Irish Benedictine priest made `Servant of God'

An Irish Benedictine priest has been declared "Venerable" by the Vatican. Dom Joseph Columba Marmion was abbot of the Belgian monastery of Maredsons when he died in 1923. He is among eight to be declared a Servant of God. The others were mainly founders of religious orders.

Dom Columba was born in Dublin in 1858. He was educated at Belvedere College before going to Clonliffe, after which he completed his studies at the Irish College in Rome.

Returning to Dublin he served as a curate in Dundrum before becoming professor of philosophy at Clonliffe.

In 1886 he obtained permission to join the Benedictines and left Dublin for Maredsons where he became abbot in 1909. His books on spirituality are considered classics.

In the current issue of Ceide magazine, Father Brendan Hoban is critical of the rush to canonisation which has been such a feature of this Papacy. Pope John XXIII canonised just 10 saints, while Pope Paul VI canonised 84, he said. To date Pope John Paul has canonised 276. "This conveyor-belt process and some of the practices associated with it are verging on the bizarre. The cause of Mother Teresa, for instance, has received some sort of papal indulgence and, contrary to the rules, has been moved promptly up the queue", Father Hoban said.

No such interest, he noted, was shown in such as the late Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest and "one of the great spiritual masters of the 20th century". He wrote several best-selling books on prayer and had "an unerring ability to help angst-ridden citizens of the 20th century to search out the finger of God in their lives". But he was also homosexual, "a man who struggled with his sexuality and agonised over his place in the world and a man who, on occasion, courted the edge of despair". The main beneficiaries of what Father Hoban described as "the present ecclesiastical largesse" tended to be "founders of religious congregations on the verge of extinction. The official wisdom is that this will give the congregations a timely boost". In fact, however, it tended to hasten their decline through the expense involved.

"In short, the usefulness and credibility of the process is questionable", he said, commenting "in this, as in other areas of church life, there is a nonsense that needs to be named and we wait for leaders to name it".