Abstract: I was born in the west of Ireland shortly before World War II. often boasted that there was no Protestant, policeman or public house in our parish. In contemporary language we could say that we were ethnically (or religiously) pure. No doubt many readers of this journal would call us Constantinian. By the time I had completed second-level schooling at eighteen, I had never met a Protestant socially. were, however, well versed in the history of the religious wars in Europe. education taught us who we were: Irish Catholics oppressed by the Protestants for centuries. Indeed, Ireland is best known worldwide for this Catholic-Protestant divide. In 1956 I joined the Cistercians or Trappists. The Cistercians are a twelfth-century reform of the Benedictines, while the Trappists are a reform of the Cistercians. Armand de Rance, the reforming abbot of La Trappe, was the spiritual director of the Catholic James II, who was defeated in Ireland by the Protestant William III in one of the most decisive Catholic-Protestant battles of all time. Thus my decision to join this particular order was unconsciously in line with the sectarian ethos of the time. Nevertheless, my formation as a Christian in the monastery was soon to be influenced by Catholic involvement in ecumenism, one part of which included an encounter with the Radical Reformation. LECTIO DIVINA monastic training introduced us to the devotional reading of scripture, to which we were to dedicate at least half an hour daily, in addition to hearing the numerous passages read in the liturgy. St. Teresa of Avila once said that all one needs to become a contemplative is to say the Our Father, but one should spend an hour saying it. To which I would add, read the Sermon on the Mount but spend a month reading it; read the Gospel of Matthew but spend a year reading it. This was the early church tradition of lectio divina, or reading, whereby scripture becomes a message from God himself, received in faith and obedience. The Second Vatican Council put it as follows: Prayer should accompany the reading of sacred scripture, so that a dialogue takes place between God and the reader.... The text continues with a quotation from St. Ambrose: We speak to him when we pray; we listen to him when we read the divine oracles. (1) I remember spending a year or more reading St. Matthew's Gospel. The Sermon on the Mount constantly drew me back. I wondered about its pacifism. It was certainly a guide for one's personal life; and there was plenty of opportunity to put it into practice in the close community life we lived. However, as I was being introduced to the general body of Catholic teaching, I was not concerned much about how it would apply to the attitudes of the church itself. theological training tended to reinforce the sectarian mentality. I recall my intense interest in learning of Calvin's view of predestination and how the Jansenists strove to import the doctrine into the Catholic Church under a thin disguise. I was about half way through this course when Pope John called the Second Vatican Council, which was to initiate a Catholic ecumenism. After ordination I was sent to the Benedictine university in Rome where Magnus Lohrer from Einsiedeln, Switzerland was just beginning to teach dogmatic theology, to which he brought an enthusiastic ecumenical dimension. My training hitherto had been an intensely apologetic introduction to medieval and Counter Reformation theology. Now we were being taught how to read the writings of the early church period. A new mentality was necessary which involved dropping the polemical approach and seeing the Fathers as presenting the message of Christianity in its totality. For a whole year I was at sea until eventually I achieved a turn about which was nothing short of an intellectual conversion, one side effect of which was much new material for reading. …
Publication Year: 2000
Publication Date: 2000-10-01
Language: en
Type: review
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