“’All these things shall be added unto you’ ‘He knoweth that ye have need of these things.’ St. Teresa of Avila says we should not trouble our Lord with such petty trifles. We should ask great things of Him. 

So I pray for Russia, for our own country, for our fellow men, our fellow workers, for the sick, the starving, the dying, the dead.”

These words from Dorothy Day’s On Pilgrimage (a collection of her writings from the Catholic Worker) follow a list of her everyday struggles and needs. She reminds herself, and by extension her readers, never to tire of bringing to the Lord the most daring prayers, because he is the Lord of all things. Dorothy Day’s words seem more timely now than ever, as we see so much division in our world and so many problems that seem insoluble. But Dorothy lived through times even more tumultuous than our own—through two world wars, the great Depression and then finally the Cold War. She was imprisoned for protesting in favor of the women’s right to vote and put in solitary confinement—the women went on a hunger strike. She was arrested on a number of other occasions for championing the causes of the poor. Her movement struggled financially. And yet she tells us: “Ask great things of Him.”

As attested in the above passage, she followed her own advice. A former communist, Day was influenced by Russian authors and spirituality, and continued to pray for the conversion of Russia from the time of her conversion until her death in 1980. In other words, having prayed for Russia her entire life, she died four years before the Berlin wall fell. Her example, then, has an important lesson for us, one that many saints have also taught—that we may not live to see the fruit of our prayers and our efforts. Quite often saints die uncertain of their own legacy and, in many ways, as failures. St. Augustine, for example, died praying the penitential Psalms while the Vandals sacked the city of Hippo where he lived. The Roman empire and the culture as he knew was coming to an end, and he could have had no sense of the endurance of his the Church, let alone his own legacy. 

It can seem fruitless to keep our vigils for the end of abortion, to pray for peace and healing in this country, to pray for the renewal of the Church. And so it must have appeared to Day that it was futile to pray for Russia. So let us follow her example, knowing that we may not live to reap the harvest that we sow: pray for our world, for our own country, for our fellow men, our fellow workers, for the sick, the starving, the dying, the dead.

In the present time of trial, Catholics need examples of piety and of the critical exercise of reason. These two complementary excellences are on display in the late Fr. Marvin R. O’Connell’s Telling Stories That Matter: Memoirs and Essays (St. Augustine’s Press, 2020).

O’Connell (1930-2016) is best-known for his narrative histories, among which loom large The Oxford Conspirators (1969), John Ireland and the American Catholic Church (1988), and Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis (1994). The reader of these monumental books will find them to be “reconstructions of the past by the mind from sources,” for such was O’Connell’s conception of history. It was a definition he received from his mentor, Msgr. Philip Hughes (1895-1967), author of one of the most compelling historical narratives penned in the last century, The Reformation in England (1951).

Telling Stories that Matter, edited by William G. Schmitt and introduced by O’Connell’s long-time friend and colleague at Notre Dame, Fr. Bill Miscamble, C.S.C., contains a memoir and a selection of book reviews, historical essays, and transcripts of lectures. Each of these documents preserves a precious example of O’Connell’s voice, which was characterized by understated piety, precise observation, and a restrained eloquence that was never exactly romantic but just as surely never prosaic.

O’Connell was an empiricist. His narratives were the result of the careful sifting of circumstance, motive, end, achievement, and failure, all as they could be revealed by the documents, his sources. His memoir bears the imprint of his life-long method. It is certainly about himself; there is no other center to the narrative. Yet he placed himself against the backdrop of his family, his education, and the early years of his priesthood and professorial life in such a way as to produce something quite different from a conventional memoir, something more like a reliving of certain episodes of his life with himself as spectator and, yes, critic.

There is self-criticism, sometimes mild, sometimes not. As a newly-ordained priest, he was smitten with the optimism of the burgeoning post-war American Church. By his own admission, piety and humility were not then his strong suits. He had, apparently, an edge of Irish-American middle class resentment to his character. And he had a certain ambition—a desire to write and to publish—a drive for which O’Connell himself said he could not account. Yet he testified to his deep admiration for his father, who was at least for a time a journalist, and that may suffice to explain it, together with a nod to the extraordinary verbal gifts with which he was endowed.

The memoir was unfinished at the time of Fr. O’Connell’s death. If it has an incipient storyline, then it would seem to be that he presents his own development—from a devoted reader of Commonweal to an even-more devoted reader of National Review—as a path not trodden by the majority of American Catholics. Would the Church in America today be facing our current travails better had more priests followed O’Connell’s trajectory? We are left to supply our own judgment, having been given the evidence to make one in the form of vignettes about ecclesial life in Minnesota, Indiana, New York, and abroad. 

By placing O’Connell’s memoir in conversation with his friend Fr. Miscamble’s biography of Theodore Hesburgh, we can better appreciate the criticism of the post-war American Church that is arguably implicit in his narrative. Miscamble’s book—required reading for anyone who would understand the University of Notre Dame, but also the Church in America—is primarily a story of externals. Fr. Hesburgh’s very public talents and achievements are on display; his inner virtues and suffering are not. There was an interior poverty in Hesburgh—and not of the kind praised in the beatitudes. O’Connell’s tales from the Church of the 1950s point in the same direction. In his memoir, we meet churchmen distracted by the world and lured by the flesh, and thus—unwittingly we hope but nonetheless tragically—ensnared to one degree or another by the devil. 

Yet like any memoir worth reading, O’Connell’s manifests not merely his awareness of his own and others’ folly, but also of their goodness. There is much piety here. It is expressed at some length towards Msgr. Hughes, but also, if briefly, towards O’Connell’s priest-professors in minor seminary and colleagues at the University of St. Thomas, where he taught from 1958 to 1972. And throughout, we see glimpses of his close friends, Eugene Clark and Ralph McInerny. These sketches and remembrances are fitting reminders that the faith has indeed been passed down successfully to our generation by the previous ones, even if much of the legacy of the last century is otherwise of questionable merit.

One of the worst episodes of Twentieth Century Catholic life was the reception of Humanae Vitae. Fr. O’Connell’s discussion of the topic leaves much to be desired. “I had never been comfortable,” he wrote, “with the Catholic Church’s total condemnation of any form of artificial contraception.” He testified to an ambivalence about the encyclical’s teaching: “I do not believe I ever preached on the subject.” And he seems to have persisted in that ambivalence: “Humanae vitae has long proved its value as a beautiful evocation of married love. But I didn’t believe then, and I don’t believe now, that it presents the only possible evocation.” To say the least, these statements are deeply regrettable. Perhaps a partial explanation of them may be found in O’Connell’s admitted lack of interest in the speculative disciplines. He allowed his empiricism freer rein than he should have.

In addition to presenting his memoir, Telling Stories that Matter brings together some of Fr. O’Connell’s more memorable shorter works. If it contained only his twin review of books by Eamon Duffy and Fr. Richard McBrien, it would be well worth its reasonable price. The review’s title says it all: “Not Infallible: Two Histories of the Papacy.” Of special value is the text of the speech O’Connell delivered at the annual meeting of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars in 1990. Beneath its plain brown wrapper—“An Historical Perspective on Evangelization in the United States”—the lecture offered a sweeping vision of the Church in America, a vision with a surprising moral: that Catholics should “return to the ghetto.” Thirty years later, O’Connell’s proposal reads like prophecy.

In his sermon “Learning in War-Time” (1939), C. S. Lewis insisted on the value of historical learning in terms that may be most fittingly applied to O’Connell. “The scholar,” Lewis said, “has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.” Over a long and distinguished career, Fr. Marvin O’Connell’s piety and sharp, critical faculties held him in good stead amidst a century rivaled in its nonsense only by our own.

Faith&Culture offers this selection from St. Francis de Sales’s Treatise on the Love of God (1616) as part of its ongoing reflection on the nobility of the human face.

In a delightful and admirable way, Solomon describes the love of the Savior and the devout soul in that divine work called the Song of Songs. And so that we might more easily consider the spiritual love brought about between God and us when the movements of our hearts correspond with the inspirations of his divine majesty, Solomon employs the metaphor of the love of a chaste shepherd and a modest shepherdess. Making the spouse or bride to speak first, as though surprised by the shepherd’s love, he has her exclaim: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!” (Song 1:2) Notice how the soul, in the person of this shepherdess, has but one aim: a chaste union with her spouse. She protests that it is her only goal, the one thing for which she longs. What else would this sigh mean? “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!”

 In every age and as by natural instinct, a kiss has been employed to represent perfect love, that is, the union of hearts, and not without good reason. We express and make known our thoughts and emotions by our eyes, eyebrows, forehead, and the rest of our countenance. “A man is known by his appearance” (Sirach 19:29), says the scripture. And Aristotle explained why ordinarily it is only the faces of great men that are painted in portraits: it is, he said, because the face shows who we are. 

Yet we do not pour out the thoughts which proceed from the spiritual portion of our soul—the part we call reason, which is what distinguishes us from the beasts—except by words, and thus by means of the mouth. Indeed, to pour out our soul and to open our heart is nothing else but to speak. “Pour out your heart before him” (Ps 62:8), says the Psalmist, that is, express and pronounce the affections of your hearts by words. And when she had been praying so softly that one could hardly discern the motion of her lips, Samuel’s pious mother explained, “I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord” (1 Sam 1:15). 

We kiss in order to show that we long to pour out one soul into the other, to unite them in a perfect union. For this reason, at all times and among the saintliest men of the world, the kiss has been a sign of love and affection, and such use was universally made of it amongst the ancient Christians as St. Paul testifies, when, writing to the Romans and Corinthians, he says, “greet one another in a holy kiss” (Rom 16:16; 1 Cor 16:20). And as many declare, Judas in betraying our Savior made use of a kiss to manifest him, because the divine Savior was accustomed to kiss his disciples when he met them—and not only his disciples but even the little children whom he took lovingly in his arms, as he did the child by whose example he so solemnly invited his disciples to the love of their neighbor (see Mark 9:36).

Faith&Culture offers this selection from St. John Paul II’s Letter to Families (1994) in homage to the incomparable gift that was his pontificate.

The universe, immense and diverse as it is, the world of all living beings, is inscribed in God’s fatherhood, which is its source. This can be said, of course, on the basis of an analogy, thanks to which we can discern, at the very beginning of the Book of Genesis, the reality of fatherhood and motherhood and consequently of the human family. The interpretative key enabling this discernment is provided by the principle of the “image” and “likeness” of God highlighted by the scriptural text (Gen 1:26). God creates by the power of his word: “Let there be...!” (e.g., Gen 1:3). Significantly, in the creation of man this word of God is followed by these other words: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen 1:26). Before creating man, the Creator withdraws as it were into himself, in order to seek the pattern and inspiration in the mystery of his Being, which is already here disclosed as the divine “We”. From this mystery the human being comes forth by an act of creation: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27).

God speaks to these newly-created beings and he blesses them: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen 1:28). The Book of Genesis employs the same expressions used earlier for the creation of other living beings: “multiply”. But it is clear that these expressions are being used in an analogous sense. Is there not present here the analogy of begetting and of fatherhood and motherhood, which should be understood in the light of the overall context? No living being on earth except man was created “in the image and likeness of God”. Human fatherhood and motherhood, while remaining biologically similar to that of other living beings in nature, contain in an essential and unique way a “likeness” to God which is the basis of the family as a community of human life, as a community of persons united in love (communio personarum).

In the light of the New Testament it is possible to discern how the primordial model of the family is to be sought in God himself, in the Trinitarian mystery of his life. The divine “We” is the eternal pattern of the human “we”, especially of that “we” formed by the man and the woman created in the divine image and likeness. The words of the Book of Genesis contain that truth about man which is confirmed by the very experience of humanity. Man is created “from the very beginning” as male and female: the life of all humanity —whether of small communities or of society as a whole—is marked by this primordial duality. From it there derive the “masculinity” and the “femininity” of individuals, just as from it every community draws its own unique richness in the mutual fulfilment of persons. This is what seems to be meant by the words of the Book of Genesis: “Male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). Here too we find the first statement of the equal dignity of man and woman: both, in equal measure, are persons. Their constitution, with the specific dignity which derives from it, defines “from the beginning” the qualities of the common good of humanity, in every dimension and circumstance of life. To this common good both man and woman make their specific contribution. Hence one can discover, at the very origins of human society, the qualities of communion and of complementarity.

The family has always been considered as the first and basic expression of man’s social nature. Even today this way of looking at things remains unchanged. Nowadays, however, emphasis tends to be laid on how much the family, as the smallest and most basic human community, owes to the personal contribution of a man and a woman. The family is in fact a community of persons whose proper way of existing and living together is communion: communio personarum. Here too, while always acknowledging the absolute transcendence of the Creator with regard to his creatures, we can see the family’s ultimate relationship to the divine “We”. Only persons are capable of living “in communion”. The family originates in a marital communion described by the Second Vatican Council as a “covenant”, in which man and woman “give themselves to each other and accept each other”.

The Book of Genesis helps us to see this truth when it states, in reference to the establishment of the family through marriage, that “a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen 2:24). In the Gospel, Christ, disputing with the Pharisees, quotes these same words and then adds: “So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder” (Mt 19:6). In this way, he reveals anew the binding content of a fact which exists “from the beginning” (Mt 19:8) and which always preserves this content. If the Master confirms it “now”, he does so in order to make clear and unmistakable to all, at the dawn of the New Covenant, the indissoluble character of marriage as the basis of the common good of the family.

When, in union with the Apostle, we bow our knees before the Father from whom all fatherhood and motherhood is named (cf. Eph 3:14-15), we come to realize that parenthood is the event whereby the family, already constituted by the conjugal covenant of marriage, is brought about “in the full and specific sense”. Motherhood necessarily implies fatherhood, and in turn, fatherhood necessarily implies motherhood. This is the result of the duality bestowed by the Creator upon human beings “from the beginning”.

 I have spoken of two closely related yet not identical concepts: the concept of “communion” and that of “community”. “Communion” has to do with the personal relationship between the “I” and the “thou”. “Community” on the other hand transcends this framework and moves towards a “society”, a “we”. The family, as a community of persons, is thus the first human “society”. It arises whenever there comes into being the conjugal covenant of marriage, which opens the spouses to a lasting communion of love and of life, and it is brought to completion in a full and specific way with the procreation of children: the “communion” of the spouses gives rise to the “community” of the family. The “community” of the family is completely pervaded by the very essence of “communion”. On the human level, can there be any other “communion” comparable to that between a mother and a child whom she has carried in her womb and then brought to birth?

In the family thus constituted there appears a new unity, in which the relationship “of communion” between the parents attains complete fulfilment. Experience teaches that this fulfilment represents both a task and a challenge. The task involves the spouses in living out their original covenant. The children born to them—and here is the challenge—should consolidate that covenant, enriching and deepening the conjugal communion of the father and mother. When this does not occur, we need to ask if the selfishness which lurks even in the love of man and woman as a result of the human inclination to evil is not stronger than this love. Married couples need to be well aware of this. From the outset they need to have their hearts and thoughts turned towards the God “from whom every family is named”, so that their fatherhood and motherhood will draw from that source the power to be continually renewed in love.

Fatherhood and motherhood are themselves a particular proof of love; they make it possible to discover love’s extension and original depth. But this does not take place automatically. Rather, it is a task entrusted to both husband and wife. In the life of husband and wife together, fatherhood and motherhood represent such a sublime “novelty” and richness as can only be approached “on one’s knees”.

“Why does opium make us sleep? Because of its soporific power.” So ran Molière’s send-up of self-important Parisian physicians. Sohrab Ahmari’s “The Trouble with Christian Leftism” invites a similar question-and-answer. By taxing progressive Christians with having succumbed to the opium of the intellectuals—Marxism in its various forms—Ahmari invites us to ask what is its hidden power. Why are we so prone to be always looking for the next social-scientific solution to our problems? Because we pine for a knowledge that will take away the burden of living by practical reason.

Aristotle sized up prudence with his customary brevity: “the reason must be true and the desire must be correct, if indeed the deliberate choice is to be an excellent one.” That is an imposing task. For our practical reasoning to be true, we need an adequate understanding of the common good; for our desire to be correct, we must yearn for the common good as our personal good. Shallow or flighty reasoning undermines prudence, and so does selfishness in its various forms. And we have not yet begun to try to convince others that our prudential judgment is the right one, but we must eventually labor to do so because our problems can only be solved through consensus and common action.

It would seem to be easier if we were to set aside the troublesome work of perfecting our own understanding and desire and counting upon the virtue of others and instead were to reach into human nature for some other lever to pull. That is the perennial attraction of a social or political science: it offers to replace the vocabulary of the good, reason, virtue, and free choice with a new language that will capture human action in more effective terms.

Machiavelli was the prophet of just such a new science. He and his many followers tell us that the passions and interests of men and women are the levers that we must pull, rather than continue ineffectually to appeal to their understanding of and love for the good. Mandeville, Smith, and countless others offered similar accounts: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher . . . .” Kant was the one who solemnly announced that what we were awaiting was not another Moses, but another Newton, and in his “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” (1784), he sketched a social science in impeccably Newtonian terms of attraction and repulsion. Like Smith’s account in the Wealth of Nations, Kant’s theory was individualistic, perhaps better, atomistic. Each human being is moved by a “propensity to enter into society” that is matched by an equal and opposite “propensity to individualize.” The action and reaction of these two forces shapes history. Kant grasped the nettle of that antagonism with the same gnostic confidence that we have seen at the heart of modern ideologies ever since: “Thanks be to nature, therefore, for the incompatibility, for the spiteful competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess or even to dominate! For without them all the excellent natural predispositions in humanity would eternally slumber undeveloped. The human being wills concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species: it wills discord.” Small wonder that the next thirty years of European history would be a bloodbath. If we were to follow Kant’s prescription, we would seek to hasten the coming age of perpetual peace by adding counter-protest to protest until the blood flows freely in our streets.

Karl Marx’s Hegelianism and romantic rhetoric are so beguiling that it is easy to overlook that he, too, was a Newtonian in his essential metaphor. Instead of considering the individual atom, he looked at them in groups. It is as though his imaginative lens was not the magnet, the Leyden jar, or the telescope—the Newtonian toys of the eighteenth-century philosophers—but the steam pump and its piston. The “wheel of history” is spun by the release of pressure in a “revolution” brought about by the “increase in number” and “concentration in masses” of the proletariat. The terms of his metaphor should bring Boyle’s Law to mind. To be sure, Marx’s votaries in the nineteenth century and after have typically been motivated by their experience—or at least their perception—of injustice and by their identification with a group of persons who have been similarly mistreated. That is a strong motivator, usually much stronger than the passions and interests of the individual seeking to amass and to protect his own property. Yet while acknowledging the motivation, we should not lose sight of the metaphor that cloaks it with the guise of social-scientific impartiality and righteousness. Social science always trades in metaphors, even when it presents us with curves that are to be flattened.

Today, we have refined our metaphors. In place of Kant’s Newtonian forces and Marx’s pressure-cooker, we can claim to be attending to data that is more empirical, more directly measurable. The problem, however, is that we are constantly appealing to metaphors at the same time as we tell ourselves that we are talking about nature—even human nature—directly. We seem to think that the words we are using are not metaphorical at all. Increasingly, we consent to be ruled by models without stopping to wonder just what a model is. We bow to the authority of curves without asking what the axes of the graph are attempting to capture or what they are leaving out. Our increasing reliance on social science is tragic because we lack a salutary habit of methodological criticism.

“We’re following the science.” “Ours is a science-based response.” These phrases should ring hollow to us not because there is nothing to know about viruses but instead because they are masks for the uncritical application of a limited understanding of some feature of the non-human world to problems that we ought to face as free and intelligent beings pursuing common goods. There may be trustworthy biology out there, but it is hard to disengage from the layers of unacknowledged assumptions about human action that obscure it. 

Secular modernity is addicted to the placebo of social scientific claims to impartial certitude because it lacks a shared understanding of the human good. There is nothing too surprising about such a state of affairs. We should be gripped with sorrow, however, that the same addiction should characterize so much religious utterance, even official pronouncements of the Catholic Church. There is, after all, something diabolical about the temptation to absolutize social science: it is a grasping after a knowledge appropriate to God alone. What we most need today, in the Church and in America, is the courage to exercise practical reason and to stand by the best prudential judgments we can muster. Should we seek to bolster our practical reason by learning as much as we can from scientists? Yes. Should we also learn from careful students of human action in the aggregate? Certainly. But we need to do so in air that has been cleared of the soporific vapors of intellectual narcotics.

Ave, gratia plena.

Hail, full of grace.

Luke 1:28

Throughout the whole world, the ancient Church was of one mind, always addressing the Mother of God in the words of the angel: Ave Maria, gratia plena. Our immediate ancestors, joining their elders in devout harmony, sang the Ave Maria always and everywhere, thinking themselves to be pleasing the King of Heaven by reverently honoring his Mother, and not seeing a more proper way to honor her than by imitating the respect that God himself had decreed that she be shown on the day when his Divine Majesty honored all mankind in this Virgin by becoming man himself. O what a holy greeting, what true praise, what rich and decorous honor! God dictated the words, the archangel pronounced them, the evangelist inscribed them, all antiquity treasured them, and our parents taught us them.

Yet here is something strange. Do you not remember that when David played on the lyre, “the harmful spirit departed” from Saul, as though vanquished by the sweet melody (1 Sam 16:23)? And now, that same evil spirit, the sworn enemy of harmony and concord, having come into the possession of certain lightheaded persons, has through their mouths uttered a thousand insults and blasphemies against the use of this holy greeting.

In his Harmony of the Gospels, Calvin calls us superstitious for greeting someone who is not in our presence and taxes us with meddling in the affairs of others. He also accuses us of using magic, saying that we show ourselves to be poorly instructed when we use this greeting as a prayer, when it was nothing other than words of congratulation. All this blame comes to three points: first, that it is an unlawful usurpation of the office of the angels for us to make use of the Angelic Salutation; second, that it is superstitious to greet an absent person; third, that it is stupid to think that we are praying when we say it. O these wretched people! They would have done better simply to have said that it is wrong to pray the Angelic Salutation because it is the Church that recommends us to do so, for nothing the Church does is according to their liking.

Now, with the Church, I say that to address and to honor the Blessed Virgin with the Angelic Salutation is a holy thing to do, and that the Angelic Salutation contains a beautiful and devout prayer. I will not let myself wander into a discourse about the custom of greeting in general or the true Christian practice of greeting the brethren. Scripture is full of the handsome greetings of the angels by the patriarchs and of the patriarchs of one another, indeed at every meeting. And I do declare that not to greet a person when he is known to you is to signify one’s disdain and even hatred for him. I leave aside the example of Haman, who was “filled with fury” that Mordecai would not greet him, because even then he wished to be adored (see Esther 3:1-5). Yet consider the beloved St. John: “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house or give him any greeting” (2 Jn 10). He takes it to be an insult not to greet someone and to refrain from saying “Ave.” What, then, should we say about those who refuse to greet Mary other than that they hate her? Similarly, St. Paul tells the Philippians to “Greet every saint in Christ Jesus” (Phil 4:21), as though he wanted them to understand that a greeting is owed to holy and virtuous people.

If Mary never taught anything other than good doctrine and never said anything in the Gospels that was not holy, why do they wish to prohibit us from greeting her? If she is holy, and more than holy, why should we not greet her? Is this the doctrine that Our Lord taught us by saying “Peace be with you” so many times or by saying “Greetings!” when he met the two Marys (Mt 28:9)?

But, the heretics say, you are greeting people who aren’t there. Response: what danger is there in that? Does not St. Paul in all of his letters send greetings to people far distant from him? And what of his saying to the Philippians that “the brothers who are with me greet you” (Phil 4:21)? And what of St. Peter: “She who is at Babylon, who is likewise chosen, sends you greetings” (1 Pet 5:13)? They are saying that they are present by letter and by messenger. But Our Lady is present to Christians by her attention. As, for instance, St. Paul says to the Corinthians: “though absent in body, I am present in spirit” (1 Cor 5:3). And as Elisha said to Gehazi, “Did not my heart go when the man turned from his chariot to meet you?” (2 Kings 5:26) 

Now, having thus shown that it is a holy practice to greet the Virgin, I ask you what greeting could be found more holy than this one? The author is holy; the words are holy. Should you wish to honor her, say the Hail Mary. Should you have any doubt as to how she should be honored, say the Hail Mary.

And what shall we say about the affections with which the devout heart is moved by this holy greeting? The Angelic Salutation represents the holy mystery of the Incarnation, which is why the Church adds to them the words of St. Elizabeth, “and blessed is the fruit of your womb” (Lk 1:42), that this mystery may be represented to us all the more profoundly.

“And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him.”

St. Thérèse opens her Story of a Soul with a reflection on this verse. She says that the verse contains the mystery of her own vocation, meditating on the words “those whom he desired.” It seemed to Thérèse that Jesus had simply chosen her out of desire for her, not because she was worthy, but simply because it pleased him to do so. This fact troubled Thérèse: “I wondered for a long time why God has preferences, why all souls don’t receive an equal amount of graces.” Specifically, she wondered why God chose people who seemed even to have offended him – like St. Paul or St. Augustine. We might add to her list the disciples being called in Mark 3:13, many of whom do not seem well suited to Jesus’ mission, and one of whom betrays him.

Thérèse has a lovely little analogy for helping us see how she resolved this problem in her own mind, writing that “Jesus deigned to teach me this mystery.” She says that she came to see how a field has many kinds of flowers, all different in size, color and scent and that she “understood that if all flowers wanted to be roses nature would lose her springtime beauty, and the fields would no longer be decked out with little wild flowers.” We are the little wild flowers in Jesus’ garden “and just as in nature all the seasons are arranged in such a way as to make the humblest daisy bloom on a set day, in the same way, everything works out for the good of each soul.”[1]

[1] Summary by Elizabeth Klein with the use of Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul, 13–14. 

“And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’”

Mother Teresa became well known for speaking about “the Gospel on five fingers,” or “the five-finger Gospel.” With her ever luminous smile, she would hold up her hand and count off each word with a finger: “You. Did. It. To. Me.”

It can seem like a radical oversimplification of the Christian faith, but the saint, with her graced wisdom, is on to something here. In Matthew’s gospel, the five-finger moment occurs in the twenty-fifth chapter and it’s a moment unique to the Matthean account. The importance of the words are heightened by their placement within a passage about the final judgment. Consequently, the importance of doing is brought out with emphasis: “As you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to me.” We will not be measured by vague intentions, positive thoughts, or sympathetic emotions; no, we will be measured by our actions and the character that is formed by those actions and gives rise to them.

But the most important word of this phrase is not “did” but “me,” because, as Mother Teresa makes clear, it refers to Jesus. “[Jesus] makes Himself the hungry one, the naked one, the homeless one, the sick one, the one in prison, the lonely one, the unwanted one, and he says: ‘You did it to me.’ He is hungry for our love.” The Gospel is not about any old kind of doing; indeed, it is not even about merely doing good. Rather, it is about loving. It is, firstly, about loving Jesus and, secondly, loving others for his sake. Mother Teresa detects a beautiful pedagogy at work here: “His ways are so beautiful.—To think that we have God almighty to stoop so low as to love you & me & make use of us—& make us feel that He really needs us.” Jesus humbles himself by taking on the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor, and when, for his sake, we love and serve those in need—the unseen, the unloved, the unclaimed, the unborn—we become instruments of his love in the world. [1]

[1] Summary by Scott Hefelfinger with the use of Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light, ed. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. (New York: Double-day, 2007), 291 and 273.

As we approach the fifteenth anniversary of the Augustine Institute, it might well occur to readers of Faith and Culture to ask: why is St. Augustine the patron of an Institute dedicated to the New Evangelization? St. John Paul II, after all, is the man who coined the phrase “the New Evangelization” and there are many other saints who are known for their evangelical work more than St. Augustine. Nevertheless, to the founders of the Institute, St. Augustine was the obvious choice.

The Augustine Institute is an educational apostolate, dedicated to helping Catholics at every level to understand, to live and to share their faith. As much as Augustine is now known as the great doctor of the Western church, responsible for such formidable tomes as The City of God, he was a teacher at his very core. Prior to his conversion to Christianity, Augustine was a teacher of rhetoric and a pagan speaker at the top of his profession, even being commissioned to give a speech in honor of the emperor while he was resident in Milan. When he became Catholic at age thirty, he did not leave those skills behind him, but turned them to the Lord’s use. Augustine was a preacher and pastor, and due to the diligent work of his scribes and friends, he left to posterity about three hundred homilies, in addition to his homilies on 1 John and on every Psalm. Augustine’s daily work was caring for the souls at Hippo, and he excelled at communicating profound theological truths to every audience, something we attempt to emulate in all we do here at the Augustine Institute. Augustine even wrote a manual for aspiring preachers, explaining how to understand the language of Scripture and how to interpret it effectively and clearly (this work is called On Christian Doctrine). Augustine was an educator, one of the best the Church has ever seen.

Augustine, however, is not only a wonderful patron for an educational mission, but he also shares many cultural challenges in common with us. We might tend to think of Augustine’s era as being a Christian one; he lived after emperor Constantine declared Christianity to be the religion of the Roman empire. Nevertheless, Christianity was still largely considered to be the religion of the uneducated and unsophisticated during Augustine’s time, and he himself as a young man looked down on what he saw as the simple piety of his mother Monica. Augustine preferred the more sophisticated writings of Virgil and Cicero to those of the Bible, which seemed to him to be below his standards in terms of style, and which had many passages that offended the sensibilities of a liberally educated Roman. We might, then, think of Augustine as living in a pre-Christian society as we are living in a post-Christian one. Although Christian ideas were certainly current in Augustine’s time, they were not seen as being especially persuasive, and more urbane Romans left Christianity to the unlearned masses. Christianity today is likewise often dismissed out of hand as a religion which is not populated by the most clear and forward-thinking in our society. 

Augustine, as our patron, therefore, has a lot to offer as an exemplar when faced with a culture that is hostile to the Bible and even to the central message of the gospel. But Augustine serves as a patron specifically for the New Evangelization because he also worked tirelessly for the conversion of those who had one foot in secular Roman society and one foot in the church – many such people populated his own congregation. The New Evangelization also seeks to reach a similar audience, those who have heard the gospel, but need to hear it anew; those who might have been raised Christian but never took that for their own identity. Augustine, in fact, wrote many of his works as much for lukewarm Christians as for his Roman opponents, and in his preaching sought to set the hearts of his flock alight for love of God, when many of them were practicing pagan religion on the side.

Augustine is a great patron from our times and for our mission – St. Augustine, pray for us!    

“But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you.”

Luke 14:10 is a verse taken from the end of one of Jesus’ parables about a wedding feast. He warns us against coming into a wedding feast and taking a spot at the head table (so to speak), because we may suffer public disgrace when we are asked to move. Rather, Jesus recommends taking the lowest spot and then if the host decides to promote us, we will be honored rather than humiliated. 

St. Teresa of Ávila reflects on the radical call to humility found in the parable. In this story, she sees the Lord’s desire that we “recognize our uselessness.” Teresa’s language may seem harsh, but she explains that when we truly see that we are nothing without God, only then we can allow Christ, who is the host of the wedding feast, to be our Lord and judge; “God is more careful than we are, and He knows what is fitting for each one.” We must assume the lowest position and trust God to decide how to distribute his blessings. She also uses an analogy to help us see how futile it is to try and determine our own place: “if individuals have bad voices, the effort to sing does them no good no matter how hard they try.” We must not think ourselves capable of seizing the highest place by sheer effort.

But perhaps what is most striking about Teresa’s insights is that she is not speaking here of material or worldly blessings primarily–but spiritual ones. The seat closest to the Lord, as in the parable, is his to assign. Sometimes we may be frustrated in our prayer life, or feel that God has given greater peace or consolations to other people, even though we are pursuing him as best we can. But Teresa tells us that God’s people “must walk along this path in freedom, placing themselves in the hands of God. If His Majesty should desire to raise us to the position of one who is intimate and shares His secrets, we ought to accept gladly; if not, we ought to serve in the humbler tasks.” Because the good news, according to Teresa, is that if we surrender ourselves to the Lord we will always “remain at the feet of Christ,” no matter what seat we find ourselves in.[1]

[1] Summary by Elizabeth Klein, with the use of Teresa of Ávila, The Book of Her Life 22.12, 197.

“There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores.”

In this powerful parable, Jesus draws a distressing contrast between an unnamed rich man and the poor Lazarus, who sat by the rich man’s gate begging daily. St. Bonaventure, who himself lived out the practice of poverty in his Franciscan vocation, meditates on this scene to reveal its spiritual lessons: that in possessing many things we can come to be possessed by them and that we can find true freedom in embracing the spirit of poverty.

He describes how the rich man is called “rich” not just because he had many possessions, “but also because of his love of them.” His love for things entraps him in the lure of riches which in themselves cannot satisfy our deepest longings. As Bonaventure puts it, “For through its love for earthly things the spirit grows fat and is weighed down, so that it cannot travel into the higher realms of heaven.” False love for money, possessions, comfort and security prevent us from rising to the true love of God. We end up being owned by the things we own.

The rich man wore fancy clothing and feasted every day. His sin of greed was thus accompanied by gluttony, which led to his lack of mercy for the poor man at his gate. It is hard to understand hunger when our bellies are always full. While Bonaventure rejects gluttony of the flesh, he commends us to a different sort of enjoyment: “Note that there is a splendid nature to spiritual feasting, which produces wisdom.” He warns us against the dangers of over-indulging our bodily appetites, but directs us toward the satisfaction of our spiritual hunger in word and sacrament.

Bonaventure regards the rich man’s lack of mercy as particularly egregious given that Lazarus was not only poor, but lonely, sick and hungry; “these circumstances show that the poor man was worthy of mercy and consequently that the rich man was merciless and impious.” The rich man was “more generous to the dogs than to the poor man, and the dogs were more tender to the poor man than the rich man was” since they licked his sores. The contrast between the poor man’s desperate need and the rich man’s sumptuous lifestyle reveal his hardness of heart. He could have easily helped this man whose need was so obvious and so extreme.

In the end, the poor man was welcomed into glory while the rich man was condemned. The poor man was truly free, while the rich man was burdened by his many possessions. Their story serves as a warning to us not to give in to selfish desires which leave us cold toward the needs of others, but to give generously to those and in need and so feast at the table of Wisdom that we might be welcomed “into the eternal dwellings” (Lk. 16:9) by the righteous poor.[1]

[1] Summary by Mark Giszczak with the use of Bonaventure, Commentary on the Gospel of Luke: Chapters 9–16, 1516–26.