A Transcript of a narrative given during the Mass on Sunday 18^th November 2007
at St Mary’s Catholic Church to celebrate the Beatification of Antonio Rosmini.

ANTONIO ROSMINI – A GIFT TO THE CHURCH

Narrator:          From time to time in the affairs of men and nations and no less in the affairs of the Church, God raises up individuals destined to play a unique role in His providential plans.   The Old Testament Prophets, the great Saints of the early Church and now in our own times, amidst the very ordinary and even less than ordinary, an extraordinary soul is empowered by the Spirit of God to give to the Church – and to the world - a salutary reminder of the eternal truths and priorities by which the Gospel invites us to live our lives in service of God and our neighbour.   Just such a man was Antonio Rosmini, who received from God lavish gifts of mind and spirit, gifts which he sought to use to the full in his service of God and the Church.   In this year of grace, 2007, we celebrate the providential signs of God’s favour in the Beatification of Antonio Rosmini and in doing so, we highlight here just a few moments, a few glimpses into the making of a man referred to by Pope Paul VI as ‘a man of great learning and wisdom.  His thinking and spirit ought to be made more known and imitated and perhaps he himself should be invoked as a protector in heaven.   We look forward eagerly to the day when that will happen.’

Antonio Rosmini, this is your life.

Unlike many of the great servants of the Church, you were born into a rich and noble family, the middle of three children born to Pier and Giovanna.   Your early years were greatly influenced by your first experience of a Christian community within your family home, which provided the ideal soil in which your deepening awareness of God and the Church could blossom.

In 1821, you were ordained Priest.  Filled with fervour, you attempted to begin a number of projects to further the cause of the Church.   As these failed one by one, you began to ask yourself whether you were seeking your own will, rather than doing what God required of you.   From this, there grew the principle which became so fundamental for the remainder of your life’s work:  that true wisdom demanded immediate attention to your own sanctification and acceptance of works only when it became obvious that this was the will of God.

Divine Providence now introduced another figure into your life’s story.   Your sister, Margarite, having opened an orphanage at Rovereto, consulted the Marchioness di Canossa, a rich but holy woman who later founded the Canossian Sisters.   She it was who urged you to begin an Institute to provide for boys what she was providing for girls.   Thus God planted in your mind the idea of an Institute, but not one for any specific work of Charity, but for all forms of Charity, once it was discerned to be the will of God.  Thus you wrote to Canossa in 1828:

Rosmini:           ‘The Lord has restored my health and I am wholly occupied on meditating on His will and listening to his voice.   For the rest, since I have made it a principle of my way of life to abandon myself to divine Providence, I intend to remain perfectly content, and refusing nothing that He may give me to do in His service.’

Narrator:          To further this principle in your life, God led you to meet a young Priest, the Abbe Jean Lowenbruck, who had ideas very similar to your own.   He was a man of great energy and idealism who enthused over the way in which Divine Providence had apparently led you to meet.

Rosmini:           My dear Lowenbruck, how good it is to see you and good, too, to hear of your plans.

Lowenbruck:    Indeed it is but by the grace of God that we have come together to carry out this great enterprise.   It is surely to be of great service to the Church, when we have set up this company of Priests – I have already heard that some of the Bishops are interested and I would hope to be able to respond to their enquiries once we have arrived at a more detailed plan.

Rosmini:           But we must not take the smallest step unless it is within the revealed Providence of the Lord.   We must not aim to do great things, and we must not be worried over the future.   Let it be God Who leads us – we shall be blessed if we journey on with great circumspection.   He will show us what we should do.   He will show us how we are to act, when, where, how much, all according to His will.

Lowenbruck:    Well, yes, I agree with all that, but…

Rosmini:           No buts.   We must pray and we must pray together.   My friend, the Count Mellerio, has told me of a deserted Sanctuary in the Alps, near Domodossola – it is the sanctuary of Monte Calvario.   Can we not go there for Lent and ask God to show us the way forward?

Lowenbruck:    A wonderful idea.   Then, when we’ve made our plans we can go to Rome and …

Rosmini:           Not so fast, my friend.   Let us get to Calvario first and then see what God has in store for us.

Narrator:          And so the plan was agreed.    Lent 1828 was to be spent together in prayer, earnestly seeking to discern God’s purpose.   You arrived at Calvario in bitterly cold weather with just two companions – and waited for Lowenbruck to join you.   Alas, when you wrote to Madalena di Cannossa on St. Joseph’s day, you added: ‘I had arranged to be here with my French friend so as to keep Lent together, to develop the foundation of the work.   But he is not here; he is still in France and I do not know when he will be free to join us.   But I am happy in this Retreat…’

Indeed, you were happy.   And it was there that you received a singular grace from God as you set down the constitutions of the new Institute of Charity.  You later wrote to Fr. Signini:

Rosmini:           The plan of the Institute was given to me without my having studied it.   I saw it one morning, presented to me instantaneously and entire, as you see it described in what I have written.’

Narrator:          Now another figure enters your life and, indeed, your life’s work.   Aloysius Gentili (Luigi) was a young man of great gifts who had cultivated for himself a positive reputation among the English-speaking community at Rome.   But, having failed to win the hand of a wealthy heiress, he threw himself with his customary vigour into a deepening of his already considerable spiritual life.   His meeting with you in 1829 led him to place himself under your direction.

Gentili:  Don Antonio, I feel sure that Divine Providence has sent me to you or, rather, you to me.   For I know now that your Institute is where I belong, where I am meant to be.   With your permission, I shall begin my preparation as soon as possible – tomorrow, perhaps.

Rosmini:           Luigi, God has already called you to the sacred Priesthood.   When you were accepted at the Irish College in Rome, the divine will was made clear to you.   Before even considering entry into our little Institute, you will be ordained Priest and then we shall consider where God is leading you.

Narrator:          But where God was leading Luigi Gentili had already been partly revealed.   The decision for him to enter the Irish College reflected his and your own concern for the future of the Church in England.  Gentili later wrote to Lowenbruck:           

Gentili               I began to study with the idea of being ordained and going to England with a few Priests of like mind, where I would try to convert souls to God, and do whatever I could, especially in reforming the clergy and improving our Catholics.

Narrator:          You were urged by Bishop Baines to send to England some of your Priests, particularly to Prior Park in Bath where he was trying to set up a Catholic College.   In July 1835, Gentili sent you his first impressions of England:

Gentili:  We seemed to be entering the city of Pluto: black houses, a black sky, black ships and black-looking sailors.  The waters of the Thames were tinged with a colour between black and yellow and emitted a highly-offensive stench.   On land there prevailed a confused noise, with horses, carriages and men of every condition running and crossing each others path – in fine, to make a long story short, here the devil is seen enthroned, exercising his tyrannical sway over wretched mortals.

Narrator:          Though the project at Bath did not progress as expected, another opportunity opened out when you received an urgent request from Ambrose Phillips de Lisle that Gentili be sent to Grace Dieu as Chaplain.

Once arrived and settled in, Gentili kept you informed of his new apostolate

Gentili:  I am here in the midst of four villages, two of which are very large and all at a distance of several miles from Grace Dieu.   I have already taken a room in one of the villages and I must say to my great satisfaction and consolation, I find a great harvest prepared.   I have to contend with the most violent opposition from the Parsons and their party.   In Shepshed, a large village of about five thousand people I have already above forty under instruction and I hope to receive them into the church next Christmas.  There are hundreds who will become Catholics.

Narrator:          At Shepshed, his difficulties produced a great harvest.   There he built the first Rosminian church in England, he built a school for 150 pupils and in ten months he had received 320 people into the Church.   His success at Shepshed led to a break with Ambrose Phillips de Lisle and Fr. Pagani asked you to move him.   In 1842, you sent Gentili to Loughborough where he remained until 1845 when you gave him permission to begin his full-time missionary work which was ultimately going to kill him.

Not only in England but in Italy the Institute of Charity was growing.   But clouds were gathering as some of your writings were criticised by your political enemies who persuaded the Holy See to question the orthodoxy of your Philosophy and Theology.   In spite of the pain of these accusations (all of which have been withdrawn in our own times) you remained serene and refused to retaliate or defend yourself.  This is what you wrote at the time:

Rosmini:           As a devoted and obedient son of the Holy See, which by God’s grace I have always been, I declare that I submit to the prohibition absolutely, simply and as completely as possible.

Narrator:          But not all was conflict.   By an extraordinary circumstance, the Abbe Lowenbruck had taken on the guidance of some Sisters of a French congregation.   When in 1833, it became clear that the Sisters needed a more formal regulation of their lives and affairs and in response to repeated requests, you gave to the Sisters of Divine Providence a Rule which reflected the spiritual legacy which you had already set down in the Rule of the Institute of Charity.   That same Providence now led the Sisters to England in response to a request from Lady Mary Arundell who wanted to open a school at Loughborough and in 1845 the Community had been established in spite of great difficulties and privations at the beginning.

Sr. Francesca:  I remember, we arrived after a very trying journey from Italy but the Lady Arundell made us very welcome at Paget’s House in Loughborough.

Sr. Anastasia:   Yes, but what about our first Sunday in Loughborough.   I remember we went to Mass at St. Mary’s but some local people started throwing stones at us, so we decided to cover our veils in future with an ordinary Victorian bonnet.

Sr. Francesca:    That’s true but in due course the opposition died down and we soon started having ladies asking to join us.   I recall the arrival of Mary Amhurst who became Sister Mary Agnes, the first English superior of the Sisters.   She brought with her what could only be described as a dowry which was so much that it enabled us to begin building what was to become the Convent of Our Lady in Park Road, Loughborough.   It was she who decided soon after she became Superior to hold an ‘open day’ at the Convent so that the local people could see what we were really like.   They came with all sorts of weird stores about the Convent and the Sisters – dungeons, trap doors, suspicious ‘goings on’ and many others.   At least it gave the Sisters the chance to show what the Convent was really like but also to answer some of the questions about things like the Stations of the Cross and statues, about our way of life and what it means.

Sr. Anastasia:      Who would have thought that things would have grown as they did – schools at Whitwick and Loughborough as well as Shepshed, Manchester and thn in South Wales at Newport, Cardiff and then Bexhill and London – but always and only at the request of the Bishop and with the approval of Fr. Rosmini and his successors.

Sr. Francesca:  Yes and not only that.  Later, the Sisters were established in Ireland from where the first Sisters would be sent to Tanzania and much later, others would go to establish a foundation in India.  I wonder how the Sisters of our times would have coped with that….?

Narrator:          Meanwhile, your own Way of the Cross caused you much pain, though without lessening your serenity nor your total surrender of the whole problem into the hands of God.  But the strain of the attacks, the effects on the Institute of Charity and the Sisters, and the doubts raised in the minds of some Bishops, had taken its toll.    Prematurely aged, you retired to Stresa where you spent the last period of your life praying, studying and keeping up a huge correspondence as Superior General of the Institute an also as Spiritual Director of so many individuals.

Finally, the cancer from which you had suffered for some time caused increasing pain and weakness, and long hours of agony.   Then, on July 1^st, Feast of the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ, you tranquilly surrendered your soul to God.

Gentili:  Don Antonio, looking at the world and at the Church of the present, you must have a feeling of vindication, not only that your teachings have been declared to be completely free from error, but that some of those teachings were enshrined in the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

Rosmini:           It is true that God has greatly blessed the little work I did to establish a philosophy which is Christian and reflects the teachings of the Church.   As for the Institute, and the Sisters of Divine Providence, you well remember how I had to counsel prudence and a one-step-at-at-time approach both to you and to the dear Abbe Lowenbruck.   ‘Begin in a small way,’ the Pope had told me, and that was how I acted.   God has allowed the growth and now that the Institute has spread, it is only to His greater glory and to the upbuilding of the Church.

Gentili:  But you see now how the Institute and the Sisters have been established in so many countries outside of Italy – England and Wales, Ireland, the United States, Venezuela, Colombia, New Zealand, Kenya, Tanzania, India – all living out the special gift you left to the Church.

Rosmini:           A special gift, yes, but one which reminds us yet again of the infinite power of God to use the most unlikely instruments to achieve His purpose.   No doubt the Institute and the Sisters will have to endure many new demands and trials and many changes, in the years ahead.   But they, like all Christians, will remain serene, never doubting for one moment that all is in the Providential design of God.   To Him be the glory for ever. Amen.

Narrator:          Antonio Rosmini died in 1855.   In answer to the ceaseless prayers of the Institute and the Sisters of Providence and of his many admirers, the Church has now recognised the heroic virtues of Antonio Rosmini and on this day at Novara, the Church will proclaim him Blessed Antonio Rosmini.  We give thanks to God for this singular grace to Rosmini’s little Institute and to the Sisters and, with the world-wide Rosminian family, we commit ourselves again to live the Gospel according to the special insights and principles which he himself lived so heroically.  Thanks be to God.

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