St Paul and Covid-19

What should we make of this Covid business?  I would not belittle the grief of those who have lost elderly parents or other friends or relations to an untimely death.  Yet from my vantage point it has seemed to me from the start like playing at the plague.  No doubt the fact that it came from China helped; people have a vague memory of having learned in school that the Black Death did the same.  If it had come from Brazil or Nigeria, I doubt it would have so impressed our minds. 

I have been living, by chance, rather off the beaten track since it all began, so perhaps my information is inadequate, but I know of no one personally of whom I can say with confidence that he died from it.  The only person whom I know who might have done so is an octogenarian who was also receiving chemotherapy.  And they tell us that life can never be the same again?  This is not a plague: that is when people wake up in the morning feeling fine and are dead by night-fall.

Some of St Paul’s words have been coming to mind recently: Because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved, therefore God shall send them the operation of error, to believe lying.  Widespread acceptance of lying words of men about what is needful for the salvation of the body would at any rate be a just punishment for widespread rejection of the truthful words of God about what is needful for the salvation of the soul.

 

The Mystical City of God

The book called The Mystical City of God contains an account in four large volumes of the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, said to have been revealed to a seventeenth century Spanish nun, Mary of Agreda.  I first heard about it some fifteen years ago.  At the time I was extremely cautious, partly because the person telling me about it, while not stupid, seemed a bit fanciful; partly because of some of things which this person said it contained (see below); and partly (if truth be told) because of a certain prejudice on my part against Spain and the Baroque.

(When he was about six years old, C.S. ‘Jack’ Lewis had this precocious conversation with his father:

Jack: ‘Daddy, I have a prejudice against the French.’  His father, amused: ‘Why’s that, Jack?’  Jack: ‘If I knew why, it wouldn’t be a prejudice.’)

However, I filed the book’s title in my memory, especially as the authoress was a ‘Venerable’, and I was reminded of it not long ago by seeing it taken seriously in a scholarly compendium of Mariology published in 2007 with a foreword by Cardinal Burke.  A few months ago I started investigating it for myself.  I am still a long way from having read the whole work, which is monumental.  But already I can say that it is one of the most astonishing things I have ever come across.

Venerable Mary of Agreda, in religion, Sr Mary of Jesus, and before that, Maria Coronel y de Arana, lived from 1602 to 1665, being of Jewish ancestry on her father’s side.  She, along with her sister and both her parents, entered religious life when she was 16; becoming abbess in her twenties, she governed her community for most of the rest of her life.  She wrote out the life of our Lady not once but three times, having obediently burned the first two manuscripts when told to do so by temporary confessors at her monastery.  Her own advice was regularly sought by King Philip IV of Spain – her surviving correspondence with the king contains more than 600 letters.

The Mystical City of God certainly contains things which at first sight are startling, and which may sound like pious exaggerations or even doubtfully to be within the bounds of orthodoxy.  Among these things are that our Lady at her birth was taken bodily into heaven to be brought before the throne of God; that she received the beatific vision several times in the course of life; and that she had the use of reason from the first moment of her existence.

Mary of Agreda herself was concerned about the first of these statements, asking how it was compatible with the Church’s belief that the gates of heaven were opened only after Christ’s death.  She says that our Lady told her that while this is indeed the law that applies to mankind in general, she was herself exempted from it in virtue of the foreseen merits of Christ; and that as regards the possibility of human beings entering heaven bodily before death, she reminded her of how St Paul says he was taken into the third heaven, and that he does not know whether it was in the body or not, thereby leaving open the possibility that someone might so enter.

Again, as regards the possibility of receiving the vision of God in a transitory way in the life, St Augustine and St Thomas both favour the opinion that St Paul experienced this too (see Summa theologiae, 2a 2ae 175, 3).  Suarez likewise holds that our Lady possessed the use of reason from the first instant of her conception – he argues that St John the Baptist possessed it even before birth, since his ‘exulting’ in his mother’s womb is not understood by the fathers as a mere metaphor, and that it was fitting that Mary should possess a higher privilege than he.

Yet the book is also remarkable in the other direction, in the emphasis that it places on our Lady’s abasing herself before God.  For example, Mary of Agreda writes that it was the custom of the Blessed Virgin to prostrate herself before the child Jesus at the beginning and end of each day, asking pardon for any faults of which she might have been guilty in His regard.  That is startling: but if she had not received the revelation at that point of her own impeccability, it would I suppose have been the right course of action, since no one can know without revelation that he is not guilty of some fault in God’s sight.

(Reflecting on how the book might be criticised from opposite sides, both for unduly exalting and unduly abasing our Lady, I was reminded of Chesterton’s remark that when you hear some person or institution criticised for diametrically opposite reasons – he was thinking of the things that he had heard in his youth about the Church herself – then you have good ground for assuming that that person or institution has it right.)

The book is rigorous and precise: there is a section in volume one on our Lady’s possession of the cardinal virtues which could serve any professor of ethics for a commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics.  It throws additional light on the gospel: for example, there is a psychologically plausible description of how Judas went from being an enthusiastic follower of Christ to a traitor.  Above all, it is a supernatural book, by which I mean that it is interested not so much in the material details of our Lady’s earthly life – here it contrasts with Anne Catherine Emmerich – as with the state of her soul, and with the relevance of her life for the spiritual lives of Christians.

Extraordinary claims require very strong evidence.  As regards the authenticity of this book, good evidence is furnished by the facts of Mary of Agreda’s own life.  It seems certain that she evangelised the Indians of New Mexico without ever leaving her convent – see this series of short articles (this link is not necessarily a general endorsement of the entire site.)  She was declared venerable by Pope Clement X less than ten years after her death.  It appears that French Jansenists, hostile to what they deemed the book’s excesses, succeeded by some interpolations or mistranslations in having it put briefly on the index, and perhaps as a result her cause for beatification stalled.  Her coffin was opened for the first time in 1909, and the body was found incorrupt.  A second investigation of the body, in 1989, found that no changes had occurred in it.  It is venerated in the conventual chapel in Agreda, in the north east of Spain.

 

St Paul on Purgatory

What do people mean by being baptised on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptised on their behalf? Why am I in peril every hour?

St Francis de Sales comments:-

This passage properly understood evidently shows that it was the custom of the primitive Church to watch, pray, and fast for the souls of the departed. For, firstly, in the Scriptures ‘to be baptised’ is often taken for afflictions and penances; as in St Luke, chapter XII, where our Lord speaking of his Passion says, ‘I have a baptism wherewith I am to be baptised, and how am I straitened until it be accomplished!’ – and in St Mark, chapter X, he says, ‘Can you drink of the chalice that I drink of, or be baptised with the baptism wherewith I am baptised?’; in which places our Lord calls pains and afflictions baptism. This then is the sense of that Scripture: if the dead rise not again, what is the use of mortifying and afflicting oneself, of praying for and fasting for the dead? And indeed this sentence of St Paul resembles that of the Machabees, ‘It is superfluous and vain to pray for the dead if the dead rise not again’ .

But secondly, it must not be said that the baptism of which St Paul speaks is only a baptism of grief and tears, and not of fasts, prayers and other works. For thus understood, his conclusion would be very false. The conclusion he means to draw is that if the dead rise not again, and if the soul is mortal, in vain do we afflict ourselves for the dead. But, I pray you, should we not have more occasion to afflict ourselves by sadness for the death of friends if they rise no more? (‘The Catholic Controversy’, III, V).

Bellarmine adds:-

This interpretation fits best with what follows, ‘Why am I in peril every hour?’, as if to say, ‘why do some afflict themselves in praying for the dead, and why do I afflict myself in preaching the gospel, if there is no resurrection of the dead?’

And again:-

 It is objected that the apostle should not have said, ‘why are people baptised on their behalf?’ but ‘why are we baptised on their behalf?’, since all Christians pray for the dead. I answer that the apostle wished to argue not from the custom of Christians, which might be rejected by the unbelievers as being something new, but from the custom of the Jews, who like their ancestors and following the example of the Scripture fasted and prayed for the dead (‘Controversies’, VI, VI).

St Ephraim, ‘the harp of the Holy Ghost’, had already expounded St Paul in this way, sixteen hundred years ago.

 

St Robert Bellarmine: Antichrist rising

St Paul’s second epistle to the Thessalonians is a locus classicus:-

And you know what withholds, that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity already works; only he who now holds is to hold until he be taken out of the way. And then that wicked one shall be revealed (2 Thess. 2).

Bellarmine comments:-

Here Paul speaks, not venturing to write openly about the overthrow of the Roman Empire, which nevertheless he had clearly explained when he was with them, and the meaning is: ‘Do you know what hinders the coming of antichrist? I told you, the Roman Empire hinders it, because its sins are not yet completed, and Antichrist, who will take this empire out of the way on account of its sins, will not come until they are completed. And so the one who now holds is to hold, that is, to reign, until he be taken out of the way, that is, abolished, and then that wicked one will be revealed (Tomus II, Liber III, caput V).

As Bellarmine shows in loc., this is a common view among the fathers, even though Augustine acknowledges that other interpretations are possible.  That the Roman imperial power was the historic force preventing Christ’s enemies from coalescing under one visible head was believed, strange as it may seem, even when the emperors were pagans and persecutors. It was still believed, naturally enough, when the emperors became the Church’s patrons   and protectors. It is as if, the birth of our Lord having been heralded by the decree going forth from Caesar Augustus, Caesar Augustus’s power must disappear before the anti-decree will go forth. But has not this been, as Maritain wrote in his study of St Paul, disproved by the facts?

The Eastern Roman Empire continued until Whit Tuesday, 1453. Within a lifetime the Protestant revolt had begun: the greatest undermining of the faith yet known. The Emperors of the West continued to have the Roman name until August 6th, 1806. In the lifetime that followed this, the basis of natural religion, namely belief in a personal God, ceased to be part of the general heritage of mankind. Insofar as the Roman imperial power and tradition continued, it was vested in the Austrian emperors until Hallowe’en 1918. In the lifetime that followed this date, natural law was destroyed. The Fathers, and Bellarmine, do not say that Antichrist would appear the day after the dethroning of the last emperor, but that the imperial power was preventing his arrival. Anti-Christian forces would always be at work, but independently one of another; once the imperial power was removed, they would, somehow, be freed to co-ordinate their efforts in view of a supreme attack. Finally, the last heir apparent to a reigning emperor died last year on Independence Day. It remains to be seen what will happen next.

 

30th June

Today in the old calendar falls the commemoration of St Paul, the apostle who resisted Peter to his face while remaining humbly subject to him in his heart. It is also the 24th anniversary of the consecrations at Econe by which Archbishop Lefebvre made provision for his work to continue after his death. I well remember the day, though I was only a school-boy at a typical post-conciliar Catholic school and had no connections with ‘traditionalist milieux’. Our head of R.E., who, as I realised some years later, was a modernist, came into our classroom quite excited at the end of the day, and told us that something historic was happening. He told us about the Eastern schism and about the Protestant Reformation, and then told us that today a third schism was taking place. Yes, it was a very potted version of church history. He explained that until the 1960’s, Catholics had generally thought that if people in other religions were ever saved, it would be in spite of their religions and not because of them. But now, he said, the Church had changed her ideas and decided that people in other religions could be saved because of their religions, not just in spite of them. Only one French archbishop had refused to accept the new ideas, and now he was going into schism by ordaining some bishops. Little catechised though I was, I remember thinking that though this French archbishop must be a very bad person to be breaking away from the Church, I preferred the old ideas to the new ones.

It is surely a unique case in Church history (Aeliane, correct me if I err.) There have been plenty of people who have broken with the Church and still wanted to claim the name of Catholic. But this is a movement which not only acknowledges all the dogmas, but which also recognises the Pope and the bishops whom he appoints as the legitimate rulers of the Church, and denies that its own bishops and priests have any power of governance. I suppose the Anglican Papalists are or were similar, but they were clearly not members of the Catholic Church. It is an unnatural situation and therefore surely cannot endure. The SSPX general chapter begins today and looks likely to be a crucial one. A novena is being promoted, starting today: the Veni, Creator Spiritus, ‘Immaculate heart of Mary, pray for us’ (thrice), ‘St Pius X, pray for us’. And maybe we could also ask St Paul to speak to St Peter about it all.