The Source and Summit of the Christian Life

6 Christmas 2012

by Peter Kwasniewski

“The Source and Summit of the Christian Life”

What the Schools Can Teach Us About the Mass

ope Benedict XVI inaugurated the Year of Faith on October 11, 2012, the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council and the twentieth anniver-sary of the publication of the Catechism of

the Catholic Church. One of the reasons given by the Holy Father for having instituted this special year of grace is the need to rediscover the authentic teaching of Vatican II—a council that continues to be misrepre-sented and misapplied in broad sectors of the Church. The Pope also writes in his Apostolic Letter Porta Fidei: “We want this Year to arouse in every believer the aspiration to profess the Faith in fullness and with renewed conviction, with confidence and hope. It will also be a good opportunity to intensify the celebration of the Faith in the Liturgy, especially in the Eucharist.” As we move through the Year of Faith, therefore, it behooves all of us who love the traditional Mass to consider how we might become better participants in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

The Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, has this remarkable thing to say about all faithful Christians, clergy and laity alike: “Taking part in the Eucharistic sacrifice, which is the source

and summit of the whole Christian life, they offer the divine Victim to God, and offer themselves along with it.”1 The source or fount of our entire life in Christ is His Eucharistic Sacrifice, that is to say, the Mass; whatever share of the life of God is ours somehow originates from that event. And the goal, the aim, the peak of our Christian life is nothing other

than the very same Sacrifice, through our participation in it, through our com-munion with Jesus Christ, in whom we have eternal life. “I am the living bread come down from heaven; whosoever eats this bread will live forever,” He says in the Gospel of John. “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.” That is the very heart of our Christian life, as we go on pilgrimage through this world, as we travel to the house of the Father, where we shall rest in the bosom of the Father, even as His beloved Son.

Our Lord in His generosity has given the Church many wonderful schools of spirituality nurtured within the great religious orders, and each of these schools has, at its foundation, some-

thing essential, something elemental, to teach us about our spiritual life, and indeed about the Mass itself. This article will therefore offer a running commentary on the parts and aims of the Mass by looking to major characteristics

Our Lord in His generosity has given the Church

many wonderful schools of spirituality nurtured within the great religious orders, and each of these schools

has, at its foundation, something essential, something elemental, to teach us about our

spiritual life, and indeed about the Mass itself.

The Communion of the Apostles by Luca Signorelli

P

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“The Source and Summit of the Christian Life”: What the Schools Can Teach Us About the Mass

of Benedictine, Carmelite, Dominican, Franciscan, and Ignatian spirituality.

The BenedictinesThe motto of the Order of Saint Benedict is ora et labora. This is a rule for the whole of life. Benedictines faithful to their Rule are well known for the beautiful balance of their lives: they know how to balance work and prayer, the bodily and the spiritual, the manual and the intellectual, the exterior and the interior; they know how to balance the individual and the social, as well. Prayer is like breathing in, taking in God’s grace; and work is like breathing out, using the gifts He gives us to build His kingdom in the world. Ora et labora. Or like the pulse of our circulatory system: the blood returns to the heart to be oxygen ated and is then pumped out into the rest of the body to bring the oxygen where it’s needed. Saint Pio of Pietrelcina once remarked: “Prayer is the oxygen of the soul.” We, too, in our souls, need to return to the heart, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to be renewed by His grace; and when this has happened, we are then able to be sent forth to the rest of the members of His Mystical Body, to serve their needs.

Ora et labora. We give ourselves to God, in the Mass, in public prayer, in private prayer; and He gives us the strength to go out and work. And we find that the more earnestly we strive to serve Him in everything we do, the more eagerly we come back to prayer, to the fountain of life, because we see how much we need His help to do great things. Even the Mass follows this principle. We are praying in our spirit, but we are also working with our senses and our limbs: we stand, we sit, we kneel; we make gestures; we sing, speak, and fall silent. Why do we do all these things? Over and above the symbolism of particular words and actions, there is a general reason: when we worship we are not altogether passive, we are active: we put our muscles and vocal cords into it, as a way of giving ourselves, body and soul, to the Lord. But neither are we activists who think that worship is all about saying and doing stuff. The very best activity we have as human beings is our receptivity to God’s grace, and that is actually the most important thing in our partici-pation at Mass: not what we do externally, but what we do internally, or what we allow to be done to us. The external gestures and words are to initiate, guide, and strengthen our internal reception of the graces God wants to give us. Once again, see the wisdom of the Benedictines. They do

not say Labora et ora, work first and then pray, but Ora et labora: fix your mind on the Lord, and then go about your work—even the “work” of the Church’s liturgy.

In the structuring of human life there are two main errors to be avoided, and each involves exalting one side of the balance to the detriment of the other. There is prayer without work: we call this quietism, the view that one should abandon oneself to God in such a way that one needs to do nothing else and be concerned with no one else: there is, in effect, no work to be done. And then there is work without prayer: we could call this, for lack of a better term, activism—as if the most important thing we need to be doing is working “out there in the world” to solve its problems. This attitude, of course, is far more common in our day and age than the opposite one. When’s the last time you met a quietist?

Saint Benedict calmly reminds us: Ora—et labora: Pray first, then work. Go to Mass, then resume your daily business, whatever it may be. Do not put even important matters before the unum necessarium, “the one thing necessary.” Notice the wisdom of the monks and nuns. They limit whatever work they must do to set periods of time each day, so that their work never interferes with their prayer. They build up sacred walls around the prayer times and make sure they are inside those walls at the appro-priate hour. Like a fortress or a citadel, this refuge cannot be destroyed. “Let nothing take precedence over the work of God,” says the Rule. Saint Benedict al-ways refers to the liturgy as “the work of God,” opus Dei. He calls it this for two reasons: first, because it is really more

properly God’s work; we are putting ourselves in a position to let Him work in us. As Jesus says in Saint John’s Gospel: “My Father worketh even until now, and I work.” He is the potter, we are the clay. If the clay isn’t on the wheel or in the potter’s hands, it won’t get shaped. Saint Benedict also means that it is our work for God: we show Him that He is first in our lives, and we give Him our mind, our voice, our song, our silence.

Our spiritual life is by far the most important thing for us to take care of, no matter where we are or what we are do-ing in our lives. If we had piercing intellects like the angels, we would see this very clearly; as it is, we are rather foolish, and we are constantly tempted to put second things first, and put first things off. At the end of the day—at the end of each day, when we examine our consciences—the number one question has to be: Have I drawn close to the Lord today?

At the end of the day—at the end of each day,

when we examine our consciences—the number one question has to be: Have I drawn close to the Lord today? Have I prayed? Have I given

myself a chance to pray? Have I received, if it was possible, the sacraments that He offers to me for

my sanctification?

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Have I prayed? Have I given myself a chance to pray? Have I received, if it was possible, the sacraments that He offers to me for my sanctification?

Nothing else in life can substitute for the divine power of the sacraments; nothing can substitute for the unique role of the sacred liturgy and interior prayer, which are indispens-able causes and conditions of spiritual growth. In a nutshell: if we want to grow spiritually, we have to make these things the axis on which our life turns.

The CarmelitesOne of the most well-known aspects of Carmelite spiritual-ity is its presentation of the spiritual life as a progression through three stages: purgation, il-lumination, and union. These stages are often referred to as the purgative way, the illuminative way, and the unitive way. Their names manifest the predominant activity of each. In the first stage, we make many and repeated efforts to mortify our sinful habits so that we may develop a way of life that is truly given over to God. In the second stage, the cleansing of our moral imperfec-tions continues, but the predominant note is that of being enlightened by God’s grace as He takes an ever greater initiative in teaching us His sovereign goodness. In this stage we become more receptive; since the main impediments to His action have been purged away, God is more and more free to act within us. His reality becomes increasingly the point of departure of our thoughts, willings, and actions, and their point of arrival. In the third stage, God draws us into contemplative union with Himself: it is entirely His doing, only He can elevate us to such a tasting and seeing of His goodness, and all that we can do is make ourselves available for the in-vasion of His tenderness. It is not so much a union we bring ourselves to, as a union He brings about in us, as it pleases His Majesty. We are assured by the great Carmelite Doctors Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Jesus that, in spite of the harsh way that leads up to this stage, and in spite of our helpless-ness to achieve it, one taste of the sweetness of the Lord is worth every suffering, every pain, every hardship; indeed, it

is heaven breaking into our fallen world. It is not something to worry ourselves about (am I almost there? will it happen to me? when will it happen?). It is our job, rather, to do that which falls more within our power: the road of purgation, and the seeking of illumination. God will do the rest, in His good time; He will make us rest in Him when we are fitted to do so, if not in this life, then in the life to come, provided we depart this one in the state of grace.

A holy priest shared with me a beautiful insight into how this Carmelite spiritual doctrine applies to the very structure and experience of the Mass.

Every Mass consists of three basic parts: a penitential preparation; instruction from the Word of God; and the

renewal of the sacrifice of Calvary, when the divine Victim is offered up to God and we, His members, are offered to God in union with Him as our Head. Mass therefore deliberately begins with a purga-tive ritual: we are bidden to recall our sins, we confess them in the Confiteor, we beseech the Lord’s mercy in the Kyrie eleison. We seek to purify ourselves of whatever may hinder our progress to union with Christ. As we transition to the Col-lect, we are opening our minds and hearts to be instructed by the Word of God: this begins the illuminative phase of the Mass, when we kneel or sit down to hear the lesson or lessons, and stand to receive the Gospel, in which the Word of God Himself teaches us. If we are alert and attentive, God’s Word will be able to penetrate our souls so that His Truth can give form and measure to our thoughts and our desires. God is shaping us to be ready for union with Himself. With the Offertory, we initiate a new ac-tion: a response, symbolized by the bread and wine we make and bring, by which we tell the Lord that we are ready to be offered up to Him as a sacrifice, to be joined to His

self-oblation on the Cross, and to be surrendered to the fire of His love. We are entering on the unitive path, where our role is to present ourselves at the feast, ready to receive the Lord Jesus, Who comes to us in the Sacrifice and gives Himself to us. Although we come forward to His altar, it is He who takes us up into communion with Himself. As

The Mass is our miniature immersion in the whole of the spiritual life, if only we open ourselves to it! It does not, of

course, take us entirely through the purgative, illuminative, and

unitive ways—that would be quite a shortcut!—but it is like these ways in its very structure, and it accomplishes something

of their work in our souls.


The Last Communion of Saint Louis, King of France by Gabriel-Francois Doyen

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Saint Augustine says, while ordinary food is transformed into the one who eats it, this heavenly food, being more real and more potent than we are, transforms us into Itself and thus conjoins us with our Lord.

This is well worth pondering: the Mass is our miniature immersion in the whole of the spiritual life, if only we open ourselves to it! It does not, of course, take us entirely through the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways—that would be quite a shortcut!—but it is like these ways in its very structure, and it accomplishes something of their work in our souls. The true purifier, teacher, and lover of our souls, Jesus Christ, is present to us, ready to cleanse us who cry out to Him, eager to illuminate us by His Word, and longing to unite us to Himself, to communicate His resur-rected life into our bodies and souls. If we enter into this great prayer of Christ and His Church and make it our own, the center around which the rest of our life revolves, we will become, as it were, apprenticed to the Carmelites; we will taste and see the goodness of the Lord.

The DominicansThe Dominicans really are the “lights” of the Church. Think about it: Saint Albert the Great, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Catherine of Siena, among others, were all Dominicans. The intellectual wattage and spiritual luminosity hardly gets brighter than that among us mortal men. It always amazes me to hear what Jesus said to Cath-erine, as reported in her Dialogue:

With this light that is given to the eye of the intellect, Thomas Aquinas saw Me, wherefore he acquired the light of much science; also Augustine, Jerome, and the doctors, and My saints. They were illuminated by My Truth to know and understand My Truth in darkness. By My Truth I mean the Holy Scripture, which seemed dark because it was not understood; not through any defect of the Scriptures, but of them who heard them, and did not understand them.

If you turn to Augustine, and to the glorious Thomas and Jerome, and the others, you will see how much light they have thrown over this spouse, [the Holy Catholic Church] extirpating error, like lamps placed upon the candelabra, with true and perfect humility. . . .

Look at My glorious Thomas, who gazed with the gentle eye of his intellect at My Truth, whereby he acquired supernatural light and science infused by grace, for he obtained it rather by means of prayer than by human study. He was a brilliant light, illuminating his order and the mystical body of the Holy Church, dissipating the clouds of heresy.

Apart from the fact that countless popes have recom-mended him for over 700 years, it seems to me that Saint Catherine’s encomium goes a long way towards explaining why the Church grants Saint Thomas such a privileged place in the teaching of sacred theology.

Saint Thomas belonged to the Order of Preachers, or Dominicans. This was the first religious order in the history of the Church to treat study—that is, intellectual labor—as a holy and sanctifying activity in and of itself, something worth pursuing not as a mere instrument for something else, but as a way of perfecting the image of God within us, as a genuine path to God. And, as a corollary, Saint Dominic saw that without a sustained and serious use of the human intel-lect, guided by the Magisterium of the Church, the world’s rulers and rustics alike would fall prey again and again to charlatans, hooligans, heretics, bad poets, and an assortment

of demonic forces. In fact, you never can quite get rid of these parasites; but Saint Dominic fashioned an order that was dedicated with steely resolve to exposing and refuting their stratagems through holy preaching and sound teaching. It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that Dominic and the Dominicans are the saints who sanctified the study of the Great Books as well as the eloquence that proceeds from such study.

We heard Saint Catherine say that God gave Saint Thomas special light to

understand Sacred Scripture. When one thinks about the Dominican zeal for study, one thinks about the Mass of the Catechumens; one thinks about hearing Scripture pro-claimed from the sanctuary and expounded in the homily; one thinks about the illuminative way touched on earlier. As Saint Augustine says in De Doctrina Christiana, all study is ordered to understanding the Word of God and communicat-ing it. The dedication to study found so plentifully in the Catholic tradition is ultimately in service of hearing God’s Word with a mind thoroughly prepared to receive it, so that His wisdom becomes ours, and our joy becomes complete. Let’s put it provocatively: the entire academic curriculum at any institution of higher learning stands or falls depending on whether it opens the ears of students to the full message of Divine Revelation, as delivered by the mouth of the Church’s liturgy.

Saint Thomas, says Saint Catherine, obtained supernatu-ral light more by prayer than by human study. His earliest biographers relate that he would often take a break from his studies to go and rest his head beside the tabernacle. He participated in the Mass twice each morning: once as the celebrant with his secretary Brother Reginald serv-ing him, and immediately after, as the acolyte at Brother


When one thinks about the Dominican zeal for

study, one thinks about the Mass of the Catechumens; one thinks about hearing

Scripture proclaimed from the sanctuary and

expounded in the homily.

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Reginald’s Mass. The mystical experience that brought his life’s enormous literary labors to an abrupt end took place while he was offering Mass on the Feast of Saint Nicholas, December 6, 1273. After this Mass, he could barely speak, and, apart from a short letter he dictated to the monks of Montecassino, he wrote or dictated no more, until he died a few months later. When you read about the life of Saint Thomas, you discover that he was a man totally consumed with love for divine Truth, longing for the blessed sight of God’s Face, and he both quenched his thirst and increased it by his daily partaking of the Sacred Banquet of the Mass, the sacrum convivium, as he calls it. He is truly, in every way, a model for Catholics who pursue the lifelong task of “faith seeking understanding.” Like the Benedic-tines with whom he spent part of his youth, Saint Thomas knew the secret of ora et labora.

The FranciscansAn exact contemporary of Saint Dominic, Saint Francis of As-sisi is often portrayed as a sort of nature-loving hippie who goes around scattering flowers, singing love songs, and doing crazy things that break the system. Well, he did some of that, it’s true, but the flow-ers were his miracles and lessons, the love songs were addressed to Christ, and the system he broke was the bureaucracy of human corruption and medioc-rity. In reality, far from being a new-age hippie ahead of his time, Saint Francis was a mystic in love with Christ crucified, absolutely faithful to Christ’s Holy Church, and almost combustible with his zeal for the Most Holy Eucharist.

His love of nature was not at all like that of the modern-day nature-worshiper. Saint Francis loved the created universe because everything in it reminded him of God, and so he was able to use it as a ladder to climb up to God. Saint Bonaventure, in his biography of the saint, tells us: “When [Francis] bethought himself of the first beginning of all things, he was filled with a yet more overflowing charity, and would call the dumb animals, howsoever small, by the names of brother and sister, forasmuch as he recognized in them the same origin as in himself.”

For us who believe in the Creator of heaven and earth, nature really is a book, “God’s first book”: it is a series of intelligible words brought forth from a wise and loving Mind and placed before us so that we could glean His mind and heart in the pages of this book. The cosmos is not something impersonal and ultimately indifferent to man, but a love letter that tells us, in passionate terms,

how much our Maker loves us and longs to have us for Himself. Even natural disasters do this: nature’s fury is God’s abrupt and startling way of reminding us that, as the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, “We have here no abid-ing city, but we seek one that is to come.” This earth is most definitely not our home, and we need to be slapped out of that illusion now and again.

When we allow ourselves to appreciate and delight in the natural world, paradoxically we come to be aware of a capacity in us that goes far beyond this world. In the very moment when this world seems the most beautiful reality there is, we have an aching sense that it is not all that there is—there must be something more. A lot more. Infinitely more. The Infinite Love, the Mysterious and Baffling and Playful and Frightening Love that stands behind it. And there we are, on the receiving end of this

cosmic declaration: “You are my beloved, you. I created you in love; I redeemed you in love; I call you to Myself in love. I will not rest until you are with Me forever.”

Does the Lord really care so much for us? Indeed He does, for we would not even exist without His loving will, and we exist be-cause He seeks us for eternal life in His blessed peace. The beauty He poured out into this world is meant to captivate our heart so that we

will give it to Him, rejoicing in what He has made; and the evils He allows in this world prevent us from placing our love in this world, as if it could satisfy us. It can-not satisfy. The Lord has given us a deeper identity than nature can give, a deeper citizenship than the nations of the earth can bestow. We will travel through this world as strangers and sojourners who admire the beautiful things God has made, but who long for their indescribably more beautiful Author. We will be among those who work for the finite and human good, but who know all along that the infinite divine good is our destiny.

Saint Augustine said it best of all: Fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te. “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is rest-less until it rests in You.” In his life of heroic virtue, Saint Francis, like Christ, teaches us how to love the good things God has made without becoming enslaved to them; how to taste and see that the Lord is good by experiencing, with purity of heart, the beauty of creation as a summons to return to its Maker, Who is peace and every good for us.

Now, what has all this to do with the liturgy or with prayer? Allow me to quote from one of my favorite books—a book called, simply, The Sacred Liturgy:

In reality, far from being a new-age hippie ahead of his time, Saint Francis was a mystic

in love with Christ crucified, absolutely faithful to Christ’s

Holy Church, and almost combustible with his zeal for the

Most Holy Eucharist.


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How should we not see in this great work of creation, its harmony ever new and fresh, a kind of natural song of praise, a cosmic liturgy rising up to God? … The Incarnate Word is not only King of the nations of the earth; He has sovereignty over the whole universe, and creation itself acquires a new dignity from the moment the earth is made literally his footstool … and from the moment when the stream of blood from the crucified Christ bathes it in the river of His love. … And so the Church, successor to the first ages of mankind when the pact was sealed between man and the created world, has not expelled from her heart the old pagan loves. She has not lost the savor of earth and sun, she has only purified them; as she has purified her alliance with Ceres and Demeter—goddesses of the harvest and of the fruitful fields—by using bread, wine, and oil in the confection of her sacraments, so she structures her Divine Office to fol-low the movements of the sun in the sky. … Paganism sullied the natural order, Protestantism rejects it, the Church consecrates it.2

The Church’s liturgy is the great hymn of creation: a whole cast of creatures is called upon to serve at the altar. Christian liturgy teaches us the right meaning and use and destiny of the natural world. Because man is the only material being that is rational, he alone can see himself as a gift and everything else as gifts; he, therefore, is the cosmic priest who can offer himself and all of creation back to God in worship, so that he not only attains his end, but leads every other creature to its highest goal. We can go further: because the entire universe has been renewed by the Incarnation of the Son of God, and because we are members of His Mystical Body, we ourselves have the power to give the entire universe to the Most Holy Trinity at each and every Mass. In this way we are helping creation achieve its destiny, we are leading the world back to its source, we are ennobling and dignifying every atom and molecule, every mineral, plant, and animal, indeed, every human person, especially those for whom we are praying. When we receive the Word made flesh in Holy Communion, the whole of

reality becomes ours, since it all belongs to Him, and He gives us Himself.

That the objective awesomeness of Holy Communion does not usually translate into subjective feelings of bliss is exactly what we should expect: our religion is not about feelings or even about true thoughts but about myster-

ies—massive, luminous realities that envelop us, far too big for our comprehension or feeling, and we respond to them in the darkness of faith. We have to trust not our chang-ing feelings or uncertain thoughts but God’s everlasting Word. We rely on the invincible and infallible promises of Jesus Christ, Who never abandons us, Who is the only rock on Whom we can securely build, when every-thing else is always changing.

This, then, is how one might think about the Franciscans: they help us to see how the Mass is a unitive way—a way that unites all of myself to Jesus and Him to me; a way that unites the members of the Catholic Church into one Body; a way that already unites all of creation while we long for the new heavens and the new earth.

The JesuitsOur journey through the Mass has brought us to the end. After com-munion, after the purifying of the vessels and the clearing of the altar, we hear the stirring words: Ite, missa est! But why does the Mass end with these words? Ite, missa est doesn’t really mean “Go, the Mass is ended.” It literally means: “Go, it is sent.” What is sent? The Sacrifice

of Calvary is sent up to the Most Holy Trinity; and we, His faithful ones, are sent out on mission. Ite, missa est: Go, you are sent forth to do the Lord’s work, in the strength of the Sacrifice He has made for us. You are sent into the vineyard by the Son Who was sent to save the world.

Authentic Ignatian spirituality is all about mission. The annals of the Jesuits are filled with models of missionary zeal: Saint Francis Xavier and Father Matteo Ricci, who preached in the Orient; Saint Isaac Jogues, Saint Jean de Brébeuf, Saint Charles Garnier, and companions, who preached to the Indian tribes of North America; Père de Smet, who celebrated the first Mass in Wyoming territory—

That the objective awesomeness of Holy Communion does not

usually translate into subjective feelings of bliss is exactly what we should expect: our religion is not about feelings or even

about true thoughts but about mysteries—massive, luminous

realities that envelop us, far too big for our comprehension or

feeling, and we respond to them in the darkness of faith.

The Last Communion of Saint Francis by Peter Paul Ruebens


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men like that. They did nothing in half measures: they gave everything to the very last drop of their blood and sweat. They walked into the arms of their enemies, preaching the Gospel all the while. They converted many; they often got martyred for their pains.

The spirituality of these he-roes of Faith could be summed up in a famous saying attributed to Saint Augustine: “Pray as if everything depended on God; work as if everything depended on you.” Whatever you are do-ing, give yourself completely to it. I’m reminded of what Saint Teresa of Jesus said to someone who observed that she had quite a good appetite: “When I pray, I pray; when I eat, I eat.” Age quod agis: really do what you are doing. Give yourself time to pray, and in that time, pray as well as you can, and as well as God gives it to you to do. And when you are finished with the time of prayer—be it Mass, a Holy Hour, the Rosary, or what have you—then go forth and work as if everything depended on you, depended on your enthusiasm, your dedication, your labor.

The example left to us by the classic Jesuit saints is a terribly challenging one—nothing less than the narrow way of self-denial that leads to eternal life. We all falter on this path, and we will keep falling, but we know that what matters is to persevere and go forward. Here is what Saint Pio says: “The life of a Christian is nothing but a perpetual struggle against self; there is no flowering of the soul to the beauty of its perfection except at the price of pain.” Padre Pio is not one who pulls any punches, and he tells it like it is. The point of it all, however, is not suffering, but joy. As Saint Paul tells us in the Letter to the Romans: “I reckon that the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come, that shall be revealed in us” (Rom. 8:18). What matters now is to keep striving, keep begging for the Lord’s help, and never lose heart, because God is our refuge, our strength, our hope, our

Savior. He will never abandon us if we do not abandon Him. The path on which He has called us is a path, ultimately, of joy—and our joy is what brings God the greatest glory. As Saint Irenaeus put it: “The glory of God is man fully alive; and man’s life is the vision of God.”

Conclusion“The Eucharistic Sacrifice … is the source and summit of the whole Christian life.”3 The Benedictines and the Carmel-ites show us how the Mass is a microcosm of the entire spiritual life. The Dominican tradition tells us that we should treasure the intellectual life and see it reaching a pinnacle in the study and preaching of divine Truth. The Franciscan school urges us to discern God’s eternal attri-butes in the temple of creation and to sanctify all creatures by our wise use of them. The Ignatian tradition sets before us the missionary zeal, integrity of character, and fortitude of spirit that are essential for Catholics who wish to survive and thrive in the modern world. These rich schools of spirituality help us to see how the Mass is a lifelong school for all Christians—the

place where we will learn who we are and what we are called to do, the time that will bind up and heal the varied parts of our days, the center that holds the spheres in their orbits. In this Year of Faith, let us seek the source, let us climb the summit. ✠

Notes1. Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, n. 11.2. A Benedictine Monk, The Sacred Liturgy (London: The Saint Austin Press, 1999), 22;

24; 25; 27-28.3. Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, n. 11.

The example left to us by the classic Jesuit saints is a terribly challenging

one—nothing less than the narrow way of self-denial that leads to eternal life. We all falter on this path, and we

will keep falling, but we know that what matters is to persevere and go

forward. …Saint Pio says: “The life of a Christian is nothing but a perpetual

struggle against self; there is no flowering of the soul to the beauty of its perfection except at the price of

pain.” …The point of it all, however, is not suffering, but joy.

Dr. Peter A. Kwasniewski is Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Wyoming Catholic College in Lander, Wyoming.

The Last Communion and Martyrdom of Saint Lucy by Sebastiano Ricci

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The Source and Summit of the Christian Life