Activate Javascript or update your browser for the full Digital Library experience.
Previous Page
–
Next Page
OCR
78 The Spirituality of Cornelia Connelly
Less than a year after this letter Pierce left Grand Coteau to become
travelling tutor to a young English gentleman. His purpose was both to try
separation from his wife and to discuss again with ecclesiastical authorities
how he might become a priest and a Jesuit. On the way to England in May
1842 he was asked to speak in the Cathedral in Baltimore. Here again he
picked up the themes of his “Royal Road:”
When I looked for the Catholic Church’s claims to be Holy . . . I took the
works of their great Council, the holy Ecumenical one of Trent, and, for
the first time, I saw the Bible treated, in all its breadth, as a book of not
impossible commands, and the Lord’s tremendous counsels of daily mar-
tyrdom — and deliberate abandonment of wealth and honor, and the holy
happiness of married life, and of the love of kindred, and of the love of
life... . And when I sought for men, such as the Fathers of Trent had
created in my imagination, I looked for them, not among the idle in the
market places, .. . I looked for men who had thrown their wealth into the
lap of poverty or into the treasury of the Lord, who have left their babes in
their cradles, who had given the last kiss to a dear mother or a dearer wife,
or who had fled from even the consecrated embraces of women that they
might go with the Lamb where he goeth forever... . in a word I found
more than ever I had hoped for. I found in thee, O Holy Church of Rome,
what if I had not found in thee, I could have found nowhere.?”!
There is, in this address delivered publicly, a disturbing failure to
distinguish between the renunciatzon of wealth, honor, the companionship
of mother or kindred, and the rejection of marital obligations to wife and
babes, the rejection also of a vocation to marriage as on a par with celibate
renunciation. It is disturbing also that this doctrine of renunciation is pro-
claimed as a distinctive sign of the Catholic Church’s holiness. It is impor-
tant to note that no reaction to it has been found in the American or
British Catholic press or correspondence. This same sermon of 1842 was
republished in Britain in 1853 after Pierce’s apostasy, not with any critique
of his doctrine of marriage/celibacy/perfection, but, on the contrary, to
show how emphatically he had, before apostasy, proclaimed the Church's
holiness. Not even John Henry Newman who read the republication of
Pierce’s address critiqued this particular doctrine of holiness.”°
The same failure to critique Pierce’s doctrine of holiness can be
observed in a response of the English Jesuit Provincial to Pierce’s inquiries
in 1842 about his possible admission to the Jesuits. Pierce wrote: “In fine,
the thing is to find out what is the means and when is the soonest time that
both [Pierce and Cornelia] may enter a holier state.” Although Father Pro-
vincial Lythgoe did not encourage Pierce, in view of his heavy obligations
to his family for the foreseeable future, neither did he, at least in his letter,
raise the question with Pierce whether, in fact, his marriage might be “a
holier state.”*°3 One wonders whether anyone might have raised this ques-
tion in the nineteenth century. As late as 1891 a manual on religious life
read:
i rs