By JAMES MONTI
It is little more than a year since the Catholic world mourned the passing of one of the greatest Catholic educators, speakers, writers and thinkers of our age, Dr. Alice von Hildebrand (+January 14, 2022). At that time, many, including me, shared in the pages of The Wanderer and elsewhere our personal remembrances of this utterly remarkable soul who changed and inspired the lives of so many as a tireless and courageous champion of truth and genuine beauty.
March 11, 2023 will mark the centenary of Alice’s birth, reason enough to explore anew the incredible legacy that this heroic woman of God has left us. Her story of course is inseparable from that of the giant of our faith whom she was ultimately to marry, Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977). Their two hearts were as one in their shared passion for philosophical and theological truth and for the Church’s great work of saving and sanctifying souls. But underlying all they did was a shared spirituality. And it is this particular dimension of Alice’s thought, as revealed in her writings, that we wish to consider here.
Alice von Hildebrand always described November 27, 1942 as the crucial turning point of her entire spiritual life. Sitting with others in a crowded New York City apartment, the nineteen-year-old Belgian refugee heard Dietrich von Hildebrand tell his audience, “We must have an unconditional readiness to change in order to be transformed in Christ.” Writing about this moment almost five decades later, Alice observed, “Thanks to his lecture that day, I understood that my soul should become malleable like wax in God’s hands, so that I could become what He wanted me to become” (Alice von Hildebrand, introduction, in Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ, Manchester, NH, Sophia Institute Press, 1990, p. vii). Soon afterward, Alice taught herself German so that she could read for herself in its original German Dietrich von Hildebrand’s monumental spiritual classic on this subject, his Transformation in Christ.
What Alice does not mention is that in her own life prior to meeting and hearing Dietrich von Hildebrand for the very first time there was already a primordial pillar of the spiritual life firmly established within her soul that predisposed her to respond so magnetically to this Christological message of von Hildebrand — her habit of daily Mass. It was a habit that both she and Dietrich shared to the end of their days, each attending Mass daily until infirmity late in life prevented them from continuing to do so. When asked about her lifelong fidelity to daily Mass and daily Holy Communion, Alice attributed it simply to her Belgian Catholic upbringing and the example of her devout father. Yet her tenacity in adhering to this practice was far more than merely a culturally nurtured custom. Alice was consumed with a great love for Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist.
This passion for the Holy Eucharist had two dimensions to it which perfectly mirror her husband Dietrich’s thought in this regard: indefatigable zeal for the most sacral manner of celebrating this sacrament, the Traditional Latin Mass; and unwavering zeal that not a day pass without attendance at Mass and Holy Communion.
In the foreword that Alice wrote for the 1986 edition of Dietrich’s Liturgy and Personality, she observes:
“. . . the Liturgy develops our personality only when our attention is focused on God and on the proper worship of Him through the Liturgy. As soon as our attention turns away from God and toward ourselves, that development ceases” (Alice von Hildebrand, in Dietrich von Hildebrand, Liturgy and Personality, Steubenville, OH, Hildebrand Project, 2016, p. 125).
In this same foreword to Liturgy and Personality, Alice says of the Traditional Latin Mass: “Linked to the ever-living past by the golden cord of tradition, the Traditional Liturgy transcended time and space and afforded a foretaste of eternity.” She speaks of “its God-centeredness…its deep sacrality, and its perfect formulation of the dogmas of the Faith” (ibid., p. 126).
Alice’s personal dedication to the cause of the Traditional Latin Mass was to bear fruit for the Universal Church. I can personally recall her telling me in a conversation sixteen years ago of an upcoming private audience she was to have with Pope Benedict XVI and that she intended specifically to urge him to broaden the permission to celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass. It was not long after that private papal audience that the Pontiff did precisely what Alice had hoped and prayed for, issuing his July 2007 Motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. I can likewise personally attest to her profound consternation and pain regarding the aftermath of Traditionis custodes.
Alice did all she could to attend as often as possible this most beautiful and most reverent form of the Roman Mass. But as there was no parish near her that provided the opportunity of a daily Traditional Latin Mass, she did not hesitate to attend a daily Novus Ordo Mass and to receive Holy Communion there. For her as for her husband, the priceless value of being present daily for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, of witnessing daily the unutterably awesome moment of consecration, and of receiving daily Our Lord intimately in Holy Communion outweighed the deficiencies of the Novus Ordo form of the liturgy.
With the Holy Eucharist firmly established as standing at the very center of one’s daily routine, Alice like Dietrich taught that absolutely everything one says, does or thinks in the course of the day should be lived from the divine perspective:
“The saint is precisely he who lives in constant and intimate communion with God, he who does not allow anything or anyone to separate him from God, he who victoriously links to God everything happening to him, sickness or health, poverty or wealth, infamy or fame” (Solitude and Communion, Notre Dame, IN, Saint Mary’s College, 1963, p. 3).
Applying this axiom to the particular circumstances of the married state in her book By Love Refined, Alice offers this advice to a newlywed bride:
“. . . the more you live in the presence of God, relating everything you do to Him, harkening to His voice, recognizing the theme He places in front of you, and dying to yourself — the more you do this, the more beautiful your relationship to Michael will become” (By Love Refined: Letters to a Young Bride, Manchester, NH, Sophia Institute Press, 1989, p. 201).
What does Alice mean here by “theme”? She defines “the theme of Christ” as the minute-by-minute answer to this simple question: “What does Christ want me to do at this particular moment, on this particular day?” (Man and Woman: A Divine Invention, Ave Maria, FL, Sapientia Press, 2010, p. 79). Discerning and living out the answer to this question is the key to true sanctity: “Saints are those who discover and accept that what God chooses for us is the way to holiness” (ibid., p. 175).
Alice shared her husband’s very realistic perspective on suffering and death. Her own experience of his final illness and death in January 1977 profoundly shaped the rest of her own life, cast in the shadow of a loss beyond all others she had suffered:
“There are moments of such darkness that one lives in a cavern when few things register or are even remembered” (He Had to Sacrifice a Great Human Love: Memories of Our Former Prior Dom Raphael Diamond, Arlington, VT, Charterhouse of the Transfiguration, 2016, p. 20).
My own earlier visits to Dr. Alice von Hildebrand in the New Rochelle apartment she had shared with her husband came in the 1990s, when she would ask me to perform various small repairs upon her computer. My meetings with her on these occasions made me keenly aware of just how totally consumed she was with the continued promulgation of her husband’s legacy. I also saw for myself how, as she herself used to put it, she lived as frugally as a nun. The loss of her beloved spouse had only deepened her resolve to live entirely for God.
Alice’s own experience of widowhood inspired her to write a book of reflections for widows, By Grief Refined. Among the many insights she offers is her advice for the difficult situation of striving to find the right words to speak to a person who is grieving the loss of a loved one: “We must be by love refined to be able to do the right thing; and if ever we succeed, God is the one who has put the right words into our mouths or directed our hands” (By Grief Refined: Letters to a Widow, Steubenville, OH, Franciscan University Press, 1994, p. 66).
Gratitude To God
So much of what Alice has had to say in her writings pertains to the subjects of family life and friendship, with regard to the latter offering a veritable spirituality of friendship. Alice intensely loved the souls that God had placed upon her path during her long life, and this gave her a deep perception of the virtue of charity. As one who never tired of stressing the need for reverence in the sacred liturgy, Alice also saw the need for this virtue in our relations with other people: “In one of his ethical works, my husband once wrote: ‘Reverence is the mother of all virtues’; I am inclined to add: ‘Reverence is also the mother of all human relationships’” (Solitude and Communion, p. 7).
Especially beautiful is her description of how our solicitude and supplications for a loved one who is ill are united to the love that God Himself has for our loved ones:
“When I tremble for the life of a beloved person, I transcend not only myself but the whole earthly reality and turn to God, the Infinitely merciful and mighty. I trust that the welfare of this loved one is not my own exclusive concern, but that God Himself cares for him, loves him even more than myself . . . at such moments I experience my love as a partaking of God’s infinite love” (Alice von Hildebrand, “Hope,” in Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Art of Living, Steubenville, OH, Hildebrand Project, 2017, p. 71).
Alice was constantly emphasizing the need for receptivity to God in the spiritual life. This is in fact the key theme of her masterpiece on Catholic womanhood, The Privilege of Being a Woman. She saw receptivity as a charism with which women are especially endowed.
Gratitude to God and to others is another recurring topic in Alice’s writings, stemming from her own constant personal disposition of gratitude for everyone and everything God had given her in her life. We for are part are grateful to God for having given us Alice von Hildebrand. May she and her beloved Dietrich rest in peace.
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