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A GREAT IRISH BENEDICTINE
DOM COLUMBA MARMION
1858-1923.
The golden age of Irish Monasticism, called the era of Saints and Scholars, has been at all times a source of sublime inspiration, not only for those interested in the religious life but for lay people and students as well. The records of monastic heroism remain a prodigious example of faith in their lengthy list of ascetics, martyrs and Christian thinkers in Ireland. Before the Rule of St. Benedict appeared, the monasteries of Ireland had, together with the teaching of asceticism, a traditional observance - not indeed a code, but rather a collection of pious maxims and exhortations in prose and verse. Such, for instance, is the short Rule for hermits known by the name of Columba. But up to the time of St. Columbanus we can find no trace of a true or genuine rule, as we apply that term to the Regula Monachorum. Columba, friend and protector of bards and poets, poured forth in song his zeal for the foundations that "the Lord had permitted him to create, or for the glory of other Sanctuaries." Ohief characteristic of St. Columba, born of a noble Irish family in 521, is precisely the extreme renunciation by which he strove to rival the poorest of the poor on earth. He could not bear to think that he would be surpassed in poverty by anybody.
In recognition of this extreme mysticism of primitive Irish Christianity, Joseph Marmion, the most authoritative of Irish Benedictines, when clothed in the cassock of the congregation, took the name of the glorious dovelike Saint, who, from the Island of Iona, had anticipated the Apostolate of the Benedictines in England promoted by St. Gregory the Great.
Born in Dublin in 1858, the son of William Marmion, a native of Kildare, Dom Columba studied in Rome at the Ludovisian College - to-day the Irish College - where he received his spiritual and cultural formation. The fascination of the great centre of Christianity gave strength to his youthful hopes, satisfaction to his sensitive soul and food to his healthy appetite for learning.
With the aid particularly of the Professors of the Urban City College of Propaganda - among whom was Monsignor Ubaldi, the future Cardinals Agliordi, Laurenti, Galimberti, and above all Cardinal Satolli, who was one of the most famous professors of dogmatic theology - he applied himself to a vast field of spiritual studies. He was called upon to expound difficult theses of profound Catholic doctrine from
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Mont Cesar became famous for his elevated discourses. These stirred the whole ecclesiastical world of North-western Europe. Cardinal Mercier was one of Dom Marmion's friends and admirers; he made constant reference to him in his high opiscopal mission. Both of them were eminent among the most valiant preachers of the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas at the Catholic University of Louvain, and their example was afterwards to inspire Father Agostino Gemelli to found in Milan a similar school, destined to become in the modern world a celebrated centre of Christian teaching.
Désiré Joseph Mercier as president of the Institute of Philosophy of Louvain met Marmion. The same love for the Doctrine of St. Thomas inspired the two zealous and generous Apostles of faith and justice. The influence of the Irish monk on the Cardinal appears to have been sometimes decisive in the essentially spiritual domain. "By the supernatural efficacy of Benedictine example, Father Columba makes us return up to God" - Cardinal Mercier affirms. It was a return to the healthy realism of piety. When the great Belgian prelate came to Rome to receive the purple and was intertained and fêted by the Benedictine Community of Sant' Anselmo, he told them that they could regard him as a friend of their Order because of his gratitude to one of their members, that true son of St. Benedict, Dom Columba Marmion. This profound bond of union between the two was to find an echo later on in Ireland, where, at Glenstal, the first modern Benedictine Abbey was to be established.
Marmion rose to the dignity of Abbot in 1909. The primate of the Benedictine Order - by permission of the Holy See - went to Maredsous to impart to the Abbot Elect the Apostolic Blessing. The cross which was Cardinal Mercier's gift to him on that occasion, when prelates, scholars and friends came from all parts to be present at the moving ceremony, was a symbol of new and more arduous struggles for the triumph of Justice and Faith.
In the years of sadness, Dom Marmion, third Abbot of Maredsous, was continually near the Cardinal in his vindication of the rights of Belgium, and later "in thanksgiving to the national army which held up the invader. Right does not consist in brute force; and social order, which safeguards the maintenance of right, has no life in it if the ordered wills are not kept within due limits." Marmion thus assisted the Cardinal every after he had succeeded in placing a great number of monks of Maredsous in various English Benedictine Monasteries. All he reserved for himself was the task of begging for alms.
He returned to Belgium in 1916. When the war ended, Queen Elisabeth and Prince Leopold expressed their desire to go to Maredsous for the religious functions of Holy Week and Easter, thereby attesting their gratitude to the generous Abbot, in the same way as the whole Belgium Nation expressed its profound and touching thankfulness to Cardinal Mercier.
His natural talents and monastic virtues made Dom Columba Marmion an exceptional figure. He possessed in truth all the prerogatives of the race which in sorrow knows how to find every resource and motive of hope. Thanks to his acute psychological intuition he felt that joy can be a powerful tonic for the soul. While his gentleness bore close