Emmaus Partnership
Before, during, and after studying Scholastic Theology, whilst preparing for the priesthood, I was inspired by St John Henry Newman to study early apostolic Catholic spirituality. When over thirty five years ago I decided to seek out a life of semi-solitude to intensify this search, while trying to practise the profound contemplation that was first generated there, I was able to rediscover the sublime spirituality that we have so recently lost. By we, I mean more specifically, born Catholics for whom the faith has become little more than a philosophy of life since, in the aftermath of Quietism, contemplative prayer was taken out of Catholic Spirituality leaving a moralism instead.
After a very long life teaching, preaching, and writing about Early Apostolic Spirituality that was, incidentally, first lived and practised by converts to Christianity, I have seen that is not new converts, but born Catholics, whose ancestors gave their all for the faith, who have let the side down. When genuine new converts want to join the Church it is to have their first enthusiasm boiled down to nominalism, externalism, moralism, and more recently to relativism rather than raised to the contemplative heights that galvanised the first Catholic Converts in apostolic times. Lest, however, I seem to be totally uncritical about modern converts let me give you some examples of a few who have indeed caused problems. But please note that this would not, could not have happened, if those born Catholics who received them, had embodied fully and deeply the new faith to which they felt drawn by God.
I had to resign from a national Catholic Newspaper, after nearly ten years as a weekly columnist because a recent clerical convert, brisling with protestant qualifications, was leading the readers astray and my orthodoxy was an embarrassment to him. Another convert put me through the third degree to test my orthodoxy, before I was allowed to use his website, yet his own, self-taught and deficient spiritual theology, has been misdirecting serious searchers for years, for ‘half knowledge is a dangerous thing’. This could only have happened, because those born Catholics who welcomed him into the faith, were even more ignorant than him, about the mystical theology that has long since been cast aside. Even though my book ‘The Primacy of Loving’ was originally accepted I had to spend over three months trying and failing to convince a senior editor, again a convert, who was received into the Church without adequate preparation, that what I had written was true Catholic Orthodoxy. His ignorance has been depriving Catholic readers for years of the deeper dimensions of Catholic Spirituality of which he is quite ignorant. In the end I chose to withdraw my book from one of the foremost Catholic Publishers in the USA.
On the feast of the Conversion of St Paul, I listened to a talk given by one of the most eminent converts of our time entitled ‘all you need to know about the conversion of St Paul’. What Christ called the ‘one thing necessary’ was not even mentioned. There was no mention of the fact that after his conversion St Paul went into the desert for three years, nor that he spent double that time in semi-solitude near his own home of Tarsus, to complete what the great historian Monsignor Philip Hughes called, his ‘Novitiate’. If St Barnabas had not insisted that it was time for his apostolate to the Gentiles to begin, he would have spent longer. None of this was even mentioned in the talk. He insisted that St Paul had a brilliant mind, the equal, if not superior to that of Aristotle. He was held up, as an example, of how God’s power can best be seen at work in human brilliance, whereas St Paul himself saw that he was a perfect example of how God’s power can best be seen at work in human weakness.
Further to this there was no mention of his mystical experiences that took place towards the end of his ‘novitiate’. These gave clear evidence that, if he had experiences similar to those described by St Teresa of Avila in her masterwork ‘Interior Castle,’ he must have passed through a prolonged purification, similar to that described by St John of the Cross in his ‘Dark Night of the Soul.’ This guaranteed that he would have received in abundance the fruits of contemplation, namely all the infused Theological, Cardinal and Moral virtues. This was the source of his divine wisdom that suffused and brought his human wisdom to perfection as it did for the other Apostles, who completed their ‘novitiate’ in Jerusalem.
The problem is that these exceptions to the rule were because, new converts were hastily, uncritically, or injudiciously received into the Church without due preparation, because they had impeccable academic qualifications. The reason why some converts have been able to take up such key positions within the Church is yet one more example of the spiritual bankruptcy of the leadership in the Contemporary Catholic Church.
In early Christianity a minimum of two years of ascetical and spiritual training was necessary before reception into the Early Church. Then they had to learn how to be further purified in a second baptism of fire after the baptism of water. But now Catholicism is seen as a philosophy of life, rather than a call to an ongoing spiritual transformation, a new intellectual reorientation alone seems to suffice.
When I was a young man a prospective convert had to wait two years before he would be admitted to train for the priesthood or religious life to lead and guide others. Then it would be six or more years before they could begin, as junior and supervised members of the hierarchy, to teach and preach to the faithful. Although there are preparatory courses for new converts they seem to be primarily intellectual in content and easily bypassed if you are a highflying academic.
In my experience the vast majority of converts come for the right reasons, seeking the spirituality that could not be found in their previous protestant faith, only to find the sublime spirituality that they had every right to expect in the Catholic Faith had long since been misunderstood, lost to sight, or squandered by born Catholics. In my experience the main problems that are destroying the Catholic Church today comes not so much from converts but from born Catholics like me.
Sometimes, you get the impression that conversion to Catholicism today is, for some, seen as just a conversion to a new different and more acceptable intellectual version of Christianity, with Spirituality as an optional extra, and with contemplative prayer as an extraordinary way for a few exceptional oddities, that is of no concern to them.
The Catholic Faith depends for its inner vitality and strength on the inner prayer that leads to the infused virtues about which they seem totally ignorant. If some do feel that they need some Catholic re-education, they study to attain a degree, or a Doctorate from a Catholic University, blissfully unaware that the true infused wisdom that they need cannot be found in academia. But it seems there was nobody to tell them. That is why the first apostles had to spend so many years first seeking, what St Thomas Aquinas called, the fruits of contemplation, that were the indispensable and only qualifications that enabled otherwise unlettered men and women to transform a pagan Roman Empire into a Christian Empire in such a short time. While doing this they wrote the inspired scriptures on which our faith is founded, while suffering imprisonment torture and death, for putting what they believed into practicing it. And please remember they were not born Catholics but converts.
For reasons that I have explained in detail elsewhere …. (Direct readers to talk on Quietism to John Henry) all too many contemporary Catholics, who so readily rejoice to receive new converts, are as ignorant as they are about the profound Sacrificial and Contemplative spirituality that galvanised the first Christians. They achieved so much in such a short time with the true God-given and infused wisdom which no amount of book learning has ever, or will ever, achieve.
The later more prolific and erudite writings of the Greek and Latin Fathers did not depart from the profound contemplative foundations of the faith of the apostolic Fathers and the infused wisdom with which they were imbued. What they did do was to develop and expand this teaching for new converts, who came from different cultural mindsets and from more cultivated intellectual backgrounds. However, in subsequent centuries the gradual and subtle invasion of Catholicism by Greco-Roman intellectualism, beginning with Scholasticism and continuing at the Renaissance and the Enlightenment has turned our faith into a predominantly intellectual religion without the profound contemplative foundations which infused and inspired the Apostolic Fathers, that has now sadly been forgotten. That is why intellectual Christians feel that they can pass to and fro from one intellectual version of Christianity to another as their capricious minds change with the years.
The spiritual bankruptcy that we have all been experiencing at every level in the Church today, is not because God has ceased to love us, but simply because we have stopped turning to receive that love. This is the love called the ‘pleroma’ by the Fathers of the Church, because it is the cornucopia of all the infused virtues, and all the gifts of the Holy Spirit given to all who persist in prayer to contemplation. Those who refuse to pursue it are committing what the scriptures call the sin against the Holy Spirit, that has been spiritually devastating our Church for decades.
All purely human action inevitably leads to selfishness, self-interest self-satisfaction, self-aggrandisement and humbug. That is why I am delighted to say that in recent years I have noticed that most converts who come to our Church come seeking the contemplation, that most born Catholics seem to have long since forgotten.
In order to return to the profound and contemplative origins of our faith in this Jubilee Year, a new form of Retreat had been inaugurated called ‘Metanoia Retreats’. The Patron is Bishop Schneider. It is in progress now online. You might like to check it out on:- https://metanoia.org.uk
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David Torkington is a Spiritual Theologian, Author and Speaker who specializes in Prayer, Christian Spirituality and Mystical Theology.
For the past fifty years, he has been communicating to his audience his profound love of the traditional and authentic Mystical and Biblical Theology that has inspired all his writings on prayer.
He has done this through his ability to express profound truths simply and truthfully in his inspiring lectures and retreats to religious and laity, in England, Ireland, Europe and Africa.
He was asked to lecture on Mystical Theology at the Angelicum in Rome as the only speaker who had practical knowledge and experience in Mystical Theology.
More recently he has concentrated on writing, blogging, podcasting and broadcasting.
Photo: Unsplash/Matea Gregg