A mystic from Lancashire, and devotion to Divine wisdom

 

What does it mean to have a devotion to the Sacred Head? Well, Teresa saw this devotion as the fulfilment and completion of the devotion to the Sacred Heart so popularised by St. Margaret Mary.

 

For Margaret Mary devotion to the Sacred Heart was a supernatural response to the errors concerning the affection or love of Christ for us, errors such as Jansenism which underappreciated the ardent love of Christ for all men, and distorted the meaning of His atoning sacrifice for us as something merely punitive and legal. For Teresa, the devotion to the Sacred Head was a supernatural response to affronts against the intellect of Christ, of His Divine Wisdom, which she saw as violated by the secular ideologies of her day. (3)

 

 

By the time of Teresa’s death, various bishops and significant clergy were in favour of the promotion of her new devotion, but others still uneasy - largely due to a concern, not so much with the nature of the devotion, but rather to the purported mystical phenomena surrounding Teresa’s biography. (7) By the 1930s however Teresa’s posthumous reputation reached its zenith, and a cause was put forward to Rome for her beatification. This presented her firstly as the model Catholic school teacher, devout, loved by her pupils and exemplary in her methods, and, secondarily, acknowledged the mystical phenomena associated with her and with the devotion of the Sacred Head. (8) Her cause became a battleground within English Catholic intelligentsia as they divided over what kind of signal such a beatification would give towards the secular world. There were significant prelates and theologians on both sides, and amid the backdrop of such division Rome quietly shelved the cause, issuing a “non expedire”, at which stage her cause remains to this day. (9)

 

 

The second quotation was identified by Agnes Holloway herself, taking it as an indication of the closeness of their ideas. This reads, “Christ, God made man is the beginning and end of all Creation and His knowledge and Wisdom are infinite as they are eternal”. (17) This demonstrates that not only did Teresa see the Incarnate Wisdom as the personal law-giver and pattern of human living, as echoed in her prayerful refrain, “O Wisdom of the Sacred Head guide me in all my ways”, (18) but also that, like Agnes Holloway she understood the Wisdom of God as both guiding creation and being its culmination through the mystery of the Incarnation. In Faith, this idea is expressed in terms of the Unity Law of Control and Direction, theological terminology which refers to the created participation or “imprint” of that Eternal Wisdom enshrined in the Head of God incarnate, (19) a concept which is ultimately nothing more than an amplification of the theology behind the Johannine prologue. (20)

 

 

We are called to commune our autonomy to the governance of Divine Wisdom, for His law to be, as it were, our environment, the means of our true flourishing. In order for fallen and confused humanity to access this wisdom, this law that it is so in need of we must look towards the Catholic Church which, for both Holloway (21) and Teresa, (22) has been established by God as

the infallible teacher of the Wisdom of the Sacred Head throughout history.

 

There are undoubtedly many overlaps between the thinking of Teresa, the school teacher from Lancashire and Agnes the housewife from South London, links certainly biographical or historical, but also, as this article has argued, theological connections which complement each other, while coming from different angles and expressed in different ways. It is to be hoped that the publishing of a greater number of Teresa’s letters might enable a deeper study into these connections, and work to enrich still further the spirituality of the Faith Movement.

 

“Then let all creatures acknowledge, praise, bless and love this Wisdom, let them adore the Sacred Head of Jesus as its Seat” (from Teresa’s “Prayer to Mary”).