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Pope Francis and the Hidden Path to Holiness

Mon, 02 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Five years ago the Catholic Church had a Year of the Priest, and now Pope Francis has declared a Year of Consecrated Life. To mark this year, he has issued an Apostolic Letter, building upon Vatican II’s decree on religious life, Perfectae Caritatis (1965), and St. John Paul II’s post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Vita Consecrata (1996). While everyone seems to have a concept of the priestly ideal, the unique charism of consecrated life, especially for men, is more obscure. In particular, religious brothers tend to have lower profiles than do priests and nuns.

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A Catholic Case Against Marriage

Mon, 30 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0500

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), marriage is a sacrament, and “the grace of the sacrament thus perfects the human love of the spouses, strengthens their indissoluble unity, and sanctifies them on the way to eternal life” (CCC 1661). Also, the Catechism claims that “marriage helps to overcome self-absorption, egoism, pursuit of one’s own pleasure, and to open oneself to the other, to mutual aid and to self-giving” (CCC 1609). Well, any honest and objective observer will have to admit that these words do not reflect reality. Therefore, for the sake of the Church’s integrity and for the health of society, it is possible for a Catholic to argue against marriage.

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Brother Joseph of Molokai

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:01:00 -0500

With the recent canonizations of Father Damien of Molokai and Mother Marianne Cope, the time has come to recognize Brother Joseph, who worked with them in that remote leper colony. The spiritual life having its paradoxes, the reason he should be recognized is that he would not want any recognition. By becoming more aware of this saintly man, we may become more appreciative of the vocation of the religious brother, which in turn helps us to focus more fully on Christ.

Famous in his own day, Brother Joseph was born Ira Barnes Dutton in 1843 in Stowe, Vermont, but grew up in Janesville, Wisconsin. During the American Civil War, he volunteered and served as a quartermaster in the Union Army, and what we would call post-traumatic stress disorder led to his failed marriage and his turning to the bottle. Once he sobered up, he converted to Catholicism and sought out the Trappist abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky. It was there that he learned about the work of Father Damien amongst the lepers of Hawaii.

In 1886 Brother Joseph, having been dispensed from his monastic vows, received his bishop’s permission to go to Molokai as a penitent. There he assisted Father Damien, his practical skills from farm life and the army making him an invaluable jack of all trades, with everything from serving Mass to cleaning toilets, changing bandages, and general tidying up. For forty-five years he worked at Molokai, refusing any pay and insisting that his army pension be sent to Gethsemani.

In 1908, while the Great White Fleet of the U.S. Navy toured the Pacific, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the ships to sail with flying colors as they passed the leper colony of Molokai in order to acknowledge the twenty-two years of selfless service given by Brother Joseph. Despite such an honor, Brother Joseph’s desire was to work and pray in obscurity.

Still, more honors came. Hawaii’s legislature adopted a resolution thanking him for his “inspiring services” and also voted that he receive a monthly pension. In 1929 Pope Pius XI sent his apostolic blessing.

In 1931, when Brother Joseph died, he received an eloquent tribute from former president Calvin Coolidge in his daily syndicated newspaper column. “[T]his man died a saintly world figure,” Coolidge wrote, “His faith, his works, his self-sacrifice appeal to people because there is always something of the same spirit in them . . . . The universal response to the example of his life is another demonstration of what mankind regard as just and true and holy.”

As John Farrow memorably related in his biography of Father Damien, published in 1937, for months Father Damien badgered Brother Joseph to become a priest, until one day Brother Joseph rounded on him and said whatever needed to be said, clearly and emphatically. Farrow does not record what was said. According to Farrow, however, Brother Joseph later described Father Damien’s repeated hounding of him to become a priest “as one of the hardest trials of his life.”

While over the years brothers have been characterized by plain and even at times blunt speech, they have also been known for their reticence and great capacity for inner stillness. Typical of the spiritual life of a religious brother is what I once heard of an Irish Cistercian brother who died in the 1960s. Significantly, I never heard his name. Throughout the long decades working at his assigned tasks, he drew inspiration from his thrice-daily Rosary and reading over and over again the one book he had, given him as a novice, Columba Marmion’s Christ the Ideal of the Monk .

Sadly, religious brothers have not all been paragons of virtue: One need only recall the number of Christian Brothers in Ireland who preyed upon teenage and pre-teenage boys. Nevertheless, as saintly brothers such as Brother Joseph and Saints André Bessette (1845-1937), Conrad of Parzham (1818-1894), and Alphonsus (Alonso) Rodriguez (1532-1617) indicate, the vocation of religious brother can be a way to holiness. If it were not, the Church would have suppressed it ages ago.

Although the Vatican has been working for several years on a document about the vocation of religious brother, it seems a long way from seeing the light of day. Meanwhile, the vocation of religious brothers proves difficult to understand. People have clear ideas about what priests and nuns are, but brothers tend to be, as the saying goes, off everyone’s radar. When one hears a prayer for “priests and religious,” nearly always the phrase is synonymous with “priests and nuns.”

In a way, that anonymity is appropriate. Religious brothers like Joseph of Molokai bear witness to Christ by sharing in the hidden life of Nazareth. Brothers have thus traditionally had deep devotions to the Virgin Mary and to Saint Joseph. Rather than resembling those hardworking parents in an out-of-the-way village, though, brothers are more like bachelor uncles alongside the fathers, the priests. Their calling as brothers is to serve in quiet ways, often performing many small, daily chores unnoticed by others, so that when brothers die or become too unwell to work, folks are surprised by how many people it takes to replace them.

Being a religious brother is a unique vocation, entirely its own. It is a way to live a single life dedicated to God, and it provides another option open to men who want to be more fully engaged in the Church but who mull over all that a priest does and know in the marrow of their bones, “That just isn’t me.” A brother is Sam to the priest’s Frodo. He finds that there must be more to life than how he has been living it, and so he seeks his vocation in a structured Christian community, his Shire (or Nazareth) usually being a monastery, although apparently a leper colony can work just as well.

Some years ago a married layman, frustrated by many problems in the Church, barked at me, “The Church doesn’t need monks, she needs priests!” By monks he meant brothers. Well, she needs both, along with hermits, religious sisters, and faithful married couples.

When encouraging and discerning vocations to be a religious brother, we all must keep in mind that the ministry of a brother is different from that of a priest yet has infinite variety. In its essential mystery, whatever else it may be, being a brother is not something like “priesthood lite.” In his own way Brother Joseph showed that truth to Father Damien, just as both in their distinctive roles continue to show us Christ.

Brother Joseph of Molokai, pray for us!

Daniel J. Heisey, O.S.B., is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.

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Joyful Evangelization

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:01:00 -0400

There is an approach to the Christian life that I find particularly tiresome. It is that emphatic cheerfulness in which all must take part, that demand that you will be joyful. But Christian joy is in fact a great part of our faith. In a few years we will mark the fortieth anniversary of a relatively obscure Apostolic Exhortation by Pope Paul VI, Gaudete in Domino , “Rejoice in the Lord” (1975). In anticipation of that anniversary, let’s look at some of his insights about Christian joy.

First and foremost, the pope underscored that true joy is internal. Like charity, it is not overbearing. He noted the need to teach people “how to savor in a simple way the many human joys that the Creator places in our path.” He then enumerated several kinds of joy: “The elating joy of existence and of life; the joy of chaste and sanctified love; the peaceful joy of nature and silence; the sometimes austere joy of work well done; the joy and satisfaction of duty performed; the transparent joy of purity, service, and sharing; the demanding joy of sacrifice.” It’s not a list likely to make an extrovert smile.

In this exhortation the pope focused on the spiritual dimension of joy, noting that its manifest absence in the modern world comes from man having “desacralized the universe” and then “desacralizing humanity.” Christians must, he wrote, become sources of authentic joy, and to do so, they must first have listened to and taken within their hearts God’s holy word. It will be the only way to help heal a world in which “God seems to him [mankind] abstract and useless,” a world where “hope, and the value of individuals, are no longer sufficiently ensured.” These observations, sadly, are still relevant.

Before the consistory in which he received a cardinal’s red hat, Timothy Dolan outlined seven points needed in evangelization, the fifh point being joy, in particular, smiling. Dolan is a Falstaffian figure now confronted with a politically aggressive culture of death. On the spiritual front of that fight, joyful smiling can go only so far.

Here is where monastic spirituality, much admired by Pope Paul VI, can inform the discussion. A charismatic festival of praise, for example, takes a lot of energy and so could not be repeated every day, several times a day. In contrast, the monastic schedule with liturgical prayer punctuating the day can be sustained with much less energy. Rows of Gothic arches may seem monotonous, yet day after day they will support an entire cathedral.

Steadiness is challenging. Pope Paul VI concluded Gaudete in Domino by returning to the theme of joy’s spiritual source. He wrote of “the original and inalienable dimension of the human person,” namely, that “his vocation to happiness always passes through the channels of knowledge and love, of contemplation and action.” Head and heart, prayer and work; a Christian life needs balance. For the pope, it was all summed up in the Paschal Mystery, especially as celebrated in the liturgy of the Mass. “Let participation in this celebration,” he proclaimed, “be at the same time very dignified and festive!” Dignity and festivity: Once again, the challenge of balance.

Jovial men such as Cardinal Dolan enrich the Church, as do reserved men such as Pope Benedict XVI. The Church must maintain room for both temperaments. While we are all called to evangelize, how we express our motivating joy cannot be one-size-fits-all.

Pope Paul VI’s wise assessment of the varieties of joy bears renewed consideration. Introverts prefer to live and let live, but in an era when shyness is being described as a pathology, when smiling seems about to be declared ecclesiastically mandatory, we do well to ponder the joy of doing one’s duty, whether a gold star is in the offing; the demanding joy of sacrifice, whether anyone notices; or the austere joy of a job well done, simply because anything worth doing is worth doing well. If in the midst of such quiet joy our ordinary courtesies and our daily prayers help bring someone closer to Christ, there will be much rejoicing in Heaven, a place of eternal rest.

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B., is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.

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