A Great Irish Benedictine

Page 1

- 24 - A GREAT IRISH BENEDICTINE DOM COLUMBA MARMION 1858-1923. The golden age of Irish Monasticism, called the era of Saints and Scholars, has been at all times a source of sublime inspiration, not only for those interested in the religious life but for lay people and students as well. The records of monastic heroism remain a prodigious example of faith in their lengthy list of ascetics, martyrs and Christian thinkers in Ireland. Before the Rule of St. Benedict appeared, the monasteries of Ireland had, together with the teaching of asceticism, a traditional observance - not indeed a code, but rather a collection of pious maxims and exhortations in prose and verse. Such, for instance, is the short Rule for hermits known by the name of Columba. But up to the time of St. Columbanus we can find no trace of a true or genuine rule, as we apply that term to the Regula Monachorum. Columba, friend and protector of bards and poets, poured forth in song his zeal for the foundations that "the Lord had permitted him to create, or for the glory of other Sanctuaries." Ohief characteristic of St. Columba, born of a noble Irish family in 521, is precisely the extreme renunciation by which he strove to rival the poorest of the poor on earth. He could not bear to think that he would be surpassed in poverty by anybody. In recognition of this extreme mysticism of primitive Irish Christianity, Joseph Marmion, the most authoritative of Irish Benedictines, when clothed in the cassock of the congregation, took the name of the glorious dovelike Saint, who, from the Island of Iona, had anticipated the Apostolate of the Benedictines in England promoted by St. Gregory the Great. Born in Dublin in 1858, the son of William Marmion, a native of Kildare, Dom Columba studied in Rome at the Ludovisian College - to-day the Irish College - where he received his spiritual and cultural formation. The fascination of the great centre of Christianity gave strength to his youthful hopes, satisfaction to his sensitive soul and food to his healthy appetite for learning. With the aid particularly of the Professors of the Urban City College of Propaganda - among whom was Monsignor Ubaldi, the future Cardinals Agliordi, Laurenti, Galimberti, and above all Cardinal Satolli, who was one of the most famous professors of dogmatic theology - he applied himself to a vast field of spiritual studies. He was called upon to expound difficult theses of profound Catholic doctrine from - 26 - Mont Cesar became famous for his elevated discourses. These stirred the whole ecclesiastical world of North-western Europe. Cardinal Mercier was one of Dom Marmion's friends and admirers; he made constant reference to him in his high opiscopal mission. Both of them were eminent among the most valiant preachers of the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas at the Catholic University of Louvain, and their example was afterwards to inspire Father Agostino Gemelli to found in Milan a similar school, destined to become in the modern…