Yesterday I caught up with Karl du Fresne’s article ‘Heaven protect us from righteous zealots’, first published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard on April 10, which condemned unbridled perfectionism as manifested in the promotion of a test to detect Down syndrome in utero.

Funnily enough, I wrote to the Dompost about that on March 22:

‘If the three beautiful young people ‘rewarded for lives well lived as part of World Down Syndrome Day’ (High Achievers, March 22) had been conceived a generation later, they might not have had lives to live, well or otherwise. They could have been snuffed out in utero under the National Screening Unit’s search-and-destroy mission on Down Syndrome. They’d never have discovered their talent for skiing, gym, speech, drama, photography, swimming or dance. And New Zealand would never have had the ‘fantastic example’ they’ve set.’

The Dompost printed a letter making the same point, but more politely.

 

I was highly edified, not to say tickled pink, when I discovered the first book Benedict XVI turned to in his retirement from the papacy is one by Hans Urs von Balthasar, the Swiss theologian whose work on contemplation, Prayer,  is currently keeping me up late at night reading.

 

Balthasar founded the journal 'Communio' with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and died (in 1988) just a day or so before John Paul II was scheduled to create him a cardinal. Now of course God always knows what's best, but it seems a pity that a theologian celebrated as one whose influence would long outlive his century wasn't in Rome last month. to exercise that influence in the conclave to elect Benedict's successor.

 

As a young Jesuit novice Balthasar reportedly found lectures on Thomas Aquinas so boring, he stuffed his ears so he could read Augustine and the early Church Fathers instead. It wasn't the 'angelic Doctor' he found fault with, it was his professors’ treatment of such an exalted subject as theology.

 

I think I know how he felt, or rather thought, about theologians. Something like the philosopher Maurice Blondel whose 19^th century comment was, ‘as soon as we regard (God) from without, as a mere object of knowledge or a mere occasion for speculative study without freshness of heart and the unrest of love, then all is over, and we have nothing in our hands but a phantom and an idol.’

 

It was as a teenager that I first read these immortal lines of Keats:

 

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'. - That is all

    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

 

Then, in middle age, while reading under a taupata tree on a beach I was handed a book called Fire Within, a treatment of contemplative prayer by famed Marist spiritual director Thomas Dubay, which elaborated on Keats' theme - and Blondel's, and von Balthasar's.

 

Listen to Dubay: ‘One of the most commonly admitted, frequently lamented and rarely corrected defects in current moral theology is its dire lack of a contemplative/mystical dimension.’

One is tempted to draw the conclusion that most theologians, like so many priests,  don’t know how to pray.

 

Unborn baby, or unborn something or other else?-

So the Families Commission in sorting itself out under the Government’s White Paper on Vulnerable Children has discovered ‘scandalous expenditure’. Maybe that’s a consequence of the White Paper ignoring the extremely vulnerable children, in the womb, which is now the most dangerous place for a child to be. In other words, the Government is deceiving itself and its White Paper is a lie. We pretend (inconsistently, as we concede it’s a child when it’s wanted) that the unborn baby is an unborn something or other else. And as Sir Walter Scott said, ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.’

While my heart aches for women suffering the trauma of abortion, and for their whanau – and given the numbers, very few families in New Zealand today are not affected – the longer we keep up this pretence, the more women will be coerced into abortion and everyone’s suffering prolonged.

A letter that found its way into print (in the Dompost)

If ‘broken promise’ is, as Vernon Small asserts (Car park tax looking for rubbish bin of history), a panic trigger for politicians, how come so many voted last night for same-sex ‘marriage’ after changing 150 pieces of legislation in 2004 to ensure protection and recognition for same-sex couples, and blithely assuring voters that the Civil Unions Act was the end of the matter? It seems to me they must have nerves of steel.

Julia du Fresne

One du Fresne columnist comments on another

Sent to the Dompost Friday, March 8 2016

To hell with it. I’m going to stick my neck right out and get denigrated as a Christian. The reason why sport has morphed into pure soap opera, as Karl du Fresne observes, is very simple. God commands us not to put false idols before him. The result of idolising sportsmen and women, as New Zealanders in general have done, is that they’re shown very clearly to have feet of clay.

Julia du Fresne

When Carmelites meet Benedictines it is Heaven

NZ Catholic
March 10-23, 2013 No. 410

Picture this. Inside a little church deep in the countryside, a nun kneels at a prie-dieu before the Blessed Sacrament on the altar. Offstage, a bell rings. Enter left, a second nun. The first nun rises, the two genuflect together before the monstrance, the first nun exits as the second takes her place.

It’s a scene re-enacted every half-hour, twentyfour/seven, in a Tyburn monastery at Ngakuru and others around the world, and my lasting impression of a weekend spent there late in January.

The church, cloister, guest house and gardens are found only after many twists and turns and dead ends, poised above a tributary of the Waikato. Pilgrims tell of consulting Google, GPS and road maps and fearing they’ve lost their way, nearly turning back. Belatedly our party realises that some agency – maybe, as one suggests, the Stokers’ Union (one of her several epithets for the Evil One) - has done away with the vital sign ‘Dod’s Road’ which a witty nun, we discover, has punned for the sign at the monastery gate: ‘God’s Road’.

The nuns wear full Benedictine habits. Always.  At the window of my room (dedicated to ‘Cor Jesu – Infinite in Majesty’) I behold a sudden epiphany. Sunglasses and  wide-brimmed hats are commonplace in January but combined with wimple, veil and face mask, the effect is surreal. Sister has evidently been detailed to clean the verandah, and she isn’t doing it by halves.

Early Saturday evening, our group has a talk on Tyburn from Mother Seraphim.  And seraphic she truly is. Young, pretty,  Asian. She says, ‘Are you Catholics?’ We say, ‘Is the Pope? We’re Carmelites.’  

All sorts come to Tyburn. Mother Seraphim cheerfully admits to being politically incorrect: Catholic Women’s Leaguers might be told that chatter in church is irreverent. Schoolgirls are told there is a hell and if they sleep with their boyfriends and don’t repent, they’ll go there. Concessions to modernity are few; Tyburn’s two computers are locked when not in authorised use. Unlike most religious orders (some actually forbid wearing habits in public) if they ever venture out it’s in full regalia. And I bet they meet with respect, if not awe.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter - the Sacred Heart of Jesus and his Adorers, the nuns of Tyburn. ‘Awesome’ is what the checkout operator says now when you produce your own bag. Or the right change. And we may eat at Café Divine, or Chapel. When our instinct for the sublime isn’t met,  we descend to the gorblimey.

As Tyburn eloquently attests, we Catholics possess the sublime. So why aren’t we all adorers? Belief in the Eucharist is the touchstone of the true disciple, the one who stays when others walk no more with him. Veiled in tabernacle and monstrance, Jesus inflames hearts now just as he did disguised as a traveller on the road to Emmaus.

To believe that we must overcome our diffidence, take the risk. Be there. Learn to believe and to love.

Petulance and hysteria

Another as-yet unpublished letter to the Dompost, emailed two days ago on Tuesday March 5:

 

The petulant outburst from promoter Mark Rogers and the Green Party’s Kevin Hague (‘Church snub for singer’s sexuality’, March 5) shows only too clearly what we can expect if gay ‘marriage’ becomes legal. If such a fuss can be kicked up over a few church-goers preferring not to host a gay singer, what would be the reaction to a church minister refusing to celebrate a gay marriage? If the Masterton experience and others overseas are anything to go by, mass hysteria and hefty fines.

 

Julia du Fresne

 

 

And did anyone else feel queasy at the follow-up to that story about the Masterton Lighthouse Church, the juxtaposition in yesterday's Dompost of Tom Scott's cartoon depicting the reprobate Cardinal O'Brien with more free publicity, in the form of another photo of the gay singer whose name I forget, and an hysterical letter denouncing the church, some of whose members weren't happy with her lifestyle? Do you get the feeling that to be Christian is to be more and more marginalized?

 

Oh well, it's Lent.