Carl E. Olson's Blog, page 71
November 5, 2014
A Community of Continuity: Five Days at St. Albert’s Dominican Priory
Matins with Friars and Aspirants (St. Albert’s Chapel)
A Community of Continuity: Five Days at St. Albert’s Dominican Priory | Anthony E. Clark, Ph.D. | CWR blog
“We Dominicans want to be the white blood cells that go into the world and the Church to heal and to bring Christ.”
At 5:30 in the morning the Gothic chapel of St. Albert’s Dominican Priory in Oakland, California, is barely lit. White hoods cover the heads of young men praying silently before the Blessed Sacrament. Father Michael Fones, OP, the Student Master, then intones the Tantum Ergo while returning Our Lord to the tabernacle. Matins is sung at 6:30, followed by breakfast, animated discussions about St. Thomas Aquinas, the history of the Dominican liturgy, recent studies of Sacred Scripture, and the Giants’ recent victory in the World Series.
Holy Mass is celebrated at 5:00 pm, followed by a social hour with lively and good-humored conversation beside the fireplace, dinner, Compline, and an evening of private study. In 2016 the Dominican Order will celebrate its eight-hundredth birthday, and after eight centuries the daily routine of Dominican friars preparing for the priesthood is essentially unchanged. Prayer, study, community, and ministry form their hearts and minds into priests in service of the Church.
During my five days in the priory I was able to learn more about the remarkable community at St. Albert’s. I heard several stories about the astonishing lives of the men below the hoods, which helped me better understand why, during my short stay, I observed more than twenty other visitors who had come as aspirants to the Order. I also was able to spend time with several of the Dominicans, who shared some of their stories and reflected on being in the Order in the 21st century.
Fr. Emmanuel Taylor, OP
Sitting in the refectory of St. Dominic’s Church, the Dominicans’ flagship parish and novitiate in San Francisco, I listened to the exciting story of Father Emmanuel Taylor, OP’s, life before entering the Order. His “other passion” is oceanography, and he lived aboard a research ship, where his duty was to dive ten thousand feet into the ocean on submarine Alvin, owned by the US Navy. Fr. Emmanuel recalled how frightened he was when he made his first dives into total darkness; he went to Confession to prepare for the possibility of dying in the ocean. “I asked big questions then,” he said, “questions that led me closer to God.” He also recalled the exhilaration of observing sea creatures glowing in darkness at depths with no sunlight, and he connected his life underwater to his current interest in the mysteries of liturgy, where God reveals Himself in an otherwise darkened world.
Fr. Michael Fones, OP
Father Michael Fones, OP, the Student Master at St. Albert’s, witnessed my marriage more than seventeen years ago, and he is among the people I most admire.
Former atheist Jennifer Fulwiler on the the witness of C.S. Lewis, praying for Tupac Shakur, and...
... the hardest thing about being a Catholic:
Jennifer is a popular Catholic blogger and homeschooling mother of six who writes about faith, family, media, and culture at her website, Conversion Diary. Fulwiler's memoir about her spiritual journey from atheism to Catholicism is titled Something Other Than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It, published earlier this year by Ignatius Press.
CWR interviewed Jennifer in April:
CWR: Let’s start with the title of your book, Something Other Than God. Where did the title come from and why did you choose it?
Jennifer Fulwiler: The title came from this wonderful C.S. Lewis quote, which is particularly meaningful because C.S. Lewis is also an atheist-to-Christian convert. The full quote says, “All that we call human history…is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.” And the reason I chose that is because at first, I thought this story was just a standard conversion story, but as I got into the writing I realized this was more of a story of a search for happiness. So that’s why I chose that quote, because it talks about how we’re all searching for what will really make us happy, and we can only find that in God.
CWR: In the book you describe the very intense, almost arduous intellectual process you went through of coming to understand Christianity and what Christians believe. During that time what was your attitude toward “cradle Christians” or those who believed in Christ in a perhaps somewhat unreflective—or at least less intellectually rigorous—way?
Fulwiler: It changed over time. When I was younger, because I had had some bad experiences with Christians, I was very disdainful of “cradle believers” and just thought that they bought into these lies for self-serving reasons. As I got older, though, I began to see it as just a cultural thing. I didn’t think that people’s religion actually meant anything to them; I thought that’s what they did because it was the tradition in their family, or whatever.
Jesuit Philosopher Works to Demonstrate Compatibility of Faith and Science
Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ, during a 2010 appearance on "The Larry King Show".
Jesuit Philosopher Works to Demonstrate Compatibility of Faith and Science | Jim Graves | CWR
An interview with Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ, president of the Magis Center, about faith, reason, atheism, and Stephen Hawking's "hogwash"
Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ, Ph.D., 62, is president of the Magis Center (www.magiscenter.com), headquartered in the new chancery office of the Diocese of Orange, California. The center’s goal is to demonstrate that faith and reason and science are compatible, and to combat the increasing secularization of society, particularly among young people.
Fr. Spitzer was born and reared in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father was an attorney and businessman; he was one of five children. His father was Lutheran; his mother a Catholic and daily communicant. He attended college at Jesuit-run Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, initially pursuing a career in public accounting and finance.
He went on a retreat led by Fr. Gerard Steckler, a former chaplain for Thomas Aquinas College, and “he got me very interested in theology and the Church.” He began attending daily Mass and taking classes in theology and Scripture. He bought a copy of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica from a used book store and began reading it. “I saw the solidity of faith in the light of reason,” he said, “and once that happened, I was ready to go.”
He joined the Society of Jesus in 1974, and was ordained a priest in 1983.
Fr. Spitzer is the author of several books, including Healing the Culture (Ignatius Press, 2000), Five Pillars of the Spiritual Life (Ignatius Press, 2008), New Proofs for the Existence of God (Eerdmans, 2010), and Ten Universal Principles (Ignatius Press, 2010), as well as numerous articles for scholarly journals, and has delivered hundreds of lectures. He is a teacher, and served as president of Gonzaga University from 1998 to 2009. He continues to produce an enormous volume of work despite suffering from poor eyesight throughout his adult life (he has not, for example, been able to drive a car for 30 years), which has gotten worse in recent years.
Fr. Spitzer recently spoke with CWR.
CWR: Prominent atheists often frame the debate between themselves and religious people by saying you either believe in “science”—however they may define it—or what they call the fairy tales of the Bible. What response would you offer such a viewpoint?
Fr. Spitzer: To start, I wouldn’t let them get away with saying faith and science contradict one another. We’re privileged to live in a time when there is more evidence from physics for a beginning of the universe than ever before. I made this point to [atheist scientist] Stephen Hawking in 2010, when I appeared along with him on Larry King Live. Stephen knows this. (Watch the discussion online.)
The debate centered on what was before the beginning of the universe. If you say “nothing”, then there has to be a God. You can’t move from nothing to something. Even Larry King got that. He asked another physicist on the program, Leonard Mlodinow, “How about that Leonard, how can you make something from nothing?” All Leonard could do was to equivocate on the term “nothing.”
CWR: Speaking of Stephen Hawking, he made the news recently when he officially declared himself to be an atheist. Do you find atheism widespread among the scientific community, or do a handful of atheist scientists receive a lot of publicity?
Fr. Spitzer: About 45% of working scientists are declared theists. Another vocal group, let’s say 20%, describe themselves as atheists. A third group is the agnostic naturalists. They’re not sure whether or not God exists, but they don’t what to compromise the naturalistic method by believing in God. I wouldn’t describe them as atheists.
CWR: Scientists often marvel at the intricacies of what Christians call Creation, but seem to suggest that these things developed on their own without a Designer outside the system to create them. Do many scientists have blinders on when it comes to God?
November 3, 2014
Dr. Holly Ordway: "What I couldn’t do, as an atheist, was to give a compelling reason why ..."
... I had this moral sense, or to explain why I recognized that my efforts to be good always fell short of my ideals."
That is from Dr. Ordway's recent interview with Brandon Vogt of Word On Fire about her new book, Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms
(Ignatius Press, 2014). Also in the interview:
BRANDON: You followed a unique route to God, one that was philosophical but just as much literary. How did your background as an English professor fuel your conversion, and how did the imagination play a significant role?
DR. HOLLY ORDWAY: I wasn’t interested in hearing arguments about God, or reading the Bible, but God’s grace was working through my imagination… like a draft flowing under a closed and locked door.
To begin with, classic Christian literature planted seeds in my imagination as a young girl, something I write about in more detail in my book. Later, Christian authors provided dissenting voices to the naturalistic narrative that I’d accepted—the only possible dissenting voice, since I wasn’t interested in reading anything that directly dealt with the subject of faith or Christianity, and thus wasn’t exposed to serious Christian thought.
I found that my favorite authors were men and women of deep Christian faith. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien above all; and then the poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Herbert, John Donne, and others. Their work was unsettling to my atheist convictions, in part because I couldn’t sort their poetry into neat ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ categories; their faith infused all their work, and the poems that most moved me, from Hopkins’ “The Windhover” to Donne’s Holy Sonnets, were explicitly Christian. I tried to view their faith as a something I could separate from the aesthetic power of their writing, but that kind of compartmentalization didn’t work well, especially not with a work of literature as rich and complex as The Lord of the Rings.
Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I needed to ask more questions. I needed to find out what a man like Donne meant when he talked about faith in God, because whatever he meant, it didn’t seem to be ‘blind faith, contrary to reason’.
The Christian writers did more than pique my interest as to the meaning of ‘faith’. Over the years, reading works like the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and Hopkins’ poetry had given me a glimpse of a different way of seeing the world. It was a vision of the world that was richly meaningful and beautiful, and that also made sense of both the joy and sorrow, the light and dark that I could see and experience. My atheist view of the world was, in comparison, narrow and flat; it could not explain why I was moved by beauty and cared about truth. The Christian claim might not be true, I thought to myself, but it was had depth to it that was worth investigating.
Read the entire interview on the Word On Fire website.
In This Place: In Praise of the Music of Frank La Rocca
(Images: www.franklarocca.com)
In This Place: In Praise of the Music of Frank La Rocca | R.J. Stove | CWR
The sacred music of the American composer is remarkable and unaffected, breathing the atmosphere of mystical devotion
Perhaps the most pernicious single delusion to have afflicted musical thought over the last two centuries is what might be called, for want of a comelier description, The Myth of Artistic Inevitability. The central teaching of this myth can be summarized in the slogan, “You can't keep a good man down.” More specifically, the myth maintains that musical genius, merelyby virtue of being musical genius, will always find a mass public; that no agency for evil can ever thwart this process; and that if a particular musician of stature fails to find a mass public, it is fundamentally his own fault.
Belief in the myth presupposes what operated to a limited extent in the centuries before 1914 but manifestly could not be relied on after that date: a European civilization sufficiently filled with noblesse oblige to regard musical genius as worth rewarding, in and of itself. Yet even before 1914 such a civilization was provisional, dependent largely on the caprice of individual patrons' effort.
Take Wagner, whose monumental self-belief possibly brought him closer than any other great musician has ever come to giving the “inevitable” dogma a fighting chance.But Wagner owed—and he himself knew full well that he owed—hisenduring world fame to, above all, a House of Wittelsbach accident. Without King Ludwig II's patronage, several of Wagner’s masterpieces would have been unperformed and in some instances unwritten. A Wagner without Ludwig II would have occupied something like the same niche in general culture now assigned to, say, Charles-Valentin Alkan: in short, renowned (rightly or wrongly) more for freakishness than for actual lasting merit.
Moreover, the Myth of Artistic Inevitability cannot even begin to explain how so many musical giants were forgotten, for generations on end, once they had died. Monteverdi and Heinrich Schütz in the seventeenth century, Telemann in the eighteenth, Johann Nepomuk Hummel in the nineteenth: all these men—who had substantial, and deserved, reputations in their lifetimes—fell so completely out of favor within a few years of their respective deaths, that it was almost as if they had never breathed.
Still, the main reason the myth is absurd is that it utterly fails to take totalitarian cultures, or even ordinary modern Western leveling,into account. Suppose that there had emerged in the twentieth entury a composer who combined the gifts of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in his own person. Those gifts, far from guaranteeing him popular acclaim and a berth in Grove’s, would not have done him a blind bit of good if he had been stuck amid the Holodomor, or amid Khmer Rouge Cambodia, or amid Maoist China’s Cultural Revolution, or (if he had possessed Jewish ancestors) amid Nazi-occupied Poland. Indeed, his exceptional abilities would have increased the likelihood of his being hunted down like a rat.
All this serves as a prelude to noting several facts: first, that there flourishes in America a composer named Frank La Rocca; second, that his creative talent for religious music is remarkable; third, that one can have been a professional musician—indeed a professional church musician—for decades without having encountered his name, let alone his output; and fourth, that those in that ignoramus category had included myself, until his CD In This Place, was recently brought to my attention—and by a non-musician! According to the Myth of Artistic Inevitability, such neglect could never have happened. I would, for certain, have discovered La Rocca’s work in the quotidian course of events; every decent-sized musical reference book would have alerted me to that work; it would be needless to accord him wider fame by writing the present article; and pigs would fly.
+++
A good case can be mounted for listening to all unfamiliar music, as it were, “blindfolded”. In other words, for judging it entirely upon what the ear apprehends, with no biographical or other data to affect one’s pleasure or distaste. Accordingly, before seeking any information about La Rocca’s career, I began playing the CD, and I concentrated exclusively on what I heard.
November 1, 2014
To Trace All Souls Day
To Trace All Souls Day | Fr. Brian Van Hove, S.J. | Ignatius Insight
As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger once said so well, one major difference between Protestants and Catholics is that Catholics pray for the dead:
"My view is that if Purgatory did not exist, we should have to invent it." Why?
"Because few things are as immediate, as human and as widespread—at all times and in all cultures—as prayer for one"s own departed dear ones." Calvin, the Reformer of Geneva, had a woman whipped because she was discovered praying at the grave of herson and hence was guilty, according to Calvin, of superstition". "In theory, the Reformation refuses to accept Purgatory, and consequently it also rejects prayer for the departed. In fact German Lutherans at least have returned to it in practice and have found considerable theological justification for it. Praying for one's departed loved ones is a far too immediate urge to be suppressed; it is a most beautiful manifestation of solidarity, love and assistance, reaching beyond the barrier of death. The happiness or unhappiness of a person dear to me, who has now crossed to the other shore, depends in part on whether I remember or forget him; he does not stop needing my love." [1]
Catholics are not the only ones who pray for the dead. The custom is also a Jewish one, and Catholics traditionally drew upon the following text from the Jewish Scriptures, in addition to some New Testament passages, to justify their belief:
Then Judas assembled his army and went to the city of Adulam. As the seventh day was coming on, they purified themselves according to the custom, and they kept the sabbath there. On the next day, as by that time it had become necessary, Judas and his men went to take up the bodies of the fallen and to bring them back to lie with their kinsmen in the sepulchres of their fathers. Then under the tunic of every one of the dead they found sacred tokens of the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbids the Jews to wear. And it became clear to all that this was why these men had fallen. So they all blessed the ways of the Lord, the righteous Judge, who reveals the things that are hidden; and they turned to prayer, beseeching that the sin which had been committed might be wholly blotted out. And the noble Judas exhorted the people to keep themselves free from sin, for they had seen with their own eyes what had happened because of the sin of those who had fallen. He also took up a collection, man by man, to the amount of two thousand drachmas of silver, and sent it to Jerusalem to provide for a sin offering. In doing this he acted very well and honourably, taking account of the resurrection. For if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead. But if he was looking to the splendid reward that is laid up for those who fall asleep in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Therefore he made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin. [2]
Besides the Jews, many ancient peoples also prayed for the deceased. Some societies, such as that of ancient Egypt, were actually "funereal" and built around the practice. [3] The urge to do so is deep in the human spirit which rebels against the concept of annihilation after death. Although there is some evidence for a Christian liturgical feast akin to our All Souls Day as early as the fourth century, the Church was slow to introduce such a festival because of the persistence, in Europe, of more ancient pagan rituals for the dead. In fact, the Protestant reaction to praying for the dead may be based more on these survivals and a deformed piety from pre-Christian times than on the true Catholic doctrine as expressed by either the Western or the Eastern Church. The doctrine of purgatory, rightly understood as praying for the dead, should never give offense to anyone who professes faith in Christ.
When we discuss the Feast of All Souls, we look at a liturgical commemoration which pre-dated doctrinal formulation itself, since the Church often clarifies only that which is being undermined or threatened. The first clear documentation for this celebration comes from Isidore of Seville (d. 636; the last of the great Western Church Fathers) whose monastic rule includes a liturgy for all the dead on the day after Pentecost. [4] St. Odilo (962-1049 AD) was the abbot of Cluny in France who set the date for the liturgical commemoration of the departed faithful on November 2.
Before that, other dates had been seen around the Christian world, and the Armenians still use Easter Monday for this purpose. He issued a decree that all the monasteries of the congregation of Cluny were annually to keep this feast. On November 1 the bell was to be tolled and afterward the Office of the Dead was to be recited in common, and on the next day all the priests would celebrate Mass for the repose of the souls in purgatory. The observance of the Benedictines of Cluny was soon adopted by other Benedictines and by the Carthusians who were reformed Benedictines. Pope Sylvester in 1003 AD approved and recommended the practice. Eventually the parish clergy introduced this liturgical observance, and from the eleventh to the fourteenth century it spread in France, Germany, England, and Spain.
Finally, in the fourteenth century, Rome placed the day of the commemoration of all the faithful departed in the official books of the Western or Latin Church. November 2 was chosen in order that the memory of all the holy spirits, both of the saints in heaven and of the souls in purgatory, should be celebrated in two successive days. In this way the Catholic belief in the Communion of Saints would be expressed. Since for centuries the Feast of All the Saints had already been celebrated on November first, the memory of the departed souls in purgatory was placed on the following day. All Saints Day goes back to the fourth century, but was finally fixed on November 1 by Pope Gregory IV in 835 AD. The two feasts bind the saints-to-be with the almost-saints and the already-saints before the resurrection from the dead.
Incidentally, the practice of priests celebrating three Masses on this day is of somewhat recent origin, and dates back only to ca. 1500 AD with the Dominicans of Valencia. Pope Benedict XIV extended it to the whole of Spain, Portugal, and Latin America in 1748 AD. Pope Benedict XV in 1915 AD granted the "three Masses privilege" to the universal Church. [5]
On All Souls Day, can we pray for those in limbo? The notion of limbo is not ancient in the Church, and was a theological extrapolation to provide explanation for cases not included in the heaven-purgatory-hell triad. Cardinal Ratzinger was in favor of its being set aside, and it does not appear as a thesis to be taught in the new Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church. [6]
The doctrine of Purgatory, upon which the liturgy of All Souls rests, is formulated in canons promulgated by the Councils of Florence (1439 AD) and Trent (1545-1563 AD). The truth of the doctrine existed before its clarification, of course, and only historical necessities motivated both Florence and Trent to pronounce when they did. Acceptance of this doctrine still remains a required belief of Catholic faith.
What about "indulgences"? Indulgences from the treasury of grace in the Church are applied to the departed on All Souls Day, as well as on other days, according to the norms of ecclesiastical law. The faithful make use of their intercessory role in prayer to ask the Lord"s mercy upon those who have died. Essentially, the practice urges the faithful to take responsibility. This is the opinion of Michael Morrissey:
Against the common juridical and commercial view, the teaching essentially attempts to induce the faithful to show responsibility toward the dead and the communion of saints. Since the Church has taught that death is not the end of life, then neither is it the end of our relationship with loved ones who have died, who along with the saints make up the Body of Christ in the "Church Triumphant."
The diminishing theological interest in indulgences today is due to an increased emphasis on the sacraments, the prayer life of Catholics, and an active engagement in the world as constitutive of the spiritual life. More soberly, perhaps, it is due to an individualistic attitude endemic in modern culture that makes it harder to feel responsibility for, let alone solidarity with, dead relatives and friends. [7]
As with everything Christian, then, All Souls Day has to do with the mystery of charity, that divine love overcomes everything, even death. Bonds of love uniting us creatures, living and dead, and the Lord who is resurrected, are celebrated both on All Saints Day and on All Souls Day each year.
All who have been baptized into Christ and have chosen him will continue to live in Him. The grave does not impede progress toward a closer union with Him. It is only this degree of closeness to Him which we consider when we celebrate All Saints one day, and All Souls the next. Purgatory is a great blessing because it shows those who love God how they failed in love, and heals their ensuing shame. Most of us have neither fulfilled the commandments nor failed to fulfill them. Our very mediocrity shames us. Purgatory fills in the void. We learn finally what to fulfill all of them means. Most of us neither hate nor fail completely in love. Purgatory teaches us what radical love means, when God remakes our failure to love in this world into the perfection of love in the next.
As the sacraments on earth provide us with a process of transformation into Christ, so Purgatory continues that process until the likeness to Him is completed. It is all grace. Actively praying for the dead is that "holy mitzvah" or act of charity on our part which hastens that process. The Church encourages it and does it with special consciousness and in unison on All Souls Day, even though it is always and everywhere salutary to pray for the dead.
ENDNOTES:
[1] See Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church, with Vittorio Messori (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985) 146-147. Michael P. Morrissey says on the point: "The Protestant Reformers rejected the doctrine of purgatory, based on the teaching that salvation is by faith through grace alone, unaffected by intercessory prayers for the dead." See his "Afterlife" in The Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality, ed. Michael Downey (Collegeville: Michael Glazier/Liturgical Press, 1993) 28.
[2] Maccabees 12:38-46. From The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Containing the Old and New Testaments. Catholic Edition. (London: The Catholic Truth Society, 1966) 988-989. Neil J. McEleney, CSP, adds: "These verses contain clear reference to belief in the resurrection of the just...a belief which the author attributes to Judas ...although Judas may have wanted simply to ward off punishment from the living, lest they be found guilty by association with the fallen sinners.... The author believes that those who died piously will rise again...and who can die more piously than in a battle for God"s law? ...Thus, he says, Judas prayed that these men might be delivered from their sin, for which God was angry with them a little while.... The author, then, does not share the view expressed in 1 Enoch 22:12-13 that sinned- against sinners are kept in a division of Sheol from which they do not rise, although they are free of the suffering inflicted on other sinners. Instead, he sees Judas"s action as evidence that those who die piously can be delivered from unexpiated sins that impede their attainment of a joyful resurrection. This doctrine, thus vaguely formulated, contains the essence of what would become (with further precisions) the Christian theologian's teaching on purgatory." See The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond E. Brown, SS, etal., art. 26, "1-2 Maccabees" (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1990) 446. Gehinnom in Jewish writings is more appropriately understood as a purgatory than a final destination of damnation.
[3] Spanish-speaking Catholics today popularly refer to All Souls Day as "El Día de los Muertos", a relic of the past when the pre- Christian Indians had a "Day of the Dead"; liturgically, the day is referred to as "El Día de las Animas". Germans call their Sunday of the Dead "Totensonntag". The French Jesuit missionaries in New France in the seventeenth century easily explained All Souls Day by comparing it to the the local Indian "Day of the Dead". The Jesuit Relations are replete with examples of how conscious were the people of their duties toward their dead. Ancestor worship was also well known in China and elsewhere in Asia, and missionaries there in times gone by perhaps had it easier explaining All Souls Day to them, and Christianizing the concept, than they would have to us in the Western world as the twentieth century draws to a close.
[4] See Michael Witczak, "The Feast of All Souls", in The Dictionary of Sacramental Worship, ed. Peter Fink, SJ, (Collegeville: Michael Glazier/Liturgical Press, 1990) 42.
[5] "Three Masses were formerly allowed to be celebrated by each priest, but one intention was stipulated for all the Poor Souls and another for the Pope"s intention. This permission was granted by Benedict XV during the World War of 1914-1918 because of the great slaughter of that war, and because, since the time of the Reformation and the confiscation of church property, obligations for anniversary Masses which had come as gifts and legacies were almost impossible to continue in the intended manner. Some canonists believe Canon 905 of the New Code has abolished this practice. However, the Sacramentary, printed prior to the Code, provides three separate Masses for this date." See Jovian P. Lang, OFM, Dictionary of the Liturgy (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1989) 21. Also see Francis X. Weiser, The Holyday Book (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1956) 121-136.
[6] Ratzinger stated: "Limbo was never a defined truth of faith. Personally—and here I am speaking more as a theologian and not as Prefect of the Congregation—I would abandon it since it was only a theological hypothesis. It formed part of a secondary thesis in support of a truth which is absolutely of first significance for faith, namely, the importance of baptism. To put it in the words of Jesus to Nicodemus: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God" (John 3:5). One should not hesitate to give up the idea of "limbo" if need be (and it is worth noting that the very theologians who proposed "limbo" also said that parents could spare the child limbo by desiring its baptism and through prayer); but the concern behind it must not be surrendered. Baptism has never been a side issue for faith; it is not now, nor will it ever be." See Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report, 147-148.
[7] Morrissey, "Afterlife" in The Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality, 28-29.
This article was originally published, in a slightly different form, as "To Trace All Souls Day," in The Catholic Answer, vol. 8, no. 5 (November/December 1994): 8-11.
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles and Book Excerpts:
• On November: All Souls and the "Permanent Things" | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Death, Where Is Thy Sting? | Adrienne von Speyr
• Purgatory: Service Shop for Heaven | Reverend Anthony Zimmerman
• The Question of Hope | Peter Kreeft
• The Next Life Is a Lot Longer Than This One | Mary Beth Bonacci
• My Imaginary Funeral Homily | Mary Beth Bonacci
• Do All Catholics Go Straight to Heaven? | Mary Beth Bonacci
• Be Nice To Me. I'm Dying. | Mary Beth Bonacci
• Are God's Ways Fair? | Ralph Martin
• The Question of Suffering, the Response of the Cross | Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
• The Cross and The Holocaust | Regis Martin
• From Defeat to Victory: On the Question of Evil | Alice von Hildebrand
All Souls and Our Mortal End
"All Soul's Day" (1910) by Aladar Korosfoi-Kriesch (WikiArt.org)
On the Readings for Sunday, November 2, 2014 | The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls) | Carl E. Olson
Readings:
• Wis 3:1-9
• Psa 23:1-3a, 3b-4, 5, 6
• Rom 6:3-9
• Jn 6:37-40
“I’ve always had a hard time explaining purgatory,” the man said. “Didn’t the Second Vatican Council say that Catholics no longer have to believe in purgatory?”
That remark was made to me years ago, not long after I had entered the Catholic Church. Although I was saddened to hear it, it didn’t surprise me. In the course of studying various Catholic doctrines, I had learned that certain beliefs, including purgatory, were often avoided or even ignored by some Catholics. And this, unfortunately, meant that many Catholics don’t appreciate the Feast of All Souls, which is all about praying for those who are in purgatory.
“I think purgatory is rather simple to understand,” I responded. “The problem is that we often have to do away with our flawed notions of purgatory.”
Growing up in a Fundamentalist home, I had been told purgatory was the belief that everyone gets a “second chance” after death. Purgatory, I had also been taught, was just another Catholic invention without any basis in Scripture.
What I learned years later was quite different. I saw that the early Christians prayed for the dead, and that this practice was based, in part, on the actions of those Jews who had prayed for the dead (cf., 2 Macc. 12:41-46). As today’s reading from the Book of Wisdom indicates, the idea of spiritual cleansing was a common one in the Old Testament: “For if before men, indeed, they be punished, yet is their hope full of immortality; chastised a little, they shall be greatly blessed, because God tried them and found them worthy of himself. As gold in the furnace, he proved them, and as sacrificial offerings he took them to himself.”
It followed logically that if there was life after death for the just, those who were just would be cleansed fully and completely, if necessary, before entering the presence of God. This, of course, also flowed from the deepened understanding of death and resurrection given through the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Savior had promised, in today’s Gospel, “that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have eternal life, and I shall raise him on the last day.”
But the early Christians recognized that not every disciple of Jesus is perfectly cleansed in this life from venial sins. St. Augustine explained that the Church’s prayers, the Mass, and the giving of alms provided spiritual aid to the dead. “The whole Church,” he wrote, “observes this practice which was handed down by the Fathers: that it prays for those who have died in the communion of the Body and Blood of Christ, when they are commemorated in their own place in the sacrifice itself; and the sacrifice is offered also in memory of them, on their behalf.”
It is ironic that the culture of death, which is present in so many ways, is so afraid to face death squarely and honestly. It tries to cheat and avoid death, both mocking it and cowering before it in movies, books, video games, and music. We fear death because it is so mysterious and hidden. We fear it because it seems so unjust that the vibrancy of life can end so suddenly and completely. If this world is all that exists, then death is to be feared. But it also will not be denied.
St. Paul, on the other hand, embraced death—that is, the death of Jesus Christ. “We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death,” he wrote to the Christians in Rome, “so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.”
The Feast of All Souls not only provides us an opportunity to pray for those who have gone before us, but also reminds us of our mortal end. We cannot deny it. But by God’s grace we can and should prepare for it, trusting that the Lord our Shepherd will guide us through the valley of darkness.
(This "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the November 2, 2008, edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)
Purgatory: Service Shop for Heaven
Purgatory: Service Shop for Heaven | Reverend Anthony Zimmerman
By no means will any of us enter heaven, or even want to enter there, unless our characters are in perfect shape, and our deficits are paid up in full. Purgatory is the service shop where repair work is done, and where books are balanced. The Poor Souls must wait for entrance into heaven, but they sense God's assistance while they make their final preparation. They already know what he will say finally: "Well done, good and faithful servant! Enter into the joys of the Lord." They understand and accept God's kindness as well as his concern that justice be done. Their tension is pictured, albeit imperfectly, in the drama of God's meeting with Adam and Eve after their sin.
Adam and Eve, after their transgression, saw their raw nakedness and were ashamed. They fled into the woods to escape a face-to-face encounter with the Lord God. But the Lord God went in search of them, like the Good Shepherd, intending to bring them to a better state of mind:
Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?" And he said, "I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself." He said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" The man said, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate." Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this that you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent beguiled me, and I ate" (Gen. 3:7-13).
Note how the Lord God took the initiative to draw near to Adam and Eve, like the Good Samaritan who paused in his journey to rescue a victim of robbers. The victim lay there helpless, half alive, half dead. If God had not come to the rescue of Adam and Eve, they would have remained alienated from him forever. It is a picture of life after death, when we will indeed be alive in mind, but dead in body, unable to move about on our own. We will be totally at the mercy of God. When God finishes with the Particular Judgment, he will direct us to join him in heaven, or to depart from him in hell, or to repair our condition in purgatory.
God asked our first parents, first of all, what they had done. They should get insight and confess voluntarily, with conviction. He will not force them to act, nor impose alien views. They must bare themselves to recognize the evil they had done. Seeing the truth, they must convert. Adam stuttered through his confession, making excuses, but finally stating his sin with the happy three words: "I ate it." Eve had an excuse too, but she also brought herself to make the confession. The Lord God then gave them their penances. They must convert, and thereafter stabilize and seal this conversion by enduring pain and hardships. Eve must accept the realities of created womanhood instead of trying to remake herself into a goddess. Adam must cope with thorns and thistles and perspire from hard labor, to obey God rather than caving in to a seductive partner. Both are then banned from the sight of God's face for a number of years. God showed his concern by providing sturdy leather clothes when exposing them to the climate outside of Eden. Their penance was of long duration: "Thus all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died" (Gen. 5:5). They persevered, nevertheless, as we can gather from the Bible. When the time was right, after Christ's Redemption, they would be readmitted into God's presence. The Book of Wisdom states, for example:
Wisdom protected the first formed father of the world when he alone had been created and she delivered him from his transgression, and gave him strength to rule all things (Wis. 1:1-2).
Saint Irenaeus (125-203) upholds Adam and Eve as models for us because they not only stood up after their Fall, but they made their experience with sin into a stepping stone toward subsequent growth. Thus, with the help of God, they turned evil into their own good. Irenaeus blames Gnostics for not giving our Adam due honor: "But those who deny salvation to Adam gain nothing by this except that they make themselves to be heretics and apostates from the truth, and show that they are advocates of the serpent and death" (Against Heretics III, 23, 8).
We do not know how long some souls are detained in purgatory, but we do know that when they emerge from the darkness into the light of God's presence, they are perfect. Every angle is perfect. Every facet is clear, like cut and mounted diamonds. The dazzling beam of God's light renders them incandescent without causing pain, resistance, or distortion. His light now lights up the thousand angles of their rich characters developed via life's experiences. The wealth of their talents reflects his light into brilliant rainbow colors. The saints are all lovely in their beauty. Swept up by the Spirit, they flow with elation in the stream of God's love for himself. Like Moses, they jubilate in the endless wealth of the I AM, of God's boundless love, truth, and beauty, of essential Splendor pulsing with Life:
The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abound ing in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation (Gen. 34:6-7).
The blessed participate not only in God's affirmation of himself, they also affirm themselves and their company with his approval. They luxuriate in their friendship with Christ first of all:
The blessed see in God, in the Word, also the holy humanity which the Son assumed for our salvation. They contemplate the hypostatic union, the plenitude of grace, of glory, and of charity in the holy soul of Jesus. They see the infinite value of His theandric acts, of the mystery of the Redemption. They see the radiations of that Redeemer: the infinite value of each Mass, the supernatural vitality of the mystical body, of the Church, triumphant, suffering, and militant. They see with admiration what belongs to Christ, as priest for all eternity, as judge of the living and the dead, as universal king of all creatures, as father of the poor (Garrigou-Lagrange, in Life Everlasting, Tan Books, 1991, pp. 228-9).
They salute also the Mother of God who meets them as Queen and as Mother, managing to be both at once. With the other beatified they join the celebration of joy, a fortissimo of what Beethoven strove to express in his Ninth Symphony. Lagrange observes that they also reach out to help those who are still on the way:
Parents know the spiritual needs of their children who are still in this world. A friend, reaching the end of his course, knows now to facilitate the voyage of friends who address themselves to him. St. Cyprian speaks thus: "All our friends who have arrived wait for us. They desire vividly that we participate in their beatitude, and are full of solicitude in our regard" (Lagrange, 229).
The main doctrines about purgatory, the station before heaven for those not using the express lane, are presented in the Catechism of the Catholic Church as follows:
1030 All who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven. 1031 The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned. The Church formulated her doctrine of faith on Purgatory especially at the Councils of Florence and Trent. The tradition of the Church, by reference to certain texts of Scripture, speaks of a cleansing fire:
As for certain lesser faults, we must believe that, before the Final Judgment, there is a purifying fire. He who is truth says that whoever utters blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will be pardoned neither in this age nor in the age to come. From this sentence we understand that certain offences can be forgiven in this age, but certain others in the age to come.
1032 This teaching is also based on the practice of prayer for the dead, already mentioned in Sacred Scripture: "Therefore [Judas Maccabeus] made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin." From the beginning the Church has honored the memory of the dead and offered prayers in suffrage for them, above all the Eucharistic sacrifice, so that, thus purified, they may attain the beatific vision of God. The Church also commends almsgiving, indulgences and works of penance undertaken on behalf of the dead:
Let us help and commemorate them. If Job's sons were purified by their father's sacrifice, why would we doubt that our offerings for the dead bring them some consolation? Let us not hesitate to help those who have died and to offer our prayers for them.
I like to think that we might be able to regulate the pace of our cleansing process in purgatory in accordance with our own choice, at least to some extent. The Lord does not, I think, burn out our rust there with precision-automated furnaces. He is a Good Shepherd who comforts lost sheep on his shoulders. He is not a tyrant who knows no love. With that thought in mind, we are not wrong, I believe, in hoping that God will allow us to regulate somewhat the intensity of the cleansing process in purgatory, whether we wish hurry via concentrated effort, or amble along in more leisurely fashion. Wisdom describes God as one who is considerate and kind:
Thou sparest all things, for they are thine, O Lord who lovest the living. For thy immortal spirit is in all things. Therefore thou dost correct little by little those who trespass, and dost remind and warn them of the things wherein they sin, that they be freed from wickedness and put their trust in thee, O Lord (Wis. 11:26; 12:1-2).
After all, if we have made our spirits bitter by harboring for decades an unforgiving spite against one who has wronged us, we will need to correct that cicatrized misgrowth in purgatory. We may want some time before we abandon our folly and agree to accept God's bargain-sale offer: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespassed against us." We will have to convert ourselves, turn ourselves around, make a U-turn, from hating that neighbor to loving him, from despising him to honoring him, from turning away from him to turning toward him. Some may want to hang onto their spite longer than others, be fore yielding to the gentle call of grace; before embracing the wisdom articulated by Sirach: "Does a man harbor anger against another, and yet seek for healing from the Lord?" (28:3).
If we were stubborn on earth and held out against the truth, we will likely carry this baggage of stubbornness right into purgatory. We may even harbor it foolishly for who knows how long. Until we relax and relent and repent, we are not fit for heaven. We may cling to our spite for a while, even at the cost of suffering for it. As Sirach says about the passion of anger: "In proportion to the fuel for the fire, so will be the flames, and in proportion to the obstinacy of strife, will be the burning" (Sirach 28:10). Fortunately, we can convert in purgatory without being embarrassed before the neighbors, which might make it easier to convert there than here. Our neighbors in purgatory are all like ourselves. All try to purge out the old leaven, and put on Christ's newness:
For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth (1 Cor. 5:7).
Martyrs escape the need of any cleansing in purgatory because they have already given witness that God is supreme in their lives. Nothing stands between them and God because they paid the price of their witness with their lives. For others there are various means of doing penance for sins in this life, and we may believe that the souls in purgatory have some choice in selecting penance in accordance with conditions of the soul now separated from the body.
Adam bit the bullet by confessing to the Lord: "The woman whom thou gavest to me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate it" (Gen. 3:32). Married partners tend to sin with each other when they contracept. Contraception, abortion, sterilization--these are grave matters, often aggravated by the malice of collusion or seduction. If done with sufficient knowledge and freedom, these acts bar the soul from admission to the Holy City:
But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death (Rev. 21:8).
Contraception and sterilization, do they bar us from heaven?
The issue of contraception is not peripheral, but central and serious in a Catholic's walk with God. If knowingly and freely engaged in, contraception is a grave sin (Archbishop of Denver, Charles Chaput, pastoral letter July 22, 1998).
The Archbishop of Denver said nothing new in that sentence. This is the constant and unchanging teaching of the Church. We may think the doctrine is out of fashion on earth now, but we will not think so after death. Changeless truths of eternity are not altered by the roller-coaster fashion changes of human society. If people arrive in eternity while in the state of grave sin, their sad lot is set forever. Even if they protest innocence, or shout that the commandment was impossible to keep, their anger avails them nothing. The Wise Man said: "If you will you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice" (Sirach 15:15). The door to heaven does not open to the foolish who were not watchful:
Afterward the other maidens came also, saying, "Lord, lord, open to us." But he replied, "Truly, I say to you, I do not know you." Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour (Matt. 25:11-13).
Conversion from mortal sin is possible before death, but it is not possible after death. An act of perfect contrition before death can cleanse the soul of mortal sin. It means complete conversion to God's way of life, it means a rejection of the deed of mortal sin, and it includes a resolve to confess when possible and not to sin again. All of this is to be done in perfect love for God with grace infused by him into our souls. The easier and more secure way is to confess the sin to a priest in the confessional, much as Adam and Eve confessed to God in Eden. Christ is marvelously kind and generous to those who confess their sins. As the CCC teaches:
1496 The spiritual effects of the sacrament of Penance are:
- reconciliation with God by which the penitent recovers grace;
- reconciliation with the Church;
- remission of the eternal punishment incurred by mortal sins;
- remission, at least in part, of temporal punishments resulting from sin;
- peace and serenity of conscience, and spiritual consolation;
- an increase of spiritual strength for the Chris tian battle.
1497 Individual and integral confession of grave sins followed by absolution remains the only ordinary means of reconciliation with God and with the Church.
Satisfaction done during this life for sins has the added value of merit toward a higher reward in heaven. In purgatory, however, souls do not gain new merit when they offer satisfaction for their sins, so most theologians tend to believe. The wiser move is to get on with our full conversion here, in this life. Here the yoke is easy and the burden is light (cf. Matt. 11:30, but there the yoke will be more galling, and the burden heavier, so many spiritual writers warn. Moreover, despite the harder burden, no new merit is acquired. The CCC lists good penitential means as follows:
1434 The interior penance of the Christian can be expressed in many and various ways. Scripture and the Fathers insist above all on three forms, fasting, prayer and almsgiving, which express conversion in relation to oneself, to God and to others. Alongside the radical purification brought about by Baptism or martyrdom they cite as means of obtaining forgiveness of sins: efforts at reconciliation with one's neighbor, tears of repentance, concern for the salvation of one's neighbor, the intercession of the saints and the practice of charity "which covers a multitude of sins."
A powerful detergent to purify oneself from remnants of contraception and sterilization is periodic abstinence. Long-term offenders who, in penance, abstain periodically for some months can heal their marriages and renovate their personal spiritual lives. The master of the vineyard gave the same full day's wage to those who started working at the eleventh hour as to those who started in the morning. Repenting couples thereby prove to themselves that natural family planning is indeed possible and that contraception was never necessary. They bear witness to God, though belatedly, that his laws against these practices are proper.
Do souls in purgatory have to struggle to rectify their lives? Very likely, yes. Deeply imbedded dispositions of sin may require some extra mending time in purgatory:
When sin is remitted by grace, the soul is no longer turned away from God, but it can retain a defective disposition. . . . Do these dispositions remain in the separated souls? Yes. They are like rust, penetrating at times to the depths of the intelligence and the will. Does this rust disappear suddenly upon entrance into Purgatory? Some theologians think so, because an intense act of charity can immediately take away these evil dispositions.
Now we do not find this answer in St. Thomas, but rather its contrary. He says . . . "The rigor of suffering corresponds properly speaking to the gravity of the fault, and the duration of the suffering corresponds to the rootedness which the sin has in the subject" (IV Sent ., dist. 21,q. a. 3). Now uprooting is generally a long process, demanding a long affliction or a long penance (Lagrange, 182).
Nevertheless, the Poor Souls do want to get themselves purged, so they accept the pains willingly even as they hurt. "The more this suffering penetrates the depth of their will, the more lovingly they accept it. Egoism, selfishness, the rust of sin, is burned away, and charity reigns without rival in the depths, rooted there forever" (Lagrange, 183). Peace grows as charity clears away the obstacles: "No peace is comparable to that of the souls of purgatory except that of the saints in heaven. This peace grows as hindrances disappear. As the rust disappears, the soul reflects more and more perfectly the true sun, which is God. And its happiness grows in the same measure" (Lagrange, 182, quoting St. Catherine of Genoa).
We can help the Poor Souls in purgatory to obtain a quick rectification of character and to telescope their penance into reduced time. God works this favor for them gladly in answer to our earnest efforts. We have confidence that God even helps the souls to convert instantly and that he forgives unpaid debts with a jubilee generosity in response to our prayers, especially through the offering of Holy Mass. We know from our own experience in life that a break with sin can be dramatic. God helps us to do with ease what we had thought was undoable. "The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will" (Prov. 21:1). God can turn the heart as he wills. We can forgive when he floods our wills with grace. We can stand up on spindly legs like the Prodigal Son and say "I will return to the house of my father." We are electrified, we walk on air, we are ourselves again. If God helps us to do this on earth so dramatically, we trust that he likewise helps the Poor Souls to do so in response to our intercessions.
An experienced priest friend used to say: "Show me a person who prays for the Poor Souls, and you show me one who has great faith." How very pleasing it must be for our dear ones in purgatory to know that we generously offer alms, prayers, penances, and especially the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for their quick release. Lest we forget, we do them immense favors by gaining indulgences. This opens for them the largess of the treasury of the Church through a very special response to the intercessory prayer of indulgences. The CCC teaches:
1498 Through indulgences the faithful can obtain the remission of temporal punishment resulting from sin for themselves and also for the souls in Purgatory.
A ninety-three-year-old religious sister delighted visitors with this enthusiastic assessment of purgatory: "The Poor Souls are so happy they are saved," she rhapsodized, "that they don't mind the pains. They jump up and down and celebrate with incredible joy, shouting over and over: 'We made it! We made it!'" Within a year she herself entered the next life. St. Catherine of Genoa harbored a similar insight: "Souls in Purgatory unite great joy with great suffering. One does not diminish the other" (see Lagrange, 167).
The Lord approves with joy, and heaven goes ablaze with fireworks, each time a released Poor Soul soars swiftly upward, buoyed on the wings of our prayers. We pray: May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
This article originally appeared in the June 1999 issue of Homiletic & Pastoral Review.
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Links:
• Hell and the Bible | Piers Paul Read
• The Question of Hope | Peter Kreeft
• The Brighter Side of Hell | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Socrates Meets Sartre: In Hell? | Peter Kreeft
• Are God's Ways Fair? | Ralph Martin
Reverend Anthony Zimmerman is Professor Emeritus of moral theology, Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan. He promotes Natural Family Planning and publishes books and articles. His latest two books published by University Press of America are: Evolution and the Sin of Eden, and The Primeval Revelation in Myths and in Genesis. More of Father Zimmerman's writings can be found atCatholicMind.com.
The Confession of the Saints
The Confession of the Saints | by Adrienne von Speyr
Chapter 11 of Confession, by Adrienne von Speyr
Holiness is found at the Cross. It is actually the preeminent holiness, of which the dying Son of God offers a final, comprehensible proof. There he is both the God who left his own glory with the Father and the man whom God made holy in every respect. Every element of holiness comes from and
is of the lineage of the Cross, even that of the untouched and innocent ones, the ones who, if it were possible, would have endured nothing of the Cross.
All holiness comes from the Cross and returns to it–not to the empty Cross, but rather to the crucified Lord who on that Cross summarizes in himself his entire earthly life and everything constituting holiness and the life of faith of the Church.
Confession is the fruit of the Cross, and the moment this fruit becomes accessible to the Lord he passes it on. When he mandates confession he is pointing out his possession of this fruit that only now really has become his own, visible and tangible, as he distributes it. We can contemplate this fruit in confession just as we behold his flesh--indeed, himself--in the transformed Host. The difference is that we view the confessional fruit of the Cross not as something existing but as something to be accomplished. Though momentarily visible when Christ gave up his spirit, it remains comprehensible for us only in its application.
Every saint will confess in the communion of all believers in order to receive a share in it--though the saint will perhaps do so not so much in order to hear the absolution of his own sins as to come to the place where the fruit of the Cross becomes visible. He confesses in order to reveal the form of grace, to lend that fruit greater visibility, to participate, indeed to share the burden of the Cross by means of his own confession, and by means of his own confession to let the Lord's word of grace become incarnate once more in the mystery of holiness he instituted. He confesses in a great nearness to communion; he actually confesses eucharistically.
The saint gives confession a certain quality that it receives only through him, a quality so precious that one might believe the Lord had precisely this quality in mind when he instituted confession. Precisely the saint who has sinned least could make the perfect confession: the confession of his distance from God, a confession that also includes all sinners. The confession of the saints, more than any other, is ecclesial and social. It is that confession in which the other sinners participate. It is a fruit so pure that it may not be consumed by one person alone.
We can differentiate three groups of saints: those who have sinned and know from experience what sin is; those who have not sinned and do not know from genuine experience what sin is; and those who have not sinned and yet know what sin is. As representatives we can list these three: Francis, the little Thérèse, and Aloysius.
Francis has sinned. He no longer views his sins individually; he views them as a sum of offenses to God. He loves the Lord ardently, ever more ardently. He is consumed by this love. The more truly, profoundly, penetratingly he loves, the more true, profound and penetrating his sensitivity becomes to the offense that sin causes the Lord. This holds true both for his own past sins and for all the others he comes to know. Whenever he hears that something evil has happened or that others. have committed sins similar to those he once committed in the same mixture of knowledge and ignorance, whenever he sees how they prefer sin to love, he confesses, and his confession stands at the burning focal point of the offenses to the Lord; the more his love grows, the more burning this focal point becomes. It becomes the focal point of the focal point.
Somehow he confesses in timelessness. The more his love consumes him, the more he senses how much more consuming it should be. In this heightening he also sees the offenses to God become heightened, and sin is subdivided for him into areas characterized by the sins he himself has committed. In one way or another he confesses distance from God, and every saint in this group does this. Although he no longer is deceitful, he loves truth too little. Although he no longer hurts his fellow human beings, he does not give them nearly as much as he could, as much as pure love wishes them to have. He confesses, as it were, a kind of reflection of his sins. Since he sees the offense to God better now, his earlier sin shows him how little his present virtue is actually fulfilled. He does not see it theoretically, but rather as a pure, pressing reality. He is the one who today has replaced his former sin with tepidity, the one who in spite of knowing better does not respond to the burning demand.
Hence it seems as if he is always confessing his former sins, which appear in a continually new light the more he becomes aware of his responsibility. Precisely because he no longer is deceitful, he should possess a consuming love of truth. Every confession refines his insight and increases the feeling of his own unworthiness, but by no means drives him to despair; for he feels grace, and feels it all the more strongly the more unworthy he feels. God's mercy accepts this wretched sinner!
Little Thérèse possesses a peculiar manner of confessing, just as she has a peculiar knowledge of sin.
Basically it never becomes clear to her what sin is. She learns by way of suggestion that people do things that offend God, and that those things have certain names which exhaustively define them--falsity, theft, murder, hatred, pride, self-love. But these things and their names have no essential relationship to her. Evil is for her simply the opposite of good, but this oppositional relationship remains somehow vague and abstract. Everything that is sin is somehow terrifying to her; she thinks about sin, she speaks about it, but in the way that one speaks about things which one really does not want to be explicit about.
This relationship to sin is reflected clearly in her relationship to what has been called her "night". In her suffering she gets to the Mount of Olives; she also gets there with her insight, knowledge and burden of sin. Yet one really cannot know clearly and specifically what the suffering on the Mount of Olives is without knowing equally about the Cross of Golgotha. Hence Thérèse never gets beyond a kind of groping and furtive circling around sin. On the "Mount of Olives" one cannot evaluate fully just how sin offends God. Confession is a matter of Thérèse accusing herself of small and ever smaller things, but she never reaches the point at which Francis confesses. She is infinitely happy that she has not committed a mortal sin, but this knowledge inhibits her confession. It remains at the stage of preparation, just as the Mount of Olives is a preparation for the Cross. There are various beginnings, steps are made, but they never reach the end. There even occur a few excuses in the midst of her accusations. And yet she would be prepared to bear more and would be glad to be in the communion of those who confess.
Here the accent on smallness can occasionally have a trivializing effect. Both her confession and her knowledge of sin lack full transparency, the light of day and realism. Saints in this group, too, could offer full confessions if the saint were seeking to be led all the way to the Cross, not by anticipating things the Lord does not give, but rather through a passivity that at the decisive moment not only passively forgets itself but also actively accepts what is revealed. Even he who has not committed sin should be familiar with it. It can be a matter of Christian courage that is not satisfied with what is vague, a courage that knows that after the "Mount of Olives", as painful as it may be, the real cross comes.
Aloysius is quite different; he is more like Catherine of Siena. He suffers from sin, and he does not withdraw from this suffering. He is able to view sin objectively and realistically. He has no share in it and is not bound to sin by sin, but he is familiar with it. He wants to know what it is, and what is unbearable for him passes over immediately into what is unbearable for the Lord. He is not bent on drawing and seeing his own boundaries or seeing to what extent he shares in it or does not. His past plays no great part. He is grateful to be allowed to do that which God expects of him right now. If he had committed a mortal sin, then he simply would have committed it; it would seem terrible to him, but he would confess and then carry on.
If, on the other hand, he knew he had not committed one, perhaps he would quickly thank God, but he would not give the matter any lasting significance. He, too, confesses his distance from God, but without really concerning himself with the source of this distance. He looks closely at the Ever-More of God and his grace, and he confesses what he himself lacks. None of this is theoretical, and therein he resembles Francis. Neither does he develop any theology of the sins he sees others commit. In his opinion they are believers just as he is, even fellow religious, who do not love enough; but neither does he love enough. Hence, although he can identify their sins with certain suitable names, he is one with them in this lack of love. It is not important to him whether their lack of love occasions those specific sins, or, as in his case, hinders a more intense ardor. His contrition arises at the point where he recognizes his distance from the demands of love.
Hence one cannot say that for him and those like him confession has no "content" and therefore no absolution. He senses the grace of absolution intensely, more than does little Thérèse. It gives him a new impulse for love.
The Mother of God does not feel excluded from the communion of those who confess, because she participates to the highest degree in her Son's confessional attitude. She participates in the confession of all sinners at the point where the Son as a man is completely transparent before the Father, where he lends his divine transparency to his own humanity. His Mother sees this infinite transparency, and in spite of her perfection she is always striving to attain that unattainable transparency. She strives without concerning herself with results. The essence of the confessional attitude for her is to become more like the Son.
There is no absolution for her; instead, she enjoys the closest proximity to the Son as the Redeemer and purifier of all sinners, and she pours out this proximity in a eucharistic spirit.
Adrienne von Speyr was a 20th century Swiss convert, mystic, wife, doctor and author of numerous books on spirituality. She entered the Church under the direction of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Her writings, recognized as a major contribution to the great mystical writings of the Church, are being translated by Ignatius Press. Read about her life and work on her IgnatiusInsight.com author page.
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