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| ‘A hill worth dying on’: Expert explains how aborted baby cells taint COVID vaccines |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-24-2021, 08:41 AM - Forum: COVID Vaccines
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‘A hill worth dying on’: Expert explains how aborted baby cells taint COVID vaccines
Pamela Acker, a vaccine researcher, shows how the process by which the COVID vaccines are developed is like 'what the Aztecs used to do.'
January 21, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Editor’s note: The following is a rough transcript of LifeSite co-founder John-Henry Westen’s explosive interview with Pamela Acker, a vaccine researcher and expert.
John-Henry Westen: Welcome to this episode of the John-Henry Westen Show, where I am very pleased to bring you Pamela Acker, who is a researcher into vaccines, in fact she's published a new book called Vaccines: A Catholic Perspective. And we are going to get into the most controversial topic going on today, we're going to be talking about what Bishop Athanasius Schneider said, what the actual case is about abortion tainted vaccine, including the COVID vaccines, you're going to want to stay tuned.
Let's begin as we always do at the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Pamela Acker, welcome to the program.
Pamela Acker: Thank you very much, it's my pleasure to be here.
Watch the full interview that was banned from YouTube: https://rumble.com/vcq539-the-unborn-bab...tract.html
JHW: If you can start, just tell us a little bit about yourself, about your background in this area of vaccinations.
PA: I've never liked to be on the cutting edge of anything, so I was excited about vaccines about 20 years ago, before it became a hot COVID topic. But, when I was in high school I was interested in studying biology, and I was particularly interested in studying it because at the time there was some thought that plants could be genetically engineered to deliver vaccines. And there was two things about that that I found very exciting, one was that you could eat something instead of get stuck by something, because nobody likes hypodermic needles. And the other was that this might make it easier to distribute vaccines in third-world countries, because you wouldn't have to worry about special refrigeration or perishable components, you could just grow them on site.
So, I was very excited about that at the time, and I also was interested in the work of Children of God for Life, because that brought to light the issue I think we're going to be talking mostly about today, which is that of the aborted fetal cells that are used in vaccine production. So, I thought that'd be a great ethical alternative if vaccines could be edible. It turns out they can't, the science behind that didn't really work. And, I'm going to refer back to that a little bit today when we talk later about the COVID vaccines, because of their nucleic acid nature, so we've got the mRNA vaccines and the DNA vaccines. And those involve some novel technologies, but there's some parallels that can be drawn to what was trying to be done in the late 90s and early 1000s.
And then, I pursued a master’s degree at Catholic University of America in 2010, 2012, I actually was there for my PhD, but left with a master's because the lab that I got into, which was also involved in vaccine development, was working on a project for HIV vaccines. And the grant funding was under the The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we had gotten the first stage of our grant, we were ready to apply for the second stage and trying to produce enough results to show that our plan was tenable there.
There was a lab meeting that we were all sitting around at, and my primary investigator said, "Look, everybody's got to get onboard with this particular aspect of the project." Which belonged to a colleague of mine. And so, I turned to her and I said, "What are you doing this part of the project in?" And she said, "HEK-293 cells." And this point most people have heard of these because they are connected with the COVID vaccines, but at that time I hadn't. So, I asked her what HEK stands for, and she told me, "Human Embryonic Kidney."
And then I spent a couple of weeks researching what that meant and what that entailed, and I came across the work of Alvin Wong from The National Catholic Bioethics Center, who wrote an article in... I believe it was 2005 or 2006, called The Ethics of HEK-293. And his work helps me a lot to discern whether I could actually be involved in this project or not. And when I expressed my concerns to my primary investigator, it ended up being the end of my career in his lab.
So, I did not get my PhD, I left with my master's. But, the use of aborted fetal cells in vaccines is definitely an issue that's near and dear to my heart, and it's influenced a lot about my life up to this point. But, I also was able to be in the lab for about nine months before that ethical issue was raised, so I have some direct research experience on vaccine development that comes into play. And it has enabled me, I think, to have a unique voice in this argument right now.
JHW: Absolutely. So, eminently qualified to discuss this topic more than most, having worked inside a lab as well on vaccines. Also, someone who has now written a book on this. We're very early into the COVID thing to have already written a book on this, that was quite something, how'd you manage that so quickly?
PA: Again, I don't like to be on the cutting edge of anything, so I started that book two years ago, almost. It was taking the trash out one fateful winter night, and fell and sprained my ankle, and unlike a normal person, I never got better. So, I was laid up on the couch for a very long time, and [inaudible 00:05:25] Kolbe Center had been after me to look into the issue of vaccines for a while. And, when I was on the couch with nothing better to do then read all the things that nobody has time to read, was when I actually started the research for this book.
So, I actually started around April of 2019, so before COVID was ever an issue, hence the reason that the book was so well timed.
JHW: Well, that's really providential. So, we are in an absolutely crazy time because the issue of vaccines, which has been around for many decades now, has taken on an absolutely new urgency with what seems basically like it's going to be forced on everyone. Even though almost everyone's saying, "No, no, we'd never force it." In reality, they're already talking about, "You need to be vaccinated to take a flight, you need to be vaccinated to go into a store." We're already seeing with the mask mandates and the social distancing mandates, the lock downs and everything else, that they are really willing to take draconian measures. So, while you might not be forcibly held down and vaccinated, you're life will become unmanageable if you don't take it.
So, this is our situation. Now, when we're looking at taking vaccines, as a parent we've assessed things like, "Is it necessary? Is it safe? Is it effective?" But also one of the questions is, "Is it moral?" And so, I'd love to address all of those points with you, with regard to the COVID vaccines that are now approved, and what does it mean that they're abortion tainted? So, if we could start right in with the abortion tainted, because I think for most people, one of the qualifying factors to take a vaccine in the first place will be its moral nature. "Is it moral to take this? What are they?" So, why don't we start with the two currently approved vaccines for Coronavirus, for COVID. What are they? And how do they differ?
PA: The two vaccines that are currently approved are the Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine, and they're both mRNA vaccines, and so at a molecular level they're very similar. Both of the vaccines were made using a biotechnology technique that can synthesize nucleic acids in the laboratory. So, a lot of people are trying to argue that they're moral because the mRNA that's made never touches fetal cells. But that's not the whole of the story when you look at the way that these vaccines were developed.
And so, the original research papers document the use of HEK-293 cells in producing these vaccines. And so, they were used in two different ways. One is that the spike protein that the mRNA codes for... can just do a three minute crash biology course. mRNA is messenger RNA, it's the nucleic acid that's a copy that's made of you DNA, and then it's sent out to the ribosomes in the cells and protein is produced using that messenger copy. So, what the vaccine reports to do is to take messenger RNA that codes for the spike protein of Coronavirus and insert that into your cells so that your human cells will then make the spike protein from the Coronavirus.
And the thought is that this is going to be a very effective way to vaccinate you because we found that if you just take the spike protein and inject it into people, it tends to degrade too rapidly for a good immune response. You tend to have some other complications which I'll touch on a little bit later in the interview. But, the thought is that if your body's making it itself, then you can get a prolonged enough exposure to the spike protein that you'll be able to mount an immune response to it. So, that's the basic way that it's supposed to work.
So, the spike protein by itself is, in the words of one researcher, kind of floppy, it doesn't tend to keep its shape very well. And so, scientists genetically engineered a spike protein that will keep its shape, it's got some mutations that cause it to be stabilized. And so, this original design of this protein... so, when they originally mutated it... they needed to see if it would actually keep its shape correctly, if that would correct the floppiness problem. So, they took that genetic information, and they transformed cells to produce the spike protein so that they could purify it and take a look at it using techniques for visualizing the 3D structure of proteins. And that original experiment was done in HEK-293 cells. So, the spike protein that the vaccines code for, was originally developed, effectively, in aborted fetal cells.
And an additional way that aborted fetal cells were used in the project is, before they were going to inject this mRNA into a human being to see if you could get human cells to make Coronavirus spike protein, you would want to test that in cell culture, you would want to test that in a laboratory. Because, it's a lot less expensive and dangerous than testing it in a human being. And so, if you can't even get the cells in a laboratory to make it then you probably can't get a human body to make it. So, the cells that then this was tested in were also HEK-293 cells. And this has all been published in the literature, and I've read a couple of the papers documenting that both of these vaccines used HEK-293 in their testing.
And, a lot of people want to say, "Well, that was just done to develop the vaccine in the very beginning, so the research part... so, it was a one and done kind of thing, it's no big deal." But just recently, Stacy Trasancos posted an article, which is available on Children of God for Life website, and she pointed out... and as a researcher I can confirm she's absolutely right, that these things also have to go through quality control testing. So, every time I make another batch of the mRNA, which is synthesized using a laboratory technique, then I need to test and make sure it's still viable, that's a fairly common thing, to have quality control like that in the laboratory.
So, the testing with these aborted fetal cells may actually be ongoing in the production of these vaccines. Because generally, when you scale up production of vaccine beyond your research and development, you're going to use the same testing procedures to test the scale up that you use to test your smaller batch, unless it's for some reason not feasible. But, this is a very feasible way to test this for these researchers. It's not a moral way, but it's very feasible because these cells have been optimized for use in a laboratory. And they're almost ubiquitous in tissue culture research, unfortunately there's a lot of laboratories around the world that use these HEK-293 cells. And there's specific products that are basically optimized for them to have ideal growth conditions. So, there's a whole industry based on these aborted fetal cells in basic science research that I think people aren't super familiar with.
JHW: So, just to be clear, both the COVID-19 vaccines, both the Pfizer and the Moderna we both, not only developed in its spike protein with HEK-293, the aborted fetal cell line, but also in their initial testing. And now you're telling us, at least from this article from Stacy Trasancos, in ongoing testing currently for new batches.
PA: Yes. As far as I know there is ongoing testing currently for batches. That is not published in the literature per se, because non of the data post the initial clinical trials has been published, but there's substantial reason to think that this is going on.
JHW: Let's stop there for a second and just do a bit of a rewind for people, because I think people have to understand something about HEK-293 and PER.C6 and a bunch of the other aborted fetal cell lines that are at work here. And that has to do with their initial development anyway, because I think a lot of people are under the impression that... not anymore now, since you've already said what you've said with regard to the use of HEK-293. But, I think a lot of people are under the impression, "Well, that was one baby killed way back in the 1970s and it's so remote from that date right now, and that's an acceptable thing we just have to live with because it's saving so many lives." If you can unpack for us, what is HEK-293 exactly? And was it just one baby that accounts for it, and what about all the other fetal cell lines?
PA: There are a number of fetal cell lines in existence right now, and I'm just going to read off a few of them for you here from Children of God for Life. There's WI-38, MRC-5, HEK-293, PER.C6, there's another one that I'm forgetting the name of that was developed in 2015 that's not currently being used in any vaccines, but has a potential to be used in vaccines and is used in other therapeutic treatments. So, there's a number of these cell lines that are currently being used to develop a variety of therapeutics, everything from vaccines to treatments for Cystic fibrosis.
Most people, as you say, hand wavingly dismiss it and say, "Oh well that was one baby that died, we can't go back and undo it, we might as well get something good out of it now." Which of course, violates the principle of the integral good, and the fact that you simply can't use the ends to justify the means. But I'm not a moral theologian, so I'll stick to the science.
For, HEK-293, that was... one of things that I've seen come up a couple of times in articles I've looked at about the ethical considerations that are involved, is that people say, "Well, there wasn't documentation that that was an elective abortion, so it could have been a spontaneous abortion." And this is a bit disingenuous or ignorant on the part of these authors, because in order to produce a viable cell line, there's a number of things that go into that, and it's a very difficult thing to do.
And so, I was doing some research specifically on HEK-293 to prepare for this interview, and the number system that's involved there... the HEK stands for Human Embryonic Kidney, but 293 stands for this is the 293rd experiment that this particular researcher did to develop a cell lines. And that doesn't mean that there were 293 abortions, but for 293 experiments you need far more than one abortion. And we're talking probably 100s of abortions. And, this was done with the collaboration of some hospitals. And there was a group in Sweden that was involved in developing the WI-38 cell line, so a different cell line, but they routinely were aborting babies for the use in trying to develop fetal cell lines.
So, people at this point usually have the question of, "But why? Why a fetal cell line?" And, when you try to grow cells in culture in the laboratory, they go through a process called immortalization, to develop a cell line. And people kind of confuse that, because it sounds like they live forever, with thinking that you can make these cells live forever in a laboratory. You can't. You can make them live a lot longer than primary cell culture, if you were to just take something out of my arm and put it to grow in a Petri dish, it would survive for a few sub divisions, but not very many. But, if you introduce some mutations into it, it can survive for a lot longer. And so that's what you have when you have an immortalized cell line, you have something that's been mutated usually with viral oncogenes. And these are genes that promote cancer actually, and so put a bookmark there too because this is important to something that hopefully we'll discuss a little later in the interview, about some of the dangers of using... just the biological dangers, let alone moral dangers of using the aborted fetal cell vaccines.
The immortalized cell lines are often given cancer promoting genes that disrupt the function of cancer suppressor genes, or tumor suppressor genes. And so, they can grow, not completely indefinitely, but for a lot more generations in a laboratory. If you start with adult cells, you have basically a shorter shelf life, because adult cells have already undergone a certain number of cell divisions, and so that kind of counts towards the total number that they could actually undergo. And so, if you use adult cells in a laboratory, you will have a shorter lifespan for your cell line, you'll have to develop a new cell line sooner, and it's not as commercially viable. If you start with embryonic or fetal cells, you have the maximum lifespan available for your cell line, and so that I think was probably one of the things that was used to justify the use of these aborted fetal cells to begin with.
And then, another question people have is, "Well, why couldn't HEK-293 have been just a spontaneous abortion? Why couldn't it just been a miscarriage? Because, the hospital lost the documentation about this particular baby that was used to develop the cell line, and so we don't really know whether it was an elective abortion or a spontaneous abortion." Well, we have all the reason in the world to think it was actually an elective abortion that was done on purpose, because the researchers who have been involved in this sort of thing have gone on record saying basically that, "You need to get that tissue within about five minutes of the abortion in order for it to be optimally viable, and if you wait an hour, it's useless."
So, if we're talking about a spontaneous miscarriage, this baby dies long before the fetal tissue is removed from the body of the mother. That spontaneous abortion or that miscarriage would not be viable to start a cell line at all, there'd be no way that you could get a living cell line out of dead tissue. So, this had to have been a baby that was aborted and they knew that that tissue was going to be used for research so they could get there within that five minutes to an hour window, preferably within the first five minutes, in order to get that tissue preserved.
JHW: Wow, so that goes right into the baby part scandal that we're dealing with now, where university researchers ask the mother first, "We're looking for a kidney or an arm or whatever to experiment with, so when you're going to have your abortion anyway, can you do this?" And sometimes ask them to wait longer so it's further developed, so that they'll have a better specimen. Absolutely sickening. So, this went on even with the vaccines, that this was not only a planned abortion, this was a planned abortion and extraction of fetal tissue [inaudible 00:20:31] used within five minutes of the abortion. So, the nonsense about it being a miscarriage is totally shown.
PA: I was going to say it's even worse than that because... and this is where I always issue a warning, if there are any little ears listening to me talk on a recording, because it's a lot more graphic even than what I've just described. Because, in a lot of cases, the babies... because it is done on purpose for research purposes, so they will actually deliver these babies via cesarean section, the babies are in some cases still alive when the researchers start extracting the tissue. To the point where their heart is still beating, and they're generally not given any anesthetic because that would disrupt the cells that the researchers are trying to extract. So, they're removing this tissue while the baby's alive, and in extreme amounts of pain, and so this makes it even more sadistic.
And my Pastor just recently gave a sermon likening this to what the Aztecs used to do, when they would consecrate their temples, they would literally rip out the beating hearts of the victims that they were slaying on top of the temples, and then cast their bodies down the side. This is pretty much exactly the same thing that these researchers are doing.
JHW: Yeah. And you had mentioned, we're getting out the Human Embryonic Kidney, HEK, so it's the kidney that they have to access. So, they're cutting open these live babies, just delivered by cesarean section... yes, and they're too young perhaps to live outside the womb by themselves right away, but they're still alive enough, and we already know that they're feeling pain. And then, they open them up to take... that has to be known. Because, I think a lot of the determination of the morality of these things, even morality as separated by years and so it's remote connections, as they call it, I don't think that they took into consideration what this actually is. That's why the science that you're presenting here is so incredibly important, because the people who made those determinations... and we all know...
And let me just explain, that in 2005, the Vatican first, through the Pontifical Academy for Life, came out with a document saying that, the use of such vaccines, if there is no others available, and if your objection to the procedure of how it was developed is known, and if it's needed, is morally acceptable somehow. But, even at that time... this was 2005 and then it was rubber stamped, I guess, in 2008 with the CDF. However, I don't know that these facts were known at that time. And if they were, it's absolutely unbelievable. So please, continue.
PA: Sure. So, since you referenced the document by the Pontifical Academy for Life, I do address that in the book that I wrote on vaccination, and there's some real problems with the science that was presented to the people who were making those decisions. Because, one of the strongest points that they used to justify the position that they take, in terms of, "These vaccines can be permissible if the situation is sufficiently grave," is the incidents of congenital rubella syndrome.
Now, congenital rubella syndrome is no laughing matter, this is when a baby contracts rubella from its mother in utero in the first trimester, and it can result in blindness, deafness, mental slowness, and even stillbirth in the infants, so it is a serious disease. Now, rubella itself is not a particularly serious disease, particularly if contracted in childhood, most people won't even have symptoms. And I think over half of the cases, nobody even makes a trip to the doctor because there's nothing noticeable or going on. And so, this is a very mild disease in children, and it's really only a problem in pregnant women who contract it during their first trimester.
And, the thought was that, "Well, vaccinating for rubella is going to protect these pregnant women, and so therefore it's morally justifiable." But, in a situation... probably pretty analogous to the situation with COVID, when you look at the actual numbers that's not the case. Because, prior to introducing the rubella vaccine, there was approximately 80% herd immunity in the population for rubella. And 80% herd immunity is the threshold at which the disease doesn't circulate particularly well. Obviously it still circulates, people will still contract rubella, but it doesn't spread through the population like wildfire and put lots of people at risk.
So, after using the rubella vaccine, what we now have is roughly 80 to 85% herd immunity. And so, you might say, "Well that's a little better, so maybe it was worth it." But for the first 10 years after this vaccine was introduced, there wasn't a decrease in the cases of congenital rubella syndrome. And in fact, in the first few years after it was introduced, there was a spike in the cases of congenital rubella syndrome, they went up. And they didn't start dropping until abortion became legal. And, there's a pretty good case to be made that the drop in congenital rubella syndrome babies was due to their mothers being informed, "You have rubella, your child is likely to develop congenital rubella syndrome, why don't you just abort it and try again." The drop that we saw in that disease is probably a lot more due to elective abortions than it is to the introduction of the vaccine.
So, now we've got this vaccine that we have, I believe, worldwide. There's 70% uptake of the MMR vaccine, which is the only way you can get vaccinated for rubella. You used to be able to get the vaccine separately, but Merck lumped them all together in the 1990s after the Wakefield scare, that potentially implied that the MMR was connected with the development of autism. And so, Merck just stopped producing the separate vaccines, you can only get it now as the trivalent vaccine with measles, mumps and rubella. Which means that you can't ethically be vaccinated for any of those things because the vaccine is produced in aborted fetal cells. It's produced in the WI-38 cell line, and that cell line took, I believe it was 32 abortions before they got to that cell line. The number 38, again, is the number of experiments that were actually performed, I believe it was 32 individual babies.
And then the virus that's used in the measles vaccine, the attenuated measles virus, instead of just swabbing the throat of a sick child like they did in Japan, US researchers encouraged women who had been exposed to rubella in their first trimester to electively abort their children. They dissected 27 fetuses before they had the virus that is currently in use in the rubella vaccine, and they continued with 40 more elective abortions, isolating a number of different viral strains that didn't ultimately get used in the vaccine. But, if you put all that together, you end up with approximately 99 abortions just for the rubella vaccine.
And keeping in mind that all of them are probably done under the same horrific conditions that we've just described, and in some cases where babies were delivered... the entire amniotic sac was removed from the mother and these babies were either dissected right then and there. And some cases they were stuck in the refrigerator to preserve them slightly so that they could be dissected in a little bit later, the brutality of that and the horror of that is not something that we should gloss over. Yet, your average Catholic parent who goes into the doctors office and is asked, "Do you want the MMR?" Doesn't even know that this is how this was developed.
And so, when Bishop Schneider was talking in the interview he did with you about the moral complicit-ness that's being asked on this grand scale of people to just accept this... this isn't something that's brand new with the advent of COVID, there's already been significant inroads, I think, made in terms of getting people to appropriate evil to use something that has a truly evil origin for their benefit, even though they're not really cooperating in bringing the evil about per se. And that doesn't even get into the fact that continuing to do this then fuels the market for additional cell lines and additional aborted fetal products, and additional vaccines that are made in aborted fetal cells. Because, if we had been refusing the MMR vaccine, we wouldn't have COVID vaccines that are made with aborted fetal cells. That would not have happened.
JHW: I have so many more questions for you I don't know where to start. Let me go, first of all, to get to what you already said. What specifically did the PAV have wrong when they looked at the science, and what were they lacking?
PA: So, they were lacking an understanding of whether the vaccine was even protective or not. So, vaccines in general do have a modest protective effect against the disease that they're trying to prevent, but implementing a vaccine doesn't necessarily just tremendously impact herd immunity that might already exist in a population. And in fact, the chicken pox example is a great example of how disastrous the introduction of a vaccine can actually be to herd immunity. Because, what we've done by vaccinating everybody for chicken pox now is effectively eliminate the natural boosting cycle.
So, my parents got exposed to chicken pox again when I was a child and I got infected with the virus, and so their immune system was given a natural booster to say, "Hey, remember me? I'm the chicken pox virus. Why don't you beef up your immune response a little bit so that you don't develop shingles in a few years?" Because it's caused by the same virus, and once you have the virus it does hang out in your nerve cells, and so if you've had chicken pox you can develop shingles. But, you don't tend to develop it until a lot later in life because of this natural boosting process. Well, we've eliminated this in the population now, so we've basically pushed the average age of shingles lower, so we're seeing more incidents of shingles, we're seeing it in younger people. And we're even seeing it in very young people who've been vaccinated for chicken pox. Because, the live attenuated virus that's used in the vaccine also hangs out in your nerve cells and it can come back later as shingles itself.
So, one of the things that was missing from the Pontifical Academy of Life, in their determination here, is that you can't just say, "Vaccines save lives, therefore this vaccine is a great idea." You have to look at vaccines on a case-by-case basis and see if they're justifiable. And the ones that are using aborted fetal cells, generally speaking, are not, they're not really life saving vaccines, and so, you don't really have a grave matter. Because, in order to participate in remote evil licitly... and as Bishop Schneider made a great case for, we're sort of muddying the waters by even saying that we're remotely participating in evil because the evil of abortion is so intense. But even if it were, the origin is extremely grave, you have to have extremely grave cause in order to actually make it licit. And so, they did not look at the science enough to see that the cause was just not proportionate.
And I think the same thing is true with the COVID vaccines, the cause is simply not proportionate. We're looking at a death rate from Coronavirus, I think it's .2% and the average age of death of a patient who is coded as having died from COVID... because there's some question about whether patients who have comorbidities should even be counted as COVID deaths. The average age of these patients who are being said to die from COVID is around 79 to 83 years old, and the average life expectancy in the US is around 78.7 years. So technically, the average age of a COVID death is higher than the life expectancy in the US.
So, this disease isn't really killing people right and left that weren't probably going to die within [inaudible 00:33:15] anyway. It's remarkable to me that anybody could consider this grave cause.
JHW: Many people think that when they're taking a vaccine, "There's nothing really of aborted babies in them, nothing really... it was tested on it, and it's so remote, there's really nothing there. If there is something even so remotely connected it's like one billionth of a particle in the whole vaccination shot you get." Speak to that for a second, if you would.
PA: With the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines there isn't any aborted fetal material remaining in the vaccines because they're not actually cultured or produced directly in the aborted fetal cells. But with the AstraZeneca vaccine and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for COVID, as well as the rubella vaccine and the chicken pox vaccine, there are remainders of these aborted fetal cells that end up in the vaccines themselves. So, when you get this vaccine, you are actually injecting pieces of this individual who was murdered into your body. And those pieces tend to be remnants of DNA and some protein debris.
But the DNA is particularly of concern, because Dr. Theresa Deisher of Sound Choice Pharmaceuticals, which I think came into existence in the early 2000s. They were also working on solving this problem with ethical vaccines and the availability of ethical vaccines. she has some tremendous work, a lot of it she's summarized in talk on YouTube, where she has looked at the relationship between the increase in use of aborted fetal cell derived vaccines, that corresponds to an increase in autism rates in the countries that she's looked at. And, this has been in some countries in Europe as well as the United States. And she's seen that there's a dose dependent response, so the more aborted fetal cell vaccines that we use, the increase there is in incidents of autism.
So, she said, "Let's take a look at that, let's see if there's any biologically plausible mechanism for that." And so she made the connection that when you put these aborted fetal DNA contaminants into a living human being, something can occur... and this does occur in vitro, in cell culture in the laboratory, called homologous recombination, where the DNA that's being injected into the individual can kind of line up with the DNA that it corresponds to in those individual cells, and then there's some enzymes that can come along and they can swap those two pieces out. So, you end up losing your actual DNA and having the DNA from the aborted fetal cells incorporated into your cells.
And she was saying how this could potentially explain why in some individuals with autism... although not all because autism is a very multifaceted problem and there's no one strict straight answer for why it develops in some individuals and not in others. But, in some individuals you see hundreds of what are called De Novo Mutations, so these are mutations that came out of nowhere, their parents didn't have them, and you shouldn't see hundreds of mutations in a child just from one generation. This child is very young probably still as well, they can't possibly have accumulated all these mutations. Well they can, if this mutated DNA... because if you recall from back at the beginning of the talk, we talked about how in order for cell lines to be immortalized, we're sticking viral oncogenes in them, these cancer promoting genes, these mutations into them in order to keep them growing in cell culture, somewhat indefinitely. The DNA in these cells has definitely mutated, so this could be the source of the mutations that we're seeing in some of these kids that are developing autism.
So, this is one possible mechanism for why we're seeing that. And it's not outside the realm of possibility biologically, but also it makes sense if you think about it, just from natural law. If you're going to do something as heinous as inject into yourself the remains of somebody who was murdered, there's going to be a natural consequence to that. You can't just do that and not have any negative effects, if that makes sense.
JHW: Well, we're definitely into the safety portion of the discussion. And I'd really like to go right into that, especially with regard to what we're seeing right now from some of the people who have already taken the COVID vaccines, either strain of them. We've seen a nurse come out with saying that one side of her face... she was experiencing Bell's palsy, she seems to be paralyzed in one side of her face. We had one nurse take it early on and pass out. We had another doctor take it and apparently die. Could those be related to the vaccine? And what are some of the other safety concerns with the COVID vaccines, the ones that are approved and the ones that are awaiting approval now?
PA: One of the main safety concerns with any of the COVID vaccines that are in development, is that most of them are what is called Nextgen technologies. These are things that have not been done in vaccines in the past, so we really don't know how the mRNA vaccines, we don't know what kind of longterm health effects they're going to have. We don't really know what effects they're going to have in the body even short term. Because, one of the concerns that I have just from thinking about genetically engineering vaccines, way back in the late 90s when they were trying to have these fruits produce vaccine antigens and produce them in appropriate doses. When you would genetically transfect a plant and try to get it to produce, say smallpox antigens, they had a huge problem standardizing the dosage, and this is why the technology eventually got scrapped. Because, they simply couldn't say that, "If you ate one banana then you'd get this much smallpox antigen." Because all the bananas were different. And, bananas are maybe a bad example because bananas are polyploid and so there's some other genetic problems going on there. But none of the plants that they tested were able to be standardized in terms of dosage.
So, when you insert foreign genetic material... and this is just true with the laboratory too. But when you insert foreign genetic material into a living organism, you can't really control exactly how much protein that organism is going to produce based on how much DNA that you give it. And you can sort of guesstimate a range, but when you're dealing with something like the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein... and we know that one of the ways that the pathology and the people who do get really sick is mediated, is through this overactive immune response. You get the cytokine storm, you get everything so amped up that your immune system is actually what's killing your body. We're going to then take genetic information, stick it into your body, not know how much protein you're actually going to produce that causes this overactive immune response, and just say, "Oh yeah, you'll be fine, don't even bother to call me if you have some soreness in your arm."
To me that's mind boggling, because I don't think they have any idea how wildly different peoples responses to this genetic information might be, and thus how wildly different their responses to the vaccine might be. And so, in addition to this general concern, there's also the AstraZeneca and the Johnson & Johnson adenovirus vector vaccines. So, the idea is that we're taking an attenuated virus that normally infects humans, which is adenovirus, and packaging some genetic information in there. And so, that virus vector is going to take that DNA from the Coronavirus to your cells and then put the DNA into your cells. And then at that point, you have even more possible complications because now not only are you sticking genetic information from Coronavirus into your body, but you also have the problem of... with adenovirus' there's... and I don't remember the technical name for it, but there's basically a mechanism whereby adenovirus' can recombine in your body.
So, if you happen to be infected with an adenovirus, which may not even be symptomatic, because some of these viruses are very benign and they don't really cause a whole lot of problems. But some of them are worse and they can cause common cold type symptoms, they can also cause digestive distress, things like that. But, say you're infected with one of these adenoviruses, you get stuck with an adenovirus vaccine, and those two viruses, the vaccine virus and the wild-type virus, they actually recombine in your body and they make something different that we have no idea what it's going to do, or how it's going to react, or how it's going to infect you.
And you can actually end up creating super viruses. And this is one of the reasons that when Coronavirus vaccines were originally being developed, back when SARS was a thing in 2003, 2004, they looked at doing live attenuated viruses. But then they said, "No, we can't do that because you could have this live attenuated vaccine virus recombine with a naturally occurring Coronavirus." Because there're about four that normally infect human beings and cause common cold type symptoms, that's not counting the SARS virus and the MERS virus, and the current SARS-2 virus. But, these four common ones could recombine with an attenuated live vaccine virus, and that could create something that we wouldn't have any idea of how infective or how pathogenic it was. So, this is a concern I think too with the adenovirus factors that hasn't been addressed properly in the public eye.
And then, one of the other things that I found interesting, I was looking at another video that was promoting these next generation technologies and how exciting they were, "Everybody calm down, we've been working on these for decades now, and they're not just out of the box brand new, somebody just thought of this." And as a researcher, hearing that, "We've been working on these for decades." Doesn't mean they're safe, it means we haven't had success in decades on this stuff. That's the actual real message that's being spun in a positive way, it's like, "Oh, we have experience with this in a laboratory." We have experience with it not working, is what we have.
JHW: So, one of the things that happens is, I think most people know but maybe you can address this very quickly, is that the companies that have produced these are indemnified against being sued. So in other words, if someone gets something from the vaccine, it's the tax payer that's going to deal with it, not the company. Yet the company is going to get profits from their making of it anyway, and got profits from their development of it because they were asked to do it under Warp Speed and with millions and billions of dollars. So, there's that, and that fact that... well, maybe address that first. And then I have another question for you in a minute.
PA: So, that's actually... minus the Warp Speed pre-funding, that's actually the situation for all vaccines that are developed in the US. All vaccine manufacturers are indemnified against liability for their products, and it's the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, the VICP, that will deal with any claims of vaccine injury. And, I did talk about this a little bit in my book as well. And just crunching some numbers based on the actual number of adverse reports that are actually submitted to VAERS, which is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, based on the fact that that is probably much, much lower than what actually occurs. Because most people don't, A, don't think to file something, B, don't file something because they know that it's impossible to have it temporarily connected, or C in some cases, have know idea that there is a connection to the vaccine.
Because a lot of the adverse events that I talk about in the book is being very commonly or possible associated with vaccines, are very difficult to pin down in terms of their actual chronology, their development, their onset. Because a lot of them are allergic or autoimmune responses because you're inciting your immune response in a very bizarre way actually. When you vaccinate yourself you're not exposing yourself to the pathogen through the normal route, you're going through your muscles instead of through your mouth. You're in some cases giving yourself three, or four, or five or ten diseases at the same time. You would never as a child have measles, mumps, rubella, polio, chicken pox, diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis all at the same time, but you might get all those vaccines at one doctors visit.
So, there's a lot of problems in terms of determining just how many adverse events there are associated with vaccines in general. But the vaccine manufacturers are not liable, and I think there's going to be... there's been some sort of special protections extended specifically for the COVID vaccines. Because, if you do obviously rush something to production, I think there is some sort of liability that you might still have, even as a vaccine manufacturer in general. But because this is now an emergency situation where you've been licensed to go ahead and do that, and cut your testing down to... I learned today that Moderna, they solicited adverse reactions for seven days. And I also learned today, that because it's not considered ethical to not give somebody a Coronavirus vaccine if we have a 'working' Coronavirus vaccine, Pfizer is already vaccinating their placebo group with actual active vaccine.
So, we're not going to have anymore data about longterm effects from these vaccines, because we're not going to have anymore placebo group, because they're going to go ahead and get the vaccine. Which, is mind blowing to me as a researcher and it's just... how do you commit that level of... it's scientific fraud, really truly, to just say, "We're just eliminating our control group. We're just completely taking them out of existence, so now we have no way to say how safe this vaccine is in longterm studies."
JHW: One of the other things I meant to ask you, which follows right on what you just said, that is, the connection from when you take the vaccine to when you experience the effects isn't immediate. It's not like what we saw with the [inaudible 00:48:15]... what are we talking here? Is it a day, or two day? Or what is it?
PA: Well, it depends on the kind of reaction that you see. If you have anaphylaxis, which is a reaction that occurs with some vaccines, that's the allergic response where your airways start to closeup and you're in danger of dying from a severe allergic reaction. That happens, supposedly, approximately one in a million doses of your average vaccine. It happens 22 times more frequently than that with the COVID vaccines, so it's one in 45,000 I think. Which is again, not a terribly, terribly high rate, but it's 22 times more than your average, normally developed vaccine. And that should be frightening, because if people are experiencing anaphylaxis, which is the most severe possible reaction you could experience from a vaccine, 22 times more than they're experiencing it from your average vaccine, what's that say about other adverse side effects?
And so, you mentioned Bell's palsy as one of the adverse side effects. We're seeing Bell's palsy, with both the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccine, they saw that more frequently in the vaccinated population than in the un-vaccinated population. Of course everybody wants to downplay it and say, "Most cases of Bell's palsy resolve within six months." But not all do. And the loss of facial muscle control isn't always Bell's palsy, it can also be symptomatic of other more problematic neurological disorders. Like Guillain-Barre syndrome, which everybody is quick to say, "We haven't seen any cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome." Well, how long have you tested for adverse reactions, 28 days? I don't know if you're going to see Guillain-Barre syndrome in 28 days, that's one that takes longer to develop. So, autoimmune conditions, as a general rule, take longer to develop.
And there's some evidence that type-1 diabetes is a possible side effect of vaccination. That can take a year to fully develop, once your body starts attacking your pancreatic cells. [inaudible 00:50:14] can take a really long time to develop. Fibromyalgia can take a really long time to develop.
But then other things, the most common severe adverse reactions, at least for the Moderna, seven and a 7.5 or 8% of people experience fatigue that's severe enough to keep them from going about their average everyday activities. And I think about 6% experience headaches that are that severe. And there were a couple of other things that people were experiencing [inaudible 00:50:44] that would happen within a day or two, or even immediately of the vaccine. So, just depends on the adverse reaction.
The stuff that I'm most worried about is that chronic, longterm downstream stuff. And I have a vested interest in this because my family has very interesting case history of all kinds of autoimmune problems, from my grandmothers generation on down to my sisters children. And, whether these are all associated with vaccines or not, I can't say, and I certainly don't think my grandmothers generation was probably the case because they weren't receiving very many doses back then. But I do know, that if vaccines can trigger autoimmune pathology, and I clearly have the genetics for autoimmune problems, I'm not taking an unnecessary vaccine, that's just not intelligent. But that's the part that concerns me the most, because those things aren't going to show up until we've already vaccinated who knows how many people. If it's going to take six months to a year, to several years for this pathology to really develop, and then it's very hard to tie it back to the original vaccine in some cases.
JHW: The UK government has warned pregnant women not to take it. The FDA and other agencies have warned that those with allergic reactions to vaccine ingredients shouldn't take it. There was a warning that men might consider freezing their sperm before taking it because of some kind of fear of possible effect that way. What have you known of those possibilities and things like that? Is this a concern for fertility as well?
PA: I would love to be able to give you a definitive answer on that, and I can't. And part of the reason I can't is because there is a lot of conflicting information that's being circulated. And even with the expertise that I have, I haven't been able to make sufficient heads or tails of it to be able to say one way or the other. I will say that the British Government is issuing that warning in part, because there hasn't been any testing done in pregnant women. So, you don't give a vaccine to a susceptible group that there's no safety testing on, generally speaking, is the thought there. I don't think that's being done out of a motivation of they know something about fertility that they're not saying, they've come out and said, "There's been no testing done, so we shouldn't do this."
But there was some information that was circulated that was saying, "Don't get it if you're planning to be pregnant within the next couple of months." Which seemed very strange to me, because that's not something that's issued with your average vaccine. And if it does cause fertility issues, it certainly wouldn't be the first vaccine to cause fertility issues.
There's been a number of vaccines that the Word Health Organization has had in development that were on purpose supposed to cause infertility. They've been looking for a birth control vaccine since the 1970s. They have tested uninformed, non-consenting women in Kenya, and the Philippines and Mexico, and I believe a couple other third world countries. And I actually have spoken personally with a doctor in Kenya, who was one of the ones who identified that the tetanus vaccines that were being administered to Kenyan women, and we specifically being targeted to women of childbearing age, were laced with hCG. Which, if you inject that in conjunction with tetanus toxoid, you can render women infertile for an indefinite period of time. So, this is something that has been done in the past, covertly, and I think that's part of the reason why a lot of people are really concerned.
And then Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, is associated with a frightening drop in fertility. And there's a study done on women, I believe, aged 25 to 29 who had or had not received the vaccine, so this wasn't a trial that was done, it was just looking at data afterwards. And, women who had received all three doses of he HPV vaccine were one third as likely to have conceived and borne a child as women in the same age cohort, roughly adjusted for other medical issues that could possibly effect fertility. You had three times as much likelihood of being pregnant if you had never had the vaccine, versus if you'd had all three doses. This is alarming stuff, because you're not told this...
JHW: Absolutely.
PA: ... when you go in and your doctor says, "Would you like your daughter to get Gardasil?" You're not told she might develop these horrible autoimmune diseases that have been associated with it, including chronic fatigue syndrome and a syndrome called PoTS. And I can never remember what PoTS stands for, but it's horrific to have it, I know some individuals who do and it's very limiting for them, it's a heart condition. And then, you're also not told, "And P.S. you might also never be able to conceive a child."
JHW: Let's touch a little bit more on whether this vaccine for COVID is necessary, and then after that I'll ask you to give some final thoughts.
PA: Did you have a specific question about that or just in general?
JHW: One of those considerations, when you look at vaccines, is about whether it's needed or not. We talked about the safety, we talked about the morality, we talked about the effectiveness, but is it actually needed? And that looks at what our current situation is with COVID right now.
PA: We talked a little bit about the death rate, the death rate is very, very low. The average age of death is higher than the average expected mortality in the US. We're not in a position where it seems necessary, and the safety concerns seem to even offset the benefits, in terms of I think you're more likely to have an adverse reaction to the vaccine then you are to catch COVID, let alone to die from COVID. But also, nobody has claimed... or they very cleverly just not mentioned it while trumpeting other areas of success, but nobody has claimed that [inaudible 00:56:41] of the vaccine will actually cause the virus to stop spreading. The only claims that have been made by both Pfizer and Moderna is that, "If you get the vaccine, you're less likely to get severe COVID symptoms than if you don't get the vaccine." And again, they're looking at a fraction of the cohort that they vaccinated.
So, Pfizer vaccinated 43,000 people and they looked at approximately 200 people who developed symptoms. And then Moderna, same thing, vaccinated 30,000 people, looked at approximetely 200 people who developed symptoms. And then they both made claims that their vaccines were 90 something percent effective, based on the fact that, "Well, the people who developed symptoms, 90% of people who developed the worse symptoms, were in the un-vaccinated cohort." They didn't test for whether these people were positive for SARS Coronavirus, they didn't look at any other symptoms, they didn't look at, "Longterm does this actually keep you from developing symptoms over a longer period of time?" And they looked over a period of just a couple of weeks, as we've said. They didn't test any of the things that they should have tested, in terms of determining whether this vaccine is actually protective or not.
So, we don't have any reason to believe that this vaccine would do anything to slow the spread of the virus. And very high profile people are saying, "Get the vaccine, get the vaccine, but keep wearing your mask because it's not actually going to effect transmission." Why then why am I getting the vaccine?
JHW: Exactly. And how dare you suggest that in order to travel, in order to make society come back to normal, need a vaccine, because then that makes no sense whatsoever.
PA: The only reason I would get the COVID vaccine is for my own benefit for that modest, protective effect against developing the worst possible symptoms. For me, I'm not in a high risk cohort, I don't have comorbidities, there's no reason for me to get that vaccine, it's not going to help my neighbor. It's not 'the right thing to do' or the moral thing to do, or a necessary thing to do for anybody other than myself. And, if it's not necessary for myself, then it's absolutely unnecessary for me to get this shot.
JHW: Pamela, just before I ask you for your final thoughts before we end off, I wanted to thank you on behalf of all of our LifeSite viewers. I know a lot of people have been asking questions, and I have got from you clearer answers than I've ever seen anywhere before, so thank you for that. Your book called Vaccination: A Catholic Perspective, is available where?
PA: It's available on the Kolbe Center's website, so that's Kolbe like [inaudible 00:59:21], K-O-L-B-E, C-E-N-T-E-R dot org.
JHW: We'll be linking to it in my blog post and in the description of this video as well. But, give us if you would Pamela, your final reflections on this question.
PA: The short thing is don't get it, it's not good for your soul and it's not good for your body. And I think that we really need to, as Catholics, if we don't stand up now... we're losing the opportunities we're ever going to have to stand up and rectify this wrong that's been going on now for decades. And it's been going on for decades and we're going to be accountable for that. We lived in this time, we had an opportunity to stand up, we had an opportunity to do something, and if we don't, we are going to be held accountable for that at the end. You can't just sit on your hands and say, "Oh well, I'm not going to take it. Oh well, it's not that big a deal." This is a big deal, this is a hill worth dying on.
JHW: Amen. And you have very, very providentially been given to do this work, to start it before it was so evident that it was so extremely needed, and it comes out now as if planned. May God bless you for what you've done and the clarity that you've brought.
PA: Thank you very much.
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| Third Sunday after Epiphany |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-24-2021, 07:10 AM - Forum: Christmas
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INSTRUCTION FOR THE THIRD SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY
Taken from Fr. Leonard Goffine's Explanations of the Epistles and Gospels for the Sundays, Holydays throughout the Ecclesiastical Year, 1880
INTROIT Adore God, all ye His angels: Sion heard, and was glad; and the daughters of Juda rejoiced. The Lord hath reigned; let the earth rejoice; let the many islands be glad. (Ps. XCVI. 1.) Glory be to the Father, etc.
COLLECT Almighty everlasting God, mercifully look upon our infirmity, and stretch forth the right hand of Thy majesty for our protection. Through our protection. Through our etc.
EPISTLE (Rom. XII. 16-21.) Brethren, be not wise in your own conceits. To no man rendering evil for evil: providing good things not only in the sight of God, but also in the sight of all men. If it be possible, as much as is in you, having peace with all men; not revenging yourselves, my dearly beloved but give place unto wrath; for it is written: Revenge is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. But if thy enemy be hungry, give him to eat; if he thirst, give him to drink; for doing this, thou shaft heap coals of fire upon his head. Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil by good.
Quote:When are we overcome by evil?
When we wish to take revenge. "Revenge is no sign of courage," says St. Ambrose, "but rather of weakness and cowardice. As it is the sign of a very weak stomach to be unable to digest food, so it is the mark of a very weak mind to be unable to bear a harsh word." "Are you impatient," says the same saint, "you are overcome; are you patient, you have overcome."
What should we do if our reputation is injured?
We should leave its revenge, or its defence and protection to God, who has retained that for Himself. "But as a good name," says St. Francis de Sales, "is the main support of human society, and as without it we could not be useful to that society, but even hurtful to it on account of scandal, we should feel bound, for love of our neighbor, to aim after a good reputation, and to preserve it." We should not be too sensitive about this, however, for too great a sensitiveness makes one obstinate, eccentric, and intolerable, and only tends to excite and increase the malice of the detractors. The silence and contempt with which we meet a slander or an injustice, is generally a more efficacious antidote than sensitiveness, anger, or revenge. The contempt of a slander at once disperses it, but anger shows a weakness, and gives the accusation an appearance of probability. If this does not suffice, and the slander continues, let us persevere in humility' and lay our honor and our soul into the hands of God, according to the admonitions of the Apostle.
How do we "heap coals of fire on the head of our enemy?"
When we return him good for evil, for seeing our well meaning towards him, the flush of shame reddens his face for the wrongs he has done us. St. Augustine explains these words thus: "By giving food and drink or doing other kindnesses to your enemy, you will heap coals, not of anger, but of love, upon his head, which will inflame him to return love for love." Learn therefore, from the example of Christ and His saints, not to allow yourself to be overcome by evil, but do good to those that hate and persecute you.
ASPIRATION Ah, that I might, according to the words of St. Paul, so live that I may be a child of the Heavenly Father, who lets His sun shine on the just and the unjust!
GOSPEL (Matt. VIII. 1-13.) At that time, when Jesus was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him; and behold, a leper came and adored him, saying: Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. And Jesus, stretching forth his hand, touched him, saying: I will, be thou made clean. And forthwith his leprosy was cleansed. And Jesus saith to him, See thou tell no man: but go, show thyself to the priest, and offer the gift which Moses commanded for a testimony unto them. And when he had entered into Capharnaum, there came to him a centurion, beseeching him, and saying: Lord, my servant Beth at home sick of the palsy, and is grievously tormented. And Jesus saith to him: I will come and heal him. And the centurion making answer, said: Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter under my roof; but only say the word, and my servant shall be healed. For I also am a man subject to authority, having under me soldiers; and I say to this man: Go, and he goeth; and to another: Come, and he cometh; and to my servant: Do this, and he doeth it. And Jesus hearing this, marvelled; and said to them that followed him: Amen I say to you, I have not found so great faith in Israel. And I sad to you that many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the children of the kingdom shall be cast into the exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. And Jesus said to the centurion: Go, and as thou hast believed, so be it done to thee; and the servant was healed at the same hour.
Why did the leper say: “Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean"?
He believed Christ to be the promised Messiah, who as true God had the power to heal him. From this we learn to have confidence in the omnipotence of God, who is a helper in all need, (Ps. CVI. 6. 73. 19.) and to leave all to the will of God, saying: Lord, if it be pleasing to Thee, and well for me, grant my petition.
Why did Jesus stretch forth His hand and touch the leper?
To show that He was not subject to the law which forbade the touching of a leper through fear of infection, which could not affect Jesus; to reveal the health-giving, curative power of His flesh, which dispelled leprosy by the simple touch of His hand; to give us an example of humility and of love for the poor sick, that we may learn from Him to have no aversion to the infirm, but lovingly to assist the unfortunate sick for the sake of Jesus who took upon Himself the leprosy of our sins. The saints have faithfully imitated Him in their tender care for those suffering from the most disgusting diseases. Oh, how hard it will be for those to stand before the Tribunal of God at the Last Day, who cannot even bear to look at the poor and sick!
Why did Christ command the leper to tell no man?
To instruct us that we should not make known our good works in order to obtain frivolous praise, (Matt. VI 1.) which deprives us of our heavenly reward.
Why did Christ send the healed leper to the Priest?
That he might observe the law which required all the healed lepers to show themselves to the priests, to offer a sacrifice, to be examined and pronounced clean: that the priest if he beheld the miracle of the sudden cure of the leper, might know Him who had wrought the cure, to be the Messiah; and finally, to teach us that we must honor the priests because of their high position, even when they do not live in a manner worthy of their dignity, as was the case with the Jewish priests.
What it taught by the centurion's solicitude for his servant?
That masters should take care of their sick servants, see that they are attended to in their illness, and above all that they are provided with the Sacraments. It is unchristian, even cruel and barbarous, to drive from the house a poor, sick servant, or to leave him lying in his distress without assistance or care.
Why did Christ say: I will come and heal him?
Because of His humility, by which He, although God and Lord of lords, did not hesitate to visit a sick servant. Here Christ's humility puts to shame many persons of position who think themselves too exalted to attend the wants of a poor servant.
Why did the centurion say: Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof?
Because he recognised Christ's divinity and his own nothingness, and therefore regarded himself as unworthy to receive Christ into his house. From this we learn to humble ourselves, especially when we receive Christ into our hearts, hence the priest in giving holy Communion uses the centurion's words, exhorting those to humility who are about to receive.
Why did he add: But only say the word, and my servant shall be healed?
By this he publicly manifested his faith in Christ's divinity and omnipotence, because he believed that Christ, though absent, could heal the servant by a word. If a Gentile centurion had such faith in Christ, and such confidence in His power, should not we Christians be ashamed that we have so little faith, and confidence in God?
What is meant by: Many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the children of the kingdom shall be cast into the exterior darkness?
This was said by Christ in reference to the obdurate Jews who would not believe in Him. Many pagans who receive the gospel, and live in accordance with it, will enjoy heavenly bliss with the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who were the most faithful friends of God, while the Jews, God's chosen people, who as such, possessed the first claim to heaven, will, because of their unbelief and other sins, be cast into outer darkness, that is, into the deepest abyss of hell, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Thus it will be with those Christians who do not live in accordance with their faith. Therefore, fear lest you, for want of cooperation with God's grace, be eternally rejected, while others who have faithfully corresponded to the divine inspirations will enter into your place in the kingdom of heaven.
ASPIRATION O Jesus, rich in consolations! grant me the leper's faith and confidence, that in all things I may rely upon Thy omnipotence, and may resign myself to Thy divine will, and may ever honor Thy priests. Grant me, also, O most humble Jesus! the centurion's humility, that for Thy sake, I may compassionately assist my neighbor, and by doing so render myself worthy of Thy grace and mercy.
ON RESIGNATION TO THE WILL OF GOD
Lord, if thou wilt. (Matt. VIII. 2.)
Those who in adversity as well as in prosperity, perfectly resign themselves to the will of God, and accept whatever He sends them with joy and thanks, possess heaven, as St. Chrysostom says, while yet upon earth. Those who have attained this resignation, are saddened by no adversity, because they are satisfied with all that God, their best Father, sends them, be it honor or disgrace, wealth or poverty, life or death. All happens as they wish, because they know no will but God's, they desire nothing but that which He does and wills. God does the will of them that fear Him. (Ps. CXLIV. 10.)
In the lives of the ancient Fathers we find the following: The fields and vineyards belonging to one farmer were much more fertile and yielding than were his neighbors'. They asked how it happened and he said: they should not wonder at it, because he always had the weather he wished. At this they wondered more than ever: How could that be? "I never desire other weather," he replied, "than God wills; and because my desires are conformable to His, He gives me the fruits I wish." This submission to the divine will is also the cause of that constant peace and undimmed joy of the saints of God, with which their hearts have overflowed here below, even in the midst of the greatest sufferings and afflictions. Who would not aspire to so happy a state? We will attain it if we believe that nothing in this world can happen to us except by the will and through the direction of God, sin and guilt excepted, for God can never be the cause of them. This the Holy Ghost inculcates by the mouth of the wise man: Good things and evil, life and death, poverty and riches, are from God, (Eccles. XI. 14.) that is, are permitted or sent by God; all that which comes from God, is for the best, for God doeth all things well. (Mark VII. 37.)
Whoever keeps these two truths always in mind, will certainly be ever contented with the will of God, and always consoled; he will taste while yet on earth the undisturbed peace of mind and foretaste of happiness which the saints had while here, and which they now eternally enjoy in heaven, because of the union of their will with the divine will.
INSTRUCTION FOR MASTERS AND SERVANTS
The master of a house should be careful to have not only obedient, faithful, willing, and industrious servants in his home, as had the centurion in the gospel, but still more, pious and God-fearing ones, for God richly blesses the master because of pious servants. Thus God blessed Laban on account of the pious Jacob, (Gen. XXX. 30.) and the house of Putiphar because of the just Joseph. (Gen. XXXIX. 5.) The master should look to the morals and Christian conduct of his servants, and not suffer irreligious subjects in his house, for he must, after this life, give an account before the tribunal of God, and he makes himself unworthy of the blessing of God, often liable to the most terrible punishment by retaining such. Will not God punish those masters and mistresses who suffer those under them to seek the dangerous occasions of sin, keep sinful company, go about at night, and lead scandalous lives? Will not God, one day, demand the souls of servants from their masters? The same punishment which will befall those who deny their faith, will rest upon careless masters and mistresses, for St. Paul the Apostle writes:
But if any man have not care of his own, and especially of those of his house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. (I. Tim. V. 8.)
Subjects should learn from the centurion's servants who obeyed his only word, that they also should willingly, faithfully, and quickly do every thing ordered by their masters, unless it be something contrary to the law of God. They should recollect that whatever they do in obedience to their superiors, is done for God Himself. Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not serving to the eye, as pleasing men, but in simplicity of heart, fearing God. Whatsoever you do, do it from the heart as to the Lord, and not to men: knowing that you shall receive of the Lord the reward of inheritance. Serve ye the Lord Christ. (Col. III. 22-24.)
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| March 2nd - Blessed Henry Suzo |
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Posted by: Elizabeth - 01-23-2021, 04:08 PM - Forum: March
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Blessed Henry Suzo
Confessor
(1300-1366)
Blessed Henry Suzo was born in 1300 at Constance in Germany. There he entered the Dominican convent at the age of thirteen, and made his preparatory studies in the sacred disciplines. In 1327 he became a teacher of theology, and in 1334 began preaching. In 1343 he was elected prior of a convent at Diessenhofen. Blessed Henry is known especially as a mystic who regarded himself as the servant of Eternal Wisdom become Man. He practiced severe austerities and experienced, along with his visions and ecstasies, bitter persecutions and grievous calumnies.
He assisted in the restoration of strict religious observance in the cloisters, especially in the Dominican convents for women at Katherinentahl and Töss. One of the Superiors in these convents preserved most of his letters and obtained the history of his life, which he himself later edited and published. As a preacher he was highly esteemed in many Swiss and Dutch cities. It is said that for 150 years there was no book of meditation more widely read in the German language than his Little Book of Eternal Wisdom. Blessed Henry translated this work into Latin as well, and added at that time to its contents.
He died in 1366; 250 years later, in 1613, workers in the old convent at Ulm found his body perfectly conserved and emitting a pleasant fragrance. Unfortunately the non-Catholic authorities of the city had the tomb closed; and the Bollandists, famous hagiographists of 19th century France, wrote in 1882 that no trace was any longer known of it. He was declared Blessed in 1831 by Pope Gregory XVI.
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| March 1st - St. Albinus |
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Posted by: Elizabeth - 01-23-2021, 04:05 PM - Forum: March
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Saint Albinus
Bishop
(470-550)
Saint Albinus was of an ancient and noble family in Brittany, and from his childhood was fervent in every exercise of piety. He ardently sighed after the happiness which a devout soul finds in being disengaged from all earthly things. Having embraced the monastic state, despite his parents' disapproval, he shone a perfect model of virtue, taking upon himself all the humblest offices and disciplining his flesh by every kind of mortification. In brief, he lived as if in all things he were without any will of his own; and his soul seemed so perfectly governed by the spirit of Christ as to live only for Him.
In 504, at the age of thirty-five Saint Albinus was chosen Abbot of his monastery; Saint Fortunatus, his first historian, compared the monastery at that time to a garden rendered beautiful by the most exquisite, most varied, most fragrant flowers. Twenty-five years later, divine Providence gave the Abbot to the entire region as Bishop of Angers. A day did not pass without his instructing his people, for he believed that the soul needs daily nourishment just as imperatively as does the flesh.
Many Christians of his diocese had fallen into slavery through the invasions of the barbarians, and Saint Albinus used every resource available to him for their redemption. To the graces of charity from which his people benefitted, were joined those deriving from his public miracles. He resurrected a young child; and when one of his servants died during his absence, those who carried the man to his grave were unable to lower him until the bishop arrived to give the final benediction. He established and restored measures of ecclesiastical discipline, through the third Council of Orleans, convened through his influence over King Childebert, son of Clovis, who greatly respected his opinions. In brief, he was inflamed with a holy zeal for the glory of God in all aspects of life. Honored by all, he was never affected with vanity.
Saint Albinus died after making a long journey which he undertook to consult Saint Cesarius, Bishop of Arles, concerning matters of episcopal government. He had been the benediction of his diocese for twenty-one years; he died on March 1, 549. He is often represented preaching in the episcopal pulpit or curing the sick, or holding chains while commanding prison doors to be opened.
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| Fauci assures World Health Org. Biden regime is committed to funding abortions |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-22-2021, 07:34 AM - Forum: Abortion
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Fauci assures World Health Org. Biden regime is committed to funding abortions
Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s newly appointed Chief Medical Adviser, promised, ‘President Biden will be revoking the Mexico City Policy in the coming days.’
WASHINGTON, D.C., January 21, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – In comments made to the World Health Organization (WHO) today, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced the Biden regime’s commitment to the promotion of abortion, as well as a new relationship between the United States and the WHO.
Fauci has been named as Chief Medical Adviser to Joe Biden, who was sworn in as president yesterday, and became Biden’s de facto spokesman to the WHO at the 148th session of the Executive Board of the organization which is currently taking place. Fauci is the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became famous for his constant media appearances during the coronavirus outbreak.
He made clear that the Biden regime would be very closely aligned with the WHO, noting that Biden had already “signed letters retracting the previous Administration’s announcement to withdraw from the organization.”
“I am honored to announce that the United States will remain a member of the World Health Organization,” Fauci declared.
Under Biden’s authority, the U.S will be “fully engaged in advancing global health,” he added, and would “work constructively with partners to strengthen and importantly reform the WHO.”
However, the newly appointed Chief Medical Adviser also highlighted Biden’s commitment to the promotion of “sexual and reproductive health,” and “reproductive rights,” both of which are common euphemisms for abortion and contraception.
“And it will be our policy to support women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights in the United States, as well as globally. To that end, President Biden will be revoking the Mexico City Policy in the coming days, as part of his broader commitment to protect women’s health and advance gender equality at home and around the world.”
The Mexico City Policy prohibits federal funding of abortion abroad. Under former President Donald Trump, it was expanded into a policy called Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance.
Biden is very public about his claims of being Catholic, even attending Mass shortly before his inauguration, yet has been very open about his strong support for abortion as well as LGBT ideology. He has called abortion an “essential health service” and wishes to enshrine abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy into federal law.
Pope Francis extended his congratulations to Biden yesterday, yet did not call mention the issue of abortion in his message.
In the flurry of executive orders which Biden signed by yesterday evening, he gave permission for gender-confused soldiers to serve openly in the military.
Aside from committing the U.S. to assist the WHO in funding, and promoting abortion, Fauci repeatedly mentioned the close relationship which would exist between the two going forward. He thanked the WHO for its “role in leading the global public health response to this pandemic,” and assured the organization that that U.S. “intends to fulfill its financial obligations.”
Trump had defunded the WHO for its botching of the coronavirus response and its close ties to Communist China.
In a “directive” to be signed by Biden today, Fauci related that the U.S. would “join COVAX and support the ACT-Accelerator to advance multilateral efforts for COVID-19 vaccine, therapeutic, and diagnostic distribution, equitable access, and research and development.”
“We will commit to building global health security capacity, expanding pandemic preparedness, and supporting efforts to strengthen health systems around the world and to advance the Sustainable Development Goals,” he added, referring to the U.N.’s 2030 pro-abortion goals.
Despite advocating for a renewed focus on promoting abortion and contraception, Fauci closed his speech by claiming that the U.S. would work to “improve the health and wellbeing of all people throughout the world.”
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| Please pray to save comatose Polish man from starvation in UK hospital |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-22-2021, 07:30 AM - Forum: Appeals for Prayer
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Polish archbishop asks British cardinal to save comatose Polish man from starvation in UK hospital
Archbishop Stanislaw Gądecki has explained that there is strong public feeling in the patient’s homeland against the British court which permitted the hospital responsible for his care to remove the patient's clinically assisted nutrition and hydration
POZNAN, Poland, January 19, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — The head of the Bishops Conference of Poland has written to Cardinal Vincent Nichols in the hope that his English counterpart will do something to save a Polish Catholic currently dying of passive euthanasia in an English hospital.
Archbishop Stanislaw Gądecki has explained that there is strong public feeling in the patient’s homeland against the British court which permitted the hospital responsible for his care to remove his clinically assisted nutrition and hydration.
“He was, de facto, sentenced to death of starvation,” Gądecki wrote.
The patient, who is known in the English-speaking world as “RS” because of a court order protecting his identity, is a Polish Catholic who suffered a heart attack in his home in England on November 6 and sustained serious brain damage. Although he can breathe for himself, he relies on clinically assisted nutrition and hydration (CANH) for survival. His hospital doctors believe that he is in a vegetative state and that he has only a small chance of becoming even minimally conscious. At the same time, they expected him to live another five or more years with the help of CANH. Believing this was not in his “best interests” the doctors received permission from the British Court of Protection to discontinue CAHN.
In Britain, CANH is considered “medical treatment” and therefore its withdrawal is not legally considered euthanasia. The practise is considered barbaric and cruel in RS’s native Poland, and the case has caught the attention of the Polish press and public. Video footage of RS in his hospital bed has been widely circulated in Poland, much to the disgust of the judge who made the order forbidding the identification of RS. Two neurologists consulted by RS’s birth family have given their opinion that RS is progressing to a minimally conscious state, but their evidence has been rejected by both the Court of Protection and the Court of Appeal.
In his letter, which Polish online newspaper Polonia Christiana reproduced in full, the Polish archbishop reminded the English cardinal of the basic details of the case: that the patient’s wife and children, who live in England, agree with the decision to end his life, but that his mother and sister who live in Poland, and his sister and niece, who live in England, are opposed to it. Gądecki noted also that the European Court of Human Rights have refused to hear the latter’s case on more than one occasion, and so the hospital is continuing to allow RS to die.
RS’s birth family testified that RS was a devout Catholic who was opposed to both abortion and euthanasia, who believed that sick people deserved compassionate care and had a right to their lives. One of RS’s sisters told LifeSiteNews that he was furious with British court decisions to end the life of toddler Alfie Evans. However, RS’s wife testified that her husband would not want to be “a burden” or to be remembered by his children as “disabled.”
Although RS’s birth family, with the support of the Polish Government, have attempted to appeal the decision to end RS’s life and, as Gądecki recalled in his letter, the Polish Government has asked permission to take RS to Poland for care, the British courts have refused. Mr Justice Cohen has repeated his judgment that it is in RS’s “best interests” not to receive life-sustaining care.
RS’s sister also told LifeSiteNews that her brother had met St. John Paul II and treasured a photograph he had of the two of them together. In his letter to Cardinal Nichols, Archbishop Gądecki reminded the prelate of the Polish pope’s warnings against the “culture of death.”
St. John Paul II, in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, wrote:
it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favoured tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of "conspiracy against life" is unleashed. This conspiracy involves not only individuals in their personal, family or group relationships, but goes far beyond, to the point of damaging and distorting, at the international level, relations between peoples and States.
The Polish archbishop concluded his letter by asking Cardinal Nichols’ help in “this difficult situation” and to make an attempt at saving the life of “our compatriot.” The Polish word Archbishop Gądecki used to describe RS, “rodak,” is derived from the same root from which the Polish word for family, “rodzina”, is derived. It denotes strong and warm ties through nationality.
Hitherto, the most prominent Catholic to speak up against the dehydration and starvation death of RS was the Anscombe Bioethics Centre’s Dr. David Jones, who published a position paper on the topic on January 12, 2021. Jones underscored that RS had previously expressed opposition to euthanasia. He was particularly troubled by the implications of hydration and nutrition being removed from vulnerable people on the grounds that they would not want to be “a burden.”
LifeSiteNews has reached out to the Archdiocese of Westminster for comment and is awaiting a response.
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| February 28th - Sts. Romanus and Lupicinus; St. Oswald |
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Posted by: Elizabeth - 01-21-2021, 02:07 PM - Forum: February
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Saints Romanus and Lupicinus his brother
Founder and Abbots
(†460 and †480)
Saint Romanus, born in the late fourth century, left his relatives and spent some time in the monastery of Ainay at Lyons, near a large church at the conflux of the Saône and Rhone. The faithful had built it in honor of the famous martyrs of that region, whose ashes were thrown into the Rhone. His purpose for this retreat was to study all the practices of monastic life, and he obtained from the Abbot of Ainay some recently written books on the lives of the Desert Fathers.
At the age of thirty-five, Romanus retired into the forests of Mount Jura, between France and Switzerland, and fixed his abode at a place called Condate, at the conflux of the rivers Bienne and Aliere, where he found a plot of ground fit for culture, and some trees which furnished him with wild fruit. Here he spent his time in praying, reading, and laboring for his subsistence. Lupicinus, his brother, came to him there, accompanied by several other disciples, who then were followed by still others, drawn by the fame of the virtue and miracles of these two Saints. Other monasteries became necessary. Saint Romanus, when he was 54 years old, was ordained a priest by Saint Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers; he remained simple in his conduct and never sought any privileges among his brethren.
As their numbers increased, the brothers built several monasteries as well as a convent for their sister and other women, called La Baume; before Saint Romanus died, there were already five hundred nuns cloistered there in prayer and sacrifice. They kept strict silence, and like their brothers, sons or relatives in the nearby monastery of Lauconne, considered themselves as persons dead to the present life.
The two brothers governed the monks jointly and in great harmony, though they were of different dispositions; the gentleness of the first was balanced by the severity of the other, according to need. When a group of rebellious monks departed, Saint Romanus, by his patience and prayer, won them back, and if they departed a second or even a third time, received them with the same kindness. When Lupicinus, whose habits were very mortified, reproached him for his leniency, he replied that God alone knew the depths of hearts, and that among those who never departed, there were some whose fervor had declined, whereas some of those who returned after leaving even three times, were serving God in exemplary piety; and finally, that among the brethren who remained outside the monastery, certain ones had religiously practiced the maxims they had learned in the monastery, even becoming priests and authorities for other religious functions or offices.
Saint Romanus died about the year 460, and Saint Lupicinus survived him for twenty years.
*On leap years, the feast day of these Saints is celebrated on February 29.
Saint Oswald
Archbishop of York
(† 992)
Oswald was of a noble Saxon family; he was endowed with a very rare and handsome appearance and with a singular piety of soul. Brought up by his uncle, Saint Odo, Archbishop of Canterbury, he was chosen, while still young, as dean of the secular canons of Winchester, at that time very lax. His attempt to reform them was a failure, and he saw, with that infallible instinct which so often guides the Saints in critical times, that the true remedy for the corruption of the clergy was the restoration of monastic life.
He therefore went to France and took the habit of Saint Benedict. When he returned to England it was to receive the news of Odo's death. He found, however, a new patron in Saint Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, through whose influence he was nominated to the see of Worcester. To these two Saints, together with Ethelwold of Winchester, the monastic revival of the tenth century is mainly due.
Oswald's first care was to deprive of their benefices all disorderly secular clerics, whom he replaced as far as possible by religious priests. He himself founded seven religious houses. Considering that in the hearts of the secular canons of Winchester there were yet some sparks of virtue, he would not at once dismiss them, but rather reformed them through a holy artifice. Adjoining their cathedral church he built a chapel in honor of the Mother of God, causing it to be served by a body of strict religious. He himself assisted at the divine Office there, and his example was followed by the people. The canons, finding themselves isolated and the church deserted, chose rather to embrace the religious life than continue to injure their own souls, and be also a mockery to their people, through the contrast offered by their worldliness and the regularity of their religious brethren.
Later, as Archbishop of York, Saint Oswald met a like success in his efforts. God manifested His approval of his zeal by discovering to him the relics of his great predecessor at Worcester, Saint Wilfrid, which he reverently translated to the church of that city. He died while washing the feet of the poor, as he did daily during Lent, on February 29, 992.
*On leap years, the feast day of this Saint is celebrated on February 29.
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| February 27th - St. Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows and St. Leander |
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Posted by: Elizabeth - 01-21-2021, 02:02 PM - Forum: February
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Saint Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows
Passionist
(1838-1862)
Saint Gabriel was born at Assisi in 1838. He was guided by Our Lady into the Passionist Order founded by Saint Paul of the Cross, and became a veritable Apostle of Her Sorrows. He was a very great and truly contemplative soul, whose only preoccupation was to unite himself to God at all times. He allowed no distractions to enter his spirit, and even though Italy, his country, was in a state of ferment when he entered religion, he wanted to know nothing of it.
The way to attain union with our Saviour and our God was, for Saint Gabriel, as for Saint Louis de Montfort, his Heavenly Mother. He wrote home to his father, from the first month of his noviciate, Believe your son, whose heart is speaking by his lips; no, I would not exchange one single quarter of an hour spent near the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, our consolatrix, our protectress and our hope, for a year or several years spent in the diversions and spectacles of the earth. Among his resolutions was that of visiting Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament each day, and praying for the gift of a tender and efficacious devotion to His Most Holy Mother. He wrote a beautiful Credo, worthy to be printed in letters of gold, expressing all that he believed of the Mother of God.
At twenty-four years of age Saint Gabriel died of tuberculosis, having already attained heroic sanctity by a life of self-denial and great devotion to our Lord's Passion and the Compassion of His Mother.
Although his life was without any miraculous event, after his death in 1862 many miracles occurred at his tomb in Isola di Gran Sasso, Italy. He was canonized by Pope Benedict XV in 1920, and his feast was extended to the entire church by Pope Pius XI in 1932. He is the patron of youth, and especially of young religious.
*On leap years, the feast day of this Saint is celebrated on February 28.
Saint Leander
Archbishop of Seville
(† 596)
Saint Leander was born of an illustrious family at Carthagena in Spain. He was the eldest of five brothers, several of whom are numbered among the Saints. He entered into a monastery of Seville very young, where he lived many years and attained to an eminent degree of virtue and sacred learning. These qualities occasioned his being promoted to the see of Seville; but his change of condition made little or no alteration in his way of life, though it brought on him a great increase of solicitude.
Spain at that time was held in possession by the Visigoths. These Goths, being infected with Arianism, established that heresy wherever they came, in such wise that at the time Saint Leander was made bishop, it had already reigned in Spain a hundred years. This was his great affliction. Nonetheless, by his prayers to God and by his most zealous and unwearied endeavors, he became the happy instrument of the conversion of that nation to the Catholic faith, as his story makes clear.
The holy archbishop had converted, among others, his own nephew Hermenegild, who was the king's eldest son and heir apparent, and for this he was banished by King Leovigild, his own brother-in-law. The pious Catholic prince, now known as Saint Hermenegild, was put to death in prison by his unnatural father in the following year, for refusing to receive Communion from the hands of an Arian bishop. Afterwards, touched by grace and filled with remorse, the king recalled Saint Leander.
When Leovigild fell sick and found himself past hopes of recovery, he sent for Saint Leander, and recommended to him his other son Recared. This son, by listening to Saint Leander, became a Catholic, and finally brought the whole nation of the Visigoths to the faith. The new king Recared also brought the Suevi back to Catholic unity; they were a people of Spain whom his Arian father Leovigild had perverted.
Saint Leander was no less zealous in the reformation of morals than in restoring the purity of faith, and planted the seeds of the zeal and fervor which produce martyrs and Saints. He received from Saint Gregory the Great a painting of the Mother of God by the hand of Saint Luke, Evangelist, since known as Our Lady of Guadelupe (of Spain). It is he who, as a refutation of Arianism, added to the liturgy of Spain the recitation during Mass of the Nicene Creed, which practice spread to Rome and then to the entire Church. This holy doctor of Spain died about the year 596, on the 27th of February.
*On leap years, the feast day of this Saint is celebrated on February 28.
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| February 26th - St. Mechtildis of Hackeborn and St. Porphyry |
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Posted by: Elizabeth - 01-21-2021, 01:59 PM - Forum: February
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Saint Mechtildis of Hackeborn
Abbess
(1240-1298)
Saint Mechtildis, born in 1240 in Saxony, was the younger sister of the illustrious Abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn. She was so attracted to religious life at the age of seven, after a visit to her sister in the monastery of Rodardsdoft, that she begged to be allowed to enter the monastic school there. Her gifts caused her to make great progress both in virtue and learning.
Ten years later, when her sister had transferred the monastery to an estate at Helfta offered by their brothers, Mechtildis went with her. She was already distinguished for her virtues, and while still very young became the valuable Assistant to Abbess Gertrude. One of the children who in the monastic school were committed to her care, was the child of five who later became known as Saint Gertrude the Great.
Saint Mechtildis was gifted with a beautiful voice, and was choir mistress of the nuns all her life. Divine praise, it has been said, was the keynote of her life, as also of her famous book, The Book of Special Grace. When she learned, at the age of fifty, that two of her nuns had written down all the favors and words of their Abbess, which she had become, she was troubled, but Our Lord in a vision assured her that all this has been committed to writing by My will and inspiration, and therefore you have no cause to be troubled over it. He added that the diffusion of the revelations He had given her would cause many to increase in His love. She immediately accepted the Lord's bidding, and the book became extremely popular in Italy after her death. Its influence on the poet Dante's Purgatorio is undeniable, for she had described the place of purification after death under the same figure of a seven-terraced mountain. The Donna Matelda of his Purgatorio, who guides him at one point in his vision, is Saint Mechtildis as she represents mystical theology. She died in 1298 at the monastery of Helfta.
*On leap years, the feast day of this Saint is celebrated on February 27.
Saint Porphyry
Bishop of Gaza
(353-420)
At the age of twenty-five, Porphyry, a rich citizen of Thessalonica, left the world for one of the great religious houses in the desert of Scete. Here he remained five years, and then, finding himself drawn to a more solitary life, passed into Palestine, where he spent a similar period in the severest penance, until ill health obliged him to moderate his austerities. He then made his home in Jerusalem, and in spite of his ailments visited the Holy Places every day, thinking so little of his sickness, says his biographer, that he seemed to be afflicted in another body than his own. About this time God put it into his heart to sell all he had and give it to the poor; then, to reward the sacrifice, He restored him, by a miracle at the Holy Sepulchre, to perfect health.
In 393 the zealous Christian was ordained priest and entrusted with the care of the relics of the True Cross in Jerusalem. Three years later, in spite of all the resistance his humility could make, he was consecrated Bishop of Gaza. That city was a hotbed of paganism, and Porphyry found in it an ample scope for his apostolic zeal. His labors and the miracles which attended them effected the conversion of many; and an imperial edict for the destruction of the pagan temples, obtained through the influence of Saint John Chrysostom, greatly strengthened the influence of the Bishop in Gaza. During a long drought, a fast and a procession to the tombs of the martyrs outside the city, held by the Christians in obedience to their bishop to obtain rain from God, brought the trial to a successful end. Many pagans were converted when a torrential rain descended.
When Saint Porphyry first went to Gaza, he found there one temple more splendid than the rest, in honor of the chief god. When the edict went forth to destroy all traces of heathen worship, Saint Porphyry determined to put the demon to special shame, there where he had received special honor. A Christian church was built upon the site, and its approach was paved with the marble stone of the heathen temple. Thus every worshiper of Jesus Christ trod underfoot the vestiges of idolatry and superstition, each time he went to assist at holy Mass.
Saint Porphyry lived to see his diocese cleared of idolatry, wholly Christian, and then died in the year 420.
*On leap years, the feast day of this Saint is celebrated on February 27.
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| "The Reign of Antichrist" by Fr. Culleton |
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Posted by: Elizabeth - 01-21-2021, 01:50 PM - Forum: Catholic Prophecy
- Replies (17)
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You can download the book at this link in multiple formats: https://archive.org/details/TheReignOfAn...1/mode/2up
THE REIGN OF ANTICHRIST
*
By
R. GERALD CULLETON
*
"Lord wilt Thou at this time restore the Kingdom of Israel?..." "It is not for you to know tILe times or dates which the Father has fixed . .." Acts 1:6-7
"Let no one deceive you . .. The day of the Lord will not come unless the apostasy comes first and the man of sin is revealed . .. who . .. gives himself out as if he were God." 2 Thes. 3-4
*
TAN BOOKS AND PUBLISHERS, INC.
Rockford, Illinois 61105
PUBLISHER'S PREFACE
Originally issued in 1951, the The Reign of Antichrist forms a companion volume to The Prophets and Our Times (1941) and is very much like the latter in scope and content. Two important differences in the books, however, should be noted: The Reign of Antichrist comprises Biblical prophecies as well as saintly prophecies; whereas, The Prophets and Our Times covers saintly prophecies almost entirely. Secondly, The Reign of Antichrist deals with a slightly different period of time, that, obviously of the individual Antichrist; The Prophets and Our Times deals with the period just before the reign of Antichrist, a period dominated by the Great Monarch. A careful reading of these two books will indicate that the time of the Great Monarch more or less prefigures that of Antichrist, although the two personages have generally reversed roles; that is, the times of both men are calamitous for the Catholic Church and for society. The Great Monarch's ascension to power ends the turmoil and initiates an unprecedented peace; on the other hand, Antichrist's coming to power ends the great peace and prosperity of the Great Monarch and heralds the most dreadful situation for both Church and society, which situation ends in the second coming of Our Lord.
The present work is by no means perfect, and all readers should recognize this before they start. Our purpose in reprinting it is twofold: It is a wonderful source book, one from which students of the subject can make an excellent beginning and from which, perhaps some really good student of eschatology, using other existing sources also, can give us a truly authoritative work on the subject. Secondly, there is practically nothing in print in this area that is even remotely reliable. History of Antichrist, by Rev. P. Huchede (1884) is a notable exception, being not only authoritative, but brief and highly readable. Our suggestion is that this book be read before The Reign of Antichrist, if possible, or at least shortly thereafter; it is an excellent outline of Catholic teaching relative to Antichrist. A first reading of Father Huchede's book should be followed by one where the reader looks up all the Biblical passages cited there. In this manner, the subject becomes extremely clear. Father Huchede bases his thesis upon Scripture, Tradition, and the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. Father Culleton, however, actually quotes the passages from scripture and the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, plus gives numerous sources of written tradition; added to these, moreover, he quotes many saints and holy people who possessed the gift of prophecy themselves. Having all these prophetic passages under one cover singularizes The Reign of Antichrist as a unique and valuable book in its field.
A word of warning needs to be interjected here. Saintly prophecies are not "of faith" (de fide pronouncements) and most of the Biblical prophecies regarding Antichrist have not been given official interpretation; consequently, we must observe precaution in interpreting them and in basing our actions upon them, especially until the Church has made judgment in their regard. Nonetheless, these prophecies, both Biblical and saintly, were given and intended for our enlightenment and should not be casually put aside. "Despise not prophecies," says St. Paul, "but prove all things." (1 Thes. 5:20-21). Also he tells us, "Follow after charity, be zealous for spiritual gifts; but rather that you may prophesy ... He that prophesieth, speaketh to men unto edification, and exhortation, and comfort ... He that prophesieth, edifieth the church ... For greater is he that prophesieth, than he that speaketh with tongues." (1 Cor. 14:1,3,4,5). We would indeed be most foolish if we debunked the prophecies Father Culleton has gathered together here, for they form an impressive collection, probably the most thorough treatment on the subject in print. Perhaps it is even providential that the book is being reissued at this time, along with The Prophets and Our Times as well. Together, these two books tell quite a story about the future. And the great divergence of the sources of the prophecies cited is itself the most compelling argument for their validity.
Needless to say, the doctrine on Antichrist is very much a part of our Catholic theology and Tradition, and as such, must be considered carefully by all men, the learned and the unlearned alike, for the Antichrist, when he comes, will affect the lives of all men. Based upon the firmness of their faith and the correctness of their knowledge, men will either apostatize or remain faithful to Christ and His Church. Thus, it will be seen that a knowledge of the prophecies regarding Antichrist is of an immensely practical nature.
We have omitted from the book the secret messages of the La Salette apparition (1846-approved by the Church in 1851), and the reader will find under Number 337 on page 163 a note to this effect. Pages 164 through 170 are missing entirely and only part of pages 163 and 171 appear. In the proper place we have explained why this was done. Other than that, a correction has been made concerning the "Secret of Fatima" on page 186. The wording of the original edition was not precisely what it should have been, and the author issued with each book a preface sheet containing also some corrections; this particular correction we have thought to include new in the body of the book, as well as two others of merely typographical nature. The balance of the author's loose-leaf enclosure has been added as the "Author's Preface."
Some readers no doubt will question Father Culleton's including Number 315, the prophecy of Michael Nostradamus (page 144) because Nostradamus was an astrologer, or at least a student of that subject. Presumably, this was due to Nostradamus' great overall accuracy as a prophet. Although Jewish by birth, he was a Catholic and apparently a very devout one. Moreover, he believed his prophetic foresight was so accurate that he scrambled his quatrains (the enigmatic, four-line verses in which he cast most of his prophecies), in order that people would not be too frightened of the future. Cultivation of the occult sciences is of course forbidden, but to what extent he relied upon astrology to make his predictions, if at all, I do not know. Nonetheless, his reputation for accuracy is great; however, in the particular predictions Father Culleton quotes here, he seems to have made several errors. But the same is true for the predictions of Father Theophilus Reisinger, O.F.M., Cap. (No. 369; page 222), the renowned exorcist of Earling, Iowa fame, popularized by the booklet Begone Satan.
This leads immediately into the question of errors in saintly prophecies. Does this obvious element of error vitiate the entire book. I do not believe it does, and for the following reasons: First, prophecies are about the future, and events, spiritually speaking, are greatly dependent upon the moral quality of human lives; when mankind improves his behavior, he can forestall or remove imminent catastrophe from happening. The prophet might be predicting in the sense of "if conditions do not change, then..." Second, a prophet may simply be misquoted. Third, he may be misinterpreted. And finally, the person in question may not in fact have the prophetic gift, as I believe is the case with Father Reisinger, whose forte or charisma was exorcism; the prediction given by him was through a second party, a mystic who received a locution.
Over all, however, the reader will see that most of Father Culleton's book contains passages that tend to support one another and which in general elucidate what Sacred Scripture has to say on Antichrist, and it is for this reason that we have reissued his book. May it bring enlightenment to its readers on this sorely abused subject, and may it inspire people today to turn to a serious spirituality in their lives, as the only valid bulwark to the onslaught of "the man of sin," a spirituality including prayer, penance, good works, spiritual reading, and frequenting the Sacraments, the formula laid down by the saints for spiritual perfection. This, after all, should be the end result of all our reading-growth in holiness so that we may earn salvation through the merits of Our Lord Jesus Christ, no matter what it may be our fate to live through.
Thomas A. Nelson July 1, 1974 Feast of the Precious Blood
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| "The Prophets and Our Times" by Fr. Culleton |
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Posted by: Elizabeth - 01-21-2021, 01:16 PM - Forum: Catholic Prophecy
- Replies (17)
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You can download the book in multiple formats at this link: https://archive.org/details/TheProphetsA...s/mode/2up
THE PROPHETS
AND
OUR TIMES
By
R. GERALD CULLETON
"It shall come to pall in the last days. says the Lord, that I will pour forth of my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughtera shall prophesy. and your young men shall see visions. and your old men shall dream dreams. And moreover upon my servants and upon my handmaids in those days will I pour forth of my Spirit, and they shall prophesy."
( Acts 2: 17-1 8)
"In all ages men have been divinely instructed in mallers expediem for the salvation of the elect ... and in all ages there have been persona possessed of the spirit of prophesy. not for the purpose of announcing neW doctrines, but to direct human actions."
(St. Thomas: Summa: 2: 2 :174 :Res. et ad 3)
TAN BOOKS AND PUBLISHERS, INC.
Rockford, Illinois 61105
PUBLISHER'S PREFACE
A few words need to be said about reissuing Father Gerald Culleton's The Prophets and Our Times. First of all it is now thirty-three years since the book was first published, and Father Culleton had an idea the world was then witnessing the events foretold by the prophecies he had recorded, the colossal occurence of that time being of course, World War II, the greatest struggle the world has ever known. Yet, from our view we realize those prophecies he presented and interpreted have not been fulfilled. Then too, there appeared in 1970 Mr. Yves Dupont's Catholic Prophecy-The Coming Chastisement, which for its brevity and command of the significance of the prophecies' meaning, has no equal in any book that I am familiar with, and certainly the present volume will not replace his nor eliminate the need of students interested in this subject reading Catholic Prophecy as well. Father Culleton's work traces many of the same prophecies as Mr. Dupont's and in general restricts itself to the same era; however, Father's book is considerably larger and more comprehensive in its coverage, for which reason, mainly, we have thought to reprint it. Added to this, however, is the general accuracy of The Prophets and Our Times, despite Father's penchant for interpreting the prophecies as being fulfilled by the events of his day.
Probably the most provocative characteristic of this book, especially to readers who have had no introduction to the subject, is the cohesiveness of the various prophecies-how they coalesce, dovetail, agree, and complement one another-this despite the fact that they were made in different centuries, from the fourth down to our own, and at times generally when transportation and communication were very poor, a factor which would preclude collusion (this is virtually unthinkable, given the conditions). The question arises then, do these prophecies, taken together, form a body of knowledge, or even a quasi body of knowledge? The author certainly treats them as if they do. Still the contemporary reader will ask: "Well, do they?" This, I believe, each person will have to answer for himself, based largely upon the interior evidence of the prophecies themselves. For my own part, I think they do. This judgment, however, is more mature than perhaps most readers will be able to make and comes from having read in various books prophecies other than those appearing here or in any recent editions, all of which prophecies I feel fit the general pattern laid down by Father Culleton in The Prophets and Our Times. Moreover, it has been my good fortune to come across a number of books from which he draws his material, some of these over a hundred years old. The impression which a reading of these older books gives, most decidedly, is that people in those days were just as interested in the prophecies as we are today, and the writers of those books were extremely careful to cite their sources and would be judged by their work as sane, sensible and careful academicians, giving most scrupulously their own sources and filling in many details about the lives of the various saintly prophets. In this regard I am thinking especially of The Christian Trumpet. The present author, moreover, has not exerpted all that he could from these books, but rather has selected only the most apropos material.
If we are to grant that this group of prophecies forms a sort of corpus of knowledge, what are the general outlines of this information? Here, I believe, we all owe a great debt to Father Culleton for his grouping of this information into two general categories, the first of which he covers in the present book and the second of which he treats in his Reign of Antichrist (1951), also being reissued concomitantly with the present book, and one which the reader, if he is interested in this subject at all will surely want to peruse, in order to flesh out his view or perspective of events. In general, the information covered by his two books concerns the time of Antichrist, on the one hand, and the time generally which precedes it, on the other. The time preceding Antichrist we might well refer to as the "dress rehearsal" period. Now the time of the Antichrist will be the most distressing the world has ever known, and the Bible is very explicit in specifying that his reign will last three and one-half years or forty-two months or 1,290 days. These figures are given in several different places in the Bible (Daniel 12:7; 12:11; Apoc. 11:2-3; 13:14), in order that, it would seem, we do not in any way understand them symbolically; the reason for this is obvious: God wishes to console the good people of that time with the knowledge of precisely when their great tribulation will end-in truly :t touching measure of His mercy toward frail humanity. Shortly after the end of Antichrist comes the End of Time, the most prophesied event in the Bible, otherwise referred to as "the Day of the Lord," which is a time not to be longed for: "Woe to them that desire the day of the Lord" says the prophet Amos (5: 18). In the view of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Day of the Lord immediately precedes the General Judgment. At that time Our Lord returns in triumph and in judgment as the Lord of lords and King of kings. Now, the whole affair is so jmportant, it would seem, considering both the Biblical prophecies and the saintly prophecies (which Father: Culleton concerns himself with here), that it is not sufficient for it simply to happen once. Rather it seems we are to have a foretaste of both the agony and the joys at that later set of events, during a time which serves very much as a warning to the world. This period is dominated by the personage of the Great Monarch: the world in his time enters a severe period of tension (social, political, and religious), which eventuates in terrific military struggles (none of which appear to be Armageddon, it might be added), the final result being the world-wide triumph of this Catholic prince, under whom and through whose influence virtually the entire world becomes Catholic. During his reign there is unprecedented peace, prosperity, and progress. But toward the end of his time, the stiffnecked, hard-hearted men of that day descend once more into widespread sin, and shortly after the Great Monarch, Antichrist makes his appearance. Just as Our Lord at His second coming, the Great Monarch is a king of kings and lord of lords, who rules in justice and who brings an unheralded Pax Christiana, thus it would seem, forming a "type of Christ" in His second coming. Such, then, is a rough delineation of the events recorded in Father Culleton's two books. whether or not it is valid the reader can judge for himself.
A number of other questions arises in this regard which might be considered briefly. "Are we in the Great Apostasy)" mentioned by St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians, Chapter 2? One encounters among troubled Catholics today a good deal of mention about this. The answer is that it would seem we are not, but in view of the "dress rehearsal" concept elucidated above, we are most certainly experiencing a serious loss of faith on the part of a large portion of the Catholic population; yet many are still holding fast, despite the confusion rampant in the Church. When the reader has read the prophecies contained here, he will begin to see that most likely "the eat Apostasy" will come after the reign of the Great Monarch and refers to the general falling away after his time.
It might well be asked, "Are we close to the End of Time, or to the time of Antichrist?" Many authoritative writers think that we are. Personally, I, would not discount the possibility, especially since some of the conditions are now fulfilled, and it takes little imagination to see how others could be. In this regard writers, and even saints, have been mistaken in the past, for which reason none of us should be too hasty to say yes to this question. Referring to the End of Time, Our Lord Himself told us, "But of that day or hour no man knoweth, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father." (Mk. 13: 32). Nonetheless, we are certain that it will come and come "as a thief in the night." (1Thess. 5:2). St. Paul tells us that Our Lord will return "in very little while" (Heb. 10:37), and St. Peter tells us that "one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" (2 Pet. 3:8), from which we can safely infer that the present Christian era is not going to be all that long. If indeed we are close to the End of Time, or at least close to or beginning the "dress rehearsal" period, it would seem providential chat these prophecies would be made known now on so widespread a basis, enabling those who thus desire to be advised on the matter.
"Have some of the prophecies about the first of these two periods ill fact been fulfilled?" The answer to this question is yes, some of these prophecies seem to be coming true, notably the widespread loss of faith, confusion in the Church (even in matters of Faith), bankruptcy of the democracies in Western Europe (that is to say their inability to cope with problems of labor, inflation, political unrest, social justice, international finance, and simple "planning for the future"). Already, we are hearing more and more about an imminent eruption in Italy, which will be one of the hallmarks of the period of the Great Monarch. Given the space to develop the notion in a substantive way, and citing additional prophecies to this effect, I believe I could quite easily support this answer.
Despite the fact that these prophecies, taken together, form a compelling tract, we must remember that they are not dogma, that is, do not concern de fide pronouncements of the Church. They are simply given for our instruction, to help us, it would seem, in a trying time. If some good Catholics choose not to accept them or choose to lay little stock in them, it is not the duty of any one of us to coerce his mind into assent (as if that were possible). These prophecies are not needed for salvation, but they may indeed be needed for sanity, and certainly for hope, by some or many of us. Indeed, there is a great deal of hope in the personages of the Great Monarch and the Angelic Pastor (a holy Pope) mentioned here. They are truly romantic figures, in the best sense of the word, and so much after the style of God, who in His action among men tends to be both simple and surprising, subtle and irresistible; in His own good time surely something like the events predicted in this book are bound to occur-they are, as it were almost wrapped up part and parcel in the confusion of the world's current life. With the development of that confusion, so trying on us all, is bound to emerge the solution from a most unpredictable quarter. Hence, the enemies of God and of His
Holy Church will not know where or how to prepare themselves to resist successfully the advent of the Great Monarch. God will nurture this man in His own manner, who the prophecies seem to indicate, will not even be known to himself until a late moment. When that man finally takes the field, it will be all over for the enemies of God, despite their numerical superiority and seeming greater power.
With these thoughts in mind we are pleased to reissue The Prophets and Our Times and hope that it will bring enlightenment and consolation to those who read it.
Thomas A. Nelson
June 26, 1974
Feast of Sts. John and Paul
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| Devotion for the Dying |
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Posted by: Hildegard of Bingen - 01-21-2021, 01:13 PM - Forum: Prayers and Devotionals
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The following information is taken from the 2021 Traditional Liturgical Calendar from Canada.
DEVOTION FOR THE DYING
"Will you not join with our dear Heavenly Mother Mary
in this work to save many of these souls who otherwise,
without our prayers, will go to hell?"
- Bl. Mother Mary Potter
Devotion for the Dying
The Month of the Holy Family - January
Mother Mary Potter and the Little Company of Mary
After making her total consecration to Jesus through Mary, Mother Mary Potter was drawn to praying for the dying.
She established an order, the Little Company of Mary, which cared for the sick and dying and prayed for all the dying.
She realized the importance of having persons in a state of grace near a deathbed. A person in a state of grace carries
God with him and so their presence has a great power against the attacks of the devil at the time of death.
Her desire was to have people all over the world and at all times praying and sacrificing for the sols of the dying who had
lost sanctifying grace or who where about to despair of God's mercy.
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| Religious and Monastic Life Explained by Dom Gueranger |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-21-2021, 12:36 PM - Forum: Resources Online
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RELIGIOUS AND MONASTIC LIFE EXPLAINED
AUTHORIZED VERSION FROM THE FRENCH OF RT. REV. DOM PROSPER GUÉRANGER, O.S.B. ABBOT OF SOLESMES
BY REV. JEROME VETH, O.S.B. CONCEPTION ABBEY, CONCEPTION, MO.
PUBLISHED BY B. HERDER, 17 SOUTH BROADWAY, ST. LOUIS, MO., 1908
SANDS & CO., LONDON AND EDINBURGH
B. HERDER, FREIBURG (BADEN)
NIHIL OBSTAT.
F. G. HOLWECK, Censor
S. Ludovici, die 22. Sept. 1908.
IMPRIMATUR.
+ JOHANNES J. GLENNON, Archepiscopus S. Ludovici.
S. Ludovici, die 23. Sept. 1908.
Copyright, 1908, by Joseph Gummersbach.
CONTENTS
PREFACE OF THE TRANSLATOR
PREFACE TO THE FRENCH EDITION
I. ESSENCE OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE
II. ESSENCE OF THE MONASTIC LIFE
1. Separation from the World
2. Divine Service
3. Monastic Work
4. Mortification of the Body
5. Community Life
6. Works of Zeal for our Neighbour
III. ON THE EXCELLENCE AND OBSERVANCE OF THE RULE
IV. ON THE ESSENTIAL FOUNDATION OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE
V. ON FAITH
VI. ON HOPE
VII. ON THE LOVE OF GOD
VIII. ON THE LOVE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
IX. ON PERFECTION
X. ON THE IMITATION OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
XI. ON THE EVANGELICAL COUNSELS
1. Religious Poverty
2. Chastity
3. Religious Obedience
PREFACE OF THE TRANSLATOR
In presenting this translation of that most valuable work, commonly known as “Réglement,” from the prolific pen of the learned and ascetic Abbot Dom Prosper Guéranger, it is our aim to meet, to some extent, a long felt necessity and oft-expressed desire that it be made accessible to our English-speaking brethren. Though our labour may not be crowned with the same success as that of the renowned author, we hope, nevertheless, that this work will find a hearty welcome and approval. May God graciously accept it as an instrument for showering His richest blessings on all who faithfully seek Him in the religious state.
THE TRANSLATOR.
Conception, Mo., June 13, 1908.
Feast of St. Anthony.
PREFACE TO THE FRENCH EDITION
Many religious houses have requested us to communicate to them the instructions which Dom Guéranger left us for the training of novices. We do it willingly, convinced that these few pages may be studied with advantage.
FR. CHARLES COUTURIER
Abbot of Solesmes.
Solesmes, Feast of the Ascension, May 14, 1885.
RELIGIOUS AND MONASTIC LIFE
CHAPTER I - ESSENCE OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE
The religious life embraces three fundamental objects:
1. Penance for sins committed; wherefore it is called conversion.
2. The imitation of Jesus Christ by the fulfilment of His precepts and counsels; in consequence of which the religious becomes like to Him.
3. Union with God, even in this world, by Charity.
Now, this union cannot be reached until certain obstacles encountered in man are removed. They are of a threefold nature, namely, the attachment, lawful though it may be, to earthly possessions, which chains man to the goods of this world; the pleasures of the senses, which divide the heart of man between God and the creature; self-will, which disturbs the harmony between the will of God and the will of man. True renunciation by poverty of spirit and of deed removes the obstacle presented by the attachment to earthly possessions; perfect purity of body, heart and soul, that of sensual pleasures, and sincere obedience to the will of another as unto the will of God breaks the attachment to self-will.
The religious life is not a transient, but a permanent state. This poverty, chastity and obedience should, then, become, as it were, the second nature of the religious, and inseparable from him. Now, this is accomplished at the taking of the perpetual vows, which alone constitute one a member of the religious state.
Once having entered upon this permanent state of religion, man is bound to strive after perfection. Now perfection consists in the love of God, or charity; and charity unites the soul with God.
Religion likewise effects the imitation of Jesus Christ; for the entire life of our Saviour involves the three virtues which form the matter of the vows.
Religion, lastly, accomplishes most perfectly amendment of life and true penance in those who profess it, by opposing to the three ailments of sinful man three wholesome remedies, which being applied effect the atonement for sin as well as the acquisition of the virtues.
Such is the general idea you should have of the religious life. Ponder over it unceasingly, and behold in it the aim proposed at the beginning of the novitiate. And since you are about to embrace the religious life in its monastic form, it is important for you to become familiar with the rule of life according to which you desire to consecrate yourselves to God.
CHAPTER II - ESSENCE OF THE MONASTIC LIFE
The principal characteristics of monastic life are:
1. Separation from the world by the enclosure and the habit.
2. The daily solemnization of the Divine Office.
3. Work.
4. Mortification of the body.
5. Community life.
6. Works of zeal towards our neighbour (if obedience allows or demands them).
Having given this definition of monastic life, it will next be expedient to consider its different elements in particular, as also the manner of practically applying them in the novitiate.
1. Separation from the World.
The monastic life is, by its very nature, a retired life. Hence it requires of those who profess it that they live within the precincts of the monastery. The separation from the world should be the literal fulfilment of this word of our Lord Jesus Christ: “Everyone that hath left father or mother” and of that other one: “Come, follow me.” This clearly shows that the monastic spirit is one of retirement, characterized by the religious enclosure.
The monastery must be considered the place of our sojourn until death. We should have such predeliction for this retirement that our love of the enclosure will not diminish when, after profession, obedience occasionally summons us to appear in the world.
Behold in the isolation from dear relatives, which will henceforth be your lot, the essential fulfilment of the counsel of Jesus Christ. This separation will be the touchstone of your vocation and also the matter of the sacrifice upon which the religious life rests as its foundation.
Though you have resolved to live away from your relatives, beware of the idea that a perfect religious must renounce all filial affection for them. On the contrary, purified by divine charity, this affection will only become the more active, tender and faithful. What is said here of one’s family applies also to relations with friends left in the world, provided these bonds of friendship are honourable and virtuous.
Though you live shut up in the bosom of the novitiate, circumstances may demand a renewal of former ties. Each order has in this regard its special regulations which must be duly learned and observed.
The external enclosure avails but little, unless the spirit of the world be banished from the heart. Be intent, therefore, on blotting out all worldly memories; appraise all things according to the spirit of Religion which is opposed to the spirit of the world; shun all worldly manners, and observe, without affectation, that gravity and modesty of deportment becoming to the state you desire to embrace. In your intercourse with people of the world, you must take care not to lose your aversion to the spirit of the world; let your behaviour be edifying to everyone with whom you may come in contact.
Hold in great reverence the religious habit, which is the visible sign of separation from the world, and daily put it on with this sentiment. Be careful to keep it clean; never take it off without necessity, and always wear it when you appear outside of your cell.
2. Divine Service.
“Let naught be preferred to the work of God.” It is in these words that our holy Father St. Benedict teaches us to look upon divine service as the noblest and most useful of our daily exercises. For it naturally follows, that he who has left all things for God should make it his first duty to give himself up to God.
Your fidelity to your vocation will justly be measured by your zeal for the divine service. This zeal will manifest itself not only in the choir service, but also in the care bestowed upon learning the rules of the Divine Office, the sacred chant and ceremonies.
Do not be satisfied with conscientiously carrying out the instructions of the rubrics and the text of the Breviary; let your pious attention embrace also the entirety of the Divine Office and thus render yourselves fit for its performance. The pitch and inflection of the voice and the manner of proceeding in all the general and particular ceremonies are also points for observation. Do not consider attention to these details a distraction, but often entreat God that you may acquit yourselves in His service with dignity, recollection, modesty and precision.
Apply yourselves with zeal to the sacred chant, seeking only the glory of God. Should you experience any prejudice against the sacred chant, do not yield to it; resist it manfully, and remember that God will exact an account of you in this respect. And even if you should not arrive at great perfection in this matter, the very thought of having prevented the disturbances always occasioned by an undisciplined voice will be of great consolation to you.
With regard to the readings in choir, let the quantity and accent of syllables be observed with exactness. Do not become discouraged if up to this time you have been neglectful of such an essential point.
Be always well prepared when you are about to participate in any sacred function, and your conscience will afterwards have no reason to accuse you for your short-comings in the presence of the Divine Majesty. Finally, be zealous in mastering every detail so that when, after your profession, you are called upon to fulfil the functions of hebdomadary, you may be a source of edification to all.
Neglect not the proper recollection before the Divine Office. Employ the moments at the so-called “station” in raising your hearts to God and in preparing yourselves to appear before Him. During the procession into the church, everything that may distract the recollected mind must be avoided. Having arrived at your place in choir, make the necessary preparations and thrust aside every thought not pertaining to the divine praise. Take proper notice of the sacred chant and ceremonies that you may be edified in them, avoiding at the same time all looks and motions which only distract you from the great object which should receive your full attention.
Let the different bows, viz., the simple, medium or moderate and profound, be made from deep religious feeling and not from mere habit. Do not fail, at the end of the psalms and hymns, to unite with the particular intention of adoring the Holy Trinity which is associated with the mystery celebrated or the Saint honoured on the day in question.
Once convinced that its familiar use will constitute a long step on the way to contemplation, we shall learn to appreciate the sacred psalmody which has been, as it were, the daily bread of the Saints of our holy Order. Let us, therefore, ask this grace of God and also that of understanding and relishing the other parts of the Divine Office.
When singing or reciting, you must lovingly penetrate into the sense of the words and make it your own. Note carefully the tender allusions used by our Holy Mother the Church in her liturgical formulas that you may be nourished by the hidden manna which strengthens the soul and endows it with understanding for the holy things of God. Gratefully call to mind, during the course of the day, the various impressions received on those occasions from the Holy Ghost that you may merit to receive new ones.
Whatever is sung or recited by the hebdomadary, especially the daily collect, to which we ought to have a particular devotion, should be followed with pious attention. Care must also be taken that the different bows at the Prayers and the other recitations be properly observed.
We must keep before us the fact that the Church constantly uses the chant at divine service to express the ardour of the sentiments produced in her by the Holy Ghost. From this we justly conclude that the disposition with which we ought to celebrate the Divine Office is that of holy enthusiasm for the sacred mysteries. Let us act in accordance with the word of our holy Father St. Benedict, who says that we should “assist at His (God’s) praises in such a manner that heart and voice may accord.”
Let us sing with interest, docility and humility, shunning everything that savours of effeminacy, vanity or caprice. Always bear in mind that the chant when disfigured by human presumption is not pleasing to God. Our song is destined to mingle with the angelic praises, and this thought will certainly be an incentive urging us to watch over nature during the performance of such a sacred function.
Let our esteem for the divine service to which we have pledged ourselves be increased, as this supreme homage to the Divine Majesty is less common in our days, on account of the violent and sacrilegious suppression of so many monasteries and convents whose walls once resounded with the holy praises. Often give thanks to God that He has chosen you to promote and transmit to posterity the traditions of public prayer, and ask Him with the Prophet that the voices of those who celebrate His holy name be heard and multiplied.
Let us shrink with horror from the worldly idea that the time passed in choir would be better employed in study or other exercises of piety; as if any work could be compared with the liturgical prayer in dignity, importance and efficacy; as if the prayer of the Church, offered up to God under conditions laid down by herself, were not, after the Holy Sacrifice and the administration of the Sacraments, the most profitable and holy work performed on earth.
Far from entertaining such unworthy notions which savour of a dangerous materialism, let us rather deplore our inability to imitate the holy fervour of our forefathers who rose for divine service at midnight and prolonged the office of the day far beyond our strength.
Let this consideration stimulate us zealously to execute whatsoever the Constitutions prescribe concerning the Divine Office and endure with joy the blessed hardships which may at times be exacted from us during the celebration of the great ceremonies.
3. Monastic Work.
The monastic life rests on divine service and work as on two hinges. By the former we devote ourselves to God; by the latter we meritoriously occupy those hours which our frail spirits do not allow us to devote to contemplation.
Monastic work, therefore, is an homage paid to God; for this very reason it should be commenced with prayer and carried on in the spirit of prayer. Hence, cherish great affection for this fundamental principle of our calling, and realize that the monk should always be found seriously occupied, the hours of recreation excepted. And even these serve only to render the soul more disposed for further prayer and work.
You must acquire now, for all your life time, the habit of fleeing from idleness which is, as our holy Patriarch tells us, the enemy of the soul. Above all things, do not surrender yourselves to empty imaginations which enervate the mind and deaden the senses for what is holy. Remember that diligent work abates the passions and prevents a multitude of sins. Offering up to God all your moments, you will secure final perseverance and acquire an immense amount of merit. If it be somewhat hard for you to submit to labour, rouse yourselves by the thought that it is a punishment imposed on sinful man by the Almighty. You will then gather sufficient strength to accept it with a humble and heroic heart, as our first parents received this sentence from their Creator. Consider that the Son of God assumed our human nature to set us the example and to make us understand that work is one of the first duties of man and a powerful means of reparation.
In order that our work may be meritorious and truly religious, it must conform to the dictates of obedience. Natural inclination and human fancy may also produce deeds praised and esteemed by men; but such deeds will not find an eternal reward on the day of retribution. Therefore, let most perfect obedience accompany all your works; follow most minutely the plan laid out for the proper use of your time, and do nothing beyond it without previous permission.
If the work enjoined happen to correspond with your anticipation, sanctify this attraction by frequently offering it up to God that He may graciously work in and by you. If the work be less inviting, then remember that one of the aims pursued in religious life is to break with self-will; that it is always better and safer to counteract than to follow this attraction.
Nor forget that you must perform the work for the glory of God, who will some day repay it with interest. Take heed that you do not acquit yourself of this duty as a hireling, but prove, by your zeal, that you really seek God in this second means of the religious state. Thus you shall obtain the assistance of God and often find your zeal blessed from on high and rewarded with unexpected progress.
We distinguish two kinds of monastic work: mental and manual. The first is the more excellent when directed towards a supernatural end and regulated by obedience; the second is also of great value, because it humbles the pride of man and consecrates the body to the service of God.
You will be employed in both, but especially in mental work. Let all your studies and your reading ultimately aim at advancement in the knowledge of God and His mysteries, the love of holy Church and the acquisition of those virtues which are most essential to the religious. With the will thus disposed, mental work will undoubtedly be most profitable for your spiritual welfare.
You will, on the other hand, submit also to manual labour. For you will be indiscriminately appointed to the more lowly services of the house, as sweeping, helping in the kitchen, working in the garden, etc. Father Master will determine the time for such work and whether you work together or each one for himself.
4. Mortification of the Body.
Mortification of the body is another essential element and principal characteristic of the monastic life. Hold it, therefore, in great esteem, convinced that a rule which lacks this element, however excellent it may be otherwise, cannot claim a place among the monastic rules.
Recall to memory the mortified life of St. John the Baptist, the austerities of the Fathers of the desert, the life of our holy Patriarch and the other Saints of our Order, and you will be more and more confirmed in the conviction that the struggle against the flesh by means of bodily mortification is a prime factor of the monk’s life.
This conviction will be strengthened the more one considers the necessity of reparation for the sinner who enters the monastery with the special purpose of working out the amendment of his life; the great help which is gained by the soul in humiliating the flesh; the vanity of those who, contrary to the example of the Saints, pretend to arrive at spiritual mortification without employing bodily chastisement, and, lastly, the inestimable advantage of participating in the bodily and mental sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Such thoughts as these make it easy to recognize the wisdom of the penitential practices which our holy Patriarch has established in the holy Rule, especially fasting and abstinence from flesh-meat. And since these venerable and salutary prescriptions have been modified by holy Church, making allowance for our weakness, we will adhere the more energetically to what is left us of these holy practices.
Veneration for these precious remnants of the ancient observance should manifest itself in every way possible and should inspire us to bear the burden they impose with resolute endurance and the utmost precision. Let the novices always speak of them respectfully and support one another by setting the example of observing them faithfully. Should their health demand some indulgence at the beginning, they will avail themselves, in simplicity of heart, of such as may be granted and ask God to give them more strength that soon they too may join their brethren in this holy work.
As for such bodily works of mortification as are not prescribed by the Constitutions, none shall be practised of one’s own accord or without the special permission of the Father Master.
Let the thought of mortification stimulate you to suffer without complaint, even contentedly and with cheerfulness, the inconveniences resulting from the inclemency of the seasons, from coarse diet or its defective preparation, from less comfortable lodging, from sickness and indisposition or from the observance of the rule. But if, nevertheless, you have reason to think that your health should be taken into consideration, then you should inform Father Master. This being done, leave the whole matter in the hands of God, accepting with equanimity the alleviation granted - or continuing to bear with good will the yoke of the religious life, should it not be thought proper to yield to your weakness.
5. Community Life.
The monastic life is a life in common. The spirit of God has designed it thus that the monk may find a powerful help in the example of his fellow-religious and acquire a high degree of merit in the exercise of fraternal charity.
This being the case, regard with reverence the family life which you are called upon to lead. Learn to appreciate its advantages and promote its spirit in yourselves and others. Rejoice at seeing others participate in the favours of which you are the special object, and love one another as brethren who have been called together by the same vocation. Take pleasure in the company of your brethren, because the Holy Ghost Himself has chosen and united you for one and the same end. Let the joys, as well as the afflictions, be in common, and let your familiar intercourse preserve intact the mutual respect which is due.
Encourage one another in perseverance and progress, and offer up your fervent prayers for those brethren who labour under temptation or trial. Studiously avoid every word or expression that might in any way be offensive to your brethren or induce them to relax their efforts to attain the perfection to which all ought to aspire.
Besides cherishing an interior affection for one another, show also by outward acts that you are united by mutual charity. Endeavour always to vie with one another in politeness, conceding mutually in word and deed and detesting whatever savours of selfishness.
Those who have been honoured by admission to Holy Orders, will always recollect their own unworthiness of such a sublime dignity, and never exalt themselves above others who have not yet received this favour.
God often permits religious vocation to bring together persons of quite opposite natural dispositions. Therefore, let us be on our guard against every form of antipathy which the devil may endeavour to enkindle by means of these differences. Use all your energy to overcome every feeling of antipathy and, at the same time, take care not to yield to those blind and purely natural attractions by which you would become attached to this or that one of your brethren in particular. Moreover, be ever careful to correct whatever might possibly injure the family spirit, which should be the common bond of all.
Should anyone perceive in himself a tendency towards isolation, that source of misanthropy which can so soon render community life loathsome, let him not yield to this dangerous temptation. Such a one must summon all his will-power to overcome it at the very outset by prayer and also by repeated and persevering efforts, lest this disposition should awaken in him a spirit of pride and expose him to the danger of losing his vocation.
The family spirit will inspire the novices to be frankly subject to their Reverend Father Master, who, as their chief and guide, is the immediate bond of unity of their society. Let them manifest due respect for the monks, in comparison with whom they are children and should see in everyone of them a father and cherish filial affection towards the Abbot, as Christ’s representative in the monastery.
Cultivate, too, sincere attachment to our Order. Incessantly beseech our Lord to protect, maintain and increase it for His glory and for the welfare and the sanctification of souls. Do not undervalue the mode of life pursued therein. It is recognized and approved by the Apostolic See as being in conformity with the spirit of St. Benedict. Consequently, this mode of life justly claims the respect of all the children of the Church; how much more should it be reverenced by those whom divine grace has led to the novitiate.
Never allow yourselves, under the pretext that they are followed more exactly elsewhere, the least criticism concerning the manner of observing the rules. Remember that a novice has not yet taken upon himself any obligation and is therefore at liberty to direct his steps whithersoever his inclination may lead him. But if some should not feel any attraction towards the Order, its spirit or its administration, let it be understood that for them community life will be unbearable. It is the duty of such to withdraw from a mode of life which will never gain the allegiance of their thoughts and intentions.
This family spirit, founded on our relations to Divine Providence, should not lessen in us due appreciation of the other Rules and Constitutions approved by the Holy See.
Far from harbouring any prejudice against them, let us fervently pray for the preservation and extension of all the various religious Orders, take a lively interest in their progress and sympathize with them when pressed by misfortune.
6. Works of Zeal for our Neighbour.
Although one of the essentials of monastic life is separation from the world, we must, nevertheless, beware of the idea that the monk may possibly arrive at the perfection proper to his state without including zeal for his neighbour in his intentions and mode of life. “And He” (the Lord), says Ecclesiasticus (xvii, 12), “gave to every one of them commandment concerning his neighbour.” Monastic life tends to draw man nearer to God by submission and love. So the monk, entering into the spirit of his vocation, should be carried away by a holy zeal for the welfare of his neighbour, the great and eternal occupation of God, for which end He delivered up even His only-begotten Son.
Let no one imagine that monastic life consists exclusively in working out our own perfection, regardless of the sanctification of our neighbour. Let us rather bear in mind that the good works performed in the Church affect the entire mystic body of Jesus Christ, in consequence of the communion of Saints. Accordingly, the intentions of each one of the faithful ought to extend beyond his own person. From its very institution, the religious state was particularly destined by our Lord to become, as regards its merits, a treasury of good works for all, and the Divine Office, which forms the chief work of the monk, bestows on him the function of a universal intercessor. In one word, nothing can be more contrary to charity, which is the distinguishing mark of every true disciple of Christ, than a petty occupation with self, which would conceal from the eyes of the monk the needs of those who will always remain his brethren.
Let us, therefore, constantly long for the kingdom of God, the immediate object of the second petition in the Lord’s Prayer. This petition includes also the conversion of Jews and infidels, the return of schismatics and heretics, the repentance of sinners, the perseverance of the just and the perfection of those souls which are called by God to a closer union with Him even in this world. These considerations enable us to observe how often we ourselves have been aided and advanced by others in the work of our conversion. Being still supported by them in our progress, we would do wrong in yielding to selfish indifference and in looking at things from a point of view which is not that of God. All our desires, intentions, prayers, penitential and religious works should be offered up to God in a spirit of zeal and charity for our neighbour. Faithfully fostered in us, this sentiment will preserve us from that cold and indifferent spirit with which the world so often reproaches the inmates of religious institutions.
You must not, however, limit yourselves to hidden and interior conviction. Exercise, from the very beginning of the novitiate, as far as circumstances permit, apostolic zeal, cheering one another by your good example, behaviour and conversation, by labouring for the maintenance and development of the religious spirit and confirming those who might waver in their vocation. As to your relatives and friends in the world, you should resolve, according to the degree of intercourse that will be granted you, to encourage them in the right and induce them to abandon any evil or error into which they may unhappily have been led.
Husband the time before your holy profession and prepare yourselves well for those works of zeal which may be entrusted to you by obedience, be they employments within the monastery, or works which have for their object the propagation of the truth in writings destined for the public, or the exercise of the sacred ministry, preaching the word of God and administering the sacraments, having always the desire that these various means may promote the glory of God and the salvation and sanctification of souls. But if only a small share of these works be allotted to you, or even if obedience should not call you to that field, still resolve to contribute to the welfare of souls at least by leading an edifying life, which will always be of great benefit to Christian society. For the sight of a monastery wherein God is served with fervour is in itself an eloquent sermon and a powerful promoter of the supernatural element in every country.
Actuated by motives of this kind, we will magnanimously recommend to God the works of zeal performed in our Order. Let us often entreat Him to accept our endeavours, whether they regard our own deeds or those of the public, or serve directly the sublime object of the salvation of souls. Ask Him frequently that for His divine glory and service our Order may be filled with men powerful in word and deed, men after the pattern of the many illustrious Saints of the monastic life, who became all things to all men and knew so well how to serve the Church and the souls ransomed by Jesus Christ. The whole life of these great religious souls was, at the same time, the most vivid expression of the spirit which our great Patriarch has laid down in his holy Rule.
In conclusion, let it be remarked that zeal for our neighbour should excite in us tender compassion for the suffering souls in Purgatory. Do not forget that the Church suffering owes the immense relief which is yearly sent her on the second day of November from the Church militant to the Abbey of Cluny, but heartily preserve this holy tradition by using every means to succour these souls so dear to God; for having sealed their earthly career, they long intensely for the efficacious help which the Divine Mercy empowers us to render them.
CHAPTER III - ON THE EXCELLENCE AND OBSERVATION OF THE RULE
Having explained the essential features of the monastic life, we must now instruct the novice on the excellence of the Rule, in order to inspire him with the respect which it deserves. This will be easily gained by considering that the man consecrated to God needs a support for his weakness in the struggle to live up to the requirements of the religious life in general and the monastic life in particular. It must also be remembered that to monks who live together as one society, common and definite laws are indispensable for the maintenance of order and the attainment of the object of the cenobitic life.
To satisfy this double want, in the course of time many religious rules have come into existence. Such great importance is attached to them by the Church, that she first ascertains and confirms its rule before she approves any religious society. Hence the custom of our times that the religious not only professes the three vows essential to his state, but also promises to live according to a certain rule approved by the Church. From this it follows that the life of a religious cannot be perfectly acceptable to God, unless it agrees in all things with the rule according to which he took his vows. The monk whose life is in constant opposition to the rule cannot flatter himself that he is on the straight road to heaven.
Let the novice, then, learn the true value of the Rule and apply himself with diligence and understanding to its practice even in the novitiate. It makes the religious pleasing to God by fortifying him against his weakness and prompting him to undertake a number of supernatural works which would scarcely have been performed otherwise. Lastly, it secures in the community the order without which it would not exist for any length of time in an edifying condition.
By the rule we mean not only the holy Rule of our Blessed Father St. Benedict, but also the Statutes approved by the Holy See which adapt the holy Rule to our circumstances without, however, altering its spirit and, lastly, the regulations and ordinances made by the legitimate authority in accordance with the Rule and the Statutes.
Behold in the holy Rule the testament of our holy Patriarch and the most precious legacy we have from him. Treat with respect the volume in which it is contained and listen devoutly to its reading in the Chapter and the Refectory. Memorize it cheerfully to the extent imposed upon you and be attentive in the fear of the Lord to the explanations and commentaries you receive in the instructions of the novitiate or in spiritual conferences.
There cannot be the least doubt that one of our principal sources of grace is to be found in mastering this truly admirable book, which has made so many Saints and which is stamped with the spirit of God. God alone could have inspired our great Patriarch with the charity, wisdom, mildness and force which excites our admiration in every line. If in our age there is no longer a literal observance of its precepts, we should at least lack none of its spirit; moreover, where our authorized practice is less severe, we should enter the more into the intentions of our holy Patriarch by accomplishing the little we do in such a manner that he may always acknowledge us as his children. It is through the Rule of St. Benedict that we are Benedictines; therefore, we must try, by every means in our power, to identify ourselves with it and imbue the work of our entire life with its spirit.
The Statutes, which have for their principal object the adaptation of the holy Rule to the moral and physical decline of the present generation, should also be held in sovereign respect by the novice, who ought to become well acquainted with them and observe them exactly.
But since it is necessary to state the precise extent of the obligations which you are called upon to assume, it is well to note the following: with the exception of those articles of the holy Rule and the Statutes which bear upon the matter of the vows or are at the same time established in Canon Law, the different precepts contained in the said holy Rule or Statutes are not obliging in themselves under sin. This generally accepted opinion agrees with the teaching of St. Thomas and saves us from overburdening the Conscience with a heavy yoke. It must not be forgotten, on the other hand, that any violation of the different points of the holy Rule and Statutes which proceeds from a feeling of contempt or is accompanied by scandal becomes a sin, mortal or venial, according to the degree of the contempt or the scandal.
Although you are, as novices, not yet under the obligation of the Rule or the vows, you should, nevertheless, accustom yourselves to the divers practices of the observance as if you were already bound by your profession. If his bodily or spiritual welfare demand it, greater indulgence may be granted to the postulant until he is somewhat accustomed to his surroundings. Too abrupt a transition from one mode of life to the other must be avoided. But the novice should conform to the letter of the common and particular observances of the professed and be happy to give God this proof of fidelity to his vocation.
Moreover, remember that a novice who is ungenerous or unfaithful in observing the rule runs the risk of not being permitted to make his profession; and even were he admitted to the religious state, he would still have incurred the most serious responsibility of having neglected the means of pursuing the vocation pointed out by God, which is one of the greatest dangers that our salvation may meet with in this world.
The thought that the bad example which he sets by violating the rule may be imitated by his brethren should also deter him from deserting the path of duty. To sum up, let everyone contribute to the common edification by preparing himself for a holy profession by perfect fidelity in all things.
CHAPTER IV - ON THE ESSENTIAL FOUNDATION OF RELIGIOUS LIFE
Having acquainted you with the essential notions of monastic life, we must now resume the contemplation of religious life, which finds in the former its most excellent and complete form. Religious life consists, as you know, in the practice of the three virtues of poverty, chastity and obedience, by means of which the soul disengages itself from the obstacles which arrest its march to perfection; purifies itself from its stains by expiation, and arrives at union with God by the imitation of Jesus Christ. This state, we maintain, must be firmly established, otherwise it cannot endure. Now, the foundation on which it must be established is the Christian life, which necessarily precedes the religious life, and is so indispensable that the latter, even though its outward appearance might, perchance, be retained for some time, inevitably falls with the former.
The Christian life consists chiefly in these two things: the presence of sanctifying grace in the soul and the practice of the precepts of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Without sanctifying grace, the soul is dead to God and to itself; in the state of sanctifying grace, it possesses life. It would, therefore, be vanity for a religious who is not in the state of sanctifying grace to imagine that he is fulfilling the obligations of his vocation, even if he tries to be faithful in the practice of the vows and the rule. The whole would lack its foundation. If he should fail to abandon this unhappy state promptly, he would run the risk of eternal damnation, the more so in as much as he had been favoured with a more holy calling. From this it follows that the religious is under the same, nay, even greater obligations than the simple Christian to flee sin, which dispels grace, and that he cannot rely on the holy exercises of his state of life. He must often consider his frailty and the deep malice with which the evil spirits are wont to attack the servants of God. Let him remember that it is written: “He that thinketh himself to stand, let him take heed lest he fall.” (I Cor. x, 12.) Following the counsels of Jesus Christ, he should watch and pray that he enter not into temptation; lastly he must fear and shun the occasions which he knows to be hurtful, roused to the combat by the thought that, no matter how great the merits acquired by a religious may be, it needs only one mortal sin to deprive him, in an instant, of all the graces accumulated throughout long years of toil.
The religious differs from the Christian in the world, as to the care which he should bestow upon the preservation of sanctifying grace, only in so far that one mortal sin would plunge him into a state much more deplorable, because he has more at stake than the simple faithful and misuses a greater number of graces.
And since deliberate and habitual venial sin makes the danger imminent of falling into mortal sin, it is necessary that the religious, even more than the simple Christian, should watch over his conscience in regard to venial sin, lest he diminish, by his infidelities, the abundance of actual grace, the need of which is felt at every moment, and lose gradually his sense of the inestimable value of sanctifying grace.
Second only to this supreme good, which has been purchased with the blood of Jesus Christ, are the precepts of our Lord. Since religious life is the perfection of Christianity, and the Christian life as we have said consists in the observance of the precepts of Jesus Christ, therefore endeavour to keep them with ever-growing fidelity. Beware of the delusion into which so many have fallen of persuading themselves that a religious can be held irreproachable as such without being blameless as a Christian. Examine yourselves often to discover whether the efforts you put forth in order to acquire the special qualities of the monk do not remove from your view the obligation of maintaining and developing by grace those qualities which constitute one a true follower of Christ. For this purpose mark well the chapter of the holy Rule entitled “Quae sunt instrumenta bonorum operum,” wherein our holy Patriarch seems to blend into one all the precepts of the Decalogue and the holy Gospel, together with the counsels of perfection.
The theological and moral virtues should be daily cultivated by the religious with ever increasing attention. On these virtues would have rested the hope of his salvation, had he remained in the world; salvation knows no different conditions in the religious state.
Let these virtues, then, be the prime matter of your daily self-examinations and your chief care when you approach the sacrament of Penance. The more you endeavour to acquire, establish and augment in your soul the Christian virtues, the greater will be your desire for religious perfection. What else is amendment of life, which must be the special object of your profession, but the strenuous effort to model your life after the precepts of Jesus Christ, by planting the virtues recommended by the Church?
Hence, let the Christian life be considered the preamble to the religious life and its indispensable support. As the impregnable foundation for the Christian life, first of all, should be established the fear of the Lord, which is, as the royal Prophet tells us (Ps. cx. 10), “the beginning of wisdom.” The effeminate spirit of our age would provide for the sinner a quite different foundation for the service of God. But what fallacy this is! No doubt, it is written that love dispels fear, but who can be sure that he possesses perfect love? And even if love does dispel fear, is this not a proof that fear must exist before love? May you, therefore, be able to grasp, in its fullness, what our holy Patriarch teaches us on this subject, and equip yourselves, for your whole life, with this salutary fear, which is a solid basis for the amendment of our lives and the best preservative against the decline of religion.
Do not shrink from meditating on death, the inevitable end of this life, the hour of which is uncertain, which comes closer upon us every moment and which shall establish us forever in the one eternity or the other. Watch in expectation of the judgment of God, when fidelity in our works shall be our only defence; a judgment, whose sentence shall be irrevocable and without appeal. Reflect frequently upon the eternal pains of hell and the vain despair of those who are consumed by its everlasting flames. Fathom the abyss of the justice of God, which did not spare his own Son, when He took upon himself our sins. Be ever mindful of the warning of our Redeemer on his way to Calvary: “If in the green wood they do these things, what shall be done in the dry?” (Luke xxiii, 31.)
Following the example of the saints, let us live in continual remembrance of our sins, being the more careful not to forget them, that God has pardoned them with greater mercy. Be convinced that the surest sign of this pardon which we have obtained will be found in that compunction of heart which we should constantly experience within us. Beware of the levity which nowadays appears in so many who seem to think no more of their sins after absolution; as if it were not written that sin, although forgiven, should never cease to inspire the sinful soul with true fear. Indeed, it cannot be said of such persons that love has dispelled their fear; for this is evident: either they have no love at all, or very little.
You will find another most powerful motive for fostering the salutary fear of the Lord by considering our entire dependence on divine grace and the terrible danger to which we are exposed by its abuse. Grace is given to all, but it does not fructify in all, because it is in the power of man to obstruct and hinder its operations. Now this divine and merciful grace is come down upon you. It has converted you and placed you on the most perfect and the surest way to salvation. As sanctifying grace, it may be suddenly withdrawn, in consequence of mortal sin, and leave the soul in utter death and ruin; as actual grace, it may, in consequence of an affection for venial sin and frequent resistance on the part of the soul, become rare, weak and barely sufficient. In fact, a soul, accustomed to more powerful assistance, if surrounded by snares and enemies, will surely succumb, sooner or later, and will then have no cause for murmuring against God, Who owes nothing to the creature, and sees that inestimable succour which He has unremittingly bestowed, despised and rejected.
The fear of the Lord, therefore, is a well-founded sentiment and the support of the entire edifice of perfection. It must be extremely necessary even to a soul in the more advanced stages of the spiritual life, since we see it roused by God with the greatest energy in such a one as the seraphic St. Theresa, after the ecstacies which were the reward of her love.
Let us take every precaution against be coming insensible to the motives of the fear of the Lord, a symptom of one of the most dangerous maladies of the soul. In such a state, the heart of man is both hardened and impervious; the best means to soften, subdue and strengthen it is the supernatural fear of the Lord. Experience teaches that conversions resulting from mere sentiment are not lasting, unless this blessed fear, in some way or other, come to shield man against inconstancy, indifference and pride.
Imitating the example of the holy Fathers of the desert who retired into solitude, in order to meditate on and to prepare themselves for the judgment of God, make the truths of this chapter the frequent subject of your meditations and you will soon learn the value of this fear of the Lord. And beholding you sincerely humbled at the thought of His dreadful judgment, He shall sweetly transform this first sentiment so that from the fear of arousing His wrath, because He is terrible, you will advance to the fear of offending Him, because He is good. Most seriously and firmly resolved to walk the way of purgation, you shall be called to mount still higher, to follow the straight pathway with a confidence the surer, that it has risen in a soul profoundly stirred and made conscious of the only true reality by the most lawful, formidable and reasonable fear that can agitate man here below.
Humility should, henceforth, strike deep roots in the soul. For no other virtue prepares it so well for the true love of God and union with Him. At whatever degree of charity you may arrive, take care occasionally to reanimate your courage and perseverance by the contemplation of the dreadful judgments of God.
By applying the maxims of this chapter, we shall become staunch Christians, thus laying the one foundation of religious life which is not open to delusion and danger.
CHAPTER V - ON FAITH
The fear of the Lord, so necessary to every Christian, docility to His teachings, the study of His precepts, abhorrence for all that He condemns, all these assume the virtue of faith, which alone reveals to us Jesus Christ, His rights over us and what we have to fear if we do not listen to His voice.
Faith is the beginning of our salvation: by it we come into contact with God; without it, we should remain in darkness; if our faith is lively, we are full of light; if it is weak, then our entire soul becomes languid. Therefore the Apostle says: “Without faith, it is impossible to please God.” (Heb. xi, 6.)
Now, the faithful in the world can maintain their relations with God only by means of this virtue, which places before them the sublime motives which must regulate their lives. How, then, can the religious preserve the life of his soul and advance on the more perfect way which he must constantly pursue, unless he possess a lively faith? Hence our great duty of acquiring this virtue in an eminent degree and making a steady progress in it. In order to accomplish this, turn to God, and ask Him for an increase of this admirable gift, beseeching Him with the Apostles: “Domine, adauge nobis fidem.” (Luke xvii, 5.) Aspire constantly after the supernatural, and learn to appreciate and to judge all things from the standpoint of faith alone. It is that of God Himself, who mercifully sent into our midst His purest light to prevent our minds from going astray and our corrupt nature from failing into error.
The state to which you aspire is foolishness in the eyes of the world. Experience will show, that it is possible to succeed in it only if, with singleness of purpose, you model your thoughts, impressions, even your inclinations, after the life and actions of our Lord, which have nothing in common with what is purely natural, after the holy Rule, which involves conditions altogether contrary to those induced by our natural propensities and finally, after the example of the Saints, who victoriously put nature under foot because, being foolish in the eyes of the world, they were filled with the wisdom of God.
Strive constantly to effect this union in thought and intention with Jesus Christ and His saints. Establish yourselves firmly in faith and the safety of your entire spiritual edifice will be assured. Experience will make it evident to you that your perseverance will be certain so long as this foundation remains unshaken, but that as soon as it threatens to collapse, you, like the Christian in the world, will be unable to retain your foothold on that height to which you were guided by faith and where faith alone can uphold you. The prophet tells us, “The just shall live in his faith.” (Hab. ii, 4.) If this be true of the simple Christian, how much more of the religious! Faith must be his element, his nourishment, his joy, his delight; for it is first and principally through faith that God communicates Himself to man and transforms and supernaturalizes his life.
The eyes of those faithful to grace are opened by this divine light, and all things appear in a purer and fuller aspect. The world and this present life are transformed in their sight. They clearly behold the immensity of God and the nothingness of the creature. The goodness of God, the honour and happiness attained in denying one’s self for his sake, the insignificance of the sacrifices involved in following Him are then unfolded and fill them with joy and peace. All these blessings we owe to faith. Its holy enthusiasm should be ever active in us and should be constantly renewed by giving thanks to God, who has condescended to enlighten us, and also by earnest prayer for the increase in us of this ineffable gift.
Let the spirit of faith breathe forth in all your words and actions. You should be most responsive to everything that promotes it, but should shrink from that which is contrary to, or hinders it. From it arises a supreme reverence for whatever has reference to God and a tender veneration of holy things, even the least of them. Those objects should be particularly dear to you which are sanctified by the prayers of the Church and bear direct or indirect reference to the supernatural. Living in this blessed atmosphere which the spirit of faith diffuses around the faithful soul, you will be safe against numberless dangers and discern more distinctly the voice of God within you. Another effect of this state, which should be common to all Christians, is the perceptible diminution of the power exercised over the soul by Satan, who generally opens his attacks by awakening the spirit of rationalism, which is, however, neutralized instantly by faith.
Let it be understood that the faith so necessary for us does not consist in that purely intellectual conviction of the truth of Christianity which may also be obtained from study and observation. Most assuredly, reason must be employed to the degree granted by God for gaining an unshaken conviction of the fact of divine revelation and the reality of the mysteries by means of which God condescends to come into relation with man. It may, however, be easily noticed, from practical life, that this faith is not sufficient for the sanctification of man. The evil spirits and the damned in hell have this faith and are neither saved nor converted by it. It is the virtue of faith, and not the more or less learned deduction of the arguments of the teachers, that saves and converts. The Christian believes, because he wills to believe; because he is humble before God; because he knows that God will impart His light to the simple of heart; and that the faith of reason remains sterile as long as it is not supplemented by the faith of the heart.
To aspire to this virtue of faith must, therefore, be the first concern of the religious. He should, so to say, possess it in a higher degree than that necessary for the simple faithful, since he is called to a closer union with God, who dwells in an inaccessible light, in the midst of which we must, to avoid being blinded, close our mortal eyes in love and confidence.
From this it follows that the religious should profess unbounded adherence to holy Church, which has been intrusted by her Divine Spouse with the special charge of leading us to this light. Let us not be content with submitting our reason to the formal decisions of her whom the Apostle calls “the pillar and ground of truth.” (Tim. iii. 15) Let our hearts also incline towards the pious beliefs which she favours, and be filled with horror by everything that deviates from her holy teachings, assured that we shall be in the right as long as we remain united with her in even the least point of doctrine. Let us inquire into the different ways by which the spirit of God worketh in her and resolve to conform heart and soul to the slightest manifestation of her views and desires. And since the centre of truth and life in the holy Church is the Apostolic See, we will profess a tender devotedness to all the prerogatives of the Roman Pontiff: to his infallibility in doctrine, to his full and divine authority over the entire Church, which is greater than the authority of any other power on earth, even the Oecumenical Council, because he is the true Vicar of Christ. Let us beware of the contrary teaching, which is incompatible with true science, as well as with the spirit of faith. * If anyone be unable to divest himself of the prejudices which he may have imbibed on this point in the world, he should withdraw rather than injure himself and others by remaining in a society whose first law is adherence to the Roman doctrine, concerning the divinely established monarchy of the Church.
Finding us united to His Spouse by the bond of sincere submission, the Divine Saviour will diffuse in us this spirit of faith which will become a reservoir of all graces, the principle of a supernatural enlightenment that shall guide and confirm us in all things and prepare us to behold, for all eternity, in unveiled splendour, that indescribable light whose faintest ray we shall have prized so dearly even in this world.
* These pages were written by the author long before the Vatican Council. Dom Guéranger, in reviving the Benedictine Order in France, demanded, as we see, an explicit Profession of belief in the infallibility of the Supreme Pontiff as a necessary condition of admittance into the novitiate.
CHAPTER VI - ON HOPE
The consideration of the infinite blessings promised by faith should excite in us the desire for the Supreme Good which it points out to us, and the beauty of that virtue should win our hearts to seek it by every means available.
Faith is a light destined not only to shine before us, but it should likewise guide our footsteps and lead us to another virtue essential to the Christian, and still more so to the monk, namely, the virtue of hope. Without this virtue, the Christian does not exist and the religious is inconceivable. But he whose soul abounds in hope can truly be said to be on the way which leads to his last end.
Hope is the firm and supernatural trust in God, that He will graciously assist us to arrive at a happy eternity, provided we profit by His grace and, furthermore, that He will always grant us His grace in proportion to our needs, provided we ask for it in humility.
Strive to comprehend that the bounty of God towards His creatures being infinite and proclaimed by the works of His most sublime mercy, He demands this confidence in Him, by which we render Him justice. The efficacy of this sentiment is such that the Apostle does not hesitate to assert that the Christian “is already saved by hope.” (Rom. viii, 24.) Now, as the simple faithful is supported in the service of God by the firm confidence that the Lord will endow him with the necessary grace and strength, so also the religious, for stronger reasons, will persevere on his higher way, with more or less facility, according to the influence which this virtue exercises over him.
It is, consequently, necessary that the novice apply himself to its practice with heroic zeal. Hope is a virtue only in as far as its existence exacts of us defence against two enemies which continually menace it and which we must fight with undaunted fortitude.
The first is want of confidence, which makes us fearful in regard to receiving the grace necessary for performing all our duties as Christians and religious. It is from this side that the devil assaults sometimes the best and most supernatural vocations. With affectation, and often with exaggeration, he vividly depicts to us the sacrifices which we must make until death, if we wish to arrive at the perfection expected of us by God.
He reminds us of our weakness, of our past infidelities, of the scanty energy that is in us. Taking at the same time the greatest care to hide from our eyes the most powerful goodness and liberality of God towards the soul which consents to hope in Him, this evil spirit succeeds in undermining our firmest resolutions and thus places us on the verge of perdition. By means of this treacherous scheme, he has destroyed the welfare of an immense number of Christian souls and seduced from their vocation many souls called to the religious life.
When you perceive the hissing of this old serpent, be sure to stop up your ears, because this distrust which he wishes to sow in you is an infamous blasphemy against the infinite bounty of God. Consider, that though nothing may seem more true than the repugnance of nature to embrace what is good and above all, what is better, nothing more real than our natural weakness and laxity, yet there is something still more certain, namely, the promise of God concerning grace, which is always more powerful than nature, something more real, namely, the uninterrupted bestowal of grace, the constancy with which this grace is put at our disposal and the means by which we may ever increase it, if we only ask for it with humility and perseverance.
Reanimated by this thought, which faith in the word of God suggests in us, let us bless the Lord, because by teaching us that despair is the only sin which cannot be forgiven, He has revealed to us that hope has the gift of moving Him and can open to the soul the way of reconciliation with its Creator. Never allow yourselves to be intimidated in exercising this cardinal virtue, which the Apostle compares with the anchor of safety that protects the ship against the raging billows. May you, for the rest of your life, hold fast to the saying of our holy Patriarch that the novice should “never lose hope in the mercy of God; de Dei misericordia nunquam desperare."” (Ch. 4. 73.)
There is yet another rock, not less threatening to the virtue of hope, if not carefully shunned. This rock on which many have already suffered shipwreck is presumption.
Distrust injures God in His bounty, presumption attacks his honour. It seems to tell Him that man has no need of grace, or that he has such a right to this divine help that he need not disquiet himself about it. Such a disposition is fraught with the greatest danger to one’s vocation and even to his eternal salvation.
You would run the risk of being ensnared by it, to the greatest detriment of your soul, should you cease to feel your entire dependence on divine grace, not only in order to advance, but even in order to maintain your position; not only for that which pertains to the permanent condition of the soul, but for every action in particular. You would not only make no progress, but a relapse would be inevitable. Consider often the abyss of our unworthiness and the immense bounty of God, who has the right to impart His treasures to humble souls only who unceasingly appeal to him, and may refuse them daily to those wretched souls who are so sadly blindfolded by presumption. Now, he who abandons humiliation and does not ask for grace with fervour, is very apt to fall into this dangerous vice. Hence, watch carefully that you be not lulled into a false confidence, which, sooner or later, would most cruelly deceive you.
Assured, on the one hand, of the all-powerful goodness of God who glories in saving and sanctifying His creatures and leading them to eternal bliss, and convinced, on the other hand, that humble and confident prayer obtains all things from the heavenly Munificence, you will feel the blessings of hope so much the more, the less you esteem yourselves before God. This virtue will procure for you a joyful heart, interior sweetness, a most profound tranquillity, the anticipation of possessing the infinite happiness which awaits you and, lastly, the necessary courage to conquer self in all things, and, enlightened by faith, you will approach nearer to God, whom you are called to possess by love.
CHAPTER VII - ON THE LOVE OF GOD
Our Lord was not content with making His eternal truth shine forth to our view; He, at the same time, encouraged us to hope for the good things revealed by faith and deigned to call upon us to unite ourselves to Him by love. “The end of the law is charity,” says the Apostle. (I Tim. i, 5.) And fearing lest we should deem this mutual love between God and man a fanciful idea altogether above our nature, He even commanded us to love Him, under pain of being eternally cast out from His presence. “Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength” (Luke x, 97); and our Lord teaches us that this is the greatest and first commandment.
Considering the grandeur and undeniable urgency of this precept, the novice should henceforth look up to his state as that most suited for fulfilling it and bless God for the mercy accorded him in granting him the grace of a religious vocation.
Love of God constitutes the whole of Christian life. The other moral and theological virtues only prepare us for, and lead us to, the love of God. St. Augustine says: “Love and do what you will.” He who truly loves God is safe against sin, because sin is the very contrary of love. To love God is the easiest and sweetest of all the commandments, though it is just the one which is violated most frequently and imperceptibly. Love of God brings us into the possession of God Himself. It is by love that heaven is heaven. It is the prime necessity of our being, because we can be happy only in loving the good, and this is God. This love is a holy debt, because God loved us first, continually works in us by His love and awaits with generous patience the return of the love we owe Him.
The obstacle which the love of God meets in man arises from various causes that arrest the creature in its flight and turn it from its last end, outside of which there is nothing but reprobation, for whoever will not love God in this world, shall be sentenced to hate Him for all eternity in hell. These causes are: Illusions, which cause us to forget the invitation extended us by God to love Him; the world, its maxims and example; attachment to material goods, to creatures and to self; lastly, want of support and encouragement. Let the novice gratefully acknowledge that the religious state removes all these barriers, and that for him who wishes to profit by the means it offers, the accomplishment of the greatest and first of the commandments is made easy.
The religious state establishes man in recollection and peace, as on a mountain whose summit reaches far into the sky. It produces in the soul that interior and exterior silence in which the word of God works freely, dissipates illusions and protects the soul against the unperceived insinuation of forgetfulness. By separating the religious from contact with the world, it also frees him from the dangers which this deceitful enemy presents in its maxims and example, avoided only with difficulty by him who lives in its midst. The attachment to material goods, to creatures and self being successfully fought by the exact observance of the holy vows, the soul finds again its primitive liberty, and tends with ease towards its divine centre. Such a soul, supported in every possible way by the Rule and the observances, which are a source of countless graces, strengthened by the example of others, called to order by exhortations and, if necessary, by reproofs and corrections, could be induced to desert the path of love only by obstinate and repeated resistance of good. This is happily of rare occurrence.
We must justly conclude from this that the religious has a greater assurance of his perseverance in the practice of this great commandment than anyone in the world. If only on this account, he should consider himself the happiest of men.
Let us firmly resolve to take advantage of the many graces lavished on us in order to advance in the love of God by concentrating all our powers to this blessed end. It is above all of greatest importance to know that this precept requires of us no laborious exertions. For the Lord Himself says to His chosen people: “This commandment that I command thee this day is not above thee, nor far off from thee, nor is it in heaven that thou shouldst say: Which of us can go up to heaven to bring it to us, and we may hear and fulfil it in work? Nor is it beyond the sea: that thou mayest excuse thyself and say: Which of us can cross the sea, and bring it unto us: that we may hear and do that which is commanded? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.” (Deut. xxx, 11-14.) To love God, we need then only follow the impulse of our hearts. The mere thought of His supreme amiability and the remembrance of His benefits suffice to maintain us in this charity which unites us with Him.
In the first place, be ever intent upon multiplying these treasures of eternal life. Make, as often as possible, explicit acts of love towards God. These acts, arising from an impulse of grace, have great power to enrich the source from which they emanate. In all the motives of your thoughts and actions, seek to give preference to the love of God. You will find it an excellent help, and your thoughts and actions will at the same time be raised to greater merit and higher dignity. Be habitually determined by the consideration of the love we owe to God in the sacrifices which you will have to make. For, if real, it will urge you to sacrifice and not to repose.
Whereas God prescribes to man several distinct moral and theological virtues, do not dispense yourselves from any one of them under the pretext that the love of God should be enough for you, but strive to unite this motive of love with those peculiar to the other virtues, by making them participate in the nature of divine love. Lastly, when you fail, look on your faults as infidelities to the love of God. This will greatly enable you to hasten the pardon which will be readily granted by the merciful Judge.
You should be eager to carry to the utmost perfection the motives of your love of God. Rest not content with a purely self-interested love which aims at personal welfare only. Consider, without ever ceasing to love God as your last end with this love of desire which springs from the virtue of love as its pure and holy source, without checking in its course the love of gratitude which should fill you with ever increasing acknowledgement of the blessings received from God, that there exists in Him an inexhaustible loveliness which justly excites our love apart from our own interests. You should endeavour to ascend, as far as human weakness permits, to this love for His sake, which effaces sin by remitting guilt and the punishment due, and which can unite, even in this world, the soul with its Creator.
Elicit to this end, according to the impulses of grace, acts of the love of benevolence, compliance and compassion, by which the soul embraces the interests of God with an ardour that is not dimmed by self-interest. Penetrate into the sense of the Lord’s Prayer, the first three petitions of which convey to everyone who is able to comprehend them the expression of this love. In one word, let us act in all things with the conviction that as men, Christians and religious, we have a lofty and all-embracing duty to fulfil in this world, namely, the duty of loving God before all things and continually, with a love proportionate to the graces bestowed on us for the purpose of loving Him.
CHAPTER VIII - ON THE LOVE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
Such is the infinite bounty and love of God towards us that we have seen Him debase Himself to the condition of man and fill up, so to say, the chasm that separated us from Him, in order to obtain more effectively the return which is His just due. “In this we have known the charity of God, because He hath laid down His life for us.” (I John iii, 6); and the Son of God says, even in the Old Testament, when describing the motive of His future coming in the flesh: “My delight is to be with the children of men.” (Prov. viii, 31.) These advances which God has vouchsafed to make towards us should be appreciated by all with reverent astonishment. Considering that by the divine incarnation He made Himself flesh of our flesh, we shall understand how greatly this facilitated the great commandment of loving God. Let us often thank the Divine Goodness for thinking us worthy of being born after the accomplishment of the mystery of the Word made flesh, which broadened the way to Union with God in love. Jesus Christ is man as we are: he who loves Jesus Christ is already in the possession of the love of God, because Jesus Christ is God.
And how is it possible for man not to love this incarnate God? The Son of God presents Himself in this state with such infinite attractions that not to love Him man must either renounce his nature or acknowledge himself to be a degraded being. In fact, two reasons impel us to love our fellows: their charms of person and the benefits they bestow on us. Now, is it possible, in reading and meditating upon the holy Gospels, to resist the divine charm which pervades the words and actions of our Lord? When we behold Him in His infancy, what is more alluring than our Lord in the manger or in the loving arms of His most pure Mother? When we follow Him in the vigour of manhood, what is more affecting than His goodness, His compassion for the miseries of mankind, His patience, His condescension and the gentleness of His manner, that so sweetly tempers the gravity of His person as to gather about Him even the little children? What is more captivating than His teaching, in which the authority of a God lies hid beneath the most simple language, and overpowering and sublime truths penetrate the heart of the listener, flooding his mind with most vivid light? What is more touching than His predilection for sinners, those unfortunate sick, whose compassionate physician He is, those lost sheep for whom He is the unwearied shepherd? Lastly, what is more moving than the calmness with which He faces the death He foreknew, never protesting against the ingratitude of His enemies?
It is impossible that an upright man should meditate on this life - and the novices ought incessantly to study it - and not be moved and quickly captivated by the love of Him Who led this life on earth. If one may be moved at perceiving in another one of those traits which reveal a noble sentiment, and moved to such a degree as to feel his heart drawn towards this man whom he will never see, who has, perhaps, ceased centuries ago to dwell upon this earth, how is it possible to fortify one’s heart against love towards Jesus, in Whom all is perfect, all complete, all inspired by the most generous love for us.
Now, it is God Himself, whom we love in loving Jesus Christ. Thus the great commandment of charity has come nigh to us, as if to lay a snare, and we have fallen into it: he who loves the Son of Mary, loves the Son of God; and he who loves the Son of God, loves the Father and the Holy Ghost, because these three are one in the same substance.
But when, without turning our eyes from the ineffable charms of our celestial Lover, we come to consider His benefits, is it possible that this love may not triumph over our cold hearts? We were His enemies: He died for us the death of the cross; we were lost for all eternity: He has saved us by delivering Himself up for us; we have crucified Him by our sins: He set forth His glory in our pardon. The slightest reparation offered by Him would have sufficed superabundantly to compensate for the outrage committed by a thousand worlds against the divine Majesty, but to insure our devotion to Him, He has willed to shed amidst awful torments, all His blood, even to the last drop. His sacrifice, offered up for the whole human race, was made in particular for every one of us, as if every one of us had been the only person culpable and the only object of His coming into this world.
Is it not evident that he who thus mentally rehearses the motives of loving our Saviour would be the most degraded of men and would not deserve to live, if he did not feel himself pierced by that love? And is it not also true that he whose heart is not totally corrupted by self-love, nor wholly pressed down by the disgraceful weight of sensuality cannot think of the benefits of the God-man without feeling himself drawn to the love of such a benefactor, a love superior to self-love?
Let us, then, say once more, the great commandment is accomplished: the mysteries of the Incarnate Word have been the divine bait which has allured us. Following the natural bent of our hearts which inclines us to love our fellow-men for their attractions and for the benefits they bestow, we have risen, through Jesus Christ, the God man, to the love of the invisible God, who has created us to love and serve Him.
It is not hard to grasp the blessed facilities which our Lord has, in this way, extended to us for the accomplishment of this fundamental precept of the Christian and religious life. You will perceive that everything depends on the firmness and constancy of this love towards our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, let us often say with the Apostle: “Who shall separate us from the love of Jesus Christ?” (Rom. viii, 35.) And that this charity be fortified and increased in your soul, neglect nothing which may preserve the impression made by the perfections and benefits of the incarnate Son of God. Let them become the most familiar subject of your thoughts and affections. For this very same purpose, strive daily to advance in the understanding of the Gospels, which will then indeed be good tidings to you. For, in them you will learn the art of loving God by loving the Divine Saviour, who has bestowed on us such marvellous favours.
CHAPTER IX - ON PERFECTION
God, by revealing Himself to man by faith, arousing his hope in an eternal reunion with the supreme Good and commanding him to love His Creator and Redeemer, proposed to Himself an end which relates first of all to man’s state in this world. This end is that man here below should aspire to perfection.
Perfection is the greatest possible harmony of relation between the creature and its God. It is the result of the conformity of the creature to the holiness of God by exemption from sin and the acquisition of the virtues, of which charity is the most lofty and the most extended in its influence upon the others.
From this it follows that the Christian has a real obligation to strive after perfection, and must exercise himself in it according to the amount of grace which he receives. Otherwise it could be truly said that God either did not care to see the plan which He conceived realized by His creature, or that the latter could justly refuse to accomplish the purpose for which He wrested man from perdition and ransomed him from hell. Nothing could be more odious, nothing more foolish, than such perverse ideas as these. And that the Christian may not allow himself to be duped with respect to this precept of perfection, which comprises all others, our Lord has said: “Be you therefore perfect as also your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matt. v, 48.) By these words, He shows us the model upon which we are to mould not only our actions, but also our thoughts and aspirations.
Imbued with this doctrine, let the novices examine their past life, and they will observe that they have never committed sin without losing sight, at least momentarily, of the duty of striving after perfection. The very thought of this duty would have sufficed to preserve them from falling into sin. You can easily notice that your hope of persevering in the state of sanctifying grace is steadfast only as long as you pursue the object of perfection. You would endanger even your eternal welfare by neglecting this object or allowing it to vanish from your sight. The sanctity of our heavenly Father shall, therefore, be the aim of our efforts. Created and regenerated according to the likeness of God, it is our first duty to acquire this similarity in so far as we are able until we shall be reunited with Him forever in that habitation where as the Apostle says, “we shall be like to Him.” (I John, iii, 2.)
However, do not become discouraged, if, in spite of your resolute struggles, you should still find yourselves so far removed from your model by reason of sins not yet sufficiently expiated or faults frequently committed, or on account of the infinite end proposed. Derive great consolation from the thought that the perfection acquired is not of this world; the greatest Saints have realized it to its fullest extent only in heaven. It is the continual desire for perfection that made them Saints, a desire and tendency never weakened in them by their faults and imperfections.
Have this great Christian obligation always firmly fixed before your eyes and pay no heed to the objections of self-love, which would distinguish between the rights of God and our own ill-understood interests. When you consider how seriously imperiled is the welfare of him who renounces his efforts towards perfection, how such a one alienates himself from the love of God, it will always be easy for you, with the never-failing help of grace, to remain fixed in this firm resolution, which will be your security as well as the consolation of your life.
The arch enemy of mankind never tires in his attempts to stifle the desire after perfection, frightening man by the most absurd illusions. According to him, the path of perfection offers nothing but thorns. Despise these hallucinations and you will gradually comprehend more and more clearly that nothing is more just and wise in a Christian than the abhorrence of sin and its occasions and the longing after every virtue. Thus you shall come nearer to God, who is infinitely holy and has destined us to be united with Him for all eternity. Consider what constitutes perfection. It does not consist in this or that extraordinary act of which we read in the lives of the Saints and which might seem to us above our abilities. It is not through such acts that they became Saints, but by the constant desire for perfection, their acts being the outgrowth of this desire and its expression, more or less varied, according to the nature of the graces they possessed.
We have just reasons to be especially thankful to God, as He has vouchsafed to summon us to the religious state which forms, in the holy Church, the school of perfection. In fact, the religious life is founded upon the practice of the evangelical counsels, and these aim at the removal of the numerous barriers which retard the Christian on the path of perfection. He who concludes that it is better to devote himself to God by holy poverty, chastity and obedience and faithfully abides by his contract, will certainly reach the perfection that assures him union with God. This perfection shall be his repose, his recompense even here below, and he will bear testimony to the word of our Lord which says: “My yoke is sweet and my burden light.” (Matt. xi, 30.) The obstacles to every resolution of seeking perfection, which are awakened by the love of self and exterior objects, are put to flight by the voluntary and constant practice of the divine counsels. The love of God, which is called by the Apostle “the bond of perfection” (Col. iii, 14), will then reign supreme in the soul and become, without difficulty, the governing principle of our entire life.
Lastly, remember the call to perfection, extended to Christians, and the heroic struggles which those must undergo who practise it in the midst of the world. Do not forget, that you have been marked with a special predilection in being placed, by your holy vocation, on a road where the light that illumines the soul never grows dim and where innumerable graces that support and correct are hourly lavished on you, so that, to miss the goal, not only incurable weakness would be necessary, but also obstinate resistance, from which may the bounty of God ever preserve His own!
CHAPTER X - ON THE IMITATION OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
Just as, in order to make sure in us the fulfilment of the great and indispensable precept of charity, God has deigned by making Himself man, to bring near to us the object of the love which is essential, so also He has seen fit, in this same mystery of the Divine Incarnation, to set quite within our reach the type of the perfection to which He obliges us to aspire.
By becoming man, God, in His infinite goodness, brought near to us the essential object of our love, to insure our accomplishment of the great and indispensable precept of charity. With the same end in view, He has also thought it proper to send the model for that perfection to which He obliges us altogether within our reach, by the mystery of the Divine Incarnation. The imitation of our heavenly Father would have been very difficult for feeble and ignorant creatures as we are, but the Son of God, perfect as the Father, assumed our nature and, coming down to this earth, acted, spoke and willed as a man-God could act, speak or will and thenceforward we had only to imitate Him, in order to arrive at the imitation of God. Therefore the Apostle teaches us that “whom the Father foreknew, He also predestinated to be made conformable to the image of His Son.” (Rom. xiii, 29.)
We ought, then, to render unceasing thanks to the Divine Mercy for having ordained us to be born after the Incarnation of the Divine Word; for the lustre of His example enlightens and guides us, as His precious blood has ransomed us. The primitive man, created in justice and holiness, exists no more. Sin has made of him a ruin, in which the divine image is no longer discernible. Therefore, Jesus Christ was given to us, not only as Redeemer, but also as model. In Him we can see what we should become in order to resemble God once more. St. John tells us, in one of his Epistles, that our greatest hope on the day of judgment will be in this, that “as He is, we also are in this world.” (I John, iv, 17.) The same Apostle says in another place: “He that saith he abideth in Him, ought himself also to walk even as He walked.” (I John, ii, 6.) St. Paul explains this in one word, when he admonishes the faithful: “Put ye on our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Rom. xiii, 14.)
In gratitude to the ineffable goodness of God, which decreed to bring down from heaven the type following which we should be remodelled and become perfect as our heavenly Father, we should have nothing more at heart than the most thorough study of this divine and human ideal, which shall suddenly confront us on the day of judgment. Our Divine Saviour, speaking to His heavenly Father, expresses Himself also thus: “Now this is eternal life: that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.” (St. John xvii, 3.) Every Christian should infer from these words that to know Jesus Christ is his greatest concern in this world, because it leads to eternal life.
Let the novices, accordingly, comprehend that the study of our Lord by reading the holy Gospels supplies the surest means for nourishing and developing this love of their Redeemer, just as attention to all that He did, all that He said and all that He was, as related in the sacred text, will be the source of that imitation which leads to the perfection required by God. As an incentive to this research, which is to result in eternal happiness, often refresh in your memory what St. Luke teaches us of the Blessed Virgin: that she contemplated the actions of our Lord, had them constantly present in her thoughts, and “kept all these words, pondering them in her heart.” (ii, 19.) By this constant and most loving study, Mary succeeded in realizing the model of her Divine Son and rose to perfection. Every disciple of Jesus Christ ought to do likewise according to his ability.
You should consider it a great honour to have been withdrawn from the world and its vain tumult, in order to study thoroughly our Lord and to devote yourselves to His imitation. This should be your constant thought and effort, because if this imitation be realized, everything may be counted for you as gained, but all will be lost, if unfortunately it should be wanting to you. A Father of the Church (Tertullian) said, and he did not say too much: “Christianus alter Christus.” In fact, what is meant by a Christian? A member of Jesus Christ. Now, the members have the same life and inner feeling as the head.
This imitation of the man-God, this incorporation with Jesus Christ, is undoubtedly a hard task, and costs nature many a sacrifice. But even so, let us bear in mind that there is no choice. We must resemble either the man of the earth or the man of heaven. If we preserve the features of the earthly man, we shall be damned and thrust into hell-fire; if, on the other hand, the heavenly Father recognize in us the features of His Son, who is the heavenly man, He will reclaim us as His children, and where Jesus is, we also shall be.
It is true, we cannot resolve to imitate Jesus Christ, if we do not love Him. But have we not seen that this is our first duty, the strictest justice and our dearest consolation in this vale of tears? Therefore, be determined to remain faithful in this love, and generously acknowledge that nothing is more just than that we become like to Him who has taken our likeness upon Him out of love for us. Moreover, you have no right to find that reform severe which makes us like to God, by purifying our life from the bad germs which would have caused our eternal ruin.
In conclusion, remember that this reform in man, wrought after the model of Jesus Christ, is in no wise the work of nature, but the work of grace. This is never refused to us and can be increased by prayer in the response to which God always grants what is conducive to the progress of the soul. May you, therefore, incessantly pray that Jesus Christ be accomplished in you; that His life find its expression in your lives and animate your whole being. Be heartily and loyally attached to this great end of our life, returning to it again and again, and taking advantage of every opportunity to attain it. When studying the lives of the most Blessed Virgin and the Saints, search out the cause of their holiness. Seeing that it is nothing else than their conformity to the deeds and sentiments of Jesus Christ, let it ever become clearer to you what God expects of you, and apply to yourselves in humility and gratitude the word addressed by Christ to every one of us in the person of St. Peter: “Come, follow me: veni, sequere me.” (John xxi, 19.)
CHAPTER XI - ON THE EVANGELICAL COUNSELS
The imitation of our Lord Jesus Christ being the obligatory way for everyone who wishes to arrive at eternal salvation and glory, the supreme wisdom of God has ordained that the imitation of a type so elevated should be realized to different degrees. Taking into consideration human frailty, and resolved to dispense His grace most justly according to the measure of His good pleasure, our Saviour gave to man precepts and counsels. The precepts, obligatory on all men, represent the essential conditions without which there is no salvation. The Counsels refer to those who are called to ascend still higher in the imitation of our Lord, who realized, in this life, the matter of the counsels in admirable perfection and plenitude.
Our notion of the evangelical counsels cannot be too lofty; be it that we behold their type in our Lord, or that we consider them in their relation to salvation. From the first point of view, these divine counsels merit our esteem on account of the union which they establish between our Lord and the one who practises them. As to the second point of view, our idea of their importance cannot be too high, since the practice of the counsels insures that of the precepts and is consequently the most sure highway to salvation. And this last truth is so evident that very often, even in the midst of the world, the practice of the Christian life would be impossible of realization without rising, in certain instances, to the observance of the counsels.
In giving the divine counsels, our Lord could have no other intention than to see them followed. If He did not make them obligatory on all men, He at least desired their accomplishment in a certain number of His faithful. His wisdom and honour are likewise involved in it, as also the realization of the Gospel of which not a single iota is to remain unfulfilled. To find grace, it was necessary that the earth constantly reflect, in the sight of God, the image of His Son, realized in humanity. Now, the simple precepts, though observed to the very letter by all men on earth, would not have sufficed to reproduce the features of the Incarnate Son of God. This, then, is the reason why the Divine Restorer of the primitive man vouchsafed to employ the inducement of a reward, promising a hundredfold to those who keep His counsels in order to allure thereby the greatest number of those who were bought by His precious blood.
You should, consequently, show most sincere acquiescence in the merciful intentions of our Redeemer. Render Him humble thanks, because, by calling you to the religious state, which is the school of the evangelical counsels, He has placed you on the privileged way, where the glory of God is sought with the greatest solicitude by the most perfect imitation of his Son. Cease not from asking Him for the grace not to fall back from this superior degree, where you have been gratuitously established by grace, and be humbled at the consideration that it did not enter into the designs of God to call all men to this same favour.
Often call to mind the calling of the Apostles, who were the first ones chosen to leave all things that they might devote themselves not only to the precepts of our Lord, but also to His counsels. Their recompense consisted, at first, in familiar intercourse with their Divine Redeemer, in initiation into His secrets and in the sharing of His mission; at the end of time, they shall be seen sitting on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. A similar lot is reserved for those who imitate them: intimacy with Jesus Christ, who has no secrets from them, and the highest distinctions in the eternal kingdom.
Turning then his eyes upon his own frailty, which he knows from experience, the novice should acknowledge how much he owes to the Divine Mercy which, desirous of assuring his salvation, has set him on a way that is most likely to lead him to this the one thing necessary. The practice of the counsels, so greatly facilitated in the religious state, insures him the highest merits and guarantees the practice of the precepts. Thus he will, at the same time, arrive at salvation and perfection. For such is the efficacy of the religious vocation, when embraced by a man of good will, that it conducts him to the Supreme Good with much more ease than could be acquired in the world, where every thing is of the nature of an impediment, whilst in the religious state everything is a help.
He shall clearly understand that this religious vocation is a way graciously opened to a great number of souls, although only a few pursue it. Indeed, God calls them to the religious state sometimes by an interior affection for it, at other times by external circumstances. It is He who infuses this affection, and it is His grace that gives rise to the circumstances. He calls the just and the sinner; the just, to satiate his hunger and to still his thirst after justice; the sinner, to make him just and holy. Such wonders of grace are achieved by the practice of the evangelical counsels, which elevate our entire life and transform it in Jesus Christ.
Let us thus inform ourselves as to the nature of the religious vocation, which is so different from that to the holy Priesthood. The latter depends entirely on God, to whom alone it belongs to choose His ministers, that is to say, those whom He wishes to set up as mediators between Himself and man. The former, on the contrary, depends both on divine grace and on ourselves. Faith illumines us as to the advantages of the perfect life; grace urges us to embrace it and gives us the strength to practise it. Man follows or resists this attraction. We see that our Lord invites man to embrace the way of the counsels in the holy Gospel, but when the Priesthood is concerned He makes the choice Himself. There is, consequently, no power on earth, be it civil or even ecclesiastical, which has the right to prevent any one from following the way of the counsels, since no one has the right to prevent the just from drawing nearer to God, or the sinner from seizing the means which assures for him the amendment of his life and his progress in righteousness.
1. Religious Poverty
The evangelical counsels may be summed up into three principal ones, the first of which is poverty, that is, the complete and unconditional renunciation of all earthly possessions, of whatsoever value they may be. Holy poverty is the first degree in the perfect imitation of our Lord. He was born in a borrowed stable; worked in the sweat of His brow, to gain His livelihood; lived upon alms during the years of His preaching; was nailed naked to the cross, and His body was finally laid in a tomb not His own. It was impossible to make us better understand that absolute poverty is a way of merit and of reparation. For, indeed, it quenches the desire for earthly goods, called by St. John the concupiscence of the eyes, which is one of the chief sources of offence towards God and the ruin of souls. Holy poverty is the beginning of the perfect life. Hence our Lord has said: “If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.” (Matt. xix, 21.) There is, then, no life in perfect harmony with that of Jesus Christ, which is not effectually despoiled of earthly goods, and holy poverty must be our first step in order to enter upon this happy life.
Facts have repeatedly demonstrated that this virtue is the basis of the entire structure of the holy religious state. Moreover, everything may be expected of a religious family in whose bosom poverty is faithfully observed and held in honour. It may likewise be noted that, where the same is violated or neglected, there also the other fundamental principles of the religious life become shaken and soon fall together. In truth, a violation of religious poverty, no matter how trifling, is a perjury, because this virtue is the subject of a vow. Besides this, it is a veritable theft, because he who is guilty of it has no right over the thing which he assumes to be his. It is true that the matter is grave or light according to the value of the thing, but the perjury and theft are not less real.
It is, therefore, necessary that the religious who is desirous of persevering in the constant practice of poverty have a true love for this indispensable virtue. And how can he fail to love it, when he remembers the wonderful zeal with which our Lord Himself practised it; the rigour with which He enjoined its observance on His Apostles; the ardour with which it was promoted in the primitive Church of Jerusalem, all burning with the fire of the Holy Ghost?
Filled with respect for this fundamental virtue and eagerly longing after the treasure in heaven promised by our Lord, let the novice wish for the day when he may effectively practise this first of the counsels. Let him acquire an adequate idea of the nature and practice of this noble and holy virtue. You must understand that he who has taken the vow of poverty, ought not to have any desire for those things which he has left, nor to long after anything whatever. To be attached to objects given for his use, e.g., a book, furniture, his cell, etc., would be to fail in the poverty he has promised. The privations which may at times come upon the religious should be endured with cheerfulness, provided they are not prejudicial to his health, because then he will be a religious in the full sense of the word. For nothing is more contrary to the monastic spirit than that anxious solicitude with which one arranges all his affairs, so that nothing be wanting to him, whereby he seizes also upon things more comfortable than necessary. It is even wrong to aspire without permission to the private use of things which were not destined for such use. Finally, the religious is bound in conscience to make economical use of things regularly distributed for his personal needs, considering them as objects lent to him, of which he must take care with probity and delicacy of feeling.
Being also instructed as to the extent and the practice of holy poverty, the brethren of the novitiate will prepare themselves for it with a holy yearning, happy to renounce already, in their desires, the goods and material advantages of this world in order to possess God. Be not troubled in the least by the events of our times, when the conspiracies of thie enemies of our faith are, in a special manner, directed against the revival of the religious state, but deem yourselves exceedingly honoured because it has pleased the Lord to count on you as He did on the Apostles, whom He summoned from their boats and nets, in order to send them into the world as lambs into the midst of wolves.
To show the sincerity with which you aspire to become the poor of Jesus Christ, commence, as soon as possible, to banish from your conversation all terms denoting property. Consequently, restrict, as much as possible, the use of things that belong to you, accustoming yourselves to be satisfied with what is strictly necessary. When you happen to lose, destroy, or injure anything belonging to the monastery, you will accuse yourselves in Chapter and do penance as the professed do. Should you perceive in yourselves any repugnance toward the privations imposed by religions poverty as to the food, the furnishings and the rest, rejoice and gladly harden yourselves in the sacrifice laid upon you by the renunciation of ease and property, calling to mind that this is what you sought at your entrance into the monastery.
In this way should the novice prepare himself for the taking of the vow of holy poverty and ripen in the spirit of his vocation. These supernatural sentiments are fostered by various means, as, meditation on the vanity of natural goods, from which man will be separated forever by death, the contemplation of the life of our Lord, who being rich, as the Apostle says, became poor for our sake and, lastly, the remembrance of the many kings and princes, queens and princesses who renounced wealth and crowns and whatever could flatter the senses or vanity, in order to become poor and detached from everything that is perishable, happy to resemble thereby our Saviour and proud to acquire by this means true riches, lasting honours and the eternal reward.
2. On Chastity
The second of the evangelical counsels is chastity, to which our Lord directs our attention when He calls those blessed who have renounced the pleasures of sense “for the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. xix, 12.) St. Paul unfolds to us also its importance when he proposes perfect continency as that which is “better for man” (I Cor. vii, 38), because it sanctifies man in body and soul. But since chastity is a virtue imposed on all men, even outside of the religious state, - though it reaches its perfection only in this state - it is expedient forthwith to expose the whole Christian doctrine on this subject, that such an important matter may be fully comprehended.
The holy virtue of chastity seeks to control the sensual appetites by subjecting them to the law of the Spirit. It maintains man in his dignity and causes his soul continually to reflect the image of God who is a spirit. The vice opposed to chastity degrades man, reverses the economy of creation by giving predominance to the lower element and stifling the soul under the pressure of the senses. Nothing could be more adverse to the decrees of the Creator. He, therefore, willed to join the obligation of continency to the exercise of the very rights he conceded to the conjugal state. It is in obedience to a fundamental principle of his existence that man should constantly strive to shake off the yoke of the senses. Not only every exterior act against holy purity is forbidden to him, but he is likewise bound to secure heart and soul against every wilful desire or delight in respect to that which is forbidden by this virtue. Such is the delicacy of holy purity that the infringement of its obligations does not admit lightness of matter; want of sufficient consideration or imperfect consent may alone render venial a sin which would have been mortal otherwise.
From this it follows, that man should avail himself of every means to persevere in holy purity, because this virtue is indispensable for him. Now there are two obstacles which bring it about that this virtue can exist in us only by dint of warfare. In the first place, we are, in consequence of original sin, loaded with the weight of concupiscence, which destroys the equilibrium between the flesh and the spirit, and makes the former, weak as it is, the tyrant over the latter. In the second place, the holy virtue of chastity is an object of particular hatred to the devil, who is humiliated on seeing man ascend, through chastity, by the spirit; notwithstanding his human weakness. Wherefore this fallen angel is always ready to attack us from what he knows to be our weakest side.
Man, nevertheless, must not consider his condition too hard, when he finds himself obliged to struggle for the preservation of such a noble and powerful virtue. God never imposes on His creatures a burden which they cannot bear. However great the weakness of our fallen nature may be, the grace of Jesus Christ is superabundantly placed at our disposal, to equalize our forces in the light. We shall not be tried above our strength: the justice and goodness of God are our vouchers for this. The temptations, to which we may be subjected should not make us dejected or faint-hearted; they should rather animate us to strive after a virtue against which Satan manifests such relentless fury.
It is incumbent on every man to preserve continence according to his state and to live in the esteem of a virtue so beautiful and so necessary that its violation suffices to plunge him into the lowest, most vile state; to ruin the powers of his body; to blindfold his reason; to instigate him to trample under foot even the most sacred obligations. But our Lord, who came for the complete restoration of human nature, has graciously inspired us to pursue a higher way, where holy purity not only serves to maintain his purity and to save him from disorder, but, likewise, raises him from his lowly condition and unites him with God. Blessed is the man who comprehends and tastes the sweetness of this word; who could add to the renunciation of earthly goods the absolute renunciation of even those sensual pleasures which are lawful and sanctioned by an august sacrament, in a lower calling, by reason of the end that accompanies them. Blessed is he to whom it has been given by divine grace to choose, in this life, the state which all the elect enjoy in the heavenly fatherland, where, as our Lord tells us, we shall be like angels!
Perfect continency, embraced by man with the intention of complying with the second counsel of our Lord, seeks to establish in man a new degree of resemblance to his divine model. It includes a sacrifice the homage of which is received by God with particular satisfaction. It obliterates that division in which consists, according to St. Paul, the relative imperfection of the most holy marriage. It is the occasion of an eternal bond with God, which imprints on the entire person an indelible mark of glory that merits for him from God a love not bestowed on others. It reserves for God not only inanimate objects, as religious poverty does, but the human creature, which there upon enters into a contract with God, as the spouse with the bridegroom. It is a state of liberty, in regard to the senses, which it purifies and sanctifies; it is the sweet scent of the earth, which freely mingles with that of heaven; it is an object of reverence on the part of the most worldly men, so that the heathen nations of old could not refrain from bowing down before it in homage.
Conceiving such sublime notions of religious chastity, let us always bear in mind that this virtue vowed by the religious soul is prized so dearly that its slightest infraction must necessarily be a grave offence against God. Even the lowest degree of this virtue is accompanied by immense merit. A transformation takes place in the entire person. United to God by the most sacred contract with which He ever favoured man, fidelity is the first duty of the favoured soul. Hence, not only the breaking of this bond would be a fearful sacrilege, but every mortal or venial sin which would inculpate, in this matter of impurity, a man not bound to God by the holy vows would involve, on the part of the unfaithful religious, also the malice of sacrilege, corresponding to the enormity of the fault, just as every violation of conjugal fidelity is tainted with the malice of adultery.
Take care, therefore, to temper with holy fear the just enthusiasm which ought to be stirred in you by this sublime engagement, a contract according to which you will share the life of the angels. Humbly aspiring to the consummation of this bond which shall attach you to God forever, inquire diligently into the various means by which you may be able to fulfil it with honour and fidelity.
The first means is to realize during your whole life and under all circumstances that, in his fallen state, man cannot, by his own efforts obtain and preserve the heavenly gift of chastity, but that God alone can bestow it upon us and preserve it in us. Therefore, we must incessantly call to our assistance the divine help, asking our Lord with confidence graciously to extend His powerful hand over us, and we must redouble our entreaties at the rising wind of temptation. Very conducive to the attainment of chastity is recourse to Mary, because she has received the special prerogative of aiding those who faithfully defend a virtue of which she is, before all other creatures, the most perfect and magnificent expression, being styled by the Church the “Virgin of virgins.” Of great help also is devotion to the holy angels, to St. Joseph, to our holy Patriarch and to the Saints of both sexes who have preserved unspotted the lily of virginal purity.
The second means consists in the frequent reception of the Holy Eucharist. Being the most pure body of the Incarnate Son of God, it has the special virtue of abating the rebellion of the flesh. In as much as this august sacrament transforms man in Jesus Christ, it speedily weakens concupiscence, spiritualizes the cravings of the heart, enlightens the intellect and plants in the soul a perception of the sanctity of God together with the desire of following this sanctity as a norm. Repulsed by his enemy, the devil flees from him, and if he does not yield completely at first, he nevertheless knows that his empire is threatened and in time withdraws altogether from a soul which worthily and frequently has recourse to such a powerful remedy.
The third means consists in the preservation and gradual development of the spirit of faith, which continually places before our mind the salutary truths revealed by the merciful God. He who is ever conscious of the bounty of God manifested to man in the mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption; he who can form for himself a true estimate of sanctifying grace which assures him the eternal possession of God; he who trembles at the thought of judgment and hell, - such a one has nothing to fear. Firmly established on the rock of faith, he shall not be hurled down by temptation; very often it will attack him without being able to move him at all.
The fourth means consists in loving and practising humility. God has established a mysterious relation between humility and chastity; Satan has set up a similar one between pride and impurity. This observation was made long ago by the masters of the spiritual life, and constant experience proves it very true. Always be humble and it will then be easy for you to remain chaste. When labouring under temptation, accept humiliations with courage, seek them and impose them on yourselves, and you will feel, before long, that Satan’s power over you is broken and that the tempest is succeeded by a calm.
The fifth means is a sincere delicacy of conscience, which takes alarm at whatsoever may menace holy chastity, whether it be in the senses or in the imagination. This delicacy, based on faithfulness and not on scrupulosity or narrow-mindedness, notes the slightest motion on the part of the enemy and is never easy as to his intentions, which are as treacherous as they are hostile. It recognizes the weak points in its line of defence and watches them most closely. A slight warning, a wound, however insignificant, is enough to prompt constant vigilance at the vulnerable spot. In fine, it is on the look-out for all the illusions of a false conscience, which have been the cause of ruin for so many.
The sixth means consists in constant control of the imaginations, by checking their wantonness. Restraint and modesty of looks are absolutely necessary to everyone who wishes to practise chastity; they belong, at the same time, to the monastic decorum. The resolutions to be taken against the other senses should reach as far as experience has proved the danger to extend. As to the imagination, it is necessary to know that everything, not only what is sinful, but also what may become hurtful, must be cut off without delay, and that reveries and laziness of mind must be constantly distrusted.
The seventh means consists in the mortification of the body. Hardships voluntarily imposed on the flesh diminish its influence and check its insolence. By habitually chastising the body, we take a salutary precaution and can easily gather enough strength for a successful repulse. Be instructed by the example of our holy Patriarch, who acquired chastity by suffering. Learn to be unremitting in the practice of penance, and you shall also, in your turn, gain a sure and lasting victory over concupiscence.
The eighth means consists in the esteem and love of holy purity. Never look upon it as bondage, but as freedom. There are, no doubt, souls which God leads by the way of long and weary temptations. In this He purposes His glory and the triumph of grace. He often sends trials of this kind to prevent greater dangers which threaten these souls. He keeps them, thereby, in humility and opens to them an immense source of merit. But this is not the way of God in respect to most of us. On the contrary, we know from experience that chastity, when loved and resolutely guarded, soon becomes easy in practice; the curbed senses are ruled without great effort; the imagination, subdued by the consideration of the teachings of faith, no longer goes astray; the purified heart seeks God in simplicity and finds Him. Gloomy solicitude about chastity is often more hurtful than beneficial. Prove yourselves simple and upright in this and the other points, and you shall find peace and joy for your souls.
3. Religious Obedience
The third and most excellent of the evangelical counsels is holy obedience. It consists in the renunciation of one’s own will in order to do the will of a superior, to whom one is voluntarily subject for the purpose of pleasing God. Religious obedience, therefore, differs greatly from that which is due to parents or imposed by nature, and still more from that of the soldier, which need be exterior only and still suffice. Religious obedience must be interior and directly willed, as proceeding from the free choice which the religious makes of this virtue in order to please God. Man parts, by religious poverty, from things that are not his own that he may march towards God with a lighter step; by religious chastity, he restricts the rights over his person, in order to draw near to Him; by religious obedience, however, he lays down his whole self, renouncing his will, which indeed was limited by poverty and chastity, but remained otherwise still free. This surrender is made into the hands of God, to whom the religious henceforth belongs, not only as creature, but also as a freely offered and consecrated holocaust. From that moment, there exists a contract between God and the religious soul, in virtue of which it substitutes the will of God for its own. And since God does not manifest His commands in a visible manner, but, on the contrary, wills to nourish love in the religious soul by faith, it seeks and finds His will in the creature to whom it is subjected. This, then, is the reason why such a soul attains union with God and is established in the way of perfect charity. There cannot exist a bond between two intelligent and free beings more intimate than that which is the effect of the fusion of their two distinct wills into one. Happy, therefore, the soul to whom it has been given by divine grace to understand the ineffable gain of renunciation!
Our Lord has realized this perfect obedience in His own sacred humanity. It is the underlying characteristic of His whole mortal career and is not less essential to the religious in whom Jesus Christ wishes to produce His imitation. The Son of God descended from heaven, according to His own testimony, “to do the will of His Father.” He teaches us in another place (St. John iv, 34.) that the accomplishment of His divine will is His nourishment, that to fulfil it He became “obedient unto death: even to the death of the cross.” (Philippians ii, 8.)
Nothing is more glorious, nothing more salutary to the soul, than obedience after the example of Jesus Christ. Sin is our greatest enemy, because it can deprive us of God. Now, sin is the product of self-will. This will, therefore, being chained down so it can not move but for a good end, is it not evident that sin is expelled from our lives wherever this blessed obedience reigns supreme. And every human and obnoxious element of the will being annihilated, is it not likewise evident that this virtue unites the soul with the will of God, which is always holy and favourably disposed towards our true interests? Thus the word of our Saviour is accomplished, who bids us to hate even our own souls, that is, our self-will; to detach ourselves from it, if we wish to serve Him in safety and be intimately attached to him.
Convinced of this truth, let us entertain true love for this virtue of obedience, which is fraught with many advantages. Let us love it as our glory; let us love it as the principle of our safety. But to practise it perseveringly, we must understand that, above all things, the spirit of faith is absolutely necessary. Faith alone can disclose to us the will of God through the person and the commands of the superior. Live, therefore, by faith and rise above that which is of flesh and blood; obey with joy and perseverance, and your obedience will be acceptable to God.
Take care to accustom yourselves, from the very beginning, never to question a command, but simply to carry it out as if you had heard the direct voice of God, being filled with thankfulness for the care He graciously takes in leading you. Should the command disagree with your own ideas, master your reason and carry out the command, from the motive that it comes from God. Beware of criticising, even interiorly, much less exteriorly, the injunctions received; for this is an unmistakable sign that the spirit of faith has deserted you, that you have become again men of the flesh.
Your obedience should be prompt, courageous and unhesitating. It should not see the difficulties and should overcome all repugnances. Nothing is more delightful to the heart of God than the spectacle of this abandonment, which is proof of the trust and love placed in Him by His creature. Neither need we be astonished at the miracles oftentimes wrought by obedience. Its effect being the concurrence of the will of God with that of the creature, in the same action, is there any thing astonishing in this, that God should work where nothing retards His action?
With this sublime precept of renunciation, which is pointed out in the holy Gospel as the indispensable way to perfection, constantly before your eyes, stand ready for any thing, awaiting only the signal in order to do on the instant the reverse of what you have done the moment before. Accomplish, with the same good will, this or that, assured that it does not matter what particular thing we do, if we only do it in accordance with the good pleasure of God, who reveals what is agreeable to Himself and will reward eternally the slightest proof of abnegation offered to Him in this world.
Fear, above all, to influence the command by showing in your manner of obeying a lack of generosity. If the Superior, upon experiencing their want of zeal, should think it necessary to spare some more than others, let such forbearance be considered one of the greatest evils that could befall them. But they should humble themselves before God for having deserved this sad privilege and allow themselves no rest until they have reconquered the right of being tried, like their brethren, in this most essential virtue of the religious.
Be most careful not to be guilty of sloth in the province of obedience; sloth, into which such fall as are not generous of heart. This consists in resting content in the enjoyment of self-will and in finding a peculiar delight in the thought that one does what he desires, there being no command to disturb his independence. Often reflect on the words of the Following of Christ: “Qui se subtrahit ab obedientia, ipse se subtrahit a gratia.” Under the exercise of obedience, grace extends its empire over the soul, and merits increase and multiply; in the absence of command, the soul is very liable to lose what it has acquired, if it does not take the precaution to preserve, in good condition, that inner recollection which keeps it, day and night, disposed for grace. Often examine yourselves on this point, and may the desire of remaining for ever united with God live constantly in you, and maintain the spirit of a virtue which is the vital principle of any religious calling.
Be also on your guard against a danger to which your obedience may oftentimes be exposed by neglecting to watch most energetically over your inmost disposition. This danger is obedience, not from love of God, but from a human attraction towards the one who issues the command. It is an undeniable fact that God very often renders obedience easier to religious by infusing in them affection for their superiors. We must, however, preserving it in its entirety, strive to elevate and purify this laudable sentiment, so that the prevailing motive for the action still remains supernatural and merits for us the reward which God has stored up for us. In such instances, imagine yourselves under the obedience of a superior for whom you have no affection of this kind, and then make the resolution to obey with no less fidelity. You will acquire thereby that indifference which is as holy as it is necessary to every religious, and find yourselves equally prepared to see what you desire refused or granted, having only this end in view, that you behold in the command the holy will of God and accomplish it with willingness and determination.
Love of this virtue of obedience will render you docile not only to the will of the Superior under whose authority God has placed you, but will also put you at the disposal of those charged with your guidance or make you ready to engage in the different offices of the novitiate or the monastery. More than this, be zealous in conforming yourselves to the prescription laid down in the holy Rule (Chap. 71), where our holy Patriarch formally enjoins the brethren to be obedient to one another, that self-will be destroyed every where and the spirit of obedience, which should redress every wrong of self-will, be ever augumented in his children.
Esteeming in accordance with its great importance this fundamental spirit of the religious state, ask the Lord with fervour to avert from us, during our whole lives, that unhappy tendency which has hindered the rapid progress of more than one religious soul; we mean the practice of deliberating as to how far one violates his conscience by resisting the mandate of obedience, and hesitating only at the fear of formal sin. Unless such souls be converted, they will never reach the perfection which they have avowed. To please God, obedience must be the fruit of the liberty of a soul, devoid of selfishness, and not the result of speculative calculation. To reduce one’s life to the abhorrence of formal sin, instead of seeking and doing good for its own sake, does this not mean to make one’s self a base hireling of God when he could be His child; to deprive God of a glory which He expects in return for the sublime vocation to which He has called the religious soul; to constrain the heart when, on the contrary, it ought be dilated by the sentiment of love which finds its most noble and complete expression in perfect obedience?
Let us add, in conclusion, that the vows of poverty and chastity, which must necessarily be practised by the religious until death, are placed under the safeguard of obedience. He who is not obedient from the heart, will not hesitate to infringe upon poverty, whose sacrifices greatly depend on the will. How can such a one have the assurance of preserving holy chastity for any length of time, if, in the first place, he will not listen to the counsels and injunctions of obedience, which tend to protect him against his weakness?
From all this we are to infer that obedience is the most precious gift for the religious; a treasure which he cannot love too ardently, nor defend with too much energy. It puts him in complete possession of that liberty which is enjoyed by the children of God and offered to him, even in this world - a liberty which will merit infinite glory for all eternity.
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| Catholic Signs and Symbols |
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Posted by: Elizabeth - 01-21-2021, 12:25 PM - Forum: Church Doctrine & Teaching
- Replies (7)
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ANIMALS, BIRDS, FISH & INSECTS
ANT: Christian industry.
APE: In art it depicts malice.
ASS: Humility. Patience. Animal of the poor.
BASILISK: A fabled creature, based on Psalm 91:13: naming four animals for the Antichrist. These were interpreted by St. Augustine as four aspects of the Devil, who was trodden down by the triumphing Christ. Although a well-established symbol, and often represented in the Middle Ages, the basilisk rarely appears in Italian paintings of the Renaissance.
BAT: Night. Desolation.
BEAR [wild]: Cruelty and evil influence. In the Old Testament it represented the kingdom of Persia.
BEAR [tame]: Christianity.Typical is the life of St. Euphemia, who, when thrown to wild animals in the arena, was shown honor by a bear who appeared tame, and would not eat her.
BEE: Tireless activity. Regal power. Chastity. Also associated with St. Rita of Cascia.
BIRDS: Symbol of the "winged soul." Many artists have the Child Jesus holding a bird in His hand.
BLACKBIRD: The black feathers and melodious song represented the temptation of sin. Tradition tells us that one day when St. Benedict was praying the Devil appeared to him in the form of a blackbird which tried to divert him from his devotions. St. Benedict was not fooled: he made the Sign of the Cross and the Devil departed in haste.
BULL: Depicts strength; sometimes St. Sylvester is shown with a bull at his feet because he brought back a dead bull to life. If the bull is made of brass, this is a symbol of St. Eustace who was Martyred with his family by being encased in a brass bull under which a fire was ignited.
BUTTERFLY: Resurrection of Christ.
CAMEL: Represents the virtue of temperance because he can go a long time without water. Also a sign of royalty in the Old Testament. Camel's hair is one of the the symbols of St. John the Baptist.
CAT: Symbolizes laziness and lust generally because of its indolent habits, although the cat is a symbol of good, for instance, when it is shown with the Virgin because tradition has it that a cat gave birth to a litter of kittens in the stable at Bethlehem. Several Annunciation images portray the Virgin Mary with a little cat near her feet.
CENTAUR: This mythic animal, part horse, part man is a symbol of St. Anthony Abbot because a mysterious animal appeared to him to point the way to reach St. Paul the Hermit in the desert.
COCK: Because the cock crows early in the morning, it symbolizes vigilance, but when depicted in a painting of St. Peter, it signifies his denial of Jesus Christ and subsequent repentance. Thus the cock is now a symbol of the Passion. [John 13:38]
CRANE: Vigilance. Loyalty and good works. Good order in monastic life. It is thought that at night some cranes maintain watch for the others.
CROCODILE: Hypocrisy.
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| Desecration of the Tombs of the Kings of France by the Revolutionists |
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Posted by: Elizabeth - 01-21-2021, 12:18 PM - Forum: Resources Online
- No Replies
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The Revolutionary Exhumations at St-Denis, 1793
In July 1793, heralding the first anniversary of the French Republic that ousted the Bourbon monarchy, the new government issued a decree that shocked Europe and haunts France still. To punish the vanity of the deposed “tyrants” and to cleanse the nation of their memory, the National Convention ordered the destruction of the ancient royal tombs, most of which were in the basilica of St-Denis, near Paris—for centuries France’s royal necropolis, deconsecrated in 1793 and its Benedictine monks disbanded. Operations proceeded in two stages to coincide with programs that symbolically consolidated the new republic. For the Festival of Reunion on August 10 that marked its birth, the coffins of the oldest dynasties in the upper church of St.-Denis were emptied, lead removed for recasting, and the remains moved to a trench by the demolished Valois Chapel. The Bourbon crypt was opened as a prelude to Marie-Antoinette’s execution on October 16 (Louis was beheaded the prior January 21) and the remains (including hearts and entrails) dumped in a new trench. The bodies of the preceding Valois dynasty followed into a third trench, along with any corpses still left. The transfer dismembered most cadavers before the quicklime deposited on top could corrode them. In 1817, when the restored Bourbon monarchy returned the remains to the basilica, all that survived intact were the lower portions of three corpses. The fragments of about one hundred and fifty-eight once-sacred bodies fit into two large ossuaries in the crypt.
Their funerary monuments in the upper church were also symbolically executed. Metal monuments were melted down for arms and marbles removed until the Bourbons returned them to St-Denis twenty years later, greatly damaged and altered.
Taking to an extreme what many cultures consider heinous sacrilege, the legislated destruction of the royal burials—for many inseparable from the spontaneous Revolutionary vandalism throughout France—was an especially “obscene” campaign for millennial antinomianism, as historian Bruce Lincoln calls it, an attack on prevailing taboos, as part of the overthrow of the old order, to assert symbolic and psychological dominance. Artist-archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir, present at the exhumations while assembling the marbles for transfer to Paris, instead couched the campaign in religious terms. Profanation of the royal tombs, he asserted, fulfilled Jeremiah’s warning (Jer. 7:29-34; 8:1-5) that God would annihilate an entire race and scatter its buried ancestors if it deviated from divine mandate.
I pursue the Judeo-Christian idiom that Lenoir used to highlight features of the infamous profanation of St-Denis that relate to the sensory culture of religion. Desecrating the dead consecrated by Catholic rites and burial is, after all, violently somatic for both perpetrator and victim. Detailed reports and memoirs of the exhumations present elements that recall the lived/felt dimensions of belief proposed by historian David Morgan: a confrontation between charged bodies, living and dead, in a charged setting and moment, that deploys sensory perception for moral judgment, leading to public acts (performance) that were alternately reverential and sacrilegious. Throughout, the encounter intertwines not only contemporary religion and politics but also religious traditions with contemporary intellectual debate.
Unlike the royal executions that triggered many popular prints and three-dimensional souvenirs, the exhumations at St-Denis appear in few images known to have circulated publicly at the time, a circumstance that belies the importance of the event. Though the aims and means of the project suggest the imperial Roman rite of Damnatio memoriae (erasure of specific dead emperors from public memory by destroying their remains, effigies, and public inscriptions), France’s National Convention intended to eradicate all royals in a project given an ambitious Christian name, the Last Judgment of kings.
Conducted under the scrutiny of officials and a mixed crowd ranging from Jacobins to St-Denis’s former monks, the exhumations took an unusual, possibly unscripted form. Corpses were removed from carved sarcophagi in the upper church or draped coffins in the crypt and examined for their state of preservation. Those of the ancient dynasties were reportedly mostly ash; certain later kings were relatively well preserved; most others were badly decomposed despite embalming. The Bourbons were among the worst. The putrefied bodies of some emitted a malodorous black vapor that sickened workers before it was checked with vinegar and burned saltpeter.
At face value, such findings dismiss these once-revered corpses as predictable evidence of the dangerous effect of the dead on the living, an argument that radically changed French urban burial practices from Christian forms to classical models in the eighteenth century. Symbolically, however, these exhumation chronicles of 1793 register moral judgment. Though the founding races turned to dust as nature decreed, the later putrid specimens suggested the moral taint of succeeding monarchs. An ancient reading of somatic evidence participated in the judgment. Whatever their politics, those present at the exhumations had been conditioned, like many since antiquity, to associate physical corruption with sin even among the living, especially where smells were involved. A pleasingly fragrant individual signaled moral purity; a corpse without the normal stench or decay connoted extraordinary virtue and divine favor. Formalized as the Christian doctrine of the odor of sanctity, the moral interpretation of corrupt and incorruptible flesh contributed to eighteenth-century social attitudes as disparate as sexual choice and racial discrimination.
Deep in the central Bourbon crypt, the revelations of the first coffin to be opened, that of the dynasty’s progenitor King Henri IV (1553-1610), caused a sensation: eerily torchlit, the corpse and shroud proved stunningly well preserved. To record the “miracle,” a cast of Henri’s face was taken. The resulting plaster (Fig. 1) provided an exceptionally vivid, palpable simulacrum of his face for a nation that had seen only the mediated images of him disseminated during his lifetime and beyond. Rendering the lush beard and mustache, the firm bone structure and skin, and delicate eyelashes and eyebrows of an arrestingly vigorous man, the mask offered a special authenticity as Henri’s durable twin, and projected a forceful presence in gritty plaster.
Henri’s mummy, as such intact corpses were then called, was then propped in its coffin in the crypt ambulatory for the weekend, then prominently displayed in the choir at the foot of sanctuary steps before its removal to the trench.
Only one exhumed corpse was spared: that of Louis XIV’s eminent maréchal-général (supreme commander), Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne (1611-1675), France’s greatest general before Napoleon. His coffin, in a small crypt below his monument in the St. Eustache chapel of the upper church, was opened just before the Bourbon crypt as a special case, reportedly because workers wanted to see a grand homme (exemplary citizen worthy of the nation’s gratitude). Despite his noble blood and royal service, Turenne was the ideal Revolutionary commander, even during the polarized climate of 1793, for his unprepossessing humanity, deep bond to his soldiers, and love of France. Witnesses were awed when his body emerged intact and odorless. Lenoir executed a drawing of Turenne’s mummy among several of the exhumed corpses (including Henri’s) that he claimed were produced “from nature” in situ. This drawing is nonetheless openly idealized. The shrouded body is placed on an engraved slab, floating at a distance from us in blank space, rendered in profile but with the head turned slightly towards the viewer. Revealed from the waist up, this mummy is only slightly gaunt, bearing none of the gruesome traces of the fatal cannonball shot to the abdomen, the embalming, or subsequent degradation. The swelling torso evokes a neoclassical heroic nude. The floating corpse is not given the strong chiaroscuro of a torchlit crypt, but is instead evenly, softly lit. The image suggests an icon with a certain sacrality, rather than neutral, intimate reportage or macabre sensationalism.
The timing of Turenne’s exhumation undoubtedly affected its impact. It was the first of the October campaign and yielded the first of the two “miraculous” mummies in close succession. In the volatile, emotional atmosphere, Turenne’s corpse seemed animated by the virtues for which he was cherished. Lenoir claimed everyone believed they saw the grand homme stir with patriotic fervor, despite the traces of fatal injury and disfigurement after death omitted from his drawing.
The witnesses’ confrontation with the mummies of Turenne and Henri IV merged thought, emotion, and the senses. The encounter also triggered extraordinarily varied actions that suggest how powerful the historic dead, in this special existential state, seemed to those present. Predictably, pieces were taken. Crowds pressed close to Turenne, displayed in a chestnut box in a small sacristy, encouraged by a guard who offered to pull teeth for a price. The prominent journalist and member of the National Convention, Camille Desmoulins, took Turenne’s right little finger. Whether such acts were considered reverent or sacrilegious depended on the chronicler. Responses to Henri’s exhibited mummy were especially varied. Lenoir claimed, “I had the pleasure of touching these venerable remains . . . I took his hands with a certain respect that I could not resist, as true a Republican as I am.” He also noted a soldier who embraced the corpse and cut a lock of the still-soft red beard as a mustache to become the modern militant Henri destined for victory over France’s newest enemies. Others turned violent. One woman allegedly approached the displayed corpse and, cursing it as a royal, struck a blow that sent it crashing to the floor. Recently, forensic scientists and scholars identified a mummified head in private hands as Henri’s, removed before his transfer to the trench—a sensational announcement that caused intense debate and has been challenged through study of the DNA.
However spontaneous, the crowd’s actions in 1793 seem to have drawn upon disparate forms of behavior: empirical scrutiny, religious reverence, violent hostility to power rendered present and vulnerable. What effect did this heterogenous audience have upon those who performed? There was no one community, ritual, or predictable emotion to shape this event.
The corpses of St-Denis bore complex semiotic charges surrounding France, past and present. Whether mere ash or intact corpses, this somatic material made political abstractions (a social order, ideology, or power) palpable. Even the most desultory remains stood witness to successive moments of France’s history. The intact bodies—especially those of Henri and Turenne—most fully incarnated that history at especially critical points. These special dead made the remote past believable and present, in the literal sense of the word, fully there and available to the senses.
The pursuit of sensory proof at St-Denis in 1793 simultaneously invokes the antithesis of faith in Christianity, skepticism (personified, as scholars often point out, by Doubting Thomas), and a defining principle of eighteenth-century sensualism or sensibility. The latter refers to the radical rethinking of perception throughout Europe spurred by seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke and continued through the eighteenth century and beyond. The new approach rejected the prevailing view of a purely optical, rational process to argue the central perceptual role of the fuller, engaged body. The premise affected a wide range of disciplines and essential issues—even the very definition of humanity. For the most prominent among its Enlightenment advocates in eighteenth-century France (notably Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the pastoralist poets), the body, seeking information from the allied senses guided by unerringly accurate touch, provided the crucial agent for creative exchange between the phenomenal world and the inquiring, emotionally responsive mind. The anti-Cartesian motto of this camp (“I feel, therefore I exist”), popularized in France by pastoralist Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in the twelfth of his Studies of Nature of 1784, demanded that the passionate, fully embodied “I” be “there.” Direct, even intimate experience of the physical world was essential for the sensitive human to produce meaning. For participants in the exhumations at St-Denis, such processes constituted a loaded dialogue with the national past, in a charged setting (the ancient royal necropolis), at a flashpoint in French history. The order to destroy the somatic roots of a compromised France proved elastic enough, before unexpected revelations, to permit those present to engage with and recruit historical traits for the new order.
Less poetically evocative than ashes or a single femur, the mummies of Turenne and Henri conjured stories in the beholders’ imagination through vision (visible resemblances that matched inherited texts and images) and touch (palpated anatomies that proved an actuality like their own); their moral worth had also been tested through smell. To judge by the reported responses of witnesses, the mummies’ high degree of preservation, ancient sign of supernatural power and divine grace, suggested that historical France was still vital, linking the beholder and beheld from different existential planes: death and life, past and present. That perceived life within the preserved bodies of Henri IV and Turenne was double-edged, for some a force to destroy, for others to deploy. The two mummies made compellingly present exceptional individuals who forged the national past, suspended in an extraordinary physical state before emotional witnesses who could touch, smell, embrace, punch, and remove parts of them to possess, if not to be magically transformed into modern greats.
The response to the discovery of the intact Turenne and Henri in 1793 easily recalls the Christian cult of saints and martyrs found miraculously preserved when exhumed. Their similarities, however, are limited. The remains at St-Denis were not channels to the divine. These preserved dead derived their primary power and/or culpability from their direct hand in shaping France when alive. The protagonists in the exhumations of 1793 indeed judged, as diverse individuals with diverse responses, some reverential, some antagonistic, all seeking proof, power, and a role vis-à-vis the historical personage before them. All but Turenne were condemned to the obliterating trench.
Turenne’s exhumed mummy was instead displayed for eight months at St-Denis, then again in Paris (at the Museum of Natural History) before prestigious reburial, first in Lenoir’s honorific Elysian Gardens within his Museum of French Monuments. In 1800, the new First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte had the corpse moved, in an elaborate public translation, to its present location in the main floor of Louis XIV’s Church of the Dome of the Invalides, then republican France’s Temple of Mars. The First Consul ordered the coffin buried in front of Turenne’s original monument, transferred shortly before to the Invalides from Lenoir’s Museum of French Monuments, where the republicans had deposited it after removing it from St-Denis in the 1790s. The placement of the monument and body in the prestigious public space of the Invalides made them, as never before, the ritual focus of a major religious site. There, this potent corpse presided over the militant Revolutionary French as their revered father within the architectural embodiment of France’s renewed military glory.
https://mavcor.yale.edu/conversations/es...denis-1793
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