A short time after my conversion to Christianity I had a desire to spend an informal retreat at a Trappist abbey some few hundred miles from my home. As my train sped through the natural wonderland that is New England in the springtime, my thoughts were mostly of a religious nature centring about life in an abbey, ideas gathered from several books that I had recently read.

As my train travelled along I became aware of a sense of doubleretreating, one physical and the other spiritual. My own city being far behind me, and the strange towns and villages going by my window as though framed in a movie film, gave me a strong sense of world-abandonment. I had a feeling that the world, and all that it means, was receding into the distant past. Not only was it receding physically, but spiritually too. I was en route to another kind of world, a world of peace and contentment within the confines of an abbey.

The theme of the whole conference is the Common Life of Christians; the theme of this paper is the Monastic Ideal of the Common Life. The monastic life exists in two forms, the eremitical and the cenobitical. It would be interesting to show how the common life of Christians is realised also in the eremitical monastic life, but for several reasons this paper will consider only the Christian common life as it is envisaged in cenobitical monasticism. And in the West, the Rule of St Benedict remains the norm of cenobitical monastic life, so that the monastic ideal described will be that of the Rule of St Benedict.

Even with this limitation of scope, the subject is not an easy one to treat. During the 1,400 years of Benedictine history, and also in contemporary monastic life, the ideal of the Rule has been realised in a great variety of ways.

It is truly meet and just, right and availing unto salvation that we should at all time and in all places, give thanks unto thee, Holy Lord, Father Almighty, everlasting God, gracious dweller in chaste bodies and divme lover of undefined souls.

For in that Word of thine by whom all things were made, thou dost renew man's nature corrupted in. the first of our race by the malice of the devil. And this in such wise as rtf only to recall it to the innocence of its first beginnings, bu even to bring it to a knowledge of those everlasting good things attainable in the life to come. Indeed, thou dost even now uplift unto the likeness of angels those who are still bound by the condition of this mortal life

A certain obscurity seems to surround the idea of religious chastity (manifest even in the various names given to it, chastity, perfect continence, purity, virginity), and there is a tendency to envisage it in a negative manner, as chiefly the exclusion of sex and marriage. On the other hand, many recent studies have emphasised the positive richness of the idea and the many elements involved in it. It may therefore not be out of place to try to give a synthetic view of the whole. Basically it is a special kind of temperance called chastity, balanced between lust and insensibility, and supported by the sense of sharne and modesty, and by the attraction of a spiritual beauty. Its specific difference as religious chastity comes from a vow, which belongs to the virtue of religion; while charity, both towards God and the neighbour, is its end.

At a time when an anthology such as ‘The Pleasures of Poverty’ is published, for one thing perhaps to help stiffen the economic morale of the general public, it may be instructive and even interesting to learn how one of the Church's great women personalities reacted to the problem of material security.

Julie (now Saint Marie Madeleine) Postel might never have become so interested in the question of poverty had she not lived in the second half of the eighteenth century, in a France which was rapidly heading for economic disaster. She herself, belonging to good middle-class country stock, had always known a fair measure of security. But that was an exceptional experience in a country, where, for all but a privileged few, misery haointed the land in the form of famine and squalor.

The absence of hermits as a recognised and esteemed element in the life of the Church for the last century or two is an extraordinary phenomenon, for in other ages hermits have always been numerous and accepted. This is not merely that eremitical vocations are lacking, they possibly exist in numbers; but is in part at least to be attributed to the general attitude of suspicion with which the eremitical life is viewed. In the West there is no legal provision made for hermits in canon law, and the difficulties of a religious or priest embracing the eremitical life ar practically insuperable. Spiritual writers rarely treat of eremiticism as a means or state of perfection, and it tends to be regarded as a thing of the past which has no place in the Church today.

There are, however, not lacking signs that this state of affairs may be passing away. The example of Charles de Foucauld and the spiritual personality of St Thérèse of the child Jesus are turning minds to the possibilities of the life of an anchoret, and many writings on the subject are beginning to appear.

The Mass is both sacrifice and sacrament. As sacrifice it consists principally in man's activity, Christ's and ours, inspired and aided by grace, and of God’s approval and acceptance of what we do. Christ as man and Head of his Mystical Body represents that sacrifice of himself and us in him which he offered on Calvary. We his members endorse and ratify this, associating our own offering with his. It is in Christ's name as well as his own that the priest says: ‘Brethren, pray that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God'. And God's reply is to receive and accept this offering as if saying once more: ‘This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased'.

It is needful to be quite clear about the nature of our activity. The priest says words and makes gestures which are essential to the offering of the sacrifice. There would be no Mass without them.

The Forgotten Paraclete', the title of a small and now unobtainable book by a Catholic writer (Mgr Maurice Laudrieux), suggests that the ‘normal’ spirituality taught in seminaries and faithfully distributed to the Catholic flock since the seventeenth century has tended to ignore both the theology of the Holy Ghost and the necessary corollaries which should develop from it in daily Christian prayer and life.

This has not happened without some historically recognisable reason. Pére Congar, O.P., explains the situation when he writes: ‘Heresies always represent the erection into a system of undue or partial emphasis on a particular point of view…. In face of these one-sided deformations of truth the Church affirms indeed not only the particular truth which is perverted, but the whole corpus of truth which is above all partial statements…. It is quite impossible that apologists should not seek to re-establish the partially misunderstood truths, and that theologians should not devote themselves to more precise and detailed development of doctrine…. Wherever an erroneous emphasis or statement is made, the organism of the Church stiffens into concentrated resistance, with the result that since error is always partial, dogmatic truth runs the risk of appearing partial as well.’

I Think good Catholics want the common Christian life of prayer as much as ever. They know that Christians should love one another, and live and pray as a body, but they do not know how to set about it. Other Christians would want it, and thereby become better Christians, if they saw before them an example of the Christian common life of prayer.

From one point of view the big difficulty seems to be that our Christianity is heart without head; from another it seems to be head without heart.

It is heart without head in so far as in this twentieth century of Christianity, hundreds of Catholics seem to be insufficiently instructed in what it means. It is head without heart in so far as Christianity has become for many people a mere matter of creed and catechism without sufficient of the practical common action which bring creed and catechism to life. Religion is worship, common religion and common worship; and it can never be a mere creed.

Tradition has always surrounded marriage with ceremony and feasting even among the most primitive races and countries. Being the climax of human love it is not surprising to find this very natural instinct expressing itself thus. This tradition has almost inevitably found its way into the Christian mode of life and the liturgical spirit of the Church.

Mere love of pageantry is not a sufficient explanation of the full ceremonial of Christian marriage. The Nuptial Mass, which should always form part of any full Christian marriage, has a much deeper significance and reason, especially for the parties concerned. It is not just a kind of luxury, something added to fill out and prolong the festivities, still less should it ever be the privilege of the rich. It is more than an adornment or a frill, for it is deeply concerned with the very essence of marriage.

Religious obedience differs from ordinary obedience by being vowed. The vow is an act of worship of God, and dedicates the controlling faculty in man to him, and so the whole of the future life is under the vow. The power to choose is subjected and consecrated to God and his ministers, so that everything done thereafter in execution of the vow has the value and merit of the virtue of religion as well as of obedience.

As in the case of the virtue, there is a difference between the subjective and the objective extension of the vow. It is generally agreed among theologians, and is usually expressed in the constitutions of religious institutes, that there is only objective obligation under the vow when a proper precept binding under sin is given, and commonly only when the Vow is expressly invoked in the precept, in a more or less fixed formula.

Religious obedience, as it has been developed during the centuries, especially in the West, is a special form of the virtue of obedience, determined by a religious rule, and by a vow. It therefore involves the normal elements of the virtue, and others arising from the vow. The chief elements of religious obedience are, therefore, the virtues of respect and obedience, religion and its act, devotion, the gift of piety, and social justice.

The Fatherhood of God is an idea that is far from exhaustive of God's nature. Alone it would isolate God from a vast part of our own nature.’ So wrote Dom Vonier, O.S.B. (in The Divine Motherhood, p. 90), and what he does not go on to say in so many words, though the idea is implicit in his book, is voiced by Fr Victor White, O.P., in his article on ‘The Scandal of the Assumption’ (Life of the Spirit, Nov.-Dec. 1950), when he says: ‘Perhaps it [the definition of the Assumption] will lead the Church to closer consideration and ultimate formulation of the deep mystery of the “Motherhood of God”. For by the Assumption Mary returns to her own eternal Source, and not she but God himself is the ultimate and eternal type of Motherhood, Womanhood, and even materiality.’ In what follows there Will be suggested, with much diffidence, one possible line of approach to a deeper understanding of this mystery.

Christian chastity and purity, therefore, look towards God, and by a development in this direction can become a new virtue, that of vowed virginity or perfect and perpetual continence. Virginity consists in the will to abstain totally from sex for God, the will to be immune from sexual pleasure. It is destroyed by deliberate consent to such pleasure, though restored by penitence, in the sense that there can return a will to remain virgin and to have remained virgin, though the fact of indulgence cannot be done away with. Bodily integrity is not essential. Perfect perpetual continence is the same will to abstain from all use of sex, but only in the future, in those who take the vow after voluntary experience of sex. While those who take the vow before any such experience can reiterate their former good will even after losing the virtue, and so regain its formal element in the will, though not the material element of never having experienced sex, those who vow after such experience cannot will virginity, except as a might-havebeen.

Saint Richard, surnamed de Wiche, was born at Wiche in Worcestershire. His father was called Richard and his mother Alice. From his childhood he applied himself so diligently to learning as to excel in a short time all his school-fellows and others of his age. HlS elder brother, during his minority, was under ward, so that he came to his estate in great distress. Richard, pitying his brother's case and being not able to help him in any other way, made himself his servant, tilling his ground and serving him for a long time, with much patience in the meanest and most laborious employments: by which means he so far gained his brother's love and affection that of his own accord he freely settled by deed all his inheritance upon him.