Dear Teachers,
Ave Maria Press sponsors its own chapter of Catholic Relief Services.
We have been blessed in the past two years to be involved with local initiatives in our community to help those in need, but primarily aiding CRS in its goals to procure help from the United States Congress in supporting ratification of the Farm Bill, a bipartisan bill that funds several food, clean water, and education programs that offer support to the most vulnerable people internationally.
We are asking for your help in gaining support from your local congressional representative and US senators to support passage of the Farm Bill.
The vote comes up in the house in September so the time for action is now. We suggest an assignment for your students to write letters to the editor of your local or regional newspapers.
The letters can be written by
• individual students
• small groups of students
• entire classes (e.g., Social Justice or any theology course, US Government or US History, English)
The letters should contain a basic request about passage of the Farm Bill. You can share basic information on the Farm Bill from the handout linked here. This CRS video also provides orientation to the Farm Bill for your students to watch before writing their letters.
The letters should be brief and personalized by the students; simply telling why the basic right for food, water, and education should be guaranteed for all people is personally important to them.
As necessary, have parents sign a waiver that agrees to allowing their sons or daughters names to be published in a newspaper.
Once completed, mail the letter(s) to the editor of a newspapers in your area and region. List yourself as a contact person.
Ave Maria Press will award a classroom set of 30 books (book options below) to the first three classes that have an individual, small group, or entire class letter on Farm Bill ratification published in a newspaper. Send a photo of the articles (see sample) to me at mamodei@nd.edu. The deadline for publication is July 1, 2023.
Any class that produces a published letter to the editor requesting passage of the Farm Bill can choose 30 books (mix and match okay!) from among these options.
• Lift Up Your Heart
• Go Bravely
• Loved as I Am
• Holy Grit
We hope this will make for an uplifting and important addition to assignments in your final few weeks of school.
Thank your for your interest in supporting this worthy initiative!
Cordially,
Michael Amodei
Executive Editor, Curriculum
https://avemariapress.activehosted.com/index.php?action=social&chash=1efa39bcaec6f3900149160693694536.1463&s=157f9c928e45a1dcf8de5fe04fccd130
One way to increase devotion to the saints is by developing a relationship with one particular saint—your patron saint. This exercise will help students choose their own patron saint. Create and distribute a worksheet with the following prompts.
Your Patron Saint
Write your first and middle names here:
Using a Catholic encyclopedia, or a book of saints, or an Internet site list as many saints as you can find that share one of your names.
Write your birthday and the date of your Baptism here:
List those saints whose feast day is one of the dates written above.
List as many hobbies or regular activities as you can think of that are important to you here:
Find out if there are patron saints for those hobbies or activities. List them here:
Now read the short biographies of the saints you have listed above until you find a story that inspires you. Write that saint’s name here:
Complete the following information about the saint who inspires you and who we can define as your “patron saint.”
Date and place of birth
Lifelong Catholic or convert?
Date and circumstance of death
Best known for
Virtues exhibited by this saint
Temptations or struggles faced by this saint
Extra Credit: Purchase and wear a necklace with a medal of your patron saint. Show the medal to your teacher.
Print the following Scripture passages on 1.5 x 11 strips of paper (one passage per strip):
John 2:1-12
Matthew 15:32-39; 16:5-11
John 6:1-14
John 6:22-71
John 15:1-11
Give each students a Bible and a set of all five strips.
Tell them that in each passage, Jesus offers some explanation for the Eucharist, which he will reveal, finally at the Last Supper.
Ask the students to go to a place where they can be by themselves and reach each passage. On the back of each strip, have them write one sentence that expresses an insight they have about the Eucharist based on the particular passage.
Play some instrumental background music. Allow at least twenty minutes for the students to read, reflect, and write.
When the time is complete, gather the class together, preferably in a large circle. Go around and ask each student to share one or two insights on the Eucharist.
Conclude with a dramatic reading of the Emmaus story (Luke 24:13-35) or the meal with fish (John 21:1-14).
There are a total of twelve Catholic Colleges in this year's March Madness . . . i.e, the NCAA men's and women's basketball championships.
Here's an image of a crossword puzzle with clues for all twelve teams.
If you would like a pdf copy of the worksheet, email me at mamodei@nd.edu and I'll be happy to send it and the solution.
Enjoy!
Brandon Vogt, author of What to Say and How to Say It: Discuss Your Catholic Faith with Clarity and Confidence, shares a forty-minute interview with Dr. Brant Pitre, a professor of Sacred Scripture at the Augustine Institute. The interview is labeled “Trusting in the Gospels.”
You may wish to assign the entire interview and following questions to students as a homework assignment or play all or part of the interview in class and have the students respond to the questions as they are answered in the interview.
Questions
Who is Dr. Brant Pitre?
How do we know the Gospels are true?
What genre are the Gospels?
When were they written?
Who wrote the Gospels?
Were the Gospels anonymous or did they have names attached to them?
How do we know the information passed down through the decades is true?
How did the information not get garbled like the “telephone game”?
What is meant by eternal and internal evidence of reliability in the Gospels themselves?
How do you respond to the charge that the Bible is merely myth and legend
Photo Credit: Dr. Brant Pitre
February 12, 2023 is the 214th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States. Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 15. 1865, by John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate spy from Maryland. Did you know that many Americans thought that Abraham Lincoln’s assassination was a Catholic conspiracy? Author and historian Kevin Schmiesing this and several other unique events in his book A Catholic Pilgrimage through American History: People and Places that Shaped the Church in the United States. Share the story with your students. See also a Teacher Resource Guide that accompanies the book.
Bryantown, Maryland, is an unincorporated community located on State Route 5, a major thoroughfare that leads north to Washington, DC, and south toward the peninsulas of southern Maryland, where the Calverts and other Catholic settlers founded St. Mary’s City (see chapter 2). Bryantown is dominated by its Catholic church, St. Mary’s. The current parish dates to 1793, but there was Catholic liturgy in Bryantown as early as the 1650s.
On the grounds of St. Mary’s is a large cemetery, a testament to the Catholic history of the region. Among the tombs is an unremarkable gray stone engraved with the names Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd and Sarah Frances Mudd. The date of the earlier deceased—Samuel, 1883—belies the contemporary look of the stone. In fact, the original tombstone was replaced in 1940, and it can be viewed at the Samuel Mudd House in nearby Waldorf. Dr. Mudd is the most famous area resident because, in 1865, he participated in what has credibly been called “the most sensational crime in American history.” He helped to kill the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.
Or maybe he didn’t.
The guilt of Samuel Mudd is one of the great, unsettled debates of American history, and the Lincoln assassination connects a bewildering array of political, social, and religious factors in a complex web of intrigue. Catholics were in the thick of it.
Samuel Mudd and Jack Booth
Samuel Mudd was born December 20, 1833, in Charles County, Maryland, the fourth of ten children. He was educated at Georgetown College, the Jesuit school in the District of Columbia, and obtained a degree in medicine from the University of Maryland, Baltimore. In the 1850s, Mudd began practicing medicine in Charles County, married his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Frances Dyer, started a family that would eventually consist of nine children, and began managing a small tobacco farm, where he owned five slaves.
A few years later, the nation was torn apart by the Civil War. Maryland was a border state where loyalties were divided, but Mudd was a proslavery stalwart and thus a southern sympathizer. In 1862, he wrote a letter to the well-known Catholic convert and intellectual Orestes Brownson, explaining his reasons for canceling his subscription to Brownson’s Quarterly Journal. Brownson had written vigorously against slavery and in defense of the war aims of the North, affirming the Catholic Church’s disapproval of human enslavement. Mudd objected strenuously to Brownson’s assertions and declared that the South was fighting to defend states’ rights.
Ominously, in light of later events, Mudd targeted Lincoln as the source of the conflict that roiled the nation: “I confidently assert, that if there was any other man at the head of the government of true conservative and constitutional principles, the Revolution would immediately cease so far as the South is concerned.” He further predicted that the South was capable of standing up to the northern bullies. “She is possessed of every ingredient to make her self-sustaining and powerful—all she wants is a little more time,” he insisted, “and if the war should be protracted, all the better for her future, because her resources will be brought out.”
Like many southerners, Mudd’s optimism concerning the capacity of the Confederacy to keep pace with the war machine of the North proved unfounded. His belief in the threat posed to slavery, however, was accurate. In 1864 the state of Maryland abolished slavery, costing him his labor force and undermining the financial viability of his farm. He decided to sell the property and rely on his medical practice.
There was at the time a young actor who was wandering the area, ostensibly intending to purchase real estate. His name was John Wilkes Booth, and he was in fact planning an escape route from Washington, where he and his collaborators intended to kidnap Abraham Lincoln and force the Union to release southern prisoners.
In December 1864, Booth and Mudd met after Mass at St. Mary’s Church. Was their connection innocent, with Mudd merely courting a prospective property buyer—or was it more sinister, with Booth recruiting the doctor to assist in the conspiracy? This is the critical question in the mystery of Dr. Samuel Mudd.
It wasn’t their only meeting. The government’s star witness in its prosecution of the conspirators after the assassination, Louis Weichmann testified that Mudd rendezvoused with Booth at a Washington hotel in January 1865, and there was spotty evidence that they got together on other occasions.
Booth had been active in creating a small circle of dedicated conspirators, including John Surratt, the son of a widowed boardinghouse proprietor. Mary Surratt, whose story was told in the 2010 major motion picture The Conspirator, was the first woman to be executed by the federal government. She and her son were Catholics from southern Maryland. (Mary’s tavern was the main attraction in the town of Surrattsville—which was promptly renamed following the proprietor’s conviction and execution.)
The Surratts were not one of Maryland’s old Catholic families. Much of their ancestry is unclear, but John Surratt’s biographer guesses that the first American Surratts may have been Huguenots fleeing persecution in Catholic France—one of many ironies in this story. As a child, Mary Surratt, born Mary Elizabeth Jenkins, attended the Academy for Young Ladies in Alexandria, Virginia, a school operated by Mother Seton’s Sisters of Charity. Mary decided to convert from Episcopalian to Catholic during her time there. She married John Surratt Sr. in 1840, and their third child, John Jr., was born in April of 1844. Like the other children, he was baptized at St. Peter’s Catholic Church in the District of Columbia.
“From all indications,” historian Kenneth Zanca writes, “Mary Surratt took her Catholicism very seriously.” Through Mary’s influence, her mother, her mother-in-law, and her brother and his family all entered the Church. Priests were among Mary Surratt’s close friends and confidants. She aided Fr. Joseph Finotti, SJ, as he raised funds for the building of a new church in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Fr. Bernadine Wiget helped with her sons when she grew concerned about the influence of their alcoholic father.
In 1859, John Jr. enrolled at St. Charles College, an institution founded by Charles Carroll of Carrollton as a preparatory school for future priests. The young Surratt was there in 1860 when Abraham Lincoln was elected president and sectional politics raged in Maryland. A classmate later recalled that the young Surratt “was a pronounced friend of the Southern cause from the start, yet I do not recall that he ever made himself offensive to anyone by the persistency of his views.”
In August 1862, John Sr. died, leaving Mary a widow. She asked her son to come back home, and he left his classmates at St. Charles, never to return. Mother and son devoted themselves to their farm and tavern. Failing to make ends meet, they decided to move into the District and manage a boardinghouse on H Street, not far from Ford’s Theater. Priests and sisters were among its patrons. It was a popular gathering place.
The final meeting between Booth and Mudd occurred on April 15, 1865. On the previous day, Good Friday, Booth had entered Ford’s Theater and shot Abraham Lincoln as he watched the play Our American Cousin. With the surrender of the Confederate Army on April 11, the motive of prisoner exchange had evaporated. In its place welled the frustration and fury of defeat. Booth had vowed to destroy the man who symbolized the end of the Confederacy and the southern way of life.
When Booth leapt from the viewing box—or perhaps in a riding accident during his escape—he broke his leg. He managed to make his way to Mudd’s house in Maryland (the place, now a museum, where the original tombstone is preserved). After Mudd treated Booth, the assassin and his coconspirator David Herold resumed their flight from the relentless manhunt. Booth would be cornered and shot by federal troops a few days later.
Samuel Mudd and Mary and John Surratt were among those implicated and captured in the dragnet of the federal investigation of the assassination. A total of eight conspirators were tried and found guilty. Four, including Mary, were hanged. Four, including Mudd, were imprisoned.
A Catholic Conspiracy?
The Catholic connections of some of the accused were not lost on a distraught, conspiracy-minded public. David Herold, who accompanied Booth on his escape, had attended Georgetown College. The Jesuit link was a suggestive one. Members of the Society of Jesus, champions of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, had been antagonists of Protestantism since the sixteenth century. Shortly after the assassination, a letter addressed to War Secretary Edwin Stanton from a former Protestant Civil War chaplain tried to connect the dots and helpfully suggested where the fugitive might be found:
John M. Surratt is a Roman Catholic, once patronized . . . by the priests of Georgetown. . . . As the Papal government only has shown favor to the Southern Rebellion, and the loyalty of a large proportion of the Catholic clergy is, to say the least, questionable, is not the presumption fair, that Surratt is harbored in some of their secret sanctuaries, more likely in Georgetown?
Surratt was in fact in Canada at the time. He had fled immediately and was the only major conspirator to escape punishment.
Stanton’s tipster, though perhaps motivated by irrational anti-Catholicism and not quite accurate as to either the position of the Catholic Church on the Confederacy or the geographical location of Surratt, did shrewdly guess somewhat close to the mark. Surratt in fact had the assistance of priests during his exile from the United States. Stanton, for his part, directing the search for Booth and his accomplice, had already issued orders to scour the “counties of Prince George, Charles and St. Mary’s” in Maryland, a region “noted for hostility to the Government and their protection to Rebel blockade runners, Rebel spies and every species of public enemies.” Southern Maryland happened to be both the historic heart of American Catholicism and also a hotbed of Confederate sympathy. There was plenty of grist for the mill of those who were determined to view the Lincoln conspiracy as a Catholic plot.
The anti-Catholicism of the 1850s—manifested in the Bedini riot and the affair of the pope’s stone (see chapters 13 and 14)—had been tempered by the Civil War. Indeed, part of the motivation for the nativism of the Know-Nothings—the “American” Party—was to solidify a national American identity and preserve the Union. It didn’t turn out that way, as the pioneering historian of nativism, John Higham, notes: “The division between North and South, which nativists endeavored to submerge, soon submerged nativism.” Nativism, including its anti-Catholic component, would not long remain under water, however. Even as northern Catholic opposition to the war and emancipation kept northern Protestant suspicion toward Catholics kindled during the conflict, Catholic involvement in the Lincoln assassination furnished fresh fuel for antipapist fires afterward.
Mary and John Surratt’s Catholic connections were not merely historical. In Canada, John lived in the house of a priest in a remote village in the province of Quebec. In September 1865, he fled to England, where he lodged at a Catholic oratory in Liverpool. The following spring, he moved again, this time to Italy, where he joined the Papal Zouaves, a short-lived military unit composed of volunteers from around the world who banded together to defend the territorial claims of the papacy as the Papal States were besieged by Italian nationalists during the 1860s.
The anti-Catholic narrative had problems, though. While Maryland was the cradle of Catholicism in the British colonies, it was also a den of anti-Catholic sentiment. Secretary of State William Seward, the other victim of the April 14 plot, was a detested figure in southern Maryland, in part because of his friendliness to Catholics and other immigrants. There is also the fact that, once papal authorities learned the identity of Surratt, they placed him under arrest with the intention of extraditing him for trial in the United States.
But the desperate Surratt escaped from his Roman captors, scrambled into the Italian countryside, and eventually ended up in Egypt. There he was at last apprehended by American officers. In what some continue to view as a miscarriage of justice, the jury—on the strength of testimony that insisted Surratt was not in Washington on the day of Lincoln’s assassination—failed to convict Surratt and he went free. He got married, had children, and taught at a Catholic school in Emmitsburg, Maryland. He lived until 1916 and was buried at a Catholic cemetery in Baltimore.
The Conspiracy Theory Lives On
During Mary Surratt’s trial, five Catholic priests appeared as character witnesses for the accused. Fr. Jacob Walter, her parish priest, joined Mary’s daughter in a frantic final attempt to stay the execution. “You cannot make me believe,” he wrote later, “that a Catholic woman would go to Communion on Holy Thursday and be guilty of murder on Good Friday.” Their efforts failed. On the morning of the hanging, Mary appeared in the company of Frs. Walter and Wiget. They spiritually and physically supported the middle-aged woman, who fainted as she approached the scaffold. They were present as the trap door opened and her mortal life ended. Her body, with those of the other conspirators, remained in government custody for several years but was finally interred in 1869 at Mount Olivet, a cemetery of the Archdiocese of Washington.
Protestant disgust at Catholic involvement in the plot prompted Congress to take action as well. It passed a ban on funding for an ambassador to the Vatican that stood for over a hundred years. The beleaguered Pope Pius IX was in the process of losing the Papal States—the Church’s sovereign possessions for over a thousand years (the efforts of the Papal Zouaves came to naught)—and thus the need for a diplomatic mission to the pope seemed diminished in any case.
The notion of a Catholic assassination conspiracy, far from petering out, actually gained momentum in the postwar era. One of the most flamboyant anti-Catholics of the nineteenth century, ex-priest Charles Chinquy was its chief proponent. His 1885 screed, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, has been called the “main witness” for the prosecution against the Church and the first “systematic development” of the assassination as a “Catholic grand conspiracy.”
There had been rumblings of an unseemly affinity between Catholicism and Confederacy during the war. The southern government made overtures to Pope Pius IX, and he replied in a friendly though diplomatically noncommittal way. The supposition of natural alliance between what they saw as two enemies of freedom was confirmed in the minds of papal detractors by Pius’s sympathetic gesture of sending a letter to Jefferson Davis, the imprisoned former president of the Confederacy, after the war.
Chiniquy heated this simmering controversy to a boil by fabricating Lincoln quotations, which in turn became stock items in the anti-Catholic literature of subsequent decades. “I do not pretend to be a prophet,” the president allegedly said, “but though not a prophet, I see a dark cloud on our horizon. And that dark cloud is coming from Rome.” During the war, Chiniquy claimed, Lincoln declared, “It is not against the Americans of the South, alone, I am fighting, it is more against the Pope of Rome.” In Chiniquy’s telling, Lincoln thought the First Amendment would need to be curtailed for Catholics because they are “sworn and public enemies of our constitution, our laws, our liberties, and our lives.”
The editors of one Lincoln collection describe Chiniquy as “the biggest liar in Lincoln literature,” but no matter: Fifty Years was a huge success. It reached forty editions by 1891, and among its publishers was the major evangelical press Fleming H. Revell. Chiniquy spread his message by spoken as well as printed word. He was a popular draw on the lecture circuit until his death in Quebec in 1899.
A Chiniquy pamphlet summarizing the case for a Catholic conspiracy made the rounds during the election of 1890. The secular Los Angeles Herald denounced it as “too silly for any sane man or woman’s attention,” but conceded that it was “widely circulated.” The nativist American Protective Association rehashed Chiniquy’s claims in its magazine in the same decade. The tale long outlived the teller. In the 1910s, an abridged version of Chiniquy’s account, titled “The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Romanists,” was published in the anti-Catholic periodical The Menace, circulation 1.5 million. The fundamentalist Jack Chick Publications republished the story once again as “The Big Betrayal” as late as 1981, and both Fifty Years and the Jack Chick article remain easily available online, preserving the Catholic conspiracy theory for generations to come.
His Name Was Mudd
Samuel Mudd was sent to an American prison in the Dry Tortugas, west of the Florida Keys. At first he tried repeatedly to escape, but he eventually submitted to his fate. He distinguished himself by his service as a physician during a yellow fever outbreak, and this among other factors was cited in President Andrew Johnson’s pardon decree of February 8, 1869.
Mudd returned to his family in Maryland and lived out the rest of his days in peace. When he died in 1883, he was buried in the parish cemetery. One granddaughter, Cecilia, joined the Congregation of Holy Cross, taking the name Sr. Samuela. She died at the congregation’s convent at Notre Dame, Indiana, in 2003. A grandson, Richard, devoted himself to clearing his grandfather’s name, going so far as to petition Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Both responded similarly, expressing their personal opinion that Mudd was innocent of any serious wrongdoing but also insisting that they had no power to formally overturn a federal conviction. “As President,” Reagan wrote, “there is nothing I can do. Presidential power to pardon is all that is in a President’s prerogatives and that, of course, was done by President Andrew Johnson.”
Did Mudd willingly participate in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln? The definitive answer will likely never be known. It’s a secret Mudd took to his grave—the one that lies in the cemetery of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Bryantown, Maryland.
Grave of Dr. Samuel Mudd
St. Mary’s Catholic Church
13715 Notre Dame Place
Bryantown, Maryland
Listed below are the key Church laws known as the precepts of the Church. Review the precepts and the requirement for Catholics to keep them. Use the accompanying questions for a discussion or journal-writing activity. Non-Catholics can answer the questions in terms of “if they were Catholic.”
1. You shall attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation and rest from servile labor.
What are the times of the weekend Masses at your parish?
Which time do you prefer to celebrate Mass? Why?
2. You shall confess your sins at least once a year.
What value do you find in the celebrating the Sacrament of Reconciliation?
When are natural times during the year that you celebrate this sacrament?
3. You shall receive the Sacrament of Eucharist at least during the Easter season.
What is a prayer or reflection you say to yourself after receiving Holy Communion?
Compare your feelings about the Eucharist now as to when you received your First Communion?
4. You shall observe the days of fasting and abstinence established by the Church.
How does maintaining your physical health related to being spiritually fit?
What are the benefits of days of fasting and abstinence? Should the Church have more of these days?
5. You shall help to provide for the needs of the Church.
How might you divide your charitable donations among your parish and other organizations?
What percentage of a person’s income is reasonable to expect to be allowed for charity?
Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 Encyclical, Spes Salvi, which takes its name from Romans 8:24, “Spes salvi facti sumus” – in hope we were saved, is dedicated to the theme of Christian hope. The following citation is from paragraphs 10 to 12, a section subtitled “Eternal Life—what is it?”
Make copies of the text and pass out to each student. Lead a discussion on eternal life based on this reading. Discussion prompts are listed below.
We have spoken thus far of faith and hope in the New Testament and in early Christianity; yet it has always been clear that we are referring not only to the past: the entire reflection concerns living and dying in general, and therefore it also concerns us here and now. So now we must ask explicitly: is the Christian faith also for us today a life-changing and life-sustaining hope?
Is it “performative” for us—is it a message which shapes our life in a new way, or is it just “information” which, in the meantime, we have set aside and which now seems to us to have been superseded by more recent information? In the search for an answer, I would like to begin with the classical form of the dialogue with which the rite of Baptism expressed the reception of an infant into the community of believers and the infant's rebirth in Christ. First of all the priest asked what name the parents had chosen for the child, and then he continued with the question: “What do you ask of the Church?” Answer: “Faith”. “And what does faith give you?” “Eternal life”. According to this dialogue, the parents were seeking access to the faith for their child, communion with believers, because they saw in faith the key to “eternal life”. Today as in the past, this is what being baptized, becoming Christians, is all about: it is not just an act of socialization within the community, not simply a welcome into the Church. The parents expect more for the one to be baptized: they expect that faith, which includes the corporeal nature of the Church and her sacraments, will give life to their child—eternal life. Faith is the substance of hope. But then the question arises: do we really want this—to live eternally? Perhaps many people reject the faith today simply because they do not find the prospect of eternal life attractive. What they desire is not eternal life at all, but this present life, for which faith in eternal life seems something of an impediment. To continue living for ever —endlessly—appears more like a curse than a gift. Death, admittedly, one would wish to postpone for as long as possible. But to live always, without end—this, all things considered, can only be monotonous and ultimately unbearable. This is precisely the point made, for example, by Saint Ambrose, one of the Church Fathers, in the funeral discourse for his deceased brother Satyrus: “Death was not part of nature; it became part of nature. God did not decree death from the beginning; he prescribed it as a remedy. Human life, because of sin ... began to experience the burden of wretchedness in unremitting labor and unbearable sorrow. There had to be a limit to its evils; death had to restore what life had forfeited. Without the assistance of grace, immortality is more of a burden than a blessing”. A little earlier, Ambrose had said: “Death is, then, no cause for mourning, for it is the cause of mankind's salvation”.
Whatever precisely Saint Ambrose may have meant by these words, it is true that to eliminate death or to postpone it more or less indefinitely would place the earth and humanity in an impossible situation, and even for the individual would bring no benefit. Obviously there is a contradiction in our attitude, which points to an inner contradiction in our very existence. On the one hand, we do not want to die; above all, those who love us do not want us to die. Yet on the other hand, neither do we want to continue living indefinitely, nor was the earth created with that in view. So what do we really want? Our paradoxical attitude gives rise to a deeper question: what in fact is “life”? And what does “eternity” really mean? There are moments when it suddenly seems clear to us: yes, this is what true “life” is—this is what it should be like. Besides, what we call “life” in our everyday language is not real “life” at all. Saint Augustine, in the extended letter on prayer which he addressed to Proba, a wealthy Roman widow and mother of three consuls, once wrote this: ultimately we want only one thing—”the blessed life”, the life which is simply life, simply “happiness”. In the final analysis, there is nothing else that we ask for in prayer. Our journey has no other goal—it is about this alone. But then Augustine also says: looking more closely, we have no idea what we ultimately desire, what we would really like. We do not know this reality at all; even in those moments when we think we can reach out and touch it, it eludes us. “We do not know what we should pray for as we ought,” he says, quoting Saint Paul (Rom 8:26). All we know is that it is not this. Yet in not knowing, we know that this reality must exist. “There is therefore in us a certain learned ignorance (docta ignorantia), so to speak”, he writes. We do not know what we would really like; we do not know this “true life”; and yet we know that there must be something we do not know towards which we feel driven.
I think that in this very precise and permanently valid way, Augustine is describing man's essential situation, the situation that gives rise to all his contradictions and hopes. In some way we want life itself, true life, untouched even by death; yet at the same time we do not know the thing towards which we feel driven. We cannot stop reaching out for it, and yet we know that all we can experience or accomplish is not what we yearn for. This unknown “thing” is the true “hope” which drives us, and at the same time the fact that it is unknown is the cause of all forms of despair and also of all efforts, whether positive or destructive, directed towards worldly authenticity and human authenticity. The term “eternal life” is intended to give a name to this known “unknown”. Inevitably it is an inadequate term that creates confusion. “Eternal”, in fact, suggests to us the idea of something interminable, and this frightens us; “life” makes us think of the life that we know and love and do not want to lose, even though very often it brings more toil than satisfaction, so that while on the one hand we desire it, on the other hand we do not want it. To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality—this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy. This is how Jesus expresses it in Saint John's Gospel: “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (16:22). We must think along these lines if we want to understand the object of Christian hope, to understand what it is that our faith, our being with Christ, leads us to expect.
Do the following prior to a class discussion:
Put a question mark near two sentences you don’t understand or would like more information about.
Underline three sentences caused you to muse about eternal life. Be able to explain your thoughts regarding these sentences.
Write your response: How do you understand the meaning of “eternal life”?
