Toward Traditional Catholic Spirituality

If you are a Catholic writer, reporter, columnist, or chat show host and you want to keep your followers happy, then you can talk about the merits or demerits of synodality. You can talk about private or public revelations. You can talk about the liturgy as the solution to all our problems, once we get it right. But even the best of the liturgists don’t seem to understand that it is at best the outward expression of the true Traditional Catholic Spirituality that they, like so many others, have long since forgotten, if they ever knew it.  

You can talk about and praise Scholastic Theology, which was once the only theology taught in our seminaries, without realizing that it was the personal contemplative prayer of such great Scholastics as St. Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, and the Blessed John Duns Scotus that originally inspired it; nor will it be understood today without the contemplation that originally inspired it. That this was long since forgotten sadly means that this contemplative prayer was therefore never taught in the seminaries that taught Scholastic Theology after the council of Trent. 

If the shepherds were ignorant of contemplative prayer—and therefore of what St. Thomas called the fruits of contemplation, without which we are spiritually bereft—then so also were the sheep. Yet it was the fruits of contemplation, including the infused virtues and the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit, that was seen embodied in the first Catholic disciples of Christ that enabled them to convert the ancient pagan world. That we have come to the point where this profound prayer is seen as no more than an extraordinary and dispensable way for a minority of “pious souls” shows just how far we have come from the profound contemplative and sacrificial prayer practiced by our Lord Jesus Christ Himself and bequeathed to His first Catholic disciples. 

You can talk about Medjugorje or Garabandal and question whether or not Our Lady did or did not appear there. You can talk about her miracles and her prophetic warnings that can be discussed ad nauseam, but there is one subject that you cannot mention without turning your audience off. That subject is not so much the endless outpouring of God’s Love, which she repeatedly proclaims, but the Sacrifice and the time that needs to be given to receive it as Christ Himself received it. He received it to be filled with the Holy Spirit, in His human nature, and to empower Him to do His Father’s will—from the wooden crib where He was first laid, to the wooden Cross on which He finally died. 

Furthermore, He did this as an example to us to show how we, too, must follow His example if we also are going to do the Father’s will, day by day, as He did, to the end of our lives. In short, you will find a ready-made audience who will listen to anyone speaking about all the subjects that I have just mentioned. But the moment you try to speak about the time needed to take up your daily cross—to sacrifice precious time and energy to do what Christ did as an example for us all who want to imitate Him—then you come to an impasse and your ratings will dramatically go down.    

After over 65 years of giving hundreds of retreats and lectures, I have found that, without fail, the moment I mention time for Prayer, Sacrifice, and the Cross, suddenly eyes will glaze over, ears will turn off, and displacement activity will be the order of the day. Why? Because it’s all been said before, many times over, by weary shepherds who preached the party line like automatons—not so much out of conviction but out of habit. It is simply the conventual wisdom that has to be handed on as part of their job, even if they, like so many others, have been seduced by other forms of love that are slowly destroying them. 

In a world where self-serving, self-fulfillment, self-satisfaction, and self-indulgence have become the order of the day, anyone who tries to stem the tide by teaching True Traditional Catholic Spirituality will be drowned by waves of apathy and indifference. Things are so bad that, as Christ Himself put it, “Even if a man were to rise from the dead, they would not believe Him.” However, and just as He promised Himself in parable after parable, God would not stop trying, as one representative after another would be sent in His name, only to be ill-used and even put to death. What happened relentlessly in the Old Testament has happened relentlessly in the New Testament too. His representatives, His saints, His mystics, His prophets have been sent, but nobody but an extreme minority have heeded them. 

In these latter times, when things have never been as bad before in His Church, He has sent none other than His own Beloved Mother to tell us all of the Love of God and to teach us in all simplicity how to receive it. But new, modern versions of the Scribes, Pharisees, Priests, and Levites whom Christ failed to convert two thousand years ago are still with us in modern dress, to reject her on one pretext after another, or at least to reject, water down, or gloss over her message. 

In 1982, I arrived to give a retreat at a well-known Catholic retreat and conference center in Ireland. I walked into a sitting room where half a dozen priests were talking excitedly about Medjugorje. They had recently come back from a pilgrimage to the place where they were all sure Our Lady had just appeared many times over. They shared experiences of the miracles they had seen, the conversions they had witnessed, the healing that had taken place, and dramatic events they had seen, like the Sun dancing in the sky. 

Then, quite out of the blue, an elderly Benedictine priest interrupted them. While they had been enthusing about the miracles they had seen, he had been quietly reading about the message of our Lady at Medjugorje. “Fathers,” he said, “May I interrupt you for a moment? Could I ask you, do you believe in Medjugorje?” They all looked at him in astonishment, as if he had been deaf to all that had been said. “Of course we do,” they said, “Most of us have just returned from there.” 

“The reason why I ask,” he said, “was because I have just been reading about Our Lady’s Message at Medjugorje. She said that all the miraculous signs were for atheists, unbelievers, and doubters, the message is for faithful believers! How many of you fast once a week on bread and water and spend an hour a day in personal prayer?” There was a deadly silence and the priests were only saved from an extremely embarrassing situation by the bell ringing for supper. 

Put together, all the teachings of Our Lady at her appearances and the message are always the same. The message is extremely simple but infinitely profound: we are all called to continual Repentance, personal Prayer, and daily Sacrifices. Then we take these sacrifices with us to Mass each Sunday to be united with the supreme Sacrifice of our Redeemer. These Sacrifices—made to God in, with, and through Christ—enable us to receive our Father’s Love in return, to the measure of our inner spiritual capacity to receive it. This is the only active participation that really matters. Then we must use the divine love that we have received at Sunday Mass to make each day the Mass, through continual daily Repentance, Prayer, and Sacrifice. 

This is the profound, ongoing, mystical dynamic that enables each one of us to imitate the spiritual life that was lived by Our Lord Himself when He was on Earth—then to do this with such regularity and perseverance that our daily lives become the Mass, the place where we continually offer ourselves in, with, and through Christ to the Father, in all that we say and do. That is why our Morning Offering—which we know Christ Himself said, in a prayer that the Jews call the Shema—is crucial to remind us of the very essence of our daily spiritual lives in which we exercise the priesthood to which we were called at Baptism. 

This is the profound mystical and daily dynamic that gradually enables our heartbeats to synchronize with the heartbeats of Christ—as together with Him, in Him, and through Him we are united with our loving Father, who created us for this very purpose, beginning in this life and continuing to eternity in the next life.

However, we are, it seems, at all times surrounded by the usual culprits who muddy the waters for themselves and others with their inevitable skepticism, questioning the veracity of any or all the appearances of Our Lady no matter how cast-iron the evidence. Let me quote from one of the visionaries who was weary of their incredulity. She said what really matters is the message, even if all the signs and miracles and the appearances of Our Lady herself are denied. Why? Because it is the simple message of the Gospels. It is the True Catholic Traditional Spirituality that was first lived by Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, beginning at Nazareth and continuing throughout His life on earth, ending with His death and glorification. 

Then see how it was put into practice by the faithful in the early Church that He founded. Study this simple teaching, love it, live it, and you will be living the very essence of True Traditional Catholic Spirituality. It is sadly not precisely  the same tradition as practiced by our parents and grandparents that so many believe to be the tradition to which we must return. If it was, why did Our Lady have to appear? 

It might be argued that it was implicit in what might appear to be a rather bizarre, complex, and questionable spirituality to outsiders. If it was, then it must be made explicit, not just for us, their descendants, but for contemporary outsiders too. The truth is that they are more readily converted when they see the Faith lived by us, as it was first lived by Christ Himself and His first Catholic disciples, not as we have obfuscated and convoluted it since contemplative prayer has been extracted from Catholic Spirituality in recent centuries. 

Fortunately, thanks to our merciful God, who judges us by how best we have tried in the circumstances in which we were born, our immediate forebears were able to find their way into Heaven even though their spirituality might have been a diluted or even a divergent form of the truth. It is certainly not the spirituality to which we must uncritically return as Paradise Regained, as so many seem to believe. By the truth, I mean the profound Contemplative, Redemptive, and Sacrificial Spirituality that Our Lord introduced into the early Church two thousand years ago.

There have been many more millions of Marian Pilgrims in the last two hundred years compared to the comparatively few Christians in the first two hundred years of the Early Church. But there is a massive difference which each respective group achieved for the Kingdom of God. The Early Christians were so transformed by the profound contemplative spirituality given to them by Our Lord Himself that it was the fruits of their contemplation that enabled them to do the impossible. It enabled them to transform a Roman Empire into a Christian Empire in a very short time—such a short time that, to this day, secular historians are baffled by a phenomenon that cannot be explained by human scholarship alone. 

Sadly, the many more Marian Pilgrims in the last hundred and fifty years or more might well have found spiritual solace in their piety for themselves, but it has never done for them or the Church what profound contemplative prayer and the fruits of contemplation did not just for the faithful in the early Church but for the pagan world that they converted. This failure to deepen their prayer lives into contemplative prayer, where God’s infused love transforms them, has enabled the modern pagan world to make serious inroads into our Catholic world and the traditional faith that has been all but forgotten. 

That is why Our Lady has promised dire consequences. There may indeed be one last chance. It is the sinfulness of Mankind that makes any universal experience of the love of God impossible; but the universal experience of our sinfulness can, and I believe will, make Mankind aware of his need for the love of God, when God so chooses. But why wait to be moved to act from the fear of God when, if you act now, there is still time to act for the love of God. It might be the last minute of extra time, but it is never too late to love. 

But this last chance will not be given to enable us to bypass the call to Repentance, Prayer, and Sacrifice, but rather, to return to it without any further hesitation. If this is not done, then the catastrophic punishments promised by Christ Himself in the Gospels will inevitably follow, as His mother has promised. That is why no time must be lost in returning to the Repentance, Prayer, and Sacrifice that sums up the profound Spirituality that Christ Himself lived before giving it to His Church through the early apostles. 

For the pure and humble of heart, Our Lady’s simple message is enough to galvanize them into action; and with perseverance, the Holy Spirit will do the rest, shepherds or no shepherds! For the rest of us, however, and most especially for those of us who are called to transmit this spirituality to others, more detailed teaching would be necessary to detail adequately this spirituality in the setting that it was originally lived in the Early Church. For those who have a certain understandable impatience, this spirituality can be explained to you now and without delay. Simply go to https://metanoia.org.uk.

Here you will firstly find a free series of lectures in the form of podcasts that you can follow whenever you have time and in whatever predicament you find yourself—at home, abroad, or even traveling there.