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Love Among The Saints

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2024

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Nature abhors a vacuum: and terrible things can happen to a man with an empty heart. That is one reason why it can be more difficult for a priest or a religious to be a good Christian, living a really vital Christian life, than for happily-married lay people. The latter can without too much difficulty integrate their love of each other into their shared love of God, sanctifying the one and deepening the other. What of the priest and the religious?

One sometimes meets among lay people a dangerously romanticised idea of this vocation. For them, these are men and women set apart, dedicated, living in the sanctuary, their whole lives are spent close to God, their minds and hearts filled with God, and with a charity which causes them to think of all other human beings as ‘souls’ to be served and saved. And to move the more sentimental, there is that appalling painting of the young monk with cowled head gazing wistfully through the narrow gothic windows of his tiny cell at the world he has lost for ever…

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1953 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Pages from the Introduction to the Letters of Bl. Jordan of Saxony, o.p., to Bl. Diana d'Andalo, O.P. The book is to be published later in the year by Blackfriars Publications. To the author and publisher the Editor wishes to express his gratitude.

2 We are not concerned here with the purely contemplative Orders.

3 Histoire des Maîtres Généraux de POrdre des Frères Prêcheurs (tome 1, p. 167)

4 He once rebuked a thin-lipped master of novices for scolding some novices who had laughed in choir: ‘Have they not reason to be gay?'