How to go to Confession

What follows is an excerpt from the book, Happiness in Holiness: A little guide to holiness of life for members of the Third order of Saint Francis and for other devout souls, edited by Rev. Apollinaris Baumgartner, O.M. Cap.* (who was later the first bishop of the diocese of Agaña, Guam), published in 1930, which purports to be an adaptation of Conduite intérieure pour toutes les actions de la journée, by Very Rev. Joseph of Dreux, O.M. Cap,* first published in 1667.

The following is attributed to St. Bonaventure, though without citation.

"Confess with simplicity as if you were speaking to an angel who knew all your secrets. Do not draw the veil of excuse over your actions and do not seek to diminish the gravity of your faults. Specify your sins but do not give the history of them. Do not enter into superfluous details and do not tell the sins of others. Acknowledge briefly and directly the faults you remember to have have committed since your last confession: but do not make a long series of of general statements such as: 'I have not loved God sufficiently well, etc.' 'I have not fervor enough, etc. ...' You may accuse yourself of such faults to God in prayer. In a word, let your confession be sincere, humble, and brief."

The book goes on:

"Listen with humility and gratitude to the admonitions of your confessor, being careful not to interrupt him repeatedly by saying, 'Yes, Father.' When the confessor imposes a penance upon you excite yourself to humility at the thought that it is in order to condescend to your weakness that he places such a slight burden on you.

"When you receive absolution, place yourself in spirit at the foot of the Cross of Christ and recite more with your heart than your lips, the act of contrition. The Precious Blood of our Lord is poured forth on your soul because its merits are applied to you when the priest pronounces the words of absolution.

"Leave the confessional giving thanks to God, and imploring Him to confirm in heaven, in accordance with the promise of Jesus Christ, the absolution which the priest has pronounced over you. Renew your resolve to amend your life, and make one practical resolution to which you will attend particularly until your next confession. Carry it out promptly and respond to the grace you have just received. Say your penance with devotion and ask God to accept it favorably, even though it is so small and inadequate. Offer some little sacrifice or some penance which you will perform that day in order to make up for what is wanting in your sacramental penance.

"Leave the church with the firm purpose of never again committing what you have confessed, lest falling back into the same faults you may become unworthy of God's mercy: 'Behold thou art made whole: sin no more, lest some worse thing happen to thee.' (John v. 14.)"

*O.M. Cap. is an older postnominal for the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, now O.F.M. Cap.

Retreat Report

This afternoon we have returned home from our annual community retreat. It was held, as has been usual in time my time here, at our house in Frascati in the hills outside Rome.

Ah Rome. She's pretty from a distance, no?

For me the grace of the retreat was to pause and take a look at my life and vocation at this particular moment, especially in light of some changes in the recent past (e.g. loss of a spiritual director) and looking forward to changes that are on the way (e.g. the General Chapter this summer). My prayer was mostly about who I am at this point and the discernment of what God desires for me going forward.

For the days of retreat, I found myself most of the time in one of two places. The first was the Capuchin church adjacent to the friary:

San Francesco d'Assisi, Frascati. Consecrated 1579.

There I prayed, reflected on things, and sometimes just sat with the Lord. It was cold enough in there that even I wanted a sweatshirt, so there wasn't much danger of any other friar interrupting my solitude!

My other spot was in the friary rec room, where I read, journaled, and tended the fireplace in the later afternoons.

What a rich source of metaphor for the spiritual life! Long-time followers of this blog will remember my sufferings during a period of my religious life when I gathered with confreres to pray around a fake fireplace (supplied with real tools; 'Lord, close my lips' must be my prayer about that), despite the fact that the Blessed Sacrament was reserved in a number of nearby places.

During the retreat I finished Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation by Fr. Martin Laird, O.S.A., which had been recommended to me by a confrere, and I read most of Cardinal Sarah's The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, which is a prayerful, beautiful book. I recommend it.

"I Know Nothing Due To Holy Obedience"

An Irish priest sent me this gem of a footnote on Capuchin ignorance from Ulrich L. Lehner's Monastic Prisons and Torture Chambers: Crime and Punishment in Central European Monasteries 1600-1800.

(click to enlarge)

Bring Me The Breviary

Over the last couple weeks a visiting friar has displaced me from my regular place in choir. Not a big deal, though I don't like my little choir-cubby ruffled.

One friar noticed my suffering and said,

'Well, brother, there are many displaced persons in Rome.'

Cooperatores veritatis

Today I finished Last Testament: In His Own Words. To be honest, I didn't find it as interesting as Seewald's other interview books, but if you appreciate Benedict XVI very much, as I do, you will enjoy it. Particularly interesting is the material about Joseph Ratzinger's younger life, especially the time around the Second World War.

Salty Ramble

Jesus said to his disciples: "You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. (Matthew 5:13)

Two days before Christmas the fog lifted just enough to allow a single chopper to work its way up to us, a dangerous journey, squeezing beneath the cloud ceiling just a few feet above the jungle-covered ridges. Along with food, water, mail, and ammunition came the battalion chaplain. 

He had brought with him several bottles of Southern Comfort and some new dirty jokes. I accepted the Southern Comfort, thanked him, laughed at the jokes, and had a drink with him. Merry Christmas. 

Inside I was seething. I thought I'd gone a little nuts. How could I be angry with a guy who had just put his life at risk to cheer me up? And didn't the Southern Comfort feel good on that rain-raked mountaintop? Years later I understood. I was engaged in killing and maybe being killed. I felt responsible for the lives and deaths of my companions. I was struggling with a situation approaching the sacred in its terror and contact with the infinite, and he was trying to numb me to it. I needed help with the existential terror of my own death and responsibility for the death of others, enemies, and friends, not Southern Comfort. I needed a spiritual guide. (Karl Marlantes, What It Is Like To Go To War)

The Flannery O'Connor Prayer Journal

I'm glad for the inspiration to read A Prayer Journal, W.A. Sessions' editing of a journal kept by Flannery O'Connor during 1946 and 1947 when she was a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Certain insights struck me as very deep and have been coming back to me in meditation, which I usually take as a sign that the Holy Spirit means for me to pay attention to them:

"I do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God."

"I feel too mediocre now to suffer. If suffering came to me I would not even recognize it."

The following passage really resonated with my own experience of prayer and journaling:

I will always be staggering between Despair & Presumption, facing first one & then the other, deciding which makes me look the best, which fits most comfortably, most conveniently. I'll never take a large chunk of anything. I'll nibble nervously here & there. Fear of God is right; but God, it is not this nervousness [.] It is something huge, great, magnanimous. It must be a joy. Every virtue must be vigorous. Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large & stale. You can never finish eating it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited. But perhaps that is too literary a statement--this musn't get insincere.

I'm not sure how to recommend the book; if you have ever struggled with prayer and yourself as a pray-er, or used journaling as a spiritual practice, I think you would probably appreciate it or at least enjoy it. The only thing is that it's almost too short to be worth paying for. So borrow a copy. I got mine on Kindle via the maternal economy.*

*Capuchin inside joke

The Road of Iniquity

As a sort of token effort at interior consent to my new life in Italy I have been making my slow way through Manzoni's The Betrothed. I read some in English (trans. Bruce Penman, Penguin Classics, 1972) and then if I feel up to it I go back and try to read the section again in Italian.

About half done after a year, I came across this wonderful description of how it feels to be a sinner:

Our manuscript remarks here that the road of iniquity is indeed wide, but that does not mean that it is a comfortable road to travel; it has its stumbling blocks and its difficult stretches; it is a painful road and a tiring one, although it goes downhill. (337)

Reading 'The Infancy Narratives'

I've been reading Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives on the Sundays of Advent and finished it this morning. The first thing I would say about it is that the reader does well to take seriously what the author says about the nature of the book, that it "is not a third volume, but a kind of small 'antechamber' to the two earlier volumes." It's a sweet little book of just a few chapters, but shot through with the sort of reflection that reveals a real devotion to the events recorded by Matthew and Luke. Particularly touching in this sense is the thoughtful section on the Virgin Birth:

It seems natural to me that only after Mary's death could the mystery be made public and pass into the shared patrimony of early Christianity. At that point it could find its way into the evolving complex of Christological doctrine and be linked to the confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God--yet not in the manner of a story crafted from an idea, an idea reformulated as a fact, but vice versa: the event itself, a fact that was now in the public domain, became the object of reflection--understanding was sought. The overall picture of Jesus Christ shed light upon the event, and conversely, through that event, the divine logic was more deeply grasped. The mystery of his origin illuminated what came later, and conversely the developed form of Christological faith helped to make sense of that origin. Thus did Christology develop.

Another section that makes a similar point in a more general way:

The two chapters of Matthew's Gospel devoted to the infancy narratives are not a meditation presented under the guise of stories, but the converse: Matthew is recounting real history, theologically thought and interpreted, and thus he helps us to understand the mystery of Jesus more deeply.

How refreshing that is for us who absorbed so many brittle doctrines about history and fact and meaning and God--e.g. 'yes, it's just a myth' or 'yes, it's just a symbol,' 'but that means it's more true!' or 'yes, the Bible is all true, and some of it really happened'--all of these doctrines that when they are heard by unbelievers convince them more deeply that we religious people are self-deluded and full of nonsense. More and more I tend to consign such teaching to the large category of things that seemed liberating to our parents in the faith but have not delivered on such hope.

It is said by some that the Church needs to be updated according to the times, in order to be more relevant, more comprehensible, and set free from her doctrines that are offensive to the cherished ideas of contemporary society. But what they forget is that the world doesn't hate the Church because of her teachings; the world hates the Church because it hated Jesus Christ first. And those are his words, not mine.

And why should Benedict's assertions seem strange? Do we not in just the same way work out our spiritual understanding of ourselves? It is a historical fact that in the early afternoon on August 29, 1992, I walked up and out of the basement of Freeman dormitory and down the street to Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Quaker Hill, Connecticut, where a deacon of the Roman Catholic Church poured some water on me and invoked the Blessed Trinity. It really took place. You can go to the church and find a historical record of it in their office. But to know and understand what happened that day requires some theological reflection. That's how our spiritual lives work, history coming to be understood in light of God's eternity. Why should the Sacred Scriptures be any different?

I also enjoyed a little jab at academic theology delivered by the old professor. He is discussing the beginning of Matthew 2, in which Herod, following up on the inquiry of Magi, asks the chief priests and the scribes where the Messiah is to be born. Despite giving a learned and complete answer, Benedict notes that this knowledge does not prompt them to actually do anything:

The answer given by the chief priests and scribes to the wise men's question has a thoroughly practical geographical content, which helps the Magi on their way. Yet it is not only a geographical, but also a theological interpretation of the place and the event. That Herod would draw the obvious conclusion is understandable. Yet it is remarkable that his Scripture experts do not feel prompted to take any practical steps as a result. Does this, perhaps, furnish us with the image of a theology that exhausts itself in academic disputes?

New Breviary Hopes

I heard yesterday with great delight that our bishops in the United States had voted in favor of a project to develop a new translation of the Liturgy of the Hours. This is, of course, a necessary thing given the new translation of the Roman Missal. At the very least, we need to be relieved of the funny situation of using the new Sunday and sanctoral collects for Mass while still having the old ones printed in our breviaries.

So, given that I am full of opinions about breviaries--and for this I make no apology, since, as one notes, breviaries are the only things (apart from our clothes) that the Rule permits us to have--I offer my hopes for the glorious day when I unbox a new English Liturgy of the Hours. Please, my brothers...

• Let us have the three Magnficat and Benedictus antiphons for each of the three Sunday hinge hours, instead of this stingy business we have now where Evening Prayer I gets year A, Morning Prayer gets year B, and Evening Prayer II gets year C, such that the antiphon only corresponds to the Sunday gospel once during the Sunday hours. Every other edition I have ever seen gives all three for each.
• Point the psalmody for singing.
• It's a little thing, but put the daggers for when the antiphon doubles the first line of a psalm so that it might be skipped, as is right and just. I don't know why we don't have these.
• Include the Latin hymns, or at least translations of them. Both would be best.
• Make the cards for the gospel canticles, festal psalmody, Te Deum, etc., tough.
• Dump the psalm prayers.
• Six ribbons are better than five. That way there's one each for Proper of Seasons, Ordinary, Psalter, Night Prayer, Proper of Saints, and Commons.
• Give us books just as tough as the Catholic Book Publishing Company's 4-volume set we have now. Say what you want about them, but those books are strong.

Thanks in advance for all of your work!

It was no longer possible to consider myself, abstractly, as being in a certain "state of life" which had certain technical relations to other "states of life." All that occupied me now was the immediate practical problem of getting up my hill with this terrific burden I had on my shoulders, step by step, begging God to drag me along and get me away from my enemies and from those who were trying to destroy me. 

I did not even reflect how the Breviary, the Canonical Office, was the most powerful and effective prayer I could possibly have chosen, since it is the prayer of the whole Church, and concentrates in itself all the power of the Church's impetration, centered around the infinitely mighty Sacrifice of the Mass--the jewel of which the rest of the Liturgy is the setting: the soul which is the life of the whole Liturgy and of all the Sacramentals. All this was beyond me, although I grasped it at least obscurely. All I knew was that I needed to say the Breviary, and say it every day. 

Buying those books at Benziger's that day was one of the best things I ever did in my life. The inspiration to do it was a very great grace. There are few things I remember that give me more joy. (Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, 329-330)

The Deepest Sadness, the Greatest Danger

In my current state of being between assignments, I've been able to get to several books I had meant to read but never did. One of the books I'm in now is Dom Augustine Baker's Sancta Sophia, which has already shown up in a couple of posts. It's one of those books that I'm so grateful to have finally got around to reading. Sometimes I think this is an operation of grace; the Holy Spirit means for us to read a certain book at a certain moment in the journey, and makes it happen just that way.

Another book I had meant to read but never got to until now is Peter Steinfels' A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Whether you agree with Steinfels or not, it's an important book. Though still fairly recent (2003), it's a little jarring how dated it already feels, given certain events in the Church: the election of Benedict XVI, Summorum pontificum, the election of Timothy Dolan as president of the USCCB, etc.

I'm enjoying the book, particularly in its communication of a love and reverence for the whole of Catholic experience in the United States. As a convert without a family history in the Church, that's something good for me to sense and feel, and to hold in reverence.

What grabbed me for a post today, however, was a little line in the section in which Steinfels is correcting nostalgia for the liturgy before the reforms following Vatican II, as if this were a time of universal reverence and awe before the mystery of God. As an effective strategy for doing this, Steinfels describes the experience of being an altar boy in the days before the Mass of Paul VI: "Other priests quickly communicated to the altar boys a smug familiarity with all things sacred, a kind of authorized irreverence in which we were privileged to share." (177)

How that speaks to my experience! Not that I was ever an altar boy, but I have received the same initiation: 'Here you go, brother, accept this false liberation to which you are now entitled by being admitted to our little club. It will only end in sadness and is ultimately ordered to your damnation, but for now let me admit you to this happy irreverence that frees you from worrying about God and lets you relax and be yourself.' Boo.

I remember in one place I lived we had a public chapel where there was adoration of the Blessed Sacrament each weekday afternoon. I would often spend some time praying with the odd assortment (one has to admit) of folks who would come. One day when I was going to the chapel one of the priests asked me bemusedly if I was on my way to join those who spent their afternoons "quietly screaming at the wafer."

That comment hit me so hard that I could hardly pray for a couple of days. It's bad enough that a priest was making light of the real presence of Christ in the sacred species. In a way, though, I was even more bothered by the way he was mocking the prayer and piety of the people. Fine, maybe adoration isn't your thing, or not the way you pray. Maybe you even think it's contrary to the spirit of the reformed liturgy. (You're wrong, but that's not the point.) But none of this grants permission to treat the grace of prayer in someone--as imperfect and confused as it is in any of us--as an inside joke on which we build our own rotten and fleshly communion.

It just goes to show how vigilant and cautious we have to be in any of our disagreements and conflicts. The world, the flesh, and the devil get into them so easily.

When we invite each other into the false liberation of the "smug familiarity" and "authorized irreverence" for the things of God, it won't be long before we are also trying to build our rotten solidarity on irreverence for persons and their experience. And the incarnation has rendered all irreverence for the human person a sacrilege.

Sustento del Alma

Many times in the first few years of my Christianity I tried to read John of the Cross but failed. Then, one day, as novice Capuchin friar on retreat in lovely Marathon, Wisconsin, I picked up The Ascent of Mount Carmel and read it freely. The moment had come for me to meet one of my great teachers. A few years later, having learned a little Spanish and finding myself as a student at the former Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I went over to Shoenhof's and spent a large portion of my monthly 'day off' money on his Obras Completas.

It is often said in the spiritual life that God sends us guides and teachers at the moments when we need them. I have found this to be the case in my own life, and I believe it is one of the graces of the communion of saints. It's not limited to the Church on earth, however. We are also given saints to read at the right moments. That's why John of the Cross didn't work for me until I was ready. My first desires to read him were vainglorious; I thought I would read him because he was supposed to be deep and I wanted to be deep as well. When I had stumbled along long enough trying to live a life of prayer such that I could understand what John was talking about, then I was given the grace of being able to read him.

In this spirit we should be attentive if we have an inspiration to take up a devotion to a certain saint or to read his writings. God can also speak to us through others who suggest to us what we might read or with whom we might pray. The communion of saints is a way to talk about larger economies of grace working through friends of God across time and space, and it is a communion that is on our side in our desire for prayer and sanctity.

"Por ninguna ocupación dejar la oración mental, que es sustento del alma." ~Juan de la Cruz, Grados de Perfección, 5.

Names in Books

I love having books that once belonged to someone else, or, even better, were once gifts between people I don't know. It makes me feel like the books connect us, and are some small sign of the communion of saints.

I have copy of the St. Anthony Guild Press edition of Bonaventure's translated Mystical Opuscula that seems to have once belonged to Nicholas Elko, sometime Ruthenian bishop of Pittsburgh, who was one of the council fathers at Vatican II and once wrote a cold war-themed historical novel. It's stamped with his ex libris, complete with an episcopal cross before his name, in a lovely sort of teal.

My set of the Breviarium Romano-Seraphicum seems to have once pertained to a Fr. Louis of the Capuchin community in Mons, Belgium, and my Liber usualis seems to have once been for the use of Fr. Ignatius McCormick, a famous curmudgeon of my own province.

My copy of Étienne Gilson's The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure bears a stamp from the "Catholic Library" at MIT. I wonder if such a thing still exists.

I don't even know how I came to have it, but I have a volume of Franciscan sources in Italian which was originally given to a Fr. Pio from a Fr. Bonaventure in Turin in 1978. As far as I can tell with my minimal Italian, the inscription is quite heartfelt and flowery.

I have what I think is a first edition copy of Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain inscribed to someone called Daddy "Ga-Ga" as a gift on Father's Day, June 19, 1949. In a different hand it also seems to be the property of a M.W. O'Connell. Were M.W. and Ga-Ga the same person? Who knows. Having been old enough to have a son old enough to give him a serious book for Father's Day sixty-two years ago, I suspect that Daddy "Ga-Ga" has left this world. May he rest in peace.

I also have a book with a hoax of a dedication. It's one of my history textbooks from college, and one that I've never been able to part with because of the hilarious selection from Alvarus Pelagius's De Planctu Ecclesiae which it features. In the front a couple of my college friends marked it up as an alleged gift from them to me on the occasion of my forty-fifth birthday, February 27th, 2017. That must have seemed like the unimaginable future back in the goofy bemusement of college, ca. 1992. Not so much anymore, I'm afraid.

Of course I also have a number of books inscribed to me: a 1987 edition of Stedman's Pocket Medical Dictionary, a first edition of Fight Club, and a beat-up, paperback copy of the The Idiot in which one of my best friends from high school wrote, "To Charles, may you cultivate blessed idiocy."

Salty Ain't Enough

"Duty without piety is meat without salt, but piety without duty is salt without meat. Let pious gluttons look to it."

--Fr. F. X. Lasance, Prayer Book for Religious (Benziger, 1941)

A Child's Questions, Lovecraft, and God

Like a lot of people, I received an Amazon Kindle e-reader for Christmas. I've really enjoyed it and have found several uses for it. One of my favorites is that it is for me like an ever-accessible version of the bin of random paperbacks at a used book store. So I've used it to pick up--mostly for free--all kinds of random old things I might want to read or read once again. One of these was a big collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories for only a couple of dollars.

I was really into Lovecraft for a spell in my middle teen years, and as I've read a few of these odd stories once again, full as they are with both fantastical beings and pointedly conservative old New England prejudices, I have wondered why they were once so enjoyable for me. I think I have an idea.

When I was little, like during recess in elementary school, I used to wonder idly sometimes about a lot of questions I had. Some of these were cosmic. Why was there something instead of nothing? What would it be like if there was nothing? I used to be fascinated by how hard it was to think about it. Others were about how the world seemed to be set up. If fog was the same thing as clouds, as I was told, why did the two look different? Did the water in the ocean go all the way to the bottom? How come you could sometimes feel the air, and sometimes not, but you could never see it? How come if you thought about it, you had to breathe on purpose or hold your breath and die (as I was told) but at other moments you realized that you were breathing all along without thinking about it? Still other questions, and in some ways the most interesting and frustrating ones, centered around my experience as an individual self-consciousness. Could this particular self-consciousness--which I am--have been born in another place or time? Or could it only have come to exist in these particular historical circumstances? When I was dead, I was told, it would be just the same as before I was born. But could that be?

I don't mean that I had the proper language for these questions at the time; mostly I felt them more than I was able to articulate them. Not having the language, my attempts to ask adults about them were mostly pointless. I remember in particular that when I tried to ask questions about the 'individual self-consciousness' I only had language to talk about particularity in terms of location and vision, and so I talked about my 'outlook.'

All this is just to say that ever since I was little I have had a kind of sense that there is more to the story, that we live in the midst of a much larger reality and history of which we are only dimly aware in our day-to-day lives. This is very much the sense one gets in Lovecraft; there is much 'more to the story,' to the history of the earth and the cosmos, and it is very, very sinister and will threaten your sanity even to become aware of it for a moment.

A few years later in life I would realize that the 'more to the story' of which I had always been aware and curious about at some level, was the Ground of all being that religious people call 'God.' Far from being sinister, this 'more to the story' was entirely benevolent. As one of my professors likes to translate what the medievals call the benignitas of God, it is 'aggressive goodness.' I was grateful to discover that this reality, which turned out to be more a reality than anything else, could be stepped into through the Word made flesh. And so I got to be the Christian.

Trinitarian Theology

This morning I'm reading Lewis Ayres's account of Augustine's "tenative" and "cautious" exploration of the how and in what way the persons of the Trinity can be "understood as identical with the intra-divine acts that Scripture attributes to them."

I'm grateful for this, because it helps me to remember that when it comes to the work of offering an account of the Blessed Trinity, the starting point is not reason, concepts of ideal community or social utopia, or a meta-argument about theological 'starting points.' The beginning is Sacred Scripture, from which God the Trinity is revealed to us.

Spent and Tired Bureaucracies

So I'm through about half of Light of the World, Peter Seewald's latest book of interviews with (now) Benedict XVI. As usual, the most interesting, surprising, and even provocative material is quite other than the bits picked up and celebrated by the secular media. Here's one part that struck me strongly in what I have read thus far:

Benedict is speaking on the decline in Catholic observance and identity in Europe and the United States, in relation to the new vitality the Church is experiencing in other parts other world:

Less clearly but nevertheless unmistakably, we find here in the West, too, a revival of new Catholic initiatives that are not ordered by a structure or a bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is spent and tired. These initiatives come from within, from the joy of young people.*

What is meant by 'bureaucracy' here? Is it the structures of dioceses? That would seem to be the obvious guess. If so, I think the Pope's words raise an important reflection for us religious, and especially religious of institutes that are largely clerical.

Historically, here in North America, the ministerial resources and priestly energies of religious have often gone into supporting and assisting the diocesan structure and its parishes. This was a tremendous good work at one time, and built a network of parishes, schools, hospitals and many other Catholic institutions that accomplished the greatest work of social uplift the world has ever seen.

But where are we now, if the bureaucracy is "spent and tired"? Often we religious of clerical or largely clerical communities justify and eagerly go about the work of parish priesthood because we want to respond to what is called "the needs of the Church." But I think Benedict's words beg for us the question: are the 'needs of the Church' the same thing as the needs of bishops and the needs of diocesan structures, which may be 'spent and tired.'?

This is a difficult and delicate question. Many religious communities have tried to better proclaim the Gospel by moving outside of the traditional structures of the Church, but some have only succeeded in stepping outside of the Church--and sometimes even Christianity--altogether. So, to me, the question is not whether or not to work within the structures of the Church--because we all form that structure, and to deny it is to deny ourselves and our baptism--but how it is we can best serve the needs of the Church conceived in the broadest possible way, and perhaps this means seeking out and supporting the new and joyful energies of which Benedict speaks.


*I don't know the page number, because I am reading the Kindle edition. It's 'location' 870.

Nerd

Finally I get some recognition. Thanks Foursquare!

Time to Find These Library Books

By accident, in trying to download a statement in which Boston College alleges that I owe $3,547 for the beloved privilege of continuing my current association with her, I discovered a link that displays a list of the books one has on loan from the various BC libraries. This will be very helpful in not forgetting to return them. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I have only ten outstanding loans:


Cur deus homo : atti del Congresso anselmiano internazionale, Roma, 21-23 maggio 1998 / a cura di Pa

The love of learning and the desire for God; a study of monastic culture. Translated by Catharine Mi

Magistri Alexandri de Hales Glossa in quatuor libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi, nunc demum reperta

Alexander of Hales' Theology of the Hypostatic Union

The city of God / translated by Marcus Dods ; with an introduction by Thomas Merton.

Doctoris irrefragabilis Alexandri de Hales Ordinis minorum Summa theologica iussu et auctoritate rmi

Proslogion / Anselm von Canterbury ; Untersuchungen lateinisch-deutsche Ausg. von P. Franciscus Sale

Monologion. Lateinisch-deutsche Ausgabe von P. Franciscus Salesius Schmitt.

Pourquoi Dieu s'est fait homme / Anselme de Cantorbéry ; texte latin ; introduction, bibliographie,

Decem opuscula ad theologiam mysticam spectantia / seraphici doctoris S. Bonaventurae ; in textu cor

Edith Stein

All of a sudden it feels like the end of the semester. Next week is the last of classes. All of my term work is in draft. It's rather uneven, and I'm not even sure how good some of it is, but it all represents a kind of groping and clumsy start at finding some direction in the obedience of this doctorate.

So as time opens up, I can get back to other things I either set aside because of the course work or left for later. But it also means I can find some time for personal reading. Various evidence suggests to me that it might be time for me to read Edith Stein. Does anybody who is better acquainted with her work have any advice? Because of the John of the Cross connection I'm curious about the Kreuzeswissenschaft/Science of the Cross, but I don't know if this is the right place to start.

Thanks in advance!