Bulletin Column from September 4, 2022

Dear Friends at Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish and Saint Frances Cabrini Parish:

Praised be Jesus Christ! In mid-August I was very fortunate to be able to return for nearly two weeks to some of the places and faces of my 2019 sabbatical. The main location of my visit was to the monastery “Stift Heiligenkreuz” which lies roughly 30 minutes west of Vienna, in Austria. This is a Cistercian monastery, home to just over 100 men, the vast majority of whom are from Germany and Austria. Not only is the Medieval and Baroque era grounds lovely and peaceful, but the community itself is markedly warm, vibrant, and holy. There is a wide range of ages and backgrounds in the house with many young, new members.

True to the European monastic tradition, it is also a community that interacts continually with the surrounding area, with Heiligenkreuz at the center of the Catholic life of the region. The priests and brothers there staff several parishes, welcome the locals to their community prayers, offer continual confessions, blessings, devotional opportunities, Catholic formation opportunities, and also serve the pilgrims passing daily along the Via Sacra which is Austria’s oldest pilgrimage route on which the monastery sits.

Most interesting for me when I visit there is the opportunity to talk with the men and with the locals about the state of the Church in Europe, especially in the German-speaking territories. It is also an opportunity for me to share a bit with them about what the Catholic Church is like in America since many of them are not directly familiar with our experience here.

Sadly enough, it could probably be said that Heiligenkreuz is among the few bright spots in an otherwise very bleak German and European Christian landscape these days. When I would share with them how active our parishes are here, how many people come to Mass, how we run our own schools with our own donations, how many volunteers we have, how many seminarians we have, etc, etc, many of them are astounded. One of them shared with me that he finds great hope in the American Catholic church, and that hopefully one day they will emerge out of their Continental winter of faith into a future, spring-time of evangelization.

All this by way of saying that for all of the challenges we have here in the American Catholic church, and indeed we do have them, one sometimes does not appreciate just how truly lively, amazing, and vibrant we are here until one gets a first-hand look at other places where the faith really is all but dead. I returned home with a renewed appreciation not only for the great gift of that monastery, which most definitely represents the next surviving generation for what will be a very small German church, but an appreciation also for our parish communities here in West Bend. We are so fortunate here in so many ways.

As I’ve observed previously, one complication to the picture is that Christian Europe still exists as something like a cultural museum-piece. It’s buildings, artwork, and many customs are still everywhere, rather like seeds lying dormant and waiting to sprout again. For many residents of Europe these things are mere symbols and not expressions of lived faith, and yet they are still attached to them in ways that are deeply rooted. In the pockets of Europe where faith is still alive, especially in some of the rural Alpine areas where I often travel, the synthesis of the State, the Church, and the Culture are seamless in ways that we in America cannot even begin to grasp. America has never officially had a state religion, or a majority religion, in the ways that Europe had for most of its history. Meaning a danger for us here is that often our faith, while lively, is usually practiced in a very private manner that is not truly of the Gospel. Europe can learn from us, and we can learn from them about what it means to be a Catholic culture.

To that end, please pray for me and for 45 other pilgrims who will be leaving for the Alps on September 11th so that we can view the showing of the famous Passion Play in Oberammergau. Ordinarily I would not be engaging in two overseas trips to the Alps in 6 weeks time, but with Covid re-scheduling, and life events being what they have been for me, all of this landed together during this time of the year.

The pilgrimage to the Passion Play will be for us who are going an opportunity both to learn from the Catholic roots of the parts of Europe that shaped our American Midwestern life so heavily, and it will also be an opportunity for us to evangelize post-Christian Europe by visiting lovely churches and chapels not as tourists, but as believers. Maybe we will inspire our onlookers. I am hopeful we will come back inspired and enlivened by the cultural Catholic beauty that so many of them now take for granted. Please pray for our safe travels there and back and know that everyone here back home will be in our prayers as well.