I have been neglecting my blog writing quite a lot and need to catch up on a few things. Among them some new women saints, including two Franciscans. So I have decided to do a roundup of sorts - beginning with some very big news. In a recent meeting with Cardinal Angelo Amato, head of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Pope Benedict gave the go-ahead for extending the cult of medieval mystic and writer Hildegard of Bingen to the Universal Church. She has long had a popular cult, but was never formally canonized. Now she is officially joining the ranks of the saints. He is also expected to declare her a Doctor of the Church. Here is a part of a marvelous article on Hildegarde by Sandra Miesel:
Next October, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) will join a most select company of saints if she is proclaimed a Doctor of the Church, as reports indicate. To date, there are only 33 of these saints, whose exceptional holiness and wisdom have made significant contributions to our Faith. Hildegard would be only the fourth woman so honored, joining Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, and Therese of Lisieux.
Among those luminaries, Hildegard blazes in colors all her own. Medievalist Peter Dronke describes her as “an overpowering, electrifying presence—and in many ways an enigmatic one.” The breadth and variety of Hildegard’s accomplishments are unique. Her voluminous writings encompass theology, prophecy, poetry, hagiography, medicine, and natural science as well as extensive correspondence with major figures of the twelfth century including Bernard of Clairvaux, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Hildegard is also the first known female composer in the Western world and wrote Europe’s first morality play—with accompanying music. She invented her own artificial language as well as an alphabet in which to write it. An ardent supporter of Church reform, she made four long preaching tours along the river valleys of southwestern Germany. There she addressed admiring audiences of clerics, monks and laity, an unprecedented privilege for a medieval woman. She achieved all this despite chronic ill-health and while serving as a Benedictine abbess for more than forty years
I’ll confess to not knowing very much about St. Hildegard, though she also has a large modern, even secular following, but i expect to learn more about her as the time draws near for the formal ceremonies in October. Here is a fascinating bit of video:
In other news, there is a new book out about St. Camilla Battista da Varano (1458-1524), who was canonized by Pope Benedict in 2010: From Worldly Princess to the Foot of the Cross: The Life and Writings of Saint Camilla Battista Varano, OSC. Translations and Introduction by Bret Thoman, SFO.
Camilla, brought up amid the rich and decadent nobility of the time of Machiavelli and the Borgias, was the daughter of Giulio Cesare da Varano, the Duke of Camerino, who rejected wealth and power to become a Poor Clare nun. Thoman writes:
What we know of Camilla comes mostly from her Autobiography, the “Spiritual Life.” She grew up vivacious, playful, and passionate for the courtly life. She was sincere, dedicated, and independent to the point of being stubborn. She loved beautiful and pleasurable things. According to her father’s plans and desires, Camilla should have been destined to an arranged marriage like her sisters, in order to strengthen the family’s power. However, she chose a different path. Her conversion began during Lent of 1466 when she heard a sermon by an Observant Franciscan friar in which the priest exhorted his listeners to shed a little tear – just one (una lacrimuccia sola sola) – each Friday in memory of Christ’s Passion. Camilla was only eight years old, but something within moved her to make a promise to do what that friar told her – she actually took a vow. Even though she was just a girl, she was precociously aware that the pleasures of the court would never truly satisfy her soul. She began to see that there was something much more powerful and significant in the cross of Jesus than the intrigues and superficial pleasures around her. And in that penitential devotion of shedding a little tear, her conversion began.
Her new devotion was not without a struggle, though, and she found it difficult to be both faithful to her vow and be present at the court with its worldly pleasures. She said that she would often go into the chapel and squeeze out a tear, then “quickly get up and run away.” She also recounts that during this period she was averse to devotional writings, as well as priests, nuns, and friars. Her spiritual life progressed after she discovered a booklet containing a meditation, divided into fifteen parts, on the Passion of Christ. She said it was as if it were designed for “a person who did not know how to meditate.” Every Friday, she performed this new devotion on her knees. Then the tears flowed abundantly and her conversion deepened. She began fasting on bread and water on Fridays, reciting the rosary, and scourging her body. Nevertheless, she recounted that she still felt “imprisoned.”
It was not until hearing a series of sermons that she was freed. During Lent of 1479, she heard a sermon by a friar from Urbino named Francesco whom she called the “Trumpet of the Holy Spirit.” She said his words were like “thunder and lightning that struck her soul” and caused her to fear God. At that point she began to fear Hell and she said she felt freed from her imprisonment of the soul. During this time she made a lifelong vow of virginity and felt the calling to enter a cloistered convent. At this point, she received from God the three lilies described in her autobiography: a hatred of the world, humility, and a desire to suffer badly (malpatire).
Her next struggle was with her powerful father, whom she described as her Pharaoh. He clearly had other plans for Camilla. However, she persisted in pursuing her vocation and after a continual deepening of her spiritual life through prayer, confession, and spiritual dialogues with various Franciscan friars, she decided to enter a convent. In 1481, she entered the Poor Clare monastery in Urbino (roughly 50 miles north of Camerino) in the same region.2 The Poor Clare monastery in Urbino was associated with the Strict Observance within the Franciscan Order; i.e. a reform movement among the Franciscans seeking to ‘observe’ the original austere Franciscan way of life without privileges or exemptions that had been granted over the centuries. Camilla compared her own story to that of the Jews who were enslaved by the Pharaoh in Egypt. She recounts that God freed her from “the worldly slavery of Egypt” (the secular world) and from the “hands of powerful Pharaoh” (her father). Then she “crossed the Red Sea” (left the world and entered the monastery) where she took the name Battista (Baptist).
In another post, I plan to talk about Bl. Marianne Cope, a religious of the Third Order Regular of St. Francis, who worked for years with the lepers of Molokai, and and Bl. Kateri Tekakwitha, who ranks, I believe, as the very first American saint, - a young native American woman, of the Mohawk nation, converted by Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century. Both will be canonized this October. Both are also New Yorkers! But more about that later.
“I find myself on the last stretch of my journey in life, and I don’t know what is awaiting me. I know, however, that the light of God exists, that he is risen, that his light is stronger than any darkness and that God’s goodness is stronger than any evil in this world, and this helps me go forward with certainty,”
Well said!
Read the whole delightful story, including his meeting with his fellow Bavarians here.
Jesus to Sister Faustina, “Encourage souls to place great trust in My fathomless mercy. Let the weak, sinful soul have no fear to approach Me, for even if it had more sins than there are grains of sand in the world, all would be drowned in the unmeasurable depths of My mercy” (Diary, 55-56).
“Let us pray for the Nazis, because no conversion is impossible!” Fr. Maximilian Kolbe to his friend Fr. John Lipsky, in Auschwitz.
Today is Divine Mercy Sunday. I came across this extraordinary story of divine mercy on Fr. Z’s blog.
Rudolf Hoess was the commandant of the concentration camp at Auschwitz The man certainly had the blackest sins imaginable on his soul. When he was arrested in 1946, unlike other Nazis, who denied the existence of the “final solution,” Hoess confessed everything freely and even dispassionately. He was imprisoned in Poland, tried and, on April 16, 1947, hanged just outside the gates of the camp he had once commanded.
But that isn’t the whole story.
Rudolf Hoess was baptized and brought up Catholic, in fact, by very fervent, even fanatically religious parents. In boyhood, he dreamed of being a priest. But in his teens, after a betrayal by a priest, he drifted away from the Church. He enlisted in the army at fifteen, and fought in the last two years of World War I. After some terrible war experiences, he rejected God completely. He eventually joined the Nazi Party and embarked on a career as a camp commandant. In his memoirs, he spoke of the pain he had often suffered witnessing brutality in the camps — but rejected all remorse because of his belief in Nazi ideology, and because he wanted his superiors to see him as tough and unfeeling. It was the Nazi ideal, after all.
After he was condemned to death, Hoess was sent to a prison in the little town of Wadowice, just fifteen miles from Auschwitz, to await execution. Suddenly he asked for a priest. There was considerable difficulty finding a Polish priest who could speak German, but eventually Fr. Wladislaw Lohn, the provincial of the Jesuits of southern Poland, agreed to come from Cracow. Fr. Lohn was well acquainted with Auschwitz. Twenty-seven of his fellow Jesuits had been imprisoned there, and twelve of them had died. When he learned who the prisoner he was going to see was he felt he needed some spiritual reinforcement: He went to the Cracow convent where Sister Faustina had received the revelations about Divine Mercy and asked the sisters to pray for his mission and they did so. Here one account says:
Fr. Lohn then spoke several hours with Hoess. At the end of the conversation, the former commander of Auschwitz made a profession of Catholic Faith and officially came back to the Church. Then Hoess received sacramental confession.
Years later, Fr. Lohn testified that he prepared this man, who had been condemned to death, for confession by speaking about Jesus’ heart. On the following day, Fr. Lohn brought Holy Eucharist to the converted Hoess. On receiving Holy Communion, he knelt down in the middle of his cell and cried. He dismissed the priest with the words, “God has forgiven me, but the people will never forgive me!”
Anticipating his imminent death and reconciled with God, he wrote a touching and loving farewell letter from prison the next day, April 11, 1947, to his wife and his five children. In it he openly stated the motives for his behavior and admitted his faults, but he also describes his sincere and caring love for his family and describes his return to God: “It was a difficult struggle. Yet I found my faith again in the Lord my God.”
On April 12, four days before execution, Hoess wrote a statement publicly asking the Polish nation for forgiveness…
On the day of the execution, April 16, 1947, it was written in the district attorney’s record, “Rudolph Hoess was completely calm until the last moment and he expressed no wishes.”
There are a number of extraordinary coincidences in this story. Not the least of them is the fact that Wadowice, Poland, where Hoess spent his last days and made his extraordinary confession, is the birthplace of the Pope who canonized Sister Faustina and gave the Church the Sunday after Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday, Blessed John Paul II.
There is more here. But by far the best-documented account is here.
You can also read more about John Paul II, his predecessor, John Paul I, and the Divine Mercy here.
. . . looks like he has trouble rising from bed, let alone rising from the dead.
Yes, folks, it’s this year’s Newsweek cover story on Christianity for Holy Week. This year the honors fall to deeply confused Catholic Andrew Sullivan. The marketing-department-inspired cover text informs us we should follow Jesus and forget the Church.
But Sullivan’s article is barely about that at all. He is all about finding the “real Jesus.” He speaks of approval of Thomas Jefferson’s Bible, the one where the great Founding Father took a pair of scissors to all those parts of the New Testament he didn’t like, including the miracles, the supernatural claims of Jesus and his Resurrection. What was left was the moral sage. (Come to think of it, Jefferson could be considered the first member of the Jesus Seminar).
Sullivan would accept more of the real Jesus than Jefferson would. He says, parenthetically, that he does accept the Resurrection, but the Resurrection, in his conception of Jesus, is purely marginal, a kind of “add-on” you can have if you insist. His Jesus is fundamentally the moral teacher who lived a life of complete rejection of wealth, who practiced complete nonviolence of forgiveness for all, who forgave even his killers. On the other hand, he apparently never mentioned sin at all, so he never would have brought up homosexuality or abortion, or any of those other things benighted “conservative” Christians obsess about and make themselves and us miserable over. . . (did I mention that Sullivan is a practicing homosexual?). The author never says whether or not he thinks Jesus founded a Church for us to ignore, though as a Catholic, he should know the answer very well.
But back to the cover. This washed-out, wimpy Jesus with the beatific idiot’s gaze is the one they want us to follow? The stoned-looking guy with an expression that’s a cross between “Bless you all my friends” and “Uh, why am I here again”?
The picture of Jesus Christ I prefer is the one below, the one I put up for Easter. The Christ who stands astride the realm of death, like a super-hero rescuer, grabbing people and sending them flying from the grave with both hands. Those Byzantine painters really knew what the message of Christ was. “I am risen and I will raise you too!”
If we are brave enough to accept the whole New Testament, we will get this. Along with the message of Christ about sin that is the prelude to salvation. And along with those other things that Sullivan and Jefferson cherish. But of course we, all of us, who by nature would rather pick and choose, will also have to accept things that are tough, teachings that mean we, not just the nasty rest of the world, will have to change. It’s called honesty, folks.
I love what Fr. Barron wrote about this story:
. . . a proposal like Sullivan’s. . . offers absolutely no challenge to the powers that be. It is precisely the bland and harmless version of Christianity with which the regnant culture is comfortable.
Go back to Peter’s sermon for a moment. “You killed him,” said the chief of Jesus’s disciples. The “you” here includes the power structures of the time, both Jewish and Roman, which depended for their endurance in power on their ability to frighten their subjects through threats of lethal punishment.
“But God raised him.” The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the clearest affirmation possible that God is more powerful than the corrupt and violent authorities that govern the world — which is precisely why the tyrants have always been terrified of it. When the first Christians held up the cross, the greatest expression of state-sponsored terrorism, they were purposely taunting the leaders of their time: “You think that frightens us?”
The opening line of the Gospel of Mark is a direct challenge to Rome: “beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk 1:1). “Good news” (euangelion in Mark’s Greek) was a term used to describe an imperial victory. The first Christian evangelist is saying, not so subtly, that the real good news hasn’t a thing to do with Caesar.
Rather, it has to do with someone whom Caesar killed and whom God raised from the dead. And just to rub it in, he refers to this resurrected Lord as the “Son of God.” Ever since the time of Augustus, “Son of God” was a title claimed by the Roman emperor. Not so, says Mark. The authentic Son of God is the one who is more powerful than Caesar.
Again and again, Sullivan says that he wants a Jesus who is “apolitical.” Quite right — and that’s just why the cultural and political leaders of the contemporary West will be perfectly at home with his proposal. A defanged, privatized, spiritual teacher poses little threat to the status quo.
But the Son of God, crucified under Pontius Pilate and risen from the dead through the power of the Holy Spirit, is a permanent and very dangerous threat. That’s why I will confess that I smiled a bit at Andrew Sullivan as I read his article. Like the young Thomas Jefferson, I’m sure he thinks he’s being very edgy and provocative. Au contraire, in point of fact.
After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb. And behold, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, approached, rolled back the stone, and sat upon it.
His appearance was like lightning and his clothing was white as snow. The guards were shaken with fear of him and became like dead men. Then the angel said to the women in reply, “Do not be afraid! I know that you are seeking Jesus the crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised just as he said.” (Mt. 28:1-6)
As our Eastern brothers and sisters say: Christos anestit! Alithos Anestit! Christ is risen - he is risen indeed. Alleluia!
Pausing to look at all the sights on our way to Jerusalem. . . Mainly about faith, the Church, film, writing, famous Christian authors, and anything else I'm interested in at the moment.
The photo above was taken at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in March 2007.
Quote of the Month
"Jesus stands for all victims of brute force. In the twentieth century itself we have seen again how inventive human cruelty can be; how cruelty, in the act of destroying the image of man in others, dishonors and destroys that image in itself. The fact that the Son of God took all this upon himself in exemplary manner, as the "Lamb of God", is bound to make us shudder at the cruelty of man, on one hand, and make us think carefully about ourselves, how far we are willing to stand by as cowardly or silent onlookers, or how far we share responsibility ourselves. On the other side, it is bound to transform us and to make us rejoice in God. He has put himself on the side of the innocent and the suffering and would like to see us standing there too."
Joseph Ratzinger, God and the World with Peter Seewald
Her new devotion was not without a struggle, though, and she found it difficult to be both faithful to her vow and be present at the court with its worldly pleasures. She said that she would often go into the chapel and squeeze out a tear, then “quickly get up and run away.” She also recounts that during this period she was averse to devotional writings, as well as priests, nuns, and friars. Her spiritual life progressed after she discovered a booklet containing a meditation, divided into fifteen parts, on the Passion of Christ. She said it was as if it were designed for “a person who did not know how to meditate.” Every Friday, she performed this new devotion on her knees. Then the tears flowed abundantly and her conversion deepened. She began fasting on bread and water on Fridays, reciting the rosary, and scourging her body. Nevertheless, she recounted that she still felt “imprisoned.”
