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For my power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9
The Sacred Virginity of 25 March, 1954. In this encyclical he explains that “the sacred virginity and perfect chastity consecrated to the service of God is certainly for the Church, one of the most precious treasures that its Author left as an inheritance. For this reason, the Holy Fathers emphasised that perpetual virginity is an excellent good of an essentially Christian character.”
Virginity is a state that concerns above all those who make the religious choice but, as Pius XII explains, it can also be the vocation of lay people, men and women, living in the world and “by private promise or vow completely abstain from marriage and sexual pleasures, in order to serve their neighbour more freely and to be united with God more easily and more intimately.”
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What we must be convinced of is that today, both through marriage and through virginity, a special mission is entrusted to women, especially to the young.
2. HOW THE REVOLUTION USES WOMEN TO ACHIEVE ITS ENDS
There is a project to destroy the Church and Christian civilisation and its existence becomes ever clearer to everyone. The popes have defined this project as the Revolution and indicated its historical phases. This project also uses women, to transform their role and through this transformation, to destroy society.
The Revolution is a centuries-old process of aggression against the Church and the Christian civilisation that already by the end of the nineteenth century understood that it had to take possession of the woman in order to destroy the family, society and, finally, the Church.
A professional revolutionary Vladimir Lenin has an emblematic expression: “The experience of all liberation movements attests that the success of a revolution depends on the degree of participation of women.”
The role of women in the Revolution is little known but terrible. As pointed out by Prof. Roberto de Mattei at the Rome Life Forum in 2017, in the leaded wagon that in April 1917 brought the professional revolutionaries to Petrograd, along with Lenin, travelled Inessa Armand (1874-1920), a member of the executive committee of the Bolshevik party, founder of the “Zhenotdel”, the “women’s department” of the party. She was a woman who had the absolute trust of Lenin, who was her lover. She died of cholera in 1920 and had the honour of being buried in the “red cemetery” under the walls of the Kremlin, as one of the main protagonists of the Revolution. Her name is less known than that of Aleksandra Kollontai (1872-1952), but her influence on Lenin was perhaps greater.2 Inessa Armand and Aleksandra Kollontai publicly advocated free love, in the belief that sexual liberation was a necessary premise for the realisation of a socialist society. On 17 December 1917, a few weeks after the Bolsheviks’ conquest of power, divorce was introduced; abortion was legalised in 1920 with no restriction (it was the first country in the world where this happened) prostitution and homosexuality were decriminalised in 1922.3 Trotsky wrote in 1923: “The first period of family destruction is still far from being achieved. The disinte-
The revolutionary project envisaged a precise strategy based not only on false ideas, such as the absolute equality between the roles of woman and man, but also on the bad tendencies of human nature, wounded by original sin, beginning with female pride. This programme, which was
gration process is in full swing.”4 Kollontai wrote, in 1920, in the journal Komunistka:
“In place of the individual and egoistic family, a great universal family of workers will develop, in which all the workers, men and women, will above all be comrades. This is what relations between men and women, in the communist society will be like. These new relations will ensure for humanity all the joys of a love unknown in the commercial society, of a love that is free and based on the true social equality of the partners. (…) The red flag of the social revolution which flies above Russia and is now being hoisted aloft in other countries of the world proclaims the approach of the heaven on earth to which humanity has been aspiring for centuries.”5
They were moved by a deep hatred of God and His creation.
planned in the Masonic lodges at the end of the nineteenth century, today, more than a hundred years later, has been fully realised.
The woman left the home and, introduced into the world of work, was immediately indoctrinated by the feminist, socialist, trade unionist mentality. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, in a still patriarchal society, feminists managed to occupy spaces, to found associations, to convey the poison of social claims. A historian of feminism writes:
“For many militant women, involvement in associations brought about a mental revolution; for each individual, it was an attestation of existence and meant the acquisition of a social span of time outside the home.”6
It is enough to read books on the history of feminism today to confirm that it was necessary to make women “free”, to make them equal to men and therefore to abolish the laws on parental authority; claiming new laws like divorce or abortion to liberate women from any control, both of the Church and of an objective moral law.
The premise of this diabolical work was the destruction of the woman’s sense of reserve. Whether a woman has a vocation to marriage, or to virginity, reserve is, in any case, a bulwark, in a sense the very foundation of her virtue.
Reserve “protects the mystery of persons and their love”. Reserve is modesty. Modesty “inspires one’s choice of clothing. It keeps silence and reserve. (…) Modesty inspires a way of life which makes it possible to resist the allurements of fashion and the pressures of prevailing ideologies”.7
The woman was therefore to be freed from this sense of reserve that oppressed her. It was necessary to make her taste “worldly” success, to make her understand that she could “realise herself” (a very fashionable phrase) outside of the family and make her forget God. It was the subtle return of the serpent’s temptation: you will become like God. And Eve falls once again. And once again the man is dragged to his downfall.
We could recall here how bad the revolution of 1968 was and its deep association with the feminist movements. The Masonic magazine L’Humanisme wrote at that time:
“The first conquest to be done is the conquest of women. Woman must be freed from the chains of the Church and from the law […]. To break down Catholicism, we must begin by suppressing the dignity of women, we must corrupt them together with the Church. We spread the practice of nudity: first the arms, then the legs, then all the rest. In the end, people will go
around naked, or almost, without batting an eyelid. And, once modesty has been removed, the sense of the sacred will be extinguished, the moral will be weakened and faith will die of asphyxiation.”
Pius XII said that “perhaps today the greatest sin in the world is that men have begun to lose the sense of sin.” (26 October 1946) The woman begins to lose the sense of sin by losing the sense of reserve.
Already at the beginning of the 1900s, Our Lady at Fatima had said to little Jacinta:
“The sins that bring more souls to hell are the sins of the flesh, certain fashions will be introduced that will greatly offend Our Lord. Those who serve God should not serve certain fashions. The Church has no fashions. Our Lord is always the same.”
Our Lord is always the same: the moral law does not change, it does not change with the variation of historical periods. Instead, how much has the female attitude changed, how much woman has changed in attitude towards God and towards society.
What followed was a consequence: in the middle of the twentieth century laws on divorce and abortion were introduced all over the world, deeply immodest fashions were propagated, sexual freedom spread. Thereafter we arrived at artificial fertilisation, the legalisation of homosexuality, the spread of gender ideology, euthanasia …
All this is part of the same revolutionary process that goes on and does not stop. We do not have the time to go into the details of its various phases, but it must be clear to all of you that the pivot of this was the revolution in the role of women. For a deeper examination of this process, I recommend the book Revolution and Counter-Revolution of Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira.
3. WHAT A YOUNG CATHOLIC CAN DO TODAY
a) What to do today? How should a woman fulfil her role today?
First of all, we cannot accept the process of de-Christianisation of society, because it detracts from the salvation of souls and, above all, from the honour and glory of God.
The present hour demands from the woman a Christian spirit capable of resisting and coping with current fashion; capable of reacting to the secularisation of society and the progress of materialism with an increasingly profound supernatural response. toms, the restoration of modesty and thus fight against immodest fashions that are among the most powerful means of corruption of souls, publicly fight against unjust laws that mainly corrupt young people, try to change the culture and the dominant mentality. Women must strive to bring society back to God, bringing it back to the Christian spirit and rebuilding its foundations on natural law and Christian principles.
What means do we have at our disposal to do all this? The means are those that have always been pointed out by the Church. 1) Prayer. To meet the demands of today’s struggle, natural forces are insufficient without grace and union with God. God’s help is obtained above all through prayer. Without a life of
To defend Christian civilisation, women must, first of all, dedicate themselves to the restoration of the family, the living cell of society. The woman, especially if she has made the choice to abstain from having her own family, must safeguard the institution of the family by fighting the currents and the doctrine that threaten the family, and above all, giving it a hierarchical sense, that of conjugal fidelity, and the Christian spirit.
But more generally, to give greater glory to God, the woman will have to contribute to the restoration of cusprayer, we cannot do anything. A holy life is lived through prayer, which is a necessary and indispensable means for any apostolate. The feminists, the revolutionary women (like the Russians Armand, Kallontai, the Spanish Dolores Ibarruri, the Polish Rosa Luxemburg) were moved in their action by a deep hatred for God. Catholic women need to have at the centre of their life a deep love for God: both the contemplative life and active apostolate start from this. And love is increased by prayer. The more we love God, the more we hate evil. The more we love God, the more we would like to spread His Kingship over souls, over society.
It should be added, that our prayer must, above all, appeal to the intercession of the Most Holy Virgin. If I had to list all the reasons for which we must ask for Her intercession, we should need another conference. I limit myself to the suggestion that you read the works of St Louis Grignion de Montfort to understand better why we owe everything to Her. Here are just two reasons: • Our Lady is the model of every
Christian woman, married, virgin, active, contemplative: in Her everything was accomplished to perfection and therefore she remains the example to be imitated in the certainty that the more we imitate
Her, the more we will be pleasing to God; • Our Lady appeared in the last century in Fatima to leave us a very strong and dramatic message. You are all well aware of it, but I would like to remind you what Our Lady said: “God wants to establish devotion to my Immaculate Heart in the world.” How can we think of not having recourse to Her, to Her Immaculate Heart, if it is God himself who asked us to do so? 2) Study. To defend the Church, women must carry out a doctrinal apostolate that can be considered a true spiritual motherhood of the utmost importance. To do this you need to prepare yourselves with study, knowing well and intensely the reasons for our faith in order to guard oneself against the mistakes and dangers of the world and help others do the same. Today, the very foundations of Catholic religious instruction have been lost. It is from there that we must start again, studying the Catechism and spreading it. However, one can not limit oneself to studying the great truths of the Church, it is necessary to know also what are the main errors that oppose these truths. The Church is experiencing an unprecedented crisis in its history: we need to understand its deep, doctrinal and moral causes if we want our remedies to be effective. 3) Action. Finally, for those who do not have a purely contemplative vocaTrue and the Beautiful in a society imbued with selfishness and the pursuit of personal interest; in a world in which the only professed philosophy of life is relativism according to which there are no absolute truths; in a society in which hedonistic culture reigns, according to which the only possible form of happiness is the satisfaction of one’s own pleasure and instincts
CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN (1641–1644). DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ. THE PRADO MUSEUM, MADRID.
tion, action is necessary: action that we must exercise for the good of our neighbour and society. This is a task for every woman today that naturally needs to relate to personal gifts and talents. None of us today is exempt from having to defend the Good, the
We must aspire, we must desire with all our strength to be a legion of Catholic women behind the banner of Christ the King who are committed to rebuilding society from its foundation, defending the social sovereignty of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
You may recall the famous text of St Theresa of the Infant Jesus:
To be Thy Spouse, O my Jesus, to be a daughter of Carmel, and by my union with Thee to be the mother of souls, should not all this content me? And yet other vocations make themselves felt – I feel called to the Priesthood and to the Apostolate – I would be a Martyr, a Doctor of the Church. I should like to accomplish the most heroic deeds – the spirit of the Crusader burns within me, and I long to die on the field of battle in defence of Holy Church.”
The mission of women, once restricted to the hearth and to charitable and educational works, although still necessary today, also extends, given the new needs, to very important political and social action.
We certainly must not think that this is normal, but today we do not live in normal times and therefore if in a deeply Christian society women would resume their role within families and monasteries, today this is not the case. Following the example of so many saints, we must be ready to embrace different vocations and missions but have as their sole end to give greater glory to God, to defend the Church and Christian civilisation.
b) Purity and fortitude
We must rediscover the mainly feminine virtues of purity, of the spirit of sacrifice, self-denial, patience, sweetness. Purity is not weakness or inexperience but a force that derives from the love of God, from the faith of His presence in us and from Christian pride (we have to be proud of being Catholic).
But we must not forget the very important virtue of fortitude. Today also the virtue of fortitude is necessary, especially for women, to respond to the demands of our faith. Furthermore, it is impossible to preserve purity without self-control and a continuous struggle against the world, against the spirit of evil and against passions. This struggle is the seal of the true Christian and demands from the woman and from the young strength and courage, often to the degree of heroism, like that of the martyrs; it requires a spirit of penance and sacrifice, the fruit of living faith and the condition of self-control. St Teresa of Avila recommended to her nuns: “In courage, you should not be women but strong men … indeed to put fear into the same men.”
Pius XII, in a speech to Catholic women, recalled that what is most asked of women today is purity and fortitude. Purity was the first virtue of Our Lady, he affirms and then recalls the example of St Agnes, quoting St Maximus:
“She looks in the face of those who flatter her, and rejects them; who threaten her, and despises them … She loves her purity so much that neither derisions, nor flames, nor torments, nor her executioners frighten her. (S. Maximi Taurin, Sermo 56 In natali S. Agnetis, Migne, PL 57, 644) (…)
“Fortitude and purity, this is what we ask for, as the two most precious ornaments of the heart, for you to the Immaculate Virgin and the martyr Agnes.”
Every woman always has a choice before her: to be Eve or Mary.
I hope that today we leave here being more convinced that we must choose Mary as our model and our safe haven. Convinced that we must fight with love and determination for the cause of God, following the example of many women who have preceded us and whose hidden virtues are only known in Paradise. Convinced that everything could depend on each one of us, knowing well that God does not need anyone, and therefore serving Him in that spirit of profound humility and abandonment to Divine Providence.
I would like to leave you with an example of a courageous and pure woman, chosen by God for a role that she herself did not understand and initially was certain to refuse because she did not feel equal to it: Joan of Arc.
St Joan8 is the model of the virgin warrior in whom two virtues, chastity and heroism, are marvellously conjoined. A virgin – writes Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira – to such an extent that she can assume the warrior function of man, fully retaining her femininity.9
“The complete ideal warrior of the Middle Ages, St Joan of Arc, shows the possibility of a new way of holiness for the woman, which is the sanctity that conforms par excellence to the praise that the Gospel addresses to the strong woman.”10
In the bull with which Benedict XV proclaimed her saint, he wrote:
“Joan always had the habit of often receiving the divine sacraments, observing the prescribed fasts, always attending church, participating every day in the sacrosanct sacrifice of the Mass, reciting fervent prayers in front of the images of Jesus hanging from the cross and the Blessed Virgin. The days of celebration, while the other girls took rest and gave themselves to the dances, she went to church, bringing candles, which she offered to the most holy Virgin and, by singular devotion to her, she would undertake pilgrimages to the solitary church of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Bermont. She was also transported by such a great love towards God and to the worship due to Him, that in the evening, even when she was in the country, as soon as she heard the church bell, bent her knees, she raised her mind to God. She distinguished herself by charity towards her neighbour. In fact, she refreshed the sick and willingly gave alms, housed the poor, to whom she willingly gave up her bed, sleeping herself on the ground. God filled these wonderful virtues with glory and honour in a girl of about 12 years, and he began to reveal his intentions.”11
Each of us must appreciate this example: the search for pleasure in God in small things, in small daily duties, in acts of charity towards one’s neighbour. But always ready to be docile
instruments in the hands of God, as was St Joan of Arc:
“who, in order to carry out divine orders, abandoned her family, left her female occupations, braced her arms and led the soldiers to the battle: not fearing death threats or the unjust sentence, which condemned her to be burned. Knowing that she was innocent, and not a heretic, witch, apostate and recidivist, surrounded by flames, offered prayers and supplications and repeated that she had done everything by God’s will, until, finding strength in seeing the cross, she gave up her spirit.”12
Here too we must be ready, not so much to suffer the stake, as having to suffer scorn, contempt, misunderstanding, and false accusations. Men’s misunderstanding does not matter when we know that we are doing God’s will, no sacrifice is too great when offered for the glory of God: this must be our compass and only this can give us true and profound joy in this life and eternal happiness in Paradise, which is the ultimate goal for each one of us.
Virginia Coda Nunziante is the Head of the International Relations Office of the Italian National Research Council, the main research institution in Italy. She is the President of the Italian Association for the Defence of the Family (Associazione Famiglia Domani), active since 1988. She is also the President of the Italian March for Life since its inception in Italy in 2011.
ENDNOTES:
1. Cited in R. Pernoud, Rizzoli, Milano 1986, p. 62. 2. Cf. The Letters to Lenin from Inessa Armand and Aleksandra Kollontai from March 1917 in V. I. Lenin, Opere complete, vol. 35, Editori Runiti, Roma 1952, pp. 210-212. 3. Cf. Giovanni Codevilla, Dalla Rivoluzione bolscevica alla
Federazione Russa, Franco Angeli, Rome 1996. 4. Leon Trotzkij, Problems of everyday life, Monad Press, New York 1986, p. 37. 5. First published in Komunistka, No 2, 1920, and in English in The Worker, 1920. Republished in Selected Writings of
Alexandra Kollontai, translated by Alix Holt (London, Allison & Busby, 1977) https://www.marxists.org/archive/ kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm [Accessed 30 November 2018]. 6. Fiorenza Taricone, Dal privato al politico: il salotto della contessa Spalletti Rasponi (From the Private to the Politician: the Parlor of Countess Spalletti Rasponi) (1903-1931), an article. 7. CCC 2522, 2523. 8. St Joan of Arc (1412-1431), the peasant of Domrémy, was favoured by heavenly voices who encouraged her to help the French King Charles VII in his work of liberation of France from the English. Arrested by the English she was tried for witchcraft and was burnt at the stake on 30 May, 1431. She was declared blessed by Pius X, 18 April 1909 and proclaimed a saint by Benedict XV on 10 July 1920. The conclusion of the epoch of St Joan of Arc can be known thanks two sources of exceptional historical value: the two processes that concern it. The first contains the transcription of Joan’s long and numerous interrogations during the last months of her life (February-May 1431). The second contains the depositions of about 120 eyewitnesses throughout her life. This process, which opened under the authority of Pope Callistus III, ended with a solemn sentence that declared no condemnation (7 July 1456; pp. 604-610) (cf. Procès de Condamnation de Jeanne d’Arc, 3 vols and Procès en
Nullité de la Condamnation de Jeanne d’Arc, Klincksieck, Paris l960-1989, 5 vols). 9. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, A Cavalaria, pp. 99-100. 10. CSN, 14 September 1991. 11. Benedict XV, Divine Bull, on 16 May 1920. 12. Ibid.
Next year’s Voice of the Family weekend of prayer and formation for young adults will take place in Rome on 16-20 October 2019.
FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE EMAIL:youth@voiceofthefamily.com
How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to Thy word. - Psalm 119:9
Reflections on the vocation to the contemplative life
This letter from an enclosed Carmelite nun was addressed to the young women at the Voice of the Family conference Created for heaven: the mission of Catholic young adults in today’s world. We are very happy to make it available to all!
Dear young people,
In the world in which we live, which seems to have completely forgotten the supernatural order, and therefore the existence of God, it is natural to wonder what the contemplative life is, why it exists and whether it is necessary for it to continue to exist. To answer these questions, we must examine history and ask ourselves: why, in the course of 2000 years of Christianity, monks and nuns have withdrawn into solitude, so-called “cloisters” have been built, and these have even become synonyms of the environment for the kind of life that is defined precisely as “claustral”? The contemplative life, which to modern man appears as an escape from the world and its challenges, is really the manifestation of the greatest love that a creature can render to his Creator. This is not an escape from the world, but a total donation to the world by means of the greatest sacrifice. The enclosure is born of the action of the Holy Spirit, thanks to which love is diffused in our hearts: “It is not fear, nor repentance, nor only prudence that the solitudes of the monasteries inhabit. It is the love of God!” said Pope Pius XII. These words are echoed by the words of a fourth-century hermit: “Because of Christ, I remain in these walls.”
To understand the contemplative life, which perhaps may seem an incomprehensible mystery, it is necessary to go back to the origins of monasticism. The first centuries of the Church, as we know, were characterised by the persecutions of the Roman emperors against the Christians who, with their blood, gave the supreme testimony of love. When the persecutions ceased under Emperor Constantine, the most fervent Christians – unable to shed their blood – retired to the deserts to offer God the martyrdom of their life, spent in the solitude of a life of prayer and penance. Contemplative life is born, therefore, as a substitution of the martyrdom of blood and, consequently, as the form of supreme donation to God.
Through separation from the world, the monk or nun is the heir of the martyr. The monk is like the martyr not only for his asceticism and for his renunciations, for his heroic perseverance and for his special consecration to the Passion of Christ, but also for his voluntary solitude. Tertullian said that the martyr in prison is like a monk. And the monk in his cell is like a martyr. In the course of history, this aspect of the enclosure understood as voluntary imprisonment became increasingly relevant, assuming ever more precise rules, and in this way became one of the principal means of evangelising Europe. St Benedict, in fact, with his famous rule, spread the Christian faith throughout pagan Europe not with preaching but with the presence of monasteries of monks, which constituted a living and silent preaching of the Christian faith.
From the beginning, monasticism appeared as a powerful method of reform for the Church, thanks to its purity and its detachment from the world. Monastic life testifies to mankind that God exists and
that His Kingdom, though beginning in this world, is not of this world. It was up to the monks to withdraw from the world, to live there as strangers in order to become, as far as possible for human frailty, citizens of Paradise associated with the Angels of Heaven.
In the twelfth century the contemplative life had such a development that St Peter Damian could say: “It seemed that the whole world became a hermitage.” And this flowering was not an escape from the world, but a confirmation of the apostolic dimension of the contemplative life. St Aelred told his sister that his heart should be as big as the world: “Bring the whole world together in the depths of your love and here, all together, contemplate the good and the bad, rejoice on one and cry over the other. There you fix your gaze on those who suffer, on those who are oppressed, and suffer with them.” Contemplatives – we read in a rule for hermits – “should lead such a holy life that the whole Church, that is, all the Christian people, can rely on them, feel supported, because they elevate others through their holiness of life and their fervent prayers. A contemplative is united to the Church as the anchor to a ship to keep it safe amid waves and storms.”
William of Saint Thierry, a great friend of St Bernard, sings the praises of the enclosure playing on the etymology of the two terms: the cell (which is the place where the nun lives) and Heaven [caelum in Latin]. “The cell,” he writes, “hides the nun from the world and opens Heaven to her.”
“For the cell [cella] and Heaven [caelum] are akin to one another. And what is hidden in the heavens is also hidden in the cells; the same occupation characterises both the one and the other. And what is this? To dedicate oneself to God, to enjoy God.”
The nuns remain in the house of God, in the monastery, in the cell, where they are enclosed in their Paradise which is “an open prison without chains” (St Bernard), while the world for them would be a prison. Separated from the world, they lead a hidden life, knowing that their vocation is not to preach but to pray and keep silence, since they will teach others not by word but by example. For according to St Bernard, the nun “must help the earthly Jerusalem to seek the heavenly Jerusalem”.
If religious life – in the broader sense – is an imitation of the life of Our Lord, and all the different forms of religious life imitate a particular aspect of the life of Jesus, the contemplative life imitates Jesus’s hidden life for thirty years, Jesus led into the desert by the Holy Spirit, Jesus in the solitude of the Cross, and finally Jesus in the Eucharist. It is love that urges us to always seek the Lord, to live in solitude with Him, to desire to know Him more every day, to be united to Him in a constant intimacy, collaborating in His Redemption. “You are the collaborators with God Himself and support of the weak and wavering members of his ineffable Body,” wrote St Clare to St Agnes of Prague.
The ultimate goal of a nun is not different from that of other Christians; it is the perfection of charity. It is however – thanks to a special grace of God her specific vocation – as fully understood, the unique excellence of this end, of the greatness, purity and tenderness of God, whom St Francis loved to call “the Beautiful”. She has known “the great love” (Eph 2:4) with which the Father has loved her freely and understood that such love should be preferred to everyone else, love without measure until the total gift of self. The nun could not imagine even for a moment that she no longer loved the one who has loved her so much that He “gave Himself for her”, however, she also desires to respond with a greater love, with the gift of her life. The enclosure is therefore a choice of love, of the supreme love of a creature for her Creator.
If the martyrs testify to their faith not through the word but through death, the nuns do it through the example of their hidden life with Christ. They witness that God exists, that there is a supernatural order of things, for which they live and in which they are consumed in the hidden life that the world despises. And yet, after all, the world understands the preciousness of this life, because, when it wants to persecute the Church, it usually always starts from the destruction of the monasteries: this is what happened, for example, during the French Revolution. “The monks are lighthouses that shine from above to illuminate those who come towards them from afar,” said St John Chrysostom.
“Standing in the harbour, they invite everyone to share their tranquillity, not allowing anyone who sees them to be shipwrecked or to remain in darkness.”
“Model for the monks are the Angels,” asserted St John Climacus “the model for all men is the monk.”
The first strictly cloistered form of life for women was given by St Clare of Assisi. It is said of her that she was a light which “remained enclosed in secret cloisters, and outside it emitted sparkling rays; it was gathered together in a strict convent, and it was sprinkled upon the entire age; it was guarded within, and it flowed forth outside.” (Bull of canonisation) Three centuries later in Spain, St Teresa of Ávila began the reform of the Discalced Carmelites, promoting solitude and the cloister as the indispensable ascetic means for the sanctification of the nuns and the building up of the Church. One of the main reasons that prompted the Spanish Saint to start the reform was the spread of the Protestant heresy by Luther’s disastrous action.
“… at this time,” she wrote, “I received news of the damage and slaughter that the Lutherans had done in France and how much this unfortunate sect was increasing. I felt great pain and I begged the Lord, as I could, to remedy so much evil. It seemed to me that I would give my life a thousand times to save one of the many souls lost there. But, seeing myself as a woman and worthless, unable to be useful in a way I wanted to serve the Lord, being anxious that He has so many enemies and so few friends, I decided to do what little depended on me. […] I thought that (we nuns), all dedicated to prayer for the defenders of the Church, for the preachers and for the theologians who support her, we would help as best we could my Lord, so persecuted by those who have benefited so much; by these traitors appearing to want to crucify him again and that he has no place to lay his head.”
Since the reform of St Teresa, Carmel has generated many holy souls from the silence of its strict enclosure, some raised to the honours of the altars, others – the most numerous – remained unknown but no less important for the life of the Church. From the depths of the cloister, the nuns are the pulsating heart of the Church, as St Thérèse of the Child Jesus said – the angelic Carmelite of Lisieux, known all over the world, and declared by Pius XI “patroness of all missions”; she who at the age of fourteen had wished to leave to evangelise the pagan lands, but then considered it more perfect “to sacrifice all the consolations and satisfactions of the external apostolate” and to choose a cloistered life “to suffer more in the monotony of an austere life and so save more souls”. With this act, Pius XI showed the whole apostolic dimension of the contemplatives, whose prayer embraces the whole world, although their visible apostolate is restricted and unknown. Young Thérèse of Lisieux possessed the zeal of the apostles, the ardour of the martyrs and the missionaries, who are the different members of the Body of Christ, which is the Church. None of these vocations, however, satisfied her desire to love God, since she could not possess them all at the same time. Then she realised that the Church has a heart, and this heart throbs with love, and this heart gives courage to the martyrs, strength to the missionaries, constancy to the virgins. And she realised that to have all the vocations it was necessary to be that heart, that is, love.
“Then,” she writes, “with great joy and ecstasy of the soul I cried out: O Jesus, my love, I finally found my vocation. My vocation is love. Yes, I found my place in the Church, and you gave me this place, O my God. In the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be love and in this way I will be everything and my desire will result in reality.”
But to “be love” it was necessary to renounce all that is not God to live only for him, which is Love by essence: this she did by living in the dark solitude of Carmel.
Modern Christianity tends to condemn the contemplative life, considering it a selfish choice that dismisses the numerous needs of humanity. But this is a 2000-year-old accusation! It is, at a closer look, the accusation of Martha, who worked – mind you! – for the Lord, against her sister Mary, who instead – ecstatic – sat at the feet of the same Lord, listening to His words of eternal life. St Augustine says that, in this episode, the contemplative life – represented by Mary – has found a definite advocate like no other, who is the Lord Himself, who said then and for all the centuries to come: “Mary has chosen the better part that will not be taken from her.”(Lk. 10:42) The contemplative life is the better part, since it is the choice – on earth – of what we will do in Heaven. Pope Pius XI comments: “Those who lead, for their state, a contemplative and solitary life, to fix the gaze of the spirit with all their strength to the contemplation of the divine mysteries and eternal truths, those it must be proclaimed with certainty, have chosen the better part.”
This “better part” by many spiritual authors is compared to the “search for the Face of God”. To seek the Face of God means, according to the Scriptures, to try to “see God” – to perceive His presence, to live for Him and with Him in an incessant dialogue of love. The Holy Scriptures are all filled with this desire: “O God, my God, to thee do I watch at break of day. For thee my soul hath thirsted … so in the sanctuary have I come before thee, to see thy power and thy glory.” (Ps. 62)
St Augustine comments: “Do you want to fulfil this desire: to see the face of God? Do nothing else. Fix yourselves only on this end and it alone will suffice … He who loves God says: All that is not He has no sweetness for me. If my Lord wants to give me a gift, He will take away everything and give Himself to me.”
It is only love that nourishes this search for the Face of God. The nun is “the one in love with God” who wants to see His beautiful Face. “Love,” said St Peter Chrysologus, “cannot help but see what it loves. So all the saints valued very little what they had accomplished, if they were not to come to see God.” Love is unifying by definition: it cannot but desire the presence and possession of the Beloved. Now, this is exactly what contemplation accomplishes: since it is an act of knowledge inspired by love, it allows God to live in a special way in our hearts “as what is known is in the one who knows and what is loved in those who love,” teaches St Thomas. When one loves, it is then impossible to wait for the other life to see the face of the Beloved: one seeks it and finds it in this life through contemplation, which is a simple glance at the beatifying Face of God.
Cloistered life is therefore a choice of love, of the most radical love that can be chosen by a human creature. And the model of this choice is the Blessed Virgin, the one whose origin – like all her life – disappear in silence. The Gospel teaches us that she received the Angel’s announcement in the solitude of her house in Nazareth, and throughout her life she kept the words of the Son in the silence of her heart and in her hidden life. And just as the Holy Virgin was not only the physical mother of Christ, but also the spiritual mother of Her members who form the Church, generating them under the Cross, so nuns are called to participate in this unlimited fruitfulness of the Mother of God and have all men as their children. St Ambrose said that the nuns, even if they do not know the pains of childbirth, have “a most numerous posterity”. And this happens by bringing the grace of God into the hearts of men through prayer and penance. This is the work of contemplative life.
“This life,” wrote a Benedictine monk, “is an instruction, and today perhaps that is what our world needs most. This preaching is the voice of those who say nothing, who speak of God and attract with prayer grace on the world.”
The Imitation of Christ elevates this sublime prayer to God – with which I conclude and which I leave you with for meditation – that, besides being a synthesis of the contemplative life, is a call for every soul to raise the gaze from the earth to Heaven, from the time to eternity and, finally, from man to God: “Therefore, whatever You give me besides Yourself, whatever You reveal to me concerning Yourself, and whatever You promise, is too small and insufficient when I do not see and fully enjoy You alone. For my heart cannot rest or be fully content until, rising above all gifts and every created thing, it rests in You.”
