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Brookline Carmel Bulletin                         J M J T

February 28, 1960

 

 

Cogitatio Sancta

(Holy Meditation)

 

Postscripts

 

Father Peter-Thomas’ new book, Bold Encounter, is now available.  It may be obtained from Mount Carmel Book Shop, 2131 Lincoln Rd., N.E., Washington 2, D.C., or from your local bookstore.  The price is $3.75 (10 percent discount for Tertiaries from MC.B.S.).  We quote from the flyleaf:  “Bold Encounter is a novel based on the life of John Yepes, known to later history as St. John of the Cross.   John of the Cross has long since been relegated to the anonymous mausoleum of vaguely haunting religious abstractions.  He is relatively unknown. The Doctor of the Spiritual Life, he has been obliterated by his work.  Yet it was his mystical theology, which was unknown in his own time.  He was not.  Bold Encounter recaptures the life and stark, splendid times of John of the Cross.  It throbs with the life of Spain at the height of her glory and with that of a dynamic, often suspect, powerful leader of a movement, which captured Spain’s imagination and interest.  Sixteenth-century Spain was caught up in a breath-taking panorama of adventure, discovery, conquest, power.  In contrast to the dramatic splendor of the times and, yet, paradoxically, a part of it, was the surging monastic revival, the incarnation of a burning desire to return to primitive austerities and inflexible purity.  John of the Cross was at the heart of this new movement; and it is this story that Father Peter-Thomas unfolds.”

 

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Some who have requested back issues of the bulletin have noted that the October 25 issue was not sent to them.  The explanation is simple.  This issue was a very brief sketch of the Third Order Congress.  Since the proceedings of the Congress will soon be published, we thought it unnecessary to re-mimeograph our October 25 issue.

 

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For those who come in frequent contact with those outside the Church, we highly recommend a little magazine called “Guide” which is published by the Paulist Fathers, 180 Varick St., New York 14, N.Y.  A year’s subscription (10 issues) is only $1.00.  The excellent material should be of great help in understanding the viewpoint of non-Catholics and of helping them to understand the Church.  Here is a sample, taken from Fr. James J. Killgallon’s article “How to Present Christian Doctrine to Non-Catholics” in the February 1960 issue:  “Clare Boothe Luce once remarked that the Church is like a stained –glassed window – it can be seen and appreciated only from the inside.  How does it look from the outside?  It is difficult for ‘born Catholics’ to imagine, but the attempt to do so would be salutary for us and for others.  It must look like a huge jumble of odd and rather frightening things – priests in funny clothes, nuns in funnier clothes, all of them unmarried, vigil lights, confessionals (where God knows what goes on), strange, secret rites in which everything is said in Latin. 

 

It must look like a secret society, too.  No one will ever tell you anything.  Ask a Catholic a simple question and he immediately is on his guard.  ‘You’d better ask a priest,’ he says, knowing full well that you’d never dare approach one of those mysterious and frightening figures in black.  Many Catholics do not help the situation, either, considering the way they express themselves.  Why is birth control wrong?  The Church says so.  Why is divorce and remarriage forbidden?  The Church says so.  Why do you have to go to Mass on Sunday?  The Church says so.  Yes, but why does the Church say so?  I don’t know, but if the Church says so – it’s so.  We Catholics, fully aware of the divine authority of the Church, realize that when the Church speaks Christ speaks.  But non-Catholics do not know this.  Do they even know that we believe it?  They must think that we give our love and allegiance not to God, but to an institution which somehow in the course of centuries ‘got between’ the individual and God.  They cannot understand why we insist on going to God through the Church.  To them it seems so much more simple and satisfactory to go to God, to Christ directly.  They cannot understand why we have to confess our sins to a priest instead of simply to God.  Tell them that Christ insisted that we must.  Prove it from John 20, 21-23, and he will still be unconvinced unless he sees the whole picture.  That, I submit, is what the modern non-Catholic needs to be presented with – the whole picture.  So much time has been wasted on trying to answer individual objections.  What the unbeliever does not understand is not merely this or that particular point – confession, devotion to Mary, the immorality of contraception.  It is the Church itself that he does not understand.  It is the whole economy of salvation, the whole wonderful story of God’s love and our redemption… Why not present the doctrines we believe in a way which will attract by their beauty…”

 

 

 

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