Blogging has been light for the past week because I´m away from home (and for the previous week because I was preparing to be away). I´m visiting the Passionists at Pasing, just outside Munich, giving the Passionists in Glasgow a rest. Saint Gabriel´s Retreat, Pasing, is a small retreat house and is also the residence of the Provincial, Father Gregor Lenzen c.p. They don´t have a website yet, so I can´t link you to it. However, encouraged by Father Gary´s recent visit, I have started taking digital photographs again and hope to let you see some of them when I return to my own community.
During the week, Father Gregor took me to Altötting. I had never been there before and really enjoyed the visit. I was very impressed by the devotion of the pilgrims, including a number of young people. It´s a real centre of faith, and is traditionally known as The Heart of Bavaria. The Pope will be going there in September. Photographs and more information to follow!
The Passionists here belong to the Bavarian-Austrian Vice-Province of the Five Wounds. Vice-Province means that there are too few of them to constitute a real province; they are only about fifteen members, but the majority are under sixty. They had a new priest ordained a few weeks ago and had another ordination last year. A new novice will receive the Passionist habit (minus the Sign, which is given at profession) in a few weeks time. So, although their numbers are small, they have probably the lowest average age of any of our provinces in northern Europe. In my own community I am the youngest, but everyone here (including the Provincial) is younger than me – so I´m feeling quite old at the moment!
For many years now, this Vice-Province has committed itself quite strongly to community prayer, with daily meditation in common as well as the Office, and to promoting our Passionist Spirituality, through emphasising the teaching of Saint Paul of the Cross and the lives of the Passionist Saints – it seems like a good recipe for survival in difficult times.
Laus Crucis 
The Pope will be going there in September.
To Pasing, or just to Bavaria?
Unfortunately not to Pasing, but to Altötting. He,s also going to Munich and Regensgurg.
So are there plans for Pope Benedict to visit the Passionist Community in Regensburg, as he has done in the past when on holidays in Regensburg?
It is true that when he was simply Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict celebrated Mass every morning (and had breakfast) at “Paulusheim”, the Passionist student residence in Regensburg, when he was at his own house on holiday, and that he also usually spent a day during his summer holidays with the community at the Retreat at Schwarzenfeld; but things aren´t so simple any more, so it looks so far as if it will be official engagements only on this visit.
You highlight the committment to communal prayer, meditation together and an emphsis on the teachings of St Paul of the Cross as “good recipe for survival in difficult times”.
Is it just for difficult times? or is this just the community reinheriting the Passionist charism? a life of conviction in the ways of living out that charism that others before and elsewhere have deemed to be old fashioned and of little relevance – ie have dis-inherited themselves and the others that followed them? is it surprising when this sort of conviction of life is attractive to the young?
Does this then give a potential answer to the difficult question I posed about what your community were doing about re-awakening the form of religious life as not just another way to be a priest?
The example in the vice-province is interesting. As a smaller group they are more able to be guided to reasses their practise of religous life, to explore the different ways of living that life that might bring life back in to it, than a large province of older religious that have potentially never lived that life – or have cast it off in an effort of renewal in a previous era.
What do you think?
Yes, Stephen, I think that the-vice-province has certainly been able to translate the values of Saint Paul of the Cross into a form of life which speaks to young people today and provides in many ways an example of continuity and hope.. It is true that in the bigger provinces it can be difficult to move in that direction. Some people still fear the ghosts of a former way of life which was extremely austere and physically demanding, and seems to have been experienced by some, in the end, as formalistic or based principally on discipline. (It did, however, produce great saints too.) I myself am too young to have lived in the religious life before the Council, although when I entered in the early 1970s, we still had many of the forms of an earlier way of life. However, I think anyone who has eyes can see that much of what was done in the way of renewal in the 70s and 80s, while it was done with good intentions and produced some good, was at best incomplete. Unfortunately, it seems that many older religious are suspicious of recent developments and want to continue on or return to a direction which they embarked on thirty or so years ago. However, those of us who are older have to realise that the future may not turn out to be what we had in mind.
I remember hearing Cardinal Lustiger preaching at the Chrism Mass in Paris in 1996, when he spoke to the older priests and religious present about their younger colleagues. His message was: when you arrived on the scene in the 1960s with all your new ideas, your old parish priests and superiors gave you the space to do things differently – and will you not do the same for these young people today? Religious Life has always been challenged by the new movements and also by new vocations coming out of a different society and culture. What we religious really need is an influx of the John Paul II (and now Benedict XVI) generation of young Catholics to waken us up.