Dagny Kjaergaard knew what to do when storms hit – Hold on, Be Faithful, and Bear Fruit A Hundredfold | Catholic National Register

The consecrated virgin Dagny Kjaergaard is one of those figures whose influence on the Church is hidden but omnipresent. Now that she has left this life, this fact is sure to be recognized more and more.

The precise authorship of each part of the Catechism of the Catholic Church is a closely guarded secret and Dr. Kjaergaard honored it to his grave. This, however, did not prevent some detective work on the part of her friends and colleagues and students who revealed the decisive and extensive role she played in this monument to the pontificate of John Paul II.

The Catechism itself proclaims that it was “prepared following the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council”. It aimed to restore doctrinal certainty to the faithful, demonstrating that the teaching of the Church remains complete and uninterrupted from Pentecost to the 21 Ecumenical Councils and beyond.

In a sense, the Catechism was a deliberately naive project. He refused to see Vatican II as a revolution and instead saw it as an ecumenical council of the Church. Such a project required the influence of someone with such purity of vision and intention. The hour comes, comes the woman.

The conversion of Dagny Kjaergaard

Dagny Kjaergaard was born in 1933 in Greifswald, Germany, to a Danish Lutheran father and a non-practicing Catholic German mother. His family left Germany and returned to Denmark as the horror of the Nazi regime became apparent. Dagny was therefore still only 7 years old when Germany occupied Denmark in April 1940.

Even then, Dagny was an Anglophile, no doubt as to which side she supported during the war. The present writer was amazed to hear him one evening explode from memory all the verses of Britannia Rule (not easy to sing, let alone memorize) and she proudly remembered approaching a German soldier in Denmark when she was little and singing that to him. Fortunately for posterity, he was so surprised that he did nothing.

Despite all his zeal for the Allies, after the war Dagny’s parents feared that his half-German status was a problem at school, so they decided to send him to a private Catholic school. The Lutheranism of her family was nominal enough that she was not even baptized, but it was a requirement of the new school and so, although at the hands of a Protestant minister, she was reborn in Christ and was sent. in his new school as a new creation.

This experience will be for her totally transforming, especially because of the meeting with Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. The key moment came one day when she was attending the Solemn Exhibition and she asked one of the sisters, “What is this?

The sister replied, “It is Jesus and he loves you. “

Those who have seen her receive communion or venerate the relic of the True Cross or of Saint Thomas Aquinas can testify to the ferocity of the love that burned in her for Christ and his saints.

Soon after, she asked to be received into the Church but encountered opposition from her parents. She was to be confirmed as a Lutheran, however, and she informed her parents that when asked at the ceremony if she adhered to Lutheran doctrine, she would respond, “No! as strong as she could. Her horrified parents gave in and she was allowed to become a Catholic. Even before she was formally received, Dagny visited Lourdes and consecrated herself privately as a virgin at the age of only 14.

A delayed vocation

Shortly thereafter, Dagny entered the Order of Discalced Carmelites in Belgium and made the solemn vows. In 1965, she was sent with a group of sisters to found a house in Sweden. But then, the terrible turbulence of the post-conciliar years befalls them. Like so many nuns, Dagny struggled to reconcile the rule and charisma to which she had sworn herself with the arbitrary novelties she was commanded to embrace, supposedly in the name of the Council.

Her sanity was disturbed and she suffered depression, being sent out of Carmel for treatment. As she made a full recovery, she was told that a relapse was inevitable if she returned to the convent and was excused from her vows. Somewhat disorderly, Dagny devoted herself to missionary activity and to the study of theology, first in Belgium then in Friborg and finally in Rome at the Angelicum, where she was completing her doctorate in sacred theology.

While remaining faithful to the vow she made in Lourdes in 1947, Dagny, forced to leave Carmel, insisted on reaffirming her state of life canonically. Providentially, in 1970, Paul VI had restored the old form of consecration of a Virgin living in the world and so this form of life was again available. Dagny asked her bishop when she returned home if this would be possible. Unfortunately, he was a follower of the “spirit of counseling” and responded that he thought it was a very old-fashioned idea.

Shortly after, the collapsed Dane found herself in a Roman bus a few seats behind Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. She followed the cardinal out of the bus, introduced herself and asked him if she could tell him about her misfortunes. The result was that an alarmed Scandinavian bishop received a letter from the prefect asking him why he thought the idea of ​​consecrated virginity was out of fashion and whether he would be willing to allow the cardinal himself to consecrate Dr Kjaergaard. The embarrassed authorization was quickly granted and Dagny was consecrated on March 25, 1989 to the abbey where Cardinal Ratzinger made his annual retreat.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church

It is from this relationship, and from an acquaintance made in Freiburg with Christoph Schönborn (future Archbishop of Vienna), that Dagny gets involved in the writing of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Although she kept the authorship of the various parts of the text a secret, she told anecdotes over dinner with the names and numbers deleted. A little identification with the puzzle by his friends sometimes helped fill in the gaps. His hand is everywhere.

The draft of a very important section arrived in Rome one day and Dagny was horrified by what she read. She stood for a long time in fervent prayer and went to see Ratzinger in his office the next day.

“What did you think?” He asked. She hesitated and he encouraged her to answer.

“This is not the religion I have converted to,” she replied.

“What a relief.” He smiled and dropped the text in the trash. “Let’s not hear about it anymore.

A former Dominican teacher from Dagny was enlisted to write a new version. Once, years later, a complaint was transmitted to him that the Catechism says too little about the mystery of predestination. The problem is basically that Pope Paul V in the early 17th century dropped the ball on the subject, fearing to offend the order that lost the controversy, and so it’s difficult to explain without going into immense details of the different positions tolerated – hardly appropriate in a catechism. Dagny read the proceedings intensely for a few weeks, then woke up suddenly in the middle of the night and sat up straight.

“The Dominicans are right! she exclaimed.

Mentor, Guardian, Friend

This reflected the special grace bestowed on him for his work, which it seems persisted thereafter. After catechism was completed, Dagny took up a teaching post at the Austrian International Theological Institute founded by John Paul II in 1996.

She was deeply loved and her flair for heresy was greatly appreciated by the students. She lived the last years of her life, as a sociable medieval anchorite, in a tower of the castle where the Institute was based. A student helping her clean her room remembers her books being arranged in concentric circles of declining orthodoxy, with the Scriptures and St. Thomas on her desk and the most dubious theologians at the ends of the apartment.

Whenever a guest speaker came, she would sit in front of the audience and lean on her staff, listening intently. If the speaker began to show signs of deviating from orthodoxy, his brow creased and student interest began to drift from the lecturer to telltale signs of disapproval from Dr. Kjaergaard. Dagny herself didn’t realize it because she was completely absorbed in the conference.

If at any point she went from suspicious obscurity to outright heresy, Dagny would erupt banging his staff on the ground and screaming “No! It was never clear if she even knew she had done this, but it was very confusing to the speaker. The students loved it.

A colleague of Dagny’s once in Rome and ran into Cardinal Ratzinger saying mass. He spoke with him briefly afterwards and conveyed greetings from Dagny Kjaergaard. Ratzinger looked almost scared and said: “Oh yes! The Thomist.

As she grew older, she needed a lot of care, which was lavished on her by the students and by the family of Father Jurai Terek, the chaplain of the Institute. She died in Vienna after a short illness and was assisted by Father Terek and buried after a funeral liturgy in the Byzantine rite she loved, behind the parish church of Trumau where the Institute currently resides. The eulogy was delivered by his dear friend, Mgr. Larry Hogan.

A German friend who was due to visit the Institute once asked me about the appearance of the legendary Dr Kjaergaard and told him to imagine a fearsome old matriarch in a Nordic village during the Viking Age. The men have set out to plunder an innocent Anglo-Saxon monastery or village and she is firmly planted on a three-legged stool on the steep hill that slopes down to the sea, leaning on her staff, her dark eyes fixed on the horizon for see if the men will ever come back. When I got to Trumau, my friend immediately recognized Dagny by sight without being told. Dagny often said that the Danes would never be truly converted until they stopped being proud of the Vikings. A twinkle in her eyes implied that she understood the struggle.

Dagny struggled not theoretically but emotionally with the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. The years had impressed her with the doctrine of Scripture that the “perishable body weighs upon the soul” and she could not imagine it being a joy to receive it again at the end of time.

This problem was solved for her, she explained, by Benedict XVI. She said his demeanor and facial expressions were so charitable that looking at him she could begin to understand how a body can be lifted up to glory.

She would have gruffly dismissed the idea that her own warm and loving ways could have done the same to those who knew her, so no one would have dared tell her, but it’s true. May she rest in peace.