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14.
Help of Christians and Non-Christians
THE
HISTORIAN who does not believe in a supernatural influence on natural
events must nevertheless know and admit that the Church does, and has
traditionally had recourse to Mary to get results, and got them at Lepanto,
Vienna, Belgrade, and elsewhere. Should he fail to make the observation
in his survey of the facts, he betrays a blind spot that prevents a
genuine report at all. To be consistent, he would have to disallow the
divine interventions all through the Old Testament when the enormously
weaker side in a battle wins the victory. Explain it how he will, the
record is there.
"Though the army of the Syrians had come with
few men, the Lord delivered into their hand a very great army"—the much
larger army of the Israelites. Why? The text without the question has
the answer, "because they had forsaken the Lord, the God of their fathers"
(2 Chron. 24:24). There, an avenging Providence has taken sides in an
uneven battle to defeat the stronger forces of an unfaithful people.
Conversely, during their seasons of repentance, the record of the same
people tells of quick turnovers from imminent disaster to their finest
triumphs.
King David, having against heavy odds won the
victory that brought him the crown and preserved the nation, takes no
credit to himself. He knows better. He thanks God for it. And since it
was a national no less than a personal rescue from ruin, the psalmist
pluralizes his pledge of gratitude to include his countrymen. "We," he
promises the almighty Victor, "will sing and praise thy power" (Ps.
21:13).
Victories of the kind come from God at a time
the beneficiaries are true to him. So it was before Christ. So it
remains. Yet ever since the Son of God entered human history as a Child
from a virgin mother, it has pleased the Blessed Trinity to work the
interventions through her. This has been the rich experience of the
Church.
St. John Bosco, who gloried in Mary's role as
help of Christians, did not understand it narrowly. He saw in it no
conflict with another role of hers, but rather an expression of her
maternal solicitude for the whole human race. He saw that, while she used
her God-given power in battle after battle to rescue the Church from
imminent ruin, she was equally benefiting the non-Catholic Christian in a
world of practical atheism that would abolish Christianity altogether if
it could. Nor, of course, did he fail to see that unbelievers who turned
to Christ would not have turned to him without an awareness of him. And
who best keeps that awareness of its Savior alive in the world, if not the
teaching Church? Accordingly, her survival must be accounted a blessing
to all such converts.
St. John Bosco liked to believe, moreover, that
these converts number high: as high as Mary, their unfailing auxiliatrix,
could in conformity to justice raise the total. Her influence works more
often in secrecy than not, so that for every known Saul who becomes a
Paul, there must be multitudes of him unknown. Statistics of newcomers to
the Church belittle the truth. They simply do not know the score. Be
prepared for plenty of surprises in heaven.
The fact is, the most embarrassing threats to
the Church have come from within. Arius was a priest, Nestorius an
archbishop, Eutyches an abbot. But aside from attacks on her doctrinal
life, history supplies a number of political assaults from her rebellious
children. There fell a period in the early nineteenth century, to take
one of several choice examples, when her supreme pontiff was kidnapped,
locked into a carriage and smuggled out of Rome, to be held a prisoner for
five years, in Savona for three of them, in Fontainebleau through the
remaining two. At Grenoble, during a stopover on the way, it was said of
the captive in the carriage: "He isn't Pope Pius the Seventh; he is Pope
Pius the Last." The sneer made the rounds among the hostile who were ever
ready to chant their cheerful dirge over the Church who has always somehow
survived her many intended funerals. Minus the pope, they thought to
themselves, how long can the Church stay alive? They had not counted on
Mary, Help of Christians, even against Christians.
Napoleon, still a Catholic at heart, knew
better than to expect the demise of the indestructible Church. But at the
same time his attempt to subject the Holy See to his political aims by
abducting its apostolic occupant, incited the fond hopes of the would-be
pallbearers. The attempt failed. Pope Pius would concede nothing. He
refused to lift the ban of excommunication from the recalcitrant emperor.
The refusal stunned Bonaparte who had in anticipation of the censure
written from Dresden to his stepson: "So ridiculous an idea can emanate
only from a profound ignorance of the day in which we live; the idea is a
thousand years out of date." Then followed his famous reference to the
pontiff he had so completely misunderstood: "Would he place my throne
under an interdict? Would he excommunicate me? Does he suppose that then
the muskets will fall from the hands of my soldiers?"
Whether or not Pope Pius VII thought they
would, they did. Less than three years after his excommunication,
Napoleon on the retreat from Moscow did in truth see the muskets drop from
the benumbed hands of his grenadiers—whole regiments of them. Till then,
his mastery over Europe had climbed steadily to a peak. Victory after
victory he had won. There seemed to be no stopping his will to dominate.
Once when a chamberlain had ushered into his presence three European
kings, the busy emperor backed them into the hall with the command: "Let
them wait." No monarch dared to contract him, save one, and he but a
spiritual one who was safely imprisoned, put out of action, nullified.
And yet, His Imperial Majesty might well have wondered, what did it all
now avail him as here in the Russian snow the frost more effectively than
bullets went to work on his proud army?
It was the turning of fate against him, the
historians say. He had had his period of glory. It now lay behind him.
But Napoleon himself, steeped in the homiletic reasonings of Bossuet,
would not have been inclined to attribute the reversal to fate. He
frowned on the pagan world. If he did not practice his faith, at least he
had never quite lost it. Shakespeare rather had the idea he could
respect, with a capital D in the synonym for Providence:
There's a Divinity
that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how
we will.
Napoleon, when himself a captive languishing in
exile, recovered in full the faith he had subdued but never relinquished
to the demands of his ambition. It had always been there. He had the
pope come to Paris to preside at his coronation in Notre Dame because he
considered it the right thing to do. Certainly on the occasion that the
Abbé Emery protested to his imperial face the seizure of the papal states,
which had preceded the seizure of the Holy Father, he replied altogether
in character: "Well, I do not deny the spiritual power of the pope, since
he received that from Jesus Christ; but it was Charlemagne, not Christ,
who gave the temporal power to him, and I, as successor to Charlemagne,
now deprive him of it."
His kidnapping the pope provided to be the
blunder that underlay the immediate causes of his downfall. It provoked
an indignation that left Europe buzzing like an aroused nest of hornets.
It stirred up, says Belloc, "the moral forces of Europe which had hitherto
lain dormant." It stiffened the opposition to the Grand Army of the
Republic which in the long run must tell. But meanwhile the emperor in
saddle galloped from one conquest to another. Nothing could yet match his
military exploits; it began to look as if the Holy Father would die in
prison; would the conqueror date to name his successor? Then, like a
sudden light in the dark, came hope. Instinctively better than half the
continent turned in appeal to its traditional stand-by in need, Our Lady,
Help of Christians. A campaign got under way, which gained momentum at
each new report of a Napoleonic triumph. A determination took hold of the
weaponless faithful. If his military stratagems could not be stopped,
they'd pray for a change of heart in the man. They'd do it with the
rosary.
The change of heart in Napoleon came. Not for
many months, and only after his grievous setback from the Russian winter,
but come it did on January 22, 1814. The great warrior still had plenty
of fight left in him, what with the eventual battle of Waterloo a year and
a half away. But his arrogance was gone. Not unaware of the rosary
crusade in appeal to a higher court, which he respected, he knew now his
outrage on the papacy had backfired. It hurt him badly. He set Pope Pius
free.
There was no hurrying the pope out of the
chateau in Fontainebleau. He was allowed a leisurely departure. It
proved to be a triumphant exodus the whole way to Rome. Cheering
spectators lined the roads over which the papal carriage rode through the
countryside from town to town. There were scheduled stopovers for
luncheons and lodging at night and for religious services during the day,
outdoors and in churches. His Holiness would lead the crowds in prayers
of gratitude to Our Lady, Help of Christians, and upon her statue wherever
one stood ready to his hand he would place a floral wreath. Many such a
statue awaited the honor on temporary pedestals along the roadside, so
that probably no horses in the history of their species ever witnessed
more coronations and heard more recited rosaries than the thoroughbreds
that in easy stages escorted Pope Pius VII out of France into Italy and
Rome.
The Vicar of Christ reached the outskirts of
the Eternal City on May 24th, the date he accordingly selected for the new
local feast to be inserted into the liturgy, that of Mary, Help of
Christians. The next day he was back at St. Peter's at last, and in full
possession. The papal states would soon be restored to him. The long
trial was over. Her special advocate in trouble again relieved the
Church.
Meanwhile back in Fontainebleau, Napoleon
Bonaparte signed his abdication. His reign was over. The absolute power
he had exerted was taken from him; he would reclaim it for a while; then
yield it for the rest of life to an austere exile on the Isle of St.
Helena. The perpetrator of a sacrilege upon the Holy See, now himself a
captive under the custody of the English, had ample time to reflect on the
ironic shift of events. In disgrace, deserted by his former colleagues in
power, he would not have had no one of influence to befriend him if he had
not turned his own prisoner free. Pope Pius stood out as his benefactor.
To begin with, he instructed his secretary to write a letter to each of
the allied monarchs, and in particular the prince-regent of England, to
ask for a kind treatment of their exile. It would be to him, he said, "an
extraordinary joy to have helped lessen the torments of Napoleon."
Then, His Holiness took pity on Napoleon's
mother to Cardinal Consolvi, the papal secretary of state, tells it best
and in words of a maternal warmth tells it all. "The sole consolation
left me," writes Letizia Buonaparte, "is the knowledge that the Holy
Father forgets the past and remembers only his affection for those
belonging to me. We can find no refuge but under the pontifical
government, and our gratitude is as great as the benefit. I speak in the
name of my entire family of proscribed ones; especially for him who is now
slowly dying on a desert rock. His Holiness and Your Eminence are the
only persons in Europe who try to soften his fate."
Pope Pius, having a true devotion to Mary,
could have no animosity in his heart. The two do not mix. He had in
prison prayed to her to get him free for the sake of the Church and to win
back to the Church the wayward emperor. There had not been then, there
wasn't now, even a semblance of ill will toward Napoleon. You will hear
it said in his hometown, where they know him intimately, that Bishop James
E. Walsh who languished for years in a Communist jail has nothing but kind
words to say of his captors and the Chinese in general. He loves them.
But what else should we expect of one who in solitary confinement retained
his sanity by praying rosary after rosary all day long? Whoever does that
cannot hate people, no matter how odiously misled they are, because the
practice inculcates an awareness that the very mother invoked is also
theirs. The rosary promotes a brotherly, a sisterly, benevolence. That
was what Pope Pius VII preached, and in his life exemplified.
He prayed in and out of prison to Mary, Help of
Christians, for the negligent Christian who had done him and the Church a
grievous wrong. The prayer was not wasted. No prayer ever is. Even if
the prayed-for soul does not respond to the graces sent because of it, the
prayer pleases the mediatrix of those graces and almighty God, their
source, and that in itself makes the prayer worth while. But in the case
of Napoleon there was a magnificent response. The turn of events could
not disinterest him in his exploits; nor in the fame they brought him; but
it did disillusion him of the unnecessary follies of his arrogance. He
repented these. He went back, and with a fervor that edified his
custodians, to the practice of his faith. He became dead set on saving
his soul.
In his stark confinement at St. Helena he
prayed again the Hail Mary of his childhood, asking the Mother of
God to remember him now and in the hour of his death. He was resigned.
On the last New Year's morning of his life when his valet Marchland had
expressed the hope that the allies would recall the sick man to a decent
climate, Napoleon replied, "It shall be as God wills." At a later time,
his health failing rapidly, he cried out with a flash of his old
dominance: "I must have a priest here. I do not care to die like a dog."
A priest was sent for. He came, a Pater Vignali, with the blessings of
Pope Pius. He stayed on as chaplain. For the patient who had told his
doctor that he would welcome death now asked his priest if the Blessed
Sacrament might be brought into his presence and kept in his presence
during his final agony. The request was honored—well in advance.
It was the least they could do for a dying man,
and the very best thing possible. It brightened the closing weeks of his
exile—on earth. He could look from his wretched iron bed through the open
doorway of his small room into a dining-room now converted to a chapel. A
makeshift altar stood there, upon which regularly the Holy Sacrifice was
offered. But the bedroom door remained open after the Mass, so that for
the rest of the day the quickly-made tabernacle with its Resident could be
seen at will. In that adorable Presence a dethroned emperor would die in
peace. On his last day of consciousness the priest was at his side, heard
his confession, absolved him, administered to him the sacrament of the
sick, but dared not give him Holy Viaticum. His stomach cancer had gone
too far to allow an intake of food. But he had a crucifix by him. It
remained with him in death. They had the courtesy to place it on his
lifeless breast.
Those historians who would have us believe that
Napoleon Bonaparte died in degradation do not say enough. They do not see
far enough. They miss the deeper truth. And so they are essentially
wrong. He died rich.
And that suggests another deficiency in the
record, which cannot be helped. If no chronicle tells to what a degree
the prayers of Pope Pius aided the final return of the worldling to his
boyhood piety, it is because the chronicler does not know. But the
mediatrix of that grace does. Nor could she have forgotten an incident
that occurred on the feast of her Assumption in 1769, the day Napoleone
Buonaparte was born. The mother of the infant, realizing whose feast it
was and what feast it was on that August morning when the church bells of
Corsica were ringing out their acknowledgment, took the newborn in her
arms and dedicated him to the Queen of Angels. A lifetime later this
simple act of faith likewise had its degree of influence on the penitent
who through the years had grown too famous to care about God—and now did.
Every prayer said for him by no matter whom, every sacrifice offered up
for him, contributed to the nobility of his death. Not one of all such
efforts went unnoticed. God's chosen agent put them all to good account.
They all made it so much the easier for the sinner to cooperate with that
serene inner urging from the mother of divine grace.
The lesson to be learnt from the conversion of
Napoleon, as from similar episodes in history, is the efficacy of
intercessory prayer. Let the prayer be addressed to whomever of the
blessed, an angel or a saint, or to the angels and saints in general, or
to their queen, or to the God of them all—let it be addressed directly to
the Father, Son or Holy Spirit, or to the Trinity of the unified
Persons—the prayer must in any case come to the attention of her who
dispenses its merits. A magnificent and harmonious communication system
prevails in heaven. It never breaks down. Every prayer from earth, even
when not addressed to her, is referred to Mary. And having her for
another, the suppliants may rest assured that she will make the most of
their spiritual earnings.
Look how, in early 1974, her influence softened
the asperity between Christians and non-Christians of South Vietnam as
soon as Buddhists and Caodaists and Hoa Haos engaged with Catholics in a
crusade of prayer to her. The facts intrigue. Much to the satisfaction
of the war-plagued nation it had been announced that, to climax the
crusade, the pilgrim statue of Our Lady of Fatima would be flown in from
across the Pacific. And indeed it was. The statue with its escort of
forty members of the Blue Army arrived from the United States on January
31, 1974.
The statue remained three days with the
Vietnamese. They responded multitudinously. Upwards of two millions of
them, according to an official estimate, came to this station or that to
view it during the triduum of prayer. Borne on floats worthy of a queen,
it traveled the country. The Caodaists, eyewitness John Haffert reports,
had a specially made pavilion waiting on their temple grounds to receive
it. The gates to those sacred precincts had never before been opened to
members of an alien faith. In the name of the Our Lady of Fatima they now
were. The turnout, with the Caodaists robed in ceremonial white, numbered
into the tens of thousands.
Prior to that, indeed the first rally around
the statue had been held on a site where a Catholic shrine had once stood
and now lies in ruins, perilously close to the North Vietnamese border.
The vast throng, as in very other rally, forgot their religious and
political differences to pray together to the Mother of God. They showed
no fear of the snipers that infested the area. Their confidence was not
foolhardy. Nobody got hurt. Who knows but what the snipers themselves
had come out to pray?
Typical of the enthusiasm shown, a Cambodian
woman had no sooner learned of the statue's being in Vietnam that she
ordered a bouquet of orchids to bring to it. She set out for Saigon,
where she knew a final demonstration was scheduled for the 3rd
of February, featuring the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. This grand
farewell drew hundreds of thousands to the open centre of the city, the
public square. The like of it "has never taken place in our four thousand
years of history" declared Congremann Do-Sinh-Tu. But in the incredibly
large overflow crowd, among whom the papal nuncio prayed alongside the
dignitaries of other faiths, the Cambodian with the orchids was not to be
found. She was still on her way.
Flown from Saigon to Bangkok, Thailand, the
statue was taken eventually to the cathedral. Another overflow crowd
attended the services there, which included a Mass coram episcopo.
At the rear of that dense crowd a determined woman found it impossible to
push her way through it. In frustration she turned to a man standing by,
who bore the air of an official and in fact was. She spoke to him in
English, identifying herself as a Buddhist from Cambodia, saying she had
gone to Saigon to see the statue only to be told of its departure for
Bangkok, and that she then followed it herself by plane—but still could
not get near it. Would he help her? And she handed him a bouquet of
thirty-three orchids with the urgent request that he use his influence to
have the flowers placed at the pilgrim statue of Fatima. Thus her gift of
love, through the courtesy of Franco Rimini, reached its blessed
destination at last.
Let the blooms look a bit tired; it didn't
matter; there was nothing wilted about the reverence in that Buddhist
heart which would so honor the Mother of God. The orchids traveled with
the statue from Bangkok to Akra, once the Mongolian capital, and into the
cathedral there. Archbishop Athaide himself placed them in the sanctuary,
where they stayed until they died of service in the Real Presence. The
whole incident, stranger than fiction, corroborates a finding of history:
namely, that whatever goes to the honor of Mary redounds to the ultimate
honor of her Son.
That is the way she wants it. That is the way
it is. Pope St. Pius V in the rosary procession through the streets of
Rome carried the Blessed Sacrament. The exiled Napoleon, so widely prayed
for to Mary, died with a strong desire to be with his Eucharistic Lord.
Historic appeals to her have always led to a renewed fervor in the
faithful, or on the part of unbelievers to a curious respect, for the
adorable Mystery of the altar. She sees to that. The crowds at Saigon,
of different faiths, came out to honor Our Lady of Fatima, but stayed for
the outdoor Mass. By whose influence do you suppose they did that?
Nothing like it had ever happened in the country before.
Jamming the public square and the convergent
streets, they listened with not a trace of dissent to the plea from the
homilist to subdue their hatreds into a symphony of love under the
maternal influence of Mary. The cameras showed, in photos snapped from
every feasible angle, the rapt attention on that sea of faces: a
uniformity of trust in Our Lady of Fatima, to bring about harmony on earth
at last. Nor does the present Communist domination of the country
militate against so well founded a trust.
It is becoming better known, that the Moslems
cherish the word Fatima. It is also known why Mohammed had given
his daughter the name, and upon her death he wrote that she "is the
holiest of all women in Paradise after Mary." But how did a village in
Portugal come by the name? From the Moslems who once occupied the
country. Anyhow, though a mere coincidence, it endears Mary to them the
more to be identified as Our Lady of Fatima. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen,
while director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, reported
to the press that the appearance of her pilgrim statue in India, Africa
and Asia would always start a wave of conversions to Catholicism. He
thinks that by and large the Mohammedans, who believe in the Virgin Birth,
will through the effect of Our Lady of Fatima upon them eventually believe
also in the Divinity of Christ.
The response of the South Vietnamese to Our
Lady of Fatima, when her statue appeared in their midst, affords a
miniature preview of what she will accomplish among the divided Christians
and non-Christians of the world when in desperation they turn to her.
Pope Leo XIII wrote out a question, for his 1895 encyclical on the Virgin
Mary, which he then answered. He did not need to answer it. The reply
lies implicitly clear in the very question: "Will not she employ her
goodness . . . to bring to full perfection the blessing of unity among the
members of the Christian family, which is to be the fruit of her
motherhood?" Prior to the question, there stands another in the context
which takes for granted her effective custody over non-Christians as
well. Mindful of her Son's earnest prayer to his heavenly Father for the
religious union of the nations, "will she not for that reason," concludes
the Vicar of Christ, "arrange it so that under a marvelous enlightenment
they will all strive as with one mind for unity?"
In our day Pope Paul has expressed no less
confidently the same conviction. "Certainly it will be necessary to have
much patience, much understanding, no hurry; but the desire is great; and
prayer will animate it." He was speaking to a crowd in St. Peter's
Square, gathered there to recite with him the noonday angelus but now
hearing these preliminary remarks of his. "What is more," he continued,
"Our Lady most holy, whom we implore as the Mother of Unity and Mother of
the Church, will favor it with her powerful intercession until it has been
fully received."
That says it all.
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