The Coffee Monks of Cody Wyoming

A Discalced Carmelite friar 

prepares to take his vows.

“They seem to be very good monks, but they aren’t Carmelites”  I was at a forum celebrating the fifth centenary of the birth of Saint Teresa of Avila when a member of the audience asked the panel of speakers about the “Mystic Monks” coffee producers of Cody Wyoming.   The speaker went on to explain: “Carmel is a family of religious friars, cloistered nuns, and various congregations of Third Order Sisters as well as affiliated laity that date back to the early 13^th century when Saint Albert of Jerusalem wrote a “Formula for Life” (Formula Vitae) for a small band of lay hermits who lived on Mount Carmel. Within a few years of their foundation, the lay hermits had become formal religious; their Formula Vitae, a religious Rule; and they themselves aggregated into the Mendicant Friars along with other Lay hermit groups such as today’s Franciscans and Augustinians.  For two and a half centuries there were only Carmelite men but then in the middle of the fifteenth century the Order began receiving women as nuns as well as Laity into a “Third Order.”  In the nineteenth century groups of apostolic women affiliated with one or the other branch of the Carmelite Order.   In the last decade of the sixteenth century the Order was split between the reform movement led by Saints Teresa and John of the Cross and the original branch of the Order.  The reformed group became known as the Discalced Carmelite Order, the original group is known simply as “The Carmelites.”  To  be a Carmelite, part of the Carmelite family, you must be affiliated to one of these two Pontifically recognized families, even if your group is not a Pontifical Right Community but a local diocesan community.  The monks in Cody are not affiliated with either group and are not recognized by the Carmelite family as authentic Carmelites.  But they do make great coffee none the less.”

I took the speaker’s suggestion and I called each of the Provincial Offices of both the Carmelite Order and the Order of Discalced Carmelites and each gave me the same response that the “Carmelite Monks” of Cody Wyoming are not affiliated in any way with the Carmelite Order or with the Discalced Carmelites.  One of the Provincial Offices gave me this description of the origins of the Monks:

“In the late 1980’s a diocesan priest with ties to the Discalced Carmelite Nuns of Lake Elmo MN wished to establish a community of Carmelite hermits.  The nuns gave him some land on which to build their hermitage and the good Father gathered his community.  Although they enjoyed the good will of the nuns they had no canonical ties to the larger Carmelite Order and their founder more or less pieced together what he thought Carmelite hermits should be, borrowing a lot of the customs from the nuns.  Their hope was to be received into the Discalced Carmelites but when they approached the Discalced Carmelite authorities in Rome they were rejected because while the Discalced Carmelites value the tradition of hermits they do not see it as a permanent vocation.  In the Discalced Carmelite Tradition, friars go to a hermitage for a period of between two and five years but then return to a more apostolic life.  Being turned down by the Discalced Carmelites, the founder approached the Carmelites who were more open to the idea of an eremitical life.  They were received into the Carmelite Order in the early 1990’s, but the subprior of the group was not happy with the proposed affiliation to the Carmelite Order and left with several of the brothers to form the Carmelite Monks.  They had never received a proper novitiate in the Carmelites before they left and their subsequent development indicates that while they know some of the “fluff” in the Carmelite Tradition, they miss the substance of Carmelite Life and Spirituality.”

I was referred to a Carmelite historian who for many years taught Carmelite history and spirituality and I asked him “If the original hermits on Mount Carmel were monks, why is it so impossible for these monks to be considered to be authentic Carmelites?”  The professor explained:

“The hermits on Mount Carmel weren’t monks.  There never have been “monks” in the Carmelite tradition.  There were two types of hermits in the 12^th and 13^th centuries.  There were monastic hermits such as the Camaldolese or the Carthusians or even individual monks in cenobitic abbeys who had permission to live as hermits on the monastic grounds or one of the abbey’s granges.  And there were lay hermits who were men who consecrated themselves to live without personal property and support themselves by manual labor and alms.  They also dedicated themselves to live without corporate wealth and shunned big monasteries and the sort of institutions the monks had for support.  Lay hermits tended to live in smaller groups, often attached to an insignificant church which other priests did not want.  Their convents (they called their houses “convents” or friaries or priories and avoided the word “monastery” to describe their home) were functional but very simple compared to the great monastic abbeys.  The lay hermits gave themselves to prayer and to a limited apostolate of what we would call today “street-corner preaching” as well as work with lepers and others on the margins of society.  The hermits on Mount Carmel were of this lay hermit sort, not of the monastic model.  Other religious orders today who have their origins in the lay hermit movement are the Franciscans and Augustinians.  The Monks at Cody seem to have adopted the Monastic Model, notably the Carthusian idea of a large Church surrounded by a cloister containing the “hermit houses” or multi-room cells of the Carthusian or Camaldolese or Vallambrosian models.  This is totally foreign to the Carmelite tradition which both on Mount Carmel and in the Teresian Reform avoided display in favor of a simplicity that testified to the corporate poverty of the Mendicant movement.”

“Another difference—and an essential one—is that Carmelite men were never enclosed or “cloistered.”  Carmelite nuns are traditionally enclosed because at the time the first houses of Carmelite women were established, it was canon law for all religious women in vows to be cloistered.  I always tell the nuns when I am doing workshops that they are cloistered not because they are Carmelites, but because they are women.  To “cloister” the men is a bit of an historical anachronism, a sign that these fellows in Cody are “making it up as they go along.”  They have this romanticized version of the Carmel and its heritage that is more Sir Walter Scott’s novels than Saint Albert’s Rule.  I am not saying that they aren’t good men or that they don’t make great coffee or even that they are good monks: but they aren’t Carmelites.  They don’t understand the heritage.”

Another idiosyncrasy that was pointed out is that while the Carmelite Monks claim to be attached to the Discalced Carmelite Tradition, they use—without any canonical authority—the post-Tridentine version of the Carmelite Rite.  The Discalced Carmelites, from the time of their separation from the Carmelite Order, renounced the distinctive Carmelite Rite for the Roman Rite as found in the 1570 Missal of Pius V. While some Carmelite friars have been given permission to use the old Rite, this authorization has not been extended to the Discalced Carmelites since it never was part of their heritage.  The Local Bishop can, of course, give any priest authorization for the 1570 Roman Missal, and indeed according to some interpretations of Summorum Pontificum, such permission is not even needed.  Permission to use the medieval or Tridentine versions of the specific religious orders is restricted to members of those Orders and so is not available to the Monks at Cody since they are not recognized as members of the Carmelite Order. 

“What the Monks seem to have grabbed at are the particular customs of the Order in the sixteenth century—things like having a skull on the tables in the refectory to remind us of our mortality, or the use of the ‘discipline’ (the scourge or small whip used on penitential days for self-flagellation).  They like customs such as ‘kneeling out’ when late for choir or refectory or the monastic tonsure or the Solemn Salve Regina on Saturday evenings.  There is nothing wrong with much of this stuff, but it isn’t at the heart of Carmel.  The Cody monastery is more about playing at Religious Life than the serious spiritual heritage of Carmel.”

What is going on here is what is going on in much of the Church where neo-traditionalism has set in.  there is an attempt to refashion the present into an idealized and romanticized version of the past.  It reduces the Church to an ecclesiastical Colonial Williamsburg rather than a community of Disciples with the Divine Mission of heralding the Kingdom of God. It betrays a lack of historical knowledge and an ability to critically evaluate the data of the past in determining the present and charting the future. It is no way for our Church to go.  It is not what Pope Francis is about and it isn’t even an authentic interpretation of the agenda that Pope Benedict had for the Church.   But the boys in Cody do make great coffee.  Ya gotta give ‘em that. 

Beyond Piety: More Reflections On An Evangelical Renewal of Religious Life

Today is the Feast of Saint John of the Cross.  Well, actually yesterday was his feast day but for Discalced Carmelites the Solemnity was transferred until today so as not to interfere with an Advent Sunday.  I say this because I spent a good chunk of the day with a community of Discalced Carmelite Nuns and it lets me pick up on the theme of the need for an evangelical renewal of Religious Life and in particular on where I left off: namely my observation that the pieties of the past are not enough to sustain Religious in a genuinely evangelical life and what is needed is a substantive spirituality.  I mentioned in the my previous posting that many Religious today are either spiritually and psychologically burned out for the lack of a proper formation in the past or, at the other end of the spectrum, are being formed in and for spiritually and psychologically unhealthy systems.  Both the dying communities of the pre-Conciliar Church and the unhealthy communities of what might be called the Conciliar Reaction have this in common: they feed their members spiritual pabulum that is sufficient for beginners in the spiritual life but they have not given them (the old groups) or do not give them (the new groups) the tools of an authentic spiritual life suited for self-realizing (that is to say self-realizing under grace) Christian discipleship. 

Some years ago I had in class a woman who had been a cloistered Dominican Nun for over twenty-five years.  In our conversation she told me that for those twenty-five years her spiritual life consisted in daily Mass, the Divine Office in choir, her participation in the monastery work of a perpetual rosary before the Blessed Sacrament (where she spent approximately 2 hours a day and said about ten rosaries.)  She was told that there was no need for mental prayer beyond that that could be accommodated by her obligatory rosaries and that there was no time for Lectio Divina.   In other words, her entire prayer life was active prayer, either liturgical or devotional.  She had matured more in the spiritual life, she told me, under a Cistercian Spiritual Director in the three years since leaving the monastery than she had in her 25 years inside the cloister.  And “if this is what happens to the green wood, what will happen to the dry?”

For many communities founded in the 19^th century a typical prayer life was Mass, the rosary, and the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary along with assorted litanies and devotional prayers.  Sisters and Brothers and even priests were told that meditation or mental prayer was unnecessary and even that it was dangerous.  Many of the newer communities are little better.  The Little Office has been replaced by parts of the Divine Office but there is still either no training in mental prayer or inadequate time given to it.  People are encouraged in some communities to fill their meditation time with devotional prayers. 

Piety is a good thing but it is not spirituality. “Piety” comes from the Latin word pietas which means the duties that one has towards ones parents, mentors, elders, and God.  In the context of religion, piety is what we do, led by grace, for God. It is our taking responsibility (always by grace) for our relationship with God.  We initiate and sustain the relationship. Spirituality, on the other hand, is the relationship that God, in his grace, works in us.   God takes the initiative and sustains (with our response) the relationship.  In piety, we are the principal active agent; in spirituality God is the initiator.  It is the difference between active and receptive prayer.  For the heart that is bent on searching for God, whether a Religious or a priest or a lay person, piety, in and of itself, is a dead-end path.  Piety can lead one to genuine spirituality and indeed most great spiritual journeys begin in piety.  But they must mature and the soul must yield the reins of the spiritual life to God. 

Today watching the Carmelite nuns prayerfully sitting in their choir or going about their roles in the liturgy, or greeting their guests, or sharing their celebratory dinner with nuns from several other communities, I was struck by the grace—on both the natural and supernatural meanings of that word—with which they live.  There was nothing artificial about how they did things, nothing “nunny.”  A low note of celebration pervaded the prayer and a constant tone of prayer pervaded the celebration.  One could see a certain depth of meaning, an integration of all the diverse facets of life, that is too often missing in both the spiritual fuss-budgeting of some of the newer communities and the tired cynicism of the established groups.  

Spiritual Malnutrition in Modern America

I was surprised to hear that Ann Romney had been Episcopalian and converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormon faith) when she met and was dating Mitt.  When I heard that her family was of Welsh background I was particularly curious as while there are some Welsh Anglicans they are fairly rare, the Welsh being mostly evangelicals—Baptists and Wesleyans in particular along with various “free Church” Congregations.  The Anglicans in Wales are usually quite Low Church but high income—the upper crust sort of people.  Working class Welsh—and Mrs. Romney’s grandfather was a miner—are either non-religious or, as I said, evangelicals.  It turns out that Edward Davies, Mrs. Romney’s father, an immigrant, had been raised in the Free Church tradition but was strongly opposed to organized religion.  This may have been due to the heavy and rigidly Calvinist bent of the Welsh Evangelicals which is dour enough to suck all joy and life out of you like one of Harry Potter’s Dementors.  The Davies family rarely went to Church and while Ann identified herself as an Episcopalian, I can’t find any mention of her ever being formally received into or confirmed in the Episcopal Church. 

But it isn’t Ann Romney whom I want to write about today. It is rather the Episcopal Church.  Thinking—until I started to research—that Mrs. Romney had been a cradle Episcopalian I was going to bring up the subject of how the Episcopal Church has been gutted of its membership—dropping 40% of its membership over the last 40 years.  What has caused this loss?

Actually I think the loss is even more dramatic—many of the Episcopalians I know, indeed most, are people who have joined the Church over the last 40 years meaning that the number who have left is even greater than 40%, the converts taking the place of perhaps another 20 or 30%.  An Episcopalian priest friend of mine—who himself is a former Catholic priest—says that about two-thirds of his congregation of 350 members joined the Episcopal Church as adults.  Many of these are, like the priest himself, former Catholics.  They feel more comfortable in the Episcopal Church because they are in second marriages, or they are in gay unions, or they feel emarginated in the Catholic Church because of their support for “liberal” causes.  “Father Joe” said too that there are a number of regular attendees at his parish who still call themselves Catholics but are just more comfortable worshipping in an Episcopal Church because it is more “inclusive” and “welcoming.” 

“Father Joe” said that in addition to converts from Catholicism he has about an equal number of people who have come from other Christian faiths—particularly evangelicals—who are drawn to the Episcopal Church (they say) by the more formal liturgy.  “They like the music—and the language of the Prayer-Book.  These are the ones who are most resistant to liturgical innovations and they love the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’.”  Some of these “pass through the gastro-intestinal tract of the Episcopal Church and into the Roman Catholic Church because they want even more ritual than we can give them, but they tend to become Latin Mass Catholics.  I even know of one or two,” the priest said, “who used the Catholic Church as a changing station for Russian Orthodoxy.  But people on that sort of spiritual journey are generally just restless and not religious.” 

What has caused the exodus from the Episcopal Church?  Liberal Protestantism in general has gone into decline since the heady years of their support for the Civil Rights movement and Anti-War movement of the Vietnam years.  Those were exhilarating times for liberal Protestants in general and Episcopalians in particular.  But the subsequent causes—feminism, abortion rights, gay rights—the Churches have embraced have been much more polarizing.  Yet I think the affinity for the Episcopal (and Presbyterian) Church for liberal agendas doesn’t really answer the question of why their membership has declined.  While a minority of former Episcopalians have either gone into the schismatic Anglican groups such as Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) or moved to more evangelical Churches, the majority have just stopped going to any Church or attend a church of their choice on a sporadic basis or as need for a funeral or wedding occur.  American society is overall far less churched in 2012 than it was in the Ozzie and Harriet years of the Eisenhower administration. 

I think—and I could be wrong—that another reason that Church attendance and membership has dropped in the mainline denominations, including the Episcopal Church, is that the churches had become little more than a social event.  The preaching is often bland and sufficiently vague to make sure that no one is offended and the liturgy is often the triumph of form over substance.  I think a focus has been lost on the saving work of Christ and how that saving work intersects not with some future afterlife, but with the demands of faithfulness in the here and now world.  This brings me back to one of my theme songs—the lack of substantial spirituality in contemporary American Christianity.  I have written before on this issue as it relates to Catholicism, but I think the problem is much wider.  Anglicanism has a strong spiritual tradition both with the Caroline Divines and the Oxford movement.  Methodism too in Wesley has a strong spiritual heritage that leads the Christian to look honestly at himself and what much change for fidelity to Christ.  I think the various “Bible Churches” and other pseudo-evangelical groups present a distortion of this spirituality—not a willful distortion just a failure to capture the real thing—in the sort of emotional theatrics of mega-church worship and people find their “faith” satisfied even as a child would rather fill-up on Cotton Candy rather than Broccoli and lean meats.  The meat and potato spiritual diet found in Ignatius Loyola or John of the Cross or John Wesley or Teresa of Avila or Lancelot Andrews or Jeremy Taylor requires a discipline that the musical surge and stage lighting of a Joel Osteen or a Pete Wilson or a Brad Powell or a Pat Robertson supplants so that the believer can “feel the feeling” without having to confront the challenge.   The mainline denominations, Catholicism included, needs to get back to its deep spiritual roots and find the sort of faith that sustain contemporary Christians in a post-Christian world. 

The Faith Your Don't Find In Catechisms

Saint John of the Cross

I had planned on going back to the subject of Peter Waldo, Cathars, etc so that we could bridge into the Innocentian Reformation—the Reform of the Church under Pope Innocent III which I think was the most successful Reformation of the Church to date, but then I found myself in a fascinating conversation that has made me stop and think anew about some contemporary issues especially as there is a link between this new topic on which I hope to reflect and the success of Innocent’s attempts to restore vitality to the Church in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. 
       This conversation came up at dinner on Tuesday when a Brazilian friend of mine was talking about his doctoral thesis in Spirituality at the Pontifical Gregorian University.  He is writing on a reexamination of the spiritual doctrine of Saint Francis de Sales from the perspective of the personalist philosophy of John Paul II.  His point is that “conversion” must involve not merely an intellectual assent to doctrine but a person-to-person encounter with Jesus Christ.  We had a fascinating conversation as I know relatively little about either Francis de Sales or the philosophy of the late and now Blessed Pope.  I know them both as historical figures, but not as intellectuals, but I was struck by the similarity with the ideas being attributed to them by my friend to the mystical theology of Saint John of the Cross with which I am somewhat famiiar.  I guess I should not have been so surprised, at least in regards to John Paul, as I believe he wrote his doctoral dissertation on John of the Cross and Faith.  In regard to the subject of Faith, John of the Cross makes a clear distinguishing between knowing about God and knowing God. 
       I am struck by how many people know a lot about God without necessarily “knowing” him, or more to the point, without knowing Jesus Christ because no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son has revealed him.   Faith to them is a matter of an assent of the intellect to theological propositions defined by the Church.  As I am writing this, I think in particular of a woman I had known some years ago when I was frequently in Leesburg Virginia.  This lady  was the local doyen of orthodoxy.  She rigorously critiqued every sermon, taped various priests and religious education speakers who had come to her parish to report them for suspicious ideas, and for years had controlled the religious education program in the local parish.  She had her small group of disciples and she used them to make sure the parish didn’t stray from what she perceived to be sound doctrine.  But alas, new brooms sweep clean and a new pastor displaced her stranglehold on things.  I have no doubt that she was (and perhaps, if yet alive, still is) a sincere person.  The problem was that for her faith equaled orthodoxy, or what she took for orthodoxy.  She could tell you all about what the Church (for her that meant the magisterium) taught about the faith, at least from Trent up to 1960, but I can’t say that I think she was a woman of faith.  She was a person of doctrine—but that is not a woman of faith.  Prayers were something one said.  “Spirituality” was comprised of no more than devotions—we had an argument about that once when she told me that “meditation is dangerous and you shouldn’t be practicing it, much less teaching it.”  Her fundamental moral compass was off in as that she had no scruples of taping a speaker without his (or her) permission, quoting them out of context in letters to the bishop, or even bearing false witness when she thought a religious education director, a speaker brought into the parish, a music minister or liturgical director was going off in what she thought to be a wrong direction.  Faith was orthodoxy; orthodoxy was faith.  There was no evidence of anything more than rigid doctrine and a rigid relationship to a rigid deity in her life.   She fit that description of Henri Bremond regarding Jansenism that I cited two or three days ago:  “Before penetrating into the depth of the mind Jansenism ruins the peace, condition of all true religion.  Before making converts it makes partisans, sectarians, whom it fatally severs from the mystical currents of their time.”  
       Unfortunately this woman is by no means unique.  The fault of classic Protestantism—at least the American variety—has been gross subjectivism: the triumph of emotion  over intellect.  But Catholicism, again at least the American variety, is no better off in its opposite of being strait-jacketed into doctrine.  All the doctrine in the world does not lead one to change of heart that is at the center of Jesus’ call in the Gospels.  That is why I was delighted to hear this Brazilian priest talk about Benedict XVI’s emphasis on evangelization as this personal encounter with Christ that is so transformative of the human person.  It is certainly not to be that raw subjectivism that I just attributed to the American Protestant tradition.  (I will do a few entries some day on John Wesley and how his own crisis of faith brought about this bizarre doctrine-less “faith” that marks American religion.)
       Now as to how this ties into our upcoming entry on the Innocentian Reformation.  The reign of Innocent III was marked by figures such as Francis of Assisi and Dominic de Guzman and others who, working within the perimeters of Catholic doctrine and just on the frontiers of institutional Catholicism  brought their contemporaries to this personal encounter with Christ that revived a religion that had been fading from the lives of everyday people and made Christian faith an exercise in actually shaping one’s life to the demands of the Gospel.  That is what we need today for renewal and that is what we rarely have.   At the end of the day the issue of faith is: do I take the Gospel for my rule of life.  Do I try to live not the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or the Documents of Vatican II, but the Gospel.  All due respect to those ICEL and Vox Clara people but it looks like their latest work isn’t succeeding in bringing faith to life any more than had the Latin Mass or the previous translation of the liturgy,  but if we are to be people of faith we had better find something that will.    

Of Gnostics, Carmelites, the Incarnation, and Communion in the Hand

Two Carmelites, sisters by blood as well as in religious

life, at the Detroit Conference

I mentioned in the last entry that heresy sometimes lurks just beneath the surface of trumpeted orthodoxy.  Let me give an example.  Some years ago I was in Detroit to do some research on the infamous Father Coughlin who had a very popular radio show in the 1930’s which he used as a platform to attack Franklin Roosevelt  as well as to proclaim his anti-Semitic views.  I was staying, courtesy of a friend of mine, at a retreat center run by the Passionists.  Coughlin was very popular with a large segment of the American people though he was a huge embarrassment to the Church.  Coughlin had no endorsement from the Archbishop of Detroit –to the contrary.  The Osservatore Romano, the semi-official Vatican newspaper condemned him in 1935, but Coughlin remained popular with anti-Roosevelt Americans, Catholics and Protestants alike.   Cardinal Pacelli, papal Secretary of State discussed the matter with American officials on his 1936 visit to they United States but was unable to silence him.  Cardinal Mooney was appointed to Detroit in 1937 with the mandate to silence him but was unable.  American Catholics are notorious for listening not to the Church but to those voices in the Church with which they agree.  There must be something in the water in Motown as we currently have Michael Voris setting himself up against the hierarchy with his “Real Catholic TV.”   O well, I digress. 
     While I was staying at the Passionist Retreat Center there was a conference of Carmelite nuns going on—a meeting of about a hundred cloistered nuns—mostly the Prioresses (mothers superior) and Formation Directors (novice-mistresses) of various monasteries in the United States and Canada, though I did see some younger nuns with the white veils of novices.  It was interesting seeing these women outside their monasteries.  They were anything but a somber group.  There was much laughter and a strong sense of family.  They looked very traditional—almost all in the same habit their predecessors had worn  for centuries though a few had modified veils that showed a wisp of hair.  They were very serious when it came time for prayer and it was a privilege to attend their Mass each morning.  I served the Mass—or rather I served the old priest who celebrated the Mass for them each morning.  I was surprised to note that at communion not a single nun received communion on the tongue.  Young and old, reverent all, but each nun extended her hands to receive Holy Communion.  I mentioned this one day at lunch—I had my meals with them in the retreat dining room—and the nuns at the table all thought for a moment and then began to discuss it.  They had never given it much thought, they agreed, it just seemed natural to them.  Then one older nun—the prioress of a Carmel on the West Coast—said “Well, why wouldn’t we?  The Incarnation is the central mystery of our lives.  Holy Mother (Saint Teresa of Avila) says that we should meditate on either the Passion or the Incarnation.  When you meditate on the Word Becoming Flesh, you burn with desire to hold the Flesh of the Lord for yourself.    In this sacrament, his Flesh becomes our Flesh and our Flesh becomes his.  Why should be afraid to touch him?  He is our Spouse, the deepest Desire of our being.”  I was impressed at her fervor as well as her insight.
     Several years before while in Minneapolis I had been taken to hear a young priest, a Father Robert Altier, who at the time was something of a seven day wonder.  Father Altier drew huge crowds to Saint Agnes Church where he celebrated what at the time was the “indult” mass.  A college buddy of mine who had just returned to the Church after three “marriages” (only one of them with a woman if you get my drift)  would go only to Saint Agnes.  Saint Agnes with the Latin Mass facing the wall represented the Church he had left forty years ago and it was the only Church to which he was willing to go back now that he had religion again. (That is the danger in being a historian: the temptation is to restore the past, a futile effort, rather than build the future on the past.)   Father Altier told us in his talk that day—it wasn’t a sermon but a talk in the hall after mass as I recall—that receiving Communion in the hand was “an abomination, a sacrilege”  The Blessed Mother, he assured us, had never received Communion in the hand.  I almost laughed out loud.  She who had changed Jesus’ diaper (I could use a more graphic phrase) was too awestruck to take his flesh in her hand in Holy Communion?   Who is this Christ in Whom this young priest believed?  Is it the Christ of the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, the Christ whose human nature is preserved intact in the hypostatic union?  Or does this Christ have a different sort of human nature than we do?  Sure he is “consubstantial” with the Father according to his Divinity.  What I wonder if people believe is whether he is “consubstantial” with us regarding his humanity?  Here again is Gnosticism lurking behind orthodox piety.  It is perfectly all right to receive Communion on the tongue if that your choice, but can we say that it is wrong or sacrilegious to receive Christ in our hands?   If so, what is that implying about human nature?  What is that saying about material creation?  Beneath such “orthodoxy” lurks some very dark beliefs. 

Check out the website

Here is a web site that I have found and think is worthwhile   

http://www.carmelstream.com/

hope you all like it