Bob Wild
Fr. Bob Wild has been a member of the Madonna House community since 1971. He is originally a priest from Buffalo, N.Y. For a number of years in Madonna House he has lived the life-style of a poustinik, spending 3 days a week in poustinia and the rest of the week with the community. He has edited a number of Catherine Doherty's books and written a trilogy himself on her spirituality. He has been the postulator for her cause since 1990. Presently he is the guest master at the clergy retreat centre in Madonna House.
Bio last updated April 30th, 2018.
Articles by Bob Wild
Catherine Doherty's Divine Milieu
By Bob Wild
June 1, 2014
Trinitarian love is the heart of community in Combermere, Ont.
I want to emphasize this difference between traditional culture and the modern culture-creation of the subjective self as it forms one of the very major differences between life in the modern world and what people will experience in Madonna House "The defining features of evangelical Catholicism are: a clear embrace of traditional Catholic thought, speech and practice, the usual word for which is orthodoxy; eagerness to proclaim one's Catholic identity to the world, emphasizing its implications for culture, society and politics; faith seen as a matter of personal choice rather than cultural inheritance," he says Madonna House presents itself as a Catholic culture in the traditional sense, as a "web of significance," as a "historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols" that we ask people to accept, and not try to change, in order to be formed through the pores of their whole being Because of Catherine's spiritual genius, one of the greatest gifts she had to offer to the new communities is precisely a profound vision of formation in the Christian/ Catholic life I have mentioned that the divine milieu of Madonna House is basically Catherine's vision and cultural expression of Catholicism The other world is the transcendental world of faith, the divine life of the Trinity, which penetrates this world and for which our whole being longs Cardinal Ratzinger speaks of creative minorities in a general sense, but what he says applies, of course, to creative minorities within the Catholic Church It is crucial to have convinced minorities in the Church, for the Church, and for society, communities of persons who in their encounters with Christ have discovered the precious pearl that gives value to all life (Matthew13:45 ff A fairly recent term used to describe our Catholic life today is evangelical Catholicism and it is a modern confirmation, for me, of her vision