CDM for the Feast of Saint Maria Goretti (6 July 2009)I am composing this message on Sunday, July 5, and will record it on the telephone and by e-mail because on the morning of Monday, July 6th, I won’t have time to do that. I leave with friends for the airport to fly to Bozeman, Montana, from where we begin our vacation to Yellowstone National Park, the Grand Tetons, Glacier National Park, and then up to Banff Springs and Lake Louise in the province of Alberta, Canada. I have never been to that part of the world and everyone tells me what a beautiful treat I am in for. I’m looking forward to it! There is a very close connection between beauty and prayer, and I’m sure that many of the things we see on our trip will lead us to admiration and the joy of being in the presence of natural beauty on a grand scale, and then that will lead us to praise the Creator of those beautiful scenes.

While we are away, we will celebrate the commemoration day of Saint Benedict on July 11th and Our Lady of Mount Carmel on July 16th. I mention those two feasts because they are among my favorites. Saint Benedict is the founding father of the monastic life in the western world, and thus in a sense, he is the spiritual father of all of us monks and nuns and friars and religious from about the year 500 down to the present. If you want to read a spiritual classic that breathes an atmosphere of peace and religious tranquillity, read the Rule of Saint Benedict. It has formed religious life for these fifteen centuries, and will continue doing so, I hope, for centuries into the future. The friends with whom I will be traveling were with me some years ago when we went to Monte Cassino, between Rome and Naples in Italy. It is there that Saint Benedict spent the last and most influential years of his life, and where he and his sister, Saint Scholastica, are buried together under the main altar of the abbey church. We were able to celebrate Mass there, and will no doubt be remembering that moment when we celebrate him again this year.

Then, five days later we will celebrate Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the title of Our Blessed Mother by which the Carmelites of the world venerate her. Actually, the Church is passing through a sort of golden age of Carmelite spirituality right now, beginning just about 125 years ago when Saint Theresa of the Child Jesus—”the Little Flower,” as we call her—entered the Carmelite monastery in her home town of Lisieux in northwestern France. She lived there only nine years but in that short period, achieved tremendous sanctity which has caused the Church to canonize her soon after her death, and to declare her a Doctor of the Church.

At that same period, another young Carmelite nun in France, but in the city of Dijon, was achieving sanctity. Her name was Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity. She has already been beatified, and will probably be canonized before long.

Then, during the period of World War II, a German Jewish professor of philosophy by the name of Edith Stein was led into the Church and into the Carmelite cloistered life by reading the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila, the foundress of the Carmelite reform movement in Spain during the 16th century. She died in the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in 1942, offering her life in reparation for the Holocaust. And in that same period, the Carmelite priest from Holland, Father Titus Brandsma, died rather than discontinue his religious teachings and writings as the Nazis demanded that he do. All of these outstanding Carmelites make this a special time in the history of the Carmelites, and we will be celebrating this on July 16th. These messages will resume on July 20. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.