Sunday, March 31, 2013

Te Dominus Amat

God loves you...  The most important message that Christ brings us all this Easter Day.

 And on a personal note, this transpired at the wonderful parish of Sts. Ann and Joachim in Fargo, ND, which I had the honor to be the design architect for their new church....

FARGO - Timothy Murphy experienced a dramatic turnaround at the last minute.
A friend from Yale who hadn’t been in touch since graduation looked him up after envisioning a suicide attempt; the phone in Murphy’s Fargo home rang just as the local retired farmer, hunting enthusiast and poet loaded his double-barreled shotgun.

Instead of ending his life, a two-hour conversation led him to relinquish the gun.

The life-changing incident nine years ago really only constitutes the first stanza of Murphy’s conversion story. What happened after the phone call – the agonizing year that followed and the climactic moment that brought a spiritual rebirth – is where his true transformation began.

A year to the day from the fateful call, a second sign came to convince a former skeptic that God is real.

Drifting away
Born in Hibbing, Minn., Murphy came to Moorhead with his family as an infant. The oldest of six children, he was active as an altar boy at St. Joseph Catholic Church.
Leaving the church his junior year of college wasn’t difficult, he said. As a homosexual, he’d felt alienated for some time.

His entire family – mother, father and siblings – drifted away, as well.

At 22, Murphy met his longtime literary partner, Alan Sullivan, then 24, and the two joined forces as poet and editor/translator. Together, they pursued everything from Tibetan meditation and Zen Buddhism to Daoism and Confucianism.

“We were spiritual seekers, but we never looked to the Catholic Church because of their position on gays.”

Continue reading.... 

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Rudolf Schwarz's influence on modern Catholic architecture

Rudolf Schwarz (1897-1961)

Rudolf Schwarz (1881-1962) was virtually unknown in the United States until the last decade of his life, and his theory of sacred architecture is idiosyncratic and problematic, yet he holds an enduring influence on the way we think about modern Catholic churches and liturgy.  Schwarz was a pupil and close friend of Fr. Romano Guardini, the German priest-philosopher whose liturgical experiments in the 1920s at Burg Rothenfels are considered seminal in shifting the Mass to a centralized, versus populum model, and Schwarz gave architectural form to Guardini's ideas.

Fr. Romano Guardini (1885-1968)
Though Guardini himself was little-known in the United States until after World War Two, his influence on the Liturgical Movement in Europe is significant. The German theologian Fr. Karl Rahner, SJ famously said that, "It is a widely known fact that the Rothenfels experiment was the immediate model for the liturgical reforms of Vatican II.”  

As importantly, Schwarz was a product of the sort of Bauhaus inspired modernism that was fashionable in Germany after the First World War, and it can be said that his sense of mechanical aesthetics (which ought to have been completely detachable from his liturgical sensibility) also had a strong influence in shaping the sort of barren, reductionist, stripped down warehouse churches that became fashionable in America after the Second Vatican Council.
Yes, that is a church and not a warehouse.... Kirche St. Fronleichnam, Aachen, by Rudolf Schwarz

Schwarz was, and still is, little known in America especially against the towering figures of Bauhaus architectural modernism - Mies der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and the others who fled Hitler's Germany and found homes, careers and influence in US schools of architecture such as Harvard, Yale and IIT. He might not be known at all here if not for another Catholic priest who fled the Gestapo and arrived in America to become a dominant voice of the Liturgical Movement in the US, Fr. Hans Ansgar (H.A.) Reinhold. Reinhold both introduced and promoted Schwarz's work and ideas through strategically placed articles in secular architectural trade publications and Catholic liturgical magazines.
 
Fr. Hans Ansgar (H.A.) Reinhold (1897-1968)
 For more insight on the history of how Schwarz came to influence our Catholic churches in America, I invite you to read an article I wrote a couple of years ago, originally published in Das Münster in Germany, now available on-line. (click here)

Das Münster Jan 2011

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

A Pope who is a Jesuit who is a Franciscan!



Francis I, Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio

HABEMUS PAPAM!!! any second now....

Saint Peter Basilica is about the most elegant and noble facade in the world. A perfect stage for the Church to proclaim:

Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum:
Habemus Papam!!!!

Thank you Paul V, Camillo Borghese (1552-1621).

Monday, March 11, 2013

HABEBIMUS PAPAM!!!!

Not quite yet though -- habebimus is the future tense just to remind us that "we will have a Pope". In the mean time, we are in a period of interregnum, when the seat of Peter is vacant (sede vacante).






When the Cardinals in the conclave (con +clave means "with keys" to indicate that they are lock up, sequestered being a particularly popular term these days) finally elect the next Successor to the Prince of the Apostles, they will burn the ballots in the chimney and send a white smoke signal to announce they have concluded their deliberations.  I suspect that burning the ballots might have once been a political safeguard, but it means that while the results are known to the world, all physical evidence of the deliberation is destroyed and the votes are now entrusted to the eternal memory of God alone.

While we are praying and waiting to learn of our new Holy Father (Fr. Aidan Nichols OP once told me that only the current pope is called "Holy Father") I thought it would be interesting to see the earliest known film footage of a pope: the much beloved Pope Leo XIII who both revived modern studies in Thomism with his encyclical Aeterni Patris, and developed the basis for Catholic Social Teaching with his great encyclical on capital and labor in the modern economy and social structure, Rerum Novarum. Pope Leo XIII declare the Holy Year of 1900, entrusting the world to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.


During the pilgrimage events of the Holy Year 1900, Pope Leo XIII also played a key role in St Therese of Lisieux being allowed to enter the Carmelite monastery, and thus gave the Church one of the great gifts of the 20th century.The Little Flower's own description of that event is touching:

After the Mass of thanksgiving, following that of the Holy Father the audience began. Leo XIII was seated on a large armchair; he was dressed simply in a white cassock, with a cape of the same color, and on his head was a little skullcap. Around him were cardinals, archbishops, and bishops, but I saw them only in general, being occupied solely with the Holy Father. We passed in front of him in procession; each pilgrim knelt in turn, kissed the foot and hand of Leo XIII, received his blessing, and two noble guards touched him as a sign to rise (touched the pilgrim, for I explain myself so badly one would think it was the Pope.)

Before entering the pontifical apartment, I was really determined to speak, but I felt my courage weaken when I saw Father Révérony standing by the Holy Father's right side. Almost at the same instant, they told us on the Pope's behalf that it was forbidden to speak, as this would prolong the audience too much. I turned toward my dear Céline for advice: "Speak!", she said. A moment later I was at the Holy Father's feet. I kissed his slipper and he presented his hand, but instead of kissing it I joined my own and lifting tear-filled eyes to his face, I cried out: "Most Holy Father, I have a great favor to ask you!"

The Sovereign Pontiff lowered his head towards me in such a way that my face almost touched his, and I saw his eyes, black and deep, fixed on me and they seemed to penetrate to the depths of my soul. "Holy Father, in honor of your Jubilee, permit me to enter Carmel at the age of fifteen!"

Emotion undoubtedly made my voice tremble. He turned to Father Révérony who was standing at me with surprise and displeasure and said: "I don't understand very well." Now if God had permitted it, it would have been easy for Father Révérony to obtain what I desired, but it was the cross and not consolation God willed to give me.

"Most Holy Father," answered the Vicar General, "this is a child who wants to enter Carmel at the age of fifteen, but the Superiors are considering the matter at the moment." "Well, my child," the Holy Father replied, looking at me kindly, "do what the Superiors tell you!" Resting my hands on his knees, I made a final effort, saying in a suppliant voice: "Oh! Holy Father, if you say yes, everybody will agree!" He gazed at me steadily, speaking these words and stressing each syllable: "Go . . . go . . . You will enter if God wills it!" (His accent had something about it so penetrating and so convincing, it seems to me I still hear it.)

I was encouraged by the Holy Father's kindness and wanted to speak again, but the two guards touched me politely to make me rise. As this was not enough they took me by the arms and Father Révérony helped them lift me, for I stayed there with joined hands resting on the knees of Leo XIII. It was with force they dragged me from his feet. At the moment I was thus lifted, the Holy Father placed his hand on my lips, then raised it to bless me. Then my eyes filled with tears and Father Révérony was able to contemplate at least as many diamonds as he had seen at Bayeux, the two guards literally carried me to the door and there a third one gave me a medal of Leo XIII.
 So while we wait for further news, here is the film, one of the earliest known records of live video and audio of anyone in the early age of cinematography:







Thursday, March 7, 2013

The Quotable Newman




Edited by Dave Armstrong; Forward by Joseph Pearce. 
Manchester NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2012
$24.95, 448 pages.

It has taken roughly 100 years for the work of John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) to begin to  find more widespread reception among the lay faithful. Much of this is due to the excellent work of Fr. Ian Ker, unarguably the world’s foremost Newman scholar, who has written numerous substantial and accessible works on Cardinal Newman, including the definitive biography, collected sermons and essays, topical books, and new editions of Newman’s own books. Newman has recently been raised from Venerable to Blessed by Pope Benedict XVI, and many are calling for him to be enrolled as a Doctor of the Church. As his stature grows, works such as The Quotable Newman will be useful to an increasing number of readers.

Newman is an intriguing figure and very much a man of his Victorian age; he is also in many ways a man for our own age. Newman started as a hardline Calvinist, moved toward Evangelicalism, became dissatisfied with the subjectivism of evangelical Christianity and as he studied the early Church he moved into Anglicanism wherein he was ordained deacon and priest. He finally converted to Catholicism as lay man in 1845, having been convinced of the Apostolic origins of the Catholic Church, and increasingly convinced that the Church of England was in schism. On the eve of his conversion, he famously wrote, “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.” 

Newman was ordained a priest in 1846, and later a Cardinal in 1879. It is interesting that Newman petitioned to remain a priest, rather than be consecrated as bishop, in order to be elevated to the Cardinalate, which was granted by Pope Leo XIII who installed Newman as Cardinal-deacon (the lowest of ranks in the Sacred College). His was the first major and public conversion to Catholicism among the British intellectuals, a path soon followed by Fr. Frederick Faber and Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, and later by such leading intellectuals as Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ, Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson, GK Chesterton, Fr. Frederick Copleston SJ, and Evelyn Waugh. Newman’s departure caused an immense furore among the nascent Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, and throughout the rest of his life he was having on occasion to deny allegations by others that he was seeking to leave the Catholic Church.

The life of Newman is a life pertinent to our own age: the present day contentions between Protestants and Catholics, and the general hostility of the secular world to Christianity, are in many ways paralleled to that of mid-19th century England. It was only in his life that Catholicism was even made legal in Great Britain, and Newman himself was deeply embroiled in the crass anti-Catholicism of the British establishment, both in religious and political circles – notably in his legal defeat against libel charges in the Achille case. In an of age of claims of pernicious popery even against the Anglo-Catholics, the anti-Catholic polemics of Joseph Blanco White, popular stories of the Black Legend and the myths of Bloody Mary, and the scandalous and pornographic fictions of Maria Monk, Victorian broadsheets and religious pamphlets could be every bit as fear mongering, distorting, crass, and widely disseminated as anything found on the internet today. Today, regardless of what is now lost in erudition, articulation, careful thought, and eloquence in current polemics, it is neither greater nor lesser than the vitriol and antagonistic energy against the Church as in Newman’s era. To see the way Newman navigated these treacherous waters can be instructive for us today.

Dave Armstrong’s new edition of his selections of quotes from the vast body of Newman’s writing is an excellent introduction for the lay reader. It is perhaps not "quotable" in the sense of a collection of  pithy aphorisms as one finds in books like The Quotable Chesterton, for Newman has too much gravity to be taken lightly. It must have been a daunting task to sift through the dense prose of Newman’s writing, and to systematically organize it for practical use. It is particularly helpful that Armstrong treats each topic by the major category (e.g., Development (of Doctrine), The Eucharist, Papal Infallibility) ordered alphabetically, and then chronologically so that we can understand Newman’s own growth and development as a thinker. This all the more so since Newman’s own formulation of “development of doctrine” is now widely accepted, and we can see it in microcosmically his own life as he grappled to find truth and clarity for expressions of the faith as he grew to embrace and understand it. 

Consider, for instance, the change in his understanding of the Eucharistic presence of the Lord in the Body and Blood. As a Protestant writing in 1834, he held that: 

“It seems so very irreverent and profane a thing to say that our Saviour’s own body is carnally present on the Altar. That He is in some mysterious incomprehensible way present I fully believe; but I do not know what way –and since that way is not told us in Scripture or the ancient fathers I dare pronounce nothing.” (p. 144)  

 It was not out of ignorance either, but a faith position grounded in Protestant methodology: 
“The Roman Church, we know, considers that the elements of Bread and Wine depart or are taken away on Consecration, and the Body and Blood of Christ take their place. This is the doctrine of Transubstantiation … what neither our Church, nor any of the late maintainers of her doctrine on the subject, even dreams of holding.” (1838, p. 144)
A few years before his reception into the Catholic Church, Newman could write: 
“Without going so far as to speak of miracles, which I do not mean to do yet really things have happened to me in connexion with the Most Holy Sacrament which quite prove to me it is a reality and not an empty show.” (1841, p. 146).
And after his conversion and toward the end of his life, he would write: 
“Catholics believe that ‘totus Christus,’ our Lord in body and blood, in soul, in divinity, in all that is included in His Personality, is present at once whether in the consecrated Host or in the Chalice. Indeed, how else can his presence be spiritual? He who partakes of either species receives Him in His whole human nature as well as in His Divine…” (1883, p. 149). 
Armstrong’s method allows us insight into the shifts in Newman’s thinking over time, both in his long range conversion from a Protestant to a Catholic, and even in a more condensed fashion as in the case of papal infallibility, which was being discussed and discerned in his lifetime, and was a topic with which he personally grappled. Given the momentous occasion of the Benedict XVI’s resignation in our present day, and the vastly widespread and obvious confusion in the media (even among “religious” journalists), it is instructive to read Newman’s own thoughts on this question of infallibility before it was actually promulgated. While still a Protestant, Newman understood the need for some sort of final authoritative voice in the Church, and the need for some infallible office of which the only evident possibility was the Pope of Rome (4 May 1843, p. 281). Even after his conversion, we can read of his hesitancy and concern for any formulation of such a doctrine throughout the 1850s and 60s, but also of a certain resignation and sense of submission to the authority of the Church: 
“If it be God’s will that some definition in favor of the Pope’s infallibility is passed, then I should at once submit –but up to that very moment I shall pray most heartily and earnestly against it.” (20 March 1870, p. 286). 
Again, 
“My rule is to act according to my best lights as if I were infallible before the Church decides; but to accept and submit to God’s Infallibility, when the Church has spoken. The Church has not yet spoken.” (15 April 1870, p. 287). 
To gain a sense of Newman’s serious concern, 
“When it is actually done, I will accept it as His act; but, until then, I will believe it impossible.” (April/ May (?) 1870, p. 287).
After the promulgation of the Dogma by the First Vatican Council that same year, we can read of Newman’s filial assent, and how he works systematically through the dogma to his own resolution (27 July 1870, pp.288-289; March 1871, pp. 290-91), of how he thought one could morally withhold assent until the Council concluded (8 August 1870, p. 289), and of how he criticized the manner with which the dogma was promulgated: 
“It is impossible to deny that it was done with an imperiousness and overbearing willfulness, which has been a great scandal”  (c. Oct. 1871, p. 292). 
He also makes a whole series of qualifications as to the limits of infallibility, particularly how it is pertinent  to matters of “the Deposit of Faith originally given” (which is to say, that it can only be a clarification and articulation of a doctrine entrusted to the Apostles from the Lord as part of the Traditio of written and oral revelation and the inspiration of the NT writers), and that it is limitation more than a power – binding against error, not power to create new doctrines.  The development of Newman’s own thinking, and his resolution of previously held positions against the positive teachings of the Church, are instructive for us both as to his method and as solid catechesis for our own understanding. 

My only minor criticisms of the book are twofold: indices would have made the texts more accessible, even though Armstrong does as best as possible to treat the subjects topically and in alphabetical order. An subject index would have helped the reader who was looking for specific topics that might be buried in other categories that Armstrong assigned based on the major theme; and an index of contents that cross referenced the various sources would have been helpful as well.   

Secondly, the modern reader might well have appreciated quick translations from the occasional Latin passages with which Newman peppers his writings.  Newman wrote in an age where any educated person could read, and even speak, Latin. For instance, writing in respect to the way the Universal Church speaks definitively against error through history, in the words of St. Augustine,  Securus judicat orbis terrarum (“the verdict of the world is conclusive”) such words flowed effortlessly from the pen of Newman to the minds of his contemporaries. For us today, phrases such as Meo periculo (“at my own risk”), Fieri non debuit, factum valet (“It should not have been done, but it is valid”), pro re nata, pro hac vice (“for the occasion as it may rise, for this time only”), and such really ought to have been translated.  

As Newman’s stature grows his thoughts and ideas will find a growing audience. And they should.  Dave Armstrong’s book will be a helpful aid for both the serious and casual reader of Newman, and it deserves its place on the shelf next to the more comprehensive works of Fr. Ker, other compilations and anthologies by Fr. Francis X. Connolly,  Fr. Louis Bouyer of the Oratory, Fr. James Tolhurst, and Newman’s own writings.