Mary the Tabernacle of God

The stream of the river maketh the city of God joyful: the most High hath sanctified his own tabernacle.
Psalm 45:5 (aka Psalm 46:4)

One of the reasons why Catholic and Orthodox Christians on the one hand and Christians of the Reformation traditions (Protestants) on the other have such divergent approaches to the person of Mary, the mother of Jesus, is because they read the Old Testament in significantly different ways. For the first (and oldest) group the text is chiefly significant because it contains in a veiled form the contents of the New Testament and one studies it to see in shadow what becomes more fully revealed in the light that is Jesus Christ our Saviour. Protestants primarily see it as a record of the relationship between God and His chosen people Israel, a relationship which reaches its summit and fulfilment in the mission of our Lord.

The two approaches are perfectly compatible with each other. Catholics would use both but perhaps place the emphasis more on the typological method, that is looking at the types or figures with which the Holy Spirit has pre-figured the Gospel. Protestants, however, are generally suspicious of typology unless Scripture itself clearly mandates it for a particular passage. This is particularly so with the use of allegory, the fear is that humans will devise their own doctrines and artificially seek to impose them on the Bible by allegorising texts which have a clear meaning and sense without allegory. There is a certain lack of consistency in this approach; the Song of Songs, for example, read literally is erotic love poetry so Protestants tend to read it as an allegory but there is no specific mandate in Scripture to do so.

It strikes me, however, that there is a possible way which allows us to synthesise our understanding to some extent. Even if we grant for the sake of argument that the allegorical method is generally inadmissible there should be no reason why we cannot agree that the use of analogy is perfectly acceptable. By which I mean that if the Old Testament shows God acting in certain ways or upholding certain principles we can assume that He acts in the same way and on the same principles in the New unless Scripture specifically informs us otherwise.

Which brings me to Mary and the Tabernacle of the Lord. The Tabernacle was that structure sitting at the heart of the nation of Israel where God dwelt among His people in a special manner. It first took shape as the Tent of Meeting at the time of Moses and later became the Temple of Solomon. There is no doubt that God dwelt in a special way too in Mary, the mother of the Son of God. I would suggest that the principles which underlay the construction of the first Tabernacle, made by human hands, also underlay the creation of Mary in the womb of her mother St Ann by the hand of God.

What were these principles? The details for the Tent of Meeting were laid out at some length in two passages of the Book of Exodus. Chapters 25-31 contain the plans outlined by the Lord to Moses on Mount Sinai and Chapters 35-40 describe its actual construction. Significantly the final verses of the final chapter of Exodus (40) concern themselves with God inhabiting the Tabernacle. It would take up to much space to go through every point here but there are some key aspects to highlight-

• Moses was not just told how to build the Tent but was shown its divine blueprint "Look well, and make everything in due accord with the pattern which has been shewn to thee on the mountain." (Exodus 25:40) Which means that before it existed on earth it was fully formed in God's mind i.e. it existed from eternity.
• It was to be constructed of the best of all possible materials available, gold, silver, jewels, linen, wools and so on. " Provide thyself with spices, a stone of the best and choicest myrrh, and half a stone of cinnamon, and half a stone of scented cane, a stone, too, of cassia" (Exodus 30:23-24)
• The most skilled craftsmen (and women) were to be employed on this work and the Lord would fill them with wisdom to complete their tasks. "And now the Lord said to Moses, Here is the name of the man I have singled out to help thee, Beseleel, son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Juda. I have filled him with my divine spirit, making him wise, adroit, and skilful in every kind of craftsmanship...and I have inspired the hearts of all the craftsmen with skill to carry out the commands which I have given thee." (Exodus 30:1-6)

And once the work had been completed- "When all was done, a cloud covered the tabernacle, and it was filled with the brightness of the Lord’s presence" (Exodus 40:31-32) Solomon's Temple although on a grander scale and intended to be permanent was constructed on the same basic principles as outlined in 1 Kings 6-8 (sometimes known as 3 Kings.) "Nothing in the temple but was sheathed in gold, the altar that stood before the shrine with the rest." (1 Kings 6:22) with the same result "As soon as the priests had left the inner sanctuary, the whole of the Lord’s house was wreathed in cloud; lost in that cloud, the priests could not wait upon the Lord with his accustomed service; his own glory was there, filling his own house." (1 Kings 8:10-11)

Solomon, however, makes a point about the Tabernacle which Moses did not. He says "This I ask, that thy eyes should be ever watching, night and day, over this temple of thine, the chosen sanctuary of thy name; be this the meeting-place where thou wilt listen to thy servant’s prayer. Whatever requests I or thy people Israel make shall find audience here." (1 Kings 8:29-30) So the Tabernacle was not only a place where God manifested Himself in a particular way it was also a privileged place of prayer which was more efficacious than petitions delivered without regard for the Temple. Even directing oneself heart and body towards the Tabernacle from afar was effective "as they fall to prayer, let them but turn in the direction of the city thou hast chosen, the temple I have built there in thy honour, and thou, in heaven, wilt listen to their prayer for aid" (1 Kings 8:44-45)

If all these things applied to the lesser sanctuaries, which hosted God's appearance concealed within a cloud, can we assert that the sanctuary of the incarnate God Himself received fewer or less valuable gifts? St Thomas Aquinas put it like this "The Virgin was elected to be the mother of God, and therefore there can be no doubt that God, by his grace, rendered her fit for it." Like the Temple she existed from eternity in the mind of God as a central element of His plan for the redemption of mankind. She was, from the moment of her conception crafted of the finest spiritual materials, exempted from the stain of sin, filled with grace. By the time of her birth it could be said "how lovely in the sight of heaven and earth was the beautiful soul of that happy infant" (St Alphonsus de Liguori)

What the Gospels tell us of Mary's life lets us see that she had indeed been so gifted. As St Alphonsus put it "The offering which Mary made of herself to. God was prompt, without delay; entire, without reserve." If the Tabernacle were a privileged place of prayer for Israel then, again, how much more so will this be true of Mary. Those in her presence, such as the newlyweds at Cana (John 2:1-11) only needed her to observe their needs for Mary to effectively petition her Son Jesus. Those of us who have distanced ourselves from her and from her Son by our sins can, like the ancient Israelites, direct our prayers towards the Tabernacle that is the Mother of God and be sure that they will be heard.

The principle of analogy holds another message for us here also. Catholics are often asked "why pray to Mary when you can go directly to Jesus?" The ancient Israelites were actively encouraged to make their prayers via the Tabernacle although they could, like Abraham, Isaac or Jacob, have made them directly to the Godhead. Why was this? Well, God knows everything about the humans whom He has made. Very few of us are of the stature of Abraham, we are weak and full of fear and forever going back on our intentions and breaking our promises. To turn ourselves towards God in His fullness is a task too intimidating for us and rather than lose us altogether the Lord in mercy provides us with bridges and ladders. Where the terror of Jesus as the just judge may drive us away the mildness of Mary, mother of mercy and Tabernacle of God, will draw us through her Immaculate Heart and pure hands towards her maker and ours.
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The painting is the Natvity of Mary by the Master of the Life of the Virgin.

Mary: Refuge of Sinners

                                        The Story of Ruth- Thomas Matthews Rooke

 Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.
John 4:35

And Ruth the Moabitess said unto Naomi, Let me now go to the field, and glean ears of corn after him in whose sight I shall find grace.
Ruth 2:2

The gulf of incomprehension between Catholics and Christians from the ecclesial communities of the 'Reformation' (Protestants for short) on the subject of devotion to Mary is fuelled in part by the radically different ways the two traditions read the Old Testament scriptures. The man who inspired the 'Reformation' Martin Luther said "The Christian reader should make it his first task to seek out the literal sense, as they call it. For it alone is the whole substance of faith and Christian theology" This means that what appears on the surface of the written words is sufficient in itself to convey all that we need to know about God. Catholicism, by contrast sees four levels or senses of Scripture. The literal is the foundation of all the others but it does not exhaust the content of Divine revelation, so if we rest in it alone then we miss out on all that the Lord intends to convey to us via the medium of the sacred texts.

For example, we can believe that the crossing of the Red Sea was both an historical event and a pre-figuring of baptism. Protestants will accept this because St Paul said so (1 Corinthians 10:1-2) They are reluctant however to apply the same kind of approach to those scriptures where there is no explicit scriptural mandate to do so. Catholics are not so timid. An allegorical reading of a passage which does not deny or contradict the literal sense, which is consonant with the faith received from the Apostles and which helps us to better understand and more deeply love God is a perfectly acceptable approach to studying scripture. By using it Catholicism arrives at the idea that the New Testament is hidden within the Old, that is, concealed under persons and events, and so the New reveals the meaning of the Old. Christians and Jews therefore will read these Scriptures in radically different ways unless the Christians adopt the Lutheran approach which bring them close to the Jewish methodology.

And so we come to Mary. Catholics understand many OT passages to refer to the Mother of Jesus, her life, her personality and her role in the history of salvation. Since Protestants see nothing more in these passages than the events, persons or places described in them they simply don't 'get' what Catholics are on about when discussing our Lady and so accuse them of importing extra-biblical ideas and practices. In this blog, as my contribution to ecumenism, I propose to look at the eponymous heroine of the Book of Ruth and see in what way she prefigures Mary as refuge of sinners.

                                                      Our Lady of Ransom

In my earlier blog Mary & Eternal Life I looked at a number of the ways in which Ruth acted as a type or figure of our Lady here I will look at some others. By 'type' is meant that what is done in part and imperfectly in the OT is brought to fulfilment and perfection in the Gospel and forms part of the economy of salvation. So, Ruth sets out to glean the ears of corn which the reapers leave behind in order to be able to feed Naomi her mother-in-law and herself. When, in the Gospels, Jesus speaks of harvesting He usually means gathering in souls to the kingdom of heaven. Since He speaks through the Old Testament as well as the New it is worth considering the possibility that references to the same subject in the one will have the same purpose as in the other. When to this harvest is added the figure of Ruth following 'after him in whose sight I shall find grace' we are irresistibly reminded of the words of St Gabriel 'Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace with God.' (Luke 1:30) It seems then legitimate to read this passage as an allusion to the role played by the Mother of God in bringing into the kingdom those who escape from the hands of the reapers.

What Mary gleans are those who have heard the Good News about Jesus but have not benefited by it. They lie on the earth having missed salvation but not yet consigned to destruction. It seems likely to me that these are not necessarily greater sinners than the saved but they are guilty of the sin of despair. They feel themselves to be so wicked or to have committed such terrible acts that there is no possibility of them being forgiven and so they fear greatly to come into the presence of our Lord never doubting that condemnation will be the only outcome of that encounter. The Protestant approach is basically to say 'pull yourself together, Jesus will forgive you if you repent.' This is perfectly true of course but nonetheless it is a psychological fact that many people find themselves unable to overcome that fear of the Just Judge. So either we consign them (by them I mean of course me) to the flames or we offer them another route by which they can come without fear into the presence of the Saviour. The Church asks 'if you fear the Son do you also fear the mother?' And who can fear Mary? The despairing can turn to her and she will raise them from the earth, gather them in her arms and present them to her Divine Son who can refuse nothing from the hands of His most beloved mother. To the accusation that Catholics, through the cult of Mary, add an unnecessary barrier between Christians and Jesus we can reply that on the contrary Marian devotion give us a bridge that bring those who would otherwise be furthest from Him straight into His Sacred Heart.

The labours of Ruth are described thus: 'This is the Moabitess who came with Noemi, from the land of Moab, And she desired leave to glean the ears of corn that remain, following the steps of the reapers: and she hath been in the field from morning till now, and hath not gone home for one moment.' (Ruth 2:6-7) This sounds like Mary who went 'with haste' to support St Elizabeth (Luke 1:39) who stood unflinching at the foot of the Cross (John 19:25) and who constantly prayed at the heart of the Church (Acts 1:14) Her personality has not undergone a change for the worse since she was raised to heaven. If she worked tirelessly for the kingdom of her Son then how much more she does so now. The sinner, fallen from a state of grace and despairing of entering into it again will not call to her in vain. The field in which she works is filled precisely with the lost, the furthest from God, the ones guilty of the most gross sins. Those whose desire to be reconciled is finely balanced with their expectation of damnation will through Mary receive the grace and strength which they need to make that decisive choice, to be transformed through repentance leaving a life wholly given over to darkness behind them, entering the kingdom of light and themselves performing acts of light.

Space does not permit me to say all I could on this subject. So as homework I will leave you to ponder on how much this prayer offered for Ruth was fulfilled in Mary 'The Lord make this woman who cometh into thy house, like Rachel, and Lia, who built up the house of Israel: that she may be an example of virtue in Ephrata, and may have a famous name in Bethlehem' (Ruth 4:11) To the separated brethren of the Protestant traditions I say do not close your eyes to the treasures hidden in Scripture, the whole substance of faith and theology consists in more than a description of events, persons and places. And to those who fear to be excluded from the company of Jesus because they know themselves to be so hardened in wickedness I say put you hand into Mary's hand, she will lead you into His presence and He will have only smiles and love to offer to anyone who accompanies His mother. Mary, refuge of sinners, pray for us.


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                                         Madonna under the Fir Tree- Lucas Cranach the Elder

From Primitive to Degenerate?

                                                   St John, Evangelist by Zampieri
21 Just as the Father raises the dead and gives life, so also does the Son give life to whomever he wishes. 22 Nor does the Father judge anyone, but he has given all judgment to his Son, 23 so that all may honour the Son just as they honour the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honour the Father who sent him. 24 Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life and will not come to condemnation, but has passed from death to life. 25 Amen, amen, I say to you, the hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. 26 For just as the Father has life in himself, so also he gave to his Son the possession of life in himself. 27 And he gave him power to exercise judgment, because he is the Son of Man. 28 Do not be amazed at this, because the hour is coming in which all who are in the tombs will hear his voice 29 and will come out, those who have done good deeds to the resurrection of life, but those who have done wicked deeds to the resurrection of condemnation.
30 “I cannot do anything on my own; I judge as I hear, and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me.
(John 5:21-30)

Whenever I hear the expressions 'Primitive Church' or 'Primitive Christian' I always have a vision of Wilma and Fred Flintstone occupying a pew or at any rate something involving cave dwellers wielding clubs while dressed in animal skins. Which, it appears, is something of a misapprehension on my part. 'Primitive' in this context means 'early' or 'first.' The Primitive Church is simply the Christian community as it existed in it beginnings, fresh from the events surrounding Jesus in Galilee and Judaea, guided by the Apostles. It is considered by many to be the gold standard against which contemporary Christianity should be judged usually to its considerable disadvantage. There are two particular currents of thought which make use of this critical tool largely for the purposes of disparaging Catholicism.

The ecclesial Christian communities of the Reformation (Protestants for short) since the emergence of their various tendencies have united in the criticism that the Catholic Church distorted, obscured, deviated from, and added alien elements to, the original faith of the Primitive Christians. By thus corrupting the religion they at some point, usually arbitrarily selected by the critics, became definitively degenerate or actually apostate. The Protestant aim from the beginning and in each subsequent schism, split or formation of a brand new sect has always been to return to the faith and practice of the Primitive Church. Quite how they reconcile this with their dogmatic assertion that Scripture Alone is the sure basis of Christianity I've never quite understood because if there is one thing about which we can be certain regarding the first Christians it is that they did not possess the New Testament and therefore could neither use it in their liturgies nor seek within its pages for the doctrines of their faith.

The currently more influential critique emerges from the secularists, the atheists and the liberal theologians. It amounts to this: Jesus was misunderstood by His contemporaries, friend and foe alike. These misunderstandings were incorporated into the Bible and the Christian Church (which subsists in the Catholic Church) has busied itself ever since in emphasising the misunderstandings and downplaying the authentic fragments which we possess. Only now after some two thousand years is it possible for us to see what Jesus really meant far more clearly than those who knew Him could and much, much, much more clearly than the Church can. Whilst the Primitive understanding was flawed it is much nearer the truth than the current orthodox understanding of it. Therefore we should look to its practice and its texts so that we can discern His authentic sayings (those we agree with) from the interpolated ones (those we disagree with.) Only then can we find the true Jesus who was a wise teacher like the Buddha (only not so sexy) and not the complex third of an obscure trinitarian deity.

In his An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman dealt with some of these issues far better than I could ever aspire to do. Briefly, he pointed out that if a thing lives then it must change. That something has changed is not in itself a criticism of it. The only important question is whether the change is a development or a corruption. The Christian faith as received by the Church in the Apostolic age is like the seed of a tree, containing within itself the potential for growth and development. We must then judge of each element of the faith as contained in its creeds, its liturgies and its doctrines in the light of the original seed from which they came. If we can trace these as an unfolding of the original blueprint then we should welcome them and rejoice in them. If they are alien imports uncongenial to the original seed then they should be rejected for they are corruptions. However, the radical incompatibility between the received faith and a hostile import necessarily creates a destructive sequence of events so that either the original or the import ends by being expelled. Since the Catholic Church has never expelled its original notions but on the contrary has held fast to them then it is more than likely that its developed doctrines are inherently consistent with its founding ones. The possibility exists that alien elements congenial to the original seed can be grafted on. This has happened with, for example, elements of Greek philosophy. These changes, again, should be welcomed and not rejected since they serve to help our understanding of what we have received but do not in any way change the content of what we have received. To return to the faith of the Primitive Church in the sense of returning to the fervour, purity and commitment of the early Christians is a laudable aim but if it is in the sense of forgetting all that we have learned since through constant prayerful meditation upon the deposit of faith received once for all in the first century then it is itself a corruption, an abandonment of gains not a shedding of losses.

                                            Ecce Ancilla Domini by Dante Gabriel Rossetti 

The criticisms boil down to the assertion that the Church has taken an essentially simple message and made it unnecessarily complex in order to ensure that an especially dedicated caste, the priesthood, is required to interpret it in return for receiving unique powers and privileges. In the light of this it is worth considering the short text from St John which heads this page. Within the body of this text it is possible to notice implicit and explicit references to many things which subsequently turn up in the Creeds and doctrines of the Catholic Church some hundreds of years later. This is significant because the Gospel was written no more than about fifty years or so after the events which it records which means that its contents form part of the beliefs of the Primitive Church. Moreover tradition points to its author as being the Apostle John and there is no reason to suppose that the tradition is comprehensively wrong, that is, if St John did not write it in full himself then it is likely that it is the product of a Johannine community which he had established, led and taught. The Gospel itself suggests that it is the product of the 'beloved disciple' of Jesus a disciple who was also the adopted son of Mary (John 19:26-27) So we have before us a Primitive text which the Primitive Church accepted as being the product of an Apostle who knew Jesus well and who's understanding of Jesus would have been deepened by his closeness to the Mother of the Lord. I lack the ability or the space to develop all the themes present in this fragment but it is possible to consider some.

To start with life, we see at verse 26  ...just as the Father has life in himself, so also he gave to his Son the possession of life in himself. Which is echoed in a later passage I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own. I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again. (John 10:17-18) One of the standard secular/liberal arguments is that Jesus nowhere claimed to be God yet it is hard to understand these statements as meaning anything else. Every creature (a technical term, if God is Creator then each of His creations is a creature) every creature I say has life on loan as it were. Our life begins when God wills it to begin and if He should cease to will that we live then in that instant we shall be annihilated. Not so with Jesus, He has possession of life 'in himself.' How can this be? Well the very start of John's Gospel account tells us In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1) So, what you might call the commentary by St John agrees with the dialogue of our Lord which he reports. Jesus claims a divine prerogative, full possession of His own life, a prerogative which He will illustrate through His resurrection.

The matter is somewhat complicated by the fact that our Lord uses life and death in two fashions in this passage, literally and metaphorically. When He says whoever hears my word....has passed from death to life (verse 24) He clearly means that those who are spiritually dead, or dead towards the Father, will become spiritually alive. But when He says  all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and will come out (verses 28-29) He clearly means that at His word those who have died in the flesh will come alive again in the flesh. Which means that He is saying that the prerogative He possesses over His own life is extended over every other life also which is another way of Him stating His divinity. It is no less a claim to divinity, by the way, to state that He can give spiritual life to the spiritual dead. The statement in verse 21 so also does the Son give life to whomever he wishes can be taken in both senses. And if we consider this from the Song of Hannah The LORD puts to death and gives life, casts down to Sheol and brings up again (1 Samuel 2:6) there can be no shadow of  doubt that Jesus is making a parallel statement making the point that the attributes of God as understood by the Jews are His own attributes.

Another point of attack by liberal critics is the doctrine of the Incarnation which they suggest is so alien to Jewish thought that Jesus could not have held it. It is, they suppose a later import torturously derived from Greek philosophy by over subtle theologians trying to reconcile the difficulties in their texts. That the doctrine is indeed developed using the Greek philosophical tools is true but that it must therefore be a late addition to the story of the itinerant wise teacher Jesus is simply an hypotheses. If we return to our central passage we see a threefold iteration of Son-
25.... the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God
26....so also he gave to his Son
27.... because he is the Son of Man.
  St John is always very careful to ensure that the ideas which he records are sequenced and this is an example of that. The central hinge is the simple use of Son on its own, it links the two dimensions of its meaning on either side. When our Lord talks about the Son of God and the Son of Man He is not talking about two persons but one, Himself. He unites these two facets and He also possess the power to be heard by the dead (v25) to command life (v26) and to judge the living and those whom He has raised from death (v27.) A human who is Son of God and Son of Man and possessed of the plenitude of divine power cannot readily be explained by anything other than the doctrine of Incarnation.

Protestant critics have maintained almost from the outset of their movement(s) that the Scriptures contain a clear doctrine of salvation by Faith Alone and that Catholicism has preached a works based model of salvation to increase the dependence of the faithful on the priesthood. Although the last part seems like a non sequitur to me what about the first? In our Johannine text we do have this-
24...whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life 
Which would seem straightforward until we come to this-
29... those who have done good deeds to the resurrection of life, but those who have done wicked deeds to the resurrection of condemnation
If our Lord had meant to say 'those who have had faith to the resurrection of life' then no doubt that is what He would have said. Clearly if both statements are true neither of them can be simply true, that is, they require to be considered in relation to each other. A synthesis of the two would suggest that some kind of union exists between faith and works both parts of which have to be operational in order for the attainment of salvation. It would also suggest, I think, that we need to be fairly cautious in defining just what faith is. If God is the origin of all good then all good deeds carried out by humans proceed under His inspiration. Yet we know of plenty of non-Christians who consistently perform good, they must be responding to Him in their hearts without necessarily having heard of Him with their ears. Traditional Protestantism has viewed such good deeds as being an abomination before God-
WORKS done before the grace of Christ, and the Inspiration of his Spirit, are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ, neither do they make men meet to receive grace, or (as the School-authors say) deserve grace of congruity: yea rather, for that they are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, we doubt not but they have the nature of sin.
XXXIX Articles: Of Works Before Justification
Leaving all other considerations to one side it does seem to me that those who have developed such a doctrine are in no strong position to accuse Catholicism of over elaborating a simple faith.

I could go on but you will be glad to hear I won't. The proposition we have been considering, that doctrinal development necessarily represents a degeneration from primitive truth is I think false. The Bible often expresses in terse language and summary form very complex ideas. To unpack these ideas and seek to understand them ever more fully is a proper work for Christians. Of its nature it must be the work of centuries, each idea unfolded reveals new horizons, the insights of one generation of Christians lays the foundation for the prayerful study of future generations. Does this process of doctrinal development mean that the faith of 21st Century Catholics is a different faith than that held by their 1st Century predecessors? No it does not. Our objects of faith are precisely the same as theirs. What they held implicitly we can hold explicitly and, it may be, those who follow us in the faith will see clearly something we now see only dimly. A further point to be made is that while it is the obligation of the Church to unfold revelation as fully as possible it is not necessarily the obligation of each believer. Simple people can hold a simple faith simply. The bare acceptance of Jesus as Lord and Saviour and a subsequent life lived trying to be clothed with Christ is a perfectly Christian faith. What is not acceptable is that people with intelligence and insight should bury their talent in a field, not using it for fear of a Master who reaps what he did not sow and gathers where he did not scatter (cf Matthew 25:24.) Intelligence is given us to be used, theology is not reason in search of faith it is faith in search of understanding. If we fear to understand what we believe then, perhaps, it may be because we do not really believe.

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Praying to Saints?

                                                            Venerable Margaret Sinclair

When the centurion heard about Jesus, he sent to him elders of the Jews, asking him to come and heal his servant
Luke 7:3

Enemies of Catholicism suppose (or affect to suppose) that Catholics pray to Saints instead of praying to God. Those who are merely uninformed think that Catholics pray to Saints as well as praying to God. So what is the situation? The idea, briefly, is that Christians on earth ask Christians in heaven to join with them in praying for this or that petition. The two challenges to that proposition which I have encountered most frequently are-

• Why not just pray directly yourself since Jesus is the sole mediator between Man and God?
• How do we know that Saints can hear our prayers?

As far as the first point goes there are several possible answers. One Christian asking another Christian to pray for them has been standard practice since New Testament times. The Apostle St Paul wrote You also must help us by prayer (2 Corinthians 1:11) We know that the Apostle prayed directly to Jesus so clearly he did not see intercession by others as detracting from that but rather strengthening it. As he put it to the Philippians  for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance (Philippians 1:19) Why this kind of intercession might be helpful is something that St James addresses The effective prayer of a righteous person has great power (James 5:16) Which, by the way, raises the suggestion that in the eyes of God some people appear more righteous than others something which more hardline Protestants would deny absolutely. But I digress, the point is that asking others to pray for you is not a sign of your lack of faith in Jesus it is a frank recognition of your own failings. Because I suspect most of us reading this and myself writing it are very far from being righteous it is more than helpful to us to invoke the aid of those whom we know or suspect of being nearer to virtue than we ourselves are.

Does it somehow offend Jesus if we thus ask others to present our petitions to Him? The episode of the Centurion's Servant (or slave) in Luke (Chapter 7:1-10) indicates that far from being offended He is absolutely delighted. The story is that a Centurion has a servant (or slave) whom he loves and who is gravely ill. It is worth noting that as a Roman the Centurion is not only not Jewish but is actively involved in perpetuating the hated occupation of Palestine by a foreign power. So he sends Jewish leaders to Jesus to act as his advocates. They commend his petition for these reasons He is worthy to have you do this for him,  for he loves our nation, and he is the one who built us our synagogue  (vv4-5) That is both his charity and his works are presented to Jesus as being sufficiently meritorious to earn our Lord's goodwill. The argument seems persuasive enough insofar as our Lord and his entourage then set off to the Centurion's house. However the Roman then sends out a further bunch of advocates, his friends, who say to Jesus Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. (v6) And he makes the point that our Lord can simply command that the servant (or slave) be healed and that would suffice to make it happen, which of course it did. Did Jesus get het up because the Centurion chose to appeal to Him in this fashion? What He said was turning to the crowd that followed him,[He] said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” (v9) 

I think that much of the confusion surrounding this issue stems from a misunderstanding that equates the role of mediator with that of advocate. Jesus is the sole mediator between Man and God in the sense that all reconciliation proceeds through Him and only through Him. Yet although this reconciliation is freely available to all not all will finally avail themselves of it. Some are estranged from God through lack of explicit or implicit faith in the Saviour. Others are estranged through sin which presents a barrier to grace though they may formally acknowledge the importance of Christ. Seeking to overcome these barriers through the assistance provided by the prayers of those who are in a state of grace is not replacing the mediatorship of Christ with that of the Saints it is a seeking by those with an imperfect faith to enter fully into the inheritance promised to those with perfect faith. That is, they certainly place their hopes in Christ, which is wise, but not in their own merits, which is also wise, thus they ask those whose merits are known to Christ to add to the sum of their own prayers and as it were tip the balance from justice to mercy a kind of accountancy that Jesus always smiles upon.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that the equivalent episode in the Gospel According to St Matthew (8:5-13) presents the story as if the Centurion and our Lord had actually met and engaged in a dialogue. I think that this can be explained by the different purposes underlying each Evangelists narrative. St Matthew was writing in the first instance for a primarily Jewish audience, his priorities were to emphasise that Jesus was a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies and that these transformed the religious mission of the Jews from a national project to an international one with the renewed Israel becoming a beacon to the world-

“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
    to raise up the tribes of Jacob
    and to bring back the preserved of Israel;
I will make you as a light for the nations,
    that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

(Isaiah 49:6)

St Matthew then, as it were, bigs up the encounter between the heir of King David and the gentile in order to emphatically put Jesus' imprimatur on the mission to the gentiles which is why he includes this passage which is absent from St Luke's account

" I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

(vv11-12)

St Luke had different purposes and his account of our Lord's mission is often called "the Gospel of Prayer" (don't believe me? Google it.) Therefore he describes the episode with the Centurion in the way that he does precisely because it bigs up the prayer aspect, that is to say, the intercessory prayer aspect. One can easily reconcile the two accounts by considering that the words spoken by the advocates really were the words first spoken by the Centurion which is precisely what you would expect when Saints intercede for you with the addition, as St Luke notes, of extra material highlighting whatever merits you may possess.

                                                            St Margaret of Scotland

Granting that asking people to pray for you is not displaying a lack of faith in Christ but is actually being obedient to the plain sense of the Scriptures people still doubt whether it is legitimate to add Christians in heaven to our list of people that we ask. The question is do they hear our prayers. One school of thought is that when people die they enter into a 'soul sleep' which is to say that they literally snooze their way from death to the final judgement without any sort of awareness of their surroundings. The basis for this idea is the frequent references to people who die 'falling asleep.' But this, I think, only refers to the physical half of the equation, a dead person resembles a sleeping person when we look at them. There are, by contrast, numerous scriptural references to post-mortality people being very much alive to the eyes of God. Here are some-

• And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:43) Said to the 'good thief' on the Cross.
• "Have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” (Matthew 22:31-32) 
• The Parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19-31 which portrays Abraham, Lazarus and the rich man as all being spiritually alive and aware after their mortal death. It might be argued 'its just a parable' but it would be an extraordinarily misleading one for Jesus to use if there is no spiritual life and awareness among those who have passed on.
• The Transfiguration (Mark 9:2-8) which includes- there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus. (v4) Now, Elijah had been assumed into heaven but Moses had unequivocally died and been buried. If Moses could hold a conversation with Jesus clearly he was both spiritually alive and aware of what was going on. I have heard it argued that 'it was just a vision' and not the real Moses but, again, it seems an extraordinarily misleading one if the scriptures want us to believe in 'soul sleep.'

So granting that intercessory prayer is scriptural and A Good Thing and granting that Christians after death are spiritually alive to God and aware what warrant do we have for assuming that they can hear our requests? Sacred Scripture offers no explicit guidance on this subject, asking Saints to add their prayers to ours is certainly not contrary to Scripture but neither is it affirmed by it. What we can say is that it is an ancient practice of the Church. It began with invoking the aid of martyrs whom the faithful have excellent grounds for believing to be in heaven. Protestant critics of Catholicism offer various competing dates for the time when the Church supposedly fell into apostasy. What we can say about praying to Saints is that it predates all of them. The Church which defined the Nicene Creed was a Church that prayed to Saints. Therefore anyone who accepts the one has no logical grounds not to accept the other and practically every Christian denomination does accept the Creed. It cannot surely be the case that the Holy Spirit guided the Church to be so profoundly right in these central matters of the faith but was entirely laissez faire about the prayer life of Christians. The practice then is not contrary to Scripture and is entirely consonant with the beliefs and practices of the Church from practically the get go. Individual Christians may not feel the need to invoke Saints, thats up to them, but they have no grounds to criticise others for doing so nor to suggest that it is somehow non-Christian or displaying a lack of faith in Christ our Lord and Saviour.

Finally, as with faith itself, the greatest proof is experimental. If you ask the Saints to join their prayers to yours then you will yourself discover the wonderful benefits which flow from the practice. Above all invoke the aid of Mary, Mother of Jesus, Mother of Christians, Mother of the Church and you will find that where, perhaps, grace once abounded now it will abound all the more. Going to Jesus through Mary shows no lack of faith in Jesus but at once is an affirmation of your own littleness and of that indescribably huge reservoir of love that flows between Jesus and His mother. There is nothing that He will refuse her and there is nothing containing virtue, charity or hope that she is not bold enough to ask from Him.

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An Everyday Assumption

                                                Coronation of the Virgin by Fra Angelico

He hath given us most great and precious promises: that by these you may be made partakers of the divine nature
2 Peter 1:4

Draw us onward with the sweetness of your voice, that one day, after our exile, you may show us Jesus, the blessed Fruit of your womb, O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.
Pope Venerable Pius XII

One reason why the Church celebrates certain feasts, such as Easter and Christmas, with particular solemnity is that they have a universal applicability. That is to say, after we have put away our festal party frock and resumed our workaday dress the content of the feast which is celebrated on one day continues to have vital relevance on all the other 364 days of the year. [NB. the frock and the dress can be either literal or metaphorical as the case may be.] Recently some of my non-Catholic friends on social media, they know who they are, expressed some bemusement about my rejoicing on the occasion of the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary so it struck me that it might be useful to say something about what this feast is all about and why its importance overflows into the daily life of the Christian.

Quite simply the Church celebrates this fact-
The Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory 
Munificentissimus Deus
This was proclaimed a dogma of the Church in November 1950 by Pope Pius XII of blessed memory although it has been celebrated and believed in by Christians since ancient times as he outlines in the Apostolic Constitution which I have just quoted. Among Eastern Christians it is celebrated under the perfectly splendid title of the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God. The word dormition has the same root as dormouse and refers to the falling asleep of the Virgin which preceded her Assumption into heaven.

In the whole course of the 20th century the Catholic Church only once exercised, via the Pope ex cathedra, her infallible teaching office in order to affirm as certainly true what had only been received as probably true before. At the halfway point of this most troubled of centuries and only 5 years after the end of the most destructive war in human history she proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption. Christians of the Reformation traditions (often called Protestants) might argue that what the world most needed was to have Jesus proclaimed, not Mary. Non-Believers might argue that instead of indulging in such magical realism the Church would be better employed in feeding the hungry, tending the sick and housing the homeless. In part of course the critics are right so far as their instincts go but err in their judgement. In proclaiming Mary Assumed by Jesus, because of her love for Jesus and His for her, the Church precisely proclaims Jesus to the world and show the effects of His involvement as Emmanuel, God with us. And amongst those Catholics who do in fact commit themselves to feeding the hungry and so on there are few whose commitment is not enriched and strengthened by their devotion to Mary and there are none whose work is not made more effective through her prayers and the graces which flow through her hands as Mediatrix of all Grace.

It is obvious why we might be glad for our Lady that she has been reunited with her Son in much the same way as we might be glad when a friend passes an exam or marries their beau ideal but what practical effect does it have on our daily life? If you have read my blog about Mary-Mirror of Perfection you might recall the Jubilee Prayer which includes these words-
because you are the star of the morning, the gate of Heaven,
and the first resurrected creature
The words 'first resurrected creature' contain in very few words an idea I am about to use many words to explain. In this kind of context 'creature' is a technical term it follows from the role of God as Creator, those living things which He creates are referred to generically as creatures. 'Resurrection' refers to rising from the dead never to die again. So, in Scripture Jesus is the only Resurrection recorded but He cannot strictly speaking be referred to as a creature since He is fully God as well as being fully Man. Scripture records other people, such as Lazarus (John 11:38-44,) rising from the dead but in time they would again die so the term resurrection cannot be applied to them. Similarly Scripture arguably records two people, Enoch (Genesis 5:24) and Elijah (4 Kings 2:11), who were translated into heaven but they did not first die so again resurrection does not apply to them.

Being first has a double significance to it. It means that no one was before Mary, her Son accorded her a unique privilege, and it also means that others will follow her. She is not the first and the last she is the first of many. So for us Mary is a pioneer. Her faith in the Father, her co-operation with the Spirit and her love for the Son were of such a superlative order that she has precedence over all other Christians yet all who share in that faith, co-operation and love for God have a share too in the gifts that flow from it. In the vision of Mary Assumed the Catholic can fill their own lives with hope and raise up their hearts at all times. 'Pie in the sky when you die' the atheist will say. If that was the sum total of the gift to us from the Assumption then they would have a good point but as usual with God's gifts it overflows with abundance and cannot be limited to just one thing. If our Lady is now seated with honour in the heart of heaven it is because heaven was first seated with honour in her own heart. Entering heaven is not about endless time it is about a continuously present eternity and we can enter eternity now and experience it now by opening our hearts to the eternal God and giving Him a dwelling place. A necessary prelude to the Assumption was the indwelling of the Spirit in the Theotokos and a prelude to our own eventual resurrection is a similar if lesser indwelling and this transforms our lives here, it transforms our lives now and if we remain faithful it transforms them forever.

It is important to notice also that this is among other things a physical event. From the very get-go Christianity has been vigorously challenged about the whole notion of the Incarnated God and the physically resurrected Christ as forerunner to a general and universal resurrection. It was about this very point that the Sadducees challenged our Lord (Mark 12:18) and the Athenians ridiculed St Paul (Acts 17:32.) Gnostics, Cathars, Buddhists, Baha'is and theologically liberal Protestants can all unite around the idea that life from eternity and into eternity is purely a spiritual thing in which the body has no part. If life continues beyond death and attains a happier state than now it is because the body which is an encumberance and a stumbling block is 'left behind' (to coin a phrase). Indeed matter itself in any form is a potent source of evil and the spirit alone is or can be the only source of good and happiness. 'Not so' says the Church, by uniting Himself essentially and forever to a body of flesh Jesus, the Divine Logos, has divinised matter, He has become Man by nature that Man the whole of Man can become God by participation. Our Lord who desired the most supreme possible blessedness for His mother did not permit her body to be subject to corruption and decay, the Assumption is a triumphal affirmation that perfect happiness for humans is an exaltation of all that it means to be human, not spirit alone, not soul alone but spirit, soul and body. And it reminds us day by day that we must give our bodies what is due to them, if they make bad masters opening to us the gates of damnation they also make excellent servants sharing in the joys of eternal beatitude if only we use them wisely.

Protestants may say that this is all very well but where in Scripture can we find a reference to the Assumption? In Munificentissimus Deus Pope Venerable Pius XII refers to a number of figures or types of the Assumption which contain the mystery under a veiled form but essentially these are secondary sources. The belief has been held in the Church since ancient times, it has been celebrated in the West and in the East, it is fitting that God should have acted in this way and it is not contrary to Scripture. As the First Vatican Council put it- all those things are to be believed by divine and Catholic faith which are contained in the written Word of God or in Tradition, and which are proposed by the Church, either in solemn judgment or in its ordinary and universal teaching office, as divinely revealed truths which must be believed. There is nothing in Scripture which says that Scripture Alone should be our rule of faith and neither Catholic nor Orthodox Christians feel constrained to ignore what has been handed down from antiquity simply because it has no express warrant in the Bible. Scripture is a sure guarantee against error if we do nothing which contradicts it but it is an unsure source of doctrine when read without reference to the continuous beliefs of the People of God as the ever growing multiplicity of Protestant sects all too sadly confirms.

Another powerful help to our daily Christian journey comes from the knowledge that the Son, who through love of His mother raised her to heaven, cannot fail to respond positively to her prayers. In Mary we have a highly effective intercessor. As the Marian prayer Memorare puts it Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that any one who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided.  Protestants argue against this that since we can pray to Jesus ourselves why should we need intercession? To which we can  reply that we have an explicit injunction in Scripture itself to seek intercession from others-
Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The fervent prayer of a righteous person is very powerful.           James 5:16
That Mary is righteous beyond all others we can know from the fact of her Assumption therefore we can have every confidence in her intercession. It is also worth considering this point You ask but do not receive, because you ask wrongly (James 4:3.) The Saints and the Blesseds have greater success with their prayers than you or I because they know how to ask aright. That is to say their prayers are not infused with their own egos and passions nor do they act as conduits for the egos and passions of others but their prayers proceed from pure love to Him who is pure Love itself. And since Mary is filled beyond all others with love for her Son Jesus who can doubt that her prayers are asked with perfect rightness and are heard with gladness by our Lord? All that is impure and awkward in our petitions is transmuted by flowing through her hands so that they come to Christ in forms which are perfectly suited to our real needs.

But how can Mary hear all these prayers offered up day and night by millions around the globe the objector asks? How can I hear your objection? I hear it because God has made it possible for you to communicate and for me to understand your communication. Is it more difficult for God to make it possible for Mary to hear many communications than it is for Him to enable me to hear one? If Mary were in time she might be overwhelmed but she is not in time she is in eternity. Those Christians who believe it possible for God to enable the dead to rise with their bodies after thousands of years in the grave, and who can empower an Elisha or a St Paul to raise the dead themselves but impossible for Him to allow Saints to hear prayers have a very limited notion of omnipotence.

There is so much more that could be said but I will consider just one final thing. One of the Marian titles is Our Lady of Sorrows.

As Simeon prophesied (Luke 2:35) our Lady had her soul pierced by a sword not just once but many times. Her life, like the lives of so many of us, was marked by loss, anxiety and pain. Above all that unnatural loss that every mother fears, a child who dies while its parent still lives, was enacted in brutal and horrific reality in front of her eyes. Yet that soul did not break because it was linked with that of her Son in a love stronger than death. Through sorrow she was sustained by Him and that love which was and is mutual was not conquered by the end of her own earthly life it triumphed to raise her up to where she always longed to be. And we in our own sorrows to the extent that we possess that love of Jesus and recall to our minds the dogma of the Assumption can be assured that sorrows will have an end but the love of God for us is without end and without measure. There is no despair so bleak that it can overwhelm a firm faith in the Assumption as a guarantor of how the friends of God are cherished by God. It is important to recall, of course, that our ability to hold this faith can be gravely impaired by mental illness or some other factor which incapacitates our judgement and which is known to God alone to whom we can safely entrust the souls of all those who have died under the influence of such unblameable despair.

St Paul famously outlined the three theological virtues as being faith, hope and love (1 Corinthians 13.) We can see each of these three as being powerfully present in the Assumption. Through them and by them Mary was raised to heaven. Through meditating upon the Assumption, or at least frequently recalling it, we as Christians can grow in each of these virtues and above all in love which is, as it were, the fuel that powered the flight of Mary from the grip of the tomb into the arms of her beloved Son. May the prayers of Mary, Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, help us to find our way to the same destination.


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The Case of the Forgetful Saint

And it shall come to pass after this, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy: your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.  Moreover upon my servants and handmaids in those days I will pour forth my spirit.
Joel 2:28-29

About 20 years or so ago when I was a new Catholic I was more than slightly sceptical about the various stories or legends surrounding many Saints. In particular the miracles and visions which were directly or indirectly associated with them seemed to me for the most part far fetched. This week I have been reading Blessed John Henry Newman's Essays On Miracles and it recalls to my mind how and why my attitude began to change. I haven't yet finished the essays but Newman has made one salient point about the different attitudes towards miracles associated with the Church (Ecclesiastical miracles) which have been expressed on the one hand by Christians of the Reformation traditions (often called Protestants) and on the other by Catholic Christians. Protestants accept the miracles which are recorded in the Scriptures but for the most part deny those associated with the Church in subsequent eras. Catholics not only accept the miracles in the Bible but also believe that in some way the miraculous will always be associated with the Church without denying that in many cases reported miracles are merely legendary or susceptible to non-miraculous explanations. Newman makes the point that the determining factor for belief in this or that miracle is not the evidence adduced for it but the attitude towards the Church which one takes as a starting point.

Protestants do not deny that God may well have worked miracles in this world  since the age of the Apostles. What they deny is that He associates the Church in any special way with this work of His. Indeed, insofar as miracles tend to confirm Catholic doctrines which Protestants reject, such as the invocation of Saints or the special honour accorded to the Blessed Virgin Mary, they must either be spurious or the work of the devil. Miracles are, they suppose, no more common among Catholics than they are among pagans or idolaters. Catholics, on the other hand, would argue that Jesus promised that special powers, particularly healing of the sick and exorcism would always be present with the Church, and that we would anticipate from prophecies like that of Joel that visionaries also would ever be associated with Catholicism. Each person then will evaluate the evidence presented to them in each particular case through the lens of their a priori expectations. Still more of course does this apply to those who deny any Divine agency at all who will simply decline to examine the evidence on the basis that their assumption tells them it must always and everywhere be false or misleading.

Thus far Newman. I think in one way, which I shall come back to, his argument is ultimately decisive but, as it happens, my path towards accepting the reality of a good many reported Ecclesiastical miracles and visions proceeded less from my attitude towards the Church as such and more from the forgetfulness of St Bernadette of Lourdes. Her story is well known to many Catholics but for the benefit of those who are not familiar with it I shall speed-narrate my way through the most important points. In 1858 a poor, sickly and largely uneducated teenage girl, Bernadette Soubirous, reported seeing visions of a beautiful young woman in a small cave (grotto) near her home in Lourdes, a town in the French Pyrenees. On one occasion following the directions of the apparition Bernadette uncovered a spring which was previously unknown to her. On another when asked her name the young woman replied in the local dialect "que soy era Immaculada Councepciou" meaning "I am the Immaculate Conception" a title which the Church had only a few years previously definitively ascribed to Mary the mother of Jesus although, again, it was previously unknown to Bernadette. From within a few hours of its discovery the spring had become associated with inexplicable cures of diseases, taking this together with the honour in which the Catholic world held and holds the Virgin Mary Lourdes very quickly became a major pilgrimage centre. Today, indeed, it receives about seven million pilgrims a year. In the meantime Bernadette ceased having visions after a few short months and subsequently she became a nun in Nevers a French town some hundreds of miles from Lourdes where she died aged 35 in 1879.

I first became interested in our Saint in about 2000 when I heard the book Lourdes. Body and Spirit in the Secular Age by Ruth Harris being read. One of the threads running through it is the way that Bernadette moves from her brief role centre-stage ever more into the shadows symbolised by her departure to distant Nevers and her early death. There is an air of sadness about this, somewhat reminiscent of John the Baptist's comment about Jesus He must increase, but I must decrease. (John 3:30) This admittedly is a sentimental response which perhaps deserves the rebuke which our Lord gave to St Peter thou savourest not the things that are of God, but the things that are of men (Matthew 16:23) since there is no indication that either the Baptist or our Saint were ever less than joyful at the attention paid, respectively to our Lord or our Lady of Lourdes. Sentimental or not I became interested in Bernadette and subsequently read the scholarly biography by Therese Taylor Bernadette of Lourdes: her life, death and visions It is important, I think, to emphasise that this was an academic exercise and not a hagiography because it has some bearing on what follows.

Apart from my sympathy for the young visionary I approached her story with a number of other pre-conceptions. Firstly, as a Christian I accepted in principle that it was possible that from time to time God does intervene in human history via, among other means, miracles and visions sent by Him. Secondly, I did not feel at all obliged to accept that He actually had done on any particular occasion since the heroic age of the Church. I had, moreover, a frankly elitist approach approach to Lourdes specifically; thinking that the pilgrims and believers in our Lady of Lourdes tended to be either poorly educated or especially credulous or both. As I became immersed in the life of the young visionary I was very forcibly struck by the girl's character. Bernadette was a transparently honest and straightforward person. She was possessed of a lively sense of humour but not of an equally lively imagination. It is important to note that time and again after she had started encountering the apparition she refused, often indignantly, offers of money or other material benefits for herself or her family which poured in to her. At one point her brother ran a stall selling holy memorabilia, a lucrative occupation shared then and now by many Lourdais, and Bernadette absolutely forbade him to operate on a Sunday thus significantly reducing the profitability of the operation. Thus, there could be no reason to suppose that she invented the story in order to profit from it.

Sister Marie Bernard, as she became in the convent, was one of the most examined and prodded about women in France at one point. The unanimous conclusion of all who examined her was that she was of sound mind. no symptoms of mental illness or a propensity to hallucination was ever discovered in her. So there could be no reason to suppose that mental unbalance had led to her to report her visions which were confined to a few weeks of one year of her life. Both in Lourdes and at Nevers she was frequently sought out as the seer of the Mother of God, a distinction which plainly irritated her and which she developed considerable skills in avoiding. So there could be no reason to suppose that a desire for notoriety had prompted her to report her experiences. On the basis of all the evidence about her character the only reasonable conclusion to which a person could come, in my opinion, is that she saw something which nobody else could see and then she reported as honestly as possible what she had seen. The question which remains is did she report accurately or did she cast into a form acceptable to her culture and religion a phenomenon which was not exactly as she described it? Therese Taylor makes the point that in the Pyrenean region there are a number of shrines to our Lady and stories circulating about her appearances which contains many similar elements to those described by Bernadette, a grotto, a spring, miraculous healings and so on. Our Saint's subconsciousness may have processed this material and combined it with whatever phenomenon it was that she saw to produce the story which so electrified Catholic France and scandalised secular France.

This naturalistic explanation is not only plausible but, I suspect, for atheists and hard core anti-Catholics the only possible narrative account if you discount the possibility of Bernadette being a liar or in some way mentally ill. Against it though stands the collateral evidence independent of Bernadette herself, by which I mean the inexplicable cures associated with the spring and the shrine of the grotto. From the beginning doctors, including robust sceptics were all over these claims like a rash and some of them can be discounted as of doubtful veracity or purely psychosomatic. there remains though a definite residuum of purely physical diseases which have been cured immediately. These the rationalists account for by saying either that science cannot explain them yet but one day it will be able to, which is a faith statement if ever I heard one, or that they exhibit a syndrome known as 'spontaneous remission' which is a fancy way of saying 'miraculous.' The combination of Bernadette's testimony and the related emergence of inexplicable cures mutually reinforce each other and lend weight to the likelihood that the Mother of God really did appear to that little girl in Lourdes.

The datum which finally convinced me, however, was the drama of the last few weeks and months of the life of Sister Marie Bernard. From her youth Bernadette had a very poor memory, she had been delayed in her progress through school and catechism classes as a result of this. As it became apparent that her life was soon to end she was constantly badgered by those who planned to write histories of the events and were desperate to get a full account of the story of the apparitions. Again and again she was questioned about them. This was not only a trial to her, as we can well imagine, but they added another dimension to her suffering. "My God", she said to her fellow nuns "what if I should forget?" With most people when they tell a story about their lives find that with each repetition the story grows longer and longer and more details, accurate or not, are added in. This is rarely an outright process of lying usually it is the simple effect of a normal human imagination dwelling upon a sequence of events which we place in the past. Elements that we think should be in it find their way in, things that we ought to have said it turns out that we did say and so on. With Bernadette though her story got shorter and shorter as she just forgot details and was unwilling to fill in the gaps in her memory with any old thing. The concessions she made to her forgetfulness by simply saying "I don't remember" seem to me to be the hallmarks of an honest person trying as hard as possible to recall an actual event and preferring to be thought of as stupid rather than say anything about it which she could not remember.

So, taken together accepting the possibility of a Divine Agency at work in the world,  the character (and memory) of the witness or witnesses, and the existence of collateral evidence could serve to act as persuasive arguments in favour of any claim to the miraculous or the visionary. However, they may be a necessary basis but they are an insufficient one. Which brings us back to Newman's suggestion that our prior attitude to the Church plays a decisive role in the decision we come to about a claim. It is certain that if we look across the history of the world we will see a number of cases where witnesses are unimpeachable and collateral evidence of some kind exists but yet the visionaries or miracle workers say things which are mutually incompatible. For example Baha’u’llah a contemporary of Bernadette's and the founder of the Baha'i faith was clearly an honourable and noble man who reported seeing visions and of whom it was reported that he performed miracles. Yet, despite Baha'i claims to the contrary, his religion is radically incompatible with the Catholic faith. We need therefore a standard by which to judge such things. The Scriptures say believe not every spirit, but try the spirits if they be of God (1 John 4:1) And the highest possible standard by which to judge anything is Jesus, His person and His revelation. Any purported vision or miracle which is compatible with that standard may be worthy of belief (though the Church compels no one to accept any post-Apostolic revelation) and any which is not so compatible cannot be accepted. This implies no dishonesty on the part of visionaries nor even necessarily denies the presence of Divine agency, it merely supposes that at the least they have misunderstood the significance of what they have seen and heard. And the only sure custodian of that revelation is that body to which it was made, the Apostles and their successors, that is to say the Bishops of the Catholic Church united around the See of St Peter the Prince of Apostles and his successor the Bishop of Rome.


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