Returning to Don Bosco’s initial exposure to the youth reality…

Don Bosco had an intuitive understanding of the positive impact that active participation in the apostolate had on his young clerics. This is the way he chose to form his first collaborators – Rua, Cagliero and others. In the midst of their many studies they were involved in the life of the Oratory and in daily assistance and also entrusted with different responsibilities. We know how this was a bone of contention with Bishop Gastaldi who was horrified to see clerics mingling in such an undignified way with the young.

In writing his Memoirs of the Oratory Don Bosco talks of his own apostolic engagement as a boy and teenager with his companions as the key moments of his own vocational discernment and growth. But also, he himself experienced the formative dimension that active ministry can have on a young priest  if one is accompanied and helped to reflect on the experience. There is no doubt that the three years that Don Bosco spent at the Convitto were crucial. As Don Ceria testifies in his book Don Bosco con Dio, the years ‘contributed powerfully to mould his spirit in a definitive manner’. After six years of speculative theology isolated from reality in a seminary, insertion into the active apostolate was not easy.

Fr Joseph Cafasso [1], exposed the young priests under his care to the challenging pastoral realities of a city fast becoming industrialized. Don Bosco was no exception, and in reading the Memoirs one can see the impact that Don Bosco’s visit to the prisons left on him: “It was Fr Cafasso who  first took me into the prisons, where I soon learned how great was the malice and misery of mankind.”

This exposure often led the young priests to a crisis point as they were confronted by the harsh realities in which the masses had to live in.  We know of Don Bosco’s own horror when he visited the prisons: “…seeing them [the youth] idle there, infested with lice, lacking food for body and soul, horrified me.” Yet in this situation something else was even more shocking for him: “What shocked me most was to see that many of them were released full of good resolutions to go straight, and yet in a short time they landed back in prison, within a few days of their release.” This was unacceptable!

The exposure led the pastoral ministers to a crisis “…because they were aban­doned to their own resources.”

Towards a humble Church

Reflection

Timothy Radcliffe, OP (1945, London–) is a Dominican friar of the English Province, and former Master of the Order of Preachers from 1992-2001. He is now highly sought after speaker, teaching and preaching in many countries.

Friendship with Jesus – intimacy –means learning to be gentle and lowly of heart. Then we shall find rest for our souls. But if one thinks of the Catholic Church, the first word that springs to mind might not be “humble”.

I have given retreats for dioceses in 15 countries since I finished my term as Master of the Dominican Order in 2001. The vast majority of priests and bishops whom I have met are simple and unpretentious people who just wish to serve the people of God. But this personal humility has to be sustained in the teeth of a clerical culture, common to all Christian denominations, which stresses rank and power.

The Stole and the Apron

Stole and apron:to put the two of them on together may sound disrespectful, almost an act of desecration.

The stole is made for the sacristy, kept neatly with the finely decorated chasubles and all the other sacred linens, amidst the perfume of incense and the mystical language of biblical symbols. There is no newly ordained deacon or priest who has not received a beautiful and precious stole as a gift from a convent of Sisters.

The apron belongs to the kitchen among the frying pans, the bags of flour and jars of oil, the vegetables and other ingredients, and the plates to be washed... or in the store with the domestic cleaning materials. No one would think of giving an apron as a gift, for a wedding or a birthday, much less for an ordination.

And yet the apron is the only liturgical dress mentioned in the Gospel... yes, the Gospel, and the most theological of the four - the holy gospel according to John!

For Christ’s first solemn Mass, the first Mass in the history of the universe, celebrated the night before he died, there is no mention of alb, stole or chasuble, but only of a rough piece of cloth, the apron that Jesus put on, the perfect priestly garment. 

Maybe it would be good for us to complete the equipment of our sacristies by including an apron among the golden decorated chasubles, dalmatics and stoles and the finely embroidered albs.    

BEATIFICATION OF VENERABLE CARDINAL JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI

Pope Benedict XVI presided at the beatification of Blessed John Henry Newman on September 19 2010, in the culminating act of a 4-day visit to the United Kingdom. 

 In an outdoor liturgy attended by 70,000 people at Crofton Park in Birmingham, the Holy Father pronounced the beatification of the 19th-century British scholar and convert. 

The Pope focused on the figure of Cardinal Newman, whose many writings helped to illuminate “the vital place of revealed religion in civilized society, and into the need for a broadly-based and wide-ranging approach to education.” In his remarks the Pope said that Cardinal Newman’s “fine Christian realism” was a reliable guide for today as well. He pointed out that Newman “would describe his life's work as a struggle against the growing tendency to view religion as a purely private and subjective matter, a question of personal opinion.” That same struggle continues today, the Pope said, “when an intellectual and moral relativism threatens to sap the very foundations of our society.” 

Cardinal Newman’s life "also teaches us that passion for the truth, intellectual honesty and genuine conversion are costly,” the Pope said. Truth must be proclaimed, even sometimes at personal cost. Finally, the Pope observed, Cardinal Newman insisted that “there can be no separation between what we believe and the way we live our lives.” 

Cardinal John Newman

Beatification

The beatification of Cardinal John Newman is of particular significance for the Church. The following is the LETTER OF THE HOLY FATHER JOHN PAUL II ON THE OCCASION OF THE 2nd CENTENARY OF HIS BIRTH WHICH WAS ADDRESSED To The Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, WHO WAS Archbishop of Birmingham AT THE TIME.

Pope Benedict’s apostolic journey to the United Kingdom culminates on September 19 with the beatification of Venerable Cardinal John Henry Newman, described by Venerable John Paul II as “one of the most distinguished and versatile champions of English spirituality” and as a thinker who came to “a remarkable synthesis of faith and reason.”Hailed by James Joyce as “the greatest of English prose writers,” Newman was at once a seminal theologian (An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent), a poet (“The Pillar of the Cloud,” “Dream of Gerontius”), the leading defender of liberal education in his day (Idea of a University), the author of a classic spiritual autobiography (Apologia Pro Vita Sua), and a preacher with an eloquence perhaps unsurpassed in the English language, from his Anglican Parochial and Plain Sermons to his Catholic Sermons Preached on Various Occasions. 

Born in 1801, Newman became an Anglican cleric in 1825; seven years later, he helped launch the Oxford Movement, which sought to emphasize and restore the Catholic aspects of the Church of England while conceiving of Anglicanism as a via media between Rome and Protestantism. In 1845, he was received into the Church by Blessed Dominic Barberi. Ordained to the priesthood in Rome in 1847, Newman brought the Congregation of the Oratory to England the following year. 

Pope Leo XIII created Newman a cardinal in 1879. Upon his death in 1890, the Guardian hailed him as “one of the very greatest masters of English style,” “a man of singular purity and beauty of character,” and “an eminent example of personal sanctity.” Pope John Paul II declared Newman venerable in 1991, and the Congregation for the Causes of Saints issued a decree last July that cleared the way for his beatification.