December 4

Jeanne Manford, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the Council of Trent

Author

David Barnhart
December 04, 2025

A sign spotted in Portland, 2025. Own photo.

On this day in 1563, the last session of the Council of Trent of the Roman Catholic Church was held. This council met twenty-five times for nineteen years, and was part of the counter-reformation against Protestantism. The Council decided that the authoritative version of the Bible would be in Latin, and reaffirmed the importance of the Apocrypha (books of the Bible not considered authoritative by Protestants). 

Today is the birthday, in 1920, of Jeanne Manford, who founded PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) after her son, Morty, was viciously attacked while in the presence of police who did nothing. When she marched in a gay pride parade in 1972 with a sign calling for parents to unite in support of their children, the outpouring of gratitude and love from the gay community was so strong that she was inspired to start the organization. 

She shares a birthday with Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, born the same day. His poetry expresses a deep theology of life. 

Reflection: 

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: 

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them
pressed me against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.”

and

“Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and suppose they mean something shared by all? — Only consider two schoolboys: one of them buys a knife, and the other buys an identical one on the same day. And a week later, they show each other the two knives, and they turn out to be only remotely similar, so differently have they been shaped by different hands. ... Is it possible to believe we could have a god without making use of him?”

and

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Prayer: God, whoever we mean by that word, help us to live the questions now. Amen.