of military service. Above all, and in spite of his intuitive intelligence and lively sensitivity, there was his great difficulty in learning and memorizing, and so in following the theological courses in Latin, all of which resulted in his dismissal from the seminary in Lyons. However, after the genuineness of his vocation had finally been acknowledged, at twenty-nine years of age he was able to be ordained. Through his tenacity in working and praying, he overcame all obstacles and limitations, just as he did later in his priestly life, by his perseverance in laboriously preparing his sermons or spending the evenings reading the works of theologians and spiritual writers. From his youth he was filled with a great desire to "win souls for the good of God" by being a priest, and he was supported by the confidence placed in him by the .parish priest of the neighboring town of Ecully, who never doubted his vocation and took charge of a good part of his training. What an example of courage for those who today experience the grace of being called to the priesthood ! His Love for Christ and for Souls The Cur6 of Ars is a model of priestly zeal for all pastors. This secret of his generosity is to be found without doubt in his love of God, lived without limits, in constant response to the love made manifest in Christ crucified. This is where he bases his desire to do everything to save the souls ransomed by Christ at such a great price and to bring them back to the love of God. Let us recall one of those pithy sayings which he had the knack of uttering: "The priesthood is the love of the heart of Jesus.-4 In his sermons and catechesis he continually returned to that love: "O my God, 1 prefer to die loving you than to live a single instant without loving you . I love you, my divine Savior, because you were crucified for us. because you 484 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 have me crucified for you."5 For the sake of Christ, he seeks to conform himself exactly to the radical demands that Jesus in the Gospel puts before the disciples whom he sends out: prayer, poverty, humility, self-denial, voluntary penance. And, like Christ, he has a love for his flock that leads him to extreme pastoral commitment and self-sacrifice. Rarely has a pastor been so acutely aware of his responsibilities, so consumed by a desire to wrest his people from their sins or their lukewarmness. "O my God, grant me the conversion of my parish: I consent to suffer whatever you wish, for as long as I live." Dear brother priests, nourished by the Second Vatican Council which has felicitously placed the priest's consecration within the framework of his pastoral mission, let us join St. John Mary Vianney and seek the dyna-mism of our pastoral zeal in the heart of Jesus, in his love for souls. If we do not draw from the same source, our ministry risks bearing little fruit! The Fruits of His Ministry In the case of the Cure of Ars, the results were indeed wonderful, somewhat as with Jesus in the Gospel. Through John Mary Vianney, who consecrates his Whole strength and his whole heart to him, Jesus saves souls. The Savior entrusts them to him, in abundance. First his parish--which numbered only two hundred thirty people when he arrived--which will be profoundly changed. One recalls that in that village there was a great deal of indifference and very little religious practice among the men. The bishop had warned John Mary Vianney: "There is not much love of God in that parish, you will put some there." But quite soon, far beyond his own village, the cure becomes the pastor of a multitude coming from the entire region, from different parts of France and from other countries. It is said that 80,000 came in the year 1858! People sometimes waited for days to see him, to go to confession to him. What attracted them to him was not merely curiosity nor even a reputation justified by miracles and extraordinary cures, which the saint would wish to hide. It was much more the realization of meeting a saint, amazing for his penance, so close to God in prayer, remarkable for his peace and humility in the midst of popular acclaim and, above all, so intuitive in responding to the inner disposition of souls and in freeing them from their burdens, especially in the confessional. Yes, God chose as a model for pastors one who could have appeared poor, weak, defenseless and con-temptible in the eyes of men.6 He graced him with his best gifts as a guide and healer of souls. While recognizing the special nature of the grace given to the Cur6 of Ars, is there not here a sign of hope for pastors today who are suffering A Letter to Priests from a kind of spiritual desert? The 1Vlinistry of the Curb of Ars Different Apostolic Approaches to the Essential John Mary Vianney dedicated himself essentially to teaching the faith and to purifying consciences, and these two ministries were directed toward the Eucharist. Should we not see here, today also, the three objectives of the priest's pastoral service? While the purpose is undoubtedly to bring the People of God together around the eucharistic mystery by means of catechesis and penance, other apostolic approaches, varying according to circumstances, are also neces-sary. Sometimes it is a simple presence, over the years, with the silent witness of faith in the midst of non-Christian surroundings; or being near to people, to families and their concerns; there is a preliminary evangeliza-tion that seeks to awaken to the faith unbelievers and the lukewarm; there is the witness of charity and justice shared with Christian lay people, which makes the faith more credible and puts it into practice. These give rise to a whole series of undertakings and apostolic works which prepare or con-tinue Christian formation. The Cur~ of Ars himself taxed his ingenuity to devise initiatives adapted to his time and his parishioners. However, all these priestly activities were centered on the Eucharist, catechesis and the sacrament of reconciliation. The Sacrament of Reconciliation It is undoubtedly his untiring devotion to the sacrament of reconcilia-tion which revealed the principle charism of the Cur~ of Ars and is rightly the reason for his renown. It is good that such an example should encour-age us today to restore to the ministry of reconciliation all the attention which it deserves and which the Synod of Bishops of 1983 so justly emphasized.7 Without the step of conversion, penance and seeking pardon that the Church's ministers ought untiringly to encourage and welcome, the much desired renewal will remain superficial and illusory. The first care of the Cur~ of Ars was to teach the faithful to desire repentance. He stressed the beauty of God's forgiveness. Was not all his priestly life and all his strength dedicated to the conversion of sinners? And it was above all in the confessional that God's mercy manifested itself. So he did not wish to get rid of the penitents who came from all parts and to whom he often devoted ten hours a day, sometimes fifteen or more. For him this was undoubtedly the greatest of his mortifications, a form of martyrdom. In the first place it was a martyrdom in the physical sense from the heat, the cold or the suffocating atmosphere. Second, in the moral Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 sense, for he himself suffered from the sins confessed and even more the lack of repentance: "I weep because you do not weep." In the face of these indifferent people, whom he welcomed as best he could and tried to awaken in them the love of God, the Lord enabled him to reconcile great sinners who were repentant, and also to guide to perfection souls thirsting for it. It was here above all that God asked him to share in the redemption. For our own part, we have rediscovered, better than during the last century, the community aspect of penance, preparation for forgiveness and thanksgiving after forgiveness. But sacramental forgiveness will always require a personal encounter with the crucified Christ through the media-tion of his minister,s Unfortunately it is often the case that penitents do not fervently hasten to the confessional, as in the time of the Cur~ of Ars. Now, just when a great number seem to stay away from confession completely for various reasons, it is a sign of the urgent need to develop a whole pastoral strategy of the sacrament of reconciliation. This will be done by constantly reminding Christians of the need to have a-real relationship with God, to have a sense of sin when one is closed to God and to others, the need to be converted and through the Church to receive forgiveness as a free gift of God. They also need to be reminded of the conditions that enable the sacrament to be celebrated well, and in this regard to overcome prejudices, baseless fears and routine.9 Such a situation at the same time requires that we ourselves should remain very available for this ministry of forgiveness, ready to devote to it the necessary time and care, and I would even say giving it priority over other activities. The faithful will then realize the value that we attach to it, as did the Cur~ of Ars. Of course, as I wrote in the post-synodal exhortation on penance,~0 the ministry undoubtedly remains the most difficult, the most delicate, the most taxing and the most demanding of all---especially when priests are in short supply. This ministry also presupposes on the part of the confessor great human qualities, above all, an intense and sincere spiritual life; it is necessary that the priest himself should make regular use of this sacrament. Always be convinced of this, dear brother priests: this ministry of mercy is one of the most beautiful and most consoling. It enables you to enlighten consciences, to forgive them and to give them fresh vigor in the name of the Lord Jesus. It enables you to be for them a spiritual physician and counselor; it remains "the irreplaceable manifestation and the test of the priestly ministry." ~ The Eucharist: Offering the Mass, Communion, Adoration The two sacraments of reconciliation and the Eucharist remain closely linked. Without a continually renewed conversion and the reception of the A Letter to Priests / 487 sacramental grace of forgiveness, participation in the Eucharist would not reach its full redemptive efficacy.~2 Just as Christ began his ministry with the words "Repent and believe in the Gospel,"~3 so the Cur6 of Ars gener-ally began each of his days with the ministry of forgiveness. But he was happy to direct his reconciled penitents to the Eucharist. The Eucharist was at the very center of his spiritual life and pastoral work. He said: "All good works put together are not equivalent to the sacrifice of the Mass, because they are the works of men and the holy Mass is'the work of God."~4 It is in the Mass that the sacrifice of Calvary is made present for the redemption of the world. Clearly, the priest must unite the daily gift of himself to the offering of the Mass: "How well a priest does, therefore, to offer himself to God in sacrifice every morning!"~5 "Holy communion and the holy sacrifice of the Mass are the two most efficacious actions for obtaining the conversion of hearts."~6 Thus the Mass was for John Mary Vianney the great joy and comfort of his priestly life. He took great care, despite the crowds of penitents, to spend more than a quarter of an hour in silent preparation. He celebrated with recollection, clearly expressing his adoration at the consecration and communion. He accurately remarked: "The cause of priestly laxity is not paying attention to the Mass!''~7 The Cur6 of Ars was particularly mindful of the permanence of Christ's real presence in the Eucharist. It was generally before the tabernacle that he spent long hours in adoration, before daybreak or in the evening; it was toward the tabernacle that he often turned during his homilies, saying with emotion: "He is there!" It was also for this reason that he, so poor in his presbytery, did not hesitate to spend large sums on embellishing his church. The appreciable result was that his parishioners quickly took up the habit of coming to pray before the Blessed Sacrament, discovering, through the attitude of their pastor, the grandeur of the mystery of faith. With such a testimony before our eyes, we think about what the Second Vatican Council says to us today on the subject of priests: "They exercise this sacred function of Christ most of all in the eucharistic liturgy." ~8 And more recently, the extraordinary synod in December, 1985, recalled: "The liturgy must favor and make shine brightly the sense of the sacred. It must be imbued with reverence, adoration and glorification of God . The Eucharist is the source and summit of all the Christian life."19 Dear brother priests, the example of the Cur6 of Ars invites us to a serious examination of conscience: What place do we give to the Mass in our daily lives? Is it, as on the day of our ordination--it was our first act as priests!--the principle of our apostolic work and personal sanctification? What care do we take in preparing for it? And in celebrating it? In praying 41111 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 before the Blessed Sacrament? In encouraging our faithful people to do the same? In making our churches the house of God to which the divine presence attracts the people of our times, who too often have the impres-sion of a world empty of God? Preaching and Catechesis The Cur~ of Ars was also careful never to neglect in any way the ministry of the Word, which is absolutely necessary in predisposing people to faith and conversion. He even said: "Our Lord, who is truth itself, considers his Word no less important than his body."20 We know how long he spent, especially at the beginning, in laboriously composing his Sunday sermons. Later on he came to express himself more spontaneously, always with lively and clear conviction, with images and comparisons taken from daily life and easily grasped by his flock. His catechetical instructions to the children also formed an important part of his ministry, and the adults gladly joined the children so as to profit from this matchless testimony which flowed from his heart. He had the courage to denounce evil in all its forms; he did not keep silent, for it was a question of the eternal salvation of his faithful people: "If a pastor remains silent when he sees God insulted and souls going astray, woe to him! If he does not want to be damned, and if there is some disorder in his parish, he must trample upon human respect and the fear of being despised or hated." This responsibility was his anguish as parish priest. But as a rule, "he preferred to show the attractive side of virtue rather than the ugliness of vice," and if he spoke--sometimes in tears-- about sin and the danger for salvation, he insisted on the tenderness of God who has been offended, and the happiness of being loved by God, united by God, living in his presence and for him. Dear brother priests, you are deeply convinced of the importance of proclaiming the Gospel, which the Second Vatican Council placed in the first rank of the functions of a priest.2~ You seek, through catechesis, through preaching and in other forms which also include the media, to touch the hearts of our contemporaries, with their hopes and uncertainties, in order to awaken and foster faith. Like the Cur6 of Ars and in accor-dance with the exhortation of the council,22 take care to teach the Word of God itself which calls people to conversion and holiness. The Identity of the Priest The Specific Ministry of the I~iest St. John Mary Vianney gives an eloquent answer to certain question-ings of the priest's identity which have manifested themselves in the course A Letter to Priests / 4119 of the last twenty years; in fact it seems that today a more balanced position is being reached. The priest always and in an unchangeable way finds the source of his identity in Christ the priest. It is not the world which determines his status, as though it depended on changing needs or ideas about social roles. The priest is marked with the seal of the priesthood of Christ in order to share in his function as the one mediator and redeemer. So, because of this fundamental bond, there opens before the priest the immense field of the service of souls, for their salvation in Christ and in the Church. This service must be completely inspired b.y love of souls in imita-tion of Christ who gives his life for them. It is God's wish that all people should be saved and that none of the little ones should be lost.23 "The priest must always be ready to respond to the needs of souls," said the Cur6 of Ars.24 "He is not for himself, he is for you."25 The priest is for the laity. He animates them and supports them in the exercise of the common priesthood of the baptized--so well illustrated by the Second Vatican Council--which consists in their making their lives a spiritual offering, in witnessing to the Christian spirit in the family, in taking charge of the temporal sphere and sharing in the evangelization of their brethren. But the service of the priest belongs to another order. He is ordained to act in the name of Christ the head, to bring people into the new life made accessible by Christ, to dispense to them the mysteries---the word, forgiveness, the bread of life--to gather them into his body, to help them to form themselves from within, to live and to act according to the saving plan of God. In a word, our identity as priests is manifested in the "creative" exercise of the love for souls communicated by Christ Jesus. Attempts to make the priest more like the laity are damaging to the Church. This does not mean in any way that the priest can remain remote from the human concerns of the laity. He must be. very near to them, as John Mary Vianney was, but as a priest, always in a perspective which is of their salvation and of the progress of the kingdom of God. He is the witness and dispenser of a life other than earthly life.26 It is essential to the Church that the identity of the priest be safeguarded with its vertical dimension. The life and personality enlightening and vigorous illustration of this. Configuration to Christ and Solidarity with Sinners St. John Mary Vianney did not content himself with the ritual carrying out of the activities of his ministry. It was his heart and his life which he sought to conform to Christ. Prayer was the soul of his life: silent and contemplative prayer, gener- 4~0 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 ally in his church at the foot of the tabernacle. Through Christ, his soul opened to the three divine persons, to whom he would entrust "his poor soul" in his last will and testament. "He kept a constant union with God in the middle of an extremely busy life," And he did not neglect the Office or the rosary. He turned spontaneously to the Virgin. His poverty was extraordinary. He literally stripped himself of every-thing for the poor. And he shunned honors. Chastity shone in his face. He knew the value of purity in order "to rediscover the source of love, which is God." Obedience to Christ consisted, for John Mary Vianney, in obedience to the Church and especially to the bishop. This obedience took the form of accepting the heavy charge of being a parish priest, which often fright-ened him. But the Gospel insists especially on renouncing self, on accepting the cross. Many were the crosses which presented themselves to the Cur6 of Ars in the course of his ministry: calumny on the part of the people, being misunderstood by an assistant priest or other confreres, contradictions, and also a mysterious struggle against the powers of hell, and sometimes even the temptation to despair in the midst of spiritual darkness. Nonetheless he did not content himself with just accepting these trials without complaining; he went beyond them by mortification, imposing on himself continual fasts and many other rugged practices in order ''to reduce his body to servitude," as St. Paul says. But what we must see clearly in this penance, which our age unhappily has little taste for, are his motives: love of God and the conversion of sinners. Thus he asks a discouraged fellow priest: "You have prayed . you have wept . but have you fasted, have you kept vigil?"27 Here we are close to the warning of Jesus to the apostles: "But this kind is cast out only by prayer and fasting."28 In a word, John Mary Vianney sanctified himself so as to be more able to sanctify others. Of course, conversion remains the secret of hearts, which are free in their actions, and the secret of God's grace. By his ministry, the priest can only enlighten people, guide them in the internal forum and give them the sacraments. The sacraments are, of course, actions of Christ, and their effectiveness is not diminished by the imperfection or unworthiness of the minister. But the results depend also on the dispositions of those who receive them, and these are greatly assisted by the personal holiness of the priest, by his perceptible witness, as also by the mysterious exchange of merits in the communion of saints. St. Paul said: "In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church."29 John Mary Vianney in a sense Wished to force God to grant these graces of conversion, not only by his prayer but by the sacrifice of his whole life. He wished to love God for those who did not love him and even A Letter to Priests / 491 do the penance which they would not do. He was truly a pastor completely at one with his sinful people. Dear brother priests, let us not be afraid of this very personal commit-ment-- marked by asceticism and inspired by love--which God asks of us for the proper exercise of our priesthood. Let us remember the recent reflections of the synodal fathers: "It seems to us that in the difficulties of today God wishes to teach us more deeply the value, importance and central place of the cross of Jesus Christ."30 In the priest, Christ relives his passion for the sake of souls. Let us give thanks to God, who thus permits us to share in the redemption, in our hearts and in our fles!! For all these reasons, St. John Mary Vianney never ceases to be a witness, ever living, ever relevant, to the truth about the priestly vocation and service. We recall the convincing way in which he spoke of the great-ness of the priest and of the absolute need for him. Those who are already priests, those who are preparing for the priesthood and those who will be called to it must fix their eyes on his example and follow it. The faithful too will more clearly grasp, thanks to him, the mystery of the priesthood of their priests. No, the figure of the Cur6 of Ars does not fade. Conclusion Dear brothers, may these reflections renew your joy at being priests, your desire to be priests more profoundly! The witness of the Cur6 of Ars contains still other treasures to be discovered. We shall return to these themes at greater length during the pilgrimage which I shall have the joy of making next October, since the French bishops have invited me to Ars in honor of the second centenary of the birth of John Mary Vianney. I address this first meditation to you, dear brothers, for the solemnity of Holy Thursday. In each of our diocesan communities we are going to gather together, on this birthday of our priesthood, to renew the grace of the sacrament of orders, to stir up the love which is the mark of our vocation. We hear Christ saying to us as he said to the apostles: "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends., I have called you friends.TM Before him who manifests love in its fullness, we priests and bishops renew our priestly commitments. We pray for one another, each for his brother and all for all. We ask the eternal Father that the memory of the Cur6 of Ars may help to stir up our zeal in his service. We beseech the Holy Spirit to call to the Church's service many priests of the caliber and holiness of the Cur6 of Ars: In our age she has so great a 492 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 need of them, and she is no less capable of bringing such vocations to full flower. And we entrust our priesthood to the Virgin Mary, the mother of priests, to whom John Mary Vianney ceaselessly had recourse with tender affection and total confidence. This was for him another reason for giving thanks: "Jesus Christ," he said, "having given us all that he could give us, also wishes to make us heirs of what is most precious to him, his holy mother.'S2 For my part, I assure you once more of my great affection, and with your bishop, I send you my apostolic blessing. From the Vatican, March 16, 1986, the fifth Sunday of Lent, in the eighth year of my pontificate. NOTES ~Jn 13:!. 2See Jn 10:11. ~See 2 Tm 1:6. aSee Jean-Marie Vianney, Curb d' Ars, Sa Pensee, Son Coeur, presented by Abbe Bernard Nodet, Editions Xavier Mappus, Le Puy, 1958, p. 100. Henceforth quoted as: Nodet. 5Nodet, p. 44. 6See 1 Co 1:28-19. 7See John Paul II, post-synodal apostolic exhortation Reconciliatio et Paenitentia (Dec. 2, 1984): AAS 77 (1985), pp. 185-275. sSee John Paul I1, encyclical letter Redemptor Hominis (March 14, 1979), no. 20: AAS 71 (1979), pp. 313-316. 9See Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, n. 28. ~°.See ibid, 29. ~'John Paul II, Letter to Priests for Holy Thursday, 1983, No. 3: AAS 75 (1983), Pars I, p. 419. ~2See Redemptor Hominis, n. 20. ~JMk 1:15. ~4Nodet, p. 108. ~5Ibid, p. 107. 161bid, p. 110. ~7Ibid, p. 108. taSecond Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, n. 28. 191I, b, b/1 and c/l; see LG n. 11. 2°Nodet, p. 126. 2'Second Vatican Council, Presbyterorum Ordinis, n. 4. ~See ibid. 23See Mt 18:14. 24Nodet, p. 101. 2~Ibid, p. 102. ~6See Presbyterorum Ordinis, n. 3. 27Nodet, p. 193. 2SMt 17:21. 29Co1 1:24. 3°Final Report, D/2. 3lJn 15:13-15. 32Nodet, p. 252. Religious Life: God's Call and Our Response Christopher Kiesling, O P. Father Kiesling is professor emeritus of systematic theology at Aquinas Institute in St. Louis, and former editor of Spirituality Today. He may be addressed at liis residence: 97 Waterman Place, Saint Louis, Missouri 63112. What is religious life--an institution of life? Actually, it is both, but it does not make a difference how we view it primarily. From an observer's point of view, it is an institution, an organization of life to achieve a specific goal by particular means. From a participant's perspective, it is life which, as it unfolds, assumes a pattern. If we think of religious life first as an institution, emphasis falls on the organizational elements. It then appears as a more or less fixed framework existing "out there" into which people must learn to fit. On the other hand, if religious life is perceived primarily as life, the stress is on the religious development of the people who constitute a community. This article considers religious life from a participant's viewpoint and describes it as a call from God to which we respond, both call and response mediated by Jesus Christ, the Church, a religious congregation, and personal history. A call is something with which we are familiar. People call us to catch our attention when they want us to do something. We receive telephone calls. A call comes from outside of ourselves. It enters into us and evokes a response of attention or rejection and, if attention, a further response of action or refusal to act. Religious life'is aptly regarded as a call. We commonly refer to religious 493 4~1 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 life as a vocation, which means "call." We religious are aware that our religious life comes from outside of ourselves, that is, our controlling ego, whether we imagine the call as coming from above us or from the depths of our being. We can explain to people why we are religious. But even as we offer reasons for our choice of religious life, we are conscious that even the totality of answers does not adequately explain our choice. The "why" of our religious life always contains an element of mystery. In the light of faith, we attribute this mystery, not simply to our ignorance of our com-plex and often subconscious motivations, but to God's call as the ultimate and inexplicable reason for our being religious. God's call to choose this way of life has entered our controlling ego, caught our attention, and won a response of action from us. God's call is enduring. It continues to invite us to renew radically our choice of religious life or to choose activities which confirm our radical choice. God's call is effective. It accomplishes what it asks, provided that we do not place obstacles in the way. God called creation out of nothingness, Israel out of Egypt, Jesus out of death. So to say that religious life is a call from God is not to affirm only that it begins with God's catching our attention and proposing a way of life for our choice. God's call enables us to attend to it and to respond to it initially and continually. Our religious life, in other words, is God's work in us. Yet we freely choose religious life; it is also our work. One reason why explanations for our choice of religious life seem inadequate is that they do not amount to an absolutely compelling set of motives for our choice. We could have done, and even now can do, otherwise than follow this way of life. If we follow it, we have freely chosen to do so. Hence religious life is both God's efficacious call at work within us and our response freely given: it is life issuing from our own hearts as well as from God's call. As the call is enduring, so is the response in the form of periodic radical renewals of our choice of religious life and in the form of daily choices of activities confirm-ing the radical choice. How religious life can be the result of both God's efficacious call and our free response is, of course, a mystery which theologians over the centuries have not been able to illuminate, much less explain, in a way agreeable to all. It is a mystery we are forced to acknowledge, however, for we cannot deny our experience of freedom and respons~ibility on the one hand and, on the other, the necessity of God's grace for us sinners to live a life pleasing to God. Our response to God's call to religious life is not only.free but is meant to embrace the whole of our lives. Religious life is life. It is more than a Religious Ltfe: God's Call / 495 particular organization of life and more than a job to be done. It embraces our bodily being, sensible perception, emotional functioning, and spiritual operations. Following Bernard Lonergan's lead,~ we can list a host of activities which we can attribute to our spirit, a spirit of inquiry, and which we constantly perform as we go about daily living: we experience, observe, note, gather information, seek insight, discover intelligibility, conceptualize, find words to express our ideas, check our ideas against reality (that is reason about them), judge them to be true or false in comparison with what is, evaluate the goodness or badness of what we find in reality, decide whether or not to choose this or that good, choose, and act to carry out what is chosen. These activities prompted by the spirit of inquiry engage, it should be noted, not only intellectual operations (e.g., questioning, seeking insight, reasoning) but also bodily activities (e.g., experiencing, observing, noting), emotional reactions (e.g., evaluating), and operations of the will (e.g., choosing, acting). So the response which constitutes, with God's efficacious call, religious life is very comprehensive. Religious life as response to God's call entails the whole of life in several ways. It involves giving of the whole of ourselves to God, all the components of our persons and personalities. We are called to give the whole of our-selves wholly, that is, to direct all our energies to the giving of the whole of ourselves to God. And we are called to give the whole of ourselves wholly for the whole of life, for the vocation is not to a training period in religious behavior, or to an extended retreat, or to a supervised experience of com-munity living (as valuable as such experiences may be for some people), but to religious life. To achieve, or rather approach achievement, of such totality of response to God's call is a lifetime task. Religious life as composed of God's call and our response is, then, ongoing dialogue and interaction between God and ourselves. It is event, something that happens, a dynamic reality. It is highly personal. It is not a relatively rigid framework into which everyone must fit in exactly the same way, but cooperative,activity between ourselves and God. It assumes insti-tutional form because it is social and occurs in community. But it always overflows its organization because it is first of all life adapting itself to changing circumstances in dialogue and interaction with God. Periodic congregational and provincial chapters required by canon law are recogni-tion that religious life is primarily engendered in dialogue and interaction with God in changing situations, rather than being relatively unchangeable institutional organization. The Bible contains numerous stories of God's call to various persons and their responses. We think of God's call to Abraham (Gn 12:1-9), Moses (Ex 3:1-4:17), Joshua (Dt 31:14-15, 23; (Jos 1:1-9), Gideon (Jg 6:11-24), 4~6 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 Samuel (1 Sam 3:1-21), Saul (1 S 9:1-10:24), Isaiah (Is 6:1-13), Jeremiah (Jr 1:4-19), Ezekiel (Ezk 1:3-3:15), Joseph (Mt 1:18-25; 2:13-15, 19-23), Mary (Lk 1:26-28), Jesus (Mt 3:13-17), Simon, Andrew, James, and John (Mt 5:18-22; Lk 5:1-11), Matthew, or Levi (Mr 9:9), and Paul (Ac 9:1-19). These accounts of God's call and the initial response of certain biblical figures together with further narratives of their carrying out their response are a source of reflection for religious. They alert us to the variety of ways in which God calls people and the diversity of responses that are possible. They help us to hear God's call to us today, to interpret it, and to answer it appropriately. God's call is not a divine shout or whisper which we hear with our ears, or even an interior imagining of such a vocal invitation. God's call--and our response also--are mediated. They are mediated first of all through Jesus Christ. God's call comes to us in the urging of Jesus to follow him (Mt 4:18-22; 8:19-22; 9:9-13; 10:37-38; 19:16-30 and parallels in Luke and Mark). Religious life is rooted in Jesus' call to become his disciples, for religious life developed in the Church as a way of responding to Jesus' call to discipleship. The scriptural passages recounting Jesus' invitation to come after him are, therefore, important for religious to meditate on because in them they "hear" Jesus' call and, through that call, the call of God whom Jesus addressed as Abba (Father)? God's call is mediated not only by Jesus in his earthly life remembered in the Scriptures but also by Jesus in risen glory. The basis for saying this is the continuance of Jesus'. followers' discipleship after the resurrection (Ac 1:3) and their being sent by the risen Lord to forgive sin (Jn 20:21-23) and to preach his message throughout the whole world (Mt 28:18-20). Another basis is the resurrected Jesus' call of Saul on the road to Damascus (Ac 9:3-6). Still another foundation is the conviction of religious through the centuries that Jesus' call comes to them not merely in the memory of his earthly life recorded in Scripture, but that Jesus the risen Lord calls them personally now as he once called his followers after his resurrection in Palestine nearly two thousand years ago. Our response of religious life is also mediated by Jesus. By his self-offer-ing on the cross, Jesus reconciled us to God, removing the obstacles between us and God, and giving us access to God. His sacrifice won for us the divine help, grace, whereby we are enabled to live for God. The risen Jesus now "forever lives to intercede for us" (Heb 7:25). He prepares a kingdom, which includes the lives of religious, that he will hand over to his Father at the end of time (1 Co 15:24-25). He lives in us, making our discipleship in religious life a reality (Jn 15:4-5; Ga 2:20; Ep 4:16; Col 1:27). Jesus is the mediator of our response to God's call also in the sense that Religious Life: God's Call / 497 his life is the model for the kind of response we as religious seek to make to God's call. Our religious life, then, is like our liturgical worship: it is "through Christ our Lord," in regard to both God's call and our response. Jesus' call to religious life, both the earthly and the risen Jesus' call, is mediated to us by the Church. The celebration of the word and the sacra-ments in the liturgy, evangelization, catechesis, preaching, religious educa-tion, theology, pastoral counseling, spiritual direction, doctrinal teaching regarding faith and morals, dogmatic definitions--all these ecclesial activi-ties recall the memory of the earthly Jesus, convey the action of the risen Lord through his Spirit, and so extend God's call in Jesus to discipleship and thus to religious life. Not less worthy of consideration are the activities of parents, school teachers, religious sisters and brothers, parish priests, Newman chaplains, and others who in various ways make Jesus' call to discipleship a particular invitation to us. The Church, we must absolutely not forget, consists of all the baptized faithful, not only the clergy, or the bishops, or the pope, or the Roman curia. The Church's mediating Jesus' call to us is experienced chiefly in the direct encounters we have with a variety of Church members at a local level. The mediation of the Church is a crucial factor in God's call coming to us. The faithful gathering of God's people through the centuries for wor-ship, for care for one another, for all the needy, and for the reform of society has had an impact on people. It has raised questions in people's minds about the purpose of life and the value of their occupations. It has thus led to the discovery of God,s call in Jesus to discipleship and life with the Father and all his children. At times parts of the Church, whether among the clergy or the laity or the religious, have not been very edifying in their lives or credible vehicles conveying the call to follow Jesus. But God overrides these obstacles and somehow uses them, faulty as they may be, to quicken the life of his people. God raises up saints, canonized and noncanonized, in every age. Even the unchurched depend upon the Church, for if they have faith in Jesus Christ, if they treasure the Bible, if they seek to imitate the conduct of Jesus, they have inherited all these values from the community of the faithful, from the Church, which has preserved them over the centuries through times of unity and division, fervor and laxity, freedom and persecution. As we religious think of the Church as mediating God's call through Jesus, we ought not to romanticize our idea of the Church, but accept it in all its weakness, defects, and even sins. Despite imperfections and even perversities, it remains a vehicle whereby God communicates to us the divine word and the power to renew our lives. Through the Church we tlgl~ / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 have access to God. The Church may be a besmirched sacrament of God's union with humanity and of all men and women with one another--a sacrament badly in need of being cleansed and polished. But it is still that sacrament and our need of it is profound. And it may not be as badly besmirched as many people take for granted in this era of suspicion towards all institutions. The Church civilized barbarian Europe, preserved the vestiges of classical culture, and provided for the sick, handicapped, and poor until the modern state developed and could take over social concerns. Even now it is the Church, along with other voluntary associa-tions, which cares for people who fall between the cracks of social welfare in modern society. Not only is Jesus' call to religious life mediated by the Church but also our response. Founders of religious orders and congregations, the ancient commentators on monastic life, preachers of retreats, congregations' chap-ters, and canonical legislation over the centuries have interpreted the so-called evangelical counsels, laid down rules to safeguard their practice, and confirmed the constitutions of orders and congregations. Religious respond to God's call in Jesus by using this interpretation, these regulations, and these constitutions in the guidance of their lives. The Church, moreover, prays for religious. This is eminently obvious in the liturgies for religious profession, but appears also from time to time in the general intercessions at Mass and in the Liturgy of the Hours. Many members of God's people, such as parents or friends, pray for religious in unofficial ways. All these prayers intercede for religious, not simply that they be called by God, but that they cooperate with that call by responding with the gift of their lives. The apostolates which religious engage in are approved by the Church, or assigned by the Church, or carried out in the name of the Church, and serve the needs of the Church, both in its inner life and in its mission to the world. Insofar as the ministry of religious constitutes part of their response to God's and Jesus' call, that part of their response is also mediated by the Church. We religious need to be increasingly appreciative that the ecclesial life in which we participate is a concrete way of saying yes to God's call through Jesus Christ. God's call and our response, constitutive of religious life, are further mediated by a religious order or congregation. The call through Jesus and the Church comes to an individual through some community whose members, ideals, apostolate, and lifestyle attract attention and evoke a desire to participate. Perhaps only one religious community has ever been enticing, or several may have proved interesting but eventually one is singled out as the concrete form of God's call and of personal response. Sometimes the religious congregation that draws a person is one encoun- Religious Life: God's Call / 499 tered first in childhood; sometimes the one known most recently in adult-hood embodies God's call. The contact with the religious group may have been initiated through vocational literature or through acquaintance with some members of the congregation. The admissions procedure and basic formation program of a religious community mediate God's call either to that community or to some other group, or even to another way of Christian life. A community's constitutions, its chapters' decisions, and its ministries are all further mediations of God's call to the community's members. The congregation's life and mission, taken up and lived by the members of the community, become the concrete form in which they say yes to God's call through Jesus Christ mediated by the Church. Religious life as life which flows from the depths of persons toward God assumes a pattern of organization which characterizes a particular religious group. Hence the importance of appreciating one's congregational history, life, ministry, constitutions, and members, for they all convey concretely, existentially, in a down-to-earth way both God's call and our response through Jesus Christ and through the Church. Finally, God's call is mediated through our personal history. It is not difficult to see our response to God's call as mediated through personal history, for our response is precisely our living out in time our personal religious life. But personal history also mediates the call from God. Our temperament, character, personality, neuroses, talents that incline us to find religious life attractive and a particular congregation congenial have been inherited from parents, family, teachers, friends, and other significant people in our lives. The social environment in which we grew up, the schooling we had, work experiences, and events which made deep impressions on our psyches have all left traces in us which contribute to making religious life appealing and this order or congregation attractive. In religious life many similar factors enter into our history to confirm our continuation in that way of life. Still other factors peculiar to religious life support our further dedication, such as agreeable experiences of com-munity, enjoymeht and success in ministry, satisfaction of the desire for prayer, and the gratifying sense of helping others in need. Since we believe that our lives are guided by divine providence, we believe that all these factors which make religious life attractive and fulfill-ing are indeed God's call to us to follow Christ in religious life. Self-knowl-edge, then, plays an important role in discerning God's call to religious life and in assessing the quality of our response to that call. Why do we need to consider these mediations of God's call and our response? The answer is: to be realistic and avoid false idealism. We need to recognize that the mediation of God's call through Jesus, especially as 500 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 further mediated through the very human realities of the Church, a religious community, and personal history means that the call is now always going to be clear. At times we may scarcely "hear" it; at other times it will seem obvious. On some occasions it will appear to be a certain path on which to follow Jesus; but at other times it will seem risky, a gamble, of dubious value. The mediation of our response will sometimes be exciting, adventur-ous, a joyful and deeply satisfying enterprise; at other times it will be prosaic, routine, dull, and even boring; and at still other times it will be chaotic, exasperating, and exhausting physically and emotionally. So fidelity to the moments of obvious call and fulfilling response must tide us over times of obscurity and dullness. Young religious in particular are apt to idealize elements of religious life. They expect more from religious community than it can actually provide. Unrealistic expectations of the change that they can effect in the lives of individuals and society through their ministry can lead to disap-pointment and discouragement when those expectations are not fulfilled. But if we understand that even in these less satisfying and less brilliant moments of religious life God is efficaciously calling us and we are working out our response, some value can be found even in the commonplace and unsuccessful. Indeed, those situations can purify our motivation. We hear and answer God's call because it is God's call and we wish to give our lives to God, not because we find delight or satisfaction in the particular form in which God's call comes or in which our response is given. God's call is mediated through Jesus. Jesus referred to God as his Abba (Father) and so distinguished his person from the person of Abba. Our call to religious life, and the one to whom we respond, is ultimately the first person of the Trinity, the font of divine life in the Trinity, the origin without origin among the three divine persons. Jesus as Son is the image of the first person of the Trinity and in his humanity conveys to us the Father's call to share in the divine life. The Son incarnate also provides for us the model for sharing in the life of the Trinity, namely, to receive all we have from the Father and return it to the Father. We are enabled to regard the first person of the Trinity in this way and to have faith in the Son incarnate as conveying God's call to us and exemplifying for us our response because Jesus' Abba and the risen Jesus have poured forth into our hearts their Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. The Spirit is the love binding Father and Son together in the divine life, and the Spirit then binds us into the triune life through the life which she engenders in our hearts. God's call and our response which constitute our religious life entails Religious Ltfe: God's Call / 501 our being related to each of the three divine persons of the Trinity: being called by the Father, responding by the power of the Spirit, hearing the call and making our response through the Son. NOTES ~Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), pp. 2-20. 2For studies of these scriptural passages in relation to religious life, see Francis Moloney, Disciples and Prophets (New York: Crossroads, 1981) pp. 9-12, 19-31, 62-63, 89-90, 105-14, 133-54; John M. Lozano, Discipleship: Toward an Understanding of Religious life (Chicago: Claret Center for Resources in Spirituality, 1980), pp. 5-18, 31-38. Christ the Center of Our Vowed Life b.v Boniface Ramsey, O.P. Father Ramsey's three articles on the vows of religion are available as a single reprint: i - The Center of Religious Poverty ii - Christocentric Celibacy iii - Cruciform Obedience Price: $1.75 per copy, plus postage. Address: Review for Religious Rm 428 3601 Lindell Blvd. .St. Louis, Missouri 63108 Expectations in Religious Community James Fitz, S.M. Father Fitz is a member of the provincial administration of the Cincinnati province of his community. Prior to that, he was director of novices for six years. He may be addressed at the Marianist Provincialate; 4435 East Patterson Road; Dayton, Ohio 45430-1095. In the Old Testament, God and Israel are major partners in covenant. God has certain expectations of Israel; Israel has certain expectations of God. These mutual expectations become a source of security for Israel and a call for Israel to be what it is capable of becoming. The very nature of covenant implies life-enhancing expectations. In the New Testament, we, the Church, have become the people of the new covenant. Again expecta-tions are part of the covenant. For example, "This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you"(Jn 15:12). Faithfulness to the cove-nant is one of the characteristics of our God; unfaithfulness has often been our response. However, God continues to call us, his people, to all that we are capable of becoming. Our God is faithful even when we are unfaithful. Covenant is the basis of our commitment to one another in religious communities. We join communities because we can do some things in community that we cannot do alone. In community we find the support and challenge to be the disciples of Christ that we are called to be. The Christian call is a continual call. We are made to be in union with others; none of us is complete in ourselves. Since we are made in the image and likeness of our God who is loving, generative and faithful, we will not be fulfilled unless we love, give life and are faithful. In the covenant communities we form as religious, we too have expec-tations of one another. Although expectations are not the only ingredient 502 Expectations in Religious Community / 503 for good community, I have learned during the past nine years in a leader-ship role in religious community the important role expectations play in building community and also the problematical role of hidden and unreal expectations. There are two important dynamics in terms of our expecta-tions in community. First, it is important that members of communities identify their expectations of one another in order that hidden expectations do not lead to unnecessary tension and conflict. Secondly, after expecta-tions are identified, it is important to sort out which are life-enhancing and which are not. It is important to identify expectations that we are capable of meeting, which call us to be the persons God calls us to be, and in which it is worth investing our energy. I have found it helpful to understand clearly what are fai? and realistic expectations. These expectations are based on who we are and what we are capable of becoming. On the one hand, we cannot expect from others something that is not truly possible for them to be. On the other hand, our expectations should call them to be the best that they can be. Since our expectatigns are to be fair and realistic, there are some things we cannot expect. We can hope that they happen, but we cannot expect them. An example may be illustrative. We can hope that we will have a deep friend-ship with each member of our local community. However we cannot expect or demand that each becomes our friend. Friendship is a gi~ that must be received, not an expectation that can be demanded. Fair and realistic expectations, clearly stated, are the building blocks for a Gospel community of one mind and one heart. With obvious room for forgiveness for human failings, it is important in covenant community that we invite and challenge each other to meet the fair and realistic expectations we have set in our covenant. If we grant that clear expectations are important to community, then it is important to identify the realistic expectations we can have in Christian community. What are the expectations that call us forth to build together the community of one mind and one heart that is the invitation of the New Testament Scriptures? There are probably many that could be listed. My experience has surfaced five important expectations: respect, honesty, care, forgiveness and faithfulness. Respect The dignity of the human person is one of the basic principles of Catholic social thought and an important basis for building Christian community. Therefore, the mutual respect of the dignity of each person is an important expectation in community. Members of a community will never bring their human potential to actuality unless there is a true respect 51~4 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 of that potential and the invitation to use it. There are many ways that we can demonstrate respect for one another in community. For example, it is important that we listen to one another when we speak. We do not have to agree with others, but the Gospel calls us to give others our full attention when they speak. For example, do 1 try to hear another's concern? Do I listen well enough to be able to feed back that concern, or am I busy formulating a response before I really hear what is being said? Do I try to be sensitive to nonverbal as well as verbal messages? Another form of respect would be to respect one another's privacy and .need for quiet, to respect one another's personal belongings. Examples of respect could be multiplied. It should be clear that without a mutual respect, little can be done to build a rich community experience. Honesty Honesty is one of the basic elements for building any type of relation-ship but especially a trust relationship. Since some level of trust is necessary for community, honesty is an important covenant expectation. The honesty about which I speak is not a harsh, brutal honesty but an honesty that proceeds from a loving and compassionate heart modeled on Jesus. It is an honesty based on the conviction that the truth will set us free (Jn 8:32). I find that the lack of honesty in community is one of the principal obstacles to real growth in the common heart and soul to which we are invited by the New Testament experience. Religious, in my experience, often have difficulty expressing and dealing with their true feelings, whether positive or negative. Fearful of phony affirmation, some religious are afraid to say what they like about their brothers and sisters. Others of us have difficulty accepting positive affirmation when it comes our way. We also have problems with negative feelings. Somehow we hope that they will go away or no one will notice. However, as we know, negative feelings generally do get expressed, sometimes in passive-aggressive behavior. I sometimes marvel at how long it takes us to express our negative feelings when a discussion of them could eliminate a great deal of tension. Our fear of confrontation can lead us to hold onto our negative feelings. But have we not also learned that the honest and charitable discussion of our feelings can lead to deeper and more understanding relationships? Some of my best friendships have come to fruition because I have honestly shared some negative feelings in a desire to create deeper relationships. Even when honesty has not led to deeper, relationship, the mutual understanding and respect has most often led to the lessening of tension. One of the greatest hurts for me in community is hearing criticism second hand. It bothers me Expectations in Religious Community because it means the possibility of deeper relationship is blocked. When we care enough for others to affirm and confront them honestly, there is a possibility of deeper relationship and for a union of hearts. Compassionate and loving honesty is not the only ingredient for unity in community. But no community can develop without it. Without an expe-rience of honesty, we can never feel secure enough to trust one another, and share on the level that bonds more deeply in our mutual covenant. Care The expectation of care flows from the call of the Gospel: "Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do unto me" (Mt 25:40). We are called upon to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick (notice the Gospel does not say we must be attracted by them). We are asked to care. In community we should care about each of our brothers and sisters. We should care about their spiritual growth, their physical health, and their other needs for full life. It would be a tragedy in my mind if a brother in my community were in the hospital and none of us had the time to visit, if a brother was struggling with his commitment to celibacy and no one cared enough to talk to him about the issue, or if a brother was drinking himself into the grave and no one intervened. It is true that if we are not careful some can manipulate us in this area by trying to lay guilt on us. But that should not stop us from honestly giving of ourselves in care of others. In fact our care should lead us to challenge the manipulating brother or sister; it should lead us to challenge him or her firmly and compassionately to adult living. In order to avoid unreal expectations, it is important to distinguish care from friendship. Care and friendship are not the same. We can honestly care for a brother or sister who is not a friend. Friendship is a relationship of mutual attraction, sharing and trust. In Christian community, we can reasonably expect some care when we are sick or hungry or lonely. How-ever, we cannot demand friendship. We can offer the gift of care, love, and trust and hope for a response to that gift, but we must remember that these can never become a demand. Forgiveness Forgiveness is also an important expectation in community. We are all imperfect human persons in process towards fullness of life; we are reli-gious on a journey. Like St. Paul, we do the things we do not want to do and do not do the things we want to do. Therefore, we must be willing to forgive our brothers and sisters when they ask for forgiveness. Forgiveness does not necessarily mean to forget as some popular wisdom has it. But it 506 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 does mean to heal the events of our lives. Some of the hurts in our relationships with fellow community members may be hard to forget but healing will lead us to remember the events in a new way. We can grow to view these events as moments of grace in our relationship and remember them in that way. They become moments of reconciliation. So we need to forgive others and to forgive ourselves; we need others to forgive us. Both dynamics are necessary if we are to grow together in the common heart and soul of the New Testament ideal. Faithfulness Finally, I .feel we can expect faithfulness in community since we are made in the image and likeness of a faithful God. This faithfulness is expressed, for example, in community agreements and in the community mission. If, for our growth as a faith community, we agree to pray together in the morning and evening, then it is fair to expect members of the community to be present. If we agree to meet on Monday evening to develop and coordinate our common mission, then it is fair to expect that we will all be there for the meeting. If we decide to live simply by sharing the cooking, then we can expect all to share the task. Obviously we can make exceptions to an agreement. But those with whom we have made an agreement have a voice in the exception. For example, if we have agreed to do the cooking, and one member finds it difficult or impossible to do, he or she should share that with the community either at the time the agreement is made or when he or she finds out that it is impossible to fulfill the terms of the agreement. Then we can renegotiate the agreement in some way satisfactory or at least acceptable to all involved. We are made in the image and likeness of a faithful God; we should invite and challenge one another to be the faithful people we are capable of becoming. Conclusion There are probably other expectations that are fair and realistic in covenant community. But the ones developed in this article are essential if our community life is to have a healthy sense of security and is to be life-enhancing. Communities can even agree to more expectations of one another (times of prayer, sharing personal faith, simple living statements, and so forth). The important thing for developing a community of one mind and one heart is that expectations be as clear as possible. Without clear expectations we create an environment for tension and conflict. Clarified expectations will not lead to deep community life. This is only a start. As I mentioned at the beginning, expectations are not the only ingredient in good Christian religious community. I have found that good Expectations in Religious Community / 507 community goes beyond expectations. There are many attitudes that con-tribute to good community life: trust, generosity, patience, and so forth. In focusing on expectations, the most important attitude to keep in mind is generosity. "If your brother (or sister) asks you to go one mile, go two" (Mt 6:41). We should not count in community. We should not first be concerned about how others perform. We should examine our own per-formance. "Remove the plank from your own eye first; then you will see clearly to take the speck from your brother's (sister's) eye" (Mt 7:5). Our God is faithful to us even when we are unfaithful. To be a creative agent of community we must remain faithful to our covenant even when our brother or sister is unfaithful. We should be generous as our God in heaven has been generous with us. "Love one another as I have loved you" (1 Jn 15:12). God has taken the initiative in our lives; we are called to do the same for our brothers and sisters. If everyone is giving generously in community, we have the foundation on which deep Christian community can develop. We have the strongest foundation for a life of one mind and one heart. Friendship It seems but a word on this page. It cannot, does not, describe-- a patient listening, a gentle touch; soft, comforting nearness, forgiveness--waiting ready before the hurt, hilarity shared together (Snoopy-dancing--you are a crazy person, you know!) tears--hard-coming, yet trustingly dampen my heart, insights, thoughts, dreams, ESP?. yes! remembering--in prayer, close to my heart honest, pulling and dragging (sometimes fearfully) each the other-- forward, closer, faithful It cannot contain--my friend, my other self., this mere word Love. Sister Mary Therese Macys, S.S.C. 2601 W. Marquette Road Chicago, Illinois 60629 ToSee the Other Side. George J. Schemel, S.J. Father Schemel is founder and director of the newly formed Institute for Contempor-ary Spirituality at the University of Scranton (Scranton, Pennsylvania 18510). An earlier article of Father Schemel was "In Time of Consolation." which appeared in the issue of January/February, 1985. The need for enabling and empowering structures for groups increases as the group's complexity increases. There are just and unjust structures right within our own apostolic and community operations. To be insensitive to our own unjust structures and processes makes us less believable when we address such structures in society at large. The injustice is found in the very process of coming to decision. It is this unjust process that allows us to walk over the deeply held personal values of another. It is truly a personally oppressive structure, inefficient in method and leading to poor apostolic decisions. Yet it passes unnoticed and uncorrected because of ignorance and lack of awareness in this area, though often little personal culpability is involved. The objective wrong is great, however, and cannot be condoned just because of ignorance or lack of awareness. The average community meeting, with its amorphous structure and ill-defined processes is often a nightmare of unjust structures. In general there are few, if any, haphazardly just structures. What just structures and processes there are, flourish because of much examination, evaluation, and consistent implementation. Not to be consciously structured is usually to be unjustly structured. It is my observation and experience that most unjust structures in religious life, both on the one-to-one interpersonal level and on the level of . 5O8 To See the Other Side. / 509 the group apostolate or community, come from lack of "thinking" as this is understood in the Jungian perspective. This notion of thinking is character-ized by discursive logic and the isolation of variables. There are other sources of injustice in our apostolates and community life, of course,~ but none is so pervasive as this lack of thinking. The orientation and cast of our religious apostolates and communities are so overwhelmingly affective that the lack of formal thinking is not even noticed directly. We become aware of it only in its effects; the disruption and confusion caused by processes which largely ignore the thinking function. It is taken as axiomatic in the realm of interpersonal relationship that we must not hurt anyone's feelings. It is my contention that one's thinking is due the same respect and care; this is far from obvious in most religious circles today. I would like to present a proper process of coming to decision that will be just, efficient and phenomenologically correct. Reflecting on the process will also help "convict and convert" attitudes; unjust processes and atti-tudes will show up in high relief. The process will involve achieving consen-sus on different levels of an issue and moving through to a final decision. It will move from an assimilation of pertinent facts and data, through an appreciation of the interrelatedness, interconnections, and potentialities of the data and facts, through a discursive rationality of necessary causal nexus, to final judgment of fittingness and suitability. It will follow the functionally sequential "gradient of more difficult consensus." S--N--T--F In order to establish an adequate vocabulary with which to talk about this problem, I would like to call on the matrix of psychological types elaborated by C.G. Jung and its current popularization by the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). I will give only a short summary here, and refer those interested in a further development of psychological types and the MBTI to other sources where a more complete understanding may be pursued.2 Those already very familiar with type theory may want to skip to page 513. Type Theory In order to account for certain consistencies and inconsistencies in behavior that he observed among different types of people, Jung elabo-rated his theory of psychological type. The theory, in essence, sees all conscious mental activity as reducible to two main processes, perception and judgment. Perception is a process of "becoming aware of."; of gathering data, taking in information. It is a non-rational process. We do this work of ~$'10 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 taking in data in one of two ways: either by "sensation" or by "intuition." Actually of course we use both these functions, Sensation and iNtuition, to gather in information, but we have a decided preference for one way or the other. We cannot take in data by both Sensation and iNtuition at the same time. At best, they can operate sequentially, but one way will be decidedly preferred to the other. (Note that it is common usage to indicate Sensation by "S" and intuition by "N'; 'T' is reserved for Introversion). Sensation is perception or data gathering by the concrete singular. It takes in specifics, by use of the five senses. It perceives things one at a time. Sensation is tolerant of routine, sameness, specified procedures. Sometimes it can't see the forest for the tree. Sensation has a present-time orientation. The other form of perception is intuition. It perceives in terms of patterns, relationships; intuition sees possibilities, interconnections, impli-cations. It is perception by way of the unconscious. INtuition likes variety, challenge, is future-time oriented. Sometimes it can't see the tree for the forest. Besides the non-rational perceptive functions Sensation and intuition which simply take in information and gather data, there are two rational functions, Thinking and Feeling. The rational functions prioritize, rank, sort out the data taken in. They hierarchize the information and make judgments on it. They come to closure on perceptions. These are the two judging functions whose work it is to come to conclusions about the data taken in. They are opposing ways of judging, and cannot proceed at the same time. At best they can be sequential.3 Thinking moves to conclusion from principles, logically attending to necessary connections and cause-effect relationships. Consistency and validity are important, and principles are applied objectively, "whether I like it or not." The value sought is "The True." Thinking has an a-temporal and un-contextualized time orientation. Feeling comes to conclusion by an associative process, by analogy, comparison, association. Harmony and suitability are important, and are judged from a more subjective stance. The value orientation is toward "The Good." Feeling has a past and traditional time orientation. One of these, either Thinking or Feeling, will be much preferred to the other for making judgments and coming to conclusions. It is important to note that we cannot use opposing functions at the same time. Sensing halts Intuiting; Intuiting halts Sensing. Thinking halts Feeling; Feeling halts Thinking. Neither can we perceive and judge at the same time. Judging halts perceiving; perceiving halts judging. Nor do we use all four functions with equal skill and confidence. Yet quality decisions are made only with the adequate contributions of all four functions. Indi- To See the Other Side. / 511 vidually and especially in groups, it is important to implement structures which assure the application of all four functions to any given issue. Since the natural autonomy, even antipathy, among the four functions precludes their being applied at the same time, they must be applied sequentially. A person will have an attitude toward the outside world that takes its cue from the judging functions (Thinking or Feeling) and will be called a Judging attitude, or he or she will have an attitude toward the outside world that takes its cue from the perceiving functions Sensation or iNtui- " tion) and will be called a Perceiving attitude. Note that both these attitudes, J and P, are toward the outside world. This attitude toward the outside world J or P is not to be confused with Extraversion or Introversion, which indicates the person's "preferred world." The preference for the world inside oneself--the world of ideas and thoughts and inner feeling is known as Introversion. Its opposite, a prefer-ence for the world outside oneself--the world of people, events, happen-ings, objects--is known as Extraversion. Both introverts and extraverts have an attitude, either J or P, toward the outside world. For a treatment of Extraversion and Introversion see Gifts Differing. A person's type is constituted in large part by his or her preference for one of the two perceiving functions, S or N, and one of the two judging functions, T or E The possibilities are: ST, SF, NT, NE One perceiving . function plus one judging function constitute the preferred functionality of the person. Of these two functions, however, one will be favored and preferred over the other. One will be the "boss" function, and the other the helper function. So an individual will be one of the following: ST, ST, SF, SF, NT, NT, NF, NF, where the underlined function is the "boss" or Dominant function and the other is the helper or Auxiliary function. The dominant function is the real rudder or kingpin of the psychological type. In "conflict of interest" cases, the dominant always gets its way. For an understanding of the Judging and Perceiving attitudes and the Extraverted and Introverted attitudes, which also throw much light on meeting dynamics, see some of the literature cited. There is a dangerous misunderstanding current concerning the Feeling function--"F"--among those who use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the psychological matrix of C. G. Jung which undergirds it. It is widespread even among those who administer and teach the instrument. It is doubly dangerous because it leads to a misunderstanding of the correlate of Feeling, which is the Thinking function, "T." One frequently hears the (mistaken) pronouncements: "Feeling is interested in values, Thinking is interested in principles and logic." "Feeling is personal, Thinking is impersonal." Both of these statements are half- 512 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 truths, and therefore very dangerous and misleading. Let us analyze the Thinking and Feeling functions for a more accurate understanding than these too-easy assessments afford. To say that Feeling is interested in values and Thinking is interested in principles and logic is to compare apples and oranges, process and product. The value that attracts Feeling is "The Good." The value that attracts Thinking is "The True." The process used by Thinking is objective (in that sense impersonal) proceeding from principles, using logic and cause-and-effect relationships. The process of Feeling is a subjective (in that sense personal) associative process, a process of comparison, analogy, using per-sonal association and past experience. Neither Thinking nor Feeling in the first instance says anything about emotion. Emotion is the first register of value in the human person, whether that value is seen as coming under the aegis of "The Good," (Feeling), or as coming under the aegis of "The True" (Thinking). Both Thinking and Feeling according to Jung are rational functions. They both hierarchize, rank, come to closure, judge on the basis of the value that attracts them: The Good for Feeling and The True for Think-ing. Ideally, or one might say transcendentally, both The Good and The True are the same. But each person has a particular and delimited appreci-ation of that higher unity according as he or she judges by Thinking or by Feeling.4 An example may further help clarify and distinguish the Feeling func-tion from its first register of value, emotion. (The first register of value for the Thinking function is also emotion.) St. Thomas Aquinas addresses the question: "Whether Christ's mother remained a virgin after his birth?" (S.T. Ilia, Q.28, a.3) St. Thomas cites several well-known texts from Scripture that would indicate that Mary had other children after the birth of Jesus: Mt 1:18, 1:20, 1:24, Rm 8:29, Jn 2:12, Mt 27:55, Jn 19:25. He then puts together these last two texts to form an argument that Mary had other children after the birth of Jesus. Mt 27 says: "Many women were there [that is, by the cross of Christ] watching from a distance, the same women who had followed Jesus from Galilee and looked after him. Among them were Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of Zebedee's sons." Thomas puts this together with the Jn 19 text: "There stood by the cross of Jesus, Mary his mother." It follows that if Mary the mother of Jesus who was standing by the cross and the Mary who was the mother of James and Joseph was the same Mary, then Mary had other children besides Jesus. St. Thomas takes care of the exegetical questions adroitly enough, so that Scripture is not gainsaid. The clinching reasons against Mary having other children after the birth of To See the Other Side. / 513 Jesus, however, are Feeling reasons, in the true sense of Feeling. He says it is unthinkable that Mary would have other children besides Jesus, because, ". as he [Jesus] is in his divine nature the only-begotten of the Father and his Son, perfect in every respect, so it was fitting that he should be the only-begotten of his mother, as being her perfect offspring." Another rea-son Thomas gives--a Feeling reason--is that it would make Mary seem ungrateful, not to be content with such a Son. Note that these are not the same kind of reasons given for Jesus not being the only child of Mary: If the Mary of Mt. 27 (mother of James and Joseph) Is the Mary of Jn 19 (the mother of Jesus) Then Jesus was not the only child of Mary. This is "T"--Thinking rationality. But ". as he was the only-begotten of His Father, so He was the only-begotten of His Mother" is not "T," Thinking rationality, it is "F," Feeling rationality. It is a reason from fittingness, appropriateness, seemliness; it is ~'becoming" that Jesus be the only child of Mary. This is the meaning of Feeling in the Jungian matrix and the Myers-Briggs. It is not emotion or feeling in the common parlance, but a judgment of fittingness, seemliness, becomingness. It is brought to bear after the Thinking judgment has done what it can with the data, not before Thinking or instead of Thinking. It is the ambit of "F," Feeling rationality, to historicize and contextual-ize the a-temporal judgment of "T," Thinking, but not replace it.5 Feeling needs to be fed and focused by the objectivity of Thinking. Otherwise one has inauthentic Feeling and a too subjective Feeling judgment. Thinking needs the completion of another rationality, one not necessitated by logic and cause-effect relationships, but personalized/subjectivized and opened out to a wider gestalt. Feeling, without the backbone of Thinking behind it, is purely subjec-tive, personal and, therefore, not interpersonal. It can indeed become emo-tion and not be a rationality of fittingness or suitability, but mere whim or fancy. This is what is meant by a "mood," which is not a personal expe-rience. The mood has the person rather than the person having the mood. It is the opening door to projections and confusion, especially in a group. Application to Meetings Equipped with this understanding of psychological functionality, let us reflect on the relatively unstructured or poorly structured meeting. The purpose of most group meetings is to come to some kind of consensus. That is why the meeting is held in the first place. Many come to a meeting assuming there is already a consensus on a given issue. This is 5111 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 often more counterproductive than assuming that there is not. A consensus is a delicate affair; it is a "con-sentire," a "feeling-together-with." An assumption either that there is a consensus on a given issue or that there is not, is vastly disruptive of the possibility of arriving at a consensus. Since a consensus is a delicate affair, it must be wooed, as a lover is wooed. One has to have the tact to know where to begin to discover what consensus is there already, and to raise it to the level of insight and usabil-ity. An attempt to "build a consensus" on a given issue is counterproduc-tive. Rather, one first discovers what consensus actually exists, and brings that to consciousness and articulation. Once that consensus is recognized and owned, the scene is set to pass on to a higher level of "con-sentire." The process of arriving at consensus is not a "building"; this has too much the connotation of hammer and nail, muscular effort to persuade, even coer-cion. Rather, the process of arriving at consensus is one of discovery and articulation. Once a group (meeting) articulates a true consensus, it has already passed beyond it, and it is ready for the next discovery, the new and higher level of consensus. It must be, however, the articulation of a true consen-sus. It must not be assumed. It must be articulated and all must agree to the lower level of consensus before attempting to arrive at a higher level. Perhaps this will come as a surprise, after saying how delicate is the matter of arriving at consensus, and that one should not assume that there is a consensus on a given issue. There is, however, always a consensus in a group! Perhaps not on a given issue, or on the level of consensus one would like, but there is always a consensus in a group. Otherwise the group would not be meeting. This is the key assumption that I am making. A moment's thought will indicate that if a group (not a "crowd" or a "gang") comes together, it is coming together for a purpose. Implicit in this broad purpose are concrete points of consensus and a desire for further consensus. There already exists the consensus that "we want" a "con-sentire'" if at all possible. There is the further shared hope that we can arrive at a consensus on some particular issues. There are many other points of concrete consensus in the group also. (Deficiency in these attitudes will indicate the highly controlling or manipulative person.) The place to start looking for consensus on pro-gram level issues is here, among the patterns of consensus that already are resident in the group. A group does not arrive at a consensus by building from the top down any more than a construction company builds a building from the top down. One starts from the bottom up. One begins at the bottom and works up. Whenever a group can articulate a consensus, it has already passed beyond it and is ready for the next level of insight and consensus. Once it To See the Other Side. / 515 has articulated and owned that next level of insight and consensus, it is ready for the next, and so on. Thus the group is moving toward its limit of consensus consciousness bit by bit--by articulating known levels of con-sensus and allowing the group to find its way to ever higher and more specific and programmatic levels of con-sentire. A functional, structural way to help a group move from a lower and perhaps largely unconscious level (myth level) of consensus to an ever higher level of programmatic consensus is to follow the natural order of perceiving, then judging. The schema herein suggested implicitly takes into account dominant and auxiliary functions and introverted and extraverted functions. Since coming to a consensus judgment implies a need to perceive in order to judge, there is a "natural" sequential order to arriving at quality decisions, whether personal or group decisions. Perceiving comes before judging. In attempting to unearth any resident consensus in the group and free it to move toward higher levels of programmatic consensus, the natural sequential dependence of the functions should be followed: S--N--T--F The group, just as an individual, will have a strong bias to spend time and energy in its Dominant and Auxiliary functions. It sometimes wants to wallow in its Dominant, without using even its Auxiliary, let alone using its non-preferred functions. It is here too that many religious groups with a preponderance of people with a preference for "F" rationality unwittingly thwart their own process of coming to consensus. Almost always they begin looking for consensus on the "F" level. This is to begin the process at its end-point! Each individual has a preference for one of the two perceiving func-tions (either Sensation or iNtuition), and one of the two judging functions Thinking or Feeling) already established in the Dominant and Auxiliary (with an inclination more toward perceiving or more toward judging). Most often, the importance of the other perceiving function and the other judging function is not recognized. Yet these less preferred functions are also necessary not only for quality decision making, but even for adequate decision making. Thus a person who is an NT will naturally prefer to do his perceiving by iNtuition and his judging by Thinking; but he needs the help of Sensate perception and Feeling judgment if his decisions are to be quality decisions, reflecting the objectivity and contextuality of sensate perception and feeling rationality. So with all the various preferences. 516 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 Both Sensate and intuitive perception are necessary for judging. Intui-tion depends on Sensate details, however slightly noted, for registering Intuitive connections and possibilities. The Sensate process may be less conscious, but the Sensate function is always at work recording sensate impressions. The Intuitive process may be less conscious, but the intuitive function is always registering connections and relations among sensate data perceived. Even when the Thinking function is not preferred or developed, the Thinking function first examines intuited connections and possibilities and determines inevitable cause-effect consequences. Whether carefully attended to or slight and unobserved, the Thinking function provides the Feeling function with an an.alysis of what has been perceived. The Feeling function receives what has been thus perceived and judged, and examines it in the light of contextual suitability. Whether carefully attended to or slight and unobserved, the Feeling function completes the judgment of present per-ceptions and present consequences in their historical context and in terms of the rationality of suitability, appropriateness, fittingness. Just as each individual has her profile and preferences, so a group has its profile and its preferences. The group profile is the sum and extrapola-tion of the profiles of the individuals who compose it.6 The disciplined group asks its members to first "S" it on a given issue, to use the Sensate function. Get the raw data. Get the concrete informa-tion. While doing this, those who naturally prefer "S" as their perceiving function are in their element, and the Intuitives are asked to stretch a bit, as the whole group strives .to assimilate the Sensate data. Once that task is accomplished, the Sensate data is handed over to intuitive perception to see the possibilities inherent in the data; to see the interconnections and implications and future potentialities. During this part of the group's task the iNtuitives will be in their element and the Sensates will be required to do the stretching now. But it is a temporary inconvenience for a permanent improvement; the group now knows "what it is talking about." The issue has been perceived with no prejudice as to function; all perceptions have been honored. We have moved thus in the natural sequence: S~N Now comes a big moment. It is time to hand over the matter perceived to judgment. Here the group must be very careful that it does not get into the final Feeling judgment. It is not yet asking the final question, the "go or no-go" decision. It is not asking yet "what will the traffic bear?" Or "should we do it or not?" It is asking for the Thinking judgment of the group to be applied. It is looking for inevitable consequences, cause-effect relation- To See the Other Side. / 517 ships, what are the necessities involved. Symbolically it can be represented like this: S--N--T Perceiving is finished, and the group is entering into the first stage of judgment, Thinking judgment. Now all are asked to "T" it--to use Think-ing judgment. Here those who naturally prefer Thinking judgment for coming to closure and conclusion are in their element, and those who prefer Feeling judgment are asked to stretch a bit. If this phase is neglected, even those who naturally prefer the Feeling function for their decision making will feel restless and insecure in their Feeling judgment. It will be almost intolerable for those who naturally prefer the Thinking function for their decision making if this phase is slighted; as intolerable for Thinkers as it would be for Feelers if no Feeling function were ever brought to bear. A Thinker might well be feeling: "I won't hurt your feeling if you don't hurt my thinking." That is, there are certain aspects of rationality that must be taken care of or the Thinker is "stuck"; he can't go forward. He cannot proceed to a "con-sentire,"a feeling-together-with, to a fruitful and con-textualized judgment of fittingness--the Feeling judgment. Having done its perceiving by both Sensation and intuition, and handed the matter thus perceived over to the first phase ofjudgment--"T" rationality, the group is now ready to pass on to the final and most difficult phase of consensus seeking, that of Feeling rationality. S--N--T--F In this phase the judgments of fittingness, suitability, appropriateness are in order--but not before this phase. This is the ". all things consid-ered, this is where I am" time. But a group should not be in that time unless it has passed through the previous three phases in sequence. This is in accord with what was said above--letting the group move upward from consensus to consensus from the lower to the higher "con-sentire." Note that moving according to the sequential dependence of the functions: S--N--T--F is following "the gradient of more difficult consensus." The easiest area to find consensus is in the sensate data. It is the area most open to "consensus consciousness." Sensate data is available to the five senses, is the most objective kind of perception and is least open to subjective and idiosyn-cratic interpretation. There is no judgment involved; it is simply reporting "the facts." Next in order of ease of arriving at consensus consciousness is 5111 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 still perception, but now iNtuitive perception. INtuitive perception takes in many things that "are not there" for Sensate perception--interconnections, relatedness, future possibilities--yet which can be assimilated by Sensation rather easily once they are pointed out. Now comes "the great divide." Moving into the area of judgment poses a new level of difficulty in coming to consensus consciousness. Though Thinking judgment, the fir~st phase of rational judgment, is more objective than Feeling judgment, it is still a quantum leap in trying to arrive at consensus here over against consensus in perception. Still, there are cause-effect relationships and necessary consequences, and a compelling logic to help find the consensus in this area of Thinking rationality. S--N--T The most difficult area for consensus consciousness to emerge is in the area of Feeling judgment. This is the most personal-subjective area of judgment--the judgments of fittingness, suitability, appropriateness-- "what I like"; "what I want." Still, a true suitability and appropriateness can unify and focus a group, especially if the prior phases of Sensate and iNtuitive perception and Thinking rationality have prepared the way. S--N--T--F The various levels of consensus, of con-sentire, are, again, not some kind of equality in emotional states, but an experience of union in the proper object of the function S or N or T or F. It may, further, be an experience of union in the transcendental concern of that function--The One, The Beautiful, The True, The Good. This latter was briefly treated in the Essay on The Constructive Use of Differences. Thus, to go against or violate the "gradient of more difficult consensus" is self-defeating. Many religious groups immediately jump in to the area of Feeling judgment in considering an issue, and try to begin the consensus seeking process at its end-point. They move directly against the gradient of consensus. They go against traffic on a one-way street, and leave all kinds of mayhem and injustice in their wake. If a group hopes to focus and harness the energies and commitment of its members in a consensus decision by a process that does justice to all, following the gradient of consensus, S -- N -- T ~ F will prove a graced and productive structure. Summary In this article 1 have tried to point out: 1) Religious groups that are composed mostly of people who prefer To See the Other Side. / 519 Feeling rationality to Thinking rationality should be especially careful to employ structures that invite the contribution of Thinking rationality to decision making. Truly unjust structures can ensue from this neglect. 2) Feeling judgment in the Jungian and MBTI matrices is not emotion or sentiment; it is a judgment of suitability or appropriateness, and has noetic reference. Emotion is the first register of value for both Thinking and Feeling. 3) Consensus is a "con-sentire," a "feeling-together-with." There is always a consensus in a convening group. This resident consensus is the place to start in seeking further consensus. By the process of articulating what consensus is present in the group, the group has already passed beyond that consensus and is moving toward a new and higher level of consensus. 4) Following the sequential dependence of the functions, the "gradient of more difficult consensus" S -- N -- T -- F is a graceful structure in group work, and its understanding and application can greatly help the attitudes and contributions of those involved. NOTES tOne thinks of course of projecting our own neglected psychic concerns on others, stereotyping, transferences, and so forth. These are always present, especially, but by no means exclusively, where men and women work together. 2See Isabel Briggs Myers, with Peter B. Myers, Gifts Differing, (Palo Alto: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1980); Isabel Briggs Myers, Introduction to Type, (Gainsville: Center for Applications of Psychological Type, 1980); George J. Schemel and James A. Borbely, Facing Your Type, (Wernersville: Typrofile Press, 1982); C.G. Jung, Psy-chological Type, vol. 6, Bolingen Series XX, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1971). 3"Rational judgment is based not merely on objective but also on subjective data. The predominance of one or the other factor, however, as a result of psychic disposition often existing from early youth, will give the judgment a corresponding bias. A judg-ment that is truly rational will appeal to the objective and the subjective factor equally and do justice to both. But that would be an ideal case and wouldpresuppose an equal development of both extraversion and introversion. In practice, however, either movement excludes the other, and, so long as this dilemma remains, they cannot exist side by side but at best successively. Under ordinary conditions, therefore, an ideal rationality is impossible." C. G. Jung, Psychological Types [644]. 4Noting the correspondence of the four transcendentals with the four functions is not Jung's observation, but my own. The One--Sensation; the Good--Feeling; the Beauti-ful- Intuition; the True--Thinking. See Facing Your Type, pp. 3 and 4. 5George J. Schemel and James A. Borbely, Facing Your Type, (Wernersville: Typrofile Press, 1982), pp. I l- 12. 6See Facing Your Type, pp. 17-20. Religious Charism: Definition, Rediscovery and Implications Jean Marie Renfro, S.S.S. This article is based on a talk given by Sister Renfro, of the Sisters of Social Service, at a regional meeting last fall of California's Catholic Conference (CCC), the CMSM and the LCWR. Sister Renfro may be addressed at her residence: 1120 Westchester Place; Los Angeles, California 90019. We are indebted to Paul of Tarsus for putting the word charism into our religious vocabularies. We are indebted to Paul VI for giving the expression a specific meaning for us as religious women and men.~ Although Paul the Apostle used the Greek charismata a number of times, and it was often translated into Latin as "gift" or "grace," the most striking use of the word is in his first letter to the Corinthians? The classic passage speaks of (a) the great variety of gifts, (b) which the Spirit gives, (c) each one different from the other, (d) each given for the common good, (e) each given for the building up of the Body of Christ. The apostle makes a key point: he is not speaking of the baptismal grace of the presence of the Holy Spirit which belongs to all baptized Christians, but of special gifts given people with special missions. The passage is not so much about gifts as it is about the Spirit who gives the charismata. That Spirit is the one whom Jesus describes as wind which blows where it will; that Spirit whom Luke says is like a dove, a bird which takes off and flies; that Spirit who in Acts is fire and in John is living water. Now wind, fire, water are hard to contain, hard to pin down. In speaking of religious charism the underlying, fundamental premise is that Religious Charism / 52"1 we are in the realm of that unpredictable Holy Spirit. Charism was not a commonly used word down the ages, but it did strike a chord in the hearts of the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, who used it in the same sense as did the Apostle Paul. By choosing the expression a number of times, although never in relation to religious life, they made it quite clear that the special gifts of the Spirit are not restricted to the apostolic community. Having defined the Church as the People of God, Lumen Gentium points out that there are special graces of the Spirit ("apart from the sacraments and the ministrations of the Church") which are distributed "among the faithful of every rank," gifts which make the people "fit and ready to undertake the renewal, and whether these charisms be very remarkable or more simple and widely diffused., they are fitting and useful for the needs of the Church." At the end of the passage bishops are charged with judging the genuineness and proper use of these charisms and at the same time they are reminded that their office is not to extinguish the Spirit.3 The renewal of the Church then, while under the guidance of the bishops, is truly the work of God the Holy Spirit. Religious Charisms Now if charisms are given "to the faithful of every rank," it follows that religious must also receive the Spirit's special grace. In November 1964 that seemed an obvious enough statement and it caught no one's attention. Neither Lumen Gentium's Chapter VI on religious, nor Perfectae Caritatis (October 1965) specifically used the word charism in relation to religious life; however, the concept of charism, of special gifts given for the development of religious life, was not new. For centuries there had been a common belief that the founding persons of religious communities were the recipients of special grace. The Jesuit, Jerome Nadal, writing in 1554 said: When God wants to help his Church, he first raises up a person and gives him or her a special grace and impulse under which he or she may serve God in a particular manner. This is what he did in the case of St. Francis: God gave him a particular grace for his personal growth as well as for his companions . In the same way he raised up Ignatius and granted him a grace, and through him to us . ,,4 For a millennium, pope after pope had commented on the unique gifts given to this founder, and (after a few centuries) to that foundress. This concept, together with the direction the council documents had taken, surely paved the way for the expression used by Paul VI in his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelica Testificatio, On the Renewal of Religious Life. The Pope said that religious who wish to be faithful to the teaching of the council are those who, seeking God before all else, combine contempla- 522 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 tion with apostolic love. He continued: "By the former they cling to God in mind and heart; by the latter they strive to associate themselves with the work of redemption and to spread the kingdom of God. Only in this way you will be able to reawaken hearts to truth and to divine love in accordance with the charism of your founders, who were raised up by God within his Church."5 (Emphasis mine) The expression has been used again and again in subsequent papal docu-ments. Evangelica Testificatio was dated June 29, 1971, and countless communities were already well into the work of renewal. To understand what that phrase, "charism of your founders," meant and has come to mean to us, it is necessary to look for a moment at religious life in the 50s. The Leveling of Religious Life for Women The following observations may not apply to men's communities. They flow from my own experience of two dozen women's communities with whom I worked closely and sometimes stayed between 1953 and 1968. If anything can be said of religious women when the council began, it must be that we were faithful. We were faithful to the Church, to the pope, to our foundresses, to our constitutions, and to our communities. We meticulously kept the rule, performed our apostolates, learned to walk, to write, to speak and to dress exactly as Mother Mary Someone did one hundred, or perhaps two hundred years before somewhere in Europe. We kept her customs to perfection, whether or not they made any sense in our culture, because we believed that was what God and the Church asked of us. Consider one example among many. Visualize a group of healthy American women, some with Ph.D.s, sitting at table in silence, passing around a pan of suds to wash their dishes. No wonder we were the quaint little nuns! We reverenced everything about our lives. And everything had equal value. The special gifts which the Spirit gave the foundress were on a par with how people in her culture peeled potatoes. We were equally careful about both. Everything was leveled. Our special charism, our uniqueness, our gifts from the Holy Spirit were lost in a sea of trivia. We could have invented Trivial Pursuit. Nor was that totally our fault. In a sense the whole Church behaved in that way. We were taught to give the same credence to the teaching on Limbo and the doctrine of Resurrection. Recently I had an experience which let me see in an instant how communities lost sight of their charisms. I went to Sequoia National Park on a field trip with a geographer, who on the way up pointed out character-istics of various trees to be found in the forest we would visit. He described the giant sequoias, the biggest, the oldest trees in the world. Trees which live for two thousand years, but trees with a very shallow root system, Religious Charism having roots which extend from the trunk for yards, but always very near the surface. Because of this shallowness the sequoia needs a fire from time to time to clear the surface brush so that its roots can get the necessary nutrients. The tree itself is protected from fire by a very heavy bark with a high content of tanic acid. The sequoia is totally different from the juniper, which has an extremely long tap root, quite capable of making its way through granite, thus allowing the juniper to live on the edge of a precipice, to survive comfortably where the sequoia would never take root. Each tree has a wholeness in itself, its own beauty, its own reflection of the creative magnitude of God. I had been thinking about charism for a long time and the parallel was obvious. A few hours later I was walking in the forest, caught up in its lavish-ness. For a moment I was alone, in silence and in awe, when the silence was broken by a voice coming from the trail below me. Someone said, "Oh, sequoias, junipers, cedars--to me they are all just trees!" In an instant that person had leveled the wonders of that forest to just trees. Gone the marvelous integrity of each species. They were all just trees. That is what happened to women's communities before the Council called us to search for our own charism. We were all leveled to be just "the sisters." First everything in our lives was of equal importance, and secondly, we might as well have been one gigantic community. We knew we were different from one another and meant by God to be different, but it was an intuitive kind of knowl.edge, with not much to support it. To the rest of the world we were distinguished from one another only by some aspect of our dress. (And when we started studying the Gospels we found that the only group distinguished by its clothing had broad phylacteries and long tassels.) Frequently we did not even have a name. People, including our clerical brothers, simply said, "Sister," and we replied. Canon law leveled us still further, qqaere were pages and pages of canons that required communities of women to do things in a uniform way. Communities founded in the twentieth century ended up with virtually the same constitution as all the others, with only a paragraph, or at best a page which pertained to itself alone. I once indexed our constitution and was astounded that a Society called Sisters of Social Service had only one reference to social welfare. One final word about the leveling process. The Vatican Council, in telling us to find our own integrity, our own identity, called a sudden, sharp halt to the leveling, at least for a time. But it does continue. People find it easier to deal with, or perhaps to dismiss, the quaint little nun in her medieval garb than they do with many of today's religious women. We have educated ourselves about our charisms and their implications, but we 594 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 have not educated others. Having gone through much to discover and attempt to be faithful to our own charisms, it is painful to have people-- sometimes those who should understand--seemingly seek to level us again. For example, while I greatly admire Teresa of Calcutta, it is problematic to see her work and her way of life held up as the ideal for our day. It is the leveling process at work again; we do not all have the same charism. The Call to Renew In 1962, when the Holy Spirit and John XXIII convoked the Council, most of that amorphous mass called "the sisters," absolutely dedicated to faithfulness to the Church, were quite ready to do as we were asked--to undertake an interior renewal and to make exterior adaptations suitable to our own time. No one .yet spoke of "charism" as the Council Fathers presented us with the now famous steps to renewal. First, since the "final norm of religious life is the following of Christ as it is put before us in the Gospel, this must be taken as its supreme rule by all institutes." In other words, we were told to go back to Scripture and make it, like the Eucharist, our daily bread. Secondly, the Council Fathers were at pains to point out in several passages that there is a "wonderful variety of religious communi-ties," and that variety needed to be reemphasized. To bring about renewal we were to seek the authentic spirit of our individual founding persons, but what exactly did that mean, and how were we to go about it? Finally, since the whole Church had to learn to read and respond to the signs of the times, certainly we did, too. But how were we to adapt our lives to the changed conditions without destroying ourselves, since we saw our lives as a seamless garment. Entering into the work renewal asked of us, sparked a variety of responses in the early days. Some said we do not need to renew; we have never departed from the vision and way of life of our founder. Some women's communities, desirous of becoming fully competent in ministry, were already into Sister Formation, and were hungry for what renewal promised. We were at various stages of our journey when in 1971, Paul VI, in Evangelica Testificatio, spoke of the charism of your founders. The expression was noticed immediately because it shed great light on our search for the authentic spirit of the founder, for ''the primitive inspira-tion of the institute." By definition, charism is gift from the Spirit, generally for the good of others, but sometimes a personal gift as well. Charismata, if accepted and freely given back to the People of God, build up the Church. The concept of "charism of the founder" narrowed the focus of our search from the founder's whole way of life to how God worked in him. It led us to concentrate on the way the Spirit gifted the foundress, rather than on the Religious Charism / 525 accidents of her culture. To be told by the Church that the cultural mores of another age were not essential to our vocation was at once startling and freeing. Never again could everything about our life be valued equally. It now became urgent that we rediscover our unique identity, that we sort out the charism from the cultural traditions. Simultaneously we searched the past and the present. I suspect many communities shared the experience of my own community, the Sisters of Social Work. It seemed perfectly evident that if there is such a thing as a community charism, then it must somehow be lived by us, its members. We looked around and we were/are all so different. We asked what do we hold in common? What we shared was so obvious that we missed it at first. We did not know that we knew who we are. We did know that we were founded by women already working to alleviate and prevent social evils, and we knew we would die out if we ever ceased to fight contemporary social problems. We knew that since we often work alone on uncharted paths our ministry demanded an attentiveness to the Spirit. We knew that we were not Benedictine sisters, yet our spirit is powerfully influenced by the Benedictine tradition. We knew we were not Religious as such, but rather members of a Society of Common Life (now "Apostolic Life"). Different as we were, we shared these elements with each other; gradually we realized they came from our foundresses and define us. The late 70s were a time when many communities, struggling to find their true identity, finally understood that they did know their own unique essence, that they did know more of their own integrity than they could easily verbalize. But first many questions had to be answered. Charism and the Gospel One of the first questions with which we had to come to grips was how the Gospel, now the supreme rule of our lives, related to our charism. Some of us, overwhelmed with a new reading of the Word of God, asked why do we need anything more than the Gospel? Is not everything necessary for renewal right there? It was an honest question, for indeed it is all there. But everything needed for a holy life in any lifestyle is there. The G0spel points the way for all invited to Christian baptism, not just for religious. Then it became clear. No one person, no one community could manifest all the attributes of the Lord. Each religious family reflects a particular aspect, or a particular combination of aspects of the Gospel. Margaret Slachta, the foundress of the Sisters of Social Service, some fifty years ago, spoke of the concept of charism, although she did not name it as such. She said: God has all perfection. It's as if the perfections of God are a great globe 526 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 and religious communities are a thousand mirrors reflecting one or other of the divine attributes. The Franciscans reflect the spirit of poverty to a world always attracted to riches. The Dominicans reflect truth to a world ever flirting with error, while we reflect the sanctifying love of God to a world which does not know the Spirit.6 All of us need the Gospel as the final measuring rod of our lives, but each community needs its own special gift or specific combination of Gospel attributes or gifts from the Spirit to give it its own identity. The Founding Charism A unique gift or combination of gifts was originally the special charism of our founding mothers or fathers. That raised many questions which needed answers.7 What aspects of the Gospel were especially attractive to our founder? What ignited a flame in the heart of our foundress? What combination of Christian characteristics makes this religious family different from that one? These questions sent us scurrying back to our earliest documents, back through legend and history to the flesh-and-blood men and women through whom God gave us life. To clearly describe our founding charism it was necessary to go back to the founding person's historic life, necessary to learn the culture, the social and political situation in which the founder awoke to a personal call from God. It was necessary to see how the foundress responded to the signs of her times. We searched our primary sources with new eyes as we sought to find how the Spirit of God was manifested to our founding persons. What was the conversion experience from which there was no turning back? Was it in a cave like Subiaco or Manresa, or as with the foundress of my community, after coming home from a colorful, exciting ball in a luxurious salon in Budapest? How was the challenge met? How did the person read the message? What did Benedict or Francis or Dominic or Ignatius or John Bosco intend as they gathered disciples, as they structured a way of life which would allow their disciples to experience God as they had? What was the intent of Angela Merici, Louise de Marillac, Catherine McCauley, Elizabeth Seton, Frances Cabrini, or Margaret Slachta as they found like-minded women and began to pray with them, began to prepare them to attack some grave need felt by the People of God? We found life-giving answers to our questions. We discovered the why our founders did what they did, and the how was no longer so important. Most of their customs were the ordinary customs of their day. Take clothing for example. Many founding persons, both women and men, in many different centuries and different places wore the oridinary clothing of the poor or of the common people of their time. What they wore was the least Religious Charism / 527 of their concerns. Of course the "why" and the "hows" of the past brought us up sharply to the present and another set of questions. How does the present moment relate to what the founder was all about? In our great faithfulness to the foundress, to her customs and her way of doing things, did we lose sight of her vision? What would the founder do if called by God to begin the community now, today? Which of the foundress' gifts are being incarnated in the members of the community today? We have become very aware that the heart of the charism given our founding person must be enfleshed in our time or we have no deep ties with our roots. In our communities we are very conscious of our diversity, of the richness of personality of our members. Each of us comes with valued and often unique gifts from the Spirit which become the treasure of the whole community, yet we are also aware that we share, and in a radical way, the attraction, the charism of our founding person. Personal Charism of the Founder/Foundress Most communities discovered that the charism of the founding person was somewhat different from the charism of the community itself. Some gifts of the Spirit were for the foundress alone, some aspects of the founder's charism necessary only to the work of foundation, some strengths needed to give life to the new group in its formative years. In seeking out our own individual roots many of us became very conscious that the founder's specific time in history was so unlike our own, that the foundress brought the community to life often out of a specific need of her culture which does not exist in our technological age. Again it became evident that customs, manner of responding to need, which were a part of the initial environment in which the community was created, may have been a part of the personal charism of the foundress, but were not a part of the community's charism. If the charism is at the heart of the community's identity then the charism must transcend both the time and the culture in which the community was founded. Elements of Religious Charism The charism of a religious community is that gift or combination of gifts which God the Holy Spirit gave to the founding person so that the community might come into existence in the first place. The gifts reflect certain attributes of God, or in more contemporary language, aspects of the Gospel which the founding person lived out in her or his life. The gifts were given for the common good, to build the Body of Christ in the time in which they were first manifested. This gift, or special combination of girls, 5211 / Review for Religious, July-August, 1986 is not limited by time or culture and is found in, and is enfleshed by, the present-day followers of the founding person, enabling them to live his or her vision in our own time. The charism gives the community its basic identity, provides it with its own wholeness, gives it its own unique meaning within the total family of religious institutes. Because the charism is the gift of the Spirit, its expression is never static, it can lead a group in unpredict-able ways, and as the bishops were told in Mutuae Relationes, Mutual Relations Between Bishops and Religious, sometimes it can be quite trouble-some to deal with.8 Founders, foundresses and their religious communities have generally discovered that following one's charism usually involves a risk, always a challenge, and not infrequently, misunderstanding. As initially the primitive charism did not bring riches, honor, power, neither does its rediscovery. Charism and Daily Life If we want a wholeness about our lives, consciously or unconsciously we take our charism into consideration in all that we do. Formation personnel should be very clear about the community's charism, should test candidates precisely in the area of the charism. In the matter of the vows which the new members will take, we profess the evangelical counsels within the context of a particular religious family with its own particular charism. We understand our vows and live out our vocation as the com-munity understan

Issue 42.2 of the Review for Religious, March/April 1983. ; Trends and Issues in Spirituality, 1983 The Service of Religious Authority Negative Feelings--Positive Growth Volume 42 Number 2 March/April, ~983 R~v~J~w t:OR Rt~l.~(;~otJs I ISSN 0034-639X). published every two months, is edited in collaboration with the faculty members of the Department of Theological Studies of St. Louis University. The editorial offices are located at Room 428:3601 Lindell Blvd.: St. Louis, MO 63108. RJ~v~!v,' t:o~ R~qt.~(;IotJs is owned by the Missouri Province Educational Institute of the Society of Jesus. St. I.ouis. MO. © 1983 by R~v~t~w FOR Rt-zl.~t;Iot~s. Composed. printed and manufactured in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at St. Louis. MO. Single copies: $2.50. Subscription U.S.A.: $9.00 a year: $17.00 for two years. Other countries: add $2.00 per year Ipostage). For subscription orders or change of address, write: Rl.:v~l.:w ~'oR R~:u(;tot~s: P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, MN 55806. Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Dolores Greeley, R.S.M. Daniel T. Costello, S.J. Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Jean Read Editor Associate Editor Book Editor Questions and Answers Editor Assistant Editor March/April, 1983 Volume 42 Number 2 Manuscripts, hooks for review and correspondence with the editor should be sent to REv~v:w I,oR RELIGIOUS; Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108. Questions for answering should be senl Io Joseph F. Gallen, S.J.; Jesuit Community; St. Joseph's University; Cily Avenue at 54th St.; Philadelphia, PA 19131. Back issues and reprints should be ordered from REVIEW I-'OR RELIGIOUS; Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108. "Out of print" issues and articles not published as reprints are available from Universily Microfilms International; 300 N. Zeeb Rd.; Ann Arbur, MI 48106. Priorities for Religious Pio Laghi Archbishop Laghi is Apostolic Delegate to t~ae United States. His delegation is located at 3339 Massachusetts Ave., N.W.: Washington, DC 20008. This article is the text of his homily at the joint meeting of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, held last August in San Francisco. With great personal interest I have been looking forward to this opportun-ity to lead you in eucharistic prayer and to reflect upon priorities for specially consecrated members of the Christian community. Today's readings provide an indispensable framework for this reflection. While they speak of priorities essential to any form of Christian life, they tell us in.a special way of the priorities of religious life: to respond wholeheartedly to God's call; and to respond by word and witness, equally without reservation, to the pressing hunger--the "famine"---for God's word which is as real today as in the time of Amos. Total Includes Permanent Religious !ife is essentially a total gift of self to the plan of God and to the service of his love, so that it is properly called a total "consecration." You know this well, but you know also that your commitment is renewed and strengthened by reflecting constantly on its meaning. What, then, do we mean by this total consecration which is sealed by religious vows? Everything great is final. All life-determining commitments are irrevocable. Not because they cannot be taken back (plainly they can) but because, making such commitments, we define ourselves as persons and so establish the parameters of success and failure, of generosity and selfishness, not merely for our lives but for our very selves. One of the worst aberrations of our times is the idea that one can be a religious--or a priest or a spouse--for a time. This is the very denial of the gift. 161 162 / Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 Those who adopt this attitude lend themselves but they do not give themselves. "What is essential in the religious vow," says Father Danielou, "is precisely that, by a definitive commitment, you are expressing this profound desire of being totally in the service of God in regard to all the eventualities of radical doubt, of questioning, and of temptation." One might say that in totally handing over his or her life to God, the religious makes with him a permanent bridge, a stable pact, a perpetual alliance. Total Includes Detachment and Attachment The words of Jesus make it clear that this total gift of self involves a two-fold movement: first, setting aside--detaching oneself from--whatever is an obstacle to the girl; second, a continuing act of positive response to the invitation--"Come back and follow me." The rich young man balked at the first step; many do. But it is possible to take this step, yet hang back from the second--"Come back and follow me." It is a permanent challenge for each religious, as for each priest and each Christian, always to renew in the context of daily life this determination to entrust one's destiny and one's self totally to God. Pride hinders us, but there is a more subtle hindrance than pride: the belief, of which we may not b'e fully conscious, that our own insight and discernment are superior--because seemingly more efficacious or even more virtuous--to the imperatives of Christ's summons as mediated to us through the particular way of life to which he has called us. Beyond detachment, one might say, lies abandonment. To take the first step but not the second is to travel only part of the way God wishes us to go. Religious Life as Witness Another fundamental point:the first function of religious life is to wit-ness- Znot to what men and women are capable of, but to what God is capable of. There are many ways of expressing this. Pope Paul Vl, in Evangelii Nunti-andi, put it with special beauty: All evangelizers--and therefore all religious-- he says, are called to be servants of the truth, not merely by speaking of abstract intellectual truth, but.by living and witnessing to God and the things of God "as if they could see the invisible" (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 76). How else, in times of spiritual famine, shall we respond to that hunger of which Amos speaks, the "famine. for hearing the word of the Lord"?. One cannot give what one does not have. "At the deepest level of their being," Pope Paul tells us, "[religious] are caught up in the dynamism of the Church's life, which is ~'hirsty for the divine Absolute and called to holiness. It is to this holiness that they bear witness" (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 69). Men and women are capable of much that is admirable: of courage and generosity, for example. But what is unique to sanctitY--and to religious life in its role of giving witness--is that it is not the work of men and women, but of the Spirit of God. Sanctity is not humanity at a high level of excellence. It is a radical leap, nothing less than our participation in divine life. Because it is not Priorities for Religious / 163 humanly ostentatious, it speaks all the more powerfully. "Being a challenge to the world and to the Church herself," Pope Paul remarks, "this silent witness of poverty and abnegation, of purity and sincerity, of self-sacrifice in obe-dience, can become an eloquent witness" (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 69). Priorities for Religious It is a joy for me to verify the presence and the dynamic activity of so many religious, men and women, in this country--all together about 160,000. They dedicate their lives, not for a time but forever, to God and to the People of God. They are "authentic witnesses of the Gospel," irreplaceable "workers" of evangelization, the most powerful "sign of total availability to God, to the Church, and to the brethren" (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 69). Prayer Among the priorities that 1 see for religious in this country, then, is the effort to ensure that prayer is an attitude toward life, so that prayer and life mutually enrich each other. This implies that prayer will lead religious to involve themselves in real life, while real-life experiences call .for intense moments of prayer. Today, as we know, along with the necessary quest for personal prayer, there is a strong concern for community prayer, for sharing one's experience of the faith, growing in one's insight into the evangelical imperatives dictated by one's circumstances, applying the events of the history of salvation, as related in Scripture, to the events of today. How important, too, that religious remain faithful to the sacramental life in its totality. There is no religious life--as there is no sanctity--apart from the Eucharist. Religious life is the expan.sion, the living out, of those energies which the Eucharist develops and nourishes in us. Our prayer must further-more be, visible and a source of encouragement to others; and this is possible through the liturgy, well prepared, well conducted, and well shared. The Social Dimension Another priority arises from awareness that the message we profess and communicate has not only a theological dimension but a social dimension. We preach a Gospel which frees men and women from sin in its roots and manifes-tations. We therefore preach and promote the human dignity and divine filiation of every human being. Preferential Option for the Poor This points to still another priority: the preferential option for the poor. Today religious increasingly find themselves in difficult, marginalized situa-tions: caring for the sick, helping those in need, promoting the rights of victims of discrimination, carrying on humble and self-sacrificing labors of many kinds. This option does not imply thb exclusion of anyone--the spiritual 164 / Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 poverty of our contemporary counterparts of the rich young man makes that clear--but it does call for a preference for the oppressed and victimized, and a constant effort to draw closer to them. This preferential option has led religious, and not only religious, to reex-amine traditional works in order to respond better to the requirements of evangelization. It has also shed a clearer light on the relationship between religious life and the poverty of the dispossessed. Beyond interior detachment and community austerity, it implies solidarity with the poor, often expressed by sharing wi~h them their conditions of life. At the same time, while adhering to this option, it is necessary to avoid certain dangers--a lack of adequate preparation, a lack of personal maturity, or a lack of evangelical motivation. At the very least these can imperil the preferential option by causing it to be misinterpreted. Hispanic Involvement There is another priority about which I also feel strongly. It concerns the presence, already substantial and rapidly growing, of so many Hispanics in the United States--their large number (almost twenty-five percent of our Cathol-ics), their religious and human values, their need for full acceptance in the Church and society. In their recent joint pastoral letter, th~ Hispanic bishops of the United States spoke of the "constant rejection" which has been "part of [the] daily life" of their people. Nevertheless, they said, "our parents taught us to love the United ~tates, although the struggle has been difficult. Our people have always struggled to improve themselves. We love the peace founded on truth, justice, love and freedom . We have not taken up arms against our country but instead have defended it. We have fought to eliminate the injusti-ces that rule our lives. The road has been long and difficult, littered with many obstacles, but we have made progress and will continue ahead with firmness and determination" ( The Bishops Speak with the Virgin: A Pastoral Letter of the Hispanic Bishops of the U.S., 1982). Yet, in the words of a Spanish-speak-ing priest of Texas, "there is a certain tendency to look upon the Hispanics as an unavoidable problem. But rejoice and appreciate us. as God's life-bear-ing gift, not only for the enrichment but even for the salvation of our Church and of our world." I recall something T.S. Eliot once said: No one is truly educated unless he or she knows a second language. These are wise words. Only then can one know what it means to be laughed at as one gropes for the right word or stumbles over its pronunciation. Truly, to know another language--in this case, Spanish--is to work for the coming of the kingdom of God and for the service of our brothers and sisters. Integration of Religious into Local and Universal Church A final priority concerns the integration of religious into the life of the local churches and the universal Church. Here, of course, a balance is essential. It Priorities for Religious / 165 was once said that religious life "has no other end but to be at the service of the priest." Plainly, however, religious must defend the specific character of their vocation against attempts, however well intentioned, simply to use them for fulfilling the immediate needs of parishes and dioceses. At the same time, though, there is another side to this coin. Individual religious, as well as their communities, must take special care to be in deep and sincere unity with the Vicar of Christ and with the orientations he gives, especially those which concern religious life or interpret the charisms of the founders of any religious institute. The same applies to their relationship with bishops. As a matter of priority, the norms contained in the Holy See's document Mutuae Relationes should be implemented in order that religious life be fully integrated into the life of the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church. Conclusion Permit me, in concluding, to quote words of Pope John Paul II which draw together many of the themes upon which I have touched. Speaking last May to religious men and women of England and Wales, the Holy Father ob-served that although "to most people you are known for what you do," never-theless "your true greatness., comes from what you are," and that can only be understood "in the light of the 'newness of life' revealed by the Risen Lord." "At some time in your lives," he said, "the call of the Lord to a special intimacy and union with him in his redemptive mission became so clear that you overcame your hesitations. You put aside your doubts and difficulties and committed yourselves to a life of total fidelity to the highest ideals of the Gospel. Your free decision was sustained by grace, and your perseverance through the years is a magnificent testimony to the victory of grace over the forces that struggl~ to tarnish the newness of. your life in Christ . "'l~oday there exists a wid~pread~mptation to unbeliEfanddespair. You, on the other hand, are committed to being men and women of deep faith and unceasing prayer. To you in a particular way may be addressed Saint Paul's exhortation to Timothy: 'Fight the good fight of the faith: take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses' (1 Tm 6:12). "Believe in the Risen Lord. Believe in your own personal vocation. Believe that Christ called you because he loves you. In moments of darkness and pain, believe that he loves you all the more. Believe in your mission within the Church. Let your faith shine before the world, as a lamp in the darkness; let it shine as a beacon that will guide a confused society to the proper appreciation of essential values. May the spiritual joy of your personal lives, and your com-munal witness of authentic Christian love, be a source of inspiration and hope" (Address to Men and Women Religious of England and Wales, May 29, 1982). Religious Life in the Young Churches Jan Snijders, S.M. At the end of 1981, Fr. Snijders finished his term in the general administration of his congrega-tion and has enjoyed a sabbatical for the past year. Presently he is lecturing in philosophy at the interdiocesan seminary of Papua, wfiere his address is: Marist College, Bomana: P.O. Box 1101 ; Boroko; Papua, New Guinea. ~n a periodical that aims at providing a forum for theological and spiritual reflection on religious life one does not have to underline the importance of religious life, and the case of tile Young Churches is not so different as to warrant an exception. The entire Church has become missionary (or should have). The contribution of religious to the mission of the Church and espe-cially their religious consecration itself are to manifest in all churches, young and old, that "the kingdom of God is at hand" (AG, 18; LG, 44). While pontifical and conciliar documents are eloquent on the subject of fostering religious life in the Young Churches, they are prudently vague on how this should be done, on who should do so and on the forms that religious life should take. Religious superiors too are probably very wise to keep things out of the limelight. Growth and adaptation are processes of a delicate nature. Premature publicity and interventions could easily do more harm than good. All of this may explain why so little is being written by private observers or scholars on the~ founding of local re!igious institutes and on the spreading of international institutes in the Young Churches. Still these things are taking place everywhere and a few general remarks can be of use to people trying to make responsible decisions. Are Local Foundations Preferable? Among the many connected questions there is one that especially observers in the "old" churches often bring up: ls it not better to leave the field to local 166 Religious Life in the Young Churches / 167 foundations so that religious life from the beginning can be thoroughly Afri-can, Indian, or whatever the case may be? Before proposing elements of a possible answer we must note that, as a matter of fact, local sisterhoods have been founded nearly everywhere and many are flourishing. Local lay institutes of men are much less numerous, and rare are those that can be said to flourish; in fact, one does not have to be very widely informed to know of several that after the first generation of members have ceased to exist. Practically nonexistent are clerical institutes founded in the Young Churches, with a very few, but notable exceptions. If the long-distance observer's concern for the "contextualization" of reli-gious life is praiseworthy, the assumption that it has a better chance in local institutes is debatable. For every case that substantiates the assumption there may be one that disproves it! Admittedly, a local community is never under pressure from faraway higher superiors to conform to rules and customs that originated in different cultures. But, even so, their first models of religious life were necessarily expatriates and the spontaneous desire of local religious communities to imitate foreign patterns may be a more effective force against what outsiders might conceive of as "contextualization" than pressure of higher superiors possibly could be. Conversely, local members of an interna-tional group are just as likely to carve out an identity of their own by insisting on local adaptations. In any case, those distant higher superiors who sup-posedly insist on foreign rules will in many cases prove to be either mythical figures or memories of a past that has disappeared many years ago! There are good reasons for local institutes, but "contextualization" is a doubtful one. A recent Roman document extolled (and perhaps exaggerated) the value of international religious institutes.~ In any case their importance cannot be doubted: they are able to respond to needs and opportunities across the globe; they provide spiritual renewal where local means fail; they form a network of communion and unity where local Churches become excessively particular; they carry a rich spiritual heritage and have the resources to revitalize it. If in the older churches local communities successfully work alongside of local branches of international ones, it would seem a little patronizing to doubt that this could be so in the Young Churches. Moreover, international institutes allow the Young Churches to take part in fbreign missionary activity (AG, 38). ¯ Local communities have advantages that 1 shall mention further on, but they also have to cope with disadvantages. It is not fair to .demand that local ordinaries (such communities usually are of diocesan right) always manage to strike a perfect balance between rightful concern and respect for internal autonomy. But it means that especially small lay communities at times suffer under interference from one bishop, only to be neglected by his successor.2 Local communities often were founded by a missionary or a bishop to respond to immediate and urgent needs. One cannot expect all founding fathers or mothers to be saints or spiritual giants. With the passing of time needs change and the initial inspiration dries up. For institutes to be flexible 161~ / Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 and to retain spiritual vigor they need somehow to stay in contact with one of the great spiritual traditions of the Church. For the large orders and congrega-tions it must therefore always be a sacred duty to assist small communities without infringing on their autonomy and identity. "Planning" For The Spirit Much more complicated are the questions that arise when we look at the implantation of international religious orders and congregations. Granting that, in principle, there is a place for them in the Young Churches, one still has to ask whether it is opportune to do so, and under what conditions. But before tackling those questions a more basic one must be answered, namely whether such,matters can and must be "planned" at all. Shouldn't one leave things entirely to the free movements of the Spirit who calls whom he chooses, where he chooses? The religious vocation is an indix~idual gift of God and the receiver has an inalienable right to follow the call of the Lord. The task of superiors, ecclesias-tical and religious, can only be to discern, to respect and to encourage the movements of the Spirit in the hearts of people who feel themselves called. Granted this point of departure, it still remains a fact that God's call usually leads the receiver to ask admission in a particular community, and then the superiors concerned have a right and a duty to decide whether it is for the good of the candidate and of the community to accept her or him. And, in a place where that particular community is not firmly established, that is bound to be a delicate question, especially if it concerns a single applicant, or a very small number. Unless a community is going to be firmly established among the people from whom the applicants come, accepting them carries the risk that they will pass their religious lives as strangers, either permanently in a foreign country or as the lonely locally-born among foreign fellow religious in their own country. Of course people may be called to do just that, but it demands a high measure of psychological balance, of personal maturity, and of spiritual depth. Unless these gifts are clearly present, superiors may have to conclude that the candidate is not called to such an exceptional life. The fact that candidates ask for admission may lead the community to attempt a permanent foundation in their country. Conversely, candidates can be accepted, and even sought, in view of a planned foundation. Whatever the case may be, the decision to establish the order or the congregation in a new country is distinct from the decision to accept a few individual candidates, even if one thing will eventually lead to the other. We have two separate decisions, each to be made on its own merits, and not necessarily by the same people. For one thing, accepting candidates is the responsibility of religious superiors only; starting a foundation needs the agreement of ecclesiastical superiors. My conclusion is that, while we must respectfully follow the movements of the Spirit, we cannot abandon prudent "planning," i.e., weighing changes and consequences whenever candidates are to be admitted and foundations in the Religious ~fe in the Young Churches / 169 Young Churches are considered. The Spirit also asks responsible decision making. Reasons to Hesitate I have started from the assumption that it is not self-evident that all religious orders and congregations should attempt to begin foundations every-where in the Young Churches. I have argued that the matter must not be confused with the question of eventually admitting a few individual candidates but also that, on the whole, there is a place for international institutes within the Young Churches. So why, the initial assumption? Foi several centuries missionary activity Was organized around the so-called ius commissionis whereby missionary territories were entrusted to a missionary or religious institute. This means that usually only one clerical institute was present in a given area and only a very few lay institutes, often in some way related to the ~lerical institute to which the mission was entrusted. Naturally, local candidates to the religious life would usually enter either a local community founded on the spot, or the international institute working there. Now, the former mission territories have gradually become dioceses in their own right, the ius commissionis has disappeared, and a healthy diversifi-cation of missionary and religious institutes has taken the place of the earlier "monopolies." It can now no longer be self-evident that a religious institute will found itself wherever it helps founding the Church. And there can be very good reasons why in certain cases it should not do so. The main reason for this view is the one discreetly hinted at by the Bishops' Conference of Senegal and Mauritania in a Declaration on the Vocational Apostolate of 1978.3 The bishops ask that "in a spirit of generosity, dispersion be avoided." Let us look at this idea of "dispersion." We must admit that life in an intercultural setting is demanding. Generally speaking, people can be expected to feel and to function better at home, and to show a healthier growth among people of their own culture (one advantage of local foundations!). The prob-lems of intercultural communities are still not rod difficult if the "mixture" of cultures is balanced but they become more serious for a small minority in a group that for the rest is solidly of one race, nationality or language. Especially for young people the problems this poses can be nearly insurmountable. The consequences are obvious wherever one is dealing with small Catholic populations. ! do not know of any study that has come to firm conclusions on the question of how many vocations can reasonably be expected to come from a given Catholic population. The variations according to country and period of history are considerable, but clearly there are limits. If the religious voca-tions of a small Catholic population are spread over a disproportionate number of religious institutes, then many of the locally-born religious will for-ever be minorities among the foreign missionaries. "171~ / Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 Will those religious be able to cope with the stresses of this situation? Will, in the communities that have such minorities, the groups of local people ever grow large enough to reach what could be called "critical mass," i.e., a group large enough to spark creativity and lead to genuine indigenization of religious life? Finally, what happens if the international institute has to withdraw from the country, for lack of vocations at home, for political reasons, or whatever? Will the few locally-born members leave with the foreigners? Will they be left stranded by themselves? The situation is far from imaginary. One example may illustrate what dispersion can look like. Before the war eleven clerical religious orders and congregations entered Japan. In 1981.all but one had Japanese priests among their members. Between 1947 and 1958 sixteen other clerical institutes followed them into Japan and in 1981 twelve of those had Japanese priests among their members, in the following proportions and absolute members:4 Entered Before the War Entered After the War 87.5% = 21out of 24a 71.1% = 4 out of 7 84 %= 21 out of 25 31%=9out of 29 82.6% = 43 out of 52 28.5%=4out of 14 78.9%= 15 out of 19 25 %= 3outof12 50 %= 4out of g 21.4%= 3out of 14 44.8% = 78 out of 174 20.8% = 5 out of 24 43.3% = 39 out of 90 20 %=2outofl0 43.1%=41 out of 95 19 %=8out of 42 33.8% = 91 out of 277 17.3% = 4 out of 23 9.4%= 5outof 53 I1.1%= 1 outof 9 ai.e. 21 Japanese priests 6.6% = I out of 15 out of 24 priests in 3.1% = 2 out of 64 Japan In all but one of the pre-war set the Japanese priests are in the majority or form substantial and viable minorities. In the post-war set the Japanese members are, both proportionately and in absolute numbers, in far from promising situations. It cannot be without significance that.for the same year the institutes of the first set mention that they have together 83 members studying for the priestho6d, respectively (in the same order as above): 0, 1,9, I, 0, 8, 19, ! 1, 25, 9. The institutes of the second set register together eleven students, spread over four institutes. The other eight have none at all. It is not reasonable to expect the picture to change substantially. Already the vocation rate in Japan is "exceptionally high (but going down): more than 850 Japanese priests (diocesan and regular) in a Catholic population of about 400,000. The rate is still higher if we take into account the preponderance of Japanese women over men in the Church. Similar dispersion could probably be registered among lay religious in Japan. The clear division between pre-war and post-war entries is perhaps particu-lar to Japan but it must be far from the only place where serious dispersion is taking place. Unfortunately very few places have such splendid publications as Religious Life in the Young Churches / 171 the Japan Catholic Directory and reliable information is scarce. A Matter of Criteria If there is a place in the new churches for international religious institutes but not everywhere for all of them, choices must be made and criteria are needed: What factors constitute reasons for or against an eventual foundation? Firstly, we must take into account what has already been said about the danger of dispersion: What is the size of the Catholic population and how many institutes already exist among them? Is there room for more? Or is the area "saturated"?. One does not need hard and fast rules to make a prudent assessment. Secondly, an institute must take stock of its resources for the formation of eventual candidates. Wouldn't it be presumptuous to admit candidates if one does not have the personnel and the means to offer them a good spiritual and professional formation? And it cannot be assumed that a solid formation can ordinarily be given by sending young people to a foreign country, or by entrusting them to formators who are not familiar with the candidates' culture. The fact that this has been done in the past and that it has been known to succeed does not ~jusify doing it on a general scale: The failure of those experi-ments cannot be overlooked. Faced with the decision whether or not to seek and admit candidates, an-institute must honestly ask itself, especially today, if it has the personnel to maintain an adequate presence in the host country for a long enough period of time. A careful look at how long it has taken new provinces in the past to reach "cruising speed" and assure self-sustained growth can help to make an intelli-gent guess. By way of target figure l would propose that a clerical institute must reckon with a good twenty-five years before the local religious can reasonably be expected to carry on withou( substantial outside support. Lay institutes may not need that much time. The already mentioned Declaration of the Bishops of Senegal and Mauri-tania says that an institute should have a substantial presence in the country. But what is "substantial"?. I am inclined to think that their presence can just as easily be too big as too small. The founding community must of course be large enough to show diversity of talents and personalities. Each person's weaknesses must be balanced out by the strengths of others and candidates must be presented with an ample range of models. But if the founding com-munity gets a little too large then the chances are that it lacks buoyancy and that it has too many other interests besides founding. Especially important is the minoriO, effect. In a large group of expatriates the locally-born religious remain for too long a minority; the foreigners' ways remain normative; locals waste their energy fighting for room and their creativity is not given enough scope. The last point varies with the way the founding group is composed. If all are of the same home country, the minority effect on the locals is all the more stifling. Any group of people of the same background, living together in 172 / Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 a foreign country, tends to cultivate their common memories and cultural traits more than they ever would at home. In spite of the most noble intentions they often are, unwittingly, quite intolerant of local ways. An international group on the contrary that has proved to be able to function together has great advantages--the locals soon find their own niche. The minority effect is mini-mized: everyone is a minority, thus no one is. A religious community that believes in its spiritual heritage naturally seeks to expand. This general framework however can carry incidental traits that provide important indications as to the viability of an eventual "implantation" project. A missionary group actually engaged in one of the Young Churches, seeing that no replacements or reinforcements can be expected from the home province or the order as a whole, turns to local vocations in the hope of ensuring the continuity of its works. But this complex of attitudes must raise doubts about their ability to take in local vocations. Are they not too much preoccupied with their past achievements? Does the search for security not play too large a role? ls the specifically "religious" commitment central enough in their lives? Religious communities and superiors in the older churches that see the former flow of vocations dry up can be tempted by tales of plentiful vocations in some faraway place (even if true). Add a touch of cultural romanticism about our "decadent Western civilization" and about "the spiritual youth of unsophisticated people" and the scene is set for another unfortunate experi-ment. It may sound harsh but the general rule should be that religious who do not project their enthusiasm at home and who do not attract young people of their own culture to follow them, should not attempt to do so either among young people of another culture. This is not a matter of inviting negative comments on the motivations of religious either at home or in the foreign missions, but simply a matter of objective appraisal of their suitability to undertake a particularly demanding task. These criteria add up to a formidable list! No situation is ever going to be hundred-per-cent perfect. Still, the community that accepts young members in a new country takes on a grave responsibility. The picture as a whole must be fairly favorable to justify going ahead. It is not the kind of project that asks for bold ,risks: The generosity of young people and the future of religious life in the emerging churches is at stake. Conclusion Religious institutes belong to the life of the Church. They provide their members with ways to follow Christ. Religious discover in their own lives and show others that the kingdom of God is at work here and now. Every culture, like every individual, is in need of conversion.5 Therefore religious institutes should be present in all the churches in the diversity that is part of their charism (PC, 1; ND, I1, 12, 29). But unless this program is implemented with great care, we risk defeating our purpose and Religious ~fe in the Young Churches / "173 people of good will would suffer the consequences. This article does not pretend to have touched on all the aspects of religious life in the New Churches. It will have attained its goal if the problems involved receive a little more attention and, when choices are to be made, problems would be discussed in realistic and open exchange. NOTES ~ Directives for the Mutual Relations between Bishops and Religious, 23rd of April 1978 signed by Paul VI. Quoted as "ND.". -'See REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS. 1980, pp. 122-123. ~ Dbclaration des Evbques du Sbnbgal et de la Mauritanie sur la Pastorale des Vocations, Dakar, 13 July, 1978, p. 4. 4These figures are based on information contained in the Japan Catholic Director.v, 1981, with minor adjustments where different tables did not quite agree. 5Cardinal Pironio, Message aux Religieux et Religieuses d'Afrique, Informationes SCRIS, 1978, II, p. 279. NOW AVAILABLE From Tablet to Heart: Internalizing New Constitutions land II by Patricia Spillane, M.S.C. Price: $1.25 per copy, plus postage. Address: Review for Religious Rm 428 3601 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, Missouri 63108 Currents in Spirituality A God for a Dark Journey: Trends and Issues in Spirituality, 1983 George Aschenbrenner, S.J. This is Father Aschenbrenner's fourth annual survey of the field of spirituality. He now resides in St. Alphonsus House, a residence for Jesuits at St. Joseph's University. The address is 5800 Overbrook Ave.; Philadelphia, PA 1913 I. This is the fourth in a series of articles--appearing annually--which the editor asked for with a view to exploring and reflecting upon currents in American spirituality. Last year's articlO gave extensive space to a description of the larger context and environment within which, in my judgment, the spiritual trends an~d issues discussed were developing. That major influence and context, within which all American spiritual life is being lived, was seen to be secularization--rapid, continuing secularization. The lengthy first part of last year's article sought clearly to distinguish between what it viewed as a necessary and very healthy dynamic--seculariza-tion- from its pervasive and very destructive alternative--secularism. This present article is, fundamentally, a continuation of last year's perspective and approach. It directly assumes and builds further upon that reflection on secu-larization and secularism. I would suggest, then, that the reader may be helped to read the opening sections of last year's article. I take this approach because I remain persuaded that, from many different angles, there continues to be a concern and struggle in American spirituality to balance on the tightrope of this secularizing trend in our contemporary faith life while avoiding the easy missteps that lead, whether gradually or abruptly, into secularism. Besides the overarching theme of secularization, the concrete, specific trends and issues themselves which are reflected on here also relate this article 174 A God for a Dark Journey somewhat to last year's reflections. This is so--not surprisingly--because our important experiences, and what we manage to make of them with God's grace, are generally in continuity even while, at the same time, our spiritual life really grows and really changes. In some cases, therefore, trends and issues treated here are obviously direct developments of topics discussed before. In other cases, though the trend or issue 1 am writing about now may appear new, reader's closer reflection will show that, whether explicitly or implicitly, the matter actually relates to the same basic theme: our spiritual struggle as American Christians to incarnate the life and love of God in our rapidly secularizing world. 1. The God of Darkness and Suffering Our rapidly secularizing and highly technological world can be very decep-tive and misleading. In most of the world we have available light of whatever color and intensity we choose all through the day and night, No more dark-ness. Computers, cameras, radios and recorders seem to promise constant companionship and communication. No more isolation. And yet, together with all this garish light and constant talk, there is a lingering and growing sense of darkness, of alienation, impoverishment and loneliness. For a while this past year we could read of three actual wars in the papers each day: in the Falklands, in Iraq, and in Lebanon. Though the inevitable destruction and carnage of those wars was disguised and muted temporarily, gradually the terrible details came to be revealed. Slowly but stubbornly our troubled economy has been squeezing not only comfort and convenience, but hope and life out of many of the jobless poor in this country. Most of the world events and concerns mentioned in last year's article continue to be active among u's.2 This suffering and violence often visit a despairing darkness and sense of emptiness upon the human soul. To find God in this darkness and emptiness is a growing challenge. Because, for most of us, God is more obviously associated with light, fullness, wholeness, with the beautiful richness of being, people today have more of a sense of forsakenness and abandonment in their experience of the empty darkness. Nor will the immediate future, of our secular world bring a sudden evaporation of this darkness and alienation. Rather than attempting to escape the darkness, therefore, we must learn to look deeper into it, to find God present everywhere--and always a God of personal love and intimate care. The negative, or apophatic, element in our experience of God, then, may be taking on more practical importance today in spirituality. As David Rast has said: "Only if we can know the God whose transcendent greatness allows him to be 'no-where,' can we gradually experience our God as always 'now-here.'" This is the approach of Pseudo-Dionysius, of The Cloud of Unknow-ing, which leads beyond the surface light of God's love into the depths of a darkness of faith where the God of loreand light is experienced in a great 176 / Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 simplicity of presence and faith. The experience needed here is the one I described in last year's article as the protection against secularism. Now l~think we are facing some specific implications of this experience of God. If we do not settle for a God who is too small, then we can find a God of light, fullness, wholeness and beauty in the pervasive darkness, emptiness, fragmentation and horror of our world and of our hearts. A God whose greatness and majesty can make human hearts tremble in awesome wonder is also so inextricably involved in this world that the intimacy of love in Jesus can quiet human hearts even in the most fearsome and trying situations. As events in our world and in our personal lives shock and strip us to the very core of our being, we must, rather than despairing and falling into an unreal world either of denial or of naive optimism, learn to plumb the depths tofind the God who holds all being, and so each of us, in existence. In the depths of a heart experiencing pitch-darkness or crass evil or chilling emptiness, there is present a God without whom being and existence cannot be. And this God, our God, is always love. It is the God whose love and care were always present to Jesus on Calvary, even when he sensed a chilling absence. We are now struggling, and we will continue to struggle, to find what Louis Dupr6 calls The Deeper Life.3 We need to discover the God whose pervasive and intimate love is finally revealed more fully through the negations of an apophatic spirituality, that same love which, like a quiet flame at the center of all being, is sometimes experienced.like a torch for great zeal, at other times like a white heat apparently consuming while actually laying bare the divine center of our true identity. Dupr+ describes the attitude involved in this pro-found experience of God: "Unconditional trust without knowing what it is we trust, willingness to let go without knowing whether anyone will ever catch us, preparedness to wait without knowing whether we will be met.~Total looseness and unconditional trust are the virtues negative theology teaches us to culti-vate. There could be no more appropriate lesson in our time.TM 2. The Temple of the Human Heart In a rapidly secularizing world, public life provides less and less of the genuinely religious. Shrines and temples seem useless. The decay of their buildings speaks of a dead past. Christendom, it would seem, has long since died and does not offer even a desirable ideal any more. The world and society are no longer built or structured according to a Christian vision, nor, for that matter, according to any genuinely religious vision. For many people, this seems no great loss. But for the person of faith and religious sensitivity, the situation presents a great challenge. Realizing the futility of trying to turn back contemporary developments, to return to a past age's forms of public religious expression, we see that we are being invited instead to enter the temple of our own hearts. It is not enough, though, that the ontological reality of every human heart makes it actually a temple of God. We need consciously to app.reciate this, to cooperate actively A God for a Dark Journey / 177 with the adornment of this uniquely personal temple. Without a sense of itself as this personal religious temple, the heart's faith can die as it falls prey to secularism. This temple of the human heart, however, cannot be wholly an inward reality. It must find some appropriate externalization. The inner sanctuary, of course, mus~ be highly personal and intimately religious--a profound meeting of God and of our truest self. And yet, while profoundly personal and inti-mately unique, this inner temple ought not promote a closed individualism. The human heart where God lives and is adored and loved cannot become a church unto itself. The God who is known and reverenced in our own hearts is at once the source of, and the invitation to, community, the community of the human family and the community of the Church.This religious temple of the heart, if its air is to remain healthy and invigorating, will require, especially in a secularistic, religionless world, some appropriate external aids, like the desig-nated chapel of a religious community or a special place in one's own room, and a special time set aside for regular prayer. When the human heart has thus become a carefully provisioned temple of the Lord, the person has also become capable of an inner life of quiet intimacy and peace everywhere, whether it be in a bustling subway, or in the solitary confinement of a jail, or in the dangerous crowding of a refugee-boat or on the death-bed of a cancer patient. At times our hearts will be temples of bright light focusing on a God joyfully imaged and named in Jesus. At other, catas-trophic and confusing times, this temple will be darkened, housing a God temporarily nameless and unknown. In either atmosphere, this templeis a place where we bend low in quiet awe and in reverently trustful abandonment to a Love that fires ministry for God's justice in our world. This profound inner life o~ personal religious experience will be increas-ingly necessary as we move to the future. And it is always available, because of that God whom Jesus spoke of as seeing and rewarding all hidden gestures of love: "Let it be a secret between you and your Father. And your Father who knows all secrets will reward you.'~ Karl Rahner, in an article entitled "The Spirituality of the Church of the Future," sums up this trend and its issue: "It has already been pointed out that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all. If by mysticism we mean., a genuine experience of God emerging from the very heart of our existence, this statement is very true and its truth and importance will become still clearer in the spirituality of the future.'~ 3. To lk Peoplg of the Church Many people continue to grapple with the role of the Church in their Christian identity. Whether these be earnest novices in a religious congrega-tion, serious students in a seminary or college, or young people just returned from some volunteer service and about to enter into a parish, the issue is always the same: in living a genuine and generous love for God, how much 171t / Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 must one be a person of the Church? And the issue centers on the institutional Church. Can I stand for, and identify myself (maybe in some necessarily special way) with this international institution that is the Catholic Church? It is a matter of conscience for some whether they can identify with some of the practices and policies of the Church. Many, while believing in God and living generous lives of service, either explicitly reject membership in the Church or effectively live their religion without any real relationship to the Church. This is a complicated matter, but one that must be ~faced by the whole spectrum of Church membership, from pope and bishop to parishioner in the pew. A specific cause, or combination of different causes, can raise the issue critically for different persons: a domineering clerical attitude encountered; monotonous, uninformed preaching; a successful remarriage after divorce; the prohibition of women's ordination--or maybe even the prohibition of their service as lectors; and many other reasons. For an increasing number of people, practices within the institutional Church which they perceive to be unjust are making membership in the Church more and more painful and questionable. To the query as to how much one must identify with the institu-tional Church, answers would range far and wide. Some would almost identify the Church with the institution, while others would play down the institution to almost no significance--and thus would think the entire question otiose. A "sense of Church" must be reclaimed for many people. For the fully Christian mind and heart, the mystery of God in Christ Jesus, and therefore the mystery of the whole human family, is incarnational and communal--and universal. All this says community. And not just sect, either--but Church. But we must all be concerned that it be a Church that is attractive, inspiring, demanding, inviting. The development of such a Church that others can believe in will continue to be the task of us all. The Church on all levels of its membership must continue to struggle for a more genuine following of Jesus in our world. Some gather regularly into small groups to share life and faith and find support in community. This can begin to provide an experience of community which is at the core of Church. But it does not, in the long run, suffice. To see the glory of God in a weak, human Church, struggling in the Spirit,'is never easy. It requires a stubborn hope, the hope of a genuine love, sometimes, surely, critical, but always a lover of the Church.7 4. An Expansive Ministry Born in Forgiveness Especially iri religious life, but also throughout the whole Church, it is getting more and more difficult to find people competent and willing to under-take ministries of difficult responsibility. In religious life, some major superiors speak of a crisis of leadership. They speak of a lack of available and suitable men and women for the challenging roles of leadership either in the religious community itself or in the apostolic works of the community. It may be a formation director; the pastor of a new black or Hispanic parish, a third-world mission assignment or a superior in a larger community. But the issue is always A God for a Dark Journey the same: men and women to fulfill these challenging tasks. We have renewed our concept of the role-model for a religious superior and for the leader of our apostolic works. But it is difficult to find men and women suitable and willing to undertake such missions. Among the consequences of this leadership crisis, paramount is the inter-ference it is causing with the service that religious communities could otherwise render in the world. This leadership need is not to maintain past, outmoded structures, but rather to inspire and facilitate more unified and effective service in response to new, serious challenges facing the Church in today's world. Is this leadership failure a result of faulty formation? This is a question worthy'of reflection on the part of all of us. And it must be answered carefully. The profound renewal of contemporary religious formation has involved a necessary development in a direction quite different from the past. The stress on individual responsibility and careful respect for the gifts and talents of the individual has correctly tailored formation programs increasingly to the strengths and weaknesses of each individual. But while moving in this person-oriented direction, we have not, perhaps, maintained or developed as well as we might that healthy sense of self-abnegation which would allow an individ-ual to be truly available for more of the service-needs of the religious group. This is a necessary correction/refinement of contemporary formation that we now recognize and can implement. In an earlier article, I called this the devel-opment of a more refined Christian personalism which would help us recog-nize and transform the very real, though subtle, self-serving tendencies in all our hearts,s ° As we ponder the difficult ministries facing us now and in the future, we must remember that all genuine ministry is rooted in devotion. Ministry is neither something carelessly superimposed from above, nor somethifig nar-rowly limited to an individual's comfort and convenience.Devotion here is not some emotional pietism. Rather, it is the experiential capacity to find God-- something that runs much deeper than emotion and feeling. Formation pro-grams should provide a great diversity of experiences, in order to stretch the person's capacity for devotion far beyond what might have been originally expected. If an individual's ability to find God is too narrowly limited, that person's lack of availability for service can easily become a future liability. This trained, experiential ability to find God in various ministries and situations always involves a kind of self-transcendence. This transcendence is made possible thrbugh an abnegation of self which is motivated and inspired by an experience of the greatness of God's love for me, The goodness of God's love is exhilarating and expansive, attracting the human heart beyond nar-rowly self-centered concerns. Heroism for God is born here. But without a growing mortification, one that is not destructive but revelatory of our true self in God, the devotion of finding the expansive joy of God's love in many future ministries simply is not possible. Another aspect of this crisis of leadership for ministry is our ebbing expe- 1~10 / Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 rience of forgiveness. Forgiveness is meant to be the birthplace of great zeal for ministry. God's gratuitous forgiveness sets off a dynamic which turns the heart outward for service. To be forgiven beyond one's wildest dream is not some-thing to be kept to oneself, but becomes a life of service of others. The greater the sense of forgiveness, the greater and more expansive will be the zeal of devotion for finding God in ministry. But a trend I mentioned three years ago continues to haunt us in this whole matter of a vigorous availability for ministry which is essentially rooted in the religious experience of forgiveness? and it is this. We remain timid and con-fused in our admission of personal sin. As we continue to grow out of an unhealthy, Jansenistic, legalistic sense of sin (especially in the sexual realm), we are left with a vacuum, since we have not yet properly assimilated a healthy sense of social sin or personal sin (also in the sexual realm). Fears of self-hatred and unhealthy guilt still dull our sensitivity to the healthy guilt and shame that are always part of the grace of a forgiving God seeking out the sinner. But so long as our past leaves us confused and quite unresponsive to our present sinfulness, we cannot experience the full dynamic of God's forgiveness in our hearts. And it is only an acknowledged sinner, humbled in the truth of forgive-ness, who receives.from God an expansive zeal for ministry. The effect of a shallow experience of forgiveness finally registers in minis-try. If one is not driven to ministry through forgiveness, one can fabricate one's own ministry in too selfish a manner. Rather than receiving a ministry from God in the devotion of forgiveness, a person can cling to a ministry with an angry arrogance and impatience that often speaks of improving and aggrandiz-ing oneself rather .than serving the needs of others. Further, this experience of being humbled in the truth of one's sin and God's forgiveness is always an important sign distinguishing a true prophet from a false prophet. In these days when prophecy is a more noticed phenomenon among us than before, and when we are in need of the inspiration of true prophets, we cannot forget that the true prophet is forged in the zeal and humility of forgiveness. 5. A New Way of "Making" Catholics Any remedy for the deficient sense of personal sinfulness mentioned in the previous trend will require much more than our renewed rite for the reception of the sacrament of reconciliation. This renewed rite, in practice now for about eight years, though it is an improvement, has obviously not by itself renewed the experience many people have of God's forgiveness. What is needed is a whole catechesis to help people recognize in their own hearts the dynamic of receiving God's gift of forgiveness. This raises the issue of how Catholics are formed and trained, raised in the faith these days. It is a matter of how people over a lifetime continue to enter the Church. There seems to be a great change occurring here which will have tremendous implications for the future. Most of us were raised in a Catholic school system where we had drilled into us the essentials and practices of A God for a Dark Journey / 1111 Catholic life. But things have changed. There are not nearly as many religious serving as teachers as before. Many parish schools have closed. And besides, many of those simple, clear essentials of Catholic life are not so simple and clear any more. As formal Catholic schooling becomes less and less available, CCD and other methods of religious education take on greater importance. Often in the past CCD was not very effective. It was.perceived as a definite second-best to the parochial school. But that view is slowly changing, and it must continue to change. As the whole procedure and atmosphere of formal schooling become less and less the way of handing on faith, new replacements must be instituted. Genuinely Catholic believers will never sprout fully grown from the ground. Besides learning the doctrines of faith, young people must receive a feel for the faith life. They must be allowed to admire it as they see it lived and shared by others. As Michael Warren, an expert in youth ministry, claims: Young per-sons need the fidelity of adults who care for them.~° The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults has received very good press. Some have called it "a revolutionary document" as it ritualizes a process of initiation into the Church which "gives first priority to the mystery of God's love for us.TM It can also be used as a guide in the baptism of infants.12 While this document expresses a better view of Church and ritualizes much better the process of initiation into the Church, its effectiveness will very much depend on the proper attitudes of priests and laity, and the availability of enough competent, generous, committed adults. Only in this way will the words of the document come to life as an ongoing process of initiation, a real catechumenate, which can help transform both how we "make" Catholics and what genuine Catholic life will look like in the future. RCIA, then, over a period of years, can play a large role in the formation of Catholics, but it cannot dispense us from the serious experimentation needed to discover and develop other forms of religious education that will be effective formatively on persons through their young years and on into their adulthood. I do not want to be misunderstood. I am not calling for the abolition of all Catholic schools. 1 am, rather, reflecting in the context of the actual situation that faces us now. The cos( of private religious education continues to escalate even as we struggle for tax credits to cover some of the expense. And the number of parochial and private schools continues to decrease. In this situa-tion, we must find a viable replacement for handing on Catholic faith, for helping our young people to grow up in that faith. Both in the schools that remain and in new religious education programs, the role of competent, enthu-siastic lay people continues to grow in importance. And this brings us to our next trend. 6. The Growing Vocation of the Lay Person We need to broaden our understanding and usage of the word "vocation." 182/ Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 One Often hears the worried question: "Do you think we'll have enough voca-tions?" The question clearly limits the concern to priestly and religious voca-tions. In breaking out of this past narrow understanding, we need to help others to see that living a serious faith life involves for everyone a vocation to service in the Church. It is not only priests and religious who have a vocation. Again, the lay vocation itself can be viewed too narrowly, as Archbishop Bernardin has cautioned: "Sometimes the impression is given that if a lay person wishes to become involved in the Church's mission, he or she must always be specially trained to become, in effect, a kind of professional within the Church. This view of lay ministry, I believe, is too narrow.''~ As a broader sense of vocation develops and spreads, I think we will never know exactly how many vocations (in the narrower sense) are "enough." But we will cooperate much more in all sorts of Christian ministries--and so we will feel much less shorthanded. Attitudinal changes, however, among some clergy especially, and among some lay people, too, are needed before that older limited view of vocation is transformed into a vision of great collabora-tion on all levels of the Church. Both the need for and the supply of well-educated, committed lay men and women continue to grow. More and more lay men and women are needed both to share and to implement the religious vision that must shape the curriculum of our Catholic schools, as well as to exercise other ministries in parishes and dioceses. A growing number of competent people are available for all these posts. And, increasingly, they are men and women who are hungry for an adult, inspiring and integrating spirituality. If these people are not to be forced to search for this spirituality even outside the Church, we must find ways of responding to this hunger. And this assistance must be largely centered in the parish. In no way does this exclude the use of special spiritual centers, retreat houses, or programs that are outside the boundaries of the parish. But these mhst always be complemented by a lived sensE, within the parish, of the presence of spiritual growth and challenge manifested in things like the quality of homilies, small discussion groups and a strongly collaborative response to the missionary needs both within and beyond the parish. Dolores Leckey, executive director of the U.S. Bishops' Secretariat for the Laity, lists among the primary needs of the laity: "a place to tell the truth, the experience of being listened to with respect, a chance to minister in ecclesial or designated ministry, and affirmation of the secular lay vocation and support of that vocation through theological education and in-depth spiritual formation." She sees these needs calling forth three needed attitudes in the ordained priest: com-mitment and community, interdependence in ministry, and willingness as opposed to willfulness.~4 For many of these lay men and women, the fundamental vocation to which they are called is the noble and glorious one of raising a good Christian family. I have written before on the precarious state of the family and the challenges with which this situation confronts us.~ Without repeating all those A God for a Dark Journey / 11t3 points again, my concern here is simply to face and restate the need for holy, self-sacrificing men and women to give themselves to raising a family. In a culture tending more to self-centered comfort and convenience, this ideal of raising a family tends to lose some of its glow. In fact, how many young people, once they finally decide to marry, actually plan on having a family? It is hard, though, to know how pervasive this attitudinal-shift away from raising a family really is. The vocation of a mother and father, with its own unique suffering and sacrifice, ought never seem "ordinary." It is a great, glorious vocation, and one vitally essential to the future of the Church and of the human race. Talented and dedicated young men and women must be helped to see that raising a family is truly a "vocation" in the Church. A theology and spirituality of the family must continue to be developed for the contemporary world and Church. Only with continuing reflection and careful cooperation on the part of husband' and wife can their raising of a family become integrated with, and be a powerful, creative means for furthering, their own profession and sense of self-worth. And the legitimate, essential struggle for women's rights .must not be allowed to create a condescending scorn for the women whose life, for so many years, is spent at home raising a fa'mily. To co-create with God, and daily to reveal God's love to children, is an exalted vocation--one that gives profound joy and binds parents in deeper love through sacrifice. 7. Public Witness to a Gospel Spirituality Which Prescinds from All Political Ideology The Church has been taking more and more stands on social questions over the past three years. A quick review of the weekly issues of Origins would show how often the National Conference "of Catholic Bishops has testified before various congressional committees over this same period. Some names of church men and women have almost become household words on various social issues, in this country and beyond. Nuclear disarmament, international concern for human rights, aid to El Salvador, an anti-abortion amendment, ~nd the abolition of the death penalty are but a few of the issues that have drawn public statements from various bodies within the Church. I would guess that, as the Church's social consciousness continues to grow, there will be need in the future for even more public stands. There is a serious danger here, though, something that could corrupt the Church's whole approach to social issues, both in this country and throughout the world. Some of the stands that the Church is taking and will be called upon to take may well coincide with the stands of different political ideologies and parties, whether Marxist or capitalist, Democratic or Republican. But the Church's stands must always clearly be and be seen to be conclusions of a gospel spirituality which prescinds from any and all political ideologies as such. One can, these days, hear someone speak strongly for international human rights or for nuclear disarmament, or for any other social issue, but 184 ] Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 who does so in such a way as to become clearly involved with a specific political ideology. When people hear such talk, they often, and quite reason-ably, wonder how a speaker of another political view would address the same topic. When the speaker's viewpoints are given in such a partisan manner, any gospel vision, if expressed at all, simply has to lose much of its force. And so the gospel witness is blunted for the listener. A specific political orientation of the speaker can, therefore, distract from the power of a position which he or she sincerely intends to incarnate gospel spirituality. To be identified too closely with a political ideology, rather than to be and act as a person of the Gospel, distracts people from what can be the power of various public stands of the Church. To be ready to take such stands requires that the individuals involved in these issues continue to take the means necessary to grow in and live more profoundly a gospel spirituality. In its first version of the pastoral letter on peace and war, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops claimed that "war, especially the threat of nuclear war, may well be the central problem.of our age." Within the past two years much energy and effort has resulted in a gradual development of sensitiv-ity and consensus, not 0nly on the part of the bishops, but also, though more slowly and perhaps less perceptibly, on the part of the Catholic faithful. How extensive this consensus will become, and whether it will prevent a serious division among the faithful at the publication of the final version of the pastoral letter, perhaps this spring, are hard to predict. But the different titles of the first two versions of the pastoral letter do manifest some of this devel- ¯ opment: "God's Hope in a Time of Fear" becomes "The Challenge of Peace~ God's Promise and Our Response." Some commentators have seen the first version as inviting Catholic theologians to develop a true theology of peace, and the second version, in response to an avalanche of helpful criticism, as an actual contribution to such a theology. Joseph O'Hare's words seem very sound and sensible: "In the end, the process may prove more important than the document it produces."16 The dialogue, debate and honest confrontation of different positions, at times quite heated, seem a work of the Spirit painfully forming a clarity and consensus that can challenge not only the consciences of Catholics, but also the difficult decisions of those responsible for the peace policies of our country. This complicated issue of the use and even possession of nuclear weapons must be both carefully scrutinized and evaluated, ultimately, in terms of an explicitly gospel vision of reality. The bishops must speak, and must be seen to speak, from a different vision than those who simply work within "liberal" or "conservative" ideologies or categories. The seriousness of the issue, which may be honestly summarized as the very survival of the human race, deserves the most careful s~arching out and testing of consensus within the American Catholic community. It must be a consensus based on our richest moral consciousness. To settle for any minimal, least-common-denominator position would be to default on the spiritual leadership that is required of the bishops A God for a Dark Journey by their position in our faith community. In many different ways we can be instructed by this process. It can teach the bishops, and the rest of us as well, about appropriate ways of reading and facilitating the Spirit's formation of a faith-consensus within our community. It can instruct us about what shall have to go ihto the future meaning of an internationally accountable, authentic patriotism. It can help us learn expe-rientially about the essentially important matter of unity and division within the American Catholic Church in the face of a great public issue which is moral as well as utterly pOlitical. Religion, and not just moral perspectives, shall have to be part of what we are taught. A profound and comprehensive peace, which God's love as revealed in a crucified Son can bring to human hearts, is what alone makes possible genuine conversion and love within the whole human family. This peace of God is the heart of the matter. And Jesus is God's victorious promise of this peace. Iksides this crucial issue of peace and war, there are other aspects of our concern for justice to be mentioned here. As we continue to increase our concern for justice, there can be a tendency to become too narrow in vision and even to exaggerate the justice issue--even though it very rightly continues to grow in importance. And again, lest 1 be misunderstood here, let me reassert that I do realize how very far many of us have to go in developing a true sense of justice, letting it influence the dedication of our Christian lives,t7 However, as can happen with almost any issue, we can so stress orthopraxis that our concern becomes chiefly the need for immediate action on behalf of social justice rather than with developing a vision which can enlighten and invigorate all the works of the Church, and not simply her social works. For example, in the work of a professional in higher education, besides direct social service when this is possible, there are many other means for inculcating in students attitudes for service and long-range social change. Professors who do not manipulate or dominate, but who serve their students by staying alive to their subject, who keep their classes well prepared and challenging, are very directly promoting justice. A view which would suggest that direct social service is the best, if not the only way that higher education can serve God's justice in this world, would seem a far too narrow, and therefore false, position on what is involved in the "integral promotion of justice." A similar exaggeration of the justice issue can overlook the spirituality that is needed to give force to any social concern. Though most of us still have a long way to go. in sensitizing our hearts to God's call for justice, I wonder whether, for some who have decidedly moved their center of gravity in the direction of their own social involvement, the challenge now is to find and maintain a viable spirituality within the new central thrust of their lives. A flurry of social work is not enough. Christian commitment to the works of justice must spring from a profound sense of God's love always at work and most dramatically promised in Jesus' Calvary experience of dying into a full- 11~6 / Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 ness of life and love. Among religious, an extreme tendency can yield to the temptation of settling for what Johannes Metz has called the political dimension of each of the vows, without a struggle on the part of the religious to integrate the mystical with the political dimension so as to develop an organic life of con-cerned service.~s The struggle for justice can also become unfocused and lose its gospel foundation if it forgets the mutual interaction between those internal, individ-ual, more personal dimensions and the external, social dimensions in our human world. This struggle for justice must always involve the careful balance and interplay between the evangelization of individual hearts and the forma-tion of a just-world society. Concerns about stealing, cheating, abortion and sexual immorality must always be carefully related to concerns of international human rights, nuclear disarmament, politics and economic justice. Some indi-viduals, some religious communities and other Church groups who are labor-ing nationally and internationally for justice and liberation, must be careful lest they seem caught up in liberal causes for the day which claim to pursue a systemic social justice without enough concern for the conversion and sanctifi-cation of individual hearts. A just society will always require more than any mere political and economic system. The justice and liberation we are con-cerned with here is Of God. It is God's sanctification and liberation of human hearts in Jesus.~9 But this is a liberation that can only be incarnated in our world through humanly cooperative analysis, planning and action. The sense and grace of its being God's work through us can never become empty theory, but must always throb in the veins of the apostle for justice. Liberation ~heology must always be energized by a spirituality of liberation?° This difficulty of keeping the ihdividual and the social, the internal and the external in proper balance runs deep in the modern mind. The issue is too extensive to be treated here and will surely not be changed overnight. But it needs urgent, serious attention. In a world overly interpreted by scientism there is, of course, little or nothing beyond the physical. Metaphysics has fallen on tough times. What you see is not only what you get, but it is all there is, in this modern view. This development of modernity has a long philosophical history reaching back at least to the sixteenth century, and developing through the Enlightenment. It is an issue of huge proportions,.far beyond any possibility of more than mention here. But it should not surprise us that this issue insinuates its way into our struggle to understand and to integrate "that justice without which faith is incomplete," that justice which .demands not only social action but moral conversion of soul. 8. Brldgebuilders Besides a growing need for prophets in the Church today, there is an equally great need for bridgebuilders. The pioneering prophet always calls and A God for a Dark Journey / 187 leads a people into the future. The builder of bridges is needed to keep the body of the people together and not let them be separated. In many areas polariza-tion is not as severe, or at least it is not so obvious as it used to be. But on all levels of the Church there is need to bring people from different viewpoints together in a genuine unity beneath and in and through their differences. The work of the bridgebuilder is creatiVe, patient--and very difficult. It is creativity that prevents community from capitulating to the least common de-nominator. In the face of certain impasses the ingenuity of an engineering feat is called for to bridge the gulf. Bridgebuilding is also messy work: you have to be willing to get dirty. To dive underwater and survey the depths, to lay foun-dations in muddy ground and to set steel and cement are never easy. It is very patient work, work that stretches a person. One must be able to live on both shores, to recognize the gulf of difference and to have a genuine desire and hope for bridging that gulf of difference. The builder of bridges learns to listen compassionately, though not uncritically, to the good of both sides and doesn't become trapped on only one side. Bishop Cummins of Oakland, when talking about the changing relations between bishops and theologians, called his brother bishops to "be wise enough to consult not just those theologians with whom we are intellectually comfortable, but even a wider group so that we will have the sense of the broader reflection and experience of the community.TM Bridgebuilding is a priestly work in imitation of Jesus who is the great high priest, Pontifex (which means a bridgemaker). It is a priestly work we can all practice. Just as Jesus' priestly bridgebuilding is best revealed in his salvific suffering and dying on Calvary, so our own bridgebuilding ministry will involve a passion of patient suffering which will always be creative for unity. Today, we all need to develop some of this creative, paschal charism of bridge-building, if we are not to settle, on all levels of the world andthe Church, for a shallow, easily disrupted communion of minds and hearts. 9. Ongoing Monastic Renewal Three years ago, in surveying the decade of the seventies, I mentioned the matter of renewal in monasticism.22 During this past year, the issue has been brought home to me again with even an intensity. Some members of monastic communities obviously feel it is time for an honest, thorough evaluation of all the experimentation of the last fifteen years. They sense that communities too easily presume the validity of too much of that experimentation. Though this issue is somewhat removed from my personal experience, I sense in certain voices, not just a traditionalist tendency, but a healthy call for evaluation before monastic communities move on much further with planning for the future. In the midst of the worthwhile development which recent experimentation has brought, are there some changes that have weakened rather than strengthened the monastic experience of God in the Church? How, for example, do the sisters of a renewed contemplative community resolve their growing unease about whether they have lost too much of silence in their 11~1~ / Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 life together? How does a monastic community recognize and reject the newer versions of a tendency to rigidity, legalism, boredom, self-satisfied compla-cency- signs always antithetical to the Gospel~3 These questions, and there are many others that monastic communities could formulate far better than I, are not easy questions. But they could provoke stimulating, life-giving evaluation. In the long history of monasticism, it has always been a complicated matter to determine the appropriate "works" of a community. Merton has reminded the monastic community that it "does not exist for the sake of any apostolic or educational work, even as a secondary end. The works of the monk are not justified by their external results but only by their relevance to his monastic life alone with God.TM Louis Dupr~, in a powerful chapter on "The Poverty of God," while commenting on the monastic life-style, says that "the monk avoids looking ridiculous by refusing to take himself or his work more seriously than they deserve. Measuring them against the backdrop of eternity he rightly judges human concerns to be less than all-significant."~5 The traditional "work" of hospitality continues to bring many people into touch with the powerful monastic witness and source of faith in God. Perhaps it can be an extension of hospitality today to be involved in explicitly spiritual ministries, such as direction, or other temporary services which can be ren-dered to tile local civic community--often right in the monastery. Of course the details of such determinations can only be known in the light of prayerfully careful study of the spirit and writings of the founder or foundress--and by planned, scheduled evaluation. It will always be a challenge for the community members themselves to believe in the monastically apostolic style of being and to resist any inappro-priately active style of doing. We speak here of more than a rearranging of schedule or works. It is a matter of renewing an attitude and a vocation of men and women called to witness to God, our eternally faithfiil Lover, called to do this through who they are and how they live together, rather than through what they "do" and "accomplish." As some monastic communities try to evaluate the developments of recent years, they may be helped by re-reading Thomas Merton's "Memorandum on Monastic Renewal'~6 and by looking at Louis Duprr's conferences to the monks at Gethsemani,27 and a hosi of other writings on the monastic life today. And if, as some suggest, this issue requires further attention, perhaps the Association of Contemplative Sisters in this country could facilitate a prayerful evaluation. Monastic life is at the very heart of Christian faith and justice. In a secularistic world so hyperactive and quick to identify and evaluate people according to what they do and have, the joyful witness of men and women whose basic identity is to be in apostolic contemplation before God, while always difficult to maintain, becomes ever more important. 10. Developments in Religious Life New religious groups continue to appear in the Church. One meets new A God for a Dark Journey / 189 religious communities that have broken off from older, better-known congre-gations; some impasse could not be resolved and a new group was born. There are other new groups that are not offshoots of any previous congregation. Some of these groups have canonical and ecclesiastical approval; others do not--and some are not interested in such approval. There is much vigor, value, variety and novelty in all of this. All these groups are responding to some need but often in quite different ways. Some are permanently formed groups, founded in the permanent covenant of final profession. Others are bound together much more temporarily. It is important to acknowledge the valuable service rendered by these groups, when they are not dominated by an ugly reaction to a past difficult situation. Can all such groups be classified as religious life? Are there new forms of religious life appearing in all of this? How far can the traditional understanding of religious life be stretched in new directions? It is still too early for this observer to be sure about any answers to these issues. My personal conviction is that we must be careful that religious life cannot come to mean almost anything. Otherwise words lose meaning. It would seem clear that the Spirit is breathing new types of groups into the Church at this time. And it is not necessary to force all of them into the framework of religious life. 1 myself incline to think that religious life will continue to be a life of total consecration to God, specified in terms of celibacy, poverty and obe-dience, lived in community,28 and with explicit ecclesiastical approval. In the light of this understanding, though there can be much renewal of forms of religious life, there probably are not any wholly new forms. But there are, and will continue to be, new forms of communities that are not formally part of religious life. And this, rather than being a problem, should be a welcome addition to ways of serving in the Church. To be mutually understanding and to serve together in building that Kingdom of Jesus' Father in human hearts, as it grew and was revealed in Jesus' own heart--this is the most important gift to receive from God and to share with each other until time and experience give us greater clarity about this issue.29 Another development in religious life, and for various reasons a cause of sadness and discouragement for some, is the continuing departure of men and women both before and after final profession. As I mentioned in my last article,30 evidence seems to support the belief that the number of departures which decreased in the end of the seventies is now picking up again in the eighties. Such a phenomenon needs to be pondered. It can contain a call to keep renewing the lived witness of religious life. But, it seems to me, here we have a phenomenon different from the sixties and early seventies. People realize more and more what the truth and demands are of a religious vocation ¯ in the world today. The immediate reason for many who leave seems to be related to celibacy. Fo~ them, celibacy does not seem right and good, if pos-sible at all. But to settle for this as a final, adequate explanation seems too simple. Investigation and reflection upon many of these cases reveal, for instance, that the observance of religious poverty had stopped and at least the "1911 / Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 attitude, if not the execution, of religious obedience of mission had also weak-ened or even stopped before celibacy also lost its gift quality and began to seem a burden too heavy to bear any more. Though celibacy may be the more immediate and obvious final crisis, it cannot be separated from religious pov-erty and obedience, both of which buttress and give expression to the interper-sonal, unique companionship with God which, at its core, is what celibacy is all about. 11. Openness to New Non-Western Ways of Seeing Reality Over this past year, missionaries have brought to my attention this final trend. As the Church continues to grow in Africa, Japan, India, and other parts of the Near and Far East, the faith of our universal or '~world" Church3~ can be enriched by openness to the very different ways of perceiving reality in these countries. But it wil! .~'¢quire a flexibility that is not always easy for us. My-own liinited experience and reading in this area prevent, me now from writing about the obviously vast and important implications of this openness for our Christian future. But I feel the truth of the witness of 0these missionaries at least to want to mention the matter here--with the hope that both reader and writer will ponder this further over the coming year. Conclusion As I conclude this fourth article on currents in American spirituality, two reflections come to mind. They may be stated very briefly. They are both, I think, very obvious. And very important. First, 1 think it is necessary, in a rapidly shifting, changing world and in a Church whose future we are called upon to choose in the Spirit, that an informed believer have a sense of con-temporary spiritual trends and issues. Second, it is necessary to recognize and to choose, again and again, precisely within these shifting, changing trends of our time, the one perennial truth and beauty of God's revelation in Jesus. This is the great and difficult, but exciting task of the believer. A God for a dark journey. The Letter to the Hebrews speaks to the stead-fast center of the enterprise: "Christ yesterday, today and the same forever.'~2 And Hopkins catches splendidly the variety and difference of that journey, common to us all, our journey into God: "Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his, to the Father, through the features of men's faces,m3 A God for a Dark Journey ] 191 NOTES WTrends and Issues in a Secularizing World," March/April 1982, pp. 186-206. 2Ibid., pp. 186-187. 3The Deeper Life, Louis Dupr6 (Crossroad: New York, 1981). 41bid., p. 46. 5Mt 6:18. 6Concern For the Church, Theological Investigations XX, Karl Rahner, tr. Edward Quinn (Crossroad: New York, 1981), p. 149. 7Avery Dulles, S.J. is always a helpful and carefully creative guide in this whole question of the Church. See his Models of the Church (Image: New York, 1978) and his most recent book, A Church to Believe In (Crossroad: New York, 1982). 8"Trends of 1980: Some Themes and a Few Specifics," Review for Religious, March 1981, pp. 238-239. 9"The Past Decade," Review for Religious, March 1980, pp. 200-201. ~°"The Dimensions of Care," Origins, Jan. 28, 1982, pp. 520-524. ~tTad Guzie, The Book of Sacramental Basics (Paulist: New York, 1981), p. 85. ~2Ibid., pp. 97-103. ~3"The Future of Church and Ministry," Origins. May 6, 1982, p. 750. ~4"What the Laity Need," Origins, May 20, 1982, pp. 9-16, esp. 14. ~See art. cir., Review for Religious, March/April, 1982. pp. 202-203. ~6America, November 13, 1982, p. 284. Since we are in the midst of a process with regard to the pastoral letter of the bishops on Peace and War, it may be helpful to the reader to know that these remarks of mine were written in December, 1982. ~TArt. cit., Review for Religious, March 1980, pp. 201-202. 18Johannes B. Metz, Followers of Christ (Paulist: New York, 1978) esp. pp. 41-44. ~gThe Social Teaching of John Paul II, No. 4 "The Theme of Liberation," presented by Rev. Roger Heckel, S.J:, Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace, Vatican City, 1980, esp. pp. 16-17. Heckel shows that John Paul 11 does not use the word liberation very much, and when he does God and Christ are the subject and content of the liberation. ~°Art. cir., Review for Religious, March/April, 1982, pp. 193-194. 2~"The Chahging Relations Between Bishops and Theologians," Origins, June 17, 1982, p. 70. 2ZArt. cir., Review for Religious, March 1980, pp. 197-198. ~See John C. Futrell, S.J., "The Monk and the Apostle," Review for Religious, May/June, 1982, p. 409. 2~Thomas Merton, The Monastic Journey, ed. Br. Patrick Hart, (Image: New York, 1978), p. 213. ZSDupr~, op. cit., p. 43. 26Merton, op. tit., pp. 213-217. ~TDupr~, op. cir. ~sSee art. eit., Review for Religious, March/April 1982, pp. 199-201, and James T. Burtchaell, "The Future of Our Fellowship," Commonweal, June 18, 1982. pp. 364-368. ~See Richard A. Hill, S.J., "The Community and the Option of Non-Canonical Status," Review for Religious, July/August 1982, pp. 542-550. The author treats the issues involved in a congrega-tion's moving to non-canonical status. ~°Art. Cir., Review for Religious. March/April 1982, p. 200. 3~1bid., p. 195. ~Heb 13:8. ~From the sonnet, "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame." Conversion and Conflict John Navone, S.J. Father Navone writes of the pres,~nt article that it "develops the idea of the previous article ['Conversion Expres~d in Dialogue and Story.' Sept/Oct, 1982] in terms of the Synoptics' conflict stories and their implicit meaning for Christian conversion." Father continues to teach at the Gregorian University, where he also resides: Piazza della Pilotta, 4:00187 Roma. Italy. The New Testament is an external expression of the internal reality of Christian conversion. It brings to expression the mystery of God as a history of transforming love in Jesus Christ and in his community of faith: "No one has ever seen God: it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father's heart, who has made him known" (Jn 1:18). The "conflict stories" of the New Testament imply that God's word of love will encounter human resistance.~ The adversaries of Jesus give expression to the various forms that human resistance takes to the grace and demand of God for our truest and fullest life in his love. His adversaries represent the mind-sets and heart-sets that oppose the event and the process of Christian conversion-- the personal and social transformation that results from the surrender of oneself to the love that is God. The synoptic gospels contain a number of episodes prior to the passion narrative in which there is a verbal exchange between Jesus and his contem-poraries on some crucial issue, exchanges in which Jesus and the other parties are adversaries. In these episodes, the crucial issue generally arises because of some action of Jesus, or of his disciples, which is unacceptable to the other parties. Some-times they arise because Jesus (or someone else) asks a question which pro-vokes conflict? There are three parts to the formal structure of these "conflict stories": 1) an introductory narrative: 2) the opponent's question or attack; and 3) Jesus' reply--the so-called "dominical saying." 192 Conversion and Conflict / "19:3 These stories are always preceded by some narrative. This narrative func-tions not only as a transitional link with what has preceded~ but it also estab-lishes the setting in such a way that the reader is prepared for the inevitable conflict. Thus the narrative stages a polarity or tension, with speaking and acting persons as the poles of the tension. Except in Mk 3: I-5, the conflict stories begin with a question or accusation that is usually directed toward Jesus or his disciples. In two instances, however, the questions begin from Jesus himself (Mr 22:41-46 and Lk 14:1-6). At times the silence of Jesus' opponent (as in Mk 3:2) can have the significance of a statement in the ensuing dialogue of question and answer. All materials of the conflict story are organized to stress Jesus' reply--the dominical saying--which brings the dialogue to a close. This pronouncement of Jesus has some bearing on an aspect of Christian belief or conduct. It implies the need of understanding, and it explains both the grace and the demand of God's word of love in Jesus Christ that calls for human transforma-tion in the process of Christian conversion. These conflict stories were formulated at various stages in the process of formation of the gospels, and in diverse circumstances.3 Some were shaped within the living context of the early Church's apologetical concerns in response to Jewish criticism. Others were shaped in the context of the catechet-ical concerns of the Church in its response to the need of teaching converts and regulating" the life of the believing community. Central to all conflict stories, however, is their focus on the person of Jesus, on his words, attitudes and actions. Christian conversion always has as its object the interpersonal life of Jesus Christ: his relationships to God, and his relationships to fellow-humans--his relationships to divine and human per-sons. This interpersonal life of Christ is the prime analogate for the Christian community's experience, understanding and judgment of its own interpersonal relationships with divine and human persons. ThE object of Christian conversion, then, is not just a set of truths, nor an ethical code. It is participation in the interpersonal life of Jesus Christ as this is itself rooted in receiving and giving the Father's love, in knowing and being known. The gospels' conflict stories imply the difficulty with which the mystery of God becomes a history of love in the actual life-stories of Jesus and of his followers. These stories imply that Christian conversion, both as event and as process of maturation, must have a dimension of conflict at both the intra-and interpersonal levels. "Not my will but thine be done" itself tells of a conflict relationship with the self that is always to be transcended in the individual's response to the grace and demand of the serf-giving love that is God. God's coming into our lives creates the transforming tension between his grace and its demand for an ever-greater selflessness which brings about a lasting communion with God's own self--and thereby with one another among his followers. Jesus Christ's "way of the cross" represents the "costly 194 / Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 love" of divine and of human self-giving and self-investment. Christian conversion, then, is the new life which derives from our accepting for ourselves God's own life of boundless love for all. The Cross expresses the suffering, that the acceptance of boundless love must entail--even for the sinless Son of God. It makes manifest that our acceptance of this love will inevitably place us in a conflictual relationship with others: If the world hates you. remember that it hated me before you. If you belonged to the world. the world would love you as its own: but because you do not belong to the world. because my choice withdrew you from the world. therefore the world hates you. Remember the words I said to you: A servant is not greater than his master. if they persecuted me. they will persecute you too . . . (Jn 16:18-20). If the conflict stories of the gospels are an expression of the interpersonal life of Jesus Christ, of his receiving and giving his Father's love for the trans-formation of all, they imply also that Christian conversion, our participation in his life, must inevitably entail conflict at both the intra- and interpersonal levels. At both levels it must entail an ever deeper penetration into the mystery of that love which itself embraces our lives, and constitutes the term towards which our whole beings strive. The God whose word of love is addressed to us in the conflict stories gives us the ability to make that word our own by the process of Christian conver-sion. 4 Not only do we hear Jesus' story, but we tell the same story in our own lives, making his struggle to overcome the unlove of the human heart our own. The Church tells these conflict stories of its Lord as an expression of the life which derives from his love. His struggle reveals the way that God's ' kingdom comes to us. Consequently, we might well question our tendency to believe that conflict at the intra- and interpersonal levels of Christian life is always an indication that something is wrong. Rather, it would seem we might be more concerned about the authenticity of a Christian commitment which did not encounter resistance at both these levels. The way of the cross is the way of inexhaustible and unquenchable love. It enables us to live in the tension and conflict that this love demands if we are to attain to the fullness of life in the kingdom of God. These conflict stories must not be read outside the context of the Good News. This is what fills the heart with joy and enables self-sacrifice to be wholehearted. Even though these stories imply the demand of a God who challenges everything that is in us, they are expressions at the same time of the great Good News that God is Love and has given us his life and love in Jesus Christ and in his Spirit. Even though these stories imply all the conflict, tension, suffering and Conversion and Conflict / 195 renunciation that is inherent in living as Christians, they, too, belong to the Good News, because what is primary in them and in it is the joy taken in the goodness of the life and love that God has given us: "Jesus. who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame" (Heb 12:2).5 The conflict-dimension of Christian conversion and its way of the cross is founded on the joy that is taken in the Supreme Good, in the Boundless Love that we know and proclaim to be the Father of Jesus Christ. Through the gift of the Spirit. we are enabled to rejoice in this Love and its challenges. In this context we know that where there is love, there is also struggle. The crucified and risen One reveals that Love is not indifferenl to human unlove, but struggles to overcome it in the conflictual activity of Love's self-giving. NOTES ~Other terms have been used to designate the material which we have called here "conflict stories." The term Streitgesprhche (controversy dialogues) was used by Martin AIbertz and Rudolf Bultmann. Martin Dibelius used Paradigmen. Vincent Taylor used pronouncement stories. Sometimes controvers.v stories was used in English as a general designation. -'The following conflict stories are those designated by such as Arland J. Hultgren in Jesus and His Adversaries (Minneapoilis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1979), pp. 26-27: I. There are eleven conflict stories in Mark. usually with parallels in Matthew and Luke: 2: 1-12: The Healing of the Paralytic (Mr 9:1-8: Lk 5:17-26). 2:15-17: Eating with Tax Collectors and Sinners (Mr 9:10-13: Lk 5:29b-32). 2:18-22: The Question About Fasting (Mt 9:14-15: Lk 5:33-35). 2:23-28: Plucking Grain on the Sabbath (Mr 12:1-8: Lk 6:1-5). 3: I- 5: Healing on the Sabbath (Mt 12:9-13: Lk 6:6-10). 3:22-30: The Beelzebul Controversy (Mt 12:22~32: Lk 11:14-23). 7: I- 8: The Tradition of the Elders (Mt 15:1-9). 10: 2- 9: On Divorce IMt 19:3-9). 11:27-33: The Question About Authority (Mt 21:23-27: Lk 20:1-8). 12:13-17: Paying Taxes to Caesar (Mt 22:15-22: Lk 20:20-26). 12:18-27: On the Resurrection (Mr 22:23-33: Lk 20:27-40). 2. There are two conflict stories in the special Lucan material." 13:10-17: Healing the Crippled Woman on the Sabbath. 14: 1- 6: Healing the Man with Dropsy on the Sabbath. 3. There are three conflict stories in Matthew based in part on Marcan and Q materials: 12:38--42: The Refusal of a Sign (in part from Mk 8:11-12 and Q: Lk 11:29-32). 22:34-40: The Double Commandment of Love (in part from Mk 12:38-42 and Q: Lk 10:25-28), 22:41-46: The Question ,~bout David's Son (in part from Mk 12:35-37). 4. There is 1 co~Tflict story in Luke based in part on Marcan material." 7:36-50: The Sinful Woman at Simon's House (in part from Mk 14:3-9). 5. There is I conflict story in Q." Mt 12:22-32: Lk 11:14-23: The Beelzebul Controversy (see Mk 3:22-30). JConflict stories, obviously, are but one way for the evangelists to express Jesus' struggle. The story of the demoniac in the Capernaum synagogue, for example, expresses the demons' sense that in Jesus they have met the victor in the cosmic conflict between good and evil: "You have 196 / Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 come to destroy us, haven't you?" (Mk 1:24). '~See the treatment of Christian conversion in the eighth chapter of my book. co-authored with Thomas Cooper, Tellers qf the Word: Nine Moments in the Theology of Story (New York: I_e Jacq Publishers. 1981). SThe incapacity to enjoy seems to be connected wth the incapacity to love. Some do not enjoy anything enough to be able to forget about themselves. The first thing we read about God in the Bible is that he made something and thought it was good. St. Thomas writes of the love of benevolence or friendship that by it the person who loves desires for the person loved the same goods that he desires for himse~f"as for another se~f.'" And so the lover desires to give to the beloved the same things that have been the objects of his own love and enjoyment. See, e.g., ST. I-II, q. 27, a. 3. Prayer of Personal Reminiscence: Sharing One's Memories With Christ by David J. Hassel, S.J. Price: $.60 per copy, plus postage Add ress: Review for Religious Rm 428 3601 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, Missouri 63108 The Service of Religious Authority: Reflections on Government in the Revision of Constitutions Mary IJnscott, S.N.D. Sister Mary, formerly Superior General of the Sisters of Notre Dame of Namur (1969-1978), presently works at the Sacred Congregation for ReLigious and Secular Institutes in the area of constitutions and general chapters of sisters. She resides at her motherhouse: Suore di Nostra Signora di Namur: Largo Berchet, 4; 00152 Roma, Italy. Experience in recent years strongly suggests that religious authority, like most other kinds, is in a moment of crisis, A justifiable but over-vigorous reaction to some previous styles of operation has often been the immediate occasion of this. Other causes, however, have also contributed to the situation: the emergence of a strong culture-consciousness in certain areas; the introduc-tion of new processes and patterns whether offered postively, negatively, or simply as a change from what existed before; the need to make values and structures correspond more evidently; the evolution of ideas about religious life itself and about the Church; and even the very fact of having lived since the late 1960's in experimental conditions which often did not provide clearly for the exercise of authority. The crisis is something which ultimately affects fundamental values in religious life: identity, apostolic efficacy, the nature and importance of consecration, the future form of religious life as such. Because of its potentially serious consequences, the crisis cannot be ignored. In fact, many institutes are facing it very honestly. Responses vary. A few follow the ostrich in seeming to assume that if no attention is paid to it, the situation will disappear of its own accord. Some tend to extremes: a holding to the status quo as if nothing had happened, or a leap into a pattern which involves the virtual dissipation, or at least the non-exercise, of any real authority. Some 197 "19~1 / Review for Religious, .March-April, 1983 strive to keep the reality of ,authority but clothe it in a different language, often that of business management or politics. Some keep the concept in words but virtually shift the content to something else: usually participation, communica-tion, consensus or leadership. None of these responses meets the situation but each indicates the realization that there is a situation to be faced. More recent lines of development show a growing awareness of the need to relate religious authority to religious obedience, and both to the ecclesial dimension of consecrated life. Sisters are realizing that the authority question can only be handled adequately on the level of faith and of relation to the Church, and they are trying to find expressions which will simultaneously r~flect faith, foster life and values, meet present realities, and be in accord both with the Church's common law and with the best traditions of their institute. One such line of development is based on a better appreciation Of the service rendered by authority. Current attempts to express this are frequently contradictory because the service of authority is taken to mean either authority and service or authority as service and the conclusions drawn are not wholly consistent with either one or the other. But if authority of itself is service--that is, if by the fact of being itself it serves religious life necessarily and fruitfully-- we have a line with rich possibilities. It is some of these lines which 1 hope to explore. Before doing so, I think that a few clarifications are in order. First, I will not be speaking about authority in general but only about religious authority: the authority properly exercised in a religious congregation because of its recognition by the Church. Secondly, since without it the religious congregation would not exist as such, I will be assuming that the reality of religious authority itself is not in question but that much of the crisis lies in the evolution of structures and the search for suitable styles of exercise. Thirdly, I will restrict my reflection to the experience of congregations of sisters of apostolic life. This is partly because it is in them that questions regarding authority and government are sharply presented, and partly because my own experience is extensively with them and my reflections are largely conditioned by their sharing. The reflections fall into three main phases--a look at religious authority itself as it is seen in Jesus, in the Church and in religious institutes; then the service of authority in religious government; and finally some of the strengths, confusions and questions in the service of authority at present. I. The Service of Religious Authority 1.1 In Jesus Probably the most familiar scene associated with the authority of Jesus is the one at the end of St. Matthew's gospel (Mt 28:19-20).__.M_a.~y Of Magdala and the other Mary have been mandated, first by the angel at the tomb (28:7) and then by the risen Lord himself (28:10) to tell the disciples, "my brothers," to go to Galilee. It is a solemn convocation to the "mountain where Jesus arranged to meet them." There, before the adoration of some and the hesitation of others, Jesus makes his last, confident claim, gives his last The Service of Religious Authority / 199 command, and pledges his last promise in a setting which, for Matthew, recalls the old law of Sinai and the new law of the beatitudes. The claim is absolute-- "All authority in heaven and on earth is given to me" (Mt 28:19), and, to make this effective, he promises to be with them until the end of time (Mt 28:20). Therefore, in the work of evangelization--preaching, baptizing, teaching, carrying God's word everywhere and to all the ages--the inner strength, impulse and power are always that of Christ himself, to whom all authority is given. To the disciples, this can hardly have been surprising. Many knew Jesus as one who had authority and who exercised it. He spoke with authority and not as the scribes and pharisees (Mt 7:28-29): he interpreted the law on no authority but his own (Mt 5:21-22 ff.); he ordered evil spirits to go forth, and they went (Mt 8:32); he commanded the winds and the seas, and they obeyed him (Mt 9:27): he had authority over sickness (Mt 8:14-15); blindness (Mt 9:29); deafness (Mk 9:7-35); dumbness (Mt 9:32-33); lameness (Mt 15:30); paralysis (Mk 2:!1); sin (Mk 2:10): and death itself (Lk 7:15). The authority he exercised in regard to the disciples was unquestioned. So also was the fact that, when he chose, he could confer on others authority similar to his own. Sometimes the authority was for a short period, as when the apostles who had rejoiced exuberantly in it during their first mission (Mk 6:7, 30) found that they no longer had it when they tried to cure the boy possessed, at the foot of Tabor (Mk 9:18). Sometimes it was promised for a longer future, as to Peter after his confession of faith (Mr 16:18): and by the lake of Tiberias it was given in a definitive way (Jn 21:15-17). Jesus was Lord and Master, Shepherd and Teacher, King, though not of this world; Lord of the Sabbath, Messiah and Son of the living God. His authority was never in doubt. According to his own testimony, however, this authority was neither assumed nor taken by acclaim, but given. Like his priesthood, it was not something that Jesus conferred upon himself or took of his own initiative (see Heb 5:4), nor was it something that he Would accept from the acclamation of delighted followers who wanted to make him King (Jn 6:15). It was, as he himself said, "given" and given by the Father. For this reason, his authority was unlike any other. Intimately connected with his person as Son and with his mission as Redeemer, it served a purpose which was the Father's business (see Jn 14:31), the "will of him who sent me" (Jn 5:30). It extended to all things in heaven and on earth. It was clearly distinct in its exercise from the authority of "the rulers of this world who lord it over their subjects" (Jn 22:25) and it was used to give life (Jn 10:10) and to heal (Mr 8:16); to teach (Mr 5:14); to save (Jn 12:47); to forgive (Mr 9:6); to sanctify (Jn I: 12); to unite (Jn 17:21); to bind and loose in heaven (Mr 18:18); to send in evangelizing mission (Mk 16:16); to found the Church (Mr 16:!8). 1.2 In the Church It is this authority, exercised for the same purpose and in the same manner, that Christ continues in his Church by his presence to the end of time. Peter's 200 / Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 authority was something that was given as a matter of faith: it was Christ's authority invested in him. He knew it when he said to the man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple: "In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, get up and walk" (Ac 3:7). He knew it when he helped phrase the decision of the so-called Council of Jerusalem in the words: "It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us" (Ac 15:25). He experienced it in the inner changes of values that he had to make in order to welcome Cornelius (Ac 10:34, 42) and to break with the Judaizers at Antioch (Ga 2:i1-14). Exercising the authority of binding and loosing that Christ had uniquely given him (Mt 16:19) and confident in the Lord's prayer for him (Lk 22:32), Peter confirmed his brethren with a power which he knew was pure gift. It was at the service of Christ's mission. It depended for its efficacy on an intimate personal relation and loving obedience to the Master who had conferred it and it was exercised for Christ's purposes and in Christ's way even to union with him in martyrdom. The same characteristics marked Paul's exercise of authority. "Be imitators of me as I am of Christ" ( I Co 4:1) was his cryptic summary of his own place in relation to the Lord who was his life (Ph 1:20) and the new Christians who were his responsibility. He could appeal, and did, to the moral authority of example which can result from the quality of life, of work and of prayer in someone who is fully living his or her baptism. But he had another kind, too: a personal authority given him by God for his work among the gentiles whereby, in union with Peter, he could inspire, instruct, encourage, correct, judge, and organize the Churches he founded in order to lead them to the fullness of Christ. In using it, he made a careful distinction between what was common teaching "from the Lord," as he called it, and what was his own opinion (1 Co 7:10, 12). He was particular not to profit from it in any way personally (! Th 3:8-9 and 1 Co 9:15-18) and he was at pains to ensure that it was continued in his young Churches (2 Tm 1:6, 2:1-2). So we find him constantly instructing, correcting errors whether of doctrine in Galatia or of manner of life in Corinth, fostering order in the local Churches whether liturgical (1 Co !1) or organizational (Tt 1:15) or in the matter of interpersonal relations (Ph 4:2). When necessary, he appealed for material support from them ( I Co 16:I-4 and Rm 15:25). None of this was done without suffering, as the second letter to the Corintl~ians makes clear. The authority of Christ was only exercised in the way of Christ--through the passion and resurrection, and Paul's was a paschal experience. Religious authority in both Peter and Paul was the power of Christ given them and acting through them to fulfill the purposes for which the Church was founded. From their time onwards, the essential authority of the Church has been the same. Her task is to save, to sanctify, to unite, to r~concile to the Father, and to spread the good news of Jesus Christ concretely to all nations and to the end of time. She is, in Vatican ll's beautiful phrase, the sacrament of salvation. She therefore has to direct, judge and teach with an authority that cannot come from her members and which she cannot take upon herself but The Service of Religious Authority / 201 which is the authority of Christ whose presence she is. Her intimate union and identification with him ensure that his own authority is exercised in and through her. It does not, however, make her proof against human weakness in her style of exercising it, any more than it protected Peter from errors of judgment or Paul from the consequences of a volatile temperament. In the course of history much has occurred to condition the Church's structures in ways that needed later revision, and, on that level, she has been embroiled at times in uses and abuses of authority that had little to do with the authority of Christ. But the essential truth remains. The authority which is uniquely proper to the Church is a religious authority--that of Christ himself--to save, to make disciples, to preach the gospel, to bring all to the Father in every place and age. This is the authority which is exercised in the recognition of religious institutes by the Church as a microcosm of her own reality. It is to this authority that they relate; and it is this authority which gives them theirs. 1.3 In Religious Institutes There are several circumstances which require that the authority in a religious institute be an ecclesial or religious authority and not just one which meets functional or organizational needs. These circumstances touch the nature of religious life itself. Religious institutes do not originate of themselves nor do they continue entirely as a result of their own efforts and planning-- they are the result of a gift of God and they depend on him for both their origin and their continuance. Their basic reason for existence is the closer following of Jesus Christ from which, for them, everything else must flow and to which everything else must be related. Moreover, they are in a special way God's gift to the Church: their way of life makes good sense only on the level of faith; they witness to realities and absolutes that are neither tangible nor visible, and it is only in virtue of the Church's recognition and approval that they exist. Their purpose is that of Christ and of-the Church. Such institutes require an authority that operates on the level of faith, Christ and Church, and which corresponds to the obedience which the members have freely vowed as a value because of their closer following of the Christ whose love made him obedient even unto death. All religious foundresses have become aware of the need for this kind of authority as God continued to act in their lives. A variety of providential circumstances can bring Christians together to do good--Pax Christi, the Christian Social Volunteers, CAFOD, the Catholic Women's Guilds would be random samples, and the members of these groups need no more than the authority that results from their own self-organization in order to operate well and to achieve their purposes. Their members give to each other whatever authority is necessary for the organization to function. They are related to the Church~ not essentially or by nature of the authority which they exercise, but by the recognition of their common purpose and by the baptismal commitment 209/ Review for Religious, March-April, 1983 of the individual members. Some religious institutes have begun in this way. At some point in their development, however, came the realization that they were aspiring to something more than what a group of Christians, however well-intentioned, could give to itself. The desire for a total public commitment to God formally received, the need for perpetual vows, the call to follow Christ intimately and as community in his obedience, and the urge towards a particular insertion into his public mission, would be some of the reasons which would prompt a founder or foundress to ask the Church to exercise her proper authority and to recognize the institute as a religious family. The Church alone, in Christ's name, can establish a religious institute, can receive vows that are vows of religion, can give an ecclesial mission and can confer the specifically religious authority in virtue of which an institute can require its members so to live and to work as to attain the purpose for which the institute was erected. This authority, which I will call religious authority, relates particularly to consecration, vowed life, mission, formation and government. It is specific to religious institutes and it is not the same thing as organization, responsibility, power or leadership. Given by the Church, it always involves an ecclesial accountability. Moreover, religious authority is never absolute. It is invested in persons clearly designated but who for the most part may not operate alone, and it is mediated through structures, usually worked out by the foundress in dialogue with the Church, which express the charism, nature, spirit and purpose of the institute and which are approved in its constitutions. Such authority makes possible a life of vowed obedience. Moreover, it is necessary for it. It is true, of course, that the structures by which religious authority is mediated can become outdated. They can atrophy, be abused or manipulated, lose contact with reality, or fail to function. They can reach a stage when they no longer correspond to or express the values that they are meant to foster. They then need to be revised and renewed. For this process, it is of the utmost importance to bear in mind the nature, purpose and source of religious authority, since models that are suitable to other forms are not necessarily appropriate to the structures of authority in religious life. It is also necessary to remember and respect the strongly ecclesial dimension of religious authority since this makes renewal of authority structures always a matter of dialogue with the Holy See and not simply the unilateral initiative of an institute. We further need to keep clear the correlation of authority with charism and life as expressed in the institute's own sound traditions, since this gives the best practical guidance for structures which will reaffirm the institute's identity in creative fidelity, continuity and openness. Where structures are renewed in this way, authority is a fruitful reality serving the purposes for which religious life exists. It is a witness to him who came not to be served but to serve and who used fiis authority at the service of the kingdom. Where the renewal of structures somehow loses sight of the unique nature, ecclesial dimension, and The Service of Religious Authority / 203 charismatic continuity of religious authority on the level of faith, it can ultimately betray religious life itself by secularizing it, in the negative sense, in what is fundamental to it. The various crises of authority at present lie at various points between these two possibilities. II. The Service of Authority in Religious Government 2.1 The Model The model of the authority that serves is Christ, the Servant of Yahweh. He to whom all power is given in heaven and on earth is also, and without diminishing either aspect, the one who came to serve, who emptied himself, obeyed even to the cross, and gave his life as a ransom for many. Clearly in ,iesus authority and service are not in contradiction. One is not at the expense of the other and there is no tension of opposites having to be held in balance. He refers easily to both, as when he is washing Peter's feet (,in 13:14), and he never attempts to justify either. Being at once Son and Servant, he exercises both authority and service as one, and this is of the essence of his incarnation. As religious, the goal of our life is the closer following of Christ in all its fullness but there is no doubt that we have a certain difficulty with this aspect of his reality. This may be because we tend to separate the concepts of authority and service in a way which he does not. ,iesus is concerned with the reality of each; he never confuses them, but they are one in his person. We tend to oppose them and to get involved in words to describe them. For example, we often think or speak of authority as an abstraction. Its synonym is power, with connotations of lordship, mastery, might and force that move easily into oppression and violence. Its implications are efficiency and the carrying out of orders. Its contrary is subservience. We think of service as a function accom-plished or something done in view of helping another, whether this is a kindly individual act like giving a hand to an old person, or a public utility, like driving a bus, or the meeting of a national need like the operation of civil service. Its synonym is action in relation to something or action in view of something. It implies somehow being less or becoming less than another. Its contrary is command. We tend, therefore, to identify authority with the power and lordship which are the contrary of service and, because of the negative connotations which we attach to it, we try in fact to avoid its exercise in-common life, to reduce or even to eliminate it, and we forego, perhaps too simplistically, the potential which it has for holiness and for fruitfulness in the apostolate. Yet Christ had authority, used it, and did not hesitate to speak of it and to confer it. It enriched, and in no way d