It appears that the AACSB accreditation process is seriously moving into the international business domain. We are also seeing an awakening in the political arena. A Republican administration is much more likely to remove some of the export disincentives that have gradually been placed in the way of American Multinational Corporations in their efforts to increase export sales. This interest in international business is a very good sign which seems to indicate an increase is quite likely in our College enrollment in the general area of international business. The author of this article has been involved with an experiential course offering (A Traveling Seminar) in the area of international marketing and international management for the past six years. The article will highlight some observations about such programs and attempt to pass along a few recommendations for those that might be considering similar course offerings out- side the United States.
This paper describes problems which were experienced by business faculty and students at two large universities in planning and executing two separate field projects, one an externally funded private field research project and the other a publicly sponsored evaluation of a government program. In the private field research project, there was a tendency to underestimate the demands of the administrative tasks upon faculty required to provide students with this innovative experiential learning opportunity. In the government sponsored program evaluation effort, the sponsoring agency tried to exercise input, process, and output control. of the research work. The paper concludes that field research projects teach students the lessons of self confidence in problem-solving, adaptability to changing circumstances, independent thinking, and social confidence, and also provide an opportunity to apply theoretical concepts and principles to real world situations and problems. It also concludes that the close working relationship between faculty and students which develops during such projects may unintentionally teach students much about business faculty weaknesses and strengths in dealing with unanticipated research and administrative problems. The behavior and example of business faculty who face threats to their academic integrity teaches more about academic standards and values than any amount of formal classroom instruction.
This essay, which was never officially published, presents perspectives on the educational characteristics of production and service sites in the business, governmental, and independent sectors of American society. Sigmon hopes to expand experiential learning through employee and citizen participation in systematic study of organizational dilemmas. Experiential learning is suggested as one major source for educators and employers to come together for the purpose of responding to the new relationships.
The North Carolina Student Involvement Assistance Center Proposal was intended to convince state government to utilize the manpower, financial resources and experiential learning potential. Sigmon lays out the various problems associated with the internship programs in North Carolina, the goal, plan of operation, management strategy, planned impact, and funding alternatives. Sigmon also encloses a four year goal of the program including number of students, estimated cost, and weeks of work provided.
Undergraduate courses in social awareness are now part of the core requirements of many schools of business. While supporting texts, readings, and exercises are available in the field, most view the subject area from the business side. There is relatively little or no coverage that approaches this branch of learning front the government aspect. To partially fill this emptiness, thus providing some balance to enhance student understanding in this area, a hybrid critical incident and rote playing experiential practice has been designed. The exercise, consisting of 18 situations, is particularly intended for management students in a one-semester course which is built upon student participation as a significant underpinning of the learning process.
Issue 30.2 of the Review for Religious, 1971. ; EDITOR R. F. Smith, S.J. ASSOCIATE EDITOR Everett A. Diederich, S.J. ASSISTANT EDITOR John L. Treloar, S.J. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS EDITOR Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Correspondence with the editor, the associate editors, and the assistant editor, as well as books for review, should be sent to REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS; 6i~ Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard; Saint Louis, Missouri 631o3. Questions for answering should be sent to Joseph F. Gallen, S.J.; St. Joseph's Church; 321 Willings Alley; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania tgxo6. + + + REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Edited with ecclesiastical approval by faculty members of the School of Divinity of Saint Louis University, the editorial offices being located at 612 Humboldt Building ; 539 North Grand Boulevard ; Saint Louis, Missouri 63103. Owned by the Missouri Province Edu-cational Institute. Published bimonthly and copyright (~) 1971. by REvmw Fog RELIO~OUS. Printed in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at Baltimore, Maryland and at additional mailing offices. Single copies: $1.25. Sub-scription U.S.A. and Canada: $6.00 a year, $11.00 for two years; other countries: $7.00 a year, $13.00 for two years. Orders should indicate whether they are for new or renewal subscriptions and should be accompanied by check or money order paya-ble to REvmw Yon RELtOtOUS in U.S.A. currency only. Pay no money to persons claiming to represent REvmw yon RELIOIOU!L Change of address requests should include former address. - Renewals and new subscriptions should be sent to REvmw FOR RELIOIOUS; P. O. Box I 110; Duluth, Minnesota 55802. Manuscripts, editorial correspondence, and books for re-view should be sent to REvIEw FOR RELIGIOUS; 612 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard; Saint Louis, Missouri 63103. Questions for answering should be sent to the address of the Questions and Answers editor. MARCH 1971 VOLUME 30 NUMBER 2 BROTHER THOMAS MORE, C.F.X. Religious: Partners for Justice and Peace Within the past few years, Pope Paul VI has established January 1 as a World Day of Peace. For 1971 he has selected the theme: "Every man is my brother." To enlist the support of religious institutes, the Holy See recently sent a document to" all superiors general stating that the World Day of Peace should transcend the limits of a simple celebration and really bring to the world the message of Christ's love. This Day of Peace is an invitation for an examination of conscience; it is an exhortation not to judge or condemn others, but to find out how much we ourselves as individuals and as mem-bers of society are accomplices of evil in this world; it is a means of making us more aware that we are and ought to be the guardians of our brothers. As religious by the very nature of their profession are orientated towards their fellow men, they have special motives for making this examination of conscience. Pious practices are not sufficient to make us good Christians. Christ Himself told us that we shall be judged by our attitudes and acts towards our fellow men. Nor is it suffi-cient that we be on good terms with our fellow religious. In this age, with the mass media keeping us informed about what is going on throughout the world, we cannot say to the Lord: "Where did we see you hungry, or naked, or" in prision. ?" The theme for 1971 looks beyond the present state of hostility in the world to the root of war--a failure to understand the yearning for the recognition of basic human rights by men in all parts of the world to escape from hunger, misery, disease, discrimination, and igno-rance. As long as this festering condition exists in any part of the world, there will always be the threat of war, violence,- and unrest. Perhaps nowhere else have the hopes of this part of mankind been better expressed than in Pope Paul's own Brother Thomas More, C.F.X., is su-perior general of the Xaverian Broth-ers; Via Antonio Bosio0 5; 00161 Rome, Italy. VOLUME 30, 1971 161 ÷ ÷ ÷ T. More~ C.F.X. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS blueprint for peace, Populorum progressio: "Freedom from misery, ~he greater assuranceof finding subsistence, health and fixed employment; an increased share of re-sponsibility without oppression of any kind and in se-curity from situations that do violence to their dignity as men; better education--in brief, to seek to do more, know more and have more; that is what men aspire to now when a greater number of them are condemned to live in conditions that make their lawful desire illusory." It is these men and women in particular whom'the Holy Father wants us to see in the light of Christian charity as our brothers. For only when we do believe them to be our brothers can we be deeply concerned about their struggle to obtain their freedom. This struggle for freedom is given greater emphasis if it is looked at within the framework of three contem-porary issues that are on the front stage of our history. The first is that 20% of the people living in the Atlan-tic world command about 75 to 80% of the world's in-come, investment, and trade. This statement becomes more than a matter of statistics when we realize that the society within this 20% contains a large number of professed followers of Christ who are the inheritors of a Christian tradition. But within this society, "Christianity is invoked in order to lead a sort of crusade against communism. Christianity is invoked in order to combat the wave of hatred, deeprooted re-sentment and terror which is rising everywhere. The 20% who let 80% stagnate in a situation which is often sub-human-- what right have they to allege that communism crushes the human spirit? The 20% who are keeping 80% in a situation which is often sub-human--are they or are they not responsible for the violence and hatred which are beginning to break out all over the world?" x If these words seem to ring with the exaggerated rheto-ric of a prophet, they do come from the heart of a bishop in an underdeveloped section of Brazil to awaken us from complacency. The second contemporary issue is the influence of the younger generation in movements for social justice and peace. It is almost universally agreed that this young generation has a feeling of oneness in human develop-ment and is alive to the increasingly international char-acter of human events.~ Also among the young is a new 1 Helder Camara, "Development Projects and Concern for Struc-tural Changes," IDOC, North American edition, May 23 1970, p. 20. 2John Tracy Ellis notes that in the transformation of the Catholic Church's leadership in the United States from a passive to an active adherence to the social papal encyclicals of John XXIII and Paul VI, the Church had the advantage of the "radically different ap-proach to war and peace" of students in the Catholic colleges, uni-versities, and seminaries, "the vast majority of whom were much radicalism which questiOnS strongly, often violently, the priorities and standards inside the economy and struc-tures of the Atlantic world. "If, say the young, this is the ultimate fine flower of our commercial industrial civiliza-tion, it might be better to blow it up and start again." a The third current issue is the growing awarenegs that we live in a village world, that we belong to a world community. We are all becoming alive to the increasingly inter-national character of human events and associations. There has been a great stir~:ing of conscience on the sub-ject of world poverty in the midst of plenty, on the ques-tion of world peace, and in the matter of racial discrimi-nation, wherever it may be practiced. This stirring of conscience and the awareness of the repercussion of global events have helped to break down parochial and national barriers. People everywhere are catching the vision that sees any deprivation of human rights as a universal crisis that profoundly disturbs the world community. Within this contemporary framework of an unbalanced world economy, the influence of the young generation in social justice and peace movements, and the search for world community, the Holy Father's theme for 1971 has a particularly strong appeal for religious. There is abundant evidence that religious in the United States are aware of these three contemporary issues and of the major social ills of our times. The fol-lowing suggestions and reflections are made as contribu-tion to this growing involvement of religious in arousing the People of God to promote development, justice, and peace in a world where "Every man is my brother." Peace As professed disciples of Christ, we cannot limit our horizon to the internal concerns of our community life. As members of a religious institute, we cannot be satisfied with the missionary efforts of a few of our members in developing countries. Perhaps there was a time when people could feel at ease when they had prayed for peace. In our days, we have an inescapable responsibility not only to pray but also to do something for peace in the world. Peace is an involved and sometimes painful question. It touches us on the emotional level because of our racial, national, religious, social, or educational background, or more sensitive to the papal teaching on peace than their parents and grandparents had been" (American Catholics and Peake [Washing-ton: Division of World Justice and Peace, USCC, 1970], p. 14). a Barbara Ward, The Angry Seventies (Rome: Pontifical Commis-sion of Justice and Peace, 1970), p. 44. + + + Justice and Peace VOLUME 30, 1971 163 ÷ ÷ T. More, C.F.X. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 164 because of other more or less conscious motivations. For the.objective education of ourselves, our communities and those whom we serve in Our apostolates, we have to make a continuous effort to overcome these all too human feelings. We must likewise try to avoid all blind spots of emotional prejudice which prevent us from seeing the real issues. One of the first things to be done .is to seek informa-tion in order to build up a solid basis for judgment. To refuse, either emotionally or through sheer indifference, to become informed is certainly one of those sins of omission which the renewed liturgy has most appropri-ately called again to our attention. The constitution Gaudium et spes (n. 82) gave us a lofty ideal when it stated that "it is our duty to prepare, by all possible efforts, the time when all war can be com-pletely outlawed by international consent." Too often we are not aware of the moral influence which we, as individuals or as a group, can exercise on the political level. War is one'of the major moral concerns of our day --what is our attitude toward war in general? Do we know and appreciate the theoretical and practical impli-cations of moral theories on war and on the use of vio-lence? Does the traditional "just war" theory still hold in our times when the powers of destruction are apocalyptic? Gaudium et spes continues: "Those who are dedicated to the work of education, particularly of the young . should regard as their most weighty task the effort to form the minds of all to the acceptance of a new spirit of peace. Every one of us should have a change of heart." Those religious engaged in the apostolate of education have the opportunity and the duty to give practical direction in this area. In particular cases there should be discussions with students and parents on the implications of "conscientious objection," passive civil resistance, and other controversial attitudes towards war, social injustice, and the like. Moreover, as citizens we have our political rights and duties. On some occasions this may require forthright speech and action, after mature consideration, even against decisions made by the highest authorities. We all respect the attitude of a man like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and of others under the Nazi regime, or of some modern Soviet authors, or of. a man like Hekler Camara. Great and at times heroic courage is needed by such people to stick to their most profound convictions and to suffer for them. In a democratic society similar courage can sometimes be needed. One can appreciate, for instance, the moral fortitude of the American Jesuit provincials who, in a letter to all United States senators, on May 21, 1970, expressed their deep concern about the recent de-velopments in the Vietnam war. Development and Justice We must show every man the esteem, the respect, and love which he deserves as a member of the human family and as a being created by God and the object of His love. We must concern ourselves with the full human develop-ment of the world, to take a global view of mankind and of the human race, to see ourselves as members of a planetary village, where "Every man is my brother." Religious cannot be less sensitive than the younger generation to the worldwide and national obstacles to social justice; nor can they fail to see in these committed young people their fellow brothers and sisters who may be showing religious that evangelical poverty can be the purest expression of Christian liberality. In every religious institute there have been community and chapter debates on evangelical poverty. Some think it has lost its meaning or that it has no place in contem-porary society. But before reaching such conclusions, the individual religious or the community involved should remove from the scene all those obvious unnecessary forms of middle-class comfort upon which so many of them may depend. Perhaps a few bold steps in experi-encing how poor people live might also be considered. Communities and provinces could include special de-velopmen~ projects in their budgets.4 It may then hap-pen that religious will discover alternate options to settling down to a comfortable middle-class existence. This process of "settling down," with its subsequent bourgeois acceptance of a comfortable and secure living, is a corporate sin which religious can fall victim to against the spirit of poverty. And this lack of the spirit of evangelical poverty can prevent religious from being sensitive to the social ills of our society. The greater awareness in our times of belonging to a world community parallels the movement within the re-ligious life for a greater understanding of gommunity. If fuller participation in community is evangelical, if it is the forum 'in which the hope of the Resurrection and the appreciation of the present realities are held in ten-sion, then it will predispose religious to take a global vision of mankind and of the human race. This vision ought certainly to be one of the first fruits of the new religious community. *See Louis G. Miller, C.Ss.R., "The Social Responsibility of Re-ligious," REWEW fOR REI.~CIOUS, v. 29 (1970), pp. 658-61, for a practical suggestion for practicing social consciousness on the prov-ince level by investing funds to alleviate the pressing social crisis in our times. 4- 4- Justice and Peace VOLUME 30, 1971 165 ÷ T. More, .F.X. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 166 Provincial and general chapters need to discuss those issues which profoundly affect the world community and national communities, with the hope that as they face their own internal problems, they will also turn toward those which lie at the heart of our contemporary society. Some of these issues are: racism, minority groups and. human rights, nationalism, .conscientious objection, the so-called theory of "just war," and disarmament in our era of nuclear weapons and missiles. Religious should continue to serve the Third World through their missionary work. However, this commit-ment ought to be incorporated into the new thinking on evangelization-development now taking place in many secular and religious assemblies. As Father Philip Land, s.J., of the Pontifical Commission of Justice and Peace pointed out recently to the superiors genera.1 in Rome, one of the chief contributions religious can make is to un-derstand the development debate, increase their com-mitment to the UN's Second Development Decade, and integrate the activity of their congregation into this global project. As an example of the need to understand the devel-opment debate, Father Land pointed out that real challenges confront religious as regards developing and developed countries in the area of education. With re-gard to the former, it is widely argued that Christian schools produce an education that simply ties their stu-dents to the existing power structures; with regard to the latter, it is questioned whether our schools produce an education conducive to the structural changes the poor nations rightly demand. The final suggestion is that made by Monsignor Joseph Gremillion, Secretary of the Pontifical Commis-sion of Justice and Peace, to a recent assembly of su-periors general: "The initiatives of religious are abso-lutely vital everywhere. Even though conferences of bishops might take certain responsibilities, it is essential that 'free movements' and individual leadership be ex-ercised-- a~d often this is provided by religious, men and women, as chaplains, inspirers, educators, anima-tors." "Every man is my brother": In choosing this theme, the Holy Father's aim is to help people to become aware of the unity of the human family, and thereby to favor a deeper and more sincere solidarity between men by removing from their manner of acting every form of discrimination based on distinction of race, color, cul-ture, ethnic origin, sex, social class, or religion. Are we prepared to play our part for a better, a more human, a more Christian world? JEAN LECLERCQ, O.S.B. Culture and the Spiritual Life I. THE MEDIEVAL MONASTIC TRADITION Learning and the culture which results from it refine a personality by helping it to acquire certain values of humanity which make up the fund of the commonwealth of human nature. In the Middle Ages these were never isolated from a man's religious living: they became part and parcel of his initiation to Holy Scripture, spiritual reading, meditation, prayer; they were determining fac-tors in a man's search for God, a search which, at all times, implies an ascesis not only for the inquiring mind, the intelligence, but for every one of man's faculties. These human values are not independent; they are an-cillary to the more noble values of a sacred humanity, that is, of a human nature and condition penetrated with the grace of Jesus Christ, transformed by the Holy Spirit, and consecrated, set apart for the Father in the Church. For the men of the Middle Ages who sought after God, Christian humanism meant something more than mere assimilation of culture; it implied the growth and self realisation of the person in the totality of his values: the raw material of human nature was never separated from the refining effect of Christian living. Certainly, culture and language had an important part to play in this process of fructification; but they did not, of themselves, bring it about. They favored the assimi-lation of profane literature and allowed the scholar to discern those experiences which were susceptible of being transformed and thus raised to the level of his own lived Christian reality, the level at which he became and real-ized himself by union with God. Thus in order to under-stand the humanism of these Medieval monks we must try to discover the specifically Christian experience lying behind the terms of a language inherited from masters of pagan antiquity. We have, as it were, to guess the per-sonal experience, the desire for God experienced by each + + + Jean Leclercq, O.S.B., is a monk of Clervaux Ab-bey in Luxem-bourg, Europe. VOLUME 30, 1971 16'/ lean Leclercq REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 168 writer who loved learning; we must endeavor to unveil in some way the Medieval monastic writer's intimate being in presence of God. Conflicts and Solutions But once we start trying to do this, we perceive the presence of two conflicting parties. According to the degree of sensitivity of a given Medieval period, this conflict situation is experienced more or less keenly, more or less clearly, and expressed more or less frequently in the texts. But the two parties of the conflict are con-stantly in presence and are mutually conditioning. The first conflictual element is the relationship to be established between the spiritual life and the profane realities which one met with when learning Latin; the problem with which students had to grapple was how to remain Christian and become even more so by contact with pagan values expressed in ancient literature. The second element is situated in the sphere of impact be-tween man's fallen state and the nobleness of human nature: man has personal experience of concupiscence waging within him; his experience tells him that he is capable of sinning, and that he actually does sin; but he knows too that he is endowed with a real "capacity" for God--the Medieval man firmly believes that he is capable of throwing open his being to the divine pres-ence, and even that God does already dwell within him. Divided as he is, how can man recover his unity? Let it be noticed that the experience of this conflict situation was not the monopoly of monks: it is inherent to our human condition. The solution to this problem lies, now as then, in the encounter of God and man in Jesus Christ, and in the union between man and his Savior. Yet if we judge by the number of witnesses and their spiritual density, it seems that it was more keenly experienced, in a more privileged manner as it were, in monastic circles. Elsewhere, pastoral or temporal activi-ties distracted the attention. But in the cloisters, there was nothing to alleviate the inner combat; the monk constantly kept the whole of his existence focused on a search for the presence of God. His method was prayer. Nothing hollows a man out as much as the activity of prayer; nothing more than prayer makes him fathom the depths of his own abyss; in prayer man comes up against his own void, he experiences the need he has of God. We see, then, that monks were in the ideal conditions for suffering this conflict more keenly than their fellowmen. They expressed it more frequently than others outside the cloister, but it has always been the common lot of humanity. And humanism is nothing else than th'is conjunction of a given experience and a given culture in a single person. The higher this experience and this culture are, the more the person develops his human capacities. It is not a ques-tion here of mere literary varnish, but of a profound en-richment on the level of the intimate depths where a man meets his God. The humanism of the Medieval monks supposes this alliance of culture and the spiritual life, with all that this implies in ascesis and prayer. The mon-astery offered the means for acquiring culture, and the religious experience which the inmates underwent pro-vided an objective for this culture; the monastery was the workshop, so to say, where man, by the instrumen-tality of culture, attained, over and beyond culture itself, to union with God. The Drama of Christian Humanism Having once grasped the fact of the conflict which the Christian humanist, within and without the cloister, had to overcome, it will be suspected that harmony was not established without a certain drama. And Medieval mo-nastic texts confirm our suspicions. Always, we find the conjunction of the two inalienable elements of Christian experience provoked by honest and cultured reading of Holy Scripture. These two elements are ~emptation and hope: the latter is always predominant and has the last word. Why? Because, as one Medieval writer reminds us: Stat Iesus et dicit.--Jesus is there and He speaks to us. That is just what humanism is: an experience of Jesus Christ present in man. In order to taste, to savor, ~the reality behind words we must not only read but also live. You notice that reading, learning is a primary condition of any religious experience and the result is always inner peace. Between the beginning, the abc, and the end lies a long struggle to be waged between the different values, a struggle between contrary tendencies. Many acts of this drama are painful, but it always ends in light and peace. This supreme and perfect realization of-man, of hu-manism, is none other than the perfect accomplishment of the Incarnation: there is no more lofty humanism than that which leads to perfect union of man with God. In reading some Medieval authors one is tempted to say that for them there is a sort of humanism in God shown by divine care for man which goes so far as to assume humanity into the divinity. The kernel of such a theol-ogy is the justification of the humano-divine situation, the justification of the passion and death of Christ in function of man's reconciliation with God. And what strikes us in Medieval works structured round such theol-ogy is that often, though major stress is laid on God's honor and glory, the primacy of man and his salvation in the divine economy is dominant. For certain Medieval + ÷ + Culture VOLUME 30, 1971 ]69 ÷ ÷ ~ean Leclercq REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS theologians it is essential to God's honor and glory that mankind whom he has destined for eternal happiness should be saved. Conclusion Throughout the Middle Ages, the problem in mon-asteries and other Christian seats of learning was not to say "yes" or "no" to culture, but to discern the correct use to be made of it. The monks took the risk of ac-quiring culture, they saw the danger; they overcame the risk in the strength of humility and ascesis: their courage led them to love. Let us, in a sort of review of the conflict situation, see how monks were victorious in suffering and joy. The texts left by Medieval monks prove that it was no imaginary struggle; they help us to grasp the concrete, real, even existential nature of the conflict in the student --it was a struggle for purity of heart and purity of body. It was a real personal problem that the student had to solve; nothing could be further removed than this from a merely speculative, a so-called objective attitude with regard to profane realities. The problem was real and acute. The solution could only be found in Jesus Christ in whom one of the divine Persons, belonging to another world, lived in a man of our own world. The Last Supper and the Resurrection are absolute and undeniable reminders that Christ's pres-ence in this world appropriates even the physical ele-ments of man. And the Medieval person is always per-ceived in a triple relationship to a second self--a superego (t3ber-Ich), a self-surpassing self, if we may so say--to God and His kingdom, and to man's place in this king-dom. Now the ego surrenders itself to a superior power, not, as might be thought, by emptying self of sell but in liberating the potentials for self-surpassing which it con-tains. The aim is not to seek one's own advantage-~one's own pleasure or glory--but to renew the experience of those whom the Bible tells us encountered God, before being in a position to manifest Him. The glory of a creature is to serve the Creator, to refer to Him; and this man is able to do because God has endowed him with reason. Man is not centered on himself but on God, and the Medieval monk cannot construct a doctrine of man on any other foundation than his relationship to God. The monk exists as an individual, and he knows it, he experiences the truth of this reality in moments of temp-tation and on every occasion where he becomes conscious of himself; yet he knows too that he is not autonomous in the sense that he could have any worth independently of God; the monk's self-realization, the development of his personality as such could never be his sole objective nor sut:fice to make him totally happy. There thus coexist in him at all times, and sometimes in a manner which we find baffling, on thb one hand that which is specific to his human nature--his failings, but also his capacity for reasoning, for critical reflection-- and on the other hand faith in a mystery which he cannot grasp, and even belief in the marvelous. The Medieval religious man knows that he carries within himself both greatness and pettiness; heis a sinner, but God comes to meet him, and he in turn goes towards God. The en-counter is perfected in Christ who, as God, created man in the cosmos, and as man situated Himself in this same cosmos. The encounter between God and His sinful crea-ture is also accomplished in the man who lives united to Christ. The Christian man is already, in the kingdom of Christ, a homo caelestis--but not entirely so. Para-doxically, carnal man has still to become the heavenly man which he already is. This transformation, this meta-noia, can only be accomplished within him by the daily fight, by a constant and daily conversion to the Lord. The perfect man, he who is already totally re-formed, even transformed, transfigured, is none other than the saint: from this point of view, it is easy to understand why hagiography has such an important place in Me-dieval monastic historiography. Lastly, just as he is attracted by heaven--which he likes to represent as being open, on the occasion of theophanies for example--the humanist in the monastic Middle Ages is on friendly terms with everything created: the cosmos and animals which he tends to idealize. There is a tension within him, between his own self and the world in its two aspects, earthly and yet already sanctified, and in this sense, heavenly. The solution to all these at-tractions, tendencies, and tensions lies in the mystery of the cross which is figured in medieval representations as a symbol of struggle and victory: in hoc signo. Sometimes the cross is framed by a low doorway, the narrow gate which at once separates and unites, and by which one has to pass freely of one's own will by liberating self, by shaking off something of self --- this is the narrow gateway beyond which we can find self again, and with self every-thing else once sacrificed but now bathed in light. II. A CONTEMPORARY MODEL But now, in order to step beyond Medieval history, let us see how such an ideal can be lived in our own desac-ralized and profane twentieth century. There are many examples of men ~ind women who ally culture with the spiritual life sometimes attaining to high sanctity on the university campus--always under the sign of the cross ÷ ÷ ÷ Culture VOLUME 30, 1971 of Christ. The example we choose to quote here is none other than Edith Stein: the scholar and the saint, as she has been called. Witnesses are never more eloquent than in the testimony of their lives, often translated, in the case of men and women of learning, into writing. We can do no better than let Edith Stein speak for herself in a few carefully selected texts. As we read through her works we notice that there is one major generating principle of energy--a unified ex-istence in which the many activities are brought together as a single unit tending to the one thing necessary to the Christian humanist: the knowledge of Christ crucified and his all-pervading dynamic presence in professional and private life. Edith Stein had grasped this principle. After having spent Holy Week of 1928 at the Benedictine Abbey of Beuron, she wrote: Passiontide and Easter are not meant to express simply a transitory festive mood quickly submerged in the daily hum-drum; no, they are the divine power living in us, which we take with us into our professional life so that it may be leavened by it. This oneness, this unity between apparently contradic-tory, even paradoxical elements of an existence seems to be a characteristic of Edith Stein--the passion and the cross are a single divine power, the fulcrum by which she raised the deadweight of daily humdrum existence. There was a constant dialectic tension within her, a continuous striving to reconcile on a higher level--that of union with God--the realities of life, at home, in school, or on the campus. It is evident that this harmonious unity was not at-tained without a persevering ascesis in order to face squarely and solve peacefully the dilemmas roused by the co-existence of the love of learning and an ardent desire for God. In the present context we cannot develop the matter as fully as we should like; we shall merely illus-trate how Edith Stein harmonized four very important dialectic tensions. + + + Jean Leclereq REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 172 i. Harmony between the Spiritual and the Intellec-tual Life In February 1928 she wrote: Of course religion is not just something for a quiet corner and a few hours of leisure; it must be the root and ground of all life, and this not only for a few chosen ones, but for every true Christian. (of whom, indeed, there is always only a small number). It was through St. Thomas that I first came to realize that it is possible to regard scholarly .work as a service of God. Immediately before, and a long ome after my conversion, I thought living a religious life meant to abandon all earthly things and to live only in the thought of the heavenly realities. Gradually I have learned to understand that in this world something else is demanded of us, and that even in the con-templative life the connexion with this world must not be cut off. Only then did I make up my mind to take up scholarly work again. I even think that the more deeply a soul is drawn into God, the more it must also go out of itself in this sense, that is to say into the world, in order to carry the divine life into it. This text shows that Christian humanism is not the pri-vate property of scholars, it is incumbent on every Chris-tian. We also notice that learning, scholarly work, is a service of God. In other letters Edith Stein states the con-ditions for maintaining the balance of power between the spiritual and the intellectual. The keyword is sim-plicity. The scholar has to be simply content with the conditions of life; he has not to be anxious about many and superfluous things. We might almost say that he has to take life as it comes. This is detachment, another con-dition which Edith Stein considered essential for the truly Christian humanist--detachment from earthly riches, but also detachment from spiritual goods: she teaches that we must not be anxious about times for praying---each one must pray according to the possibilities of his professional commitments. Nevertheless a portion of the day should be set apart for God. Edith Stein writes: The chief thing is first to have a quiet corner where one can converse with God as if nothing else existed, and this every day. The early morning seems to me the hest time for this, before the daily work begins. Further, I think, this is where one re-ceives one's mission, preferably for each day, without choosing anything oneself. Lastly, one should regard oneself entirely as an instrument, especially those powers with which one has to work, for example in our case one's reason--I mean as an in-strument which we do not use ~urselves, but God in us. 2. Harmony between the Intellectual Li[e 'and'Every-day Life The scholar must not live shut up in his study from morning to night. The humanist, the Christian scholar, is a person closely linked with human values in and around him; he should have contacts with the world of his fellow men if his learning is to be really a service of God. Christian Iearning, like prayer from which it should never be separated, is a diacony. Here again, Edith Stein has left principles of unifying action, theory which was practiced in her own existence as a scholar, within and without the cloister. She was well aware of the danger of intellectual aloofness as she shows by this extract from an article published in 1931: All of us who live in the universities absorb a little of the "type ot~ the intellectual". But we must be quite clear that this attitude separates us from the crowds. Outside people bat-tle with the daily needs of life in their manifold forms. As soon as we go out they confront us . We are placed among people ÷ ÷ ÷ Culture 173 whom we are meant to help in their needs. They ought not to think of us as strange beings living in an inaccessible ivory tower. We must be able to think, feel, and speak like them, if they are expected to have confidence in us . The intellectual can find the way to the people--and without finding it he can-not guide them---only if, in a certain sense, he frees himself" from the intellect. Here again we notice the principles of Christian soli-darity, humanity, service, and detachment: freedom from self for others. ÷ ÷ ÷ lean Leclercq REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 174 3. Harmony between Traditional Culture and Con-temporary Mentality This third dilemma is by no means the least which the modern scholar has to face.For Edith Stein, the patron of existentialism, as she has been called, it meant balance between the past and the present. The favored disciple of Husserl, translator of Aquinas, had to find a way of living progress; she had to realize the Bergsonian principle of progress: the past which advances and amplifies in the present as it'becomes the future. Her well-defined meth-odological principles (betraying an ascetically trained mind) enhanced and structured her art as a teacher and show how she combined the past and the present: Wherever scholastic arguments are our point of departure, we shall first present them in scholastic terminology. But in order to ascertain that we have grasped the actual sense of the matter, and are not just playing about with words, we shall seek to find our own terms, in which to render the pas-sages in question. While doing this we want to think together with the old masters in a vital manner; but not only with the old masters, but also with those who have resumed the ques-tion in their own way in our time . This is the necessary way especially for the present author, whose philosophical home is the school of Edmund Husserl, and whose native tongue, as far as philosophy is concerned, is the language of the phenomenologists. These only too few texts give us a glimpse of the mind and thought of Edith Stein. They hint at the way in which she strove to attain union with God through books and without alienating herself from her fellowmen. Any who is familiar with the work and life of Edith Stein knows that the application of these principles was not always easy: Edith Stein willed her way to holiness as a scholar; hers was no haphazard chance: she collaborated with divine grace with all the ardor of her semitic heart. EXISTENTIAL EXPERIENCE Nothing. happens by chance. Edith Stein contests the formula of Heidegger thrown into existence. In dense and direct sentences she attacks the weak spot of his ex-istentialist philosophy, she attacks the Geworfenheit: With this is expressed above all that man finds himself in existence, without knowing how he has come there . But with this the question of the "whence" has not been abolished. How-ever violently one may try to silence it or to forbid it as sense-less, it always rises again irresistibly from the peculiarity of hu-man being demanding a Being that is both the foundation of the former and its own foundation, needing no other, demand-ing the One who throws that which is "thrown." And with this the "being thrown" is revealed as creatureliness. In this text Edith Stein reveals herself to be truly a humanist: she has a keen and penetrating vision of the human situation. She writes with even greater acuity: The nothingness and transitoriness of its own being becomes clear to the Ego, if it takes possession of its own being by thought . It also touches it. through fear (Angst), which accompanies unredeemed man through life in many disguises ¯. but in the last resort as fear of his own non-being . How-ever, fear is not normally the dominant sensation (Lebensge- [iihl). This it becomes in cases which we describe as pathologi-cal; but normally we walk in great security as if our being was a certain possession . The reflecting analysis of our being by thought shows how little cause for such security there is in itself., the undeniable fact that my being is transitory., and exposed to the possibility of non-being is matched by the other, equally undeniable fact that, notwithstanding this transitoriness, I am and am kept in being from one moment to the other, and embrace a lasting Being in my transitory be-ing. I know myself held, and in this I have peace and se-curity- not the self-assured security of a man who stands in his own strength on firm ground, but the sweet and blissful se-curity of the child which is carried by a strong arm-~considered objectively, a no less reasonable security . Hence in my being I meet another, which is not mine, but is support and ground of my unsupported and groundless being. The dispositions of the unified soul of Edith Stein are revealed in the text we have just read where we notice the words "great security," "peace and security," "sweet and blissful security." The reason for this happy state does not lie in the Ego, but in the lasting Being whom we encounter when we enter deeply into ourselves. It is this encounter in man of God and man which should be the objective of every Christian scholar today, as in the Middle Ages. How can we come to recognize the supreme Being, He who is, in our own finite being? By reasoning or by faith: the latter was the way of the medieval monks; it was the way, too, of Edith Stein: The security of being, which I sense in my transitory being, points to an immediate anchoring in the last support and ground of my being . This is, indeed, only a very dark sensing, which one can hardly call knowledge . This dark sensing gives us the Incomprehensible One as the inescapably near One, in whom we "live and move and have our being," yet as the Incomprehensible One. Syllogistic thinking formu-lates exact notions, yet even they are incapable of apprehend-ing Him who cannot be apprehended; they rather place Him at ÷ ÷ ÷ Culture VOLUME 30, 1971 a distance, as happens with everything notional. The way of faith gives us more than the way of philosophical knowledge: it gives us the God of personal nearness, the loving and merci-ful One, and a certainty such as no natural knowledge can give. Yet even the way of faith is a dark way. This text shows how very close she was to her own age; she proves here that she allied the heritage of ancient masters with the modern mentality, more intuitive than that of Ancient Greece: the intelligence of Edith Stein was semitic, Biblical and it is this Biblical essence which makes her to be kith and kin with Medieval monastic humanists and scholars. THE SCHOLARLY NUN But there is more than a certain way of apprehending God which links Edith Stein to the monastic thinkers of the Middle Ages. Like them she renounced the secular seats of learning to give herself to God as a nun in a Carmelite convent. At first she gave herself entirely to the humble duties of a beginner in the monastic life; but later on, at the request of her superiors, she began to write and study again. One of her two works concerning mysticism has a very telling title: Kreuzeswissenschaft (Science of the Cross). It was written for the fourth centenary of the birth of St. John of the Cross, and in it we discern the insuffi-ciency of pure philosophical thinking for tackling prob-lems of mystical theology. There, too, we recognize Edith Stein--now Sister Benedicta of the Cross--the philoso-pher whose thought was always structured and subtended by rigorous methodological principles indicative of a dis-ciplined mind. A passage from the preface to Science o[ the Cross reveals this: In the following pages the attempt has been made to grasp John of the Cross from the unity of his being, as it is expressed ~n his life and in his works, from a point of view that makes it possible to envisage this unity . What is said there on the ego, freedom and person, is not derived from the writings of our holy Father John. Though certain points of contact may be found, such theories were remote not only from his leading intention but from his mode of thought. For only modern philosophy has set itself the task of working out a philosophy of the person such as has been suggested in the passages just mentioned. ÷ Once more we recognize the unifying [actor which was + characteristic of her own life; unity of being. And this + leads us to the last dilemma which we wish to mention. $ean Leclercq REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 176 4. Harmony between Personal Experience and Serv-ice The question set here is how to share with others what we ourselves may have received in prayer: how may we legitimately share with Others our own personal experi-ence of God who reveals Himself to mankind? Divine revelation needs to be grasped by the human reason en-lightened by faith. It is faith alone that allows us to suck the honey out of the hard rock of the Scriptures. Learning is a help to deciphei'ing the letters, bfit the real key to Scriptural exegesis is faith contained in a pure heart--blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God. But the talent received must not be buried, it must be shared with others. Edith Stein writes: It may also happen that a sort of "office of the keys" is conferred on individuals or groups which have received the gift of Scriptural exegesis . To these spirits is given the office to transmit the light they receive . It is their duty to accept the Divine mysteries. . with. a purified mind .and to take charge of them. Th~s also ~mphes preaching and interpreting the Divine Word. Corresponding ~o the different modes and degrees of hiddenness, there are different modes and degrees of unveiling, degrees of office. Conclusion: The Science of the Cross There could be no better summary of all that has been said in this paper. At all periods, there is only one Chris-tian humanism, one Christian way of uniting love of learning with desire for God: the way of the cross, the narrow door of self-denial, the existential imitation of Jesus Christ, God made Man. When a scholar converts to God, dedicates his whole mind and heart to God in the carrying out of his professional duties of study or teaching, then, and only then, will he be a light shining in the darkness. Edith Stein tells us what she means by sicence of the cross: If we speak of the Science of the Cross, this is not to be understood as science in the ordinary sense: it is no mere theory . It is indeed known truth--a theology of the Cross~ but it is living, actual and active (wirkliche und wirksarne) truth: it is placed in the soul like a seed, takes root in her and grows, gives the soul a certain character and forms her in all she does or leaves undone, so that through this she herself shines forth and is recognized . From this form and force living in the depth of the soul is nourished the philosophy of this man and me way in which God and the world present themselves to him. For Edith Stein, as for every great and holy scholar throughout the ages, faith in God and His mystery are primordial: Where there is truly living faith, there the doctrines of the faith and the great deeds of God are the content of life, every-thing else must take second place and is formed by them. This is holy objectivity (heilige Sachlichkeit): the original interior receptivity of the soul reborn of the Holy Ghost. Whatever is brought to her, this she accepts in the proper way and depth; and it finds in her a living, mobile power ready to let itself be ÷ ÷ ÷ Culture VOLUME -~0, 1971 177 formed, and unhampered by false inhibitions and rigidity . If the mystery of the Cross becomes her inner form, then it becomes the science of the Cross. This science is a night, an absence: if we accept to believe in the divine Crucified then our language is silence for "All speaking about God presupposes God's speaking. His most real speaking is that before which human speech is silenced." ÷ ÷ + lean Leclercq REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 178 MARY-ANGELA HARPER A Layman's Response to Contemporary Religious While post-Vatican II laymen bustle about the business of shaping their new, enlarged role in the contemporary Church, many members of another segment of the People of God, the consecrated religious, without much notice from their lay brothers, are quietlyteari'ng themselves to shreds by agonizing selbcriticism. The general cause of this self-destruction seems to be a fear that traditional religious life is anachronistic both in form and purpose. The only hope for survival, these religious have decided, is radical change. To the laity, this "change" has meant new habits and new names and more frequent socializing. For the reli-gious, the speci.fics of change fall into one of two categor-ies: (a) concern with structures and relationships within the community and (b) concern with the function of reli-gious within the Christian community-at-large. On the one hand, therefore, religious .struggle with such questions as size and government, and with legisla-tion pertaining to prayer, work, recreation, and dress. And they scrutinize themselves as individuals to verify their personal authenticity. The criteria for this verifica-tion are contemporary philosophical and psychological definitions of man which emphasize the affective dimen-sion and the primacy of interpersonal relationships in meaningful human development. On the other hand, religious seek to identify the shape and character of their activities in a newly-valued, post-conciliar world that contemporary theologians recognize as not only redeemed but continually sanctified by Christ who abides within it. A genuine Christian mission, they believe, must be one of real involvement with the nuts and bolts of everyday living and a rubbing of shoulders with lay co-workers in the apostolic field that is the world. To be Christian missionaries, then, religious cannot ÷ ÷ Mary Angela Harper is chairman of the philosophy department; Dun-barton College o[ Holy Cross; Wash-ington, D.C. 20008. VOLUME ~0, 1971 179 4" M. A. Harper REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ]80 live a less-than-human existence, above and apart from the rest of men. They must purge religious life of any alienating, stereotyped, and distorted image and of out-moded, restrictive characteristics such as traditional vows and lockstep community exercises. These must be re-placed by a new and more democratic concept of reli-gious community which allows each individual to de-velop his own capacities in freedom and love and by new forms of religious activity that permit creativity, sponta-neity, affectivity, and the celebration of a redeemed hu-manity. And all of this is taking place ~vith relatively little public notice or comment from the lay element of the People of God, for whose sake religious toil, and whose acceptance they seek. But more interestingly, these con-siderations, critical as they have been to religious, are of little pressing concern even to the better informed lay-men, who nnderstand and sympathize with the crisis in religious life. As laymen see it, the effectiveness (and, therefore, justification) of consecrated commitment de-pends not upon what religious wear, or what they are called, or on how they organize their daily lives. The layman primitively and primarily cares that religious con-tinue to achieve their unique, specific and indispensable mission--to point to God. Now surely it is presumptuous, if not absurd, for any-one to assume the position of spokesman for the laity-at-large. Every layman responds to the world and to people and to situations differently, depending upon the varia-ble factors of education, spiritual formation, and per-sonal experience. My own response to contemporary reli-gious is indeed conditioned by each of these factors. But it is also and especially determined by a specific view of our post-Vatican II world. The first statement pertaining to this contemporary Christian Weltanschauung main-tains that existence today is an organic, interpersonal complex, in which all individuals, loyal to their unique identities, nonetheless recognize that the perfection of this identity takes place in a process of completion by others. It is with others that each individual achieves his own identity, and together, by mutual interaction, that all attain the perfection of the whole that is our world. This is the characteristic of complementarity. But equally important is the correlative principle which maintains that this organic, interpersonal universe is sustained and vivified by belief in Christ who is God and in a divine kingdom in which humanity will be absolutely perfected. Authentic existence in the real world of today, then, is a life predicated upon interper-sonal cooperation, but simultaneously upon co-commun-ion in Christ as a pledge of the Parousia. All the People of God are bound together by a recognition of the neces-sity of others, which is reinforced and transfused by Christian love--the giving of the self to achieve the oth-er's perfection in Christ. And each thus con.tributes to the integral and absolute perfection of all in the kingdom of God. Now, if this "new look" of a nearly 21st century world turns on such an enlarged principle of complementarity, and if a meaningfully contemporary Christian world is a complex of Christ-loving, kingdom-seeking, mutually per-fecting human spirits, then distinction and difference is as significant as unanimity and wholeness, because with-out these characteristics, we might achieve fusion, but never complementation. Moreover, a lack of unique perfection in any individ-ual component in this interconnected, organic complex, is a loss, not only to the totum, but to all others as individuals. This was the message of Henri de Lubac ten years ago when he wrote of the Church as the "corporate destiny of mankind," and explained that "in the measure of [each one's] strength and according to his own voca-tion- for the gifts of the one spirit differ, and in the unity of one same body, each member has a different function--leach] will labour heart and soul to achieve it. If he fails fall] will feel it as a wound in [their] own flesh." 1 The uniqueness of the individual contribution gives a specific character to the whole Christian commu-nity which cannot be replaced by another. And the perfection of one is the perfection of all. And this is the message today when we use the term witness to identify the Christian mission in a post-Coun-cil world. William J. Richardson, S. J., has analyzed the contemporary notion of witness~ and notes that it "in-volves a double communion--communion, between the witness and the truth, or person to which/whom he testi-fies; [and also] a communion . between the truth/per-son and the tribunal or persons before whom the witness testifies." This double communion is suggested by the formulae being witness and bearing witness. To be a witness, Father Richardson says, is to be so identified with a person or truth that to deny these would be to deny oneself. Moreover, "the quality of witness will be measured by the intimacy of the union between the witness and the one to whom he testifies, the extent to which they become one." To bear witness is to share this person with other per- ¯ Henri de Lubac, S.J., Catholicism (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958), p. 31. 2William J. Richardson, S.J., The University and the Formation of the Christian, an unpublished manuscript, copyrighted by the author, 1958. ÷ ÷ Layman's Response to Religious VOLUME 30, 1971 18! ÷ M. A. Harper REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 182 sons. And the result of the sharing is that the witness thereby grows more deeply in the communion himself because, within an interacting complex, he now contacts this reality through the communion of others which was heretofore denied him. All witnesses, therefore, enrich one another within the organic whole that is the testify-ing community, and achieve growth and perfection by an interpenetrating exchange of individual identity and meaning. Should the uniqueness of the individual be less-ened or lost, however, the totum would suffer irreparably. In terms of witness, this presence, this communication of meaning would be denied to the Christian community, which becomes radically impoverished. Now, what is the witness of consecrated religious? What do these men and women offer the Christian community and to each individual within it that is unique and indis-pensable, and without which each of us would suffer? Consecrated religious are witnesses, par excellence, to the Pilgrim Church, and to the truth that the Christian com-munity is, in fact, on its way to Almighty God. As Sidney Callahan has observed in Beyond Birth Con-trol, 3 present existence is 9ctually a life of incomplete-ness; perfection and completed history await the Parou-sia. "Those who choose [consecrated religious lives]", she says, "live the sign of incompleteness, of fulfillment to come, of aspiration to a more complete community and pe.rfect unity." By our own distinctive form of existence, we, the laity, witness to a restored creation which James O'Reilly ex-plains in "Lay and Religious States" 4 reveals "the power and goodness of business, marriage ~nd freedom [to] carry us toward the kingdom." By virtue of their distinc-tive state of life, consecrated religious witness to "the limited character of the goodness of property, of spouse [and] of liberty." ~ They give witness to the truth that although possessions and ownership, marital love and total psycho-physical unity, unlimited movement and op-portunity, are good, God is still better. No matter how intrinsically valuable these considerations may be, they do not suffice of themselves to bring human existence to completion and perfection. This can only be achieved by our releasing control and, in Father O'Reilly's words, letting the world "slip into the hands of God," 6 who saves and completes and perfects. Consecrated religious help us laymen to loosen our hold and to let go. 8Sidney Cornelia Callahan, Beyond Birth Control (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), p. 80. ~James O'Reilly, "Lay and Religious States," REviEw fOR REU-GiOOS, v. 27 (1968), pp. 1027-52. Ibid., p. 1051. Ibid. Such a minor miracle is wrought by their reminder to us of our need to be pilgrims. And this they effect by their public vow of total commitment to a communal life manifestly lived in poverty, celibacy, and obedience (or whatever language they choose to signify these realities), which reinforce in us the truth that one gain~ by giving. We, who behold such a commitment, and recognize it as the foundation of all human religious development--and who may even be living these values, though in a less concentrated, less explicit form--we look to religious for inspiration and for guidance. And by their spirit of sim-ple frugality, availability, and openness, they sustain us in our efforts to rightfully enrich this world, and to de-velop and fulfill our human personalities, but with hearts turned heavenward. To this end, religious provide us with a working model of persons-in-c~ommunity and of a united humanity. In the day-to-day liv.ing of this value, they confront us with the actual experience of availability and generosity which reminds us of our need for others, and of our obligation to care and to spend ourselves for one another. By their refusal to seek perfection in isolation, manifesting instead responsibility for others within (and beyond) their com-munity, they instruct us that the meaning of authentic human freedom involves limitation and amounts to de-termined- indetermination. And by refusing to choose those with whom they live on the basis of common inter-ests or congeniality, they instruct us that the comm~unity of man must be a gathering together, not for personal gratification, but rather to share and reenforce one an-other in the love of God. Consecrated religious help us to reconcile apparent conflicts between the human and the divine by their pure, simple, and direct vision, which embraces both man and God in a single gaze. And by their evident spirit of prayer, they redirect our consciousness, not exclusively outward to legitimate worldly cqncerns, but inward to the center of our being, where we contact ourselves most truly, and discover here that our own meaning is rooted in a divine source. And they bring us a joy that seems to us to shine forth from the wellsprings of their personal communion with the divine; and we warm ourselves in its brightness, and feel it, somehow, transform us. Nor are these merely psychological phenomena, wrapped around us like a security blanket. We are, I think, well adjusted, often well educated laymen, quite convinced of our dignity as laymen. We are not having an identity crisis. In fact, quite to the contrary, we have discovered ourselves, and the significance of our roles as mature Christians, for the first time in history. But we also believe in the necessity and intrinsic value of a reli-÷ ÷ ÷ Layman's Response to Religious VOLUME 30, 1971 183 + + 4. M. A. Harper REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ]84 gious liIe o[ total commitment to God. We acknowledge the indispensable contribution it makes to the Christian community and sincerely belie;ce that this contribution depends upon the preservation of its unique sign-value. Moreover, we hope that it will be meaningfully and truly implemented. Such "true" implementation, in the mind of the lay-men, involves certain conditions, however. First of all, the laity expect religious to be honestly poor. Such pov-erty the layman does not confuse with destitution, but rather understands as involving what the Duquesne Uni-versity Institute of Man program refers to as a "respectful use and celebration of things natural and cultural as gifts of the holy." We appreciate the fact that books, facilities, time, and recreational opportunities are necessary for the religious to function professionally. But we also expect evidence of what Ladislas M. Orsy, S. J. calls "the effica-cious desire to give away [everything] in the name of God's kingdom." 7 All this world's bounty,, therefore, could be employed naturally, intelligently, and happily, but with the evident and effective intention of always viewing the acquisition and use of created goods (including the self) in the con-text of community. Moreover, this intention would em-brace a life-style modeled on that of Christ Himself, whose life was one of frugal simplicity, of reverence for creation, and of availability to all men. Secondly, the laity respond appreciatively to the celi-bate state when it is conceived (to borrow again from the Institute of Man) as involving a "respectful love of self and others as uniquely called and graced by the Sacred." Such love would seek to establish r.elationships of friend-ship with fellow religious and laity, and these would be humanly warm and expressive and unstrained by old fears of compromise and contamination by sexual compli-cations- phobias that have happily been laid to rest.It would presuppose a genuine rejoicing in the goodness of the lay role and the married state and preclude an artifi-cial hierarchical understanding of vocations or distorting comparison of functions based on measures of perfection. And, of course, it would thoroughly dispose of any "mys-tique" of religious life. Celibate love knows that each state of life is necessary to the other, and that each develops in perfection and grace in terms of its counterpart.8 It understands that re-ligious and laity must be wholly open to one another as persons in our contemporary Christian world, because 7 Ladislas M. Orsy, S.J., "Poverty in the Religious Life," REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, V. 26 (1967), pp. 60--82. sSee David B. Burrel], C.S.C., "Complementarity," REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, V. 26 (1967), pp. 149-60, for a discussion of this point. this is the sine qua non of both human friendship and Christian love. To this end, it welcomes opportunities to join the laity in their homes for occasions of social sig-nificance, and also cordially unlocks the cloister doors so that laymen may breathe of the spirit that uniquely dwells there. But in all these interpersonal relationships, the laymen expects that celibate love will be permeated and directed by a necessary wisdom which is sensitive to the priority of God's relationship to each soul, and efficaciously con-cerned not to frustrate God's plan for it. Thirdly, laymen expect religious, whether they be "subordinates" or "superiors" (or whatever new titles they use) to live a life of genuine obedience. Such a life is nurtured and guided by a r~spectful alertness to what the Institute of Man calls "the dynamics of the life situation as a temporal and local manifestation of God." This means that all elements of a religious community must be finely tuned-in to the real and concrete and changing needs of the world and the Church. It means, in fact, redefining obedience as the act of listening--listening to the will of almighty God making itself explicit through the Scriptures, indeed, but also through the events of the world, the activities of daily living, and through personal contacts with us laymen. In the light of this concept of obedience as listening, the specific authority structures of a religious community seem to us relatively unimportant. What matters is that all members, including "superiors" (and presumably there will always be someone who formally accepts re-sponsibility for the community), to appreciate the neces-sity of others in the decision-making process. They must understand that this imperative follows from the incom-pleteness of any individual in value and operation, and from everyone's need for complementation and perfect-ing. Finally, but actually firstly, the laity expect consecrated religious to be men and women well versed in the art of prayer. We have observed that their prayer life produces an intimacy .with almighty God that penetrates their whole being; and we have often experienced the truth that contact with them is a happy, homely contact with the Divine. Somehow, laymen find it difficult to speak easily or publicly with loving familiarity of God, and tend to tuck Him away for private moments. Yet our hearts respond with almost childlike delight when reli-gious women and men effect His presence in our midst by their relaxed reference to the divine Person who is their friend. But His presentation must also be honest. He must be there as the genuine beloved, or the introduction will .generate resentment and distrust and even, some-÷ ÷ + Layman's Response to Religi'ous VOLUME ~0, 1971 ÷ ÷ M. A. Ha~per times, contempt. And, of course, regular, vital, personal prayer makes the difference--prayer for which action is no substitute. But laymen do expect religious to be action people as well. They expect to find religious present in all situa-tions of want, be these physical poverty, or infirmity, or social injustice, and to support the laity in their human commitment to one another. Moreover, we welcome them to work alongside us in our professions, which we hope and anticipate they will competently enrich by their unique intimacy with and witness tQ. Christ. In all these activities, however, we ask the consecrated religious not to blur their identity with ours. Such blur-ring does not necessarily take place by their choosing ordinary lay clothing instead of traditional habits, though many laymen appreciate some sort of identifiable although contemporary dress or insignia for professional or public appearances, and the reserving of anonymity for private occasions. More to the point is the signaling of God's kingdom mentioned before--the "pilgrim witness" which per-meates the entire personality of the consecrated religious. In the rhythmic, interpenetrating flow of action between the human and the divine in all Christian lives, the lay-man publishes and protects the human. But it is the consecrated religious who points to the divine, and who must give this sign the highest visibility. In days gone by, such visibility was carefully prescribed by rules which governed all aspects of religious life, in-cluding prayer, dress, and general decorum. Today it is a matter of individual responsibility, and each religious must seek ways to radiate God in his own life, and by his own style--a difficult project, indeed, with the old guide-lines gone, and none very clear or precise to take their place. No wonder there have been dark moments of con-fusion, insecurity, and doubts. And the worst may be yet to come as religious-in-transition continue to probe and test their inspirations. During all their struggles, however, we laymen want religious to trust and draw strength from our loyalty and devotion, and from our great confidence that religious will solve their problems and, in their own proper way, continue to mature in Christ. But, most importantly, on every occasion of solicited or unsolicited criticism from us post-Council laymen, we want religious to understand and believe how humanly and eschatalogically, but uniquely, we need them! REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 186 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. Toward an American Theology of Contemplation Introduction In* the process of renewal of religious life in the United States no question is more polarizing than the role of "contemplation" in religious life today. Some-how Americans have always had difficulty about this question. At the time of the confused "Americanism" controversy in the 1880's, among other errors supposed to be prevalent in the American Church Leo XIII con-demned the emphasis on the active rather khan the con-templative life.1 In a recent history of the Dominican fathers in the United States, The American Dominicans, Father Reginald Coffey has made very clear how the attempt to transplant the Dominican ideal of "contem-plata aliis tradere" ran into astonishing difficulties which have never been resolved after 170 years of earnest effort.2 What is true of the Dominicans. can be paralleled in most of the other" religious orders who came to this coun-try. We cannot ignore this experience, nor assume that the difficulty has arisen because we just have not tried hard enough. Perhaps the reason is that we have been trying to do the impossible and have not had the intellectual courage to think the whole matter through to a better and more practical solution. We have tried to import into American culture a mode of the awareness of God * This article is based on a talk originally given to a meeting of the Dominican Education Association in Atlantic City, April 2 1970. 1See T. T. McAvoy, C.S.C., The American Heresy in Roman Catholicism, 1895-1900 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 196~). ~Reginald Coffey, O.P., The American Dominicans (New York: St. Martin de Porres Guild, 141 East 65th St., 1968). 4- Benedict Ashley, O.P., is a member of the Institute of Religion and Hu-man Development; Texas Medical Cen-ter; Houston, Texas 77025. VOLUME 30, 1971 187 B. M. Ashley, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 188 which arose in European culture and which can be achieved in our culture only with strain and artificiality. After all, God reveals Himself to men in the way that He chooses; and He ordinarily chooses a mode of revela-tion suited to their concrete experience and style of life. If contemplation is to be vital for us it must arise from a contact with God present in our world, not in the world of the 13th century, nor the 17th nor the 19th, nor in an artificial world created by a romantic love of the past. Just as we realize there is something decadent in building Gothic churches as if God could only be found in a particular style of architecture, so it is deca-dent to seek a form of prayer in a style of life that is only artificially re-created. We need to study our own culture and see whether in its system of values there is room for an authentic contemplative life. Pragmatism The United States of America as a people began with a theological conception of its mission. Our most influ-ential founders saw this country as a promised land, "the land of opportunity" in which God had given mankind a new chance to realize the kingdom of God, freed from the traditional compromises which the Church had made in Europe with tyrannical monarchies.3 This conception of mission was reenforced by the ac-tual experience of the pioneers in possessing the land, then of American government and business in applying scientific methods of organization and technology to the control of the environment and to the mass education and human development of the people. These experiences have given us a particular under-standing of what truth is. Our most dominant philosophy under thinkers like James, Peirce, and Dewey expresses this idea of truth as.pragmatic or instrumental. Some have understood this philosophy to mean that truth is valuable only as a practical instrument. A study of Dewey will show that this is a misunderstanding. Americans do not limit truth to the role of a mere tool of action, but what they say is that unless truth is effective, unless it leads to change, to growth, to progress, to the liberation of man, it cannot be genuine truth. It follows that the traditional Greek idea of "contem-plation" is very hard for an American to grasp. What do you contemplate? If it is the world or ourselves, then to know the world and ourselves is to see something that ~On the concept of an American theology see the symposium Projections: Shaping an American Theology [or the Future, ed. by Thomas F. O'Meara, O.P. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970); and Herbert Richardson, Towards an American Theology (New York, 1967). needs to be improved and freed from its restrictions. If you say we contemplate God, then the American says: "Why should I look at God from a distance? If I really engage God as a person, then we must do something to-gether. Surely God is not idl~. To be with God is to engage with Him in His work, and His work is with His world and the people who are His people. We can understand working with someone, we can understand playing with someone, but just looking at some one. !" Tradition Americans experience the past as something foreign (Europe, Mexico, the Far East). As such it fascinates us, and the world is filled with American archaeologists and anthropologists and historical researchers digging into the past and the primitive. But the value, of the past for us is that it tells us "how far we have come" and encourages us to change even more. It does not set for us a norm or a stamp of approval on what we are now doing. In fact, we are inclined to be uneasy if we realize that we are still doing what men found useful in the past. If it was useful then, surely it can be only a hindrance now when we live in such a different age. When we do admire something traditional it is precisely b~cause it is still a success. We marvel that its originators could have been so foresighted, but there must be experiential proof that it still works. From this point of view a young American religious can admire the founder of his order for being so "mod-ern" in the sense that for his times he was forward-look-ing. But the reason, above all, that our vocations are few and that so many younger people leave is that it appears to them that the religious orders are not preparing for the future. To speak to persons of this mentality about the "nnchanging essentials" of religious life. and its time-tested means of silence, cloister, Office, and study that have produced so many saints in the past, is precisely to confirm their greatest fear that their order lives in the past. A young Dominican I know once said: "Our Order is no longer the Order of Trutk, since if it possessed the Truth it would be changing to meet the future. Truth is the capacity to change for the future." Thus, if contemplation is a call to withdraw into the silence of the cloister, to spend much of the day in the chapel at Office or in the library studying the documents of the past in order to occasionally preach a sermon or deliver a lecture, it is not easy to see how this fidelity to the "tried and true" methods of tradition is anything but a "cop-out" from problems of the present. It is worse than taking drugs, because the use of drugs is turning people on to new experiences, while the old monastic ÷ ÷ ÷ Contemplation VOLUME 30~ 1971 189 B. M. Ashley, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS methods seem in actual fact to close people up in stale routines. Prophecy There is a kind of divine truth which the American mind can appreciate, the truth of prophecy. Authentic prophecy, in Biblical terms, is an interpretation and criticism of the present, which also has the effective power to produce the future. It is a call to man to act in co-operation with God, and it announces the doom of him who hesitate~. It is a pragmatic truth in the deepest sense. Writers on contemplation generally emphasize that it is a receptivity or openness to transcendent reality. With-out this receptivity human activity becomes feverish, shallow, and ineffective. I think Americans respond with real understanding to this concept of openness. It is no accident that our country has produced in the psychiatrist' Carl Rogers a remarkable exponent of the "art of listen-ing" who has shown that the basis of all human life is the capacity to be really open to the communication of another person, a communication deeper than mere words.4 But notice the great difference between the American idea of openness and receptivity and that of the monastic tradition as we have ordinarily tried to live it. To be open in the American sense one has to be in the midst of the world and of persons, in the situations where peo-ple are interacting and where God is bringing people together. The monastery seems ideally designed to close people off from one another, and hence to God. What the American tends to see in the monastic tradi-tion is essentially a dualism. There is a dualism of the body and the mind, of matter and spirit, of the world and the cloister, the secular and the sacred, the active and the contemplative. What he protests against is not the mind, the spirit, the cloister, the sacred, or contem-plation, but a tradition which seems to force us to di-chotomize these and to prefer one to the other, or even to make one the basis of the other. The American be-lieves that there must be a contemplative, receptive ele-ment in communication but it is part of a rhythm of action and reception, of interaction. It makes no sense, therefore, to argue that "we contemplate in order to give to others." The giving and receiving are joined in a single activity. We are learning about reality as we act to change it or to communicate with it. *Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), Chapter 1: "This Is Me." Criticism I think I have said enough to show why the.terms in which traditional books discuss the problem of contem-plation make little sense to young Americans and, I would think, to young Europeans also, because in this the American style of thought has taken a lead throughout the world. It is not true, however, that Americans accept this pragmatic attitude without criticism. To see the need of prophecy as a criticism of our times entails also an attitude of self-criticism. In this the American fondness for depth-psychology, "group dynamics," and "sensitivity training" is characteristic. Americans are seeking a pecu-liar mode of asceticism which involves an exposure of hidden motives to the scrutiny of others. The American is haunted by the fear that he cannot change, that he cannot grow because of fixations, because of blindness and illusion. He is anxious, therefore, to uncover in himself the obstacles to growth. At the present Americans are engaged in-deep self-criticism. We realize that in one sense and paradoxically we are the most conservative country in the developed World. The rapidity of change in the United States has driven the "silent majority" of our people into a defen-sive position. The silent majority (if it is that) iti our religious convents is only a reflection of that frightened conservatism which pervades the whole of American so-ciety. This has produced an atmosphere which is near panic and despair. Americans are deeply frightened that at this moment when we feel so desperately the need to meet the future we will be unable to do so, that we are already locked int6 structures (which we ourselves built) and which we cannot dismantle rapidly enough. The racial problem or the poverty problem in the United States is typical. All of us, even the most conservative really admit that racial discrimination and poverty must go; but we are afraid that the strains of accomplishing this will be more [han we as a society can undertake in a short time, and that tomorrow it will be too late. This self-criticism is, therefore, terribly urgent for the American, and it must be radical. It cannot simply be a matter ~f "adaptation," nor can it be a matter of changing the "accidentals" and retaining the "essentials." We do not think in those terms. What we need, we think, is a new model. It may retain many features of the old, but it must constitute somehow a new response to the future. This entails the serious consideration of whether we should retain the traditional forms of religious life or whether it is necessary to begin new ones. This does not entail, please, notice, that Americans ÷ ÷ ÷ Contemplation VOLUME 30, 1971 191 ÷ + ÷ B. M. Ashley, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS a priori want new and American forms of religious life. Our pragmatism is deeper than that. We are perfectly ready to keep the existing orders if they are el~ective, but not otherwise. Inherent in this self-criticism is also the growing reali-zation that American culture is itself quite sick, and that one of its deep sicknesses is activism. Throughout Amer-ican culture in the most unlikely places there is a strong reaction against pragmatism cbnceived as a religion of success and material productivity. These are seen as de-humanizing, as reducing man to a servant of the ma-chine, of things. Thus American pragmatism is taking a new and purified form. It is still a conviction that truth must be effective, but the effect sought is not material; it is rather to be judged in terms of "the quality of life," a widened and deepened experience, a more intimate communication with other persons, a freer realization of man's creative potential. Experimentalism The outcome of this is that young Americans are looking hopefully to pluralism and experimentalism. Theologically this is understood by many young Catho-olics as the liberating work of the Holy Spirit who dis-tributes His diverse gifts to individuals and groups. In religious life this means a diversity of "life-styles" and apostolates. The danger here, of course, is that the unity of a religious community will be completely disrupted. Sociologists are among the first to warn us that the weak-ening structures and symbols of group unity may render a community completely dysfunctional. However, the advocates of this pluralism and experi-mentalism join it with an insistence on communica-tion, evaluation, feed-back: They do not propose a proc-ess of splintering, but rather a rhythm of changing life in which forms are developed through an interchange of experiences and ideas, and then constantly revised in view of ongoing experience and new ideas. In such a conception it becomes hopeless to talk about "essentials" and "adaptations," and the discussion rather takes the form of talking about "the enrichment of values." The Basic Question Perhaps nothing is more crucial in "this question than the diagnosis which each side makes of the "signs of our times." A recent writer on the renewal of religious life, while conceding many pgsitive aspects to the present sit-uation, singles out as our deepest sickness our secularism, and "insensitivity to the transcendent." ~ This means that for him God is primarily the transcendent, and that He is to be found, therefore, by the various monastic tech-niques by which a man turns away from the noise of the world to the silence beyond the world. This, however, is the very point in question. Is God to be known primarily as "the transcendent?" He may have revealed himself in the monastic period" of the Church primarily in that way, and through the practices of silent and cloistered meditation. But is this the way that He has willed to reveal Himself today? After all, to accept an historical view of revelation as most theologians do today, also entails the conviction that God reveals Him-self to men historically in a way specific to the time. Our problem becomes, therefore, to search for God to-day where He reveals Himself and according to the man-ner in which He, as Lord of History, dictates, not ac-cording to some tradition, however venerable. Our younger people have the conviction that somehow this point of revelation is precisely in the secular, in the pov-erty and the need of our world. This need felt by the world is not an explicit religious need. Rather it is a simple human need of justice, of love, and of peace, but it is authentic need, and that is why God is to be found there. After all Jesus Himself said: "I was poor, hungry, ¯ naked, and in prison, and you did not visit me." ¯ Receptivity Are we then to lose ourselves in meeting the social problems of our time? Is there not a real danger that tak-ing the form of our life from the apostolate we will simply become humanitarian activists? We already see many who are leaving religious life to engage themselves as lay persons in the problems of the world and who in a short time seem to have lost all prophetic sense and simply to have succumbed to the dead routine of com-mercial society. How then can we develop a sincere re-ceptivity to the word of God? It appears incredible to our younger people that this is to be achieved by a return to "conventual life" in its monastic form. Nothing in their experience points this way. Nor do they see in us older religious very convincing proofs that this type of life has in fact made us receptive to what God is doing today. Rather they see that the conservative advocates of regular observance were and are closed to the work of the spirit which has manifested itself in Vatican II in a manner whose authenticity cannot be mistaken. ~Valentine Walgrave, O.P., Do~ninican Self-Appraisal in the Light of the Council (Chicago: Priory, 1968), pp. 112-20. ÷ ÷ + Contemplation VOLUME 30, 1971 193 ÷ ÷ ÷ B. M. Ashley, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS The first step, therefore, to a renewal of genuine re-ceptivity to the Spirit, to authentic contemplation, is an awakened sensitivity to the world's needs, to the 15resente of Jesus in the poor, the suffering, and the despairing. There is, however, a danger that concern for social ills will become a mere "cause," an abstract party ideology little concerned with real people, as Marxism has be-come. To be Christian this concern for the poor and re-ceptivity to their needs must be brought close to home and must become a receptivity to the persons in our daily lives. Hence, we cannot achieve a renewal of the contemplative spirit unless we begin with an increased sensitivity to the human needs of those around us, an openness to dialogue, a freedom of communication. This ability to hear others and to respond to them is hindered by our own lack of self-understanding, which al-lows barriers of communication to grow within us. In the past these walls against others have actually been reenforced by the conventual observances so that nnder the guise of seeking to be more receptive to God we have closed ourselves off to our neighbors. The parable of the Good Samaritan summarizes the tragic fact that religious purity can be an excuse for "passing by on the other side." This growth in self-understanding can, of course, lead to self-centeredness, just as the practice of meditation and examination of conscience sometimes did. The remedy for this excessive subjectivity is study. Books cannot sub-stitute for experience, but experience in interpersonal re-lations does not necessarily produce deeper insight unless it is accompanied by study. If we are to be prophetic men and women we must make use of all the knowledge ¯ ~hich modern science furnishes to help us understand man and his condition; and we must push this explora-tion to its philosophical and theological depths. Perhaps our greatest danger at the moment is to settle for a psy-chological view of man which is positivistic in character and which does not push behind positivist assumptions to the basic problems of human existence. When we speak of study, however, it cannot be a study of texts. In America today, more and more the advance of learning is pulling itself free from the printed page and is becoming a matter of the laboratory, the clinic, the symposium, the workshop. A group of men and women, therefore, who are to be a community of study today will not look like a monastic library or scriptorium; but it will be in constant contact with the gathering of empirical data and the debating of theoretical hypotheses. Because in our times a prophet must also be deeply involved in professional life, he can become overly cere-bral, a human computer. He must fight free of getting trapped in the narrow world of scientic and technological rationalism. If religious life is to foster a prophetic open-ness to reality, it must not reduce our energies to the lim-its of efficient work and productive routine. The esthetic, creative, and spiritual components of human personality must be awakened and developed. The dualism which infected Christian asceticism in the past often led to an atmosphere in which we became closed to all reality which threatened the arousal of our emotions. A certain type of Thomism closed us up in a tight world of defini-tions and classifications that excluded much of God's world of beauty, mystery, and experiential insight. If we are to be open to the prophetic Spirit we must make place in our lives for genuine celebration, the praise of God in His world. The Divine Office originated in such a spirit of praise, but that does not mean that it is today a genuine celebration. Nor are we sure that it can be. In any case we have the obligation to find a way to celebrate our community life in God if we are to be a prophetic community. American life today in a country that possesses half of the world's wealth is clear proof that our riches, which could be the solution to world poverty, are the chief cause of our apathy to poverty. This is true also of our search for security in sex and family, in personal au-tonomy and professional competence. We cannot criti-cize this idolatrous American search for security if our conventual life is itself aimed at security. Thank God, we are becoming insecure! Our decline in vocations is forcing us to liquidate our property and to face a doubt-ful future. We are frightened by the decline in apprecia-tion for celibacy. Is not this the payment for our lack of poverty? If we have a genuine eschatological sense of the urgency of the world's problems--if we were expect-ing to go to jail soon for our share in the revolution-- then celibacy would become very logical. This is true also of obedience. Obedience makes-sense when it is a response to a leadership ready to risk all. American Monasticism Does all this mean that there is no place in American culture for monks or nuns devoted to the contemplative life without an exterior apostolate? The life of Thomas Merton was a sign for us that such a conclusion would be too hasty.0 Americans dislike the ancient dualism be-tween contemplation and action, but they do understand the principle of specialization. If contemplation as a ~ Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer (New. York: Herder and Herder, 1969). 4- 4- + Contemplation VOLUME 30, 1971 195 ÷ ÷ ÷ B. M. Ashley, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 196 value is to be vigorous in American life it must have its specialists. We look to such specialists of contemplation, however, for a pragmatic demonstration that is convincing to our times. Merton provided such a test by showing that his life in the hermitage had made him more sensitive to the problems and opportunities of our times than most of us in active life. If the cloister is to draw young Americans, it should not offer them a retreat from the world, but a place to confront the issues of our time in an intense encounter where every illusion is stripped away. Most of us see our times through the TV screen carefully in-terlaced with commercials whose message is middle-class complacency. If we are to have cloisters, they must be places in which contemplatives look reality square in the face. Far from destroying the monastic tradition this would be a return to its original inspiration which, according to Father Bouyer, was not to escape the world and its evils but to confront them in the desert of unflinching truth, like Jesus "who was led into the desert by the Spirit to be tried by the devil." 7 This requires a rethinking of the traditional monastic means of silence, choral prayer, discipline, and the clois-ter so as to make these truly effective means to a profound self-knowledge, a knowledge of ourselves not cut off from the world, but as responsible for it. It means too that the insight achieved must be shared with others by modes of communication that are effective in our society, and it is here that the deep American interest in com-munications verbal and non-verbal must come into play. The Active Religious Communities Those religious communities dedicated to an active exterior apostolate, if they are to root that apostolate in the authentic receptivity of spirit required to hear the word of God calling to us from crisis situations, need to get to work on the following objectives: 1. Our first objective must be to locate and operate our communities in situations where we will be forced to confront the problems of our time. We must seek a form of life which does not permit us to protect our-selves by false securities from the urgency of the situa-tions which make a prophetic witness a constant demand upon us. Our obedience, chastity, and poverty must be-come functional because they are necessary for us in our r Louis Bouyer, The Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers (New York: Descl~e, 1963), especially Chapter 13: "The Origins of Monasticism," pp. 300-3. state of emergency. Our security must be in faith and hope in God alone. 2. Our next objective should be to support each other in this common emergency through a community life that is based on a spirit of openness, receptivity/and di-alogue. A pluralism of life styles and points of view must be combined with a vigorous effort for greater unity .through experiment and dialogue. We must encourage the emergence of leadership, and we must foster the gifts of the Spirit in each member of the community. 3. We must break through the current tendency to faddism and a superficial copying of the techniques of scientific positivism to a deeper, prophetic understanding of man and his problems in the light of the Gospel. This demands that our communities be places of research and study where people of different experiences and compe-tencies can meet to raise penetrating questions and en-gage in mutual criticism of opinions. 4. In order to achieve this openness and to be able to meet the conflict involved in the clash of opinions and tendencies we must in our communities seek a profound purification of the spirit. We should not neglect the techniques provided by modern psychology'and sociology to help us overcome immature and prejudiced modes of thinking, feeling, and acting. Beyond this we must by a disciplined simplicity of life and by personal and com-munity prayer open the way to the action of God's grace. 5. We must find the courage for this renewal in a spirit of celebration of the presence of God in the world and in our community through liturgical prayer and through a genuine enjoyment of friendship in the com-munity and with those we serve. The Eucharist and the praise of God must become for us the fundamental life styIe which unites us in a pluralism of expression and activities. Some will ask: When in all this complex of activities will we come face to face with God, alone and in silence? Can there be genuine contemplation without this naked confrontation? There cannot be. But it is God Himself who calls us to face Him. If He does not call, then we cannot find Him. Therefore, the beginning of our contemplative re-newal must be to answer Him where and when He calls ÷ to us. It seems that today in the United States God is ÷ calling us not in a silent cloister, which is hardly to be + found, but in the situations of fear and doubt, in the desert of alienation, and at the gates of hope where Jesus stands side by side with suffering men and women. We must meet Him there with faith. It is my belief that a religious community which takes this step will be Contemplation VOLUME 30, 1971 197 more truly obedient, chaste, poor, charitable, studious, prayerful, receptive of God's word, and urgently driven to bring God's word to others in their need, than a com-munity which applies itself to some illusion of con-ventual observance. What then is my conclusion? Our American experience shows a great need today of a prophetic mission which will enable men to find God at work in the critical situations of our society. No doubt there is also need of men and women who so feel the urgency of this pro-phetic task, that they are willing to put aside economic, family, and individual securities, to work as a commu-- nity to help the larger community of the Church per-form this task better. Such a community cannot fulfill its prophetic mission unless it is deeply engaged in the world's problems, but it cannot be content to meet these problems superficially. It must penetrate them to the deepest level where God reveals Himself. This implies a search for God in our life together in tl~e world made ever more profound by study, dialogue, discipline, prayer, suffering, and celebration. ÷ ÷ ÷ B. M. AshleT, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 198 BERNARD VERKAMP Cultic Purity and the Law,of Celibacy The situation as a whole of the early Church, Jean Paul Audet has noted, was one of tremendous simpli-fication. 1 With this simplification came a general flexi-bility, which also found expression in the early structures of the Christian priesthood. Both in the service of the gospel and the ecclesia, the early Christians broke out of the fixed patterns of a sacral priesthood, and freely adopted whatever structures most suited their work." Thus, to come to the subject of our present concern, while some chose to leave their wives or husbands, others, the majority, continued to pursue their mission out of the context of a married and home life.s What is most sig-nificant, however, is that neither one nor the other style of life was thought to be, in itself, incompatible with service. Both were viable options. And such was to re-main the case throughout the first centuries of Christi-anity. In the year 305, however, nineteen bishops from differ-ent parts of Spain gathered at the Synod of Elvira and issued along with various other very stringent measures,4 the following canon touching upon the marital status of the clergy: Placuit in totum prohibere episcopis, presbyteris et diaconi-bus vel omnibus clericis positis in ministerio abstinere se a 1 j. p. Audet, Structures of Christian Priesthood, New York, 1968, p. 80. "~ Ibid., p. 79. ~ Ibid., p. 41. ~ Canon 13 states that a virgiu consecrated to God and committing a carnal sin could receive communion only at the end of her life and after perpetual penance. Bishops, priests, and deacons detected in fornication were, according to Canon 18, to be denied communion for the rest of their lives. And, according to Canon 71, pederasts were not to be admitted to communion even on their deathbeds (Hefele-Leclerq, Histoire des Conciles, Paris, 1907, 1.1, pp. 212-264). ÷ ÷ ÷ Father Bernard Verkamp, a doc-toral candidate in the St. Louis Uni-versity Divinity School, lives at 3658 West Pine Boulevard; St. Louis, Mo. 63108. VOLUME 30, 1971 199 ÷ ÷ ÷ B. Verkamp REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS '~00 conjugibus suis et non generare filios: quicumque vero [ecerit, ab honore clericatus exterminetur? While stating exactly the opposite, the synod appar-ently meant to forbid bishops, priests, and deacons from continuing sexual relations with their wives.~ Nothing is said about separation of the clerics from their wives; only that they may not relate sexually. There is no ques-tion here of the synod desiring to render the clergy more available for apostolic service. Rather is the prohibition clearly motivated by a concern for cultic purity. This conclusion is further supported by,the phrasing of the canon: ".vel omnibus clericis positis in ministerio." Were this phrase disjunctive, it might have been in-tended only to extend the prohibition to yet another class of clergy, namely, subdeacons. But, in all likelihood,; it is meant to be explicative--with "vel" meaning "id est" --so that the canon must read: "It pleases us to forbid absolutely bishops, priests, and deacons, that is, all clerics engaged in the service of the altarS., from relating sex-ually to their wives and having children." Combining as it does such a variety of elements, it is difficult to say exactly when and by whom this notion of cultic purity was first ushered into Christianity.° But "Canon 1, Hefele-Leclerq, pp. 238-239. " Literally, the canon forbids bishops, priests, and deacons to abstain from intercourse and not to have children. Such a prohibi-tion might have made sense some eighty years later in Spain when the Priscillian brand of Manichaeism was rampant, but not in the Spain of 305. The rigorist tone of all the other canons of this synod would suggest too that the synod did mean the exact opposite of what it actually declared. This conclusion is further supported by the fact that one of the prime agitators for legislation against clerical marriage at the Council of Nicea in 325 was the Spanish bishop Hosius (Hefele-Leclerq, p. 621). 7 See Martin Boelens, Die Klerikerehe in der Gesetzgebung der Kirche, Paderborn, 1968, p~ 39. s p. Harkx, The Fathers on Celibacy, Des Peres, 1968, p. 16, takes "positis in ministerio" to mean "appointed to orifice." But Audet, Structures, p. 13, notes that in the Christian Latin of the period, when referring to pastoral service, the ministerium was generally seen as a sacrum ministerium, that is, as a service of the altar. ~Certainly its introduction was aided to some extent by the disparagement of sex which, despite the Church's rejection of the encratic sects spawned by Gnosticism, began, as early as Athenagoras, to gain ground within Christian circles; see Athenagoras, Supplicatio pro Christi 33, PG 6, 965-967; Minutius Felix, Octavius 31, PL 3, 335-338; Tertullian, Ad Uxorem I, 3, PL 1, 1277-1279; Clement of Alexandria, Christ the Educator 11, "Fathers of the Church," v. 23, New York, 1954, pp. 169f; Sextus, Sentences 230-233, ed. H. Chad-wick, Cambridge, 1959, p. 39. The trend toward sacralization received a major stimulus from Cyprian in the 3rd century; see Letters 1 and 67, "Fathers of the Church," v. 51, Washington, 1964, pp. 3-5 and 232. From Cyprian onward the Old Testament example of the Aaronic priesthood and its laws of periodic continency (Lev 22:3; Lev 15:18; Ex 19:15; 1 Sam 21:5) were appealed to more and more frequently as a model for the Christian priesthood. once introduced, it quickly established itself and became during the next fifteen hundred years the predominant rationale behind the legislation of clerical c6ntinency.1° For more than two hundred years after Elvira, all the legislation regarding the marital status of the clergy in the Western Church11 was solely directed toward pro-hibiting sexual intercourse between the higher clergy and their wives. Not until the Synod of Gerona in 517 did the Spanish bishops require separation. And in other coun-tries such legislation came still later. This fact, in itself, would suggest that throughout those two hundred years clerical continency was motivated almost solely by a con-cern for cultic purity. What other evidence is available supports that conclusion. Outside of Elvira, there was almost no legislation re-garding clerical marriage in the Western Church during the first seventy years of the 4th century.12 But in the 1°This is not, of course, to imply any judgment about the rationale for the chastity of religious men or women during the same period. Our present concern is only with the legislation of clerical celibacy. For a discussion of celibacy in a broader context, J. M. Ford's, ,4 Trilogy on Wisdom and Celibacy, Notre Dame, 1967, is especially good. A recently published work by Roger Gryson, Les origines du cdlibat eccldsiastique du premier au septi~me siecle, Paris, 1970, may also prove helpful. 11 In the East, legislation in this regard took a somewhat different course. At the Synod of Ancyra in 314, it was ruled in canon 10 that any deacon declaring his intention to marry at the time of his appointment might marry even after his ordination and continue in his ministry (Hefele-Leclerq, v. 1.I, pp. 312-313). Without such a prior declaration, however, he could not subsequently marry and still hope to exercise his office. Thus Ancyra already contained at least the germ of the practice eventually adopted by the Eastern Church at Trullo in 692, namely, marriage before but not after ordination. But for all these differences, the legislation in the East was really no less motivated by a desire for cultic purity than in the West, as we shall subsequently see in our discussion of the Synod of Trullo. That the notion of cultic purity was already prevalent in the East in the first half of the fourth century was exemplified by Eusebius of Caesarea when he wrote: "Verumtamen cos, qui sacrati sint, atque in Dei ministerio cultuque occupati, con-tinere deinceps seipsos a commercio uxoris decet" (Demonstrationis evangelicae I, IX, PG 22, 82). Likewise, the Synod of Laodicea, in 350, passed a number of measures which can only be understood within the context of cultic purity. Canon 21 decrees that sub-deacons shall not touch the sacred vessels; canon 44 bars women from approaching near the altar; according to canon 19 only clerics shall be permitted to approach the altar of sacrifice (Hefele-Leclerq, v. 1.2, pp. 1010-'20). On the other hand, however, the Synod of Gangra in 345 sought to check the sectarian thrust of Eustathian asceticism by excommunicating anyone maintaining that when a married priest offers the sacrifice, no one should take part in the service; see canon 4, Hefele-Leclerq, p. 1034. ~2 p. Harkx, The Fathers on Celibacy, p. 17, states that the Synod of Aries (314) reiterated the decrees of Elvira. But, the six appended canons, upon which Harkx bases his conclusion, do not really belong to this synod, but must be ascribed rather to a decretal of Pope + + + Celibacy VOLOME ~0~ 1971 201 last quarter of that century, Popes Damasus I (366-384) and Siricius (384-399) were both very active in initiating a program of clerical continency. Several synods were held at Rome some time around 370, which, while indi-cating a preference for clerical candidates who were not married, nevertheless allowed that someone baptized as an adult and already married might also be ordained, as-suming that he had remained chaste and was a man of one wife ("unius uxoris vir").13 In a letter to the bishops of Gaul, Damasus relayed this and other decisions of the Roman synods along with a discttssion of the reasons for clerical continency.14 A variety of reasons are proffered,1~ but the central argument builds upon the notion of cultic purity.16 The very first synod held at Rome (384) under Pope Siricius, declared in its 9th canon that, because of their daily administration of the sacraments, priests and dea-cons should not have intercourse with their wives.17 In ÷ ÷ ÷ B. Verkarnls REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 202 Siricius: "Weil der Wortlaut dieses Kanons mit den cc. 4 trod 5 aus dem Brief des Papstes Siricius an die afrikanischen Bish6fe fast wortlich iibereinstimmt und wahrscheinlich von dort iibernommen worden ist" (Boelens, Die Klerikerehe, p. 28). The Council o[ Nicea (325) forbids any cleric to mutilate himself (c.1) and also prohibits the higher clergy from having the so-called "virgines subintroductae" in their houses (c.3). But its canons say nothing about clerical con-tinency (see Hefele-Leclerq, v. 1.1, pp. 528-620). Apparently, some of the Council fathers had hoped to require continency of the clergy, but thanks to the saintly Egyptian bishop, Paphnutius, this move was checked. E. Schillebeeckx, Clerical Celibacy under Fire, London, 1967, p. 26, cites Mansi 2, 670, in support of his claim that the Council of Nicea forbade marriage after reception of higher orders "according to an ancient tradition of the church." But the canons of Nicea say no such thing. The only possible support for Schillebeeckx's claim might be the statement of Paphnutius that "it would be sufficient, according to the ancient tradition of the Church, if those who had taken holy orders without being married were prohibited from marrying afterwards" (Hefele-Leclerq, v. 1.1, p. 620). an H. Bruns, Canones Apostolorum et conciliorum veterum selecti, Turin, 1959, v. 2, pp. 277f. a~ Ibid. (The text is also presented in PL 13, 1181-96.) ~'~ The authority of Scripture and the fathers; a good example to the widows and virgins, and so forth: ibid. ~"Denique illi qui in templo sacrificia offerebant, ut mundi essent toto anno in templo solo observationis ~nerito permanebant, domos suas penitus nescientes. Certe idolatrae, ut impietates exerceant et daemonibus immolent, imperant sibi continentiam muliebrem et ab secis quoque se purgari volunt, et me interrogas si sacerdos dei vivi spiritualia oblaturus sacrificia purgatus perpetuo debeat esse, an totus in carrie carnis curare debeat facere?" (ibid). x~"Suademus quod sacerdotes et levitae cum uxoribus suis non coeant, quia in ministerio ministri quotidianis necessitatibus occu-pantur., si ergo laicis abstinentia imperatur, ut possint deprecantes audiri, quanto magis sacerdos utique omni ~nomento paratus esse debet, munditiae puritate securus, ne aut sacrificium offerat, aut baptizare cogatur." The canons of this synod have come down to us through the letter of Siricius to the bishops of Africa, which in the following year, Siricius repeats this injunction in a letter to the Spanish bishop Himerus of Tarragona and further embellishes it with the cultic purity rationale. Those priests who have continued to beget children are wrong, he says, when they appeal to the example of the Old Testament priests. These latter were permitted to have children only because the law demanded that only descendants of Levi be admitted to the service of God. Such is no longer the case. Furthermore, the Old Testa-ment priests were strictly enjoined to have no sexual relations with their wives during the time of their service, so that they might present to God an acceptable offering. Priests, therefore, who want their daily sacrifices to be pleasing to God must remain continually chaste,is The 5th century follows a similar pattern. Sexual intercourse is forbidden between higher clergy (deacons, priests, bishops) and their wives.10 But their separation is not required:°0 Why no intercourse? "Because at any moment," the Synod of Tours proclaimed in 460, "they may be summoned to the discharge of a sacred func-tion." 21 Canon 2 of the same synod notes that while those who break this rule need not be deposed from their office,2-0 they shall no longer be eligible to a higher grade and shall not be permitted to offer the holy sacrifice or to assist as deacons.23 To strengthen such an arrangement between the clergy and their wives, a number of synods began during this turn was read at the African Synod of Telepte in 418, whence the present text. See Bruns, op. cit. I, p. 154. It is to this canon that the 6th spurious canon of the Synod of Aries (314) probably owes its origin; supra, footnote 11. ~ See Boelens, Die Klerikerehe, pp. 43-44. Arguments such as this were echoed repeatedly in ihe writings of Ambrose and Jerome who during this period were combating the "errors" of Jovinian and Vigilantius. 19See canon 1, Synod of Toledo (400), Hefele-Leclerq, v. 2.1, p. 123; canon 8, Synod of Turin (c. 400), ibid., p. 134; canons 23 and 24, Synod of Orange (441), ibid., p. 446; canon 2, Synod of Arles (443), ibid., p. 462. Pope Leo I in 446 included subdeacons under the rule; see PL 54, 672-3. ~0 Pope Leo I wrote that from the ti.me of ordination, the higher clergy must convert a carnal union into a spiritual one: "They must, though not sending away their wives, have them as though not having them" (PL 54, 1204). It will be recalled that during this same period the Church expressed itself as vehemently opposed to any "spiritual relations" between the clergy and the virgines subintro-ductae. .ol Hefele-Leclerq, v. 2.2, p. 899. The cultic purity rationale was also expressed during this century by Pope Innocent I (see Audet, Str~*ctures, p. 89) and by the Synod of Telepte (418) which, as we have noted earlier, took over the Letter of Siricius and its canons regarding clerical continency; see Bruns, Canones, v. l, p. 154. -°:As other synods had suggested, for example, c. 4, Synod of Carthage (401), Hefele-Leclerq, v. 2.1, p. 127. .-a. Ibid., v. 2.2, p. 899. + + + Celibacy VOLUME 30, 1971 203 + + 4. B. Verkamp REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 204 period to require a vow of chastity prior to ordination. Thus we read in canon 22 of the Synod of Hippo (393) that when lectors have attained the age of puberty, they mnst either marry or make a vow of continence.-04 Later, in 441, a synod at Orange declared that "married men shall not henceforth be ordained deacons unless they have previously vowed chasity." "~ The same decree was repeated at the Synod of Arles in 443.-06 Whatever else these vows came to connote in a later period,-07 there can be little doubt that in their original conception, they were meant simply to support the cultic purity arrange-merit. The next major step in legislation regarding clerical continency came with the rule that the clergy and their wives must separate. Here again the initiative came from Spain. In 517, a synod at Gerona ruled that all ordained married men, from subdeacons to bishops, must cease liv-ing with their wives. If they will not do that, they must at least have living with them someone else who might witness to their conduct."s The last part of this decree suggests something of the motivation underlying the rule of separation stated in the first part. The higher clergy were to separate from their wives, not because they would thereby become more available for Church service, but rather to remove them from suspicion of being less pure than was required of anyone serving at the altar. In other words, the rule of separation was simply a strengthening of the earlier no-interconrse legislation. This becomes even clearer as we trace the development of the law of separation in France during the fith century. Some of the first French synods of this century simply reiterated the EIvira legislation and sought to enforce it by strict penalties. Thus in 535, the Synod of Clermont declared that if anyone is ordained deacon or priest, he must not continne marital interconrse. He becomes a brother of his wife. Those who, inflamed by desire, have "cast off the girdle of the warfare," and have returned to their previous condition,"9 must be deprived of their clerical dignity.:~0 A few years later, however, we see the _o~ Ibid., v. 2.1, p. 87. -"~ Canon 22, ibid., p. 445. ,-,a Canon 2, ibid., p. 462. '-'~ See Schillebeeckx, Clerical Celibacy, p. 60t". ="De conversatione vitae a pontifice usque ad subdiaconum post suscepti honoris oflicium, si qui ex conjugatis fuerint ordinati, ut sine testimonio alterius fratris non utantur auxilio: cure sorore jam ex conjuge facta non habitent; quod si habitare voluerint, alterius [ratris utantur auxilio, cujus testimonio vita eorum debeat clarior apparere" (Bruns, Canones, v. 2, p. 19). See also c. 5, Synod of Toledo (589), ibid., v. 1, p. 214. ._~a,,.abjecto militiae cingulo vomitum pristinum et inhibita rursus conjugia repetiisse." ibid., v. 2, p. 190. ao Canon 13, ibid. start of an attempt to remove the cleric from suspicion, which would climax in a rule like that of Gerona (517). In 541, the Synod of Orleans ruled that bishops, priests, and deacons must not have the same chamber and the same bed with their wives, so that they not be brought into suspicion of carnal intercourse,a~ A synod at Tours in 567 went several steps further, and declared that wherever the bishop resides he must be surrounded with clergy,a" And lest the clergy who serve him come into contact with the maidservants of the bishop's wife, the bishop and his wife shonld have separate abodes,a:~ Sim-ilar rules are laid down for the priests, deacons, and sub-deacons. As very many rural archpriests, deacons, and subdeacons rest under suspicion, of continuing inter-course with their wives, canon 19 states tbat the arch-priest must always have a cleric with him, who accom-panies bim.everywhere and has his bed with him in the same cell;a4 tbe remaining priests, deacons and subdea-cons are warned to take care that their female slaves shall always live where their wives do, while they themselves dwell and pray in their cells alone,a~ A priest who lives with his wife, canon 19 concludes, must not be rever-enced by the people, but disapproved of, because he is a teacher, not of continence, but of vice.a~ In 578, the Synod of Anxerre reiterated the earlier decree of Orleans (541) to the effect that no priest, dea-con, or subdeacon was to sleep in the same bed with his wife after ordination,av In 581, the Synod of Mficon added yet another measure: No woman may enter a bishop's chamber unless two priests or deacons are pres-ent? s Finally, in 583, the Synod of Lyon expressly de-manded that priests and deacons not only have separate beds from their wives but that they also cease all daily contact with them.~9 "t Canon 17, ibid., p. 204. .a~ Canon 12, ibid., p. 227. :~ Ibid. ~' But no priest or monk mlJst sleep in the same bed with an-other, in order to avoid every evil suspicion; ibid., p. 228. a.~ Canon 19, ibid., pp. 229-230. ~ Ibid., p. 230. ar Canon 20, ibid., p. 239. ~ Canon 3, ibid., p. 243. a~ Canon 1, ibid., p. 247: "Placuit etiam, ut si quicuniqne u~oribus juncti ad diaconatus aut presbytcratus ordinem quoquo modo pervenerint, non solum lecto sed etiam frcquentatione quotidiana debeant de nxoribus suis sequcstrari." Outside of Spain and France, the law of separation was only much later enacted. Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) expressly rejected the idea of making those already married leave their wives after ordination unless they had promised continency prior to ordination (Letter 44, PL 77, 505-6). The first Roman synod to require separation was probably that of 743 (See canon 1; Hefele- Leclerq, v. 3.2, p. 851). In the East, the Synod of Trullo (692) rnled + + + Celibacy VOLUME ~0, ~971 205 ÷ ÷ ÷ B. Verkam~ REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 206 It is hard, therefore, to escape the impression that, as stated above, the separation of clergy from their wives was anything other than yet another facet of the same concern for cultic purity which underlay the earlier pro-hibition of sexual interconrse. This impression is further enhanced by the fact that French synods of the same pe-riod were passing a variety of measures which could only quicken the process of sacralization. The synod at Tours in 567 declared, for example, that at Masses, as well as at Vigils, the laity are not allowed to stand among the clergy near the altar on which the holy mysteries are solemnized.4° According to the Synod of Orleans (533), no woman must henceforth be given the benedictio dia-conalis. 41 Nor may a woman receive the holy Eucharist with uncovered hand,42 or touch the pall.4,~ Clerics are not to wear secular garments.44 The next six centuries saw no basic change in ec-clesiastical legislation touching upon the clergy's sexual conduct or marital status. The myriad decrees issued during these centuries either simply reiterate previous legislation or attempt to strengthen the same with more stringent penalties or some other positive measures, or, finally, seek to deal with complications arising out of the earlier laws. Some repeated the earlier demands for a vow of chastity prior to ordination.4~ Others encourage({ the adoption of a vita communis by the clergy.46 While none that if a married priest is consecrated bishop, his wife must go into a convent at a considerable distance (canon 48, Hefele-Leclerq, v. 3.1, p. 569). The motivation behind this measure was no less grounded in a concern for cultic purity than were similar measures in the West. Canon 13 of Trullo states that at the time when they must celebrate divine services, subdeacons, deacons, and priests are obliged to refrain from their wives since it has already been ordained that be who ministers in sacred things must be pure (ibid., v. 3.1, p. 565). The bishops must abstain completely because, unlike the priests and deacons, theirs is a fulltime service of the altar. ~o Canon 4, Bruns, Canones, v. 2, p. 226. ~t Canon 18, ibid., p. 187. ~-" Canon 36, Synod of Auxerre (578), ibid., p. 241. ~ Canon 37, ibid. "Canon 5, Synod of Mficon (581), ibid., p. 243. ~ Schillebeeckx, Clerical Celibacy, p. 60, cites the Fourth Council of Toledo (633) in this regard. But the "professio castitatis" to which canon 27 of that Council refers concerns a vow made after ordina-tion by those about to take up a rural pastorate (Bruns, Canones, v. 1, p. 231), and not, as Schillebeeckx says, a vow prior to ordination. This would suggest, as Boelens has noted (Die Klerikerehe, p. 100), that the conversio prior to ordination required by the Synod of Toledo in 527 had fallen out of practice. Vows prior to ordination were, however, required by the following synods: Worms (868); Bourges (1031); Limoges (1031); London (1102). ~ One of the first to advocate systematically the vita communis was Chrodegang of Metz (d. 766); see Bihlmeyer-Tiichle, Church History, Westminster, 1963, v. 2, p. 108). Synods at Canterbury (969), Rome (1059), Rome (1063), and Winchester (1076) encourage the idea. showed any concern for the care of the clergyman's wife and children after separation, a number dictated what was to happen to these latter if they did not separate from the cleric. Both the wives and the children were made subject to being sold or taken into slavery.47 The clergymen themselves were generally threatened with dep-osition in the event of disobedience; but when this had little effect, the legislators moved to forbid the laity from attending the Masses of such clerics.48 This "separation from the altar" of the incontinent cleric was extended by Gregory VII in 1079 to exclude the cleric from entrance into the church, so that he could not even take a passive part in divine worship.49 The notion of cultic purity, which we contend was operative within all this legislation, was not always given explicit expression.~° Gregory VII (1073-1085) himself, who climaxed the period under discussion, most fre-quently appealed only to the need for obedience to papal authority.~1 But his untiring efforts to separate the in-continent clergy from the service of .the altar, and oc-casional utterances to the effect that God can only be 57 Concerning wives, see canon 5, Synod of Toledo (653), Brtms, Canones, v. 1, p. 280; Synod of Rome (1049), Boelens, Die Klerikerehe, p. 135. Regarding children, see canon 10, Synod of Toledo (655), Bruns, Canones, v. 1, p. 295; Synod of Pavia (1022), Hefele-Leclerq, v. 4.2, p. 920. The inability of the children of clergymen to inherit Church goods had long before been established by the Code of Justinian (529), and by Pope Pelagius (556-561). The synods of Toledo (655) and Pavia (1022) reasserted the same. Pope Gregory VII especially showed himself callous as regards the clergyman's dependents. Boelens writes: "Tatsache abet war doch, (lass die meisten verheiratet waren und (lass sic Frau und Kinder hatten, fi_ir die sie zu sorgen batten. Wie sich die gregorianische Reform fiir sic auswirkte, wurde in den Gesetzcn hie erwahnt. Man vcrffigte nicht, was mit Frau und Kindern gcscbchcn sollten; nut immer wicder das Eine: 'crimen fornicationis' oder 'morbus fornica-tionis clericorum' oder bloss cinfach 'fornicatio' muss strong bestraft werden" (Die Klerikerehe, p. 147). ~8See Synods of Rome 0059), Rome (1063), Gerona (1068), Rome (1074), Poitiers (1078), Piacenza (1095), London (1102). Gregory VII also turned to the laity for support when some German bishops refused to cooperate with his refo
Issue 48.3 of the Review for Religious, May/June 1989. ; R~z,.'n~w vor R~.t~3~oos (ISSN 0034-639X) is publishcd bi-monthly at St. Louis University by thc Mis- ¯ souri Province Educational Institute of the Society of Jesus; Editorial Office: 3601 Lindcll Blvd. Rm. 428: SI. l.x~uis. MO 63108-3393. Sccond-class postagc paid at St. Lxmis MO. Single copies $3.00. Subscriptions: $12.00 pcr year: $22.00 for two years. Other countries: for surface mail. add U.S. $5.00 per year; for airmail, add U.S. $20.00 per year. For subscription orders or changc of address, write: R~,.'u~w voa R~t.~Gous: P.O. Box 6070: Duluth. MN 55806. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Rv:vtv:w v(m REI.I(;IOtJS; P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, MN 55806. David L. Fleming, S.J. Iris Ann Ledden, S.S.N.D. Richard A. Hill, S.J. Jean Read Mary Ann Foppe Editor Associate Editor Contributing Editor Assistant Editors Ma\'/June 1989 Volume 48 Number 3 Manuscripts, books fnr review and correspnndence with the editor should be sent to REvtEw wm Rr:t,t(;mt~s; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. la~uis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the department "Canonical Counsel" should be addressed to Rich-ard A. Hill, S.J.; J.S.T.B.; 1735 l~eRoy Ave.; Berkeley, CA 94709-1193. Back issues and reprints shnuld be nrdered from R~:\'t~:w vo~ R~:~,nntms; 3601Lindell Blvd.; St. la~uis, MO 63108-3393. "Out nf print" issues are available frnm University Micrnfilms International; 300 N. Zeeb Rd.; Ann Arbor, MI 48106. A major pnrtion of each issue is also available on cassette recordings as a service for the visually impaired. Write to the Xavier Snciety fnr the Blind; 154 East 23rd Street; New York, NY 10010. PRISMS . Color plays an important role in our human lives. Before modem psy-chological studies were done about color and its effect upon our human psyche, the Church emphasized color to highlight liturgical seasons and to enhance individual feast-day celebrations. Both the colors for deco-rating altar, tabernacle, and sanctuary and the colors for priestly vest-ments and stoles conveyed a mood or feeling of the season or feast. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS over the past ten years has distinguished its is-sues within any one volume by color. Willy-nilly, whether by foresight or only upon reflection, color for us, too, tends to have a certain sym-bolic relationship to the seasonal and liturgical placement of an issue. An obvious point can be made with the blue cover of this issue--a blue which is associated with Mary, Mother of God and Mother of the Church, and with her special identification with the month of May. In more recent times, the popular place of Mary in the devotional lives of Catholics has dimmed. The Vatican II renewal of our liturgy and sacramental celebrations necessarily focused our attention and re-education upon the central mysteries of our faith-life. Devotions in their myriad forms of litanies, novenas, vigils or holy hours, and various other pious practices--whether in honor of Mary or of any of the saints-- naturally received less attention during this period. Our time and ,our en-ergies were being re-directed so that we could recapture the Eucharistic celebration and the other celebrations of sacraments with all the fervor and participation that marked our popular devotions. It sometimes appeared that, with popular devotions less emphasized, Mary and the saints were also losing their place in Catholic life. Instead, this has been a time of nurturing fresh growth, with new insights and em-phases to invigorate and renew our faith-lives. The recent Marian year stands as a proclamation of the renewed understanding of Mary's place in the life of the Christian faithful. In this issue, we look through four different prisms at Mary. The first article is "Mary in Contemporary Culture" by Father Stan Parmisano, O.P. Just as Mary has played a distinctive role in the various ages of the Church, for example, in the "lady" ideal of the Middle Ages culture, so we need to ask how our relation to Mary facilitates our Christian re-sponse to.the issues and values prevalent in culture today. The author 321 399 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 stimulates our own thinking about the hidden ways in which Mary might be said to be prevalent in our culture. The second article in this issue is "Through Mary" by Ms. Hilda Montalvo. As wife, mother, and teacher, Ms. Montalvo calls us all into a personal reflection upon what the dogmas about Mary mean to us. She points the way to seeing how Marian dogmas are necessarily Christian dogmas, helping us to clarify our own relationship with God and to en-rich the meaning of our human lives. Sister Mary Eileen Foley, R.G.S., writes the third article on Mary, raising the question in her title, "Reflections on Mary, Bridge to Ecu-menism?" In view of an existing Reformation tradition in which the honor given to Mary continues to divide Roman and Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Christian from the majority of other Christian churches, Sis-ter Mary Eileen suggests ways of seeing how a new understanding of Mary may well be in our day a true ecumenical bridge. The fourth article allows us all to pursue further at our leisure the most recent writings on Mary. Father Thomas Bourque, T.O.R., pro-vides us with a selected bibliography of writings about Mary which have been published between the time of Paul VI's exhortation, Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and John Paul II's encyclical, Mother of the Redeemer. Hopefully this compact bibliography can serve as a helpful resource for a fresh and renewed understanding of Mary's role in the lives of Christian peoples. Finally, I will note that in a newly added section to our Book and Cassette Reviews area, called "For the Bookshelf," we have briefly noted the contents of a few books about Mary just recently published. I hope that you will find the occasional addition of this section to Re-views a help in highlighting those recently published books, which we want to note and can often group around certain themes or issues. David L. Fleming, S.J. Mary In Contemporary Culture Stan Parmisano, O.P. Father Stan Parmisano, O.P., is Regent of Studies for the Western Dominican Prov-ince. He teaches at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California in the area of Religion and the Arts. His address is 5877 Birch Court; Oakland, California 94618. ~ have been asked to specify the difference Mary, the Mother of Jesus, makes or can make in our contemporary culture. Let me first propose some principles, or basic thinking, that may help toward a fruitful dis-cussion of the complex of issues and subjects involved in the question. Afterwards, we may consider some of these particulars in terms of Mary and her possible role within them. We think of the presence or absence of Mary, as of Jesus, in terms of visibility or of imaginable or intelligible content. Thus if there is a dearth of "thinking" about Mary or of images of her, we would say that she is absent in our time; on the contrary, we would say that she was pre-sent in former times, especially in the medieval and early renaissance worlds, when she was quite "visible" in the content of theology, art, architecture, poetry, music. But there is another kind of presence: invis-ible, unconscious, the presence of form rather than content, the kind of presence we are asked to look for, say, in non-representational art or in music, or in poetry where the music or rhythm precedes idea and image and helps create them. t This is a presence of thrust, of dynamic, of spirit ¯ . . like that of the Spirit of God (ruach Elohim) hovering over the yet unformed waters of chaos and warming them toward visibility and life. I want to suggest that perhaps Mary is present here and there in our time in this last manner, and that we should strive to promote her more universal presence in this direction as well as in that of visible content. In fact, this is the direction in which we should seek to define culture 323 324 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 itself. Culture is not a matter of any one specific content or subject or activity nor of all taken en masse. Rather, it is the inherited dynamism or spirit or form that produces each of them in all their various nuances, though it itself is affected and reshaped by them.z The same is true with regard to God and Jesus: it is not so much the content of our thought about them, not the images we have of them that is telling, but what un-derlies these, beyond thought and image, inspiring and shaping the con-tent of our belief. I would regard Mary in a similar way. In the earliest Church there was not, perhaps, much content or visibility of Mary, at least when com-pared to Jesus and his male disciples, to Paul and his entourage. But, to borrow an image from one of her later lovers, I would suggest that she was there from beginning to end as "atmosphere," as "world-mothering air, air wild," as form or spirit shaping the emerging thought and action of the Church.3 Certainly it was in her modest context, her "atmosphere," that Christ was preserved from mere myth and acknowl-edged as substantially and earthily human (so Paul's almost casual aside: "born of a woman"). By the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance that spirit had blossomed into a fullness of content. Then that content be-gan to harden till in some instances and locales it quenched the moving spirit and became identified with Mary. And could it be that Vatican II tried to recover her spirit, the "form" of Mary? If so, we must not mis-take what it had to say about Mary for the fullness of Mary but, with its beginnings, refocus on the thrust of Mary in our time and beyond. In speaking of Mary's presence in this way I would hope to suggest another presence, that of the Holy Spirit. Saint Maximilian Kolbe spoke boldly of Mary as the quasi-incarnation of the Holy Spirit, emphasizing the latter part of this hyphenation. Since then, less venturesome theolo-gians have accentuated the quasi.4 In any case few Catholic theologians will deny Mary's special and intimate relationship with the Spirit. They go hand in loving hand, indissolubly Wedded--not only because they were cooperatively together at the conception of Christ and later at the birth of the Church, but because they have a kind of natural affinity. Both are hidden, in the background as it were, but dynamically so, strik-ingly reemerging at critical moments in Jesus's adult years--as when the Spirit leads Jesus into the desert to prepare him for his ministry, and when Mary, waiting for Jesus "apart from the crowd," inspires in him the revolutionary declaration as to his true and lasting kindred (Mk 3:31 - 35). There are other shared characteristics. These are discoverable in cer-tain movements or thrusts of our time, and I suggest that we look here Mary in Contemporary Culture / 395 for the presence of Mary/Spirit in our time as well as in any explicit Marian theology or devotion. Some of these revelatory movements are as follows. The interiorization of religion. Certainly emphasis today is on the sub-jective aspect of belief and morality. Even those who rightly uphold the objectivity of belief and morals are concerned more than ever with lib-erty of conscience, personal and cultural limitations of understanding, the virtue of prudence and its largely intuitive functioning, the unique-ness of a given "situation," the restoration in one form or another of casuistry(the individual case). But interiorization, subjectivity, intuition are of the unpredictable Spirit "who blows where he wills" and of the traditionally feminine rather than of the predictably and predicting ra-tional and the traditionally masculine. Purged of all excess and distor-tion, they are, in other words, of the Holy Spirit and Mary. Contemplative prayer. In the last twenty to thirty years there has been in the western world a mounting interest in and practice of medita-tive prayer, sparked by eastern imports such as TM, Zen, Yoga, and now developed along lines of traditional Christian contemplation. This prayer is seen now to be not just for the select few, mainly among nuns and monks, but for all in whatever walk of life. Here is obviously another aspect of interiorization and the letting go of content in favor of a poised and expectant darkness. It is not a looking to what is outside (image, word, symbol, creed) but to what is within, to the private, personal "reve-lation," to what God is "saying" to me here and now--like a pregnant woman turned inward, quietly aware of the mystery growing within her. Here again is the Holy Spirit praying within us when, as St. Paul tells us (Rm 8:26-27), we do not know what to pray for (that is, when all con-tent is surrendered) and here is Mary, the silent, surrendering contem-plative par excellence. Unseen, unfelt, they are at the heart of so many today who are trying to pray such prayer, and so many others desper-ately in need of it if only to avoid being torn apart and scattered by the noise and confusion of a world off-center. Ecumenism. Another mark, and need, of the contemporary Church is ecumenism, conceived now as the unification not just of the various Christian churches but of the worldreligions as well. Again we may see here the stirring of.the Spirit who is the bond of love, the vinculum cari-tatis, uniting Father and Son, the one hovering over the deep bringing, at the Father's Word, order out of chaos, the one forming and securing the one Church in the beginning. And as Mar~,, with and in the Spirit, brought to birth the one undivided Christ, so is her labor today with re- 326 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 gard to the Church. It is the opinion of many Catholic theologians that Mary should be downplayed today so as not to offend our Protestant broth-ers and sisters and thereby impede ecumenism. I should think it would be just the opposite, providing the depth of Mary is presented, which is her spirit, her form more than her traditional content; yet the latter, in the purity of Church teaching and practice, is of marked importance, too, for itself and for what it reveals of her spirit and the new directions that spirit may take, for all the churches, in the future.5 Social Justice. Whereas in former times we would speak of charity and the works of charity, now the cry is for justice and the doing of jus-tice: we do for the poor not so much out of our love and their need as out of our sense of justice and their rights. Again, in the past justice has been in the main the province of the male, the one actively engaged in the world, in politics, business, civil defense, and so forth. But women are more and more coming to the fore in it, seeking justice for themselves and for the marginal and oppressed in general. Here we may note a fresh dynamic of Mary--the seed of which, however, was there from the be-ginning. Thus those writing of Mary today, particularly women, view her in the context of the women of justice in the ancient Hebrew world-- Esther, Deborah, Judith--and see a whole theology of social justice in Mary's Magnificat.6 And if the movement toward social justice is of the Holy Spirit, who as creative Love seeks balance, harmony, substantial peace and concord, then, yes we can find, if we look, the Spirit's spouse at work with the Spirit toward the same goal. Mary, while drawing us within in contemplative stillness, also directs us outward to the Christ who lived and lives in our objective, tangible world and identified him-self with the quite visible poor and needy. She points to this Christ dwell-ing outside us as well as within, just as does the Holy Spirit who, as the gospel tells us, is there to remind us continually of all Christ has visibly done and audibly spoken. Perhaps part of the new "content" of Mary today is this visibility of the woman in works of justice and peace, not as having lost the interiorization, the contemplative spirit, the gentle, mothering love of her past, but as gaining something in addition: the hid-den life while, paradoxically still remaining hidden, come forth openly to help heal the world. Mary remains what she was in the past and there-fore under the press of current need becomes someone new for the pre-sent. When considering Mary in her relationship to women, past and pre-sent, we must be cautious. Christ is male; his maleness is part of his his-tory, and history is important in the religion known as Christianity. But Mary in Contemporary Culture / 327 his maleness is meant mainly as a means of access to his humanity and person which are neither male nor female. Christ is equally for both men and women, though, of course, in different ways according to different psychologies and cultures. However, the h~stoncai fact of Christ s male-ness has often dominated our thinking about him, with regretful results; as when, in spite of changes in psychologies and culture it is used to jus-tify an ongoing exclusive male ecclesiastical leadership. Similarly with Mary. Her femininity is a providential part of her history, but it is as a human being and person that she is of greater moment. Accordingly she is for the man as well as the woman; she serves both equally and both are equally to learn from her, though, again, in different ways. Yet her femininity has had its influence, for good and bad. For bad." it has tended to limit our ideal of the Christian woman to what it was in Mary's own day and to which, accordingly, she herself was in good measure bound. For good: it has softened our conception of God and so made our ap-proach to God easier, more inviting, loving rather than fearful. In and through the gospels, past art and poetry and drama, seeing God in the arms and in the care and "power" of this then insignificant Jewish woman--quiet, gentle, lowly, we find some of that same womanhood rubbing off, as it were, on Father God. A fair part of the accessibility of Jesus himself, his merciful compassion, is the fact that he has Mary as his flesh and blood mother. Without her, would we be altogether con-vinced of the mercy of God and the understanding compassion of Jesus? Here is one way in which the "content" or dogma of Mary has affected us in the past, with its mark still upon us, thankfully. In the present thrust of woman toward justice, with Mary behind (and before) her, it would be tragic if this content were surrendered in favor of one that is hard, merely active, superficially and imitatively masculine. Eventually God himself might regress into the terror and cruelty of past and present dark religions. Mary, the Spirit, and Christ Above I recalled the bold but, to my mind, accurate Mariology of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Mary is the spouse of the Holy Spirit in a unique way, such that we can speak of her as the very incarnation of the Spirit, with some reservation (quasi). As indicated above, some Catholic theo-logians are embarrassed by this as by much else in the Church's past the-ology and practice concerning Mary. They think it an exaggeration of the biblical teaching and find it an impediment to union with our Protes-tant sister churches. As to the first objection we must insist that Scripture was not meant Review for Religious, May-June 1989 to stand alone: it sprung up out of the Church (community of believers) and its seeds are meant to grow within the Church under the care of the same Spirit who once inspired it. There was an initial content, to be re-spected as the Spirit's word through all time; but there were also drives, dynamisms within the original word, forms yet to find their specific con-tent or matter. Thus the gospels' powerful presentations, lovingly and carefully lingered over, of the relationship between Mary, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit cry out for meditation and penetration and so the revelation of truths beneath the surface. Thus we have the doctrines of the Immacu-late Conception, Assumption, the Queenship of Mary, and so forth; and her quasi-incarnation of the Spirit. This last is not to make a god of Mary. The gospels are clear on this score: Mary is the handmaid of the Lord, his lowly servant. Rather it is to point up something in God--the femininity, womanhood,, motherhood of God. Mary can be looked upon in two ways: as an historical person, flesh and blood, the daughter of Anna and Joachim (or of whomever), the physi-cal, natural mother of Jesus. Here she is all and only human. But she must also be seen as symbol, but the special kin~ of symbol that makes what is symbolized present in very reality. Thus as the Eucharist does not simply remind us of Christ but makes him really present upon our altars, so Mary does not simply recall the Holy Spirit to our minds and point us in the Spirit's direction; she makes the Spirit. really present among and within us. Seeing her we see the Spirit, as seeing the Eucha-rist we see Christ himself. This is a good and legitimate reason for ad-dressing the Spirit as feminine--not as a sop for the marginal woman but simply because as there are reasons for addressing God as Father or Son there is this equally cogent reason for addressing God as Mother.7 As in time, in the mystery of the Incarnation there is eternal Father, mother Mary, and Son Jesus, so in eternity there is Father and Son with mother-ing Spirit as their bond of Love. As for the difficulties such teaching may hold for ecumenism, they may be only initial difficulties. As suggested above, if we view Mary and present her in terms of form, thrust, spirit, and not just as already shaped content, and if we continually move deeper within this content in context of present needs and lawful desire, perhaps Protestants will eventually come to see what Catholic belief and theology have long since held as truth and will thank us for having led the way back home, as we have reason to thank them for having helped bring us back to much that had been lost. One final remark before considering some of the specifics of our sub- Mary in Contemporary Culture / 329 ject: it has to do with Mary's relationship with Christ. Again, in sensi-tivity to Protestant criticism and in reaction to exaggerated statements about Mary and misguided devotion to her, Vatican II and ecclesiastical documents and theology since have been most careful to insist upon the subjection of Mary to Christ. Salvation is through Christ alone; he is the one mediator between God and humankind. There is little if any talk about what formerly there was lots of talk about, namely of Mary as co-redeemer and mediatrix of all graces. Such theologizing, it is believed, and the devotion arising from (or producing) it detracts from the power and mission of Christ. But I wonder if we are not here misconceiving power and the whole matter of Christ's redemptive work. We seem to be equating Christ's (God's) power with power as we ordinarily think of it: dominating rule, often exclusive. But Christ's power is not univo-cal with ours, and he himself quite literally took the greatest pains to turn the tables in the matter: "You know how those who exercise authority among the gentiles lord it over them . It cannot be like that with you. Anyone among you who aspires to greatness must serve the rest . Such is the case with the Son of Man who has come, not to be served by others, but to serve" (Mt 20:25-28). And what about the power of love, which is Christ's power, or that of helplessness: the power of the sick to draw upon the strengths of oth-ers to heal and console, the power of the ignorant to create scholars and teachers, and so forth? I have often observed that the one with most power in a family is not the father or mother but the newly born baby, the whole life of the family revolving around the child precisely because of its powerful helplessness. If this seems farfetched relative to God, we have only to think of the Christ child in the crib at Bethlehem and the adult Christ upon the cross on Calvary. And what of the power of one who knows how to share his or her power, which requires greater strength, ability, "power" than to keep it all to oneself? I should think the great power of Christ, of God himself, is most manifest in the power to empower, to raise others to his very life and level. Jesus at the Last Supper remarked: "I solemnly assure you, the one who has faith in me will do the works I do, and greater far than these" (Jn 14:12). Not ex-clusive but inclusive--such is the power of Christ. Though our Holy Father in Redemptoris Mater follows Lumen Gen-tium in insisting upon Mary's subordination to Christ, h~, together with the Vatican II document, reiterates an old principle we ought to consider with equal care: "The maternal role of Mary towards people in no way obscures or diminishes the unique mediation of Christ, but rather shows 330 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 its power" (emphasis mine). Why not assert this aspect of Christ's power and see Mary as true queen "at the side of her Son," as the encyclical expresses it? Indeed, for centuries and still today, at least in our Christ-mas liturgies and devotions, we see the King rather in the power of his mother and in her arms, enfolded by her who gives him to the nations: "and so entering the house, (they) found the child with Mary his mother. Who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me . He went down with them then, and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them . Figlia del tuo figlio, queen of heaven" (Mt 2:1 I ; Lk 1:43; Lk 2:51; T. S. Eliot, Dry Salvages, after Dante's Paradiso, xxxiii). In one mariological conference that I attended the speakers were in-sistent that we not view Mary apart from Christ. I kept thinking yes, but might not the reverse also be true: we must not view Christ apart from Mary. In Redemptoris Mater, John Paul several times reminds us of the indissolubility of the bond between Mary and Jesus and explicitly de-clares that "from the very first moment the Church 'looked at' Mary through Jesus, just as she 'looked at' Jesus through Mary." Christ does not want to be viewed in splendid isolation with everyone insisting that everything and everyone else is subordinated to him. His own image of himself is of one who serves, just as Mary's self-image is of the Lord's handmaid, neither thought less of their dignity for that: "Behold, all gen-erations shall call me blessed" (Lk 1:48). Mary is the first-fruits of the redemption, the Church in promised fulfillment, the Mother of the Re-deemer, of God himself, the spouse of the Holy Spirit and the effective symbol of the Spirit's presence and action in the world--this woman who embodies the very motherhood of God holds the new creation in her arms and nurtures it, just as she did her divine Son centuries ago. She has a greater, more powerful (loving) role in the work of redemption than much of our present theology is prepared to concede or any of us begin to imagine.8 At the conclusion of Redemptoris Mater we read: ". the Church is called not only to remember everything in her past that testifies to the special maternal cooperation of the Mother of God in the work of salva-tion in Christ the Lord, but also, on her own part, to prepare for the fu-ture the paths of this cooperation. For the end of the second Christian millennium opens up as a new prospect." Our Holy Father also calls for "a new and more careful reading of what the Council said about the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, in the mystery of Christ and the Church . " Renewed thinking about Mary and action relative to her Mary in Contemporary Culture / 33"1 are called for.9 But we are to do our thinking and acting in the context of both Scripture and the wider tradition, and of current need. We are to listen to the living Spirit as "she" shows within this treasure, Mary, both the old and the new. Mary and Some Specifics of Culture: Psychology In light of the above generalized reflections on Mary and contempo-rary culture I would like to comment briefly upon several segments of our culture in terms of Mary's possible role within them. In the area of psychology, so overwhelmingly influential in the shaping of our contem-porary culture and such an intimate part of it, it depends on what psy-chology we are talking about. If it is Jungian depth psychology, we need not look long or far to find Mary's place within it. Much of the work has already been done by the master and his disciple. Jung maintained that ideas and archetypes such as the anima, the intuitive, the dark, the yin--in general, the feminine--are underdeveloped in our western cul-ture, with disastrous results. His psychology must go even further today and add they are also on the wane in much of the eastern world in com-petition now with the west in its masculine drives toward action and domi-nance, rational knowledge and acquisition. This psychology's percep-tion, then, of the need for Mary or some equivalent dynamic is evident. Jung himself expressly spoke of the need in terms of Mary. He rejoiced over the definition of the doctrine of Mary's assumption, declaring it to be "the most important religious event since the Reformation." At last the feminine was given the exaltation it requires and deserves.~° However, as suggested above, and as Jungian psychology insists, we must not think of the feminine exclusively in terms of the woman. In the past maybe so, and in our present world still many women may be said to possess more of the "feminine" than do men. But feminine charac-teristics are meant to be part of the male psychology as masculine ones of the female, and cases abound where dominance in one or the other is reversed. I think of the two great sixteenth-century Carmelites. Both Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross had the organizational skills and drives and other "masculine" traits appropriate to founders and reform-ers of religious orders, and in these Teresa, as evidenced in her numer-ous religious foundations and governance thereof, may be said to have surpassed John. Again, both were richly passive, intuitive, contempla-tive, steeped in dark and mystery and in cleaving, passionate love, all notable feminine characteristics. Yet it is John, at least as revealed in his poetry, who appears the more feminine: he is the anima, the woman pas-sive under the strong and passionately active love of a quite virile God. 332 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 To what extent, therefore, the feminine characteristics are de facto ¯ found in women more than in men may be moot. But they are definitely the major component of the psyche of the woman Mary as she appears in the gospels. Mary's strong, paradoxically active passivity (she brings .forth the Word as she receives it), her alert and watchful hiddenness, her concern and compassion for those in need (Cana) and for the suffering (Calvary), her motherhood (of Christ and the Church), her deep, loving fidelity (from thefiat of Nazareth and before to that of Calvary and be-yond) are purposely emphasized that both men and women might real-ize their indispensability in each life that would be Christ's. They are also underscored to draw our attention to the feminine in Christ, whom oth-erwise we might tend to view simply as masculine: visibly out front, ac-tive in his preaching, teaching, healing, immersed in religious contro-versy-- a male among a world of males. In the context of his mother (and the other women who surround him), Jesus is still masculine but we are forced to attend to the deep roots of his masculinity, which is his femi-nine Spirit: his passivity (his prayer and passion), his hidden life even as he actively encountered the world, his cleaving love and compassion unto death, his motherhood (Mt 23:37; Lk 13:34). In Mary's presence, her "atmosphere," such qualities of Christ are not simply seen, but they are seen to be the best of him. Jesus was so powerfully and creatively masculine--such a leader for his time as for all time--because his mas-culinity was rooted in and suffused by the feminine, the Spirit. It is Mary who as his mother nurtured him in this, and who helps draw our atten-tion to it. It is she, then, who as our mother nurtures us in the same Spirit and in a similar way. As for other psychologies suffice it here to say that Mary should be looked for behind and within any therapy working toward healing and wholeness. Again, it is Christ who is the healer, but it is Mary who in-itiates the process by bringing Christ to birth, in the world at large and in each individual. Mary, one with the Spirit, struggles and groans in each of us to bring us to the wholeness, the sanity of Christ. Like her, and with her, we concentrated on the activefiat that allows it all to hap-pen. Politics, Economics, Sociology In the political, economic, and sociological concerns of our time Mary points up the need for the hidden, the contemplative, and for uni-versal justice (as in her Magnificat), and, though unnoticed, she is be-hind and within all creative efforts toward these ends. The absence of the contemplative, of the feminine in general, in contemporary politics Mary in Contemporary Culture / 333 is evident, and results have been tragic. Because they lack roots, our poli-tics, both domestic and foreign, change even as they are being formed; and this condition is aggravated by lack of goals other than immediate and pragmatic. But it is the contemplative spirit that gives depth and con-stancy and lights up the future and beyond. Also, our current concentration is upon superficial differences and divisions (my need, my race, my country, my self) rather than on our deeper oneness, which only contemplation, in the one God-centered form or another, can reveal and promote. Further, the disturbance we experi-ence within and among nations may well have as its root cause the fail-ure of the contemplative, the fruit of which is "the peace that surpasses understanding." And so we find divisions among us, the growth of fear, the expan-sion of military might to safeguard our "own" war or the cold threat of war. We look, then, to Mary, universal Mother and Queen of peace, for political healing. She is already there, in this felt social need, but also in those religious orders of men and women whose main concern is con-templation. One of the concrete ways in which the state might help work its own remedy, and so implicitly acknowledge Mary in its functioning, is itself to encourage and promote contemplative communities within its boundaries. These would help make up for the failure of prayer else-where and would be invitation and incentive for the rest of us to unite ourselves with them, at least from time to time, and so help bring our nation and the world to greater depth, unity, and peace. If the need for Mary and what she represents is obvious in politics, it is more so in the field of economics. Here the masculine dominates to the complete exclusion of the feminine, and material concerns have been so isolated from the spiritual that never the twain do meet. This is especially disturbing when we realize that it is economics that determines even our politics. Science too, as technology, is subordinated to it and dominated by it. Indeed, economics has become the dominant factor of our culture or a-culture; it is our pseudo-religion, often becoming, in fact if not in theory, the determining force in more legitimate and traditional religion. If, then, Jesus needs to be born into our world today, it is cer-tainly here in our economic systems and practice. And if born here, he may begin to penetrate the rest of our world. So once again we look to Mary to mother Jesus where he is most needed and we do what we can to help her in the birthing. To see sociology in terms of Mary is to reconsider love. Whatever the other theories as to the origin of society, from the Christian perspec- 334 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 tive it is love that first brings us together and, accordingly, it is love that is society's fundamental problem. So from its beginnings Christianity has taught that the basic unit of society is not the individual but the family which (ideally) is the product of love; and social workers, I believe, would readily agree that it is the lack of love, with the resulting fear and loneliness, that is their chief concern. But today love which is meant to unite is itself fragmented. Sex, in-tended to be integral with love, has been divided from it and made to function alone with all the consequent evils, both mental and physical, that plague our society. The inward-outward directions of love have also been severed, so that now it is either love of self (inward) to the exclu-sion of others or the love of others (outward) to the neglect and loss of self. One of the results of this is the breakup (further division) of the fam-ily which, accordingly, is now challenged by sociologists as the de facto basic unit of society. Mary can and, in secret ways, does have a curative place in all of this. Her love was integral. It reached out to others in and through Christ's large love; indeed, she brought that very love to birth. But she also reached deep within herself to the Spirit of love wherein she found her personal growth and happiness: "All generations will call me blessed." True, she "knew not man." But this does not mean her love was sexless. It is the myopia of our time that sees sex as having but one kind of expression. Mary can alert us to look for the depth in sex and sexual love and so open to us new possibilities of love. And love restored to wholeness should work toward the restoration of the centrality of fam-ily with consequent diminution of fear and loneliness. The Arts and Sciences Mary can have, and has, her place in those areas of our culture known as the arts and sciences. In any presentation or exercise of the hu-man, as in the arts and sciences, we are to see Christ, of course, but also Mary who, in her Immaculate Conception and her conception and birth-ing of Christ, was the first to bring the human to perfection. But as in Christ the human is perfected in and through the divine (Christ's person and divine nature) so also we find Mary bringing the human to perfec-tion in, through, and toward the divine. Again, it is a matter of whole-ness, which our contemporary world tends always to divide. Apart from the divine the human can only degenerate into the inhuman; but with the divine all of its gifted potential is realized. It is in this sense that the only true humanism is Christian humanism. Thus in the arts and sciences Mary is present as they express and promote the human, and she is dy- Mar), in Contemporary Culture / 335 namically present, moving them forward and deeper into the divine to become divinely human. Christ alone might be said to suffice for this: he is the one who in his very person brings the human to perfection. But Mary gives assurance of and added emphasis to Christ's humanity (he is of herflesh) and his divinity (she is Mother of God) and is responsible for the becoming of these in our world (she conceives and nurtures the perfect human being). She is behind the process of the arts and sciences. Here, then, as elsewhere in our contemporary world, Mary, together with her Son, may be found, not just as a possibility, but as actively engaged in shaping a reemerging culture. Our concern ought to be to look for them together and, having found them, enter into their work. NOTES ~ "I know that a poem, or a passage of a poem, may tend to realize itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words, and that this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the image; and I do not believe that this is an experience peculiar to myself." T. S. Eliot. "The Music of Poetry" in On Poetry and Poets (New York: 1957), p. 32. z Eliot again: "Culture cannot altogether be brought to consciousness; and the cul-ture of which we are wholly conscious is never the whole of culture: the effective culture is that which is directing the activities of those who are manipulating that which they call culture." Christianity and Culture (New York: 1949), p. 184. For Eliot's summary definition of culture see p. 198. 3 Gerard Manley Hopkins in "The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air We Breathe." 4 Ren~ Laurentin, indeed, disapproves of the expression altogether, reserving the term "incarnation" for that bf Christ alone~ However, he proceeds to speak of Mary as "pure transparency for the Spirit . . . she is wholly relative to the Spirit; this indeed is at the very core of her deep relationship to Christ and the Father." "Mary and the Holy Spirit," in Mary in Faith and Life in the New Age of the Church (Ndola- Zambia: 1983),"pp. 287-288. 5 See note 9 below for C. Jung's defense of Mary, precisely as in Catholic dogma, as a remedy for a defective Protestantism. In a letter to The Tablet, Sept. 5, 1987, p. 944, Dora Bede Griffiths, writing from his ashram-in Tamil Nadu, South India, suggests a rapprochement, between eastern religions and Christianity through the femi-nine. He notes that in Hebrew the "word for the Spirit (ruach) is feminine and in the Syrian Church, which spoke a form of Aramaic, which is close to the Hebrew, reference was made to 'our Mother, the Holy Spirit.' " The same for the Hebrew word for Wisdom (hokmah): it too is feminine and "this Wisdom is described as 'coming forth from the mouth of the Most High' as a feminine form of the Word of God." He suggests the possible enrichment of our Christian tradition by contact with Hinduism which "has no difficulty in calling on God as 'My Father, my Mother' and with Mahayana Buddhism which conceives of the highest form of Wis-dom as a feminine figure. Dora Bede does not mention Mary here, but it is my sug-gestion that she it is who concretizes the divine feminine, gives it flesh. Thus she 336 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 is the one who, rather than impede universal ecumenism, is meant to help in its re-alization. 6 There are the fine women theologians writing on Mary, such as E. S. Fiorenza and E. Moltmann-Wendel. But I am also thinking of the poets who perhaps do even more to deepen and broaden our knowledge and appreciation of Mary: a Caryll Houselan-der of the past generation and an Ann Johnson of the present. For the Magnificat especially, see the latter's Miryam of Nazareth: Woman of Strength and Wisdom (In-diana: Ave Maria Press, 1984). 7 In his essay "Sur la maternit~ en Dieu et la feminit6 du Saint-Esprit," Escritos del Vedat !I (1981), Yves Congar argues from Scripture and Tradition to the femi-ninity of the Holy Spirit, but is here silent as to Mary's role in the "sacramentiz-ing" of it. The essay may also be found in Theology Digest 30:2 (Summer, 1982) pp, 129-132. 8 Solus Christus, as solafides and sola scriptura, requires severe qualification. For centuries Catholic theologians have argued vigorously against ~he two latter formu-lae. They have been rightly suspicious of such exclusivity in view of the fullness of Christian revelation. For the same reason, perhaps, they should also challenge the solus Christus, this time in view of the fullness of Christ who is our revelation. 9 In an interview carried in America (June 6, 1987), pp. 457-458, Cardinal Suenens stressed the incompleteness of Vatican II's declaration on Mary. "I felt we needed to say more . She is not merely an historical figure; from the beginning she has been given an ongoing mission to bring Christ to the world." ~0 C. G. Jung, "Answer to Job," in Psychology and Religion: West and East, trans. by R. F. C. Hull, Bollinger Series XX (Pantheon Books, 1958), p. 464. Jung goes on to criticize Protestantism for its criticisms of the dogma. "Protestantism has ob-viously not given sufficient attention to the signs of the times which point to the equal-ity of women. But this equality requires to be metaphysically anchored in the figure of a 'divine' woman, the bride of Christ." Jung realizes that the dogma does not give Mary "the status of a goddess," still "her position (now) satisfies the need of the archetype." 1 don't know how this last can be, however, unless it is in and through Mary that we recognize that within the godhead itself the feminine is real-ized in the Person of the Spirit. Through Mary. Hilda S. Montalvo Hilda Montalvo is currently teaching at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary in Boynton Beach, Florida. She is a wife and mother, currently a candidate for a Doc-torate in Ministry. She has completed the graduate program in Christian Spiritual Guid-ance from the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation in Washington, D.C. Her ad-dress is 7151 Pioneer Road; West Palm Beach, Florida 33413. The other day at a Lay Ministry workshop there was a spontaneous burst of applause when I shared my way of praying Mary's life. From the be-ginning of my spiritual journey over twenty years ago I have had an in-tuitive knowledge that the objective "facts" and titles about Mary were important not only because they honored and revered the mother of God but also because they spoke of my reality as a human being and a Chris-tian. These Marian dogmas have helped me to clarify and understand my basic assumptions of myself, my relationship with God, and the mean-ing of my life. I have always had a problem with original sin. To inherit Adam's sin is simply not fair, and so at seven I became an agnostic. The idea of a God that punishes and condemns innocent people--and I experi-enced myself as innocent--was repulsive and frightening. Christianity was not good news. If I was good, if ! kept the commandments, then God would love me. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception simply meant that God had wai.ved that evil from one person. To be born with original sin was bad enough but at least it was a shared human experi-ence and it explained (somewhat!) evil and death. But if Mary was born without it, not only was she not totally human but her "fiat" was pre-destined and she had no actual freedom. Christianity became good news when I realized that the fall/ redemption concept of original sin was simply one way of understand- 337 331~ / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 ing the Genesis story. The traditional interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve posits a paradise lost because of disobedience and the conse-quent punishment of suffering and death. But modern biblical interpret-ers such as Brueggemann are recognizing that the fundamental revela-tion of Genesis is that God's creation is good and that God is constantly gracing and blessing it. God made man and woman in "our" image and it was very good. That has to be the most important assumption of our spiritual life. Each person must come to a personal conviction of this truth that is not only an intellectual response but a lived, grounded ex-perience. The story of Adam and Eve is now being understood as that moment in history when human beings first become self-consciously aware, the first truly human act. Before that there was simply undifferentiated ex-istence; total unconscious dependence on environment and relationship, such as each baby.lives through his or her first year. The process of be-coming self-conscious, of becoming autonomous, in a child can be de-scribed a bit facetiously as the "terrible two's," in humankind, as the Fall. Original sin is not a 'thing' that we are born with: it simply de-scribes in mythological language our natural tendency for independence. Catholicism has always affirmed that grace builds on nature. Crea-tion spirituality, which has its origins in the earliest writer of the Bible, the Yahwist, emphasizes the constant presence and blessings of God in spite of the seeming sinfulness of his creatures. The main thrust of the whole Yahwist Saga which culminates in that beautiful and simple story of Balaam and the talking ass (Nb 22:25) is to celebrate God's refusal to curse his people and his insistence of unconditional love and bless-ing. We, like Balaam, are blinded by our needs and expectations. Per-haps .the Immaculate Conception is yet another reminder of our innate gracefulness? Could not this be the fundamental celebration of baptism? Jesus experienced the unconditional love of his Father at his baptism; we celebrate this same unconditional love and our acceptance into a lov-ing community at our baptism. Mary's Immaculate Conception could be the reminder of God's unconditional covenant with each one of us and the celebration of his covenant through one individual. It is not a nega-tive gift--but a positive statement: God is with us and for us. Original sin (and now I can begin to forgive God and Adam!) is the mythical explanation of our desire for independence from God and his creation--autonomy--with the inevitable consequence of alienation and death. Baptism is the celebration of the fact that God not only loves us unconditionally but is present within us and among us; it effects what it Through Mary / 339 signifies. The truth and hope beyond individualization is unity with God and interdependence with others--co-creators of the parousia, paradise, but now conscious and mature and in freedom. Mary is the archetype of this truth which has been named as Immaculate Conception. At the experiential level I resonate with Mary's "fiat." I also have experienced, am experiencing, the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit and have been afraid and anxious. I also wrestle with the "how" and "why" and the "why me." I also (carefully and tentatively) have said "fiat" and Christ has become incarnate, is now conceived, and contin-ues to be conceived in my life moment by moment. I also have felt com-pelled to go forth and share this good news with others. I give birth daily to Christ in my family, in my ministry. I also sing daily "My soul mag-nifies the Lord, my spirit exalts in God my savior." Mary's story is my story and every Christian's story. She is the ar-chetype of the Disciple as well as the archetype of Woman and Mother for both men and women. An archetype, in Jungian terms, is an image in thepsyche that when recognized and owned can serve to integrate be-liefs, feelings, and behavior. Unless one allows the Word to be con-ceived within one's very being, Christianity remains barren and lifeless, a moral code. It is onlywhen I become willing to accept the transform-ing gracefulness of God's love and presence in my life that I become ca-pable of writing my own Magnificat. As I journal the events of my life I become aware that God "has done great things for me," not least of which is to radically change my values and priorities. Mary is both virgin and mother. If this is understood only in the physi-cal sense, it is simply a faith statement that speaks exclusively of Mary. Mary "undefiled" stands above and beyond created reality, sexuality, and life itself. By implication, then, all persons who express their love sexually, even in stable and committed relationships, are impure, cor-rupted, polluted, tainted, or unclean. The list of synonyms in Roget's Thesaurus is much longer. But dogmas and doctrines speak of the truth of our nature and our relationship with God and with one another. Thus it behooves Catholic Christians to question what God is revealing through this dogma. Might it not mean that "perpetual virginity" means a life of integrity and innocence in any walk of life? Every disciple must conceive and birth Jesus; must be reborn; must be both virgin and mother regardless of his or her sex or sexuality. This way of perceiving Mary's virginity and motherhood can be especially fruitful for men who, in Jung's terms, project their ideal image of woman instead of accepting and owning their own femininity or anima. Mary Review for Religious, May-June 1989 within, for all disciples, symbolizes openness, receptivity, gentleness, gracefulness--many of those feminine virtues that have been lacking in our contemporary society. As a wife and mother I recognize and celebrate both the gift of moth-erhood and the wholeness and purity of my own life that is bespoken of through virginity. In and through motherhood I continue to be uncon-taminated, unprofaned, spotless, unblemished, andchaste. As I pray this dogma I become more comfortable with the paradoxical reality of my own inner being; I begin to name and own my authentic self; I become more open and vulnerable to the healing presence of Christ within. To meditate on the dogmas of Mary in this fashion helps us come in touch with the paradoxical nature of creation. It helps us to see be-yond the either/or stance that divides, judges, and creates conflict and war. It helps us to accept that much broader vision of both/and that is so freeing and encompassing. It helps us to see and understand the dif-ference between facts and Truth, between knowledge and wisdom. It is an invitation to live and enjoy mystery, to be surprised by newness and resurrection and Presence. Meditating on the dogma of the Assumption can be especially help-ful for us in recognizing our projections of the categories of time and space unto life after death. We were taught that heaven and hell were places for all time---eternity. Purgatory was a transient place of purifi-cation. The time and place one went to depended on one's choices. All very neat and logical--and totally contradictory to Revelation. The mag-nificence and mystery of the Spirit's presence in the Church is especially obvious in this dogma of the Assumption. Again we must take it seri-ously and symbolically--in the deepest sense of symbol which is to point beyond the literal sense to the mystery of which it speaks. Mary, the Dis-ciple, is assumed, taken up into heaven, body and soul, after her death. In mythological language she passes into timelessness and spacelessness. She simply is. Westerners tend to equate rational thought with knowledge, thus de-nying intuitive, imageless wisdom. The Assumption--as the Resurrec-tion- is revealed knowledge that goes beyond rational logical thought into mystery and Truth. But as finite human beings we factualize and ex-teriorize the nameless, misunderstand symbol, and live mystery as if it were actuality. The invitation of the dogma of the Assumption is to .let go of our need to understand, to know, to control, and simply trust the goodness and kindness of God. The invitation is to live this life to the fullest and trust that God will take care of our future--name it resurrec- Through Mary / 341 tion or assumption. The invitation is to experience beyond imagining and to live with the paradox of knowing but not understanding. My skepticism/agnosticism has served my faith in the sense that by doubting, questioning, and mistrusting religious experience I have not succumbed to superstition or fanaticism. On the other hand--as was pointed out to me by a wise fellow-traveler--skepticism was also an "ego defense, behind which lies a fear of change and loss of control that giving in to the religious experience may bring." Gifted with this insight I have consciously approached the dogma of the Assumption with as much of an attitude of "letting-go" and an open mind as possible. This has allowed me to see beyond the constricting barriers of space, time, matter and form. It has encouraged me to become open to mystery and surprise and to think in other terms than those of classical theology which comes to logical and rational conclusions about the mystery of God: "It is fitting and right." The Assumption means that when I die I become present. The.As-sumption means no more time, space, dualism, paradox. The Assump-tion means no more becoming. All the barriers to fullness of life that I have struggled with either because of environment or because of genes will disappear and I will become--I am, one with Christ. Catholics have traditionally prayed "through Mary to Jesus." This archetypal way of praying Mary, in fact, allows Jesus to become incar-nate in our very being. As I "ponder" the Immaculate Conception I be-come aware of the goodness of creation and my innate gracefulness; I conceive Jesus' within me by the power of the Holy Spirit; I give birth to him daily and discover him in others; I slowly let go of my need to control through power and knowledge. Through Mary belief statements become faith experiences; factual knowledge becomes lived Truth. I can then say with Paul: "I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me." Some Reflections On Mary, Bridge To Ecumenism? Mary Eileen Foley, R.G.S. Sister Mary Eileen Foley, R.G.S., has been teaching courses in Scripture in a par-ish and to her own Sisters, in addition to her free lance writing. She has been princi-pal and teacher of special needs of teenage girls. Her address is Convent of the Good Shepherd; Cushing Hill Drive; Marlboro, Massachusetts 01752. The hopeful days of ecumenism following Vatican Council II in the 1960s highlighted a maj6r difference between Catholics and Protestants, namely, devotion to Mary. For a long time after the Reformation in the sixteenth century, there was an absence of any productive or even respect-ful communication between us, and consequently there was little under-standing of each other's point of view, especially regarding the mother of Jesus. Historical Background Devotion to Mary, an outstanding characteristic of most Catholics, became the dividing line, with symbolic rather than logical origins. Mary represented Catholicism, against which the Reformers were protesting on the Continent. About the same time in England, the suppression of Catholicism un-der Henry VIII was more specifically directed against the papacy. The destruction of monasteries, however, depri red the people of religious in-struction and centers where Mary was honored; as a consequence, devo-tion to her almost died out. Elizabeth I, motivated politically rather than religiously, continued her father's efforts to dominate Ireland, capitalizing on the anti- Catholic movement by implementing the policy of "Anglicization 342 Mary, Bridge to Ecumenism? / 343 through Protestantization." In Ireland, the mere possession of a rosary was sufficient evidence of treason against the Crown, and was punish-able by death. Under Cromwell's dictatorship in England, Anglicanism, as well as Catholicism, was repressed, and even the celebration of Christmas was forbidden. "Where was the Blessed Mother in thought and practice if her son's birthday was repudiated by the law of the land?"~ Divinity vs. Discipleship Influenced by the history and the politics of the times, misunderstand-ings grew in regard to the Church's attitude toward Mary. Protestants were disturbed about the apparent centrality of devotion to Mary; it seemed to be taking something away from Christ. Non-Roman Catho-lics balk at giving Mary the title of "Co-Redemptrix," fearing that Christ will be displaced as unique mediator of salvation.2 In time, Catholics were able to hear Protestants voice their concern about our apparent "divinization" of Mary, yet countless explanations to the contrary did not seem to convince them, either to put their fears at rest or to allow them the comfort and friendship of the Mother of God. The Council actually approached the subject of Mary with the concerns of non-Catholics in mind, even over the objections of some of the bish-ops, who felt that ecumenism should not be the focus of a document on Mary. Some wished her to be declared Mediatrix of All Graces, but this did not happen at the Council. Actually no separate document on Mary materialized. In the final analysis, Mary appears in the context of the document on the Church. In a discussion of Christ (the Redeemer) and the Church (the Redeemed), she is very clearly identified with the Church, the people of God, rather than with Christ, the Son of God. The document portrays her, not as Christo-typical but as Ecclesio-typical. The implications of this decision were far-reaching indeed. First, this is a very different focus from that to which we have been accustomed. We have tended to see Jesus and Mary together, and while Mary was by no means deified, we did tend to .pray to them together. We looked up to them. Her stance now, however, is with us, the re-deemed, the beneficiaries of the passion and death of Christ. Discipleship Part of the reason for the change seems to be the emphasis on Mary's role in Scripture as disciple. As a hearer of God's word, she is an out-standing disciple of Christ, and she is logically first among his disciples :344 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 and members of the Church. The concept of disciple, clearly presented in .the Scripture, seems to be more acceptable to our Protestant brethren and carries with it no overtones of divinity. All four Evangelists as a matter of fact paint her portrait as the faith-ful disciple, and in so doing, they reflect this role as seeming to surpass her title of Mother of God. "Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you," cried a woman in the crowd, to whom Jesus responded, "Yea, blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it" (Lk 12:27-28). "Your mother and brethren are outside, awaiting you," he was told, and he deftly responded with a question: "Who is my mother? Who are my brethren? He who does the will of my Father, is mother, brother, and sister to me" (Mk 3:31-35). Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother and the disciple whom Je-sus loved. "Woman, behold thy son," he said; then to John, "Behold thy mother" (Jn 19:25-27). Jesus is speaking to his ideal followers, who henceforth will model discipleship for all who desire to follow the Mas-ter. It struck me while comparing these Gospel passages that the Evan-gelists are at great pains to demonstrate that Mary's dignity comes from the fact that she was a woman of faith, which is the outstanding charac, teristic of a disciple. She was open to the word of God and completely obedient in carrying out whatever it called her to do. Whether it was ac-ceptance of the angelic message ("be it done unto me according to thy word," Lk i:38) or responding to the call to go to Bethlehem, then Egypt, and finally Calvary, she modeled clearly for us what the disciple of Christ should be. Grace and Discipleship No one, it seems, could be faulted for honoring one who followed Christ so perfectly. Yet, here again, differing beliefs on grace playa part. Protestants believe that salvation is effected by God alone, that hu-man nature plays no role. Protestants tend to view human nature as totally corrupted by sin, and grace as the merciful disposition of God to forgive and to treat the sin-ner as justified . To speak of human cooperation is to underestimate either the radical nature of human sin or the absolute gratuity of grace. In this perspective (from the Protestant point of view) the use of Mary's fiat becomes a primary example of Catholic presumption of God's sov-ereignty, making God dependent on humanity or making a creature mu-tually effective with God in the work of redemption.3 Mary, Bridge to Ecumenism? / 345 Resistance to the title "Co-Redemptrix" is related to this belief also. The Catholic point of view has been adequately stated, and to quote Tambasco again: "Mary's life simply reflects the fullest effects of grace which enable a faith-filled freedom that responds to and engages in the sovereign work of God in Christ .F.reedom does not substitute for grace, or grace, freedom."4 Because she is preeminent in carrying out his word, Mary's signifi-cance lies, according to the synoptics, in this characteristic of disci-pleship, more than the fact that she is Jesus's natural mother. At the foot of the cross, howe~,er, the beloved disciple, John, and the faithful disci-ple, Mary, seem to be called to discipleship in terms of a family rela-tionship, specifically that of mother and son. The role of disciple now seems to be expressed best in terms of mothering! Discipleship And Motherhood Actually, Mary conceived Jesus by means of an act of faith, the mark of the disciple: When the invitation to be Christ's mother is proposed to her, she says, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done unto me according to thy word" (Lk 1:38). And then the Word becomes flesh . Faith comes first, and then motherhood. John, too, is to carry out his discipleship in similar terms. In his First Letter, John's words are as tender as any mother's: "Remain in him now, little ones . See what love the Father has bestowed on us in letting us be called the children of God! Yet that is what we are' (1 Jn 2:28; 3:1). Mothering is what disciples do. Whatever our ministry is, we hope to bring to it compassion and caring. As a teacher l felt honored to be involved in nurturing the intellectual and spiritual growth of students. The Scriptures are full of mother images that apply not only to a disci-ple but were, in fact, chosen by the Lord for himself. The scriptural im-age of Christ weeping over Jerusalem is very explicit: "How often have I wanted to gather your children together as a mother bird collects her young under her wings, and you refused me!" (Lk 13:34). The disciple of Christ shares in his life-giving approach to those to whom he has been sent. Life-giving calls up images of motherhood, and lately it has been very popular to speak of God as Mother. Julian of Nor-wich often prayed to "Mother Jesus." Mary images motherhood for us, not only her own, but the motherhood of Christ as well. Even the Apos-tle Paul says: "You are my children, and you put me back in labor pains until Christ is formed in you" (Ga 4:!9). Finally the God of the Old Testament speaks through Isaiah: "Can 346 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 a mother forget her infant, or a woman be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Yet even if she should forget, I will never forget you" (Is 49:15). It looks to me that, although Protestants accept the fact that Mary is the mother of.Jesus, they do not seem to see her as their mother, too. While we sometimes see ourselves in the role of mothering, at other times we, too, need to be nurtured or affirmed. The mother of Jesus seems to be a natural one to turn to, especially since we understand that she has been given to us in the words spoken to John, "Behold thy mother" (Jn 19:27). The motherly qualities so ~befitting a disciple are surely present in a special way in Mary, the paramount disciple of all. Doctrine, Scripture, And Tradition Another possible ecumenical barrier regarding Mary is the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (Mary conceived without sin) and the dogma of the Assumption (Mary taken into heaven, body and soul.) A dogma is a doctrine that has been presented for belief, and the idea of the evo-lution of dogma is an enlightening one for many, Catholics included. A doctrine emerges from tradition, which has been explained as follows: Tradition is the living faith experience of the Church which preserves the truths enunciated in the Scriptures but also explicates these truths, draws out what is hidden, and develops more fully insights consistent with but not wholly expressed in the biblical text.5 As has been better expressed above, sometimes a dogma affirms what was not known in complete form from the beginning, but devel-oped from reflections on, for example, the mystery of the Incarnation, and has been the constant teaching of the Church for centuries. Dogma may appear to have been imposed exteriorly, in a context that is a-historical. The vagueness of its scriptural basis is difficult for Protestants, who are biblically, and therefore, historically, oriented. Rootedness in history and Scripture, sources that are being mined assiduously by Catho-lics today, may well provide the undergirding necessary to place devo-tion to Mary in properperspective for all. The aforementioned dogmas on Mary were defined during what we now call the Marian Age (1850 to 1950), although they have been part of the tradition of the Church since the sixth century. Belief (in the Assumption) originated not from biblical evidence nor even patristic testimony but as the conclusion of a so-called argument from convenience or fittingness. It was fitting that Jesus should have res-cued his mother from the corruption of the flesh and so he must have Mary, Bridge to Ecumenism? / 347 taken her bodily into heaven.6 At the end of the sixth century, they began to celebrate the Immacu-late Conception in the East, but it remained unknown in the West until the eleventh century . To eastern ears, which had a different under-standing of original sin, it meant only freedom from mortality and genu-ine human weakness.7 Such doctrines are based on what has been described as "theology from above," or an understanding of the Incarnation as originating in the Trinity. When the Father sent his Son to earth to be born of the Vir-gin Mary, it was incompatible with his nature that the Son would inherit original sin, taught to be transmitted through birth into the human race. Therefore, it was appropriate that Mary be conceived immaculate. The honor is for the sake of Jesus, not Mary. The Communion Of Saints An understanding of the communion of saints, a belief shared by both Catholics and Protestants, may be helpful in seeing Mary's role more clearly. The idea seems to have originated with the martyrs who gave their lives for Christ, and, as a result, were believed to be enjoying his presence and the rewards of their sacrifice. Obviously, they would be in a unique position to be allowed by God to hear the prayers of those still struggling on and would be willing and able to offer these petitions for help to Christ himself, in whose presence they now live. The idea of intercessory prayer is accepted by most people, who pray not only to the saints who have distinguished themselves in the service of God, but to their own friends and relatives who led good lives on earth and as-suredly are still mindful of the needs of those they have left behind. Peo-ple who are still living are also asked to pray for the intentions of oth-ers! That people should present their petitions to Mary in order that she might intercede with her Son for them follows logically in this tradition. It would seem that he would be especially attentive to one who was his model disciple on earth, to one who spent, her life hearing his word and accomplishing it, especially if she were interceding for one who was ask-ing her help to be an effective disciple also. - In ordinary life we often speak to someone with influence in order to present our case. Such is the nature of intercessory prayer, not to be confused with praying directly to Mary,'as if she were able to grant these petitions herself. Protestants dislike seeing Mary in the role of Media-tor, since Jesus Christ is the one Mediator. A movement at the Council to declare Mary Mediatrix of all Graces was scrapped, although this be- Review for Religious, May-June 1989 lief has been part of the tradition of the Church since the eighth century. The ecumenical dimension of the Council reflected the Church's percep-tion of herself now as a world church, with respect for the truth possessed by all churches. Theology -From-Below The contributions of Karl Rahner to contemporary religious thought seem to have great value for the ecumenical movement. Rahner, consid-ered to be one of the greatest theologians of our time, is especially im-pressed with the sacramentality of creation--the fact that God himself is revealed in his works. When creation first came from the hand of God as recorded in Genesis, it was seen to be good--to be holy. God was in his creation from the beginning. Although it was good, it was not com-plete, and in the p.rogress of time, all creation moves to fulfillment, which is finally achieved in Jesus Christ. Rahner's idea is that Christ emerged naturally from God's creation, rather than emphasizing his "being sent down from heaven." He says things often like "the more one is like Christ, the more he is truly him- ~elf." To be like Christ is to approach being a perfect human being. Rahner's ideas allow for experiential learning on the part of Jesus, like any human person going through the normal stages of growth and de-velopment. This Christology is very attractive to a Catholic today, and perhaps it has been better known to Protestants all along. This Christology does not deny his divinity, of course, but the em-phasis is very different from the implications of the theology:from-above design, which seems to emphasize his divinity more, although it does not deny his humanity. One argument advanced was that since one is the mother of a person, rather than a nature, it seemed logical to em-phasize Mary as Mother of God. "In 451," writes Charles W. Dickson, a Lutheran pastor who has served as Chairman of the Commission on Ecumenical Relations of the North Carolina Council of Churches: the Council of Chalcedon dealt with the subject of dual natures by af-firming the inseparability of the two natures, each nature being pre-served and concurring in one person (prosopon) and one subsistence (hy-postasis). 8 Reverend Dickson continues: If this Chalcedonian formulation is given serious attention in contem-porary Protestant thought, some feel the human nature of Christ will not continue to suffer the devaluation of the past, nor will, therefore, its pre- Mary, Bridge to Ecumenism? / 349 cursor in the Incarnation--the Virgin Mary.9 The title, Mother of God, does seem to imply that Mary is divine, and although Protestants accept Mary as the mother of Jesus, tradition-ally they seem to resist the title of "Mother of God." In pagan mythol-ogy, the mother of the god or gods was considered to be a goddess. There seemed to be anxiety in New Testament times from the beginning not to equate Mary with the pagan goddesses, and although this distinc-tion has always been understood by Catholics, it may have looked to Prot-estants that we were divinizing Mary. Popular Religion - An Aid To Ecumenism? In view of the ecumenical dimension, the relationship between sym-bol, basic human need, and religion is very important. Clifford Geertz says that religious symbols provide not only the ability to comprehend the world but to endure it. Man depends upon symbols and symbol systems with a dependence so great as to be decisive for his creatural viability and, as a result, his sen-sitivity to even the remotest indication that they may prove unable to cope with one or another aspect of experience, raises within him the grav-est source of anxiety. ~0 In worship, people tend to clothe God with attributes that will meet their innermost needs. Sometimes in the past the abstract definitions of the theologians left people cold. God was oftentimes seen to be a dis-tant, transcendent God, and a judging God, who dispensed rewards and punishments in strict accordance with one's deeds. People were longing to see him as loving and compassionate, like a mother. If ordinary Catholics had been accustomed to reading the Scripture for themselves, as they are beginning to do now since Vatican II, they might have experienced firsthand the motherly concern of Jesus for the poor, the sick, and the scorned. Probing the Bible now, one is touched, for example, by his attitude toward women, especially disgraced women, regardless of the disapproval of males present. I do understand, however, that Bible reading for Catholics was sharply curtailed at the time of the Reformation due to so many people leaving the Church because of pri-vate interpretation of the Scripture. We understand now that in God there is a perfect balance of so-called masculine and feminine qualities; thanks to insightsfrom psychol-ogy, we are more theologically sophisticated than our predecessors. How-ever, in the early centuries of Christianity, people turned to the feminine Mary, in whom they felt that they had a ready-made mother who cared 350/Review for Religious, May-June 1989 about them. Based, no doubt, on the idea of the communion of saints and the practice of asking for the intercession of the martyrs, who were surely with God, there was a normal development of devotion to Mary, who, as the mother of Jesus, w,a_.,s seen to be more than willing to help those for whom her Son died such a cruel death. Popular Religion And The Apparitions When Catholics finally turn to the Scripture for news of Mary, they are amazed at how little is there! The immense body of material that is available on Mary derives from tradition and also from popular religion, which is based on Mary's relationship to Jesus ~nd the needs of people. Our knowledge of her has been shaped also by .accounts of her various appearances throughout the world. However, as Tambasco comments: ". (the) return to biblical and ecumenical considerations has rightly reduced these devotions to a minor role (p. 71)." Their value is in the Gospel teaching that each affirms. The Church moves very slowly in granting approval for belief in ap-paritions, and even when approval is received, there is no obligation to believe. The one important guideline in regard to any appearance is the fact that nothing is presented or ordered that is contrary to the constant teaching of the Church. An example would be when Mary reportedly appeared to Catherine Labour6 in France in 1830 and to Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes, also in France, in 1858, she said, "I am the Immaculate Conception," a tra-dition in the Church since the sixth century. At LaSalette she insisted on the observance of the Lord's Day, which the people were ignoring, treating Sunday as any other day. She also re-proved them for blasphemy and taking the Lord's name in vain, thus un-derscoring the second and third commandments. At Fatima she asked them to do penance and to pray for peace. In 1879 at Knock, in County Mayo in Ireland, she said nothing at all! She appeared with St. Joseph and St. John, beside an altar sur-mounted by a lamb and a cross, over which angels hovered. The Irish saw in her appearance a message of comfort for the persecution they had suffered for their faith, dating back to the sixteenth century. They iden-tified the symbols with those of the heavenly liturgy in the Book of Reve-lation, seeing in them an affirmation of their fidelity to worship. Priests had risked their lives to offer the Sacrifice of the Mass, symbolized by the Lamb. St. John the Evangelist is holding the Gospel book in one hand, with the other hand raised, as if he is making a point in a sermon. Mary, Bridge to Ecumenism? / 35"1 The theme or instruction accompanying each visit was not a new teaching in any way, but an old teaching which needed a new emphasis, depending on the times. When I was at Knock in 1987, I remember think-ing to myself: it really doesn't matter whether Mary actually appeared here or not! All around me at the shrine there was evidence of faith, as people prayed, participated in the liturgy, reflected on the passion of Christ at the stations, or were merely kind and friendly to each other. I felt a renewal of my own spirituality in such a faith-filled atmosphere. The element of pilgrimage is, of course, very strong at Knock, and pil-grimage from the earliest days has been a vibrant expression of popular religion among people. Pilgrimage Pilgrimages stemming from the apparition at Lourdes are legendary. According to Victor and Edith Turner (Image & Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1978), who did an anthropological study on popular religion, people do not necessarily go on pilgrimage for the cure, but for the atmosphere in which their spiritu-ality is nourished. People see a pilgrimage, or a journey, as a symbol of the journey of life, and they value their association with fellow trav-elers oriented toward God in the service of neighbor. There is a leveling of classes on a pilgrimage; kings travel with ordinary folk, as will be the case in heaven. They volunteer as stretcher-bearers or wherever there is a need, and are energized in the role of service to their fellow human be-ings. In writing about pilgrimages to the shrine of Our Lady at Guadalupe, Segundo Galilea says that here the rich can discover the world of the poor and become sensitive to their need for justice and reconciliation. The movement towards Mary obliges the rich to go out of themselves and to meet the poor. It gives the poor a sense of security and allows them to meet the rich without apology, on an equal footing. Mary is, then, one of the rare symbols of integration in Latin America . ~ The apparition at Guadalupe in i 53 I, perhaps one of the first appa-ritions on record, is said to to be a large factor in popular religion in Latin America, and as a result, has given impetus to the liberation theology movement there. It has touched the hearts of the oppressed, making them feel that they are loved by God, and consequently raised in their own self-esteem, to the point where they are seriously struggling for self-determination in their living situation there. 352 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 Mary and Liberation Theology A new reading of Luke's gospel, which emphasizes salvation his-tory, yields much that is pertinent today in regard to saving, or liberat-ing, the oppressed. Accustomed as we are to seeing Mary as queen, it is a new thing for us Catholics to see Mary as a peasant woman as she was at Guadalupe, and, indeed, at Nazareth. It is a challenge for us to take another look at the Magnificat, which we sing every day in the Liturgy of the Hours. There are places in South America where the recitation of the Magnifi-cat is forbidden, as being subversive. Mary's song begins with the praise of God. "My soul proclaims the glory of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior." The use of the word Savior emphasizes her stance with us, in need of salvation. She re-fers to herself as his lowly handmaid, on whom he has looked with fa-vor. All generations will call her blessed because he, the mighty one, has done great things for her. In countries where there is no middle class, but only the poor and the rich, who possess all the wealth of the land, the poor hear Mary's Magnificat message in the Virgin of Guadalupe: He has shown might in his arm; he has scattered the proud in their con-ceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty (Lk 1:51-53). They look to God for the mercy he promised to "our fathers,"-- and here all peoples sharing the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of Christ, unite in looking back even to the patriarchs, to whom God prom-ised mercy and liberation, which was accomplished first through Moses and eventually through Jesus Christ. And now there is hope for these poor also. The Exodus and Exile theme of liberation fit the situaiion to-day. A new look at Scripture will allow us to see Mary as homeless and as an exile, driveh out of her homeland to Egypt for the safety of her child. Popular religion often forges ahead of the theologians, and the hier-archy has only recently given its approval to the liberation theology move-ment in Latin America. A Latin American theologian says that the Mariology of Vatican II was more preoccupied by dialogue and relations with Protestants than with the simple people and popular Mariology. What is important now is to prolong the'deep and rich Mariological affirmations of Vatican II by a popular Mariology, a renewed Mariology . ~2 Mary, Bridge to Ecumenism? / 353 The basic idea of this renewed Mariology is that Mary is the sign and sacrament of the motherly mercy of God towards the poor, of the ten-derness of God who loves and defends the poor (Puebla, no. 291). ~3 (ital-ics mine) How will these considerations serve as an ecumenical bridge for us? By recognizing the need among peoples for freedom of conscience, free-dom from oppression, freedom of religion, justice for all. It is said that the problem with the doctrines presented for belief in former days was not with the dogmas themselves, but with authority. (Belief in the Im-maculate Conception predated the Reformation.) The wording was that he who did not believe, let him be anathema! Even Martin Luther did not deny the doctrines themselves, but pronounced them pious opinions. John XXIII insisted that there be no condemnations! He condemned no one. Evangelization itself must be an invitation, even a lure, to Christi-anity. No one is to be coerced in this matter in any way. John Paul II in Mother of the Redeemer.says that the Church's jour-ney now, near the end of the second Christian millennium, involves a renewed commitment to her mission. In the words of the Magnificat, the Church renews in herself the awareness that the truth about God who saves cannot be separated from his love of preference for the poor and humble, expressed in the word and works of Jesus. These points are di-rectly related to the Christian meaning of freedom and liberation' (p. 51 ). One must be free from oppression in order to respond to the call of Christ to do one's part toward the building up of the kingdom of God. In discussing Mary's role at the wedding feast at Cana, when she ad-vised Jesus that "they had no wine," the Pope sees this as expressing a new kind of motherhood according to the spirit and not just according to the flesh, that is to say, Mary's solicitude for human beings, her com-ing to th'em in the wide variety of their wants and needs (P. 30-1). I feel that the orientation toward ecumenism observed at Vatican Council II, especially in regard to Mary, has borne fruit and hopefully will continue to do so in the future. I am intrigued by the interpretation offered by Edward Yarnold in regard to reconciling Protestants and Catholics in regard to the Immacu-late Conception and the Assumption. It is possible that Christians disagree over the symbolic form of doctrine, while not disagreeing over the theological meaning. Thus, Roman Catho-lics could take literally that Mary was immaculately conceived and then assumed into heaven, but that is just the symbolic meaning. Protestants might not agree with that, but could accept the ultimate theological mean- 354/Review for Religious, May-June 1989 ing that says God's grace requires response, providers conditions for re-sponse, and results in sanctification even after death. There would thus be theological unity with a plurality regarding symbolic meaning. ~'~ When the late Rev. Arthur Carl Piepkorn, was professor at Concor-dia Seminary, St. Louis, he explained that "other Christians" (he did not refer to them as non-Catholics) have taken hope from references to Mary at Vatican II as follows: It may yet happen in our time that there will come about a happy bal-ance between excess ardor in the veneration of the Mother of God and in excessive coldness to the role that God himself has given her in the drama of human salvation. If it does, as I pray it will, we shall see in our time what the "Mag-nificat" placed on the lips of the mother of God--'All generations will count me blessed.' Other Christians feel that the more we esteem Mary, the more we honor her Son; when men (sic) refuse to honor Mary, they really do not believe in the Incarnation.~5 NOTES ~ William L. Lahey, "The Blessed Virgin Mary in the Theology and Devotion of the Seventeenth-Century Anglican Divines," Marian.Studies,,XXXVlll (1987), p. 143. 2 Anthony J. Tambasco, "Mary in Ecumenical Perspective," What Are They Say-ing About Mary? (Ramsey, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1984), p. 54. 3 lbid, p. 57. '~ lbid, p. 58. 5 lbid, p. 60. 6 Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism (Minneapolis: Winston Press Inc., 1980), p. 873. 7 Ibid. 8 Charles W. Dickson, Ph.'D., "Is a Protestant Mariology Possible?" Queen of All Hearts (Vol. XXXIX, No. 4) Nov./Dec. 1988, p. 26. Quoted from Willison Walker-- A History.of the Christian Church, p. 139. 9 lbid, p. 26. ~0 Clifford Geertz, "Religion as a Cultural System," Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (London: Travistock Publications, Ltd., 1968), p. 13. ~ Segundo Galilea, "Mary in Latin American Liberation Theologies," ed. Bertrand de Margerie, S.J., Marian Studies, XXXVIII (1987), p. 57. ~2 Victor Codina, "Mary in Latin American Liberation Theologies," ed. Bertrand de Margerie, S.J., Marian Studies, XXXVIII (1987), p. 49. ~3 Ibid. 14 Quoted in Tambasco, What Are They Saying About Mary? p. 64. ~5 "Lutheran Hails Mary in Vatican ll's Words," The Boston Pilot (June 29, 1973), p. 2. Prayer and Devotion to Mary: A Bibliography Thomas G. Bourque, T.O.R. Father Thomas Bourque, T.O.R., is Chairperson of the Philosophical and Religious Studies Department of St. Francis College in Loretto, Pennsylvania. He has been involved in youth ministry, parish ministry, and the ministry of Catholic education and adul( education. His address is St. Francis College; Loretto, PA 15940. The Marian Year is meant to promote a new and more careful reading of what the Council said about the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, in the mystery of Christ and of the Church . We speak not only of the doctrine of faith but also of the life of faith, and thus of authentic "Marian spirituality," seen in the light of tradition, and especially the spirituality to which the Council exhorts us. Marian spirituality, like its corresponding devotion, finds a very rich source in the historical expe-rience of individuals and of the various Christian communities present among the different peoples and nations of the world. John Paul II Mother of the Redeemer, #48 ~,lohn Paul II invites all of us to reflect upon our.journey of faith with our Lord in light of our relationship with his Mother Mary. As many Catho-lics and Christians continue to question the role of Mary in the Church today, the Pope's encyclical is very timely. Solid devotion to Mary can only spring from an authentic knowledge of her role in salvation history. The Mariology of John Paul lI's encyc-lical, Mother of the Redeemer, as well as the Mariology of Paul Vl's ex-hortation, Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, can truly be summed in the words of Paul VI: "In Mary, everything is relative to Christ and de-pendent upon him." Both pontiffs remind us that Mary is never to be 355 356 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 considered in isolation. She must be seen in relationship to Christ, the head, and to his Body, the Church. Both Paul VI and John Paul II con-tinually link Mary to Christ, and not only is Mary Mother of Jesus, but also to the Church. The basic principle of Mariology is that Mary is Mother and Associ-ate of the Redeemer. She is a woman of faith, simplicity, loving avail-ability, and a disciple of faith. As a follow-up to the Marian year, the following selected bibliogra-phy is offered as an aid for reflection and prayer. This selected bibliog-raphy can serve as a guide to study and reflection on the contemporary devotion to Mary. The concentration of this work is a modern approach to Mariology from the time of the apostolic exhortation, Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, to the time of promulgation of the encyclical let-ter, Mother of the Redeemer. The selected bibliography is divided into four sections. The first sec-tion consists of books which deal with Marian prayer, devotion and spiri-tuality. The second section lists articles from periodicals from the years 1974 to 1987. Encyclicals and pastoral letters are cited in the third sec-tion, while typescripts and tape cassettes of value are cited in the fourth section. Books and Pamphlets: Ashe, Geoffrey. The Virgin. London: Routledge and Paul, 1976. ¯ Bojorge, Horacio. The Image of Mary: According to the Evangelists. New York: Alba House, 1978. Branick, Vincent P., ed. Mary, the Saint and the Church. Ramsey, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1980. Brown, Raymond E., ed. Mary in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978. Buby, Bertrand. Mary: The Faithful Disciple~. New York: Paulist Press, 1985. Callahan, Sidney. The Magnificat: The Prayer of Mary. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Carberry, John Cardinal. Mary Queen and Mother: Marian Pastoral Reflections. Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1979. Carretto, Carlo. Blessed Are You Who Believed. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1982. Carroll, Eamon R. Understanding the Mother of Jesus. Wilmington, Delaware: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1979. Cunningham, Lawrence and Sapieha, Nicolas. Mother of God. San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982. A Mary Bibliography / 357 Deiss, Lucien. Mary, Daughter of Zion. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1972. Flanagan, Donal. In Praise of Mary. Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1975. --. The Theology of Mary. Hales Corner, Wisconsin: Clergy Book Service, 1976. Flannery, Austin P. The Documents of Vatican II. New York: Pillar Books, 1975. Graef, Hilda C. Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion. New York: Sheed and Ward, Two Volumes, (Volume I, 1963 and Volume II, 1965). --. The Devotion to Our Lady. Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1963. Greeley, Andrew M. The Mary Myth: On the Femininity of God. New York: Seabury Press, 1977. Griolet, Pierre. You Call Us Together." Prayers For the Christian As-sembly. Paramus, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1974. Guste, Bob. Mary At My Side. Mystic: Twenty-Third Publications, 1986. Habig, Marion. The Franciscan Crown. Chicago: Franciscan Her-ald Press, 1976. Harrington, W. J. The Rosary: A Gospel Prayer. Canfield, Ohio: Alba House, 1975. Haughton, Rosemary. Feminine Spirituality: Reflections on the Mys-tery of the Rosary. Paramus, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1976. Hertz, G. Following Mary Today. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1979. Houselander, Caryil. Lift Up Your Hearts to Mary, Peace, Prayer, Love. New York: Arena Letters, 1978. Hurley, Dermot. Marian Devotion For Today. Dublin: C. G. Neale, 1971. Jegen, Carol Frances. Mary According To Women. Kansas City: Leaven Press, 1985. Jelly, Frederick. Madonna: Mary in the Catholic Tradition. Hunt-ington, Indiana: Our Sunday .Visitor Press, 1986. Johnson, Ann. Miryam of Judah: Witness in Truth and Tradition. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1987. --. Miryam of Nazareth. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1986. Jungman, Joseph A. Christian Prayer Through The Centuries. New York: Paulist Press, 1978. 351t/Review for Religious~ May-June 1989 Kern, Walter. New Liturgy and Old Devotions. Staten Island, New York: Alba House, 1979, 119-184. Kung, Hans and Moltmann, Jurgen. ed. Mary in the Churches. New York: Seabury Press, 1983, Concilium, volume 168. La Croix, Francois de. The Little Garden of Our Blessed Lady. Ilkley, England: Scholar Press, 1977. Long, Valentine. The Mother of God. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1976. Maestri, William. Mary: Model of Justice. New York: Alba House, 1987. Malinski, Mieczslaw. Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious Reflections on Life and Rosary. Chicago: Claretian Publications, 1979. Maloney, George A. Mary: The Womb of God. Denville, New Jer-sey: Dimension Books, 1976. Moloney, John. Pilgrims With Mary. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Messen-ger, 1976. Obbard, Elizabeth Ruth. Magnificat: The Journey and the Song. New York: Paulist Press, 1986. Pelikan, Jaroslav. Flusser, David. Lang, Justin. Mary: Images of the Mother of Jesus in Jewish and Christian Perspective. Philadelphia: For-tress Press, 1986. Pennington, Basil. Daily We Touch Him. Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, 1977, 135-148. Rahner, Karl. Mary, Mother of the Lord. New York: Herder and Herder, 1963. Randall, John. Mary, Pathway To Fruitfulness. Locust Valley, New York: Living Flame Press, 1978. Ratzinger, Joseph. Daughter Zion: Meditations On The Church's Marian Belief. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983. Rosage, David. Praying With Mary. Locust Valley, New York: Liv-ing Flame Press, 1980. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Mary, the Feminine Face of the Church. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977. Schillebeeckx, Edward. Mary, Mother of the Redemption. London: Sheed and Ward, 1964, 164ff. Sheed, Frank. The Instructed Heart--Soundings At Four Depths. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1979. Stevens, Clifford. The Blessed Virgin: Her L~]'e & Her Role In Our Lives. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1986. Tambasco, Anthony. What Are They Saying About Mary? New A Mary Bibliography / 359 York: Paulist Press, 1984. Unger, Dominic J. The Angelus. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1956. Viano, Joseph. Two Months With Mary. New York: Alba House, 1984. Wright, John Cardinal. Mary Our Hope. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984. Articles: Abberton, J. "On the Parish: Marian Devotion." Clergy Review. 63 (April 1978), 147-150. Albrecht, Barbara. "Mary: Type and Model of the Church." REvtEw ~oR REt~tG~Ot~S. 36 (1977), 517-524. Alfaro, Juan. "The Marioiogy of the Fourth Gospel: Mary and the Struggles for Liberation." Biblical Theology Bulletin. 10 (January 1980), 3-16. Barrionveuo, C. "For A Better Rosary." Christ to the Christian World. 18 (I 979), 304-307. Billy, Dennis J. "The Marian Kernel." REview ~oR R~t.~ous. 43 (May/June 1983), 415-420. Blackburn, Robert E. "The Reed of God Continues To Flourish." U.S. Catholic. 47 (May 1982), 2. Browne, Dorothy. "Mary, the Contemplative." Spiritual Life. 23 (Spring 1977), 49-60. Buby, B. "The Biblical Prayer of Mary: Luke 2:19-51 ." R~v~w RE~.tG~Ot~S. 39 (July 1980), 577-581. Buono, Anthony M. "The Oldest Prayers to Mary." Catholic Di-gest. 48 (August 1984), 111-113. Burns, Robert E. "Don't Let Sleeping Devotions Lie." U.S. Catho-lic. 52 (January 1987), 2. Carberry, John Cardinal. "Marialis Cultis: A Priestly Treasure." Homiletic and Pastoral Review. 78 (May ! 978), 7-13. Carroll, Eamon. "A Survey of Recent Marioiogy." Marian Stud-ies. 36 (1985), 101-127. b. "A Survey of Recent Mariology." Marian Studies. 35 (1984), 157-187. --. "A Survey of Recent Marioiogy." Marian Studies. 31 (1980), 11-154 (Similar surveys may be found within volumes 24 to 31 of Marian Studies). b. "A Woman For All Seasons." U.S. Catholic. 39 (October 1974), 6-11. 360 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 --. "In the Company of Mary." Modern Liturgy. 9 (May 1982), 4-10. -- "Mary After Vatican II." St. Anthony Messenger. 91 (May 1984), 36-40. --. "Mary and the Church: Trends in Marian Theology Since Vati-can II." New Catholic World. 229 (November-December 1986), 248- 250. --. "Mary, Blessed Virgin: Devotion." New Catholic Encyclope-dia. 9 (1967), 364-369. -- "Mary: The Woman Come Of Age." Marian Studies. 36 (1985), 136-160. --. "Prayer and Spirituality: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Catholic Prayer-Life." Today Catholic Teacher. 12 (March 1979), 40-41. Chantraine, George. "Prayer Within the Church." Communio. 12 (Fall 1985), 258-275. Ciappi, L. "The Blessed Virgin Mary Today and the Contemporary Appeal of the Rosary." Origins. 44 (October 30, 1975), 4. Clark, Allan. "Marialis Cultus." Tablet. 228 (April 6, 1974), 354- 356. Colavechio, X. "The Relevance of Mary." Priest. 36 (June 1980), 14-16. Coleman, William V. "A Peasant Woman Called to Guide the Church." Today's Parish. 13 (May-June 1981), 7. Coiledge, E. "The Church At Prayer: To The Mother of God." Way. 19 (July 1979), 230-239 and 19 (October 1979), 314-321. Conner, Paul. "The Rosary Old Or New?" Sisters Today. 59 (Oc-tober 1986), 108- I 10. Curran, Patricia. "Women Reclaim the Magnificat." Sisters Today. 55 (August-September 1983), 24-30. Daly, Anne Carson. "A Woman For All Ages." Homiletic and Pas-toral Review. 86 (May 1986), 19-22. Davies, Brian A. "Mary In Christian Practice." Doctrine and Life. 26 (June 1976), 403-407. Deak, Mary Ann. "Mary's Faith: A Model For Our Own." Catho-lic Update. UPD 108 (I 978). Dehne, Carl. "Roman Catholic Popular Devotions." Worship. 49 (October 1975), 446-460. Demarco, A. "Hail Mary." New Catholic Encyclopedia. 6 (1967), 898. Donnelly, Dorothy H. "Mary, Model of Personal Spirituality." A Mary Bibliography / 361 New Catholic World. 219 (March-April 1976), 64-68. Emery, Andree. "On Devotion To Mary." New Covenant. 11 (May 1982), 12-14. Finley, Mitchel. "Rediscovering The Rosary." America. 148 (May 7, 1983), 351. Fischer, Patricia. "The Scriptural Rosary: An Ancient Prayer Re-vived." Catechist. 20 (October 1986), 21. Flanagan, Donald. "The Veneration of Mary: A New Papal Docu-ment." Furrow. 25 (1974), 272-277. Frehen, H. "The Principles of Marian Devotion." The Marian Era. 10 (1971), 34-36 and 272-277. Foley, Leonard. "Mary: Woman Among Us." St. Anthony Messen-ger. 94 (May 1987), 12-16. Gabriele, Edward. "In Search of the Woman: Reformulating the Mary Symbol in Contemporary Spirituality." Priest. 42 (February 1986), 28-29. Gaffney, John P. "APortrait of Mary." Cross and Crown. 24 ~Spring 1975), 129-138. h. "Marialis Cultis: Guidelines to Effective Preaching." Priest. 38 (December 1982), 14-18. Galligan, John Sheila. "Mary: A Mosaic Joy." REw~wFoR R~L~G~Ot~S. 43 (January-February 1984), 82-92. Galot, Jean. "Why the Act of Consecration to Our Lady?" Origins. 3 (January 18, 1982), Galvin, John P. "A Portrait of Mary In the Theology of Karl Rahner." New Catholic World. 229 (November-December 1986), 280- 285. Gordon, Mary. "Coming To Terms With Mary." Commonweal. 109 (January 15, 1982), 1. Green, Austin~ "The Rosary: A Gospel Prayer." Cross and Crown. 28 (June 1976), 173-178. Grisdela, Catherine. "How May Processions Began." Religion Teacher's Journal. 18 (April-May 1984), 28. Gustafson, J. "A Woman For All Seasons." Modern Liturgy. 9 (May 1982), 4-10. Hamer, Jean Jerome Cardinal. "Mary, Our Foremost Model." Con-templative Life. 10 (1985), 173- i 74. Hanson, R. "The Cult of Mary as Development of Doctrine." Way ,Supplement. 51 (Fall 1984), 8-96. Hebblethwaite, P. "The Mariology of Three Popes." Way Supple- 369/Review for Religious, May-June 1989 merit. 51 (Fall 1984), 8-96. Herrera, Marina. "Mary of Nazareth in Cross-cultural Perspective." Professional Approaches For Christian Educators. 16 ( i 986), 236-240. Hinneburgh, W.A. "Rosary." New Catholic Encyclopedia. 12 (I 967), 667-670. Hofinger, Johannes. "Postconciliar Marian Devotions." Priest. 37 (January 1981), 43-45 and 37 (February 1981), 15-17. Hogan, Joseph. "Hail Mary." Sisters Today. 57 (January 1986), 258-261. Jegen, C. "Mary, Mother of a Renewing Church." Bible Today. 24 (May 1986), 143-166. Jelly, Frederick M. "Marian Dogmas Within Vatican II's Hierar-chy of Truths." Marian Studies. 27 (1976). --. "Marian Renewal Among Christians." Homiletic and Pastoral Review. 79 (May 1979), 8-16. --. "Reply to 'Homage To a Great Pope and His Marian Devotion: Paul VI.' " Marian Studies. 31 (1980), 96-98. -- "The Mystery of Mary's Meditation." Homiletic and Pastoral Review. 80 (May 1980), 11-20. Johnson, Elizabeth A. "The Marian Tradition and the Reality of Women." Horizons. 12 (Spring 1985), 116-135. Karris, Robert J. "Mary's Magnificat and Recent Study." REVIEW ~OR REt~G~OUS. 42 (November-December 1983), 903-908. Keolsch, Charity Mary. "Mary and Contemplation In the Market-place." Sisters Today. 54 (June-July 1983), 594-597. Kerrigan, Michael P. "The Beginnings Of A New And Prosperous Way of Life." New Catholic World. 229 (November-December 1986), 251. Kleinz, John P. "How We Got The Hail Mary." Catholic Digest. 50 (May 1986), 55-57. Koehler, A. "Blessed From Generation to Generation: Mary In Pa-tristics and the History of the Church." Seminarium. 27 (1975), 578- 606. --. "Homage To A Great Pope And His Marian Devotion." Marian Studies. 31 (1980), 66-95. Krahan, Maria. "The Rosary." Mount Carmel. (Autumn 1977), 124-131. Kress, Robert. "Mariology and the Christian's Self-Concept." REVIEW ~OR RELiGiOUS. 31 (1972), 414-419. Lawrence, Claude. "The Rosary From the Beginning To Our Day." A Mary Bibliography / 363 Christian World. 28 (July-August 1983), 194-201. Leckey, Dolores. "The Rosary Time of My Life." Catholic Digest. 47 (October 1983), 57-58. Leskey, Roberta Ann. "Ways To Celebrate Mary." Religion Teacher's Journal. 17 (April-May 1983), 28-29. Lewela, M. Pauline. "Mary's Faith-Model Of Our Own: A Reflec-tion." Africa Theological Journal. 27 (April 1985), 92-98. Low, Charlotte. "The Madonna's Decline and Revival." Insight. (March 9, 1987), 61-63. MacDonald, Donald. "Mary: Our Encouragement In Christ." REviEw FOR REt.tG~Ot~S. 44 (May-June 1985), 350-359. -- "Our Lady of Wisdom." REvtzw FOR REt.~G~Ot~S. 46 (May-June 1986), 321-331. Main, John. "The Other-Centeredness of Mary." R~w~w FOR RELIG~Ot~S. 38 (March 1979), 267-278. Maloney, George A. "A New But Ancient Mariology." Diakonia. 8 (I 973). 303-305. -- "Do Not Be Afraid To Take Mary Home." Catholic Charis-matic. 1 (October-November 1976), 30-33. --. "Mary and the Church As Seen By the Early Fathers." Diakonia. 9 (1974). Marino, Eugene A. "Mary: The Link Between Liturgy and Doc-trine." Origins. 14 (December 27, 1984), 467-471. Marshner, William H. "Criteria For Doctrinal Development in Marian Dogmas." Marian Studies. 28 (1977), 47-97. "Mary and the Saints." National Bulletin on Liturgy. 12 (Septem-ber- October ! 979), 178-183. Mary Francis. "Blessed Mary: Model of Contemplative Life." Homi-letic and Pastoral Review. 8 i (Mary 1981), 6-12. Mary of the Sacred Heart. "Remember the Rosary." Religion Teacher's Journal. 20 (October 1986),39-40. McAteer, Joan. "What the Rosary Means to Me." Ligourian. 72 (October 1984), 16-20. McCarry, Vincent P. "Mary, Teach Us To Pray." Catholic Digest. 50 (May 1986), 40-43. McDermott, John Michael. "Time For Mary." Homiletic and Pas-toral Review. 83 (May ! 983), I i- 15. McHugh, John. "On True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary." The Way Supplement. 25 (Summer 1975), 69-79. McNamara, Kevin. "Devotion to The Immaculate Heart of Mary." 364 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 Furrow. 36 (October 1985), 599-604. -- "Mary Today." Furrow. 31 (July 1980), 428-450. Miller, Ernest F. "Why We Honor Mary?" Liguorian. 63 (August 1975), 13-15. Montague, George. "Behold Your Mother." New Covenant. 10 (May 198 I), 4-7. Moore, M. and Welbers, T. "The Rosary Revisited." Modern Lit-urgy. 9 (May 1982), 4-10. Motzel, Jaqueline. "Growing Through the Rosary." Liguorian. 73 (October 1985), 28-3 I. NC News Service. "Mary: An Image of Obedience and Freedom." Our Sunday Visitor. 75 (April 12, 1987), 17. Nienaltowski, Mary Ellen and Metz, Kathleen. "How Do We Pray The Rosary?" Religion Teacher's Journal. 21 (March 1987), 17-18. Noone, P. "Why Catholics Hail Mary?" U.S. Catholic. 44 (May 1979), 47-49. Nouwen, Henri J. "The Icon of the Virgin of Vladimir: An Invita-tion to Belong to God." America. 152 (May 1 I, 1985), 387-390. O'Carroll, M. "Recent Literature On Our Lady." Irish Theologi-cal Quarterly. 45 (I 978), 281-286. Offerman, Mary Columba. "Mary, Cause of Our Joy: A Bibliogra-phy On Mariology." REvl~.w ~oR RE~.~lous. 35 (1976), 730-734. Palazzini, P. "The Exhortation Marialis Cultus and the Rosary." Origins. 27 (July 4, 1974), 9-10. Pellegrino, M. "Comments on the Apostolic Exhortation: Marialis Cultus." L'Osservatore Romano. 35 (August 29, 1974), 3-1 I. Pennington, M. Basil. "The Rosary: An Ancient Prayer For All Of Us.'" Our Sunday Visitor. 72 (October 23, 1983), 3-ff. Peter, Val J. "Marian Theology and Spirituality." Communio. 7 (Summer 1980), 100-178. Puzon, B. "All Generations Shall Call Me Blessed." Sisters Today. 45 (May 1974), 533-537. Quinn, Jerome D. "Mary the Virgin, Mother of God." Bible To-day. 25 (May 1987), 177-180. Rasmussen, Eileen. "Accept Devotion To Mary." National Catho-lic Reporter. 11 (January 3 I, 1975), I I- 14. Rausch, Thomas P. "The Image of Mary: A Catholic Response." America. 146 (March 27, 1982), 231-234. Roberts, William P. "Mary and Today's Classroom." Catechist. 18 (April-May 1985), 28-29. A Mary Bibliography / 365 Schreck, Alan. "Devotion To Mary." New Covenant. 13 (July- August 1983), 14-18. Senior, Donald. "New Testament Images of Mary." Bible Today. 24 (May 1986), 143-166. Shea, John J. "Mary's Melody of Amazing Grace." U.S. Catho-lic. 47 (May 1982), 6-10. Smith, Herbert. "Mary: Mother and Disciple." Liguorian. 73 (Oc-tober 1985), 52-53. Smith, Joanmarie. "Re-Seeing the Rosary." Professional Ap-proaches for Christian Educators. 16 (1986), 12-15. Smith, Patricia. "Images and Insights: Mary In A Modern Mode." New Catholic World. 229 (November-December 1986), 269-273. Smolenski, Stanley. "Rosary or Chaplet?" Homiletic and Pastoral Review. 86 (October 1985),9-15. Snyder, Bernadette. "Who's Praying the Rosary Today?" Liguorian. 74 (October 1986), 2-6. Speyr, A. "Prayer In The Life Of The Blessed Virgin." Commu-nio. 7 (Summer 1980), 113-126. Stahel, Thomas H. "Redemptoris Mater." America. 156 (May 2, 1987), 353-354. Tambasco, A. "Mary: A Biblical Portrait For Imitation." New Catholic World. 229 (November-December 1986), 244-271. Tannehill, R.C. "The Magnificat As Poem." Journal of Biblical Lit-erature. 93 (1974), 263-275. Tutas, Stephen R. 'Who Is Mary For Me?" REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS. 43 (September-October 1984), 778-780. Unger, Dominic J. "Does the New Testament Give Much Histori-cal Information About the Blessed Virgin or Mostly Symbolic Mean-ing?" Marianum. (1977), 323-347. Van Bemmel, John. "How To Pray The Rosary." Religion Teacher's Journal. 17 (April-May 1983), 29-30. Ward, Jack. "The Rosary-A Valuable Praying and Teaching Tool." Catechist. 19 (October 1985), 24-25. Ware, Kallistos, Timothy. "The Jesus Prayer and the Mother of God." Eastern Churches Review. (Autumn 1972), 149-150. Zyromski, Page. "Rosary Meditations Especially For Catechists." Catechist. 20 (October 1986), 20-22. Church Documents, Pastoral Letters and Addresses: John Paul II. "Address to a General Audience About the Rosary As An Opportunity of Pray With Mary." Origins. 44 (November 2, 1981 ), 366 / Review for Religious, May-June 1989 --. "Address to the Faithful About Mary and Her Spiritual Testa-ment." Origins. 30 (July 25, 1983), 2. --. "Address to the Faithful Saying That With the Rosary We Are Armed With the Cross and the Word." Origins. 41 (October 10, 1983), I. --. "Address to the Faithful Saying That Mary Is Present In Every Liturgical Action." Origins. 8 (February 20,, 1984), 10. --. Address to the Faithful Stressing Devotion to Mary Our Mother." Origins. 880 (April 9, 1985), 12. ~. "Address to the Faithful Urging Honor to the Infinite Majesty of God Through Mary." Origins. 891 (June 24, 1985), I. --. "Homily Announcing A Fourteen Month Marian Year To Be-gin Pentecost Sunday." Origins. 16 (January 15, 1987), 563-565. --. Mother of the Redeemer. Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1987. --. "Renewal of the Act of Consecration of the World to the Mother of God." Origins. 14 (April 2, 1984), 9-10. --. Redemptoris Mater. Tablet. 241 (March 28, 1987), 355-359. National Catholic Conference of Bishops. Behold Your Mother: Woman of Faith. (Pastoral Letter on the Blessed Virgin Mary). Wash-ington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, November 21, 1973. Paul VI. "Apostolic Exhortation: Marialis Cultus." L'Osservatore Romano. April 4, 1974. ~. "Mary, Model of the Church." REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS. 34 (March 1976), 161 - 164. ~. "Renewal of Devotion to Mary." The Pope Speaks. 20 (1975), 199-203. --. Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1974. Poletti, U. Cardinal. "Significance, Value and Practice of Devotion to the Rosary." Origins. 42 (October 16, 1975), 9. Transcripts, Lectures and Tapes: Clark, Alan. "The Holy Spirit and Mary." Mary's Place In Chris-tian Dialogue. (Occasional Papers and Lectures of the Ecumenical), 1982, 79-88. DeSatage, John and McHugh, John. "Bible and Tradition in Regard to the Blessed Virgin Mary: Lumen Gentium." Mary's Place In Chris-tian Dialogue. (Occasional Papers and Lectures of the Ecumenical), 1982, 51-60. Dimock, Giles. "Practical Devotion to Mary." Marian Conference A Mary Bibliography / 367 at the University of Steubenville, 1986, (Cassette). Hutchinson, Gloria. Mary, Companion For Our Journey. Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1986, (Cassettes). Peffley, Bill. Prayerful Pauses With Jesus and Mary. Mystic: Twenty-Third Publications, 1987, (Audiocassettes). Pittman, Robert S. "The Marian Homilies of Hesychius of Jerusa-lem." Ph.D. Thesis. Catholic University of America, 1974. Powers, Isaias. Quiet Places With Mary: A Guided Imagery Retreat. Mystic: Twenty-Third Publications, 1986, (Audiocassettes). Scanlan, Michael. "Prominence of Mary: The Time of Visitation." Marian Conference at the University of Steubenville, 1986, (Cassette). Ware, Kallistos. "The Mother of God in Orthodox Theology and Devotion." Mary's Place in Christian Dialogue. (Occasional Papers and Lectures of the Ecumenical), 1982, 169- ! 81. An Ignatian Contemplation on the Baptism of Our Lord Michael W. Cooper, S.J. Father Michael Cooper, S.J., teaches in the Theology Department and the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University of Chicago. His address is 6525 N. Sheri-dan Road; Chicago, Illinois 60626. Baptism has once again become an integral part of the Christian experi-ence. Instead of simply an individual event between God and the bap-tized, the sacrament once more celebrates a person's entrance into the community of believers. Moreover, with the renewal and expansion of the understanding of ministry, it is baptism that now offers the founda-tion for the call to mission and service for every member of the People of God. Even with all these rich theological and liturgical developments, I have still found it difficult to make any vital connection between them and my own baptism. In part, I simply have no sentiments or recollec-tions to explore or deepen. Like many other pre-Conciliar born, I was rushed to the local parish on the Sunday following my birth to save me from a sudden case of limbo. Nor does my mother have any spiritual re-membrances of my baptism to share with me, since on that day she was still in the hospital recuperating from my worldly entrance. Thus until very recently the experiential and spiritual sense of my own baptism re-mained in a limbo of its own. The meaning and power of my own baptism finally came alive, how-ever, as I shared Jesus' experience of his own baptism during several pe-riods of prayer on my recent thirty-day retreat. The thrust of contempo-rary spirituality reminds us to pay close attention to our human experi-ence- whether in prayer, in ministry, or in the rest of life--and to ask 368 Contemplation on Baptism / 369 what the Lord might be saying or how he might be inviting. Often these moments become actual revelations of God's living Word for us-~either individually or collectively. Through these experiences we realize the Gos-pel no longer as. a onetime event in the past but as always happening-- and now most immediately to us. From this perspective of the ongoing Gospel I share the fruits of a very transforming experience of the baptism of our Lord. Though admit-tedly the very personal encounter of one individual, maybe my experi-ence will contribute to our collective efforts to reclaim the experiential and spiritual roots of our baptismal call to community and ministry with God's people. I entitled this article "An Ignatian Contemplation . . ." to highlight a very definite approach to praying the Scriptures. Instead of methodi-cally plodding through the Gospel, I contemplated, that is, I watched at-tentively and receptively the scene of our Lord's baptism, letting it touch my mind and heart. I began by reading through the scripture text (Mt 3:13-17) several times, then I put down my Bible, closed my eyes, and let the event come alive before the inner eye of my imagination. Following Ignatius' instructions in the Spiritual Exercises (no. 114), I then took my place in the scene, so that I would be experiencing the baptism as an engaged participant and not as a disinterested spectator. Paying attention to the persons, their words, and their actions, I contem-plated the event as if it were happening now for the first time. On the banks of the Jordan, Jesus steps out from the crowd and pre-sents himself to his cousin John for baptism. His voice filled with emo-tion, John protests saying, "I should be baptized by you, yet you come to me!" But Jesus responds very straightforwardly. "Let it be for now." Then in a very powerful moment of the contemplation, I hear Jesus go on to explain himself, "I'm no different from the rest of the people gath-ered here. We're all struggling to gain our human freedom and whole-ness. With all the fear and unfreedoms we carry around from growing up plus all the pressures and demands on us today, it's a wonder we're not more wounded than we are." For Jesus, this very heartfelt experience becomes his baptism into a deep identification and solidarity with the rest of the human family united together in the struggle to become more human and free. Jesus' words to John then cannot be taken as some sort of pious self-effacement. Rather, our brother Jesus is experiencing his baptism as a deep, deep bond-edness with the human family gathered at the healing waters of rebirth and wholeness. 370/Review for Religious, May-June 1989 As I continue to contemplate the baptism unfolding before me, I am drawn to even closer physical proximity with Jesus by the magnetism of his human compassion and tenderness. At the same time I begin to feel close again to several friends from whom I have parted company because of certain decisions on their part that hurt me very deeply. Along with this new feeling of closeness comes the realization that despite the pain and darkness that have separated us, there exists a deeper bond of soli-darity in the human struggle that binds us together. We are no different from each other or from the rest of the people on the face of the earth. In one way or another we are each carrying around within us parts of our wounded child and of our stressed adult. The shadow of our fuller human potential and psychic wholeness always seems to lie just beyond our reach. With this realization a lot of the bite to my pain and anger subsides and I hear myself saying very serenely, "In our choices and endeavors, we really do try to give as much as we can at the moment. Sometimes our responses aren't adequate or all that the situation might call for or that we or others might hope for. Because we will always be carrying around our wounded and unfinished selves, we at times end up creating pain and darkness--for others as well as for ourselves--despite our best and freest possible intentions at that moment. I am no different from the rest of mortals. We are all in our own way longing and strug-gling for our human freedom and wholeness as daughters and sons of the living God." These intense feelings of solidarity with my friends that ac-company these reflections free me to let go of a lot more of the pain and misunderstanding in our relationship. And almost immediately these peo-ple actually appear on the banks of the Jordan and, ecstatic and teary-eyed, we embrace one another. By this time Jesus and John are sitting off to the side talking intently to one another. I am savoring the wonderful feelings of reconciliation and the pure joy of this moment when all of a sudden my attention switches. Several close friends for whom I had initially been either .teacher, spiritual director, or mentor become present to me. These new feelings of solidarity in the human struggle now bring a different sort of bondedness with them. Any leftover images of being in some way "the expert" or "the helper" or simply the one who is a couple of steps ahead of the others seem to disappear forever. I am just acutely aware of'how similar our journeys and struggles have been at such a profound level. A marvelous celebration of deep friendship and belonging to each other takes place as they, too, appear on the banks of the Jordan and I jump up to embrace them. Contemplation on Baptism / 371 This first moment of the baptism climaxes as I join hands with my friends who have come to the Jordan. Together with Jesus and John we dance in circles and zigzag chains across the sands. Then we run into the water to splash and frolic like little children and truly we are, because so many of the hurts and wounds of growing up and of adult life are be-ing healed. This wonderful moment comes to a close when with ecstatic reverence we take turns baptizing one another in these life-giving wa-ters of human compassion and solidarity. The second major moment of the baptism begins as Jesus steps out of the water. This time the heavens open and a voice proclaims, "This is My Son, the Beloved, on whom My favor rests." Along with his sense of profound solidarity with the human family, Jesus now experiences most intensely his deep, deep solidarity with God. Because the baptism has become not only Jesus' but mine as well, I feel myself being drawn into that same solidarity with God. I now hear a voice from the heavens addressed to me, "You, too, are My son, the beloved, on whom My favor rests." Initially, I simply rest in this deep sense of belonging to God. Though still feeling very much the earthen vessel, chipped and bro-ken in so many ways, I receive nonetheless a strong assurance in the prayer that I will have whatever I need by way of resources for my per-sonal journey and for my ministry. With God's favor there will be enough of hope, courage, and justice, of human and psychic energy, and of whatever else needed for today with more to come tomorrow. The Lord has spoken . Rather than end a prayer that is really only be-ginning to unfold, I simply thank the Lord from the depths of my spirit for sh.aring the baptism with me both in contemplation and in life. This Ignatian contemplation of the baptism of our Lord invites sev-eral brief comments. First of all, we realize that the foundations for a renewed understanding of Christian baptism do not come so much from our own sacramental initiation as from sharing the experience of baptism with Jesus. Like the Lord, we are baptized into covenantal solidarity with both our brothers and sisters and with our gracious God. From this perspective, baptism loses much of its static notion as sim-ply a once-in-a-lifetime event. Especially for adults being baptized or re-claiming their baptismal call, as we did in this contemplation, the cele-bration of baptism becomes a dynamic initiation into a lifelong process that continues to open up new levels of human and divine solidarity as our Christian existence unfolds day by day. This sacred bondedness with the human family confronts the blatant Review for Religious, May-June 1989 barriers and subtle alienation that separate us from each other. Baptism invites us to embrace the human family--both near and far--as "my peo-ple" and not just God's people. Our experience is meant to mirror that of Jesus: "I am no different from anybody else." The heart of the mat-ter remains this recognition that we are all struggling with varying de-grees of success for our human freedom and wholeness--two of the gate-ways to encountering the divine in ourselves. Here, too, our experience follows the pattern of Jesus in discovering his own divinity. In facing the forces that would shrink, wound, or destroy these most precious gifts of God to us, we plumb the depths of our human resources and discover the wellsprings of the divine energy in us as well. Second, this baptism into human solidarity against the enemies of our humanity celebrates our entrance as adults into the Christian com-munity. We now recognize and claim for our own this community both broken and healed yet always struggling for greater wholeness. Third, this very sacred experience of human solidarity becomes the foundational stance for each Christian's involvement in ministry as part of our baptismal commitment. It is only from a vital sense of bonded-ness to each other that we can enter into the.joys and struggles of one another without pretense or feigned empathy. By the Lord's design we are in this human struggle together. Baptism then celebrates our call to be companions to one another and to all our brothers and sisters in the unfolding of the kingdom of God in our time. Fourth, the divine bondedness solidifies as we hear the voice from heaven address us withthe same love and promise offered to Jesus: "You are My beloved on whom My favor rests." This proclamation then nurtures our heartfelt sense of belonging utterly to God. Moreover, this divine connectedness touches all the dimensions of who we are, so that we begin to look and feel more and more with the eyes and heart of our gracious God on our~e, lves, others, and our world. In the face of our human wounds and inadequacies, this sense of di-vine favor sustains Christian perseverance and empowerment for life and ministry. We can be stretched to the limits of our understanding and of our physical and psychic energies, yet we now know deep down that no matter what comes God's favor will sustain us this day and there will be more of what we need tomorrow. From the Lord we need only ask with Ignatius in the Suscipe of the Spiritual Exercises: "Give me only Your love and Your grace; that is enough for me" (no. 234). For those hungry to deepen their commitment to Christian commu-nity and ministry, an Ignatian contemplation of the baptism may be the Contemplation on Baptism I 373 occasion to nourish those desires as they share this moment with Jesus as though it were happening for the first time. We never know whom or what we might meet on the banks of the Jordan! the woman with the hemorrhage i was tired of their pity and their prayers now for how many years each face became compulsive to be good with kindness--their helpful helplessness i've seen their looks that worried into silence "i'm so sorry" drove me to distraction until they learned my shame would last God only knowswperhaps forever then they disappeared like frightened children and the very thing