Period March
- May 2008
MEETING PLACE
Chapter meetings are held at
March - Chapter meeting to be held on Sunday, 16 March. Discussion on RB
68 & the Gospel of the day - Mt. 26:14 - 27:66.
April - Chapter meeting to be held on Sunday, 20 April. Discussion on RB
69 & the Gospel of the day - Jn. 14:1 - 12.
May - There will be no Chapter meeting during the month of May, as our
annual retreat held at New Norcia, will take its
place.
PRAYER LIST
Please remember all our sick oblates - in particular Pat Cockett & Michael Kent.
Prayers requested for Des Hoad and Levi.
Also and always, continue to pray for our parent community in New Norcia.
Would you please remember all our deceased oblates.
Please pray for the repose of the soul of Dom Benedict
who died on 5 January, age 76. Several oblates journeyed to New Norcia for the funeral on Friday 11 January. Dom Benedict was buried in the New Norcia
cemetery, next to his mother who died at New Norcia,
after working there, several decades ago.
ITEMS OF INTEREST
Please remember that our annual retreat at New Norcia will be held over the Trinity Sunday weekend Friday
- Monday - 16, 17,18 &
As is usual at our Christmas social functions, we had a good roll-up, with
about eighteen oblates in December. Our grateful thanks to
oblate Doris Walton, who was the hostess on this occasion and went out of her
way to make the day a success.
Our first regular Chapter meeting of the year was held on 17 February, together
with our Annual General Meeting, presided over by
President - Tony Smurthwaite
Secretary - Adrienne Byrne
Treasurer - Michael McGovern
Assistant Secretary - Doris Walton
Spiritual Director -
Committee Members - Eleanor Sgherza, Mike Schilling
& Don Morris.
Congratulations to Tony Smurthwaite who has once again taken up the reins of
President after a long period of time. A vote of thanks was passed at the
meeting for outgoing President, Brian Low. At this time, we thank all our
officers and Committee members for their support over the past year,
particularly those who have re-enlisted for another term. Continuing
thanks to
FATHER ANTHONY - 25 YEARS A
PRIEST
Taken with thanks from an article
in The Chimes Newsletter.
Playing schoolboy football at New Norcia isn't what
one might normally think would lead a person to join the monastery, but for Fr
Anthony Lovis, who on 13 December celebrated his 25th anniversary of ordination
to priesthood, it was a factor.
After having already embarked on religious life with the Franciscans, 'I
discovered I wanted a more contemplative lifestyle,' Fr Anthony said, 'and New Norcia was the only monastery I knew, as I'd played
football here as a schoolboy.'
Born in
But it was during his 12-months' postulancy (a period
of formation before novitiate) with the Franciscans in
But becoming a monk does not automatically mean becoming a priest also -
Benedictine monks traditionally only have sufficient priests for the
community's needs. 'When you arrived at that front gate, you were asked if you
came to be a monk. If you said you came to be a priest, you'd be told there was
a seminary down the road in
However, after his first couple of years of monastic formation, Fr Anthony was
asked by the community to become a priest. 'With the Franciscans I had done
some introductory studies and I thought then that I could handle the studies
for priesthood, but when the monks asked me, I did wonder whether I wanted that
challenge at my age.'
After further studies at New Norcia and three years
at Yarra Theological Union in
Fr Anthony remembers that for the first couple of years he often used to get
stage fright during the liturgy. He was later appointed parish priest of New Norcia, a position he held for fifteen years. 'That threw
up its own challenges,' Fr Anthony said, 'trying to bond three widely spread
out centres with New Norcia, into a homogenous
parish.'
Reflecting on his years of priesthood, Fr Anthony wondered: 'Where has the time
gone? Twenty-five years has passed in a flash.'
THE PRESENCE OF
GOD THROUGH BENEDICTINE SPIRITUALITY
by Father Adrian Burke, OSB -
continued from the last newsletter
Work
The traditional motto of the Order of
Work is how we human beings act in a generative, creative manner and thus
fulfil our human inclination, rooted in our likeness to God, to be creative
beings. We take raw materials-such as wood, earth, clay, metal, thoughts, concepts,
attitudes, even love - and reshape them in order to make something that already
exists, better, more fruitful and in this way give glory to God. In doing our
work, we enter into the creative power of God and act with God in creating the
world anew.
Work, because it is an inherent part of being fully human, has integrity of its
own. It gets its integrity from the human persons who do it. Yet work is not an
end in itself. The purpose of work is to build a better world, build the Reign
of God and thereby, give God the glory. St. Irenaeus
of
All of this is not to say that prayer is work, or my work is my prayer. To
believe so is a cop-out and does damage to the balance in Christian life that
requires both contemplative retreat and active working in order to live fully
according to the Gospel imperatives. We retreat with God to be refreshed and
renewed in order to bring fresh perspectives and new energies and insights to
our work in the world. Our work engages us in the world where we can make a
difference, bear the light and help to build the Kingdom. We then go back to retreat
with God in prayer and the cycle continues. For the monk, this is a daily
rhythm.
Authority and Community
The basic building blocks of any monastery are a rule
of life. For us, it is the Rule of St. Benedict,
lived under the authority of an abbot and within the confines of a commitment
to life in community.
The Rule establishes an outline of norms for daily living. Written in the sixth
century in central
To live in community is to imitate in life the great community we call the
Trinity, our God. To seek God by living for others is the key to this way of
life. Everything we do as monks is to be done for the sake of the whole, for
the good of the community. Our work, our prayer and even our recreation is done
for the sake of the whole, of which each of us is a unique part. My mental,
emotional, physical and spiritual health all strengthen my community by
allowing me to contribute to the life of the community through prayer, play,
work and service.
Human life is relational. We are in relationships with family, friends, the
environment and all of creation. Through each and all of these relationships,
we encounter God and deepen our relationship with Him. Our relationship with
God is the principal relationship that directs and guides all of our other
relationships. When we sin, our selfishness breaks down our connectedness with
God. Through selfishness, we undermine justice, which is about right
relationships, relationships that respect the integrity of self and others.
Justice is rooted in a fundamental understanding of ourselves as made in the
image and likeness of God, a likeness renewed by Christ and made greater than
before by His self-sacrifice on the cross.
The Cross is our supreme model of behaviour in the community of the monastery,
as it is in the wider community of faith within the Church at large. Jesus has
given us a way to live that is new and requires a new way of perceiving the
world. No longer are we to hold to our own ways of doing things, or to hold on
to our ideas and conceptions of reality as if we had all the answers. We are to
live in a manner that is open to conversion at every moment, open to another's
will, ultimately to God's Will, laying aside our own proclivities and ideas
about how things ought to go. This is the vow of conversatio,
conversion of manners, that we monks take upon
entering this way of life. By placing ourselves under the authority of the
abbot, we embrace a freedom that is not of this world.
This is not easy to do. It takes true humility to lay aside our ego's will and
begin to do things according to the will of the abbot and the community in
which we live. This does not mean that I am no longer to voice my opinion. To
be silent when I have something helpful to say would be selfish indeed. Rather,
it means that I am to remain in the posture of humility, listening carefully to
what others have to say, that they might be respectful of what I have to say.
As you can see, there is nothing particularly extraordinary about our way of
living the Gospel way of life. All of these principles can readily be
translated into life lived in the secular world. In fact, they must be. This
Gospel way of life is the light which enlightens the world and we are to be the
source of that light, agents of the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. We
monks strive to live this way as a witness to the world of what God is calling
all people to - life lived for others, the life for the glory of God.
May your life continue to be a living witness to the saving power of Jesus
Christ and may God bestow upon you, peace and goodness.
HOPE
By Benet Connor OSB, taken
from the
It wasn't too long ago that a young man asked me a question which I am sure
could have been asked by many of us unconsciously - 'Father,' he asked, 'what
is hope? I mean what does it mean to have hope? We get up every day, go to
breakfast the same way, go to school or work, have a period of recreation or
study, eat dinner, study or watch television, maybe go to a movie and then
retire to bed, only to rise again the next day to follow a similar schedule.
What is there to hope? What is the use of it all?'
Do not bury this question as a passing problem and pretend it does not exist.
It will only pop up again later, perhaps in a more serious form. What indeed is
the sense of hope? Any routine can become distressing and when things go badly
within that routine, everything about you can distress you. Relationships seem to
go sour, work grows dull and tedious, the days become long and without meaning.
Our whole life can take on a dark gloomy existence and we might well ask -
'Father, what is hope?'
Let us not exclude ourselves when seeking fault. Let us not look to our supervisor
at work or teacher at school or at our seeming too-heavy schedule. Let us look
where the real cause is-let us look at ourselves. Somewhere along the way we
have lost the close contact with the 'someone else' in our lives. I do not here
refer to one special and particular 'someone else,' but simply 'someone else.'
When we find ourselves in this dark attitude of gloom it is usually the dark
attitude of egoism. In our egoism we can close out everyone - and this includes
God. When this happens, the very natural result must be the question - 'What is
hope?'
Hope is a paradox. We seek happiness and we find sorrow. We seek peace and we
find strife. We look for joy and find only discouragement. The paradox is, that there seems to be no joy without discouragement, no
peace without strife and no happiness without sorrow. That which is the
transforming power of these paradoxes is hope.
Frequent are the experiences in our lives of how much happiness is found
largely through the anticipation of possessing the thing we seek. We hope for
what is to come and in that very hope, that anticipation, is found the first
traces of the fruit, not yet attained.
Hope is the fundamental attitude a Christian soul has toward God and toward the
guiding hand of God in his life. With this attitude, the discouragement, the
strife, the sorrow, can be borne because this attitude looks toward our
destiny, our happiness to come which is fully attainable only with God. If God
were to allow us to measure out for ourselves the 'proper amount' of
discouragement and sadness, I think we would deal ourselves a pretty meagre
share and as a result we would know only the superficialities of peace and
happiness. For deep happiness can be uncovered by living through deep sadness.
In the anticipation of this happiness, we find also the light and strength to
perform the daily tasks. This hope enables us to allow the daily schedule to
provide a maximum of effort and production for us and refuses to allow the
regular pattern of work to become a straitjacket to our freedom.
This brings us back to the 'someone else' in our lives. With this hope, this
basic attitude, we can discover a joy - not a giddy vivaciousness, often not a
mark of happiness anyway - but a real deep-seated joy, rooted in interest and
confidence in someone else. We place someone else's interests before our own
and when these interests are God's, we are saying in effect, 'Your will and not
mine be done.' These were also Christ's own words to his Father. What better
model can we have?
But how did Christ, our model, work this out practically each day in His own
life? For surely He found routine in His life, much as the young man who asked
the original question about hope found in his and much as you and I find in our
own lives. Jesus must have become deeply interested in the work He performed,
the simple, common tasks of a carpenter and when the work became monotonous, then His interest must have been in the people around Him.
For when one permits the daily schedule to become something 'apart from himself,' he can only become bored and disinterested and his
routine can only become a rut. His hope can only become hopelessness and he
will seek his consolation elsewhere, in illicit pleasures which promise falsely
to lift one above the daily affairs. Hope is in others. Hope is in God. Hope is
in His providence which takes us through, not around, the joys and sorrows
alike which are the parts which make up the total love story of our human
history.
THE DESERT
FATHERS
Commencing some articles on and surrounding
the era of the Desert Fathers, taken from 'Desert Christians', by William
Harmless SJ.
In the fourth century, the deserts of
Egyptian Christianity - Christians in
Origen and the Alexandrian Theological
Tradition -
Origen was born into a Christian family in
He travelled widely, to
Origen was by training and temperament, a scholar. He
brought formidable skills to the study of the Bible. He was one of the few
early church, gentile Christians to have some mastery
of Hebrew. He put together a remarkable six column edition of the Old
Testament, which enabled him to compare and contrast different Greek
translations, with the original Hebrew. He was prolific and dictated
commentaries on virtually every book of the Bible, only a fraction of which
still survive.
He was also a pioneer of systematic theology and authored a remarkable treatise
- On First Principles. Throughout his career and especially in this book, he
proposed bold hypotheses. Some of his most original would earn him fierce
opposition during his life and damage his long term reputation. For example, he
recognised that the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2,
do not match. So he read these not as two creation accounts (as most scholars
do) but as two separate creations. He proposed other controversial hypotheses
on the nature of the Godhead, on the soul of Christ and on the resurrection.
Origen powerfully influenced leading church fathers,
such as Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus and
Ambrose. He certainly influenced Athanasius, whose
Life of Antony is such an important part of Desert
Father history. He may have influenced
The Origenist Controversy.
It was 150 years after his death that the great Origenist
Controversy exploded. It has been described as one of the great crises in
Egyptian monasticism. It resulted in the purge and exile of leading
intellectuals from the major centres of Nitria, Scetis and Kellia. Ancient
documents on the controversy are abundant, but they are deeply biased and come
from either participants or partisans. At certain junctures, it is hard to know
what happened or whom to believe and especially, to sort out the real issues
and motives behind what happened.
Theophilus, the Bishop of Alexandria from
385-412, following the usual custom, sent out his annual festal letter and
included in it a reflection on a key issue touching the life and faith of the
Egyptian church. In it he attacked the heresy of 'Anthropomorphism' (that is,
conceiving or visualising God in crudely human or materialist terms). He
insisted, as had Origen, that God had no human form
and that all biblical mention of God's face, hands, feet and so on, must be
read allegorically. The true God being incorporeal, beyond
body or matter. This letter was delivered to all the churches and
monasteries in
Monks outraged by the letter marched to
In the next issue we will take a look at some of the monastic settlements
in
MERRIE OLDE ENGLAND
By James Bemis, abridged from an article in the LatinMassMagazine Nov. 2007. Can we, living in such a broken world, imagine there
was once a time and place where there was no poverty, where work and food were
plentiful for every family, where widows, orphans and strangers were cared for?
Could there have been a land known for its generosity, revelry and gaiety,
where laughter echoed through the hills on feast days and the weeping of the
poor and oppressed were heard not? Have ever a people loved Our Lord so deeply
that they wholeheartedly founded their society, both civil and ecclesiastical,
on His teachings?
Yes, there has been.
Merrie Olde
Contrary to many historians' assertions, the period before the English
'Reformation' was not stagnant. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries,
the clergy and educated Catholics led a revival of letters and a return to the
study of classical
Work was available for any able-bodied man who desired it. Under the auspices
of medieval guilds, merchants and tradesmen prospered, peasants were farming
and gradually becoming small freeholders and artisans rose to the position of
small contractors. Court intrigues, such as the War of the Roses, while
fascinating to historians, were not a distraction for most people as they went
about their daily business.
No more religious a people existed in Christendom. Men and women saw their
churches as the centre, not only of their religious life, but their social
existence also. A Venetian visitor commented, 'They all attend Mass everyday
and say many Paternosters in public. The women carry long Rosaries in their
hands and any who can read, take the Office of Our
Lady with them and with some companion recite it in church verse by verse.'
Christ's two Great Commandments, about loving God and neighbour (Matthew
This was, perhaps, the happiest society mankind has ever known.
The Catholic Church's Role
The Catholic Church's history of providing spiritual sustenance to the faithful
is well known. What is less often recognised, is the
Church's part in offering the basis for the temporal happiness of those
recognising the Truth she proclaims. Yet this should not be surprising, as the
Church's founder is Our Creator, Who knows us better than we know ourselves. It
stands to reason then, that the rules He set down for relationships among
mankind, best summarised in the 'Sermon on the Mount', whose amplification is
known as the Church's Social Gospel, would best provide for social justice,
stability and prosperity.
It is impossible to overstate the Catholic Church's role in Medieval England's
happy state of affairs. For instance, two elements of the Church, the monastery
system and clerical celibacy, contributed mightily to the elimination of
poverty and provision for the needy and suffering.
The English Monastery System
From early times, the piety and charity exhibited by monks impressed the English
and they became widely respected and admired. In due course, the royalty and
nobility made their monasteries a means of providing generosity to the poor,
founding monastic houses, erecting buildings and bequeathing endowments and
estates.
Consequently, English monasteries became owners of great landed manors and huge
tracts of land requiring tending. To support its ongoing operations and
charity, monasteries rented land to tenant farmers, who raised cash crops and
paid a tithe to the owners.
This system of tenancy farming was one of the foundations of the stable,
prosperous English economy. A farmer would rent land from the monastery for
long periods at low rents, paying one-tenth or so of the profits to his
landlord. As title resided with the monastery, the farmer need not worry about
the vagaries of ownership changes, with all the wrenching change that might
bring. If the farmer fell on hard times, he found the monks to be easy
landlords, often having rent forgiven or other arrangements made during times
of distress.
Where did the landowner's profits go? Generally, after paying the costs of
running the monastery, the remainder was provided for the indigent and needy
within miles of the monastery.
Clerical Celibacy
Similarly, the Catholic parishes of the time were huge
landowners and provided large areas for tenancy farming. Rent was collected and
like the monasteries, the farmer who fell on hard times, found his parish
priest to be a forgiving landlord.
What about the rent? By order of the English bishops, priests kept written
accounts of what was paid to them and it was divided in the presence of
specially appointed parishioners. The first part of the funds was for Church
operation and repairs, the next portion reserved for the poor and disadvantaged
and the last for the priest. Thus, the lion's share of rents paid,
went either to the needy or for church upgrading.
Consequently, Catholic England established the most effective and efficient
social safety net ever devised. The work of charity - feeding the hungry,
clothing the naked, comforting the widowed and fatherless - came from land
rents paid to the Church by the working farmer. Thus, resources for this work
were provided, not from the occasional donations of the rich, but from the
certain and steady source of the resident and unmarried parish priest, who,
prompted by Christian charity, was responsible for both the spiritual and
temporal well-being of his parishioners.
Here the Church's discipline of clerical celibacy was the key to
A notion of the size of the Catholic Church's landholdings is helpful.
Somewhere between one third and one fifth of all
When Henry VIII (whose claim to the crown was illegitimate) began seizing
monasteries in 1536, he attacked 376 of the lesser houses, turning out all the
resident monks and dependents. This monstrous act marks the beginning of Merrie Olde
Consequently, thousands of tenant farmers were displaced and commonly, their
lands fenced and made into pastures for the more profitable sheep industry.
This vast dislocation caused the prosperous economy to fall into chaos and
created a large class of wandering paupers.
The new Protestant government responded by outlawing
penury in 1541. In all, twelve acts of Parliament were passed with the intent
of dealing with this growing phenomenon and its attendant problems of crime and
public health and morality. Compulsory taxation for the relief of the poor
began and penalties for begging became harsher. Finally in 1547, the first year
of Edward VI's reign, came the anti-begging act,
nearly obscene in its cruelty. Beggars were punished by burning with a red hot
iron and they became slaves for two years, with their masters able to force
them to wear an iron collar and feed them with only bread and water.
Thus, Merrie
Architecture
Nothing in English architectural history is more remarkable than the church
construction activity during the later half of the fifteenth and early part of
the sixteenth centuries. From one end of the island to the other, church
building and decoration, particularly in the English Gothic style, occurred in
virtually every village. Much of this great architecture now lies in ruins, the
result of the plundering of the monasteries, churches and abbeys. However, the
difference between the earlier
Norman architecture blended the rugged Viking spirit with the Gallic Christian
character. Thus, it tended to be blunt, massive and defensible. The
In contrast, the beautiful and ornate Gothic style of our period, reaches its
apex in Salisbury Cathedral, Winchester Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, three
of Christendom's most beautiful buildings.
James Bemis is an editorial board member and columnist for
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