I found myself on a cold washroom floor, distraught, sickened, trembling, my heart-rate pounding, as I spat into the toilet after vomiting senselessly due to another day of alcohol abuse. My addiction was getting severe. I could feel the stench of vodka in the pits of my stomach, the poison that was getting the best of me was becoming a part of me. I couldn’t go a week without getting completely wasted on hard liquor at least two or three or four times, sometimes it seemed daily.

I was a 17 year-old kid in high school. I attended a bad, inner-city school in Chicago.

My addiction began with a bad relationship.

She was a drinker.

She was a drinker partly because she had a troubling upbringing. She was abused by her father, physically and, at times she implied (though felt too ashamed to admit it directly), sexually.

“There’s no shame in that,” I would say to her today, if I could, attempting to console the wounds of her past: “In being a victim of something so horrific. There’s no shame in that.”

But back then I was far from a mature individual, my character was weak. So we became “drinking buddies.” Instead of helping her with her own addictions, I indulged with her and joined in the escape from reality that was our mutual intoxication.

We were in love. …. Needless to say, it was far from a healthy love. I noticed that around this time, as my infatuation with her and with alcohol grew, my prayer life (though, in those years, it was never that great to begin with) completely deteriorated. I stopped praying altogether.

Here, with her, with the love that we had, with the highs that we shared, I felt an ecstasy; an ecstasy that I didn’t feel in prayer. I felt a communion. I replaced one with the other, elevating the creature over the Creator through my actions. Notwithstanding, as the severity of my alcohol abuse intensified and as I eventually found myself in a darker, hellish pit of misery, I slowly started realizing that it was a false ecstasy and a false communion that I was experiencing, that I was seeking: a deceptive, superficial high that came from an empty and senseless place, leading to nothing more than a path of ruin.

I struggled in school. Sometimes I showed up to class intoxicated, once even vomiting, my state was so bad. It was horrible. It was depression, it was darkness. It was low and cold and lonely. The anxiety led me to troubling thoughts, thoughts of ending it, thoughts of the cruelty and emptiness that constituted my life, my existence. At times, the desperation was unbearable.

I couldn’t continue on this road for much longer. My body couldn’t take much more of it. If I did continue, I knew – as I do know today – I would be dead. There were times when I could have died from the excessive amount of substance abuse that my body, my system, took in.

It is a great irony, if not mystery, that we most often feel closest to God when we hit rock-bottom in our lives. That is when we encounter the mortality of life in a deeper way. Through the prism of melancholia, through the dark night of one’s soul – sometimes the darkest of nights – we cry out for help, a cry that is evoked from the innermost depths of our being, a cry so sincere and so desperate and so lonely that a merciful God, a merciful Father, can only see it for what it is: a prayer.

I started praying again.

There is nothing more powerful than a prayer that comes from the deepest, at times darkest, places of one’s heart. …places filled with hurt, with angst, in need of great healing and consolation.

At the time, someone gave me a prayer card. It was a prayer card dedicated to St. Rita of Cascia. They called her “the Saint of the Impossible,” or “the Saint of Impossible Causes.” My cause, I felt, was impossible. I needed her help. I needed her intercession. I needed the hope that this woman, a mystic and stigmatic, symbolized.

Rita, “the Rose of Cascia,” they called her. She was a thirteenth century Italian who, married at an early age, put up with unbearable circumstances under an abusive husband. When she was widowed, this prayerful and devout woman decided to join a convent of Augustinian nuns. It was during a mystical encounter, praying in the convent before an image of the crucified Christ with the words, “Please let me suffer like you, Divine Savior,” that Rita became a stigmatic, receiving a wound from the Crown of Thorns on her forehead. The immense pain of the wound would remain with her for the rest of her life. At her death, the odor from the wound turned into a beautiful scent of roses. Rita developed a reputation after death as being a holy woman whose intercession was responsible for numerous, widespread miracles.

A miracle is what I needed, I thought to myself. My life, at that point, seemed to be going nowhere. Nowhere good, at least. I felt hopeless, a soul without a future. Yet, in reawakening prayer, in responding to God’s mercy, in asking for St. Rita’s intercession, I slowly started feeling spiritual consolations within me, and a gradual detachment from the addictions that possessed me formed.

Our Lady was instrumental in this process, too. I began carrying a prayer card of Our Lady in my pocket every day, asking for help and strength; a prayer card with those famous, timeless words:

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence, I fly to thee, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother; to thee do I come; before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy hear and answer me.

Oh, what words of hope! The beauty of the prayer radiated and touched my sinful and sorrowful self. It is not, by any means, incidental or insignificant that one of the 12 steps of recovery in the Alcoholics Anonymous program includes a spiritual experience. The story goes that the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was largely responsible for this discovery and insight. Treating a patient who suffered from chronic alcoholism, Jung found the man’s condition to be hopeless – with the exception, he thought, of the man encountering a spiritual experience. Jung understood astutely, throughout most of his life, the transformative effects that spiritual experiences have on us.

Though my own experiences with alcohol abuse were not quite that chronic, they were bad. With prayer, however, things began improving. Not only did I stop drinking but, towards the end of my senior year, I was accepted into a good private university, choosing to study political science. Coming from a high school wherein few graduates ever go to college, this was a great blessing. The chances of having a future were, all of the sudden, improving. It was not until my senior year in college, however, that I experienced the profundity that is transformation through a spiritual experience. It was not until that year that I fully understood the timeless words of John Newton’s famous song:

How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed

For me, that hour came when I was handed a book. The book had a title so alien and foreign to me. I’ve never heard such a word before. It was called Medjugorje: The Message by Wayne Weible. As I look back, I realize that I had no idea what I was getting myself into in picking up that book and reading it.

That book changed my life.

It was my mother who encouraged me to read it. Both of my parents are Polish immigrants who can barely read a word of English. She read a Polish edition of the book and, though being a religious woman throughout much of her life, was transformed. There was something different about her. It was noticeable: an intensified spirituality, a deeper joy in prayer, a sense of hope that was previously lacking was now awakened in my mother, for she too was someone who had to put up with many difficulties and hardships in life—not least of which, a troubled marriage. Now she seemed to bear those hardships with a greater ease, a deeper contentment.

That book changed me.

The story of six Croatian children who began receiving apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1981, three of whom continue to claim to do so as adults over 30 years later, gripped me. Slowly the act of reading was no longer simply reading. As I read, something began happening inside of me. The act of reading became a spiritual experience. A glowing warmth overcame my body. My soul began to rise up to a higher presence. I felt the presence and depth of God’s love in an intense and beautiful way. I was gripped by the messages of the Virgin: the messages of prayer, peace, fasting, repentance and reconciliation. I was gripped by the remarkable example of these children who were experiencing the apparitions. How they were changed by the experiences. How they began to attend daily Mass to be in the presence of Christ and then, as everyone left, remained in the church for hours in personal prayer. I have never heard or seen such devotion amongst young people before.

And they carried themselves with so much joy and humility, a joy and humility that came from a deep, soulful place borne of their supernatural encounters. My prayer life changed drastically after that, for I too wanted to experience that joy, that peace. In Medjugorje Our Lady identified herself as the Queen of Peace. Returning to prayer, returning to her Son, reawakening the discipline of fasting—the Medjugorje visionaries fasted on bread and water twice a week, sometimes more— these were the means to true interior peace and transformation.

In college, I studied politics. Political change is about changing structures. But I soon came to realize a profound insight: if there’s no interior change in us, if there’s no spiritual transformation, then external change will also be lacking legitimacy. Structures can be changed, true. But that in itself will not lead to transformation. The human soul longs for things deeper and truer than material comfort. The human soul longs for its meaning, for its purpose: for God.

My prayer life changed completely. There was a deeper sincerity and interiority now, fostered by a greater faith, a deeper dimension of belief. Before reading that book on Medjugorje, I recall how much doubt I had even when I did pray and feel consolation. I remember praying before an icon of the Virgin and Child in my local parish in Chicago and, frequently, asking myself whether I am simply wasting my time, whether I am simply speaking to myself. I hoped that that wasn’t the case. I hoped there was someone on the other side, someone listening to the cries and pleas of this wounded soul. However, I had so many doubts.

After Medjugorje, I never doubted again.

I discovered something so special, so pure and holy in that remote Bosnian village: a reawakened sense of the supernatural. I once read these words from Pope John Paul II. They were words that pierced my heart, touching to the very roots of my spiritual conversion. Addressing a group of Italian physicians on their way to medically study the experiences of the Medjugorje visionaries, the blessed Pope explained: “Today’s world has lost its sense of the supernatural, but many are searching for it – and find it in Medjugorje, through prayer, penance, and fasting.”

With his prophetic words, the great pontiff, someone who possessed such an interior understanding of the supernatural life, nailed it.

Medjugorje illuminated not only my soul but also my skeptical mind in a supernatural way. It was not only the sublime spirituality of Medjugorje that touched my heart, but my intellect was also moved – moved by the facts, by empiricism: by how many scientific and medical investigations were performed on the visionaries, throughout the years, while they entered their ecstasies and experienced their apparitions, and yet no one—not one test, not one doctor or scientist—could disprove or cast doubt on their experiences. On the contrary, the science, ranging from EEG brain scan tests to psychological, neurophysiological, and polygraph exams, all showed that the seers were perfectly healthy, that they were not lying, and that they were, in fact, experiencing something scientifically unexplainable during their apparitions.

This was unbelievable! This was groundbreaking stuff.

As a former girlfriend of mine likes to say, we live in a world that worships at the altar of science. In this case, the science supported the integrity of the spiritual experiences. For the first time in human history neuroscientific technology was used to test visionary encounters and could not diagnose those encounters as pathological in any way. My mind was as stimulated by these findings as my heart and soul were by the spirituality. This phenomenon was fascinating on every level.

My spiritual life changed radically. I started praying at least an hour a day, sometimes a couple hours. I wanted to emulate the visionaries and live the messages Our Lady was giving. I started fasting on bread and water Wednesdays and Fridays. I started praying the rosary daily. Eventually I began attending daily Mass and going to confession regularly. God was touching me in a powerful way through Our Lady and slowly my life was experiencing a transformation.

I decided to apply to Divinity School as a graduate student, hoping to deepen my knowledge of the Christian faith and perhaps discern my vocation along the way.

A few months later, to my great surprise, I received an acceptance letter to Yale Divinity School.

To this day I remember that letter: not only did it speak of admission but it also proudly announced that Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, would begin teaching classes at the Divinity School that following year: the year I was to arrive.

This was unbelievable. The joy was overwhelming. God was too good to me, I thought; just too good. Our Lady was too good. At the time, I was developing a deep devotion to the rosary and praying for her intercession constantly. Yet I never expected anything like this.

My life had taken a remarkable, 180-degree turnaround.

It seemed impossible.

Only a few years back, I was in a wretched state, an absolute mess, an addict; depressed, frustrated, and lifeless, without hopes for any real future or goal in life. Now I would be attending one of the most prestigious Ivy League universities in the world: Yale, a university that has produced American presidents, Supreme Court justices, senators, governors, not to mention theologians and religious minds as prominent as Jonathan Edwards, William Sloane Coffin, and Reinhold Niebuhr.

After Yale, I hoped to continue my studies in religion and spirituality by applying to Ph.D. programs around the country. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to get in, most doctoral programs only take a handful of applicants a year, some as little as one or two, amongst hundreds of applicants.

Then something happened: Our Lady decided to intervene by sending me a Cardinal, so to speak.

As I was sending out my applications in the winter of 2010, Christoph Cardinal Schonborn, the influential Archbishop of Vienna, and former protégé of Pope Benedict XVI, made national news for making a pilgrimage to Medjugorje. I admired him for it, knowing he would experience a lot of opposition for visiting an ongoing apparition site. About a month later, Cardinal Schonborn decided to make a trip to the United States. He would be visiting the Catholic University of America – a place that I was applying to.

Immediately, I decided to hop on a Greyhound bus and make the trip from New Haven, CT, to D.C. to see the Cardinal speak. Deciding to kill “two birds,” I also made an appointment with a CUA faculty member who was on the admissions board, hoping to interview.

Getting on an excruciatingly uncomfortable Greyhound bus overnight to get to D.C., transferring buses at 3:00 a.m. in New York, and witnessing a number of obscenities and perversities that one can only see at the darkest hours of the creepiest stations in America, I was exhausted in the morning, finally arriving to Washington.

Yet the interview went well. I decided to go for it, speak about Medjugorje to the professor (notwithstanding the taboo-nature of the subject within Catholic circles) and tell him how remarkable the neuroscientific evidence is, testing visionary experiences for the first time in human history and disproving a number of pathological theories. The good man didn’t look at me like I was crazy. He was, in fact, impressed with my interests.

Afterwards, I went to see Cardinal Schonborn speak. Giving a lecture on the secularization of Europe and the need for spiritual renewal, he was asked – during Q & A time – by one young lady: “Your eminence, you’re talking about the need for spiritual renewal, will what about Medjugorje!?” she shouted out after her microphone mysteriously went dead.

You could have heard a pin-drop at the moment, the packed hall permeated with an eerie silence at the comment.

Schonborn, sharp and with a bright sense of humor, slowly replied in his thick Austrian accent: “Easier question you don’t have?” He spoke safely, at first, about the importance of the Church to make its final decision on Medjugorje. But then, he opened up, from his heart, emphasizing that if it wasn’t for Medjugorje he would have to close down his seminary in Austria for almost all of the seminarians have received their vocations through Medjugorje. So many young people have converted there, the Cardinal emphasized, his voice breaking a bit from emotion, so many have found their faith there. He had to, he admitted in the end, go for himself as a pilgrim and see what the big deal was.

It was a moving answer—a testimony, in essence—coming from the man’s soul. He did not hide his heart that day. Many of us were touched in the room.

A few months later, I received an acceptance letter to start the doctoral program at the School of Theology and Religious Studies at CUA. It was the one program that accepted me. The letter of admission emphasized that the professor who interviewed me had been made my adviser. We would be working together. If it was not for Cardinal Schonborn making a pilgrimage to Medjugorje that year and then coming to Washington, D.C., to speak, then I would have little interest in making the road-trip down there for an interview. It was another blessing, one which Our Lady was, once again, leading me to.

A deeper point here should not be lost.

I like to think that my problems began not when I started drinking but when I committed the graver sin of halting prayer in my life; in other words, erasing the final traces of hope in a time of trial. Notwithstanding how lukewarm or dry my prayer life was before I started drinking, it still existed. God was still in the picture. Today, God encompasses my entire life, spiritual, moral, and professional—my entire being is (on my stronger days, at least) oriented toward, and around, Him. I tried to replace God by searching for an ecstatic experience in all the wrong places. Through the divine will, and through unfathomable mercy, I slowly discovered that true mysticism, a true experience of transcending one’s self, is impossible when one excludes the Creator from the act of mystical union. Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, the Capuchin friar and papal preacher, uses a great term to describe the deeper, experiential union with the sacred (especially with the Holy Spirit) that we should strive for: sober intoxication.

The Priesthood. It is a very special vocation. Consider and contemplate this unique reality: It is the only vocation wherein a man acquires supernatural powers.

Through, and in, Christ, a man acquires numerous gifts by partaking in that sacred personhood of the Anointed One. There is no greater calling than the priesthood. There is no higher, nay more noble, vocation. I am convinced of this. The facts behind this reality are remarkable.

When a bishop lays his hands on a man’s head, for the purpose of ordination, an ontological change transpires within the man. A mark is left on his soul, one that remains forever. Something changes. He acquires the personhood of Christ and, therefore, along with Christ, can work miracles. Yes, once a man becomes priest, he – for lack of a better term – becomes superman, someone who can make the impossible possible.

Consider the profundity of these realities.

The priest is the only man who can say, “I absolve you of your sins,” and instantly, through the grace given, a soul is cleansed of all sin. Every sin that one has committed in the past, every experience of hurt or shame or regret, is erased in that moment. It is a moment of freedom, liberation, and healing. We are set free. We are healed. Our souls have become pure, cleansed of all the dirtiness that restricted us from flourishing, from reflecting the God-given dignity of our images, as children made in the image of the Almighty. Only a priest has the profound—the supernatural—gift of cleansing a soul its sins. This is a remarkable, remarkable gift, coming through, and working in, Christ the Lord.

The priest is the only man who can make God come down from heaven and enter among us, at the words of consecration during the holy Mass, when the bread and wine turn into the body and blood of Christ Jesus. No other human being, even if speaking the words of consecration, would be able to make this supernatural reality become exactly that: a reality. The priest can. Christ gave him the capacity, at ordination, to do this. It always was, and remains, a wondrous mystery. That a priest can be present anywhere in the world, at any time, and through consecration, bring the supernatural presence of God down to the people. He doesn’t even have to be in a church to do this, as Mass can be celebrated at various venues.   

I, as a lay person, cannot bless another person. It is true: I can, through intercessory prayer, pray for a blessing upon another by the divine, but only a priest can say “I bless you” and the words instantly become a divine reality. Our Lady of Medjugorje once told the visionaries that when a priest blesses a person it is her Son who blesses that person, Jesus himself. It is a poignant reality to both acknowledge and contemplate.

Most often we associate the priesthood, and the prospects of religious vocation, with sacrifices—of which, no doubt, there are plenty (since it becomes a man’s job to become a second Christ, the shepherd of his flock, the servant of his people, when he makes his vows to the Church). No rational person can deny that sacrifice is present.  But too often, I think, we associate the priesthood with incredibly worldly thinking—thinking that concentrates on such sacrifices like celibacy, for instance, and ignores the dignity and sublimity of the vocation that is present in its actualization.

That dignity is seen in (at least) two major ways: the fact that it is a supernatural vocation, of the highest calling wherein the personhood of Jesus Christ, of God Himself, is absorbed in one’s innermost being. And the fact that it is a vocation of self-giving service. A priest becomes a “Father” to many. He does not take a human wife because he is married to the Church, all his efforts, all his life, all his moments, of prayer, charity, preaching, administering the Eucharist, caring for the poor and the sick, confessing and reconciling sinners, offering spiritual direction, are given for the greater glory of God, for the Kingdom of Heaven. His entire life – a priest’s – is oriented around a deeper reality, one of higher value: one that cares not only for the world but also for eternity. In a time when our media is too often infatuated with denigrating the status of the priesthood by giving overt attention to the pedophilia scandals within the Church and concentrating on the minority within the Church who have disgraced the dignity of their vows, let us not forget the majority of good priests who have lived up to their vocations and let us not forget the supernatural dignity of the calling they have responded to. For all our shepherds, let us continue, in humility, praying.      

By the mid-1960s, most observers felt Padre Pio was headed for the dustbin of church history. Paul VI, however, looked kindly on the Capuchin and called off the dogs. In return, one of Padre Pio’s last acts, just days before he died in September 1968, was to write a public letter praising Paul VI’s birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae. – John Allen Jr.

St. Teresa in Ecstasy

Monsignor Slawomir Oder, who is in charge of Blessed Pope John Paul II’s canonization process, aptly wrote: “One can justly think that John Paul II was gifted with an extraordinary perception of the supernatural. A member of his entourage, while they were talking about Marian apparitions, asked him if he had ever seen the Madonna. The pope’s response was clear, ‘No, I’ve never seen the Madonna, but I sense her.’”

That astute perception of the supernatural is something that not all popes have possessed in the same degree. It seems, as history and facts have shown us, that certain popes have had a greater grasp of mystical realities, a deeper intuition of spiritual phenomena than other popes. The case of Pope John XXIII speaks well to this.

John XXIII is most famously known as the pope who formed the Second Vatican Council, of course one of the most important religious events of the twentieth century. For that he does deserve much esteem. However, what is less known about Pope John is that he’s had a very dubious history with the mystics; in essence, he’s had much trouble with correctly discerning the authenticity of God’s divine presence and work in the lives of many contemporary mystics. For example, Pope John had a negative opinion of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, the Apostle of Divine Mercy, who today is recognized as one of the great visionaries and saints of the twentieth century, being canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2000. The private revelations and writings of the Polish visionary have not only led to a popular feast day within Catholicism – Divine Mercy Sunday – but also to a popular prayer devotion – the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. Yet, before all this could transpire, Pope John placed Sister Faustina’s Divine Mercy writings on the Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.

Similarly, speaking of one of the most revered and esteemed saints of the twentieth century, Padre Pio, the great Italian stigmatic and mystic, was also someone who John XXIII had a negative opinion of.  Today Padre Pio has become one of the most popular saints in all of Catholicism, having a worldwide following among millions of devotees and being, reportedly, responsible for thousands of miraculous healings with his saintly intercession. Yet, Saint Pio’s reputation was not always so esteemed within the Church. A recent story published about the great man in the New York Times, which originally appeared in the San Giovanni Rotondo Journal, explained: “Popes had various opinions of him, however, the harshest being John XXIII, who, a recent book contends, considered him a fraud and a womanizer. In 1960, the pope wrote of Padre Pio’s ‘immense deception.’”

The path of controversy is a path that every mystic must walk. And, unfortunately, Padre Pio – like most mystics – had many false and slanderous rumors spread about his sanctity before the historical record was cleared up of all distortions and, finally and formally, the Italian friar was recognized as a saint by the Church in 2002; again, under the guidance and encouragement of Pope John Paul II, who for a long time revered the holy friar.

Interestingly, it was not simply Pope John Paul II who had a different perception of these modern mystics from John XXIII. John’s predecessor Pope Pius XII and John’s successor Pope Paul VI also had a different perception of the mystical from the Vatican II pope. In fact Pope Pius XII was pressured by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, head of the Holy Office then, to place Sister Faustina’s Divine Mercy writings on the Index. Pius refused to do so. Cardinal Ottaviani therefore pressured his successor, John XXIII, with the same task. John signed the decree to place Sister Faustina on the Index of Forbidden Books. 

Interestingly on the same day that Saint Faustina’s writings were placed on the Index, Maria Valtorta was also placed on the Index by John XXIII with Cardinal Ottaviani’s insistence.  Valtorta, the twentieth century mystic who reported experiencing visions of Christ’s life in first century Palestine, culminating in her multivolume work The Poem of the Man God, where she recorded her experiences, did see support – like Faustina – from Pius XII, John’s predecessor.  

Pope Pius held a positive opinion of Valtorta, once enunciating about her work: “Publish this work as it is. There is no need to give an opinion on its origin, whether it be extraordinary or not; whoever reads it will understand. One hears talk of so many visions and revelations. I do not say that all are true; but some of them could be true.” These words were spoken by Pius during a papal audience with Fr. Corrado Berti, Professor of Dogmatic and Sacramental Theology at the Pontifical “Marianum” Theological Faculty of Rome from 1939 onwards, who later become Secretary of the Faculty, as well as a consultant at the Second Vatican Council. The very next day, L’Osservatore Romano recorded this meeting in its February 27, 1948 edition.

Interestingly, Pius XII was also a great supporter of Padre Pio, encouraging devotees to visit the Italian friar. Thus, that’s three cases of modern mystics with which Pius’ opinion differed from John’s: on Sister Faustina, Padre Pio, and Maria Valtorta. This disagreement in spiritual discernment would also be seen in Pope John’s predecessor, Pope Paul VI.

Paul VI also seemed to possess that deeper intuition of the supernatural, that sense of the mystical as seen in popes like Pius XII and John Paul II. Paul VI actually made sure to counter some of John XXIII’s negative opinions and decisions against the mystics. First, Paul VI made sure to officially dismiss all ecclesial charges against Padre Pio, showing them to be without merit. “By the mid-1960s, most observers felt Padre Pio was headed for the dustbin of church history. Paul VI, however, looked kindly on the Capuchin and called off the dogs. In return, one of Padre Pio’s last acts, just days before he died in September 1968, was to write a public letter praising Paul VI’s birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae,” John Allen wrote of the matter.

Second, in addition to starting the rehabilitation process that would lead to Padre Pio’s eventual beatification and then canonization through John Paul II’s papacy, Paul VI also made a significant decision that would affect the legacies of both Sister Faustina and Maria Valtorta. He abolished the Index of Forbidden Books on June 14, 1966.

In fact, with regards to Maria Valtorta and her writings, Paul VI had a personal history, a personal connection and devotion to her work. When Paul VI was Archbishop of Milan, he read one volume of Valtorta’s Poem of the Man God, deeply appreciating it and, thereafter, deciding to send her whole published work to the Seminary of Milan. This information was conveyed to Fr. Corrado Berti during a private meeting that the priest had in 1963 with Monsignor Pasquale Macchi, the private secretary of Pope Paul VI.

Interestingly, this means that the negative opinions that John XIII held of three eminent mystics of the twentieth century – Faustina Kowalska, Padre Pio, and Maria Valtorta – were at odds with the positive opinions that Popes Pius XII and Paul VI held of these mystics, not to mention the positive opinions that Pope John Paul II held of both Faustina and Padre Pio, eventually presiding over their canonizations.

A word is necessary here on the topic of papal infallibility. Unfortunately, many people, including not a few sincere Catholics, do not have a proper understanding of what the term “papal infallibility” means. It does not mean that the Pope is perfect and never makes mistakes—a popular misconception. The Pope, like every other human being in history outside of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, was born with Original Sin and, therefore, also makes mistakes. Pope John Paul II, for example, reported going to confession once a week. Papal infallibility simply refers to the fact that a pope’s decision is infallible when he defines and promulgates a universal dogma in the Church to be true, ex cathedra. Ex cathedra, a Latin term that literally translates to “from the chair,” refers to a dogmatic teaching of a pope that is made with the intention of infallibility and, therefore, cannot be overturned, for it is an eternal and universal truth recognized as being part of divine revelation. Things like the Index of Forbidden books, however, are not infallible. The negative personal opinions of certain popes about mystics or mystical claims, as the prominent example of John XXIII shows, also are not infallible; and, hence, the reason why rehabilitation of mystics and their reputations is a possible, and often occurring, phenomenon.

Not all popes have had the same intuitive sense of the supernatural. We see this fact throughout the twentieth century. Certain popes were clearly blessed with a greater perception of mystical realities in the Church. Popes Pius XII, Paul VI, and John Paul II all exuded a deeper and keener proclivity, in their decisions, of comprehending and understanding deeper, sublime truths associated with private revelations and mystical figures. John XXIII, on the other hand, while gracing the Church and the world with the breakthroughs of the Second Vatican Council, did not, as history shows, possess that same grasp of mysticism.

Patriotism or Paganism?

My home parish in Chicago, a Catholic church that literally resides across the street from my family home, is probably most prominent for a key reason: it is the childhood parish of Francis Cardinal George, the Archbishop of Chicago and the former president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

This past Thanksgiving, I attended morning Mass with my father at the parish. Towards the end of the Mass I did something that I never did before: I abruptly walked out of the church in disgust and anger. It was “liturgical anger” that I was experiencing based on two components. It started with an odd blessing that the priest gave (which could be called liberal) and concluded with a patriotic hymn that parishioners sung (which could be called conservative), both offered at a Catholic church yet neither of which had anything to do with the Catholic faith or Church.

The priest celebrating Mass, an elderly man who years back used to be an advisor to Cardinal Bernardin, offered us, on that Thanksgiving morning, a “Native American blessing.” First, he asked the parishioners to turn East – I thought we were okay, since in the Christian tradition we recognize the rising Sun as coming from the East in symbolic homage honoring the resurrected Christ. Then we were asked to turn South, then West, and then North, while giving honor to the “universal spirit” (which, essentially, felt like it had nothing to do with the Holy Spirit).

I was getting very uneasy.

Don’t get me wrong. I have the utmost respect for Native Americans and would be the first one to admit that their people suffered the greatest travesty of mass murder and ethnic cleansing during the period of Spanish colonialism of the New World at the hands of Christopher Columbus and his men. But I failed to see what place Native American spirituality had in a Catholic church. It felt, in all honesty, like being subjected to a pagan ritual (pagan, I should note, is defined as a religion outside of the monotheistic tradition).

After receiving this seemingly pagan blessing in a Catholic church honoring the universal spirit, as if the revelation of God as Jesus Christ was never known to us, the priest finished the ceremony by asking us to pick up our hymnals and turn to that most idolatrous of songs (my take, not his) as the concluding hymn: “America the Beautiful.”

I had enough. I walked out of there at the very mention of the song. This had nothing to do with Christianity. This was absolute nonsense.

Once again, I failed to see what honoring America had to do with Catholicism, with Christ or His Church. It was not an act of Christian worship. It was (and continues to be) an act of secular idolatry. One should expect such idolatrous acts—at the discomfort of many attuned Catholics—during 4^th of July weekend. However, this on Thanksgiving morning, followed by the Native American blessing, took me by surprise. It felt like going from one form of paganism to another: from a spirituality of an ancient people who did not recognize Christ to a spirituality of a contemporary people who, too often, worship their country at the expense of their faith and Church.

Professor William Cavanaugh, an eminent Catholic theologian teaching at DePaul University, has written about these matters eloquently, perhaps most notably in his book Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church. Cavanaugh explains that many American Catholics fall into a form of modern idolatry toward the nation-state, elevating its status in guiding their decisions while, in the process, devaluing the status of the Pope and the Church.

Cavanaugh gives a powerful example of how many American Catholics, rallying behind their president, supported the Iraq War notwithstanding the strong opposition that Pope John Paul II expressed toward the war, toward the inevitable mass killing of millions of innocent lives, looking for a more reasonable (read: peaceful) resolution to the conflict. Here the Pope’s opinion was not perceived by a majority of American Catholics as the authoritative opinion of their spiritual leader but, on the other hand, in a privatized category as simply one opinion amongst many. In other words, the value of the Church, the value of the Vicar of Christ, is profoundly undermined by the Catholic faithful when the nation-state, thus America (in this example), and its political leadership is given priority over the teachings of the faith and, consequently, the Vicar of Christ and the Church of Christ.     

The Mass, the liturgy, is the most solemn, sacred event in the world. It is the drama of heaven meeting earth. It is the presence of Christ and the Heavenly Kingdom at the altar during the Eucharistic celebration. It is not to be exploited with a glorification of nationalistic or “patriotic” loyalties—many of them not only extrinsic to, but ultimately opposed to, Christian principles and teachings—which, essentially, lead to a glorification of the secular over the sacred. This is what happens when we elevate our country over our Church and our faith – a tendency that, unfortunately, too frequently American Catholics, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, fall into.

Of course, with the “Native American blessing” we get into deeper, spiritual problems that are in play. At the expense of appealing to a certain (pluralistic) political correctness that chooses to honor our Native American brethren, my priest may have neglected the detrimental spiritual consequences of such a blessing. After all, Vatican exorcists often point out that a major reason that demonic possession occurs in victims is through a direct invocation of foreign spirits, at times experimentation with the occult. Thus, when we invoke any foreign spirit that does not belong to the monotheistic tradition we are in great risk of endangering our souls. A priest, especially, has a responsibility to his parishioners to know better.

 Instead of accommodating to a certain liberal political correctness or pluralism which infects the Catholic Mass, the most sacred liturgy, with foreign spiritualities, and – inversely – instead of accommodating to a certain conservative “patriotism” that blindly honors (if not worships) the secular nation-state in the Catholic liturgy, we should try to be honest and responsible Catholics, true to the faith of Christ and no one else. Let us end where we began: Cardinal Francis George once appropriately reflected: true Catholicism does not mean following the left or following the right. It means following the truth.  

•-          Maria Valtorta, The Notebooks 1943

When I was a graduate student at Yale Divinity School I once took a class

          Maria Valtorta

on spirituality and the mystics that was taught by a professor who was also a Catholic sister. When we were not discussing the writings of great mystics like Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, or Yale’s own Jonathan Edwards, we were delving into personal experiences with spiritual encounters. One day in class we were discussing extraordinary phenomena like visionary experiences.

“Do dreams count?” one curious student asked the professor.

“If there’s something different about them,” the professor replied. “If they’re vivid.”

Understanding a vivid dream as something more, as something constituting a visionary experience, is not new in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Dreams as visionary encounters with the divine are pervasively present throughout biblical literature, from both the Old and New Testaments. There are beautiful things that take place not only during vivid dreams, but also after, that show us that the dream was more than a dream: that it was a deeper encounter with a truer reality.

This has happened – among others – to the Italian mystic Maria Valtorta, the twentieth century visionary who reported experiencing visions of Jesus Christ and His life in first-century Palestine which were later recorded in Valtorta’s magnum opus, the multivolume work The Poem of the Man God. Valtorta reported visionary encounters with numerous holy figures, from Christ to His mother Mary, to saints and her own garden angel. She also reported and documented a lesser known spiritual encounter which she had with Padre Pio – Saint Pio – the famous Italian stigmatic who was a contemporary of Valtorta’s, both as her fellow country-man and as a twentieth-century mystic who died only seven years after Valtorta; Padre Pio leaving the earth in 1968.

In her 1943 Notebooks, Maria Valtora documented her intimate encounter with Padre Pio, writing:    

 ”On the other hand, I have seen and spoken (while dreaming) to Padre Pio of Pietralcina. I saw him, also while dreaming, in ecstasy, after Holy Mass; I have seen his penetrating gaze and observed on my hand the scar of the stigmata when he took me by the hand. And, not dreaming, but wide awake, I have smelled his fragrance. No garden bursting with flowers in full bloom can give off the celestial scents which filled my room on the night between July 25 and 26, 1941 and the afternoon of September 21, 1942, precisely when a friend of ours was speaking about me to Father (I did not know that he had left for San Giovanni Rotondo). On both occasions I later obtained the graces requested. The fragrance was perceived by Marta, too. It was so strong that it woke her up. It then ceased as suddenly as it had come.”

Marta – full name: Marta Diciotti – was a friend and caretaker who lived with the infirmed Maria Valtorta, also smelling that powerful fragrance that the presence of Padre Pio (and other saints) often invoked.

Notice all of the sacred components surrounding Valtorta’s dream, signs signifying that her encounter was, indeed, more than a simple dream. It was something deeper. First, she encounters the experience after Holy Mass, the holiest of all rituals between God and man on earth. Second, she encounters the experience in a state of ecstasy; thus, it has the feeling of an out-of-body experience for the mystic. Third, there is a vividness to the dream that is evident in Valtorta’s intimate details of the encounter – from the fact that touch is accentuated in the way that Padre Pio held her hand and she could clearly see the details of the painful stigmata, to the fact that she describes Saint Pio’s “penetrating gaze,” showing us a poignant personalism in the encounter between these two Italian mystics. This personalism is further noticeable in the very fact that Valtorta reported speaking with Padre Pio. Thus, it wasn’t simply a casual dream of a saint that she experienced, but a deeply personal and intimate interaction with a saint.

The fact that a powerful, sacred fragrance remained afterward while Valtorta was wide awake, a fragrance so powerful that no “garden bursting with flowers in full bloom can give off the celestial scents” which filled her room and which even woke up her friend Marta, further shows us that her experience was something special. Notice that the second time that this fragrance came, according to Valtorta’s description, was when a friend of the family’s was speaking of Valtorta to a priest in Saint Giovanni Rotondo, the site famous for a hospital founded by Padre Pio. 

What further merits attention is that Valtorta experienced the encounter in the 1940s, back when Padre Pio was still a controversial figure in the world of Catholicism as a mystic. It would not be until decades later, in 2002, that Padre Pio would finally be recognized as a saint through formal canonization during the papacy of Pope John Paul II, who himself revered the famous stigmatic. Yet, before Padre’s ecclesial recognition by Rome, the friar remained a controversial figure, admired and revered by countless of people but, unfortunately, also demonized by his bishop who spread many falsehoods about Padre’s reputation and sanctity. The path of controversy is the path that every mystic must walk. Valtorta is no stranger to this reality, having both strong supporters and critics in the Church while her writings continue to inspire a wider audience. Perhaps her early encounter with Padre Pio, recognized today as an unquestionably holy presence, an encounter that took place back when Saint Pio’s sanctity was still being questioned by many, hints at a sacred source behind Valtorta’s own mystical experiences: for she saw authenticity in a holy man before the Church even recognized that authenticity.

This reflection began with a place, with Yale. Let us, therefore, end there as well.

In 1937, the famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was invited to give the eminent Terry Lectures at Yale University. Jung, who – among other things – became renowned for his work on dream analysis, gave a number of lectures on psychology and religion in which he focused on dreams. In his lectures, Jung called dreams “the voice of the Unknown,” and called for greater introspection in studying this voice; in essence, the voice of the divine. He connected the growing tendency of contemporary culture to take dreams less seriously with the growing tendency of contemporary people to take spiritual matters, and especially the plight of the soul, less seriously. A serious problem, Jung explained:

“The very common prejudice against dreams is but one of the symptoms of a far more serious undervaluation of the human soul in general. The marvelous development of science and technics has been counterbalanced on the other side by an appalling lack of wisdom and introspection.”

By refocusing our attention on our dreams, especially vivid dreams, we are – in essence – refocusing our attention on matters higher and more sublime. There is a depth to the unconscious, within the human mind, that points to the spiritual realm. We are discerning possible visionary experiences in special dreams. We are discerning a truer reality, the voice of the divine other in our lives.