As a cloistered nun in the Dominican order makes her first profession, her white veil is replaced with a black one and her superior declares that she has become “recognized as a house of prayer . . . and a temple of intercession for all people.” The expectation and desire of her life, from that moment on, will be to spend the rest of her days in monastic enclosure, unseen by most but—in the mysterious way of prayer—deeply and efficaciously connected to the world through the near-constant praise, supplication, and penance she offers for its sake.
When Pope Benedict XVI departs from the Chair of Peter on the evening of February 28, he will remain briefly at Castel Gandolfo while his new quarters are readied, and will then take on the gift and burden of monastic enclosure, which he has called “that which is essential and has primacy in the life of all the baptized: to seek Christ and place nothing before his love.”
One of his last acts as pope this week has been to accept the resignation of Cardinal Keith O’Brien of Scotland; it was one more drop in the overflowing bucket of shame and—to use the pope’s own word—“filth” that has made the Church’s moral authority a slippery thing and contributed to the “questions of deep relevance for the life of faith” that Benedict cited in his resignation statement.
He says he is tired, and we can’t doubt it. An introvert’s energy is quickly depleted by social interaction, be it celebratory, diplomatic, or grimly administrative. Spare hours of solitude were unlikely to have brought the pope to full re-charge if passed (as they probably were) in contemplation of the Church’s failure in its primary duty to Christ: demonstrating the gospel to a world sorely in need.
The failure is heard in the shrieks of pain, ignorance, and hatred directed at the Church throughout the chambers of mainstream and social media; it is seen in the faithful priests and laypeople who read one awful headline after another and continue on, but with increasingly slumped shoulders; it stands before the pope’s very eyes, in the form of priests and religious who have served idols and theologies formed within themselves, and in the bishops and cardinals who have handed in their resignations, or who should bow out and won’t.
Noting the glimmers of promise coming from Africa and Asia, anyone looking with honest eyes must also acknowledge the worldwide social and institutional wreckage that threatens the Church from the West. Benedict, having faced it, realized that the Church’s disorientation—and thus the world’s—would not be righted by yet another professorial speech, or another pilgrimage. A ship in profound danger requires a profound action, and Benedict has taken it. He is throwing all of us into the arms of the Lord in the belief that, as he said after his announcement, “the Church belongs to Christ, whose care and guidance will never be lacking.”
At the final Sunday Angelus of his pontificate, Benedict said, “The Lord is calling me to ‘climb the mountain,’ to devote myself even more to prayer and meditation . . . so I can continue to serve the Church with the same dedication and the same love with which I have done thus far, but in a way that is better suited to my age and my strength.”
In Rome, a cloistered prioress tried to explain what Benedict is doing: “When he lives this monastic lifestyle, his prayers will reach those who maybe were unbelievers during his papacy,” said Mother Maria Angelica, of the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria del Rosario. “I’m absolutely sure of this, of the value of his prayer and of his silence. And it will reach the whole world, even where it wasn’t previously able to reach. . . . [Even unbelievers] will feel the effects of [a cloistered person’s] prayer.”
As Cardinal Ratzinger, the pope sometimes retreated at the Benedictine Monastery of Subiaco, which was founded by St. Benedict of Nursia—the Patron of Europe and father of Western monasticism. In embracing monasticism, the Bishop Emeritus of Rome is perhaps looking at history—at how that other Benedict’s Rule and example once reordered a world that seemed ready to plunge into an abyss of darkness and ignorance—and making a supernatural gambit. In faith he will have delivered the powerful lesson that a life of faith is never without resources, because prayer extends beyond time and space, through darkness and into light.
And perhaps we will need to learn that lesson well, to face our future, together.
A monastery is a kind of powerhouse of prayer, but with distractions and impediments removed from its functioning; in enclosure, Benedict will become “a house of prayer and a temple of intercession” for us all. His hope and ours may reside, as it has before, in the simple yet profound reach of a monk.
Elizabeth Scalia is the Managing Editor of the Catholic Portal at Patheos and blogs as The Anchoress. Her previous articles for "On the Square" can be found here.
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Comments:
Well said. One can easily come to the conclusion that modern 'liberalism' seeks to erase all meaningful differences between the sexes, and even make the idea of gender itself obsolete, unless one chooses to be one or another gender. Forms now have choices such as male, female, other. Not only is Benedict "unmaksing the tyranny of relativism" but he is also putting on display the God-given truth of male and female, building on the precepts of Humane Vitae, in an effort to stem the destruction of our human differences.
Benedict, I forgive you for resigning as Pope.
It doesn't matter whether Papa Ratzi loved the limelight or if it withered him. He is responding to God's call, as mysterious as the call of the virgin to bear the Savior. I love him and his faith.
Elizabeth, is there a possibility that the man was Pope Benedict? As he said "the Lord is calling me to the climb the mountain?" I truly forgot the words of the children but seemed like the "man dressed in white" was tired or suffering? We know that for sure our beloved Pope is tired & is suffering a lot. What can you say about this?
And perhaps the last part if the secret which said that " many men dressed in white so fell?" Again sorry cant recall. I think this part remains to be seen or remain to be fulfilled? What can you say? Please, I'm not part of the left or right, I belong to the group that listens & obeys only to the Pope & the Magisterium.
Thank you & would appreciate your opinion.
Best,
Richard
Then Cardinal Ratzinger relates the story as told by St. Gregory whereby St. Benedict standing at the window in an upper tower is praying earnestly to God.
While he was looking out, in the middle of the dark night, he[St. Benedict] suddenly saw a light pouring down from above and driving all the darkness of the night away…. The whole world was held before his eyes, as if brought together in a single ray of sunshine. A cynic would ask I have never encountered this and just cannot imagine it. [Most people would be incredulous] and ask how could one person ever see the whole world ? Pope Gregory replied to this question by stating, “If he… saw the whole world before him, then it was not that heaven and Earth became narrower but that the visionary’s soul became so wide.”
Then Cardinal Ratzinger reflects on this stating that “[St Benedict’s] ascent to the tower was akin to the ascent to the Upper Room (a symbol of being brought together and drawn up, rising up out of the world of making and doing…..) It is not the world that is narrowed down but the soul that is broadened out being no longer absorbed in the particular, no longer looking at trees and unable to see the wood, but now able to see the whole.”
As the Holy Father retreats from the world of “making and doing” perhaps we can see it as an attempt to broaden his soul and thereby the souls of all Catholics (including priests and Cardinals).
Yes, this is a terrible age for the Church, but the immense suffering of the faithful is without question the birth pangs of a new great age for Christianity, for I see it clearly in the suffering eyes of these crucified young priests.
I'm certain for most every Catholic he still is Holy Father; and, in fact, this action of his will, in my view, broaden the supernatural horizon of the Petrine Office, not diminish it in any way.
If you want a grand exploration of this, read Hans Urs von Balthasar's "The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church", a book he wrote to explore the widespread anti-Roman sensibility within Roman Catholicism itself, far more destructive to the Church than the sum total of all anti-Roman Catholicism outside the Church.
Time will demonstrate that this Pope's retirement will make more visible the depths of the Petrine Office, and this loving man, Poe Benedict XVI, will always be our Holy Father.
One of the central tenets of Benedict's papacy has been his unmasking of the tyranny of relativism. He has cut to the core of liberalism's basic lie: that truth does not exist in the absolute, is in the eye of the beholder, (and is therefore at the command of whoever possesses the maximal will to power).
The puritanical underpinnings of contemporary liberalism are becoming clearer every day in the West as a secularist theocracy demands more and more homage to destructive delusions about the nature of marriage, life, sex, of morality itself, all derived from an indifference to truth and reliance on a reason that has become disconnected from the grounding of natural law and faith.
By going back to the monastery, Pope Benedict is ascending above the myopic sphere of liberalism, trapped as it is in the horizontal. He is reinforcing the vertical component of the cross and, in combat terms, getting inside the OODA loop of the enemy.
Liberalism is not equipped to compete with a church that reasserts its integration with that which transcends all. The pope is showing us the way, how we will help to overcome the contemporary version of the more overt nihilistic impulses that were defeated, at great cost, last century.