20 November 2023

November 21: Our Lady of Light, 1924, and Unitatis Redintegratio, 1964

Ninety nine years ago tomorrow, on the Feast of the Presentation of our Lady, November 21 1924, in the little Anglo-Catholic mining village of S Hilary in Cornwall, where Fr Bernard Walke so heroically worked and suffered to establish the Faith, one of his collaborators had a remarkable vision. Mother Theresa, Foundress of the Franciscan Servants of Jesus and Mary, describes it:
"We were preparing to go to church as usual just before 9 p.m.. It was a dark misty night, there was no moon and the stars were not showing at all. As I came down the stairs from my bedroom, I saw through a long window on the landing that there was a great glow of light shining all round the house and lighting up the fields beyond the house. My first thought was that there must be a fire somewhere, though the light was not red but white, and I called to Emma to come out with me to see from where it was coming. We went out of the front door, which opened straight on to a lane, and stood in the middle of the lane to see better.
"At the side of the house there was a gigantic figure, veiled and crowned in a dazzling, perfectly still light. The figure seemed to reach from the sky down to the ground. It was the figure of a woman but we saw no features, the face, as well as the rest of the figure, was veiled in the pure light. We could see the other's faces and the hedges in the lane, and the fields beyond the lane, quite clearly in this light. The figure did not move at all, though we stood silently watching it for nearly ten minutes, It was still there when we left and walked up to the church, but there was no sign of it when we returned in about three quarters of an hour. We did not speak, either that night or for a long time after, to one another about what we had seen.
"I think, while I was looking at the figure, I did not reflect at all on what I saw. I hardly even wondered at it, I watched with a great sense of quietness within myself and with no surprise. Afterwards, while we were praying in church, there came into my mind and soul a certainty that what we had seen concerned our Lady and must have been an apparition of her ... "

I think the most remarkable thing about this is that our Lady said nothing. There is Light: but there is nothing here of all the daily chatter and bustle reported from Medjugorje; instead, there is Silence! I am powerfully reminded of the Byzantine liturgical texts for our Lady's Presentation, with their incessant emphasis on the theme of Light. And we recall  another Byzantine perception, which links the sojourn of the Mother of God in the Temple with the hesychast ('silent') tradition of prayer. Yet I think it unlikely that the Cornish experience was a product of subconscious memories because I know of no evidence that Mother Foundress was a student of things Byzantine. Surely, it truly was Mary, Queen of Athos, the exemplar of hesychia, the prayer of Silence, who came to that Cornish lane in a great veil of Light, on this her Feast of Light and of Silence, and said nothing, and stood in silent prayer, and gave her Son's gift of Silence ('... perfectly still Light ... the figure did not move ... we stood silently ... I watched with a sense of great quietness ...'). The messages the Mother of God brings when her Son sends her among us do not always have to be verbal.

Oh dear ... I suppose this account raises the possibly contentious question of Appearances of our Lady to those not in full canonical communion with the See of Peter. The Catholic Church has never taught that such appearances are to be denied. Unitatis Redintegratio (3) teaches ...ex elementis seu bonis, quibus simul sumptis ipsa Ecclesia aedificatur et vivificatur, quaedam immo plura et eximia exstare possunt extra visibilia Ecclesiae catholicae saepta ... haec omnia, quae a Christo proveniunt et ad Ipsum conducunt, ad unicam Christi Ecclesiam iure pertinent (many of the good things by which the Church is built up can exist outside her visible boundaries, and they by right belong to her). This was far from an innovation in teaching; it expresses what had for centuries been Catholic praxis. And I can cite the fact that Eastern Catholic calendars today include liturgical commemorations of graces bestowed through the hands of the Mediatrix of All Graces extra visibilia Ecclesiae catholicae saepta. Subject to correction, I see no reason not to accept, as a private opinion, the probable authenticity of such reported visions. The Church, of course, reserves to herself the authoritative judgement about all such matters ... both within her visibilia saepta and outside them. Readers will remember the Apparitions in a Coptic context at Zeitun; and the appearances of our Lady of the Atonement to Anglicans not yet in Full Communion with the Holy See.

I will dare to go further. It seems to me that the powerful converging arguments for the authenticity of such an Apparition as this, on a day such as this, afford support to the teaching of Vatican II, about the authenticity of the Lord's gifts outside the visible boundaries of His Church; gifts which are graces truly belonging to the Church herself.

I have left parts of the original thread.

21 comments:

Nicolas Bellord said...

Silence. May I suggest that we should all read Cardinal Sarah's 'La Force du Silence'; hopefully to be available in English shortly.

RichardT said...

To me, the astonishing part of this is not that Our Lady appeared, or even that she appeared in Cornwall, but "we stood silently watching it for nearly ten minutes", then "we left" and "there was no sign of it when we returned in about three quarters of an hour".

This seems to be a good example of that part of the English character that so confuses, and often annoys, foreigners.

A more excitable race might have said "let us build tents" so that we might remain in this holy presence for longer. We English think "Ah, a hundred-foot glowing apparition. Ho hum. Still, must get on, or else the scones might burn."

Prayerful said...

Our Lady was silent at Knock too.

Rubricarius said...

@Prayerful - Indeed, that is exactly what I thought: Light and silence, the similarities are striking.

tradgardmastare said...

Never heard that account before,most ,moving.Where is it in print?
Om another matter do you know if Fr Bernard's Christmas plays are currently available in print or as BBC recordings?


Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

Dear Father. That last paragraph is beautiful and quite helpful as it is the case that virtually all, if not all, that is in Vatican Two can be reconciled with Tradition even if ABS has no idea how that is to be done -but it will be done.

Liam Ronan said...

Marvellous! Thank you, Father.

Then too I am sure you will recall 21 August 1879 Knock, County Mayo. Not a word spoken by the Mother of God there either. I cannot recall if that is near the date of the Queenship of Mary but she is Queen of Ireland

Banshee said...

Our Lady was silent at Pontmain, too.

Éamonn said...

I think there is a lesson in the silence at Knock - particularly for us in Ireland.

Matthew said...

And at Llanthony; see 'New Llanthony Abbey' by Hugh Allen, reviewed in the Church Times of 18 Nov and the Dec New Directions.

Matt said...

Indeed, Fr. Hunwicke, the idea that there may be something Catholic outside the Catholic Church is a very ancient one. ... And from the perspective of the Second Vatican Council, all baptized Christians share a "certain but imperfect" communion with the Catholic Church. Not to mention that the Blessed Mother has appeared to many Muslims in recent times. ... Anyway, I'll leave you with this from St. Augustine: "Just as one can find that which is not Catholic in the Catholic Church – one can also find something that may be Catholic outside of the Catholic Church" (Augustine, On Baptism against the Donatists: PL 43, VII, 39 , 77).

Simon Cotton said...

One may visit La Sanctuaire Notre-Dame de Lumières at Goult, near Avignon.

https://www.ndlumiere.diocese-avignon.fr/

Matthew F Kluk said...

🤣The scones might burn! Perfect understated English mindset. Thank you!

Banshee said...

Re: the above ho-hum comment - Generally, apparitions or even other humbler religious experiences are not supposed to interfere with duty, or even with greeting visitors, etc. It is a bad sign if they do, and a good sign if they don't.

So obviously Mary would have wanted the ladies to go on to their prayers; she was just visiting, not hindering.

Banshee said...

At Zeitun, one of the Muslim guys at the bus depot across the street thought that Our Lady's first appearance was a gurl attempting suicide. He ran out to try to talk her down...

And at some point, his gangrenous hand was healed, and he didn't even notice until he reported to his doctor for surgery.

Our Lady loves all men of goodwill.

El Codo said...

Perhaps Our Lady is silent among the Celts..Irish,Welsh and Cornish…because they talk such a lot?

Compton Pauncefoot said...

Our Lady of Zeitoun?

Pater Ambrosius said...

I know that Fr Paul of Graymoor, founder of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, encouraged devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary under the title of Our Lady of the Atonement; but I have never heard of apparitions under that title.

There is, however, an officially approved apparition of Our Lady to the Protestant children at Siluva in Lithuania in the 17th century. This apparition led to the re-Catholicizing of that part of Lithuania after 80 years of anti-Catholic Calvinist propaganda.

It's a particularly beautiful story, with the recovery of a lost image of Mary, and a tacit recognition that Mary can acknowledge as her spiritual children even those Christians who don't know her, so as to draw them to Catholic unity.

Here's a link:

https://www.ourladyofsiluva.org/our_lady/

Albertus said...

''the authenticity of the Lord's gifts outside the visible boundaries of His Church; gifts which are graces truly belonging to the Church herself.'' This is also Saint Augustine's teaching, that we catholic christians should not destroy, but rather, appreciate all what is good, beautiful and true amongst the pagans, and claim those things as our own birthright.

PM said...

'I see no reason not to accept, as a private opinion, the probable authenticity of such reported visions.'

You are quite right, Father. It is worth remembering that strictly speaking all apparitions are private revelations.

If I could add to Matt's list, the proposition that 'no grace is given outside the Church' numbered among a list of propositions from the writings of the Jansenist Quesnel condemned by the Pope in 1713.

Arthur Gallagher said...

There was a locally famous apparition in the Bronx in 1945. My mother used to talk about it. I had a relative who used to go there to pray the Rosary, back in the 1970s.
One day, my buddy Michael, who lived on the same block where the apparition took place, and I went up, into the yard where the apparition had happened. I saw one of the older men from the street. I recognized him. He spoke to Mike, mostly about his daughters. That was the visionary. Everybody on the street knew him. Everybody on the street believed that it was true. In no way was he a celebrity. I asked him about the apparition. According to him, she appeared several times, but she hardly spoke at all. She told him to pray for peace. That was about it. Many years later, he saw her again, once, very briefly. I am not sure that she even spoke. He was having trouble supporting his family, and took a job out of town, worrying all the time. After that brief vision, he never saw her again. He got a better job, enough to raise his children, but he never had much, and had suffered. He was a humble man, who stuck by his story. I believe he did see Our Lady.