|
Back to WELCOME and INDEX |
Back to 1. WHAT WE DO |
Back to 1.4 OBLATES: MUTUAL SUPPORT |
|
|
Back to WELCOME and INDEX |
Back to 1. WHAT WE DO |
Back to 1.4 OBLATES: MUTUAL SUPPORT |
Douai
Oblate
October 2002
No 17 Part 1
Benedictines for Peace invites you to join with them to pray for peace and compassion in our world.
Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica, you were people of peace,
you walked the paths of peace your whole lives
and led all who came to you into the ways of peace.
Help us to seek peace and pursue it,
to be the first to hold out our hands
in friendship and forgiveness.
Help us to achieve peace in our hearts, in our homes,
in our neighbourhoods, and in our troubled world.
Let peace fill our lives
so that we may live in God’s grace and love.
Amen.
Benedictines for Peace is based in the USA, web site http://www.mountosb.org/bfp.html
Notes & News
WELCOME to this issue of your Newsletter. I suppose the threat of war in Iraq is overshadowing everything at the present time. Peace was the topic at our last retreat in September. It seemed appropriate therefore to print the Benedictine Prayer for Peace at the top of the page. Also we include, with permission, the Statement from Benedictine Men and Women in the USA addressed to President Bush. While most of our media give the impression that Americans are fully behind the aggressive stance of the President, we need to know that that is not true.
Benedictines certainly will not support a war. And they are not alone; the Religious Superiors have sent a similar document to the President. If you want to gauge the strength of the anti-war movement, then read the National Catholic Reporter. This is available on the internet each Friday at http://www.natcath.com /ncr_onli.htm or if you do not have internet, you can subscribe to the print version.
Those of you who were with us in 1999 will remember that in the February issue that year we published an article, Emmanuel God is With Us by Liza Apper Obl OSB from Ora at Labora, the Newsletter of St Benedict Catholic Worker, an organisation of Benedictine Oblates in California. Recently Brian Apper emailed me and suggested we might like to reproduce another article by Liza, which we are delighted to include . With threats of war, news of justice and peace is highly significant.
Retreats
The number booking for the retreats is growing. Such is the demand that next year we are going to run a sixth retreat. This will be a second mid-week retreat, as the guest house is already fully booked for the mid-week retreat in May. This extra retreat will take place from Tuesday October 21 to Thursday October 23.
The next retreat in December is already fully booked, not just the guest house, but completely! This is good news. However it underlines the need to book up as early as possible to ensure that you will not be disappointed.
One of the dates we had planned for next year has had to be changed. The retreat planned for the beginning of October has been moved to September 26 - 28. Forthcoming retreats therefore are: Dec 13 - 15 fully booked, in 2003 April 4 -6, May 13 - 15, July 4 - 6, Sept 26 - 28, Oct 21 - 23, Dec 12 - 14.
Centenary
The reason for the change of date is that during the first weekend in October a large number of the monastic community will be visiting Douai, France. The visit is part of the celebrations for the centenary of the community in England. It was in 1903 that the French government expelled us from France. The citizens of Douai did not support the decision and they have maintained friendly relations with the community. A contingent from Douai will attend our celebrations at Woolhampton on June 21.
New Oblates
During the September retreat Dan and Helen O’Connor, cousins of Fr Godric, who have known Douai for many years, and Allen Jagiello who has attended several oblate retreats were received as oblate novices. On October 3 Ron O’Toole was delegated to receive Deacon Paul Hirons, his wife Joan, and Sylvia Bullivant as oblate novices. Paul and Joan are the mangers of the book shop at the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham. On October 22 Fr Maurice Twomey, who has been coming to Douai for forty years and has just retired as assistant pastor in Basingstoke, became an oblate novice.
Please would those who wish to become novices or to make their final oblation write or email me before-hand so that the event can be scheduled into the programme.
Thanks
to the Oblates on the September retreat who during the Saturday afternoon walk picked blackberries for the community jam making. Fr Bernard, who usually organises the fruit picking, was away supplying in the parish of Scarisbrick, Lancs. for Fr Francis, who had had a heart attack.Prayers
Pray for oblate novice Marie-Louise Edmondson, who will be married to Benjamin Bland in the Abbey Church on November 2.
Also our prayers are asked for the wife of Jim O’Mara, who has been seriously ill. Pray for her speedy and complete recovery. Also for Fr James who is becoming increasingly feeble now, Fr Wilfrid recovering from heart failure and for Fr Francis.
Lourdes
Oblate Martin Simpson has published on the Oblate Forum that he will be in Lourdes for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and offers to take petitions from any oblate to Lourdes. If you wish to make use of this offer, please contact him before December 3 at: martin.a.simpson@btinternet.com or 15 Norman Court, 36 Craneswater Park, Southsea, Hants, PO4 0LY.
AMERICAN BENEDICTINES PLEA FOR PEACE
The following STATEMENT FROM BENEDICTINE MEN AND WOMEN arose from the meeting of Benedictine Presidents of Women's Federations and Men's Congregations of the United States held on October 12, 2002.
STATEMENT FROM BENEDICTINE MEN AND WOMEN
We Benedictine men and women, members of the oldest religious order in the Roman Catholic Church, are alarmed by President Bush’s and the US government’s steady movement toward an unprecedented pre-emptive attack against the people of Iraq. Born in late antiquity when marauding armies made all civilization vulnerable to violence, Benedictines adopted as their motto the Latin word Pax (Peace), and the central teaching in our 1500 year-old Rule of Benedict is that everyone, including every stranger, is to be welcomed as a blessing and treated as Christ. From that stance of reverence for the other, we state our opposition to a military attack on Iraq for the following reasons:
* A military attack against a densely populated country, already decimated by war and economic sanctions, will put millions of vulnerable civilians at risk of death and disease;
* The threatened military attack would follow over a decade of repressive sanctions that have already killed millions of innocent Iraqis, many of them children, who die of malnutrition, contaminated water, and a shortage of medication for treatable diseases;
* A military attack will not decrease but increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks against the US and any allies who join us, both by giving immediate incentive to existing terrorist cells and by drawing more resentful and desperate young people of Islamic nations towards terrorist ideology;
* A military attack now will further divert attention and resources from solving our domestic economic problems, which threaten millions of American families and individuals with the terror of hunger, homelessness, and unemployment;
* A military attack would needlessly put at risk the young men and women in the US military who would fight this war;
In saying this, we also recognize that Saddam Hussein’s threats must be taken seriously. We realize that he did use chemical weapons against his own people in the 1980s, when he was allied with the US. We believe that United Nations diplomacy must be used to resolve this ongoing problem; threats to attack serve only to destabilize the situation and make more likely the use of any weapons Iraq may have.
One of the main reasons given by the administration for going to war is that, as Americans, we must refuse to live in fear. As people of faith, we know that fear is a spiritual problem. Fear can only be overcome by confronting fear itself, not by eradicating every new object of fear. The answer to fear is not war but a deep and living faith. Some of us Benedictines oppose all war as immoral, but all of us oppose this particular war as immoral. We will each do what we can to prevent it. As we gather each day for prayer in our monasteries, we pledge to join together in praying that peace will prevail.
Abbot President Timothy Kelly OSB
Saint John's Abbey,
Box 2015, Collegeville,
MN 56321-2015
320-363-3935
Copyright © 2002 American-Cassinese Congregation. All rights reserved.
Reproduced by kind permission of Abbot Timothy.
Benedictine Saint: Hildegard of BingenSAINT Hildegard was born in 1098 and died in 1179. She was born in Bokelheim. Although she lived to be nearly eighty, Hildegard was always sickly. She became a nun when she was fifteen in the monastery at Dissenberg where she became abbess in 1136.
Since the age of three she experienced visions. At first she was too shy to tell anyone about them, but eventually she told her confessor who told her to write them down, which she did in a book Scivias (the one who knows the ways of the Lord). This was approved by the Archbishop of Mainz, and by Pope Eugenius III at the instigation of St Bernard. The pope authorised her to publish any of the contents she thought would be useful for the faithful. Selections of these are included in Word in Season the book used for the monastic Office of Readings.
When the community became too big for its premises, Hildegard moved it to Rupertsberg near Bingen in 1147, and from there she founded another monastery at Eibingen in 1165.
As a result of her mystical experiences she felt called to a prophetic role, criticising rulers, including Henry II of England, Frederick Barbarossa, the emperor, and the pope, Eugenius III.
Hildegard is probably the best known of all the mediæval women mystics. She is well known beyond Christian circles, especially as a composer, her highly elaborately crafted music being recorded on several CDs. But she was also an artist, a poet, a playwright, wrote works on medicine, including headaches, giddiness, insanity and obsessions; botany; biology including fish, birds, animals and reptiles as well as commentaries on the Scriptures, the Rule of St Benedict and lives of saints. The vast area and breadth of her writings and knowledge, quite apart from their sheer quantity, is amazing for someone who was also fully engaged in the leadership of her monastery.
She was never formally canonised, but she was included in the Roman martyrology in the 15th century, although her feast had been celebrated in Germany since the 13th century. Her feast was and is on September 17.‡
Benedictine Obedience
AN important illustration of the nature of Benedictine obedience was seen recently. It concerned the participation of Sr Joan Chittister OSB at the conference on woman’s ordination in Dublin. The Vatican congregation responsible for religious ordered her prioress, Sr Christine Vladimiroff OSB, to forbid Sr Joan to attend. Sr Christine declined to deliver the order.
Sr Christine sent a letter to the Vatican officals explaining why she felt unable to deliver the order. The letter was signed by all but one of the 128 nuns in the community, some of whom were elderly in wheelchairs. Sr Joan explained that Sr Christine had been in dialogue with the Vatican officials in an effort to help them understand monastic obedience. "It’s not like military obedience, Benedictines see authority as relational." "We don’t give people orders, we give them information, and on the basis of their sense of responsibility and their own discernment they make decisions. And we support those decisions. We trust those decisions."
Sr Christine said, "My community met many times around this issue, giving me counsel and advice, and I met many times with Joan. It was a discernment process. We are looking at obedience from the position of people who live in this tradition, and the Vatican is looking at it from a tradition of canon law. The norms are different."
The Vatican accepted St Christine’s position which was endorsed by the Federation of St Scholastica, the nuns’ monastic congregation. Sr Christine said "It’s heartening to me that the Vatican would continue the dialogue so that there would be better understanding between religious communities’ place in the church and the role of religious leadership in their communities and with the church’s hierarchy. This will be great news for religious all over the world because it’s been difficult for religious to establish that kind of dialogue. We want to be able to exercise leadership within our communities and want our judgment to be trusted."‡
To Part 2.