Mother Katharine Drexel
Page 28
The pope here revealed that the dignity of men and women is based on divine love for humans. People may be outraged and may perpetrate outrage, but individual persons will always be loved by God and welcomed home joyously as was the prodigal son. According to the pope, it is this truth about the person that, once known, will set the person free — free to be his or her authentic self and free to help bring about a world more congruent with human dignity.
John Paul II emphasized that the church of Christ is responsible for upholding and proclaiming the truth about persons as revealed in Jesus Christ. “The Church thus appears before us as the social subject of responsibility for divine truth. With deep emotion we hear Christ himself saying: ‘The word which you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.’ ”29 In Veritatis Splendor, the pope continued the same theme. “This essential bond between truth, the good and freedom has been largely lost sight of by present-day culture. As a result, helping man to rediscover it represents nowadays one of the requirements of the Church’s mission, for the salvation of the world. Pilate’s question: ‘What is truth?’ reflects the distressing perplexity of a man who often no longer knows who he is, whence he comes and where he is going.”30 The pope clearly believed that without knowing the truth about themselves and the link between the truth and the good, people cannot make reasonable decisions even about their own good. They make decisions based on a disordered view of the good — decisions that ultimately work to their detriment and that of others; they become more concerned with making, having, consuming, and enjoying the so-called goods of the material world. They become more and more alienated from becoming or being their authentic selves.
In Nigeria in 1981, the pope warned his audience about the dangers of not knowing the truth: “Without spiritual values man is no longer true to himself, because without them he denies or ignores his essential relationship of dependence on the very source of his existence, on his Creator in Whose image he was made and continues to exist.” But the pope relied on the greatness of humanity to bring men and women back into a right relationship with God. In Australia in 1986, he stated, “The great nobility of the human mind is based, above all, on its ability to know God and to search more and more deeply into the mystery of God’s life, and then at that point to discover also man. Thus the truth of man leads us to the truth of God.”31 Because in Christian understanding truth is unitary, one can also say that the truth of God leads to the truth of man. But the truth cannot be forced on men and women. The pope wrote, “[Man] can be drawn toward the truth only by his own nature, that is, by his own freedom, which commits him to search sincerely for truth, and when he finds it, to adhere to it both in his convictions and in his behavior.”32 However haphazardly, human intellect always seeks truth, and human will always seeks the good. If man perseveres in seeking the truth, it will be revealed to him.33
The pope believed that part of the problem faced by modern men and women was philosophical. In the postmodern world, the very concept of objective truth is under assault. The pervasiveness of subjective existentialism in the West is exemplified by the joint opinion by Justices O’Connor, Souter, and Kennedy in the 1992 Supreme Court case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which they wrote in support of a virtually unlimited constitutional abortion right: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of the meaning of the universe and the mystery of human life.” Such self-definition of meaning, of truth, flies in the face of a Christian’s firm belief in absolute truth, as the pope understood it. Speaking before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the pope said, “Truth cannot contradict truth.”34 The Bible warns, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death” (Prov. 14:12). According to Christian understanding, man does not create truth; truth is ultimately revealed to him as the truth of God through Christ, who is Truth. “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Pilate’s question “What is truth?” should have been “Who is truth?” It is this Christ, the Truth, who said, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve” (Matt. 20:28). The church of Christ is responsible for protecting and handing down divine truth; the church has continued his service and ministry across the ages into the third millennium: “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you” (John 20:21). The Father sent the Son and the Son sent his disciples out to the ends of the earth. Why? To proclaim the truth, the good news. What is the basis for the truth? According to Catholic Christianity, it is in the love of God who desires the ultimate good for all human persons — their communion with him in heaven for eternity.
Christianity teaches humans that Christ is the source of love, reflecting the love of the Father; Christ is love’s model and its measure. God made each man and woman for love. The commandment to love — love God, love self, and love neighbor — is the foundation and summation of the Decalogue.35 The Church believes that the human person is “the only creature that God has wanted for its own sake.”36 People were created to be in loving relationship with God and their neighbors. If “God is love,” as proclaimed in 1 John 4:8, his love is not a mere attribute attached to his person, but it is of his essence as God, in the same way that God is holy or that God is Truth. According to traditional Christian teaching, an individual possessed of the truth about God looks to Christ as the model of love. Possessed of great dignity and created in the image and likeness of God, each person is able to love because God first loved her or him. One cannot love one’s neighbor without loving God, nor can one love God without loving one’s neighbor. The pope taught that one cannot love either neighbor or God without first loving one’s true self and not the socially constructed, egocentric, pleasure-seeking, acquisitive, power-seeking self so prevalent in modern culture.
But of what does the command to love consist? What must one do or not do? Following Kantian ethics, one must not treat another human being as an object of pleasure. Pope John Paul II points out that this negative imperative does not begin to exhaust the meaning of love. Love “requires the affirmation of the person as person.” This is his personalistic principle based on the inherent dignity of each individual person. The person becomes most human and more Christ-like when he or she loves and is loved by another. Indeed, “The person is realized through love.”37 This is accomplished, in the model of Christ, in making what Vatican II called “a sincere gift of self.”38 The pope emphasizes that “man affirms himself most completely by giving of himself. This is the fulfillment of the commandment of love. This is the full truth about man. . . . If we cannot accept the prospect of giving ourselves as a gift, then the danger of a selfish freedom will always be present.”39 Christian love seeks no rewards and includes even enemies and persecutors.
Love, Communio,
and Eucharistic Spirituality
Drawn by human nature to love and be loved, to search for truth and the good, men and women are led by Christ to look in the right places and in the right manner to find them. Christians believe that it is the Christian church that, since Pentecost, has in the fullest sense led the individual in the ways of God, for Christian love is not a mere emotion but an assurance and a program of action. Within the body of Christ, there are many ways of performing the actions required by love. All are called to love, and everyone loves and acts within the spheres of individual vocations. The Church nourishes love in all of its true manifestations: “The reason is that the Church . . . believes in man. She thinks of man, and addresses herself to him not only in the light of historical experience, not only with the aid of the many methods of scientific knowledge, but in the first place in the light of the revealed word of the living God. Relating herself to man, she seeks to express the eternal designs and transcendent destiny which the Living God, the Creator and Redeemer, has linked with him.”40 To repeat, “The Church cannot abandon man.”41 Made up of the body of Christ, she is in service to all in imitation of, conformity to, and at the commandment of her founder. The Church serves the person in h
is or her unity of body and soul. She welcomes each one into a communio of love, nourishing above all by the Eucharist. Communio is deeper in meaning than a community; it “denotes a union of persons that is proper to them alone; and it indicates the good that they do to one another, giving and receiving in a mutual relationship.”42 Communio in the Church is best likened to the communio that belongs to the Holy Trinity: three distinct persons in one Godhead held together in love. The communio of the Church is begotten in the water of baptism and the bread of the Eucharist. It is not familial or tribal and not based on blood. One must choose to be part of the communio of the Church.
The Church is a communio such that once one becomes a member of the body of Christ, one is inalterably changed. The moment one enters into full communion with the Church, one becomes a different person suffused with grace and divinized as a sister or brother to Christ the Lord. The faithful become what they consume in the Eucharist.43 This is what Jean-François Lyotard would have referred to as le différend. Le différend makes a sudden, unpredictable, and what may seem like an unaccountable difference in discourse with others.44 It is a life-changing event; one views the world differently afterward. To borrow further from critical theory, Alain Badiou would use the term l’évènement to describe what Lyotard means by le différend.45 To use a mundane example of l’évènement, imagine a proposal of marriage given and accepted. That event has immediate and unpredictable repercussions for the couple involved. They will be previously separate individuals who are now viewed by themselves and everyone else as a “couple.” They have new rights and new responsibilities. Lyotard and Badiou, although non-Christian, express here a usage and a style of language and argumentation that are at home with the Christian understanding of metanoia, the complete conversion and change of heart that take place within the communio of the Church. One enters into a unique love relationship with God, self, and others proper only to the members of the mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church.
According to John Paul II, the Church is the home and school of this communio, or “communion,” the more commonly used word. The pope recommended the promotion of a spirituality of communion in order to properly carry out the demands of communio:
A spirituality of communion indicates above all the heart’s contemplation of the mystery of the Trinity dwelling in us, and whose light we must also be able to see shining on the faces of the brothers and sisters around us. A spirituality of communion also means an ability to think of our brothers and sisters in faith within the profound unity of the Mystical Body, and therefore as “those who are part of me.” This makes us able to share their joys and sufferings, to sense their desires and attend to their needs, to offer them deep and genuine friendship. A spirituality of communion implies also the ability to see what is positive in others, to welcome it and prize it as a gift from God: not only as a gift for the brother or sister who has received it directly, but also as a “gift for me.” A spirituality of communion means, finally, to know how to “make room” for our brothers and sisters, bearing “each other’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2) and resisting the selfish temptations which constantly beset us and provoke competition, careerism, distrust, and jealousy. Let us have no illusions: unless we follow this spiritual path, external structures of communion will serve little purpose. They would become mechanisms without souls, “masks” of communion rather than its means of expression and growth.46
It is no coincidence that the Church’s main sacrament, which most expresses her very nature, by which she lives and has her being, her very “source and summit,” is called Communion. The sacrament of Communion, or the Eucharist, is for Roman Catholics not the mere memorial, in the modern sense, of Christ’s Last Supper. It is not just an action performed in the present that calls to mind a similar action two thousand years ago. It is actually the same event as Christ’s offering himself to his Father on the cross for the remission of the sins of humankind. It is a memorial sacrifice in the Hebraic understanding of the term — a re-presentation of a past event that actually takes place in the present. Christ, the High Priest, offers himself, the spotless Victim, as an oblation in praise and glory to the Father, in perfect expiation of the sins of man, and uniting communicants to the Father and one another in the bond of communion. “In this gift Jesus Christ entrusted to his Church the perennial making present of the paschal mystery. With it he brought about a mysterious ‘oneness in time’ between that Triduum and the passage of the centuries.”47 This oneness of time is a cause of amazement and wonder.
It was the pope’s express desire to rekindle this eucharistic amazement in the faithful. He wrote,
The Church is called during her earthly pilgrimage to maintain and promote communion with the Triune God and communion among the faithful. For this purpose she possesses the word and the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist, by which she “constantly lives and grows” and in which she expresses her very nature. . . . The Eucharist thus appears as the culmination of all the sacraments in perfecting our communion with God the Father by identification with his only-begotten Son through the working of the Holy Spirit. . . . In the Eucharist “unlike any other sacrament, the mystery [of communion] is so perfect that it brings us to the heights of every good thing: here is the ultimate goal of every human desire, because here we attain God and God joins himself to us in the most perfect union.” Precisely for this reason it is good to cultivate in our hearts a constant desire for the sacrament of the Eucharist.48
This desire for the Eucharist can become a “spiritual communion.” Such spiritual communion is endorsed by the pope, who wrote that spiritual communion was “recommended by the saints who were the masters of the Spiritual Life.”49 So important is the Eucharist, the “sacrament of love,” in the life of the Roman Catholic Church, that the pope called it “the most precious possession which the Church can have in her journey through history.” He continued, “The Church draws her life from the Eucharist. This truth does not simply express a daily experience of faith, but recapitulates the heart of the mystery of the Church.”50
Pope John Paul II Comes into Dialogue with Katharine Drexel
Eucharistic Spirituality
Pope John Paul II came into dialogue with St. Katharine Drexel precisely at the point of their shared eucharistic spirituality. Each one believed that the spiritual benefits of the Eucharist are continued beyond the immediate consumption of the Host. There is the spiritual communion of desire, as mentioned above, which precedes its reception. Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament prolongs the last Eucharist and anticipates the next. “The Church and the world have a great need of Eucharistic worship. Jesus waits near us in this sacrament of love. Let us be generous with our time in going to meet Him in adoration and contemplation that is full of faith and ready to make reparation for the great faults and crimes of the world. May our adoration never cease.”51 John Paul II, like Katharine Drexel before him, punctuated his day with time spent in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.
To live the Eucharist it is necessary, as well, to spend much time in adoration in front of the Blessed Sacrament, something which I myself experience every day drawing from it strength, consolation, and assistance. . . . The bread and wine, fruit of human hands, transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit into the Body and Blood of Christ, become the pledge of the “new heaven and new earth” (Rev. 21:1) announced by the Church in her daily mission. In Christ whom we adore present in the mystery of the Eucharist, the Father uttered his final word with regard to humanity and human history. How could the Church fulfill her vocation without cultivating a constant relationship with the Eucharist, without nourishing herself with this food which sanctifies, without founding her missionary activity on this indispensable support? To evangelize the world there is need of apostles who are “experts” in the celebration, adoration and contemplation of the Eucharist. . . . It is the “bread of life” which sustains those who, in turn, become “bread broken” for others, paying at
times with martyrdom their fidelity to the Gospel.52
Katharine Drexel, who shared a similar eucharistic spirituality with Pope John Paul II, taught her Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament that eucharistic spirituality was to be the center of their lives, the same source and summit as the Church’s. The 1913 Constitutions of the order stated the rule unequivocally:
As the congregation is, in a special manner dedicated to Jesus Christ really present in the Holy Eucharist, the Sisters shall make this Mystery the principal object of their love and devotion, especially by frequent visits to the Blessed Sacrament and by inculcation in those for whom they labor, respect, and love for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. To animate their zeal and fervor by the example of their Divine Master, they shall endeavor to study this Mystery, all the mysteries and virtues of His life, death, and resurrection and by this means render more sensible the commemoration of what it is daily renewed in the Holy Eucharist. All the Sisters shall every day make a visit of one-half hour to the Blessed Sacrament.53
This is not just one rule among many; it expresses the very centrality of the Eucharist in the life of the order. Eucharistic devotion is at the center of true Catholic spirituality. “Even apart from the time of the actual celebration of the Eucharist great saints and poor sinners in the Catholic Church have prayed, worshipped, wept, and rejoiced before the Blessed Sacrament. Since the time of Saint Francis and Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century there has not been a single Catholic saint for whom this devotion to the Eucharist has not been an integral part of spiritual life.”54 The pope wrote that the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament “becomes an inexhaustible source of holiness.”55 Katharine noted that to be before the Blessed Sacrament was her “sweetest joy,” for “the religious needs strength. Near the Tabernacle the soul finds strength, consolation and resignation. The religious needs virtue. Jesus is the model of virtues in the Blessed Sacrament. The religious needs hope. In the Blessed Sacrament we possess the most precious pledge of our hope. The Host contains the germ of future life.”56 Like Pope John Paul II, Katharine and her sisters found “strength, consolation, and assistance” from eucharistic devotion. She prayed that it would transform her soul.57 As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, pointed out, the eucharistic “adoration is an intensification of communion. It is not ‘individualistic’ piety: it is a prolonging of, or a preparation for, the community element.”58