By JAMES MONTI
From the beginning, mankind has been destined for greatness, purposefully made so by His loving Creator: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’” (Gen. 1:26). Mankind soon spoiled that greatness by listening to the Devil, who has always hated that God would dare to make us in the divine likeness. But God confounded Satan all the more by becoming man Himself, and by His death on the cross refashioned us anew in His image. And by the sacrifice of Christ, man has become, more than ever, capable of greatness — capable of heroism.
The first three centuries of the Church’s history formed an age of heroes, when countless men and women thought our faith was worth dying for. And no century since has been without more such heroes.
Yet Christian heroism is to found not only in how a Catholic dies, but also in how he lives. In deciding whether a person is a potential candidate for beatification and canonization, the Church defines the criterion in terms of whether a person has lived the virtues to a “heroic” degree. Indeed, every saint is a hero.
There are opportunities in every Catholic’s life to answer the call of God in a manner that goes beyond the ordinary, to exercise Christian virtue in a way that requires him to rise above himself.
In an age that talks much and loudly about reconciling differences, but which seeks to resurrect and even create grievances and resentments about events that took place centuries ago, we need to relearn what true Christian forgiveness is.
In 1568 a young Belgian lawyer with Calvinist sympathies named John Rubens arrived in Cologne with his wife Maria. He came into the service of a German noblewoman, Anne, the consort of Prince William the Silent. John’s duties took him away from home, requiring him to attend to Anne’s matters at her estate in Siegen.
It proved to be a spiritual death-trap for a man already fatally alienated from the true faith by his profession of Calvinism. Ultimately his sin of adultery with Anne was discovered, a crime at that time punishable by death under German law. From “Death Row” John wrote a letter to his wife in which he broke to her the terrible news of his marital infidelity and the price he was about to pay for it, asking of her only her forgiveness for his sin against her.
Quite understandably, adultery is not a vice that lends itself easily to forgiveness by the betrayed spouse. And in our day and age it quickly becomes an excuse for divorce. Yet what is forgotten is that even a sin as horrible as adultery can’t break asunder what God has joined together. Maria Rubens knew and believed this. And in responding to her husband’s letter, she penned one of the noblest expressions of marital forgiveness to be set to paper:
“How could I allow my severity to add to your affliction when you are already suffering pains from which I would give my life to deliver you? Even if a long lasting affection had not preceded this misfortune, I could never hate you sufficiently to be unable to pardon a fault towards myself. Rest assured that I have entirely forgiven you; if my pardon was the price that Heaven required for your release, we should be restored to happiness. Alas! That is not what your letter tells me. I could hardly read it, for it seemed my heart must break. I am so distressed that I do not know what I am writing.
“If there is no longer any pity in the world, to whom can I apply? I shall pray to Heaven with infinite tears and lamentations, and I hope that God will hearken and soften the hearts of your captors, that they may spare us, and have compassion on us; otherwise when they kill you they kill me. . . . Never write again ‘your unworthy husband,’ for everything is forgotten” (Maria Rubens, quoted in Hope Rea, Peter Paul Rubens, London, George Bell and Sons, 1905, p. 3).
Maria Rubens’ tears and lamentations gained a hearing in Heaven. John’s death sentence was commuted, and in 1573 he was permitted to return to his family, albeit under constrained conditions. Over the years that followed, the Rubens household became a Catholic household, and two more children were born, the second a boy named Peter Paul who would grow up to become one of the greatest artists of the Catholic Counter Reformation, a painter who went to church daily and said of his art, “My passion comes from the heavens, not from earthly musings.”
Fidelity to the Commandments of God, to the virtues, to the Beatitudes as well as the Evangelical Counsels ennobles the soul. Over the centuries, Christian culture has developed poetic imagery to symbolize the beauty of this fidelity; one of the most powerful and enduring of these metaphors, particularly for men, is that of knighthood.
When in 1917 the Franciscan martyr St. Maximilian Kolbe founded his new movement of Marian consecration, he gave it a name that invokes this imagery, the Militia Immaculatae, a title rendered into English as the “Knights of the Immaculata.” It’s an especially apt application of the medieval term, because one of the essential tenets of genuine Christian chivalry is the virtue of chastity, of purity; and the whole point of Fr. Kolbe’s movement has been to enroll souls in a veritable army of the Virgin of Virgins, the Queen of purity, under the very title of her state of total purity from sin, the Immaculate Conception.
A truly masterful reflection upon the virtue of chastity as a manifestation of authentic chivalry is to be found in a rather unexpected source, a journal for Massachusetts prison inmates dating from 1915. Citing the medieval transformation of manliness and knighthood “through the veneration of the Blessed Virgin, and the influence of the monastic schools,” the unnamed essayist of this reflection explains what it means to be a true knight and practice chivalry in one’s own life:
“Moral chivalry is purity of Heart. . . . With a pure heart a man can achieve anything. He may not conquer the world, but he will conquer himself. This is the greatest victory that a man may win.
“To be a knight it is necessary to be a man. Be a man in the truest sense. Being a man means being self-controlled. . . .
“Being a man means caring for the weak and defenseless . . . It means respect for the chastity of women. It means to do not that to any woman that you would not have another do to your own mother or sister. It means to say not to another that which you would not say to your mother or sister.
“Defend the honour of any woman as quickly as you would defend the honour of your mother or your sister.
“. . . Fight to keep every person with whom you come in contact pure and sweet.
“. . . Pure mind, high aim, love of Truth — because it is Truth — honour in act, and thought, and word — all these constitute the requirements due from a true knight. When these virtues are essayed a man is on the High Road to Glory — to true knighthood and manhood” (“Chivalry,” Our Paper, Massachusetts Reformatory, volume 31, June 5, 1915, pp. 270, 271).
As Christmas of 1581 was drawing near in Lancaster, England, John Finch, a married Catholic layman in his early thirties, busied himself with finding priests who could come to a secret rendezvous to hear Confessions, celebrate Mass, administer the rite of blessing mothers after childbirth (“churching”), and reconcile several Protestants seeking to return to the Catholic faith.
Helping priests to move about from one Catholic home to another in the service of Elizabethan England’s underground Catholic Church had been a way of life for Finch ever since his own reconciliation with the faith of his fathers around the time of his marriage. What Finch did not know was that the man who had asked him to find priests for the December 1581 rendezvous was in fact an imposter, a betrayer employed by the Elizabethan regime to entrap Finch and any priests he brought. When Finch and Fr. George Ostliffe arrived, they were arrested.
Over the two and a half years that followed, John Finch was subjected to repeated rounds of torture, both physical and psychological, threats, blandishments, isolation from fellow Catholics, and defamation of character, all calculated to coerce him into renouncing his Catholic faith and conforming to the state-imposed Protestant religion.
But these efforts to break him proved futile. A contemporary account of him explains, “But the more his calamities increased and the more they grew to extremities, the more our merciful God, by His internal and secret consolation, did support and supply the want of external comfort; in such sort that His afflicted servant thirsted every day more and more to dedicate life and blood for God’s honor and in the defense of the Catholic faith” (“The Martyrdom of John Finch,” in Fr. John Hungerford Pollen, SJ. Unpublished Documents relating to the English Martyrs: Volume 1: 1584-1603, Publications of the Catholic Record Society, volume 5, London, Catholic Record Society, 1908, p. 84).
After being tried and condemned to death by drawing and quartering, John Finch spent his final night in prison exhorting the other prisoners to be reconciled with the Catholic Church. He was martyred on April 20, 1584. He was beatified in 1929.
Words Of St. Thomas More
As the New Year swiftly closes in upon us, there is ever-growing apprehension as to what it is likely to bring. There are grave reasons to believe that we will be facing challenges to our faith of a kind and to a degree that few of us have ever experienced in our lifetime. Yet standing between us and the year to come is the Manger of Bethlehem. And in its sacred stillness we will find the courage to face whatever lies ahead:
“If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. . . . But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust, and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice, and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all . . . why then perhaps we must stand fast a little — even at the risk of being heroes” (St. Thomas More to his daughter Margaret, in Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, Act II, New York, Vintage Books, 1962, p. 81).
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