Fr. Paschal Scotti offered the following homily at the morning conventual Mass of Tuesday, October 3, the feast of Blessed Columba Marmion.

Blessed Columba Marmion, O.S.B.

Today is the feast of Columba Marmion, who was beatified in the year 2000 by Pope John Paul II. He was born in Ireland in 1858 into a very large, very prosperous, very Catholic religious family. His mother was French. He was very attracted to religious life, to a spiritual life, a priestly life – as, in those days at least, the cream of Irish manhood was. A great many people who could have done many things wanted to be priests, as the best thing you could be. He entered the seminary at sixteen; he was ordained in 1881… I guess he was twenty-three. On his way back home to Ireland, having been ordained in Rome at the Irish Pontifical College, he went to a place called Maredsous, in Belgium. It has been founded just nine years earlier by the Beuronese Congregation, one of these reformed Benedictine congregations, one that was very austere, very demanding – a full throttle kind of Benedictine monasticism, unlike other orders that exist in many other places. And when he got back to Ireland, he wanted to become a monk at Maredsous, but his bishop said no. So, for the next five years he did various things: worked in a parish, taught at colleges, philosophy, etc. Finally, in 1886, he got permission to enter Maredsous in Belgium, in which the language was definitely not going to be English. And it was very difficult, very traumatic sometimes, he says, but he did it. He became a very eminent kind of figure at Maredsous. Then, in 1909, he was made abbot, the Third Abbot of Maredsous. He died in 1923 as the Abbot of Maredsous in Belgium. It was a very successful – certainly very successful under him – Benedictine monastery in Belgium, and it had two schools and a very, very full monastic choir. He is most famous, though, not as an abbot, though he was a very able abbot, but as a spiritual writer – perhaps the most influential of Catholic authors in the early part of the 20th century. Many of his books, translated from the French (since he mostly wrote in French being the language of the region that he was working in) into English. were very, very popular in this country and in other parts of the English-speaking world as well (and obviously the French world).
What can we draw from the books, the very influential books, of Abbot Marmion, of this great spiritual figure, intellectual figure, religious figure? I think two things. One is, the centrality of dogma and true spirituality. You can’t build on sand. You can’t build on vagueness and nothingness. Christianity is a unique religion. The incarnation is a very unique reality, and any Christian spirituality, to be worth anything, has to be founded on Jesus Christ, the foundation of the Incarnation, the reality of the redemption, and of what God does in us by divine grace. We are adopted to become sons of God by the Incarnation, by the redemption of Christ. And the second thing, obviously flowing from that, is the centrality of Christ, Jesus Christ, the God-made-man, who restores us, redeems us, transfigures us to become other Christs.

Some Marmion literature

More and more so, if we play our cards right and do what we should do. So, we are called to an extraordinary existence. We have the key of life, Jesus Christ, who is the key of life. This can make everybody’s life better, everybody. I don’t care who you are or where you are, how wealthy, how poor, how intelligent, how whatever. Christ is the key to all reality. We have it, if we live it, if we actually try to live it (which is another question unto itself). We are called to an extraordinary existence – to imitate Columba Marmion in holiness, to imitate him. And his books are full of wonderful things – I think his books are pretty good on the whole. Every style is different, people’s styles are different than our styles, maybe different in what they are like in terms of spiritual literature, but we are called to live a life of Christ. To be transfigured, transformed into other Christs, to become sons of the Father, as Christ was by nature and we by adoption, by divine grace. And in doing that, we set free the world, make the world a better place, make ourselves happy and fulfilled and complete. So, Columba Marmion should Inspire us. We should read his spiritual writings. They are often very, very good (everyone is different but nonetheless I think on the whole his writing is pretty good). And, imitate this great saint in all things, as all the saints imitate other saints and imitate Christ, since Christ is the center of our existence, the center of our belief, the center of everything. We are called to be other Christs. Columba Marmion tried to be another Christ. We are called to be transformed in divine grace, as Columba Marmion was transformed by divine grace. And we all will meet again in paradise and enjoy the full fruits of that reality, that transformation, that transfiguration.

Fr. Paschal Scotti, author of Galileo Revisited: The Galileo Affair in Context and Out of Due Time: Wilfrid Ward and The Dublin Review, is a monk of Portsmouth and teacher of history.