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Did our foundress Catherine, who died in 1985, ever say anything about the future of the Church? Well, as a matter of fact, she did—in a letter to her MH family.

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December 9, 1966

Dearly Beloved,
This year I tried to write my usual Christmas letter to you, but somehow words did not come to me easily, so I prayed to the Lord and it came to me that perhaps in my utter poverty I could offer you only my agony.
Agony is not a very good gift to offer on Christmas, so I add to it joy; yes, when one is in an agony for the Church, which means not only the Christian, the Catholic, part of it, but for all that humanity for which Christ died, then there comes a point when a strange joy, peaceful and serene, comes to bind the wounds that agony made.
So, dearly beloved, so very dearly beloved, here is my gift. It is one more step of the enlargement, the growth, of the “Vision of the Whole of the Madonna House Apostolate” that is all I have to give you.
Accept it with my deepest love for you, the depths of which so many of you do not suspect, but which stays with you and follows you and understands you, no matter how it may be with you.
So, with deep love I send you my Christmas gift—the enclosed letter.
Lovingly yours in Mary,
Catherine

***

In The Dark Valley

The night of November 14th –15th has been a very strange one for me indeed, for I spent many hours between sleeping and waking, with long periods of being fully awake. Yet, awake or asleep, I was taken up into what I must call a “deep vision” or an intellectual insight that gripped me during that time and without any surcease.
There is no beating about the bush that I was in the throes of a sadness beyond description, a fear beyond the telling of it, a numbness and yet a clarity of mind that strangely blended all together.
It came to me that the Catholic Church is in grave danger!
We Christians are like a snowball that is rolling down an immense mountain and, in the process, becoming a juggernaut. And all of this is falling on the Church and, in some manner, crushing it.
The Church lies in ruins underneath the cold snow, which symbolizes so many cold hearts of so-called Christians.
The conviction grew upon me that the Church is at the crossroads. And by “Church” I mean all of us.
Yet it is more than just all of us, the People of God (bishops, priests, and lay people), it is also God! For the Church is the mystery of the Bride of Christ, and he is its Head.
It seemed to me that the People of God have forgotten this aspect of Church. We have set aside the fact that the Church is the Bride of Christ. We have not taken into consideration the tremendous mysterium of Christ’s Headship.
We are beginning to treat the Church as if it were only human. It seemed to me that so many of us are tearing that humanness apart, cutting the Church down to our own level, treating it as if it were just another institution—an organization!—and forgetting the awesome fact that it is also and predominantly an organism, a Living Body, the Head of which is Christ.
I realized, in some inexplicable way, that if one tears the Body apart, then the Head must die. So it came to me that Christians are crucifying Christ again, in ourselves!
How this could be I don’t know, but it was very clear and vivid to me; and it was exceedingly fearful.
Fear shook me like a fever. Suddenly it came to me that God the Father was intensely angry at this re-crucifixion of his Son, at mankind’s total forgetfulness of the Church, which is his Son’s Body; and that his Son is, at the same time, the Head of it and its Bridegroom.
Our faith teaches us that our God is a jealous God. The word jealous is not to be understood in a purely human way. It is to be understood as a passionate concern about our ultimate happiness as well as our present tranquility and peace; for God loves us simply because God is good.
It came to me, therefore, that God’s anger was a just anger, because we ourselves were tearing apart all that makes for our peace. His justice has given birth to an anger over our blind, absurd, wilful, hostile, stupid ways of treating the immense graces he had sent us through the Holy Spirit, through Vatican II.
It came to me that God was continually giving his signs to us—writing on seen and unseen walls many awesome words of warning—calamities such as disease, floods, hunger.
These natural disasters we try to explain away scientifically; but we have had wars, and I don’t mean only the Vietnam War. I mean the terrible, unholy wars in which human beings rage, one against the other, in their souls.
The fragmentation and division of the People of God, their hostilities and hatreds toward one another, their rejection of the Gospel in a most obvious way—all of this was before me with a startling, fearsome clarity.
Everybody was becoming a reformer! But each person was a reformer, not according to the Spirit of the Lord but according to his or her own spirit, which was often impregnated with the spirit of evil.
I saw the Church crumble, its Body torn to pieces, its Head crucified, not as Christ was crucified as a whole man, but with little bits and pieces of him (namely, ourselves) nailed to some immense grotesque cross.
It is said that we are a prophetic people. I fully understand that this does not mean we prophesy the future. But it appeared to me that the future is, or could be, exceedingly dark, depending on how many just men God could find among us.
By “just” I mean, in this case, loving men. Men who love their enemies. Men who love each other according to God’s order, and therefore love God.
I’m not ashamed to say that I trembled before this sight. It came to me vividly that we of Madonna House must truly increase in love, must hasten to make that community of love which my heart urges me to talk about so constantly, so violently, so passionately.
I fully understood the words of God that the Church will continue to exist and that all hell will not prevail against it.
But it also seemed to me that we, Catholics at large, through the communications media and all the intellectual turmoil that now exists, are slowly but surely driving the Church, which is already in the Diaspora, into the catacombs.
I shuddered, almost wept, at our responsibility for those who are tearing the Church apart.
These people are our elite; they are endowed by God with many graces of intelligence, with talents beyond the average.
I trembled at their misuse of these gifts, at their shirking of the true responsibility these talents give them.
The words of the Gospel that came to me last night were: Woe to those who scandalize the little ones of Christ! (cf. Mt. 18:6)

***

A Vision on the Mountain

I saw the immense changes that were coming; again, fear overcame me and a sadness beyond words. Instead of leading men toward God, instead of making it easy for people to find him, these leaders were leading them away from him.
When I had reached what appeared to me the point of no return, when I wanted to run away from it all and hide someplace (knowing there is no place to hide from God), I seemed to see with a sort of blinding clarity what the role of Madonna House must become in the face of what appeared to be the future ruin of the Church.
It seemed that God has placed us on a mountain top the better to see the whole perspective of this battle between men and God, between good and evil.
Down below, there in the valley, men were building another Tower of Babel. Here on the mountain top, we of Madonna House were being called to build a community of love.
Because this community was a community of human beings, it seemed to me that it was composed of the things that human beings primarily need—shelters, buildings, etc.
Yet each dwelling, each house, also had a symbolic meaning. Each was a parable representing an instrument of God to repair, restore, heal, call, help those men in the valley who were creating a Tower of Babel, who were fragmenting the Church, who were crucifying each fragmented piece of the Body of Christ on the grotesque cross and thereby again crucifying its Head.
But it also seemed to me that these buildings, as well as the community of love which they sheltered on that mountain, were placed there by God to console, heal, and in some way die for the little ones of Christ who were being scandalized by others.
So, there was a mountain. And on that mountain were dwellings, real dwellings, which to me signified the fruits of this community of love that Madonna House must become or perish!
In one building were gathered experts (both priests and lay persons), very special people chosen by God.
Like others who will come in the future, they were endowed with the God-given talent of intelligence. They were very proficient in their fields of canon law, scripture, theology, etc.
Some scientists, interested in integrating the Gospel with their particular intellectual disciplines, were there also.
These priests and lay people were all busy in their fields and, because of their extreme competency as well as their love for God and desire to serve him, they were drawing up from the valley their colleagues.
These latter were slowly beginning to climb the mountain because they could not participate, or were tired of participating, in the fragmentation of the Church and its crucifixion.
In a second building, I saw writers, painters, artisans, people interested in all forms of art (including handicrafts and the dramatic arts). They too were filled with a great love for God and a deep knowledge of their arts and crafts.
They also were drawing up from the valley their colleagues who, like the scientists, could not continue to fragment and crucify the members of Christ’s Body.
In a third building, I saw priests burning with the love of God and man, making ready to serve both—either by returning to the valley or by going to other valleys throughout the world—to witness to Christ by “being” and by loving, and then by doing.
They were leading our lay apostles into places where God was either not known or had already been rejected.
I saw smaller dwellings scattered around those three big buildings. They were “mothers” to future poustinias all across the world—ashrams in India and prayer huts in Africa.
In them, living alone, were priests, laymen, laywomen. They had embraced solitude, prayer, and penance in order to uphold others and to atone before God for the men in the valleys.
These people had an open door. I saw the little ones from the valley come in great numbers to eat of the fruit of their silence, contemplation, and penance.
I saw other buildings in which many people, both men and women, were living and working and being trained (if that is the word) in the formation of a community of love—community in which all the others I mentioned above could exist.
I saw the whole of those buildings as one single candle, a little candle shining in that terrible darkness which is becoming darker every day. But even a little candle is a great light for those who dwell in Stygian blackness.
It seemed to me that this was what God wanted of Madonna House. We must become that little candle in the terrible darkness which is already here and which will intensify in years to come.
It seemed to me that this was God’s loving answer to the chaos that man has created within himself; this was God’s peaceful response to the hostilities, to the anger, to the unpeace, to the forgetfulness of the essentials of the Gospel, to the terrible cutting up of the Body of Christ, of the People of God, which increases in violence from day to day.
I understood that this community of love was placed on a mountain top so that the burning candle, even though little, could be seen from everywhere in the darkness below.
I realized that the buildings were humble and poor, and very simple. And all who dwelt in them had to be equally as simple and little and childlike.
For the Goliath down in the valley can be killed only by a David—a young boy clad in simple shepherd’s garments, who has a slingshot of love and the little stones of simplicity, humility, and childlikeness.
And so it was. The community of love that dwelt on the mountain top were all clad in the garments of service (which are the priestly robes of the Good Shepherd) and were using their talents only as tools of service.
Besides their weapons of love and humility and simplicity, they each held a towel, a pitcher of water, and a basin, so that they could wash the feet of all those who came to them.
Those who went down into all the valleys of the world carried nothing but a slingshot of charity and in their pockets the pebbles of childlikeness and humility.
They were girded with the towel of service, but they possessed neither pitcher nor basin, knowing they would find “in the marketplace” a vessel to capture the clear waters of love flowing from their hearts, wherever they went to witness to Christ.
Such was the vision I saw in the strange night of November 14th–15th.
—Slightly adapted from Dearly Beloved, Vol. 2, (1990), pp. 187-193, available from MH Publications

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