Catholics are rediscovering the Faith in His words: Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange

source : Blog : One Peter Five

A Theologian for Our Times – Rediscovering Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange

Here is but a small look at the article, and Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange link to rest below:

Thirdly, his central focus was in fact the Christian spiritual life, and thus many of his works are wonderful for the soul looking for good, traditional, spiritual reading. His magnum opus was a work not of abstract, speculative theology, but of concrete pastoral and spiritual concern: The Three Ages of the Interior Life. A smaller version of this three-volume work, The Three Conversions in the Spiritual Life, summarizes the three volume work in a little over one hundred pages. In these books, he synthesizes St. Thomas with St. John of the Cross and describes the Christian growth in holiness according to the tradition of the Church. His book Mother of Our Saviour and Our Interior Life is perhaps my favorite and is equally pastoral. It was very painful deciding on just one passage to quote, but here is a particularly striking one:
“In Bethlehem [Mary] sees her Son born in a stable and believes that He is the Creator of the world; she sees all the weakness of His infant body and believes in His omnipotence; when He commences to essay His first words she believes in His infinite wisdom; when the Holy Family takes flight from Herod’s anger she believes that Jesus is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, as St. John would later say. At the Circumcision and the Presentation in the Temple her faith in the mystery of the Redemption expands. Her whole life on earth was passed in a dark brightness, the darkness arising not from human error or ignorance but from the very transcendence of the light itself—a darkness which was, in consequence, revealing of the heights of the mysteries contemplated by the blessed in Heaven…Mary’s act of faith on Calvary was the greatest ever elicited on earth, for the hour was unspeakably dark and its object was the most difficult of all—that Jesus had won the greatest of victories by making the most complete of immolations.” (124)
There are many great theologians, devotions, prayers, liturgies, and teachings that have been forgotten in the past few decades, but I think that a recovery of Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange (and with him, traditional Thomism) needs to be one of our priorities. He passed on to his reward just on the cusp of the revolution, and while we may wish he had lived but a decade longer, we can still have frequent recourse to him. Often, God grants us a holy witness to the Faith just before the light is blown out. Within a decade of his death, the winds of change had swept into the Church, but in His person we have beautiful figure of the Faith before all the disorder hit.
If we wish to avoid descending into an ever-deepening critique of people and events around us and instead rebuild a positive Catholic culture and theology in the Church, we would do well to have recourse to this holy friar. And if we do need to confront errors, we would do well to imitate his disposition:

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