Religious booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
Of dandies pilgrims Lawrence S. Cunningham 1991 marked the fourth centenary of the death of the great Spanish mystic and poet, John of the Cross. To celebrate that event, Kieran Kavanaugh,...
...Their stumbling efforts to solve problems concerning the Eucharist in communities where not all are Roman Catholic or even Christian...
...That would have been a much more fruitful source to meditate upon than the rather labored reflection he offers contrasting Job and Qoheleth's views on suffering...
...The only lingering affectation from the 1890s was his penchant for black linen bedding and his continued interest in poetry...
...McCormack's book is a thoroughly researched and delightfully written study of the man, his poetry, and his circle...
...To put the matter somewhat simplistically: Luther believed in the unmerited grace of God in Christ while Erasmus believed in the philosophy of Christ retrievable through philology broadly understood...
...how widespread it is in Hispanic lands...
...Finally, I found it odd that in his discussion of the Penitentes he had nothing to say about the source of the affective historicizing of Christ's passion as a result of the kind of piety inspired by Francis of Assisi and the subsequent Franciscan charism...
...Recent official documents from Rome, Puebla, and Medellin have taken account of this folk piety...
...Today, there are nearly ninety such houses, spread all over Europe, the Americas, Africa, India, and the Middle East, where "assistants" live with persons suffering from deep physical and mental handicaps...
...While he had little patience for liturgical or sacramental theology, his piety was genuine and some of his prayers still inspire and edify...
...His books were wildly popular in their own day with some of them running through many editions and enjoying wide translation...
...Born (1928) into an illustrious family of Canadian diplomats, Vanier's life evolved from a naval career into a spiritual search which brought him into contact with the ferment of pre-Vatican II Catholic renewal...
...John Gray (1866-1934), born into the working class in London, managed, while barely out of his teens, to achieve a fairly decent literary education (self-taught) and to associate himself, through dint of hard work, chance meetings, and some luck, into the circle of poets who in the 1880s and 1890s were known as the Decadents...
...I will leave it to the theoreticians to decide how valid these rereadings are...
...Inspired by the gospel vision of love, sacrificial poverty, sharing, and community, the L'Arche communities attempt a new form of Christian living somewhere in the interstices between a religious order and a commune...
...McConica's study of Erasmus of Rotterdam reflects well the merits of the series...
...This anthology, might be a useful work to consult in an academic library but only the most dedicated, I suspect, would be tempted to buy it...
...This latest one is a collection of essays designed, at least in part, to take issue with the theories of the anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner and, to a lesser degree, the work of the phenomenologist, Mircea Eliade...
...their very nature uncovers problems that range from the simple issue of sexuality to the inevitable tensions between professionalization and simple apostolic witness...
...For me, what was far more interesting (but not worth the price of this thin, cheaply printed, volume) was the descriptive work of the writers, all of whom, in good anthropological fashion, were out in the field, notebook and tape recorder in hand...
...The air was filled with Verlaine, Baudelaire, and the odor of green carnations...
...In 1964, encouraged by his friend and spiritual director, Pere Philippe, Vanier began to live with severely handicapped people in a community setting to which he gave the name L' Arche (The Ark...
...Gilbert Romero would number himself among the latter as his book on religiosidad popular makes clear...
...He also slyly notes the paradox of a shrine devoted to two women (Mary and Bernadette) totally in the hands of a male dominated sodality, albeit a lay one...
...While not a substitute for the standard biographies of Huizinga, Bainton, and Phillips, this is certainly as good a brief introduction as one could hope for...
...This was the roaring age of Oscar Wilde (Gray is thought, with good reason, to be the inspiration for Wilde's fictional character, Dorian Gray), Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Pater, and a bevy of other "aesthetes" who produced a fair mountain of slim, elegant volumes of poetry with much of it inspired by the Symbolists in France, and not an insignificant amount of it redolent of "Uranian" (read: homosexual) sensibilities...
...I am grateful for Spink's sympathetic portrait of Jean Vanier just as we are goaded to think more on, and pay attention to, the experiments in love and service that he, and many others in the church, are attempting to incarnate...
...One may purchase, for example, the complete works of John of the Cross in one volume for just under $9...
...Erasmus can lay fair claim to be a primary inspiration behind the great sixteenth century retrieval of the Bible in the vernacular just as he can be crowned as a supreme theorist of humanist educational reform...
...Readers unfamiliar with the Institute of Carmelite Studies (ICS) may wish to know of their splendid publishing program...
...Some (e.g., Juan Luis Segundo) have seen it as a deadening impediment to a truly liberating Christianity while others have asked for a deepened analysis of such piety and an appreciation of its liberating potential...
...His priestly years were spent in...
...McConica also notes that Erasmus made a notable effort at ecumenism as he tried mightily to heal the breach between Luther and Rome...
...Connected to the French movement Eau Vive, Vanier spent time in a Trappist monastery and earned a doctorate in ethics from the Institut Catholique in Paris...
...and the fraternity of the Penitentes) against the background of biblical motifs, especially as they derive from the Old Testament, which is his particular field of expertise...
...In addition to the work under review, they have produced careful translations of the great Carmelite writers (Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Elizabeth of the Trinity, Edith Stein, etc...
...It should not surprise us that Luther grumbled about the Erasmian penchant for the writings of Jerome at the expense of sympathy for Augustine...
...Pilgrimage does not result, pace the Turners, in a sense of communitas nor does the pilgrimage location, pace Eliade, always consist of dwelling in a sacred space homologized as an axis between heaven and earth...
...It is true that both men directed their hatred (and vitriol) at the same targets: monasticism, the mendicant orders, late medieval popular devotions, and scholastic theology just as they shared a common love for biblical studies and patristic literature...
...Again, mercifully, they do not often stray into theology...
...Nonetheless, I did learn a good deal from Romero (especially from the footnotes) about the hermeneutical discussions about popular piety—a subject which interests me a good deal—and for that I am appreciative...
...Alas, it was not to be...
...30: 28 February 1992 Commonweal...
...Jean Vanier is one of the more illustrious figures of the contemporary church...
...He tells me much, for example, about the symbolism of ashes and penitence in the Bible but leaves me in the dark as to why so many people (it is hardly a Hispanic phenomenon) flock to church for ashes at the beginning of Lent...
...the Quinceanera celebration for young women...
...Raffalovich would finance the building of the church of St...
...I say "mercifully" because the one sustained example of such an excursion (on the "bodily" in Catholicism) was a farrago of banalities, errors, and generalizations...
...In just over a hundred pages we follow the main stages of Erasmus's career while a clear case is made for the pertinence of his intellectual labors and judgments are rendered about the sig28: 28 February 1992 Commonweal nificance of his most important books...
...And, he added, with just a touch of malice, plenty of French sonnets in the head should the sermon be dull...
...His only true link with his earlier days was his lifelong friendship with an enormously wealthy Russianborn French Jew, Andre Raffalovich, who, also a convert, was his benefactor and spiritual friend...
...home altars...
...Similarly, it is obvious that a ceremony celebrating the fifteenth birthday of a young woman is a rite of passage with many biblical analogues but he offers little about the specific origins of the ceremony...
...Theologians, however, have been of two minds...
...Where they differed, and the difference was a chasm, was over the issue of how the Christian life was to be lived and how salvation was obtained...
...I found Romero's book oddly off balance...
...Similarly, John Eade's study of the brancadiers (lay helpers) at Lourdes deftly compares their almost militaristic organizing strategies with the more compliant pilgrims who are herded about...
...the tension between contemplative urges and the sheer energy required to live with people needing constant care and love...
...The Oxford "Past Masters" series provides us with short interpretative studies of figures from the past who still influence our thinking today...
...John and a sumptuous feast for the eyes in the bargain...
...A fair number of these artists, among them John Gray, became Catholics or at least seriously flirted with the church...
...Erasmus held a strong view of the Christian tradition and made a trenchant argument for seeking consensus on the essentials of that tradition while permitting discussion on that which was disputed...
...Father Romero is a biblical scholar...
...Gray eventually detached himself from his poetic circle and, taking his conversion rather seriously, went to Rome, enrolled at the Scots College (a decade earlier it had, as a seminarian, the rather loony Frederick Rolfe, aka Baron Corvo, who had to be pitched out bodily on the street), was ordained a priest in 1901, and returned to Edinburgh where he served as a parish priest until his death...
...John complete with 800 sumptuous illustrations, maps, and excerpts of texts relating to the saint's life...
...A number of books have come across my desk in recent years and a few have been mentioned in this column...
...Mercifully—and one cannot always count on this when reading academic social scientists—the writers provide a clear descriptive account of their designated pilgrimage sites...
...As Spink makes clear in this popular biography, Vanier is motivated by a New Testament vision of living in communion with those who are often the most marginalized...
...Attractively boxed features within the text give us the flavor of the towns, convents, and universities with which the saint was associated...
...The study of pilgrimage has become a growth industry in academe...
...She also makes clear that these experiments in Christian living have not always been perfect...
...The result is a work which takes account both of history/ phenomenology/ethnography and biblical studies...
...To celebrate that event, Kieran Kavanaugh, the distinguished translator and Sanjuanista scholar, has provided an English translation of a Spanish/Italian collaborative biography of St...
...The old cliché has it that Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched...
...The end product is an authoritative study of St...
...the practical issue of balancing a life of poverty with the material requirements of the community all of these issues point to struggles common to every attempt to create post-modem intentional Christian communities...
...An essay on the tension between the town folks and the friars who run a vast pilgrimage site in honor of the late Padre Pio was extremely well done, while a study of contemporary pilgrimage attitudes among Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants in the Holy Land struck me as somewhat glibly generalized...
...Essays on Catholic pilgrimage sites in Sri Lanka and the Andes, the latter quite good, round out the volume...
...His voice was not to be heard (his acid pen and wicked satirical gifts hardly left him in a disinterested position) but there is something terribly plaintive in his 1523 cry that true religion est pax et unanimitas (is peace and consensus...
...To the Lutheran dialectic of sin and salvation, Erasmus proffered the presence of the Logos in creation, history, and humanity...
...He looks at four popular expressions of Hispanic piety (Ash Wednesday...
...The authors of this volume insist that the matter is more complex with a good deal of the complexity orbiting around social status, power relationships, and varied perceptions of the sacred...
...Even after the Edwardian dandy had transformed himself into the redoubtable Canon Gray of Edinburgh, he kept up his literary interests (he wrote and translated religious poetry) and maintained contacts with figures as diverse as Ezra Pound, Henry James, John Masefield, and the "Catholic culture" crowd of Eric Gill, Bede Jarrett, and Hilary Pepler...
...Peter which Gray would pastor until his death in 1934...
...why it is not common in other Mediterranean cultures, etc...
...Liberation theologians have been passionately interested in "popular" religion, if only because so much of Latin American Catholicism has been shaped by it...
...Thus, one study of the Lourdes pilgrimCommonweal 28 February 1992: 29 age from the perspective of the sick who come to Lourdes was illuminating on the dialectical tension between those who hoped for miracles and those who run Lourdes...
...at exceedingly reasonable prices...
...While most people will read this work to learn of the life of this exemplary Christian, my own interest (as a theologian) in Vanier's life arises out of his struggle to imagine and live a new form of Christian community which is not precisely a religious order (although the L'Arche communities are influenced by the regular life) nor a simple intentional community...
...The attractive pull of Catholicism was mainly aesthetic as the poet Lionel Johnson, himself later to convert, would attest: "White tapers upon the altar, an ascetic and beautiful priest, the great gilt monstrance, the subtle-scented and mystical incense, the old world accents of the Vulgate...the splendor of sacred vestments...
...devoted parochial work, the occasional essay and translation, a few devotional poems, and his hobby of hiking which prompted articles on his excursions for Blackfriars...
...their attempts to integrate married folks as assistants (and the larger issue of celibacy/sexuality...
Vol. 119 • February 1992 • No. 4
