Blessed Schuster’s Daily Thoughts on the Rule: Saturday after the Fourth Sunday of Lent

Saturday after the 4th Sunday of Lent
Station at St Nicholas in Carcere

The Divine Testimony

1. The Station is at St Nicholas in carcere [in the prison] at the foot of the Capitoline hill, and the Gospel reading describes a new attempt of the Jews to arrest Jesus. It is on purpose that we are at the prison [Carcere] of the early Middle Ages in Rome!

The Saviour solemnly affirms today: ‘I am the light of the world. He who follows Me does not grope about in the darkness, but will have the light of life.’

We can consider the works of grace in two ways: in the salvation of each Christian, or collectively in the sanctification of the Church as such, that is, inasmuch as she is the complement and the pleroma [fullness] of Christ.

They are two points of view which mutually complete each other.

In general, the spirituality of the ancient Fathers, especially of the East, considered the Christian Community, that is the Church, or as Origen says, the mystery of the Church, more than the single individual.

Jesus affirms in the Gospel: ‘I am the light of the world.’ This world means all of human society.

It is dangerous to encapsulate ourselves, even ascetically, in our own ‘I’, so as to forget little by little the grand mystery of the predestination of the Church to the dignity of being the mystical body of Christ, His spouse, and the City of the Highest King.

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2. The Divine Saviour authenticates His message with the authority of the Divine Father, and He observes to the Jews that two testimonies give a sufficient guarantee. Now, the witnesses are in fact two: He and the Father.

The Saints, when they are contradicted or calumniated in the world, repeat with the Saviour: ‘I do not seek indeed my own glory; there is instead one Who vindicates it and Who judges.’

The history of the Church shows us quite eloquently how God has vindicated the honour of His Saints, beginning with His Only-Begotten Son, Whom He raised from death.

The Priest Florentius at Subiaco was already singing of victory against the Patriarch Saint Benedict, whom he had forced to plant his tents elsewhere. But in that very hour the hand of God reached him, and the honour of the voluntary Exile was vindicated. Est qui quaerat et iudicet.

When in 1917 Wilhelm II proposed to celebrate solemnly the centenary of Luther;¹ when Hitler later dreamed of driving the Roman Pontiff from the Vatican, from Italy, and from Europe, it was he instead who was deprived of life, along as his various adherents. Est qui quaerat et iudicet. (John 8:50: ‘There is One Who examines and judges.’)

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3. The Jews would have liked to arrest the Divine Master, but, as Saint John describes: Nemo apprehendit eum, quia nondum venit hora eius. (John 8:20: ‘No one arrested Him, because it was not yet His hour.’)

Why did they non arrest Jesus? Because He did not yet will it. When He wills, He will deign to let Himself be arrested and suffer for us. In Christ, the Passion was a spontaneous and voluntary sacrifice, and not a [sudden] act of violence undergone.²

And why does the Lord not want to be arrested at this moment? Because His time has not yet arrived.

Quia necdum venerat hora eius.

All the things of God have their time, and the time is ordained by the Divine Father. Hence, in order to remove from the Apostles a preoccupation with future political events, the Lord once declared to them: Non est vestrum nosse tempora vel momenta quae Pater posuit in sua voluntate. (Acts 1:7: ‘It does not pertain to you to know the times and the moments which the Pater keeps in His will.’)

We know that this will is powerful, and wise, that is, that it is benevolent. This should be enough for us to entrust ourselves simply to God’s good pleasure.

This is precisely what Saint Benedict did when he foresaw the future destruction of Monte Cassino.

¹While Kaiser Wilhelm II lived until 1941, Br. Schuster may be alluding to the fact that in 1918, a year after the
centenary referred to, he was forced to abdicate amid Germany’s defeat in the First World War.—tr. ↩

²The Italian, non violenza subita, is somewhat ambiguous, as subita can be either the past participle of subire, ‘to undergo, to submit to’, or an adjective meaning ‘sudden’. The words are distinct, as they are accented differently in pronunciation. The first meaning, ‘violence undergone’, seems more likely in context.↩