Saint Vincent Ferrer today, and we Dominicans stick together.
He is very much a Saint for our times. As devoted a Biblical scholar as he was a philosopher, and vice versa. A vigorous converter of the Jews. A tireless itinerant missionary, preaching to tremendous effect in Aragon, Castile, Switzerland, France, Italy, England, Ireland and Scotland.
And blessed with the gift of tongues, since, other than Ecclesiastical Latin and despite his English father, he had no language but Limousin, which was what they spoke in his native Valencia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (Whatever my solidly left-wing objections to the likes of the Welsh language lobby in South Wales, or the anti-black Spanish lobby in the United States, or the enforcers of bilingualism in English-speaking Canada, I am as Jacobite, Legitimist and Carlist as any in my affection for the old tongues of the pre-Jacobin, and therefore pre-capitalist, Kingdoms.)
Speaking in tongues? The very same. Thoroughly Biblical, and a feature of the Lives of the Saints, notably in this case, and always mirroring the Day of Pentecost in making intelligible what was previously unintelligible. Whereas glossolalia is a twentieth-century running together of two Biblical Greek words in order to describe a twentieth-century phenomenon which does not occur in the Bible. Is it Saint Paul's "tongues of angels"? There is nothing in Scripture to support that view.
The gift of tongues is as manifested by Saint Vincent Ferrer OP, Biblical scholar, philosopher, thus doubly informed and doubly informing theologian, and thanks to that ongoing formation a gloriously successful preacher of the Gospel precisely as an ordained priest and a solemnly professed Religious in perfect unity with the See of Peter. Like the reconciled, previously schismatic community of traditionalist Dominicans under his patronage at Chémeré-le-Roi, recalling his efforts to heal the Great Schism between Rome and Avignon, and celebrating the Old Dominican Rite that he, miraculously healed and a speaker in tongues, also celebrated.
Ora pro nobis.
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We Dominicans?
ReplyDeleteOh, yes, indeed. My formation has been somewhat interrupted by ill health. But oh, yes, indeed.
ReplyDeleteRemind me never to join a club that has accepted you as a member.
ReplyDeleteYou would never be invited, darling.
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful post. So many Catholics are so frightened of anything reminiscent of Pentecostalism that they are not open to the miraculous in the Church of today. That makes them less and less open to the miraculous in the Church's history and in the Bible.
ReplyDeleteThose who are get mixed up with the Charismatic Renewal, which depends heavily on Protesant material and seems to have no concept of how truly Charismatic and Pentecostal the Tradition really is. Even Traditionalists seem to be pretty wary of these things because the Charismatic Catholics are part of the "Spirit of Vatican II".
Yet, of course, they are anything but liberal. The politics of these things make more sense on the other side of the Tiber, where the Charismatic Renewal is the one thing with which liberals cannot cope. I'll be doing a full post on all of this at Pentecost.
ReplyDeleteI will try and make a serious point that has always confused me. The gift of tongues means that when the person speaks everyone hears them in their own language. The person speaks the one language but everyone hears it differently. If this is the case, is this not the gift of ears?
ReplyDeleteNo, because it accompanies the speaker, not the spoken to. The miracle only occurred when they heard Saint Vincent, at least usually only once in their lives. Whereas it occurred to and through Saint Vincent many times, in many different places.
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