A talk given to the clergy of Venice at a Diocesan Synod, November, 1957. by the patriarch, Cardinal Roncalli, our present Pope.

My dear brothers in the priesthood, of Christ:

For a long time now I have wanted to have a heart-to-heart talk with you. Up to now I have been following all that you do and I am very pleased and bless the Lord for all the good that is in you. In public, as you know, I am happy to bear witness to your excellent spirit and to the work which you accomplish. It is with joy that I give even more abundant testimony of this in the presence of the Holy Father, Vicar of Christ on earth and head of the whole Catholic family. I did so last year. on the occasion of my first ad limina visit. I received in return words of encouragement and comfort for us all. That audience of June 8th, 1956, has left a deep impression of good-will on the part of the Holy Father and, on our side, of filial devotion to his august person.

Doth not wisdom cry aloud and prudence put forth her voice ? Standing in the top of the highest places, by the way, in the midst of the paths, beside the gates of the city, in the very doors she speaketh, saying, O men, to you / call, and my voice is to the sons of men! O little ones, understand subtlety, and ye unwise take notice! Hear, for I will speak of great things, and my lips shall be opened to preach right things. My mouth shall meditate truth and my lips shall hate wickedness. (Prov. viii, 1-7.)

My dear brothers and sisters in St Dominic: I think that the Dominican vocation is the hardest of all, because it is the vocation of an apostle. It is true that all of us suffer from the results of Adam's sin. We can cry with the apostle of the Gentiles, ‘Who is weak, and I am not weak?’ We are all engaged in the struggle with our adversary, who goes about, like a roaring lion, to devour us.

CONVERSION means by and large changing the main principle which governs the shape and direction of a human life. As such it may be for better or for worse; a man may commit himself to evil, he may decide against God, he can adopt Marxism, if he is a Catholic he may turn to Greek Orthodoxy or to Protestantism, if he is a Christian he may become a Jew or join a religion alien to our tradition. In short, what a psychologist may call a conversion, a moralist or canonist may call an apostasy.

Moreover, a distinction can be drawn between a religious conversion and a moral conversion. The first is a matter of our ideas concerning God and the economy of salvation, a change of mind and an intellectual conviction which usually leads to the acceptance of the teaching of a religious body, and agreement with its practices.

EACH year in the United States 150,000 converts enter the Catholic Church. Considered by itself, this is a rather impressive figure. But when we consider that ours is a nation of some 170 million people (well over 100 million of them still outside the Church) and when we remember that there are some 40 million potential Catholic apostles, these convert statistics leave us little cause for complacency. The trial balance is even less encouraging when we recall that a considerable number of Catholics lapse from the Church every year. ‘But as far as conversions are concerned', says Fr Sheerin in The Catholic World, ‘Catholicism and Protestantism in America are like two great forces that have reached a stalemate in competing for the minds of Americans. Neither side is making any great gains.'

But the prospect of a nation's conversion must go beyond mere statistics. The mysterious workings of God's grace must be taken into account.

It is 1936—or could be ‘39, or ‘29, or any of the pre-war years. The Catholic Evidence Guild speaker, in the market square, is surrounded by a motley crowd; some noisy, and angrily putting their point of view; others genuinely interested, ftod asking a carefully-thought-out question; some frankly bored, but hoping for blood to enliven the proceedings.

How many of us were familiar with the scene—and few of us realized the full significance of what we saw.

A speaker? Yes, we saw the speaker—heard him too—and were impressed with his lively answer, and obvious desire to impart his own love for his faith, to those who would listen to him. We rather wished that we had his courage, or his gifts, or both. But we didn't see the point of his speaking in the market square; it wasn't quite respectable, not the sort of thing that a real Catholic would drag his faith to.

I Suppose the thing that strikes one most forcibly about St Augustine's Confessions is the astonishing power of introspection which they reveal. Rarely can there have been a man aware of himself and his experience with such ruthless clarity. The result is that all Augustine's theological thought is an experience-theology. it is never abstract, uncommitted, or impersonal. But this is not to say that his mind remained enclosed in his own personal world. He was not only a person of unusual self-awareness, he was also, if we can so put it, an unusually public person, Because he could look at himself so shrewdly and objectively, he was able to develop his experience into ideas of universal validity. It is with such a development of his experience of conversion that we are here concerned; not with the personal voyage of discovery described in the Confessions’, but with the geographical charts which came of that voyage, and which he unfolds in his De Tnnitate.

In a jotting he made in 1821J. H. Newman wrote: ‘I speak of conversion with great diffidence, being obliged to adopt the language of books. For my feelings, as far as I remember, were so different from any account I have ever read, that I dare not go by what may be an individual case.'

The abbé Huvelin, who was to be God's principal instrument in the conversion of Charles de Foucauld, felt the same difficulty. 'The story of a conversion', he wrote, ‘even of one's own, is something that can never be fully understood. You can see the stages that have led up to it, but that is all. Our Lord acts in such a variety of ways.’ In this article we will sketch the story of such stages, and investigate as delicately as possible their convergence on the focal-point which constitutes de Foucauld's conversion.

BY contemplation here I am not referring to any merely natural operation of the intellect, however sublime it may be, but to an operation much more elusive, namely, supernatural contemplation, called also mysticism. It may be defined as an immediate or experimental knowledge of God. Our ordinary knowledge of God, of his existence and. of his nature, comes to us not immediately but only mediately, that is through intellectual concepts or ideas in the mind derived from reason and faith. By our natural reason it is possible to know of God's existence and to some extent his attributes, but only by faith can “we know his inner nature, for example, his threefold personality. But mysticism, or mystical knowledge of God which is supernatural contemplation, is something quite different. This is immediate knowledge of God and experience of his presence through union with him by charity.

Christianity has produced without any doubt men and women who have fulfilled in themselves the greatest potentiality of the human personality. In all the centuries of the Christian era there stand out men and women, and no small number of them, whom everyone felt were fully developed and integrated and whom mankind could take as patterns of the mature and develped personality. This has been more so than in any other period of history.

It is very true that it is the triumph of the life of Christ in these men and women that has brought them to holiness, maturity and integration; but in the process their psychological development has taken place. The life of grace does not by-pass nature but adds to it, and lifts it on to another plane.