Processing through the Courts of the Great King

The Jewish Temple, in either of its historical forms—Solomon’s or Zerubbabel’s—possessed certain basic features that go all the way back to the tabernacle erected in the wilderness of Sinai. In its most elaborate form, as renovated and expanded by King Herod shortly before the birth of Jesus, we find a series of concentric circles of holiness, from the most secular to the most sacred.

First there was the Outer Courtyard, which anyone, including Gentiles, could visit. Then there was the Inner Courtyard, which only male Jews could enter. Next was the Temple itself, with its Holy Place where only members of the tribe of Levi were permitted to serve. Lastly, you came to the Holy of Holies, which was off limits to anyone but the High Priest of that year. What we see in this arrangement of the Temple mount is a gradual progression from the secular to the sacred. There was the throne room of the King, but there were also many antechambers surrounding it where His citizens came and went, busy with their prayers or offerings.

In her life of worship, the Catholic Church, inheritor and fulfiller of the religious life of Israel, has something analogous to this concentric series of spheres, although now that Christ has pierced the veil and entered the heavenly Holy of Holies, there is no longer a distinction based on sex or race or tribe; all who are baptized have access to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. While we do see physical remnants of the Temple such as the clear separation between the sanctuary of a Catholic church and the nave where the faithful congregate, what I have in mind is the rich variety and complexity of Catholic liturgical and devotional life outside of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

The Mass is the “source and summit of the Christian life,” but we do not reach the summit except by climbing the mountain, and the mountain represents all the other rituals and pious practices we have been given, such as morning offerings, grace before and after meals, the Divine Office, Eucharistic Adoration and Benediction, the Rosary and the Angelus, First Fridays and First Saturdays, the Stations of the Cross, processions, Bible study groups, popular religious gatherings.

We are prepared to drink from the source by increasing our thirst for the living waters. We intensify our readiness to receive Our Lord at Mass by allowing His presence to permeate the rest of our life outside of Mass—something we do at set times with set practices, and more generally, by cultivating an awareness of the presence of God wherever we are. The spiritual life of a Catholic is not one-dimensional but many-dimensioned. To change metaphors, even as a homestead has different paths and gates, buildings and fields, and as the main house has many rooms and floors, doors and windows, for all different sorts of purposes, so too does the great spiritual homestead and household of the Catholic Church.

This richness and diversity in our expression of faith is not only healthy, but necessary for communal and personal sanity. Indeed, things begin to go very wrong when Catholics forget about the huge realm of public prayer outside of Mass and the private devotions that are their rightful heritage. When people attempt to compensate for this unrecognized loss by packing all their devotional needs and wishes into the Mass itself, they start expecting things that might be reasonable to expect, but not from the Mass.

Take music, for example. The stance of the Catholic Church is that popular religious songs are, as far as they go, a good thing (although some of them might be bad, either because the lyrics are unorthodox, or because the musical style is too distracting or animalistic). Lovely popular religious songs have been sung for generations in the living rooms of homes, in outdoor meetings, at prayer groups and other events. However, this music is simply not appropriate for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which is an awesome mystery—a matter more for fear and trembling than for rousing refrains and tapping toes.

Listen to the way the Byzantine Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom speaks of the Eucharist: “the divine, holy, most pure, immortal, heavenly, life-creating, and awesome mysteries of Christ.” This is what Mass is all about: cosmic mysteries before which we bend our knees in humble adoration. It is not a jamboree, not a sing-along, not a “festival of praise,” not even a Scripture study or a Marian devotion. We are kneeling before the Holy of Holies, and so, like Moses before the Burning Bush, we must do what is appropriate for that encounter with Divine Fire. As St. Ephrem the Syrian writes: “He called the bread his living body and he filled it with himself and his Spirit . . . He who eats it with faith, eats Fire and Spirit.”

When, on the other hand, Catholics develop a more diversified culture and life of prayer, they find outlets for all the different legitimate needs and wishes they have; the Mass does not have to bear all the weight. It is quite unreasonable to expect that our complex and manifold spiritual needs can all be met by one hour each week on Sunday morning, but unfortunately that is the typical expectation of many American Catholics.

We men and believers need to do not just quantitatively more things, but qualitatively different things. To return to my opening image, we reach the Holy of Holies or the Throne Room by entering in a leisurely way the Outer Courtyard, proceeding with increased piety to the Inner Courtyard, stepping up with reverential fear into the Temple itself, the Holy Place, and, at last, coming to the very foot of the Throne, in the presence of the King: sitting while his prophets and apostles are speaking, standing at attention when He addresses us in the Gospel, kneeling when He delivers Himself to the Father as a sweet-smelling oblation and yields Himself to us for our nourishment.

How can we not exclaim with St. Francis of Assisi: “What wonderful majesty! What stupendous condescension! O sublime humility! O humble sublimity! That the Lord of the whole universe, God and the Son of God, should humble Himself like this under the form of a little bread, for our salvation.” We will be properly prepared for this “admirable exchange,” whereby we give ourselves to God and He gives Himself to us, when we have walked, with devout presence of mind, through the courtyards and into the Temple.

We owe it to our King to prepare ourselves for His royal banquet, His wedding feast, and the Church has given us an abundance of ways in which we can do that: the Divine Office; Eucharistic Adoration; Lectio Divina; Confession; the Rosary; and so forth. The Mass is the crown jewel, to be sure, but it is not the entire crown; indeed, the jewel is given its appropriate place by the other materials that hold it and complement it.

Offspring of Arius in the Holy of Holies: Recent False Claims about the Roman Rite

Detail of French MS, ca. 1360–1370 (Master of Jean de Mandeville; full image here)

Imagine my surprise when I read, in the second installment of the (now finished) five-part series at Church Life Journal by Drs. Cavadini, Healy, and Weinandy [CHW], the following claim:

Significantly, while the faithful [before The Council] knew and believed that the one God is a Trinity of persons, their liturgical and personal prayer often primarily consisted of praying to the one (generic) God. Only after Vatican II, with the revision of the rite and the use of the vernacular, did the faithful become more cognizant of the trinitarian nature of the liturgy and of their own ability to pray in a trinitarian manner.

Apart from the authors’ remarkable ability to know intimately how millions of Catholics prayed and engaged with the liturgy prior to the 1960s — and in particular, their ability to know that widely-available and popular devotional materials, explicitly Trinitarian in content, in fact must not have been used by anyone who bought them — together with their crystal-ball glimpse into the Trinitarian literacy of modern Catholics (which I am sure a Pew Research survey could quickly establish, together with their literacy in Eucharistic doctrine) and their intimate Trinitarian prayer lives, we should, with discipline, zero in on the central claim: that it was specifically “the revision of the rite and the use of the vernacular” that brought about this renaissance in Trinitarian knowledge and prayer.

Archbishop Lefebvre in one of many flourishing preconciliar missions run by the Holy Ghost Fathers in Africa; sadly, their liturgy did not help them much in their conquest of the continent for Christ.

In my book Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis, published in 2014 — a book frequently reviewed, and easily available, for those with a taste for liturgical studies — I devote one of the chapters to documenting the systematic removal of Trinitarian and Christological confessions from the reformed liturgy, demonstrating that the vernacular rite Catholics were given after 1969 was far less centered on the mystery of the Trinity than the Tridentine liturgy to which the faithful were accustomed (especially from the unofficial vernacular versions they would have encountered in widely-used hand missals — unless CHW somehow know, once again, that the millions of copies of such missals that were sold over many decades were never actually used by anyone).

Given the magnitude of this claim — that, essentially, the Church had allowed her faithful for centuries to be deficient in their knowledge and devotion to the Trinity (!) — it seems opportune to share this chapter online, in the interests of making the truth better known.

Offspring of Arius in the Holy of Holies

(Chapter 6 of Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis, Angelico, 2014)

In the New Testament two basic “orientations” of prayer are displayed and inculcated: first and foremost, in keeping with Jewish tradition, prayer addressed to “God” or “Lord” (into this category may also be placed the altogether novel way in which our blessed Savior intimately addresses his “Father,” as we see, for example, in the farewell discourses in the Gospel of John), [1] and occupying a secondary but still important place, prayer addressed to Jesus Christ himself.

To the former and more familiar Jewish practice, Jesus adds a new and crucial element that concerns the very essence of the revelation he embodies: God is to be invoked in Jesus’ name, for the Son of God is now the Son of Man, the one and only Mediator between God and man, through whom all our prayers ascend to the Father and all his graces are given to us in the Mystical Body. Hence the Lord teaches his disciples: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide; so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you” (Jn 15:16), and again: “Truly, truly, I say to you, if you ask anything of the Father, he will give it to you in my name. Hitherto you have asked nothing in my name; ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full” (Jn 16:23–24). Such teachings are the revealed foundation of the Church’s custom of concluding her prayers per Christum Dominum nostrum, a formula we already see frequently in St. Paul, whose letters are full of liturgical language: “I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed in all the world.” [2]

Nevertheless, our Lord also taught his disciples to address him, the Son and Savior, in prayer: “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son; if you ask me anything in my name, I will do it” (Jn 14:13–14). [3] When Jesus says: “You call me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am” (Jn 13:13), he affirms that his followers are right to turn to him as the ultimate authority, the Holy One of Israel. Events, especially miracles of healing, confirmed the truth of these words. “The centurion answered him, ‘Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only say the word, and my servant will be healed’” (Mt. 8:8). [4] “The crowd rebuked them, telling them to be silent; but they cried out the more, ‘Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!’” (Mt. 20:31). There are the words of the thief: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Lk 23:42), and the words of the doubter: “My Lord and my God!” (Jn 20:28).

Pietro da CORTONA, The Stoning of St Stephen (c. 1660)

Again, the spontaneous exclamations of the early Christians are a precious witness that Christ, as true God, was the addressee of many prayers, not only a mediator through whom one had access to the Father. “As they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit’” (Acts 7:59). “To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 1:2–3). More important than any one verse, however, is the general tenor of a number of texts, for example chapter 10 of the Epistle to the Romans, where St. Paul writes:

If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. . . . The scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. For, “every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.” (vv. 9, 11–13)

Here, in typical rabbinic fashion, the Apostle to the Gentiles weaves together citations from the Old Testament that are manifestly speaking about the one true God, the God of Israel, and applies them to Jesus Christ. In this way he is not only clearly asserting Christ’s divinity, but also urging the Christians who receive his letter to confess this mystery with their lips (a reference to liturgical worship) and to invoke Jesus as God in their prayers.

In the end, both ways of praying are given a succinct endorsement in the solemn words of Jesus that have echoed down the centuries: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me . . . He who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:6, 9). By saying that he is the way, he self-effacingly presents himself as Mediator, the Word made flesh, the only way to reach the Father; by saying that he is truth and life, consubstantial with the Father, he presents himself as he truly is in the Father’s glory — namely, as the Son who, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, forever and ever. Hence, there can never be any tension, much less contradiction, between praying to the Father and praying to Jesus. For Jesus is Emmanuel, God-with-us, and whoever sees or speaks to him has seen or spoken to the Father.

Icon of the angelic visitors to Abraham, representing the persons of the Trinity

In regard to ways of praying, it comes as no surprise that traditional liturgies of all rites, Eastern and Western, closely adhere to the witness of the New Testament and the practice of the ancient Church. The classical Roman liturgy — viewed in terms of ethos, ceremonial, spirituality, and the dogmatic theology expressed in the texts — shares much more in common with the Byzantine liturgy than it does with the Novus Ordo Missae. [5] Perhaps nowhere is this fact more obvious than in regard to the presence, in liturgical texts and ceremonies, of solemn Trinitarian affirmations and their counterpart, a thoroughgoing Christocentrism.

Indeed, there could hardly be a more insistently Christ-confessing liturgy than the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. In this liturgy there is a constant hymning both of Christ as the one true God and of the indissoluble unity of the Trinity: “Let us commend ourselves and one another and our whole life to Christ our God”; “For You, O God, are gracious and You love mankind, and to You we render glory, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now and ever and forever.” Right before the Nicene Creed is recited, the priest sings: “Let us love one another, so that with one mind we may profess” — and the people finish his sentence: “The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in substance and undivided.” Immediately after the consecration the priest sings: “We offer to You Yours of Your own, on behalf of all and for all,” to which the people respond: “We praise You, we bless You, we thank You, O Lord, and we pray to You, our God.” One of the most beautiful texts in the Divine Liturgy is an ancient hymn that perfectly illustrates the point we are making:

O only-begotten Son and Word of God, Who, being immortal, deigned for our salvation to become incarnate of the holy Mother of God and ever-virgin Mary, and became man, without change. You were also crucified, O Christ our God, and by death have trampled death, being One of the Holy Trinity, glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit, save us.

The Byzantine liturgy is overflowing with such texts, boldly confessing the divinity of Christ and the perfect unity of Father, Son, and Spirit.

Now, even if the classical Roman liturgy, with its comparative sobriety and simplicity, is not “overflowing” in the same way as Eastern liturgies tend to be, it too conveys the same theological message, and with many of the same expressions and gestures. It clearly belongs to and derives from the same ancient Christian heritage, where chanting the praises of the divine Word-made-flesh and falling in adoration before the Most Holy Trinity were the pith and purpose of liturgical life.

In marked contrast, the Novus Ordo Missae displays an insistent “Patricentrism” or generic Theocentrism that is characteristic of no historically well-established liturgical rite. In its official texts and ceremonial the Novus Ordo exhibits what can only be called a certain Arianizing appearance or tendency. [6] The presbyter Arius of Alexandria (ca. 256–336), after whom the heresy of Arianism is named, taught that Jesus Christ is not truly and properly divine, but rather, a highly exalted creature and specially favored servant of God — a “son” or “god” by grace, not by nature.

St Athanasius Triumphs over Arius, by Jacob de Wit (after Peter Paul Rubens); public domain image from the website of the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD).

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Bulgakov on the Benefits of a “Tedious” Liturgical Prayer

Not long ago I was reading a fascinating book, Sergius Bulgakov’s Spiritual Diary—newly translated and published for the first time in English by Angelico Press—and found myself frequently nodding in agreeing with various points he had to make about life, the world, politics, and ecclesiastical matters. Written in 1924–25 in Prague, after Bulgakov had been exiled from Soviet Russia along with many other intellectuals, the diary offers a fascinating window on the interior struggles of a man who was longing for his fatherland and continually suffering from feelings of discouragement and confusion at the direction in which the world was going. (Sound familiar?)

In the midst of worldly troubles and personal woes, Fr. Bulgakov found a constant source of strength and peace in the Divine Liturgy, about which he speaks with glowing eloquence. I am reminded in this regard of Fr. Bryan Houghton, who closes his moving autobiography Unwanted Priest with the words: “You have in front of you a priest rejected because of the old Mass, but whom the old Mass alone keeps going.”

It was highly edifying to read Bulgakov’s defense of the need for commitment, persistence, and a certain ascetical violence to self when it comes to the rigors of prayer, including liturgical prayer. He says we will often be cold in soul and the only way we will ever warm up is by forcing ourselves to “go through the motions,” as if trying to let the body, the tongue, rule the soul, or steer the soul into its proper course. The presupposition, needless to say, is a rigorous course of prayer to follow, so that it becomes possible for the soul to awaken as it should.

Here are his words, written on May 6, 1924:

We must love the work of prayer and never slacken in it. People seek spiritual pleasures, and if grace ever shows its face to them, when it is taken away from them they languish and their soul grows cold. But the work of prayer—persistent, never slackening, tenacious—is the expression of our active love for God that strives to bind our sinful being and bring it to the altar. The Kingdom of God is taken by force [Matt. 11:12]. And this work never remains unjustified [cf. Matt. 11:19].
       At times you pray but the heart remains cold and callous, the tongue wooden. And yet, if you force yourself and make absolutely no concessions nor grant any indulgence to your laziness, after prayer the soul feels itself renewed, resilient, and strengthened.
       The same thing also happens when you attend church services and the experience is accompanied by a certain coldness; after this too do you feel yourself strengthened. Therefore, work, brothers, and even you, wicked servant [Matt. 25:26], work. For work is love, and the one who does not work and is lazy in love—his heart is cold. (58)

How different is this from the attitude of the liturgical reformers! They would solve the “problem” of modern man’s difficulty with prayer by shortening, simplifying, easing up the prayer, making it less painful, less demanding, less “worky,” to use a favorite expression of a dear college student I once knew. How foolish and myopic. One must make “absolutely no concessions nor grant any indulgence to laziness.” This is the ascetic way that leads through dryness and lack of desire to the warmth of love, tears, and contemplation. The Eastern tradition has never forgotten this. Why has the Western? Although traditional Latin enclaves are certainly many steps ahead in this regard, one still notices some cutting of corners. There are some who avoid the High Mass because it is too long and demanding; others who never pray part of the Divine Office (e.g., Vespers, which was once nearly as common as Mass). In traditional circles, rather than priding ourselves on the great good we have in the Tridentine liturgy, we should be finding ways to live still more fully a life of prayer centered on it but not limited to it.
 

The same book contains an appendix called Remembering Fr. Sergius, written by his long-time friend Sr. Joanna Reitlinger. In a wonderful passage she shares her recollections of Bulgakov’s attitudes about the Lenten Tridion and repetitious prayer.

Having been brought up in the church from childhood, Fr. S. grew up organically together with its life. While still a little boy—as he used to tell the story—he anxiously awaited when they would sing the canon, “Beneath the waves of the sea” and was afraid to miss it. This sacred and almost childlike attitude towards all the services of Holy Week remained with him for his entire life. While there was much that he criticized about the archaisms and rhetoric of our canons (especially those for the commemoration of certain saints, which were written without any inspiration), the services of Holy Week he singled out and considered particularly inspired. Not long before his final illness he once again recalled with enthusiasm: “‘O Lord, the woman fallen into many sins perceived your Divinity’—Exactly so!”

Note: he criticized these things in private, but he never sought to change them. He accepted them as part of the cycle of public prayer, with its peaks and troughs, its moments of sublime inspiration and its more humdrum business. Sr. Reitlinger continues:

He likewise highlighted not so much the intrinsically tedious content of our services’ interminable repetitions as much as the atmosphere they would create—especially our services at the St. Sergius Representation Church—during the first week of the fast [Great Lent]. Although these services greatly wore him down, he would return from church as if from a long journey in unknown lands, having scaled the great heights of the spirit, and would say that the soul in this season breathes the particularly rarified air of these heights. And thus even this private critique of these services in their particulars, which was entirely justified, became somewhat discordant, especially later in his life, with these feelings of his. He recommended treating these Holy Week services with even some superstitious fear: “do not skip them.”
       But many of our prayers seemed to him burdensome, archaic, unmodern. This was especially true of the rule of prayer for preparation for Holy Communion. We often spoke about this, how burdensome it was and how it did not correspond to our feelings and thoughts before the holy mystery of Communion in the Body and Blood of Christ. Despite this, he never allowed himself any sloppiness or nihilism toward the “rule” and recited it strictly. At the end of his life, when he was very weak, he almost always read them while sitting at his writing desk.
       As for the archaic canon of Andrew of Crete, he liked to poke fun at it; but as I mentioned earlier, he valued the atmosphere it created, as he valued the entire atmosphere of the first week of the fast. He even tried to define what the “magic” of this rhythm consisted of, locating it in the mysterious repetition of “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me,” in the mysterious sighs of repentance. (175–76)

Here, then, we see a man of immense learning who totally dedicated himself to liturgical prayer as it concretely existed, not as he might have privately wished it could be. Not for him a Consilium to turn everything inside-out and upside-down. Rather, he valued the spiritual fruit derived from even what seemed, to the flesh, wearisome repetition. The idea that there is “useless repetition” in the liturgy—a view that could be held with far greater reason of the Greek and Slavic liturgical rites!—would have struck him as verging on blasphemy. He knew that the Church’s prayer was too sacred, too strong, too far beyond the realm of the individual, to dare allow oneself “any sloppiness or nihilism.” He did what was written as to be done, even to his final days.

Such reflections could likewise be of benefit to those who pray the (traditional Latin) Divine Office (or any other lengthy liturgical ceremony) and who may find that its repetitions may sometimes feel “tedious or interminable.” There is a way to deal with such thoughts and feelings. It is the way we see in Bulgakov, not the way we see in Bugnini. In fact, I have no hesitation in saying the former was far more Catholic in mentality than the latter.

Prostration during the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete

How to Pray With Sacred Art

How do we pray with sacred art? Judging by the length of some books that have been devoted to this subject, one might imagine that the answer to this question this is long and complicated. However, in my experience, much of the content of these books is devoted to discussion of the symbolism of traditional imagery, to the question as to why we ought to pray with sacred art, and general information about techniques of prayer that are not specific to images. This is all good information, but it is available elsewhere, and the inclusion of these subjects in one place creates thick tomes which give the impression that you need to be a bookish academic to be able to do this. Once we focus on the actual engagement with imagery during prayer, then the subject becomes much simpler.

So simple in fact, that I would say that the short answer to this question is just this: pray as you would normally, but look at sacred art as you do it.

Good sacred art will promote a right attitude in the one who prays, through the combination of its content, compositional design, and stylistic elements. In this sense, the artist does the hard work in advance to make it easy and natural for us. I will write another post soon, called How Artists Create a Dynamic of Prayer Through Style and Content in Sacred Art, which will explain this further. This will be, I hope, useful for artists and interesting to the curious, but I will happily say in advance, not actually necessary for the one who prays.

I am also assuming a certain degree of wisdom on the part of the one who chooses that art and its placement in the place of worship or prayer. Style, for example, can be distracting even if the content is right. When we choose art for home this is a personal choice, but I would be far more conservative when choosing art for church, where it has to appeal to as many people as possible. The traditional styles are more likely to do this. You can decide whether or not this modern style is distracting or supportive of your prayer. (It wouldn’t help mine).

The Virgin Mary

If you are praying to the Virgin Mary, look at the image of her and treat the image as you would her, with the greatest respect. We can kiss or bow to an image on the understanding that we are offering that respect, appropriately, not to the image in isolation, but rather to the one portrayed through the image. When the right image of (e.g.) the Mother of God is set up in such a place that when we wish to pray to Her in the liturgy, we do so naturally and easily, then very little instruction is needed. I would be more inclined to choose a traditional style even for home, such as this:

Madonna and Child with Ss Jerome, Bernardin, John the Baptist, Anthony of Padua and Two Angels, by Sano di Pietro, ca. 1465

The hierarchy of prayer and how sacred art harmonizes with this
In his little paper on the New Evangelization written in the year 2000, Pope Benedict XVI gives us a lesson in prayer. He does this to make the point that in order to be evangelists, we ourselves must first be transformed supernaturally, which happens through prayer. He describes a three (or perhaps two)-tiered hierarchy of prayer. Highest is the worship of God the Father, through the Son in the Holy Spirit in the liturgy; second is what he calls para-liturgical prayer, which is prayer in common derived from popular religiosity and devotions (such as the rosary or the Divine Mercy chaplet); and third, or perhaps equal second, is personal prayer, carried out in the “in the quiet of one’s room, alone in front of God’s eyes.”

Each form of prayer has a value in and of itself. God is not limited by His sacraments or the liturgy and the connection to us can be profound and real if He wishes it. But as a general principle, their greatest value is in the enrichment of the highest form of prayer. By all prayer, we are formed as lovers capable of an ordered reception of Him and the giving of ourselves back to Him in the liturgy. In turn, it is the liturgy which forms us most powerfully to be lovers of our fellows and neighbors in the world.

The Church tells us that art is not just desirable, but necessary to prayer and to the liturgy. We have a problem in the Roman Church at the moment, in that we seem to have forgotten how to engage with art in the context of the liturgy. In my observation, this can be as true of pious traditionalists as it is of liturgical liberals. Even when the church is beautifully adorned with high-quality art, and the liturgy that takes place in that church is dignified and orthodox, very rarely do I see anybody engaging with art in the Mass itself. As a result, the art is reduced to something that creates a mood-setting beautiful backdrop - not altogether useless, but still underutilized. Contrast this with an Eastern Church where typically every time the Mother of God is prayed to, the image is incensed by priest or deacon and all turn and address the Theotokos through her image. We need to find ways that this can happen too in the Roman Church.

As a layperson, I have no power over what the priests do and can’t, for example, direct them as to when we might process to and incense a particular image so I leave it to any priests or seminarians who might be reading this to think about what I am saying. However, there are other things that I can focus on. I can develop the habit of looking at the imagery at appropriate junctures. I don’t need permission from anyone, when the Father is addressed, for example, to look to the image of Christ (those who see the Son, see the Father); or at the same image when Christ Himself is addressed, or Our Lady and the Saints when they are mentioned. I am free to turn to their images and bow as the prayers are said, and so on.

Compressing many truths into a single visual ‘utterance’
There are also things we can do outside the church in order to make this engagement in the liturgy more fruitful. One is to practice praying with sacred imagery in front of the icon corner at home. Ideally, we would choose art to accompany all of our prayer at home. By developing the habit of praying with images whenever we can, aside from being an additional source of inspiration for our prayer, the image becomes associated in our minds with all the words of our prayers, meditation and inspirational thoughts that occur during those prayers. Each time we see that image, or another of the same subject, all those memories are re-presented to us. So, for example, if we simply ensure that we look at a single image of Mary when praying the rosary, then all the truths associated with the rosary and our reflection on the mysteries will be associated in our minds with the picture of Mary. At a certain point, simply seeing the image brings to mind in a single moment all that we know about her and that we know about her Son through her. It is as though all the time of that prayer is compressed into a momentary sight of the image. It is just like when we see a person we love from whom we have been separated, all that we know about that person is with us in the joy of that first moment of seeing her again.

The hope is that we can be like this in the liturgy. We look at Our Lady when her name is mentioned, perhaps on a feast day dedicated to her, and all that we know about her is made present in our minds in some mysterious way and then added to and reinforced by our experience in the liturgy itself.

Vassily Maximov, ‘Sick Husband’, painted in 1881, showing a traditional icon corner

Rite by Rote

Why learning of the texts of the liturgy will transform worship, improve singing, improve art, and renew the culture.

In some ways, I am the product of the new-model education that became trendy in the 1970s and which sought to throw out all tradition. The emphasis on experiential learning meant that I had very little formal training in grammar and punctuation - I once managed to talk my way into a job at the Sunday Times as a sub-editor without knowing how to use speech marks. If you think that my work is full of typos now, you should have seen it before Grammarly told me my errors! And I can’t recite a line of Shelley or Shakespeare to save my life, let alone offer you a coherent exegesis of the text. (I even had to look up “exegesis” on the internet prior to writing this paragraph, as I wasn’t sure if I was using the right word.)

As we were going through this educational revolution, many - including my parents - were critical of the trend and argued for the re-introduction of the traditional methods, most simply characterized by the “three R’s - reading, writing and ’rithmetic.” At the time, I was glad to avoid such horrors (as I saw them), but I have to say that now I am not so sure that my 1970s-style education by osmosis given was a good thing. In fact, I am going to suggest that we not only promote all three of those Rs, but also introduce a fourth, one that I hated even more when I was a teenager - Rote.

The purpose of a great books education is to give us familiarity with certain key texts that characterize the culture and so form us to participate in it. Collectively, they form our story, in which, it is hoped, our own personal stories will participate. The more familiar we are with the story of our nation and our people, the more likely we are to be contributors to and conservers of it.

This aspect of education - inculturation by storytelling - is as old as culture itself. The Greeks had the Iliad and Odyssey, the Romans had the Aeneid, and the Israelites had Sacred Scripture, which itself tells us of this principle of inculturation; the story of the Israelites is to be retold to successive generations in order to preserve their faith. At different junctures, it describes how this was done in order to redirect a straying people; for example, we see Moses, Joshua, and Samuel in the Old Testament, and Stephen and Peter in the New, doing just this.

As Christians, we are Israelites by adoption, and any education that doesn’t focus on the Bible, or does not make it a central part of the education, is not Christian. In our case, we need both the Old Testament, the original Scripture, as referred to by St Paul in his letters, for example, and the addition to this, the inspired Scripture of the New Testament (including Paul’s letters). It is the latter that connects us to the former, bringing the Gentiles into Israel through Christ, which completes the story of salvation for all humanity. I am all for learning other classical texts that typically make up the Great Books curriculum too; they represent good supporting material, but I would say that they are not absolutely necessary. However, an education that has classical texts but little or no Scripture is a waste of time.

You can’t become a doctor by taking the course in a pre-med program, no matter how thoroughly you know the material. Studying Dante, Beowulf or even Greek philosophy is not a bad thing, but it is wrong to place these at the center of our education or to see them as absolutely necessary. The study of salvation history, on the other hand, ought to be mandatory. I don’t regret at all having had little or no exposure to classical texts in my education. I find literature, and poetry especially, incredibly dull. But I do wish I had learned the value of Scripture.

If we were Protestant, the discussion would stop there, but we’re not. The liturgy itself is a living-out of the story of salvation, a drama in which we are participants. The study of salvation history in Scripture prepares us for the worship of God in which our formation as Christians is more profound. The Bible is dependent upon the liturgy for its true meaning - it was written to be proclaimed in a liturgical context (as well as studied outside it), and contains much of the blueprint for it.

Jean Danielou’s book The Bible and the Liturgy explains this well, to quote from the summary of the book written by the publisher:

The Bible and the Liturgy illuminates, better than has ever before been done, the vital and meaningful bond between Bible and liturgy. Father Daniélou aims at bringing clearly before his reader’s minds the fact that the Church’s liturgical rites and feasts are intended, not only to transmit the grace of the sacraments but to instruct the faithful in their meaning as well as the meaning of the whole Christian life. It is through the sacraments in their role as signs that we learn. So that their value will be appreciated, Daniélou attempts to help us rediscover the significance of these rites so that the sacraments may once again be thought of as the prolongation of the great works of God in the Old Testament and the New.

The deepest participation in the liturgy will come from an intimate awareness of the texts, as well as a deep understanding of their meaning and through them, how to engage, body, soul, and spirit with the dynamic exchange of love that is taking place. This is where rote learning comes in.

The more we know and understand the texts and can sing those parts we are required to without having our noses buried in a book, the more we can engage authentically with what is happening. It will allow us, for example, to engage with art. Furthermore, we are likely now to require art that speaks of all the liturgical activity going on, and it is this that will stimulate the reestablishment of an authentic schema of liturgical art in our churches, one that actually nourishes our prayer. This, in turn, could become a powerful driving force for cultural change, for it is the forms and styles that are intimately connected with authentic worship that will drive this.

For those who wish to learn to pray with sacred art, especially in the context of worship, freeing ourselves up to look at the art in the church or icon corner will help; knowing and understanding the texts and their chants, gives us the ability to sing along, so that we are less reliant on the missal and the psalter that will do this. I am not expecting memorization of the whole text of the liturgy, but we should start somewhere if we haven’t already. The more we can do this, starting with those that are repeated most often, I suggest, the freer we will be.

Authentic liturgical art induces right prayer when we take the trouble to look at it during our worship. Currently, in my observation, (thinking now of the pious and orthodox) there is very little engagement with art beyond devotional prayer, and so it becomes too much an internalized, introspective cerebral activity. This contemplative aspect should be there too, make no mistake, but it should not dominate to the degree that it does. I had these same thoughts in mind with previous postings about Baroque art in the Latin Mass and the placement of choirs in the church.

In my opinion, the damage to our culture and our faith through this lack of engagement of the whole person cannot be underestimated. The prospects of cultural renewal are greatly diminished without it, and in my reading of history, this may well have been what caused the dislocation between the culture of faith and contemporary culture that Benedict XVI describes as taking place in the early 19th century, in his book the Spirit of the Liturgy.

I am currently attempting to put this into practice myself. Rote learning is a very difficult process for me - especially as I am now in my late 50s - but I am doing my best. I sing repeatedly the texts of the liturgy so that I can look at my icon corner as I do so. I have set myself the target of learning by heart  the chants of oft-repeated liturgical passages, the hymns, psalms, canticles, prayers and so on.

For a man to start doing this in his late 50s is a difficult task. If I had been given the chance in my first 10 years of life, the riches that it would have given me would have been great. Still, I am where I am...back to the Gloria and the Benedictus!

“The Sacrifice of Praise and the Ecstatic Orientation of Man”: Dr. Kwasniewski’s Davenport Lecture

The following lecture was given in Davenport, Iowa, on March 2, 2022, at the invitation of Una Voce Quad City. I am grateful to the organizers for making a video, which is now on my YouTube page.

I am convinced that one of the greatest errors we are facing in the Church today—and one that, in a hidden way, drives a lot of other problems we are suffering under—is the dominance of an activist, utilitarian, this-worldly notion of what Christianity is all about. It’s taken for granted that religion is for the sake of social justice and improvement of quality of life, that it’s a matter of being busy with charitable projects, of making ourselves “useful,” and so forth—quite as if God is not very good at ruling His universe and needs a lot of help from us (“excuse me, Lord, let me step in and take care of this disaster”). At its extreme, as we see it too often in Vatican documents and activities, Catholicism looks like an interreligious, humanitarian social services operation, the “chaplain to the United Nations” as some wags have put it.

In my talk this evening I would like to present to you a totally different way of thinking of the meaning of Christianity and of the purpose of human life. I will offer you the traditional vision, which, needless to say, is not well understood. And I will do so starting from a book of the Bible that used to be at the heart of all of theology but has suffered enormous neglect in the modern Church, namely, the Epistle to the Hebrews, which is all about priesthood, sacrifice, and heaven, and the very title of which underlines the profound continuity between the worship of Israel instituted by God through Moses and its fulfillment in the worship of the New Israel instituted by the God-man Jesus Christ.

In this Epistle, whose author I will take to be St. Paul or certainly of St. Paul’s circle, a climactic verse of chapter 13 exhorts us: “By Him [our Lord Jesus Christ], therefore, let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is to say, the fruit of lips confessing to His Name” (Heb 13:15). Given the relative paucity of explicit references in Hebrews to the Christian liturgy and how it is to be conducted here on earth,[1] this exhortation rings out all the more loudly, summoning us to a certain way of life: one in which we offer unto God, continually, the “sacrifice of praise,” which is the fruit of interior faith and its verbal confession. One might ask: Why does St. Paul sum up the Christian religion as a sacrificium laudis? What might we learn from the emphasis on praise?

Before digging into that question, it is worthwhile to point out how frequently Sacred Scripture uses this language. Apart from Hebrews 13:15, here are some other instances:

Offer to God the sacrifice of praise: and pay thy vows to the most High. (Psalm 49:14)

The sacrifice of praise shall glorify me: and there is the way by which I will shew him the salvation of God. (Psalm 49:23)

And let them sacrifice the sacrifice of praise: and declare his works with joy. (Psalm 106:22 )

I will sacrifice to thee the sacrifice of praise, and I will call upon the name of the Lord. (Psalm 115:8)

And offer a sacrifice of praise with leaven: and call free offerings, and proclaim it: for so you would do, O children of Israel, saith the Lord God. (Amos 4:5)

But I with the voice of praise will sacrifice to thee: I will pay whatsoever I have vowed for my salvation to the Lord. (Jonah 2:10)

And thou hast taken pity upon two only children. Make them, O Lord, bless thee more fully: and to offer up to thee a sacrifice of thy praise, and of their health, that all nations may know, that thou alone art God in all the earth. (Tobit 8:19)[2]

And there are countless verses that suggest the same in different language. We have, for instance, Psalm 70:8: “Let my mouth be filled with praise, that I may sing thy glory, thy greatness, all the day long”—a verse, incidentally, that is sung in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom immediately after the reception of Holy Communion, in a way identifying Our Lord with the very act of praise: “Let my mouth be filled with praise.”[3] The Prophet Jeremiah says: quoniam laus mea tu es, “for Thou art my praise” (Jer 17:14).

Of all forms of prayer, praise is the one most “for its own sake.” In a sense, it is useless, in that it has no further ulterior motive or result we are seeking out of it.[4] Praise looks to the greatness, glory, beauty, and worthiness of the one praised and seeks to render to him a selfless homage; in the words of the Gloria, propter magnam gloriam tuam, or in the words of the final Psalm: laudate eum secundum multitudinem magnitudinis eius, “praise him according to his exceeding greatness!” (Ps 150:2). All forms of prayer, of course, are directed towards God, this being part of the very definition of prayer. That explains why the publican in the parable went home justified rather than the Pharisee, since the publican actually turned to God in self-abnegating repentance, whereas the Pharisee turned to himself in admiration of his own excellence.

All the same, other forms of prayer besides praise are unavoidably wrapped up with oneself. When we give thanks to God, we are recalling the good things He has done for us. When we supplicate Him, it’s about our own needs or the needs of others, and that’s perfectly fine; we are needy creatures, and the worst thing we can do is to pretend otherwise. When we accuse ourselves of wrongdoing and repent of it, we are recognizing that we have failed to live up to God’s just expectations of us, that we are at fault and deserving of punishment, and we beg for pardon. But when we praise, we are lifting up our hands, our voices, our minds, towards God who is almighty, all-glorious, awe-inspiring, worthy in Himself of the homage of the entire cosmos for all eternity, worthy of the total surrender of myself to Him. In a short story called “The Castle: A Parable,” George MacDonald gives us this magnificent prayer:

We thank Thee for Thyself.
Be what Thou art—our root and life,
our beginning and end, our all in all.
Thou livest; therefore we live.
Thou art—that is all our song.[5]

In order to have a concrete model in front of us, we might think of the sequence of psalms in the office of Lauds in the monastic tradition. On Sundays of Paschaltide, on Sundays in special seasons, and on Solemnities, Lauds is a time of prayer given over entirely to the pure praise of God: Psalms 66, 62, 92, 99, the Benedicite, and Psalms 148 to 150 (from which Laudate psalms the office derives its very name).[6] In contrast, when we look at Prime or the Little Hours, we can see how concerned they are with the labors and trials of the day, the ongoing struggle with our enemies who seek to surprise us and capture us, the need for help, mercy, and consolation in a time of exile or pilgrimage. While not excluding these themes, Lauds is principally a “sacrifice of praise,” a burning up of the incense of our time and of the fruit of our lips. It is an office we perform not in order to “get” something, but propter magnam gloriam tuam. May all the earth praise the Lord: every creature, every order of being, every man, woman, and child. We will stand in for them, voicing the praises of creation; we will announce and obey the divine imperative, laudate Dominum; we will give utterance to a sleeping world on its behalf.

As with the religious life in general, Lauds is not concerned with going out into the streets, knocking on doors, engaging in conversations, making the Gospel relevant or intelligible. Those things are important and have their place, but first comes praise, the precondition and promise of the fruitfulness of anything else we may do.[7] A priest once wrote to me these words:

I know of no great thinker, no great advocate of justice or mercy or great keeper of an institution, who was not first an ardent laudator (giver of praise). I also do not know true intercessors who did not do this ministry in the context of praise. Self-forgetting praise is our foretaste of Heaven.[8]

This is the message we modern Christians need to hear in the expression “sacrifice of praise.” We are steeped in a world of pragmatism, utilitarianism, and activism, where we place such a high premium on doing and making, where we ask “what good is it” and “what’s in it for me,” where we look for results, the bottom line, the cash value, the pay-off. It is so interesting to see how Our Lord in the Gospels repeatedly refuses to lower Himself to the level of quick victories over the roiling crowds, how He insists on the disciples taking time off to recollect themselves and to pray, and, most mysteriously of all, how He Himself spends whole nights in “the prayer of God,” as St. Luke says.[9] He who, as God, could not pray to Himself; He who, as man, was hypostatically united to the Word and therefore perpetually and perfectly communing with the Most Blessed Trinity in His human mind and heart, nevertheless really and truly exercised all the acts of prayer, including praise.

In this way He revealed to us that prayer is not something superficial and optional to man but, rather, is constitutive of his inmost identity as a rational creature fashioned by God, dependent on God, and destined for God. The one who does not pray is not living as a man; in any case, he cannot inherit the kingdom that a saint—that is, a man of prayer—is competent to receive. Jesus showed His disciples that prayer is an activity as necessary and as refreshing as eating and drinking when the body needs nourishment, as vital and fundamental as breathing in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide.[10] The poignant little prayer before the Divine Office brings out this point: “O Lord, in union with that divine intention with which You Yourself praised God while on earth, I offer You this hour.” This short prayer addresses Our Lord as the one who first lived and always lives the sacrificium laudis with utter completeness, with inexhaustible superabundance; we wish to unite our will to His pure, lofty, all-sufficient intention.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Our Lady’s Garden: A Benedictine Oblate’s Prayer Initiative for Catholic Families

A Benedictine oblate with whom I have been in correspondence for some time asked me if I would post this at NLM.--PAK

Our Lady’s Garden

“Who maketh a barren woman to dwell in a house
The joyful mother of children.” Psalm 112:9

I would like to introduce both myself and my apostolate.

My name is Barbara Swan. I am a parishioner at Mater Ecclesiae in Berlin, New Jersey. I am also Sister Barbara Mectilde of the Blessed Sacrament, OSB Oblate, and as such, I am an “external monastic,” an Oblate, attached to Our Lady of the Annunciation Abbey in Clear Creek, Oklahoma. (Clear Creek Abbey is a daughter of the Abbey of Fontgombault, which is, in turn, a daughter of the Abbey of Solesmes founded by the great Dom Prosper Guéranger, the author of The Liturgical Year.) My apostolate is prayer—prayer especially for the many young faithful families at Mater Ecclesiae.

Starting on December 28, 2021, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, I will begin praying a daily Holy Hour at my home oratory for any family who would like to have me do so. What I ask is that, if you are interested, you provide me with the following:

The names of all family members
A recent photograph of the entire family to put on my altar (because we are often anonymous to each other; preferably portrait orientation so I may use it on my mobile devices)
Any special prayer requests or concerns you would like me to pray for

My daily Holy Hour for each family would consist of:

Monastic Vespers according to the Rule of St. Benedict
Five decades of the Rosary of the Mysteries of the day
Individual prayers for each family member
Intercessory prayers to each member’s patron Saint
A daily sacrifice or mortification
Dedication of the graces and blessings of entire day to that family

On Sundays, I would offer my intentions at Mass and the Divine Office for all the families for whom I am praying.

I take my inspiration from Father Pasley’s declaration of gratitude for, and encouragement of, the many “young families making many sacrifices to pass on the Faith…(who) give me strength and hope…(and who) remind me every day that the Lord will be victorious.”

You, young faithful families, are our future and it is incumbent upon all of us to also offer our own sacrifices along with yours so that the entire Body of Christ will be strengthened.

If you are interested in allowing me to offer what I can to the Lord for your family, please contact me at: ourladysgardenprayers@gmail.com.

I hope to be able to set up a website for this apostolate if it generates enough interest.

Our Lady’s Garden

I sit in a Garden of Flowers
In bud and in bloom
Precious in the eyes of Him
To Whom they lend their fragrance:
their fragrance of innocence, purity and  love

Many blooms has this garden
Too numerous to count
O that they will bloom for eternity
Planted in His hidden garden of
Life Everlasting

The Church Exists to Seek First the Kingdom of God

(Part 1 of a two-part series, “Exorcising the Demon of Activism.”)

As the traditional Latin Mass returns and as discussions of it multiply, one might hear an objection like the following, which I heard almost verbatim. “The traditional Latin Mass is too focused on the vertical and not enough on the horizontal. It fosters a bunker or fortress mentality. We cannot have people leaning so much toward the contemplative; they must be ready to storm the battlefield of the culture war.”

A specimen “in the wild” can be seen in the following words published a few years ago by a Catholic writer who, I believe, would no longer endorse them:

I am not saying there were no aspects of the “way of praying” in the old liturgy which may have been dangerous, in some way, to true Christian maturity. It may be true that, in some ways, as some reformers have argued, the old liturgy tended to foster a type of piety which was simplistic, a “pie in the sky” faith detached from the “here and now” of Christ’s call to act on urgent matters of charity and social justice. In this view, some aspects of the celebration of the old Mass, the incense, the robes, the mystery, caused people so much to focus on “heaven” that they forgot “earth.” I acknowledge that this may have been, and may be, true, and a concern for liturgical reformers who are truly committed to building the Kingdom, here and in time to come.

If this caricature were true, why would the greatest saints of charity and social justice — such as St. Vincent de Paul in the seventeenth century, or in our own times, Dorothy Day, who was traumatized by the liturgical revolution — encourage the careful and beautiful celebration of the traditional liturgy, which nourished them for their whole lives? They knew that whatsoever we do to the poor, hidden, humble, and vulnerable Host, we do to the glorious Christ our Judge in heaven; indeed, whatsoever sin we commit against the divine liturgy, we commit against our poor brothers and sisters, whose greatest treasure in this world is the Church’s faith and worship. For it is in the liturgy that the comforting words of the Prophet Isaiah are fulfilled:

All you that thirst, come to the waters: and you that have no money make haste, buy, and eat: come ye, buy wine and milk without money, and without any price. Why do you spend money for that which is not breed, and your labour for that which doth not satisfy you? Hearken diligently to me, and eat that which is good, and your soul shall be delighted in fatness. (Isa 55, 1–2) 

The history of the Church tells a far different story, one that C. S. Lewis has aptly conveyed in a famous passage from Mere Christianity that’s always worth repeating:

A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth “thrown in”: aim at earth and you will get neither.

In the hustle and bustle of actively participating in close-to-home vernacular “Lite Rites,” it has come to be viewed as almost indecent for laity to ask that the liturgy be conducive to meditation, or for clergy to expect the Mass and the Divine Office to foster a contemplative life in their souls. Lewis’s observation could be custom-fitted to our postconciliar situation: “Aim at worshiping the Lord in spirit and in truth, and you will get active participation ‘thrown in’; aim at active participation, and you will get neither.”

The way that liturgists still carry on, one would think they are speaking thus to one another: “What shall we do, so that all of us may be doing something? What shall we sing or speak? Who shall do the reading, who shall bring up the gifts, who shall clap the laudatory hand or hug the neighborly torso? When shall we stand or sit or kneel?” And Jesus is there to say, “The pagans seek all these things. Your Father knows that you need them — at the right time and place. Seek first the kingdom of God, and all the rest will be added unto you.”

If we aim more at the participation than at the reality to be partaken of, and if we insert explanations and directions into the liturgy (“how to”) rather than taking pains to instruct people at other times so that they may truly yield themselves to the liturgy, we are inverting the proper order of goods, the proper hierarchy of values — and thereby meriting the deprivation of those goods, the anarchy of those values.

A Dominican spiritual writer, Fr Gerald Vann, articulated this relationship of primary and secondary in his work The Divine Pity (pp. 12–13):

It might be true to say, take care of contemplation — make sure that it is fervent, assiduous, and wholly God-centred — and action will take care of itself, the redemptive work will inevitably follow in one form or another; but the reverse would certainly not be true. What is the purpose of the grace of God, the sacramental system, the whole dynamism of the supernatural life, but to enable us to know God, to love God, to serve God?...   To be poor in spirit, to be meek, to be clean of heart: all these things denote an attitude of soul towards the world; but primarily they denote an attitude of soul towards God… Yes, we must long, and pray, and work to be filled with the love of our neighbour; but first of all, above all, we must long and pray and work to possess the one thing necessary, the substance of life everlasting, the thing whereof this other, when it is strongest and deepest, is the expression and derivative.

Abbot Ildefons Herwegen conveyed much the same sentiment in his 1918 introduction to Romano Guardini’s The Spirit of the Liturgy — an introduction sadly no longer printed with it these days:

It is not assemblies, speeches, demonstrations, nor the favor of states and peoples, nor protective laws and subsidies that make the Church so strong. And while there can never be enough done in preaching, in the confessionals, in parish missions, in catechesis, and in works of mercy; yet all such things are merely the external achievements that flow from an internal power. It would be perverse indeed to be concerned principally for such achievements whilst neglecting the concern for the purity, intensity, and growth of the internal source. Wherever the Church truly, vitally prays, there supernatural holiness springs up on all sides; there active peace, human understanding, and true love of neighbor blossom.

Dom Gabriel Sortais, Abbot General of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance from 1951 to 1963, likewise had a profound understanding of the primacy and fruitfulness of contemplation:

The Church is intimately united with the Word of God, who became flesh for the salvation of mankind, and it is precisely this union with the incarnate Son of God which is the source of her pastoral function… It is by her union with Christ praying, teaching, and suffering, that she transmits the benefits of the prayer, the word, and the sacrifice of Jesus.
          Once you have close union, you have outgoing and true apostleship. Without close union with Jesus, there can be no question of radiation, of making others know and love him. (Quoted in Guy Oury, OSB, Dom Gabriel Sortais: An Amazing Abbot in Turbulent Times, trans. Brian Kerns, OSCO [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2006], 279; 300.)  

Mexican allegorical painting of Christ’s wounds as the font of life (depicted are the “five persons,” Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Anne, and Joachim); for more on this type of image, see here.

Una voce, the prophet Isaiah, C.S. Lewis, Fr. Gerald Vann, Abbot Ildefons Herwegen, Dom Gabriel Sortais tell us of the primacy of contemplation, of being centered on God, of feasting on the food He offers us, so that the rest of what we endeavor to do will be permeated with the “internal power” of divine grace, besought and received from its “internal source”: prayer, liturgy, sacraments. These orient Christians to the life that never ends, the life of the world to come, the heavenly destiny for which Christ purchased us with the outpouring of His precious Blood.

The Word became flesh not to bring us bigger and more climate-friendly houses, electricity and running water, literacy and hygiene, voting rights and online banking. None of this will prevent any of us from paying the debt of Adam: pain, sorrow, and death, followed by judgment and eternal bliss or woe. The Word became flesh to lift us, body and soul, to a share in His resurrection from the dead and His indestructible joy in His Father.

Upcoming Eucharistic Reverence and Reparation Novena, January 24 to February 1, 2021

It has become increasingly clear that the year 2020 was, by God’s providence, a wake-up call on many levels. Massive disruption has been caused by draconian civil and episcopal responses to COVID-19, and these may well worsen in 2021. In our churches, where we might have expected to find strength and consolation, faithful Catholics have faced demoralization from liturgical tinkering, shutdowns, arbitrary rules, and institutionalized abuses. The message has been transmitted that Mass is optional, resulting in what appears to be a permanent dramatic dropoff in attendance. Crowdedness now seems to be a “problem” only at liturgies offered in a more traditional manner, where Catholics have found to their relief a spirit of reverence lacking elsewhere. This, indeed, is a silver lining on an otherwise dark cloud.

In so fraught a situation, at least a few should “stay awake and watch” with Our Lord in His Agony in the Garden, uniting themselves to His Cross and begging Him for His mercy on mankind and on the household of believers. The Lord assured Abraham He would spare a city where only a few just men lived. Our prayers and sacrifices will strengthen us and contribute to the eventual restoration of the Church and of the Faith.

Sophia Institute Press has announced a “Novena for the Eucharist,” to take place over the nine days from January 24 to February 1. The website is https://eucharisticpenance.com. Those who sign up pledge to do as much of the following as they can:

• pray a daily Rosary and Divine Mercy chaplet
• attend daily Mass
• fast by skipping one meal
• give alms
• abstain from media

The Novena of the Eucharist is linked with the release of my book The Holy Bread of Eternal Life: Restoring Eucharistic Reverence in an Age of Impiety, which take a no-holds-barred look at the evils committed daily against the Blessed Sacrament due to decades of liturgical deformation and abuse, and argues for immediate and urgent concrete solutions. Not everyone is equally well-positioned to implement every solution, yet we should all do what we can: pray and do penance. As Jesus said, some demons are driven out in no other way—and there are a lot of demons on the loose right now.

I will certainly be doing this novena, so help me God, and I strongly encourage NLM readers to join the over 5,000 who have signed up for it. Even if you don’t think you can do all of the recommended practices of piety, it would be worthwhile to do at least some. When you sign up at the website, Sophia will send you, for each day of the novena, a short daily meditation from Scripture and a prayer.

Some Words of Encouragement

Photo taken at the last public Mass at St Mary’s, the FSSP church in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania; courtesy of Allison Girone. 

Here are a few items which I would like to share with our readers who are now unable to attend Mass, and those who cannot even go to a church to pray. The first was published on Corpus Christi Watershed a couple of days ago by Fr David Friel, a young priest of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and is reproduced here by his kind permission, with our thanks.

“While still a seminarian, I had the wonderful opportunity to undergo training for Navy chaplaincy. This training was some of the best formation I have ever received. There was a portion of this training, however, when it was not possible for me to participate in the liturgical life of the Church. I could not attend daily or even weekly Mass during this time, nor did I have the freedom to pray the Divine Office as I was accustomed to doing at various times throughout the day. It was a real suffering.

Several very good things came to pass through this objectively not-good situation. I would like to highlight just three of my takeaways:

1. God was immensely good to me during this time, showering me with unexpected and unprecedented graces. I have never forgotten His goodness to me during those days, and I try to remind myself of this whenever I am feeling ungrateful.

2. The separation I experienced actually deepened my hunger for the Eucharist, my thirst for the Word of God, and my love for the Lord.

3. The experience confirmed for me that my regular commitments to Mass and the Divine Office were not merely matters of routine. Being unable to fulfill these regular commitments would not have been a source of suffering, were they not first a source of genuine spiritual nourishment. This confirmation was a great source of consolation to me.

The situation in which we find ourselves today and in the coming weeks is, likewise, less than ideal. There are a few things we might do, however, to ensure that this objectively not-good experience is at least spiritually profitable. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Unite yourselves with so many other Catholics who are regularly separated from the liturgical life of the Church (e.g., the homebound, members of the military, Catholics in places like China and Syria, etc.).

2. Pray the Liturgy of the Hours with your families on Sundays, especially Lauds and Vespers. These prayers (which are part of the official, public prayer of the Church) can be accessed with free apps like Laudate and iBreviary.

3. Do something concrete to serve your neighbor. “Worship that is pure and undefiled before our God and Father consists in this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (James 1, 27).

4. Let’s pray for one another. Oremus pro invicem.

The Lord was immensely good to me throughout my period of separation from the Church’s liturgical life during Navy training. He will be just as good to each of you during this time of coronavirus-prompted lockdown. ‘For the LORD is good! His steadfast love endures forever, and His faithfulness to all generations.’ (Ps. 100 (99), 5).”

Folio 165 of the Grandes Heures d’Anne de Bretagne, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Latin 9474.

The second comes from a pastoral letter which His Eminence Vincent Cardinal Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, recent sent out, which included this payer to say to one’s Guardian Angel when one cannot go to Mass.

“Dear Guardian Angel, go for me to the church, there kneel down at Mass for me. At the Offertory, take me to God, and offer him my service; what I am, what I have, offer as my gift. At the Consecration, with your seraphic strength, adore my Savior truly present, praying for those who have loved me, and for those who have offended me, and for those now deceased, that the Blood of Jesus may purify them all. During Holy Communion, bring to me the Body and Blood of Jesus, uniting Him with me in spirit, so that my heart may become His dwelling place. Plead with Him that through this sacrifice, all people throughout the world be saved. When the Mass ends, bring home to me and to every home the Lord's blessing. Amen.”

Finally, I would enourage members of the clergy especially to read this post from the Facebook page of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, which describes what His Excellency Archbishop Jerome Listecki did on the first day of the suspension of public Masses. Within the limits dictated by prudence, and the necessary cautionary measures to prevent further spread of the disease, this would be an excellent practice to take up.

“...at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, Archbishop Listecki consecrated the Archdiocese of Milwaukee to St. Joseph and then traveled to 11 locations across the archdiocese to pray for healing from CoVID-19 and protection from evil. This blessing occurred on the first day of suspension of public Masses in the archdiocese.

In these challenging times, when the Church cannot gather for worship, Archbishop Listecki wishes to make it clear to the Church and to the world that prayer remains effective and God’s power is unsurpassable, despite prudent efforts to slow the spread of CoVID-19. As the local shepherd of the flock, Archbishop Listecki went out to the entire Archdiocese of Milwaukee to formally lift up the Church in prayer. Through his witness to prayer and God’s care for His people, Archbishop Listecki invites everyone to deepen their confidence in Divine protection and blessing.

Upon leaving the Cathedral, the Archbishop traveled with the Blessed Sacrament and two priests in procession to one parish in each of the 11 deaneries of the archdiocese. At each parish, he blessed the entire deanery and its people to communicate the reality that Jesus Christ abides in our midst in the Eucharist and is true to His promise: ‘Behold, I will be with you until the end of the age’ (Matthew 28:20). ...

On the eve of the Solemnity of St. Joseph, husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and during this difficult time for our world, let us remain steadfast in prayer, and confident in Christ’s power to deliver us from all evil.”