July 2012 Letter from the Provost

In his sermon for the Feast of Pentecost last month, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI offered the following reflection: “We see daily events which appear to suggest that people are becoming more aggressive and more unsociable; it seems to be too demanding to try to understand each other, and we prefer to be closed up in our own ‘I,’ in our own interests.”

Any society that reaches such a state should be made to carry a health and safety warning. The wellbeing of its inhabitants is in peril.

The wondrous dignity of every human being lies in the fact that man has been created, as Genesis puts it, in the image of God. We know from the Gospel that the life of God is anything but self-centred. Within the Trinity there is a continuous outpouring of self between three Persons, an eternal communication of knowledge and love between Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The expansiveness of this love is expressed in God’s will to create man, a knowing and loving creature, and in His call to man to participate in the mystery of His own life.

The image of God lies chiefly in our mind and in our will, in our capacity to discern the truth and to unite ourselves with the good. It is this divine imprint that makes every innocent human life sacred to God and inviolable at every stage from conception to death. We live this likeness to God to the full by living in communion with Him. This is made possible by the grace that is poured into us in Baptism, a ‘Trinitarian event’ that elevates us into the very life of the Godhead. We are also called to live in communion with our neighbour, honouring the image of God that is emblazoned on his soul. This communion with God and man is the character of personal existence. It demands that we always treat a fellow human being as an ‘I’ and never as an ‘it’.

In his writings and discourses, the Holy Father has often acknowledged the influence on his own intellectual development of the Italian/German priest and theologian Romano Guardini. From 1923 to 1939 Father Guardini taught Philosophy of Religion in Berlin, until his disdain for Nazi ideology led to his resignation from teaching. After the war he resurfaced in academia and filled the chair of ‘Christian Worldview’ at Munich in 1948. He was friendly with the fathers of the Munich Oratory, and was buried in their cemetery after his death in 1968.

Guardini’s own worldview was richly seasoned by experience. The first part of his career took place amid the moral and economic collapse of Weimar Republic Berlin. This gave way to the totalitarianism of the Third Reich, which in turn was succeeded by efforts to build a democratic society (at least in West Germany) imbued with Christian principles.

It was against this background of upheaval and contrast that Father Guardini developed his theology of personal existence. The situation that he observed in Berlin during the 1920s bore parallels to the state of affairs decried by the Pope in his recent Pentecost sermon. Guardini identified a culture of hedonistic individualism in the Weimar Republic that was destructive of society and of its individual members.

On Whitsun, the Holy Father used the image of the Tower of Babel in Genesis to illustrate what he believes is happening today. “Babel is the description of a kingdom in which men have so much power that they think that they no longer need a distant God and that they are strong enough to build a way to Heaven by themselves … to put themselves in God’s place,” said the Pope. However, “While men were working to build the tower, suddenly they realized they were working against each other. While they tried to be like God, they ran the risk of no longer even being men, because they lost a fundamental element of being human persons: the capacity to agree, to understand and to work together.”

The illusion of self-sufficiency is always dangerous. According to Guardini, in Weimar Germany this illusion was ultimately so unfulfilling of man’s need for personal existence that it inevitably caused revulsion towards the status quo and facilitated a swing to tyranny. Men had “declared themselves to be lords of their own lives and also lords of life in general,” argued Guardini, “until they grew tired of this burden. But instead of returning to their authentic selves directed towards God they abandoned themselves. That is, they renounced God … and gave themselves over to totalitarian rule.” In other words, an overemphasis on personal autonomy had so alienated people from the notion of living in relation to God, and to their fellow men as persons rather than as objects, that it made them easy prey to the dictator’s rhetoric and opened the way to the crimes of the Third Reich.

Undeterred by his distaste for the Weimar Republic, Father Guardini was always convinced that democracy provided the best environment for the human person to flourish. What he had in mind was a Christian democracy that honours the sovereignty of Almighty God and respects such absolute and objective moral principles as the sanctity of human life. According to Guardini, a democracy governed by Christian principles is the most effective model of government for nurturing the common good through the exercise of responsible personal freedom.

Towards the end of his life, however, Father Guardini witnessed Christian democracy giving way to a liberal democracy in which moral relativism had the upper hand. A form of personal autonomy was reasserting itself that could only be inimical to the common good. Fashion, fluctuating opinion and mood were taking the place of God’s law as a basis for making life and death decisions. Meanwhile, the major denominations were indulging themselves in the self-absorption of an identity-crisis of their own, which made the Christian voice sound increasingly irrelevant to a modern world that was hungry for ‘authenticity’; and so the contagion of secularism galloped ahead without much effective opposition at an institutional level. The sanctity and inviolability of each and every innocent human life, which is a fundamental foundation of any civilized society, was no longer taken as a given.

Surveying the rise of what Cardinal Ratzinger would later identify as the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, Father Guardini declared in 1964, with the weary voice of one who had seen it all before: “Liberalism was the father of Nazism, and will be again in one form or another.”

The Church has never bound Herself to upholding any particular form of government. Most of us today probably value the liberties that come with living in a democratic society. If the insights of Romano Guardini and Pope Benedict XVI are right, however, it would be foolhardy to take the freedoms we currently enjoy for granted. When man behaves without regard for the common good, as enshrined in the laws that have been revealed to us by the Creator, then we are heading into deep trouble.

It would seem that the danger is present. It would also seem that Catholics have an indispensible role to play in any solution. For Guardini, genuine personal existence can ultimately only be lived within the Church. It is through the Church that access to the ‘social life’ of the Blessed Trinity is made a reality. We go to God the Father through the Son, and we encounter God the Son within the Church; a Church that was launched as a Catholic – truly universal – concern with the outpouring of the Holy Ghost on Pentecost Sunday.

In his Whitsun sermon, the Pope reminded us that the Holy Ghost is the Spirit of unity and truth, “The Spirit Who leads us to the whole truth Who is Jesus Himself,” and “Who makes us capable of listening to each other and working together” for the building of the Kingdom: “And thus it becomes clear why Babel is Babel and Pentecost is Pentecost. Where men want to make themselves God, they can only oppose each other. Where they place themselves in the Lord’s truth instead, they open up to the action of the Spirit, who sustains and unites them.”

As the tentacles of secularism tighten their grip, it becomes a temptation for Catholics to avoid going into public life altogether. A promising new graduate cannot look forward to a rocketing career in politics if he remains true to the Faith. A lucrative job in the private sector probably looks more attractive. The trouble with this is that it contributes to the isolationism and fragmentation of an already fragile society. We should thank God for the handful of backbench MPs who ensure that the pro-Life voice is still heard in Parliament. Without their courage and patience the debate would already be dead, and the cause lost definitively. If the ‘common good’ is to have any hope of flourishing, then the Catholic contribution in the public forum is indispensible. The world needs the Gospel, and we must be prepared to engage with the world with a boldness that is always tempered with charity and humility.

Are the aggression and the unsociability identified by the Pope this last Whitsun not signs of incipient fatigue – a fatigue that, according to Father Guardini, is the inevitable malaise of a society glutted with its own self-absorption? If so, then it is surely time for a change.

We have a choice. It could be that this change will only come about after a collapse of civilization as we know it. Perhaps it will take a new reign of soul-destroying totalitarianism to bring us to our senses. On the other hand, we could always say ‘Yes’ to God now, and rise to the challenge. This ‘Yes’ will involve self-sacrifice; but suffering in the cause of justice is a way of imitating that selfless outpouring of love that characterizes the life of the Blessed Trinity. It is a means of living personal existence to the full in this fallen world. And anyway, these inconveniences all fall into their proper perspective when we remind ourselves that this life is very short compared with an eternity participating in the glory of the Blessed Trinity as promised to those who give a positive answer to the call to discipleship.

To readers who are rattled because they think the Provost’s Letter has become indigestible with stodge (probably the fruit of a post 1960s Roman theological formation), it can be said that the formula for a safe society need not be complicated. It can be whittled down to two very simple principles: 1) Almighty God is Sovereign, and every one of his human creatures bears the image of God in his own soul. 2) Honour that divine image in ourselves and respect it in our neighbour and, with God’s grace, we shall not go far wrong.

Fr Julian Large

June 2012 Letter from the Provost

The meaning of Our Lord’s words is quite clear: if we wish to be saved, then we should receive Holy Communion.

Holy Communion is the most intimate and wonderful encounter with God that is possible in this life. Participation in the Mass means that we are united with Our Lord’s Passion and Death. In the Offertory we place ourselves (with all our joys, sorrows and especially our personal sacrifices) spiritually on the paten with the bread and in the chalice with the wine. This is so that when the Sacrifice of Calvary is made present through the separate Consecration of bread and wine we are united mystically but in a very real way with that Sacrifice.

It is Our Lord’s Risen Body that is made present in the Sacred Host. This really means that the Mass somehow contains the whole mystery of our salvation. The Word becomes Flesh, His Sacrifice of Atonement is made present, and we kneel before His Risen Body; and it is in receiving His Risen Living Body that we participate most completely in the Mysterium Fidei.

But how often should we communicate? Historically the frequency of receiving Holy Communion has varied widely according to time and place. The Acts of the Apostles suggest that in the early Church daily Communion was normal among the faithful in Jerusalem, while elsewhere the Blessed Sacrament was certainly received on Sundays. By the 4th century, however, it seems that many Christians consumed Our Lord’s Body only on the rarest occasions, perhaps just once in a lifetime as Viaticum (food for the journey) when dying.

The great 4th Lateran Council of 1215 ordered sacramental confession at least once a year and the reception of Holy Communion at least annually at Easter, on pain of excommunication and exclusion from Christian burial. This ‘Paschal Precept’ ensured regular Communion, at least for the law-abiding, but frequent Communion remained rare throughout the ‘Ages of Faith’. St Louis, King of France from 1226 to 1270, was considered uncommonly pious for approaching the altar rail six times a year.

Even St Philip Neri, who is hailed as an apostle of frequent Communion, usually insisted that his penitents went to confession more often than they received the Blessed Sacrament. He allowed certain of his spiritual children to communicate three times a week, but others who pressed for frequent Communion were told to be patient because it was “better to come thirsting to the fountain.”

Nevertheless, by the time of St Philip, Rome was beginning to promote more frequent Communion as a matter of policy. In 1562 the Council of Trent expressed the wish that “at each Mass the faithful who are present should communicate, not only in spiritual desire, but also by the sacramental partaking of the Eucharist, that thereby they may derive from this most holy sacrifice a more abundant fruit.”

Debate on the appropriate frequency of Communion came to a head in the following century. The Jansenists of Port Royal, with their dismal emphasis on limited salvation, tried to reserve the reception of Holy Communion only for those who were in a state of exceptional spiritual perfection. In his best-selling De la Frequente Communion published in 1643, the Jansenist guru Antoine Arnauld argued that the purity of those who receive Communion on earth must be equal to the perfection of the saints in Heaven.

The disastrous result of this forbidding doctrine was that wherever the Jansenist weed took root, reception of Holy Communion was smothered, to the extent that in some places the faithful were too frightened to fulfil their Easter duties and many souls were even dispatched to their Particular Judgment without the nourishment of Viaticum.

It was while the plague of Port Royal was at its most virulent that St Margaret Mary Alacocque was favoured with a series of visions at the Visitation convent at Paray-le-Monial, in which Our Lord confided to her the mission to establish devotion to His Sacred Heart. In these apparitions Our Lord revealed His Heart to be aflame with tenderness for wounded humanity, and promised “that my all powerful love will grant to all those who will receive Communion on the First Fridays, for nine consecutive months, the grace of final repentance: they will not die in my displeasure, nor without receiving the sacraments; and my heart will be their secure refuge in that last hour.”

Despite the spread of Devotion to the Sacred Heart, and the consistent condemnation of Jansenist rigorism by the popes of the baroque period, the first generation of Oratorians who came to Brompton in 1854 still found it necessary to weed out scruples which had their roots in Port Royal. Fr Dalgairns’s treatise The Holy Communion of 1861 lacerated Jansenist severity and heartily promoted frequent Communion as the ultimate means of sustained intimate union with Our Lord and His Sacred Heart in this life.

In 1905, frequent Communion received its ultimate approbation in Pope St Pius X’s decree Sacra Tridentina, which declared it to be “the desire of Jesus Christ and of the Church that all the faithful should daily approach the sacred banquet” in order to receive forgiveness from venial sins and strength to avoid grave sins.

In other words, Holy Communion should be seen as a most effective means to growth in holiness in this life rather than as a reward for spiritual perfection. Anyone who is free from mortal sin may receive the Blessed Sacrament on the condition that he does so with the right intention. Sacra Tridentina defines this right intention as “the wish to please God, to be more closely united to Him by charity, and to have recourse to this divine remedy for his weakness and defects”. That is to say, to receive Communion in good faith we should take care to avoid doing so out of mere routine.

So the answer to the question ‘How often should I receive Communion?’ must be ‘It depends’. It depends on the situation of the individual. If he has a ‘moral certainty’ that he is in a state of grace (i.e. he is unaware of any unconfessed mortal sin) and his desire is to nurture friendship with Our Lord then yes, he is encouraged to receive Communion.

At most Masses there will be some members of the congregation who do not go up for Communion. It is not our business to speculate why. It might be that they have not kept the one hour fast, or perhaps they have already received Communion that day. If we concentrate on making a ‘good Communion’ ourselves, then we shall not give in to the distraction of judging anyone else’s dispositions.

And while Catholics are obliged to attend Mass every Sunday and Holy Day, we should remember that the Church still only insists that we must receive Communion once a year around Easter. This must surely be to ensure that whenever we do communicate, we fulfil the minimum requirement of being in a state of Grace. There is a proper sequence in the Sacraments. If we have sinned gravely, we need to be resurrected from the death of sin in the Sacrament of Penance, so that we might look forward to that encounter with Our Risen Lord in Holy Communion with the greatest joy and confidence.

In order to foster a ‘right intention’ we have to make some basic preparations. ‘Remote preparation’ involves the way we conduct our lives: praying, practising the virtues, examination of conscience, Confession and regular repentance of venial sins. The frequent communicant might be advised to seek spiritual direction in order to derive maximum benefit from his Communions.

‘Proximate preparation’ includes modest dress, observing the one hour fast (there is nothing to stop us fasting for three hours or from midnight as long as we do not try to force this on others as if it were a precept), and arriving on time for Mass. Keeping ‘custody of the eyes’ when approaching the altar is also important. We must aim to receive Our Lord with maximum humility and reverence.

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI has reminded us that Holy Communion must never become routine. Since Corpus Christi 2008, those receiving Holy Communion from the Holy Father at papal Masses have been instructed to do so kneeling and on the tongue. His Master of Ceremonies explained that this “better sheds light on the truth of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, it helps the devotion of the faithful, introduces them more easily to a sense of mystery; aspects which, in our time, speaking pastorally, it is urgent to highlight and recover.” Perhaps this is why he has reinstated the practice of receiving Holy Communion kneeling and on the tongue at all papal Masses.

If we really want the full benefits of the Sacrament, we must also make a thanksgiving afterwards. The minutes after Holy Communion are a time of close intimacy with Our Lord. Saint Philip Neri noticed that a parishioner habitually left the church immediately after receiving Holy Communion. One day he instructed two acolytes to accompany the man with lighted candles as he walked home. When the man returned to St Philip to ask why, St Philip replied, “We have to pay proper respect to Our Lord, Whom you are carrying away with you. Since you neglect to adore Him, I sent two acolytes to do the job for you.” Realizing his fault, the man knelt and made proper thanksgiving after Holy Communion.

Fr Julian Large