Christ-Centered Catholic Spirituality: Decline and Fall and the Second Franciscan Spring

Many years ago, during my holiday in the south of France, I began to feel dissipated thanks to too much self-indulgence. So, I took a ferry to the Islands of Lerin to the south of Cannes. I spent the day on Saint-Honorat Island, where, in the year 400, a group of monks who were formed in the spirituality of the great St. Antony took up their new home. It was part of a general movement to renew a Church that had lapsed into laxity and loose living thanks to two major factors that had sullied the first spring. The idea was to take monasticism out of the desert and place it on the edge of the newly secularized world—or even into its towns to become beacons of light to re-evangelize the world that had seriously lapsed into a weak and wanton faith.

At the beginning of the fifth century, the heresy of Arianism that proclaimed that Christ was not God perverted 90 percent of Catholics. It received a certain impetus from a secular movement in the Roman Empire, which took away the divine claims of previous emperors, abandoning their traditional imperial divinity. So when Christ, too, was said to not have a divine nature, believers could not be united with Him and share, therefore, in His contemplating loving of God to receive what St. Thomas Aquinas called “the fruits of contemplation” like Christ before them. Without the fruits of contemplation and other supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit to support them, all too many of the faithful fell into faithless lives. They became easy prey to the temptations to seek positions of power and secular preferment in an empire in which Catholicism was now the official religion. 

Before their “fall from grace,” the faithful were animated by the same love that animated Christ Himself. The infused virtues had transformed them into Christlike people who were continuing His work of Redemption in a way that all could see. They might not be able to see the mystical or hidden supernatural virtues at work in them, but they could see other supernatural gifts that St. Paul lists for us in his letter to the Galatians: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Trustfulness, Gentleness, and Self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). This is St. Paul’s description of those first Christians as could be seen by their pagan peers, who had never seen or experienced such sublime human behaviors before.

It was this, then, that converted them in droves—because they saw these supernatural gifts not just in individuals but in the families who lived among them, families sacralized by Jesus Himself at the feast of Cana, before He even began to preach. These families would be the spiritual building blocks of the forthcoming Kingdom of God that He was about to set up on earth.

Westerners like us might fail to notice the real symbolism of the changing of water into wine. It was not just an act of kindness for His hosts; it promised that in this kingdom the water of purely human love would be changed into the wine of Divine love, which would be mutually given and received by Catholic fathers and mothers, who were the ministers of the new sacrament, before it overflowed onto their children.

When these families came together on the “day of the Resurrection” to unite together in the sacrifices made in offering every moment of their day to God and finding time for the prayer that would enable them to do it, it was a time of great happiness. It was a time of great joy because it enabled the whole community to be revitalized simultaneously by God’s love made flesh and blood in Jesus Christ, to be made bread and wine in the Sacred Sacrament, so continuing to redeem the world through them and through their families.

Saint Jerome gives us a picture of St. John at the end of his life, carried from one Eucharistic community to another, inspiring them to do what Christ Himself had said would be the hallmark of their authenticity. The words of the beloved apostle were always the same: “Love one another.” This they did, and it was this tangible, seeable explosion of love in their midst that did more to convert pagans to Christianity than anything else.

They knew that the way they lived and loved, and the way they practiced what they preached to others, was crucial. So, if any one of their number betrayed the high moral standard that Christ had called them to uphold, they were asked to leave their community lest scandal be given and their way of life be betrayed. To this end, if anyone committed any of the specific sins of fornication, adultery, murder, or idolatry, they could no longer remain members of a community whose very raison d’être was to give witness on earth to the living and loving God in Heaven.

One serious lapse could be forgiven if the offender publicly admitted their sin before the whole community and sought God’s forgiveness, and the forgiveness of the community, in what came to be called the Sacrament of Reconciliation. A second offense would not be forgiven in the same way, nor therefore could they be received back into a community whose prophetic mission was, above all, to proclaim the love of God—not just in abstract but as lived in those first Catholic communities. They may indeed be forgiven by God, but belonging to such a community in those days would not be seen as acceptable, for it would give mixed messages, as it does today—deranging, distorting, and drastically damaging their prophetic calling. 

It is easy to say that the faith and fervor of the early Church was all but terminally destroyed by those twin evils—namely, the heresy of Arianism and the surrender to the seduction of the new Secularism; but more must be said. If we really understand what happened then, and in some detail, it will help us realize what must happen now; for we have long since fallen anew into practical Arianism and into Secularism in the form of Modernism gone manic. Who was it who said that those who do not know their history will be condemned to relive it?

What Arianism did was to take Jesus Christ the King, true man and true God, out of the spirituality that He Himself first lived before introducing it to all on the first Pentecost Day, through His Holy Spirit. Without Him, the new living Temple, any effective prayer to God, never mind contemplation, would be impossible. So, if you wanted to possess the virtues that are the fruits of contemplation, then you would have to learn from your Arian peers how to obtain them, through the teachings of the Stoics who did not need the grace of God that was now denied them, at least as it was given them before.

It was denied them because they ceased to pray as they had prayed before. That is why St. Augustine spent his latter years trying to defeat the heresy of semi-pelagianism that all Stoics fall into as they did in the early Church—and then in the modern Church beginning again after the Renaissance, as we shall see in this series.

What is the answer to this problem that was originally caused by Arianism in the past and by the practical Arianism in the present? The answer is that we return to prayer—more specifically, to the prayer that prepares the way for God to lead us into the contemplation that was, for those first Catholics, the “daily bread” for which they prayed each day in the Our Father. 

That we understand the precise nature of this prayer, and indeed the precise nature of all true Catholic Mental Prayer, I must repeat and then further embellish what I have said in a previous article. Pope Benedict XVI was responsible for the canonization of the wife and mother St. Angela of Foligno—so that her teaching on prayer would inspire, instruct, and reeducate us about the true inner nature of prayer which she called “The School of Divine Love.” In other words, the primary reason why we go to prayer is to learn how to love God.

How? By repeatedly practicing the repentance to which Our Lord calls us as we endlessly keep turning back to God: by relentlessly turning away from the devilish temptations and distractions that assail us in the darkness and aridity in which we generally find ourselves, most particularly when God has led us into the beginnings of contemplative purification. 

The peace that we expected to find in prayer, then, turns of necessity into a battle against the same powers of evil that Christ had to encounter, as we can read for ourselves in His prayer as described in the Gospels. Notice that in the Gospels nobody was there with Him in the desert to witness the attacks of the devil; nor was anyone there in the Garden Gethsemane—or if they were, then they were asleep. So Jesus must have gone out of His way to ensure that we know that what happened to Him would happen to us. The same devil whom He had to fight against, we have to fight against too. And the dying to self which involved endlessly saying no to self in order to turn back to God pertains to the very essence of prayer.

But further to this, these relentless series of selfless actions that are made are free actions of the will that desire union with God despite all the machinations of the devil. He repeatedly conjures up temptations and distractions from the world from which we have just come, over which he presides, and the hell from within us that he created thanks to original sin and the actual sins that we have committed for ourselves, thanks to his insidious machinations.

As they are clear and deliberate acts of the will, they are acts of love to which God always responds, even though the prevailing darkness and aridity in which we find ourselves makes it, at least for the present, impossible for us to feel His love. Nevertheless, this love enters into us to impart the virtues, most particularly the virtue of wisdom, to understand what is going on, and the virtue of fortitude to keep going, despite the repeated little voice that keeps saying, “You are wasting your time, when you could be using that time to do good to others outside of prayer.” Eventually, the repeated performance of acts of love will lead to a habit of loving that will make it possible for you to be, at all times, open to receive the love of God, both inside and outside of prayer through infused contemplation.

But long before this happens, the process of daily dying to self inside of prayer teaches a person something that is vital to know and to have practiced for their spiritual endeavor outside of prayer. That is why whenever a temptation tries to make you sin outside of prayer, you have generated in your spiritual endeavor inside of prayer the wherewithal to turn away from that temptation with speed and with firmness whenever it reoccurs. In other words, it is rather like a spiritual gym.

You are able to do this because you are not acting alone. Your loving inside of prayer has not just enabled you to generate a human habit but a superhuman infused habit, enabling your otherwise weak human nature to be suffused and surcharged with divine love. You may have no tangible experiences of this love for a long time to convince you of what is happening. But be sure of this. Once you stop going to “The School of Divine Love” your moral behavior outside of prayer begins to decline rapidly. It is this that usually enables a person to see and realize for the first time that there is strength being given by God in what had seemed to be a purposeless and empty darkness.

Although St. Francis of Assisi praised all the God-given virtues, he said that no one can attain anyone of them unless they first die. In this spiritual dying, the virtues that we can then receive are not given piecemeal or one by one over a period of time but simultaneously, although their strength will grow stronger as they are exercised over the years under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit from whom they all come.

So, if you meet a person who seems to have developed a wealth of knowledge—so that they seem to know all that there is to be known—but, in St. Paul’s words, they lack charity, you can be sure that their wisdom is not of God but of man; and it is, therefore, highly fallible. If the quality of a person’s love appears to have come from God but they are gluttons, then you can, once again, be sure that what appears as charity is of human origin and not, therefore, to be trusted.

True God-given virtues are always born in a person simultaneously as a family of virtues and not what you may think is a virtue but is only the result of nature or nurture, not necessarily practiced for the honor and glory of God but for the honor and glory of ourselves. These virtues are only usually given by God beginning in the purification that marks the commencement of contemplative prayer. So the receiver is normally quite ignorant of what others notice first. That is why, for a well-practiced spiritual director, whether or not a person is in the contemplative way can easily be judged by whether or not they have begun to receive the fruits of contemplation.

The decline and fall of the original contemplative spirituality that prevailed in the Church began when the contemplative prayer that has been the lifeblood of the exalt Church was abandoned—thanks to Arianism and its aftermath—as the ordinary way for the majority and soon came to be seen as the extraordinary way for a few especially chosen souls.

In order to revitalize a Church in decline, monasticism was invited to build their monasteries on the edge or even in the center of towns to become beacons of light. Then holy monks would be made bishops and take some of their monks with them, or at least gather their secular clergy around them, to form what came to be called “canons regular.” That is why, to this day, you still see choir stalls in the major cathedrals where monks or canons regularly used to say the divine office in order to spiritually support  their bishop who presided over them. Then, if some monks were considered spiritually strong enough, they were sent out to re-evangelize a Church in decline and falling fast.

Before leaving Saint-Honorat Island, I went to visit the present Cistercian community. Just at the door of the church, I saw, as you can still see for yourself, a plaque which proclaimed that it was here that St. Patrick learned “the science of the spiritual life” before returning to Ireland to spread this teaching far and wide.

The sort of eremitical monastic spirituality that he spread was that of St. Antony of the Desert, from whom the monks on Saint-Honorat came. That is why in Ireland to this day you can see early monasteries that take the form of many little hermitages all clustering around a central church. It can be seen elsewhere, too, as St. David spread this form of monasticism to Wales. St. Columba spread it not just in Scotland but into the north of England beginning at Lindisfarne, thanks to St. Aidan; and then St. Juliot took it to Cornwall, as can still be seen at Tintagel.

Saint Athanasius, who wrote the life of St. Antony, explained that this spirituality culminated in what he called “Spiritual Paternity.” That is why, like St. Antony—who in his later years returned to preach in the marketplaces of major cities like Alexandria—Celtic monks did the same when they reached “Spiritual Paternity.” And so monks like St. Columba, St. Columbanus, and St. Brendan, among many others, set off to convert or re-evangelize those who were in need of their apostolic zeal in the Dark Ages.

But note that a subtle change had taken place. In the early Church, if you wanted to see the Christan life as it was being brought to perfection, then you would look to those first Catholic families which were the spiritual building blocks of God’s Kingdom on earth and to those lay communities gathered around their Risen Lord to celebrate the Mass. However, it was religious life first exemplified in monasticism which inspired the perfect form of Catholic spirituality in the making.

As we will finally see, we are now moving toward a new age, when once again Catholic Family Life and fervent Catholic Communities will be the place where, once more, the perfection of Catholic Spirituality can be seen as it develops toward perfection.

Next time, what was lost to Arianism and Secularization will return in what came to be called “The Franciscan Spring.”