Friday, May 25, 2007

A week from Sunday, there will be a ceremony to recognize the sainthood of this good man: Father Charles Houben, known more popularly as Charles of Mount Argus.

He lived in Dublin for about half his 71 years and this native of The Netherlands would never have been taken for a native speaker of English. But he had a great love for the people among whom he had been sent to live. They knew him not as a great preacher, nor as a teacher of theology. Rather, he was the one they called to minister to the sick and dying. Father Charles was known to be kind and deeply humble; in reading his biography, it is hard to think of anyone less self-absorbed.

The persistence of these qualities through his whole life is more remarkable because, as his biographer puts it, he gave hope to people in their sufferings. He prayed and they received strength and grace to go on. Sometimes he would discern that they would be cured, physically, and they were: the lame walked; the blind saw; the mortally ill rose from their beds and returned to long, healthy lives.

As Roman Catholics, we believe that the "communion and fellowship of the saints" is something that death does not diminish. As a consequence, we believe that we share our life of faith with Father Charles and the others in our "cloud of witnesses". We believe that we can ask them to pray for us, that they can and will, and that God hears them. And so even today people continue to beg Father Charles' intercession. And, even today, people are still being healed and cured.

That's the headline, I suppose, of Father Charles' life: God answers prayers of holy man. But the story is what so much attracted me to him from when I first learned of his life 14 years ago when I, too, was a stranger in a strange land. The story is one of quiet goodness, of hope triumphing over fear and pain.

This is a project that has been on my mind since I first began to work on the Web a dozen years ago. Although the text is complete, except for revisions still being made to the second edition, I know I will continue to find keyboarding errors. And I expect to continue to work on better design solutions and illustrations. It is a work in progress.

A word about the biographer, Paul Francis Spencer C.P. When we arrived in Paris in 1993, he was pastor of St Joseph's, the Anglophone mission. Since 1996 he has been rector of Saint Mungo's Church in Glasgow, where his parents were married and from which he recently buried his father. He has ignited tremendous hope in Townhead, a part of Glasgow devastated (would that it had been "decimated", only!) by urban "renewal". Somehow his co-conspirators from Paris, Fathers Marius Donnelly and Anthony Behan, have ended up in Glasgow, too: hard workers in hard work. Many people came into our lives during our sojourn in Paris; these men are the ones who have stayed.

Father Paul Francis caught a vision for the Web when few religious had even heard the word "Internet". He "introduced" me (i.e., he asked me to call a complete stranger, something I would never do, except that he asked me) to Victor Hoagland C.P. in 1995 and things have kind of gone along from there. It is a great privilege to bring this work of his onto the Web.

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