Via Crucis, Lucca

Several weeks ago, the monks began a new book during our evening dinners (Medieval Christianity: A New History by Kevin Madigan, Yale University Press, New Haven, 20015). Chapter 3 interested me for several reasons. I have been thinking about and researching the topic of ‘mission’ and recently spoke to the religious of the Diocese of Providence about the shared mission of the laity and consecrated religious. 

Chapter 3 is titled ‘Foundations: Monasticism, the Papacy, and Mission.’ It relates a lot of information about St. Benedict and Pope St. Gregory the Great (the secondary patron of Portsmouth). It also contains one of the best descriptions of the very first Benedictine oblates which, as you may know, were children.  Here’s how the author puts it:

“Monasteries also increasingly served as safe havens for children, called ‘oblates,’ given by their parents to the cloisters. Allowing the family to avoid partitioning its estate, this practice was especially useful to noble families, as monasteries allowed sons born to the purple to live in relative security and comfort and with other children of the well-born. Aristocratic girls for whom no satisfactory marriage could be arranged also found homes in Benedictine nunneries. Eventually proscribed in 1215 by the Fourth Lateran Council, the recruitment of child oblates produced some of the most remarkable monks of the Middle Ages.”

The author quotes an ecclesiastical history written by the Saxon-Norman monk Oderic Vitalis who died around 1143.   The author writes, “Oderic tells us what it was like to be ‘donated’ by his British parents to a Norman monastery and the assurances given by his father.”  Here are Oderic’s own words:

Thus, we have one version of how oblates of St. Benedict came to be. Oblation is a promise to live life according to the Rule of St. Benedict to the best of one’s ability and circumstances, in the various spheres of your life.  Like the vows of a monk, it’s a way of getting closer to God. Often when you try to get closer to someone, it might mean attempting to be more like them, to imitate them.

My entire life has been lived on an academic schedule, from kindergarten through high school and college, to three decades of teaching at the university level, and now at Portsmouth. This schedule allowed me to travel throughout the world on spring breaks, often during Lent, Holy Week, the Sacred Triduum, and Easter Week itself. It allowed me to walk and pray the Stations of the Cross in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Chile, Argentina and elsewhere. 

The Stations, or the Way of the Cross (via Crucis), are one of the popular devotions of our faith, a Lenten tradition shared by families, and observed for centuries in many countries. It is not a liturgy, like the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist which comprise our Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, or even like the Liturgy of the Hours. Stations are a devotional practice, like praying the rosary, both of which rely on a certain repetition.

Via Crucis, Lucca

In Zamora, in northwest Spain, a life-sized statue of Christ falling under the weight of His cross is carried on the shoulders of men walking through the streets of the town every Good Friday following the Way of the Cross. Each station is represented by one of the town’s Catholic churches, and the barefoot men are greeted at the main door of each church by the pastor. The men belong to one of the town’s penitential societies and are dressed in distinctive long tunics or robes with pointed hoods masking their faces.  Prayers are said by the gathered people, and the somber procession moves to the next church, ending up at the town’s cathedral.

On three different Good Fridays since 2002 I have walked the stations in the Vitacura neighborhood of Santiago around Colegio San Benito.  One year it was raining.  Fourteen boys from the school are chosen each year to portray Christ, one for each station.  The stations are set up on short platforms in the nearby park creating small stage sets, in the style of tableaux vivants, or ‘living pictures.’ The students pose motionless with homemade costumes and simple props to silently re-enact the scenes of Christ’s Passion.

Across the Pacific from Chile, in the Philippines, men are nailed to crosses every Good Friday to literally undergo the pain and agony suffered by Christ.  Their goal isn’t to die but to suffer.  They walk around for months afterwards, at home, at work, at church, bearing the same wounds that Christ bore, self-imposed stigmata, as badges of courage.  Most assuredly the news media will report on these activities in early April.

Good Friday, Colegio San Benito

On Good Friday night of 2008, I stood for hours outside the Coliseum, at the foot of the Aventine in Rome, where Pope Benedict XVI led the prayers of the stations with thousands of us standing in the rain.  We were very much aware that beneath the rain-soaked cobblestones was ground consecrated by the blood of many martyrs who had died nearby in witness to our faith. 

One summer after leaving Rome I did the stations in Zimbabwe at the Monastery of Christ the Word in southern Africa. Christ the Word was founded in 1997 by Ampleforth Abbey which also founded Saint Louis Abbey. The monks have nailed very simple posters of paintings of each station to the tree trunks in one of the monastery gardens, providing a contemplative oasis in sub-Saharan Africa.  This Good Friday I hope to walk the Stations of the Cross here at Portsmouth for the second time, to the top of Cross Hill overlooking the campus. 

It is not only the priest who is called to imitate Christ as he leads us through the 14 stations on the path to Calvary. It is a call to each one of us to become more like Christ in imitating His love, His forgiveness of others, and ultimately His sacrifice on that cross. A prayer by St. John Henry Newman for the Second Station tells us “to be ever ready to take up our cross and follow [Jesus Christ],” imitating the way that our Lord received His own cross at that second station. At the sixth station, where Veronica wipes the face of Jesus, our prayer to Him begs that “Thy image be graven on our minds, until we are transformed into Thy likeness.”

When the Last Supper was completed on Holy Thursday night, Jesus humbled Himself by washing the dusty feet of St. Peter and the other apostles. When Peter balked at this, as John 13:15 tells us, Jesus gave Peter and the others an instruction. It is meant for priests today, but is even directed at us: “I have given you a model to follow [i.e. to imitate], so that as I have done for you, you should also do.”

Imitation comes in many other forms besides humility. Books have been written about this subject alone [see The Imitation of Christ by St. Thomas a’ Kempis, 15^th century].  St. Benedict reflects on imitation in the Rule and one example is in chapter 27 [as translated by Leonard Doyle, Oblate of St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville MN, The Liturgical Press, 2001]. It begins: “Let the Abbot be most solicitous in his concern for delinquent brethren, for “it is not the healthy but the sick who need a physician.” [Matt 9:1]

It ends with this verse:

Just as we are called to imitate Christ in His humility, as at The Last Supper, and in His example of love as the Good Shepherd, we also strive to follow His loving obedience to His Father, as in the following comment on RB 72:6 (Let [the monks] compete in showing obedience to one another). This is from my Lenten reading last year: