It is with a sense of deep inner satisfaction that I have revisited several Church History volumes written by the very well-known French historian, H Daniel-Rops.
As students in the mid-1960s, we had to leaf through the pages of several of his volumes with a high level of concentration, as the eminent historian would deal with extremely controversial issues and events that had marked the “soul” of the Church.
Daniel-Rops had the uncanny quality of making you feel that, notwithstanding the many setbacks and achievements experienced in nearly 20 centuries of its history, the Church’s life and identity could not be questioned; that, somehow, successive meltdowns had not only brought to the surface its impregnable quality, but had, in the course of many centuries, added maturity to its resilience.
In Cathedral and Crusade. Studies of the Medieval Church, 1050-1350, he notes (p 599) that the Church has always been realistic, taking the world as she found it, notwithstanding her ambition to make it a better place.
Between 1050 and 1350 she had realised those great syntheses of which Christian intellectuals had dreamed since the patristic age.
Now she could offer a philosophical system, a conception of the world, as rich and as valuable as those which she had inherited, a system which included all that was best in ancient thought.
During that period, also, Christian art attained its zenith … it was an epoch of great creative audacity, during which Christianity expressed itself with much originality, with a power of invention and synthesis the like of which has never since been seen. The Cathedral, with its vertical lines suggestive of a soul at prayer, with its precise mathematics and regular design, with its innumerable forms directed to a single entity and at once human and divine, was concrete evidence of the Church’s greatness, to which it still bears witness.
Notwithstanding his rigorous and detailed presentation and explanation of facts and events as they have occurred over 20 centuries of struggles and achievements, Daniel-Rops keeps mentioning the word “soul”, the soul of the Church.
This soul lies in the continuity of adoration, prayer and love. In his Bernard of Clairvaux, he explains the justification of the presence of a monastery in Citaux:
In this age of the “death of God”, predicted by Nietzsche, those who wish to be faithful in spite of all, are fighting for their lives. That in this combat, the effort made by Christians to carry their faith to all parts of the globe, and to make it everywhere efficient is indispensable and admirable and is, of course, true: but it is inseparable from the effort those men and women, who sacrifice all to solitary prayer, accomplished in the silence of their cloisters.
There are few words more profound than those of the young Cistercian Abbot Roger Durey, who died in 1917 at La Trappe de Saint-Marie-du-Desert: “I came here because I loved the apostolate” (p 222-223).
There has been a flurry of proposals put forward for round table discussions involving the Roman Curia and Bishops by countless individual theologians, priests and Bishops within the Church.
They all call for a radical review of the Church’s government and policies.They all echo the dictum: Ecclesia sempre reformanda. That is, the Church is always on the path of reform and it needs to be reformed. But where is the most urgent surgery to be applied?