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Prayer

For those of us whose apostolate is within the world, the prayerful power and contemplative intercessions of the religious has our back, for they are a mighty arm of the Church and their prayer is one of the sharpest swords of the Word, now as it was centuries ago, when St. Teresa of Avila wrote these words: "I think we should act as people do when, in time of war, the enemy has overrun the country and the king finds himself hard pressed. He retires into a strongly fortified town from whence he sometimes makes a sortie. The small company with him in the citadel, being picked men, are better than a large army of cowardly soldiers; thus they often come off victors, they are not vanquished for there is no traitor in their ranks and famine alone can conquer them. No famine can force us to surrender--it may kill us--it cannot vanquish us! But why have I told you this? To teach you, my sisters, that we must ask God to grant that, of all the good Christians in this fort, none may desert to the enemy, that no traitor may be found here, and that the captains of this castle, or city--that is, the preachers and theologians--may be proficient in the way of our Lord. Since most of these are religious, you must pray that they may advance in perfection and may follow their vocation more perfectly. This is very necessary, for, as I said, it is the arm of the Church and not of the State which much defend us now. We, being women, can fight for our King in neither way: Let us, then, strive so to live that our prayers may avail to help these servants of God who have laboured hard to arm themselves with learning and virtue with which to help their Sovereign." The Way of Perfection, [1565]. (1997). Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers. (pp. 16-17)

With Peter, to Christ, through Mary, for the greater glory of God

Apostolate

Of the wealth of material shaping the work of the laity, we rely primarily on the Apostolic Exhortation Christifideles Laici by Pope John Paul II (1988); and of that material which relates the history and development of the Church's social teaching, we rely primarily on the two-volume work, Christian Social Witness and Teaching: The Catholic Tradition from Genesis to Centesimus Annus by Rodger Charles S.J. (1998) and his earlier work, The Social Teaching of Vatican II: Its Origin and Development (1982); and of that material which defines the social teaching of the Church, we rely primarily on the seminal encyclical on socialism of Pope Leo XIII in 1878, Quod Apostolici Muneris, and on that identified by Pope Benedict XVI in (and including) his 2005 Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, and his recent encyclicals, Spe Salvi, in 2007 and Caritas in Veritate, in 2009.

" 27. It must be admitted that the Church's leadership was slow to realize that the issue of the just structuring of society needed to be approached in a new way. There were some pioneers, such as Bishop Kettler of Mainz (died 1877), and concrete needs were met by a growing number of groups, associations, leagues, federations and, in particular, by the new religious orders founded in the nineteenth century to combat poverty, disease and the need for better education. In 1891, the papal magisterium intervened with the Encyclical Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII. This was followed in 1931 by Pius XI's Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. In 1961 Blessed John XXIII published the Encyclical Mater et Magistra, while Paul VI, in the Encyclical Populorum Progressio (1967) and in the Apostolic Letter Octogesima Adveniens (1971), insistently addressed the social problem, which had meanwhile become especially acute in Latin America. My great predecessor John Paul II left us a trilogy of social Encyclicals: Laborem Exercens (1981), Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) and finally Centesimus Annus (1991). Faced with new situations and issues, Catholic social teaching thus gradually developed, and has now found a comprehensive presentation in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church published in 2004 by the Pontifical Council Iustitia et Pax. Marxism had seen world revolution and its preliminaries as the panacea for the social problem: revolution and the subsequent collectivization of the means of production, so it was claimed, would immediately change things for the better. This illusion has vanished. In today's complex situation, not least because of the growth of a globalized economy, the Church's social doctrine has become a set of fundamental guidelines offering approaches that are valid even beyond the confines of the Church: in the face of ongoing development these guidelines need to be addressed in the context of dialogue with all those seriously concerned for humanity and for the world in which we live." (Deus Caritas Est #27)

***

Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, O.C.S.O. (1946) teaches us what is necessary to hold and grow the soul of the apostolate:

"SEVENTH TRUTH. I must seriously fear that I do not have the degree of interior life that Jesus demands of me:

"1. If I cease to increase my thirst to live in Jesus, that thirst which gives me both the desire to please God in all things, and the fear of displeasing Him in any way whatsoever. But I necessarily cease to increase this thirst if I no longer make use of the means for doing so: morning mental-prayer, Mass, Sacraments, and Office, general and particular examinations of conscience, and spiritual reading; or if, while not altogether abandoning them, I draw no profit from them, through my own fault.

"2. If I do not have that minimum of recollection which will allow me, during my work, to watch over my heart and keep it pure and generous enough not to silence the voice of Our Lord when He warns me of the elements of death, as soon as they show themselves, and urges me to fight them. Now I cannot possibly retain this minimum if I make no use of the means that will secure it: liturgical life, aspirations, especially in the form of supplication, spiritual communion, practice of the presence of God, and so on.

"Without this, my life will soon be crawling with venial sins, perhaps without my being aware of it, self-delusion will throw up the smoke screen of a seeming piety that is more speculative than practical, or of my ambition for good works, to hide this state from me, or even to conceal a condition more appalling still! And yet my blindness will be imputed to me as sin since, by failing to foster the recollection indispensible to it, I shall have fomented and encouraged its very cause." (The Soul of the Apostolate, pp. 16-17)

As an additional work of the apostolate, Lampstand maintains a daily weblog commenting on the public square from a Catholic perspective, A Catholic Eye, http://catholiceye.blogspot.com