Homily Fr David Myers – Westminster Cathedral, July 1st 2008
On behalf of the ‘Rosminian Family’ I would like to welcome you to Westminster Cathedral, a Cathedral dedicated to the most Precious Blood, a devotion very dear to the heart of Father Founder.
In 1855, the Feast of the Precious Blood was celebrated on 1st July. On that day, Antonio Rosmini died. Today we celebrate the Mass of Blessed Antonio Rosmini.
This afternoon we are honoured with the presence of Archbishop Faustino, the Apostolic Nuncio and we thank him for accepting the invitation to be Chief Celebrant at this Mass.
We thank Bishop John Arnold and the many diocesan clergy and religious who are also concelebrating.
We are privileged to have with us, Francis Campbell, The British Ambassador to the Holy See and we look forward to his address at the end of Mass.
Among our many other distinguished guests we welcome Lord St John of Fawsley and the Rt Honourable Paul Murphy, Secretary of State for Wales. We also thank Cardinal Murphy O’Connor and Canon Christopher Tuckwell for very kindly allowing us to celebrate this Mass in the Cathedral. I would also like to thank the choir and all who have helped in the preparation of this celebration.
A few months ago when I was faced with the daunting prospect of having to say a few words on this occasion, I got the stepladder out and climbed to the top of the shelves in my office to take down dusty old copies of The Tablet. I wanted to find out what had been written about Antonio Rosmini on his death, so I turned to July 1855.
There I found, for example: that on 7th July there was the record of the death of Lord Raglan. Many column inches were given over to his life and his death. The next week there was even a detailed record of Prize Day at Ratcliffe College.
As I turned over the pages of the subsequent editions I looked in vain, even for a mention, of the name Antonio Rosmini.
I did, however, read that when some Mormons had been baptised by total immersion in Belfast, the women had stripped down to their underwear and the men had gone even further! The indignant Editor wrote that “the authorities” must make sure that this must never happen again!
This silence about Rosmini at his death was, in its own little way, significant. Many of his time found it very hard to come to a judgement about him. His many and varied talents made it very difficult for most people to categorise him, or as we might say today, “to know where he was coming from”.
Rosmini had played a significant part in the spiritual, intellectual and political life of Italy.
Just seven years before his death he was about to be made Cardinal Secretary of State by Pius lX. He had been a friend of several of the previous Popes who had encouraged him as a writer. They also supported his foundation of both ‘The Institute of Charity’ and the ‘Sisters of Providence’.
In 1849 Rosmini’s life changed dramatically. He no longer had, as it were, ‘A seat at the top table’ and for the last seven years of his life he became a figure on the margins of the Church and a figure of suspicion. And except for the loyalty and companionship of the Brethren and friends, he became more isolated.
But, even if ‘the goings on’ of the church in Italy were of little interest to our parochial vision, the silence of ‘The Tablet’ is nevertheless strange. Rosmini, in 1835 had sent Luigi Gentili and some of his ablest men to the small Catholic community in England who lacked vitality and felt very much a defeated minority. In the subsequent twenty years however, the landscape was transformed completely.
Gentili and his companions converted thousands to the Catholic faith and ministered to the multitudes of the poor Irish Catholics in the new industrial towns. They started Missions in the Midlands, South Wales and London. They opened many schools and the children from some of these schools are here today.
I am not suggesting for one moment that the ‘Second Spring’ was due solely to the new Italian missionaries. The Oxford movement and the restoration of the hierarchy were more important. But the work of the Italian missionaries, begun by Gentili and his companions, should not be forgotten.
Rosmini, in 1843, sent Sisters of Providence to Loughborough. They faced much hostility, as did the priests and brothers. A cartoon in ‘Punch’ lambasted the Italian Mission as Barbarians, Pagans and Gentiles a ‘play’ on the three names of Barbari, Pagani and Gentili.
Gentili had introduced into these islands the warmth of the Catholic piety and devotions of Italy. When he died in Dublin of cholera in 1848, The Tablet wrote in his obituary that, ‘Gentili had exercised an influence… to have been enjoyed by no other preacher in this country of our time, or as far back as our enquiries extend’, and he likened Gentili to St Augustine who had been sent by St Gregory the Great.
Many of these great missionaries had been formed by Antonio Rosmini. They had become Apostles of Charity. Rosmini had given much to these islands in manpower and money, especially during the Irish famine, yet he was denied recognition by many on his death.
Truly great men are rarely appreciated in their own time. That is why it is almost inevitable that they are misunderstood.
Two of Rosmini’s books in June 1849, had been put on the Index and it was an ‘open secret’ that his writings were under suspicion. Alas, what was not generally known was that Pope Pius IX and the Holy Office had cleared all Rosmini’s writings of error. This Decree however, had not been made public so Rosmini remained ‘under a cloud of suspicion’ and it was under this cloud of suspicion that Rosmini died. His last words were, ‘Be silent, adore and rejoice’.
Then in 1887, many years after Rosmini’s death, the cloud darkened with the condemnation of the ‘Forty Propositions’. This suspicion was to last for more than a hundred years.
During the last 150 years the Church has wavered from condemnation to approval.
However, with the election of John XXIII in 1958, the Church began to see Rosmini in a more positive light. Rosmini now is even quoted in encyclicals! John Paul II, in ‘Faith and Reason’, wrote that Rosmini was one of the thinkers who could guide the Church in the twenty first century.
With time, Rosmini’s greatness and holiness have finally been recognised.
Benedict XVI in his Apostolic Letter, called Rosmini Blessed and decreed that his feast may be celebrated every year on 1st July.
On the day of Rosmini’s Beatification, in his Angelus Address in St Peter’s Square, Benedict XVI said:
“This afternoon… Antonio Rosmini will be beatified, a great priestly figure and illustrious man of culture, inspired by a fervent love for God and the Church”.
The Pope went on to say that Rosmini “witnessed the virtue of charity in all its dimensions… but what made him most famous was… ‘intellectual charity’, which means the reconciliation of reason with faith.”
His Holiness concluded by saying, “May Rosmini’s example help the Church…. to grow in the awareness that the light of human reason and that of Grace, when they journey together, become a source of blessing for the human person and for society.”
As the wonderful Bishop of Novara said on the occasion of the beatification,
“We must pray and look forward to the day Blessed Antonio Rosmini will be declared a Saint and a Doctor of the Church”.
Antonio Rosmini’s Feast Day – 1 July 2008
Westminster Cathedral
Speech by the British Ambassador to the Holy See, Mr. Campbell
What would Blessed Rosmini make of this? A fine afternoon many hundreds of miles from his place of birth and death – in a country he had never seen - a group of people gathering to commemorate his life’s work and inspiration 153 years after his death? Perhaps surprise, or humility, or a joy that the mission he sanctioned in 1835 had borne fruit.
Britain and Ireland
It is very fitting that we are here today celebrating the life of Antonio Rosmini. That we are doing so here in the Mother Church of the Catholic Church of England and Wales. For it was to England and Wales in 1835 that Rosmini first sent out his followers. To put the move in proper historical context – he took what some might have seen then and indeed now as– a reckless decision to send three Priests to the Church in Britain and Ireland. At the time the Institute consisted of just six followers so the scale of Rosmini’s commitment to the Church in Britain and Ireland is made very apparent to us.
Rosmini’s founding of the Institute of Charity and the Rosminian Sisters of Providence chimed with the passage of the Roman Catholic Relief Act – otherwise known as Catholic Emancipation – in 1829. That first mission to England and Ireland was led by – Luigi Gentili – one of Rosmini’s first followers. He first came to England and Wales – where he led the growth and renewal of the Church in the Midlands, in particular Leicestershire. He was a renowned preacher and a contemporary of John Henry Newman whom he met many times. Like Newman, Gentili later went to Ireland to help the Church grow and survive the ravages of the Famine.
I am personally very grateful for this kind invitation to speak today on the legacy of Rosmini and the Rosminian family. Not simply because of the position I currently hold, but more importantly because the names of Gentili and Rosmini are etched in my memory. Gentili’s remains are buried on the shores of Carlingford Lough. It was there that he built his beloved Calvary with Stations of the Cross which had been saved from destruction in post revolutionary France. He set about recreating the scene from the Institute’s Mother House at Calvario where he and Rosmini had first prepared the mission to England and Ireland. Today – the Calvario – where Gentili is buried is a site of pilgrimage and it was also where I went to School and benefited – as I am sure many of you here today did – from the commitment and dedication of many Rosminian Sisters, Brothers and Priests following the example of their Founders.
Confusion
But what is it that attracts us to Rosmini and what is our challenge today? Rosmini is much less known than John Henry Newman – yet he is described as the continental equivalent. The Institute he founded is much less known than say the Jesuits, yet his philosophy and theology were as unique as that advocated by Ignatius. He too arose at a time in the Church following much upheaval. So why is he less well known?
For much of Rosmini’s later life, but in particular following his death and up until the middle of the 20th century – his work was under suspicion and had been placed on the index of forbidden books. Cardinal Martins, speaking last November ahead of Blessed Rosmini’s Beatification said that he was misunderstood in his day. That misunderstanding was in part due to the context in which he lived his life with the political, social and religious flux in the wider European society.
His life is illustrative of the wider societal tensions and issues on the Italian peninsula at that time. Born on 24 March 1797 in the Trentino - educated in the works of European philosophers from Locke to Kant while studying at the University of Padua - heavily influenced by Aquinas and perhaps one of the key influences in re-introducing Thomism into the wider Church through his influence on many of the Popes in the first half of the 19th century – Rosmini was a strong advocate for upholding the integration of philosophy and religion.
Rosmini’s work was an attempt to find a philosophical synthesis following on from the divisions with Christianity, the Enlightenment and the trauma of the French Revolution. He saw the limitations of the Enlightenment project with its elevation of rationalism and empiricism. In 1955, to mark the centenary of his death, the President of Italy wrote that ‘he re-stated the Christian tradition in an organic system that included the vital claims of modern thought.
Italy
But it was not just in the life of the Catholic Church that his influence was felt. He was also a key figure in creating an Italian national consciousness leading eventually to the unification of Italy in 1870. He was a close friend and confidant of Alessandro Manzoni one of the great fathers the Italian cultural nation. In 1955, the President of the Italian Republic wrote “The name and work of Antonio Rosmini belong to the inheritance of our Risorgimento still preserved by Italians as a vital spiritual reality. From it our national conscience was formed, our free institutions born. Rosmini was a teacher of the principle of liberty, keeping a perfect balance between theory and practice; he also powerfully proclaimed the duties and the rights that freedom needs if it is to flourish.’
In so many ways Rosmini was ahead of his time, in his political, philosophical and theological writings. His political writings brought him negative attention from the then colonial power in much of Northern Italy - Austria - and his calls for reform in the Church and for the separation of Church and State brought him powerful enemies in the Church. His principal contribution to reform within the Church is perhaps his book on the ‘Five Wounds of the Church’. The five wounds were; divisions between clergy and laity in religious worship; the lack of education of Priests; disunity among the Bishops; civil control over the appointment of Bishops; and the restrictions placed by the state on the use of Church possessions.
It was perhaps this publication that caused him the most trouble. He was challenging the status quo and calling for greater independence for the Church. In so doing he was challenging vested interest. Yet all the time he was a close confident of successive Popes who sought his counsel. He saw trends in Europe and wanted to see the Pope reform the Papal States rather than be swept away in the tide of political reform that was spreading across much of 19th century Europe. Rosmini’s detractors became many and in 1850 two of his works were placed on the Index. All his works were examined between 1850 and 1854 for their orthodoxy. The verdicts of the examiners were unanimous. Rosmini’s works were not wanting in terms of orthodoxy. As a result Pope Pius IX in 1854 called on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to draw up a dismissal of all the accusations against Rosmini’s work. But following his death, his detractors returned and in 1887, ‘Forty Propositions’ of Rosmini’s work were condemned by the Holy Office. These were mainly taken from his posthumous works.
Rosmini also recognised the negative impact imperial power had on the day to day spiritual life of the Church. This led him in 1823 to call for greater independence for the Church from state interference. He was a leading Christian intellectual figure on the European stage in the early years of the 19th century and one of the leading thinkers responding and critiquing the European enlightenment. He strongly advocated to the Church of the day the need to maintain the relationship between faith and reason. He was alarmed by the growth of Jansenism in particular in the Church in France. He challenged those of the zealous enlightenment schools who tried to replace religious faith with a faith in absolute reason.
Beatification
Pope John Paul II first mentioned Rosmini in his 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio. In describing him as undertaking ‘courageous research’ he opened the door to Rosmini’s eventual rehabilitation and Beatification. Rehabilitating Rosmini had started much earlier. Pope John XXIII had read his works ahead of calling the Second Vatican Council. Cardinal Martins in describing Rosmini said that he was a precursor of Vatican II. He said that his influence is particularly felt in the teaching on religious freedom. Martins said that on that theme he really was a misunderstood forerunner and that Dignitatis humane owes him a great deal.
In the short pontificate of John Paul I we also find the Pope speaking of Rosmini. As a young Priest he had had presented his thesis at the Gregorian on the works of Rosmini. We are told that during the 33 days of his Pontificate he described Rosmini as a Priest who loved the Church, who suffered for the Church; a man of vast culture, of integral faith, a master of philosophical and moral wisdom who clearly saw the delays as well as the evangelical and pastoral inadequacies of the Church. Writing in 1998, Pope John Paul II said ‘Rosmini stands in that great intellectual tradition of Christianity which knows that there is no opposition between faith and reason, but that one demands the other. His was a time when the long process of the separation of faith and reason had reached full term, and the two came to seem mortal enemies. Rosmini, however, knew that faith without reason withers into myth and superstition, and therefore he set about applying his immense gifts of mind not only to theology and spirituality, but to fields as diverse as philosophy, politics, law, education, science, psychology and art, seeing in them no threat to faith, but necessary allies. Although very much a man of the 19th century, Rosmini transcended his own time and place to become a universal witness whose teaching is still today both relevant and timely’.
And for the future?
And now on this his first Feast Day – what can we say of Rosmini and the future? For it was the crisis of the modern world which occupied much of Rosmini’s time and work in the 19th century. In recent decades many of those questions have re-appeared. Rosmini saw the limitations of the enlightenment when it came to the realm of religious faith. Today, one can find many echoes of his work in the words of Pope Benedict XVI. Pope Benedict speaks of religion and reason needing each other and acknowledging that mutual need. Perhaps Rosmini’s works could serve as a bridge to help contemporary society overcome some significant philosophical challenges regarding the reconciliation of the secular and religious realms. Perhaps he could help us avoid the breakdown of consensus which sees opposing sides approaching the issue from irreconcilable philosophical positions. Alasdair Macintyre characterizes this as Thomistic ideals coming up against Rousseauist ideals and this lack of a common language or ability to reach consensus could lead to a Nietzschean amorality of total chaotic relativism. [1]
During Rosmini’s life he sought the harmonisation of revelation and reason. He was not among those who sought to reject ‘modernism’ or to turn back the Enlightenment. He advocated ‘a healing of a rupture’. He did not condemn what was then reality, but he critiqued it. He helped the Church on its path to embracing religious freedom and in supporting democracy. The former Father General of the Jesuits – Kolvenbach spoke of Rosmini as the prophet of the third millennium.
Writing just last year, a former President of the Italian Republic, Francesco Cossiga said of Rosmini “His whole philosophy rest on the simple but extremely universal idea of being, his anthropology on the dignity of the human person, his idea of law on the solidarity of justice, his theology on the natural light of reason which is made whole by the supernatural light of grace, his ethics on the duty of recognising being in practical fashion, and his theosophy on the primordial nexus between the unity and the multiplicity of being’.
If I may return to Fides et Ratio, I believe the key to Rosmini’s influence in today’s world is found in that 1998 Papal Encyclical. It is an Encyclical that speaks of his influence. There Pope John Paul II challenges thinking people to be bold. To take on the fundamental questions which pervade human life. To do this we have the work of Blessed Antonio Rosmini.
But it is not just in the intellectual realm that Blessed Rosmini can aid us. It is somewhat ironic that Rosmini and Newman are today seen as aiding us in reconciling modern conflicts between faith and reason and yet throughout the 19th century they encountered much suspicion and attack from their detractors within the Church. Rosmini’s reaction, like that of Newman, was neither to fall into despair or depression. Nor to give into the intellectual ego and to turn away. It was rather to have belief in the providence of God. Today, that faith in the providence of God has been vindicated. It is a powerful lesson in faith and humility. As Cardinal Martins said in 2007, Rosmini shared the fate of many Prophets chronicled in the Bible and the history of the Church. But throughout he remained steadfast in his loyalty to the Papacy and did not become an instrument of disunity. Hs desire was reform not revolution.
I cannot think of a better way to conclude than to quote John Henry Newman who wrote this upon hearing of Rosmini’s death ‘Although he belonged in a special way to the Institute of Charity, a man like him, as long as he lived, was the property of the whole Church… I hope he will not forget me as soon as he reaches heaven, in fact we may believe he has already arrived there.
[1] Alasdair Macintyre, ‘After Virtue, University of Notre Dame Press; 2nd Edition (August 30, 1984)
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