Preferring the Work of God: Benedictine Liturgical Ideals and the New Evangelization

The year is 988. Emissaries of Vladimir, the grand prince of Kiev, have been sent out on a vitally important mission. Their orders are to find among the various nations a new religion, which will be able to lure their tribes away from servitude to the cruel gods of their fathers, and which can forge them into one people, praising one creator with one voice, one heart, and one mind. After many months of searching, the emissaries of Vladimir finally find what they had been looking for within the walls of the great imperial church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. They send the following report home:

[T]he Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth, there is no such splendour or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty.¹

Fast forward about a thousand years, to rural Kentucky, 1941. A young bohemian writer, a recent convert to Catholicism, arrives at the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani to consider his vocation in life. Early in the morning, before the dawn, he witnesses simultaneous celebrations of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass by an army of priest-monks. The experience somehow hits the young man with the full force of a mystical revelation, akin to the lifting of the veil separating heaven from earth. “The overpowering atmosphere of prayers so fervent that they were almost tangible,” he says, “choked [him] with love and reverence” to the point where he “could only get the air in gasps.”

Here, even through only ordinary channels, came to me graces that overwhelmed me like a tidal wave, truths that drowned me with the force of their impact: and all through the plain, normal means of the liturgy—but the liturgy used properly, and with reverence, by souls inured to sacrifice.... The eloquence of this liturgy was even more tremendous: and what it said was one, simple, cogent, tremendous truth: this church, the court of the Queen of Heaven, is the real capital of the country in which we are living. This is the center of all the vitality that is in America. This is the cause and reason why the nation is holding together. These men, hidden in the anonymity of their choir and their white cowls, are doing for their land what no army, no congress, no president could ever do as such: they are winning for it the grace and the protection and the friendship of God.²

Reflecting on this first experience of monastic worship, Thomas Merton remarks:

Certainly one thing the monk does not, or cannot, realize is the effect which these liturgical functions, performed by a group as such, have upon those who see them. The lessons, the truths, the incidents and values portrayed are simply overwhelming.³

I open with these stories—from tenth-century Russia and the twentieth-century American South—to illustrate something which, I believe, is absolutely crucial to the challenge of the New Evangelization: the leading of souls along the via pulchritudinis, a glimpse of that heavenly splendor that so seduced the Kievan pagans to Christ, and caused a young American man to leave all and take up his Cross in the obscurity of the cloister. And where better to find a school of catholic spirituality so thoroughly infused with a sense of this splendor than in the monastic tradition in all its richness? If, as history shows us, monasticism was the spiritual engine of the “Old Evangelization” of Europe, then it stands to reason that a healthy, robust, renewed monasticism could once again become for the church a source of inspiration and new vitality as she labors for the turning of believers and unbelievers alike to Christ, so that they, with St. Ambrose, can say: “Face to face, you have made...