Christ-Centered Catholic Spirituality: Tridentine Sacrificial Spirituality

Without detailing the many different strands of the Catholic post-Tridentine Sacrificial Spirituality of this period, let me say that the two great pillars of this spirituality were the Sacrifice of the Mass and the daily Sacrifice of ourselves in imitation of the way Christ sacrificed Himself for us every day of His life on earth. It was not just that the sacrificial nature of the Mass was reiterated, but that the sacrificial nature of the Catholic Spirituality was reiterated too, because it mirrored in the seventeenth century the spirituality that predominated in the first Christian centuries.

This became ever clearer to me in my own personal study of my own ancestors in England and Ireland. It enabled me to see for myself the sacrificial nature of their daily spirituality that was handed on to me, not just “in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword,” but because of it. I am a direct descendant of Sir Nicholas Tempest who was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn in 1537 and myriad more who were taxed out of existence, or rather into extreme penury, because they refused to go to a Protestant church and receive their idea of Communion. Then, when they could no longer pay, they paid for their refusal with imprisonment until they could. Ancestors of mine languished in the infamous dungeons of Hull Castle where the tide came in each day to soak them so they were never dry, and a prey to multiple illnesses, some of which were fatal. It is believed that the expression “come hell or high water” derived from the sufferings endured in this infamous hell hole. Hell if you betrayed your faith and high water if you did not!

Although the prolonged persecution of Catholics and the sacrifices that had to be made by them can be seen in England more than elsewhere, the persecution of Catholics took place throughout Europe as a backlash against the Catholic Counter-Reformation. During this time the importance of the sacrifices necessary in order to continue to practice one’s faith, and the sacrifices made in keeping one’s faith in daily spiritual dying to self, was seen perhaps more clearly than at any other time since the early Church. They saw, with a clarity that has sadly long since been forgotten, that all the sacrifices made in their daily lives in order to come to know and love God and to love their neighbor as Christ loves them were the gifts, the offerings, the sacrifices that they took with them to Mass to be united with the supreme sacrifice of Christ made present in that Holy Mystery.

What could clearly be seen in the vibrant faith of Catholics were the fruits of contemplation that Saint Thomas Aquinas said would be the sign that the Holy Spirit was once more at work in those who freely chose to open their hearts and minds to receive Him. Through the Holy Spirit, Christ was living, not just in His Church in general, but in each individual member of the Church, so that they could say with Saint Paul, “I live. No, it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20).

Although we Catholics might think we know what is going on at Mass, many of us do not. We can begin anew by understanding the precise nature of what takes place when we go to Mass, and Christ’s own personal sacrifice through which He redeemed us. When He called upon us to do the one thing necessary, He was in His sacrificial life upon earth, loving God with His whole heart and mind, with His whole body and soul, and with all His strength both inside and outside of the prayer in which the Holy Spirit continued to infuse into His weak human nature, the Father’s infinite loving that made all things possible.

In order to do this, each sacrificial day on earth began with Jesus reciting a prayer called the Shema, which was the equivalent of our morning prayer, in which He pledged Himself to do His Father’s will in all and everything that He did in the forthcoming day. It would enable Him to express tangibly, really, “in spirit and in truth,” the first commandment, which was to love God with His whole heart and mind, His whole body and soul, and His whole strength. This sacred sacrificial offering would be made again and again in the synagogue where He went to pray three times a day, and each evening when, after the day’s work He would, as St. Luke tells us: “Always go off to some lonely place where he could be alone and pray…sometimes throughout the whole night” (Luke 5:16 and 6:12). It was this wholehearted loving of His Father that enabled Him to receive from the Father, the Divine Loving that He would be able to share with the neighbor in need of His divine redemptive loving.

Nevertheless, throughout His life on earth, as He was trying to do His Father’s will, He was continually opposed by the Power of Evil, not just in His personal prayer life, but through the unpurified sinners whom He had come to redeem. Indeed, it was their leaders who condemned Him to the ignominious death on the cross. However, the very moment He died on the cross was the moment when His sacrificial action on earth was brought to its completion, to its final and glorious apotheosis in heaven.

Just as Jesus Christ Himself was transformed, transfigured, and glorified, so also was His sacrificial action. It was transformed into another form of supra-supernatural sacrifice, or rather loving, that was pure, simple, unalloyed, and contemplative. The sacrifice that He had made in His human nature throughout His life on earth, and in His death upon the cross, entailing both physical and psychological pain and agony, was now shorn of all such suffering as His human loving was transformed and glorified. Now it could be subsumed into a pure, simple, unalloyed, and contemplative act of loving, into the infinite otherworldly loving that Christ, as the Son of God, had experienced before His incarnation on earth.

But this time there was a difference. That same experience that totally enveloped Him now also enveloped His human nature too, with which He had already redeemed the world in principle, and with which He would continue to redeem the world in reality through those who were open to receive Him.

The rather ugly phrase “an unbloody sacrifice” is such an inept, inert, and anemic expression to express the full-blooded fulsome act of hypostatic loving, performed by the most perfect divinized person, Jesus Christ, our Lord and King. This pure, simple act of selfless, wordless, imageless, contemplative loving is the supernatural highway over which Christ’s Loving reaches out to His Father, and His Father’s Loving reaches out to Him and through Him to us, to give us the fruits of the contemplation that we have been called to share with our Redeemer so that others can be redeemed through us.

This is now how Christ our King becomes present amongst us when we celebrate what the early Christians called the “Heavenly Liturgy” and we now call the Holy Mass. He is caught up in a supernatural act of suspended animation; an act of pure, unalloyed contemplative loving, the same contemplative and ecstatic loving with which He loved His Father from all eternity. It is the same ecstatic act of loving with which He loves the Father now, and the same ecstatic loving that He invites us all to join Him now, beginning here on earth and then continuing to eternity. If I may paraphrase Saint Thomas Aquinas, this otherworldly contemplative loving can be defined as “the pure, simple, unalloyed act of lovingly gazing upon the glory of God, accompanied by awe.” This is how Jesus Christ our King prayed on earth, and this is how He continues “to raise His heart and mind to God in heaven” now, and continues to call upon us to join Him, so that in, with, and through Him we may be able to contemplate His Father. Then, to experience with Him the eternal flow of infinite love that passes to and fro between the Two, which is the person of the Holy Spirit.

It is He who facilitates our journey from start to finish into the life of the Holy Trinity. By residing within those who choose to receive Him, His loving gradually infuses and surcharges every part of our being and acting with the divine goodness. It is the goodness that then becomes visible to others as it expresses itself in the perfect human action called the infused virtues and the gifts and charisms of the Holy Spirit.

Through baptism we are taken up into Christ’s being, and then, through continual cooperation with the Holy Spirit, we are further taken up into Christ’s acting. Then we are taken up into His contemplation of the Holy Trinity, which is our ultimate end. In order to help us understand this sublime Mystery, Jesus called Himself the New Temple that would arise after His glorification, so that in this New Temple we could contemplate with Him the glory of God the Father, hence the word CON-TEMPLATION. Then, to the measure in which we have been purified in learning contemplative loving here on earth, we can receive from God what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the fruits of Contemplation. They are the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit that enabled the early Christians to so embody Christ, that through them He could convert an ancient pagan Empire into a Christian Empire in such a short time. Then to do it again in subsequent centuries whenever Christians returned to the profound purifying and transforming contemplative loving to which Christ calls us. In this way we can participate in our own personal redemption, and in the redemption of the world in which we live and then enjoy to eternity the ecstatic bliss of eternal beatitude.

After years of joyful endeavor, the early Christians built the vast and awe-inspiring Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It was completed in 537 in thanksgiving to the Holy Spirit for what He had done through those who were open to receive Him, in those first glorious centuries of Christianity. It was the same infused contemplative loving that transformed the early Church, that once again transforms the early medieval Church through the new mendicant apostles, the Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, and the Augustinians, whom St. Thomas Aquinas defended from their detractors with those famous words: It is better “to contemplate and share the fruits of contemplation with others” –“contemplata aliis tradere.”

That is why it was under the profound wisdom of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, and so many other contemplative apostles whom they inspired and influenced that, as Monsignor Ronald Knox pointed out, post-Tridentine Catholicism returned to the essential, ascetical, contemplative, and redemptive spirituality that prevailed in the early Church.

Although the sacrificial nature of Catholic Tridentine Spirituality was everywhere apparent, it was not everywhere the same. There were two clearly apparent but different emphases that I will compare and contrast to see the nature of each and the part they played in future “Spiritualities” in the Catholic Church. The first is a “Theocentric Spirituality,” lived and introduced by Jesus Christ our Lord, into the early Church, and continued in subsequent centuries, finding a unique flowering in post-Tridentine Spirituality. The second is an “Anthropocentric Spirituality,” because it has its origins in the Renaissance with its particular emphasis and focus on man.

The fortunes of these two spiritualities, and through them the fortunes of the Church, were dramatically changed for the worse at the end of the 17th century, when a new heresy, just as damaging to Catholic spirituality as Arianism in the early days of the Church, was condemned by Rome. Yet how few Catholics have even heard of it? Nor have they any idea how its aftermath has led to the tragic circumstances in which Catholic Spirituality finds itself today. In her book The Interior Castle, Saint Teresa of Avila describes the first level of experiential contemplation and calls it the “Prayer of Quiet.” A Spanish priest resident in Rome called Miguel de Molinos taught his followers that they could attain this degree of Mystical experience almost instantly without having to pass through the mystical purification called “The Dark Night of the Soul” by Saint John of the Cross. All they had to do was to wait in naked faith upon the action of God doing absolutely nothing.

When assailed by distractions and temptations, they were told to do exactly the same, absolutely nothing, for God would take them away when He chose to do so. In the year 1687 Molinos was condemned to life imprisonment for heresy (Quietism) and immorality, for which he was indicted together with some of his followers. (See Enthusiasm by Monsignor Ronald Knox Chapters XI & XII.)

In the following decades armies of anti-mystical crusaders spread all over Europe, quashing any form of prayer that had the slightest whiff of Quietism about it. Mysticism, they chanted, begins in mist and ends in schism and they have been chanting it ever since, albeit sotto voce in later centuries, thus throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As the Theocentric spirituality that centered on God went out, so then the anthropocentric spiritualities centering on man came in. The profound contemplative prayer with the fruits of contemplation that had so far characterized true traditional Catholic spirituality went out, and a moralism came in instead, as the newer anthropocentric congregations now took the lead. In the centuries that followed, even the older orders who originally had a theocentric spirituality centered on the contemplation and the sacrifices needed to attain it, gradually began to adopt the spirituality of the Anthropocentric Spiritualities and the moralism that characterized it.

In his monumental history of the Catholic Church, Monsignor Philip Hughes put it this way: “The most mischievous feature of Quietism was the suspicion that it threw on the contemplative life as a whole. It was the tragedy of history that this life shrank to very small proportions, and religion, even for holy souls, too often took on the appearance of being no more than a divinely aided effort towards moral perfection.”

This new moralism began to infiltrate into Catholic education after the Renaissance, seen as the birth of modernism. The stoical philosophy that grew up in the pagan world alongside Catholicism in the early Church, began to creep into Catholic education as can be seen in the foundation of St. Paul’s school in London by the Renaissance man Fr. John Colet in 1509. Gradually, all the other major private schools, grammar schools and higher university education followed suit. The Classical stoical belief that you can make yourself into a perfect human being in the new anthropocentric Spirituality being passed down through the centuries, was first handed on to me in a Catholic grammar school run by secular priests many centuries later. Finally it found its way into religious education in the novitiates of religious orders and congregations of men and women, as I found out for myself many years later, both in the Franciscan Novitiate where I was “formed” and in the myriad other orders and congregations to whom I gave retreats immediately after the Second Vatican Council. Moralism was giving way to the new man-made socio-psychological spiritualities that destroyed them.

It also introduced into Catholic Spirituality the corrosive cancer that would corrupt it, namely the pride and the arrogance that has to be banished before God’s power can work. St. Paul insists that God’s power can only work in weakness. That is why in any authentic prayer journey God always leads those who begin as adolescent stoics into contemplative prayer, which, contrary to common belief amongst non-practitioners, and pseudo-mystics, begins with a prolonged period of darkness, dryness and aridity in which the proud and arrogant of heart are purified for union with Christ.

Throughout the aftermath of Quietism and down to the Second Vatican Council, the Traditional Tridentine Mass reigned supreme at the center of Catholic Life. Today, this Catholic Tridentine Mass has become the standard around which traditional Catholics gather to defend their traditional Catholic faith. Although the standard bearers are physically united by the Traditional Tridentine Mass they are sadly disunited by the superficial cafeteria spirituality that divides them. Only a return to the God-given Theocentric and contemplative Spirituality given to the early Church by Christ Himself can reunite us all together in the Holy Spirit through whom this spirituality was transmitted to the early Church.

When I say that the vast number of Catholics do not understand the true traditional theocentric spirituality that has been outlined in these essays, I do not just mean ordinary Catholics, but Catholic intellectuals and theologians too. I do not mean to point an accusing finger at them as if they are responsible for this sad state of affairs, because they most certainly are not. They, like everybody else, are the victims of the prolonged spiritual bankruptcy that has prevailed in the Catholic Church, in the aftermath of the condemnation of Molinos and the other semi-Quietists, and of the anti-mystical crusaders who have systematically extracted contemplative loving from Catholic spirituality. As all too many enthusiastic amateur spiritual theologians have tried to make a synthesis of Traditional contemplative spirituality with disastrous consequences, I must, in charity, call out some Shepherds who can cause confusion, but I will leave that to my next essay in this series.