Virginity and Totality

Virginity is not only the fulfillment vocation par excellence. It is also the vocation of totality: entirety of self-gift in exchange for plenitude of return, the "much more". Because the virgin gives up earthly marriage and property for the kingdom, she sets out on a path of identification with Jesus that is as complete as is open to the human person. She is a virgin for the sake of the transforming union. Prayer is the primary purpose of her vows. Not just a little prayer, but the consummation of it.

Martha's sister, Mary, sitting at the Lord's feet undividedly drinking of him and his wisdom, is the perfect picture of virginity and contemplation. While she does her due work at its appropriate time, she knows full well that the "one thing", the top priority in anyone's life, is gazing on the beauty of the Lord. And Jesus gives her his complete stamp of approval; her absorption in him is both the overriding necessity of life and the beginning in dark faith of what will be her eternal, enthralling destiny in clear vision- "it will not be taken from her" (Luke 10: 38-42).

~Father Thomas Dubay, S. M.
from "...And You Are Christ's"; The Charism of Virginity and the Celibate Life

Amo Christum

I love Christ, into whose chamber I shall enter, whose Mother is a virgin, whose Father knows not woman, whose music and melody are sweet to my ears. When I love Him, I remain chaste; when I touch Him, I remain pure; when I possess Him, I remain a virgin. With His ring my Lord Jesus Christ has betrothed me and He has adorned me with the bridal crown.


~from a Carmelite solemn profession and veiling

here it is... the Conversion Story

What is Truth? This powerful question once asked of Christ by Pilate led me from a comfortable bubble of Presbyterian upbringing, through a darkness of atheist philosophies, and finally, into the light of the Catholic Church. Intertwined with my conversion to Catholicism was a growing sense that I am called to contemplative religious life.
When I was growing up in Washington State, I never questioned my strong Presbyterian upbringing. I eagerly participated in summer camps, youth groups, international mission trips, and street ministry. My brother, now a Presbyterian minister, served as a role model for my faith, as did my devoted parents and extended family. Upon graduation from high school I enrolled in Whitworth University, a Presbyterian college. It was here that Pilate’s question began to trouble me.
At Whitworth, I was introduced to many aspects of Catholic culture, without, however, putting together that these were Catholic. In my musical studies I was exposed to Gregorian chant, falling in love with the simplicity of its sublime melodies. In my theological studies, I was exposed to the writings of the Fathers of the Church. As a result of my exposure to this new world of ideas, I became increasingly disaffected with my own religious upbringing. Though I led a weekly Bible study, performed in a worship band, and attended lectures on Reformed theology, something was missing.
Perhaps my most influential class was a thirty-day course in the Cascade Mountains devoted to Christian Spirituality. Twenty-three of us students sought to live a condensed form of monastic life, adopting a rhythm of prayer, work, and study. As a result of this experience, monastic life deeply impressed many of us. However, I do not recall ever being told that, far from being a bygone relic of the obscure past, monastic life was an ongoing feature of Catholicism throughout the ages, present to this day. Thus I devoured the classical works of such holy luminaries as Sts. Therese of the Child Jesus, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Brother Lawrence, never fully grasping that they were Catholic religious whose way of life is available to me. Nevertheless, after that incredible month, my life forever changed: I gave up watching television, pursued opportunities for silence and solitude, and strove to live the purity and simplicity of St. Therese’s “Little Way.”
During the summer of 2005, I took my last course at Whitworth: a philosophical study tour through Europe. In Paris, Rome, Florence, and London, the Lord whetted my aesthetic appetite as I explored the manifold treasury of sacred art and architecture preserved in Catholic cathedrals. The corresponding course material challenged me to consider the necessity of physical realities, and how our Lord uses them to reveal Himself to us in a way befitting our nature. How appropriate it seemed to me that the invisible Creator would communicate Himself to us through the elements of visible creation! Though I did not perceive it at the time, a deep attraction to the Sacraments began to blossom within me.
When I returned from Europe, I moved to Lincoln, Nebraska to pursue graduate studies in music. Though I knew no one in Nebraska, I was certain through prayer that the Lord was calling me out of my comfort zone into unfamiliar territory. Perhaps because of my new surroundings, I began to explore out of curiosity a variety of philosophies: existentialism, nihilism, materialism, and eastern religions. At the same time, through a fortuitous series of events, I took up residence with two devout Catholics, one of them a musician, even though their brand of Christianity appeared more dangerous to me than any of these esoteric philosophies. Because I could see that they took their faith seriously, I took pains to guard myself against what I saw as their “outlandish” popery, legalism, and Mariolatry. Fortunately, through the influence of their steadfast example I was gradually disabused of these misconceptions of the Catholic Church.
During this time, I dreaded Sundays, for I had begun the faith-numbing process known as “church-shopping.” I attended a plethora of Protestant churches, none of which satiated my thirst for the Truth. In my frustration and discouragement, I distanced myself from my Catholic roommates and friends. The Bible resting on my nightstand collected dust. My prayer life withered away. Increasingly, I gravitated towards my yoga-loving atheist friends, only to find myself sinking into a morass of moral confusion and spiritual darkness. When I awoke each morning, the more I felt I had nothing to live for, the more I loathed getting out of bed. My memories of church camp, missions, and theological studies seemed like chimerical fairy tales. I captured this state of mind in the following journal entry of December 30, 2005:
"Nothing, no ONE on earth, NO THING having anything to do with this life will ever bear a completeness that will satisfy, because that is the nature of this God-forsaken place. It is ruins. Burning shambles. Nothing is complete. Nothing ever will be complete as perceived by us because we won’t live to see it. We are just a part of a work-in-progress — a screw or a bolt in some disjointed, broken mechanism, rusting and creaking in exhaustion. Purpose? What is purpose?"
By the grace of God, I soon found answers. On the Feast of the Epiphany, 2006, I came home from school to find my Catholic roommates singing “We Three Kings” while a priest sprinkled holy water around the house. Bemused, I thought “What are these Catholics doing?” Afterwards, I spoke with the priest, who peppered me with questions about my studies and my interests in philosophy and theology. Less than two weeks later, we began to meet to discuss some of my questions. Unbeknownst to me, these meetings were like little catechetical sessions. I would come to each meeting with endless questions about Mary, the papacy, the Eucharist, the Sacraments, purgatory, the communion of saints, apostolic succession, the canon of Scripture, morality, and many other subjects. Under the guidance of this priest, I returned to the writings of the early Church Fathers, and was shocked to discover they were thoroughly Catholic. This priest introduced me to a number of saints, including St. Faustina. He gave me a copy of her diaries, which I read voraciously. He also introduced me to the Liturgy of the Hours, which I began praying every morning and evening thereafter. Each day I was given a glimmer of hope, and a purpose that led me outside of myself.
Little by little, our Lord led me to Himself in the Mass. Initially, I attended Mass with reluctance and skepticism, even anger. And yet, because of all my inquiries into Catholicism, my throat began to physically ache during Mass. I did not realize there existed in this pain an incredible thirst for Him, and hidden in that thirst, a budding faith in His Real Presence. This manifested itself most fully in a visit to a contemplative monastery, the Community of Saint John in Illinois, to which one of my roommates had invited me to attend a silent retreat. Recalling the fond memories of my monastic experience in the Cascades, I could not resist the invitation to encounter real monastic life.
The Community of Saint John spends the beginning and end of each day in silent Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. Our first morning there, I awoke at dawn and, on a whim, attended early morning Adoration (which I had never before attended). Sitting on a hard wooden bench in the very back of the chapel, I watched in sheer bewilderment as young sisters silently filed in and took their places. The Prioress unlocked the tabernacle and slowly opened it to reveal our Lord. I stared at the Blessed Sacrament, and then at the contemplative sisters prostrating themselves in silence, and realized I was witnessing an intimate, silent, and very real exchange of Love. I was transfixed, and knew I was the in presence of Truth. In the sisters themselves, I discovered kindred spirits. The silence and solitude replenished me, allowing me room to breathe, spiritually, for the first time ever.
After this visit, I was a “fish out of water” — Protestant yet irresistibly attracted to Catholic sanctuaries, especially those which hosted Eucharistic Adoration. The community’s devotion to Mary was especially beautiful to me, and I found myself often contemplating her role as Theotokos, God-bearer. The new subject for my oil-paintings (a hobby) became icons of Mary. The more I painted her, the more I fell in love with her. After Christmas of 2006, I secretly bought a finger Rosary and, after teaching myself the mysteries, hid it inside my coat pocket for easy access. Starting in January of 2007, I prayed the Rosary daily for priests and seminarians.
To satiate my aching for Jesus in the Eucharist, I knew I needed to become Catholic. I also knew that if I became Catholic, His ultimate Answer to my yearning for Him this side of heaven would be a contemplative religious vocation. Becoming Catholic and entering into religious life is, for me, one and the same calling. In January of 2007, I made the decision to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church. In a journal entry from January 15, I wrote “I am either going off the deep end, or I am truly entering into the realm of the fullness of Truth. My greatest desire is to be so united with Him that I live my life in complete abandonment to His will, always giving of myself to others. A passion burns in me to lead, like a priest, souls to Christ.”
At the Easter Vigil of 2007, I was confirmed under the name Teresa Benedicta a Cruce (Edith Stein). I grew close with Teresa Benedicta as I shared her Cross of family persecution. As she offered her life as a holocaust for her Jewish people, so I wanted to do the same for my Protestant family and friends who misunderstand the Catholic faith. Her poignant name, “Teresa Blessed by the Cross,” challenges me to bear all sufferings with hope and joy in His name. In the face of persecution from my family, I have learned to keep my eyes focused on the Lamb, following Him, please God, to the end. Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity especially inspires me with these words: “She does not look at the paths on which she is walking. She simply gazes at the Shepherd who is leading her.” Like the disciples who were scandalized by Jesus’ teaching on the Eucharist in John 6, I had to choose whether to follow my family or to follow Him. With Peter, all I could say was “Lord, to whom shall I go? You have the words of eternal life.”
In December of 2006 I had asked St. Therese of Lisieux to intercede for me, that I could find a contemplative religious community. Throughout my travels, I had encountered a variety of strangers who felt compelled to tell me I should be a contemplative. On a train from Poland to Austria, for example, when a Catholic Polish woman discovered that I too was Catholic, she kept saying in broken English, “Convent! You  convent!” Upon visiting the Missionaries of Charity in Chicago, a sister greeted me at the door with these words: “Hello. Are you discerning a vocation to religious life? To be a Carmelite?” While in line for a blessing after an ordination, an elderly gentleman kept asking me what I was planning to do after graduation. Finally he asked, “Well, have you ever considered the contemplative Sisters of St. John? You have their smile.” In the middle of a talk I gave on prayer to a group of Catholic high school students, the teacher interrupted me to say, “I feel very strongly that you have a contemplative vocation.” A two year old sitting in my lap was fingering a medal of St. Faustina I wore around my neck. I told her the nun was St. Faustina, but she insisted, “No, it’s you. It’s you!” Such encounters happened at least four other times within six months, all with complete strangers.
What began as others’ observations has blossomed into a clearly defined, personal conviction that the Lord is calling me to contemplative religious life with the Sisters of Saint John. Father Marie Dominique Philippe, their founder, was a Dominican priest and philosopher. The charism he inspired in his community seems a perfect continuation of my own journey into the heart of God: prayer, silence, solitude, manual and artistic work, philosophical and theological studies, and a lifelong contemplation of the Truth.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's controversial address...

Text of Address by

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises,

Thursday, June 8, 1978

I am sincerely happy to be here with you on this occasion and to become personally acquainted with this old and most prestigious University. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today's graduates.

Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.

Three years ago in the United States I said certain things which at that time appeared unacceptable. Today, however, many people agree with what I then said...

-- -- --
A World Split Apart

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The split in today's world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of entirely destroying the other. However, understanding of the split often is limited to this political conception, to the illusion that danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is a much profounder and a more alienating one, that the rifts are more than one can see at first glance. This deep manifold split bears the danger of manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a Kingdom -- in this case, our Earth -- divided against itself cannot stand.

Contemporary Worlds
There is the concept of the Third World: thus, we already have three worlds. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. As a minimum, we must include in this category China, India, the Muslim world and Africa, if indeed we accept the approximation of viewing the latter two as compact units. For one thousand years Russia has belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its autonomous character and therefore never understood it, just as today the West does not understand Russia in communist captivity. It may be that in the past years Japan has increasingly become a distant part of the West, I am no judge here; but as to Israel, for instance, it seems to me that it stands apart from the Western world in that its state system is fundamentally linked to religion.

How short a time ago, relatively, the small new European world was easily seizing colonies everywhere, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but also usually despising any possible values in the conquered peoples' approach to life. On the face of it, it was an overwhelming success, there were no geographic frontiers to it. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden in the twentieth century came the discovery of its fragility and friability. We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious, and this in turn points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests. Relations with the former colonial world now have turned into their opposite and the Western world often goes to extremes of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the total size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West, and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns will be sufficient for the West to foot the bill.

Convergence
But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which developed out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet's development is quite different.

Anguish about our divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between leading Western countries and the Soviet Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity; neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side's defects, too, and this is hardly desirable.

If I were today addressing an audience in my country, examining the overall pattern of the world's rifts I would have concentrated on the East's calamities. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the West in our days, such as I see them.

A Decline in Courage [. . .]
may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and weak countries, not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?

Well-Being
When the modern Western States were created, the following principle was proclaimed: governments are meant to serve man, and man lives to be free to pursue happiness. (See, for example, the American Declaration). Now at last during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state. Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the morally inferior sense which has come into being during those same decades. In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to obtain them imprints many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings. Active and tense competition permeates all human thoughts without opening a way to free spiritual development. The individual's independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, leading them to physical splendor, happiness, possession of material goods, money and leisure, to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment. So who should now renounce all this, why and for what should one risk one's precious life in defense of common values, and particularly in such nebulous cases when the security of one's nation must be defended in a distant country?

Even biology knows that habitual extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.

Legalistic Life
Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.

And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.

The Direction of Freedom
In today's Western society, the inequality has been revealed of freedom for good deeds and freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; there are thousands of hasty and irresponsible critics around him, parliament and the press keep rebuffing him. As he moves ahead, he has to prove that every single step of his is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Actually an outstanding and particularly gifted person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind hardly gets a chance to assert himself; from the very beginning, dozens of traps will be set out for him. Thus mediocrity triumphs with the excuse of restrictions imposed by democracy.

It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power and, in fact, it has been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

And what shall we say about the dark realm of criminality as such? Legal frames (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists' civil rights. There are many such cases.

Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature; the world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems which must be corrected. Strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still is criminality and there even is considerably more of it than in the pauper and lawless Soviet society. (There is a huge number of prisoners in our camps which are termed criminals, but most of them never committed any crime; they merely tried to defend themselves against a lawless state resorting to means outside of a legal framework).

The Direction of the Press
The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media). But what sort of use does it make of this freedom?

Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist have to his readers, or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No, it does not happen, because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance.

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press. It stops at sensational formulas.

Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. One would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the communist East a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time and with what prerogatives?

There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the East where the press is rigorously unified: one gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole. It is a fashion; there are generally accepted patterns of judgment and there may be common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspapers mostly give enough stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.

A Fashion in Thinking
Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era. There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. It works as a sort of petrified armor around people's minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events.

I have mentioned a few trends of Western life which surprise and shock a new arrival to this world. The purpose and scope of this speech will not allow me to continue such a review, to look into the influence of these Western characteristics on important aspects on [the] nation's life, such as elementary education, advanced education in [?...]

Socialism
It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world a way to successful economic development, even though in the past years it has been strongly disturbed by chaotic inflation. However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of not being up to the level of maturity attained by mankind. A number of such critics turn to socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.

I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly will not speak for it. The well-known Soviet mathematician Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliant book under the title Socialism; it is a profound analysis showing that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. Shafarevich's book was published in France almost two years ago and so far no one has been found to refute it. It will shortly be published in English in the United States.

Not a Model
But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening.

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper and more interesting characters than those produced by standardized Western well-being. Therefore if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant scores. It is true, no doubt, that a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to elect such mechanical legalistic smoothness as you have. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor and by intolerable music.

All this is visible to observers from all the worlds of our planet. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model.

There are meaningful warnings that history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen. There are open and evident warnings, too. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.

But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?

Shortsightedness
Very well known representatives of your society, such as George Kennan, say: we cannot apply moral criteria to politics. Thus we mix good and evil, right and wrong and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world. On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism's well planned world strategy. There are no other criteria. Practical or occasional considerations of any kind will inevitably be swept away by strategy. After a certain level of the problem has been reached, legalistic thinking induces paralysis; it prevents one from seeing the size and meaning of events.

In spite of the abundance of information, or maybe because of it, the West has difficulties in understanding reality such as it is. There have been naive predictions by some American experts who believed that Angola would become the Soviet Union's Vietnam or that Cuban expeditions in Africa would best be stopped by special U.S. courtesy to Cuba. Kennan's advice to his own country -- to begin unilateral disarmament -- belongs to the same category. If you only knew how the youngest of the Moscow Old Square [1] officials laugh at your political wizards! As to Fidel Castro, he frankly scorns the United States, sending his troops to distant adventures from his country right next to yours.

However, the most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam war. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that there should be room for national, or communist, self-determination in Vietnam, or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity. But members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear? The American Intelligentsia lost its [nerve] and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States. But there is no awareness of this. Your shortsighted politicians who signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree breathing pause; however, a hundredfold Vietnam now looms over you. That small Vietnam had been a warning and an occasion to mobilize the nation's courage. But if a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small communist half-country, how can the West hope to stand firm in the future?

I have had occasion already to say that in the 20th century democracy has not won any major war without help and protection from a powerful continental ally whose philosophy and ideology it did not question. In World War II against Hitler, instead of winning that war with its own forces, which would certainly have been sufficient, Western democracy grew and cultivated another enemy who would prove worse and more powerful yet, as Hitler never had so many resources and so many people, nor did he offer any attractive ideas, or have such a large number of supporters in the West -- a potential fifth column -- as the Soviet Union. At present, some Western voices already have spoken of obtaining protection from a third power against aggression in the next world conflict, if there is one; in this case the shield would be China. But I would not wish such an outcome to any country in the world. First of all, it is again a doomed alliance with Evil; also, it would grant the United States a respite, but when at a later date China with its billion people would turn around armed with American weapons, America itself would fall prey to a genocide similar to the one perpetrated in Cambodia in our days.

Loss of Willpower
And yet -- no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal. Thus at the shameful Belgrade conference free Western diplomats in their weakness surrendered the line where enslaved members of Helsinki Watchgroups are sacrificing their lives.

Western thinking has become conservative: the world situation should stay as it is at any cost, there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society which has come to the end of its development. But one must be blind in order not to see that oceans no longer belong to the West, while land under its domination keeps shrinking. The two so-called world wars (they were by far not on a world scale, not yet) have meant internal self-destruction of the small, progressive West which has thus prepared its own end. The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one and I do not believe it will) may well bury Western civilization forever.

Facing such a danger, with such historical values in your past, at such a high level of realization of freedom and apparently of devotion to freedom, how is it possible to lose to such an extent the will to defend oneself?

Humanism and Its Consequences
How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.

The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.

However, in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.

An Unexpected Kinship
As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation at first by socialism and then by communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say in 1844 that "communism is naturalized humanism."

This statement turned out not to be entirely senseless. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictatorship; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach. (This is typical of the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century and of Marxism). Not by coincidence all of communism's meaningless pledges and oaths are about Man, with a capital M, and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today's West and today's East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.

The interrelationship is such, too, that the current of materialism which is most to the left always ends up by being stronger, more attractive and victorious, because it is more consistent. Humanism without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition. We watch this process in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, on a world scale as the situation becomes increasingly dramatic. Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism and socialism could never resist communism. The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes. When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them. In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. But Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and with empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.

Before the Turn
I am not examining here the case of a world war disaster and the changes which it would produce in society. As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life. There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.

To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging and evaluating everything on earth. Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but -- upward.

-- -- --
Notes

[1] The Old Square in Moscow (Staraya Ploshchad') is the place where the [headquarters] of the Central Committee of the CPSU are located; it is the real name of what in the West is conventionally referred to as "the Kremlin."

Source: Texts of Famous Speeches at Harvard

St Aloysius Gonzaga

I love being Catholic... for a thousand reasons, but here is just a little one: the Office of Readings! Discovering this treasury of spiritual readings was, for me, like discovering a new Island. Read Chesterton's Orthodoxy and you'll know what I'm referring to when I say "island" and then be sure to locate the Office of Readings, and bask in the Light of these saintly men and women!
From a letter written by St. Aloysius Gonzaga to his mother, as he was dying from the plague (St. Al's feast day was 21 June):

Take care above all things, most honored lady, not to insult God's boundless loving kindness; you would certainly do this if you mourned as dead one living face to face with God, one whose prayers can bring you in your troubles more powerful aid than they ever could on earth. And our parting will not be for long; we shall see each other again in heaven; we shall be united with our Savior; there we shall praise him with heart and soul, sing of his mercies for ever, and enjoy eternal happiness. When he takes away what he once lent us, his purpose is to store our treasures elsewhere more safely and bestow on us those very blessings that we ourselves would most choose to have.

Mary's Symbolic Value

An excerpt from St. Edith Stein's Woman and Women:

Mary is the most perfect symbol of the church because she is its prefigurement and origin. She is also a unique organ of the church, that organ from which the entire Mystical Body, even the Head itself, was formed. She might be called, and happily so, the heart of the church in order to indicate her central and vital position in it. The terms body, head, and heart, are of course simply metaphors. But their meaning, nevertheless, is somehow absolutely real. There is a distinctive coherence between head and heart, and they certainly play an essential role in the human body; all other organs and limbs are dependent on them for their existence and function. Just as certainly, through her unique relation with Christ, Mary must have a real- that means here a mystic- relationship with the other members of the church. This relationship extends far above that of the other members in intensity, nature, and importance; it is analogous to the relationship which a mother has with her children, a relationship surpassing that which the children have among themselves. The title of Mary as our mother is not merely symbolic. Mary is our mother in the most real and lofty sense, a sense which surpasses that of earthly maternity. She begot our life of grace for us because she offered up her entire being, body, and soul, as the Mother of God.

That is why an intimate bond exists between Mary and ourselves. She loves us, she knows us, she exerts herself to bring each one of us into the closest possible relationship with the Lord- that which we are above all supposed to be. Of course, this is true for all humanity, but most particularly for women. The maternity and bridehood of the Virgo-Mater is continued, so to speak, in their maternity, natural and supernatural, and in their life as brides of Christ. And just as the heart sustains the other organs of woman's body and makes it possible for them to function, so we may genuinely believe there is just such a collaboration of Mary with every woman wherever that woman is fulfilling her vocation as woman; just so, there is a collaboration of Mary with us in all works of the church. But just as grace cannot achieve its work in souls unless they open themselves to it in free decision, so also Mary cannot function fully as a mother if people do not entrust themselves to her. Those women who wish to fulfill their feminine vocations in one of several ways will most surely succeed in their goals if they not only keep the ideal of the Virgo-Mater before their eyes and strive to form themselves to her guidance and place themselves completely under her care. She herself can form in her own image those who belong to her.

A Total Gift of Self

Here is an excerpt from Archbishop Fulton Sheen's The World's First Love. Realizing that some of these words will rub many of you the wrong way, I encourage you to carefully read the text in its entirety. Do you think this is a Scriptural view of womanhood? Why or why not? In reading this, I was convicted of our call as Christians to be distinct from the world. Modern views of womanhood completely contradict Fulton Sheen's views, which not only are Christian, they are distinctly Catholic. The Catholic Church seems to be the only voice today that goes against modern views on, say, motherhood, sexuality, contraception, abortion, etc. Is this not intriguing? Here it is:

One of the most beautiful lessons in the world emerges from the Annunciation, namely, the vocation of woman to supreme religious values. Mary is here recapturing woman's vocation from the beginning, namely, to be to humanity the bearer of the Divine. Every mother is this when she gives birth to a child, for the soul of every child is infused by God. She thus becomes a co-worker with Divinity; she bears what God alone can give. As the priest in the order of Redemption, at the moment of Consecration, brings the crucified Savior to the altar, so the mother in the order of creation brings the spirit that issues from the Hand of God to the cradle of earth. With such thoughts in mind, Leon Bloy once said: "The more a woman is holy, the more she becomes a woman."

Why? It is not that women are naturally more religious than men. This statement is merely a rationalization made by men who have fallen from their ideals. Man and woman each have a specific mission under God to complement one another. Each, too, has its symbol in the lower order. Man may be likened to the animal in his acquisitiveness, mobility, and initiative. Woman may be likened to the flower, which is fixed between Heaven and earth; she is like the earth in her bearing of life; she is like Heaven in her aspirations to blossom upward to the Divine. The mark of man is initiative, but the mark of woman is cooperation. Man talks about freedom; woman about sympathy, love, sacrifice. Man cooperates with nature, woman cooperates with God. Man was called to till the earth, to "rule over the earth"; woman to be the bearer of a life that comes from God. The hidden wish of every woman in history, the secret desire of every feminine heart, is fulfilled in that instant when Mary says: "Fiat"- "Be it done unto me according to thy word."

Here is cooperation at its best. Here is the essence of womanhood- acceptance, resignation, submission: "Be it done unto me". Whether it be the unmarried daughter who cares for the mother with her Fiat of surrender to service, or the wife who accepts the husband in the unity of the flesh, or the saint who accepts little crosses proffered by her Savior, or this unique Woman whose soul submits to the Divine Mystery of mothering God made man- there is present in varying degrees the beautiful picture of woman in her sublimest vocation- making the Total Gift, accepting a Divine assignment, being submissive for Heaven's holy purposes. Mary calls herself ancilla Domini, the handmaid of the Lord. Not to be this for any woman lowers her dignity. Woman's unhappiest moments are when she is unable to give; her most hellish moments are when she refuses to give. Tragedy stalks when woman is forced by economic or social circumstances to busy herself in those materialities that hamper or dam up the outpouring of that specific quality of surrender to Divine Purpose that makes her a woman. Denied an outlet for the bursting need of giving, she feels a deeper sense of emptiness than a man, precisely because of the greater depths of her fountain of love.

For a woman to be the Collaborator with the Divine- whether it be helping the missions, visiting the sick after business hours, freely offering services to hospitals, or mothering her children- is to enjoy that equilibrium of spirit which is the essence of sanity. Liturgy speaks of woman as fulfilling mysterium caritatis: the mystery of love. And love does not mean to have, to own, to possess. It means to be had, to be owned, to be possessed. It is the giving of self for another. A woman may love God mediately through creatures, or she may love God immediately, as Mary did, but to be happy she must bring the Divine to the human. The explosive revolt of woman against her alleged inequalities with man is at bottom a protest against the restraints of a bourgeois civilization without faith, one that has chained her God-given talents.

What every woman wants in the "mystery of love" is not the bestial but the soul. Man is driven by love of pleasure; woman by the pleasure of love, by its meaning and the enrichment of soul it grants. In this beautiful moment of the Annunciation, woman reaches her sublimest fulfillment for God's sake. As the earth submits to the exigency of the seed for the sake of the harvest, as the nurse submits to the exigencies of the wounded for the sake of the healing, as the wife submits to the exigencies of the flesh for the sake of the child, so Mary submits to the exigencies of the Divine will for the sake of the Redemption of the world.

Closely allied with this submission is sacrifice. For submission is not passivity but action. Woman is capable of greater sacrifices than man, partly because her love is less intermittent, and also because she is unhappy without total and complete dedication. Woman is made for the sacred. She is Heaven's instrument on earth. Mary is the prototype, the pattern-woman who fulfills in herself the deepest aspirations of the heart of every daughter of Eve.