The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth

The answer to the question, “What is truth?” is clearly to be found in Divine Revelation.  Firstly, the ultimate truth is that God is love. Secondly, the truth is that God wants to share His love, His Holy Spirit, with us. Thirdly, the truth is that it is only when God’s love suffuses and surcharges human love with His own love that we can be open to receive that love with ever increasing intensity and effectiveness. Fourthly, the truth is that the more we receive God’s love, the more we become our true selves from the moral mess that sin and selfishness has made of us.

Jesus Christ came not just to reveal this to us but to show us how to open ourselves to receive this love by what He taught and by how He lived. That is why, when a way of life was created for us by Christ to produce the best possible environment in which to receive God’s love, the Holy Spirit, it came to be called the spiritual life. Then the study of how we are to live this spiritual life came to be called Spiritual Theology. There is, therefore, no more important study—because without it, access to the love of God is permanently inhibited. Treacherous Alliance: ... Parsi, Trita Check Amazon for Pricing.

When, in the late 1950s, I began to study theology after two years of philosophy, the major subjects were Systematic Theology, Moral Theology, Canon Law, Church History, Scripture, and Liturgy. There was simply no subject called Spiritual Theology; no teaching, therefore, on how to generate a prayer life that leads to the contemplation which St. Thomas Aquinas insisted can alone open us to receive the fruits of contemplation. These were the infused virtues, the gifts and the fruits of the Holy Spirit, with which the life of Christ Himself and the lives of the first Catholic family-based communities were redolent. They were so alive with God’s love that they were radioactive with all the fruits of contemplation, enabling them to transform a Pagan Roman Empire into a Christian Empire in such a short time.

When, over a thousand years later, a new Christ-centered Catholic Spirituality was reborn, it was spread all over Europe by the new mendicant religious orders: the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Carmelites, the Augustinians, and their respective lay followers. When they came under attack by the older, established orders, St. Thomas Aquinas defended them by stating what their very raison d’être was. Their work, he insisted, was firstly to contemplate and then to share the fruits of their contemplative prayer with others.

Without the fruit of what is traditionally called the first of the infused theological virtues, which is love, they cannot even begin. They cannot even start because without this love they cannot even return God’s love in prayer—never mind receive the other theological virtues; the cardinal virtues of prudence, goodness, fortitude,and temperance; nor the more than 60 infused moral virtues. Further to this are all the gifts and the fruits of the Holy Spirit, without which true Catholic apostles simply cannot even exist, as St. Thomas would put it, never mind act.

And if they are all truly infused and therefore of God, then they are all given gradually, but simultaneously, as St. Francis of Assisi insisted, and to all, no matter how lowly a person may be. That is why they were all firstly to be found to perfection in a young girl who lived in Nazareth over two thousand years ago, as Julian of Norwich explained, and in countless other poor and humble Christians whom we have called saints in subsequent centuries. Dark Night of the Soul Peers, E. Allison Check Amazon for Pricing.

When I found that the subject called Spiritual Theology, in which prayer and contemplation would be taught—and therefore how the fruits of contemplation were to be received—was not taught in my priestly training, I was horrified and thought it must be a unique oversight. However, I was sadly wrong. It was not a one-off. Through the 1970s, as the director of a conference and retreat center and as a lecturer on Mystical Theology in Rome, I found that my experience was all but universal.

This frightening realization was reiterated over and over again as I was invited to travel all over the world in the 1980s to preach, teach, and lecture on the strange new ideas that I was spreading about the contemplative prayer that I found nobody knew about, never mind practiced. I am not just talking about the leadership in the Church, who are in the firing line now from the Catholic intelligentsia, but the intelligentsia themselves, who still do not know what I am talking about, although they are all united in criticizing the leadership for falling into the moral morass that is the result of continually committing the sin against the Holy Spirit.

The intelligentsia continually commit the sin against the Holy Spirit through ignorance—that was not necessarily of their making—or through the arrogance that always leads the spiritually blind into the worst sin of all. This is the sin against the Holy Spirit. The consequences of remaining closed to the Holy Spirit are that a person is to be deprived of all the infused virtues and the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit without which the Catholic Church cannot function as the Mystical Body of Christ, with Christ the King ruling over her. How can He rule when the only way His rule can be received is by the love that they have no time to receive.

For generations now, the Catholic intelligentsia or Catholic humanists have, in fact, been far more influenced by “The Age of the Enlightenment” than “The Age of Saints and Martyrs” in the early Christian centuries. The solid rock of reason seems to them a far safer foundation for living our Faith then some airy-fairy form of mystical prayer called contemplation that was, in fact, the foundation on which our Faith was founded (Luke 5:16). Love is not irrational but suprarational and, therefore, the only power capable of satisfying all the ultimate needs and desires of human beings.

Reread the sublime spiritual theology of St. Paul. Then read how he spent about 10 years in contemplative prayer before He even started to become the Apostle to the Gentiles, never mind writing his Epistles (see Galatians 1:11-24). Reread his second letter to the Corinthians, when he speaks of the sublime mystical heights that he had long since experienced (2 Corinthians12:1-6).

The Interior Castle Teresa of Avila Check Amazon for Pricing. These experiences can only be understood by reading St. Teresa of Avila’s masterwork, The Interior Castle, and St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul (that everybody must pass through, as a necessary purification, before experiencing such mystical graces). St. Paul refers to this purification as a new inner circumcision that prepares a person to be united with Christ (see Colossians 2:8-11 and 13-23). How could St. Paul have persevered after so many awful sufferings like prison, torture, multiple beatings, and even several scourgings, like Christ, before his final martyrdom.

I am afraid that the philosophical solace and stoicism of the “age of reason” could not have either inspired or sustained him. And what happened to him happened to the other apostles; but, sadly, this has now all been forgotten. I recently heard one of the most highly respected of Catholic theologians giving a lecture titled “All you need to know about the conversion of St. Paul,” in which St. Paul was likened to Aristotle. Sadly, however, there was no mention of the many years that he spent in the Arabian desert in prayer and then near his own hometown of Tarsus; nor was there any mention of the sublime prayer that he experienced.

Of course, the technical language used in Mystical Theology was then unknown and therefore never used, but the reality was there—and more intensively practiced than at any other time in the later history of the Church. I do not mean in religious orders or congregations that did not yet exist; I mean in Catholic families that were the living, breathing building blocks of the Church.

As students studying the liturgy, we were taught that, as priests, we would become the ministers of the sacraments through which Christ continually pours out His love on all who receive them. However, we were not taught how to teach them—how to receive, assimilate, and digest this love through profound and ongoing prayer—so our flock would have to stagnate and remain as barren as we were. This also meant that the liturgy itself could never be much more than the expression of our deepest hearts’ desires, or of holy ideas in our heads, or of cultivated feelings in our cerebellums.

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