There Is No Sanctuary:
The Spirit of Vatican II v. Women’s Religious Life
by Hilary White
Why don’t we just all go join convents?
Well, because there aren’t any. Really, like Douglas Adams’ description of the existence of life in the universe; there is so little of it out there that if you were to measure the nearly infinite space around it and divide that number into the number of convents that aren’t compromised by neomodernism, ("novusordoism," "Vaticantwoism"… whatever) you would get a number so close to nothing that it makes no difference.
About 13 years ago, I nearly wrote a book about how the religious life was being revived in the US by "conservative" bishops. By the time I got to the end of the research phase, I realised I had been dead wrong. I was also a Traditionalist.
I get emails from people asking me what I think we should do. People talk to me a lot about the "Benedict Option," as we’re calling it now. Sometimes the people are interesting and say useful things. Here’s part of a conversation about religious life and the restoration of the Faith I had with one of them, a lady who corresponds regularly from Ireland:
Hello Hilary: I hope you feel settled about what you’re about. I wouldn’t mind that feeling myself. I was thinking about what you were saying about Perfection. I had been reading a blog post by another lady stating that perhaps the reason we cannot find good Catholic husbands and wives is proof that Christ wants a pile of us to go into convents and monasteries and pray.
I don’t know about this. The main difficulty is that there aren’t any convents and very few monasteries. Of course, the religious life – and here I mean mainly the contemplative life – is to the Church what mitochondria are to a cell, like a battery that keeps the whole machine running. Tiny, silent, hidden and mainly unthought-of, but without them the whole organism dies. There has never been a time in the Church without people specifically consecrated to the task of constant prayer. And the times of crisis have often been the times of blossoming of this life. But it has not always and everywhere taken the same form.
God, of course, doesn’t need this but in His mercy He certainly seems to have chosen to recruit our involvement in the maintenance of the Church in this way. And it does seem to be a rule that a deepening of contemplative prayer by people specifically called to the work is His usual answer to such crises. We had only the one Athanasius, and history records his deeds, but we will not know until the last day how many of God’s mystical supporters he had, locked in their mortal combat in their deserts.
In the last 20 years there has been a tiny – and I mean tiny – revival of cenobitic life for women. (There is a relatively larger resurgence of contemplative religious life for men that seems to be doing pretty well. There are reasons for this, mainly having to do with the ability of men to be ordained, but that’s a discussion for another time.) But these small and extremely rare – and often threatened – groups cannot be an immediate solution to the vast problem before us. A revival is not the same thing as a restoration. I’m not convinced, in fact, that we should be looking for the latter, if we mean by "restoration" the ecclesial landscape of 1954. Because it is not a restoration of religious life we should be aiming at, but a restoration of the Faith.
The much bigger problem, that of the neo-modernist claw that grips all the institutions of the Church from top to bottom, is going to be an obstacle to the growth and spread of these little communities. A few little clusters of five or six or sometimes as many as twenty sisters, sheltering under the wings of a single bishop – a bishop who may or may not fully grasp the gravity of the situation in the Church, who may or may not be himself only a more broadminded neo-modernist than his fellows – is no basis for a resurgence of the Faith.
As long as the majority of bishops of the world adhere to the New Theology, the New Mass, the New Church – one of the most prominent features of which is its loathing and violent hostility to the ancient Faith and a determination to stamp it out at any cost – there cannot possibly be any general resurgence of the religious life or the Faith that they would carry.
About 2002/03 I was working on a book about religious life, and what I then thought was a revival of its more traditional forms in some places in the west, most notably the US. In the end I got to about 90,000 words worth of notes, and had visited monasteries and communities, mainly in the eastern end of the US and Canada. I attended conferences, went on retreats, attended World Youth Day 2002 in Toronto, and had many conversations.
In the end, I concluded that my thesis at the start had been in error. There was no general revival of religious life.
There were pockets here and there of communities that had been founded or preserved with most of the external traditional trappings of religious life intact. But the appearance was nearly always deceptive. I learned firsthand that with only a tiny number of extremely rare exceptions, nearly all of what we think of as the "new conservative" communities have been very badly infected with the neomodernist Disease.
Even those communities that look on the outside to be flourishing were, upon closer inspection, riddled through with the infection, a major symptom of which, as I noted above, is an extreme hostility towards the only remedy; theological Tradition.
Further, I concluded that what we were used to thinking of as common – large communities with a unified charism with traditional trappings like habits, an ordered communal prayer life and big convents – was an artifact of a particular time and place. Looking into the history of the religious life, I found that there have been many species of consecration for women, like garden plants, and as in a garden many of them have flourished abundantly at particular times and in particular conditions. At the moment, I believe the conditions do not exist in the western Church for the kind of thing we took as normal in 1954. And they will not exist again until the neomodernist crisis has been resolved in favour of the Faith in the fullness of its Tradition.
Now, this does not mean that God does not have His plans laid for a restoration.
Merely that at the moment it seems unlikely to be coming from the sources or in the structures we expect. This is why lately I have become interested in the eremitical life as it was lived during the first five or six centuries of the Church, and as more and more people are turning to it now. I am coming to believe that a bishop who wants to restore the Faith and wants to see religious life flourishing again, should start with these little seeds, for they will prepare the ground for larger and more spectacular growth. The difficulty now in the Church is that after such a long neglect – and in most places outright poisoning – the impoverished soil is not capable of sustaining the showier plants. The form of the life dedicated exclusively to concentrated prayer has changed to respond to the circumstances of the time and place. The eremitical life, while it remains a common feature in Eastern (Byzantine) Christianity, had almost died out in the Western Church after the establishment of cenobitic life by Benedict and his followers. This became the pattern for most of the Latin Church, and if there were solitaries – as there were through the High Middle Ages – they could never rival the sheer numbers and material influence of the monasteries. But the Asteroid of Vaticantwoism has all but wiped them out along with all the rest of the old visible structures – the large targets – of the Church.
What does this leave us with? The dinosaurs are mostly already gone, and the survivors are on their last legs.
What survives? How many people are there out there who are having the similar thought: Perhaps I should pray.
Perhaps I should really be praying a lot.
More than usual. I’m single / widowed / separated / annulled… the kids are grown or there never were any, and life has settled down a bit. There is time and calm enough to start organising the day to include a settled programme of prayer. People in their 40s and 50s have established careers and settled lives, such that it is possible in at least a small way to organise their days to fit in a regular prayer life. We are no longer in our 20s and mad, flighty 30s, desperately floundering around the world trying to figure out what to do next.
How many people of the generation who were the right age, in their 20s in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when it was all coming crashing down, before there was an internet to help us communicate, before there was any thought of building back up? How many who are starting to think now, "I always wanted to be a nun but at the time there was nowhere to go.
And maybe at the time I didn’t want it for the right reasons, and now I’m too old anyway. But things are in such a dreadful state of emergency, I feel I have to do something and I’m in a position in life now that I can spare some thought to it. Maybe what St. Francis de Sales said about the heights of sanctity being open to people in all states of life was true. Maybe it’s impossible to join a monastery, but how can it be too late to pursue a holy life of prayer? After all, what else is life actually for?"
I have been told that the few and far between monasteries with a traditional mindset are practically besieged with
Continued Next Page
![[image]](images/image_20160415_11_0_large_gray.jpg)
What happened to all this? Vatican II happened!
The Spirit of Vatican II v. Women’s Religious Life
H. White/ Continued from Page 11
requests for oblation. I know that Norcia – a rather small place of not much more than a dozen young monks – has, if I’m not mistaken, a couple hundred around the world. (I went down to the Basilica one day last summer and there was a big crowd in the pews, maybe 50 people. I was told by the Oblate master that this was a group from Sardinia, some of whom were making their final oblation that day, and the rest wanted to join up, all from the same village. "What did you do, oblate the whole island?!" Br. Oblate Master smiled conspiratorially and whispered back, "Soon, soon.") Further, an Italian researcher has discovered that there are a great many women my age in this country who have chosen to live this kind of hidden life of prayer, all on their own and with next to no guidance but old books.
Isacco Turina, a professor of sociology at the university of Bologna, has done a book on them and says there are as many as 250 hermits, men and women, in Italy alone, with an average age of about 56. Only a tiny fraction of whom are officially recognised by a bishop under the Canonical provision, but all of whom have chosen a life of ordered, contemplative prayer in the eremitical life. I believe this is where the "revival" is really dwelling at the moment.
What will happen next, if anything, is anyone’s guess. And it is a very ancient precedent. This seems to be a common "emergency measure" that has emerged several times throughout the topsy turvy history of the Church. Taken in its broadest sense, it simply means that the person has deliberately consecrated herself to the task of contemplative prayer, to the "combat of the desert" as St. Anthony the Great put it, and to varying degrees of solitude, depending on circumstances. This would certainly cover the many, many single people, either widowed or even annulled or never-married spinsters who carry on their regular duties of prayer in their state and place in a quiet way, minding their little outpost assignment with as much care as though it were the battlements of Carcassonne.
A good soldier is not interested in the size or importance of his posting; only that he does his duty in it. Whether there are others who are similarly posted to keep watch in the remote places is also not a primary concern. It could be of assistance to him to know, and in this case he will be informed. I think this is the value of the internet at the moment, and for however long it is available to us.
Everything seems so ugly now, from music and art to clothes. I love Scruton and what he writes about Beauty. Lately it seems to be getting worse though, as in the past year.
Abortion and Sodomy will do that to a country. I can deal with the stupid news channels and newspapers and switch them off. It’s more than that though. What I don’t know is how to view the world in a Christian manner with that attitude. The "pick up my skirts and walk away" mentality has hit me recently and I don’t know if that’s because I’m too snobby to look at it and too cowardly to deal with conflict.
I’m afraid we have a bit of a "stand and fight" prejudice. I expect we got it from the movies. But the great spiritual masters – St. Philip Neri and Francis de Sales included – often say that the best way to deal with temptation is to run away from it, as fast as your heels will go. Don’t imagine that you are a big tough superhero saint who can duke it out toe to toe with the world, the flesh and the devil. I know personally that I’m just weak. I become depressed and discouraged easily at the sight of the endemic sin and ugliness that the modern western world has embraced. I fear it and I fled it, and I don’t feel the least bit badly about that.
Evil and ugliness isn’t something we’re obliged to accept. We don’t have to be "cool" about bad things and are not being "snobby" because we find ugliness and sin repulsive, and the simple fact is that our cities have largely become cesspits of immorality, degradation and spiritual and emotional misery. We’re not supposed to like bad things. The fact that we feel guilty about not liking bad things, or not being able to be "cool" about them, is a sign that the anti-culture has sunk its hooks into our brains.
The desire to remove oneself from the temptations of the world used to be understood as a sign of a vocation to the religious life. It used to be accepted as a perfectly normal and positive response.
It’s the reason the Desert Fathers went to Sinai and the reason La Grande Chartreuse was built in an inaccessible corner of the Alps.
While these days, anyone who talks about the eremitical life always starts with the desperate caveat that the person is not "fleeing the world," Fr. William Doyle, SJ, a spiritual director of the early 20th century, wrote that this "hatred of the world" is simply one of the normal signs of a vocation. "To have a hatred of the world, a conviction of its hollowness and insufficiency to satisfy the soul. This feeling is generally strongest in the midst of worldly amusement." Another is to have "a fear of sin, into which it is easy to fall, and a longing to escape from the dangers and temptations of the world."
I don’t think I am called to be a nun, the relief on getting out of the convent when I was on retreat was too great. I suppose it’s about building that little cell in our minds from which we cannot flee.
Well, yes, and this is something that gets said a lot. We should be able to be at one with God and to pursue the mystical heights in the heart of the ugliest city, and certainly there are people who do this. But it’s really, really difficult, and there has never been a rule in the spiritual life that says you have to do everything the hardest way possible.
Something that kind of gets forgotten today is that the Desert Fathers and hermits flee their city life and go and live in the middle of nowhere because it’s easier. The monastic life is meant to make the pursuit of holiness easier, not harder.
Moreover, there is also no obligation to live the way the World expects you to live. We only assume that the correct way to live is deep in the City of Destruction because that is how most people live. But this way of living, which is not in keeping with human nature, has been the result of 250 years of deliberate re-organisation of our civilization. In fact, in the Anglo nations it started all the way back with the Dissolution of the monasteries. It was not until that structure was taken away that there was such a thing in England as a class of indigent paupers, begging and thieving. It started the push from the old, settled, ordered, country way of life and into the cities and dependence on wage labour and the state. It is not normal for human beings to live this way.
City life is a trap; it is too expensive to live in a city, so every penny of your wages goes to merely making it barely possible for you to continue to go to your job. No matter how much money you make in wages, the modern urban consumer lifestyle conspires to make it not enough.
But there are ways to fight this and to organise your life differently. A mantra of mine lately has become, "You don’t have to live like they tell you." As the old movie had it, "The only way to win the game is not to play." And I can tell you from experience, that little interior cell in your heart (which I have always thought of as a garden) is a heck of a lot easier to build and maintain in the country than it was in the city.
Do you think that it’s necessary to literally get out into the countryside to build that cell nowadays? Is that march to Perfection possible while working and living in the world?
I could get a job anywhere in this country, including rural Ireland.
Of course, we can’t say it’s impossible to pursue holiness in a city environment, but as I said above, it is obviously a good deal easier to live materially, and to be away from the constant psychic and moral assault that characterizes life in western cities. There really is no obligation to make things harder for oneself than is necessary. In the 4th century, the point of fleeing Rome or Alexandria or Constantinople to a cave in the desert or a stone hut in the woods was, simply, to get away from distractions, temptations and the constant rattle and buzz of the world.
As things are in this world right now, it is often materially very, very difficult to live in a large city. Rents and house prices are sky high, the cost of living is such that it often ends up being a trap, forcing a person who wants to pay attention to spiritual things to become more and more worldly. The simple fact is that, while wages are lower in small country places, the cost of living, the pace of life and the moral atmosphere are all just easier to handle. Money matters less and you are not a stranger to everyone you see. (Don’t forget, when the votes were counted in the referendum, it was Dublin that wanted abortion, not the country people.) Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, it isn’t a sign of moral virtue to make your life as hard and unpleasant as possible.
I know St. Benedict removed himself to pray and in doing so he transformed Christianity. How did you figure out if your way of following him was for the right reasons?
By trying it. And by figuring that there was no other choice. I prayed, I consulted and weighed all the factors and signs, but in the end I just had to come here and try it. But at least I know that the reasons I came here were the right ones. It’s just common sense, really, applied to spiritual things.
I needed to live in a place that had the things that I found here – this monastery, this kind of quiet rural atmosphere, even the climate was the thing I had been looking for. I was able, financially, to move here and live here because the rents are very low and there are plenty of decent places available. Simply, this is where I found the particular combination of things I could not do without. As far as motivations go, it was a no-brainer.
And it’s important to understand that I’m not very good at it. The normal undulations, the kind of spiritual sine wave, in which we have our up-days and our down-days, are all going to be magnified by any effort to make it a lifestyle. As soon as you are doing it on purpose and trying to be regular then the ton of bricks falls on you. You realize just how lazy you really are, or just how careless, or how disorganized, or, and God help us this is the worst, how indifferent. This struggle with the self is what happens to anyone who tries to do the spiritual life more deliberately.
Always. You’re tempted to quit, to give up, to just let things slide… on and on it goes. And, I’m told, this is the struggle that will go on for the rest of your life. I’ve only been here a year and four months, so I’m only just the very beginningest of beginners.
I’m pretty sure St. Benedict, when he went to live in his cave, didn’t have as his goal the transformation of Christianity, or the founding of Europe or the development of bee keeping (yes, another Benedictine thing that we do here). Every time I’ve read the life of one of these great founders, in most cases the goal had nothing to do with "founding" anything. It’s well to remember that Benedict is thought to have written his Rule near the end of his life and work. He didn’t think it all up ahead of time in his cave and then march out and try to put it into practice.
We don’t, if we are smart, set out to found things or start things or rescue civilization from the barbarian hordes.
At least, not if we’re not bishops.
Bishops can do those things, if they’ve a mind to. But we lay people can only do the thing we’re given to do right here and now. The rescue of civilization or the Church beset with heresies, is, thank God, not up to us. Our most urgent task is the salvation of our own souls and the Great Rescue will flow from that. Imagine what would happen in the world if 1 in 10 Catholics attained the Transforming Union.
The very elderly nun who founded the community in Ontario that I was considering joining years ago, gave me one of the top five most useful pieces of advice I have ever had, and I have never forgotten it. She said, "Well, no matter what you decide, you’re going to have to become a saint, one way or another.
Better and easier to do it in this life than the next." ■