Our Newest Saint

I once asked a priest mentor if he had any advice for how to pray to the saints. He encouraged the use of the Collects the Church composes for a saint’s feast day. The Collect is the liturgical prayer which the priest offers at the conclusion of the Introductory Rites at Mass. Given its prominent use in the Church’s worship, she takes particular care in crafting these prayers.
 
On October 13th, Pope Francis will canonize John Henry Cardinal Newman as the Church’s newest saint. Since his feast day is October 9 ^th, the anniversary of his reception into the Catholic Church, we will have to wait nearly a year before we hear St. John Newman’s Collect at Mass. Nevertheless, I think the prayer is a good foundation from which to share a reflection on life as a seminarian. 
  An allusion in the second line is made to St. John Newman’s famous hymn  Lead, Kindly Light. My favorite line is from the end of the first verse: “Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see / The distant scene; one step enough for me.” One of the more beautiful aspects of St. John Newman’s conversion was its  deliberateness. His was not a discernment based on zealous emotivism, like the seed that springs up rapidly only to be scorched or the house whose foundation is so much shifting sand. Rather, he came to the Church, and the Priesthood of Jesus Christ, with a strong foundation firmly planted in the fertile soil of knowledge and love of tradition and doctrine of Catholicism. 
 
It was this gift of a strong faith rooted in reason which enabled St. John Newman to persevere through the abandonment of his friends and family that came as a result of his conversion. The saint acknowledges this indirectly in his first published work after his 1845 conversion, an autobiographical novel entitled  Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert. In that story, an Oxford man like Newman himself, Charles Reding, makes the decision to convert despite the objections of many around him. In a conversation with his Anglican friend, Charles confidently asserts of his belief in the Catholic faith: “It is a conviction rooted in me; it endures against the prospect of loss of mother and sisters.” A little while later in the conversation, he adds, “If I have good grounds for believing, to believe is a duty; God will take care of His own work. I shall not be deserted in my utmost need. Faith ever begins with a venture and is rewarded with sight.”
 
The reward of our faith is to be led by God’s kindly light into sight. And here we can turn back to the Collect’s last line, a reference to the inscription St. John Newman chose for his burial stone: “out of shadows and images into the truth” ( ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem). This is a fitting mantra for seminary formation. The time we are given in seminary is meant as a time to venture out of whatever sorts of things in our lives serve as “shadows and images”: technological gadgets, wealth, power, self-direction, and the rest.  It is also meant as a time to venture into the fulness of truth, a truth which brings manifold joys: of friendship and brotherhood, of simplicity, of obedience, of discipleship and the freedom in our schedule and the attention of our minds to worship God rightly.
 
St. John Henry Newman, pray for us!

To read last week's post--There is Joy Here Too--please click here.