The Sense of the Sacred –  Back to the Faith of Our Fathers

In a talk that I have just recorded in a series I am giving on prayer, I tell how, as the Director of the Diocesan Retreat and Conference Centre in London, I handed out an anonymous questionnaire to priests who attended the courses from 1972 to 1981. I was horrified to discover that no priest at all had any training in personal prayer. There were no exceptions and my findings were confirmed over and over again when lecturing in Rome on Mystical Theology and on my travels in subsequent decades as a travelling lecturer.

This is not only how the sense of the sacred has been lost but how so many of our priests have been lost too, to the terrible hurt and irreparable harm of so many innocent men, women and children.

The sense of the sacred in the Catholic Church is the external expression or manifestation of the inner life of prayer, where God is encountered. Take that away then the sense of the sacred is lost. I do not just mean in what are sacred places, objects, or liturgies, but in people too; people made in the image and likeness of God. Without prayer, they soon just become objects to be used, abused, or ignored.

The Heresy of Quietism

Profound prayer to contemplation was taken out of Catholic Spirituality over four hundred years ago as a direct result of the condemnation of a  seriously flawed form of pseudo-mystical prayer called Quietism. Its founder was a Spanish priest stationed in Rome called Molinos. He and his false mysticism was condemned in 1687 and he was given a life sentence. In order to experience what St. Teresa Of Avila called the prayer of Quiet in her masterwork ‘Interior Castle’, his followers were taught to do absolutely nothing in prayer but to be quiet. If temptations came they were still taught to do nothing.

The consequences were that Molinos’ followers were led into a practical Protestantism and gross sexual sins. People who regularly perform seriously sinful acts can become porous to evil and the consequences can be literally diabolical. These consequences were detailed at his trial, as described by Monsignor Ronald Knox in his book ‘Enthusiasm.’

Mystical Theology Lost

In the aftermath of the condemnation of Quietism, all forms of prayer that had the slightest whiff of Quietism about them were understandably condemned.  The profound teaching of Mystical Theology that had been the heart and soul of Christianity from the beginning was taken out of Catholic prayer, and so therefore was the experience of divine love. In future, personal prayer was never allowed to develop to the experience of mystical contemplation for fear that Quietism may return. The works of St John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila were quietly hidden away.

A little slogan was coined to warn the faithful against any such occurrence in future:- ‘Mysticism begins in mist and ends in schism’.

The consequence of the fear of false mysticism was that ‘the baby was thrown out with the bathwater’. In short, true mystical prayer in which the love of God was experienced was all but cancelled and cancelled permanently.

The Sense of the Sacred Deteriorates

Over subsequent centuries the sense of the sacred in our Catholic faith has gradually deteriorated. Further to this, the experience of God’s love was never allowed to develop in the lives of priests and religious, who took vows of chastity, so the consequence was that so many have turned to illicit love instead. St. Thomas Aquinas said that if we do not experience the love of God, then we will seek substitutes elsewhere.

In order to try to rectify this I am at the moment running a free course on Prayer for The Essentialist Press. The first talk will be available for all in a week’s time.

I have discussed these matters and the remedy in my latest book – ‘The Primacy of Loving – The Spirituality of the Heart’ which takes us back to the teaching and practice of our most ancient and hallowed teaching on prayer.

Instead of trying to remedy the situation, the  Church in Rome at the moment is trying, not just to play down and grant mercy to sexual abusers but, at the forthcoming Synod, to sacralise what only a few years ago was considered gross sexual behaviour.

The solution to both the problem of the loss of the sense of the sacred and the loss of chastity amongst the clergy is back to prayer. That is why I am running this free course sponsored by The Essentialist Press. If the family of the new remnant are going to stay together then they must learn to pray together, because our Saviour is not some woke and wanton wisdom of the world, but the love of our Saviour Jesus Christ and a renewed prayer life that opens us to receive it.

A Century of Mystics

For a hundred years or more after the Council Of Trent the  Tridentine Mass in all its glory was the centre of a new Catholic renewal as part of the Counter Reformation. It was satellited by a profoundly mystical spirituality in which mystical prayer was seen as its consummation and its summit. Monsignor Ronald Knox put it this way in his book ‘Enthusiasm’:

“The seventeenth century was a century of mystics. The doctrine of the interior life was far better publicized, developed in far greater detail than it had ever been in late-medieval Germany or late-medieval England. Bremond, in his Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, has traced unforgettably the progress of that movement in France. But Spain too, the country of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, had her mystics; Italy also had her mystics who flourished under the aegis of the Vatican. Even the exiled Church in England produced in Father Baker’s Sancta Sophia a classic of the interior life” (Chapter XI page 232).

This is the profound spirituality that nourished our forefathers in penal times when it meant death to celebrate this sublime Mass for the faithful. And those who welcomed priests into their homes to celebrate Mass were sentenced to death while those who refused to forsake the Mass and attend the local Anglican service and receive communion had to pay a fine of £20. This was an enormous sum of money, in those days, more like £2,000. Those who refused were thrown into prison where many died in terrible unsanitary conditions. The Blockhouse prison at Hull where the Anne Family from Padley Hall were incarcerated was perhaps the most feared of all, for the prisoners were soaked twice a day with the incoming tide. At high tide, the salt water came up to their necks., Even the rats would not stay there.

The Faith for Which our Forefathers Suffered and Died

Today we all too easily take for granted their faith from which our forebears suffered so grievously. It is time to unite in the faith of our Fathers, for all the signs are that we are about to be asked to forsake the faith of our Fathers for a new form of orthodoxy, that seems prepared to bless the woke and wanton wisdom of the world.

This so-called new orthodoxy makes a mockery of the Faith of Our Fathers, to which we must return without delay.