By JAMES MONTI
The passing of Dr. Alice von Hildebrand on January 14, 2022 is a loss that touches the lives of so many that it is rightly eliciting a wave of wonderful tributes to what this very faithful daughter of the Church achieved in the service of God during a life spanning nearly ninety-nine years. What I would like to add to this great chorus of gratitude to “Dame Alice” is something far more modest, my own personal memories of this “valiant woman” (Proverbs 31:10, Latin Vulgate) who championed the faith with all her heart in a world hostile to truth.
It was in the late spring of 2018 when Dr. von Hildebrand had suffered a health crisis from an injurious fall that I began visiting her regularly. Our conversations always began with the recitation in Latin of the Anima Christi, a special favorite of hers and mine as well. Invariably, when we reached the words, “In hora mortis meae voca me. / Et jube me venire ad te….” (“In the hour of my death call me, and command me to come unto Thee…”), she would raise her voice and gesture with her right hand to say, “Et JUBE me,” stressing as emphatically as she could the word “jube,” “command,” to emphasize the consoling thought that at the dangerous and all-decisive moment of death, we may be so fortunate as to be commanded by our Lord to come to Him. But there was a very personal reason for her doing this — she could never forget what her husband had done on his deathbed, as she relates in her foreword to his book, Jaws of Death: Gate of Heaven:
“Dietrich von Hildebrand received Holy Communion for the last time on Tuesday, January 25 [1977]. I shall never forget the ardor with which he recited the Anima Christi, that prayer he loved so deeply. With an intensity of faith that sprang from the very core of his ardent soul, he repeated three times to Christ the words, ‘Jube me venire ad te!’ — ‘Bid me come to Thee!’ These were practically his last words — he who had spoken so often and so beautifully about eternal life” (Jaws of Death: Gate of Heaven, Manchester, NH, Sophia Press, 1991, pp. xi-xii).
Throughout the three and a half years that I had the privilege of visiting Dr. von Hildebrand, the subject of her own death was ever in her mind. Her friends would hear her speak of her life time and again as a wick nearly spent, an analogy with which she often ended our conversations. Yet her life was in the hands of Him who does not quench the smoldering wick (Isaiah 42:3). Despite her severely compromised health, she lived on as a witness to truth and to fidelity in the face of great physical suffering.
What emerged from these conversations with Dr. von Hildebrand was a picture of Dietrich and her as two souls equally devoted above all else to the Holy Eucharist and the sacred liturgy. She told me that each day she and Dietrich recited together antiphonally the offices of Vespers and Compline from their Benedictine Breviary. As I knew that Dr. von Hildebrand had attended Mass daily until her infirmity finally prevented her from continuing to do so, I asked her when this beautiful habit of hers had begun.
She replied that she started attending daily Mass as a teenager in Belgium, a practice she attributed not only to the good Catholic education she had received, but also to the stellar example of her father, who went to 6:00 a.m. Mass every morning. Dietrich von Hildebrand was equally committed to attending daily Mass, having done so from when he first converted to the Catholic faith until the time of his final illness. For both Dietrich and Alice, getting to daily Mass was paramount.
Dr. von Hildebrand described her husband’s yearning for daily Holy Communion as a “hunger.” It was a hunger she shared entirely. As late as 2018, she was still managing to make it to Mass on at least some Sundays, thanks to the indefatigable efforts of her tirelessly devoted and devout weekend nurse, Miss Rosemary Rodriguez (who always joined in our conversations). But from 2019 onward, she was permanently confined to her apartment. Nonetheless, at her request, Holy Communion was brought to her daily from her parish church.
And on three occasions during this period, the Traditional Latin Mass was celebrated in her presence within her apartment. For two of these occasions, the table upon which her husband had written so many of his books served as the makeshift altar. The third Mass was celebrated beside her deathbed, less than fourteen hours before her passing.
As is widely known, the von Hildebrands’ mutual love for the Mass was particularly made manifest through their ardent efforts to work for the restoration of the Traditional Latin Mass. In our conversations, Dr. von Hildebrand spoke time and again of the vital importance of this ancient form of the Eucharistic liturgy, unfailingly describing its immutability as “the golden cord of tradition,” an expression she attributed to her husband, and one not unlike that of their favorite Greek philosopher Plato, who in his Laws speaks of “the sacred and golden cord of reason” (Laws, book 1). Expanding her husband’s use of this expression further, she told me that he had a great sense of “the holiness of tradition — the golden cord that links us to the past.” By way of contrast, she noted that “modernism tried to cut off this connection with the past.”
Our discussions of the Mass almost invariably led us to the subject of reverence. One could say that Dr. von Hildebrand had formulated together with her husband a veritable spirituality of reverence. This came to the fore when I asked her to tell me what she would particularly want me to highlight in describing her husband’s love for the sacred liturgy. She replied by speaking of how the discovery of the Catholic liturgy played a crucial role in her husband’s conversion to the Catholic faith — of how he found in the Catholic liturgy “the way of relating to God on one’s knees…with trembling reverence.” Observing that “the liturgy can only be understood on one’s knees,” she explained, “To be on one’s knees enables us to see what we could never see when we stand up.” In a similar vein, she expressed this thought: “We are never closer to Christ than when we kiss His feet.”
Stressing “the importance of kneeling,” Dr. von Hildebrand would cite G.K. Chesterton as saying that “men easily forget how tall they are on their knees.” It seems likely that she was referring to the following passage from Chesterton’s book The Everlasting Man: “The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship…the gesture of the worshipper was generous and beautiful. He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed. Henceforth anything that took away the gesture of worship would stunt and even maim him for ever….If man cannot pray he is gagged; if he cannot kneel he is in irons” (The Everlasting Man, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1926, p. 124).
Dr. von Hildebrand saw reverence as essential not only within the sacrosanct realm of the liturgy, but also in all the aspects of living our faith, going so far as to call it “the mother of all the virtues.” “The virtue that is most neglected or ridiculed is reverence,” she observed, adding that “ridicule is reverence’s archenemy.” She complained of the irreverence of those who upon entering a church begin talking, even in front of the Tabernacle. This sad reality is all the more reason to be grateful that, as she pointed out, the highlighting of reverence was “one of the great contributions” of her husband to Catholic thought.
Gratitude was another subject that Dr. von Hildebrand turned to time and again in our conversations. Describing the decline of her eyesight that she was experiencing as the greatest trial she could receive because of her lifetime love of reading, she told me that every day I should thank God for my eyes, adding that she wished she had thought to do so during her life. She said that words of gratitude should be the very first words upon our lips when awaking in the morning.
Among those things for which Dr. von Hildebrand expressed her deepest gratitude was the gift of friendship, which she repeatedly described as “a remnant of the earthly paradise.” To her friends she was ever saying, “I thank God that He has placed you on my path . . . ,” and as an expression of her unfailing hospitality, “My door is always open.”
Final Steps
Never far from Dr. von Hildebrand’s mind was the ongoing battle for truth and fidelity to the doctrines and traditions of our Catholic faith. Almost every time I visited her, she asked me to tell her the latest news concerning the Church. Paraphrasing a thought from G.K. Chesterton’s book, The Man who was Thursday, she said to me that “the real criminals” are “people who give us lies instead of truth.” Recalling what she was subjected to during her years at Hunter College, and the rampant relativism among her colleagues, she spoke of those who teach relativism as “traitors” for having betrayed their vocation of leading their students to the truth.
When discussing Sacred Scripture, she would often say, citing Soren Kierkegaard, “These things can only be understood on one’s knees.”
Reflecting upon the prospect of her approaching death, Dr. von Hildebrand said she was in the final steps of her life, but that these steps were the most important. She asked me to pray not that she be granted a “good death,” but rather a “holy death.” She spoke of what she wanted her final words on Earth to be: “Thank you, I love you, and Forgive me.”
When I visited Dr. von Hildebrand for what would prove to be the final time in the early evening of January 13, six hours before her passing, which came shortly after midnight on January 14 — just twelve days shy of her husband’s forty-fifth death anniversary — I had intended to recite for her the Anima Christi, but unfortunately I had misplaced my copy of the Latin text of the prayer and did not trust my poor memory enough to chance reciting it by heart. So I said it in English, twice. I feel sure she was reciting it too, in Latin, within her heart.
Dr. von Hildebrand once explained to me that the grave for Dietrich and her was deliberately chosen to be directly adjacent to the grave of their two dearest friends, Lyman and Madeleine Stebbins. Their reason for doing this was that on the Day of Resurrection the four of them might be together for that great day.
May we all be found together in the Lord on that great day!
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