Summorum Pontificum and the Growth of Religious Life, by Fr Stefano M. Manelli, F.I. (Part 2)

This is the second part of a lecture by Fr Stefano Manelli, the founder of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, originally delivered at the 2nd annual conference of Giovani e Tradizione and Amicizia Sacerdotale Summorum Pontificum, which took place in Rome on October 16-18, 2009. It was published in Italian in the acts of the conference by Fede e Cultura, in the volume “Il motu proprio Summorum Pontificum di SS Benedetto XVI: un grande dono per tutta la Chiesa.” (The motu proprio Summorum Pontificum of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI: a great gift for the whole Church.) It is reproduced here in an English translation by Mr Zachary Thomas, with permission of the Italian publisher. To read the first part, click here.

2. Religious Life and the Holy Mass

Certainly the even more profound spiritual motive that binds the religious life to the liturgy is, in particular, the liturgical prayer par excellence: the Holy Mass. The religious state, indeed, following the thought of the spiritual authors of primary importance such as P. Ludovic Colin and Ven. Columba Marmion, has a very particular connection to the Holy Sacrifice of the altar.

“What is the religious?” Fr Ludovic Colin asks. He responds: “A host. And religious life? A mystical Mass.”

For every religious, in fact, the three solemn vows signify the ascent of Calvary, and being crucified with Jesus! The religious must go up and surrender himself as one with his crucified Lord, and every time that the sacrifice of the cross is so renewed on the altar, then also he will renew his sacrifice and place himself again on the altar with the Divine Victim.

A man accomplishes a sacrifice, a true holocaust, insofar as he is consecrated and devoted totally to God, because in so doing he dies to the world to live in God. This sacrifice, after the Mass and martyrdom, is the most perfect, the most acceptable to God and the most fecund in time and for all eternity. And indeed, in the religious state we discover all the elements constitutive of the sacrifice of the altar, namely: oblation (in the offertory), immolation (at the consecration), consumption of the victim (at communion).

Not only does the religious who takes a vow of poverty, of chastity, and of obedience offer himself to God, but the very formula of offering is also an act of consecration, by which comes about, so to speak, the transformation of the Christian into a religious, a spiritual victim and a holy offering.

At his profession, the religious truly gives and consecrates himself to divine service; God, by His own will, ratifies and confirms this consecration for all eternity. As has been justly observed, religious profession is at once a work of God and a work of man. We may say that God holds in his hands the soul that offers itself to Him, and blesses it: “Accepit in manus suas et benedixit.” This blessing is not merely a word without meaning, but an act, a work of sanctification and of consecration.

And the consecration entails the immolation and the total consumption of the victim. This aspect is more grave and splendid, the fulcrum of the religious state. In fact, the religious is, through his vocation, a being-sacrificed, a living host which is consumed totally in the holocaust of love for the glory of God and for the salvation of souls.

“It is not the case of a bloody immolation: here the blood of the soul takes the place of that of the veins; a mystical death suffices for a spiritual sacrifice. Here, for example, St. Francis de Sales writes to a spiritual daughter: ‘Look, my dear daughter, upon a spirit consecrated on the altar to be sacrificed, immolated, and consumed in a holocaust in the sight of the living God.’ ”

For the celebration of the Year of the Priest, our Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI, wanting side by side with the holy Curé of Ars, who was a model for secular priests, to place also a model of a holy priest for the religious, has selected St. Pio of Pietrelcina, a saint of our times, a Franciscan Cappuccian who was marked with the bloody stigmata for fifty long years of his life, and happily declared by Pope Paul VI “a representative of the stigmata of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He was an extraordinary priest who, especially in the celebration of the Holy Mass, appeared like St. Francis of Assisi to be a true “image of Jesus crucified” (from the Preface of the Mass of St. Francis of Assisi).

3. Religious Life and the Divine Office

Liturgical prayer surpasses in power and efficacy every other praise or prayer or good work. It is an incontestable truth, and the saints have understood it well. St. Magdalen de Pazzi, for example, valued the recitation of the canonical Hours above any private devotion. When one of her religious asked for a dispensation from some prayers, she responded: “No, my daughter; I would mislead you if I should permit it; for you could believe that this particular devotion of yours gives more honor to God and is more acceptable to the Divine Majesty; while it is actually a small thing compared to the Office which you recite with the other sisters.”

This is the wisdom of the saints, and the faith speaks in the same way. The Divine Office is worth more than any other work, it is really the work of God par exellence. Others are “opera hominum” (the works of men), while the Divine Office is from God, as a homage of praise that comes down from God through the Incarnate Word, presented to the Church in the name of Christ.

The Divine Office can become, and often does for a few, a true sacrifice; and thus it can be called in the fullest sense a “Sacrificium Laudis” (Ps. 49:23). This can happen in various ways: foremost because the recitation of the Office (especially the old Office) follows very precise norms and ceremonies to which one must faithfully adhere. This is what constitutes the penitential aspect of the praise of God. Moreover, it is necessary to impress upon the mind a loving attention to the divine Psalmody, and to that end, repeated efforts are necessary to subdue the appetites and our natural inconstancy. These are all sacrifices acceptable to God.

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Summorum Pontificum and the Growth of Religious Life, by Fr Stefano M. Manelli, F.I. (Part 1)

The following lecture by Fr Stefano Manelli, the founder of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, was originally delivered at the 2nd annual conference of Giovani e Tradizione and Amicizia Sacerdotale Summorum Pontificum, which took place in Rome on October 16-18, 2009. It was published in Italian in the acts of the conference by Fede e Cultura, in the volume “Il motu proprio Summorum Pontificum di SS Benedetto XVI: un grande dono per tutta la Chiesa.” (The motu proprio Summorum Pontificum of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI: a great gift for the whole Church.) It is reproduced here in an English translation by Mr Zachary Thomas, with permission of the Italian publisher.

Introduction

Through the knowledge imparted in Divine Revelation, we have access to the pure waters of that unique fountain of Sacred Scripture, welling up like a great river of perennial tradition and running along through the centuries and millennia of the life of the Church: a perennial tradition expressed in a wonderful manner especially by the Fathers of the Church.

Among these Church Fathers, Saint Ambrose writes in his Hexameron: “The Church, like the moon, goes through frequent waning and waxing, but it is precisely by virtue of its waning that it grows and becomes deserving of greater fullness…The Church shines not with a light of its own but with the light of Christ, and draws its splendor from the Sun of justice” (IV, 32).

To speak about the image and the reality of the moon as applied to the Church is really something unknown to modern Christianity, and it might even sound like irreverence to look upon Her as the supreme light that illumines the world. But the saintly Bishop of Milan, with his insightful and surprising speech helps us to understand the ecclesial mystery more profoundly.

We can draw two considerations from his thinking. The Church does not shine with its own light, but, like the moon, reflects the splendors of the crucified and resurrected Lord. A Church that no longer reflects the light of its Founder would no longer be His Church, but another’s. The “lunacity” of the Church, an expression used by Card. Biffi, should not astonish us.

With an insight that is both direct and tender, Anselm writes that the Church is “ex maculatis immaculata;” She is without stain, though composed of sinful men. This Church, which is never without sinners, is always without sin in herself. In her human structure, therefore, she cannot be otherwise than “moonlike,” since she reflects the fragility and debility of fallen humanity on the road to the kingdom of Heaven.

“The ‘lunacity’ of the Church,” Cardinal Giacomo Biffi notes, “manifests itself above all in the continuous oscillations of its luminosity before us. In the same way as the moon, she too is always “robed in the sun,” though she does not always appear the same way to our observation. There come times when her gleam is slender as a blade, barely sufficing to reveal its presence, and moments when every light appears to be swallowed by the night: this is a time of darkness, though not of darkness’s decisive victory.”

Mindful of the words and thought of the saintly Archbishop of Milan, we turn our attention now to the ecclesial reality in which we live. First, it is not at all difficult to admit that in our time the splendor of the Bride of Christ is going through an eclipse of perhaps unique proportions in its bi-millenial history.

This crisis, which entirely encompasses the whole life of the Bride of Christ, according to the Holy Father Benedict XVI, “depends in large part on the collapse of the liturgy” that came not in the Council, but in the post-conciliar period.

Such words, taken up again in another of his writings, extend even beyond the limits of the Church to constitute a fundamental element of all life and of the human sphere: “What is right and what is moral do not remain the same,” the Pope also writes, “as long as they are not anchored in their liturgical center and do not draw their inspiration from it […]. Only if our relationship with God is just will all the other relations of man – those of men with themselves and of man with the rest of created reality—be able to function”.

But where, in general, does the basis of this influence of the liturgical cult on human life reside? With worlds of heavenly light, Cardinal Ratzinger responds in what immediately follows the cited text: “Adoration, the correct modality of cult, of man’s relationship with God, is constitutive of correct human existence in the world: this is for the very reason that in the midst of daily life it makes us participants of the mode of existence of heaven, God’s world, thereby letting the light of the divine world penetrate into our own […]. [Cult] prefigures a more definitive life, and in so doing gives to the present life its proper measure. A life bereft of such anticipation, into which heaven is not at all sketched, would become leaden and empty”.

For the Pope, therefore, the liturgy of the Church becomes the favored channel of divine governance upon the earth, and contains in itself a demiurgical power which fashions the events of the world according to its own model, making itself the “measure” of “the present life.”

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