Franciscan at Home

Seventeen years ago this May, I had the extraordinary blessing of meeting one of my heroes: Pope St. John Paul II. I did not meet the young pope who had once famously escaped the Vatican in disguise to enjoy a day of skiing. Rather, this was the much older man whose body was being ravaged by Parkinson’s Disease. As I stood in line inching forward to meet him, I noticed the muscles in his face were so weakened that saliva was pooling by his feet.

Adoration: Losing Self, Finding Peace

This article is the second in a three part series on the spiritual mission of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity for our time. We are arguing that contemplation of the Triune God can heal the wounds of social alienation that so profoundly mark the experience of believers today and, more than this, offers a fullness of Christian living no other kind of prayer can match. In our last article, we distinguished St. Elizabeth’s confidence in presenting a contemplative approach to the Trinity in contradistinction to the tentativeness that often comes through the preaching of those who do not share a deep devotion to the Divine Persons. In this article, we will further explore St. Elizabeth’s devotion to the Trinity by reflecting on her understanding of adoration as an oblative reality characterized by peace and a distinctly Christian understanding of self-forgetfulness.

St. Elizabeth of the Trinity contemplates the Trinity as a mystery in which one can both “lose” and “forget” one’s own self. She does not explicitly refer to Christ’s observation that whoever loses his life for the sake of Christ will gain it forever (Mt 16:25). Yet she approaches the Divine Persons, asking for the grace to completely “lose” herself so that she might be established in peace, and sees the immensity of God as evoking self-forgetfulness and complete surrender to his love.

A severe spiritual trial during her novitiate helped forge this devotion. Her prioress and novice mistress, newly appointed thirty-one year old Mother Germaine, describes Saint Elizabeth struggling with “shadows of a dark night,” including “interior disturbances, spiritual pain, and strange phantoms.” Such an observation is entirely consistent with Carmelite tradition. In his commentary, Dark Night, St. John of the Cross argues that such testing is necessary to dispose the soul to perfect union with God, and even more, that this union is already being affected during the trials when he seems so absent. In Spiritual Canticle, St. John of the Cross makes even more explicit that this is a spiritual battle against the devil. Suffering the dark shadows of this spiritual trial in contemplative prayer, according to this wisdom, would prepare Saint Elizabeth for a profound and fruitful union with Christ, the Bridegroom.

In this three-part series, I want to focus on a Saint of the New Evangelization who many of you will already have met in the Communion of Saints:  St.

“God is the author of Sacred Scripture,” and “God inspired the human authors of the sacred books.”[1] These catechetical truths are brought to life in a masterpiece painting titled, “Saint Jerome and the Angel,” from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Completed around 1625, this ethereal image is the work of the French Baroque painter, Simon Vouet. His masterful use of color, light, and line offers a visual catechesis on the power and beauty of God’s Word in the life of Saint Jerome, revered saint and Doctor of the Church. “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” These words attributed to Saint Jerome direct our gaze to the person of Jesus Christ, who stands at the heart of Sacred Scripture. And in this masterpiece image we are given a glimpse into the witness of a saint whose life was devoted entirely to Christ, present and active in his Word. As the Church concludes the celebration of a Jubilee Year of Mercy, this image also invites us to feast on the riches of God’s merciful Word, in imitation of the holy witness of Saint Jerome. Vouet places the aging Saint Jerome seated at a well-used writing table. An open book filled with words lies in front of him, while a scroll on which he is about to write unfolds at the center of the desk. His lean, muscular frame reminds us that his scholarly work was the fruit of many years of saintly asceticism. For Saint Jerome completed most of his contemplation of God’s Word and his scholarly works as a simple ascetic. An ink well, and an hour glass, on the desk suggest that the saintly scholar has labored for many years with prayerful dedication and love of God’s Word. These items together with the skull on his desk are also meant to remind us of the transience of earthly life and the promise of immortal life in the power of Christ’s resurrection.

St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus wrote, “God gave me a father and a mother more worthy of heaven than of earth,” and she called them “parents without equal.” Her saintly parents, Louis and Zélie Guérin Martin, were canonized in Rome on October 18, 2015, during the world Synod of Bishops on the Family—the first married couple with children to be canonized together. At a time in popular culture when the term “marriage” has been all but eviscerated by those denying its transcendent value or questioning its original purpose, the life of Louis and Zélie serves to prophetically illustrate marriage as a divine vocation and a true sacrament between man and woman, a means of growing in holiness. Even while Louis and Zélie Martin were a nineteenth-century French couple, they are refreshingly contemporary in their experience of marriage and family life. Not unlike many couples today, they married later in life by the standards of that age, when she was 27 years old and he was 35. They were both “young professionals.” From the age of 20, Zélie had owned a lace making business (which she continued as a wife and mother within the family home), managing several employees and personally assembling their embroidered work into the final product. So fine and well regarded was Zélie’s intricate “Point d’Alençon” lace, her business served as the appointed supplier to the clothier Maison Pigache of Paris. For his part, Louis was a master watchmaker and had established his shop in Alençon where he repaired time-pieces and sold jewelry for some eight years before meeting Zélie.

At the end of his announcement of the Year of Mercy, Pope Francis invoked the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Mercy: “Let us henceforth entrust this Year to the Mother of Mercy, that she turn her gaze upon us and watch over our journey: our penitential journey, our year-long journey with an open heart …”[1] This invocation of Mary, Mother of Mercy was underscored by the announcement that the Holy Year will begin on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. Let’s think about these two titles of the Blessed Virgin Mary together and ask ourselves how they are related. Mary is the Immaculate Conception. This is how she identified herself to St. Bernadette. That she was immaculately conceived does not mean that she existed outside the economy of redemption, on her own independent track, but rather that she, by the merits of her Son, was redeemed in a unique way, preserved immune from all stain of original sin from the first moment of her conception.[2] The “stain” of original sin is, of course, not a physical stain, but rather it refers to the impairment of freedom and therefore of the ability to love. This is the legacy of original sin. For this reason, either we are afraid of the consequences of choosing the good, or some other alternative seems more attractive. We can even choose the right alternative but for the wrong reasons or for mixed motives. Consider the power disparity that exists between Mary, a creature, and her Creator! Although it would not have been a sin to say “no,” Mary could have said “yes” to her vocation out of fear of God’s power or out of attraction to the status God could provide her! In a case like this, “in order for Mary to be able to give the free assent of her faith … it was necessary that she be wholly borne by God’s grace.”[3] God’s grace is God’s mercy, and therefore Mary had to be wholly borne by God’s mercy. God’s mercy elected her for this vocation, and in and by God’s mercy she was able to assent with perfect freedom to God’s request. Because she is the Immaculate Conception, her whole being is defined by God’s mercy, and her “yes” is a completely unhindered act of assent to all of God’s merciful plans towards humankind that come to their fruition in the Incarnation. She is the “Mother of Mercy” in the sense that her motherhood is a gift of God’s mercy, and also in the sense that she is literally the Mother of the Incarnate Word, who is God’s mercy extended to us. Devotion to Mary, Mother of Mercy, helps us realize that the Incarnation, as God’s greatest work of mercy, is not an abstract concept but is a Person. “Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Phil 2.6-7). Devotion to Mary deepens our awareness of how far that “self-emptying” mercy went, namely, to the point where the “Almighty became weak for us,”[4] in other words, to the point where he became the direct opposite of almighty, a helpless baby who “uttered crying noises like all other children”[5] and was completely dependent upon his mother. The divine compassion is concrete, not abstract, and the more devoted to Mary we are, the more a vista of the depth of this compassion, or mercy, dawns on our spiritual vision and we cry out: “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of Heaven!” (Gen 28:17) The mercy of God is the gate of heaven, and in contemplating its awesomeness we stand on heaven’s threshold! There is nothing more powerful than the contemplation of God’s self-emptying mercy to prompt conversion.

This article is the final in a series on the spiritual life commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of St. Teresa of Avila. From the moment of her conversion, a wellspring of joy sprang up in Teresa’s heart from its most inner “dwelling place,” and she wanted to share this wellspring with others. She proposes the image of two large basins of water in a garden to explain the essential feature in her new life of prayer, source of this wellspring: With one, the water comes from far away through many aqueducts and the use of much ingenuity; with the other the source of the water is right there, and the trough fills without any noise (…). There is no need of any skill, nor does the building of aqueducts have to continue; but water is always flowing from the spring.[i] For our Doctor of the Church, the first basin symbolizes the work of the Spirit in meditation. It produces joy, but it is a human joy, the joy produced by a work well done. The second basin symbolizes contemplation, which invites God’s pure gift, which is so abundant that the capacity of the basin is too small to receive all the water. Never mind that, says Teresa: the Lord himself will enlarge the basin,[ii] according to this Psalm verse: I run the way of your commandments, for you enlarge my understanding [literally: my heart] (Ps 119:32).[iii] Thus the basin will grow as it is filled by water. This dilation of the heart filled by love and joy cannot be the fruit of human work. “There is no need of any skill,” only a loving faith is necessary.

Noëlle Le Duc, a member of the Carmelite secular institute Notre Dame de Vie, was a pre-school and kindergarten teacher who worked with three to seven-year old children, in order to awaken their faith. Her work with children formed a foundation for the later development of the Come Follow Me program. She believed that even very young children can enter into a lively personal relationship with God and live this out through prayer, as well as in all the dimensions of human life. This relationship grounds catechesis and allows it to bear lasting fruit. In this article, we will begin to examine the baptized child’s capability for a dynamic relationship with God. A Powerful Inspiration at the Beginning Before we examine Le Duc’s contributions, we must first understand the Carmelite founder of the Notre Dame de Vie Institute she entered in the 1950s, Ven. Fr. Marie-Eugene of the Child Jesus, whose cause for beatification is currently being examined. Fr. Marie-Eugene was a spiritual master, who highlighted especially the treasures that come with baptism. Fr. Marie-Eugene believed that catechesis must not only teach the truth about God, but it also has to “give the sense of God” and to teach people how they can “put into practice” the capacities given by grace. He thus explains what the catechist must do: the catechist has to awaken the child to all the supernatural realities present in his soul; therefore, it is necessary to teach the child how to put the theological virtues into practice. Then the catechist must foster in the child the habits inscribed in the depth of his soul, where the reflexes that guide human nature are mainly to be found. The purity and the simplicity of the child increase his capacity to put into practice this “supernatural organism” of the theological virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit that are integral to the working of baptismal grace. The catechist has to teach the child how to find God, to have regular personal encounters with him, and to remain in his presence. Thus faith becomes keener and penetrates more deeply into God. In this way the child acquires incomparable spiritual riches that will benefit him his whole life. Emphasizing the act of believing, Fr. Marie-Eugene challenges catechists: what pedagogy can bring children to God and help them adhere to him in faith? How can the catechist help them discover God as a living and loving person, whom we can trust and who wants to enter into dialogue with us?

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of St. John Bosco. This great saint’s insights into forming young people remain vitally important and relevant today.

In 1988, St. John Paul II wrote a letter to the head of the Salesian Order to commemorate the centenary of the death of St. John Bosco. It was titled, Iuvenum Patris, or “Father of Youth.” Only the Italian version is available on the Vatican website—perhaps that is why few English speaking people have heard of it. [1] It is a beautiful document that looks at the educational spirituality of St. John Bosco. Iuvenum Patris was written by a saint who loved young people about a saint who loved young people. St. John Paul II’s insights are as practical as they are inspiring.

St. John Bosco employed a method, which has since become famous, for passing on the faith to his boys: “Reason, religion, and loving kindness.” Those who minister to youth today can still learn from this pedagogy.