[Salvation]

Vultus Christi

Thérèse

Wednesday, 01 October 2014 08:00

Some years ago, as a love offering for the feast of my dear Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face, I translated Dom Eugène Vandeur’s doctrinal synthesis of Merciful Love, the Cross, and the Mass in her life. The original text appeared in 1925 as part of a commentary of the then new Propers for the Mass of the feast of Saint Thérèse.

The Cross Reveals Merciful Love

The greatest proof of love that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has given to His Father is His sacrifice on the cross. This sacrifice, the most freely given that ever was, — and from that derives the infinite merit of this oblation of a Man Who is God — was an act of filial and loving obedience. This act repaired the profanation of the absolute rights of God over His creation that was wrought by Adam and by his race. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross was supreme adoration, fulness of thanksgiving, victorious supplication, and total expiation. The offering of this immolation appeased God and, at the same time, assured our redemption. By virtue of this, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross is also the greatest proof of Merciful Love that Jesus Christ has given to men.

Jesus’ Love for His Father and for His Friends

This doctrine is condensed for us in these two words of the Gospel: “But that the world may know, that I love the Father: and as the Father hath given me commandment, so do I: Arise, let us go hence” (John 14, 31). And He went out toward Gethsemani. And again: “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

Love for Love

The love that the Heart of Christ revealed to us there, on the cross, to all of us and to each one, is mercy: mercy bound up with an infinite tenderness, or rather, suffused into it. One who welcomes that mercy is sanctified and saved. He will assuredly be sanctified and assured of his salvation who, wanting to respond with love to this Merciful Love, and meditating the word of the Apostle, “He loved me, and delivered Himself up for me” (Galatians 2, 20), will return the proposition and, “offering himself voluntarily as a victim of holocaust to Merciful Love,” will exclaim, “Ah, then, I will love Him, and deliver myself up for Him.”

The Cross, the Altar, and the Mass

Know that what the CROSS merited, what the CROSS procured, what the CROSS preached, the ALTAR applies to us, procuring and preaching it ceaselessly, and more and more. And so, to live the MASS, is for a soul to abide in the uninterrupted act of this offering: the response of love to Merciful Love. Thus does a soul draw Merciful Love to herself ever more abundantly.

For Sinners

Thérèse tells us that to be devoted to Merciful Love “continually allows the Love with which God loves a soul and the love with which that soul loves God to come together in the heart, there ceaselessly to conceive new flames, which transform the soul in God” (Thérèse, Act of Offering). Thus does one become a wide open vessel, the receptacle of a Love rich in divine mercies. This frees “the torrent of infinite tenderness enclosed in the Divine Heart to overflow into oneself” (Thérèse, Act of Offering); it is the martyrdom of love, Love’s direct work in the soul. The consequences of this will, nearly always, entail suffering, but suffering cherished because with it one can purchase souls, a multitude of souls who will love Merciful Love eternally. By making oneself, at the altar, an extension of Jesus, crucified by Love, one causes the abundance of the infinite merits of the Cross to shower down, especially upon sinners. What an ideal!

Consumed by Merciful Love

Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus synthesized this doctrine in a practical way when, in her solemn consecration to Merciful Love — a ceaseless response to the consecration of the Cross and of the Mass — the Lord inspired her to say:

In order that my life may be one Act of perfect Love, I offer myself as a Victim of Holocaust to Thy Merciful Love, imploring Thee to consume me unceasingly, and to allow the floods of infinite tenderness gathered up in Thee to overflow into my soul, so that I may become a very martyr of Thy Love, O my God!

The Thirst of the Crucified

The entire Christian and religious life of Saint Thérèse is there, whole and entire. She herself provides the living commentary on the [liturgical texts of the] Mass composed for her [feast] by her Mother, the Church. This is what she was saying when, with a pen of fire, she wrote:

One Sunday, closing my book at the end of Mass, a picture of Our Lord on the Cross half slipped out, showing only one of His Divine Hands, pierced and bleeding. I felt an indescribable thrill such as I had never felt before. My heart was torn with grief to see that Precious Blood falling to the ground, and no one caring to treasure It as It fell, and I resolved to remain continually in spirit at the foot of the Cross, that I might receive the Divine Dew of Salvation and pour it forth upon souls. From that day the cry of my dying Saviour–“I thirst!”–sounded incessantly in my heart, and kindled therein a burning zeal hitherto unknown to me. My one desire was to give my Beloved to drink; I felt myself consumed with thirst for souls, and I longed at any cost to snatch sinners from the everlasting flames of hell.

The Souls of Priests

“I feel,” she wrote to one of her sisters,

that Jesus is asking us to quench His thirst by giving Him souls, especially the souls of priests. . . Yes, let us pray for priests; let our life be consecrated to them . . . These souls [of priests] ought to be more transparent than crystal; but, alas, I feel that there are some ministers of the Lord who are not what they should be. And so, let us pray and suffer for them . . . Understand the cry of my heart!

Merciful Love Spread Abroad

It is very clear. Thérèse lived the Mass, especially its expiatory character. She stood at the foot of the holy cross raised over the altar, to gather up the Merciful Love that quenched her own thirst; then she would spread abroad that same Merciful Love over souls, to save them.

The Mass Made Thérèse a Saint

The Mass is the application to souls of the fruits of the Redemption merited upon the cross. If Thérèse of the Child Jesus is a saint, it is the cross that merited sainthood for her, but it is the Mass that applied to her the merits of sanctification and of salvation.

[Salvation]

Vultus Christi

With Thérèse, Believe in Love

Wednesday, 01 October 2014 08:02

The Saints Choose Their Friends

Many years ago, while reading the biography of Père Jean-Baptiste Muard, the founder of the Benedictine abbey of La-Pierre-Qui-Vire, I came upon a line that so struck me that I have never forgotten it. Père Muard said something like this: “It is not we who choose this saint or that to be our friend; it is, rather, the saints who choose those whom they wish to befriend. The saints choose us, and this, in the light of God’s wisdom and providence.”

The Object of Her Affection

We, poor, struggling sons of Saint Benedict, have not, then, to ask why we have chosen Saint Thérèse among our special friends in heaven. We have, instead, to ask why Saint Thérèse has, in fact, chosen us as the object of her attention and affection. The answer is written, I think, in the mysterious journal of God’s gracious Providence. There are, nonetheless, a few indications that lift a corner of the veil on God’s hidden designs, and they are worth pondering.

To Believe in Love

The first of these has to do with the fundamental grace of Saint Thérèse: it is a holy boldness. It is the audacity that comes from the absolute certainty of being loved. In us, just as we are, Thérèse sees men called to believe that we are loved. She sees men called to hope even in the face of things that threaten to drag us down into the pit of despair. The work of Saint Thérèse is precisely this: to help souls, especially those marked by some kind of suffering — Love’s signature — to believe that they are loved, and never to lose hope. “We know and believe the love God has for us” (1 Jn 4:16).

The Holy Face

Out of this faith in the Love of God grows an immense confidence, a boldness in the Holy Ghost that authorizes even the weakest and most miserable soul to see in the Child Jesus, a brother; and in the Holy Face of the suffering Jesus, the traits of a beloved friend, the gaze of the Divine Bridegroom. This identification with the Child Jesus and, even more, with the adorable Face of the Suffering Jesus, makes the friends of Thérèse bold and full of confidence in their relationship with the Father.

For us who are called to be Benedictine Adorers, the Face of Jesus, the Child and the Immolated Lamb, is hidden and, at the same time, revealed in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar. It is by tarrying before Our Lord’s Eucharistic Face that we begin to see ourselves as the Father sees us. “Since you loved me so much,” says Thérèse in one of her prayers to the Father, “I beg you to look upon me only through the Face of Jesus.”

Priests

The second reason why Thérèse may have chosen us as the object of her affection and attention has to do with her zeal for the sanctification of priests. Thérèse had no illusions about the virtues of the clergy; as a fourteen year old girl on pilgrimage to Rome she witnessed firsthand the the weaknesses and compromises of the priests surrounding her without, however, becoming scandalized or jaded by them.
She writes in her autobiography:

Having never lived close to [priests], I was not able to understand the principal aim of the Reform of Carmel. To pray for sinners attracted me, but to pray for the souls of priests whom I believed to be as pure as crystal seemed puzzling to me.

I understood my vocation in Italy and that’s not going too far in search of such useful knowledge. I lived in the company of many saintly priests for a month and I learned that, though their dignity raises them above the angels, they are nevertheless weak and fragile men. If holy priests whom Jesus in His Gospel calls the “salt of the earth,” show in their conduct their extreme need for prayers, what is to be said of those who are tepid? Didn’t Jesus say too, “if the salt loses its savour, wherewith will it be salted?”

Later on, when, in the course of the examination before her profession, Thérèse was asked why she had come to Carmel, she said, “I came to save souls and especially to pray for priests.”

When Love Enters In

In us, brothers, Thérèse sees men with great aspirations, men with hearts made to love, men with love to give in adoration and in reparation, men ready to father souls, with a special tenderness for priests caught in the webs of sin and vice. “The love of Christ impels us” (2 Cor 5:14). Thérèse, in her own way, says to each of us that our limitations — be they physical, psychological, or moral — are not an impediment to love, but a way to love. Every wound of ours, every chink in the armour of our self-styled virtue, is an opening to Love, a portal through which Divine Love penetrates into places within us that would, were we not so wounded, remain sealed off to Love.

Thérèse says that the calling we have received is to be love, love in the heart of the Church, a love that adores, a love that makes reparation, a love that keeps Love company in the Sacrament of Love. She tells us not to give in to discouragement. She invites us to be confident and to go forward, trusting that the Lord Himself, like a mighty warrior, is with us and has taken up our cause or, rather, made His cause our cause.

Thérèse Has Things in Hand

Three years ago, in October 2011, we made a novena to Saint Thérèse, asking her to find us a house and property suitable for the development of our monastic community. She led us to Silverstream, where stands a little church built and dedicated to her in 1952. Saint Thérèse accompanied us and delivered us safely to the house the Lord had reserved for us. She has taken things in hand. She is working with us, and for us, that we might purchase and fully renovate Silverstream Priory. Here, at last, we are confident that our vocation will take root and begin to flourish. Saint Thérèse identifies with what we are doing here because it is a Work of Love and of reparation to Love, in the heart of the Church.

My Friendship With Thérèse

If I may speak personally for a moment, allow me to say that Thérèse has known me and followed me around for a very long time, for many years. There exists between us one of those life-long friendships capable of weathering every storm, of enduring long periods of silence, and of responding at a minute’s notice to a cry for help.

The Fire of Love

It seems to me that we are being invited to work with Saint Thérèse for the souls of priests. Our aim is to give back to priests the taste for Love, so that they will burn with Love and spread the fire of Love to those around them and to the whole Church.

Before the Eucharistic Face of Jesus

This a great Work, and not a little daunting, but our role in it is very simple. We are to adore for those who do not adore, and to represent our brother priests — especially the weakest among them, and those who have fallen from their priestly dignity — before the Eucharistic, the merciful, the compassionate Face of Jesus. Our Lord waits in His tabernacles for those with whom He chose to share the glory of His priesthood to return to Him, and to tarry in His presence.

Nothing to Fear

If we remain faithful to this mission of ours, we will have nothing to fear. We have only to go forward in the certainty that we are immensely loved and that nothing will be able to snatch us away from the Love that possesses us, and that has marked us with Love’s Seal.

Love: Our Beginning and Our End

Saint Benedict says, in Chapter Seven of the Holy Rule, that at the summit — or the bottom — of the twelve steps of the ladder of humility we will arrive at that love of God, which, being perfect, drives out all fear. The summit of Benedictine life is a holy freedom in love; it is the security of the child who knows, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he is unconditionally loved; that if he falls, Love will pick him up again; that if he hurts himself, Love will heal his bruises and bind up his wounds; that if he is obstinate and slow to understand, Love will wait for Him with an inexhaustible patience; and that if he trusts his life to Love, he will not be disappointed in his hope. To all of this, to the entire teaching of Saint Benedict’s Little Rule for Beginners, Saint Thérèse says a heartfelt “Amen,” for in it she recognizes her own Little Way. Let us follow it without fear, for it begins in Love and leads to Love. Amen.