Benedictine Liturgical Ideals and the New Evangelization
Icon of Saint Benedict
at Mount Athos
Although it no longer appears on the Universal (Roman) calendar, today is one of two feasts of Saint Benedict celebrated by Benedictines throughout the world.
This is the day in the year 547 when Saint Benedict of Norcia died.
Saint Benedict is generally considered the founder of western monasticism, and his Rule spread throughout the west as the Roman Empire was collapsing. Pope Pius XII lauded him, for in the perilous times that followed Rome’s fall, it was Benedictine monks who preserved the ancient learning.
It was for this reason that Pope Paul VI proclaimed him a patron saint of Europe.
Often on this day, I post a little something about Benedictine monasticism in the present day.
Today, I’m going to do something a little different. This past year, the little monastery Benedictine Monks at Silverstream in County Meath, Ireland was canonically erected as a monastic institute of consecrated life in the diocese of Meath on 25 February. This made Silverstream Priory the first new monastery in the county since the abolition of monasteries under King Henry VIII (that villain) in 1536.
The Sub-Prior, Dom Benedict Maria Andersen O.S.B., gave an amazing lecture at the 2016 Society for Catholic Liturgy Conference in Los Angeles (September 29—October 1).
Go listen to it if you are in the least bit interested in the liturgy.
It begins:
PREFERRING THE WORK OF GOD: BENEDICTINE LITURGICAL IDEALS AND THE NEW EVANGELISATION
The year is 988. Emissaries of Vladimir, the grand prince of Kiev, have been sent out on mission on a vitally important mission. Their orders are to find among the various nations a new religion which will be able to lure their tribes away from servitude to the cruel gods of their fathers, and which can forge them into one people, praising one Creator with one voice, one heart, and one mind. After many months of searching, the emissaries of Vladimir finally find what they had been looking for within the walls of the great imperial church of Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople. They sent the following report home:
[T]he Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth, there is no such splendour or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty.
Fast forward about a thousand years, to rural Kentucky, 1941. A young bohemian writer, a recent convert to Catholicism, arrives at the Abbey of Gethsemani to consider his vocation in life. Early in the morning, before the dawn, he witnesses simultaneous celebrations of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass by an army of priest-monks. The experience somehow hits the young man with the full force of a mystical revelation, akin to the lifting of the veil separating heaven from earth. “The overpowering atmosphere of prayers so fervent that they were almost tangible,” he says, “choked [him] with love and reverence” to the point where he “could only get the air in gasps.” “Here,” he writes,
even through only ordinary channels, came to me graces that overwhelmed me like a tidal wave, truths that drowned me with the force of their impact: and all through the plain, normal means of the liturgy — but the liturgy used properly, and with reverence, by souls inured to sacrifice. […] The eloquence of this liturgy was even more tremendous: and what it said was one, simple, cogent, tremendous truth: this church, the court of the Queen of Heaven, is the real capital of the country in which we are living. This is the center of all the vitality that is in America. This is the cause and reason why the nation is holding together. These men, hidden in the anonymity of their choir and their white cowls, are doing for their land what no army, no congress, no president could ever do as such: they are winning for it the grace and the protection and the friendship of God.
Reflecting on this first experience of monastic worship, Father Louis Merton remarks:
Certainly one thing the monk does not, or cannot, realize is the effect which these liturgical functions, performed by a group as such, have upon those who see them. The lessons, the truths, the incidents and values portrayed are simply overwhelming.
I open with these stories — from 10th century Russia and the 20th century American South — to illustrate something which, I believe, is absolutely crucial to the challence of carrying out the New Evangelisation: the leading of souls along the via pulchritudinis, a glimpse of that heavenly splendor that so seduced the Kievan pagans to Christ, and caused a young American man to leave all and take up his Cross in the obscurity of the cloister. And where better to find a school of Catholic spirituality so thoroughly infused a sense of this primacy than in traditional monasticism? If, as history shows us, monasticism was the spiritual engine of the “Old Evangelization” of Europe, then it stands to reason that a healthy, robust, renewed monasticism might once again become for the Church a source of inspiration and new vitality as she labors for the turning of believers and unbelievers alike to Christ, so that they, with St Ambrose, can say: “Face to face, thou hast made thyself known to me, O Christ; I have found thee in thy mysteries.”
Cardinal Ratzinger once wrote: “How we attend to liturgy determines the fate of the faith and the Church.” When we cannot pray aright, we as a Church can’t think aright, we can’t live aright — and we certainly can’t evangelise aright. If there is some kind of malfunction in the Church’s approach to the sacred mysteries, there will always be a corresponding malfunction in the Church’s ability to evangelize. Is this not a serious betrayal of the mandate we have been given by the Church to become true agents of the New Evangelization?
Listen to the whole talk here. It is amazing.