But we who use the word ‘Spirit’ in a religious context to mean what is spiritually distinctive about a particular group. In that sense people talk about Franciscan spirituality or Jesuit spirituality or even Celtic spirituality. Can you also talk about Assumptionist Spirituality?

To go back to the more general sense of the word ‘Spirit’. We believe that we have inherited a certain spirit from the founder of the order: Father Emmanuel d’Alzon. None of the Assumptionists here has met Fr d’Alzon who died in 1880 but I was taught by an old French Priest who had known Fr Etienne Pernet, one of Fr d’Alzon’s first disciples, so the link with our founder is not a remote one stretching back hundreds of years. Apart from tha6t we are all familiar with Fr d’Alzon’s life story and with his writings.

The first thing to note is that Fr d’Alzon was an aristocrat. He was born into a noble French family

which had survived the French Revolution. He was born just after the time of the French Revolution and the upheavals that followed it. The Aristocracy in France has always been labelled as one of the causes of the French Revolution. As a class of people they were considered to be lazy, pleasure- loving, indifferent to the suffering of the poor and yet happy living off the hard work of the peasantry. Yet some Aristocratic families had kept alive the old ideals of the nobility. There is an old French saying ‘Noblesse oblige!’ – Noble blood has its responsibilities.

It isn’t just a matter of privilege. These responsibilities were thought of mainly in terms of loyalty to

the King and service of one’s country, especially military service. For Emmanuel d’Alzon was captivated by three ideals except for him they took the form of loyalty to Christ the King and service of Christ’s People, the Church. He really thought of himself as a Knight. Think of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and all the code of chivalry they embodied. A chivalrous person can end up being quixotic – which means being unrealistic, biting off more that you can chew and there is no doubt that our founder was sometimes criticized for that – for not being cautious enough, for not counting the cost of certain projects but he always thought that it was better to be bold, adventurous, risk-taking, that to stay safe. There are many examples of this in his life. In the year 1862 the pope at that time, Pius IX, asked Father d’Alzon to send some Assumptionists to Bulgaria to help the minority Catholic Community there and to convert the rest of Bulgaria to Catholicism.

Fr. d’Alzon could have said, ‘Holy Father, our Order is not very old, only 12 years. We do not have many priests. They are not trained for this sort of work; they do not know the language. Would it not be better to send another Order that already has houses in Eastern Europe? But, instead, he simply accepted the mission and sent some of his best recruits out to Bulgaria. It was the beginning of a great adventure.

We like to think that part of the Spirit of the Order is this risk-taking mentality – that it is better to risk failure and try something new than always to stay safe in your comfort zone. Another chivalrous virtue is that of magnanimity – magnanimous is a Latin word meaning ‘great souled’ – putting it in a negative way he could not stand pettiness – either in personal relation-ships or in matters of missionary work. His attitude would be – we share Christ’s mission to the whole world. We must think big. We should not get bogged down in petty bickering with other groups in the Church. In connection with this big missionary outlook our founder believed that we should be open to what is happening in the modern world. Just like our own times the 19 century was a time of great upheaval and change. Countries were becoming more democratic. The French Revolution had introduced the idea of human rights, human equality. Society was

changing – things that we take for granted – universal education, mass transport, mass media, industrialisation, were just beginning. What should the Church’s attitude be towards all these changes? Some people had a very defensive attitude – we must try to restore the Church as it was in the

Middle Ages we should resist all these modern ideas and movements. Others said, we must not try to go back and we should not turn our backs on everything that is new. We should engage with the modern world. Emmanuel d’Alzon thought that the mission of the Church is to Christianise society, and to use all the means available for this. Rather than ignoring the possibilities of the Mass Media – the early Assumptionists founded a Catholic Publishing House which published a daily newspaper and weekly magazines, and religious books. The same sort of thing with mass transport – the possibility of moving large numbers of people by train. Fr d’Alzon said “Here is an opportunity for Catholics to witness to their faith in large numbers!” so he revived the idea of pilgrimages, encouraging, for example, great numbers of people to go to Lourdes by train. The Church has to defend certain fundamental human values, starting with the sacredness of life itself – but if we believe that the Holy Spirit is also at work in the world and not just in the Church, then we should be on the outlook for whatever is good and fruitful and life-enhancing in what is happening around us.

Openness in that sense is, I believe part of the Spirit of the Assumptionist as are the other characteristics I have mentioned – to these I would like to add one or two others things. Father d’Alzon came from the South of France. He had the temperament of men from that region– passionate, even a bit fiery and impulsive. He was driven by a passionate love of Christ and also a passion for God’s Kingdom – he wanted to restore God to his rightful place inhuman affairs. And he was a fighter. Had he not been a priest he might well have been an Army Officer. He loved a scrap - for example he spent a good part of his life fighting for the freedom of Catholic Education in France and fighting the enemies of the Church – the secularists, the anti-clericals, the Free-masons…

Our Rule of Life says, “The Spirit of our founder impels us to embrace the great causes of God and of Man, to go wherever God is threatened in Man and Man is threatened as image of God… We must display daring, initiative and disinterestedness . . .” “.. daring, initiative…” these are military virtues. They reflect another saying of Fr. D’Alzon. He has said that he expected Assumptionists to be hardi, généreux et désintéressé’. Disinterested is another way of saying ‘unselfish’ – not doing things for our own personal benefit or glory but for the sake of the cause.

Généreux – i.e. generous in spirit, big-hearted, not counting the cost or bothering about the wounds. Hardi – means bold, daring, tough – not shrinking from danger and risks. In modern terms Fr d’Alzon did not want an Order of wimps! All of this might suggest a sort of macho spirit but he would not like that. He was emotional and not afraid to show his emotions and he was tender hearted. When people went to him with their troubles he was kind and tender towards them. His friendships with men and with women were warm and affectionate. He had been brought up in a stable happy family environment and this is reflected in his personality which was human. Rounded and balanced. And this relates to the final characteristic of the Assumptionist Spirit – what we call the family spirit of the Order. The Rule of Life states that we live in community according to the spirit of St Augustine “Live in a household of perfect harmony, having but one heart and one mind intent on God.” Assumptionists know that they belong to a brotherhood – that in any part of the world, they will be welcomed and brothers in a community of the Order. This family spirit is not a substitute sort of family life – again it is more like the camaraderie that you find in the army – the feeling that you are involved in something important together and you depend on one another. You share your lives to the full.

I have been painting with a rather broad brush some of the characteristics of the Assumptionist Spirit – the traits that we have inherited from our founder – now I would like to say something about our spirituality. If you look through this little booklet which s a translation from the French and which is about Assumptionist Spirituality you will quickly pick up the idea that it is an Apostolic Spirituality. What do I mean by that?

God calls some people to a life of prayer, a contemplative life- in most cases a monastic life; but others are called to go out into the world and to preach the gospel or to work for the kingdom of God. This is what is meant by an apostolic life – and Religious Orders that were founded for this sort of activity are called Apostolic Orders. Assumptionists are formed to think of the members not as monks but as pioneers, trail blazers of Christ’s kingdom. Fr. d’Alzon wrote “the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, the greatest of all causes.” According to our Rule of Life our primary apostolic objective as religious is to work, out of love for Jesus Christ, for the coming of God’ Kingdom in ourselves and everywhere around us. We are to be (as a community or family) a sign of the Kingdom, to live for the kingdom, to build up among humankind Christ’s Kingdom of love, justice and peace. In practice this kingdom centred Spirituality has meant that the Assumptionists have never ties themselves to a particular type of apostolic work – for some it is Nursing, for some like the Dominicans - preaching and study, for the Redemptorists preaching missions – but our policy, if that is the word, has been to respond to the Church’s mission in our own time – in practice the Order has tended to concentrate its work on certain needs: education, social work, vocations, ecumenism.

Fr d’Alzon’s idea was that one’s personal fruits will only survive and grow in a Godless culture if it has roots in a sound understanding of the doctrines of the Church – devotions, a piety based on feelings will not be enough. Our faith should be underpinned by prayer and by study – starting with Scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. For personal prayer our training has always favoured freedom and creativity. The imported thing is that we all pray, not that we all pray in the same way. Our prayer should not be cranky or unbalanced – but it should be inspired by the mainstream tradition of the Church. It should be marked by Adoration – by praise of God, by Thanksgiving, by our need of God’s help and our need of forgiveness.

It is alright to pray that our toothache will stop but we also need to pray for the big-intentions for the coming of the Kingdom- for the mission of the Church, for the great causes of peace, justice, unity, reconciliation and so on. Our spirituality is also “Christocentric”. When Fr. D’Alzon was asked to sum-up the spirituality of the Assumption he wrote “The spirit of the Assumption is summed up in these few words the Love of Our Lord, of the Blessed Virgin, his Mother and the Church his spouse.” At the beginning of our Rule of Life we read “Jesus Christ is at the centre of our life. We commit ourselves to following him in faith, hope and charity. He is the one who gathers us together.” In the booklet – a striking passage: As a religious, I am more especially the servant of Jesus Christ, and all the desires of my heart, the whole power of my being must reach out towards him. But I cannot love Jesus Christ without wanting all his creatures to love him. This is what distinguishes the apostolic character of my life. So at the heart of our Assumptionist Spirituality is not an idea, or even an ideal but a burning, whole-hearted love for a person. However when we say that Assumptionist Spirituality is Christo-centric we do not just mean that it is a matter of devotion to the person of our Lord. But that it takes in the mystery of the Incarnation in its totality, especially the idea that the Church is the mystical body of Christ. We are all in Christ and Christ is in us because we are all members of Christ’s body. The Church is God’s instrument for saving the world now so we cannot bypass the Church is our quest for holiness.

Fr d’Alzon said that we should love the Church because it is the spouse of Christ. He is using an image taken from St Paul. “A man should love his wife as Christ loves the Church.” But he could equally well have said we should love the Church because it is Christ’s body, or it is Christ’s people. And then he said we should love Mary, because she is Christ’s mother. Nevertheless we would not consider ourselves a Marian Order or Congregation i.e. one devoted particularly to Our Lady like the Marists or the O.M.I.s; some Orders have a very strong Marian colouring in their spirituality. We consider our Lady of the Assumption as our principal patron and we celebrate her feast on August 15 as our great feast. But we do not base our spirituality on the mystery of the Assumption In the way that the Passionist Fathers base their spirituality on the Passion of Our Lord. Mary’s place ion our spirituality would be like that you find in the documents of Vatican II where Mary is always seen in the context of the history of salvation and in the context of the Church (the Church Ch. 8). One final characteristic of our spirituality is to say that it is Augustinian – it is influenced greatly by the writings of St Augustine – especially by the Rule of Saint Augustine