Robert_Wild_-_Catherine_Doherty_Servant_of_God

community life—but they were all harmonized in a different
lay mode, you might say. (Were not most of early
monastics lay people)
Secondly, due to my searchings as a parish priest, I recognized
that Madonna House was a new, living, model of
the Church which Vatican II had articulated. In the
1950s, five priests had already joined Madonna House.
They had been reading earlier Church documents in
which the Popes were calling for Catholic action. These
priests saw the need to encourage the lay apostolates.
They, too, were seeking a new, more vibrant expression of
the Church. One of them, Fr. Émile Marie Brière, visited
a certain Fr. Fulton Sheen in 1944, who said that the
Church at that time was not on the offensive or the defensive
but on the expository, that is, seeking to express who
she really was. How perceptive his insight was has been
vindicated by the Church’s own reflection on these movements
at the end of the last century. (More of that below.)
And there was something else about Catherine that I
didn’t realize for many years but had subconsciously experienced
in my monastic formation. It was the fact that I
had received the Catholic spiritual and ascetical tradition
through holy men who were living it themselves. Very few
people now have the opportunity to receive our tradition
in this way. They receive it, if at all, through books, class
work, a good Christian family, a holy friend. Few have the
opportunity to be immersed in a totally Catholic environment
for a few years and to be taught by elders who have
received the tradition, and are passing it on through their
own living witness. I don’t know if a great tradition can
really be passed on in any other way.
What I saw in Catherine, in Combermere, was that
people were experiencing the great traditions of East and
West through the life and teaching of a very alive, dynamic,
charismatic, Christian genius. It wasn’t exactly old
Russia she was transmitting; it wasn’t exactly the Western
tradition either: it was both, in some unique expression.
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