William of St. Thierry on lectio divina

William of Saint-Thierry (d.1148) was a Benedictine - later, a Cistercian - monk, and friend of St Bernard of Clairvaux.

There's an excellent introduction to his life and teaching by Pope Benedict on the Vatican website - part of the Pope's wonderful series of general audience addresses on the great theologians and mystics of the Patristic and Mediaeval periods.

William's advice on the practice of lectio divina contained in his Epistola Aurea ("Golden Letter") is one of the classic texts on the subject.

The version below is taken from the Cistercian Publications translation which is reproduced on the Order of St Benedict website.

§ 120. [A]t fixed hours time should be given to certain definite reading.

For haphazard reading, constantly varied and as if lighted on by chance does not edify but makes the mind unstable;

taken into the memory lightly, it goes out from it even more lightly.

But you should concentrate on certain authors and let your mind grow used to them.

§ 121. The Scriptures need to be read and understood in the same spirit in which they were written.

You will never enter into Paul's meaning until by constant application to reading him and by giving yourself to meditation you have imbibed his spirit.

You will never understand David until by experience you have made the very sentiments of the psalms your own.

And that applies to all Scripture.

There is the same gulf between attentive study and mere reading as there is between friendship and acquaintance with a passing guest, between boon companionship and chance meeting.

§ 122. Some part of your daily reading should also each day be committed to memory, taken as it were into the stomach, to be more carefully digested and brought up again for frequent rumination;

something in keeping with your vocation and helpful to concentration, something that will take hold of the mind and save it from distraction.

§ 123. The reading should also stimulate the feelings and give rise to prayer, which should interrupt your reading:

an interruption which should not so much hamper the reading as restore to it a mind ever more purified for understanding.

§ 124. For reading serves the purpose of the intention with which it is done.

If the reader truly seeks God in his reading, everything that he reads tends to promote that end, making the mind surrender in the course of the reading and bring all that is understood into Christ's service.

From: William of Saint Thierry (d. 1148), The Golden Epistle: A Letter to the Brethren at Mont Dieu 1.120-124, trans. Theodore Berkeley, The Works of William of St. Thierry, Cistercian Fathers 12 (Spencer, Mass.: Cistercian Publications, 1971) 51-52.

St Simon and St Jude

We know very little about St Simon and St Jude - though, as a former Zealot (Zealots were heavily politicised Jewish revolutionaries), Simon was clearly a convert from the "political action will lead to a social utopia" view of religion to the "God's incarnate Son will elevate us into communion with the Trinity" view, and is, accordingly, a patron saint of those who recognise that turning Christianity into political utopianism (of the left or of the right) is a Bad Idea.

Although Simon and Jude don't play a major role in the gospels or in Acts, one might assume that they interpreted their apostolic mission something like this:

If Christ thought it necessary to send out his intimate disciples in this fashion, just as the Father had sent him, then surely it was necessary that they whose mission was to be patterned on that of Jesus should see exactly why the Father had sent the Son.

And so Christ interpreted the character of his mission to us in a variety of ways.

Once he said: I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.

And then at another time he said: I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.

For God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

Accordingly, in affirming that they are sent by him just as he was sent by the Father, Christ sums up in a few words the approach they themselves should take to their ministry:

From what he said they would gather that it was their vocation to call sinners to repentance;

to heal those who were sick whether in body or spirit;

to seek in all their dealings never to do their own will but the will of him who sent them;

and as far as possible to save the world by their teaching.

St Cyril of Alexandria: Commentary on St John's Gospel, 12,1 @ Crossroads Initiative.

Newman - what is the point of being holy?

Why do we need to be holy to get into heaven? One doesn't need to score A-grades to obtain a university degree - it's usually enough to coast one's way through the three years and get a safe but unspectacular degree at the end of it. Shouldn't the Christian life be the same?

In his Anglican days, Newman answered this question as follows:

Now some one may ask, Why is it that holiness is a necessary qualification for our being received into heaven?

Why is it that the Bible enjoins upon us so strictly to love, fear, and obey God, to be just, honest, meek, pure in heart, forgiving, heavenly-minded, self-denying, humble, and resigned?

Man is confessedly weak and corrupt; why then is he enjoined to be so religious, so unearthly? Why is he required (in the strong language of Scripture) to become 'a new creature'?

Since he is by nature what he is, would it not be an act of greater mercy in God to save him altogether without this holiness, which it is so difficult, yet (as it appears) so necessary for him to possess?

[...] To be holy is, in our Church's words, to have "the true circumcision of the Spirit;" that is, to be separate from sin, to hate the works of the world, the flesh, and the devil:

to take pleasure in keeping God's commandments; to do things as He would have us do them; to live habitually as in the sight of the world to come, as if we had broken the ties of this life, and were dead already.

Why cannot we be saved without possessing such a frame and temper of mind?

I answer as follows: That, even supposing a man of unholy life were suffered to enter heaven, he would not be happy there; so that it would be no mercy to permit him to enter.

Bl. J.H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 1, 1: "Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness".

"Swimming in the law of God"

Continuing my occasional series of posts on various aspects of lectio divina, the following is taken from the writings of St Seraphim of Sarov (1759-1833) - a monk and saint of the Russian Orthodox Church - who brings together the Patristic idea of lectio as the eating of God's word (manducatio, in the language of western monasticism) and the characteristically Byzantine idea of salvation as theosis (deification).

It befits one to nourish the soul with the word of God; for the word of God, as Gregory the Theologian says, is angelic bread, through which souls that hunger for God are fed.

Above all, one needs to exercise oneself in the reading of the New Testament and the Psalter, and this should be done standing.

Through this the mind is enlightened and is in turn changed with a divine change.

A man should accustom himself to having his mind as if swimming in the law of God, which should be a guide in the ordering of his life.

Once a man has nourished his soul with the word of God then he is filled with understanding of what is good and what is evil.

The reading of the word of God should be conducted in solitude so that the mind of the reader may be totally immersed in the truth of the Holy Scriptures, and receive from God a warmth in himself which in solitude produces tears, which cause the whole man to be kindled and filled with spiritual gifts that delight the mind and heart more than any word.

H/T The Handmaid

St Luke, the rosary, icons, and lectio divina

Fr Mark's recent post for the recent Feast of St Luke the Evangelist over at Vultus Christi is well worth reading and re-reading.

Summarising the argument of of a book in icons by Irish Benedictine Dom Gregory Collins entitled The Icons and Lectio Divina: Ancient and Post Modern Insights, Fr Mark discusses the way in which the author "applies the four moments of lectio divina to the practice of prayer before an icon".

According to this method of reading icons,

Lectio becomes a reading of the imagery, an attempt to "receive" the message it expresses through colour and form.

Meditatio takes the images received and turns them over in the mind; it can also mean focusing on a single detail of the icon: the face, the eyes, a hand, a gesture.

Meditatio before an icon allows one to linger for a long time in the transforming presence of the light of God. "We all", says Saint Paul, "with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another" (2 Cor 3:18).

Oratio is the prayer that, like a flame, shoots up in the heart. Gazing upon the icon, like repeating the sacred text, feeds the flame of oratio.

Finally, one is surprised by a holy stillness. The "fiery darts of prayer" are absorbed into something more obscure: contemplatio. "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face" (1 Cor 13:12).

Fr Mark goes on to say that

Philosophers, psychologists and saints agree that we become what we contemplate. Look at goodness and you will become good. Look at beauty and you will become beautiful. Look at truth and you will become true. Look at purity and you will become pure.

One corollary of this is that

the contemplation of the "icons" of Saint Luke's Gospel, especially through the prayer of the Rosary, is transforming....

Consider Saint Luke's icon of the Annunciation (Lk 1:26 38) and, with Mary, become "Yes" to the Word.

Look at the Visitation (Lk 1:39 56) and learn the language of Mary's praise....

Look at...the healing Christ (Lk 7:1-10) and become an instrument of healing;

at the solitary Christ in prayer (Lk 11:1), and learn to converse with the Father.

Look at the icon of Christ in Gethsemane (Lk 22:39-46), agonizing and comforted by an angel, and enter into his submission to the Father's will....

Look at the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus (Lk 24:13-32) and know that he walks with you always, opening the Scriptures, breaking the Bread, causing your hearts to burn with a mysterious fire.

Finally, look at the icon of the Church in the last sentence of Saint Luke's Gospel - "They were continually in the temple blessing God" (Lk 24:53) - and learn to bless God always and everywhere, learn to give the last word to praise.

Acording to Orthodox Wiki

St. Luke wrote the first icon - of the Most Holy Theotokos Directress or Hodigitria - mentioned in the Paraklesis to the Theotkos:

Speechless be the lips of impious ones,

Those who do not reverence

Your great icon, the sacred one

Which is called Directress,

And was depicted for us

By one of the apostles,

Luke the Evangelist.

—The Service of the Small Paraklesis (GOARCH)

John Cassian - "continual meditation will fill your heart"

In the fourteenth of John Cassian's Conferences, Abba Nesteros explains the way in which Scripture inwardly trasnforms us when we learn how to let it enter and fill the heart, where it is nothing less than the indwelling presence of God.

The encounter with God in Scripture is a priestly entrance into the Holy of Holies - the human heart - which stands at the centre of the Temple of the soul (thus the desert fathers, the early Cistercians) and of the interior castle (thus Teresa of Avila).

I've reproduced (slightly edited) this mind-blowing (quite literally, if applied according to the specifications of Abba Nesteros) text at Enlarging the Heart. Below is a brief taster.

You must by all means strive to get rid of all anxiety and worldly thoughts, and give yourself over…continuously, to sacred reading.

Then continual meditation will fill your heart.... Your soul will be carried forward not only to the ark of the Divine Covenant, but also to the priestly kingdom.

Owing to its unbroken love of purity being as it were engrossed in spiritual studies, it will fulfil the command given to the priests, enjoined as follows by the giver of the Law:

And he shall not go forth from the sanctuary, lest he pollute the Sanctuary of God (Lev. 21:12) – that is, his heart, in which the Lord promised that he would ever dwell, saying: I will dwell in them and will walk among them (2 Cor. 5:16).

Wherefore the whole series of the Holy Scriptures should be diligently committed to memory and ceaselessly repeated.

John Cassian (c. 360-435): Conferences 14,10.

Lectio divina among the desert fathers

The following is an extract from a translation of a talk by Dom David Bird OSB given in Rome in 1995 and entitled Lectio Divina as school of prayer among the Fathers of the Desert. The full version (highly recommended) can be read here on his Monks and Mermaids blog.

From the catechesis received in his local Church, the monk learned that he was created in the image of God, that that image was deformed by sin and that it must be reformed.

For that he must let himself be transformed and reshaped to the image of Christ. By the action of the Holy Spirit and his life according to the Gospel, his resemblance to Christ is gradually restored and he is able to know God.

We have seen that the goal of the monk's life, as expressed by Cassian, is continual prayer, which he describes as a constant awareness of the presence of God, realised through purity of heart.

It is not acquired through this observance or that, nor even through reading or meditating on Scripture, but through letting oneself be transformed by Scripture.

Contact with the Word of God - no matter whether this contact be through the liturgical reading of the Word, the teaching of a spiritual father, the private reading of a text or the simple rumination of a verse or some words learned by heart - this contact is the starting point for a dialogue with God.

This dialogue is established and pursued in the measure in which the monk has attained a certain purity of heart, a simplicity of heart and intention, and also in the measure in which he has put into practice the means of arriving at this purity of heart and of maintaining it.

This dialogue, in the course of which the Word unceasingly challenges the monk to conversion, sustains this continual attention to God, which the Fathers considered as continual prayer, and which is the goal of their life.

For the monks of the Desert the reading of the word of God is not simply a religious exercise of lectio which gradually prepares the spirit and the heart for meditatio then for oratio, in the hope that it may arrive even at contemplatio (... if possible before the half-hour or hour of lectio is over).

For the monks of the desert contact with the Word is contact with the fire that burns, disturbs, calls violently to conversion. Contact with Scripture is not for them a method of prayer; it is a mystical encounter. And this encounter often makes them afraid, insofar as they are conscious of its demands.

Bl Paul Giustiniani - prayer without ceasing (part 2)

A continuation of the previous post on prayer of the heart according to Blessed Paul Giustiniani, adapted from the wbsite of the Camaldolese Hermits of MonteCorona in Ohio.

To ascend through these stages is to proceed from a solid grounding of the mind in truth to a more precious exercise of the will in hope and love, for character is in the will, not in the intellect (Archbishop Sheen). The effort this ascent requires must not be stinted, because, through the practice of the seven gifts, the divine movement of actual grace, which is the soul of prayer, comes to be received no longer violently, but connaturally.

The four grades noted by Blessed Paul...do not constitute a method in the strict sense. They are, rather, moments in a movement of interiorization of the Word of God.

And yet Giustiniani does admit of what Leclercq calls the method of prior asceticism , that is, of remote and proximate preparation for prayer.

Remote preparation is living a holy life, which detaches the mind from worldly preoccupations and disposes it for that ascent to God which is, as we have seen, prayer’s broader definition.

This remote preparation includes the practice of the virtues, liturgical worship, and discipline of the senses (the Camaldolese trinomium is solitude, silence, and fasting). Proximate preparation comprises the first two rungs of Guigo’s ladder, reading and meditation.

Now beyond such somewhat methodical remote and proximate preparation, we must climb up to the third and even, if possible, to the fourth rung. At this point, Giustiniani’s counsel to eschew method comes fully into force, and with evident wisdom.

Human planning and effort have served their purpose and run their course. They must now give place to the subtle groanings of the Spirit (Rom 8:26-27). His influence must be sought reverently and clung to tranquilly for as long as it lasts.

If Blessed Paul requires a daily half hour of stillness in prayer, with a reverent and vigilant posture and in a sacred place, this is to assure that our own actions are not so unremitting as to block the Spirit’s initiatives.

We should allow Him to lead us either to multiply acts of prayer, or to ascend to contemplation, or even to return to reading and meditation. And normally He will provide us with some word to hold fast patiently in our hearts (Lk 8:15), as Mary did (Lk 2:19, 51), to sustain what the Holy Fathers call the remembrance of God.

The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom. . . . (Ps 36 (37):30; cf. Ps 1:2 and Jos 1:8).

Bl Paul Giustiniani - prayer without ceasing

Blessed Paul Giustiniani (1476-1528), who as a "second Romuald" led a reform of the Camaldolese order, culminating in the establishment of the Congregation of the Camaldolese Hermits of Monte Corona. The following account of his teaching on prayer is extracted (and abbreviated) from the excellent website of the Camaldolese Hermits of MonteCorona in Ohio.

The hermit’s principal ideal, aim, or task is continual prayer (Lk 18:1), that is, constant union with God. There is no fixed time for mental prayer in the eremitic life, unlike other religious institutes, because prayer is to be unceasing, a kind of spiritual equivalent to breathing.

How can one enter into this prayer? Blessed Paul takes up again the doctrine...of Guigo II the Carthusian. This commonly-accepted monastic approach to prayer, called lectio divina or divine reading , can be explained as a ladder (Guigo’s Scala Claustralium) of four rungs: (1) lectio (reading), (2) meditatio (meditation), (3) oratio (prayer), and (4) contemplatio (contemplation).

(1) Lectio, as the initial and fundamental element (Coronese Constitutions 31), gives the entire procedure of four steps its name analogically. This reading is called divine because its object is divine revelation, the Word of God heard in faith. One seeks this Word either in the Bible (also heard read in its entirety each year in the liturgy) or in some other devout book faithfully echoing Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture.

(2) Meditatio or meditation is a careful thinking over of what has been read and focuses on very definite dogmatic and moral considerations . One needs an appreciation of the basic standards of interpreting Scripture and of its various senses. Meditation can also legitimately pass beyond what has just been read to other points gleaned outside the time of private prayer.

(3) Oratio makes use of the truths and sentiments found by meditation in any of an infinite multitude of possible acts of affective prayer. Ejaculatory prayer formulas could be used at this stage, such as the invocation of the name of Jesus as practiced in the Eastern Church....

Even though prayer most narrowly defined means asking God for something, yet its wider and widest senses, namely the ascent of the mind to God and colloquy with God, are equally relevant and ought not be neglected.

Blessed Paul says he prayed, in the first place, by confession of his misery and unworthiness; then by adoration, confession (of praise), thanksgiving, invocation, awaiting, and desire....

(4) Contemplatio or contemplation moves from the many acts of the previous step to a single act. Beginners may achieve this level seldom and but briefly. The starting point of contemplation will later be called the prayer of simplicity by Bishop Bossuet and subsequent theologians.

In order to enter into this state, Giustiniani bids us to be empty for and towards God, vacare Deo (cf. the English cognates vacuum and vacation ), disencumbered of all attachment to creatures and expectant like the hungry chick of Saint Romuald’s Brief Rule.

This is the adoring silence of apophatism, which eventually can give birth to annihilation, an ecstatic absorption in God, and Blessed Paul’s experience of these resembles that of other mystics. Saint John of the Cross tells us (Ascent II 24:9): . . .

God . . . is incomprehensible and above all, and therefore it befits us to go to God by the negation of all. And Aquinas (cited by Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge V:23) summarizes thus Pseudo-Dionysius’ interpretation of Ex 20:21: At the end of our knowledge, we know God precisely as unknown.

St Romuald - "sit in your cell as in paradise"

Saint Romuald (c. 951–1025) was the founder of the Camaldolese order - Benedictines who combined aspects of traditional Benedictine monasticism (very much in the tradition of Cluny) with aspects of a more ascetic and eremitical (i.e. hermit-style) approach to religious life, while also reflecting something of the hesychastic spirituality of contemporary Byzantine monasticism.

This remarkable document, from the website of the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California, is St Romuald's Brief Rule...

Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish, The path you must follow is in the Psalms — never leave it.

If you have just come to the monastery, and in spite of your good will you cannot accomplish what you want, take every opportunity you can to sing the Psalms in your heart and to understand them with your mind.

And if your mind wanders as you read, do not give up; hurry back and apply your mind to the words once more.

Realize above all that you are in God's presence, and stand there with the attitude of one who stands before the emperor.

Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother brings him.

John Cassian on the three renunciations

Following on from my post about John Cassian's teaching on asceticism and contemplation (as explained by Fr Jordan Aumann, OP), here is an extract from Cassian's striking account of the "three renunciations" (taken from a fuller version here at Enlarging the Heart).

We must now speak of the renunciations, of which tradition and the authority of Holy Scripture show us three, and which every one of us ought with the utmost zeal to make complete:

The first is that by which as far as the body is concerned we make light of all the wealth and goods of this world;

The second, that by which we reject the fashions and vices and former affections of soul and flesh;

The third, that by which we detach our soul from all present and visible things, and contemplate only things to come, and set our heart on what is invisible.

To these three sorts of renunciations the three books of Solomon suitably correspond:

For Proverbs answers to the first renunciation, as in it the desires for carnal things and earthly sins are repressed;

To the second Ecclesiastes corresponds, as there everything which is done under the sun is declared to be vanity;

To the third the Song of Songs, in which the soul soaring above all things visible, is actually joined to the word of God by the contemplation of heavenly things.

John Cassian (c. 360-435): Conferences 3,6.

Jordan Aumann, OP - John Cassian on asceticism and contemplation

John Cassian (c.360-435) is one of the foundational figures of western monastic spirituality. In Christian Spirituality in the Catholic Tradition, Fr Jordan Aumann, OP, discusses what Cassian has to say about the relationship of asceticism to prayer and contemplation.

The tradition of our Fathers and the authority of Scripture teach us that there are three kinds of renunciation which each of us must endeavor to carry out with all his strength.

The first is to reject all the pleasures and all the riches of this world. The second is to renounce ourselves, our vices, our wicked habits, and all the unruly affections of the spirit and of the flesh. And the third is to withdraw our heart from all things present and visible and apply it only to the eternal and invisible ....

We shall then arrive at this third renunciation when our spirit, no longer weighed down by the contagion of this animal and earthly body, but purified from the affections of the earth, is raised to heaven by continual meditation on divine things, and is so taken up with the contemplation of the eternal truth that it forgets that it is still enclosed in fragile flesh and, ravished in God, it finds itself so absorbed in his presence that it no longer has ears to hear or eyes to see and it cannot even be impressed by the greatest and most perceptible objects.

Thus the fruit of asceticism is for Cassian the gift of contemplative prayer. Indeed, the practice of prayer is so essential to Christian spirituality, says Cassian, that just as there can be no prayer without the virtues, so there can be no true virtues without prayer.

In the Conferences he distinguishes four kinds of prayer:

- the prayer that asks pardon for sins, which is proper to beginners in the spiritual life;

- the prayer that makes good resolutions to God, which is characteristic of those who are progressing in the spiritual life;

- prayer for the salvation of souls, which is practiced by those who have grown in charity and love of neighbor;

- the prayer of thanksgiving for graces received, which is proper to those who contemplate God in what Cassian calls the "prayer of fire."

And as if to stress that contemplative prayer is not to be identified with a pagan gnosis, Cassian insists that it has its source in the reading of Sacred Scripture and it leads the monk back to Scripture.

The one and only perfect good is "the contemplation of God, which must be placed above all merit, above all the virtues of the just, even above all that we read in St. Paul of what is good and useful."

H/T Dom David Bird OSB (whose Monks and Mermaids blog is a truly wonderful treasury of resources relating to monasticism and liturgy within the Catholic and Orthodox tradition).

St Gregory of Nyssa - "Thy kingdom come"

Gregory of Nyssa (c 335 – after 394) writes

Because we have been entangled in this kind of tyranny and have been enslaved by death through evil passions which assault us like enemies and executioners, it is good that we pray for God's Kingdom to come upon us.

For by no other means can we put off the wicked subjugation of corruption except through the substitution of God's life-giving lordship over us.

If we then ask that God's Kingdom should come upon us, we fervently entreat God to actualize in us these blessings: to be released from corruption; to be liberated from death, and to be loosed from the bonds of sin.

We pray that the tyranny of wickedness cease its power against us and its war not conquer us, leading us away as captives through sin.

We pray "Let Your Kingdom come upon us" in order that the evil passions which rule and lord it over us may depart from us, and indeed vanish into nothingness.

[...] If God's Kingdom comes upon us, all those things which dominate us collapse into nothingness. Darkness cannot endure the presence of light. Sickness cannot exist when health returns.

The evil passions are not active when freedom from passions takes hold. When life reigns in our midst and incorruption holds sway, gone is death and vanished is corruption.

Trans. Theodore G. Stylianopoulos, 2003 @ Orthodox Prayer.

St John Chrysostom on prayer

St John Chrysostom (c.347-407) writes

Prayer is a refuge for those who are shaken, an anchor for those tossed by waves, a walking stick for the infirm, a treasure house for the poor, a stronghold for the rich, a destroyer of sicknesses, a preserver of health.

Prayer keeps our virtues intact and quickly removes all evil. If temptation overtakes us, it easily drives it away; if we lose some property or something else, which causes our soul grief, it removes it.

Prayer banishes every sorrow, causes good humor, facilitates constant well-being. It is the mother of the love of wisdom. He who can sincerely pray is richer than everyone else, even though he is the poorest of all.

On the contrary, he who does not have recourse to prayer, even though he sit on a king's throne, is the poorest of all....

Source

"It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me"

I suggested in a recent post that "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20) is an important text for Pope Benedict.

It is also one of the (very numerous) Pauline texts whose depths of meaning are such that it's helpful to have one or more sure guides to help us explore them.

Two such guides are St John Chrysostom and St Thomas Aquinas, whose reflections on this key verse of Scripture I have extracted and reproduced on Enlarging the Heart (my "Catholic sources" blog) here (Chrysostom) and here (Aquinas).

Blessed Honorat Koźmiński (1829-1916)

Berenike has put up a post in honour of the feast of Bl Honorat Kożmiński (October 13th in the Capuchin calendar). She told me a little bit about him a while ago, but the only information I could find via Google was in Polish. Now I've managed to locate this mini-biography translated into English on a Capuchin website. He comes across as a holy, inspiring and prophetic figure.

According to his biographer "at home he received a fine Christian formation" but, while attending the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw, "influenced by Enlightenment currents and an atheistic environment, he lost the faith" . In 1846 he contracted typhus while languishing in a Warsaw jail (a victim of the Tsarist police), and returned to the faith on the Feastday of the Assumption if that same year.

"After battling with himself for having to leave his infirm mother...he entered the Capuchin novitiate at Lubartów", and was ordained priest in 1852.

Given the task of the direction of Franciscan tertiaries, he did not limit himself only to promote their devotional life, but sought to involve them in eneegetic social and charitable works.

At this time he met Sofia Truszkowska and was her spiritual guide and took care of the so called “living rosary.”

Far from being satisfied with forming groups of men and women dedicated to the recitation of the rosary, he enthused them to undertake a vast charitable activity.

As a consequence of the dire political situation in Poland, Br Honorat's work with tertiaries became key to his mission

After the insurrection against the Russians in January 1863 and its disastrous outcome, and with religious Orders condemned to extinction, Br. Honorat...sought to save the Catholic faith and patriotic spirit of his people in the face of Tsarist persecution that sought to separate the Church in Poland from the Church in Rome, and have it part of the Orthodox Church.

The means he chose to accomplish this bold plan were devotion to Our Lady and the Franciscan Third Order where, with the permission of the Minister General of the Capuchins, he carried out radical reform.

In a country where "civil law forbad apostolic work and the reception of novices, thus condemning religious to extinction", Br. Honorat proposed that those who sought the religious life should

live the evangelical counsels in the spirit of the Franciscan Third Order, and so continue to lead a hidden and ostensibly ordinary life, without habit, friary or convent. In the meantime the person prayed and studied the gospel from which to draw spirit and so lead a form of religious life.

His biographer notes that

His model was the Holy Family of Nazareth. Central is the hidden life which he strove to foster in the world and prescribe in precise terms in all the constitutions and directories that he lay down for the institutes that he founded.

However,

The hidden life for him is not just a contingent requisite imposed by the socio-political conditions in Poland at the time. Rather he recognised it as a gospel principle.

He wrote, “These congregations observe a life hidden from the eyes of the world. This mode of religious life is not suggested only by motives of prudence or necessity, but from the commitment to imitate the hidden life of the Virgin Mary.

"This form of life is not subject to happenings in external social and political circumstances. Each person chooses it because it is desirable in itself, since it allows greater glory for God, as well easier spiritual progress and a surer salvation.”

The fruits of Br Honorat's apostolate were spectacular:

Numerous institutes took shape within his confessional at Zakroczym. Each of these institutes had to reach a particular group: intellectuals, the young, office workers, factory workers, domestic workers, children, the sick, artisans, farmers; in places and with activities that could benefit one’s neighbour and influence a vast circle of people such as in taverns, restaurants, bookshops, libraries, schools, tailors or other shops.

Generally speaking, Br Honorat's new congregations exhibited the same threefold structure:

To spread the influence of the apostolate of his religious, he wanted each congregation to be formed by three different categories of members.

The first category was composed of religious living in common and who had the task of accepting and directing the others.

Religious in temporary vows constituted the second category while living with their families or in small groups. They are the ‘units’ (units for men and units for women). They were the more dynamic element of each congregation and had more opportunity to influence others with their active apostolate and example.

The third category, finally, included tertiaries involved in a particular way in apostolic collaboration.

Br Honorat's biographer adds

All these religious lived in secular dress and their way of life was confirmed by the Holy See with the Decree Ecclesia catholica of 21 June 1889. Thanks both to particular circumstances and the insight that a great modern apostle had into the signs of the times, a dozen or so “secular” institutes rightfully and actually found their place in the Church, institutes for which Br. Honorat is considered the forerunner.

Although this new expression of religious life came under attack in 1907 (anxieties about Modernism meant that, for aperiod of time, even healthy developments in the life of the Church were, perhaps understandably, viewed as danegrous novelties), Br Honorat "did not fail to defend the form of life and religious apostolate that he had initiated so well and which was necessitated by particular historical and socio-political circumstances", and wrote of his desire to make of the souls who came to him an "army of confessors of the faith, who could resolutely oppose scorn from the world, while silent and hidden, giving a radical and committed Christian witness everywhere."

In keeping with his belief in a hidden apsotolate, Br Honorat

had always enjoined on his religious to write nothing but to surround their identities with absolute silence. To them he gave this testimony about their life: "These ardent souls generate around themselves a charitable moral atmosphere not only among their personal individual contacts but also in groups and the masses. It is recognised that wherever persons with a good spirit are found, even if they do not do anything in particular, they make their salutary presence felt."

Illness and deafness meant that, from 1905, "he was no longer able to receive people in the confessional because of illness and deafness", so Br Honorat increasingly devoted himself to writing.

Throughout his ministry he composed a substantial correspondence of almost 4000 hand-written letters to his spiritual children, around 1000 sermons; "a vast assortment of other works" which "treat of such matters as aesthetics, Mariology, hagiography, history, homiletics, the Rule of the Third Order of Saint Francis and the constitutions of different congregations, Polish translations and various other subjects."

These include his theological masterpiece - a Marian encyclopaedia entitled Who is Mary? (in fifty two tomes and seventy six volumes) - and his Spiritual Diary in which he outlines the program of his apostolate: "Since the first moment when I entered the Order I have followed this project: to make known to people the love of God."

Br. Honorat died on 16 December 1916 aged 87, and was buried in the crypt of the friary at Nowe-Miasto. Pope John Paul II proclaimed him blessed on 16 October 1988.

(Based on the article by MARIANO D’ALATRI in Sulle orme dei santi, 2000, p. 255-262.)

Benedict XVI on Bl Angela - "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me"

Pope Benedict's recent general audience address on Bl Angela Foligno (1248-1309) is remarkable both as a portrait of one of the most extraordinary of mediaeval mystics and as a meditation on mystical theology and the interior life.

Indeed, the address offers so much material for reflection that, rather than offer snapshots of it or reproduce it in its entirety, I have divided the main part of it up into four short and self-contained meditations and posted them on Enlarging the Heart.

At the end of the first of these Benedict writes

Angela, who wrote to one of her spiritual sons: “My son, if you saw my heart, you would be absolutely constrained to do everything that God wills, because my heart is that of God, and God’s heart is mine.”

The words of St. Paul resound here: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

The more I read of Pope Benedict, the more I feel that this verse from St Paul's Letter to the Galatians is key to his theology.

The introduction and conclusion to the address, which aren't included in the meditations over on my other blog, are of interest in their own right, and are appended below.

Today I would like to speak to you about Blessed Angela of Foligno, a great medieval mystic who lived in the 13th century.

[...] The Book of Blessed Angela of Foligno recounts her conversion, and indicates for us the necessary means of our own turning to the Lord: penance, humility and tribulations.

This same book describes the numerous mystical experiences of Blessed Angela, ecstasies which she had great difficulty putting into words because of the intensity of her spiritual union with God.

Her fear of sin and punishment was overcome by her growth in love for God, drawing her along the “way of the Cross” to “the way of love.” My dear brothers and sisters, may we share her prayer to the Father:

“My God, make me worthy to know the most high Mystery, which is your strong and ineffable love ... the greatest love possible!”

Dear brothers and sisters, the life of Blessed Angela began with a worldly existence, quite far from God.

But then the encounter with the figure of St. Francis and, finally, the encounter with Christ Crucified awakened the soul by the presence of God, by the fact that only with God does life become true life, because it becomes, in the sorrow for sin, love and joy. And thus Blessed Angela speaks to us.

Today we are all in danger of living as if God did not exist: He seems too far away from today’s life.

But God has a thousand ways, for each one, of making himself present in the soul, of showing that he exists and that he knows and loves me.

And Blessed Angela wants to make us attentive to these signs with which the Lord touches our soul, attentive to the presence of God, to thus learn the way with God and to God, in communion with Christ crucified.

Let us pray to the Lord that he make us attentive to the signs of his presence, that he teach us to really live. Thank you.