We recently received an email from Teresa Monaghen regarding her activities which she agreed to let us share with readers.

Dear Friends,

Hi everyone.  I have been doing a lot of traveling these past two months, just returned, and hope to send a little update soon!  However, I feel urged first to invite you to come and meet a really great man of God, Cardinal Francis Arinze, who worked closely with Blessed Pope John Paul II, and who has been a great advocate for holiness for all ages!  He will speak on many things, but will highlight the role of the Christian Family in the Modern World: Holy Families for a Holy World!  We are so blessed to have him among us.  Join us for one or more of the free Pro Sanctity events.  If your event includes a meal, we ask you to help us by sending in your RSVP as soon as possible!  Write to Rita Hejkal: Cooperative.oblate@yahoo.com  Many blessings and I look forward to seeing you at one of the events.  Please tell everyone!  Call me if you need more info!  Teresa Monaghen 402-289-2670

Among the religious and cultural factors that influence converts to enter into full communion with the Church, the Blessed Virgin Mary holds particular prominence.  Yet she is not the possession of the Catholic Church solely, for many Protestant churches are rediscovering the presence and role of Mary in life’s pilgrimage of faith.

Before embracing Catholicism, Blessed John Henry Newman, probably the most famous convert in the last two centuries, formulated an explanation of the development of doctrines in the Catholic Church, especially the Marian doctrines.  He explained that the saving truths of revelation were not given by God in timeless and static expression, but as dynamic and life-giving truths which continue to unfold and develop.  In An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine Newman wrote: "Growth is the only evidence of life."  Ideas live in our minds and continually enlarge into fuller development.  "In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."

To believe in the ongoing prayer and care of Mary for the faithful is to find the Virgin Mother's assistance in times of transitions, of new beginnings, of wandering and searching.  Sacred Scripture shows us that Mary is the Virgin of beginnings and transitions (Annunciation, Cana, Pentecost), and the Virgin of spiritual searching (Presentation, Finding in the Temple, Cana, Calvary).  It is quite natural then to experience her motherly presence in the struggles which accompany conversion, according to Father René Laurentin in A Year of Grace with Mary.

Conversions to Catholicism develop from a complex of various factors.  They result from conviction and personal experience.  But also at play are conditions and developments in the Church and society that often help or hinder conversions.  An instance of that scenario is nineteenth-century England in which that period's theological ferment and liberalism and the decision of the British government to suppress a number of Anglican bishoprics gave rise to the Oxford Movement, which questioned the Anglican Church's legitimacy.  The consequence was a number of conversions by prominent intellectuals from 1840-1920, the most noteworthy being John Henry Newman.  These converts were usually imbued with an understanding of the Virgin Mary and their devotion to her often preceded their entry into the Catholic Church.

John Henry Newman (1801-1890)

Following his conversion in 1845, Blessed John Henry Newman journeyed to Rome.  Upon his return as a Catholic priest he wrote that he "went round by Loreto."  As a pilgrim to the Holy House he wanted "to get the Blessed Virgin's blessing."  He commented about Mary's presence in his life.  "I have ever been in her shadow, if I may say it.  My college was St. Mary's, and my church; and when I went to Littlemore, there, by my own previous disposition, our Blessed Lady was waiting for me.  Nor did she do nothing for me in that low habitation, of which I always think with pleasure."

As an Anglican, Newman thought that the Catholic Church's Marian doctrine and devotion were exaggerated.  But in his study of the development of doctrine, he discovered that it was consistent with the early church.  "I was convinced by the Fathers," he explained.  The early Fathers and ancient Christian writers viewed Mary as the New Eve.  Newman came to understand Mary in patristic terms.  He understood that the Immaculate Conception was based on Mary's holiness, a concept present in the Fathers, and that the Assumption was rooted in her dignity as Mother of God, another concept from the early Christian writers.

Although Newman had reservations about some teachings of the Catholic Church while an Anglican, he nevertheless was devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary.  In his Apologia pro Vita Sua he proclaimed, "In spite of my ingrained fears of Rome, and the decision of my reason and conscience against her usages, in spite of my affection for Oxford and Oriel, yet I had a secret longing love of Rome, the Mother of Christianity, and I had a true devotion to the Blessed Virgin, in whose college I lived, whose altar I served, and whose Immaculate Purity I had in one of my earliest printed sermons made much of."

Newman's reluctance concerning the Virgin Mary, his "great crux" regarding Catholicism, were the "expressions of popular feelings toward the Blessed Virgin" and the intemperate statements of some Catholic authors concerning Mary.  Later, when responding to Dr. Pusey's Eirenicon, which contained numerous examples of exaggerated practices and devotions to Mary, Newman made a clear distinction between the Church's doctrines and officially sanctioned prayers and practices, and the many expressions of popular devotions, sometimes questionable in taste and in theology.  "Belief is separate from devotion; belief is the same everywhere, whereas expressions of devotion differ from place to place."  Newman also noted that cultural differences become manifest in expressions of devotion, indicating that there exists a legitimate "English style" in the expression of devotion.  These distinctions between officially approved doctrine and devotion, and the many practices of popular devotion, which frequently reflect a cultural bias, have helped many along the journey of conversion.

Such was the experience of this famous convert and devotee of the Mother of the Redeemer.

Ronald A. Knox (1888-1957)

Another noteworthy English convert swayed by Mary's influence is Ronald Arbuthnot Knox, a brilliant scholar and classicist.  This Anglican clergyman embraced the Catholic Church in 1917, and was ordained a priest in 1919.  Widely hailed as "Rome's biggest catch after Newman," his book, A Spiritual Aeneid, ranks with Newman's Apologia as a classic and impressive conversion story.

His interest in Mary stems from his fascination with English heritage and his attraction to Anglo-Catholicism.  Among his earliest remembrances of the Blessed Virgin were his image on his school's coat of arms and the prayers used in the chapel services.

"Thus although I did not ask for her prayers, I had a strong sense of the patronage of the Mother of God.  Her name was part of our title; her lilies figure on our coat of arms; the blue of her robe you could easily see on the blazers of the Eight and the caps of the Eleven.  And perhaps, after all, in the wide sympathies of her compassionate heart there is a special place for her children at Eton.  I only know that it was the easiest thing in the world, on any of her feasts, to arrange for the singing at college prayers of that rather sentimental ancient and modern hymn which begins. 'Shall we not love thee, Mother dear.'"

Although his father opposed his enthusiasm for Anglo-Catholicism, young Knox spent one college vacation with a group of Anglican Benedictines who "went over to Rome en masse."  It was his fond hope as an Anglican that one day England would reclaim its Marian heritage: "England will once again become the dowry of Mary, and the Church of England will once again be built on the rock she was hewn from, and find a place, although it be a place of penitence and tears, in the eternal purposes of God."  In a sermon he delivered in 1913 he alluded to Mary's interest in what was once her country: "Mary ... has not forgotten her children just because they have run away from their school master, and unlearnt their lessons, and are trying to find their way home again, humbled and terrified in the darkness."  When ordained a deacon in the Anglican Church, he wrote: "I took a private vow, which I always kept, never to preach without making some reference to our Lady Mary, by way of satisfaction for the neglect of other preachers."

The Anglican Church's silence concerning Mary troubled Knox.  Even before his conversion he wrote:

"I cannot resist making an appeal to all those who are attached to ‘old-fashioned views’ of the person of our Savior, to reflect whether such views are afforded a proper devotional safeguard, so long as praises of, or prayers to, the Mother of God are either energetically repudiated or thrust away into a corner.  Ever since the Nestorian controversy, the divine mystery of the Theotokos has been regarded with special honor, in protest against incomplete theories of the Incarnation."

Once he left the Anglican Church and his post at Shrewsbury, he was aware of "the loneliness of a soul forced by conscientious motives to detach itself from loved surroundings and familiar friends and launch out into the deep."  At that time he recalled a line from Virgil's Aeneid "land showed no longer; all about was sky and sea."  He took the Latin words for sea and sky, mare and caelum, to represent Mary and heaven.  And he thought, "Perhaps I was not so lonely after all."

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1937)

One more renowned English convert of Marian significance is Gilbert Keith Chesterton.  A distinguished essayist, poet, novelist and outstanding apologist, Chesterton was raised in a family that did not share the typical Protestant antipathy toward the Virgin Mary.  "Our Lady was respected, though of course not invoked."

When a youngster, he turned into a poem for Mary the blasphemous lines of Algernon Swinburne's poem to the pagan queen of death.

"But I turn to her still, having seen she shall surely abide in the end.  Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend."

A poem of his youth, The Nativity of Botticelli, attests, to his understanding of Mary's role in the Incarnation.

In a letter to Chesterton written in 1907, Hilaire Belloc suggested that he search for a "first certitude" on which everything else depends.  Belloc told Chesterton they agreed on two points: the Incarnation and Mary.  Belloc explained: "... in looking up to our dear Lady, the blessed Mother of God, I recommend to you that you suggest to her a comprehension for yourself, of what indeed is the permanent home of the soul.  If it is here, you will see it; if it is there, you will see it.  She never fails us.  She has never failed in my demand.  If you say 'I want this' as in your case to know one way or the other, she will give it you, as she will give health or necessary money or success in pure love.  She is our Blessed Mother."

His early writings, such as Orthodoxy (1908) and Ballad of the White Horse (1911), led others to anticipate his entry into the Catholic Church in 1922.  This final step was the result of a promise made at a Marian shrine in Italy.

Chesterton wrote in 1934 that Mary represented the "collective unity of Catholic life" about which Protestants had such strange notions.

"Now I can scarcely remember a time when the image of Our Lady did not stand up in my mind quite definitely at the mention of the thought of all these things.  I was quite distant from these things; and then doubtful about these things; and then disputing with the world for them, and with myself against them.  For that is the condition before conversion.  But when the figure was distant, or was dark and mysterious, or was scandal to my contemporaries, or was a challenge to myself, I never doubted that this figure was the figure of my faith; that she embodied, as a complete human being still only human, all that this thing has to say to humanity.  The instant I remembered the Catholic Church, I remembered her; when I tried to forget the Catholic Church, I tried to forget her."

When writing about Chaucer, he commented that devotion to Mary, "far from being a temporary malady from which one needed to be cured," was "generally chronic and (in some cases I have known) quite incurable."

Chesterton's Marian writings are found mainly in his poetry where he refers to the "seed of dogma and from that seed alone all that flowers of art and poetry and devotion spring."

One of his poems in The Queen of Seven Swords expressed his notion of the "wholeness" which underlies all expressions of devotion.

"In all thy thousand images we salute thee, claim and acclaim on all thy thousand thrones hewn out of multi-colored rocks and risen; stained with the stored-up sunsets in all tones--If in all tone and shades this shade I feel.  Come from the black cathedrals of Castille, claiming these flat black stones of Catalonia.  To thy most merciful face of night I kneel."

Surely other world religions, and even some fellow members of Christianity, must look at the Catholic Church with a head scratching bewilderment as September 15 arrives and the Church celebrates the liturgical memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows.

Why would anybody celebrate the suffering of anybody else?  And, more specifically, why celebrate the terrible heartfelt sufferings of an innocent mother, who had to stand by and experience her son's public execution by crucifixion, still one of history's most grisly forms of death?

All authentic Christians will grant the necessity and efficacy of the sufferings of Jesus Christ to redeem the world.  Humanity could not save itself.  Humanity could not offer just compensation for its own sins, for to offend an infinite Creator is to commit an infinite offense.

Most Christians, therefore, understand in essence the September 14 feast of the 'triumph' of the Cross of Jesus.  For through his suffering, death, and resurrection, Satan is defeated, death loses its sting, and the gates of paradise are flung open to all who will receive the pass of the Passion.  That is something to celebrate.  But why the Sorrowful Mother?

How busy can a brother be?  Right now, Brother Tom Pieper, S.M. '67, is filling in as resident campus minister at Marycrest while still ministering to the needs of Stuart Hall, where he has worked for fifteen years.

Question (from Robert Corgan): When was "Holy Mary, Mother of God ..." added to the "Hail Mary"?

Answer: The first parts are scripture from the Gospel of Saint Luke--Gabriel at the Annunciation and Mary and Elizabeth at the Visitation.  They were said by monks before the tenth and eleventh centuries.  In 1196, the Bishop of Paris ordered all the clergy to teach these Marian verses to all the people.  Why not add an intercession for all of us?  No one knows who wrote it but, by the 1500s, this intercession was already the tradition.

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