Without contemplation, St. Thomas Aquinas’ "Summa Theologica" is seen as a great stained-glass window, but from the outside. But with contemplation, his masterwork is seen, as if from the inside, iridescent with all the brilliance with which he was able to write, thanks to the Holy Spirit who guided his every word and his every [...]
Quietism in all its different manifestations seemed to encourage the reformer’s belief that our own efforts are useless and even blasphemous. Its adherents were not only encouraged to do absolutely nothing in prayer, but to do nothing about temptations either, that could only be overcome with God’s grace. Miguel de Molinos Molinos, the [...]
The reforms sweeping through the Church across Europe in the century leading up to the Reformation should put to bed the later Protestant assertion that Catholic spirituality was in a state of “terminal decline” prior to Martin Luther hammering his 95 articles to the door of the church in Wurttemberg in 1517. If you visit [...]
It may sound fine to proclaim a new age in which the primacy of love was to be paramount, as it was in the beginning. But it must not be forgotten that the love Francis was talking about was God’s love, the love that can change all things including us. It was thanks to St [...]
Why is it that prayer is fundamental to politics? Politics exists to secure the common good. An essential element of the common good is that man should be able to fulfill himself at all levels. The religious level cannot be excluded. The civilization in which we find ourselves makes prayer difficult. The first thing that [...]
It can be seen how St Francis was able to see, not just with such clarity, but in poetry and in technicolor what St Paul originally called “God’s Secret Plan”, and to see the way to enter into it by entering through Love into the one who embodied it in his mystical body. I have [...]
It is above all Saint Bernard, particularly through his innovative mystical theology, who shaped the theology of the later Middle Ages and also of modern times. The history of Christian spirituality is rather like a roller coaster with continual ups and downs, as renewal is followed by decline as the human spirit inevitably falters and [...]
The God-given spirituality of love that was the mainspring of early Christianity was still enshrined in the monastic life after Constantine became emperor and Christianity was proclaimed the official religion of the Roman Empire by Theodosius the Great in AD 381. It was this consecrated form of life that was now used to renew the [...]
The way in which God’s plan was implemented in the first centuries after Jesus' resurrection was the wonder of the world. It should still be the wonder of the world today, if it had not been destroyed in the fourth century by a heretic called Arius, who denied that Christ was God. In the fourth [...]
The living water of God’s saving work spreads out through the world into many diverse tributaries. Just as much as we need God to call preachers to labor in the vineyard, so we need Christians who aren’t called to preach themselves to support the Church’s mission by their prayers. Saint Paul, the paradigmatic preacher, had [...]
It is only his love given in contemplation that can suffuse and surcharge our impoverished love with the only love that can lead us back from Paradise lost to Paradise regained. The very reason why Christ sent out his love on the first Pentecost day was so that it could enter into all who would [...]
When purification is complete mystics enter immediately into the Mystical Marriage with Christ, often called the Transforming Union. It is then that for the first time they are able to experience the continual contemplation of God that Jesus experienced at every moment of his life on earth. When I was a small boy, I used [...]
For the vast majority of people the night of purification continues for their lifetime on earth. But the truth is that our final destination is union with God, in, with and through Christ, when what happened to him on Mount Tabor will begin to happen to us. The great Franciscan theologian Blessed John Duns Scotus [...]
Immediately after Jesus was baptised in the Jordan by St John the Baptist, “The Spirit drove him out into the desert and he remained there for forty days and was tempted by Satan” (Mark 1:13). St Matthew describes these temptations and the other evangelists show how his tussles with the devil continued in one way [...]