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Douai
Oblate
February 2003
No 18
Pray for PeaceAT the present the need to pray and work for peace is more urgent than ever. A recent post on the Oblates Forum called for all Benedictine Oblates to make 3.3.3 a day of prayer for peace, March 3, 2003. Let us join in this Day of Prayer.
We give a link to a prayer for peace by Sister Christine Vladimiroff OSB, which she offered at a Washington meeting to launch the Women’s Global Peace Initiative.Oblate Growth
MORE and more people are showing an interest in the oblates. The Julian Chapter at Cromer in Norfolk reports new comers at the monthly meetings each time, and a group of people in the Alcester and Studley area of Warwickshire are interested in starting a Chapter there. So much so that the number of retreats at Douai this year has been increased to seven because of the number wishing to come, and our shortage of space at present. The dates are April 4 - 6, May 13 - 15, July 4 - 6, Sept. 26 - 28, Oct. 21 - 23, Dec. 9 - 11 & Dec. 12 - 14. Bookings have been such that the only one of these with rooms still available in the guest house is the September one.
The dates for 2004 are March 26 - 28, May 11 - 13, July 9 - 11, Oct. 1 - 3, Dec. 7 - 9 & Dec. 10 -12. Early booking is advised.
Hopefully when we have completed the building work there will be plenty of room for all who wish to attend the retreats.
This year the monastic community celebrates 100 years at Woolhampton. The celebrations will start on June 21 with Mass at which the Abbot Primate Notker Wolf will preach. The following day, Sunday, the Abbot Primate has very kindly agreed to talk to the oblates about the situation of oblates throughout the world.
The centenary celebrations will continue thoughout the following twelve months. A book of the history of Douai and a music CD are being produced which we hope oblates will support. Pre-publication price, book & CD £24.99; book only £14.99; music CD only £10.99, from Douai 1903-2003, Douai Abbey, Upper Woolhampton, Reading, RG7 5TQ.
On January 28 Sir David Goodall gave a excellent paper to the monastic community, entitled “The Role of the Monastery in Today’s Secular Society: A Layman’s View”. The full text of the talk will be published in the next issue of The Douai Magazine, due before Easter.†
Benedict in the World: Portraits of Monastic Oblates edited by Linda Kulzer & Roberta Bondi Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota
THE long awaited Benedictine Oblates biographical collection has at last arrived and it is essential reading for all oblates and would be oblates. The sheer variety of persons described here shows just how universal and ever fresh St Benedict’s Rule is. There is inspiration here for everyone. The oblates discussed fall into so many different categories and professions that there must be someone here to inspire you. The only condition put upon inclusion in the book was that the person be already dead.
In her forward, one of editors, Roberta Bondi, states her position clearly, “I am an oblate of St Benedict’s Monastery, St Joseph, Minnesota. I am also a historian of the early Church and spirituality. I teach in a United Methodist seminary. I am a wife, mother, and grandmother, the owner of a cat and a Protestant.” There is no one type of person who can be an oblate, it is a way life open to all who are sincere in their Christianity.
Carolyn Attneave, a Delaware Indian, was an oblate of St Vincent’s archabbey. She was a family therapist whose “knowledge of the American Indian family and its traditions provided her with insights into the use of the extended family as a tool in therapy”. When St Vincent’s College became co-educational, Carolyn received a grant to study whether Benedictine values are human values rather than gender specific. She found much in the Benedictine tradition that is kindred to the American Indian, reverence for the things around us, air, water, sky, trees, animals; holding all things in common; receiving as each has need; stewards of God’s world and responsible for taking good care of it; God revealing himself in ordinary items of life.
Elena Lucrezia Scholastica Cornaro Piscopia, the first lady to receive a theology degree, has already been the subject of an article in The Douai Oblate (no 2 October 1997). Her legacy is lifelong learning, devotion to holy reading and celebrating the liturgical hours.
Evelyn Davie was an African American lady who came from New Orleans. Her parents, both protestants, sent her to a Catholic school set up by St Katherine Drexel, the only establishment where black students could obtain a quality education. Evelyn became a Catholic and felt called to become a nun, but it caused her mother so much pain that she refrained. Instead she continued in her career as a school teacher in Alabama, and eventually married. She was there during the famous bus boycott; her husband had to walk to work which may have hastened his death, leaving Evelyn a widow with four children. After her children were grown up she began a new phase of service to all in need, so much so that she received the 1991 Humanitarian of the Year award. Evelyn’s vocation for a religious life was finally achieved when in 1980 she became an Oblate of Sacred Heart Monastery, Cullman, Alabama, and went on to set up an oblate cell in Montgomery, Alabama.
We have written about in these pages before about St Frances of Rome, patron of oblates, and Dorothy Day, (no 4 May 1998 and no 9 February 2000). Emperor Henry II, the Maritains, St Oliver Plunket and the Crowleys are well known, although there is a story related about the Crowleys which is worth repeating here. They practiced St Benedict’s teaching on hospitality by keeping open house; always an extra place was laid at table for whoever might arrive. Those present were always invited during the meal to talk about themselves and how they got there. “On one particular night, about halfway through second helpings, a gentleman introduced himself, told us that he had been graciously met at the door when he rang the bell and was having a wonderful time, but he was here to sell encyclopedias.”
Eric Dean is well known because of his book St Benedict for the Laity which has been featured in these pages (no 4 May 1998). He was born in London, served in the RAF during the war, and emigrated to the USA in 1947. In 1955 he was ordained as a minister in the United Presbyterian Church. He taught at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. He became acquainted with monks from St Meinrad Archabbey, where he served as visiting professor of ecumenical theology and joined the board of overseers. In spite of his closeness with St Meinrad it was at Mount Saviour Monastery in Elmira, New York, that he became an oblate. He had twice spent sabbatical leave there. Mount Saviour had been founded by Damasus Winzen OSB, who was described as already living the spirit of John XXIII and Vatican II, thirty years before that council took place. This was especially true of ecumenism and liturgy. There Eric Dean found his true spiritual home. “Herein is a lesson for all oblates: to witness to a lived spirituality by being light, by being gift and accepting others as gift. Not all oblates are college professors, but all oblates have a calling, and that is to seek God from within their own places in the world.”
Quite a different character was the novelist Walker Percy. He had been born into a wealthy Bimingham, Alabama, family. Wealth, however, does not produce happiness, for both his grandfather and his father committed suicide; and two years after his father’s death his mother died in a motor accident, when Walker was only fifteen. Suicide is ‘a leitmotif’ throughout Percy’s writings and despair looms large in them, but “he tried to find a way beyond it”. Percy graduated in chemistry and went to become an M.D. He was enthralled with ‘scientfic method’ and especially the ‘mechanism of disease’. While studying disease in others he became a victim, contacting tuberculosis, which effectively ended his medical career. He was an avid reader and turned to existentialist philosophy, which led him to question the ‘scientific method’ where things are studied in categories or classes to the detriment of the individual. There was, he explained,’a huge gap in the scientific view of the world’. This ‘huge gap’ he explored in his novels. The realisation of the ‘idolatory of the elevation of science’ led Walker Percy eventually to the Catholic Church and “to oblation to the the Benedictine expression of that faith at St Jospeh’s Abbey”. He became an oblate in February 1990, less than three months before his death from cancer. Edward J Dupuy writes: “Percy’s end as a Benedictine oblate stretches back to his beginnings as a child of an honorable, melancholic family. His writing bears testimony to the hope that is always and already available in everyday life and in the mystery of death - an end which is yet another beginning”.
Rumer Godden and Joris-Karl Huysmans are other oblate novelists who are included in the book. Emerson Hynes, also a writer, and lecturer has a place. He was deeply concerned about Christianity’s social teaching, and was leader in rural life issues, who set up the Workmans Guild and a Credit Union at St John’s Collegeville to put social teaching into practice. On the recommendation of Eugene McCarthy he represented the USA at the NATO Parliamentary Conference in Paris, as part of his concern for peace and the common good. He became legislative assistant to McCarthy until his premature death from a stroke at fifty-six.
Fr H.A. Reinhold was quite different. He was a German, oblate of Maria Laach, where he had been in the novitiate. After ordination he was appointed to the Seaman’s Mission in Hamburg. His activities brought him into conflict with the Nazis. He was forced out of Germany, eventually to the USA where he took up the liturgical apostolate under the influence of Fr Vigil Michel OSB of St John’s Abbey; he became a columnist in Orate Fratres (now called Worship). He settled in Seattle, where he was treated with suspicion, investigated as a Nazi spy and restricted to a five mile radius of the rectory in a little known town, Yakima. Eventually granted American citizenship he became pastor of Sunnyside, where he put his liturgical ideas into practice. He saw the essential connection between worship and justice. Just as earlier in Hamburg and briefly in Seattle with the seamen, now that he was concerned with Mexican immigrants, instead of just helping them, he employed another strategy. “First, he identified a leader in the community itself, invited that person to use his or her gifts for the community and then empowered the person to bring others together. Thus he developed lifelong leadership in them from which the state of Washington still benefits today.” You can see why such a person was likely to be out of favour with authority, civil and ecclesiastical. He was “continually plagued by difficulties with the local bishop”. In one of his first columns in Orate Fratres he wrote Timely Tracts are not meant to give solutions, but to stir up problems and help us face facts.” In 1965 Fr Reinhold wrote that he was “deeply satisfied” with the accomplishments of Vatican II, but said “The inner reform is yet to come ... the visible and audible field of expression will reshape our concepts.”
Benedict in the World is a book to inspire all oblates and I recommend you all to read it.
Available in the Abbey Bookshop £14.50.†
Conference on Benedictine Spirituality
THE Trinity Institute will be offering a conference called “Shaping Holy Lives, Benedictine Spirituality in the Contemporary World”, April 28 - 29. The speakers will be Fr Lawrence Freeman OSB, Sr Joan Chittister OSB, Kathleen Norris and Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. The conference will be held at Trinity Church, New York. However that does not exclude us from taking part, since the conference will be broadcast over the internet. There will also be provided a chat room for anyone to participate. Afterward the texts of the talks will also be available to read on the internet.
Trinity Institute has developed since 1970 and uses every technology available to spread the word. With those four speakers this promises to be a first rate conference. For more information look at theTrinity Institute web site ‡
Douai Oblate is the Newsletter for the Oblates of Douai Abbey. It is published at Douai Abbey, Upper Woolhampton, Reading, Berks, RG7 5TQ, phone 0118 971 5338, fax 0118 971 5303, e-mail oblate@douaiabbey.org.uk February 15, 2003
Go to Oblates Page : To Douai Oblate October 2002.
Douai Abbey Registered Charity No. 236962
15/02/03(GH)
Gervase Holdaway OSB, Douai Abbey, Upper Woolhampton, Reading, Berks. RG7 5TQ