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Many years ago a mother in Nashville, Tennessee, gave birth prematurely to a tiny baby girl. Unfortunately, the little girl was very sickly. Shortly after birth, the baby caught pneumonia. Next, the baby caught scarlet fever. Finally, she contracted polio. The last illness left her one leg badly crippled and her foot twisted inward. When the little girl reached the age of five, she hobbled about on metal braces while the other kids ran and skipped rope. When she reached eleven, the handicapped girl asked her sister to stand watch at the door while she practiced walking without the braces. She didn’t want her parents to catch her walking around without the braces on. For a whole year the girl continued her secret walks. Then one day she began to feel guilty about them. So she told her doctor what she had been doing. He was flabbergasted. He agreed to let her continue, but only for short periods of time. Well, the girl’s idea of a short period was far different from the doctor’s idea. And to her periods of walking without braces the handicapped girl added periods of fervent prayer. To make a long story short, that girl eventually threw away her braces for good.

Maybe this conference will feel as being back in novitiate, back in a History of Cistercian Order class, - but just for a short period of time. Learning, reading, listening to history is important: this is how we keep in touch with out roots, finding our place in the community into which God has called us. Talking about roots we use the metaphor of the tree, and that makes handy to use Tertullian’s famous adage: “Sanguis martyrum semen est Christianorum; The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.” Church history demonstrates that, in any century, at any place of the planet, the blood of martyrs is indeed the seedbed of a growing Christian community: wherever martyrs gave their lives for Christ, after a while a dynamic Christian community was growing and flourishing. This is our hope and prayer: that from the blood of Hungarian Cistercians a rich harvest would grow both in Hungary and in Texas.

It was one of the most touching moments in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. It happened one night on prime-time television, after Jeff Blatnik of the United States defeated Thomas Johansson of Sweden for the gold medal in Graeco-Roman wrestling.

Let’s imagine a good Catholic family in today’s world. Suppose that Mom and Dad have six children. Having a large family, it’s not easy to provide food and clothing and everything else needed for a decent daily life. Don’t you think that, once in a while, in the middle of all the whirlwind of daily family lie, the question would enter the minds of this Mom and Dad whether it’s fair to set the family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as the model of all Christian families? After all, Joseph and Mary had only one child to raise, daily life at their time was much simpler and much less expensive than today, so how could be their family life and ours compared, how could today’s families follow their example in our complicated age. To answer such a question I’d say, that the Holy Family is our model neither for the size of the family, nor for their cultural or ethnic background, nor for their social status or financial means. The family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph is our model not for any of its visible features but for the soul, the spirit, the heart that animated that family.

At very rare occasions it happens that the calendar of the Cistercian Order and that of the general Catholic Church are in conflict with each other. Today is such a case. Since Cistercians have a special devotion toward the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Cistercian Order assigns a higher rank to the feast of the Birth of Mary that is celebrated today, and therefore this Marian feast takes precedence to the regular Sunday of Ordinary Time. So, while in other Catholic churches the congregation celebrates today the 23rd Sunday of the year, Cistercian communities all over the world celebrate the solemnity of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin.

It happens very seldom that in the three readings of a Sunday the outline or structure of all three of them is almost identical but, if you take your missalette and compare the three readings of today’s Mass, this is exactly what you’ll find: all three pericopes were composed according the same basic framework. It would be difficult to find out whether this correspondence is deliberate and intended or merely accidental (I’d rather prefer the adjective providential). But, whichever is the case, the three readings, by emphasizing three times the same central idea, give us a very useful teaching for Lent.

Saints are persons who make visible to people around them how Jesus would live at that particular place and time and situation in which the saintly individual is living. They make alive Jesus of Nazareth for their contemporaries. This is why saints are important for us no matter who they are or where and in what environment they live, be that a factory or a convent, a small village or a big city, a simple hut or a palace.

Just a few weeks before the terrorist attack, with some other monks from our monastery, we visited Washington, D. C. Among the many sights of the capital city, we toured also the U. S. Holocaust Museum. It was an unforgettable experience to walk through the halls with thousands and thousands of other visitors in absolute silence as we watched the horrors millions had to go through in Nazi Germany.