Thursday, October 15, 2020

S. Teresa of Avila, pray for us



Today is the feast of S. Teresa of Avila, whose best known writing is the above brief poem known as her “Bookmark”, because it was found in her prayer book when she died:

Teresa Sanchez Cepeda Davila y Ahumada was born in Avila, Spain in 1515. After her mother's death she was sent to be educated by Augustinian nuns, but became ill and returned to live with her father and other relatives. One of her uncles introduced her to the Letters of Saint Jerome, and these inspired her to consider that she had a vocation to the religious life. At the age of 20 Teresa entered the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation at Avila.

During the sixteenth century many religious communities had lost their original devotion, discipline and openness to God. In many places convent life had become lax. Teresa's convent at Avila was no exception. She tells how she lost her first love for the Lord and embraced the status quo of comfortable convent living. In fact, she struggled with her vocation until after her father's death, and then a number of illnesses. In 1555 she underwent a spiritual renewal in which she saw the risen Jesus, and experienced a mystical transverberation, which she described as the piercing of her heart by an angel. She called this spiritual union with God, her "mystical marriage." She gave herself completely to prayer. 

Teresa began to have more spiritual experiences and visions which she, as well as the clergy she consulted, often thought were delusions. But two confessors believed that her experiences were genuine graces from the Lord, and encouraged her to embrace them as such, and to deepen her life of personal prayer and radical discipleship. More than that, they told her to write down her experiences so as to help others understand contemplative prayer. So she wrote the Life of herself (up to 1562), The Way of Perfection and Foundations for her sisters, and The Interior Castle, as a guide for praying people in general. Her writings are intensely personal spiritual autobiographies, and take their place alongside The Confessions of S. Augustine (which had also been a major influence on her). It was mainly on account of her writings that she was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970. (Teresa had been declared a saint by Pope Gregory XV in 1622.

After many tribulations and much heart-searching, Teresa felt that God was asking her to leave the Convent of the Incarnation and establish St Joseph's, a new monastery that would conscientiously observe the original Rule of Carmel. This she did on 24th August 1562. There was a great deal of opposition to the new Carmel and it was some time before she was able to live there in peace. Many condemned her as having been deceived by her mystical experiences in prayer. Eventually the hostility died down and Teresa was asked to found more of these houses of prayer in other cities of Spain. Over a period of twenty years she founded 15 houses for the nuns and, in association with John Yepes (later known as S. John of the Cross), at least two for the friars. In 1580, the Holy See recognised the Discalced Carmelites as distinct from the other Carmelites. By then Teresa was sixty-five years old, and in very poor health. Even so, she continued her work. The last Carmelite house she founded was at Burgos in July, 1582. On her way from there to Alba de Tormes she became ill. On October 4, 1582, three days after reaching Alba de Tormes, she died, and was buried there.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

S. TERESA SAID:
I believe that love is the measure of our ability to bear crosses, whether great or small. So if you have this love, try not to let the prayers you make to so great a Lord be words of mere politeness, but brace yourselves to suffer what God's Majesty desires. For if you give God your will in any other way, you are just showing the Lord a precious stone, making as if to give it and begging God to take it, and then, when God's hand reaches out to do so, taking it back and holding on to it tightly. Such mockery is no fit treatment for One who endured so much for us . . .
(From: The Way of Perfection)

Let humility be always at work, like the bee at the honey-comb, or all will be lost. But, remember, the bee leaves its hive to fly in search of flowers and the soul should sometimes cease thinking of itself to rise in meditation on the grandeur and majesty of its God.
(From The Interior Castle)  

Do not build towers without a foundation, for our Lord does not care so much for the importance of our works as for the love with which they are done. When we do all we can, His Majesty will enable us to do more every day. 
(From The Interior Castle) 

Love does not consist in great sweetness of devotion, but in a more fervent determination to strive to please God in all things, in avoiding, as far as possible, all that would offend Him, and in praying for the increase of the glory and honour of his Son and for the growth of the Catholic Church.
(From The Interior Castle) 

Our souls may lose their peace and even disturb other people's if we are always criticising trivial actions which often are not real defects at all, but we construe them wrongly through ignorance of their motives.
(From The Interior Castle) 

How many maggots remain in hiding until they have destroyed our virtues. These pests are such evils as self-love, self-esteem, rash judgement of others in small matters, and a want of charity in not loving our neighbour quite as much as ourselves. Although, perforce, we satisfy our obligations to avoid sin, yet we fall far short of what must be done in order to obtain perfect union with the will of God.
(From The Interior Castle)  

The only remedy for having given up a habit of recollection is to recommence it, otherwise the soul will continue to lose it more and more every day, and God grant it may realise its danger.
(From The Interior Castle)

O Lord, regulate all things by your wisdom, so that I may always serve you in the manner that you will. Do not punish me by granting my desire if it offends your love, for I desire your love to live always in me. Help me to deny myself in order that I may serve you. Let me live for you - who in yourself are the true life. Amen.



Friday, October 9, 2020

Professor Tracey Rowland on the Influence of John Henry Newman on Benedict XVI



On this the day when the Church honours S. John Henry Newman, it is appropriate to share a ten year old article which summarises Newman's influence on a theological movement that inspired significant 20th century teachers, including the future Pope Benedict XVI. 


Leading Australian theologian, Dr. Tracey Rowland, holds the S. John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame (Australia) and is an Honorary Fellow of Campion College (Sydney) and a member of the International Theological Commission. From 2001 to 2017 she was the Dean of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family (Melbourne) and the author of numerous books, including: Culture and the Thomist Tradition After Vatican IICatholic TheologyRatzinger's Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford University Press, 2008); Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2010). This article is from the Australian Broadcasting Commission ‘Religion and Ethics Blog’, Thursday 16th September 2010.


The Munich-based Jesuit, Erich Przywara (1889-1972), editor of the theology journal Stimmen der Zeit, had developed an interest in Newman as early as the 1920s and had encouraged Edith Stein (now St Teresa-Benedicta of the Cross) to translate Newman’s pre-conversion letters and his Idea of a University into German.


The cultural critic Theodor Haecker, who had converted to Catholicism in 1921, had also translated works of Newman into German and is one of those specifically cited by Ratzinger as a popular author for seminarians of his time.


Haecker is also credited with introducing Sophie Scholl, martyr of the White Rose movement, and others in her circle to the works of Newman. During the Advent of 1943, Haecker quoted from his translation of Newman’s Advent sermon on the Antichrist (Tract 83) to members of the anti-Nazi student group.


Haecker believed Newman was especially valuable for demonstrating the legitimate role of reason in the act of faith and for explaining conscience in relation to other acts of the mind, thus making conscience an organ and mediator of knowledge.


He praised Newman for his clear perception of the intellectual difficulties which exist for the faith in the modern world, and in particular for his understanding that these difficulties could not be overcome with “a naked syllogism.”


The latter comment was a criticism of the tendency in pre-Conciliar theology to present the faith with reference to Latin maxims and syllogistic “proofs.” In all Haecker published some seven books on Newman, mainly translations into German.


When Ratzinger joined the seminary in Freising in 1946, his Prefect of Studies, Alfred Laepple, was working on a dissertation on conscience in the work of Newman. Ratzinger has since reflected that for seminarians of his generation, “Newman’s teaching on conscience became an important foundation for theological personalism, which was drawing us all in its sway. Our image of the human being as well as our image of the Church was permeated by this point of departure.”


Ratzinger was to take from Newman his understanding of papal authority as a power that comes from revelation to complete natural conscience and Newman’s rejection of the popularist interpretations of papal authority as something akin to absolute monarchy.


Ratzinger has written that the pope is not an absolute monarch, but more of a constitutional monarch - that is, someone whose powers are circumscribed by conventions or constitutions, or in the case of the Pope, by revelation itself.


But it was not only Laepple that was immersed in the works of Newman, so too was Gottlieb Soehngen (1892-1971), Ratzinger’s teacher in fundamental theology and the director of both of Ratzinger’s theses.


It was under Soehngen that Ratzinger studied Newman’s Grammar of Assent. Soehngen had also worked on the topics of the convertibility of truth and being, on sacramentality, and on the border issues between theology and philosophy, all of which reappear as perennial themes in Ratzinger’s publications.


In an address delivered to mark the centenary of Newman’s death, Ratzinger remarked that even deeper for him than the contribution of Soehngen for his appreciation of Newman was the contribution which Heinrich Fries published in connection with the Jubilee of Chalcedon.


Here he found access to Newman’s teaching on the development of doctrine, which he regards, along with Newman’s doctrine on conscience, as Newman’s decisive contribution to the renewal of theology.


Newman’s work “placed the key in our hand to build historical thought into theology, or much more, [Newman] taught us to think historically in theology and so to recognize the identity of faith in all developments.”


This was a reference to what Ratzinger would later identify as the most significant issue for Catholic theology in the twentieth century - that of coming to an understanding of what he termed “the mediation of history in the realm of ontology.”


In short hand terms, one might call this the Heideggerian “being in time” problem. Whereas the theological establishment prior to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s prided itself on being “ahistorical” or “above history,” the effect of Heidegger’s philosophy was to push to the front of theological speculation the issue of the significance of time and history for the development of tradition.


The different responses to the documents of the Second Vatican Council often revolve around different understandings of the role that history plays in theological speculation.


Here it is highly significant that Ratzinger’s understanding of the development of doctrine comes from the convergence of the works of Newman and those of scholars of the nineteenth century Tuebingen school, who were working on parallel themes to those of Newman.


Newman was introduced to a French audience by Henri Bremond whose work in turn influenced that of Maurice Blondel, author of the seminal History and Dogma (1903). Blondel then influenced the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac, who, along with his student Hans Urs von Balthasar, ultimately became friends and mentors of Ratzinger.


In his introduction to the English translation of Blondel’s The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, Alexander Dru (a close friend of Theodor Haecker) noted that the very first edition of Annales de Philosophie Chretienne (a journal owned by Blondel and to which he was a frequent contributor) “pointed to the need to break away from the narrow Latin, Roman and Mediterranean conception of Catholicism by pointing to the relevance of the German Catholic writers of the Romantic period.”


Dru also noted that Blondel and Bremond - among others - were “carrying on (unbeknown, at first, to themselves) the tradition of Tuebingen (and in some respects therefore of Newman).”


While Newman’s teaching on the development of doctrine opened a pathway for history in theological thought, the doctrine of conscience gave weight to the emerging body of mid-twentieth century scholarship presented as Christian personalism.


Both John Paul II and Ratzinger were heavily influenced by personalist currents in their early academic years.


Whereas the young Karl Wojtyla was in contact with the French sources of the movement, and with the work of the Munich-born philosopher Max Scheler, the young Ratzinger came to personalism primarily through the Saarland philosopher Peter Wust (1884-1940) and the Austrian born Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber (1878-1965).


In the nineteenth century, Newman was working on theological topics that ran parallel to those of the Catholic theologians at the University of Tuebingen and which could be described as a Catholic engagement with themes of interest to the Romantic movement.


Although Germany, France, England and Scotland all had their own particular Romantic movements, a common theme running through all of them was an interest in history, tradition, memory and the motions of the human heart.


These topics were absent from the neo-scholastic theology of the same period. They were to enter into the theological tradition in the twentieth century by way of a number of authors, including the scholarship of Przywara, Soehngen and Haecker in Germany, Blondel and de Lubac in France, and von Balthasar in Switzerland.


Newman is linked to all three of these tributaries. One might say that at the Second Vatican Council it wasn’t merely the Rhine that flowed into the Tiber, but the Cherwell and Isis were there too.


It is therefore particularly fitting that it should be Benedict XVI - the student of Soehngen and colleague of de Lubac and von Balthasar - who finally beatifies Newman. 


As Alfred Laepple once remarked, when he and Ratzinger were seminarians, Newman was their hero. 



Thursday, October 1, 2020

The Little Flower and the Grace of God



“Nothing in my hand I bring. 
Simply to thy cross I cling.” 

From the hymn “Rock of Ages” 
by Augustus M. Toplady, 1776.

On 24th August, 1997, during the Mass he celebrated at the Twelfth World Youth Day in Paris in the presence of hundreds of bishops and before a huge crowd of young people from all over the world, Pope John Paul II announced that he was to proclaim St Thérèse a “Doctor of the Universal Church.” This he did on Sunday 19th October 1997 when he pointed out that Thérèse is the youngest of the 33 officially recognised Doctors of the Church, the one closest to our time, and the third woman among them. In his apostolic letter Divini Amoris Scientia, the Pope said: 

“As it was for the Church’s Saints in every age, so also for her, in her spiritual experience Christ is the centre and fullness of Revelation. Thérèse knew Jesus, loved him and made him loved with the passion of a bride. She penetrated the mysteries of his infancy, the words of his Gospel, the passion of the suffering Servant engraved on his holy Face, in the splendour of his glorious life, in his Eucharistic presence. She sang of all the expressions of Christ’s divine charity, as they are presented in the Gospel.” 

The Pope also said that 

". . . we can rightly recognize in the Saint of Lisieux the charism of a Doctor of the Church, because of the gift of the Holy Spirit she received for living and expressing her experienced faith, and because of her particular understanding of the mystery of Christ . . . That assimilation was certainly favoured by the most singular natural gifts, but it was also evidently something prodigious, due to a charism of wisdom from the Holy Spirit." 

No wonder that Thérèse is the most quoted woman saint in the Catechism of the Catholic Church! Today is when we commemorate her in the Church's Calendar.

Her Life
Marie Frances Thérèse Martin was born at Alençon, France on 2nd January 1873. When she was four years old her mother died, and she moved with the family to Lisieux. 

As a child, Thérèse had a deep awareness of God’s presence in her life. She grew up loving the Lord Jesus and understanding the Sacraments to be deeply personal encounters with him. By the time she became a teenager she knew that God was calling her to embrace the Religious life in its contemplative form. 

In 1887 Thérèse went to on pilgrimage to Italy with a group from Lisieux. On 20th November Pope Leo XIII met with them and Thérèse was able to ask him for special permission to enter the Carmel of Lisieux at the age of fifteen, which she did on 9 April 1888, receiving the habit on the following year. She made her religious profession on 8 September 1890, the Birthday of Our Lady. 

Thérèse embraced the spiritual principles of St Teresa of Avila while faithfully fulfilling the various community responsibilities entrusted to her, especially the menial ones. During this time her faith was severely tested by the sickness of her father who died on 29th July 1894. 

She continued to be nourished by the Scriptures, which were central to her spiritual life. Her response to God’s Word in openness of heart and mind nurtured her growth in holiness and made a deep impact on those around her. 

The autobiographical manuscripts she wrote are a detailed account of her walk with God. Based on the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels, she called it the “little way” of “spiritual childhood” and taught it to the novices entrusted to her care. 

She also accepted the ministry of spiritually supporting two missionary priests with prayer and sacrifice. Indeed, seized by the love of Christ, whom she described as her “only Spouse”, she became increasingly aware of her own apostolic and missionary vocation. 

In her Autobiography Thérèse says that on Trinity Sunday 1895 (9th June), she gave herself completely to the love of God. Several months later, on the night between Holy Thursday and Good Friday (3rd April 1896), she suffered a haemoptysis, the first sign of the illness which would lead to her death. From this point, her writings speak of the trial of faith, which would last until she died. In the midst of her pain she wrote that her vocation was simply “to be love in the heart of the Church.” 

Thérèse was transferred to the infirmary on 8 July 1896. During this time her sayings were collected. Meanwhile her sufferings intensified. She accepted them with patience, right up to the moment of her death in the afternoon of 30th September 1897. “I am not dying, I am entering life”, she wrote. 

Her final words, “My God, I love you!” were uttered at the age of 24, after years of illness and spiritual struggle, sealing a life lived in total surrender to the Lord’s love. Then she began what she had already foreseen as her new responsibility - her ministry of intercession, prayer, and love in the Communion of Saints, “in order to shower a rain of roses upon the world.”

Thérèse was canonized by Pope Pius XI on 17 May 1925. 

Since her death, Christians of many cultures and traditions - especially young people - have been inspired by her holiness, love and steadfast faith to give themselves completely to the Lord.

Letters to Maurice
To get a truly rounded picture of Thérèse – and in order to move away from the rather saccharine stereotype of her that has been built up, it is a good idea to read Maurice and Thérèse: The Story of a Love, by Patrick Ahern. This is the collected correspondence between Thérèse and Maurice Bellière, a stumbling young man she had never met, who was preparing to become a missionary priest. They exchanged twenty-one letters at a time when Thérèse’s suffering and pain was at its height, and when her spiritual struggle was most intense. It is significant that she was able to write such letters of support and encouragement to someone else. (The letters are accompanied by Ahern’s commentary.) 

Maurice had experienced a moral failure, and couldn’t quiet his conscience. Thérèse told him that God does not want our relationship with him be based on an obsessive fear of punishment. Neither, she said, does God want us to try and bargain for salvation by promising to do good works. With all who have begun to grasp the meaning of the grace-filled Gospel down through the Christian centuries, Thérèse knew that no amount of “good works” could purchase God’s love, and that in our better moments we would always wonder if we had done enough. In fact she even said to Maurice that the best of our good works are blemished, anyway, and they make us displeasing to God if we rely on them. 

Thérèse knew that Jesus came into this world to save us, to set us free. She reminded Maurice of St Augustine and St Mary Magdalene, both of whose sins “which were many” were forgiven. 

She wrote to him, “I love them. I love their repentance, and especially their loving boldness.” 

Thérèse knew that “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). Indeed, she said, “How can I fear a God who is nothing but Mercy and Love?” “Confidence, nothing but confidence” in God’s love was what she stressed. This may sound like spiritual presumption to some. But it echoes the teaching of Hebrews 10:19-22: 

“Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way which he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” 

Justification, Faith and Works
Thérèse practised what she taught. Just four months before she died, she wrote:"I am very happy that I am going to heaven. But when I think of this word of the Lord, 'I shall come soon and bring with me my recompense to give to each according to his works,' I tell myself that this will be very embarrassing for me, because I have no works . . . Very well! He will render to me according to His works for His own sake." 

And in her Act of Oblation, she prays to Jesus: “After earth’s exile, I hope to go and enjoy you in the fatherland, but I do not want to lay up merits for heaven. I want to work for your love alone . . . In the evening of this life, I shall appear before you with empty hands, for I do not ask you, Lord, to count my works. All our justice is blemished in your eyes. I wish, then, to be clothed in your own justice and to receive from your love the eternal possession of yourself.”

At the level of Christian experience, Thérèse articulates the theological convergence on the doctrine of Justification that would appear in the the Agreed Statements of the Roman Catholic/ Lutheran dialogue, the Roman Catholic/ Anglican dialogue, and the teaching of Pope Benedict XVI. It is significant that she occupies such a central place among the Doctors of the Church and in the Catechism.