Tag: Blessed Columba Marmion

The month of October is dedicated to the Holy Rosary. It is a profound prayer and a way to drawn closer to Christ by being a child of Mary, the Mother of God. Today, we commemorate the feast of the Benedictine abbot, Blessed Columba Marmion. When he was elected abbot of his abbey, he chose Rosary Sunday for the Abbatial Blessing in 1909. He had, as we ought to have, a sincere devotion to Our Lady of the Rosary. He writes:

Here is an example to help you understand the efficacy of the Rosary. You remember the story of David who vanquished Goliath. What steps did the young Israelite take to overthrow the giant? He struck him in the middle of the forehead with a pebble from his sling. If we regard the Philistine as representing evil and all its powers: heresy, impurity, pride, we can consider the little stones from the sling capable of overthrowing the enemy as symbolizing the Aves of the Rosary.

The ways of God are entirely different from our ways. To us it seems necessary to employ powerful means in order to produce great effects. This is not God’s method; quite the contrary. He likes to choose the weakest instruments that He may confound the strong: “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong — Infirma mundi elegit ut confundat fortia” (1 Cor 1:27).

Have you not often met poor old women who are most faithful to the pious recitation of the Rosary? You also must do all that you can to recite it with fervour. Get right down, at the feet of Jesus: it is a good thing to make oneself small in the presence of so great a God.

Columba Marmion
Christ, the Ideal of the Priest

If you ask monks and priests of an older generation about today’s Blessed, you will likely hear that he was a spiritual master and a man faithful to his vocation and the venerable theological teaching of the Church. You will hear people say that “Marmion is still alive and well and doing great things for people.” And in a certain real sense he is very alive with a new mission given to him by the Trinity. I “met” Dom Columba through friendship with a monk and also at the Illinois monastery named to honor him.

Dom Columba was abbot of Maredsous Abbey in Belgium. Ordained as a diocesan priest of Dublin, he entered the monastic life when he was 30, and by 28 September 1909 his brother monks elected him their abbot–a monastery of more than a 100 monks at the time; he served in that capacity until his death on January 30, 1923.

Marmion authored three books based upon his extensive retreats. These works give a deep insight into his spirituality: Christ, the Life of the Soul (1917), Christ in His Mysteries (1919), and Christ the Ideal of the Monk (1922). His is a spirituality centered on Christ and our divine adoption as children of God. Translations of these works exist in many languages, and many consider them to be spiritual classics.

Saint John Paul II beatified Abbot Columba as a Blessed of the Church on September 3, 2000, and considered him pivotal in his formation. In fact, among the few personal books in his papal library one found the works of Marmion. It was the Holy Father who told one of his aides: “I owe more to Columba Marmion for initiating me into things spiritual than to any other spiritual writer.”

 Franciscan Father Groeschel notes that “Abbot Marmion in some ways was the beginning of a movement that became known, under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, as the ‘New Evangelization.'”

I would like to remember in prayer my monk-friends at Marmion Abbey, Aurora, Illinois.

Today –at least in the Benedictine world– is the liturgical memorial of Blessed Columba Marmion (1858-1923). Dublin born and educated, Joseph Marmion first found his vocation as a secular priest before giving himself as a Benedictine monk at the Abbey of Maredsous in Belgium. In 1909, Dom Columba Marmion was elected of Abbot of Maredsous.

The cause for possible sainthood was opened on 7 February 1957. The Church authorities certified miracle at Marmion’s intercession of a Minnesota woman in 1966. When Blessed John Paul beatified Marmion in 2000, he determined this date, that of his abbatial blessing, rather than on the day of his death, as the day the Church would honor the holy abbot.

Blessed Columba is the author of Christ, the Life of the Soul (1917), Christ in His Mysteries (1919), Christ, the Ideal of the Monk (1922) –all which is a revealing Christology. Blessed Marmion has helped us focus on the Lord and to keep before our eyes our redemption through His merciful love.

Let’s pray for the Benedictine monks, nuns, sisters and oblates, but let’s particularly pray for Abbot John and the monks of Marmion Abbey (Aurora, IL) on their patronal feast.

God, our Father, you called your servant, Columba, to the
monastic life. You bestowed on him the grace to understand the mysteries of
your Son and to make him known as the ideal for all who have been baptized.
Grant that we may learn from his example to live in Christ by opening our
hearts in joy to the Spirit of your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with
you and the Holy Spirit, One God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Church observes
the feast of Blessed Columba Marmion today. He was an Irishman who became a monk in Belgium,
a diocesan priest who fell in love with the Benedictine way life, its emphasis on seeking God and who served as abbot. Dom Columba died on January
30, 1923. Marmion’s liturgical memorial, however, is observed not on his anniversary
of death but on the anniversary of receiving the abbatial blessing, October 3,
1909. At that time the first Sunday of October was the Solemnity of the Most Holy Rosary
of the Blessed Virgin Mary; in this era the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary is
observed on October 7th.

Two pieces to reflect up on…

The
whole of the Christian life consists in carrying Christ to birth within us and
in having Him live there’. This, of course is nothing more than a paraphrase of St. Paul’s
injunction in Gal. 4:19: ‘until Christ is formed in you’. For Marmion this is not just our
final goal, it is our daily, essential task:  to form Christ within us, through the Graces of the
sacraments and our daily encounter with God in prayer. (Mark Tierney O.S.B,
“The Life and Times of Columba Marmion”)

And

… Revelation teaches us that there is
an ineffable paternity in God. God is a Father: that is the fundamental dogma
which all the others suppose, a magnificent dogma which leaves the reason
confounded, but ravishes faith with delight and transports holy souls. God is a
Father. Eternally, long before the created light rose upon the world, God
begets a Son to whom He communicates His nature, His perfections, His beatitude
His life, to beget is to communicate [By the gift of a similar nature ] being
and life. You are My Son this day have I begotten You [Ps 2:7; Heb 1:5; 5:5],
from the womb before the day – star, I begot you [Ps 110:3]. In God, then, is
life, life communicated by the Father … Creatures can only lisp when they
speak of such mysteries… the Father, and the Son, with one same and indivisible
Divine Nature, and both, although distinct from one another [on account of
their personal properties, ‘of being Father’ and ‘of being Son’] are united in
a powerful, substantial embrace of love, whence proceeds that Third Person, Whom
Revelation calls by a mysterious name: the Holy Ghost.

Such is as far as faith
can know it, the secret of the inmost life of God; the fullness and the
fruitfulness of this life are the source of the incommensurable bliss that the
ineffable Society of the three Divine Persons possesses.

And now God – not in
order to add to His plenitude, but by it to enrich other beings – exceeds, as
it were, His Paternity. God decrees to call creatures to share this Divine
life, so transcendent that God alone has the right to live it, this eternal
life communicated by the Father to the Only Son, and by them, to the Holy
Spirit … To these mere creatures God will give the condition and sweet name
of children. By nature, God has only one Son; by love, He wills to have an innumerable
multitude: that is the grace of supernatural Adoption. (Dom Columba Marmion,
OSB, Spiritual Writings.  Ed. P.
Lethiellex. Maredesous Abbey, 1998.)

A very brief note on the canonization
process of Dom Columba can be read here. 

O God, almighty Father, who called the blessed abbot Columba to the monastic way of life and opened to him the secrets of the mysteries of Christ, mercifully grant that, strengthened by his intercession, in the spirit of your adoption as sons, we may become a dwelling place worthy of your Wisdom. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the same Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever.

 

Deeply steeped in the Scriptures and the tradition of the Church, through the Liturgy, the Benedictine charism and St. Thomas Aquinas, Dom Marmion emphasizes the role of Jesus Christ:

 

…Holiness then, is a mystery of Divine life communicated and received: communicated in God from the Father to the Son by an ineffable generation; [Isaiah 52:8] communicated by the Son to humanity, which He personally unites to Himself in the Incarnation; then restored to souls by this humanity, and received by each of them in  the measure of their special predestination: according to the measure of the giving of Christ  [Ephesians 4:7] so that Christ is truly the life of the soul because He is the source and giver of life…

 

In his teaching, Dom Marmion emphasizes ‘Redemption from’, oriented toward ‘Redemption for’:

 

… According to our manner of speaking, holiness seems to us that it is composed of a double element: first, infinite distance from all that is imperfection, from all that is created from all that is not God Himself. This is only a ‘negative’ aspect. There is another element which consists in this: that God adheres by an innumerable and always present act of His will, to the Infinite Good, which is Himself, in order to conform Himself entirely to all that this Infinite Good is. God knows Himself perfectly. His All-Wisdom shows Him His own essence as supreme norm of all activity.

 

(Fr. Joseph Henchey, CSS, “A Reflection on the Hope of Dom Columba Marmion”)

The author of this blog has more on Blessed Columba, plus you may want to survey this site.