Second Sunday after Epiphany Mass and Picnic

Today the Latin Mass community, North and South, gathered at Colebrook to attend the monks’ Mass for the Second Sunday after Epiphany, reflecting on the mystery of the Wedding feast at Cana and Our Lady’s intercession thereat, and afterwards to have a pleasant picnic at their property at Rhyndaston. Mass was glorious and moving, the elevation barely visible through clouds of incense – “and the glory of God filled the sanctuary” – and put me in mind of what Dom Anscar Vonier wrote about “The Doctrinal Power of the Liturgy of the Catholic Church” in his Sketches and Studies in Theology:

One of the great advantages of the liturgical presentment of Catholic dogma is found in this, that it sets forth revealed truth in a non-combative and non-controversial way. It is truly the divine bread prepared for the use of the children. We forget the unbeliever, the heretic, the schismatic, when we are gathered together for the Feasts of the Lord; instead, we are made to remember the Angelic Choirs and the Saints of heaven. If evil and Satan are at all alluded to in the liturgy, such remembrances are songs of triumph, because in the Liturgy the powers of darkness are mentioned only in connexion with Christ's victory over all sin. It is indeed a supreme satisfaction to the Catholic soul to be thus left to enjoy the Faith for its own sake; it creates in the Church a spirit of confidence far more potent than any controversy, however well conducted, can do.

(I quoted quite a lot more of this back in 2008.) 

Vonier on Eternal Rest

Eternal rest seems to be the notion most universally associated with the future life.  ‘Rest’ is the word found engraven on the tombstones of our cemeteries more frequently than any other expression of faith and hope.  The most shadowy forms of Christianity still believe in rest for the departed, and make of this idea the great contrast between terrestrial and heavenly conditions.  The preference for the word ‘rest’ in connexion with the world to come is, of course, a sad reflection on the present world.  For most men, no doubt, the climax of happiness presents itself to their imagination in the form of a complete deliverance from the conditions of life known to them here below.  There is no human being so unimaginative as not to be impressed by that reversal of conditions implied in the release from earthly struggles.  The silence that broods in the death-chamber is powerfully suggestive of rest for the one who but a few moments before may have been writhing in agony, and the least religious will say that at last rest has come to the poor struggler.  People who would never dare to say of their departed friends that they have gone to heaven, still say quite naturally and without any embarrassment that their dear ones have gone to their rest.

The question may be asked here, to what extent is this visualising of the hereafter as a state of deep rest in harmony with Christian thought?  It is the purpose of this chapter to show that rest is the one quality predicated most constantly and emphatically of the life of the world to come in Christian literature and tradition.  It would be a great comfort to anyone who loves nothing better than the dissemination of Catholic ideas to find this notion of eternal rest shared by most men: ‘So that by all means, whether by occasion or by truth, Christ be preached: in this also I rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.’  (Phil. i. 18.)

If Mrs. Mop were to come to me and tell me with all the solemnity belonging to her kind that her man, the arch-ruffian of the neighbourhood, has gone to his rest, have I not found in her a kindred spirit?  I, for one, should be very reluctant to make light of this vestige of reverence and awe with which the least religious minds look upon a dead man as at one ‘who sleepeth’, however grotesque the application of that Gospel phrase may appear in the circumstances.  To speak of the dead as of people who have found their eternal rest is pure Christianity, though it is not the whole of Christianity.  Outside Christianity you are given the restless migration of souls, the unhappy shades that wander unceasingly through dark and barren regions; you get rest with a vengeance in the Buddhist Nirvana, a rest that means a total extinction, rest to be compared with the rest of the fly over which passes the wheel of a chariot.  I am sure that Mrs. Mop means something positive when she speaks of her dead husband’s rest, though her power of discrimination between a positive and a negative idea may be extremely undeveloped.  It is no small act of faith in the unseen world to take it for granted that the man who all his life has been a rebel against society has found his place at last in the great Beyond, where nothing will provoke his ire, where the dark fires of resentment that had smouldered in his breast are finally extinguished.   No doubt it would be in some such way that our poor woman from the slums would explain her notion of rest in death, if she had the right words at her command.  It would, of course, make an enormous difference if she added just one phrase, if she said over the dead man, as her Irish neighbour would be sure to say: ‘Eternal rest give unto him, O Lord’; this supplementary notion of rest being the gift of God, and consequently an object of man’s prayer, is more than a theological nicety; it is all the difference between old Christianity and modern paganism.  This new religion claims all the fruits of Christianity but refuses to have any share in the sowing!  It wants Christian happiness without the Christian tears; it asks for the risen life without the Cross; it expects eternal rest without having laboured to deserve it.  No one nowadays wishes to revive the old paganism, with all its idols and vices, its cruelty and its slavery.  We are even losing interest in its literature, which was its only saving grace.  What people cling to is a post-Christian paganism; they are all for rest in the world to come, but no mention must be made of the tears, of the mourning, of the crying, of the sorrow, that make the ‘former things.’  (Apoc. xxi. 4.)

Now to say simply these words: ‘Eternal rest give unto him, O Lord,’ stamps Mrs. Murphy as a Christian, while her neighbour is no more than a neo-pagan when she says of her dead husband: ‘He is at rest’.  She is not an infidel, she is not a pagan of the old sort, much less is she a Hindu or a Buddhist, but she is a neo-pagan; she is of those ‘last days’ and ‘dangerous times’ prophesied by St. Paul when men shall be lovers of themselves, ‘having an appearance indeed of godliness but denying the power thereof.’  (2 Tim. iii. 5.)

The rest which is the portion of God’s saints in the world to come does not inevitably follow upon the cessation of life’s physical energies.  To be dead is not necessarily the same thing as to be at rest.  The Liturgies of the Church, from the very dawn of Christianity, pray for the dead; and the burden of the prayer is that God may grant rest and peace to the departed.  This points to one thing, and to one thing only, that there is rest and unrest, peace and discord, in the spirit-world.  Otherwise how could it be reasonable to pray for the departed, that eternal rest may be granted unto them?  is not that lovely old Catholic custom – prayer for the dead, wishing them rest and peace – an immense revelation of the unseen, showing us the spirit-world as a restless sea?  Human spirits go forth from the body on their wanderings, and when we thought that all was stillness and quietness we are told that a multitude of spirits, numerous as the sand on the seashore, are tossed hither and thither in an effort to find some centre of stability, to reach a harbour of repose.  Far from looking upon death as the goal where all yearnings cease, the Catholic Church seems to feel instinctively that the spirit of man is drawn into a seething whirlpool the moment it leaves the body, unless it be borne at once upon the placid ocean of beatific vision.  Why should the Church be so anxious about the eternal rest of the departed, unless there be in her innermost consciousness a haunting vision of struggling, yearning, thirsting souls, striving towards the upper reaches of the river of life; as fish that seek the upper waters of a stream leap and dart behind the rocks, only to find that their efforts are seldom more than a momentary illusion of success?

It is true to say that the death of every Christian ought to be perfect rest; ought to be synonymous with profoundest peace.  The saint, the ascetic, the martyr, in the language of the Church, finds rest in death.  To such a one to die is to sit down under the shade of the trees of Eden.  The consecrated word ‘rest’ is not only a prayer on the lips of the Church; it is very often a declaration of victory.  When a tomb in the Roman Catacombs has the words In Pace inscribed upon it, they often signify the glories of martyrdom; the occupant is a hero to whom death has come as full and complete rest.

It would be an ideal Christianity if everyone who has faith in Christ were to long for the last hour of his life ‘as a servant longeth for the shade, as the hireling looketh for the end of his work.’ (Job vii. 2.) Death ought to be a going home after a strenuous year of hard schooling.  Did not our own good Cardinal Wiseman say quite simply that he greeted death as a schoolboy welcomes his holidays?  What our neo-pagans say so indiscriminately of every worldling who has ended his restless life, the Church says of her apostles, her martyrs; the Church would like to say it of all Christians who are carried to their graves, because it is in the power of most men who believe in Christ to be so perfected in faith and charity that to lay themselves down on their deathbed ought to be the same thing as entering upon their eternal rest.  No doubt with many a fervent Catholic death is literally his peaceful rest; perhaps this privileged condition is more frequent than we imagine.  It is certain that this immediate transition from the struggles of the arena to the repose of the blessed is an idea extremely familiar to the early Christian Fathers.  In the Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great, for instance, the soul of many a Roman maiden, faithful to her heavenly spouse, is seen receiving His embrace the moment her bodily eyes are closed in the sleep of death.

But all this supposes that the Christian’s work has been done, and that it has been done well.  For duty neglected, for scamped or careless work, there is the fire of restlessness, not the cool breeze of the restful evening.  The heat of midday toil goes on for the shirkers.  ‘For other foundation no man can lay, but that which is laid: which is Jesus Christ.  Now, if any man build upon this foundation, gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble: every man’s work shall be manifest.  For the day of the Lord shall declare it, because it shall be revealed in fire.  And the fire shall try every man’s work, of what sort it is.  If any man’s work abide, which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.  If any man’s work burn, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.’ (1 Cor. iii. 11-15.) Fire, not rest, is the portion of all those who have done bad work, though they will be saved when there will be no more fuel for the burning.  This is why we never cease to pray for the departed Christian, that rest may be granted to him.  Our imagination is well inspired when it pictures the purgation of disembodied souls under all sorts of trying conditions: the carrying of heavy burdens, the undertaking of big tasks.  It is simply another way of stating the postponement of the hour of rest.  It matters little under what kind of symbolism that penalty of toil be presented to our imagination; man’s soul has work to do, work that is overdue, work which was not done in the body.  Till the neglected task be performed, the spirit of man, if it be one of the holy souls, will willingly exert itself in labours, that it may the sooner reach the goal from which it had strayed or fallen short through indolence.  No truer, no better prayer could be formulated for the benefit of such a spirit than a prayer for rest.

Having given that natural yearning for rest its Christian setting, we may now drop all reservations and enjoy to the full the meaning of the true requies æterna.  The repose that is promised to us in the life of the world to come has about it so much of the character of God’s own being, that we may justified in saying that through it we share God’s own prerogative.  Our inspired Scriptures speak of the life of God as having a twofold phase: first of work and then rest.  The second phase is a state of triumph and joy, the consummation of blessedness.  ‘So the heaven and the earth were finished, and all the furniture of them.  And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made: and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.’  (Gen. ii. 1, 2.)

This rest of God is more than an anthropomorphic presentment of the mystery of creation: it belongs to God as the Causa finalis of all things, as creation is the work of God as Causa efficiens of all things.  In plain English, let us say that God is first the Maker of all things, and secondly the Goal of all things.  As Maker, He is described as being at work; as Final End, He is represented as being at rest.  It is only God who can be at the same time the Beginning and the End, so that all things come out from Him and all things go back to Him.

This is the meaning of that Sabbath of God, the day of eternal rest.  ‘There remaineth therefore a day of rest for the people of God.  For he that is entered into his rest, the same also has rested from his works, as God did from His.’ (Heb. iv. 9, 10.) No words could be more expressive in order to convey what rest means in Christian phraseology.  We are meant to share God’s eternal holiday.  Not only do we receive gifts from Him: we also enter into His personal life; we conform to that life in its twofold aspect of work and rest.  It was hardly to be expected that so wonderful a disclosure of God’s moods as is contained in the second chapter of Genesis would be left unexploited by the versatile genius of St. Paul.  In the Epistle to the Hebrews he trounces the lazy, weak-kneed Christian in whom there is already ‘an evil heart of unbelief to depart from the living God.’  He pictures God as turning upon such a one, as a father would upon the petulant child that sulks on the road.  ‘As I have sworn in my wrath: if he shall enter into my rest.’  But I refrain from further comment on that glowing passage of St. Paul’s Epistle.  Let me exhort my reader to take up the New Testament, carefully to read and analyse chapters three and four, and fit into one mental picture God’s sabbath after the six days of creation, the wandering of the Jews for forty years in the desert, the rest of Jesus in death, and the repose of all His followers when their souls reach the promised land of heaven.

After reading St. Paul we shall feel rather disgusted with the modern abuse of the beautiful word ‘rest’ in relation to the hereafter.  Rest, in the Christian sense, is of all things the divinest, and we shall never again say the prayer ‘Eternal rest give unto them’ without being conscious of the immensity of our request.  The Apostle’s conclusion is: ‘Let us hasten therefore to enter into that rest.’  We are not allowed to drop into it automatically, as a tired man sinks into his armchair; we must run towards it with breathless haste.

Looking at this idea of eternal rest from the creature’s point of view, one outstanding impression is conveyed to our mind: this rest means a complete reversal of all the conditions of existence known to us.  None of us really knows what it means to have perfect repose with fullest consciousness of life.  Our restful periods are suspensions of activity, interruptions in the flow of consciousness, sleep.  God’s rest is infinite awareness, an all-embracing contemplation of the work He has accomplished.  Such also will be the rest of His elect.  It means such continuity and fullness of life that the very intensity of activity leaves no gap, no break; as when one watches a revolving fly-wheel without being able to see any movement, so that one is tempted to think it is at perfect rest.  Far from us be all those interpretations of the rest of our dear departed which savour more of narcotics than of faith in eternal life, which come from weariness of life rather than from a desire to see good days.  Eternal rest is unchanging contemplation of the beauty of God, not spiritual anæsthesia.  It is the exhilarating joy of work with everlasting freshness of mind.  Fatigue is absent, because the creature’s noblest faculty is busy with its most satisfying object; the mind is fixed on the uncreated Truth.

— Dom Anscar Vonier, O.S.B., Abbot of Buckfast.  The Life of the World to Come (1926): Chapter IX. Eternal Rest.

A Pleasant Evening

Having heard Mass and made my Communion on the way home, I made some dinner (finishing off the last of the shiraz-viognier in the sauce and in a glass) and lit the fire, then settled back to read, with some tokay...  Michael got home after that, and ate the rest of the pasta; we had a beer...  I read some bits out of my book, Dom Ernest Graf's Anscar Vonier: Abbot of Buckfast...  James came home... the fire was dying, and it struck 11pm, by the time Stephen returned.  So, having finished reading over the memoir of Dom Anscar, I'm off to bed.

Unfortunately, Graf didn't provide the sought-for bibliography of Vonier's œuvre, so I will have to do some hunting about in libraries sometime soon.

Last but not least, a lordly benefactor has sent me a wonderful gift, which arrived to-day:

Augustus Welby Pugin, The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England and Some Remarks Relative to Ecclesiastical Architecture and Decoration, Leominster: Gracewing, 2004 (1st published 1843 and 1850 respectively);

Augustus Welby Pugin, A Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts: Their Antiquity, Use and Symbolic Signification, Leominster: Gracewing, 2005 (1st published 1851).

(Tasmania, my home State, has a rich Pugin heritage, in surviving vestments, sacred vessels, and extant churches built to his designs - two with rood screens still intact! - owing to his friendship with the first Bishop of Hobart Town.)

Retribuere, dignare, Domine, omnibus nobis bona facientibus, proper Nomen tuum, vitam æternam.  Amen.

Dom Anscar Vonier, Opera Omnia

As I have previously mentioned (see my posting of his essay on the Liturgy, and my own essay on Angels largely based on his works), the works of the Right Reverend Dom Anscar Vonier, O.S.B., Abbot of Buckfast (1875-1938) I consider very worthy of attention, being at once excellent spiritual reading and very accessible doctrinal theology, and over the past year especially I have been acquiring copies of them, having previously read his so-called Collected Works (in 3 volumes), which turned out to contain only 10 of his 15 books, to say nothing of treatises and articles. It has frustrated me that I haven't yet found a comprehensive bibliography of his published writings, but (with the exception of one book - see below*) I have now acquired all his works. (While in his Collected Works a prefatory note states that they have been lightly edited and abridged, I have not considered it worthwhile to buy individual copies of the ten works included.)

Collected Works Volume 1: The Incarnation and Redemption (contains The Christian Mind (1920), The Personality of Christ (1914), The Victory of Christ (1934) and The Divine Motherhood(1921));
Collected Works Volume 2: The Church and the Sacraments (contains The Spirit and the Bride (1935), The People of God (1937) and A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist, his most famous and influential work);
Collected Works Volume 3: The Soul and the Spiritual Life (contains The Human Soul and its Relations with Other Spirits (1920, 2nd ed.), Christianus (1933) and The Life of the World to Come (1926));
The Angels (1928);
Christ the King of Glory (1932);
Death and Judgement (1930);
The Art of Christ: Retreat Conferences (1927);
Sketches and Studies in Theology (1940) - a collection made by Vonier, but only published posthumously, of some of his articles.

I have also ordered Ernest Graf's Anscar Vonier, Abbot of Buckfast... (1957).

* The New and Eternal Covenant (1930) - this is the only work of his I have been unable to obtain, but I know a library (in Melbourne) that has a copy...

Vonier: The Doctrinal Power of the Liturgy

I promised on founding this blog that it would contain rather more theology than it has turned out to present; let this reprint continue my irregular series of more properly doctrinal postings.

Ever since I first discovered his writings while on retreat at Galong, NSW, I've loved the work of Dom Anscar Vonier, Abbot of Buckfast (d. 1938). Having just obtained a copy of his Sketches and Studies in Theology (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1940), I cannot forbear from quoting long extracts from one very important chapter (XIV, pp. 146-156), which originally appeared in the English Clergy Review earlier in the century:

(BTW, he begins with an amusing sideswipe at extreme manualists! Dom Anscar was a noted Thomist, FWIW.)

THE DOCTRINAL POWER OF THE LITURGY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

There does not exist an official syllabus of the doctrines of the Catholic Church with every revealed dogma expressed in exclusively technical language. The depositum fidei is not like a manual of higher mathematics, full of doctrinal formulas couched in terms that are absolutely immutable and could not be interchanged. The Church has never found it necessary to commission any body of learned theologians to compile such a syllabus, and even if it were possible to produce such a work its practical utility would not be as great as it might seem at first sight.

Let us take as an instance that dogma of supreme importance: the Resurrection of Christ from the dead. We have no official phrase for describing the event contained in that dogma; we just have the sentence of the Creed which does no more than state the fact that 'on the third day Christ rose from the dead according to the Scriptures.' Even then when a council defines a doctrine of the Faith it is surprising to find how broad and spacious are the expressions used; the Doctors of the Church are not mathematicians, but they are teachers, and it is their office to present to the Christian people their Faith in suh a way that they can understand it. The presentment of the revealed deposit of Faith to the Christian people is indeed a marvellous charisma possessed by the Catholic Church; there is, on the one hand, the Church's mission not to alter or diminish in any way the revealed dogma whose content is, by its very nature, abstruse and recondite; on the other hand the Church has to give the bread of doctrine to the little ones, to the vast masses of uneducated minds; the Church has to make an impression on their imagination, on their sentiment, without lowering the sublime spirituality of the revealed truth. She has to put on the lips of her children professions of faith which mean something to them, nay, which mean everything; and yet those professions by their very nature are concerned with mysteries and profound doctrines. Is there anything more difficult in the experience of mankind than the maintenance of a high standard of thought or behaviour where the masses are concerned? Art and literature, to quote those manifestations of human excellency, become debased the moment they become the property of the many. How then could we expect so high a standard of thought and feeling as is implied in the depositum fidei to remain constant in the multitude of Christians?

Yet we have to admit that the Catholic Church has achieved the impossible; that she has presented to all generations of Christians the mysteries of her Faith, not only with the greatest fidelity to the very text of the mystery, but with a skill in rendering the invisible visible, the intangible tangible, that is truly astonishing. The Catholic people, at least hitherto, have had a wonderful grasp of their Faith, and nowhere do we see any diminution of that gift of visualizing the unseen mysteries in a worthy way. How is it that in spite of its baffling abstruseness the doctrine of the Trinity has remained, even for the simple Catholic, a vivid and life-giving familiarity with God, without any intermingling of base anthropomorphism? How is it that the Catholic people can understand easily what is meant by the Incarnation? How is it that the Virgin Birth, about which learned men outside the Church blunder so grossly, is for Catholics a doctrine easily acceptable, a doctrine whose place in the economy of salvation they instinctively see? Evidently the Church has done more than just state those doctrines, she has made them acceptable and sweet, she has given them a charm, she has made them lovable. The Church, in other words, has made of all her main doctrines Feasts for her people.

It would be impossible to exaggerate the meaning of this act which clearly was the Church's first care from the very beginng, to make of her mysteries the Feasts of the Christian life. I take the word 'Feast' here in the most generic sense, I give it the meaning of an act performed either by the individual Christian or by the whole community to express, to commemorate, to celebrate what they believed in, what they knew in the light of their Faith. Now this was a peculiar characteristic which all Christian dogma was found to possess; it could be made by men a celebration, a solemnity, its memory could sanctify a given day, its proclamation could make the whole Christian community happy, it had a life-giving power which truth of the merely natural order could never possess. So before many years have passed after the Day of Pentecost what do we find? That the Christian Church not only believes, but symbolises her belief, making of it a Feast, has found many wonderful symbols and ceremonies to express almost adequately the hidden glories of Christ. The constancy of that celebration is, of course, its most overwhelming aspect. In all its essentials the Church celebrates to-day the mysteries of Christ and the hidden things of God as she has done for ages without number. The whole Christian language was coined by those celebrations. We can hardly realize the extent to which the Christian temperament is indebted to the Christian Feasts. In fact, which of us could understand Catholicism without its solemnities, without its Liturgy? In the Liturgy the faithful of all ages have found it possible to utter their faith nobly, purely, and amply. Through the Liturgy we have been saved from that decadence which lies in wait for all the noble movements of humanity, we have been preserved from the vulgarisation of what is holy.

It is, of course, well known how this desire to act a hidden truth ostensibly and externally has haunted every sect and every cult. In our own days it is possible for us to witness the renaissance of similar efforts with the neo-pagans of Nordic pretensions. The history of mankind reveals innumerable such attempts. It is certainly a testimony to that hidden law of the Spirit that no truth is of any value that cannot be acted by man in some religious ceremony or expressed in some solemnity. Catholicism is simply man at his best, man uplifted to the sphere of the Divine. Our acting and solemnising the hidden verities of God, instead of being a timid and awkward attempt, is the power of the Spirit Himself, of the Holy Ghost, who is the Unction of the Church, teaching her not only how to think but also how to sing.

No apology is required for putting these considerations before the reader; nothing less than an appeal to the ultimate laws of Catholic life is necessary in order to make us understand the position of the Liturgy in the progress of the kingdom of God. We all know, the matter is in no need of emphasis, that the problem of problems in our life is this: how to present our Faith to the people who look to us for guidance. We must be quite clear on this one matter; we are expected to give to the world a religion that will interest the believer, a religion that will satisfy his artistic cravings; the expression is not too strong. Our Faith must be beautiful if it is to hold souls. Far from us the illusion that it is sufficient to tell our people what to believe and what to do as one gives medicine to a sick person, tasteless or perhaps even unpalatable! Perhaps we priests too readily become the victims of certain well-worn phrases which seem to be the product of lazy shepherds, and which appear to make every dogma just a blow on the head which the believer should receive thankfully. Some piece of doctrine is given him, not as bread to eat and to enjoy, but as a stone to carry about. Far from us, I say, such facile belief in our people's readiness to be contented believers; they are hungering and thirsting for the beauties of their Faith, and unless we meet them in their legitimate desires our true contact with souls becomes less and less every year. Wherever we go, in whatever direction we turn our eyes, we find the marvellous ways the world has to present its wares to all the senses of man. Is it Christian doctrines alone that must be put before his eyes with crudeness and baldness? Is it Christian doctrines alone that are deprived of the power of charming? Is it not rather the truth that the enemy of Christ, the spirit of darkness, does all in his power to stop the solemnities of the Lord here on earth, to make Christ and His Church appear unattractive, nay, even repulsive.

...The liturgical movement is above all things a renovation among us of the art of celebrating the Christian Feasts and consequently of presenting to the people the mysteries of God in a splendid fashion. The parish priest who gives to his people a great Christmas, a glorious Easter, a splendid Corpus Christi festivity, is a first-class liturgist, though he may press into service methods old and new. The matter of supreme importance is this, that the faithful should know the meaning of each Feast as that Feast comes along in its turn; the theology of the celebration ought to enter their minds by every one of their senses; they ought to see the divine Babe, they ought to hear the Canticles of Bethlehem; the incense of the altar ought to remind them of the gifts of the Magi; the priest's words from the pulpit should contribute just enough intellectual element to give our good people the assurance that we priests know much about the mystery which, through a supernatural instinct, they love so intensely. It is truly easy for any pastor of souls to preach what is called a 'dogmatic sermon' appropriate to the Feast; our dear people understand much more than we give them credit for, and they are always happy when they are instructed in their Faith. It is indeed evident that nothing equals the words of the Missal in order to make both priest and people enter into the spirit of a Feast, but let us bear in mind that our great solemnities have a wonderful way of takng hold of our people of enveloping them, of making them feel festive. With the Confessions they make on these holy occasions, with the Communion which they receive in the early morning, their souls are wonderfully attuned to the whole Christian concept of things; they will believe the Incarnation, the Resurrection of the Body, the coming down of the Holy Ghost, the Real Presence, without a moment's hesitation; they will take from us the whole mystery of God, wholesale, and we need not hesitate to put before them the verities of the Faith in all their greatness, with all their implications. Through our Feasts we have truly a most marvellous power of spiritual propaganda, if one may make use of a word that is falling more and more into disrepute. It is to be admitted quite simply that nowhere, not even in our best schools, can we teach religion as we teach it in our churches when we keep the Feasts of the year to the best of our ability.

My words in this matter would be misunderstood if by solemnity I were to be taken to mean a great display of external splendour such as is possible only in the important centres of religion like the Cathedral churches or Abbeys. Those solemn functions are indeed a mighty asset to the Catholic Faith; in normal times they are quite indispensable if the Catholic cause is to prosper. Their dogmatic power is truly immense. But they are, by their very nature, exceptional at least in our days. It is, however, the splendid achievement of the Catholic people to give to their worship matchless dignity even there where the external resources are more restricted. Who among us has not witnessed truly superb festivities in many a village church all over Christendom? To keep up that spirit, to foster it in every way, to encourage it in every possible manner, ought to be the primary object of the liturgical movement. Far from us a false purism which is historically incorrect and psychologically wrong. One may safely assert that the dignity of Catholic worship is safe for all times through the simple fact of the mysteriousness of Mass. Catholic piety may become naïve but it will never be vulgar, because the sense of mystery is inborn in every Christian soul. There is no danger in the more popular presentments of faith and devotion; Cribs at Christmas, Easter Sepulchres on the Resurrection day, to mention only two manifestations of traditional piety, are an immense help to faith in the mysteries. The fact is simply indisputable that any Catholic man or woman who has taken part wholeheartedly in all the Feasts of one liturgical year has a store of religious knowledge, nay, even of dogmatic faith, that is truly enviable. There is nowhere in the whole world such an educational power in matters of religion as the great Catholic Liturgy.

St Thomas Aquinas, in his Quæstio disputata,* [* De Veritate, Q. xiv, art. 11.] gives it as his decision that it is enough for a Christian to know those mysteries of his Faith of which the Church keeps the solemnity. He thus solves for the ordinary Christian the disputed point what is to be held explicitly and what is to be held implicitly in Catholic belief.

The Catholic Liturgy thus understood will always be the final rallying-point of the people of God. ...so long as Catholics celebrate together the Resurrection of the Lord, to mention the Festivity of festivities only, they are a mighty people with an independent life of their own.

One of the great advantages of the liturgical presentment of Catholic dogma is found in this, that it sets forth revealed truth in a non-combative and non-controversial way. It is truly the divine bread prepared for the use of the children. We forget the unbeliever, the heretic, the schismatic, when we are gathered together for the Feasts of the Lord; instead, we are made to remember the Angelic Choirs and the Saints of heaven. If evil and Satan are at all alluded to in the liturgy, such remembrances are songs of triumph, because in the Liturgy the powers of darkness are mentioned only in connexion with Christ's victory over all sin. It is indeed a supreme satisfaction to the Catholic soul to be thus left to enjoy the Faith for its own sake; it creates in the Church a spirit of confidence far more potent than any controversy, however well conducted, can do.

When He was on the point of celebrating for the first time the liturgical act par excellence, the Eucharistic mystery, Christ gave vent to the innermost feelings of His heart: 'With desire I have desired to eat this Pasch with you, before I suffer,' He said.* [* Luke xxii, 15.] We must think of Christ then as sitting down to the celebration of the first Mass, happy and radiant. From this spirit the Christian people have never departed; the divine mysteries in all their aspects are for them an occasion of spiritual joy; they know that they are the children of the Kingdom, eating and drinking at the Table of God. Our Christianity would indeed become a terrible power of exaggerated zeal and religious bitterness if it had not this supreme gift of being self-contained and happy in the celebration of its heaven-born truths. It would become the most relentless proselytism instead of being the Kingdom of God on earth.

May we not as a matter of history explain from this angle that strange hatred of Catholicism which is invariably to be found in the dissentient Christian bodies? Whenever they are in earnest about their religion their fervour takes the form of a terrific opposition to Catholicism, precisely because they are devoid of that internal enjoyment of Christianity which the Catholic possesses in his liturgical Feasts. Fanaticism of all kinds would certainly find healing in the corporate celebration of heavenly mysteries, where men are lifted above the sentiments and interests that carry away the unregenerate into every form of excess.

The Seer of Patmos, when beholding the divine drama of heavenly Liturgy, had the impression that there was a great silence in heaven. This divine silence of all that is earthly and passionate is truly a feature of the mighty Catholic Liturgy. There could be no better remedy for the humanism run riot that seems to engulf us on all sides than this taking up of man's mind to the disinterested and completely other-worldly praise of God and His Christ.

(I must admit, such is our distance it seems to me from this happy vision, I felt that Vonier's paean perhaps better described the intraliturgical doctrinal synthesis experienced and treasured so vividly by those of Eastern Rite, whether Catholic or Orthodox! Consider the doxastika of the Byzantine Rite, versus some dubious contemporary Western songs...)

I leave it to any readers to comment upon how far the good Abbot's arguments hold fast, especially considering the de facto deformation of the Liturgy over the past forty-odd years, but also, more positively, how all those striving to fight for the New (and True) Liturgical Movement may receive support for their cause, and even great comfort and solace in these confident insights from the great Dom Anscar. Mortuus adhuc loquitur.