Suchergebnisse

"Most of the work . was done at the University of Chicago or in connection with the War Communications Research Project at the Library of Congress." ; Bibliographical references included in "Notes" (p. 382-398) ; Introduction: The language of power, by H.D. Lasswell. Style in the language of politics, by H.D. Lasswell. Why be quantitative? By H.D. Lasswell.- Technique: The problem of validating content analysis, by I.L. Janis. The reliability of content analysis categories, by Abraham Kaplan and J.M. Goldsen. Recording and context units, four ways of coding editorial content, by Alan Grey, David Kaplan and H.D. Lasswell. The feasibility of the use of samples in content analysis, by Alexander Mintz. The coefficient of imbalance, by I.L. Janis and Raymond Fadner.- Applications: Detection; propaganda detection and the courts, by H.D. Lasswell. Trend; May Day slogans in Soviet Russia, 1918-1943, by Sergius Yakobson and H.D. Lasswell. Interaction; the Third International on its change of policy, by Nathan Leites. Interaction; the response of communist propaganda to frustration, by Nathan Leites and I. de Sola Pool. ; Mode of access: Internet.

The beeswax processing industry of the United States is gravely concerned with increasing admixture of other waxes in the incoming beeswax they process. The source is largely other waxes added to beeswax by manufacturers of honey-comb foundation. They have requested our help in devising suitable tests for such mixtures and devising quantitative methods for their analysis. They also are requesting better Government standards for beeswax and asked us to provide a base of information about United States beeswax to be used both in writing standards and in the detection of admixture of other waxes. In an interview with the research director of the National Confectioner's Association, possible fields of use of dried honey were discussed. E-59-71

Issue 22.3 of the Review for Religious, 1963. ; JOHN XXIII Allocution to Spieitual Directors Our meeting todayI immediately precedes the week of retreat by which We intend to prepare Ourselves for the opening of the Ecumenical Council. You can imagine, then, what is going on in Our soul at this moment as We welcome you who have been chosen for one of the loftiest and most delicate services that exist in the Church. As perhaps you already know, We Ourselves exercised this same ministry at the Seminary of Bergamo shortly after World War I. This precious priestly experience permits Us to understand better the feelings of your own hearts, and at the same time it makes Our conversa-tion with you more intimate and more immediate. Before every thing else, beloved sons, We extend to you Our gratitude for the hidden but invaluable work which you are carrying on in an area that is rich in hopes for the apostolate. Dioceses depend on you; it can even be said that the future fate of the Church is to a large extent in your hands. It is true, of course, that the forma-tion of seminarians must be achieved by the harmonious collaboration of all superiors under the judicious and in-terested direction of the rector; nevertheless, the most important part of this formation pertains to you because your work is executed in the depths of conscience where deep convictions take root and where is effected the real transformation of the young men who are called, to the priesthood. It is the impulse of the Spirit of the Lord that initiates this transformation and brings it to completion; ordinarily, however, a young man will have difficulty in knowing how to follow the impulses of the Spirit without the expert control of the spiritual director. 1 This is an English translation of the allocution Questo incontro given by John XXIII on September 9, 1963, to a meeting of spiritual directors of the seminaries of Italy. The original text is given in Acta Apostolicae Sedis, v. 54 (1962), pp. 673-8. $il~irltual Directors VOLUME 22, 196~ John XXII1 REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 258 We can imagine your daily sacrifices, your trepidations, and your silent sufferings. And God knows with how many prayers and efforts and perhaps anguish you daily pay for the graces of light and perseverance which you implore for your spiritual children. In manifesting to you Our gratitude, We feel that We possess the senti-ments of Christ Himself who, by entrusting to you His most precious treasures, has called you to labor with Him in this sublime work of His grace. /1 Dil~cult and Delicate Task We also wish to express to you Our satisfaction with your meeting and the good results to be expected from it. The education of the young--it is never out of place to repeat this--is a very arduous mission which is justly referred to as the art of arts. This is even more true when it is a question of young persons who in the greatness of their hearts are.giving themselves to the priesthood. The educator of seminarians is well aware that his personal preparation for this lofty ministry should continue throughout the length of his service. He must study the psychology of the students in the seminary; he must live with his eyes open to the world which surrounds him; he must learn from life. But he must also learn from books, from study, from the experiences of his colleagues, and from the progress of pedagogical science, especially from the texts and authors recommended by the Congregation of Seminaries. We cannot disguise the fact that in the matter of edu-cation there have been and are errors that are cloaked by the facile excuse that for the discernment and formation of vocations it is sufficient to have good sense, a sharp eye, and above all experience. We say this with a feeling of sadness. A more enlightened spiritual direction would have spared the Church the priests who do not live up to the greatness of their office, while at the same time it would have procured for her a decidedly higher number of holy ecclesiastics. Moreover, all of you are aware that every age en-counters and meets characteristic difficulties in the edu-cation of youth. In your own case you cannot forget that seminarians today belong to a generation that has ex- + perienced the tragedy of two tremendous world wars and that they live in a world which is evolving with amazing ÷ rapidity. Because of this you may at times be bewil.dered by various manifestations of a personality still unformed, by aspirations and exigencies which seem to be far from the mentality that was present only twenty years ago. This might lead one to conclude that the traditional formation has had its day and that new ways should be tried. On this point We would like to give candid ex-pression to Our thought. While in the matter o[ seminary [ormation it is not good to maintain outmoded ways o[ doing things, still it is necessary to be thoroughly convinced that fundamental principles retain all their~value; without thei~'o~he entire edifice would collapse and [all into ruin. Hence it is nec-essary to care[ully avoid the danger that marginal re-forms, however important and perhaps opportune they may be, should distract attention from what is the central problem o[ all seminary education. Your efforts must be principally directed towards creating in your charges an evangelically integral conception of the priesthood as well as a keen and vibrant consciousness o[ the obligation to tend towards holiness. Unchanged Value o] Fundamental Principles Beloved sons, the problem of personal sanctification was the point of honor and of joy o[ your and Our youth-ful years. Those called to the priesthood in this second half of the twentieth century can have nothing else more at heart both before the priesthood and during the years of its flowering and maturation. They must be persuaded of the emptiness of every apostolic effort that does not proceed from a soul in the state of grace and tending to-wards holiness. You must also take care to guide seminarians to a knowledge and a comprehension of the world in which they are called to live and to work; teach them to sancti[y everything good, sane, and beautiful that progress offers. This does not mean any compromise with a worldly spirit and much less does it imply a lessening o[ the importance of mortification and renunciation. A misunderstood mod-ernization that is preoccupied only with softening semi-nary life or with flattering nature too much would create a personality the direct opposite of Christ, Priest and Vic-tim. On the contrary, a really adequate adaptation to the needs of the times must result in a deeper assimilation to the personality of Christ and Him crucified. It is neces-sary to endow seminarians with a love of the self-denial of the cross in order that they may be able to love the con-dition o[ poverty in which the clergy must o[ten live and be able to meet with courage the renunciations and ex-hausting labors of the apostolate. Firm Discipline and JoyIul Dedication to Sacrifice At times one hears the expressions "autoformation" and "autodomination." It is certainly true that a person is not well formed if he does not know how to control himself; educators are justly concerned to give seminari-ans a practical and progressive exercise of freedom which 4. 4. Spiritual Directors VOLUME 22, 1963 259 4. 4. 4. John XXlll REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 260 will strengthen them to control themselves in determined circumstances and which prepares them better for the life of the ministry. But this cannot be disjoined from firm discipline. A young man will never learn to be mas-ter of himself if he has not learned to observe with love a strict rule that exercises him in mortification and in will power. Otherwise, later in the full exercise of the ministry he will not be prompt in a full and joyful obedience to his bishop; he might even undergo the temptation to as-sume an independence which, while it may not take the form of open rebellion, may nevertheless be manifested in personal action not in harmony with the plan of pas-toral activity suggested and proposed by his superiors. Finally, there can never be too much insistence on the importance of example. And it is you, beloved sons, who give this; it is older priests who give it; and We wish that We could say that all give it. Example is the most elo-quent and persuasive language for the young. Example will draw down an abundance of fruitful graces from the Lord; and from it seminarians will learn in an almost spontaneous way things that frequently are difficult to explain in words. Zeal /or Carrying Out the Decisions o/ the Council Because of the spiritual director's frequent and confi-dential contacts with seminarians, he is one of those per-sons who are incised into the memory; he can, therefore, if he is truly edifying, be one of the most effective sup-ports of future perseverance. Many times the amazing exuberance of Christian life in a diocese finds its true explanation in the silent work of a holy spiritual director who by his example and his teaching has been able to form a generation of holy priests. As We come to the end of Our reflections on this seri-ous and lofty matter of the formation of seminarians to whose good will the reinvigoration of ecclesiastical fervor in the entire Catholic world has been entrusted for execu-tion with the help of heavenly grace and by the applica-tion of conciliar legislation, We willingly give Our hom-age in these solemn circumstances to the sacred memory of those priests, now resting in the eternal light and peace of the Lord, to whose ministry as confessors and spiritual guides you and We entrusted the intimacy of our con-science at the various stages of our life. They are fully worthy of our commemoration. These elect souls who, having entered into eternity, now rejoice in their lofty goal or who~and they too are all holy and blessed--still wait entrance into that goal are according to the teaching of the Church participants in the events of the Church militant; they give her help especially at more important times such as this of the Ecumenical Council. It was the grace of the Lord which gave them on earth the meritorious work of the sanctifi-cation of priests in the past; may that grace now bring forth an abundance of fervor for the new birth which the Council intends to consecrate to the triuml~h of the kingdom of Christ the Lord: "ln holiness and justice be-fore him during all our days" (Lk 1:75). A Shining Example: Vincent Pallotti Beloved sons, the office of spiritual director bristles with difficulties and responsibilities, for it is concerned with the formation of souls into the image of Christ the Priest. It is a divine, not a human work. But this, far from discouraging you, constitutes the foundation of your con-fidence. You have a greater reason to abandon yourselves to the merciful omnipotence of the Divine Artisan who deigns to make use of you. Among the pleasing things of the new fervor which the Ecumenical Council is producing, it gives Us a lively sense of gratification to be able to look forward to the honors of the altar which are being prepared for some of the venerable Servants of God and of the Blessed who are a part of the universal constellation of the holiness of the Church spread throughout the world. We espe-cially look forward to the canonization of Blessed Vincent Pallotti. He was an edifying priest who knew how to unite the spiritual direction of the young clerics of the Pontifical Roman Seminary and of the students of the College of Propaganda with the founding of the Pious Society of Catholic Apostolate. This latter was the first movement in Rbme of Catholic Action in the proper sense of the word. And today we admire the flourishing condition of Catholic Action and its application to the important task of penetrating modern society with the Gospel. The entire activity of this outstanding priest was de-voted to the sanctification of the clergy and, as he himself put down in writing, to the defence of the faith and the spread of charity among Catholics; the one and the other he hoped to propagate in the entire world so that shortly there would be but one fold and one shepherd. He was the apostle of that manifold liturgical celebra-tion which still remains as an outstanding memorial to his far-sighted apostolic piety; this is the celebration of the Epiphany octave which is held each year in the Church of Sant'Andrea della Valle and which serves as a vigorous call for the development of missionary aware-ness in the Christian world and for prayer for the unity of the Church among all the peoples of the world. 4- 4- Spiritual Directors VOLUME 22~ 1963 26] Beloved, here for you to see are the words and example by which under the tutelage and impulsion of grace you can carry out the great work of fashioning the hearts of future priests according to the Heart of Christ. We have a serene assurance that Christ our Highpriest will make Our words to you fruitful. As a pledge of heavenly favors, We give to you and to all the. seminari-ans entrusted to your care Our apostolic blessing. ÷ ÷ ÷ John XXIII REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 262 L. LEGRAND, M.E.P. The Spiritual Value Of Virginity According to St. Paul In his pleax for virginity in Chapter Seven of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, St. Paul insists on the greater spiritual freedom it gives: I would have you free from care. Now the unmarried man cares for the things of the Lord; his aim is to please the Lord. But the married man cares for the worldly things; his aim is to please his wife and he is divided. And the unmarried woman or the virgin cares for the things of the Lord; her aim is to be holy both in body and in spiri.t. But the married woman cares for the worldly things; her a~m ~s to please her husband (1 Cor 7:32-34). Detachment from the world, complete self-surrender to the Lord, sanctity of life: those are the reasons for which Paul prefers virginity to married life. We have studied elsewhere the "holiness" of virginity.2 It remains now to consider the other two causes which, in the eyes of Paul, make for the superiority of continence. Freedom from the World The language of the Apostle seems plain enough: celi-bacy is good becauge it is care free. The celibate is ame-rimnos, literally "careless." It goes without saying that this "carelessness" is not that of the inveterate bachelor for whom celibacy means only selfishness, attachment to comfort, privacy, and his idiosyncracies, aloofness, and dryness of heart. Paul makes it clear that what he extols is dedicated celibacy. Worldly worries are set aside so as 1 This article is reprinted with permission from Indian Ecclesiasti-cal Studies, v. 1 (1962), pp. 175-95. ~ See L. Legrand, "The Sacrificial Value of Virginity," Scripture, v. 14 (1962), pp. 67-75. 4- 4- 4- L. Legrand, M.E.P., is a faculty member of St. Peter's Seminary; Bangalore 12, In-dia. VOLUME 22, 196~ 263 4. 4. 4" L. Legrand, M.E.P . REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS to allow a singleness of purpose in the spiritual life which would be impossible in marriage. But is that explanation as satisfactory as it seems? Robertson and Plummer see a striking parallel to Paul's exhortation to virginity in saying of Epictetus: Is it not fit that the philosopher should without any dis-traction be employed only on the ministration of God, not tied down to the common duties of mankind, nor entangled in the ordinary relations of life;~ This parallel raises a problem. I1 the parallelism of thought is real, is it not compromising for Paul? Does not make of the Apostle, at least in this instance, a Stoic philosopher rather than a disciple of Jesus; and of celi-bacy an inheritance of Hellenism rather than a genuine element of Christianity? Towards the end of the Old Testament and the begin-ning of the Christian era, the main trends of Hellenistic thought, deeply marked by Platonic influence, saw an opposition between matter and spirit, between the pres-ent temporal condition and .the ideal world to which be-longed God and the eternal reality of things. The body was considered to be a jail which man had to leave to soar through knowledge and contemplation into the se-rene sphere of immutable eternity. An ideal of continent life would have been in the logic of that system. Actually it did not develop in Hellenism as it did, on almost simi-lar premises, in the Hindu systems of the Ashrams and in Buddhist monasticism.4 In fact, the full consequences of the Greek dualism were drawn only by such Christi;tn heretics as the Gnostics, Encratites, Donatists, Cathari, Albigenses, and the like. They condemned marriage as unclean and made of celibacy the necessary condition for salvation. But they were heretics. The Church never con-demned matrimony. Following the biblical view of the world, Christian thought cannot accept the Hellenistic dualism. The material world is a creation of God; hence it is good and so is the human body with all its functions. The order "to grow and multiply" was given by the Crea-tor Himself (Gn 1:28), and in the New Convenant mar-riage has been even raised to the dignity of a sacrarnent (Eph 5:25-32). St. Paul does not' condemn marriage in Chapter Seven SDissertations 3, 22, quoted in A. Robertson and A. Plummer, Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians (Edinburgh: Clark, 1911), p. 158. 'Yet there were a few Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophers to consider celibacy as a higher state of life. See Epictetus, Disserta. tions 3, 22; 3, 26, 62. See also A. Oepke, "'Gun~," Theologische.; W6r. terbuch zum Neuen Testament, v. 1 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1933), p. 779. But those views never resulted in a wide movement, creating special institutions as was .the case in India. of the First Epistle to the Corinthians; yet is he not in-fluenced by Hellenistic thought when advocating vir-ginity? What does he mean by the "freedom from the worldly cares" which virginity makes possible? Is it not the indifference and the disengagement from the material world which the philosophers, advocated?. Isqt not closer to the Stoic ataraxia or Neoplatonic ekstasis than to the Christian agape? Before attributing to Hellenistic infiltrations the argu-ments of Paul in the seventh chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, one should observe that such an ex-planation runs counter to the general patterns of Paul's thought and life. Paul did not consider salvation and re-ligious life as an escape from concrete realities. He has experienced ecstasy, but like all the genuine Christian mystics, he was more disturbed by it than proud of it.5 If he mentions his raptures, it is only to prove that he has a personal knowledge of what the boisterous charismatic Corinthians used to boast of. But himself, he would not glory in such things; his only pride is in his share in the humiliations of the cross (2 Cor 12:1-10). Ecstasy and deliverance from the material world were not Paul's ideal. His soul took easily to contemplation; yet he did not make of disengaged contemplation his su-preme goal. His life was surely not carefree in the sense that he had nothing to do but to meditate on the unseen realities, for was he not the missionary who had to carry "the daily burden, the worry for all the churches" besides "the labors, exertions, and persecutions" supported in carrying out his apostolate (2 Cot 11:23-27)? When he gave himself as an example of celibate life ("I would like that all of you should be like me" [1 Cor 7:7]), he did not set up a model of carelessness: "Who is weak and I am not weak? Who is scandalized and I am not on fire?" (2 Cor 11:29). Those were not the words or the attitude of a man indifferent to daily realities, lost in a nirvana of radi-cal abstraction. It is therefore a priori unlikely that the freedom from care which St. Paul saw in virginity had anything to do with the philosophical detachment from the material world. He does consider married life entangled in the world to be opposed to celibacy which is concerned only with the Lord. But does that contrast correspond to the Greek opposition of matter and spirit, kyl~ and nous? The answer must be negative. The biblical antithesis between the world (or the flesh) and God (or the Spirit) cannot be reduced to the philosophical dualism of matter and spirit. In the Bible the opposition of the world to s See C. Baumgartner, "Extase," in Dictionnaire de spiritualitd, v. 4 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1961), col. 2187-89. 4- 4- 4- Virginity VOLUME 22~ 1963 265 4. 4. 4. /. M.~.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 266 God is not ontological but moral: the world is not es-tranged from God by essence but by choice. Between the world and God there stands not a contradiction but a re-volt. Such is the clear teaching of the first chapters of Genesis. It is true that on account of man's sin, the whole order of the cosmos has been shaken: suffering and death have entered the world in the wake of sin. Yet though deeply marked by the curse of sin, the cosmos is not evil in itself; the trouble is in the heart of men, not in things.6 For centuries the prophets strove for the restoration of the original order through conversion; if only man would repent, he would recover "life" which is the harmony and peace of the original divine plan. When man proved too stubborn, the prophets understood that he was doomed. Sin was too deeply engrained in the world; death had to do its work; the present world with all its institu-tions had to be carried away. Yet since God is a God of mercy, hope remained. But it .turned into the hope of a new creation, of a salvation beyond death (Is 51:6; 65:17- 20; 66:22; Ez 37:1-14). It is this expectation of a world to come that the New Testament inherited. But that "world to come" or rather "the age to come," according to the exact meaning of the Hebrew phrase, is not the ethereal sphere of "ideas." Salvation does not consist in escaping the world but in passing from one world to another, from "this age" ruined by sin and enslaved by the "Powers" (Gal 4:3), to the "age to come" animated by the power of God's Spirit and irradiated with the divine glory. The aim of life is not "ecstasy" that would snatch man out of his body and above matter and time; it is an Exodus that takes him, body and soul, above the present condition and the corruption of sin. The image of the Exodus was frequent in the later prophets (Is 41:17-19; 43:19-20; 52:11-12) and passed to the New Testament (1 Cor 10:1- 11; Heb 2:1-4; 3:1-3; Apoc 15:1-5). Christian life is a pilgrimage (1 Pet 2:11). The Christian is a refugee run-ning from a doomed city to a place of shelter. Yet what he flees is not the flow of time but the contagion of sin and his refuge is not his spiritual self but God's kingdom. These were also Paul's views and they constitute the background of his apology for virginity. He does not op-pose marriage and continence as matter and spirit, good and evil. What he does contrast is the age to come and the present age. Virginity embodies the spirit of the king-dom; 7 marriage is rather an institution of this worhl. As Paul sees it in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, a,,For evil comes not out of the earth, nor does distress spring out of the g~ound. But man himself begets misery as sparks fly up-wards" (Jb 5:6-7). ~ See L. Legrand, "The Prophetical Meaning of Celibacy," REwEw voa l~tzc*ous, v. 20 (1961), pp. $$0-46. matrimony belongs to the "things of this world." It is not bad indeed but it is intimately connected with the present transient order. It shares in the inconsistency of this or-der; and like it, it is "subject to vanity," "enslaved to cor-ruption" that marks everything belonging to the present era (P, om 8:20-21). The world and its spirit are deeply ingrained in marriage; they enter married life through the very necessity for husband and wife "to please" each other (1 Cor 7:33-34). The verb "to please" in this context has a very strong meaning,s and Paul's thought cannot be properly grasped unless this meaning is recognized. For the modern reader, the words "to please one's husband and wife" evoke merely the sentimental show of affection and possibly of coquetry which expresses and fosters conjugal love. Con-sequently, when the text goes on to say that the married man "is divided" (v. 33), we think spontaneously of a heart divided in its affections in the modern romantic sense of the term. The difficulty for the married man would be that two different objects, Christ and his wife, appeal to his heart and that therefore he would be in the awkward position of being unable to give his love fully to either. This would be a very shallow explanation that hardly does justice to the views of the Apostle. After all, the love of God is not a matter of sensitivity; it belongs to a higher level and does not conflict with human natural feelings. God does not stand as a rival of His creatures if they do not try to usurp His place. The danger in wed-lock does not arise from a normal sentimental attachment to the partner; it lies elsewhere. The real meaning of the verb "to please" points in another direction. In a world which had little concern for chivalry and romanticism,0 more than coquetry and a show of affection were required "to please." The wife "pleased" her husband by giving him the children, he wanted (and birth control was not unknown in the Greco-P, oman antiquity10) and by con-a The Greek verb aresk6 may be very strong. Its connotations are not merely sentimental. In 1 Cor 10:13 Paul's desire "to please everybody" does not mean that he aims at popularity or that he avoids hurting the feelings of others. It expresses Paul's readiness to oblige, almost to serve all. It means about the same as "being all to all" (1 Cor 9:22). See W. Foerster, Theologisches W6rterbuch zum Neuen Testament, v. 1 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1933), p. 455. ~ See J. Carcopino, Daily Li]e in ~lncient Rome (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956), pp. 94-5; W. J. Woodhouse, "Marriage," Encyclo. pedia o[ Religion and Ethics, v. 8 (Edinburgh: Clark, 1915), p. 444. 10 See A. E. Crawley, "Foeticide," Encyclopedia o] Religion and Ethics, v. 6 (1914), pp. 55-6. Child exposure also was not uncommon. Polybius attributed the decline of Greece° to the oliganthropia caused by those practices: "In our own times the whole of Hellas has been afflicted with a low birth rate or, in other words, with de-population, through which the states have been emptied of inhabi-tants with an accompanying fall of productivity, and this in spite of + + + Virginity VOLUME 22~ 1963 267 ducting the household efficiently (with the concessions to the ways of the world which business implied),xl For the husband it was a matter of securing [or his wife wealth, comfort, and social consideration. "Pleasing" each other covered all the aspects of the conjugal life, everything that made a marriage successful. It is easy to understand that such worldly success implied all sorts of compromises with the spirit of the world. Through the desire "to please," "the worries of the world" (v. 33) entered mar-ried life, those worries which, according to the parable, combined with wealth and pleasures, choke the growth of God's word (see Lk 8:14). If St. Paul is reticent with regard to marriage, it is not because it distracts the heart but because it tends to shoot deep roots into the present age of sin. Those roots are so deep that it is very difficult to cut oneself free, to keep in wedlock the soul of a pilgrim and to live the Exodus. Conjugal affection is not contradictorily opposed to Chris-tian requirements; but great is the danger of remaining bogged down in the present condition of considering 4- 4- 4" L. Legrand, M.E.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 268 the fact that we have not suffered from any continuous wars or epidemics . The people of Hellas had entered upon the false path of ostentation, avarice, and laziness and were therefore becoming unwilling to marry, or if they did marry, to bring up the children born to them; the majority were only willing to bring up at most one or two, in order to leave them wealthy and to spoil them in their childhood; and in consequence of all this the evil had been rapidly spreading. Where there are families of one or two children, of whom war claims one and disease the other for its victim, it is an evident and inevitable consequence that households should be left desolate and that states, precisely like beehives, should gradually lose their reserves and sink into impotence" (History 36, 7 as given in A. J. Toynbee, Greek Civilization and Character [New York: New American Library, 1954], p. 73). Modem authors have confirmed the judgment of the old historian: "The misery of a few districts in the third and second centuries B.C. would not suffice to explain the excesses of malthusianism; indeed it had always been a part of Greek manners; but at that time it took frightening proportions. Though we should be cautious in giving a general value to a few figures known only through epigraphy, they are not without sig-nificance. At Miletus, for seventy-nine families which received the citizenship between 228 .and 200, we find only one hundred forty-six children, out of which only twenty-eight were gifts; among those seventy-nine families, thirty-one have two children and thirty-two only one. In the course of the third century at Eretria, one out of twelve families and at Pharsalus one out of seven has more than a son; out of six hundred families known through the inscriptions of Delphi, six only have two girls. Seeing that, we cannot doubt the accuracy of the famous statement of Poseidippos: 'Even a rich man always exposes a daughter'" (R. Cohen, La Grdce et l'helldnisation du monde antique [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948], p. ~80). n See the rather blunt statement of the Pseudo-Demo:;thenes (59, 122): "We have heterae for our pleasure, concubines for the daily care of the body, and wives to beget legitimate children and to have somebody who can be trusted with the care of the household." pleasure, family welfare, and honor as 'the absolute goal, of letting matrimony degenerate into a mere worldly af-fair. What one would attempt if one were alone, one dare not do for the sake of the other so that, actually, through the other party it is the world and its spirit which enter the family. Conjugal harmony is: kept at the c0st of con-descensions to the weakness found or supposed to exist in the other. It is harder still in wedlock than in single life to behave already now as a citizen of heaven, to follow the ideal of the beatitudes, to be poor and meek, to bear persecutions happily, to accept being famished and down-trodden. How rare the spiritual harmony that enables a whole household to meet the challenge of the kingdom joyfullyl As Bacon said, "he that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune" and "children sweeten labors but they make misfortunes more bitter.''12 It may be said that this picture of matrimony is one-sided, that Christian matrimony is not only "a thing of this world." It has also a reference to the world to come by its sacramental value. This is true and the point will be considered later.13 It is clear that to give a complete and balanced theological appraisal of matrimony, Paul should have said that it is in the measure in which it is not transformed by the di-vine agap~ that conjugal love divides the soul. He should have explained that for husband and wife the desire to please each other is wrong only if and as far as they rep-resent for each other not Christ but the world with its devious judgments and seductions. But in the seventh chapter of First Corinthians Paul does not intend to give a full theology of marriage. Either because he was still to appreciate fully the positive Chris-tian value of matrimony14 or simply because--as he often does--he simplifies his thought to express it more clearly, he considers only the "worldly" aspect of married life. This worldly aspect does exist. For all its sacramental value, marriage has one side turned towards the present age. It must have that worldly side to be a sacrament at all, to be a sign. And there is always a risk that it is only this aspect that will be seen by men and that they will set their heart on the sign instead of reaching out to the signified. Sacramental realities can also be veils. Thus ~ Quoted in A. Robertson and A. Plummer,°First Corinthians, p. 154. 13See the second half of the present article. l~This is the view of C. H. Dodd in New Testament Studies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953), pp. 113-17. The opposite stand is taken by O. Cullmann, The Early Church (London: SCM Press, 1956), p. 173; and by X. Leon-Dufour, "Mariage et con-tinence selon S. Paul," .4 la rencontre de Dieu: Memorial .41bert Gdlin (Le Puy: Mappus, 1961), pp. 319-28. 4. 4. 4. Virginity VOLUME 22~ 1963 269 4. 4. L. Legrand, M.E.P . REVIEW I:OR REI.I~IOUS 270 when receiving manna in the desert or the miraculous loaves of Jesus, the Jews considered only "the food that perisheth" (Jn 6:27) and dreamt of an earthly kingdom with an unlimited and toilless supply of bread, They failed to perceive in the bread the power of God's word feeding them unto the "life of the ages to come" (Jn 6:26- 40). Thus, as experience proves, married people are easily tempted to set their heart upon the present tenor of marriage and lose sight of its sacramental dimension. In First Corinthians, Chapter Seven, Paul referred to that common experience which had taught the Corinthians that married life is not easily a clear and limpid reflec-tion of the divine agape. Concretely, the necessity for husband and wife "to please" each other often entails compromises with the world; for, as St. Paul and the Corinthians knew well, it is hardly possible "to please" both man and Christ (Gal 1:I0). Hence appears the significance of the contrast Paul saw between marriage and virginity. Marriage is rooted in this world. Virginity belongs to the age to come. Marriage is not condemned. It does not embody the evil of this world; it can be redeemed and transfigured. Yet it is discouraged. This is not because it multiplies earthly obligations and petty worries restricting the men-tal freedom to meditate and contemplate. Neither is because it proposes objects of affection other than Christ. It is not wife and children which disturb men but their worldly--real or supposed--requirements. The danger of matrimony is that by the whole force of circumstances which surround it it tends to remain a "thing of this age" and to enfold men in the spirit of this world. By contrast, virginity is .the ideal condition of the pil-grim who wants to progress swiftly and unencumbered across the desert. Lightly shod and with loins girt, he goes on his Exodus; he leaves the world behind and strives after the world to come. He is undivided. This does not mean that his heart has nobody to beat for but Christ. On the contrary, his love for Christ will have to take on the dimensions of the whole Body of Christ and will have to encompass the world. It means that no human love, no necessity "to please" man, will oblige him to side with the world and place him in the stretched condition of one who belongs to both sides and is torn between two loyalties, two spirits, and two standards. He is free; he has no cares, at least no cares pertaining to this world. He does not know concerns which settled family life is almost bound to cause, concerns for wealth, comforts, safety, fame. He has not the problem of secur-ing welfare and tranquillity for his dear ones in a shaken world that runs to its ruin. The Christian celibate has none of these worries. This again does not mean that he has no cares at all and that he has nothing else to do than to devote himself to intellectual or ascetical pursuit. He has his cares, the "cares for the things of the Lord" (vv. 32, ~4). "The things of the Lord" which should l~'d the virgin's only concern are not the suprasensible ideas reached by contemplation. The "Lord" in St. Paul is the risen Christ, endowed with power a~d glory after His Resurrec-tion. 1~ "The things of the Lord" are therefore the whole order which has the risen Christ as its center, the new creation, the kingdom, and, here on earth, the Church.I° As in the case of the Apostle himself, the concern only for "the things of the Lord" will not mean ataraxia, in-difference. The Christian celibate will not be spared the heavy world and the burning preoccupations of his serv-ices to the Lord. But they will be only the outward mani-festation of his devotion to his Master (see 1 Cor 9:19). Such is the freedom of the virgin. It is not the indiffer-ence which is reflected, for instance, on the serene fea-tures of the gods of Phidias, with their clear eyes that ignore the turmoil of the world to rest on the harmony of the changeless ideas. We could rather feature the Christian dedicated to virginity as the Moses of Michel-angelo (without the gigantism which is the artist's own); there is no indifference in him; he looks firmly at the children of Israel who surround him and his eyes reflect the love of God for the chosen people but also the divine disappointment and wrath. Beyond them, he sees the Holy Land-or the mountain--where he must lead them. His muscular body strains towards it; his face glows with the glory that dawns upon it. Union with Christ The typology of the Exodus does not cover entirely the reality of Christian life. At the same time as it is an ~5,,This designation expresses as does no other the thought that Christ is exalted to God's right hand, glorified and now intercedes for us before the Father" (O. Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament [London: SCM Press, 1959], p. 195). See also the several studies of L. Cerfaux gathered in Recueil Lucien Cerfaux (Gem-bloux: Duculot, 1954), v. !, pp. :~-188. A synthesis may be found in Cerfaux's Christ in the Theology of St. Paul (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1958), pp. 461-79. 1o The Vulgate and the Latin fathers have."idealized" the opposi-tion between marriage and virginity by reading in v. 32 "quornodo placeat Deo" (instead of KyriO of the Greek text) and probably understanding similarly in v. 34 Domini of God instead of Christ (as Knox has done in his translation). By doing this, they bring the contrast closer to Platonic thought. For Paul, the contrast is not directly between the world and God, creatures and Creator, but be-tween the world and the "things of Christ," that is the present world and the new creation which Christ contains in Himself. ÷ ÷ ÷ girginity VOLUME 22, 1963 4. L. Legrand, M.E.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Exodus, Christian life is also life in the Land of Promise. We are still in the desert; yet the glory of the new Jeru-salem dawns already upon us. We are still in the flesh and in the world; yet we live already in Spirit and are the citizens of heaven (Phil 3:20). Correspondingly, virginity does not belong only to the desert but also to the new Jerusalem. It does not show only the tenseness of the pilgrim who wants to be unim-peded in his progression; it marks also the joy of the ar-rival when the soul has found at last what it longed for. Celibacy is not only total detachment from "the things that are upon the earth"; it is also total communion in "the things that are above"; it is life, "hidden with Christ in God" (Col 3:1-8). Free from the world, the celibate ties himself to Christ with bonds of love. Having no wife or husband "to please," the celibate is at liberty to dedi-cate all his care "to please the Lord" (1 Cor 7:82). Here also, when St. Paul says that the aim of the virgin is "to please the Lord," we should beware of giving the phrase merely sentimental significance. "To please the Lord" does not mean simply to comfort and console the Heart of Jesus. In First Corinthians "to please the Lord" is set in parallelism with "to please his wife." This paral-lelism invites us to give the same strong meaning in both cases. In the context of matrimony, the verb "to please!' expressed the interdependence and mutual belonging husband and wife. When applied to the celibate, it must describe the loving enslavement to Christ which gives continence its value. The virgin belongs to Christ as the wife belongs to her husband. To please her husband, the wife must share entirely in his views and wishes. To please the Lord, analogically, the virgin must be totally dedi-cated to Him and take His stand in everything. The theme of the spiritual marriage lies in the background. The construction of the whole passage points 'to that theme: by balancing in parallelism virginal life and con-jugal union, Paul suggests that to some extent Christ is to the virgin what the husband is to the wife.lz ~ See X. Leon-Dufour, "Mariage et continence," pp. ~22-24. In a penetrating literary analysis of 1 Cor 7, the author shows that the very construction of the chapter expresses the mutual belonging of virginity and matrimony. The chapter is built on a scheme A-B-A' (two corresponding parts divided by a digression), quite common in Paul's epistles. Part A (vv. 1-16) is addressed to married people and part A' (vv. 25-40) to the unmarried. Now we notice that in both parts the progression of the thought is disturbed by considerations belonging to the antithetic section: A speaks already about virginity (vv. 6-7) and A' cannot but evoke matrimony "as if the continence to which Paul invites his flock could be given its full significance only in relation with married life" (p. 323). Thus "the very literary and psychological trend of the chapter shows marriage and conti-nence as two inseparable realities contrasting with and yet complet-ing each other" (p. 324). The theme of the spiritual marriage figures explicitly and is connected with virginity in Second Corinthians 11:2: I am jealous for you with a divine jealousy. Fo~ I betrothed you to one husband that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. This verse is a short allegory comparing the Corinthi-ans to a betrothed girl taken to the bridegroom by her father or by the mesit~s, the go-between who arranged the marriage. The image derives from the Old Testament where Israel is frequently called the bride of Yahweh (see Hos 2:21-22; J1 1:8; Is 54:5-6; 62:5; Jer 3:1; Ez 16:6- 43). Admittedly this text does not refer directly to the question of virginity. As in the Old Testament, the bride is not an individual but a community, here the church of Corinth. Moreover, the marriage it alludes to will be celebrated only at the Parousia; for the time being, the Church is only "betrothed." In that context "virginity is nothing else than a metaphor expressing undivided dedi-cation to Christ.''is Yet it is not insignificant that Paul uses the comparison of a "chaste virgin" to describe the union of the Church with Christ. It implies that virginal life is a living likeness of that union. What was a mere metaphor in the Old Testament takes flesh and blood in the person of the virgin. She embodies fully the mutual belonging of Christ and the Church. The "marriage feast" of the Parousia is anticipated in her life. She is given to live in all its integrity the undivided attachment of the Church for her Head. In her shines the agap~ which joins the bride to the Bridegroom and makes them "one body." Virginity is agape; it has all the intensity of love; it is not primarily disengagement and withdrawal. It is unqualified dedication to the "one husband" Christ. It shows forth the exclusiveness of that unique attach-ment. As St. Paul says, using the language of human pas-sion, it is a "jealousy," a love impatient of any alien al-legiance. Christian virginity is a spiritual marriage with Christ. It is true that Paul himself did not use the phrase. Neither did Luke when explaining the relationship of the Virgin Mary with the Holy Spirit in the Gospel of Infancy. The reason is probably that Paul and Luke avoided sponta-neously words which, in the world they lived in, were too heavily loaded with pagan connotations. The hieros gamos, the sacred union of a god with a woman had been a common feature of mythology from Sumerian times on-wards and had its ritual representation in the cult and in the mysteries. In the frame of nature worship or of a ~sSee G. Delling, Theologisches W6rterbuch zum Neuen Testa-ment, v. 5 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1954), p. 835. ÷ ÷ ÷ VirginRy ÷ ÷ L. Legrand, M.E.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 274 pantheistic religion, it symbolized the fecundity of na-ture. There is obviously no relation between the pagan fertility cult and the Christian ideal of continence fol-lowed by Mary and tl:te virgins. And it is understandable that Paul and Luke refrained from using the phrase "spiritual or divine marriage," since it could too easily be understood as another case of hieros garnos. That their prudence was justified is proved by the wild conclusions which the comparative school of exegesis, from the times of Celsus till our days, has drawn from the discreet allu-sions they made to the Biblical theme of God's alliance with Israel. Yet it is the allegory of marriage, stripped of any asso-ciation with nature worship, which accounts best for the Pauline and Christian doctrine of virginity. The doctrine of virginity branches of[ from the doctrine of matrimony. We must, therefore, see what marriage meant for Paul to understand what "spiritual marriage" might have meant for him if he had used the words, what he had actually in mind when he wrote of the "chaste virgin presented to the one husband Christ." It is in Ephesians 5:25-32 that the Apostle explains most fully the Christian significance of matrimony. It can be said that if the sev-enth chapter of First Corinthians pictured wedlock as it is in fact, Ephesians 5:25-32 shows it in all its ideal sacra-mental beauty. But the "lofty sacrament" opens on to the prospect of virginity. In Ephesians 5:25-32 as in Second Corinthians II:2, the Church is compared to the bride taken to the bride-groom for the nuptial celebration: Husbands, love your wife as Christ loved the Church: for her, he gave himself up, sanctifying her, cleasing her by water aild word, so that he might present the Church to himself all glori-ous, with no stain or wrinkle or anything of the sort but holy and without blemish. Thus men should love their wives. In this text there is no go-between. Christ Himself prepares His bride and there is a stress on the point that she was not pure but was made so by the cleansing love of the divine Spouse. That love which cleanses through the laver of baptism springs forth from the cross; the words "savior" and "he gave himself up" show the sacrificial background of Paul's thought. The cross was already the marriage function which Second Corinthians 11:2 had seen in the frame of the Parousia. It is on Calvary that the bride, cleansed by the love of her Spouse, W:lS em-braced by Him to become "one body" with Him. The greatness of Christian matrimony derives from its relation to the union of Christ with the Church which was realized on the cross. Conjugal love, that mysterious power which tears man and woman away from their fam-ily to draw them together (v. 31) was a sign, a "mystery." It had a hidden significance. In a secret way, it prefigured the love, the agap~ that seals together Christ and the Church and makes them one body (v. 32). The Old Testa-ment did not know this mysterious orientation of the conjugal union but now the mystery is revealed. If placed under the influence of 'the,sacrifice of Christ', that is, if it is lived in the spirit of unselfishness and dedication which breathed in the sacrifice of Christ, conjugal love sym-bolizes the bond of charity which unites the Church with her Head and contains the life flowing through their joint Body (vv. 23, 30). Penetrated with the spirit of Christ, matrimony enshrines the divine agape; it con-tinues the sacrifice of Calvary and its efficacy. By that sacramental efficacy and in the line of that symbolism, each party represents, for the other, Christ and His re-quirements of self-denying charity: husbands love their wives as Christ loved the Church and wives obey their husbands with the same joyful abandon which animates the Church (vv. 33, 22-25). In the measure in which con-jugal affection accepts to turn into charity, wedlock is holy and "has a relevance to Christ and the Church" (v. 32); indeed, it is a part of their mysterious union. Now, "lofty" as it may be, the "mystery" of Christian matrimony remains a sign, imperfect and inadequate as any sign. After all, in Ephesians 5:25-32 it. is not said that Christ loved the Church as a husband loves his wife, but rather that husbands should love like Christ: Con-jugal love does not explain the union of Christ for'the Church; on the contrary, this union reveals the latent significance of marriage. The agap~ of Christ is set as the ideal norm of human love: it is the reality whereas matri-mony is only its sacrament. Though the "mystery" it contained has been revealed, matrimony keeps its existence and its consistency of sign, as if the veil had not been removed but only pierced b~ a powerful light. The light shines through, the veil be-comes the medium of communication of the light; but it is still there; and, transparent as it may be, it may still absorb some of the light. Containing a significance and an efficacy pertaining to the world to come, matrimony keeps its earthly solidity and persists in its "this-worldly" existence. At the same time as it announces the eschato-logical marriage feast of the Lamb, it remains union in a flesh not yet transfigured by the Spirit.19 :~The point can be expressed technically in the theological lan-guage which distinguishes in the sacraments between the sacra. mentum tantum, the res tantum, and the reset sacramentum. In matrimony, the res is the divine agap~ sealing the unity of the Mys-tical Body as it seals Me conjugal cell. The sacramentum tantum is the conjugal union. Christian marriage is reset sacramentum: there is intercompenetration of the symbol and of the spiritual reality. Christian virginity on the contrary is the res tantum of matrimony. 4- 4- Virginity VOLUME 22, 1963 275 4. 4. 4. L. Legrand, M.E.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS We saw that it is that "worldly" aspect of matrimony which is responsible for its spiritual opacity.2° The spirit-ual reality may be absorbed in the worldly thickness of the "sign" and even in the most favorable cases when it is the most transparent, matrimony remains a sign, a re-flection, not the light itself. This sacramental value of matrimony is at the same time its greatness and imper-fection. The "mystery" is at once revealed through the screen, yet hidden in its worldly folds. Or, to take an image which is Paul's, it reflects the agap~ of the cross, but only in the cloudy and confused way of the old mir-rors of polished metal (see I Cor 13:12). Because it is a closer participation in the sacrifice of the cross, virginity represents better the agap~ which ani-mated it. It not only reflects that love, it embodies it. Virginity is not a sacrament. It does not set the screen of any sign between Christ and man. In it, the divine love is not refracted through the mediation of any "worldly" feeling. There is nobody who stands for Christ to repre-sent Him; the contact is direct between Christ and the bride. Matrimony is turned towards the agap~ of the sacrificed Christ as towards its fulfillment; virginity com-munes directly in that agap& The agap~ lived in matri-mony was mediated charity; virginity is agap~ reaching directly its object. In the words of the Roman liturgy: While no prohibition lessens the dignity of marriage and while the nuptial blessing resting on matrimony is safeguarded, nevertheless there will be nobler souls who, spurning the carnal union entered into by man and wife, strive after the mystery it signifies ([astidirent connubiura, concupiscerent sacramentura). Without imitating what takes place in matrimony., they devote their entire love to the mystery signified by marriage (nec imi-tarentur quod nuptiis agitur, sed diligerent quod nuptiis pr~,e-notatur).~ 1 Virginity is the plentitude of agapO; it shows forth the reality that matrimony contains only in a veiled way. It is the full revelation of the "mystery" still half hidden in sacramental marriage.22 Like the love of the Spouse in the Canticle, the agapd of the celibate is a blazing fire, a flame of Yahweh (see Cant 8:6).23 This fire of love makes of virginal life a holo- ~o See the first part of the present article. .-a Preface of the Consecration of Virgins in the Roman Pontifical. We fellow the translation given in L. Munster, Christ in His Conse-crated Virgins (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1957), pp. 131-2. ="To be living images of the perfect integrity which forms the bond of union between the Church and her divine Bridegroom is assuredly the supreme glory o~ the virgin" (Plus XII, Sacra Vir-ginitas). = We follow for this text the translation of A. Robert, L~ Can-tique des cantiqu~s (Paris: Cerf, 1951), p. 58. caust in which the "flesh" is burnt up and with it any sign, any reality of the present world. Virginity is love impatient of the mediation of any symbols. In that re-spect too, it is analogous to the sacrifice of the cross: the death on the cross was a sacrifice without rites because in its utter despoliation all the.symbolical realities of the world came to an end; there remained only the naked corpse on the bare wood in a total holocaust of anything belonging to this world. Virginity too is a festivity with-out rites, a marriage feast celebrated without any exter-nal rejoicings because, as the cross and in it, this marriage is consummated and consumed in a holocaust of self-denying love that raises it above this world. It is in that sense that virginity is a spiritual marriage. It is a marriage: in the phrase "spiritual matrimony," the adjective does not obliterate the noun. Virginity is a thing of love, total communion to the divine agap~ which is the essence of the life of Christ and of life in Christ. That marriage is spiritual. Spiritual does not mean metaphorical. The spiritual union of Christ with the vir-gin is not a vague likeness of the conjugal union. It is rather the opposite; virginity gives the true picture of real love in all its intensity and purity. Neither is it spiritual in the Platonic sense of the term. It does not correspond to a chimerical dream of abolition of the flesh. In virginity the flesh is accepted as it was in the Incarnation. But it is sanctified, transformed as the flesh of Jesus was in His glorification. The glorification does not delete the Incarnation; it fulfills it. Virginity is no negation of the flesh but its consecration. The virginal union with Christ is spiritual in the bib-lical sense of the term. It shows man's transformation by the power of the Spirit. The Spirit, the divine force that animates the new creation, takes possession of man's body and soul, freeing them from "the shackles of corruption" to give them "the glorious liberty of the children of God." And the transforming force which the Spirit implants in the virgin is the charity of God (Rom 5:5), the flame of love which, coming from God, consumes the flesh of the virgin and transmutes it into the likeness of the "spiritual flesh" of the risen Christ (1 Cot 15:45-49). The New Testament does not explicitly call virginity a spiritual marriage. Yet its doctrine of marriage and its exhortations to virginity converge towards that theme because both states of life refer to the mysterious con-nubial union of Christ and the Church which marriage prefigures and virginity embodies. Linked by that com-mon relation to the mystery of Christ, virginity and matri-mony are intimately connected. Matrimony moves to- + + + Virginity VOLUME 22, 1963 4. 4. 4. L. Legrand, M .E.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS wards a virginal type of love as towards its fulfillment, and virginity is nothing but the full realization of that which is prefigured in marriage. The best exposition of the spiritual meaning of Chris-tian virginity would be, therefore, a Christian transposi-tion of the Canticle of Canticles, the nuptial song of the Old Testament.~4 The liturgy, the fathers of the Church, and the mystics have understood it spontaneously and have repeatedly made of the Canticle the epithalamium of the Christian life dedicated to the Lord. From Origen's homilies on the Canticle to the com-mentary of St. Bernard and the Spiritual Canticle of St. John of the Cross, it would be easy to compose a mag-nificent anthology in which the best of Christian elo-quence and lyricism would figure. As a sample of what this anthology would contain, it is difficult to resist the temptation of quoting at least extracts of the hymn with which Methodius concludes his Symposium on Chastity. The Ten Virgins who have taken part in the symposium conclude their discussion with the triumphal chorus: For Thee, I keep myself chaste, and with a lighted torch in hand, 0 my Spouse, I come to meet Thee. And the stanzas follow each other, composed by Thecla, the most eloquent among them: From above, O virgins, there came the sound of a voice that raises the dead. It says: Hasten to meet the Bridegroom in white robes and with lamp in hand. Turn to the East. Arise lest the King should precede you at the gates. [Chorus:] For Thee, I keep myself .'. For Thee, O King, spurning a rich home and the embrace of mortals, I came in spotless robes, to enter with Thee within tile bridal chambers. [Chorus:] For Thee, I keep myself. In my eagerness for Thy grace, O Lord, I forget my own country. I forget the dances of my companions, the desire even of mother and kindred, for Thou, 0 Christ, art all things to me. [Chorus:] For Thee, I keep myself. 0 blessed bride of God, thy couch do we adorn with hymns. And we praise thee, O Church, immaculate virgin, pure like snow, wise, undefiled, lovely. [Chorus:] For Thee, I keep myself. Open thy gates, O resplendent queen, and take us too within the bridal room. O spotless and triumphant bride, breathing ~ Such transposition is not too distant from the literal sense if it is accepted that in its literal sense the Canticle is an allegory of the convenant relationship of Yahweh with Israel. See A. Robert, Le Cantique, pp. 7-23; also A. Feuillet, Le Cantique des cantiques (Paris: Cerf, 1953). beauty, behold we stand round Christ, clad like Him, singing thy nuptials, O happy maiden.~ The canticle of Methodius weaves a web of biblical themes. The bride of the Canticle and of Psalm 45 has joined the Bridegroom of the parable (Mr 27:.!-13). The voice that arouses the Ten~Vii-gihs is tha(.~vhich had called Abraham and invited him to leave "home and kindred" for the first Exodus to Canaan (Gn 12:1). It is also the voice that raised Christ from the dead. The nup-tial procession is at the same time an Exodus and an As-cension that takes the Church and the virgins to the bridal chamber of the King. There is more in that text than fanciful allegory; the profusion of biblical allusions shows a thought deeply rooted in biblical ground. The hymn echoes Paul's call to virginity, Though amplified, the exhortation of the Apostle is rendered faithfully. The attitude and the bliss of the Ten Virgins corresponds exactly to the ideal proposed by Paul to the Corinthians of a life "free from worldly worries" to be spent "waiting upon the Lord without distraction" (1 Cot 7:35). ~Patrologia Graeca, v. 18, col. 208-9. A substantial part of the hymn is quoted and translated in J. Quasten, Patrology, v. 2 {Utrecht: Spectrum, 1953), pp. 4, ÷ ÷ VOLUME 22~ 196;~ 279 SISTER MARY CELESTE, S.M. The Virtue of Mercy Sister Mary leste, $.M., is on the faculty of the Col' lege of Our Lady of Mercy; 2300 Ade-line Drive; Burlin-game, California. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS As the good news of Christ continues to be heralded, classrooms in Catholic schools rapidly mushroom into being and innumerable extra rows of desks are squeezed into innumerable older rooms; CGD classes flourish; hos-pital beds are filled; homes for the aged, the mentally ill, the delinquent, the abandoned and helpless have long waiting lists; clinics are daily crowded to capacity. The works of mercy are literally endless. Yet precisely for that reason, their true purpose must be all the more clearly understood if the pitfall of activism is to be avoided. This is especially necessary for the sister whose community is officially sent by the Church to bear witness to Christ in the ministry of mercy. She is responsible, in whatever way her individual position allows, to see to it that the works are authentically merciful ones--that they are per-meated through and through with the spirit of Christ's mercy. This means that she must know well what mercy is and how it is incarnated in her own apostolic action. If we follow the fruitful approach of St. Thomas in striving to gain. some insight into the nature of mercy, we will begin not with an abstract definition of it but rather with the concrete existential situation in which a merciful person finds scope for his activities. We may then analyze the kind of response that is given in such a situation, and finally we may ask what kind of person is needed for these works--one who will respond merci-fully. Since mercy, according to St. Thomas, is a virtue,1 this last question involves asking about the particular habit-patterns of virtue which must be integrated into the personality of one who is merciful. But since it also entails a rather complex group of associated virtues and supporting habits, we must examine this structure in some detail in order to find out precisely what kind of effort is needed to build such habits and thus to develop most effectively the virtue of mercy. Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q.30, a.3. Starting-Point: the Misery of Man First, let us turn to the concrete situation. Where does a person inspired by mercy find a ready field for the driv-ing impulse of this spirit? Always~ it is in a need. But it is not just any need; not physical need alone, although this may be part of it. There must be a specifically human need: a situation in which man finds himself in misery, falling short of what he needs to attain his human fulfill-ment. 2 Ultimately, this fulfillment lies in his beatific union with God; and therefore his most radical misery is his sinfulness. All unhappiness stems from this. But in addition to guilt before God, human misery vitiates every facet of existence: it is the old problem of evil in the world of the sons of Adam. The stimulus for mercy, then, is human distress. It is man faced with the impossibility o[ attaining the true happiness for which he is destined,n It is Job buffetted by Satan; it is the unfaithful wife of Hosea in her willful waywardness; it is the thief dying on the cross. In our own day, in a far more sophisticated and complex civili-zation, the misery of man takes on the most piteous of forms--all the heavy trials that burden man's physical life and his mind and spirit; inadequacy and weakness and guilt of all kinds; confusion of the young who idealis-tically grope for vague goals yet are shackled by luxury and habits of indecision; bitterness, bewilderment, neg-lect and persecution, even just punishment; and espe-cially, the despair of those who have given up the search for happiness. It is man in misery, lacking what he needs for the fulfillment of his humanness in union with God. The Works of Mercy: Response to Misery What response does misery evoke in the merciful? It inspires and stimulates the work of carrying out into ef-fective action whatever will i-eally remove the defects which stand in the way of another person's happiness. God Himself is called merciful because oust of His loving kindness He actually takes away the miseries of man.4 Especially by His redemptive Passion and Resurrection, Christ delivered man from the greatest of miseries; and in this act God showed more abundant mercy than if He had forgiven sins without asking satisfaction, for He actu-ally went to the trouble, as it were, of doing something personal and positive to remedy the situation.5 So, too, a merciful person does all he can to dispel the misery of another. *Summa Theologiae, I, q.21, a.4. Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q.30, a.1. Summa Contra Gentiles, 1, c.91. Sumlna Theologiae, 3, q.46, a.l, ad 3. ÷ ÷ ÷ Mercy VOLUMI: 22, 1963 2~! + Sister Mary Celeste, S.M. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 282 This means that certain external works are necessary in order to communicate the good things which the dis-tressed person lacks,e St. Thomas classes these works un-der the heading of "almsgiving," and divides them ac-cording to the kind of need that cries out for relieL Some needs are concerned with the maintenance of physical life: food, clothing, shelter, care in sickness, freedom from slavery of all sorts. But man is not merely a physical thing; so proper respect must be given the body destined for resurrection, and his spiritual needs must be relieved by prayer, instruction, and counseling. The sorrowful must be encouraged and the wayward corrected and pardoned.7 It is within the context of the active life, therefore, that the merciful person directly ministers to the needs of his neighbor.S He carries out into the realm of action the teaching of St. John to love not in word or tongue only but in deed and in truth (1 Jn 3:18). Such response to misery in the works of mercy is easily observable in the lives of the founders of religious insti-tutes which flourish today. We are so familiar with the details of our own founder's work that we tend to forget the amazing range of misery with which he was con-fronted. In fact, no individual, however energetic, can possibly cope with the vast extent of human ills that come within his vision. Thus it was a natural development that, under the leadership of a great person, others shar-ing his spirit formed themselves into a group in order to accomplish what they could not do as individuals. The work of schools, hospitals, institutions for the care of the poor and aged and delinquent in turn necessitated the organization of a religious community which would be inspired by the vital spirit of its founder and would as-sure continuity to the works. A community of itself, however, is not enough. Though the outward forms of human misery may change with time and place, its essence is as universal as wounded hu-manity itself. And in her universal compassion, Mother Church incorporates the community as a living member within herself. Through the major superior as her repre-sentative, the Church receives the vows by which an in-dividual religious is totally committed to Christ. In turn, she gives to the community an official mandate to carry out the works of mercy as part of her own universal apos-tolate of bringing all men to union with God in Christ. This goal is identical with that of the perfection o1! hu-man happiness for all men, the ultimate obliteratic.,n of human misery. Therefore, every member of a community nSumma Theologiae, 2-2, q.32, a.5. Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q.32, a.2 and 3 ~Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q.188, a.2; De Caritate, a.8; De Per- [ectione Vitae Spiritualis, c.13. whose very raison d'etre is the Church's works of mercy must be essentially dedicated to the active life of service. Within the framework of her religious life, the sister must minister to the poor, the sick, those in need of instruc-tion and care. If she does not carry out her share with complete personal dedication,, she .not only,, fails to be a merciful individual and thwarts the united endeavor of her community but in a real sense hinders the very work of Christ in His Church. The Merci]ul Person As active religious, then, it is essential that we become the kind of person who will respond to human misery in a way that will really bring about its relief and thus ef-fect the happiness of our fellow man in his union with God. Our vocation is to be a merciful person. What is meant by saying that we want to become a certain kind of person? It is a fact that at entrance into religious life, we are already possessed of a distinctive personality; and personalities vary greatly. Of course, these differences will remain. But when we become a re-ligious, we do intend to become someone in a way that we were not before. We intend to grow into an attitude, to take on a new quality and direction of endeavor which is characteristic of our community. We express this in-tention by saying that we want to have the spirit of the community, to incorporate into our personality that par-ticular aspect of Christian spirituality which is best suited to the apostolic work proper to this community. This means that we consciously try to cultivate those habitual ways of acting which characterize the merciful person. We want, in other words, to acquire the habit, the virtue of mercy.° Human virtue, according to St. Thomas, is an opera-tive habit disposing a man to good action.1° As strictly human, it cannot be merely an automatism which, oni:e acquired, allows us to carry on action in a quasi-mechani-cal and unthinking way, like tying our shoelaces,it Virtue is a mastery-habit, demanding attention and free adher- ~ In this discussion we are speaking of moral virtue as perfecting human powers insofar as it is acquired by our own efforts. It is commonly taught that, in addition, there are "infused moral vir-tues," which complement the acquired ones and come with sanctify-ing grace and charity. lOSumma Theologiae, 1-2, q.55, a.2 and 3. 1, Servais Pinckaers, O.P., "Virtue Is Not a Habit," Cross Cur-rents, v. 12 (Winter, 1962), p. 68. "To define virtue as a habit would seem necessarily to be making man into a pure automaton, and to be depriving his action of its properly human value." The author here clearly limits his meaning of "habit" to "automatism,,' and does not take the word to include "mastery-habit" as we have done here. ÷ ÷ ÷ Sister Mary Celeste, S.M. REVIEW FOR REL[GIOUS 284 ence of the will, manifesting an interiority and personal commitment in each action.12 The virtues we acquire be-come, as it were, a second nature to us, wellsprings of good actions which strengthen and dispose our human powers for realizing their specific goodness. Thus, without sacri-ficing individuality, members of a community strive to acquire a perfecting habit which exercises a distinctive influence as the "spirit" of their work. As soon as we begin to ask what mercy is, it becomes obvious that we cannot deal with it as an isolated virtue. In the practical order, of course, this is true of any virtue. Mercy in action requires a whole complexus of related virtues, a patterned grouping of habits to support it. It requires at the same time a principle of unity by which these habits are integrated into the structure of one's per-sonality and can function in cooperation for a common end. Because of the many strenuous and complex de-mands made by the external works of mercy, a sister whose life is dedicated to such worlds will be gravely en-dangered by a lack of unity in her person. But conversely, her life will be all the richer and more fruitful if it is consciously balanced and ordered toward a unified goal. This is especially crucial for a woman. Psychologically, a woman's strength lies not so much in the mastery of a single field as it does in the integrating power which weaves a widespread variety of human activities into a coherent wholeness. In the life of a sister engaged in works of mercy, the pattern of wholeness--that is, of those vir-tues and habits of action which are consciously acquired during the formative years of religious life--is specifically focused on the kind of situation which should evoke mercy: namely, that of human misery. In the responding compassion of the merciful woman, every power of her human personality is engaged. For one whose vocation it is to be thus dedicated and whose calling as religious includes the essential obliga-tion to strive for maturity and full effectiveness in the apostolate, it is important to know clearly how her pow-ers can be unified and perfected for merciful action so that such action comes as it were by second nature, ha-bitually. Everyone has the powers. The crux of the mat-ter is the question of virtue and of the subordinate good habits conducive to virtuous action. Here finally we come to the virtue of mercy in its plenary context: as a kind of master-habit toward whose perfect operation the ac-tivities of other human powers are directed by subordi-n See George P. Klubertanz, S.J., The Philosophy o! Human Nature (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953), pp. 272-97. The content of this paper owes much to further developments of these ideas in a course on Thomistic theory of moral character given by Fr. Klubertanz. nate habits. The mature personality of the religious is stabilized (but by no means stereotyped) and made apt for merciful action by the unified structuring of these interrelated habits. The Perception oI Misery The initiation of actual response to misery is the recog-nition of it. This seems obvious. Yet there are facets of misery which are not so obvious that they are recognized by everyone; and there are degrees of awareness among those who do recognize that there is some need. The sister who aims to acquire the virtue of mercy must ask: How can human misery be most keenly perceived? How ca, n insight into unhappiness be developed and deepened? There is no question, first of all, of "training" our eyes and ears; whatever we see, we see, and getting glasses to perfect our vision is not habituation at all but only an aid to the proper actual functioning of our sense o1: sight. The perception of unhappiness is rather a matter of noticing, of paying attention to those elements within our range of vision which carry meaning. To do this, the powers of imagination, sense memory, and estimative sense must be developed under the guidance of reason so that one habitually notices the kind of detail that is rele-vant. Some accumulation of experience is necessary here. For a young religious endeavoring to build the needed habits, it will be very helpful to have the guidance of an experienced person who can direct her interested atten-tion to the minute aspects of a human situation that bear on unhappiness--the tensing of a cheek muscle, the slight threadbareness of a sleeve, the brittleness of a laugh. What is sometimes vaguely referred to as "intuition" or "hunch" is, more precisely, the focusing of awareness on the material hints and expressions of poverty, ignorance, guilt, pain, confusion, weakness, of any form of human evil. Watching for these hints and observing others more adept at noticing them, we may improve and control our sensitive knowing powers for discerning and evaluating concrete situations of misery. But human misery is not something that can be sensed. It is an intelligible reality that must be understood and judged. A sharpened sensitivity to the material signs of misery will develop only with the growing realization of their meaningfulness in the lives of those we desire to help. In order to read the language of these signs, then, certain acts of intellectual understanding must concur with the functioning of the sensory powers. A mutual re-lationship exists here: by our intellect we comprehend the imeaning in the material image, and this understanding in turn is a guideline for our imaginative and estimative + ÷ ÷ VOLUME 22, 1962 285 + ÷ ÷ Sister Mary Celeste, $.M. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS powers to furnish and elaborate precisely those images which bear a meaning-content relevant to merciful ac-tion. How is facility for such intellectual acts acquired? It seems evident that there must be some serious and con-sistent meditation on the human goal of beatitude and on the nature of sin which is the chief obstacle to achiev-ing that goal. The object of mercy is hierarchized accord-ing to the goods which God loves in man and "desires" for him; hence, there must be true judgments about the relative value of various deficiencies in such goods. Sin is the supreme evil, and effective compassion for the sinner is the most merciful act. After this come the many ills concomitant with the sinfulness of man--injustice, preju-. dice, war, poverty, oppression. To judge of these evil~; clearly, a study of the social and behavioral science~ would seem at least highly desirable if not necessary. Complementary to these disciplines, the development of an appreciation for great literature will aid the sister in observing concrete instances of misery and its tragic ef-fect in human lives. In short, a truly liberal education with theology as its core ought to contribute much to tile degree in which the object of mercy is perceived. To keep the proper perspective, we must renew these judgments with conviction until they crystallize into our permanent outlook. But it is not only the object of mercy which must be judged; we ourselves must reflect on how we stand in relation to the action that we are doing. A realistic evaluation of our own position, motivated by concern for the one in need, must include the conviction that we likewise are immersed in the conditions of hu-manity and that therefore whatever good we are able to communicate to others is first a gift to us. The lack of this conviction is pride; and the vice of pride is a direct ob-stacle to the practice of mercy. The proud are without mercy, St. Thomas tells us, because they despise others and think them deserving of the sufferings they have to undergoA~ John Kuskin has stated well the kind of self-judgment that a merciful person makes: I believe that the test of a truly great person is humility. I do not mean by humility doubts about his own ability. But really great men-have a curious feeling that greatness is not in them but through them and they . see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, and ~ncred~bly merciful. Sensitivity to Suffering Though perception of misery is the first requisite of the act of mercy, its essence is in the affective response to misery. For the clarity of perception itself depends basi- Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q.30, a.2 ad 3. cally upon the concern we have for aiding another. Now concern for another is a matter of love. Human love, like human knowledge, is a unified act engaging the whole person, spiritual and physical. To love someone humanly, it is natural that our feelings should concur with our willing of his good However, there is an initial difficulty in the matter responding to unhappiness: the first impulse in the face of misery is to shun it, for we are naturally attracted to what is pleasant and try to avoid what is evil. Do the sen-sitive appetites, then, have any part in the act of mercy? First of all, we may note that the perception of someone else's misery may provoke one of two contrary attitudes in us. There may be a detached unconcern for an evil that in no way affects us at present, together with the hope that the unpleasantness of seeing another suffer will be quickly removed and forgotten. On the other hand, there may be a reaction of sympathy, a feeling of sorrow for the distressed person. This latter movement"of the sensitive appetite is the act of pity.1~ Now considered on the sensitive level alone, an act is neither virtuous nor morally bad because it is not yet a human act. Can we say, then, that it does not matter which attitude a person has, as long as he is influenced by spiritual love? And further: might it not be better to remain, as far as pos-sible, emotionally uninvolved? If we let our feelings run away with us, there is danger that' sentimentality will govern our actions; and this is not a good. To answer the question of the role of sensitivity in mercy, we may first point out a negative aspect. The dangers of sentimentality should not be minimized; there is a definite risk taken. There is a kind of undesirable emotional involvement which consists in identifying one-self with the patient or one in need to the extent that his anxiety, confusion, and helplessness are communicated to us instead of being relieved by us. This would be equiv-alent to becoming a beggar in order .to .help beggars, and thereby cutting off the very possibility of saving anyone from the misery of beggarhood. Because of warnings about such risks, young religious sometimes fear to admit to themselves that they do feel grief or anxiety for others, that they are really affected by seeing suffering and pov-erty. It would be helpful, when such is the case, to reflect on the consequences of this outlook. Fear of danger leads naturally to avoidance of the dangerous occasion. In this instance, the sister may unconsciously tend to avoid those situations which arouse her feelings of pity, and in so doing is avoiding the very misery toward which mercy is 1~ Sum~na Theologiae, 1-2, q.35, a.8. ÷ ÷ ÷ Mer~y VOLUME 22, 196~ 287 ÷ ÷ ÷ Si~ter Mary Celeste, S.M. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS directed. This obviously is not the way to develop the virtue of mercy. A further reflection on the conditions sentimentality would help to alleviate her fears. For pity will never degenerate into sentimentality when its exer-cise is buttressed with the clarity of intellectual vision and intensity of spiritual love required by an act of true mercy. Emotional involvement with those in misery, when incorporated into this virtuous (and hence, controlled) act, will never cause a loss of interior peace, patience, and trust in divine Providence. From the positive point of view, sensitivity to suffering of others should be regarded as a real asset, integral to the practice of mercy. St. Augustine says that mercy is heartfelt sympathy for another's distress, impelling us help him if we can.15 The Latin word for mercy, miseri-cordia, denotes sorrow of heart (miserura cordis) or com-passion for the unhappiness of another as though it were one's own.1. Of course, temperamental dispositions differ and solne persons are more sensibly affected than others; but the emotion of sorrow is a universally human one, and to some extent every human person feels it. Being moved with sorrow for another, we are more likely to do an act of mercy for him. Freely to take on sorrow for a misery that is not our own, to let ourselves be hurt when this is not a necessity, requires a special habit to strengthen our natural sen.,;tendency to fear and reject evil. The virtue of forti-tude is this habit, enabling us to face and accept the diffi-culties of personally assuming the suffering involved compassionate response to misery. This virtue is at the same time a guarantee against sentimentality and a bul-wark to fortify us throughout the consequent difficulties of carrying mercy into practical action. Courage to sympathize, to co-suffer with the unhappy, results also in a keener insight into the depth of misery. One's personal experience of vicarious suffering is the basis for a connatural knowledge which cannot be had on a purely speculative level. No matter how much we contemplate the social conditions of poverty and the par-ticular details of this family's wretched plight, we cannot really know what their misery is unless it affects us in our whole being: unless our judgment is swayed by a concern that is at once a willed and a felt love. In order to under-stand how the redeeming love of God works providen-tially in the "crooked lines" of evils in the human con-dition, we must feel ourselves within this condition. An habitual sensitivity to the suffering of others, habit of pity, is therefore an integral part of the total St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei 9.5. Summa Theologiae, I, q.21, a.3; 1-2, q.35, a.8; 2-2, q.30, a.l. pattern of mercy because the feeling of compassion is al-ready the directing of the sensitive appetites toward the object of mercy.1~ While not itself a virtue in the com-plete sense, pity contributes the "matter" as it were of the total response, being given its "form" or determining specification as virtue by the complementary tendency of merciful love in the will. Because of the dynamic influ-ence of this love, channeled and controlled by right judg-ment, the emotion of pity as a fully human response is truly virtuousJs It gives an intensity to the impulse of mercy to relieve the distress so keenly felt. Charity: the Source ol Mercy Formally and essentially, the act of mercy is a special kind of willed love. Whatever may be the absence or presence, the strength or weakness of supporting habits and virtues in other powers, the absolute requirement for mercy is the free and deliberate choice to love another who is in need. We make this choice as the radical orien-tation of our lives in accepting a religious vocation to an institute whose commission from the Church is to carry out her works of mercy. Thereby we accept the solemn obligation to reinforce by repeated acts what is implicit in this orientation: that is, to develop the habitual facility or virtue for good and effective action most properly be-longing to such an institute. What kind of love is the essence of mercy? In the first instance, this love must be benevolence: a willing of good for the sake of the person about whom we are concerned. It must be completely other-directed, outgoing. Religious are greatly aided in developing unselfishness in love by the numerous opportunities in community living to show thoughtfulness and consideration for others. The mani-festations of such concern are by no means of merely pe-ripheral importance, for a deficiency in love is a defi-ciency in the essence of mercy. Even on the sensitive level, pity is directed not to oneself but to another,a9 A selfish act is a disordered love-choice not only different from but contradictory to the choice of loving mercifully. There-fore, any habitual selfishness, no matter how slight it is or how trivial its object, will be a direct obstacle to de-veloping the virtue of mercy. The subjective aspect of benevolence--that is, true de-sire of good for another--must be complemented by its objective counterpart: desire for another of what is truly 1*St. Thomas notes that the reason why God forbad cruelty to animals in the Old Testament was that even pity for the suffering of animals makes a man better disposed to take pity on his fellow man. Summa Theologiae, I-2, q.102, a.6 ad 8. XSSumma Theologiae, 1-2, q.59, a.l ad 3; 2-2, q.$0, a.$. ~ Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q.30, a.l ad 2. 4. + 4. VOLUME 22, 196~ 289 ÷ ÷ Sister Mary ~eleste, $3tL REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS good. Ultimately, the true good of man is his perfect hap-piness in union with God. When we desire that a person have what is needed for this, our benevolence toward him is charity. It should be remembered that the dual precept of charity in no way detracts from its nature as a single virtue; by charity, God is loved both as supreme good in Himself and as the goal of human striving. Thus when we love another in charity, we desire for him the beati-tude toward which we also aim. The attainment of this common goal, uniting us in a social bond as fellow viatores, is hindered by our misery. Therefore, if we love God and desire that all men be united with Him, our charity will (as nearly as this is possible) be a love patterned on His. We will not seek in others what we lack and not merely respond to a goodness in others which we find there. Rather, out of the abun-dance of love, we will be able to confer on others a good-ness which we do not find, which we ourselves only hold as a gift in the first place. We will aim to relieve their misery. This is Christian love. If Christianity has been a civilizing influence in the world, it is because, as Da-ni~ lou writes, civilization is "a state of human life in which individual man is accorded his due of respect and love, being loved the more in proportion as he may be defenseless, lonely, or unlucky.''20 Since charity is the essence of Christian perfection, it is afortiori the virtue par excellence of the religious who is bound by vow to strive for Christian perfection. In the religious state, the vows are means to this goal. The pur-pose of poverty is to free one's love from attachment: to material things, for our finite human affections cannot be fully concentrated on God if they are tied down. by many physical concerns. Charity is also hindered by an excessive craving for pleasures of the flesh which prevent the development of spiritual love. Chastity does not stamp out or distort the humanness of love but univer-salizes it so that the concern of the heart may extend to all persons. Charity is hindered most of all by the in-ordinate willing of one's own independence. Obedience especially makes the sister a sharer in community effort which is part of the Church's mission of mercy i'n the world. Thus the specific way in which charity is de-veloped in a religious is intrinsically influenced by the spirit and virtue of poverty, chastity, and obedience as directly oriented to the perfecting of spiritual love: The immediate effect of charity as the benevolent love by which we desire for others their happiness in union with God is our own bond of union with them, a special and personal kind of belonging. "It is the nature of di- Jean Dani~lou, Lord oI History (Chicago: Regnery, 1958), p. 66. vine charity," St. Thomas writes, "that he who loves in this way should belong not to himself but to the one loved.''zl In belonging to another, we take on vicariously whatever is his lot, suffering included. We feel it our-selves even though the misery is'not radically our own.m Thus God Himself is said~to pity us because of His love by which He regards us as belonging to Him33 This note of belonging to the one loved may be re-garded from another aspect also. We see that the virtue of charity is perfected in three "dimensions." First, its extent must be universal, including all persons.destined for beatific union with God. Secondly, its intensity is measured by the hardships one is willing to endure for the sake of those loved, even to the point of laying down one's life. Finally, its effects are seen in the gifts of good-ness bestowed: not only in material things, not only in spiritual benefits, but even in the total personal dedica-tion of oneself.~4 Pondering this last "dimension" of charity, we recall that human love is humanly symbolized in gift-giving. The extent and intensity of love is externally shown by the value of the gift bestowed. There are degrees in the alms of mercy just as in any gift, for mercy is always freely given love, Ministering to the physical needs of another is the first and most evident degree, siv.ce man cannot fittingly strive for spiritual goals if he does not have what is needed materially for a decent human life. On a higher level, there are spiritual benefits which do not exceed the natural human capacity for giving: for instance, the com-munication of truth reached by human insight and evi-dence. But of more value still are those goods which are truly supernatural, such as divinely revealed truth or the grace of the sacraments. One who bestows on others gifts of this kind practices a singular perfection of brotherly love, for it is directly by means of these gifts that man at-tains union with God.2" A gift, however, remains but a symbol. That which is signified is the interior disposition of love which is in the person the motivating source from which his action flows. The true worth of a gift can only be judged by the extent to which the giver's love has been concretized in the per-sonal act of donation. The more fully the whole person must be involved in this act, the more apt this particular kind of action is for expressing an intense and universal love. Now the works of mercy not only give scope for a De Perlectione Yitae Spiritualis, c.lO. Summa Theologiae, 9-2, q210, a.2. Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q.30, a.2 ad 1. Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q.18,1, a.2 ad 8. De Per]ectione Yitae Spiritualis, c.14. ÷ ÷ ÷ Mercy VOLUME 22~ 196.~ 291 4. 4. 4. Sister Mary Celeste, $.M. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 292 complete engagement of the giver, but when they really spring from charity they absolutely require this total dedication. For merciful love is redemptive. It means taking on the misery of another in order to heal and strengthen and lift up; and this can only be accomplished by the involvement of one's whole being and energy. For a woman, this total personal dedication to serving the needs of another is the fulfillment of her essential role as mother. In the apostolate, it is a maternal love which inspires the sister to reach out with compassion to all who, like the child, need care and protection. She sees not only the poor, the sick, and the aged as represented by the child, but all those who are ill in mind and heart, those who are poor in the goods of the spirit. Her work of the fulfillment of professional duties is a form of spirit-ual motherhood. By this very fact, her mission in the Church is closely associated with an essential quality of the Church herself. It must be the vocation of the reli-gious woman to impart to others something of the uni-versal healing compassion of Christ, effecting a true nur-turing and growth of human life Godward. Prudence Directs Merciful Action The love-inspired insight of a mother detects the weak-ness of her child and knows instinctively what is the best thing to do. This connatural knowledge has its exact parallel in the act of mercy, the impulse to action in which there is a giving of one's whole self. Knowledge of the most effective action in a concrete case cannot be a matter of intellectual understanding alone when this knowledge is based on an intense concern for the welfare of the person for whom the action is being done. Judg-ment about such action must be governed by the habit of prudence. Thus the life of one engaged in works of mercy requires that prudence be the directive intellectual habit. This virtue is further perfected by that docility to the motion of the Holy Spirit which is called the gift of counsel.2e For this reason, St. Thomas states that the beatitude of mercy specially corresponds to the gift of counsel, the gift which directs the act of mercy.~7 The concrete circumstances of human misery are sub-ject to changing conditions; but the principles applied in the variety of instances do not themselves change. Mer-ciful action is always a means to bring about human hap-piness; the choice of a best means to achieve a goal is always the concern of prudence. The prudent person is equipped to know what should be done in the concrete so that his decision and effort are suited to the needs of Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q.52, a.2. Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q.52, a.4. the kingdom of God. Thus the prudential judgment nec-essary in the act of mercy must take into account both the needs of the recipient and the potentialities of the donor. Although spiritual alms are of more value objec-tively, it is sometimes a greater immediate need to relieve physical distress; "to a hungry man, food is more neces-sary than instruction in truth.''2s Since our humanness limits the amount of good we can do, St. Augustine coun-sels us to consider those who are nearer to us in time, place, or other accidental condition as the first recipients of our mercy.29 If the act of mercy is not merely hap-hazard, if it springs from the virtue of mercy, it must, then, be directed by prudence. Unity of the Virtues Related to Mercy Among the great variety of circumstances in which misery appears and within the myriad personalities who are called to a special dedication for responding to mod-ern needs, the stabilizing influence of a common spirit is to be found in the basic structure of virtues and habits within which this spirit is translated into action. The master-virtue of mercy has a characteristic pattern simple in its essentials yet comprising all the human powers in total personal engagement. First, because an act of mercy is concerned with con-crete human misery, the initial perception of the situa-tion will be a unified act including both sensory aware-ness of physical detail and intellectual understanding of the meaning-content incarnated in this detail: that is, its relevance to human happiness. Thus the merciful person will notice, will habitually listen and see, use imagination and memory to retain and supply impressions that help this awareness. She will use her estimative power under the control of reason to evaluate in each particular case a lack of what is befitting the dignity of man. She must be able to judge the social evils of the contemporary world with an adequate comprehension of what they imply for human living. Finally, she must be able to see herself as an instrument, a steward entrusted with a gift which is to be transmitted to others; this is her humility. In other words, all her human knowing powers are operative in the perception of what is relevant to unhappiness. Secondly, because an act of mercy is essentially an out-going response to a real situation, the merciful sister acts by the dynamic tendency of her appetitive powers. These will include a sensitivity to suffering that is called pity, a willingness to accept difficulties and to suffer for another that is called courage, and that benevolent love which in Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q.32, a.3. St. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana 1.28. ÷ ÷ ÷ Mercy VOLUME 22, 1963 293 Sister Mary Celeste, S.M. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 294 the supernatural order is called charity. Just as human nature is a body-spirit unity, and just as human knowl-edge is the perception of meaning in the material sign, so too there is a parallel in the appetitive order. The uni-fied act of sorrow for another's unhappiness, the interior act of mercy, is the spiritual love of charity incarnated and expressed in the feeling of compassion. Although supernatural in its cause, charity, mercy is thoroughly hu. man in its mode of operation. Thirdly, there is a kind of reflective moment of both knowledge and love in the act of mercy. Encountering someone in misery, a merciful person experiences a deeper level of awareness by reason of the dynamic orientation of pity and love. This is what St. Thomas calls a knowl-edge of connaturality. In the light of her love which unites her by sympathy to another, the. sister who is mer-ciful can perceive meaning in details which would pass unnoticed by a detached onlooker. This perception in turn strengthens the driving forces of sensitive pity and willed love, impelling her to judge prudently the action that is most effective and committing her to carry out this action courageously without regard to inconvenience or pain. In mercy, therefore, there is required a totality of personal dedication to serving one's neighbor in order that he may together with us come to beatific union with God. Finally, the charity-love by which we will this goal not only the source from which mercy flows forth but is the unifying principle of every virtue and subordinate habit related to mercy. The ultimate goal of man is beati-tude, union with God. It is this goal which mercy, by re-lieving unhappiness, aims to procure. The goals of other virtues and habits are only proximate and intermediate ones which can be subordinated to this primary human end. So charity, qualifying the will, permeates all activity under the influence of the will--all free actions, just as life permeates the whole living organism in all its parts. In a body, all the particular members and organs func-tion for the good of the whole; so in a life of charity, all particular activity is directed toward the supreme good of the whole which is man's union with God.~0 Every virtue and every habit of a merciful person are drawn into the powerful stream of this love. "If a man is merciful," writes St. Gregory of Nyss;,, "he is deemed worthy of divine beatitude, because he has at-tained to that which characterizes the divine nature. Thus is the merciful man called blessed, because the fruit of mercy becomes itself the possession of the merciful.''zx Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q.23, a.8; De Caritate, a.3. ~lSt. Gregory o£ Nyssa, The Beatitudes, translated ~rorn PL Mercy is most properly a divine attribute, manifesting the power and goodness of God's redemptive love.82 As source of the exterior works of mercy done by human hands, this virtue likens us to God in similarity of works and is the highest perfection of the active life.s3 As an interior effect of divine charity,.in us, companion of joy and peace and zeal, it is the greatest Of virtues which re-late to our neighbor,a4 Its effectiveness will end only when there is no further human misery left to cry out for heal-ing. 44:1193-1302 by Hilda Graef, "Ancient Christian Writers Series" (Westminster: Newman, 1954), p. 139. ~ Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q.30, aA. ~Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q.30, aA ad 3. ~ Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q.30, a.4 ad 3. VOLUME 22~ 1963 ALAN F. GREENWALD Psychological Assessment of Religious Aspirants 4. 4" Alan F. Green-wald is director of psychological serv-ices for the Seton Psychiatric Insti-tute, 6420 Reisters-town Road, Balti-more 15, Maryland. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Psychological testing has become increasingly more useful in the selection of suitable candidates for religious life and in the recognition of emotional illness among seminarians prior to ordination. A growing number of seminaries and religious communities are utilizing psy-chological services to assist superiors and seminary direc-tors in arriving at decisions about the psychological suit-ability of prospective candidates for the priesthood. In view of the desirability of a close working relationship between the psychologist and the clergy, it seems advan-tageous to review briefly the methods, strengths, and weaknesses of psychological assessment procedures as they apply to the screening of applicants for religious life. The two extremes--exceptionally well-qualified extremely poor prospects--may be identified easily within the seminary with or without benefit of formal psycho-logical testing. It is the seminarian who is making a mar-ginal adjustment--just "getting by" academically, with-drawn from others, quarrelsome, experiencing difficulties in attention, concentration, or ability to study, yet still able to conform to established minimum standards of conduct--whose symptoms are less flagrant and whose future is far less predictable. These divergent behavior patterns may represent only a transitory disturbance or they could be the forerunner of a more serious mental dis-order. In either case the psychological referral will help to clarify the situation. The psychological suitability of a candidate for the priesthood is not a black and white issue. Rarely, except perhaps in the extreme cases where a young man presents a remarkable array of talents or on the other hand dem-onstrates bizarre, pathological behavior, can a simpl~ de-termination of "suitable" or "unsuitable" be made. The human personality is too complex to permit such a casual oversimplification. Rather, it is necessary to evaluate a broad spectrum of behavior in order to identify con-vergent drives and patterns as well as divergent attitudes and reactions. The primary question usually asked of the psychologist by the seminary is, "What can :you tell us about the psychological suitability of this seminarian for the priesthood?" In response to this question;,the~psychol-ogist seeks to determine the personality assets as well as the nature and degree of any emotional disturbance which may exist. The psychologist learns early that there are no accepta-ble "canned" or cookbook interpretations of behavior, no universals in test analysis, and a notable lack of .un-equivocal prognostic signs today. No test is infallible, and as yet we have not developed the test which can predict with great accuracy how an individual will behave in complex situations. To use less than the most compre-hensive and sensitive instruments available for personal-ity assessment would be a disservice to all concerned. Con-sidering the present state of the art, there still remains honest disagreement as to what constitutes the most valid test battery. But most clinicians favor the projective tech-niques. Projective techniques provide subtle, indirect methods of personality assessment which permit the subject to re-veal his basic pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Because these relatively unstructured tests are less subject to conscious and unconscious distortion and permit greater freedom of expression within a standardized framework, projective techniques such as the Rorschach Inkblot Test, Thematic Apperception Test, Draw a Per-son Test, and Sentence Completion Test are generally preferred to the paper and pencil personality question-naires, for example, the Minnesota Multiphasic Person-ality Inventory. However, Bier,1 Vaughan,2 and others have used the MMPI extensively and developed norms for use in screening seminarians. While it is true that paper and pencil questionnaires have the advantage of ease in administration and scoring and provide quantitative measures of personality charac-teristics, the additional behavioral information elicited by a projective test battery would seem to merit the in-creased expenditure, of professional time and effort. Many 1 W. C. Bier and A. A. Schneiders, eds., Selected Papers [rom the American Catholic Psychological dssociation Meetings of 1957, 1958, 1959 (New York: Fordham University, 1960). W. C. Bier, "Test-ing Procedures and Their Value," Proceedings o] the 1959 Sisters' Institute of Spirituality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1960), pp. 263-95. W. C. Bier, Description o! Biers Modified MMP1 (Mimeographed; New York: Fordham University, no date). ~ R. P. Vaughan, "Specificity in Program of Psychological Exam-ination," Guild o[ Catholic Psychiatrists Bulletin, v. 8 (1961), pp. 149-55. 4. Psychological Assessment VOLUME 22, 1963 297 Alan l:. G~een~ald REVIEW FOR REL[G]OUS investigators prefer the neat quantitative personality pro-file which the MMPI yields, but too often we find in the behavioral sciences a tendency to follow our sister sciences in attempting to reduce subject matter to numbers and statistics. Behavior does not lend itself readily to this treatment. Even with projective techniques there are ob-jective signs which, unhappily, fail to describe adequately the person they represent. The goal of a psychological screening program is to provide an accurate, reliable pic-ture of the person and not to reduce him to a mass of in-teresting or perhaps not-so-interesting statistics. Many significant test results are qualitative rather than quantitative in nature. Through projective testing, we are able to detect an unwholesome or conflictual, motiva-tion for religious life as well as underlying problems which may interfere with the seminarian's future adjust-ment. Test evidence which relates to motivation, causa-tion, and purposefulness of behavior can prove invaluable in revealing potential difficulties which a seminarian may encounter in his pursuit of a religious vocation. A reli-gious aspirant who demonstrates human sensitivity, strong drive toward achievement, and a desire to serve mankind has significantly different and healthier motiva.- tion than another whose entry into the seminary provides a means of escape from a world perceived as cold, hostile, and threatening to him. Bowes,3 in evaluating nearly 7000 seminarians, has found these major problem areas in order of frequency: (1) purity, (2) interpersonal relationships, (3) scrupulos-ity, (4) mother fixation, (5) obsessive compulsive person-ality, (6) depression, and (7) affective disorders. Becat, se most of these problems do not exist at the level of con-scious awareness, they may go undetected until they g~:n-erate enough anxiety to produce feelings of personal dis-tress and interfere with the person's ,capacity for work and his ability to meet the demands of reality. Often psy-chological testing may detect the presence of abnormal drives or conflicting motives and permit the seminarian to work through the conflict with the assistance of his spiritual director prior to ordination. Psychiatric aid may be rendered when indicated. This coordination of reli-gious and professional services can lead ultimately to a lower incidence of mental illness among the clergy. The use of psychological test procedures with religious introduces the need for specialized handling and inter-pretation. In order for any test results to be meaningful, they must be correlated with the activities, values, and * N. T. Bowes, "Professional Evaluation of Aspirants to Religious Life," a paper delivered in a seminar conducted at St. Mary':~ Semi-nary; Roland Park; Baltimore, Maryland in April, 1962. demands imposed upon the individual by his way of life. One hardly expects to find the same mental mechanisms and hierarchy of needs and values existing in a group of combat marines and in a group of seminarians. Similarly, as Vaughan indicates, all religious cannot be stereotyped and regarded as one. Different orders and assignments within the Church make special demands--intellectual and/or emotional--upon their members, so that prereq-uisites for a Jesuit university professor may differ from those of a Trappist monk. One personality may be better suited for the active, another for the contemplative life. Thus, notwithstanding the elimination of persons with severe emotional illness from the seminary, one needs to understand the circumstances and particular environ-ment in which the candidate will function in order to offer the most intelligent clinical judgment of his over-all suitability. A clear need remains for the development of psychological test norms applicable to candidates for re-ligious life. The experienced clinical psychologist approaches his task with humility, recognizing both the strengths and limitations of his tools. It behooves those who utilize his services to develop a set of realistic expectations in order to derive the maximum benefit from the referral. A word of caution seems in order to avoid overreliance by superiors on test results without giving due weight to traditional methods of selecting religious candidates. The decision regarding a religious vocation should never be made on the basis of test findings alone. The psychologi-cal test should be regarded as a supplementary source of information rather than as a replacement for existing practices. Psychological tests are being applied more widely in the evaluation of religious aspirants. Although no tests are infallible, projective techniques have demonstrated their effectiveness in the study of personality and in de-termining within limits the psychological suitability of persons seeking a religious vocation. Early detection and disposition of seminarians making a marginal adjustment can help to avoid subsequent major disturbances. Psy-chological assessment can be a useful supplement to tra-ditional selection procedures, but there is a need for behavioral scientists to develop a more definitive psycho-logical concept of, as well as test norms for, those aspiring to religious life. ÷ ÷ ÷ Psychological Assessment VOLUME. 22# 1963 299 SISTER M. DIGNA, O.S.B. Uses of Information in a Screening Program ÷ ÷ ÷ Sister M. Digna, O.S.B., is a faculty member of the Col-lege of St. Scholas-tica, Duluth 11, Minnesota. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 300 Psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychometricians, as well as others, subscribe to the assumption that objective information about a candidate's fitness for the priesthood or religious life may be assessed by valid and reliable in. struments in terms of intelligence, personality, and inter-ests. Following the principle that a good, valid test serves as a Geiger counter in detecting intellectual and person-ality assets and liabilities, the Sisters of St. Benedict have utilized test findings for over the past ten years. Having found that a correlation does exist between test data and subsequent religious adjustment, the policy has been initiated of administering the tests prior to admission. ~ln some cases, considerable time, effort, and expense have been saved by a wise use of this information. All favorable findings are referred to a Catholic psychiatrist for further consultation and confirmation. If there is doubt, the in-dividual is given an opportunity to "try religious life." The first type of assessment is that of the applicant's intelligence. Here intelligence is considered from a purely operational viewpoint. The empirical fact is that some people show higher abilities than others. Measurement is an attempt to objectify cognition (intelligence) by eval-uating sensory acuity, perception, memory, reaction-time, and reasoning. Originally the testing program included two scores of mental ability, one based upon the Ameri-can Council Psychological Examination and the other on the Otis Self-Administering Test. The reasons for select. ing these two tests were the availability of the ACE and the ease of administering and interpreting the Otis. Completion of high school has been a basic require-ment for admission into the community. All the sisters at one time or another matriculate at the local college. Since the ACE scores are recorded in the registrar's office, they are accessible for use. However, the ACE scores are not too meaningful in determining the kind of intelligence the individual possesses. For this reason candidates were ranked percentage-wise among all other high school sen-iors or college freshmen tested and placed in the top fourth, lower fourth, and so on. Furthermore, the ACE is highly weighted with verbal factors so that the picture is not too complete. Then too, novice and candidate mis-tresses found difficulty in interpreting 224/81 or still more confusing 127/13. The Otis intelligence quotient was, therefore, a more satisfactory measurement. During the last five years the California Short Form Test of Mental Maturity has been used. This test yields information on total mental factors, language factors, non-language factors, spatial relationships, logical reason-ing, numerical reasoning, verbal concepts, average grade placement, mental age, and intelligence quotient. The following examples illustrate the use of the Cali-fornia Short Form Test of Mental Maturity. Applicant A was a young woman who applied at several communities. Because her educational background was limited to the eighth grade of a small country school, she was rejected. At the time she made contact with the local community, she was working as a domestic in a private home and had taken her vacation to make the lay women's retreat. She was advised to reapply and took the tests with other ap-plicants. The summary data scores indicated that the young woman had intelligence quotient scores in terms of total mental factors of 138, language factors of 141, and non-language factors of 129. Her intelligence grade place-ment was at the 90th percentile for total mental factors and language factors, and at the 60th for non-language factors using the norms for college graduates. The per-centile ranks at her chronological age (C.A.) were 80 for spatial relations, 99 for logical reasoning, 95 for numeri-cal reasoning, 99 for total verbal concepts, and 95 for non-language factors. The young woman was accepted. In one year as a postulant she easily completed two years of a collegiate preparatory program. At the end of her novi-tiate she completed two more years of high school and did very well in college. Her average was A minus or B plus. She is gentle, refined, humble, and modest, but above all deeply spiritual. Surely it is a courtesy to God to recog-nize and utilize His gifts to such a girl. The results of the California Test of Mental Maturity were important factors in the rejection of two applicants, B and C. The intelligence quotients obtained by appli-cant B were 86 for mental factors, 106 for language fac-tors, and 66 for non-language factors. Applicant C's in-telligence quotient, measured in terms of these three factors, were 82 for mental factors, 97 for language fac-÷ ÷ ÷ Screening Program VOLUME 22, 1963 $1~t~ M. Digna REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 302 tors, and 64 for non-language factors. Although the pre-diction of subsequent adjustment in religious life was not too promising on the basis of these scores, the applicants were not rejected merely on this basis. These scores led to a more thorough investigation of their backgrounds. As a result, the mother prioress felt that the applicants were not intellectually equipped to meet the demands of a community that stressed teaching and nursing as an ex-pression of its apostolate. Although information regarding intelligence is very important, the submerged four-fifths of one's personality is just as important as a predictive factor in adjustment to religious life. Originally, the Minnesota Personality Scale was used to discover problems with which the indi-vidual was confronted. This scale was helpful in deter-mining poor social adjustment, family conflicts, and emo-tional problems. Although the scale was structured, the evaluation results merely scratched the surface of the in-dividual's personality. According to Furst and Fricke (1956) a structured test is nonprojective in the sense that users can agree completely on the individual's score; they are projective in the sense that individuals can project personal meanings into the stimuli. Although very losv scores on the Minnesota Personality Scale were clues to more deep-seated troubles, most of the findings were of the obvious type. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) has proved a better instrument since the items, the interrelationships, and the scales all afford information stemming from feelings and emotions. I*: is often possible through careful item analyses to determine the root of emotional experience and to discover hidden attitudes and traits. Supplementing the use of the MMPI, Modified Form, are life histories, ratings from direct ob-servation, and introspective reporting. Because of the MMPI, the psychologist secures a deeper understanding of the individual's problems. The items are structured, and the interpretation from them is deter-mined a priori. For example, if the psychologist or psy-chiatrist wishes to discover whether a person has phobias, he asks questions relating to the individual's fear of snakes, crowds, high places, and so forth. One criterion of phobias is a morbid, exaggerated, pathological fear of some object or situation. The basic assumption is that an individual who has many fears will answer questions per-taining to objects and situations of which the individual is afraid, and he will admit these fears. The test items of the MMPI have to be assembled into scales based upon the principle that the psychologist building the test has sufficient insights into the dynamics of verbal behavior and its relation to the inner core or personality that he is able to predict beforehand what certain sorts of people will say about themselves when asked certain types of questions. Structured personality tests may be employed in a purely diagnostic, categorizing fashion without the use of any dynamic interpretation of the relationship among scales or the patterning of a pro-file. The discrete scores on.': the' Minnesota Personality Scale are an example. The MMPI makes possible more "depth" interpreta-tion. On the basis of the MMPI and other information, some applicants have been rejected. As a typical example, the profile for applicant D demonstrates the use of the results of a personality inventory as a clue to possible poor adjustment to religious life. Although her intelligence quotient scores were average, applicant D presented a poor personality profile. She had two high triads (pairs of threes) above the normal range (30 to 70). Six of the nine scales for this profile ranged from T-scores of~71 to 108. The F score was high. According to Welsh and Dahl-strom (1956), high F scores tend to invalidate the sub-ject's responses. A schizoid may obtain a high F score owing to delusional or other aberrant mental state. The high score for the other scales represented such areas as hypochrondriasis, hysteria, psychopathic deviate, para-noia, schizophrenia, and hypomania. This young woman was not admitted but was counseled to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist to whom she was referred discovered that the applicant had previously been institutionalized. A recent follow-up revealed that she had returned to a mental institution. Applicant E was screened out because of her emotional pattern. This young girl was sixteen years old. Her in-telligence was average but her personality picture was not good. The young woman entered, was tested, and the test material with the following comments was filed in the mother prioress' office: This individual has high scores on the psychopathic deviate, masculinity, and psychasthenia scales. If she shows the follow-ing tendencies or traits it would be very wise to refer her to a psychiatrist: inability to profit from a mistake, attention-getting devices, concentrating on a younger girl in an objectionable manner, having so-called "crushes" on an older woman; any compulsive behavior like hand washing, phobias, fears, and anxieties, depression, worry, lack of confidence, and inability to concentrate. When the young woman began to manifest undesirable traits, her testing material was referred to for counseling purposes. Despite counseling, she fortunately left the community, but unfortunately has not sought psychiatric help. T-he care needed in interpreting test scores may be em-phasized by the responses of applicant F. This young ÷ ÷ ÷ Screening Program VOLUME 22, 1963 ÷ ÷ .÷ Sister M. Digna REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 304 women's profile was unreliable. Unknown to us, the ap-plicant had previously been in two communities. In tak-ing the test, with her high intelligence, test-wiseness, and general sophistication, she presented a pattern falling within the normal range. Fifteen items of the MMPI are designated subtle items because their psychological sig-nificance would not normally be detected by individuals taking the test. Applicant F was able to discern the im-plications of test items and answer them to put herself in a favorable light. This young woman had an opportunity to "try religious life." She received counseling before en-trance, after entrance, and for two years after leaving until she settled down to complete her third year of col-lege, receiving A's in courses she liked, F's and D's in those she didn't. She does not accept God's will in her rejection. Recently, the writer received a letter from a state institution where the young woman has been for the last several years. Applicant G has average intelligence, a fairly well de-fined primary interest pattern, but an unsatisfactory per-sonality pattern on the MMPI. This applicant was tested after entrance and advised to leave. In all cases of dis-missal, the applicants have an opportunity to see a Catho-lic psychiatrist. Through a knowledge of their fields of vocational interest and job placement services, these young women often make a better adjustment as a result of their brief experience in religion. It might be inferred from these data that applicants to religious life have low intelligence or are emotionally disturbed. However, concomitant with the screening out of these "atypical" cases, eighty-one applicants were rld-mitted into the community. In most cases these candi-dates were young women who desired to serve God aad whose intellectual and emotional patterns were not de-terrent factors. Of the eighty-one, six wavered and left. Four of the six have been re-admitted and are making ex-cellent adjustments. Having seen her strengths and weak-nesses, the candidate herself often feels reassured that she can give herself to God if she is generous enough to make the sacrifice and to depend upon His divine grace to assist her. Illustrative of a good profile is that of applicant H. The California Test of Mental Maturity, interpreted in terms of intelligence quotients and grade placement, are at; fol-lows: for mental factors, the intelligence quotient is 118, grade placement, 15.6; language factors, 131, grade place-ment, 70th percentile of students graduating from col-lege; and non-language factors, 105, grade placement, 12.5. Her MMPI falls within the normal range, and her Strong Interest Blank reveals a well-defined interest pat-tern. Her primary occupational interests are in elemen- tary teaching and office work, and her tertiary interests in business education and home economics. It might be wise to say a few words about the use of the Strong Vocational Interest Blank. There rare two forms, one for men and ond for wbmen. The test has been useful in helping the community identify.strong positive and negative interest patterns. About ninety per cent of the reli

Issue 19.2 of the Review for Religious, 1960. ; Review Prayer for the General Council by The Sacred Apostolic Peniten~tiary The Psychological Possibility of Intellectual Obedience by Thoinas Dub'ay, S.M. Temptation: A ÷ R = S by John Carroll Futrell, s.J. Charity the Unifying Principl'e of Religious Life by Sister Consuela Marie, S.B.S. Neuroticism and Perfection by Richard P. Vaughan, S.J. Survey of Roman Documents Views, News, Previews Questions and Answers Book Reviews 65 67 77 83 93 102 106 109 119 . Prayer for the General Council Sacred APostolic Penitentiary [The following prayer and the declaration of the attached indulgences is translated from Acta Apostolicae Sedis.I DIVINE SPIRIT, who were sent by the Father in ~.he name of Jesus and who remain present in the Church to govern her unerringly, pour forth, we ask of You, the fullness of Your gifts upon the ecumenical council. Tenderest of teachers and of comforters, enlighten the minds of our holy prelates who, in eager allegiance to the Roman Pontiff, will make up the assemblies of the sacred synod. Grant that abundant fruit thay come from this council; may the light and the strength of the Gospel be diffused'more deeply and more widely throughout human society; may the Catholic religion and the diligent work of the missions flourish with increased vigor; and may the happy result be a fuller knowledge of the teaching of the Church and a salutary progress in Christian morality. 0 welcome Guest of the soul, establish our minds in truth and bring our hearts to a ready obedience so that what is determined in the council may be sincerely accepted and promptly fulfilled by us. We also pray to You for those sheep who are not yet of the one fold of Jesus Christ; as they glory in the name of Christian, so may they finally come to true unity under the guidance of the one Pastor. By a kind of new Pentecost renew your marvelous works in this our time; .grant to Holy Church that, unanimously and insistently persevering in prayer together with Mary, the Mother of Jesus, she may, under the guidance of St. Peter, enlarge the kingdom of the divine Savior, a kingdom of truth arid of justice, of love and of peace. Amen. September 23, 1959 By virtue of ~he powers given to it by His Holiness John XXIII, the Sacred Apostolic Penitentiary makes the following grants: 1) a partial indulgence of ten years to be gained by the 65 PRAYER FOR THE GENERAL COUNCIL faithful who recite the above prayer devoutly and with contrite heart; 2) once a month a plenary indulgence under the usual conditions if they have :piously recited the prayer for an entire month. All things to the contrary not withstanding. N. Card. CANALI, Penitentiary Major S. de Angelis, Substitute 66 The Psychological Possibility of Intellectual Obedience Thomas Dubay, IF ANYTHING is anathema to our western world it is thought control in whatever guise it may appear. Understandably enough, our democratic horror at the least restriction on freedom of thought and expression strikes a sympathetic note in the heart of the western religious, for even he cannot escape the moods of a pluralistic society. So true is this sympathy for freedom, that not a few religious find the commonly taught doctrine on obedience of the intellect an incomprehensible, if not impossible bit of spirituality. One can encountei good religious whose very constitu-tions carry a stipulation on obedience of the judgment and yet who are almost scandalized by that stipulation, who may even think it a mistaken insertion because they view it either as im-possible of fulfillment or as an unjust attempt to curtail reasonable freedom. In this article we. propose to investigate psychologically the theory and the practice of intellectual obedience, that is, the conforming of one's judgment to the judgment of the superior. We will preface our analysis, however, with a review of the com-monly received doctrine on obedience of the intellect, a doctrine classically enunciated by St. Ignatius of Loyola in his well-known letter on obedience and recently sealed by the strong words of Pope Pius XII in his 1957 address to the General Congregation of the Society of Jesus. What Is Intellectual Obedience? Before answering our question positively, we might with profit dwell for a moment on what intellectual obedience is not. Con- " forming one's judgment to the superior's judgment d~es not mean merely that upon receiving an apparently unwise command, the subject judges that in these concrete circumstances he (the subject) ' intellectually agrees that the superior is to be obeyed. A religious does not make the superior's judgment his own simply by ac-cepting the intellectual proposition that this command must be The Reverend Thomas Dubay is presently stationed at Notre Dame Seminary, 2901 S. Carrollton Avenue, New Orleans 18, Louisiana. 67 THOMAS DUBAY Review for Religious executed, for that is accepting a solid truth of ascetical theology, not a superior's judgment. Obedience of the understanding is more than an intellectual acceptance of the theory behind religious obedience. Secondly, obedience of judgment does not mean that a religious violates his intellectual honesty by "agreeing" with the superior no matter how patently wrong the latter may be -- and sometimes is. Nor does it mean that a subject must think as his superior thinks on any subject whatsoever. The superior has no infallible authority from God and no universal commission to teach, and so he has no right to expect his subjects to be of one mind with him on free questions unrelated to religious obedience. If intellectual obedience is none of these, what, then, is it? Although a religious can avoid an offense against the virtue or the vow of obedience by a mere execution of the matter commanded, yet perfection adds to execution a full surrender of both the will and the intellect. There are, consequently, three elements nec-essarily included in an act of lJerfect obedience: execution of the superior's directive, wanting to execute it because of the superior's authority, and thinking in its regard as the superior thinks insofar as such is possible. As regards this third element, we can hardly improve on St. Ignatius' explanation, an explanation ratified by the explicit authority of the Sovereign Pontiff: "He who aims at making an entire and perfect oblation of himself, besides his will, must offer his understanding, which is a distinct degree anal the highest degree of obedience. He should not only wish the same as the Superior, but think the same, submitting his own judgment to the Superior's, so far as a devout will can incline the understanding. For although this faculty has not the freedom which the will has, and naturally assents to what is presented to it as true, there are, however, many instances where the evidence of the known truth is not coercive, in which it can with the help of the will favor one side or the other. When this happens, every obedient man should bring his thought into conformity with the thought of the Superior" (Letter on Obedience, translated by William J. Young, S.J. [New York: America Press, 1953], p. 10). It is not our purpose here to develop the idea of intellectual obedience, but rather to analyze its possibility from the psycholog-ical point of view. Our aim, then, can be ~atisfied by two or three illustrations of the Ignatian teaching. Father X, a religious priest, is attached to a parish, and during Lent is charged by his superior to preach a series of sermons on the capital sins. Father X rightly 68 March, 1960 |NTELLECTUAL OBEDIENCE believes he knows the parish and its needs well, and he further thinks that those who come to Lenten devotions need a series of sermons on fraternal charity far more than one on the capital sins. Surely the difference of opinion between Father X and his superior is not~black and white either way. As is the case with most com-mands in religious life, the evidence is not coercive; the matter is at least debatable. If Father X has a "devout will" in the Ignatian sense, he will try insofar as he can to see and accept his superior's judgment about- the advisability of a series on the capital sins. Rather than adduce mental or vocal reasons against the superior's view (and that is his natural inclination), he summons up reasons that support' the superior's position, and he tries to solve his own objections. In other ~words, he makes a serious attempt to judge .the matter as his superior judges it. Sister Y is denied permission to invite to the pa['lor someone she thinks'she could aid spiritually by a word of encouragement or advice. Sister conforms her judgment to her superior's, not merely by agreeing to the proposition that she ought not to invite this person because she has been denied permission, but by trying to agree to the proposition that, all things considered, seeing this individual now is not wise in itself. Brother Z is refused permission to buy tools that he obviously needs to do his job competently. Brother knows clearly that the monastery is not h.ard-pressed financially; and he knows, too, that his present set of tools is simply not adequate. What must Brother's "devout will" do. in this situation? Rest in peace. He need not even try to conform his judgment to his superior's, because the case is clear (in our supposition, at least). Since it is patent that the superior is wrong, even the perfection of obedienc~ does not require Brother to believe that he is right. Nature of Intellectual Assent The difficulties involved in seeing the advisability and even the possibility of a submission of the judgment are prominent in the cases of Father X and Sister Y. Brother Z's situation offers no great problem. If the intellect is a necessary, determined, non-free faculty, how can it be moved to accept one view rather than another? If Father X's intellect is determined by the evidence at hand and if he can see his motives for assent but not his superior's, how can he honestly conform his judgment to his superior's? And the same is true of Sister Y. " 69 THOMAS DUBAY Review for Religious The intellect, the faculty that knows in an immaterial manner, the faculty whose proper object is the universal idea, is admittedly a non-free cognitive power. It can know only what is given it, for °the knowing intellect is what the scholastics call the possible intellect, and the possible intellect is determined by the impressed species. Though this terminology may be obscure to the non-philosopher,, the fundamental idea is quite simple. Just as the eye is passive and determined in the sense that it can see only what is given to it, so also on the more immaterial plane is the intellect passive and. determined because it can "see" only what is given to it to understand. While we readily grant the non-free character of the intellect's grasp of the idea (the simple apprehension of the philosopher, the knowing of what a thing is), we do not grant that all of his judg-ments are determined or non-free. By a judgment we mean, of course, the attribution of one idea to another or the denial of one idea of another. I attribute white to house in the judgment, "the house is white," or I deny right of James in the judgment, "James is not right.": Some of our judgments are necessary: "seven times four is twenty-eight," or "any being has a sufficient reason for its existence." These propositions are overpowering in their evidence; the intellect must accept them. It cannot do otherwise, for there is no theoretical or practical difficulty in the propositions that could distract the intellect's attention and so render the assent unnecessary. ~ "But--and this is important for religious obedience--most of our judgments are not necessary. Even more, many of our certain judgments are free even though perfectly certain and established by irreproachable evidence. Although the judgment, "God exists," is certain, and metaphysically certain at that, it is a free judgment, for it is not coercively obvious. A man can choose to be unreason-able, to look rather at difficulties practical and speculative, and thus choose to reject a truth that is amply demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt. Because the intellect is not necessitated by the evidence in these many free certitudes, the will must enter into the picture and decide whether a~judgment is to be made, and, if so, what kind. The fact that the certitude of faith (another example of a free assent) is free is one reason that it is meritorious of eternal reward. And so the will has a decidedly large part to play in our intellectual life--far more than most of us would like to admit. If I am a Democrat (or a Republican), I am such not because 7O March, 1960 INTELLECTUAL OBEDIENCE of clear, cold reason alone. The positions taken by the two parties are by no means obviously right or wrong, at least when considered as two sys~ms. If I am a Democrat, there are intellectual reasons, of course. But there are also a host of factors that have influenced my will quite aside from my desire for efficient government: parental persuasions, educational exposures, attitudes of friends, personality traits of political figures, my home city and state, income bracket (if I had one!), social position, religion. If you wonder whether rural life is superior to urban, whether married women ought to work outside the home, whether your religious superior is right or wrong in a given case, you may be quite sure that your will is going to have an important role in your final yes or no to each question. The will exercises this role in two ways, indirectly and directly. The will indirectly influences our intellect in its act of judgment by determining whether and for how long the intellect is to consider the various pieces of evidence pro and con. If a man refuses to study the evidence for the divine origin of the Catholic Church, his final judgment, "She is not Christ's Church," has been very much determined by his will, even though he might flatter himself that he has been quite intellectual in building up his case against her. If a religious refuses to examine carefully the favorable motives for his superior's decision, his judgment that the superior has erred is shot through with the volitional element. ¯ The will plays a direct role in the formation of a judgment, not because it elicits the very act of judgment (this is a cognitive act and therefore an operation of the intellect), but because it im-perates or commands the intellect to pass judgment, to link one idea with another. This direct role is found in both certain and opinionative assents. Although we have thus far considered chiefly the certain assent, what we have said bears even more pointedly on the opinionative. If certitudes can be free, it is obvious that opinionative assertions.' must also be free. If certain motives often do not determine the intellect, surely probable ones do not. And so because the opinionative judgment is not one forced by the evidence, the will must enter into the matter directly and command the intellect either to assent, not to assent, or to suspend assent altogether. Application to Religious Obedience From all that we have said it appears, then, that a definitive disagreement with one's religious superior is not usually a purely 71 THOMAS DUBAY Review for Religious intellectual affair. The reader will note that we specify a definitive disagreement, that is, not a mere difficulty in seeing the superior's position, but rather a mental assent, certain or opinionative, that the superior has erred. If we may return to a previous example, our point may be clarified. If Father X makes a judgment that his superior is wrong in directing a Lenten series on the capital sins, Father X's will has probably entered into his~ decision both in-directly and directly. On the first score, Father X's judgment has been influenced indirectly by his will, if he declined to look for and consider reasons supporting his superior's view. If, in addition, he chose only to adduce mental evidence to prove his own view, he chose so to act by his will, not his intellect. On the second score, Father's judgment has been directly influenced by his will, since the evidence is not compelling for either opinion, and in order for him to make an opinionative or a certain assent either way the will must intervene. It now becomes apparent that obedience of the judgment involves both the intellect and the will though in different ways. It is the intellect that is here conformed to the superior's, but it is the will that sees to the conforming operation. However much he might like to think so, the religious is not subject merely to ob-jective evidence in his intellectual reaction to his superior's com-mands. His final assent or dissent is 'very much determined by his desire to assent or dissent, and that desire will be shown probably by both an indirect and a direct influence on the part of his will. We may next inquire into the reasons why the will enters so pronouncedly into a realm that seems no great affair of its own. ¯ Why does the will step into the intellect's own proper sphere and influence its own proper act, the judgment? The underlying answer to this question may be deduced from what we have already said about the indetermination of the intellect in any of its judgments that lack dompelling evidence. In these cases it is the will that must decide finally whether an intellectual assent is going to be made and, if so, what kind: affirmative or negative, certain or opinionative. Without this volitional push the intellect would operate only when the evidence for its assent is overwhelming and bereft of any difficulty, practical or speculative. While the in-tellect's frequent indetermination is the underlying reason for the will's entry into the act of judgment, we may still ask why the will chooses an affirmative assent rather than a negative one (or vice versa) or a certain rather than an opinionative one (or vice versa). 72 March, 1960 INTELLECTUAL OBEDIENCE Why, in other words, do we choose to hold what we do hold? Does our will always follow the objective state of the evidence? To answer this question is to answer also the problem of why we err when we do err. St. Thomas does not hesitate to place the root cause of error in the will, and he therefore finds at least a material sin (one without guilt) if not a formal sin (one with guilt) in our errors of judgment. "Error obviously has the character of sin," points out the Angelic. Doctor. "For it is not without pre-sumption that a person would pass judgment on things of which he is ignorant. Especially is this true in matters in which there is a danger of erring" (De rnalo, 3, 7). Why the sin? Because there is a deordination in the will's extending an assent beyond evidence, in judging without adequate information. We do not err because our senses and/or our intellects deceive us. l Being passive faculties they cannot register except what is given them, any more than a catcher's baseball glove can catch a golf ball if a baseball is thrown at it. If as I ride down the highway I see a peach tree and declare it to be a plum tree, I have erred not because my eyes deceived me (for they indicated precisely what is there), but because through an over-eager will my intellect was pushed to extend its assent, "Look at the plum tree," beyond the given data. An ordered judgment, one supportedby available evidence, would have been, "Look, I think that is a plum tree." In this judgment ~here is no error for it does appear to be a plum tree. In pinning down exactly why the will imperates unjustified assents epistemologists offer a wide variety of causes and occasions. These may be seen in any complete text on the validity of human knowledge. We will apply these same reasons and add some of our own to the subject's judging of a superior's command when the rightness or wrongness of it is not obvious. We may note that in the subject's disagreement with his superior there will often be an inordination of one kind or another. We qualify our statement by the word often because it can also happen with some frequency, and even in matters debatable, that a subject judges his superior wrong for objectively valid reasons. But even in this latter case perfect obedience will prompt the religious to seek to conform his thought to the superi0r's insofar as he can, and that by trying to see the superior's reasons rather than his own. What, then, are the inordinate causes for- a. subject's willed intellectual disagreement with his superior? ~Th~ senses can err, of course, when either they or the medium are defective. Of themselves, they are inerrant. 73 THOMAS DUSAY Review for Religious 1) ,Precipitate judgment due to levity or lack of maturity. Many people, ndt excepting religious, have a tendency to pass judgment on ideas or persons or events on the spur of the moment and without allowing themselves the leisure fo~ mature consideration. This undue haste could be willed insofar as an individual realizes his tendency to ill-considered conclusions and yet does not take adequate means to overcome it. A religious who is wont to have and express an immediate opinion regarding decisions of authority is probably beset with this defect. 2) Innate tendency to disagree. Closely allied with our first cause for a religious' intellectual disagreement with his superior is the odd perversity by which some men almost automatically choose the contradictory pqsition to an expressed proposition. This type of person, when a religious, will find himself sponta-neously thinking that the community should buy a Ford once the superior has decided upon a Chevrolet. 3) Desire to appear informed and/or as having a mind of one's own. To suspend judgment upon hearing a statement or to agree with it can in the first case appear to be due to ignorance of the situation or, in the second, to a lack of intellectual initiative and originality. Sister X may disagree with a ~uperior's directive re-garding classroom procedure primarily because she wants her community to realize that she, too, knows something about matters educational. Brother Y may be at odds with his superior about some extracurricular activity just to let it be known that he still has the use of a good set of reasoning apparatus. 4) An attachment to an idea or to a thing with which the superior' s directive is incompatable. Father X in our above example Gould have been willing his intellectual disagreement with his superior because of an unreasonable clinging to his own idea of what the people need most to hear about in a Lenten series. Although this clinging to an idea may be solidly motivated, it may also spring from an in-tellectual pride or from a self-centered attachment. If we refuse to examine honestly the evidence supporting the superior's view, we have cause for suspecting a self-centered attachment. 5) A preformed set of pseudo-principles. Not unrelated to simple prejudice is the phenomenon by which a religious builds his own cozy living of the religious life upon a set of principles hardly deducible from gospel asceticism. When his superior's directives clash with these "common sense" principles, the 'former are judged to be defective, not the latter. Fit forms of recreation, the amount of money available for a vacation, types and amount of work 74 March, 1960 INTELLECTUAL OBEDIENCE assigned are all illustrations of the kind of material in which intellectual judgment is likely to be mixed with an abundance of will. 6) Dislike for the consequences of the superior's judgment. Even when no principle is immediately apparent, a religious can disagree with his superior's judgment because he can see that it is going to conflict with his own plans and purposes. A teaching sister who wishes secretly to run a particular extracurricular activity can easily be tempted to find intellectual fault with a command whose execution will disqualify her for the job she seeks. If she succumbs to the temptation, her judgment is probably rife with will. 7) Dislike for the person of the superior. If my memory does not fail me, Ovid once observed that love is a credulous sort of thing. And we might add that hatred is incredulous. The same man will strain to put a favorable interpretation on a wild remark of a true friend, while he will unabashedly reject a moderate statement of an enemy. A religious who feels a natural antipathy towards his superior is by that very fact predisposed .to disagree with his judgments on non-intellectual grounds. Because women admittedly tend to judge with their hearts to a greater extent than men do, sisters who note this incllnation in themselves should observe carefully its bearing on intellectual obedience. These, then, are some of the volitional factors that can be present in the religious' failure to conform his judgment to that of his superior. Lest we be misunderstood, we repeat that a lack of conformity of judgment can also be due to solid intellectual reasons held by the subordinate; and in this case he is not at fault, provided he has honestly tried to see the superior's point of vie.w. But we do insist that many of our disagreements can be influenced, perhaps strongly,, by any one .or several of the factors we have outlined. When such be true, our disagreement may not be flattered by the pure name of intellectual. Some Difficulties Does not intellectual obedience smack of the unreal, the dis-honest? Is not a mature man or woman being asked too much in being urged to surrender not only the will but the very intellect itself? Is the religious to enjoy no personal independence at all? These questions almost answer themselves in the asking. Intel-lectual obedience is honest and realistic for the simple reason that it requires only that a subject look frankly at evidence favoring 75 THOMAS DUBAY the superior's viewpoint. Since he already knows his own opinion, the subordinate violates no honesty in trying to see and accept that of God's representative insofar as such is possible. Nor does this ask too much, for every faculty 0f man belongs to God, his intellect included, and they all, therefore, should be surrendered to Him. As regards independence, we must note that no man is independent of God. A religious obeys with his understanding, not because the superior is more intelligent than he,. but because he commands with God's authority. There is an immense difference between the two motives. Would not the faithful practice of intellectual obedience cripple a religious' later ability to rule? Hardly. This difficulty is based on the tacit premise that the subbrdinate's viewpoint on a debatable command is the more correct because it is the subordi-nate's, that he will learn how to rule by attending to his reasonings rather than those of the superior. The contrary seems more ~ikely. A subject already knows how he would judge in a given situation ¯ and why he is inclined to disagree with his superior. It stands to reason, then, that he will be broadened, not narrowed, if he honestly tries to see this same situation from another man's vantage point. I Would expect obedience of judgment to improve a subject's later ability to govern wisely rather than hinder it. After all, who of us. is so brilliant that he has nothing to learn from another? And finally, does not the conforming of one's ju.dgment to that of another tend to smother magnanimit~ and zeal, bigness of mind and aqcbmplishment? I think I might be pressed if I had to give a convincing theoretical answer to this objection, but I find that an adequate concrete answer could scarcely be easier. We need only look at the lives of the saints and then ask whether their perfect obedience of intellect and will smothered their zeal and a~c0mplish-ment. We need only recall, for example, that towering figure of magnanimity, St. Francis Xavier, corresponding with his superior on his knees. The objection melts away. Intellectual obedience, then, is not only psychologically possible; it is logical, helpful, desirable. Without it obedience of execution and will can hardly be perfect. The subject who is at intellectual odds with his superior's directives is likely to murmur, to cut corners, to be lacking in promptness and cheerfulness. With intellectual obedience he is completely subordinated to God. He enjoys peace because his holocaust is entire. 76 Temptation." A÷R--S John Carroll Futrell, S.J. EVEN THE GREAT St. Paul complained that he found himself doing the evil he did not wish to do. Religious men and women, professionally dedicated to the pursuit of perfection, under-stand from their own humiliating experience what the Apostle was talking about. It is one thing to possess and pursue ideals of perfect virtue and high sanctity and quite another to realize them in the heat and rush of daily life. All of us suffer from plaintive moments when we see the embarrassing divide between what we are and what we are supposed to be. "What a rain of ashes falls on him / Who sees the new and cannot leave the old." More often than not it is only in profound moral crises that we find out what values truly shape our character. Men in general tend to live their lives without finding out who or what they really are. Most of the time we can successfully fool ourselves into believing that we are in our souls what we appear in our religious garb. Whether this be due to superb play-acting or to some inner veil we draw across the mirror that would show us ourselves, at least this much is clear: we fight like Tartars against the knowledge of what we really are, barring no holds and respecting no rules. It takes a crisis to reveal us to ourselves, and even then we can sometimes throw off uncomfortable truths by a kind of mental judo. The source of our troubles and the root of our self-deceit, we know, is the old Adam within us all. Man is split; his heart is divided. If, as the Psalmist and the poets have said, he is noble and splendid and but a little less than the angels, if he is of almost .infinite faculty in his mind and in apprehension like a god; still, he is also a mean-spirited reed and his own demon. He is capable of heroic grandeur shining out against the dark magnificence of things; but in the main he is rather ignoble, mean in his pleasures, slavish in his conformity to unworthy standards. We religious share this fallen nature (how well we know it!) and this divided heart. We run the constant risk that we shall live out our lives without really seeing our true face or speaking out our authentic name, who we are, why we are here. When the time comes to us, perhaps only at Judgment, when we will be forced at last to utter The Reverend John Carroll Futrell is presently stationed at the Institut Saint-Bellarmin, W~pion, Belgium. 77 JOHN CARROLL FUTRELL Review fo~ Religious the speech which haslain hidden at the center of our souls for years, we will be abashed and not a little astounded. It will be too late to deceive ourselves. If we have failed to realize our religious ideals, the reason is that we have in one way or another succumbed to temptation. Modern psychoanalysis has taught us that the best way to uncover the authentic self is to dig back under the layer of our surface personality and lay bare the subsoil from which it has emerged. Ultimately, one can do this only for himself. It is helpful, however, to consider how temptation works in general in order to be equipped to analyze its victories in ourselves. The purpose here is to consider how temptation works and why it overcomes us. In his brilliant discussion of the roots of sin St. Thomas Aquinas explains the division man discovers within himself. The philosophers have a dictum that action follows upon knowledge. How, then, can a man do the evil he does not wish to do, follow what is base, when he could write a perfectly accurate analysis of the ideal? How can he act against his own knowledge? St. Thomas gives the answer (Summa Theologiae, 1-2, 77, 2~. We have two kinds of knowledge: a general recognition of moral principles which is habitually possessed by our minds-- for instance, we know that all forms of sensuality are to be avoided- and a practical knowledge in the here and now situation that faces us which governs what we actually do-- we do not recognize that this sensual action here and now ought to be avoided. The process is obvious: we fail to consider here and now what we habitually recognize as true. What is the cause of this crucial failure to call upon our habitual knowledge when we most need it? Why is man divided? According to St. Thomas there are several possible explana-tions of this lack of consideration of moral principles. In a malici-ous man it may simply be the result of an evil intention; he does not want to pay attention to the demands of morality. More often, the source of the trouble is less direct. Some impediment gets in the way and blocks out the habitual knowledge which should step in to save us. This impediment might .be so simple a thing as a very demanding external occupation. We are so busy doing that we have no time for thinking. Or it might be the result of physical weakness. The mind is very much tied to the body. But for most of us most of the time the biggest impediment to moral .considera-tion is the force of our feelings. We are carried away from our ideals by the drive of self-propelled desire. The most insidious wile 78 March, 1960 TEMPTATION; A ~- R = S of feeling is to distract us from our habitual knowledge of what is meet and just by compelling our attention to its own attractive object. Or it may simply set itself openly against the ideal, inclining us away from it and toward the flowers of evil. Fina.lly, (St. Thomas is always thorough) feeling can actually bring about a bodily change in a person, pressing him on so violently that reason is chained and actions are no longer free. Passion can make a man insane. What we face in temptation, therefore, is a here and now compulsion to yield to an evil desire, a craving so intense that it tends to drive from consciousness our habitual intellectual knowledge of right and wrong, our higher ideals and hopes. Man is divided; and if temptation overcomes him he finds himself doing the evil he does not wish.to do. How exactly does this sway of feeling manage to upset moral consideration? What is the psychology of temptation? Perhaps we can express it as a formula: A÷R =S. A stands for appetite. Our problems begin when something catches our attention which shows itself to be highly desirable. It is not good for me, but I want it. Hold out a piece of candy to a little child, then draw it away, and the process will be clear. What feeds appetite? It is a complicated process. The initial cause may be memory of some pleasure experienced in the past, or imagination of some hitherto unknown desirable object. Or it may be that our senses are sur-prised by some unexpected stimulation. What I see or hear makes me want to gain possession. In any case, a circuit has been estab-lished. Like an electric current, desire runs back and forth from imagination to the senses, one strengthening the yearning of the other. What I want in imagination, I decide to look for or reach for, and sense action results. But the action of the senses causes imagination to paint in ever more glowing colors the object I desire, and this results in more definite sense activity. All the while feeling is being fed and is growing stronger. But it runs the risk of being crushed. Reason hastens to the rescue. R stands for rationalization. In a religious, especially, ideals, convictions, habits stand in the way of surrender to appetite. If feeling is to have its way, it must seduce reason into approving the here and now choice of an action which is completely at variance with the religious's habitual knowledge of right and wrong. This requires some ingenuity, playing off against one another various considerations of what ought to. be in general, and what ougl~t to be under these circumstances; when one should strive to be a 79 JOHN CARROLL FUTRELL Review ~or Religious saint, and when one should give a little to weak human nature; what is splendid as a hazy ideal, and what is practical at the present moment. Appetite slowly takes control of reason~ leads it away from consideration of good and evil, brings it around to the judgment that what appetite wants it should have. This step of rationalization is essential to the victory of temptation. It cannot win without it. Man will not act while he is divided; he comes to realize the division only after he has done the evil he did not wish to do. Two forces are at work in the rationalization process which favor the success of temptation. Obviously, the first is self-deceit. We manage to fool ourselves into thinking temporarily that we can be both good religious and self-indulgent at the same time. The more we give was to the onrush of appetite, the easier it becomes, to fabricate logical reasons for satisfying it. Our mood becomes one of great kindliness towards ourselves, paternal under-standing of our weaknesses, and gracious indulgence towards our felt needs. Finally, we convince ourselves that for the moment surrender is the better part of valor. The second force which bolsters up the campaign of ap-petite during rationalization is procrastination. When we manage to retain a toe-hold on reality and have a sneaking suspicion that we cannot sincerely strive to be perfect and holy religious while giving way to self, feeling strikes directly at this resistance. It allows us to admit that what we desire is honestly not the greater good, is truly not consistent withototal consecration to God. Yet, here and now it is needed. No one becomes holy in a day. Even though we surrender to appetite on this occasion, well, we will be striving for perfection all our lives. The particular kind of mortification involved in resisting this temptation can come at a later date. Put it off for the time being. Reason has. the satisfaction of feeling self-righteously honest at the same time that it approves the drive of appetite. Temptation wins again. A variation on the usual campaign of procrastination may be termed the datur tertium feint. If reason p~rsists in protesting that the object of appetite just cannot be squared with religious dedication, then the object is shifted somewhat to make it appear more acceptable. This type of rationalization is most effective when the temptation is not to do something difficult .which the pursuit of perfection clearly demands. Appetite is revolted be-. cause the prospect is painful. Therefore, some less unpleasant act of virtue is proposed. One need not experience the shame of out-right refusal to a call to greater holiness, but neither need he be 8O March, 1960 TEMPTATION: A ÷ R = S quite so extravagant as seems indicated by the movements of grace. Datur tertium -- something else can be done which will serve as a sop to conscience and yet not unduly inconvenience the precious self. Later on, perhaps, it will be possible to ascend to the heights along the highroad of the saints --but not quite yet. Once again, .temptation has its way. S stands for surrender. The circuit is now completed. Appetite, fed by imagination and sense activity, entered into the mind and met all the counterattacks of reason. Having rationalized suc-cessfully, the tempted religious is now able to make the judgment that what is wanted here and now is good, or at least allowable, even though it runs counter to his habitual knowledge of what is right and wrong for one who is pursuing perfection. The choice is made. Temptation has won the battle and in its victory is transformed into sin, or at least into religious failure: A÷R=S. This, it would seem, is a fairly accurate description of the general psychology of temptation. How this general campaign is waged in each individual soul only the individual can say. But given that. this is the way temptation works, what would be the best general strategy of defense against it? The best beginning in a defensive war is to recognize the tactics of the enemy. These we have expressed in a formula -- A +R = S. Now,.a clever general tries to counter the very first hostile move. We must above all, therefore, attempt to overcome appetite before it can advance to the stage of rationalization. Here, one must cultivate awareness of the movements of imagination and the susceptibility of the senses. Since memory and imagination incite sense activity and sense activity feeds imagination, one must be ready at any time to shift his attention from the object, which incites appetite. If the feeling of desire has entered through the imagination, catch the feeling and overcome it before sense action results. If surprised by the senses into awareness of the desirable object, quickly occupy the senses with something else. In either case, the trick is to focus the attention away from what is tempting, and to do it immediately. The very practical and psychologically valid principles underlying the exercise of interior mortification and rules of religious decorum are immediately evident. These are simply helps to cope with our divided hearts. They are the guard over our outer gates. Further, one sees the wisdom of the practice of recollection and the habit of frequent interior aspirations. These. are positive ways of keeping our attentionwhere it belongs-~on God; and they provide a quick and easy way of shifting our atten- JOHN CARROLL FUTRELL tion away from temptation when it surprises us. The practice of corporal mortification, .too, is seen for the healthy thing it is: a means of training our senses to embrace what is painful when the call of grace summons us to higher holiness. Our conscious life is a vital rhythm which the soul itself cannot regulate. It needs power-ful allies on the level ,of sense and imagination. Rationalization is harder to cope with because it means that the enemy is already within the gates. Temptation has advanced beyond the stage of mere appetite. However, some defenses are still available. One can consciously cultivate the disposition for c.omplete honesty with one's self and with God. Then, when rationalization begins, it will be difficult not to recognize self-deceit. No one can give himself heart and soul to one thing while in the back of his mind he cherishes a yearning, a secret hope, for some-thing very different. If we are constantly striving to realize total consecration to God, temptation will conquer us less and less often. The cultivation of this desire demands unswerving fidelity to the practice of spiritual exercises, expecially examination of conscience and contemplation of the meaning of God. Adam failed in con-templation, and ever since the heart of man has been divided. A very practical means to expose temptation for what it really is is suggested by Eric Gill in his Autobiography. When the appetite draws us toward something which seems desirable and promises joy, he advises us to reflect on the true nature of enjoyment. "The only real enjoyment of life is in the memory. However enjoyable this or that activity may have been or have seemed to be at the time of action -- the ecstasy of sensation, the ecstasy of touch and taste and smell, of sight and sound-- unless the memory of it be good' we must, for our own peace, eschew such action" (New York: Devin-Adair, 1942, pp. 221-22). Finally, when we have done the evil we did not wish to do, when temptation has .conquered and we have surrendered, we must hold on with all our faculties to our faith in the mercy and for-giveness of God and our trust in Him at last to deliver us from the body of this death and to lead us home. If fall we must along the way, we know that if we have confidence in Him, He will bring us to victory and holiness in His own good time. Juliana of Norwich expressed it perfectly: "He said not Thou shalt not be tempested, Thou shalt not be travailed, Thou shalt not be distressed; but He said Thou shalt not.be overcome." 82 Charity the Unifying Principle of Religious Life Sister Consuela Marie, $.B.$. SOMETIMES in religious life the minutiae of observance, the multiplicity of regulations and injunctions, the unremitting insistence on the perfec~ observance of the rule may cause us to lose sight of the fundamental obligation of all spiritual living-- the observance of the first and greatest commandment: the love of God and its included second, the love of self and neighbor. Charity in its *unadulterated essence is the root obligation of all moral law; it is of the essence of the morality of religious observance. In this atomic age, religious find themselves caught in the activity whirls of modern living. All the gadgets and electronic time-savers available today somehow do not bring them extra time ¯ or leisure. Whether the religious exercises his activity in a class-room, a hospital, or the homes of the poor, he goes intensely from one activity to another only to find that all he hoped to do in a single day cannot be fitted into the twenty-four hours that bound it. Fortunately for him, there is a definite pattern of prayer around which he builds each day and a definite horarium for'the specific duties of the day that would seem to make for one calm, peaceful whole. But in this statistical age of records and super records, of state requirements and association reports, of development pro: grams, of theatrical productions and .seminars, he finds himself swamped at times as he tries to keep his head above a tide that carries him along whether he will or not. Stress is in the very air we breathe in America today. While the nation works feverishly for bigger and better missiles, we look for more and more mechanical teaching aids, larger and better equipped buildings, new modern motherhouses and participated TV pro-grams. And all of this is good. The far-seeing religious, heeding the many suggestions of His Holiness, Pope Pius XII, realizes that all modern developments, if properly used, are effective instruments for promoting the glory of God. He would be foolish to pass them by and keep to a horse while the rest of the world whirls by in convertibles. Sister Consuela Marie teaches theology and history at Xavier University, New Orleans 25, Louisiana. 83 SISTER CONSUELA MARIE Review for Religious But not for these did the young person enter religious life. Fundamentally, he entered religious life to find God, to live with Him, to carve out, with His grace, a way of life that would bring him into close contact with this God of love for whom his whole being cries out. How often the very force of circumstance will compel him to realize that God is not in the whirlwind; He is not ordinarily found in the blare of feverish activity. There must come to him those moments when he feels there is a roadblock between his activity and his God; .and he dreams of the green fields of the enclosed contemplative and feels himself in an outside barren waste where God seems to have crossed the horizon and left him watching the sun go down not on the glory of Galway Bay, but on ¯ the dried-up barrenness of an overworked field. At this point, however, help is nearer than he knows. He has only to cry out to God to experience new floods of grace poured out on him. Divine selection and abundant grace have set the religious apart for a special kind of efficiency in a special way of living. No human mind devised the religious state. Infinite Wisdom ordained and designed it. The Holy Spirit, breathing forever where He wills, inspired the minds of saints to organize its multiform varieties in the world today. No human need has been overlooked in the long list of religious institutes or the long category of their functions. Primarily, the religious state, whether active or contemplative, is a state of perfection in which one is surrounded by means of at-raining perfection by the observance, in addition to the command-ments, of the religious counsels. Because it implies a special way of approach to God, a special way of directing one's actions to one's last end, which is the eternal possession of God, "it implies a whole ensemble of moral obligations of unequal importance.''1 There is the fundamental obligation to strive for perfection; and this is the soul's direct answer to the challenge: "If thou wilt be perfect . " There is the essential obligation of the vows and their ramifications in the particular institute; there are the secondary obligations of the specific apostolate. Finally, there is the obligation of each professed "of impregnating his soul and his life with the particular spirit of his institute and assimilating its characterigtic virtues.''~ Each of these obligations is assumed under the protecting arms of Holy Mother the Church. It is the Church which puts the seal of approval on the specific rules of the various orders and gives its as- ~L. Colin, C.SS.R., Striving for Perfection (Westminster: Newman, 1956), p. ix. ~Ibid., p. x. 84 March, 1960 CHARITY THE UNIFYING PRINCIPLE surance that sanctity can be attained by the observance of these rules. The apostolates of the institutes become by this approval the apostolates of the Church itself. Underneath the multiplicity of orders and congregations, there is the unity of all religious living in the complete consecration of individual lives to the pursuit of perfection. In the spiritual order is thus achieved that unity in multiplicity so characteristic of all being, so particularly characteristic of the Church to which Christ gave the mark of unity. What striking illustrations of this unity of the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church: membership for every race, every clime, every age; sanctity on every level, married saints, doctor saints, children saints, royal saints, peasant saints, laborer saints, active apostolic saints, silent suffering saints. In his lucid expression, St. Thomas states it thus: "Even in the order, of natural things, perfection, which in God is simple, is not found in the created universe except in multiform and manifold manner; so too, the fullness .of grace, which is centered in Christ as Head, flows forth to His members in various ways for the perfecting of the body of the Church. This is the meaning of the Apostle's words: 'He gave some as apostles and some as prophets, and other some as evan-gelists, and other some as pastors and doctors for the perfecting of the saints.' "~ As in the Church, so too in each single order or congregation there is a leit motif, an underlying unity that binds all duties, all moral obligations in one. How necessary it is that one establish the rock bottom foundation principle of unity for the multiplicity of obligations in religious life: the vows that bind for life, the virtues to be acquired, the particular duties assigned, the diverse activities to be assumed. One element, one principle binds them all together. That element, that unifying force is charity. Once that is clearly grasped, accepted, and allowed to function unhampered, the inner well of peace is safely dug, the heart finds the refreshing inner spring; the storms, the hurricanes crash and lash; but they beat without impress; and the soul walks and talks with God in the quiet of the evening in a garden enclosed. And this is not mere poetry. It is basic theology. It was clearly taught with unerring simplicity by the eternal Word who, in answer to the Pharisee's question as to what was the greatest command-ment, answered: "Thoushalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like ~Summa Theologiae, 2-2, 183, 2; Eph 4:11. 85 SISTER CONSUELA MARIE Review for Religious it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" (Mt 22: 37-39). Scripture repeats that declaration, again and again. Nothing sur-passes St. Paul's description of charity. The nature, import, vitality of charity have never been so deftly defined and so superbly summarized as in his classic encomium. The Corinthians were evidently interested in the startling and visible charisms granted freely to the new-born Church. But St. Paul urges them to strive for the greater gifts and points out to them a "yet more excellent way." All the charisms, tongues of men and angels, gifts of proph-ecy, knowledge of all mysteries, and strength to move all mountains ¯ . all are as nothing without charity. Three groups of dominant ideas in St. Paul's treatment of charity are pointed out by Father Fernand Prat.4 St. Paul, he tells us, establishes it first as the queen of virtues since all other gifts are as nothing unless they are ruled by charity. Secondly, he makes it the summary of the commandments: "Love is the fulfilling of the law" (Rom 14:10). Finally, he establishes it as the bond of perfec-tion. Fifteen different virtues are listed by St. Paul as the compan-ions of charity in his exhortation to the Corinthians (1 Cor 13). In his Epistle to the Colossians, he urges the practice of mercy, humility, kindness, meekness, patience (Col 3: 12-13), all of which are included in the list of companions of charity. But whereas in the first listing St. Paul breaks charity up into its component. virtues, in this second listing he holds them securely together by, making charity their bond. "But above all these things have charity which is the bond of perfection" (Col 3:14). At the outset of religious life, when the young person is being orientated into a new type of living, when new obligations and moral responsibilities are being explained, might it not be well to posit a course (new or review as the previous education of the aspirant would determine) on the theological virtues with strong emphasis on charity? With this theological knowledge, the balance of other moral obligations can be definitely determined. At the beginning the .air is cleared, the moral emphasis properly placed and perfectly poised. With St. Thomas for his teacher, the. young religious will know that "primarily and essentially the perfection of the Christian life consists in charity, principally as to the love of God, secondarily as to the love of our neighbor, both of which are the matter of the chief commandments of the Divine Law.''~ In discussing the question whether perfection consists in the observ- ~The Theology of St. Paul (Westminster: Newman, 1927), 2, 333. ~Sumrna Theologiae, 2-2, 184, 3. 86 March, 1960 CHARITY THE UNIFYING PRINCIPLE ance of the commandments or of the counsels,-St. Thomas makes very clear this distinction between primary, essential perfection and secondary, accidental perfection. After stating the primacy of charity, he goes on to explain: "Secondarily and instrumentally, perfection consists in the observance of the counsels, all of which like the commandments are directed to charity; yet not in the same way."" The commandments, he explains, direct us in clearing away those things opposed to charity; while the counsels direct us to remove things not contrary to charity themselves, but which could hinder it. He quotes the Abbot Moses: "Fastings, watches, med-itating on the Scriptures, penury and loss of all one's wealth, these are not perfection, but means to perfection, since not in them does the school of perfection find its end, but through them it achieves its end." Here we have obligations in their proper focus; we have the obligations of religious life in their exact and proper proportion. The obligation of charity-is primary and without measure or limit. Its boundaries are all the energy of heart, mind, and will. Faith and hope, it is true, as theological virtues, have God° as their end. But in faith, it is the knowledge of God on the authority of His revela-tion; in hope, it is confidence in God to be possessed in future beatitude. In charity however, the end is the immediate possession of God here and now, the possession of infinite Love whereby God infuses His love into the soul, and the soul loves God with I-Iis own love. "It amounts to this, that endowed with the actual love with which the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Church ('I am in the Father and you in "me, and I in you . He that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him') we find within ourselves the strength to keep the commandments, to live the life of faith, and -- most blessed of all -- to love back.''7 Charity, we must remember, is infused; we cannot create it; we cannot increase or decrease it though we can posit the actions, we can set the conditions under which, or on a~ccount of which, God will pour deeper infusions. On the other hand, we can, by our neglect of grace, dry up the streams and eventually, by our own free act, lose this infused gift by mortal sin. Charity and grace go hand in hand. They grow together; they increase together. When we lose one, we lose the other. They are distinct but inseparable. Since on the authority of God, the testimony of Scripture and 6Ibid. 7Dom Hubert VanZeller, The Inner Search (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956), p. 165. 87 SISTER CONSUELA MARIE Review for Religious the writings of the Fathers and the explanations of the Summa, charity is the first moral obligation of all Christian living, a clear concept of its theological implications serves not only as rock base for the spiritual structure; but, far and beyond the foundation, it provides the beginning and the end, the end and the means, the joy and the crown, the reduction to simplicity and unity of the many facets of religious observance and obligations. Once this foundation virtue of charity takes its proper place, all other virtues take their form from it; all other virtues are only so many ways of loving God. No one of them has any meritorious value before God unless.it is informed by charity. What a delight religious life should be if this is our first duty, this the prime obligation of our whole existence -- to love God and our neighbor as ourselves in Him. And all this because God has.first loved us. Before the uni-verse was created, God is love. He created the universe and man in an act of love. When man turned aside from His love in sin, God the Father decreed the redemption by His only-begotten Son; and the Holy Ghost, in an act of love, overshadowed the im-maculate Virgin and with her consent effected the Incarnation. "The free deliberate self-oblation of Jesus on earth is the realization in time of the eternal decree of redemption in Heaven which springs from the inmost sources of Love." 8 We were created in love; we are destined to be entirely pos-sessed by love. We have only to clear the way, to remove the obstacles, to take down the barriers of pride and self love to let the waters of the boundless oceans of love inundate our whole lives. Once the barriers are down and love's passage through us is free, all other virtues follow. Because we love, we find the practice of the other virtues an almost impelling necessity. "I have found my vocation," once exclaimed the Little Flower; "in the Church, I will be love!" Each religious should make the same discovery; and the sooner, the better. To each one is the quotation from Jeremias applicable: "I have loved thee with an everlasting love!" (31:3). What peace, quiet, refreshment in that thought. Ever-lastingly He has loved me; He has brought me into existence primarily to fill me with love, for His glory! Intellectually we should understand the nature of this charity and how it should function in our lives. We cannot build castles in the air or dream of the darts of love or the raging fires we see sur-rounding the pictures of the saints. We must seek the essence, SKarl Adam, Christ the Son of God (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1934), p. 266. 88 March, 1960 CHARITY THE UNIFYING PRINCIPLE not the extraordinary manifestations of it. There are three divisions in this precept of charity: the love of God~ the love of self, the love of neighbor. The human mind staggers when it attempts to analyze the love of God in itself. On God's side, charity is active and creative. According to Sty. Thomas, "It infuses and creates the goodness which is present in things."'~ We love something because we find in it qualities or characteristics that appeal to us. God loves His own reflection in objects pleasing to Him. God is love, so that in Him love is a bottomless spring diffusing itself endlessly to the works of His creation, making them beautiful because of His love poured freely into them. "Our God is a consuming fire" (Heb 12:29). The flames of that fire are eternal and boundless. They transform to white heat whatever they touch. The inner life of the Blessed Trinity is one of complete giving, coraplete giving in love in the eternal generation of the Son by the Father, and the eternal spiration of the Holy Ghost by the mutual love of the Father and the Son. The Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity is the most stupendous demonstration of God's love for man. The Redemption, the establishment of the Church, the order of grace and the sacraments, are all gifts demonstrating a love on God's part so perfect, we can never begin to comprehend it. On our part, charity is a supernaturally infused habit of our souls, a virtue by which we love God as the sovereign good above all else and our neighbor as ourselves in His love. This love for God which is our prime duty must have definite characteristics. It must be a love that is summus, that is, a love of God above all else. This characteristic which ~he theologians label summus has two di-visions: appretiative and intensive. Amor appretiative summus loves God as the sovereign good. "It is a postulate of charity that we must love God as the.infinitely lovable Being above all else, that is more than any other person.''~" Amor intensive summus adds the additional note of loving God ardently. "It is the highest kind of emotional love of which a man is capable.''~ This ardor, however, is not essential. ~t is a gift of God not given to all. True, there have been saints who have experienced sensible darts of love or ardent affections; but there have been many, too, who experienced years of dryness and dereliction. Yet these also loved God with an amor appretiative summus. ~Summa Theologiae, 1, 20, 3. ~°Koch-Preuss, Handbook o[ Moral Theology (St. Louis: Herder, 1928), 4, 78. ~Ibid., p. 79. 89 SISTER CONSUELA MARIE Review for Religious The second characteristic of the love we should bear God is that it be effective. That means it must show itself in good works. Love that merely exclaims, "My God, I love you!" but does not show itself in good works, is ineffective love. Mere affective love is transitory and incomplete unless it ends in effective love. If we really love God, we give proof of the love by the practice of the virtues and. by positive effort to extend the Kingdom of God on earth. The love of. God is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is the love of neighbor as self. Not often is a religious instructed in the love of self, though since God established love of self as the measure of the love of neighbor, there is a perfectly proper love of self. Pope Pius XII has made this very clear. "There exists," he said in his address to psychotherapists (April 13, 1953), "in fact a defense, an esteem, a love, and a service of one's personal self which is not only justified but demanded by psychology and morality. Nature makes this plain, and it is also a lesson of the Christian faith. Our Lord taught 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' Christ then, proposes as the rule of love of neighbor, charity towards oneself,, not the contrary." This love of self includes the proper love of our spiritual wel-fare before which we can put nothing else, and also in certain circumstances, a concern for our necessary physical welfare. St. Thomas says this explicitly: "When we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves, the love of self is set before the love of neighbor.""-' He hastens to add that we should love our neighbor more than our body. A proper uriderstanding of the nature of this love of self is essential. Before all else, we must love our soul's salvation. Before that we can put nothing. We can, however, and should put our neighbor's spiritual welfare before our physical convenience. It is worth noting, too, that God expects a reasonable care and concern for the physical nature He has given us. It has been said that some nuns push themselves too far. That can happen to a religious as well as to a hard-pressed mother or father. But here, a charity for oneself, for the physical health given by God, could help. All religious are well instructed on the third phase of the commandment of charity -- the love of neighbor. Love for others in religious life flowers into the manifold apostolates of the Church at home and abroad. So many dedicated apostles in so many dedicated apostolates, all loving God for Himself, and their neigh-r~ Surnma Theologiae, 2-2, 44, 8, ad 2. 9O March, 1960 CHARITY THE UNIFYING PRINCIPLE bors in. His love, ready to give them all they have, loving them truly as they love themselves! Now and then, however, it is well to recall that the first claimants to this charity toward the neighbor are the members of our respective communities. St. Thomas says so pointedly, "We ought to love most those of our neighbors who are more virtuous or more closely united with us.''1'~ We should wish them well, do good to them before outsiders. Helping them is part of our first moral obligation. Understanding the primacy of place, the primacy of obl.igation, and the formative influence of charity on all other virtues, the in-tellectual concept is clear. Intellectual concepts will help but they will not produce charity. God infuses it. Progress in charity is the lifelong concern of the religious. He is in the way of perfection. Can he attain to perfect charity? Discussing whether one can be perfect in this life,14 St. Thomas explains that absolute perfection is possible only to God, and that absolute totality on the part of the lover so that his affective faculty always tends to God as much as it possibly can, is not possible to human nature this side of heaven. But, he adds, there is a third perfection on the part of the lover with regard ¯ to the removal of obstacles to the movement of love towards God. This perfection, he assures us, can be had in this life in two ways: first, by removing from man's affection all that is contrary to charity, such as mortal sin (this degree is essential for salvation); secondly, by removing from man's affections not only what is contrary to charity but also what hinders the mind's affection from tending wholly to God. In this second area, there are ever-widening possibilities. In avoiding mortal sin, and as far as human frailty will permit, venial sin, there is an ever-deepening union of mind and soul with God. Affective love becomes effective in works of super-erogation assumed for the sake of love. At this point, all the theo-logical virtues, the cardinal virtues and their subsidiary virtues, are so many streams through which the current of charity flows far and wide. The stronger the charity, the stronger these other virtues which receive their merit from charity. This perfection is possible here and now --: that all that is done, is done for love of God at least through a virtual intention even though an actual intention does not precede every ac.t. The aim at this love should be direct and constant. The most important act a religious makes is an act of charity, and it is in his power to renew it actually and briefly countless ~3Ibid. l~Summa Theologiae, 2-2, 184, 2. 91 SISTER CONSUELA MARIE times during the day. Fulfilling all the obligations of his state for the pure love of God, he can still renew frequent acts of charity. "With frequently renewed acts of charity, the soul is capable of doing as much as it can in this life to make the meritorious influence of charity constant and complete.''~'~ Charity is the precious ointment, the sheer essence of all religious living, of all spiritual striving. It is the most precious element in the Church. St. John of the Cross states its position with startling simplicity: "More precious in the sight of God and the soul is a small portion of this pure love, more profitable to the Church, even though it seems to be accomplishing nothing, than are all other good works combined.''~'~ When life is over, faith will end, for we will see; hope will vanish, for the goal will be reached. Charity alone will endure. Before it is our eternal joy, it will be our judgment. St. John of the Cross tells us that in the evening "of life, we will be judged by love. How important that the morning, the high noon, and the late afternoon of life be directed to the perfection of charity! ~SDominic Hughes, "The Dynamics of Christian Perfection," The Thomist, 15 (1952), 268. ~The Works of St. John of the Cross (Westminster: Newman, 1949), 2, 346. 92 Neuroticism and Perfection Richard P. Vaughan, S.J. THE FIRST OBLIGATION of every religious is to seek perfec-tion.~ Generally speaking, the success of a religious as a religious will be measured by the extent to which he or she actually achieves this goal. Since perfec.tion and sanctit~ are synofiomous, every religious is also called to sanctity. This demand presents a special problem for the seriously neurotic religious, since the very nature of his disorder seems to militate against his achieving any degree of perfection or sanctity, and sometimes it even seems to eliminate the possibility of his striving to achieve a relative state of perfection. The question, therefore, arises: Can the neurotic religioug ever hope to attain perfection or sanctity? Or are the debilitating symptoms of almost all seriously neurotic conditi'~ns such as to exclude the possibility of sanctity? Obligation and Nature of Perfection St. Thbmas describes the type of l~erfection whibh is the primary obligation of all religious as "charity, first and foremost in the love of God, and then in the love of'neighb0r.'"-' The 'religiqus is especially called to love God with his whole heart and his neighbor as himself.:' Although few, if any, actually achieve this $odl, many have succeeded to an extraordinary degree. They have devoted the greater part of their lives to loving.God and neighbor. As a resul~, they now live among the saints of heaven. If one stops to analyze the lives of these eminently successful people, it becomes evident that this charity of which Scripture and the theologians speak presupposes many other virtues and counsels. First of all, one cannot fully love .God and his neighbor when the majo~ actions of his life are motivated by self-love. The person who is absorbed in himself finds it extremely difficult to turn his will outward toward God and neighbor. Even those who have achieved a relative state of sanctity on this earth, quickly dis- The Reverend Richard P. Vaugl~an teaches at the University of San Francisco, San Francisco 17, California. 'Code of Canon Law, canon 593. "-'~urnma Theologiae, 2-2, 184, 3. ¯ :~Adolphe Tanquerey, The Spiritual Life (Tournai: Descl6e, 1930), pp. 183-84. 93 RICHARD P. VAUGHAN Review for Religious covered that they must wage a constant battle against self, lest they find Selfish motives tainting that charity which perfection demands. Moreover, the enticements of pleasure turn the religious away from divine love. The man or woman who lives for the pleasures of the world cannot live for God. It is only by curbing the desire for. pleasure through the medium of numerous virtues that a religious will be able to center his full attention upon God. Fu.rther helps are the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. These three vows, shut out worldly interests which distract from the full development of charity. Hence, included in the notion of charity, which is the source of all perfection, is self-sacrifice, the practice of virtues, and fidelity to the three vows. Knowledge of God and Neurosis A thing must be seen as good before it can be loved. The more apparent the goodness, the greater is the possibility of a deep love. Thus, before we can love a person, we must know him. These are philosophical principles which affect our dealings with God as well as with others. In the natural order, all of us have probably ex-perienced at one time or another an initial dislike for a person, only to have this dislike after a number of months or years turn to a positive like or even to love. If we stop to analyze what has hap-pened, it becomes apparent that a new and deeper knowledge of the person makes us see him in an entirely different light. We begin to see him as he actually is and not as we have imagined him to be. When all his good qualities become apparent, we cannot help but" like him. The neurotic frequently ftnds himself in a similar situation in his relationship v~ith God. Due to his disorder and early experiences, he may harbor some v.ery hostile and angry feelings toward God. He is apt to think that God has unjustly persecuted him. He is apt to be resentful. Since all such thoughts and emotions provoke a great amount of guilt, many neurotics repress them. Unfortunately, repressed matter seldom stays fully repressed, but manifests itself in many subtle ways. For example, .a religious who is unconsciously very angry with God might ex-perience almost a compulsion to commit some type of a serious sin, and still never realize that one of the reasons for his actions is a .desire to get even with God. Once the neurotic religious through the medium of psychotherapy begins to realize why he feels as he does toward God, then he can begin to know God as others know Him. 94 March, 1960 NEUROTICISM AND PERFECTION None of us knows God directly. Our knowledge comes from experience. Some of this knowledge is the result of a long reasoning process. However, our initial knowledge of what God is like most probably springs from the attitudes and example of our parents. It is the mother or father who plants the germ of knowledge in the mind of the child. Since small children usually look upon their parents as gods, it should not be startling to. discover that our concept Of what God is like comes in part from experience with our own fathers. If, for instance, early childhood experiences with a father or father-substitute are unfavorable, as so often happens among neurotics, then one's notion of God the Father is not likely to be true to reality. The individual who has had a father who was a stern disciplinarian and unable to express any warmth toward his children is liable to look upon God as the God of ruthless justice, and not the God of love and mercy. This concept.bf God is the product of experience, and in all probability the individual does not realize that it differs from that of anyone else. This is but one example of how the neurotic mind might develop a warped concept . of God. There are numerous others, all of which profoundly affect the pursuit of sanctity. Since true love of God necessarily presupposes a true knowl-edge of God, the neurotic religious may often find himself with limited tools or even without any tools necessary for progress on the way to perfection. Any progress will first demand that the religious abandon his false notion of God. Generally speaking, such a change will require some type of psychological help. Almost all of us during the course of childhood and adolescence . de~velop some fal,se, or at least dubious ideas about God. It is only through meditation and study" that a religious comes to a true, although limited, knowledge of God. One of th~ characteristics of a neurotic' is self-centeredness. He has a tendenc~ to live inside ¯ him, .self. He frequently looks at the events of dail~ life only in so far as they affect his own personal problem.s. Often his morning meditations become mere ruminations over past hurts and failures; real of imagined. He finds it very difficult to consider things as they actually exist apart from his own disordered personality. Such an outlook does not foster that type of meditation which is likely to produce a .more realistic knowledge of God. As a consequence, the love of God which is demanded of those seeking perfection is either weak or completely ladking, since one cannot fully love God if he has an erroneous concept of Him. 95 ~ICHARD P. VAUGHAN Review for Religious Love of Neighbor The second obligation upon all those who are seeking perfec-tion is love of one's neighbor.4 This obligation poses a special prob-lem for the seriously neurotic religious, in so far as one of the major areas affected by a neurotic condition is that of relationship with others. A characteristic often found in a neurosis is an excessive striving for the manifestations of love and attention from others. This striving stems from early childhood frustrations which have been repressed. The neurotic will generally make use of some protective devices so that he is not forced to look at this anxiety-provoking part of his personality. Some handle the problem by creating a wall between themselves and others. They simply tell themselves that they do not need the rest of the community. Their lives are dedicated to God and their work. And so they withdraw deeper into themselves. Other religious make an initial but unsuccessful effort to satisfy their need for affection, but then turn against the very members of the community who have tried to help them. In general, they manifest a good deal of anger and hostility in their relationships with others. And finally, there are those religious who spend their lives seeking any small manifesta-tion of love and concern from the other members of the community or from the laity. They are very dependent. They are always leaning on someone else. Although they seldom show external resentment when others inevitably fair to satisfy their needs, still often they are seething inside with emotional turmoil. It is not only possible to love those whom we. dislike, but it is a commandment of God. "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you" (Lk 6:27). Still, if one has an almost constant tendency to be hostile and resentful of others, the task of controlling these feelings becomes extremely, difficult. In the case of neurotic reli-gious, the major obstacles for the practice of charity are feelings of the opposite nature which sp~ing from unconscious sources. One can learn to change erroneous attitudes and feelings if he realizes that he has them and can analyze to some degree why he acts accordingly. But when a person is almost entirely unaware of both his uncharitable actions and the source of these actions, then the practice of charity often becomes an almost insurmountable barrier. Over- Sensitiveness Coupled with the above-mentioned problem is the over-sensitiveness which is a part of most neuroses. The neurotic religious ~Ibid., pp. 157-58. 96 March, 1960 NEUROTICISM AND PERFECTION is more easily offended by a slight or a cross word. He takes all the actions and words of others in a personal sense. Thus, he is more apt to be tempted with uncharitable or even revengeful thoughts. Since he is so self-centered, he will probably find it considerably more difficult to resist these temptations. The slight or cross word is. striking at the most vulnerable part of his personality, namely at his self-esteem; the natural reaction is to protect himself by attacking the offender. The second obligation imposed by perfection, namely charity toward others, therefore, proves much more trying for the neurotic religious than for the rest of the community. In the case of the severely neurotic religious who has little or no insight into his hostile behaviour, the effect of the disorder could reach that point where the virtue of charity would seem to be almost impossible. In such instances, the degree of responsibility for the uncharitable-ness must be taken into consideration. The lives of the saints teach us that any advancement on the way of perfection calls for self-sacrifice and self-renunciation,s The person who is almost entirely taken up with himself has little room in his heart for love of God and neighbor. As it has been stated, one of the major characteristics of neurotics is self-centered-ness. Depending upon the degree of severity, being self-centered will present some kind of an obstacle to sanctity. In the case of religious, some become so absorbed in their own interior conflicts and frustrations that they have little time left for God and the members of their community. They are so filled with self-pity that God has but one meaning for them, namely a source of consolation and solace. These souls are unable to give love to God just as they are unable to give love to their fellow religious or to their students. As a result, self-sacrifice and self-renunciation play little or no part in their lives. Pseudo-Virtues A ~urther handicap resulting from a neurotic condition is the development of pseudo-virtues. These are repeated actions which give the semblance of virtue but in reality are just the result of the disordered personality. For example, pseudo-virtues are sometimes found among those who have deep feelings of inferiority and un-worthiness, which for the most part are uncbnscious. Under the guise of humility, some neurotic religious are constantly defacing themselves before others. Unfortunately, they never stop to analyze ~Ibid., pp. 166-69. 97 RICHARD P. VAOGHAN Review for Religious that what they are actually seeking is a word of praise to offset some very distressing feelings of inferiority. The function of this so-called humility is self-centered and not God-centered. Commandments and Counsels Striving for perfection demands the following of the command-ments and, to a degree, the counsels. "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments . If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast and give to the poor and thou shalt have a treasure in heaven" (Mt~19:17-21). If a religious is making a true effort to seek perfectio~n, he will strive to keep himself, at the very least, free from serious sin and to observe the demands of his three vows. In addition to grace, this observance of the commandments and following of the vows requires the habit of self-control. Yet one of the first parts of personality to be affected by any kind of mental illness is self-control. Both neurotics and psychotics find that as their disorders become progressively worse, they become less and less able to control their thoughts, feelings, and actions. After an emotional outburst, many a neurotic religious has been shocked and humiliated by his unusual behavior. He will tell himself that he did not act this way before. When he tries to .analyze why he became so angry and lost his temper, he can find no proportionate reason. The reason, however, for his behavior can be attributed to a loss of self-control, resulting from the neurotic disorder. This loss of self-control affects much of the neurotic's behavior. It impairs his pursuit of virtue and fidelity to the vows. The striving for sanctity is further handicapped by continuous periods of depression and fatigue, which seem to mark the path of most neurotics. When a person is unhappy and tired, he becomes an easy prey to temptation. He has less resistance. Pleasure becomes more enticing, since in a moment of darkness any fleeting joy be-comes much more desirable. The start of many a neurotic's escape into sin has begun with a peri6d of depression and unhappiness. Each lapse, especially if the lapses involve sins of a sexual nature, destroys some progress made in the life of virtue. Since repeated sinful actions are apt to become habitual, they make future progress much more difficult. Can a Saint Be Neurotic? What has been said up to this point would seem to indicate that perfection or sanctity is out of the reach of the neurotic religious. The.re are, however, modern authors who maintain that 98 March, 1960 NEUROTICISM AND PERFECTION some of the saints were neurotic. For instance, one states that St. Therese of the Child Jesus suffered from an obsessive-compul-sive neurosis.6 Still, it should be noted that this author says St. Therese appeared to be neurotic at the age of twelve or thir-teen. He does not affirm that she was neurotic when she died. Moreover, he does not state that she was severely neurotic, but that she suffered from a serious case of scruples, which in many cases is considered a neurotic symptom. During the past few decades at' least, it is highly doubtful whether a person could have been severely neurotic and still be considered an apt candidate for canonization. In the Code of Canon Law, we find: "When the cause is that of a confessor (that is, of a servant of God who is not a martyr of the faith), the following question is.to be discussed: whether in the case under consideration there is evidence of the existence of the theological virtues of faith,, hope, and charity (both toward God and toward neighbor) and of the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, forti-tude, and temperance, and of the subsidiary virtues in a heroic de-gree . ,,7 In view of our analysis of the seriously neurotic per-sonality, it is difficult to see how a religious could attain all the aforesaid virtues to a heroic degree, and thus be worthy of canoniza-tion. It might also be added that, where there is evidence of mental disturbance in a servant of God who is being considered for beati-fication and this disturbance in some way influences the exercise of that servant's freedom, the custom of the Congregation of Rites has been to dismiss or set aside the case. s Spiritual Fate of the Neurotic Religious What, then, is the spiritual fate of the priest, sister, or brother who is severely afflicted with some form of a neurosis? As long as he or she remains in this condition, there would seem to be little chance of attaining a high degree of perfection -- except through the help of a special miracle coming from the hand of God. This handicap, however, does not relieve the particular religious in question of the obligation to seek after perfection. He still has the same obligation as any other religious. He differs from other re-ligious only in so far as he must reconstruct the natural before he 6Josef Goldbrunner, Holiness Is Wholeness (New York: Pantheon, 1955),. p. 25. 7Code of Canon Law, canon 2104. 8Gabriele di Santa Maria Maddalena, "Present Norms of Holiness" in Conflict and Light, edited by Bruno de J~sus-Marie (London: Sheed and Ward, 1952), p. 168. 99 RICHARD P. VAUGHAN Review for Religious can build a solid supernatural life. Most religious have fairly well-balanced personalities when they enter the notiviate. They are, therefore, in a position to take full advantage of the spiritual benefits offered during these years of training. With the neurotic, such is unfortunately not the case. He is frequently so preoccupied with himself and his problems that much of the spiritual fruit offered during the formative years is lost. If a neurotic religious is to advance on the road to sanctity, he must first clear away the natural debris of conflicts, fears, and frustrations. Once this has been accomplished, he will then move ahead as rapidly, if not more rapidly, than the religious who has always had good psychological health. In most instances of severe neurosis, this can only be achieved through some form of psycho-therapy. Protective Devices At the heart of every neurotic condition, no matter how mild or severe, is the development of some kind of a protective device. For example, the individual who feels completely inadequate in his dealings with others may defend himself against having to face this side of his personality by putting on an air of bravado whenever he finds himself in a group of people. Usually the physical and psychological symptoms are merely protective device.s. During the course of our early lives, there is not one of us who does not develop some kind of a personality defect which we cannot bear to manifest, and so we repress it. The way we go about repressing it is to develop a protective device. For this reason, many psy-chiatrists and psychologists say that we are all neurotic to a degree, The difference between the severely neurotic person and the average person is quantitative. The seriously neurotic has many repressed personality defects, and he has built up a very elaborate system of defending himself. This system, however, either fails to give the needed protection, so that he has to face to some extent the repulsive part of himself, or the system itself is such as to prove ankiety-provoking. In the latter case, one could include the religious who uses the defense of compulsive prayer to solve an unconscious conflict. Soon the number of prayers reaches such a proportion as to make the fulfilling of his other obligations impossible~ Then, the religious is caught in a new conflict of obliga-tions which produces more psychological discomfort. The saints who, like St. Therese, gave some evidence of a neurosis built up protective devices or defenses; but they did not 100 March, 1960 NEUROTICISM AND PERFECTION construct those elaborate and complicated systems that char-acterize so many severe neurotics. Had they done so, they un-doubtedly would have also manifested such personality traits as over-sensitivity and self-centeredness. Many religious give evidence of minor neurotic symptoms, such as an unreasonable fear of high places or occasional attacks of scruples. These symptoms in themselves need not be handicaps to perfection. They may even become sources of spiritual progress. As soon as a religious, however, manifests not only these minor symptoms but also some of the neurotic personality traits, then the way to perfection and sanctity becomes progressively more difficult. Need of Psychotherapy The foregoing discussion should bring out the need of a solid natural foundation on which to build the religious life. The priest, brother, or sister who is plagued with numerous psychological problems has a poor foundation on'which to construct his or her spiritual life. In almost every instance, supernatural virtue de-mands natural virtue. This fact points to the importance of psy-chotherapy for the severely neurotic religious. For without psycho-therapy,- these religious will be unable to achieve or sometimes even to seek after the primary goal of the religious life. Sanctity and perfection are out of their reach. But once they have received and cooperated with some form of psychological help, they are in a position to use the grace God gives to every religious. It stands to reason that the sooner a religious has the opportunity to clear away debris of psychological conflicts, the sooner he can get to the prime purpose of his chosen life, namely his own perfection and sanctity. 101 Survey of Roman Documents R. F. Smith, S.J. THE FOLLOWING article will survey the documents that appeared in .Acta Apostolicae Sedis (AAS) during the months of October and November, 1959. All references in the article will be to the 1959 AAS (v. 51). Encyclical on the Rosary Under the date of September 26, 1959 (pp. 673-78), Pope John XXIII issued the encyclical Grata recordatio. The document is a brief one which begins by recalling the many Marian encyclicals of Leo " XIII. After emphasizing the desire he has for the devout recitation of the Rosary especially during the month of October, the Vicar of Christ then listed the matters for which he principally wished private and public prayers to be offered during the month of the Rosary. The "first intention was for the Holy See and for all ecclesiastical orders in the Church. The Pontiff's second intention was for all apostolic laborers that they may be granted the grace to speak the word of God with all confidence in its power. In the third place the Pope asked the faithful to remember in their prayers the leaders of the nations of the world. Catholics, he said, should petition God that these leaders may give the deepest consideration to the critical situation that the world faces today, that they may seek out the causes of discord, and that, realizing that war measures can lead only to destruction for all concerned, they may place no hope in such means. Let the leaders of the world, the Holy Father remarked, recall the eternal laws of God which are the foundation of good government; similarly they should remind themselves that just as men have been created by God, so also they are destined to possess and enjoy Him. The fourth and final intention for which John XXIII asked special prayers was the diocesan synod of Rome and the coming general council of the Church. Saints, Blessed, Servants of God Under the date of May 26, 1959, the Holy See issued two decretal letters (pp. 737-49, 750-64) concerning the canonization of St. Charles of Sezze (1613-1669) and St. Joaquina de Vedruna de Mas (1783-1854). Each of the letters begins with an account of the life of the saint, details the history of the cause for canonization, and finally gives the official account of the actual canonization. 102 ROMAN DOCUMENTS On August 11, 1958 (pp. 830-31), the Sacred Congregation of Rites formally confirmed the immemorial cult by which Herman Joseph, priest of the Premonstratensian Order, has been honored as a saint. The same congregation also issued a monitum (p. 720) in which it noted two mistakes in the text of the second nocturn for the feast of St. Lawrence of Brindisi. On April 22, 1959 (pp. 717-20), the same congrega-tion approved the introduction of the cause of the Servant of God Peter Joseph Savelberg (1827-1907), priest and founder of the Congregations of the Brothers and the Little Sisters of St. Joseph. On October 14, 1959 (pp. 818-20), the Pope addressed an allocution to a gro.up interested in the cause of Niels Steensen. The Pontiff praised Steensen for the remarkable scientific rigor with which he studied the works of God in order to better understand their structure and make-up; he also noted Steensen's pioneering work in anatomy, biology, geology, and crystallography. But it was Steensen's work after his conversion to the Church that the Pontiff principally emphasized. Once converted, he noted, the scholar gave up his chair of anatomy in the University of Copenhagen and began to study for the priesthood. After his ordina-tion and after his consecration as a bishop that soon followed, he began a life .of poverty, mortification, and suffering. He became especially noted for his zeal to lead non-Catholics back to the Church. His work in this area, the Pope remarked, was characterized by two notable qualities: his unalterable attachment to all points of revealed doctrine; and his great respec.t and love for those who did not share his own religious convictions. Miscellaneous Documents On November 4, 1959 (pp. 814-18), John XXIII delivered a homily in St. Peter's on the occasion of the first anniversary of his coronation as Pope. After recalling the feelings aroused in him by the first year of his pontificate, the Pope proceeded to outline a program of action based on the Our Father. His efforts, he said, will be directed to see that the name of God be blessed and acclaimed; that His spiritual kingdom may triumph in souls and in nations; that all human forces m~y be in conformity with the will of the heavenly Father. This last point, he insisted, is the essential one; from it will flow man's daily bread, the pardon of human offenses, the vigor of man's resistance to evil, and the preservation of men from all individual and social evils. On September 13, 1959 (pp. 709-14), the Holy Father broadcast a message for the conclusion of the National Eucharistic Congress of Italy. He told his listeners that the Eucharist is truly the mystery of faith, for it is the living compendium of all Catholic belief. In the Eucharist, he said, is found Christ, the only mediator between God and man; in it is found the lasting memorial of the sacrifice offered by Christ on Calvary; and in it is found the Head of the Mystical Body from whom come the sacraments which give fecundity and 103 1~. F. SMITH Review for Religious beauty to the Church. He concluded his broadcast by reminding his listeners that two thousand years of progress, in knowledge, in art, in culture, in economics, in politics, and in social matters have not diminished the truth of Christ's words: "Amen, amen, I~ say to you: if you do not eat the flesh of the son of man and do not drink his blood, you shall not have life in you" (Jn 6:54). A later radio broadcast on October 11, 1959 (pp. 777-78), was directed to the people of Argentina on the occasion of their Eucharistic Congress. He told the Argentines that if the human race would practice the lessons of love and unity which come from the Eucharist, then the miseries and discords of the world would cease to be. The Eucharist, he said, is the source of harn~ony and true peace for individuals, families, and peoples; for it restrains the passions, especially those of pride and egoism. On October 11, 1959 (pp. 766-69), the Vicar of Christ addressed a group of missionaries to whom he had just given their missionary crosses. He told the future missionaries that the peoples of the world await them, since they carry the secret of true peace and of tranquil progress. He ~lso reminded his listeners that the Church has received from her Founder the mandate to seek out all peoples so as to unite them into one family; accordingly no human force, no difficulty, no obstacle can stop the Church's missionary work which, will end only when God is all in all things. In his concluding words the Pontiff re-minded the missionaries that the cross they had just received should show them at what price the world is saved; the crucified Christ should be their model and their example; in their work, therefore, they should not put their trust and confidence in helps that are of purely human inspiration. On April 13, 1959 (pp. 691-92), the Holy Father issued an apos-tolic letter, raising to the status of an abbey the priory of the Sacred ¯ Heart in Ofiate. The new abbey belongs to members of the Canons Regular of the Lateran. On September 25, 1959 (pp. 706-9), John XXIII delivered an allocution to the Abbot Primate and other relS-resentatives of the Benedictine order. The Pontiff recalled with gratitude. the great debt of the Church to the Benedictine order and continued by reminding his listeners that the primary form of their apostolic work must be the chanting of the Divine Office. This, he said, is espec-ially necessary today, when so many men are intent on earthly matters to the negligence of celestial things. He also recalled the other works of the order and concluded by urging his listeners to keep faithfully to their traditions without hesitating, however, to use and accept new things that are proved to be good and useful. On October 19, 1959 (pp. 822-25), the Pontiff addressed an allocu-tion to the members, officials, and lawyers of the Rota. After giving a brief history of the Rota, the Pope told his listeners that they have been called by Providence to the defense of justice without regard to any other consideration including that of the authority or reputation of 104 March, 1960 I~OMAN DOCUMENTS those having recourse to the Rotao In this, he said, they must imitate the sovereign equity of the just and merciful God, before whom there is no acceptation of persons. In the latter part of the allocution the Vicar of Christ called the Rota the tribunal of the Christian family. By defending the sanctity and the indissolubility of matrimony, the Rota protects it from the attacks of a hedonistic egoism; at the same time, when it acknowledges the invalidity or non-existehce of a marriage bond, the Rota acts as the guardian of the sacred rights of the human person. On August 28, 1959 (pp. 701-2), the Pope sent a letter to Arch-bishop Martin John O'Connor, rector of the North American College in Rome, congratulating him on the hundredth anniversary of the college. Later on October 11, 1959 (pp. 770-75), the Pontiff gave an address to the students of the college, detailing to them the numerous ways in which the various Popes have manifested a special interest in the college. The growth of the college from its opening days with thirteen students to its large groups at the present time is, he continued, a sign of the growth of the Church in the United States. The Holy Father concluded the allocution by telling the students that the cause of Mother Elizabeth Seton had already passed the antepreparatory stage and that consequently there was good reason to hope that in a relatively short time the cause would be brought to completion. On October 13, 1959 (pp. 775-77), the Pope addressed present and former students of the Teutonic College of Sancta Maria de Anima on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Plus IX's reorganization of the college. He congratulated the college on its past achievements and urged it to greater things in the future. On September 6, 1959 (pp. 703-6), the Pontiff talked to a group of Italian elementary teachers, telling them to have a profound and jealous esteem for their mission of education. This esteem, he said, should be based on the .following considerations: Teachers train the minds of their charges, a consideration which, he added, should make them eager to perfect themselves constantly in their own culture. Moreover, teachers form the souls of their children; to teachers, then, is ent~'usted the forma-tion of the men of tomorrow. Finally, he concluded, teachers should encourage themselves by remembering that by their work they are preparing for themselves a special reward in heaven according to the words of Daniel 12:3, "But they that are learned shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that instruct many to justice, as stars for all eternity." On October 17, 1959 (pp. 821-22), the Vicar of Christ spoke to a group of persons interested in the human values to be found in labor. He congratulated the group for putting the things of the spirit before every other consideration and recommended to them the exercise of Christian virtue. He especially urged them to follow the maxim of St. Benedict, "Pray and work"; they should, he said, make prayer their 105 VIEWS,' NEWS, PREVIEWS Review [or Religious very breath and their food in the conviction that every human activity, no matter how lofty and praiseworthy, is not to be limited to an earthly horizon, but should tend towards the City of God. On October 1, 1959 (pp. 764-66), the Vicar of Christ spoke to a congress of the Apostolate of the Blind. The ~lind, he said, teach other men to value the light of intelligence and of virtue. He also reminded his listeners that the cry of the blind man of the gospel, "Lord, grant that I may see," arises today from multitudes of men who are spiritually blind; accordingly he urged his listeners to direct their prayers to the Blessed Virgin that the day will soon come when "all flesh will see the salvation of God." In a letter of October 12, 1959 (pp. 809-10), the Pope accepted the resignation of Cardinal Pizzardo from his position as secretary of the Holy Office. On November 20, 1959 (pp. 810-12), he accepted the resignation of Cardinal Tisserant as Secretary of the Sacred Oriental Congregation. On the same day (pp. 812-13) he accepted the resignation of Cardinal Cicognani as Pro-Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Segnatura. On October 9, 1959 (p. 829), the Sacred Consistorial Congregation named Francis Xavier Gillmore Stock the military vicar of Chile. An apostolic constitution of April 17, 1959 (pp. 789-91), established ¯ an exarchate in Germany for Ruthenians of the .Byzantine rite. The see of the exarchate will be in Munich. On September 23, 1959 (p. 832), the Sacred Apostolic Penitentiary published the text and indulgences of a prayer for the coming general council. An English translation of the prayer and its grant of indulgences will be found on pages 65-66 of this issue of the REVIEW. Views, News, Previews A RELIGIOUS WOMAN who has had a ten-year struggle against serious mental sickness has sent to the REVIEW an account of her experiences and of the lessons that can be drawn from them. The account ~is given below in the sister's own words: To many individuals, both lay and religious, the thought of living with one whb has been an inmate in a mental institution seems foreign, until it strikes home. When the family ties are those of blood relationship, there is sometimes a feeling of love, of pride, or even of legal force that makes for an attempt to keep the person a part of the family unit, even if this may cause inconvenience, embarrassment, or added expense to the other members of the family. When the relationship is one of a spir-itual nature even greater love and understanding might be expected, since the bond which binds a religious family should reflect the love of Christ Himself. Why, then, are there a considerable number of religi-ous whose returfi to their religious communities, when recommended 106 March, 1960 VIEWS, NEWS, PREVIEWS by the medical staff of a mental hospital, brings with it a stigma that differentiates them from the sisters who resume their usual duties after regaining their health from a physical illness? Perhaps personal ex-perience over a period of ten years may be helpful to others -- both sick and healthy, both superiors and subjects. In September of 1949 my usual teaching duties began. Shortly afterwards I experienced symptoms I did not understand -- sudden spells of crying, with no apparent provocation, and at the most unexpected.times. Since that time I have been a patient in four mental hospitals, seen fourteen psychiatrists, and a slightl~ lesser number of experienced priests. There is no regret in my having been ill. In fact, I think God, in HIS goodness, timed it well to save me from a growing pride and possibly a rather shallow religious life. Is it impossible for a sistek emotionally or mentally disturbed for a short time to again be a useful member of the community? Could mental sickness occur in a sister who ordinarily enjoys good health and has no history of mental illness in her family? Both may be firmly answered in the affirmative. With the realization that a "yes" may be given to question number two, the ego in you (but we hope also your love of neighbor) may spark your interest to further information on question number one. With good medical help received in time, prayer, patience, and a determination to win on the part of the patient, and.a kind and sensible attitude on the part of other members of the community, a very sick person may again be an active and useful worker for Christ as a perfectly normal member of the community. Lacking one or more of these condi-tions, she may be an added burden financially, a loss to a much needed Christian apostolate; and there is no guarantee that her suffering is any more pleasing to God than her active work would be. Resignation to His will as an inmate of a mental institution calls for the highest degree of fortitude. How many reach this goal? And how many potentially good religious have the spiritual capacity to repel bitterness or at least apathy? What can be done to lessen the number of sisters who are lost to the active apostolate unndcessarily? Superiors may: (1) be informed of symptoms of emotional disturbance. Early recognition and treatment is important. For the bu~y superior Psychiatry and Catholicism by Van der Veldt and OdenwaldI ig fairly comprehensive. (2) Have a Christ-like attitude toward the sick sister which will inspire confidence. (3) If hospitalization is necessary, welcome the patient's return to the community and to her work on the same basis as one returning after an appendectomy or other physical illness. Subjects may: (1) on the patient's return from the mental hospital, ac-cept the doctor's decision that she is well enough to return to religious ~Editor's note: James H. Van der Veldt and Robert P. Odenwald (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952). 107 VIEWS, NEWS, PREVIEWS Review for Religious life and treat her like any other sister. (2) Do not avoid her or show fear in other ways, such as locking bedroom doors at night, and so forth. The patient may: (1) accept her suffering as.coming from God, but not with a pessimistic outlook; (2) cooperate with medical help given; (3) determine to regain her health, with trust in God, if such is His will; (4) keep busy or try to help others when the type and intensity of the illness-permits. It's a wonderful way to minimize your own troubles. The proof of the pudding lies in the eating. Mine has been a pro-longed meal -- ten years -- but I hope soon to taste the sweetness of dessert. A short resume will crystalize the effectiveness of the suggestions above. November, 1949, forced to give up teaching, 1949-1954, in and out of mental hospitals, stays varying from tw~ weeks to three months. Returning to the community meant being a human chessman on the board, moved here and there with jobs ranging from teaching on all levels, elementary through college, to weeding the motherhouse garden. Duration of jobs might be anywhere from one to eighteen months. The feeling of "not belonging" anywhere was not easy to accept but probably forced me to a greater trust in Christ. 1952, my spiritual director first suggested I leave my community. After twenty-four years of religious life this came as an atomic blow. 1954, Rome granted me an indult of exclaustration. 1954-1956, I.looked like a secular, lived as much as possible a religious life, and discovered I Leapt Over the Wall was a bit exaggerated. The offices in which I worked and the public school which hired me to organize and supervise an art department offered opportunity for God's work. 1956, my doctor and my spiritual director advised me to return to my community. I thought this happy move was permanent. 1957, illness struck again. On the advice of my spiritual director, Rome granted another three-year period of exclaustration. 1957-1959, organization of another public school art department brought me to a New York State area where there is much work to be done with Catholic students, civic, educational and social organizations, the local Newman Club, and friends who just come to my apartment to paint, but end up talking what they really hunger for -- religion and good living! 1960, my doctor, my spiritual director, and the vicar for religious recom-mend my return to my community. I look forward to it with true joy and the hope that with God's grace, my own cooperation, and the help of my superiors and sisters, this will be my home, until Christ welcomes me to an eternal one. The fight against depression has not been easy, but God always provided the necessary help. as it was needed. There have been setbacks which I could never have surmounted alone. Even now I am not a 108 March, 1960 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Hercules of nerves.'Marsilid and equanil supplement my daffy prayers. These are not a cure but a purely natural means, not to be spurned, in keeping me fit to do a job for Christ. There are other religions emotionally or mentally ill at present, some in hospitals, some still devotedly "holding on" to their assignments in religious communities. There will be more in the futu}e. If this account gives hope to even one, I shall feel grateful to the priests and doctors who encouraged me to write. The Institute for Religious at College Misericordia, Dallas, Penn-sylvania (a three-yea~ summer course of twelve days in canon law and ascetical theology for sisters), will be held this year August 20-31. This is the first year in the triennial course. The course in canon law is given by the Rev. Joseph F. Gallen, S. J., that in ascetical theology by the Rev. Thomas E. Clarke, S. J., both of Woodstock College, Woodstock, Maryland. The registration is restricted to higher superiors, their councilors, general and provincial officials, mistresses of novices, and those in similar positions. Applications are to be addressed to Rev. Joseph F. Gallen, S. J., Woodstock College; Woodstock, Md. ( uestions and Answers [The following answers are given b~v Father Joseph F. Gallen, S. J., professor of canon law at Woodstock Col!eg~, Woodstock, Maryland.] Local Houses and Superiors Questions and cases on local houses and local superiors have been submitted with great frequency. Private replies were given to most of these, but it was thought profitable and even necessary to publish all " together and in l?gical order. Questions have been divided whenever this was demanded by the same order. The questions on local houses and local superiors will be continued through several issues of the REVIEW. I. Local Houses 1. We are a clerical exempt institute. We wish to rent a house in a summer resort, to be used only as a vacation place for our com-munity. Do we need the permission of the local ordinary to rent and use this house? The stable residence of religious and the customary tenor of life of the institute are necessary to have a religious house in any sense of this term. Therefore, a mere vacation residence owned, rented, or granted temporarily to an institute and used only as a vacation place is not a religious but a secular house. It lacks both of the requisites given 109 QUESTIONS AND ANSWEas Review for Religious above. Canon law contains no prescriptions on secular houses of religious, and therefore no permission of the local ordinary is necessary for any institute to build or open such a vacation or similar residence. It would usually be courteous to consult him before taking this action; for example, many such residences in one resort might cause difficulty for the diocese. The two requisites given above can be verified in residences which are used also as vacation places; if so, they are canonically erected or filial houses, which will be explained in questions and cases below. 2. What is the relation of the other buildings on our grounds to the religious house, that is, the building in which at least most of the religious reside? In its material sense, a religious house is the house or building in which the religious reside; but all buildings located within the same property, grounds, or premises and buildings not separated from that in which the religious reside are considered part of the. religious house; for example, separate buildings on the same grounds for a college, a preparatory or elementary school, library, science building, infirmary, gymnasium, and houses for workmen are all part of the religious house. Even when not on the same grounds nor contiguous to the residence of the religious, a building is not considered as separate if it can be judged morally to form part of the same group of buildings. It is certainly separate if a mile distant; but a building a few doors away from the residence of the religious, even if a street is between them, can still be said to be part of the same group of buildings. Because of this material sense, a novice is not absent if he is confined by sickness to an infirmary building on the same grounds but distinct 'from the novitiate building (c. 556, §§ 1-2). For the same reason, first profession may licitly be made in the college chapel on the same grounds, even though this building is distinct from that in which the community resides (c. 574, § 1). 3. Our constitutions 'speak of property owned and debts incur-red by the houses, provinces, and institute. How can any of these as such own property or incur debts? In the formal and more important sense, a religious .house is the same thing as a canonically erected religious house. It is the community as a distinct moral person, distinguished as such from both the province and the institute, which are also moral persons. A moral person in the Church may be described as an ecclesiastical corporation. It is a subject of rights and obligations, which are distinct from those of its members considered individually or collectively. A moral person can acquire, own, and administer property (cc. 531-32); is responsible for its debts and obligations (c. 536, § 1); can sue or be sued in court (cc. 1552, § 2, 1°; 1649; 1653, § 6); can receive privileges (cc. 72, §§ 3:4; 613; 615); enjoys precedence (cc. 106, 491), and so forth. The antecedent requisites for a canonically erected house are: (1) at the time of the erection it must 110 March, 1960 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS consist of at least three religions (c. 100, § 2); (2) a distinct community with its own proper superior; (3) the stable dwelling of religious in the house; (4) and the customary tenor of life of the institute according to its particular constitutions. It is not necessary that a religions institute be the proprietor of a canonically erected house, a filial house, or a separated establishment. All of these may be owned or rented by the institute or their use gratuitously given to the institute. All may be an entire building or a part of a building, for example, a floor or an apartment. The Code of Canon Law itself grants to a canonically erected house the character of a moral person consequent upon the fulfillment of the canonical formalities prescribed for an erection. 4. Our constitutions state that a parish school convent, because it is owned by the parish, cannot be a canonically erected religious house. Is this correct? No. As stated in the preceding question, the character of a moral person, of an ecclesiastical corporation, is something completely distinct from the ownership of the property where the moral person is located. Therefore, ownership of the property by the religious institute is not required for a canonically erected religious house. The sense of these particular constitutions may be that the institute will petition canonical erection only for houses that it owns. 5. Our hospital ,is civilly incorporated. The board of the civil corporation authorized the addition of a new wing to the hospital. This will cost $2,500,000. Do we need any permissions beyond the authorization of this board? Every religious institute, province, or house, by its erection as a moral person according to the norms of canon law, possesses, in virtue " of canon 531, the unlimited right of acquiring, owning, and administering temporal property (cf. c. 1495, § 2). This right extends to all species of property, all rights of use, and the right of receiving returns on property. The code permits the particular constitutions to exclude o~ limit this capacity. When the civil state, as in the United States, does not recognize an ecclesiastical moral person established by the Church, religions moral persons should incorporate civilly, so as to secure civil efficacy and protection of their property rights, which they actually possess from canon law. The incorporation therefore is a mere civil formality. The property rights are possessed in virtue of canon law, and the property must always be administered according to canon law and the constitu- ¯ tions (c. 532, § 1). In any transaction, the requisite civil formalities are to be fulfilled but only that the transaction may have civil efficacy and protection. The substantial law that governs the transaction is that of canon law and the constitutions. Care is to be taken, if externs are ad-mitted as members of the board, that religious of the institute are always in the majority. An institute may treat such a board also as an advisory 111 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Review for Religious committee, but in itself the authorization of the board is a mere civil formality. In the present case, the transaction is the expenditure of $2,500,000 for a new wing to a hespital. If the hospital already has this sum on hand, the permission of the mother general with the vote of her council prescribed by the general chapter will be necessary, because the trans-action is an act of extraordinary administration. If the hospital has to borrow money for the project, as is most likely true, the norms of canon 534 on contracting debts, supplemented by the enactments of the general chapter on the same subject, must be observed. In either case, the re-course to higher authority is required for the validity of the transaction. See Vermeersch-Creusen, Epitome Iuris Canonici, II, n. 819; Brys, Juris Canonici Compendium, II, n. 855; Muzzarelli, De Congregationibus Iuris Dioecesani, n. 163; Goyeneche, Quaestiones Canonicae, I, 253; Vromant, De Bonis Ecc~esiae Temporalibus, n. 8. 6. We have the house system of delegates for the general chapter, that is, each house of~ at least twelve religious sends its local superior to this chapter in virtue of his office and elects one non-superior delegate. Smaller houses are combined into groups of at least twelve and not more than twenty-three religious. Each group elects one superior and one non-superior delegate. Are filial houses considered smaller houses? In some institutes, all houses except the mother house are called missions, branch houses, or filial houses, which is not the strict sense. The essential note of a filial house in the strict sense is that it is not a distinct moral person but part of the larger canonically erected house to which it is attached. The one at the head Of a filial house is therefore not a superior in the proper sense of this word, even though he may have this title. He is a mere delegate of either a higher superior or of the superior of the larger house, and his authority is as wide as the delegation. In lay institutes, he is appointed by a higher superior, either for a specified term, for example, three years, or for no determined period of time. In the latter case, he may be removed at any time at the mere will of the higher superior. Since it is not a moral person, the filial house does not own property, all of which is owned by the larger house. There-fore, it has no bursar. Its local bursar is that of the larger house, but he may have an assistant in the filial house. A filial house has no coun-cilors, since it is not canonically a house (c. 516, § 1). Unless otherwise specified in the constitutions, the capitular rights of those residing in the filial house are exercised in the larger house, of which t.hey are to vote as members for the election of delegates~ to the provincial or general chapter. The number of religious resident in a filial house is usually small. The larger house to which the filial house is attached is ordinarily located in the same city or in a nearby place. The constitutions of brothers and sisters, whether pontifical or diocesan, most rarely mention filial houses. All such institutes may open 112 March, 1960 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS filial houses, unless this is expressly forbidden by the constitutions. A few constitutions have only a brief statement of the following type: "Communities of two or three sisters can be made dependent on larger houses when the mother general and her council consider it opportune." Such constitutions do not explain the election of delegates in ~elation to a filial house. Others contain such an explanation; for example: "Religious living in branch houses who cannot go to the principal house for the election of the delegate will send their sealed votes there. These votes will be, taken out of their envelopes in. the presence of the com-munity and placed in the ballot box with those of the religious who are present," "Branch houses have not the right of sending either superior or delegates to the proyincial chapter, but the vocal sisters of these branch houses will unite with the vocal sisters of the nearest house to elect delegates to the provincial chapter." Unless a special provision has been made in the constitutions, as in the last case, those residing in the filial house must vote as members of the larger house to which the former is attached for the election of delegates. This is evident from the fact that the filial house is part of the larger house. This essential argument is confirmed by the fact that the religious at the head of a filial house is not a superior and therefore has no right to be voted for as a superior delegate. Furthermore, the constitutions say that smaller houses are to be united (cf. Normae of 1901, n. 216). A filial house is not canonically a house but part of a house. The present difficulty in the election of delegates occurs only in the house, not in the group, system. Unless the constitutions state the contrary, as.in the second dase, all electors must be physically present for an election, according to the norm of canon 163. In lay congregations, a filial house ordinarily does not contain more than three religious; but this is not a matter of general law in the Church. Even in such institutes, filial houses are sometimes larger. The following authors explicitly affirm that the capitular rights are to be exercised in the house t'o which the filial house is attached: Maroto, Commentarium Pro Religiosis, 5 (1924), 128, note 14; Ver-meersch, Periodica, 13 (1923), 55; Schaefer, De Religiosis, n. 166; Jombart, Dictionnaire de Droit Canonique, VI, 700; Creusen, Religious Men and Women in Church Law, n. 12; Fanfanl, De Iure Religiosorum, m 20; De Carlo, Jus Religiosorum, n. 42; Flanagan, The Canonical Erection of Religious Houses, 31. 7. Our constitutions distinguish formal and non-formal