Believing in the Power of the Resurrection in the Era of the Grey Wolf

A Survivors Guide for Active Contemplatives

The resurrection of the Christ defines every era of human history, including our own, even in this era of the grey wolf. That is to say, all the confusion and scandal that dismays believers today does not erase the reality that with the resurrection of Christ. He has conquered death but death. He is the definitive answer to our deepest questions about human existence. He is the fulfillment of our desire, the solution to the disharmony and guilt of human existence, the only true hope in the face of all that threatens life.

St. Hildegard’s Scivias inspires my thoughts on the grayness of our time. In her visions, we find a survivor’s guide for times of confusion and scandal, when shepherds act as wolves. Since she was a child, this Doctor of the Church had the gift of constant visions. These did not occur in an altered conscious state, but instead were virtually unfolding during all her ordinary activities, her eyes wide open to all that was going on around her. It was a gift of beholding with the eye of her heart deeper truths at stake in the exigencies of the moment and the events in the life of the Church and society. Finally, at forty years of age, after obtaining the approval of St. Bernard, she wrote out what she was seeing to help the faithful of the 12th Century “Know the ways of the Lord” and she gave this as the title of her work according to her own Latin usage Scivias.

For St. Hildegard, Christ the Bridegroom is witnessed to by the Church - a mystery at the center of the whole human drama, that gathers together and unites to Christ as a Bride her Bridegroom. For her, the truest and most vital moment is when the Church gathers for worship, and no matter how feeble or broken the faith of those who come, she sees power unleashed anew in human history. She sees eternity infusing time and space the more the Church prays. Though overwhelmed by seemingly insurmountable evils, still St. Hildegard sees the Bride of Christ raising her eyes to the Bridegroom, burning fierce with the Holy Spirit, to honor the Lamb that was slain. When the irreproachable Bride of Christ whose purity is won by the blood of the Lamb calls out “maranatha” to her Redeemer, she sees Him coming with great power to rescue his Bride because nothing in the heavens or on earth or under the earth can come between Him and His Beloved.

In St. Hildegard’s visions, the Bride is in procession to the great nuptial banquet, a homecoming, and she makes ever more progress the more she keeps her eyes fixed on her Deliverer. The more hidden, the more fierce the Bride’s devotion. She sees each member of the Church bound together to lift up all the others with manifold gifts - each believer is a unique, irreplaceable instance of the glory of God, and the more they are bound together in love and faith, the more the very countenance of the Church shines as a bright light in the darkness.

If St. Hildegard offers us a survivor’s guide, it is because in her visions, Christ’s Blood flows and Divine Fire burns. The ground of humanity is under cruciform shadow throughout her visions: broken, humiliated, dying but not without hope. Always into these gaping wounds, the pierced empty caverns of heart, flows Blood of the Lamb. Where the Blood, the Fire of the Holy Spirit burns. The flowing and burning does not stop until tender love engulfs all the sin of the world. On those strands humbly offered by the Church, the flowing and burning of Divine Mercy, those who are most lost find themselves carried home.

St. Hildegard understands that the great work of the Bride of Christ is not unopposed. What Christ suffered in history is renewed in the Church in mystery. She understood that even the teaching authority of the Church, this inestimable gift of the Holy Spirit that safeguards all truth and means of salvation, can at certain moments fall short of upholding and protecting the Gospel. She holds firm that the Holy Spirit has not abandoned the magisterium but she is real about the members of the magisterium. Some fall under the intoxication of an over-sex and over materialized culture and society. Frail men have been given great authority and gifts, but if they lose sight of their frailty, like any other disciple, they too can compromise their ability to stand firm. The ego-inflation, insobriety and gluttony that results diminishes their capacity to exercise the teaching office of the Church, and in extreme cases can lead to total betrayal. Men who ought to be shepherds helping souls discern good and evil, instead become wolves, wolves who promote the very grayness we suffer today. Things that ought to be black and white are all grey and what ought to be true and false is confused.

When this happens, the contemplation of the Bride of Christ struggles to hold fast to her Savior. St. Hildegard does not point fingers or play the blame game. Instead, she advocates for keeping the discipline of the Christian life, a more fervently approach the sacraments, a redoubling of the works of mercy Christ has given her to do and a going ever deeper into personal prayer. This is the secret to surviving in such times - be like a bride who keeps her eyes on the bridegroom no matter what happens. The more hidden the prayer of faith and the works of mercy, the more powerful they are in keeping the Church together and the world from falling apart.

In Book II, chapter six she admonishes priests who do not use the authority of their office to heal sin by calling them wolves. The imagery comes from John 10 where Christ distinguishes himself as the Good Shepherd in contrast with the thieves and murderers who came before Him. Hildegard’s vision sees bishops and priests who do not exercise the authority of their office with the love of Christ (pastoral charity) not acting as priests of Christ but dirty pigs and ravenous wolves. Doing their own will instead of caring for the sheep, they snatch the faithful for their own purposes as a wolf snatches sheep. In her vision, God the Father declares about these wolves:

• By your uncleanness you shake the foundations of the earth. How? Because you do not fear to touch your Lord while foul with such crimes, I bring great griefs and oppressions upon the earth; and so I avenge the flesh and blood of my Son, for in this horror you not only cruelly shake the earth but by your filth contaminate Heaven. How? When you touch your Lord in the stench of uncleanness, as a swine tramples pearls into the mire, the heavens receive your iniquity and shower upon the earth the sentence of My judgment. … How can you be their shepherd when you seduce them so? And how will you answer for them, when you cannot give an answer for yourselves? Therefore weep and howl, before Death caries you off.

The howling wolf and the mired pig are both associated with the abuse of the priestly office. Her sense of failures of spiritual fatherhood in terms of thievery of holy things is striking. At the same time, she also associates these ministers with sexual impurity. It’s curious how mismanagement of funds and sins of the flesh go hand in hand even today. The connection of abuse ecclesial authority and failures in chastity sheds light on why the door of a prelate’s heart can become so closed to the needs of others, especially those the need for the truth - and this truth need has Eucharistic dimensions.

While Eucharistic worship is healing for humanity, touching the Eucharistic without repentance and reverence throws the stability of the world into chaos. Recklessness with divine things that abuse of authority and selfish living cause contaminates and throws into chaos the whole created order, the sacred and the profane, the heavens and the earth. Instead of offering the Church the Medicine of Immortality and the Antidote for Death, sinful ministers who approach the Eucharist without piety become a source of cosmic disarray.

Not only do they fall short of providing healing in the Church by sewing disarray in the world, they also act against the fruitfulness of the Church. Their preaching becomes so sterile in its self-absorption, they are only capable of acts of spiritual masturbation. In Book II, Vision 7 she describes these as followers of the devil actually ripping children from the womb of the Church:

• They are wicked fornicators upon themselves, destroying their semen in an act of murder and offering it to the Devil. And they also invade My Church with their schisms in the fulness of vice; in their shameful plots they wickedly scoff at baptism, and the sacrament of My Son’s body and blood, and the other institutions of the Church. Because they are afraid of My people, they do not openly resist these institutions of Mine, but in their hearts and their deeds they hold them as nothing.

Instead of passing on the life-giving Gospel, ministers offer their semen to the Devil. He is the obstacle to the Bride in her progress to the Bridegroom, and in this vision, he specifically attacks the fruitfulness of the Church. In offering him their semen, these ministers enter into a pact with him, becoming his diabolical stooges. Could the political games and blasphemous approach to the sacraments, in even the highest levels of the Church be “their shameful plots” and wicked scoffing? Behind all of it, their lack faith and disregard for the sacred invade the Church “in fullness of vice.”

In the final book of her visions, St. Hildegard describes successive eras marked by different kinds of evils embodied by different kinds of animals: a fiery dog represents an age of angry men, a yellow lion an age of warring and weakness, a pale horse for period when virtue is neglected and fear takes hold, a black pig for an age of in which leadership is marked by boorish impurity, and finally the grey wolf represents a time of the error of errors where the sense of right and wrong is lost. She sees them at once successive in causality and simultaneous experientially. What begins in restless anger (the dog) leads to war and weakness (the yellow lion). This irresolute and restless bickering in turn leads to the neglect of virtue and fear (the pale horse). Virtueless cowardice disposes to boorish impurity (the black pig), and all of this to a certain ambiguity about truth (the grey wolf) that is ripe for the coming of the anti-Christ.

Though a case could be made for the angry dog, yellow lion, pale horse and black pig, the grey wolf aptly describes our time. Taken together the animals progressively describe the state of chaos over which the antichrist reigns. Do certain errors from hell attack the Church in a way that she has never been before? The resulting spiritual trauma manifests itself in a lack of conviction about truth and falsehood, the heroic and the cowardly, sin and grace. This makes circumstances ripe for the messenger of anti-Gospel, the belief in a savior who opposes himself to Christ. In book III, chapter 11, she sees a vision of the Church as a woman-bride-spouse standing before the altar in the sight of God attacked by the anti-Christ.

• From her waist to the place that denotes the female, she had various scaly blemishes; and in that latter place was a black and monstrous head. It had fiery eyes, and ears like an ass’, and nostrils and mouth like a lion’s; it opened wide its jowls and terribly clashed its horrible iron-colored teeth. And from this head down to her knees, the figure was white and red, as if bruised by many beatings; and from her knees to the tendons where they joined her heels, which appeared white, she was covered with blood…. The people who stood there, perceiving this, were shaken with great fear and said to one another, “Alas, Alas! … Who will help us?”

In this bloody vision, toward the end of the three books of visions, St. Hildegard contemplates the Church suffering from an attack of the anti-Christ. She describes a fierce, powerful and obstinate force in a bitter struggle against the Bride. Seemingly victorious in its violent attack, its iron teeth pull at the womb of the Church leaving all kinds of blemishes even as she has been cut below the knees. The anti-Christ is a force that undercuts the Church, destroying her fruitfulness, and leaving a sense of hopelessness. Remember the earlier visions in which the impiety of prelates cause instability in the world? In this vision, believers shake with fear and despair.

In this time where more faithful shed their blood every day, a time when unborn blood is poured out without any kind of reprieve, believers are coming to share St. Hildegard’s vision into this attack and the blemishes that the antiChrist causes the Church. The wounds or blemishes that she saw and that we now see in the Church involve sexual vice, aggression against life and the plundering of spiritual goods. After relating this vision, she unveils its allegorical meaning:

• And from her waist to the place that denotes the female, she has various scaly blemishes” This is to say that, though she is now flourishing worthily and laudably in her children, before the time in which the son of perdition will try to perfect the trick he played on the first woman, the Church will be harshly reproached for many vices, fornication and murder and rapine. How? Because those who should love her will violently persecute her.

This meditation on the source of the Church’s suffering points us to betrayal. “Those who should love her” “violently persecute her.” This violent persecution solicits vicious behavior from among “her children” as if a consequence of the violent betrayal of those “who should love her.” The sin of scandal is when someone’s sin causes another to sin. Scandal can rob a person of his faith. It could also stir someone to imitate the scandalous behavior.

How can anyone survive this? Someone who has been sexually abused, or threatened with murder or plundered bears a spiritual wound that cannot be forgiven or forgotten on one’s own. Without learning to submit these wounds to the Holy Spirit, these blemishes dispose a soul to sin in exactly the same way. This is how whole patterns of scandalous behavior are passed down generationally, each generation spurring a renewal of the vicious behavior that was handed onto it. Over time, whole structures of sin take hold and restrict the imagination and understanding until what should never be acceptable is becomes accepted practice.

St. Hildegard describes the Church as being harshly rebuked. Her children, scandalized by the violent betrayal of those “who should love her” act out with the same viciousness, and the Church is blamed. The only thing that can break the enchantment of scandal is a reproach. There are some situations so ingrained with self-deception that only a stiff rebuke will provide any hope for repentance and healing.

However, a rebuke aimed at repentance is not the same as one aimed at only at condemnation. St. Hildegard indicates not a rebuke aimed at repentance but instead one aimed at destroying the Church. It is a rebuke so harsh that all courage is lost in approaching God for forgiveness until the salvific mission of the Savior is undermined. The antichrist attacks the Church when her members feel so condemned for what they have done, they lose all faith in the salvation won by Christ to forgive sins. “Christ can forgive all other sins but mine” they reason. The harsh rebuke is meant to demoralize in this way. It is to confront this demoralization that St. Hildegard offers the vision. She wants us to know that this is a strategy of the Evil One, but that this strategy does not overthrow the love of Christ. In her visions, the antichrist is not triumphant but is defeated by Christ who comes for His Bride and delivers her.

How do we respond to the era of the grey wolf in our own time? If you would fight grey-ness in your life, rather than succumb to discouragement or confusion, St. Hildegard points to Christ. He is the reason to renew our devotion and stand fast in vigilance. When we keep the eyes of our hearts fixed on the Bridegroom, we see the goodness of the Father. In the shadow of that goodness, a soul discovers, no matter the circumstances, in the end, love wins. This finds support in words spoken by St. John Paul II when he visited the United States in 1976, before he became pope:

• We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel. This confrontation lies within the plans of divine Providence; it is trial which the whole Church, and the Polish Church in particular, must take up. It is a trial of not only our nation and the Church, but, in a sense, a test of 2,000 years of culture and Christian civilization with all of its consequences for human dignity, individual rights, human rights and the rights of nations. (WSJ, 11/9/78 reprinted by Paul Kengor in a commentary for the National Catholic Register, 10/05/2018.

St. John Paul’s conviction about a final confrontation throw into relief the vision of St. Hildegard von Bingen. Though her visions tell us much about the sorry state of the Church in her own day, it is difficult not to see the scandal of betrayal and the work of the antichrist in our current circumstances. The scandal and betrayal she saw are “a test of 2000 years of culture and Christian civilization” and a “trial which the whole Church” must take up.

Among those who ought to love the Church, those who are members of the magisterium hold primacy of place. Could there be among these even today also those who “should love her” but “violently persecute her?” The failure to address the real problems behind the sexual abuse crisis and then the subsequent teachings about sexual morality that have sewn enough confusion and scandal to suggest so. How interesting that Sister Lucia, one of the Fatima Seers, warned that “there will come a time when the decisive confrontation between the Kingdom of God and Satan will take place over marriage and the family.”

There is certainly plenty of confrontation about marriage and family, the blessing of unwed but intrinsically disordered couples and the admitting civilly remarried divorced Catholics to the sacraments. Different national bodies of bishops, each claiming to be authentically interpreting teachings from Rome, remain in sharp disagreement about all that is sacred in marriage and family. What was once black and white is now grey and in this grayness there are wolves: just as St. Hildegard saw in her own time, we see in ours too. Stooges of the diabolical, some ecclesial leaders have so scandalized and confused the children of the Church that the Church herself appears to be what she is not - blameworthy.

For indeed, we live at a time when the Church has been harshly reproached. Abusive betrayals of those “who should love her” are rightly called out - but we have also seen how ecclesial politics contribute to some being more harshly dealt with than others. It all depends how conservative or traditional the perpetrator is. Such politics rob the faithful of confidence in the clergy and the clergy of confidence in themselves. Everyone in the Church points fingers at each other while the world points its finger at the Church.

In this time of the grey wolf, the antichrist attacks the fruitfulness of the Church. Cultural powers that would replace blundering bishops with a more efficient technocracy do not bother with the distinction between the members of the Church and the Church herself. It serves their purposes to harshly reproach the Bride of Christ. And what are these purposes? To replace Christ, the Son of the Father, with a more politically correct technocratic bureaucracy - salvation through technocracy. Hence, the antichrist has taken the form of the technocrat, the behind the scenes social engineer who understands progress and is ready to implement the perpetually improving data driven process that will close the loop to bring it about.

“Alas, alas! Who will help us?” The answer is the Risen Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father! Though a spirit of discouragement and dismay has taken hold and under this discouragement, remaining faithful to Christ has become a real struggle, the Bridegroom is coming and the Bride must keep her eyes on Him. If many are left questioning the meaning and relevance of their vocation, the Word who communicates a fullness of meaning and goodness to those who welcome Him stands at the door and knocks. The conquest of the Bride is a mystery that Pope Benedict prophesied about ten years prior to Pope John Paul II’s challenging words. The then Father Ratzinger declared:

• "Soon we will have priests reduced to the role of social workers and the message of faith reduced to a political vision. Everything will seem lost, but at the right time, only in the most dramatic phase of the crisis, the Church will be reborn. It will be smaller, poorer, almost catacumbal, but also holier. For it will no longer be the church of those who seek to please the world, but the church of believers in God and his Eternal Law. The revival will be the work of a small, seemingly insignificant, but indomitable, remnant, undergone a process of purification. Because that is how God works: A small flock withstands evil.” (Josef Ratzinger, 1969)

At the most dramatic phase of the crisis, the Church is reborn. Such is the hope of the young Father Ratzinger. It is a crisis that he would see unfold before he was elected Pope as the pastoral disasters of clergy sexual abuse began to unfold. This misery is a betrayal of fatherhood, an absence of paternal teaching in the Church – an absence that allows the error of errors to come up from hell and rob the world of all sense of right and wrong. Yet for all the betrayal, the Holy Spirit still burns in our hearts and the Blood of the Lamb still inebriates our spirits.

St. Hildegard’s visions show the defeat of the antichrist, left behind on a pile of dung as Christ raises up and heals his Bride, making her again blameless in his sight. Just as St. Hildegard saw, if we attend to our own conscience, weep over our sins, humbly presents our needs to the Lord and lift each other up in prayer and love, the confusion and scandal will pass and a purified spiritual fatherhood and motherhood will again be unleashed in the Church. The Church has not yet presented its most beautiful teaching about the mystery of Christ and, even after two millennia, we have only scratched the surface of all that the Father has entrusted to humanity when He entrusted His Son to the Virgin Mary.

After this time of terrible confusion, marriages and families will be even more beautiful than they ever were before, with a purified and tender love between spouses, parents and children. Men and women of every vocation will possess an even more beautiful chaste holiness, a true participation in the virginal manhood of Christ in a way that will draw future generations to virtue, to greatness, to offering of their very lives in a manner worthy of the calling that they have received.

St. Hildegard wept over what she saw, but she wept with hope, believing in her Deliverer. For us too, weeping over the state of the Church is the beginning. God has a wonderful future for us and a bright hope. The antichrist of this age or any age does not get the last word. When we weep over our sins and the wounds of the Church, we make space for the Holy Spirit to begin to move us to a deeper repentance. This means fasting and prayer. It means allowing our eyes to gaze on the Eucharistic Lord and our ears to hear more deeply the Gospel of Christ. As we begin to submit ourselves to the Holy Spirit, the Fire of God’s love will teach us the compassion and prayer that pours out of Christ’s heart for humanity. We must learn to distinguish this Holy Spirit from every other spirit that opposes Him:

• God’s Spirit is a spirit of peace, even after our most serious failings. He makes us feel a sorrow that is peaceful, humble and confident, precisely because of His mercy. The spirit of evil, the other hand, agitates, irritates and makes us feel a sort of anger at ourselves when we have failed. So, when you are bothered by certain thoughts, the agitation never comes from God but from the devil, since God, being a spirit of peace, brings you serenity. (Saint Padre Pio, 1968)

This is a question of discernment, a question of opening the eyes of the heart. The Holy Spirit moves the difficult ambiguities of life and we find Him when we seek out the most appropriate way to love and serve God. As black and white are hidden in grey, so are the vital differences between good and evil, men and animals, man and woman, creature and Creator. A contemplative does not stop at the grey-ness but with a gazing love goes ever deeper. The contemplative searches the differences and relationships of the things God has made, the truth about them, until his heart sees the sacred order written in creation - and through this order the goodness and beauty of God fills its deepest needs. Contemplatives know that it is in accepting these differences that they discover, in ever new ways, how the Bridegroom comes for his Bride. Their faithful vigilance for the truth in the grayness of the moment helps the whole Church remember that she is awaited by love.

We must open the eyes of our hearts to see the good things that God is doing to protect ourselves from anxiety and resentment. This means becoming true contemplatives - those who see the goodness of the Father with the eyes of the heart, to reveal in their own life the presence and saving power of Christ to a new generation. To walk with Christ on this pathway of victory: praying for the grace of forgiveness, not being overcome by evil but overcoming evil with the good, allowing oneself to learn compassion, generously doing penance for themselves and for others, joyfully offering up sacrifices and tears, and, the whole time, growing in trust in the love of God the Father. This is the pathway of repentance and the possibility of a new beginning for humanity.

Only as the Holy Spirit teaches us to ache over the wounds of the Church, of the magisterium, of the family, and how these wounds have robbed humanity of a sense of the future it is meant to have, only then can we groan with the Holy Spirit whose movements of power make all things new. The Holy Spirit needs our humanity to groan with him as the eternal love of God calls into the wound of oversexed and over-materialized shepherds in the Church. When the Holy Spirit groans in us – we share in Christ’s mission to bear away sin and demoralized believers find the firm ground of Christ on which alone that can stand and find their way to the Father’s house.