A brief story from Vatican Radio notes that a meeting of Catholics and Orthodox will take place this week in Istanbul to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the so-called Edict of Milan in which the emperors Constantine and Licinius ordered that all citizens be permitted to worship God as they saw fit
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Claire, one of the frequent participants in our dot-Commonweal conversations, teaches catechism in France to eighth-graders, 13 or 14 years old. The other day I sent her a link to a website that specializes in catechesis. She was unimpressed by it and its materials, and, with her permission, I pass
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Conservatives and traditionalists need not be the only ones to raise questions about some of Pope Francis’ liturgical innovations, whether it was his including women and Muslims among those whose feet he washed or in the reduction of the readings for the Easter Vigil. But shouldn’t we all be
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"And now, to conclude, for it is hardly befitting on this Day to speak much, when God has done His greatest work. Let us think of it and of Him. Let us rejoice in the Day which He has made, and let us be "willing in the Day of His Power." This is Easter Day. Let us say this again and
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An Easter sermon of Augustine preached to his people and the newly baptized:
You have heard Christ the Lord proclaimed in these words: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn 1:1). This is Christ the Lord, who if he had not lowered himself but had
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"We are now approaching that most sacred day when we commemorate Christ's passion and death. Let us try to fix our minds upon this great thought. Let us try, what is so very difficult, to put off other thoughts, to clear our minds of things transitory, temporal, and earthly, and to occupy them
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Here is how St. Augustine introduced today's Gospel:
"Before the feast of Passover [Pascha], Jesus, knowing that his hour had come that he should pass out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (Jn 13:1). Pascha, brothers and
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One of the norms for Vatican II's reform of the liturgy was that "the rites should be distinguished by a noble simplicity; they should be clear in their brevity and should avoid useless repetitions" (SC 34). The Roman liturgy was often described as more "sober" than the
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“Turn, O Lord, and deliver my soul” (Ps 6:5). Turning himself, the Psalmist prays that the Lord will also turn toward him, as is said elsewhere: “Turn to me, and I will turn to you, says the Lord” (Zech 1:3). Or should we understand that phrase, “Turn, Lord,” to mean: Make me turn,
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“Amen, I say to you that he will make them recline and he will pass and minister to them” (Lk 12:37) What does “He will make them recline” mean but that he will make them rest, will free them from labor? What does “He will pass and minister to them” mean? After this passage, he will
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"Don’t delay converting to the Lord; don’t put it off from day to day. For his anger will come suddenly, and in the time of vengeance he will destroy you” (Sir 5:8-9). So don’t put it off; don’t let the door still open close against you. The giver of pardon opens a door for you: why
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Let us take from our midst vain and wicked excuses and let us come to the banquet by which we will be inwardly filled.... And who come except beggars, the sick, the limping, the blind? The healthy rich have not come, those who walk well and have keen eyesight and count greatly on themselves and are
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"So then there is a Viatory, a preparatory, an initiatory, an inchoative blessedness in this life. What is that? All agree in this definition, that blessedness is that in quo quiescit animus, in which the mind, the heart, the desire of man hath settled and rested, in which it found a Centrical
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Thanks to Michael Sean Winters for drawing attention to Melinda Henneberger’s essay in The Washington Post on the search for the perfect baby. Talk about your cultural gulf
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St. Augustine in his sermons regularly exhorted his congregation to look beyond the physical reality of a wonder performed by Christ to the spiritual reality it symbolized. To remain at the physical level would be like admiring the beauty of an inscription in a foreign language without wondering
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The British Museum is now showing an exhibition on “Ice-Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind” which displays sculptures and engravings from tens of thousands of years ago. A review in the Financial Times opens strikingly:
As you turn the corner in the British Museum’s Reading Room gallery,
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What does it mean: “Let him take up his cross?” Let him bear whatever trouble he encounters; that’s how to follow me. For when a person begins to follow me in conformity to my life and precepts, he will encounter many to contradict him, many to hinder him, many to dissuade him, and this even
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On a less serious note: I told this story to a friend this morning who thought it would make for a good thread.
One of my cousins remembered as a child overhearing a conversation between her mother and mine about what it is that determines the sex of a child. My mother’s view was that it was
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Let us return to the Lord. The Lord never tires of forgiving: never! We are the ones who get tired of asking forgiveness. And let us ask for the grace never to tire of asking forgiveness because he never tires of forgiving. Let us ask for this grace.
Pope Francis’ words in his little homily the
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On the Lord’s words: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me” (Mk 8:34).
What the Lord commands seems hard and burdensome: that anyone who wishes to follow him must deny himself. But what he commands is not hard or burdensome because he
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The following paragraph comes from Augustine’s sermon on Ps 37[38], whose title includes these words: “for a remembrance of the sabbath”; hence a couple of the comments below.
“All my desire is before you” (Ps 37[38], 10) Not before human beings, who cannot see the heart, but “before
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What did the Lord Jesus reply? What did Truth reply? What did Wisdom reply? What did that righteousness against which a calamny was prepared reply? He did not say, “Let her not be stoned,” for then he would seem to be against the Law. But God forbid that he should say, “Let her be stoned”!
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“You who stand in the Lord’s house, praise the name of the Lord” (Ps 134[135], 2). Be grateful. You used to be outside, now you are inside. Is it some slight thing, that you stand where he is to be praised who raised you when you lay prostrate and made you to stand in his house and to confess
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"'The forgiveness of sins.' If this did not exist in the Church, there would be no hope. If there were no forgiveness of sins in the Church, there would be no hope of a future life and eternal liberation. Thanks be to God who gave his Church this gift.
"You are about to come to the
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How St. Augustine explained the Creed’s article on the Church.
What follows: “holy Church,” refers to us. We are holy Church. But I didn’t say “we” as if it meant only us who are here or you who are now listening to me. I mean all who are here, by God’s mercy, the Christian
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Here is how Augustine, in one of his explanations of the Creed, went on to the next article:
The one who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried “rose from the dead on the third day.” Perhaps here too you have doubts, fears. When you were told to believe in the one who was born,
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Two weeks before Easter, a special ritual was performed in Augustine’s Church when to the competentes, the people who had enrolled and petitioned for baptism at the great Vigil, Augustine handed over the symbol of faith and explained it (the traditio symboli). The catechumens would not have been
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It's been pointed out how frequently and insistently St. Augustine stressed the need for Christians to forgive. For example, he urged forgiveness as the chief almsgiving they should perform during Lent. Someone has remarked that he was deliberately setting himself against a kind of culture of
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Let no one say, “I didn’t sin against God; I sinned against a brother, against a man: it’s a slight sin, or even no sin at all.” Perhaps you say it’s slight because it’s quickly cured. You sin against a brother; you make up for it, and you’re healed. Your fatal deed was quickly done,
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"In everything the Lord has done he is teaching us how to live here. There is no one in this world who is not a stranger, even if not all desire to return to their country. We suffer floods and storms on this journey, but at least we ought to be in the boat. If there are dangers in the boat,
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"I have loved, O Lord, the beauty of your house and the place where your glory dwells (Ps 25:8). We love the beauty of God’s house and the place where his glory dwells if we ourselves are that house. What is the beauty of God’s house and the place where his glory dwells if not the temple
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"No one should say, 'I’ve received the Holy Spirit; why do I not speak in the languages of all nations?' If you want to have the Holy Spirit–listen, brothers and sisters: the spirit by which anyone of us lives is called one's 'soul,' and you know what the soul does in the body. It enlivens
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In his polemics against the Donatists and then against the Pelagians, Augustine insisted on the mixed character of the Church on earth. In the passage below, he repeats his argument, this time against Manicheans. He invokes the two New Testament passages that he thinks clinch the argument: the plea
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"What does it mean that Peter dared to come to Jesus walking on the water? Peter often represents the Church. What else, then, could the text mean, 'Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water?' except this: 'Lord, if you are true and never lie, let your Church be made manifest
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For those who heard the Gospel of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman today:
“Jesus, wearied by his journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour.” Now begin the mysteries. For it is not without a purpose that Jesus is weary; not without a purpose that the strength of
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“Blessing I will bless her widow; I will satisfy her poor with bread” (Ps 131[132], 15). Everyone who knows himself left without any help except God’s is a widow. ... Thus the entire Church is a single widow, whether in men or in women or in the married or in women with husbands or in
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The theme that Augustine so stressed, about the movement from external law to the inner law written on one’s mind and heart, is also found in many places in the writings of St. Thomas. Here is a link to an article which, after discussing the views of St. Ignatius Loyola, has a helpful summary
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"This day is different from those that came before..."
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Psalm 118[119] is by far the longest Psalm and the one most artificially constructed. It consists of twenty-two sections in alphabetical order with each of the eight verses in each section beginning with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It focuses on God’s gift of his law, which is
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“You who sit upon the Cherubim” (Ps 79[80], 2). The Cherubim are the throne of God’s glory, and the word means “Fullness of knowledge”. God sits there in the fullness of knowledge. Although we understand the Cherubim to be sublime powers and virtues in the heavens, still, if you wish, you
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“A sacrifice to God is an afflicted spirit; a crushed and humbled heart, O God, you do not spurn” (Ps 50[51], 19). You have what you may offer him. Don’t look around at your flock; don’t prepare your ships; don’t sail to the farthest provinces to bring back spices. Look in your heart for
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"The one who enters by the door is the shepherd, but the one who climbs up another way is a thief and a robber, and he desires to destroy and to scatter and to bear away" (Jn 10:12). ... The Lord mentioned three persons–a shepherd, a hired hand, and a thief–and we ought to examine
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“And I, the Lord, am your God.” God is above all, and I do not know how anyone would dare to say, “My God,” unless it is someone who believes in him and loves him–he says, “My God.” You’ve made him your own, and he to whom you belong, loves this. With the sweetness of your
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There is a major theme in Augustine's thought that sin means alienation not only from God but from oneself, too. Grace, then, is conceived as returning the sinner to his real self, where he also discovers the God who is "more inward than my inmost self."
When God raises a body, he
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“Better is one day in your courts than a thousand days” (Ps 83/84, 11). Those are the courts for which the Psalmist sighed, for which he fainted away.... People desire thousands of days and long to live here. Let them scorn their thousands of days and desire that single day, that day that knows
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Let us be of one mind, faithful all to one another, all of us, during this wandering, sighing with desire for a single homeland, and fervent in love. Let no one envy or scorn in another a gift of God that he does not possess. In spiritual goods, consider yours what you love in your brother; let him
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It seems that, to prevent misunderstandings, it would be good to offer a few texts in which it is clear that St. Augustine did not hate the earth and did not urge people to hate God's good creation. Other texts could be cited.
By this supremely and equally and immutably good Trinity were all
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The title of Psalm 83/84 has the word gittith, which today is often left untranslated and is taken to refer to some kind of musical instrument. The Septuagint and early Latin versions of the Psaltery appealed to one possible etymology and translated the word as "wine-presses" (torcular in
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“My mouth will proclaim your righteousness, all the day your salvation.” What does “your salvation” mean? That" salvation is the Lord’s" (Ps 3:9). No one should claim that he has saved himself: salvation is the Lord’s.... “Vain is the salvation of man” (Ps 59:13). “All
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The practice of righteousness is to bear with this time and in some way to fast from this world, not from ordinary food, which we do rarely, but from love of the world, which we ought always to be doing. Whoever abstains from this world, therefore, fulfills the law. For one cannot love what is
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Sacred Scripture far excels all other knowledge and teaching. It sets forth what is true; it calls readers to the heavenly country; it changes the hearts of readers from earthly desires to embrace things above; by its obscurer statements it exercises the strong and by its humble strain speaks
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St. Gregory the Great on the Scriptures:
As the word of God exercises the wise by the mysteries it contains, so quite frequently it nourishes plain folk by its surface-meaning. It presents openly the food it offers the little ones; it keeps hidden what will hold people of loftier reach in
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From today's papal audience:
As you know, I have decided – thank you for your kindness – to renounce the ministry which the Lord entrusted to me on 19 April 2005. I have done this in full freedom for the good of the Church, after much prayer and having examined my conscience before God,
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Before all else, brothers and sisters, fast from strife and discord. Recall the prophet’s reproach: “On your fast days you follow your own desires, you goad those under your yoke, you beat them with your fists, and is your cry to be heard?” (Is 58:3-5). And to this he added: “This is not
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It could very well be that Pope Benedict's greatest contribution to Catholic ecclesiology will be that he resigned the papal office. Everyone has known that it is possible for a pope to resign; the Code of Canon Law mentions it. But part of the very modern "mystique" of the papacy has
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In the latest New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has a rather snarky review of a few recent works on Galileo. Towards the end, he offers an explanation of why the Church wouldn’t tolerate his views at least as hypothesis:
Whatever might be said to accord faith and Copernicus, religion depends for its myth
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According to Spiegel-online today, questions similar to those being raised about Catholic institutions here are also being raised there. I wouldn't say the article is a masterpiece of objectivity, but it's worth reading.
 
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Patrick Jordan’s lovely remembrance of Dorothy Day in the latest issue of Commonweal includes these remarks:
It was very much as a realist that she had entered the church in 1927; and in 1933, when she and Maurin started the Catholic Worker, she had not sought approval for the venture from
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As its annual nod to religion, the NY Times Book Review gave space to Commonweal-contributor Paul Elie to discuss fiction and faith. Early paragrphs set out the theme developed and discussed:
This, in short, is how Christian belief figures into literary fiction in our place and time: as
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I have hardly ever exercised a contributor's right to exclude certain comments from a thread I have opened, and almost always (perhaps always) it has been, not because of heresy or some other opinion with which I might happen to disagree, but because of vulgarity or some other offense against what
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The New Yorker website has a photo of a Pakistani woman grieving over her murdered daughter, a worker in a polio vaccination clinic in a Karachi hospital.
It instantly reminded me of the terracotta statue of the grieving
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[caption id="attachment_22451" align="alignleft" width="578"] From the Perikopenbuch of Henry II, early 12th century[/caption
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I once preached on today’s first reading, concentrating on this description of God: "The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a mighty savior; he will rejoice over you with gladness, and renew you in his love, he will sing joyfully because of you, as one sings at festivals" (Zeph 3:17-18
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The slaughter of the innocents came before Christmas this year. The priest in my sister’s parish noted the paradox of celebrating Gaudete Sunday when the country is deep in grief and outrage. Twenty small votive candles were placed on the altar as a commemoration of the little ones. Dozens of
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AWOL draws attention to the British Museum’s interactive on-line presence. Typing “Nativity” into the search engine brought me to this exquisite ivory panel from 15th-century France. The whole story is there, shepherds and magi, too:
And then a friend led me to a passage by Jane Kenyon
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"And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves. But he was asleep. And they went and woke him, saying, "Save, Lord! We are perishing!" And he said to them, "Why are
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To carry forward the theme addressed in a couple of recent threads, I offer a translation of an essay by Fr. Yves Congar published fifty years ago--plus ça change... It doesn't exactly speak to the precise way in which many people are posing the issue here, but there's a good deal of wisdom in it
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In the course of conversations after one of my recent talks on Vatican II, the question came up about how knowledgeable about their faith U.S. Catholics are. At one point, it dawned on me that the overwhelming majority (over 90%) of them have never had an adult course in their faith. This estimate
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Perhaps another Pew study will contextualize recent discussions here of clergy and the election. It's on what Protestant and Catholic church-goers say they're hearing from the pulpit.
The AP has a story that the IRS since 2009 has not been pursuing cases involving political involvement on the
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On the Pew Research site, you can find a summary of the findings of how teen-age students do research today. Here is the summary of the sources they are likely to consult:
Google or other online search engine (94%)
Wikipedia or other online encyclopedia (75%)
YouTube or other social media sites
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Fifty years ago today the Second Vatican Council began with a solemn ceremony in St. Peter’s Basilica. It had rained through most of the night before, threatening to wash out the procession through the Square. But the skies cleared into the brilliant Roman blue and things could proceed as planned
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The first period of Vatican II (1962) was its most crucial; by freeing the Council from the narrow channels of the official drafts, it permitted it to expand its vision and eventually to produce texts that represented and encouraged the three goals Pope John set out for the Council: spiritual
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On July 23, 1962, the Secretary General of the Second Vatican Council sent out to all those with a right to participate in the Council a book that contained the first draft-texts that were to be debated when the Council opened on October 11th of the same year. The following texts were included:
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During the period of preparations for the Council (November 1960 – Summer 1962), ten commissions drafted texts for the bishops to consider. When finished, they were brought before the Central Commission [CPC], a body that was supposed to have certain supervisory functions and in particular to
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As we learned from today’s Gospel, Ephphatha is the command Jesus utters when he touches the ears and, with his spittle, the tongue of a deaf and speech-impaired man who immediately can hear and speak intelligibly (Mk 7:31-37). It is also the name for an optional moment in the baptismal ritual
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Andrea Tornielli recalls some remarks of Cardinal Martini shortly before his term as archbishop of Milan ended. Asked whether he preferred to be called “Father” or “Pastor,” he replied:
I don’t much like these terms. The term “Father” has never meant much to me because it reminds me
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Almighty God, father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, revealed to us so powerfully in your Son, Jesus Christ, we thank you for showering your blessings upon this our beloved nation. Bless all here present, and all across this great land, who work hard for the day when a greater portion of your justice
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A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon AWOL: The Ancient World on Line, a project largely managed by Charles E. Jones, who explains its purpose:
The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of
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Today’s NY Times has a profile by Jo Becker of Valerie Jarrett, senior White House adviser to President Obama. It appears that among other things she is largely responsible for the clumsy way in which the contraception-mandate in health insurance programs was handled when it came to religious
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Looking for something, I had occasion today to re-read paragraph 43 of Gaudium et spes, Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in Today’s World. It struck me that several of the common themes that come up for discussion on this blog are expressed and addressed in this paragraph, and I
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In the 25 August issue of the London Tablet, Clifford Longley’s column discusses the candidature of Paul Ryan and wonders about episcopal reactions to his endorsement of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Longley believes, as did Rand herself, that “it really is not possible simultaneously to be both
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Dealing with difference in Rome
In his Epistle to the Romans, Paul devoted a lengthy section (14:1-15:6) to tensions within the Christian community there. J.D.G. Dunn interprets the situation as arising from the return to Rome of Jewish Christians who had been expelled from Rome in 49 but who now
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The latest scholarship indicates that St. Paul was concerned about the character of many of the so-called conversations in the blogosphere when he wrote these words, which serve as the second reading for this Sunday's liturgy:
Brothers and sisters:Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God,with which
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Yesterday as I went out to tend to our chickens, I heard chirping near our wood pile, from a fledgling, I thought, fallen from a nest. But when I finally located the bird, it turned out to be a tiny day-or-two-old chick. More chirping led me to another. And then I found the mother hen, in a dark
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Rorate coeli is a conservative blog quite sympathetic to the Lefebvrite FSSPX. It has just posted what it thinks is the first English translation of the pastoral letter issued by the bishops of the Netherlands on the deportation of the Jewish population. Issued seventy years ago on July 20, 1942,
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The Lefebvrite Priestly Society of St. Pius X released today a communique resulting from their general chapter concluded a few days ago. The most important paragraphs seem to be these:
For this reason it seems opportune that we reaffirm our faith in the Roman Catholic Church, the unique Church
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Here is today’s second reading in the Douai-Rheims version:
Blessed by the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with spiritual blessings in heavenly places, in Christ, as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and unspotted in his
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Rainer Maria Woekli is the Archbishop of Berlin and the youngest member of the College of Cardinals. In a recent interview he gave some sensible and sensitive responses about a number of matters in the life of the Catholic Church today, among them the Vatileaks scandal and the pastoral care of
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There are countries in which it is illegal to bob the tail of a dog. Has a German court started another new movement to prevent cruel and unusual punishment? And is this a new threat to religious freedom? Will it spread here? See here and here.
Now this from Spiegel-online:
Calling it
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Noted sociologist Peter Berger in his latest blog asks: "Is freedom of religion endangered in the U.S.? His own answer: "It seems to me that, empirically speaking, the answer is no," especially by comparison with many other areas of the world. But while he has criticisms of the &
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Bob Imbelli’s thread on St. Philip Neri and the paragraph by Meriol Trevor adduced by Anthony Andreass reminded me of a lovely prayer of that great son of St. Philip John Henry Newman and made me wonder if the latter were not thinking of St. Philip.
Stay with me, and then I shall begin to shine
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Here is a lovely image of Pentecost, from an English manuscript, ca. 1230, which can be seen at the Walters Museum in Baltimore. (If you've never been there, you have great delights in store
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I have been struck by how often and how quickly criticisms of the bishops for their insistence that religious liberty is at stake in the matter of the government’s contraception-mandate have attributed other motives to their actions and statements, and Fr. Jenkins at Notre Dame has not been
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Three years ago, in the TLS, Andrew Scull reviewed David Healy’s book MANIA A short history of bipolar disorder. Here is how he introduced Healy:
Yet he has vaulted to prominence as a fierce critic of standard professional practice; of the role of Big Pharma - the collective name for large
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Two pieces bring the question of “hate speech” back before us. In the latest NY Review of Books and under the title “Should Hate Speech be Outlawed?”, Justice John Paul Stevens reviews Jeremy Waldron’s The Harm in Hate Speech. While Waldron admits that it is very unlikely that laws
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In the latest Commonweal, the Spring Books issue, Dennis O’Brien has an appreciative review of Andrew Delbianco’s book, College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be.” He particularly likes the emphasis placed on grace in shaping higher education and quotes a paragraph on the need for it in daily
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http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,830203,00.html
Der Spiegel online today has a story about the excavation of a mass grave of soldiers killed during the Battle of Lützen (1632), an event of the Thirty Years War remembered most for the death of King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden.
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Terry Eagleton, whose evisceration of Richard Dawkins still resounds, has a review in the new TLS (subscription only) of Richard Sennett’s latest book, Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation. The editors entitled the review, “On meaning well,” which already suggests
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In last Sunday’s NY Times, public editor Arthur Brisbane has an entertaining column in which he explains some of the criteria that govern the selection of the people who will be graced with an obituary in the paper. “Times obituaries,” he offers, “go not to the conventionally virtuous but
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The lead review in the latest TLS is devoted to two books on re-reading, Jonathan Yardley’s Second Reading, a collection of essays published in the Washington Post, and Patricia Meyer Spacks’s, On Rereading, written when she retired from teaching. A You-tube site introduces Spacks with this
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Augustine wrote his De catechizandis rudibus as a help for those who were giving elementary instructions about Christianity to people who had expressed some interest. His outline included, of course, a study of the Scriptures as the story of salvation. At the end of that he thought that
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And now, to conclude, for it is hardly befitting on this Day to speak much, when God has done His greatest work. Let us think of it and of Him. Let us rejoice in the Day which He has made, and let us be “willing in the Day of His Power.” This is Easter Day. Let us say this again and again
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“A helper in troubles, which have found us exceedingly” Ps 45[46]:3). Many are our troubles, and in every one of them we should flee to God; whether it is trouble in our families or with our health, or danger to our loved ones, or about things needed to sustain this life, a Christian should
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In Book 13 of his De Trintate, Augustine addressed the theme of our redemption by Christ. He introduces the subject by asking a question that may have been asked in every generation–it is still being asked today. As the following excerpt indicates, he was concerned to eliminate from the beginning
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What follows teaches us that he will come for judgement. For a fire will go before him (Ps 96[97]:3). Are we afraid? Let us change and we will not be afraid. The chaff fears the fire, but what does fire do to gold? You now have it in your power to do what should be done so that you do not
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Concerning the Bride, let us see what He says; that you, when you know the Bridegroom and the Bride, may not without reason come to the marriage. For every celebration is a celebration of marriage: the Church's nuptials are being celebrated. The King's Son is about to marry a wife, that King's Son
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“They have not in-voked God” (Ps 52[53]:6). Don’t such people entreat God every day? They’re not entreating God. Pay attention and with God’s help I may be able to explain this. God wishes to be worshipped gratis; he wants to be loved gratis, that is, to be loved chastely, not to be loved
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“Who will seek his mercy and truth for his sake?” (Ps 60(61):8) It says in another place: “All the ways of the Lord are mercy and truth for those who are seeking his covenant and his testimonies” (Ps 24[25]10). A long sermon could be given on truth and mercy, but I promised to be brief. So
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"In the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall arise again incorrupt"–that is, whole–"and we shall be changed." We are then told what kind of change there will be: "For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and
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St. Augustine began one of his homilies with the following prayer which, with proper adjustments, could be said by both preacher and congregation as the preacher begins to speak:
“May the Lord help us by your prayers so that I say what I should say and you should hear, so that the Word of
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The Lord our God spread the faith in and by which we live in many and varied ways through the holy Books, the Scriptures. While varying the mysteries of the words [sacramenta verborum], he nonetheless commended the one faith. Because the same thing is told in many ways, the variety prevents boredom
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Augustine is commenting on Psalm 121[122, which is one of the "songs of ascents," or "songs of steps."
This Psalm, which we have taken up to treat today for you, is of desire for Jerusalem itself; that is, the one who is going up in this Psalm, because it is a “song of
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St. Augustine interprets Psalm 123[124] as if it is the song of martyrs who have escaped their torments.
The exultant members of Christ are singing this Psalm. But here below who sings exultantly except in hope? But because that hope of ours is certain, we too sing exultingly. Those who are
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“May peace be in your strength” (Ps 121[122]:7). O Jerusalem! O city who are being built as a city, ... may peace be in your strength! May peace be in your love, because your strength is your love. Listen to the Song of Songs: “Love is strong as death” (Song 8:6). A great saying, brothers
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“In this are manifested the children of God and the children of the devil: Whoever is not righteous is not from God, and whoever does not love his brother.” Now it is clear what he is saying: “And whoever does not love his brother.” Only love distinguishes God’s children from the devil’
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See, brothers and sisters, how many things we pass through, things in which there is no end. We use them as if we were on the road, as if we were resting overnight in an inn, and then moving on. Where, then, is the end? “Beloved, we are children of God and it has not yet appeared what we shall be
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“This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments” (1 Jn 4:3). You have already heard this: “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” See how Christ did not want to divide you over lots of pages! “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
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“You have dealt sweetly with your servant, Lord, according to your word” (Ps 118[119]:65)... I believe that this means that you have made me feel delight in what is good. To delight in the good is a great gift of God. When a good work which the law commands is done out of fear of punishment and
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Love is a lovely word, but deeds are lovelier. We can’t always be talking about love–we’ve got other things to do, and different actions draw us in different directions, so that our tongues don’t have the leisure always to be talking about love, as much as it is true that our tongues could
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“Let us love, because he loved us first” (I Jn 4:19). For how could we love unless he had first loved us? By loving we became his friends, but he loved us when we were his enemies so that we might be made his friends. He loved us first, and gave us the gift of loving him. We did not yet love
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A few days ago, Sandro Magister took note of two articles that had recently appeared in Italy about the possibility of Pope Benedict’s resignation. Discussion about the similar matter had arisen during the last decade of Pope John Paul II’s reign as Parkinson’s disease took an increasingly
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“Whoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God” (I Jn 4:15) We needn’t use many words: “Whoever shall confess”: not in word but in deed, not with one’s tongue but with one’s life. For many confess with their words but deny with their deeds.
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“He who did not spare his own Son but handed him over [tradidit] for our sake, how has he not with him also freely given us all things?” (Rom 8:32). So: the Father handed him over; Judas handed him over. Doesn’t it seem almost the same thing? Judas is a traditor; God the Father, then, is a
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“We are of God. He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God does not hear us. This is how the spirit of truth and of error is known” (1 Jn 4:6) Now he has our attention: whoever knows God hears; whoever doesn’t know him doesn’t hear, and this is what distinguishes between the spirit of
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Yesterday the Vatican issued the following statement on the discussions that have taken place to try to heal the split between Catholic Church authorities and the Lefebvrite Society of St. Pius X. The ball is back in their court.
During the meeting of 14 September 2011 between Cardinal William
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Where does charity begin? Consider this for a moment. You’ve heard where love is perfect; the Lord told us in the Gospel what its goal and measure is: “Greater love than this no one has than to lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13). He showed its perfection in the Gospel, and it is
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How does anyone know that he has received the Holy Spirit? Let him question his own heart: if he loves his brother, then God’s Spirit remains in him. Let him see; let him prove himself before the eyes of God; let him see if he has love for peace and unity, love for the Church spread throughout
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“I have written these things to you about those who seduce you so that you may know that you have an anointing and so that the anointing which you have from him may remain in you.” There is a sacrament of anointing, whose power is invisible, whose anointing is invisible, the Holy Spirit. The
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In this Epistle, quite sweet to all whose hearts have the palate for savoring God’s bread, most worthy of being remembered by God’s holy Church, it is charity that is most especially commended. John has spoken many words, and almost all of them are about charity. Anyone who possesses the
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The cross of the Lord is the key by which closed things can be opened. (Augustine, EnPs 45[46], 1; PL 36, 514)
Our slow hearts would not follow did Truth not see fit to walk even with the slow. (De continentia, 4)
Don’t live, then, according to your own lights; that’s how you got lost–
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We have just heard in the Gospel how much our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ loves us–he who is God with the Father, man with us, one of us but now at the Father’s right hand–you have heard how much he loves us. He himself told us the measure of his love, and enjoined it upon us, too, when he
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“My heart has rejoiced in the Lord” (1 Sam 2:1). When Anna says “my heart,” she surely is speaking of her mind’s freedom. Wicked people do not possess their own hearts; the devil does. That’s what is said of the betrayer: “The devil had now put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, the
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I heard on the radio today that a couple in Portland OR had been awarded $3 million because a clinic had assured them that the baby the mother was carrying did not have Down Syndrome. After their daughter was born, she was discovered to have the extra chromosome. The couple say that they would
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The Lord exhorts us to imitate the cleverness of the snake: Be as clever as snakes (Mt 10:16). What does that mean: “clever as snakes”? Offer all your members to one striking you, but protect your head: Christ is the head of the man (1 Cor 11:3). But he's pressed down by the weight of his skin
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The entire life of a good Christian is holy desire. What you desire you do not yet see, but by desiring it you become capable of it so that when what you may see comes, you may be filled with it. If you want to fill a bag, and you know how big the thing is that will be given, you stretch the
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Cassiodorus and Augustine were the only patristic authors who left complete commentaries on the Psalms; but whereas in Augustine’s there’a lightning-flash of insight on every other page, Cassiodorus’ insights come much less frequently. Unlike Augustine, who was explaining the Psalms to his
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Thus shall I bless you in my life, and in your name I shall lift up my hands (Ps 62[63]: 5). Thus shall I bless you in my life. In my life now, the one you gave me, not the one that I chose with others according to the world and down its many paths, but in the life that you gave me by your mercy so
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Pointing out that there are seven penitential Psalms, Cassiodorus [ca. 485-ca.580] offered this as a reason:
Our ancestors said that there are seven ways in which sins can be forgiven us: first by baptism; second by suffering martyrdom; third by giving alms; fourth by forgiving the sins of our
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Brothers and sisters, God has so blessed us in the name of Christ that he has filled the earth with his children, adopted into his Kingdom, coheirs of his only begotten Son. He begot a single Son, but he did not wish him to remain the only one.... He made brothers and sisters for him, if not by
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Earlier in this sermon, Augustine had cited Ps 143[144]:9: “To you, O God, I will sing a new song; on a ten-stringed harp I will sing praises to you.” The ten-stringed harp he saw as a symbol of the decalogue, which led to this insistence on the inadequacy of fearful obedience, something he
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Come, listen, and I will tell, all you who fear God (Ps 65[66]: 16). Let us come, let us listen to what he is going to tell…. Who are to come and listen? All you who fear God. If you do not fear God, I will not tell it, because where there is no fear of God, there is no one to tell it to. Let
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"And my mouth has spoken when I was in trouble" [Ps 65[66]: 14).... What did his mouth speak when he was in trouble?"Marrowed holocausts I will offer up to you." What does “marrowed” mean? I will keep my love for you, and it won’t be on the surface; my love for you will be
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On another thread, Bob Nunz, while declaring his disagreement with it, refers us to John Allen's column on three myths about Catholicism. If contributions to that other thread are any indication, Bob will not be alone in his dissent
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My dear people, you will remember that in the two Psalms which have just been discussed, we were exhorted to bless the Lord and we chanted, “Bless the Lord, my soul” [Ps 102[103]:1 and Ps 103[104]:1). If we were exhorted in those Psalms to bless the Lord, in this Psalm it is rightly said, “
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The Lord will grant that my weak voice will be strong enough today to keep your attention. Please help me by your silence, for my mind is ready but the flesh weak. Having conceived joyous things from God’s Scriptures, that mind is now in labor, and desires to give birth to them in your ears and
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The first graduate course I taught when I went to Catholic University in 1977 was on the Second Vatican Council. As a way of getting students to reflect on what had changed during and after the Council, I gave them the paragraphs that Garry Wills wrote for the editors of Commonweal in response to
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Hope in him, all you assembly of the people. Pour your hearts out before him (Ps 61[62]: 9). Don’t give in to those who are asking you, Where is your God? My tears, the Psalmist says elsewhere, have become my bread day and night while they say to me everyday: “where is your God?”And what does
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For you have become my protector and my refuge on the day of my trouble. O my helper, I will sing to you because you, God, are my protector (Ps 58(59) 17-18). What would I have been had you not come to my aid? How hopeless would I have been if you did not heal me! Where would I now be lying unless
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It is written, “The Lord your God is testing you in order to know if you love him” (Dt 13:3). The phrase “in order to know” means “in order to enable you to know,” because how strong one’s love is is hidden from oneself unless it becomes known even to one's own self by God's testing
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Keep watch in good works. Play the psaltery by obeying the commandments; play the harp by enduring your sufferings. “Break your bread with the hungry,” you have heard from Isaiah. Don’t think that fasting is enough. Fasting chastises you but does not renew anyone else. Depriving yourself
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“They shall be drunk with the abundance of your house, and you shall make them drink of the torrent of your pleasure” (Ps 35[36]:9)
Spiritual refreshment consists of two things: the gifts of God and his sweetness. With reference to the first, it says: “they shall be drunk with the
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Let us love God purely and chastely. A heart is not chaste if it worships God for the sake of reward. What, then, are we to have no reward for worshiping God? Indeed, we shall, but the reward is the very God whom we worship. He himself will be our reward because we shall see him as he is (I Jn 3:2
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This week’s TLS has a review by Andrew Scull of Simon Baron Cohen’s book Zero Degrees of Empathy: A new theory of human cruelty, which argues that cruelty results from a lack of empathy (one is tempted to say, “Duh!”). The six degrees of empathy can be measured by questionnaires and by the
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The second reading for Ash Wednesday invites us to apply to the season of Lent the words, first, of the prophet and, second, of the apostle: “‘In an acceptable time I heard you, and on the day of salvation I helped you’ (Is 49:8). Behold, now is the acceptable time! Behold, now is the day of
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Fifty years ago tomorrow, February 22, 1962, there gathered in St. Peter’s Basilica several thousand priests, seminarians (among them your humble servant), and religious, forty-one Cardinals, around a hundred bishops, members of the Roman Curia, the members of the Central Preparatory Commission
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This past week the Pontifical Gregorian University hosted a symposium on the sexual abuse of minors for bishops and the superiors of religious congregations. John Allen has followed the proceedings closely at the NCR website. The Gregorian has a whole site devoted to the conference and there, if
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The second phase of the unfolding of Vatican II was the Preparatory Period which ran from November 1960 through to the very eve of the Council’s opening on October 11,1962. During it ten commissions prepared texts for discussion and approval when the fathers assembled in St. Peter’s for the
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One of the first steps in the preparation of Vatican II was the Vatican’s soliciting of recommendations for the conciliar agenda from the world’s bishops, from the heads of clerical religious orders, from Catholic universities and faculties, and from the offices of the Roman Curia.
I
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As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, it might be helpful to keep in mind developments since Pope John’s announcement of an ecumenical council on January 25, 1958. In my files I have a number of essays that provide some background, and I am making
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Richard N. Williamson, the odd-bishop-out of the Lefebvrite Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), continues to publish a weekly essay despite the demand of Bishop Fellay, head of the group, that he shut down his website. Williamson was the only one of the four bishops of the SSPX not invited to attend the
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Just before Christmas we had a discussion of Christmas poetry. If I had known the one I give below, I'd have included it. It's by the British poet Sally Read, and since on another thread below it became clear that not everyone likes it as much as I do, I thought I'd give it its own thread.
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http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/162180
The January 7th issue of the London Tablet has two articles developing the cover story, “The Church’s revolving door.” Christopher Lamb’s piece, unfortunately only for subscribers, discusses women who join or leave and/or return to the Catholic
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http://www.tikkun.org/article.php?story=mar2001_madsen
In the thread on “whooping,” Jeanne Follman has some remarks and a link that I think deserve discussion in their own right (rite?). Here is what Jeanne wrote:
You have to wonder what it would take for, say, a group of reasonably affluent
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A couple of people have asked me to expand on the theme of jubilation/whooping to which I drew attention in his sermon on Ps 99(100). The verb jubilo and the noun jubilatio occur often in the Psalms, and almost every time he encountered one of them, Augustine would point out that the word referred
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There is a remarkable sermon of St. Augustine on Ps 99 (100). It begins with his explanation of what “jubilation” (whooping) means, a topic that can be left for another occasion. Toward the end of this discussion, he says the whooping is possible even here on earth, as the Psalmist insists,
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A good number of years ago, this postcard arrived in my home mailbox. The other side revealed that it had been sent by a local Protestant church. “What do you think of when you think of ‘Church,’” is the same question that Fr. Yves Congar often asked: “<i>Pro quo supponit
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http://jakomonchak.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=486&action=edit&message=1
A celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Vatican II could fittingly begin by recalling the publication on Christmas Day 1961 of the Apostolic Constitution Humanae salutis, with
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THE NATIVITY OF CHRIST.
By Robert Southwell
Behold the father is his daughter's son,
The bird that built the nest is hatch'd therein,
The old of years an hour hath not outrun,
Eternal life to live doth now begin,
The word is dumb, the mirth of heaven doth weep,
Might feeble is, and force
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Three texts from Augustine for our great feastday, already sent in separately on other occasions:
What praise of the love of God we should express! What thanks we should give! He loved us so that he through whom all time was made for our sakes came to be in time; he who in his eternity is older
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Bishop Fellay, head of the Lefebvrite Priestly Society of St. Pius X, has just issued his latest "Letter to Benefactors and Friends," almost entirely devoted to the three points that are, as he sees it, at the heart of his group's "difficult relations" with the Vatican;
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On December 12th, Luis Antonio (“Chito”) Tagle was installed as archbishop of Manila. Here you can find the homily he delivered. One powerful paragraph:
Finally, let us turn to the beloved disciple, the disciple whom Jesus loved. He was the one who recognized the Lord who had loved them by
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Here's a very fine link that permits you to make a virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel. It can be vertiginous, but after a bit, you'll get used to it. Zooming buttons are in the lower left corner
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My godmother has died at the age of 96, my uncle’s wife, the last member of their generation, my parents’ generation. We–brothers and sisters and cousins--are now next in line. (In fact, one sister and two brothers-in-law, as well as several cousins, are already gone, as well as a lovely
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Ever since it was urged by Pope John XXIII that the Second Vatican Council would attempt to meet the needs of the day “by more fully explaining the validity of her doctrinethan by condemning” and that the Council’s exercise of its teaching office would be “pastoral in nature,” the
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The Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University is giving women an opportunity to proclaim Advent by giving talks on the Sunday readings. Here is an example, given by Elizabeth McCloskey, one-time Commonweal columnist, who is completing her doctoral dissertation in spirituality at the
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Perhaps we all can remember the first anthology of poetry we ever used in school or for personal use. Mine was Palgreave’s Golden Treasury, which back in the day was something of a classic. I wish I still had my copy which would include marginal checkmarks or notes next to poems I particularly
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In a NYRB review [subscription only] of Francis Fukuyama’s book The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, William Pfaff, former editor and frequent contributor to Commonweal, wonders whether we may tell the tale of human history as one of progress. He
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Forgive me for starting yet another thread, but I simply want to share my joy at the appointment of Bishop Luis Antonio Tagle to be Archbishop of Manila. "Chito," as he is everywhere known, was my student at Catholic University and completed his dissertation under my direction. He was one
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A little postscript to Jackson Lears’ nuanced critical article on Reinhold Niebuhr in the latest issue of Commonweal. John Courtney Murray was, I’d say, the only Catholic public intellectual in the post-war years. Among the essays collected to form the volume We Hold These Truths was the one in
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In the “Notebook” section of a recent number of the London Tablet, there is a brief note about Amanda Knox and her having used her time in prison to learn about Christianity from the Catholic chaplain there. The chaplain commented: “Amanda is not a Catholic. She didn’t know anything about
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Daniel Soar has a fascinating article in the London Review of Books on Google and what it already knows and wants to know about the universe--and about you. Google has described its goal as “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Any scholar will
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It was not all work and no play at the Second Vatican Council. While speeches, momentous, portentous, and dull were being delivered in very differently accented Latin, a few bishops kept themselves awake by composing limericks, that distinctively English literary genre. At my blog I have gathered
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In the last two issues of the New York Review of Books (available on-line to subscribers), Frederick Crews resumes his thirty-years war against psychoanalysis in general and Sigmond Freud in particular. Crews first became known as a literary critic who made much use of psychoanalysis, for example
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http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2011/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20110922_reichstag-berlin_en.html
Yesterday Pope Benedict XVI gave a very interesting speech to the members of the German Parliament, choosing as his theme “The Listening Heart: Reflections on the
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In my younger days I used to collect devastating reviews in a kind of commonplace book–as when <i>The Village Voice</I> entitled a review of a film by Barbra Streisand: “A Bore is Starred,” or when a reviewer complained, “O’Dets, where is thy sting?” This
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Tomorrow, September 14th, a meeting will take place between Cardinal Levada, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and leaders of Archbishop Lefebvre’s Society of St. Pius X, at which will be communicated the Vatican’s summary of the results of the doctrinal conversations
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Sandro Magister today gives the speech presented to the Napa Institute by the new Archbishop of Los Angeles, José Gómez. It reminds us of the early presence of Catholic missionaries in lands that would become the USA, a history often forgotten in favor of the later arrival of the Puritans. For
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At the heart of the parable Jesus tells in yesterday’s Gospel is the contrast between the immense debt owed by a king’s servant and freely forgiven him by the king and the relatively trivial debt owed to that same servant by one of his fellow-servants, which he refuses to forgive him. In the
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Zenit today translates Pope Benedict’s lovely meditation yesterday on the via pulchritudinis, beauty as a way, a path, to God. Before speaking of art that is expressive of Christian faith, he has two paragraphs on the experience of art as a signal of transcendence:
Perhaps it has happened to you
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I may have read George Eliot’s Silas Marner in late high school or early college. A certain unpleasant memory prompted by seeing the title in the list of her works inclines me to believe that we did have it assigned to us, and that I didn’t enjoy the experience. (I don’t necessarily blame
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The most famous public controversy over the issue in the first half of the twentieth century was the exchange of letters between an Episcopalian layman, Charles C. Marshall, and Alfred E. Smith, the Catholic Governor of New York State and later Democratic candidate for President of the United
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http://www.osservatoreromano.va/portal/dt?JSPTabContainer.setSelected=JSPTabContainer%2FDetail&last=false%3D&path=%2Fnews%2Fcultura%2F2011%2F184q11-Lettore-fermati----morto-padre-Busa.html&title=Lettore+fermati!+%C3%83%C2%88+morto+padre+Busa&locale=en
http://www.ibm
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http://ncronline.org/blogs/distinctly-catholic/chaputs-latest
Michael Sean Winters has a column at the NCReporter on a recent talk by Archbishop Chaput for which he has some words of praise and some of criticism. Among the latter are these two points:
Finally, you would not know from Chaput’s
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http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/08/15/110815crat_atlarge_wood
The New Yorker has a review by James Wood of a new book, The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now, edited by George Levine, who says that the book’s aim is to “explore the idea that secularism is a
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/magazine/the-two-minus-one-pregnancy.html?ref=magazine
Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine had as its cover story an article about the ethics of a woman’s choosing to abort one of the twins she is carrying. The procedure is called “reduction to a singleton,
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Do people still make miscellanies? I mean collections of things that strike you when you’re reading, and you write them down because they’re witty or striking or profound or humorous, or whatever. Today I came across this gem that I stumbled upon some years ago while looking for something
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Two images of the second part of tomorrow's Gospel. The first is a twelfth-century mosaic from the cathedral of Monreale, Sicily.
(Notice that there are only ten apostles in the boat. Did the artist, like some modern scholars, think this is a post-resurrection event?)
The second is by the
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During World War II, Camp Shanks in Rockland Co., N.Y., about ten miles from New York City, was the point of embarkation for hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops leaving to fight in Europe. (See here and here.) My father worked there as a clerk. He had been too young for World War I, and while not
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In a TLS review of Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A refutation of the new atheism [subscription only], Anthony Kenny has this amusing paragraph:
There is a popular master-narrative of the history of philosophy that goes like this: philosophy was started in the ancient world by Plato and
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This is now a few years ago, but it was only yesterday that a good friend told me that NPR had celebrated the 75th anniversary of my favorite radio show, The Lone Ranger, so I went online and found that I could listen to the tribute here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=
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I love stories like this one, from today's Spiegel-on-line, about archaeological digs in Thuringia revealing a very large Bronze-Age building ca. 1380 B.C., and giving historians things to wonder about, not least how did the man buried nearby accumulate such wealth. If given another life to live
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The Economist has recently published a 15-page special report on Italy. The emphasis falls on economic matters (duh!), but anyone who loves the country and its people but wonders about its often crazy politics and other aspects of its social and cultural life will find it interesting and
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One of my sisters sent me today this intriguing poem by Linda Pastan, “On the Question of Free Will”:
Sometimes,
noticing the skeleton
embossed
on every leaf
and how the lion’s mouth
and antelope’s neck
fit perfectly
I wonder
at God’s plan
had Eve refused
the apple
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A new multi-lingual website has been opened by Andrea Tornielli in assocation with the Italian newspaper La Stampa. It appears to be interested in things other than inside-the-Vatican gossip. Here's the link to the English version
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The TLS has a lengthy and rather well-balanced piece reviewing two recent books on G.K. Chesterton, one of them a very large biography by Ian Ker, known for his works on Newman. Don't be distracted by the "hook": whether he should be canonized
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Here are the new norms for the application of the papal motu proprio on the use of the unreformed liturgical rite, and here is a CNS story on them
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(Right after the reading of the Epistle, the celebrant would sing this Alleluia three times, elevating his voice for the second and third times, with the choir responding. I do not understand why it was dropped. I remember it as a thrilling moment in the Easter Mass. Et valde mane [And
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In the book of Genesis the Scriptures say: "And God saw the light, that it is good. And God divided the light and the darkness, and God called the light day and the darkness he called night." (Gen 1:4-5). If God called the light day, then surely those to whom the Apostle Paul said, "
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And to the music and to the spoken and written word may be added the visual tribute of faith that is the magnificent twelfth-century mosaic in the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome. It represents the cross as the Tree of Life from which flow the streams of living water for which the hart longs, from
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And we have seen him, and he had no beauty nor comeliness (Is 53:2). Was our bridegroom ugly, then? Of course not.... It was to those persecuting him that he appeared ugly; if they had not thought him ugly, they would not have attacked him, they would not have beaten him with whips, they would not
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But apart from that moral understanding of the passage, we remember that the way in which we commended to your attention the depth of this act of the Lord's was that in washing the feet of disciples who were already washed and clean, the Lord was symbolizing something: that we should know that, no
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The delight of a human heart at the light of truth, at the flow of wisdom–the delight of a human heart, of a believing heart, of a holy heart–there is no pleasure that can ever be compared to it, even by being called a lesser pleasure. If you say it’s less, then by growing it could become
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At the auction or market of faith the kingdom of heaven is being offered for sale to you. Review and gather the riches of your conscience, bring the treasures of your heart together in agreement. But you buy without cost if you acknowledge the graciousness of the grace that is being offered to you
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Let the cantor go up, then, but let that man sing from the heart of everyone of you, and let each person be that man. For although you all say that, because all of you are one in Christ, it is the one man who is saying it. He doesn’t say, "To you, O Lord, we have lifted up our eyes,"
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The following is extracted from a sermon Augustine gave to the competentes, those enrolled for baptism at the Easter Vigil.
Approach him, then, with crushed hearts, because he is "near to those who have crushed their hearts, and he will save the lowly of heart" (Ps 33:19). Eagerly
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Now what is God’s house is also a city. For God’s house is the people of God, God’s house is the temple of God. And what does the Apostle say? "God’s temple is holy, which you yourselves are" (1 Cor 3:17). For all the believers are the house of God, not only those who exist now,
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After entertaining chapters on the on-the-job education in the faith that he got while presenting and defending Catholicism as an eager participant in the Catholic Evidence Guild, Frank Sheed devotes the seventh chapter of his The Church and I; to “The Catholic Intellectual Revival” in the
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While trying to put some order into my bookshelves, I came across Frank Sheed’s The Church and I, his somewhat autobiographical recollections of his "experience of the Church," and now I can’t put it down. (The epigram is from G.K. Chesterton: "We’re all in the same boat, and
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The Lord is gracious and merciful, patient and plentiful in mercy. The Lord is sweet to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Ps 144:8-9). If he were not so, there would be no recovery for us. Consider yourself: a sinner, what did you deserve? Scornful of God, what did you deserve?
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There follows in this long Psalm something that we ought, with God’s help, to consider and discuss: Set before me a law, O Lord, the way of your justifications, and I will always seek after it (Ps 118:33). The Apostle says: "The law is not made for the just person, but for the unjust and
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You who stand in the house of the Lord, praise the name of the Lord (Ps 134:2). Be grateful; you were once outside that house, and now you are inside it. You are standing there, and do you think it a little thing that you are standing where he is to be praised who raised you when you were prostrate
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This is how Augustine began his series of sermons on John 6, which begins with the multiplication of the loaves and moves on to the Bread of Life discourse. The paragraphs indicate in brief how he thought of miracles and also how he approached the deeds of Jesus as themselves words needing to be
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For St. Augustine the miracles of Jesus point beyond themselves, that is, as for the Fourth Evangelist, they are "signs," and that is why Augustine never dwells on their wondrous aspect--less wondrous, he thought, than the daily wonders of God's works in nature--but looks for what they
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"And I will banish evil beasts from the land, and they will dwell in the desert in hope’" (Ez 34:25). What does ‘in the desert’ mean? In solitude. And what does ‘in solitude’ mean? Inwardly, in one’s consciousness. It’s a great solitude: no one else crosses it, no one else
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The Psalm (95/96) has this title: "When the house was being built after the captivity." "What house?", you ask. The Psalmist answers immediately: "Sing to the Lord a new song! Sing to the Lord, all the earth!" That’s what house. When all the earth sings the new song
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He will come openly, and he will not be silent (Ps 50:3). It says, "He will not be silent," because he was silent when he was being judged. But as for the words we need to hear, when has he been silent? He wasn’t silent when there were patriarchs and prophets; he wasn’t silent when he
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Here is a link to a BBC broadcast that features two people actively involved in dealing with horrors in contemporary Africa, a priest in the Ivory Coast who is trying to defend tens of thousands of refugees, and Jenni Williams, one of the founders of Women of Zimbabwe Arising, who is under
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Now another disciple presents himself (Lk 9: 57-62): "I will follow you, Lord," he says, "but first I’m going to say good-bye to my family." I think this is the meaning: "Let me tell my relatives so they won’t go looking for me." And the Lord says: "No one who
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This paragraph may appeal only to those "of a certain age," and perhaps not even to them....
We have listened to the Gospel and in it heard the Lord criticizing people who know how to examine the sky but don’t know how to discern the time of faith and the approaching kingdom of heaven
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Stretch your love, then, beyond your spouses and children–that love is found also in beasts and sparrows. You know all about sparrows and swallows, how they love their mates, how they hatch their eggs together, how they feed their chicks, all with a kind of natural goodness, with no thought of
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Our whole business in this life, brothers and sisters, is to heal the eye of the heart so that God may be seen. This is why the holy mysteries are celebrated, why the word of God is preached; why the Church has moral exhortations for the correction of behavior, the amendment of carnal lusts, the
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Today’s Gospel (ch. 9 of John’s Gospel–I do hope they read the whole of it) has from a very early date been associated with baptism which very early also came to be called "Illumination" or "Enlightenment." The conversations that follow the sign of the healing of the man
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When God examines us, he does not do so more forcefully in the ears of our body than in the secret places of our thoughts, where he alone hears, he alone is heard. ...
There are many ways in which God speaks with us. Sometimes he speaks by means of some instrument, such as by a book of the
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Come to me, all you toil and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke on you, and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Mt 11:28-30). This teaching of reverent humility drives, exhales, from
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There is no one in this world who is not a stranger [peregrinus], although not all want to return to the homeland. On our journey we face waves and storms, so we have at least to be in the boat. For if there are dangers when in the boat, outside the boat is certain death. A swimmer in the sea
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We can only urge you to keep to what you say, and that you defend your hope before those who insult and blaspheme the Christian name. Don’t let anyone’s muttering turn you aside from your expectation of future blessings. All those who blaspheme our Christ because of these adversities are the
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Some of the few occasions in which St. Thomas Aquinas seemed about to lose his temper were when he observed Christian thinkers making use of arguments in defense of the faith so without merit that they incur the irrisio infidelium, the mockery of unbelievers. St. Augustine, as these paragraphs
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Sandro Magister has a follow-up on the Paris effort at constructing a "court of the Gentiles," with interviews with Cardinal Ravasi and Julia Kristeva, and a link to much more (in Italian) at the website of Avvenire, the national Catholic newspaper in Italy
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There is something in God’s Scriptures that greatly moves me, and leads me often to counsel you. I ask you to think about what our Lord Jesus Christ says he is going to do when he comes for judgment at the end of the world. He is going to gather all the nations before him, he is going to divide
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I can never read or hear today’s Gospel about the exchange between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well without recalling the beautiful stanza of the Dies irae:
Quaerens me sedisti lassus,
Redemisti crucem passus:
Tantus labor non sit cassus.
[Literally translated: In search of
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Today this was read: "Charge the rich of this world." Charge what? Charge them "not to be proud-minded" (1 Tim 6:17) There is nothing that riches generate so much as pride. Every fruit, every grain, every kernel, every tree has its own worm; and the worm of the apple, the
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A year ago I cited this proposal of Pope Benedict XVI:
"I think that today too the Church should open a sort of ‘Court of the Gentiles’ in which people might in some way latch on to God, without knowing him and before gaining access to his mystery, at whose service the inner life of the
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That the proud of this world will oppose humble Christians he shows when he then says: "From the horns of unicorns rescue my lowliness" (Ps 22:22). The reason we understand the unicorns to refer to the proud is that pride hates to share, and every proud person desires, as much as he can,
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In "The City of God" (Bk 12, ch. 7), Augustine famously argued that it is a mistake to look for the active, effective cause of the will’s consent to evil. Moral evil occurs, he argued, because of a defective will, not an effective one, and he said that it made no more sense to look for
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[Because of all that God had done for and given to them], the Jewish people had reason to exalt themselves, but because of this very pride they were unwilling to lower themselves to Christ, to their humble creator, to the one who could reduce the swelling, to their doctor-God, to the One who,
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Is God so ignorant of things, does he know so little about the human heart, that he can find what a man is only by testing him? Of course not, the testing is so that the man can find himself....
You should recognize that God does not need to test in order to learn something he did not know
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Then he said: "All my desire is before you" (Ps 38:9). He doesn’t say, "before men"–they can’t see hearts; he says, "Before you is all my desire." Let your desire be before him, and the Father who sees what is hidden will reward you (Mtn 6:6) For your desire is
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What has been said about the symbolism of holy Church should now be briefly repeated for its moral sense. For it is appropriate that through the things said to blessed Job we learn to be called back to our hearts, because the mind more surely understands the words of God when it seeks itself in
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I am very interested in Augustine’s understanding of episcopal and presbyteral ministry and of the biblical images he prefers when he speaks about it. Thus, for example, rather than seeing the bishop or presbyter as himself a bridegroom, or as acting "in the person of Christ the Bridegroom,&
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Just as an unclean love inflames the soul and incites it to desire earthly things and leads that perishable soul to pursue perishable things, and casts it down into the depths, so a holy love raises the soul to things above and inflames it toward eternal things and excites it toward things that do
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Don’t think that John alone is a lamp; the Apostles also are lamps. The Lord said to them, "You are the light of the world," and so they wouldn’t think that they were the same sort of light as the one of whom it was said, "He was the true light that enlightens every man who comes
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John Donne came to be considered a "metaphysical" poet, one of whose literary skills was the use of "conceits," far-fetched comparisons of very dissimilar things. Donne’s sermons reveal that he knew Augustine very well, and perhaps he noticed how Augustine did not refrain from
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In preparation for becoming confessors, we seminarians were taught of a sin called delectatio morosa, a lingering delight in past sins. I wish they had given us this description of it by John Donne. He is describing a moment in the process by which we achieve purity of heart:
When the heart is
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John Donne has a wonderful description of peccata minutiora, relatively minor sins, and of their often imperceptible effect upon the heart:
So careful was God in the Law, and the Jews in their practise (for these outward things) to preserve this pureness, this cleanness, even in things which were
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The brothers in Egypt are said to have frequent prayers, but they are very brief and, as it were, suddenly hurled, lest protracted delays may cause to vanish or to dull the alert and aroused attention that is indispensable to one praying. By this they also show that this attention, if it shouldn
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In his commentary on the first chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, St. Gregory gives as one of the interpretations of the four winged creatures (vv. 5-14) that they represent holy people devoted to heavenly things. When the vision goes on to include four wheels (vv. 15ff), these are interpreted to
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Pope Gregory the Great made abundant use of allegory in interpreting the Scriptures, a method not in much favor today when the literal sense predominates. The allegories are sometimes quite fanciful, and I certainly don’t recommend them for getting at the literal sense; but they often provide the
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Augustine wrote a rather lengthy letter to Jerome on James 2:10: "Whoever shall keep the whole law but offend in one point is become guilty of all." In the course of his argument, he sets out two metaphors for the attainment of wisdom, for what we might call conversion. Which better
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Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new! Late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and that is where I was seeking you. In my unloveliness I rushed toward those lovely things you made. You were with me, but I was not with you. And those lovely things kept me far from you
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From H-Catholic I learn that two professors of architecture in Great Britain are organizing a symposium for this coming December on how modern architecture has been regarded and employed within the Catholic Church. Call for papers is here, with possible topics and these two paragraphs of background
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The lovely poem on St. Teresa by Richard Wilbur that Bob Imbelli posted earlier today seems to me to have in mind the sculpture of St. Teresa in Ecstasy that was designed and made by Bernini for a chapel in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. Below are two images, one that show the
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You can find here an interview with Bishop Fellay, head of the Lefebvrite Priestly Society of St. Pius X, on the conversations going on between his group and the Vatican, on Assisi, and several other topics. Keep in mind in reading it, that Fellay apparently belongs to the more moderate group of
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A couple of websites devoted to the revival and even restoration of the unreformed rite of Mass have recently offered statistical surveys of the number of places where the Tridentine rite is celebrated. The first of them, found here, claims to give figures for thirty countries, including the US and
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People of a certain age are tempted to worry about what is to come, and if the worry becomes too great, they may give whatever ailments may come an earlier power over them than they would otherwise have. It’s a phenomenon wonderfully described by John Donne in his "Devotions":
O
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The New Yorker has a lengthy, illuminating, and chilling article by Lawrence Wright on Scientology, its fantastic mythology, its cultivating of celebrities, and its efforts to discredit any and all criticism. If a third of it is true, it’s scary
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Spiegel-online today has a piece on the proposal to build wind-turbines close enough to Mont-saint-Michel that they could spoil the view from the spectacular site, causing it to lose its World Heritage Status. Two paragraphs explain how and why it gained that status:
Mont-Saint-Michel, located in
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In another thread, Ann Olivier drew attention to the article published in the February 11 issue of Commonweal, excerpted from Michael Dummett’s book The Nature and Future of Philosophy. I confess to being less impressed than Ann is, for three reasons. I write, of course, as minus sapiens in these
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This site will bring you to three articles on the post-conciliar Church published in the March 20, 1970, issue of Life. One illustration of the aftermath of Vatican II. For some it will revive memories, for others perhaps provide a snapshot of the times. For one old-timer, most distressing is that
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John Donne is at his most densely metaphysical in the first lines of his "Elegy upon the untimely death of the incomparable Prince Henry." The eldest son of James I, the Prince died at the age of eighteen, disappointing the hopes of those who had foreseen him as a patron of the arts and
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I just learned today that Fr. Edmund Hill, O.P., died last November 11th. Not as well known as he might have been, he deserves our lasting gratitude for his contributions to the project of publishing all of the works of St. Augustine. The most important of these were his versions of the Sermons, of
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Today’s Spiegel-online has a piece on the revolution in Tunisia and its possible consequences for other Arab countries and even for Israel, whose Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom is quoted as fearing that "Tunisia might ‘set a precedent that could be repeated in other countries, possibly
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The London Tablet had an article a week or two back about Oxford philosopher Toby Ord, founder of Giving What We Can whose members pledge that "from today until the day I retire, I shall give at least 10 per cent of what I earn to fight poverty in developing countries." Its website
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The New Yorker has a piece by David Brooks on "how the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life." Some interesting stuff, although I think it was a mistake to present things in terms of a model young man. Here’s an introductory paragraph:
We are living in the middle
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Bishop Williamson's weekly blog addresses Pope Benedict's recent announcement--the subject of an earlier thread initiated by Paul Moses-- that he wishes to revive "the spirit of Assisi." It may be recalled that the 1986 meeting of leaders of religions in that city was a last straw for
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Jean Raber mentioned on another thread the use of lard in baking. One of my sisters is coming down from New Hampshire on Tuesday, eager to start the baking, making ample use of lard. She still laughs at the woman who, seeing her put lard on the moving band at the check-out counter, exclaimed, "
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Continuing the Advent theme, here is an illustration of a theme that seems to have been rarely depicted: the Virgin Mary visibly pregnant, expectant, expecting, reflective. This dates from the end of the fourteenth century, artist known only as the "Master of the Madonna of Childbirth";
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I fear that this is a little like King Canute ordering the tide not to come in..., but here are two pieces that regret that the season of Advent has been swallowed up by Christmas: carols being sung even before Thanksgiving, the trees up and decorated weeks before the feast (and coming down right
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Advent prepares us for the wonder of the incarnation, the enfleshment, of the Word of God. For centuries the mystery has been spelled out in very human representations: hymns and carols, creches, paintings, special foods and drinks, blessings, visits, givings--every sense, it seems, given its own
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Today’s reading in the Divine Office is an excerpt from the prayer with which St. Ansem of Canterbury (or, as Italians know him, Anselm of Aosta) began his Proslogion. This is the work in which he set out what came to be called the "ontological argument" for the existence of God which
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I mentioned in another thread the advantages of reading a NT book straight through, at a single sitting, in order to appreciate it as a literary whole, something not possible when we read or hear them only in snippets. The practice also lends itself to another purpose. I used to assign my students
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An official communiqué from the Swiss headquarters of the Society of St. Pius X states that its Superior General. Bishop Bernard Fellay, learned from the press that Bishop Richard Williamson, ten days before he is to go on trial in Germany for denying the Holocaust, has fired his attorney and
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It is worth reflecting on the contrast between our two New Testament readings today. The passage from St. Luke’s Gospel (Lk 23:35-43) describes a moment in the passion of Christ–but let us remember that "passion" means "suffering," real, horrible suffering. Jesus was one of
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Two interesting articles on the Church in the USA that appear in the latest London Tablet. The first is an analysis of our recent election by Michael Sean Winters, focused on the contrasting views of the two Catholic leaders of the House. Three paragraphs that struck me:
What neither Pelosi nor
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Here is a different way in which a bishop addresses Catholic responsibilities in voting. It's from the Archbishop of New Orleans, Gregory Aymond. I know the Archbishop from the Catholic-Orthodox Theological Consultation and recognize in this video the same calm clarity he has brought as Catholic
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Next Sunday’s Gospel (Lk 20:27-38), which you can find here, gives Jesus’ reply to the question posed by Sadducees about the resurrection of the dead, a passage that N.T. Wright, in his huge book The Resurrection of the Son of God, calls "far and away the most important passage about
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The dwindling numbers of Christians in Iraq, still under seige, still being killed, as here
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In the Divine Office in use before the reforms that followed Vatican II, the hour of Prime would end with a reading of the Martyrology that gave the names of the saints whose feast day was being celebrated that day. The reading always ended with these words: "Et alibi aliorum plurimorum
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The October 22, 2010, issue of the TLS, alas not available genreally, has a fine review of a book by Paul Williamson, Medieval Ivory Carvings: Early Christianity to Romanesque, which describes the collection held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Some paragraphs of the review that struck
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Here is the link to the "Message to the People of God" issued at the conclusion at the end of the special assembly of the Synod of Bishops for the Middle East. It, and some of the comments made at the Synod are being criticized in Israel and elsewhere
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Breaking news on the chicken front! A coup d’état has taken place! (Dare I call it a coop d’état?) The smaller of the two roosters, a feisty Buff Orpingon, has dethroned the larger one, a Wyandotte. The battle must have been bloody; the victor has spattered blood on his neck, and there’s
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The phrase above is often attributed to Pope Benedict XVI. I have just googled it but not found it as his own expression, although many people attribute the idea to him. For example, in a story at the time of his election, I find this reference to our own David Gibson: "‘He has said himself
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How Augustine began one of his sermons:
"Let’s take what we have just sung as our topic today. And may the one to whom we have said, "You have held my right hand and have led me by your will and have taken me up in glory" (Ps 72:23), take up our hearts into clearer understanding
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Spiegel-online today has a photo essay on the tunnel being built under the Alps in Switzerland–57 kilometers long (35 miles). I’m getting claustrophobic just looking at the photo
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An illustration of how Newman was regarded as a spiritual counsellor is given in a letter written to him while still an Anglican priest, sixteen months before he entered the Catholic Church. It came from John Bramston, who had been a fellow of Oriel at the same time as Newman and was then an
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A week ago today, the members of the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation completed two papers which they now submit for consideration by the leaders of the Catholic Church and of the Orthodox Churches. The first calls for a common date for celebrating Easter, the second
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The Pew Research Center has just released the results of a survey of religious knowledge in the U.S. You can find their summary here, and the actual questions and answers here: I didn’t find most of the questions very interesting, but I guess they were looking for knowledge about religion, one’
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Early Christian writers made much of today’s Gospel story. St. Augustine noted something we might overlook: "That rich man’s name was known to people, but not the poor man’s. In contrast, the Lord Jesus gives the poor man’s name, but not the rich man’s." Already a sign that God
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In 1831 Newman preached a sermon on "Christian Manhood," that is, Christian adulthood, which had for its text: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things" (1 Cor 13:11). Here is the
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Newman discussed conscience in many places; if you type "conscience" into the fine search-engine at newmanreader.org, you will be given 547 places in which the word appears! Two of the places where his mature thought on it are to be found are chapter 5 of the Grammar of Assent, where it
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Tomorrow's Gospel reading is the whole of Luke 15 with its three parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. I sometimes think that if we had lost everything else that Jesus taught, and had only this chapter, we would have the essence of what he was about, of what God was about
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In December 1829, Newman preached sermons on private prayer, two of which were included in the first volume of the Parochial and Plain Sermons. The first was on "Times of Private Prayer," and included recommendations that have surely been repeated by all spiritual directors in history,
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When Newman was at Oxford, he fell under the influence of Richard Whately, later Archbishop of Dublin. In his Apologia, he refers to those years as ones in which "I was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral. I was drifting in the direction of the Liberalism of the day." By
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Newman cites tomorrow’s Gospel in a sermon entitled "The Ventures of Faith":
Such were the ventures made in faith, and in uncertainty, by Apostles. Our Saviour, in a passage of St. Luke's Gospel, binds upon us all the necessity of deliberately doing the like,—"Which of you,
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Another thread is discussing the relationship between evolution and creation, including the question of original sin. This latter doctrine has often been described as the one dogma that can be proved from experience. Here is Newman's classic statement, given at the beginning of the fifth chapter of
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I’ve long been fascinated by the relationship between language and thinking. A long article in the New York Times traces views on the matter from Benjamin Whorf’s deterministic theory through its general repudiation to the view that now prevails, a modified Whorfian thesis, that language does
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Something light for the last week of summer: What was the last book you read that you couldn't put down before finishing it? Or great examples of the experience in your life.?
I vividly remember the experience with William Golding's Lord of the Flies. I couldn't turn the last thirty or
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Another wonderful sermon of Newman’s is entitled "A Particular Providence as Revealed in the Gospel." Here are two paragraphs to tempt you in:
How gracious is this revelation of God's particular providence to those who seek Him! how gracious to those who have discovered that this
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Spiegel online today has an interview with French philosopher and feminist Elisabeth Badinter on women and motherhood in France and Germany today. She doesn't like what is happening. Are there any similarities to what's happening in the USA
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After his death, Newman's prayers and meditations were collected and published as Meditations and Devotions. Here is part of a meditation that he composed in 1848 on God as Creator. It reflects long-standing aspects of Newman's personal spirituality. He almost died of typhoid fever while
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One of Newman's finest sermons is entitled "Divine Calls." I just re-read it and was tempted to reproduce the whole of it. But here are just a few sentences from it, but, please, read the whole of it, and you will appreciate the power of Newman's preaching. (It should come with a
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Here is a haunting poem by John Whitworth, from the August 20 & 27, 2010, issue of the TLS:
Little
When Archie died the year was dying too.
Late loitering leaves were drifting to the ground,
A time when dying has a lot to do,
And does it with a dry, susurrant sound.
Some say
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Nicholas Wolterstorff, a Christian philosopher now teaching at Yale, has a new book, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, which has been reviewed very favorably in the TLS by John Cottingham. The reviewer says that the book "swims against the tide of the prevailing secularized conception of philosophy
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The Idea of a University has Newman’s essay, "Christianity and Scientific Investigation." Only a reading of the whole can do justice to the dialectical skills Newman here displays; but I can offer selections. The great statement of principle is often quoted, that the believer
is sure
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Vol. 32 of Newman’s Letters and Diaries contains hundreds of letters not discovered in time for their insertion in the chronologically ordered volumes, along with some precious appendices. One of these is a memoir giving the personal reminiscences of Canon Charles Wellington Furse, who heard
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With a tip from Golias on-line, I found these beautiful examples of Armenian Christian art. These and many more can be found here. I am still trying to figure out how to download an image of a very dramatic Stoning of St. Stephen that you can find in a slide show here (voice-over in Persian
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In one of his major Anglican works, Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837), Newman argued that the Anglican Church represented a middle road (via media) between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, with almost all his attention given to the differences between Anglicanism and
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Newman’s distinction is well known between notional and real assent. I have always felt that it had its roots in his evangelical conversion; certainly it was a frequent theme in his Anglican sermons. Here is an early example, from his sermon "Secret Faults," a reflection on the Psalm-
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Newman’s sermon "Knowledge of God’s Will without Obedience" reflects on the words of Christ: "If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them" (Jn 13:17).
Now, doubtless, many of us think we know this very well. It seems a very trite thing to say, that it is nothing to
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In the first of his Oxford University Sermons, preached in 1826, when he was only twenty-five years old, and entitled "The Philosophical Temper, First Enjoined by the Gospel," Newman, before arguing his case, noted that Christians are often accused of impeding the advance of philosophical
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The second of Newman’s Oxford University Sermons addressed "The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively." He made it clear that the sermon would compare only their respective practical efficacy; he meant no disregard of "those fundamental doctrines of our faith,
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I thought that, as a preparation for the beatification of John Henry Newman in September, I might send in from time to time favorite excerpts from his writings, in the hope also of attracting new readers to the man who saved my intellectual soul when I was in college. The latest issues of The
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Matthew Arnold’s "Dover Beach," in all its melancholy bleakness, is one of my favorite poems:
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out
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St. Thomas Aquinas labored long and hard over his Catena aurea [Golden Chain], a verse-by-verse commentary on the four Gospels drawn entirely from patristic and medieval sources, both western and eastern. [It can be found in English at several sites on the web.] I often consult it along with
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I have always heard ascribed to Peter Maurin the dictum: "The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor." The London Catholic Worker website echoes it: "Houses of hospitality are centers for learning to do the acts of love, so that the poor can receive what is, in justice,
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Tomorrow’s Gospel, the episode of Martha and Mary, was taken as early as Gregory the Great to symbolize the active and the contemplative lives, and the superiority of the latter to the former, since Mary chose "the better part." It would even be taken to indicate the relative importance
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Animals Without Backbones is the title of a book used for generations in college biology courses. A website on its new edition says that it was "considered a classic among biology textbooks since it was first published to great acclaim in 1938. It was the first biology textbook ever reviewed
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Here are excerpts from three sermons in which St. Augustine explored the richness of today's Gospel:
With this Psalm we have exhorted you to practice mercy, for that is how you will ascend, and you know that it those who sing the song of steps who ascend. Remember this: do not choose to go down
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Many will know the poetry of Carolyn Forché, much of it forged in the heat of awfulness witnessed and experienced in El Salvador, Guatemala, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and South Africa. Here is the commencement speech she gave this past May at the University of Scranton, PA.
Carolyn Forché
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I rediscovered this the other day on my computer. It was copied from a large book on Romanesque art in Spain. I didn't take note of the name of this martyr. May it be of some comfort on difficult days! (Below is how it fit into context
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Abebooks.com has a notice about Penguin Books and how that company initiated the paperback revolution in book-publishing. Many of us will have trouble remembering when paperbacks were a novelty. Many books in Europe were published in paperbacks; but in the States, it seemed, they were only in
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Ann Olivier would like a thread on God. So here are two classic texts on the Catholic Christian notion of God. The first from Augustine: ::
What then are you, my God? What, I ask, but the Lord God? For who is the Lord but the Lord? Or who is God but our God (Ps 17:32). Most high, utterly good,
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Kathy kindly sent me the site at which one can find the prayers and the reading for the Divine Office for the memorial of Blessed John Henry Newman. The prayer alludes to Newman’s best-known (but not best) hymn, "Lead, Kindly Light," and to the words he wished inscribed on his
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Spiegel-on line today has a piece on the German debate on whether modified plants and animals may be patented. This strikes me as a very important debate, but I don’t recall the issue’s getting much attention in the USA. In any case, might we get a discussion going here
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For a little break from our super-seriousness about nearly everything, here's a photo of the first two of the puppies that are in process of being given birth by my brother's female English Setter who around the first of April had an encounter or two with my Black Lab. A third has since been born
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In the summer of 1962, I visited Strasbourg, France, and spent a good deal of time in the magnificent cathedral. One stained-glass window in particular remained in my memory for decades until I was able to return and see it again in the late 1990's. It represents Pentecost, with a brilliant red
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I didn’t notice it at the time, but Elie Wiesel took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post in order to post an open letter to President Obama pleading with him not to put pressure on Israel to stop settlements in Jerusalem. The text can be found here. The most recent issue of the New York
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The Washington Post on-line has an initial description of the criticisms that Elena Kagan is receiving from both left and right. If this holds up, it will make for a more interesting discussion than one focused on a single issue
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Some decades ago, Albert Descamps, a fine Belgian scripture scholar and later rector of the Catholic University of Louvain, wrote a fine essay on teaching authority in the Church. With a fine touch of humor, he quoted from a verse of the Panis angelicus, "Per tuas semitas duc nos quo tendimus
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I apologize that this is the same piece to which Matt Boudway drew attention in a thread below. I thought it was a new one. So take out all references to repeating himself.
Anthony Grafton has another piece, this time in the NYRB, on Benedict XVI and the sex-abuse scandal. Repeating his
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Commenting on the Psalm-verse, "I have been young and now am old, and I have not seen a just man forsaken nor his seed seeking bread" (Ps 36:25), St. Augustine expected that some would deny, from personal experience or even from biblical examples, that such is the case: just people have
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Martha Nussbaum, professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, has an essay in the April 30th issue of the TLS, on the threat to liberal education represented by cuts to the humanities budgets of universities. (The TLS and the LRB have published several essays recently on the criteria
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Today's Spiegel on-line has a piece on the abilities of Google's translating software at the moment and on future prospects. I find it overly optimistic about present possibilities, but I wonder if others have had better experiences with it or with other translating software.
I remember the
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Great efforts are still in course to restore the precious works of art damaged by the earthquake that in 1997 devastated Assisi. Among them are the Giotto's paintings of the life of St. Francis. As part of the effort, a virtual display has been prepared that compares the present state of the
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In anticipation of the Pope’s visit there in May, the Vatican Information Service released today the following profile of the Church in Portugal.
Portugal ... has a population of 10,610,000 of whom 9,368,000 (88.3 percent) are Catholic. There are 21 ecclesiastical circumscriptions and 4,830
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A message from a grieving husband informed us today that his wife had died after a three-year struggle with pancreatic cancer, through which he nursed her. "Know that the past three years," he wrote, "for all their difficulty and for all of her suffering, were filled with
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I am grateful to a former student of mine, Morris Pelzel, for drawing my attention to an on-line column, with the above title, by Stanley Fish, discussing the views on the relationship between reason and religion of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. It ties in with Pope Benedict’s
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In the April issue of Jesus, a fine Italian Catholic monthly, filled with information and reflections, Enzo Bianchi, prior of the Community of Bose, draws attention to another part of Pope Benedict’s address to the Roman Curia last December.
"Finally, I would like once again to express my
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On December 21, 2009, Pope Benedict, reflecting back on the Synod for Africa, made these noteworthy remarks about reconciliation, which seem to have as much, even perhaps more, pertinence to today's situation in the Church:
"Today Saint Paul's appeal to the Corinthians has again proved most
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This would have been more appropriate during Lent, but I've only just come across it.
In his reflections on Psalm 50 [51], St. Augustine notes that in v. 11 the Psalmist asks God: "Turn your face away from my sins," but in v. 13 he pleads: "Do not cast me away from your face.&
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The London Tablet’s Easter issue publishes Dame Maria Boulding’s introduction to her last book Easter Journey. This Benedictine nun wrote several books and most recently published an English translation of all of St. Augustines "Expositions on the Psalms," the first complete
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[While Christ prays on the mountain], the ship bearing the disciples, that is, the Church, is being tossed and shaken by storms of trials and a contrary wind never calms, that is, her opponent, the devil, who is trying to keep her from reaching calm seas. But the one who is interceding for us is
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Here, followed by two beautiful icons, is a very ancient homily on Christ's descent into hell and his rescue of Adam and Eve, representing the whole human race.
"Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps
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You have heard what Christ prayed for, what he desired: "Father, I wish that those whom you gave me may be where I am. I wish," he says, "that where I am they too may be." O happy home! O safe homeland! It has no enemy; it has no plague. We will live safely there; we won’t
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I read today Augustine sermon (Sermon 216; PL 38, 1076-1082) for the competentes, that is, the people who had enrolled their names for baptism during the Easter Vigil. Some things that struck me:
Early on, he calls them contirones mei, my fellow recruits, a nice touch, found elsewhere when he
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Today's Washington Post has an article on Chief Justice Roberts's comments about President Obama's remarks, in his State of the Union address, about the Supreme Court's decision on campaign financing. Prescinding from the rightness or wrongness of the Court's decision, I must say that I agree
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Over at the Commonweal Yahoo discussion-group, its moderator John Borst has drawn attention to an interesting essay on post-Christendom politics as the UK prepares for a general election this year. With some mutatis mutandis, does this have any relevance to US discussions of religion and politics
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To Moses, who had asked his name, the Lord said: "I am who I am. Tell the children of Israel: ‘Who-am has sent me to you." "To be" is a name for unchangeability. All things that change cease to be what they were and begin to be what they were not. Real being, genuine being,
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From Augustine's third Lenten sermon:
Eleemosyna, our word for alms, is Greek for "mercy" or "pity." What greater pity could be shown to the piteous than the mercy that brought the creator of heaven down from heaven and clothed the maker of earth with an earthly body, that
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From Augustine's second Lenten sermon:
Christians understand how much they must avoid defrauding others when they recognizes that it is like cheating for them not to give their superfluous goods to someone in need. The Lord said, "Give and it will be given to you; forgive and you will be
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Yesterday it was a story about a Swiss referendum about giving animals legal representation. Today, at the Huffington Post, there's a call by someone described as a "bioethicist and medical historian," to allow parents to decide that the deaths of their ill children be hastened and
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Spiegel online today has two pieces on the fate of animals in our day and age. The first one is about an upcoming Swiss referendum that would entitle animals to state-appointed legal representation. At least one animal must be hoping that something like this is quickly passed in Germany too.
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I have just learned the sad news of the death of Rosemary Goldie at the age of 94. Actively involved in international associations promoting the lay apostolate, she was the first woman to hold a significant position in the Roman Curia. She was one of the lay auditors at the Second Vatican Council.
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This September it will be fifty years since John F. Kennedy gave his famous speech on religion and politics to Baptist ministers in Houston. Archbishop Charles Chaput has anticipated the anniversary by giving a speech critical of Kennedy’s at the Baptist University in the same city. You can find
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Spiegel online today has three pieces on matters concerning Islam. The first is an article on the persecution of Christians in Muslim lands; the second on the apology of the Danish newspaper that published cartoons of Mohammed that some Muslims found offensive; and the third on Qaddafi's
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Der Spiegel today has an article on a project to digitize the holdings of, eventually, some 30,000 libraries, museums and archives in Germany. This is an effort to provide a non-capitalist alternative to Google’s effort to digitize every book in the world. The article relates this German effort
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The March 11, 2010, issue of the New York Review of Books (not yet online) has an article on the future of books and of publishing by Jason Epstein, who knows more than a little about both. He maintains that with the digitizing of books we are witnessing an already irreversible technological shift
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Here one can find the press communiqué issued by the Vatican about the meetings that have just concluded between the Catholic bishops of Ireland and Vatican officials, including the Pope
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In the eighth and last paragraph of Lumen gentium’s first chapter, "The Mystery of the Church," attention shifts to ask where the Church that was given its basic and central theological description in the first seven paragraph is to be found. Before providing the Catholic answer to that
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As proof that good hymns can have ecumenical significance, here’s one of our Kathy’s translations being used as the climax of a sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
I sent this in before seeing Peggy's thread just below, but perhaps it's somewhat relevant
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Tony Judt, professor modern European history at New York University, author most recently of Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, has been a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. In the January 14, 2010, issue of that journal, he published the first of a series of
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On TV last week my brother and I watched a fine show on bald eagles that included shots of their nests as they brooded eggs and then fed and protected the eaglets until they had matured and could fly on their own. I went looking and found a website where you can watch live a pair in West Virginia
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Francis J. Beckwith's blog offers as a contribution to Black History Week some notes on the decision and efforts of Archbishop Rummel of New Orleans to desegregate Catholic schools and on his excommunication of the leaders of public Catholic opposition to his decision. (They would appeal from
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On Beliefnet today, Rod Dreher has a column on religious illiteracy. Dreher refers to a three-year-old interview with Camille Paglia, with these sobering paragraphs:
The decline of religion in Europe frightens this stalwart atheist. "The Europeans have become very passive, all of them,"
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With the title above, a website has just been opened in order to promote and further the Second Vatican Council. Here is the description on the home page:
Viva il Concilio' is first of all an expression of gratitude that throughout the centuries the assistance of the Holy Spirit has not been
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Spiegel today has an article on the Lefebvrite Bishop Williamson who shows no indication that he is either going to disappear from sight and hearing or to change his views on the Holocaust. An interesting point in the piece is the fear that if the Society of Pius X is reconciled to Rome,
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We had a discussion a little while back of Catcher in the Rye, but we should take note of the death of J.D. Salinger at the age of 91.. Adam Bernstein's blog at the Washington Post begins:
The news flashed across the wire in an appropriately enigmatic style: "Catcher in the Rye" author
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Sandro Magister’s newsletter today is devoted to the upcoming administrative elections in the region of Lazio, which includes the diocese of Rome. Emma Bonino, a woman well known for her opposition to Church teachings is the candidate of parties of the left. Magister contrasts the absence of
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The London Times Online announces that the January 28th issue of the TLS will have an article on the Codex Sinaiticus, a mid-fourth-century manuscript of the entire Christian Bible. From the website:
Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Handwritten well over 1600 years
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For their 14 November 1969 issue, the editors of Commonweal asked a number of well-known Catholics various questions about the contemporary Church. They asked Garry Wills the following two questions: " Is there such a thing any more as Catholic culture? Would we be better off with it or
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I had occasion today to go back to Yves Congar’s little book on the Lefebvre Affair, Challenge to the Church (Huntingdon, IN: OSV, 1976), toward the end of which he tried to engage the Lefebvrites in dialogue. He wrote:
It so often happens in squabbles between family or friends that the squabble
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Abigail Frymann, in a recent article in The Tablet, has an interesting and hopeful article on the tremendous rise in the use of cellular telephones in Africa: from 54 million to 350 million between 2003 and 2008, to the point that more than a third of Africans now owns a mobile phone. A photo
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Today I was listening on the car radio as a newscaster gave a piece of information in a sentence that ended with his voice rising the way it does when one asks a question. It reminded me of the time when at Mass a reader of a passage from the First Epistle of John did the same thing with a
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Damian Thompson’s religion blog for The Telegraph has the story and videos of the disruption of a Mass in the diocese of Evreux, France, when the local bishop announced that as part of a reorganization of the diocese, he was removing the traditionalist pastor of some 23 years. The responses to
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To follow up on the Epiphany thread below, there is a piece on Epiphany traditions in Europe, with photographs, on today's Spiegel
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In most dioceses of the US, I believe, Epiphany is celebrated today and not, as tradition would have it, on January 6th, the twelfth day of Christmas. It is the more important feast in the eastern and oriental Churches. When I was growing up, the pastor of our Slovak national parish in
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From the Miami Herald
"St. Thomas Aquinas takes third place in wrestling tourney."
Who placed first and second
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This brief letter to the editor appeared in today's local newspaper:
Do you remember Barack Obama's campaign slogan, "Yes, we can"? Well, it has changed to "No, I can't." How very sad and disappointing.
Is this premature
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Where is Mary from? From Adam. Where is Adam from? From the earth. If Mary is from Adam and Adam is from the earth, then Mary also is from the earth. But if Mary is from the earth, then let us recognize what it is we are singing: "Truth has sprung out of the earth." What benefit did it
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It is of some comfort to a preacher today to discover that St. Augustine also repeated himself in the various Christmas homilies that have survived. One of the favorite tropes is that the one who rules the stars sucked at his mother’s breasts. Another one is various reflections on the Word who
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Word of God before all time, Word made flesh at the appropriate time; maker of the sun, made under the sun; disposing all the ages from his Father’s bosom, consecrating this day from his mother’s womb; remaining there, coming forth here; the creator of heaven and earth born beneath heaven on
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Wake up! For you God was made man! "Arise, you who sleep, and rise from the dead, and Christ shall enlighten you" (Eph 5:14). For you, I say, God was made man! You would have been dead for eternity if he had not been born in time. You would never have been freed from sinful flesh if he
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The Word of the Father, through which time was made, became flesh and made his birthday in time, and willed a single day for his human birth, he without whose divine permission no day rolls round. With the Father he precedes all the spaces of ages; born this day of a mother, he inserted himself
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Fr. Vincent Twomey, a former professor of moral theology at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, Ireland, did his doctoral dissertation under the guidance of the present Pope. He is one of the former students who gather with their former professor once a year for theological conversation. Perhaps
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An earlier thread dealt with the question of extraterrestrial life and, if discovered, with its implications for faith and theology. While looking for something else today, I came upon this lovely poem by Alice Meynell: "Christ in the Universe":
With this ambiguous
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A thread below has taken up Clifford Longley’s column on the new atheists. A review in the December 4th issue of the Times Literary Supplement, written by Michael Cobb (senior lecturer at the University of Manchester, author of a book on the French resistance to the Nazis), discusses two works, a
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Guy Consolmagno, S.J., is curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory and writes a regular reflection that appears on the back page of The Tablet of London. His latest piece reflects on what science might be able to tell us about the end of the world, the explosion of the sun, etc. He has this
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Spiegel today has a long article, with accompanying photos and maps, on a project to build huge sun-power collecting units in the Saharan desert. Plants large enough to supply Europe with all the electricity it needs would occupy a minuscule fraction of the vast desert. In addition, it could
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In 1976 Joseph Ratzinger made some remarks about facilitating an eventual reunion between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches, remarks that have been widely quoted ever since and particularly since he was elected pope. On the one hand, he said, Catholics cannot give up the claim to papal
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The December 17, 2009, issue of The New York Review of Books is particularly rich. Some articles I especially liked:
(1) Ian Baruma on life in occupied Paris during World War II;
(2) David Shulman, professor of Humanistic Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, with an article entitled &
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Fr. Joseph N. Moody was one of the great priests of the Archdiocese of New York in the last six or seven decades. Tall, athletic, and handsome, he was first encountered by most of us as a professor of modern history at Cathedral College, the minor seminary of the Archdiocese of New York. We knew
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Here you may listen to an interview with Rowan Williams that was broadcast on Vatican Radio. I've been looking for a copy of Cardinal Kasper's speech at the symposium at which both men spoke. I have only the report made by CNA. I hope Kasper's remarks will soon be made available
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Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, yesterday gave an important speech in Rome at a symposium sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. It is devoted to the doctrine of the Church (ecclesiology), focuses on three main questions (authority, primacy, the relation
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There are reports today that the Vatican has just held a symposium on the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the implications for the Church. In 1952 Fr. Francis J. Connell, C.Ss.R, was already giving thought to the question and gave a lecture that was accurately summed
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The current issue of Commonweal has a conversation between editors past and present. In an initial discussion of how the magazine could attract more young Catholics, Peter Steinfels offered a typology of U.S. Catholics today:
I think there are basically four categories of Catholics middle-aged and
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Throughout the 1980's the best reporting on events and movements in Eastern Europe was done by Timothy Garton Ash in the pages of The New York Review of Books. In the same journal’s latest issue (not yet available on-line), he reviews a number of books on the revolutionary events of 1989. His
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Rocco Palmo has an important posting on the decline in number of the reporters assigned to write on religion by the major newspapers. A native of Rockland County, NY, I am sorry to see that "The Journal News" is among the papers who decide that they can do without reports on religion.
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I learned of Senator Kennedy’s death when I awoke at around 2:30 in the morning, flipped on my clock-radio, and heard Bob Schieffer giving a very graceful, carefully crafted summary of the Senator’s life. It had obviously been prepared well in advance and had been held ready for the moment, a
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Journalistic ethics might not permit David Gibson to note it, but nothing, I believe, prevents my drawing attention to his review in "America" of Patrick J. McCloskey's new book The Street Stops Here: AYear at a Catholic High School in Harlem. It is a year-long study of Rice High School,
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Here you can find the beautiful and moving eulogy preached at the funeral of Cory Aquino by her long-time friend and spiritual advisor, Fr. Catalino Arevalo, S.J
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Charles Krauthammer’s column in today’s Washington Post makes a good deal of use of three reports from the Congressional Budget Office about the very high cost of the proposed reforms of health care. He is particularly concerned to show how prevention does not reduce but increases the total
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This Sunday’s Gospel, continuing the consecutive reading of the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, contains the statement of Christ in response to the grumbling crowd: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him." (I note in passing that the politically correct &
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An article in Spiegel describes how Poles feel that they have not been given enough credit for initiating the process that within a few short months in 1989 peacefully brought the Soviet empire to an end, surely the most important event in the post-WW II era. The article mentions the poster of
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This front-page photo in the Washington Post cries out for a caption
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In today’s Washington Post, Jennifer LaRue Huget’s weekly column, "Eat, Drink and Be Healthy," is devoted to Julia Child’s famous book on which she is somewhat less enthusiastic than Peggy Steinfels in her thread of a day or two ago. In the same issue of the Post, she has a little
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Michael Kimmelman’s essay on the front page of the NY Times today talks about the way people behave at great museums, the Louvre in this case. He is struck by the fact that many don’t seem to look at the art but are content, if they stop at all, to take a quick photo and then move on. He writes
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In 1986 I was teaching a doctoral course at Catholic University and had among my students a young and dynamic Philipino priest, Fr. Luis "Chito" Tagle. With him we followed the events that were to lead to the peaceful demise of the Marcos government and the installation as president of
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Today’s NY Times has an article on recent and anticipated advances in computer technology, which has some scientists nervous. A couple of interesting paragraphs:
The idea of an "intelligence explosion" in which smart machines would design even more intelligent machines was proposed by
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An article in today’s New York Times, reporting increased funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, reminded me of a piece I wrote ten years ago but which the Times declined to publish as an op-ed piece. I entitled it: “A Modest Proposal for Ending the Culture Wars.”
Art and
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Since none of the women on this blog have addressed it, it's left to a man to note that since she was mentioned in the confirmation-hearings for Sonia Sotomayor, a couple of features have raised the topic of the influence of Nancy Drew. Sunday, in the NY Times, Jan Hoffman noted, "In recent
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In another thread Joseph Gannon supplied us with the Google translation of the first paragraph of Pope Benedict's recent encyclical. Below are the computer-generated translations of the Nicene Creed as found in the Declaration "Dominus Iesus." The first is from the German text, and it
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Carolyn Walker Bynum is a very well regarded historian of medieval ideas. (Many will remember her famous essay "Christ as Mother".) In a recent issue of the London Review of Books, she has high praise for The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages by Robert Bartlett, a study of
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The Science section of today’s NY Times is entirely devoted to the mission that first landed men on the moon forty years ago on July 20, 1969. I’m sure that many participants or observers here are not old enough to remember the event. But some of us old folks might like to record memories. I
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On its op-ed page today, the NY Times provides an opportunity for seven legal experts to say what questions they would like to pose to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Some are more interesting than others. I thought those of James MacGregor Burns the most serious and substantive:
1. The
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Sandro Magister today has an interview with Fr. Thomas Berg, former Legionary of Christ, on the apostolic visitation of the group that has just been initiated. The problems seem to go far beyond the scandalous conduct of the group's founder, Fr. Maciel
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In today’s Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley’s review of Margaret MacMillan’s new book, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, begins thus:
In this provocative examination of the ways in which we use and abuse history, Margaret MacMillan passes along a story originally told by the
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I have men here painting my house. A couple of hours ago one of them came in to tell me that there was a snake in the back yard, a big one, he said, inside a black pipe that takes rainwater away from the house. I managed to get the snake out. It was about a yard long, black with white markings on
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Sandro Magister today draws attention to an article in 30 days in which Card. Georges Cottier, O.P., former theologian of the papal household (Magister Sacri Palatii–a great title!), comments on the speeches given at the Notre Dame commencement, particularly that of President Obama. Magister (not
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I’m packing books in preparation for returning to New York, a task that requires me to make some hard choices. When I told a friend that I was using as a criterion whether I had opened the book in the last twenty years, she said this was too loose and suggested five years, which I find too rigid
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An article in today’s Washington Post has some fun with the view that celebrities die in groups of three, something verified this week with the deaths of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson. I never heard this as applied to celebrities, but my mother firmly believed that bad things
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While going through my library in order to decide which books to keep when I move back to New York, I cam across American Catholic Exodus, edited by John O’Connor (Washington: Corpus Books, 1968). Eleven chapters, written by Catholic "progressives" (the one exception, the Protestant
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National Review Online has a lengthy interview with Gian Maria Vian, editor of L’Osservatore Romano. Most of it is devoted to a discussion of the Vatican daily newspaper’s treatment of President Obama. Well worth reading
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Slate has an article on J.D. Salinger’s latest lawsuit asking for the "recall and destruction" of a novel, 60 Years Later: Coming through the Rye that describes the fortunes of a "Mr. C," who apparently is meant to be taken as Holden Caulfield at the age of 76. Salinger
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In the TLS, May 22, 2009, Rosamond McKitterick, professor of medieval history at the University of Cambridge, reviews with great praise Chris Wickham’s book, The Inheritance of Rome: A history of Europe from 400-1000. She begins:
The notion of the "Dark Ages" is a very British one. On
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An on-line article in Der Spiegel today reports on the low turnout in last Sunday’s vote for the Eurpean Union’s parliamentary elections. "Across the 27-member bloc, just 42.9 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots. That marks the lowest turnout since direct voting began in 1979.&
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That a sixth Catholic is likely to sit on the Supreme Court may lead to a discussion of the relationship between a judge’s personal religious convictions and his/her judgements and decisions from the bench. Here is an article by historian Patrick Carey which explores Catholic reactions to the
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Howard Kurtz, who covers the press and other media, has a column in today’s Washington Post in which he blames the lack of imagination on the part of newspapers for their precipitous decline which he thinks may be irreversible
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Matt Emerson ended a post to the thread below on the interview with Archbishop Dolan that prompted a discussion why people are leaving the Church: “The point of all this is to say that I think people are prone to dismiss something without really appreciating why or investigating whether their
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In her post below, Cathy uses a phrase that is new to me. I first encountered it two weeks ago in a paper a student submitted in a doctoral seminar. Here is Cathy’s sentence: "All the great thinkers of the Church, in the end, were great because they lived into the question mark" [her
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I have wondered what would happen if Elizabeth Sonnenstein-McGillicuddy marries Christopher Eberhardt-Schwarzwalder: will the child be known as Katerina Sonnenstein-McGillicuddy-Eberhardt-Schwarzwalder? And how will they ever get the name on a driver’s license. Well, according to today’s NY
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I raised this issue two years ago, but it might bear another hearing if for no other reason than relief from the drum-beat of Obama-and-Notre-Dame and what-awful-louts-those-bishops-are. Kathleen Parker had a column in last Sunday’s Washington Post on legislation that proposes to extend the range
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The NY Times has a brief article on how people are using their iPhones primarily for personal reasons while users of other types of smartphones use them primarily for business or work-related needs. Not a report of eschatological significance, but I was struck by a comment in the article that began
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In preparation for Good Shepherd Sunday (tomorrow), Kathy sent me this link to Marian Anderson singing the lovely aria from Handel’s Messiah, "He shall feed his flock." A week or two ago, the 70th anniversary of her famous concert at the Lincoln Memorial was celebrated by, among others
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I am not a sentimentalist when it comes to animals. I used to hunt, and have no trouble eating meat killed by hunters, whether my brother’s venison or the wild boar (cinghiale) one can find in northern Italian restaurants. (I did hesitate, however, when offered a tagliatelle al ragu d’asino,
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I imagine we are all familiar with the Stabat Mater (if not, here’s a site with both Latin and literal translation) which focuses, somewhat repetitively, on the sorrow, grief, and pain of Mary at the foot of the Cross. Below is a dialogue between Christ on the cross and Mary at its foot that I
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The Italian word can evoke the Italian tragedy... Below is a Lamentation of Christ taken down from the cross from the same workshop of Master Paul in Levocha. Here also are two websites that have some fifty ways in which the Pietà has been represented in art: centuries of pain and grief--and
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Today's Washington Post has an article on a National Gallery exhibit of medieval illuminated pages. This is one of them, showing Christ on the lap of Abraham.
All the blessings of Holy Week and Easter to all
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The collapse of the Soviet empire has permitted westerners freer access to the treasures of art in Eastern Europe. One of these is the high altar in the Church of St. James in Levoča in eastern Slovakia. It was carved by the school of an artist known as Master Paul, about whom not a great deal
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After Mass today, a parishioner from Germany reminded me that March 30th of this year is the 25th anniversary of the death of Karl Rahner, one of the most important Catholic theologians of the twentieth century. I remember feeling orphaned when I heard of his death, and wondered where we could turn
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The papers today report that Michelle Obama has arranged to have a vegetable garden on the White House property, the first time since Eleanor Roosevelt presided over a victory garden during the Second World War. I suspect that there are not many regular participants in this blog who can remember &
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Der Spiegel has an on-line article, with photos, about the collapse of the building containing the municipal archives of Cologne, Germany, which contain at least one item that goes back to the tenth century. And now here's a follow-up article reporting that the two missing people are presumed to
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Sometimes reading familiar texts in another language, especially the original language, helps one notice things neglected before. In the Breviary’s morning reading for the Thursday after Ash Wednesday, St. Leo the Great says that Lent is principally for preparing new people to be born in baptism
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In 1919 the U.S. bishops put out a document: "The Bishops' Program for Social Reconstruction" which offered their ideas about re-ordering American society, economy and politics. It was largely written by Fr. John A. Ryan, one of the leading American Catholic social thinkers of the first
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Here’s a very interesting piece in the Times of London, on Pope Benedict and criticisms he is receiving even from among Cardinals for his leadership (or lack of same
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Rocco's Whispers today has a lovely story about the funeral of Korea's Cardinal Kim, with photos that stand in a certain contrast to the one illustrating the story set out just before, the latter photo itself standing in a certain contrast to the lives of two of the people whose canonization has
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Enough of the serious stuff. Trolling around the TV channels this evening, I discover the original Alien movie, with Sigourney Weaver. And I remember that, twenty years or so ago, also trolling around the TV channels I came upon the movie about which I knew nothing. I was immediately engrossed, and
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Two interesting stories from Britain’s Catholic Herald, one on the "disinvitation" of Archbishop Burke to celebrate the unreformed rite for the Latin Mass Society, the other the statement issued by the Austrian bishops in the wake of the fiasco over the appointment of a bishop for the
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I suspect that everyone can complete the phrase, which, unfortunately, usually comes after a needlessly long introduction of the person people have come to hear. It’s become something of a cliché, of course, and anyone tempted to use it is hereby advised that, according to the OED, "without
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Here is an article about how the Redemptorists may have suffered significantly from Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme. I wonder how many other religious institutions have been affected
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Jeffrey Tucker has an interesting piece on the copyrighting of liturgical texts, with a passing reference to the copyright of translations of the Bible. I’d be interested in what liturgists and biblical scholars think of the question--musicians, too
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A radio ad for new windows: "Don’t you know that the dollars you spend for heating are literally flying out the window."
In the TLS (no less): "Brougham’s significance as a driving force for legal and educational reform cannot be underestimated." I’m sure it can be;
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The Vatican Secretariat of State released today a statement about the lifting the excommunications of the four Lefebvrite bishops. A couple of notable elements:
1) While the lifting of the excommunications relieves the four from a very serious canonical punishment, "it has not altered the
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I was introduced to John Updike by one of my fellow-seminarians at the North American College in Rome in the early 1960s, mostly as the author of short stories in The New Yorker. I was hooked and began to read everything that he published. The six months after I was ordained, when we had more
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I deliberately make this a separate thread from the one just below.
Rocco Palmo is reporting rumors in Rome that the Pope is going to lift the excommunications of the four bishops who head the Society of St. Pius X, the group founded by Archbishop Lefebvre. Some even think this might be done
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This Sunday, January 25th, is the fiftieth anniversary of Pope John XXIII’s announcement that he intended to convoke an ecumenical council. He did so less than a hundred days after his election, privately, to a small group of cardinals, after a service in the basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the
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Here's a link to the letter which Cardinal George, as president of the USCCB, sent to President Obama and the leaders of Congress on January 13th. It might usefully be compared to the statement released right after the election
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Both in the transcript of its reporters’ interview with Caroline Kennedy and in the front-page story that described it on December 28th, the NY Times reproduced the verbal tic she used many times: the familiar "You know" that many people use in place of a comma in their speech. In today
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This from one of St. Augustine's sermons on the birth of Christ:
What praise must we not utter, what thanks, to the love of God! Who loved us so much that for our sakes he would be made in time through whom time was made, so that in the world he might be younger in age than many of his
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Sandro Magister today has a piece on the "O Antiphons," also known as "the Great Antiphons,"the series of antiphons sung to introduce the Magnificat at Vespers from December 17th to the 24th. Their deep and broad biblical basis is given in the translations offered. Lovely
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The New York Times today has the story that the French foreign minister, a founder of Doctors without Borders, has shocked (shocked!) many by saying in an interview that "there is permanent contradiction between human rights and the foreign policy of a state, even in France" and that &
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Frank Rich’s column in today’s NY Times sounds a welcome, perhaps necessary, caution
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Today’s Washington Post has a column whose theme is announced as "The Dumbest Generation," which turns out to be, not the younger generation, but their parents, people in their late 40s. Proving the point, someone gave the article this headline: "The Kids are Alright. But Their
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The New York Times today has an enthusiastic story about the "newly restored and reinstalled Gallery for Western European Medieval Art from 1050 to 1300." Three key paragraphs:
The brimming, light-flooded presentation has been orchestrated by Peter Barnet, curator in chief of the museum
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Zenit today has an interview with the current editor of the Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, a monumental achievement begun in 1961 and only now completed with the publication of the last two of thirty-two volumes. The first ten volumes, the last to be published, cover Newman’s Anglican
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Gary Stern, the fine religion reporter for the Journal-News (lower Hudson, NY) has a column on the variety of Catholics in the US, and against easy characterizations of them
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A Washington Post profile of Rahm Emanuel today describes him as a kind of classic Washington insider with experience both in the White House and on Capitol Hill, with friends, and enemies, in both places. The last part of the article draws attention to some things that make one wonder how much
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Great minds ....
This is how I ended my homily yesterday:
And this is the second great truth that these days remind us of. That the horizon of our Christian vision, the horizon of our hope, extends beyond this life, beyond the grave, to a completion in the full expansion and full enjoyment of
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In this Sunday’s Washington Post, Michael Dirda praises the new biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Paul Mariani.
There have been several previous biographies of Hopkins, including a fine one by Robert Bernard Martin, an eminent scholar of Victorian poetry. But Mariani's possesses three great
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The American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives
announces a new website: "American Catholics and Nazi Antisemitism:
Father Maurice Sheehy, Father Charles Coughlin, and the 1938 Catholic
University Kristallnacht Broadcast." The site can be found at the
following
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Fifty years ago today, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was elected pope and took the unlikely name of John XXIII. ("Pius" had been the favored name for almost two centuries, and there hadn’t been a Pope John since the fourteenth century–fifteenth if you count the anti-pope with the same
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In today’s NY Times, Stephen Holden reviews Bill Maher’s anti-religion movie Religulous (How long do you suppose it took for them to come up with that title?) After describing two of the favorite biblical images Maher holds up to ridicule: a talking snake, and a man who lived inside a fish,
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In two different posts for a different thread, Ann Olivier raised the question of the relationship between ideas of God and experiences of liturgy, and vice-versa. She wrote to me privately: "It would be interesting, I think, to have a thread sometime about how the bloggers think of God."
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On another thread William Collier brought up the recent letter which Cardinal Rigali sent to the members of Congress with regard to the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). Rigali's letter can be found here along with the legal opinion on which Rigali relied. It is an act that is said to "codify"
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Also in today’s New York Times Magazine, there is an article by Noah Feldman in which he discusses important questions that will often confront the U.S. Supreme Court in the future, questions about the relationship between our Constitution and laws and international law.
This problem has many
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In today’s New York Times Magazine, there’s one of those interviews "conducted, condensed and edited by Deborah Solomon." Margaret Atwood is answering the questions, including one about Sarah Palin; Atwood's response includes this:
"Read the book by Antonia Fraser called &
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In this week’s edition of his diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Standard, Archbishop Wuerl offers the first part of some "Reflections on Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship," a sort of commentary on the document of the USCCB. Some highlights:
"In a democracy where each
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In his speech to the cultural community in Paris, Pope Benedict XVI had some remarks about the importance of praying with song in the monastic tradition. He sets the bar very high! No less than that it harmonize with the heavenly choir!
And once again, a further step is needed. We ourselves are
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Two pieces in today’s Washington Post stun by their sheer coincidence. An op-ed column by Michael Gerson addresses what he calls "the new eugenics" illustrated by the pressure to abort exercised upon couples who are informed that their unborn child has Down syndrome. Ninety percent of
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The Vaughan Monroe generation will remember what follows, gathered from reports in the NY Times.
On October 21, 1960, three weeks before the presidential election in the U.S., the bishops of Puerto Rico issued a pastoral letter in which they prohibited Catholics from voting in favor of the
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According to a story in today’s Washington Post, the Alliance Defense Fund, described by the paper as "socially conservative" and as "a legal consortium that considers itself the antithesis of the American Civil Liberties Union," is recruiting pastors who on Sept. 28th would
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Sent to me today: http://www.comics.com/comics/chickweed/archive/chickweed-20080907.
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Some notice should be taken of the death of Fr. Joseph Gelineau, S.J., on August 8th, at the age of 87. In the 1950s the simple music to which he put the Psalms began to become known in the U.S. He had collaborated in the translation of the Psalms into French for the Bible de Jérusalem, which was
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In her reply to the Catholic prelates who have criticized her appeal to the Catholic tradition in justification of her political decisions with regard to abortion, Nancy Pelosi appeals to a statement by St. Augustine in his comments on Ex 21:22. A few remarks:
The proper citation is to Augustine
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I was wondering if anyone is planning on watching the party conventions. The first convention I can remember having any interest in was that of the Democrats in 1956 at which Adlai Stevenson was nominated for a second time. The choice of a vice-presidential nominee was not then pre-ordained, and
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In today’s New York Times Book Review, the cover review is Walter Kirn’s vivisection of James Wood’s new book, How Fiction Works. Here’s the review’s concluding paragraph:
Having been lashed by twice as many citations as even a formalist-cum-structuralist should require, and having
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Those interested in several of the threads below on Catholics in public life, social justice, abortion, etc. might be interested in the announcement of a conference to be held in Chicago in October on "Building a Social Theology for the Americas." Information at: http://hope08conference.
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Here's the controversial New Yorker cover.
http://www.thenewyorkerstore.com/product_details.asp?mscssid=CQK93C8DTDVA8LV722PPL53Q27HD7N4C&sitetype=1&sid=125383&did=4
Do you think those it satirizes will recognize it as satire? What will its impact on the campaign be
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The Middletown NY "Times Herald Record," a local newspaper, has a story about the number of Hispanics who would like to vote but cannot because they are not citizens. One might get the impression from the article that this is an injustice. I had always presumed that one had to be a
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For comparison’s sake, here is the Latin of the first sentence of the Roman Canon, followed by five translations: (1) that found in the Saint Andrew Daily Missal (1949), the one I used in high school and college; (2) that found in The Layman’s Missal and Prayer Book (1962); that found in The
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A Reuter's blog gives the text of a talk that Bishop Fellay, head of the SSPX, gave on the Vatican ultimatum listing conditions for the re-integration of the Society into the Church. In the speech Fellay refers to a talk that Archbishop Lefebvre gave many years ago, and this is also useful to
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Sometime in the last few days I read (but can't remember where) a funny story that brought back memories of going to confession and of hearing confessions. We were required to report not only the nature of the sin, but also how often we had committed it:--"I talked back to my mother six times
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Sunday’s Washington Post has an article on the decline among young people in the ability to write clear sentences and to construct coherent paragraphs. It gives both sides of the story and doesn’t indulge in apocalyptic warnings. But I have myself wondered what the effect of text–messaging,
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Yesterday’s NY Times had an article, prompted by a case in Canada, comparing our free speech constitutional guarantees with the more restricted laws of many other countries, including Canada and several European nations, where "hate speech" is considered and can be prosecuted as a crime
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As reported by John Allen, at the CTSA convention a day or two ago, sociologist James Davidson of Purdue University
"reviewed data from surveys of what he identified as four distinct generations of American Catholics, grouped with respect to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65):
• Pre-
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The Divine Office and the Liturgy for the feast of Corpus Christi were written by St. Thomas Aquinas, and what he produced is one of the few proofs that one can be a great theologian and also a great poet. The feast, and eucharistic devotion in general, gave rise to some of the most beautiful hymns
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Wednesday’s NY Times had an article on the digitizing of the extraordinary abundance of documents that have been preserved in Timbuktu, Mali, once a prosperous trading crossroads and important intellectual center, but now a symbol of exotic remoteness, as in "From here to Timbuktu."
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Today’s Washington Post has a column by Mark Stricherz on "Casey Democrats," thus described:
Like [former Pennsylvania Governor] Casey, these voters -- blue-collar and religious, often Catholic -- are liberal on economic issues but conservative on cultural ones. Where they once looked
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I was struck that several of the contributors to the thread about Luttwack’s column decried that it had appeared as an op-edu piece in the NY Times and some of them suggested that a certain authority accrued to it by virtue of its having been published there. I wonder if it is not time to
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This would now be thirty-five years ago, I guess. In one summer issue The Village Voice decided to forego reviews of recently published books and instead invited a few reviewers to pick a classic work of literature and to review it as if it had just appeared. Someone whose name I forget simply
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The Washington Post today (I can’t find it online) analyzes exit polls of the voters in Indiana, and some of the results should give Democrats pause.
Whites voted 60-40 for Clinton, blacks 90-8 for Obama. Voters between 18 and 29 voted for Obama 61 to 39; those between 30 and 44 voted for
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The dateline "Indianapolis" on a news-program this morning made me recall the one time I’ve been in that city. I was attending Sunday Mass, I believe in the cathedral, at which a priest read the Gospel in which Christ indicts the hypocrisy of the Scribes and Pharisees. Where the priest
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Today’s Washington Post has an article about a recent survey of what grade-school and high-school students are reading. Not having any children and being of a certain age, I am not familiar with most of the books mentioned. I was amused by the comment of the man who was reassured that some of the
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In yesterday’s Washington Post, David Broder had an interesting column. He asked a friend who works in Hillary Clinton’s national campaign, whether her camp sees any realistic way she can deny the Democratic nomination to Obama "without blowing up the party," that is, "If the
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In his weekly column in The Catholic Standard, Archbishop Donald Wuerl again addresses the question of the eucharist and Catholic politicians who have supported pro-abortion legislation. My guess is that this is in response to criticisms such as that of neophyte Robert Novak, who accused Archbishop
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In my class today, teaching undergraduates who were born around 1988, I wandered off into a description for them of what it was like in 1989 to watch the sudden collapse of the Soviet empire. After the decades of the Cold War, after the a-bomb and h-bomb tests, after the
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The Washington Post has an article today about the targeting of Christian priests by Islamic militants in Iraq. It describes a young priest, Father Abdal, saying Mass while Church members guard the church with AK 47 rifles. Here is the chilling ending of the article:
Abdal, a tall 29-year-old,
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The Pope was warmly received by Catholic educators when he gave his talk at The Catholic University of America yesterday. Heads or representatives of all Catholic colleges and universities had been invited as well as the heads of education departments in US dioceses. The talk was interrupted twice
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Today’s Style section of the Washington Post has an entertaining article on the conflicts among Catholics today with regard to the music that ought to be sung at the liturgy. Unfortunately, it divides the battle-lines between those who learned to like the kind of thing produced by the St. Louis
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On the plane over, Pope Benedict XVI was asked whether he thought Europe might have something to learn from the state of religion in the US. Here is his reply as quoted in today's NY Times:
“Certainly Europe can’t simply copy the United States,” he said. “We have our own history.” But
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In case you want some relief from earth-shaking considerations, I offer:
I just got off the phone with a man who, when I thanked him for his help, said, "No problem." I find that many people in the younger generations use this phrase instead of "You’re welcome." Can
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In the back of the Sports section of today's NY Times , where it could easily be missed, a column that usually reviews automobiles this time devotes as much time to testing one on the Amalfi Drive, the spectacularly beautiful road that begins from Sorrento on the Bay of Naples and runs to Salerno.
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A book review in the 14 March issue of the TLS said that there are 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain, one for every 14 people; it does not say whether this figure is only that of the government’s cameras or includes store-cameras, etc. In any case, it does not seem that this has prevented the
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I’m not going to be able to continue sending daily snippets from the sermons and writings of St. Augustine, although if I come upon a particularly bright gem, I may send it on. For those of you interested in delving deeper into the great bishop’s work, here are some websites you may find
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Why will they be happy there? What will they have? What will they do? What they will have I’ve already said: Happy are those who dwell in your house. [Ps 83:5]... They will possess the heavenly Jerusalem without being confined, without being pressed, without boundaries dividing them from each
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Where is death? Look for it in Christ, and it is not there now. It was once there, but it is dead in him. O life, death’s death! [O vita, mors mortis!] Courage: it will die in us also! What has been anticipated in our Head will be realized also in his members. Death will die in us too. When? At
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Michael Gerson ends his column in today’s Washington Post with this from the poet Jane Kenyon:
The God of curved space, the dry
God, is not going to help us, but the son
whose blood spattered
the hem of his mother's robe.
And merechristian.org offers this, on resurrection:
...however
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And we have seen him, and he had no beauty nor comeliness (Is 53:2). Was our bridegroom ugly, then? Of course not; if he were, how would virgins who have not ought husbands on earth love him? It was to those persecuting him that he appeared ugly; if they had not thought him ugly, they would not
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Whoever loves me keeps my commandments, and whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him. And what will he give him? And I will show myself to him. (Jn 14:21). That’s what will be seen, when he does what he said: And I will show myself to him. There you will see God’s
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[The Psalmist asks:] What return shall I make to the Lord? (Ps 115:12). What does this mean? It means "repay". Repay for what? For all that he has given to me. What has he given to me? I was once nothing, and he made me. I was lost, and he looked for me. Looking for me, he found me. I was
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This is a sermon that Augustine gave at one Easter Vigil, explaining what we do in our liturgical celebrations of what happened once and for all:
We know and believe most firmly, brothers and sisters, that Christ died once for us, the righteous one for sinners, the Lord for servants, the free
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No one comes to me unless the Father draw him. (Jn 6:). Someone objects: "If one is drawn, he comes unwillingly." If he comes unwillingly, he does not believe; if he does not believe, he does not come. For we hasten toward Christ not by walking but by believing; we near him not by bodily
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He will overshadow you with his shoulders, and under his wings you shall find hope (Ps 90:4). He says this so that you will not think that you can protect yourself. He will protect you and rescue you "from the snare of hunters and from the harsh word." He will overshadow you with his
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To get us ready for Holy Week, Peter Steinfels' Beliefs column in today's NY Times is devoted to how resurrection is treated in recent books by a Jewish, a Catholic, and an Anglican scholar, all of whom regard it as central to Jewish and Christian belief. Here is how St. Augustine described how
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He shall judge the world with equity (Ps 95:13). Not a part of it, because it was not just a part of it that he bought. He is to judge the whole because he paid the price for the whole. You have heard the Gospel that says that when he comes he will gather his elect from the four winds. He gathers
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The tragedy of the death of the Chaledean archbishop called to mind some remarks of Michael Ignatieff ten years ago, in a review of Lacey Baldwin Smith, Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World (The New Republic, September 22, 1997, pp. 42-45). Notice that the date is
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Hear my prayer and my supplication; listen to my tears. Do not be silent toward me (Ps 38, 13). Let me not be forever deaf. Do not be silent toward me. Let me hear you. For God speaks in hidden ways; he speaks to many in their hearts. And there, in the heart’s great silence, comes a great sound
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I am needy and poor; the Lord will care for me (Ps 39:18).... The Lord cares for you, so feel safe. He carries you who made you; don’t fall from the hands of your Craftsman. If you fall from them, you will break. You remain in his hands if you will the good. Say: "My God wanted me, and he
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This is eternal joy: when truth is transparent, and the Word of God, and the Wisdom by which all things were made, and his surpassing mercy, is known and loved. (Augustine, Sermon 75, 10; PL 38, 479
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See what follows: "Blessed are the merciful for God will show them mercy." Do and it will be done; do it for another and it will be done for you. You both abound and need: you abound in temporal goods, you need eternal goods. You hear someone begging; you yourself are God's beggar. The
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The exulting members of Christ sing this Psalm (Ps 123). And who here below exults except in hope? If this our hope is sure, then we too can sing with exultation. For those who are singing are not foreign to us; it’s not as if in this Psalm we do not hear our own voice. Listen to it in such a way
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"The believers, it says, had one soul and one heart (Acts 4:32). There were many souls, but their faith made them one. There were so many thousands of souls; they loved one another, and the many became one. They were on fire with the love of God, and from being a multitude they achieved a
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The March 1st issue of the London Tablet has a review of a dvd about an orphanage choir in South Africa. The choir is composed of children whose parents died of AIDS. According to the reviewer, "It is the sheer joy of choral singing that comes across most strongly from the film." One of
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What will the Democrats do about Florida and Michigan? I don't think they can totally ignore them without alienating voters there. But I also don't think that they can ratify the results when there wasn't a real campaign in either state. I believe they should hold another primary in each state,
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Sing to him a new song. (Ps 32:3) Take off the old: you’ve learned a new song. New man, New Testament, new song. The new song doesn’t belong to old people; only new people learn it, people reborn by grace out of their oldness and already belonging to the new covenant that is the kingdom of God
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Hear, you greedy one; listen. The Apostle explains to you in another place what he means: Let no one seek what is his own, but what is another’s, and he says of himself: Not seeking what is profitable to myself but to the many, that they may be saved (! Cor 10: 24, 35). Peter did not yet
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If after examining your conscience you find that you are among the weeds, don’t be afraid to change. The order has not yet been given to cut the field down; the harvest has not yet come. Don’t be today what you were yesterday, and don’t be tomorrow what you are today. (Sermon 5, 2 Caillou
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The charity by which we love God and neighbor includes all that is great and broad in the Scriptures. For the one Teacher from heaven teaches us: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On
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I had to rush this when I first sent it with a terrible Freudian slip in the title: `"Whooping a sour sacrifice!!". The Latin for the key phrase is `"holocausta jubilationis". Jubilation, as verb and noun, is found all over the Psalms, and every time he encountered it,
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God himself, whom we are seeking, will, as I hope, help our labors that they not be fruitless and that we may understand why it is said in the holy Psalm: "Let the heart of those who seek the Lord rejoice. Seek the Lord and be strengthened; seek his face forever" (Ps 104:3,4). What is
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My heart has said to you: I have sought your face; your face, O Lord, I will seek again (Ps 26:8). One thing I have asked of the Lord; this I will seek: your face. Do not turn your face away from me. See how he has fixed on that one petition! Do you want to receive it? Don’t ask for anything else
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Further to the point that, though lacking nothing, God seeks:
He sought you before you sought him, and he found you so that you might find him.
[Quaesivit vos antequam quaereretis eum, et invenit vos ut inveniretis eum.] (Augustine, Enar. in Psalmum 138, 14
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What then are you, my God? What, I ask, but the Lord God? For who is the Lord but the Lord? Or who is God but our God (Ps 17:32). Most high, utterly good, utterly powerful, utterly omnipotent; utterly merciful and utterly just; utterly hidden and utterly present; utterly beautiful and utterly
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Three ways in which Augustine developed the metaphor of limping.
(1) He saw a figure of the Christian people in Jacob who wrestled with the angel and came away from the encounter both blessed and limping (Gen 32:24-31):
Jacob was both blessed and lamed; his withered leg symbolizes bad
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Classmates since first year high, David Tracy and I were ordained in Rome in December 1963 and, after having earned our Licentiates in Sacred Theology, came home in 1964. The following fall I was a curate in Yonkers and David at St. Mary’s in Stamford, CT. This was the parish of William F.
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Today’s Washington Post has an op-ed column by Jim Hunt, former governor of North Carolina in which he defends the role of superdelegates in the Democratic Party. Here’s a crucial paragraph:
"In creating superdelegates, the Democratic Party recognized the expertise that its top holders
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Someone of you may ask: "What did Jeduthin mean when he said: Listen to my tears? (Ps 39:12) Tears are seen but they aren’t heard. Tears flow but they don’t make a sound. But they do have their own voice, as Abel’s blood had its voice [see Gen 4:10: "The voice of your brother's
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And my mouth spoke in my distress. ... What did his mouth say in his distress? I shall offer a marrowed holocaust. What does "marrowed" mean? That I want to hold my love for you deep within me. It won’t be on the surface. That I love you will be in my marrow. Nothing is more inward than
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And the Lord was awakened as if he were asleep (Ps 77:65). The Lord seems to be asleep when he gives his people into the hands of those who hate them and who say to them: Where is your God? (Ps 41:11). He was awakened as if he were asleep, like a strong man drunk on wine. No one but the Holy Spirit
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Although its root is alive, in winter even a living tree is like a dead one, both of them bare of fruit and leaves. Summer will come and distinguish between the trees. The living root produces leaves and is filled with fruit; the dried-up root will remain without them in summer as in winter. The
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He brought me out of the pit of misery. (Ps 39:3) What is the pit of misery? The depth of wickedness.... From where did he bring you out? From a certain depth. In another Psalm you cry out, "Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord" (Ps 129:1). Those who cry out from the depths, are not
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And my heart abandoned me (Ps 39:14). Why wonder if your heart is abandoned by your God when it has abandoned itself? What does it mean: My heart abandoned me? That your heart is not capable of knowing itself.... With my heart I want to see the Lord but I am not able because of my many sins; but
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That "the Word was made flesh" is great beauty for those who understand. "Far be it from me to glory," said one of the friends of the Bridegroom, "except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." It’s not enough that you are not ashamed by the cross; you must glory in
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Each of us is sailing in his heart....
You’ve heard of an insult–the wind has arisen. You’re become angry–the waves are high. With the blowing wind and the surging waves, your boat is in danger, your heart is in danger; your heart is being tossed about. You’ve heard of an insult and
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Above all, keep this in mind: Do not be distressed when you have not yet understood the Scriptures, and don’t puff yourself up when you have. What you haven’t understood set aside, with respect; and what you have understood keep, with love. (Augustine, Sermo, 51:35
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[The Psalmist says:] Magnify the Lord with me! (Ps 34:3). Who is it is who exhorts us to magnify the Lord with him? Anyone who is in the Body of Christ, brothers and sisters, ought to do all he can to get others to magnify the Lord with him.... Truth is superior to all things. It is the Word of God
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Not forgetting what we were, we shall not despair of those who now are what we were.
Or: If we do not forget what we were, we shall not despair of those who now are what we were. (Augustine, Enar. in Ps 50, 24; PL 36, 599 )
Non obliviscentes quid fuerimus, non desperabimus de his qui
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The Fall 2007 issue of CUA Magazine, a publication of Catholic University, tells the story of the discovery and restoration of a phonograph record that contains a radio broadcast of Nov. 16, 1938, in which CUA brought several prominent Catholics together to protest the Nazi actions against Jews on
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In relation to the thread "Mother and daughter" (below), Peter Vanderschraaf raised a question that had occurred to me when initiating it. I think it deserves its own title and thread and so I give it in the words of Peter:
The woman I plan to marry converted to the Roman Catholic
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Well, then, beloved, take what I think, but without prejudice if you have a better thought. For we all have one teacher and we are classmates in one school. (Augustine, Tr. in Ioann., 16, 3; PL 35, 1523) [condiscipuli in una schola]
In our ignorance let us all ask the teacher, and let us not
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To go from the sublime to the ridiculous:
From the Washington Post’s gossip column, I offer the following quips from speakers at the Washington Press Club Foundation’s annual Congressional Dinner. If you take pleasure in any of these, say three Our Father’s and three Hail Mary’s.
From
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The February 9 issue of The Tablet has a beautiful article by Carolyn Butler, daughter of the late novelist and journalist Angela Lambert. It describes the spiritual reconciliation that took place over the last months of her mother’s life as the daughter took care of the mother and they embarked
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When the Psalmist says, "When will you comfort me?" (Ps 118: 82), it’s as if he’s impatient with the delay. The same idea is expressed elsewhere: "And you, Lord, how long?" (Ps 6:4) Perhaps it’s so that delayed enjoyment may be sweeter; or it may be that this is what
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Remember:
among the commands of the Lord
none is more difficult,
and none more wondrous,
than that one love one’s enemies.
(Augustine, Earr. in Ps 118, 3; PL 37, 1524
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Turn, O Lord, our captivity, like a torrent in a south wind (Ps 125:4). As torrents in a south wind are turned, so turn our captivity. Someone asked, "What does this mean?" ... Somewhere Scripture, commanding and warning us with regard to good deeds, says: Like ice on a bright day, so
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Augustine, after speaking about the warfare between the flesh and the spirit:
I want the whole to be healed, because I am the whole. I don’t want my flesh to be eternally separated from me, like something foreign; I want it to be entirely healed with me. If you do not want this, I don’t know
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Take refuge beneath the hand that corrects you. Don’t avoid discipline because the one who is correcting you cannot make a mistake. The one who made you knows what to make of you. Or perhaps you think him so unskilled an artisan that he knew how to make you but forgets what he might make of you?
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Our Lord Jesus Christ ... would not so strongly urge us to ask unless he were willing to give. Human laziness should be ashamed: he is more willing to give than we are to receive; he is more willing to show us mercy than we are to be freed from our misery.
Erubescat humana pigritia: plus vult
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He will come openly, and he will not be silent (Ps. 50:33). It says, "He will not be silent," because he was silent while he was being judged. For with regard to the words of his that we need, when has he ever been silent? He was not silent through the Patriarchs; he was not silent
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We were sought so that we might be found; it is because we were found that we are speaking. There is no pride in this because before we were found we would have been lost if we had not been sought.... We are seeking you lest you be lost. We are seeking you because we were sought. We want to find
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When preaching, St. Augustine often composed imaginary dialogues between himself and a member of his congregation. Here is one that I came across recently, which fits today’s second reading very well: "Now is the acceptable time! Now is the day of salvation!"
Augustine has been
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What are you giving up for Lent? This was the question one often heard back in the day, as they say. Parents would ask it of their children, and a spiritual director might ask you The assumption was that one gave up something during Lent–candy or cookies when we were children; smoking or whiskey
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A brief item by "J. C." in the February 1 issue of the TLS takes note of a new book by Steve Roud, Monday’s Child is Fair of Face, described as a collection of "traditional beliefs about babies." J.C. comments: "It leaves the impression that babies were traditionally in
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In today’s NY Times, Charles McGrath has a column about the relationship between genre writing and "literature," the former being considered very rarely to aspire to or to reach the quality of the latter. Double-standards? Snobbishness? P.D. James is mentioned as one writer whose
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Former Commonweal columnist, Liz McCloskey, now a doctoral candidate at Catholic University, and her husband contributed a column on politics and abortion to the op-ed page of Tuesday’s Washington Post. How much impact it will have on either party is an open question, but to judge from the
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Two of the best known, not to say notorious, statements about obedience come from the authoritative texts of the Society of Jesus. The thirteenth rule for thinking with the Church reads: "To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the
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Has anyone else read Ian McEwan's novel Atonement? I've just finished it, and I'm having a hard time remembering any novel that gripped me and moved me as much as this one did. It's exigently conceived and structured, wonderfully written. But I'm no literary critic, and won't pretend to be
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EWTN has made the full speech of the pope available in English, as translated by Asia news. The Vatican website continues to give only the Italian and the German.
Here are extracts from the lecture that Pope Benedict had planned to give at La Sapienza University.
And here is the full text
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Garry Wills, in the latest New York Review of Books, compares the speeches on religion and politics given by J.F. Kennedy and Mitt Romney. Wills maintains that John Courtney Murray was "one of Kennedy’s advisers on his Houston speech" to Baptist ministers. This requires some
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Sunday or Monday I heard a woman in New Hampshire say that she had been inclining toward Obama but then she wondered whether she’d be able to live with herself years from now if she had to confess that she had had an opportunity to vote for the first woman president and hadn’t done so. I wouldn
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The other day I was looking for something in the Washington Post and, not finding it, went looking for it on the paper’s website. I discovered that there was a good deal more information, gathered by their reporters and by others, than is in the print-edition. This made me wonder what happens to
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According to the Washington Post today, 49% of evangelical Christians in Iowa voted for Huckabee, 19% for Romney, 11% for Thompson, and 10% for McCain; nothing is said about how the other 11% voted. This means, of course, that 51% of them did not vote for Huckabee. Nevertheless, our friend
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Roger Scruton's review of Griswold's book on forgiveness ends with this paragraph:
"In this book, the Cambridge University Press has placed the footnotes at the bottom of the page, and not gathered them up, as so many publishers incomprehensibly do, as endnotes. This is a great relief,
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In the December 12th number of the Times Literary Supplement, Roger Scruton has a lengthy review of Charles Griswold’s book, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Inquiry. The review begins with these two paragraphs:
"What is forgiveness, and what good does it do? How are we helped by offering
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Today’s Washington Post has an article on two surveys of what songs people most and least want to hear during the Christmas season (apparently taken to mean the period before Christmas). The top three on both lists were Bing Crosby's "White Christmas", Nat King Cole's "The
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Sandro Magister is a journalist associated with the Italian weekly newsmagazine l’espresso. His long obsession with the History of Vatican II continues. Two weeks ago he used his weekly web-column to reproduce yet another speech by Archbishop Agostino Marchetto repeating criticisms uttered many
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While we're talking about books, here's a question on which the fate of the universe hangs: Should notes be placed: (a) at the foot of a page; (b) at the end of a chapter; (c) at the end of the book?
I am all for (a). In fact, I think it's de iure divino, but unfortunately many publishers
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In today's NY Times, April D. Deconick has an op-ed piece in which she makes serious scholarly criticisms of the translation of the so-called "Gospel of Judas" that made such a splash last year. According to Deconick, Judas is not the hero of the story, but a demon who is told by Jesus
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Today's NY Times has an obituary for Mel Tolkin who led the famous team of writers who produced the stories and jokes for the classic "Show of Shows" and later "Caesar's Hour." Tolkin lived through pogroms in the Ukraine, of which he said: "The pressures made heroes of
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Today’s NY Times has an article on different attitudes of religions with regard to cloning human beings. Laws against it tend to prevail in countries that once were Christian, whereas in Asian countries, in particular, research into such cloning is not only not frowned upon by religious people
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Joseph Bottum has a piece in the most recent issue of First Things on the disappearance of Advent. Here is how it begins (you need a subscription to read the rest of it):
"Christmas has devoured Advent, gobbled it up with the turkey giblets and the goblets of seasonal ale.
"Every
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A recent article in the "Times Literary Supplement" about China refers at one point to the word "Qin," and helpfully explains that it should be pronounced "Chin," and is the word from which China gets its name. Some of us are old enough to remember when a new
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So the World Series is over, and we enter into the dark desert of a world without baseball. Has anyone considered the possibility that what is called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) might actually be caused, not by the decline in the hours of daylight in winter, but by the absence of baseball
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Today's Washington Post has an article on the "World Digital Library." It begins: "As ideas go, they don't come much bigger: Digitize the accumulated wisdom of humankind, catalogue it, and offer it for free on the Internet in seven languages."
What wonderful
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Two very bright and very balanced graduate students at my university (one a former columnist for "Commonweal") have told me that they are home-schooling their children, which leads me to wonder what information is available about this phenomenon, which, I think, is now some twenty or
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At his blog, Rocco Palma a few days back drew attention to the lecture Archbishop Niederauer of San Francisco gave on Flannery O’Connor. Good to see an archbishop with such interests. I like the opening quip
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Today’sWashington Post has an op-ed piece by Charlotte Allen on living wills. The inside-link has the headline I chose for this thread. She recounts her being urged to sign a living will. She makes some good points, I think, and the solution she proposes, urged by a Hastings Center Report, is
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With apologies for having distracted Eduardo's thread on abortion, I decided to make this a separate thread. David Gibson wrote that "data" as a singular noun is acceptable in certain contexts, at least according to Merriam-Webster online. For me "this
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A reflection I always associate with the fall of the year:
"God made Sun and Moon to distinguish seasons, and day, and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons: But God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies; In paradise, the fruits were
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Today’s Washington Post has a thoroughly discouraging piece about the plastic and paper bags in which we carry our purchases away from the supermarket. It would appear that there is nothing to choose between paper and plastic when it comes to helping the planet. The suggestions at the bottom of
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The New York Times today has the list of books that have been approved for federal prisons
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There is a very oddly reported story in today’s NY Times about the Bureau of Prisons’ ordering chaplains to remove from prison libraries any books, tapes cds and videos that are not on an approved list. According to the story, “the Bureau of Prisons said it relied on experts to produce
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Zenit (http://www.zenit.org/article-20447?l=english) ha Pope Benedict XVI's address to government leaders and diplomats in Vienna. It repeats many themes of his teaching: the Christian roots of European society and culture; the necessary engagement of faith and reason; respect for human life,
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Today is the feast of St. Augustine. One of the most exciting developments in study of the great bishop is the attention being given to his sermons often comparatively neglected in favor of his great works. (A new translation of all of them is being prepared.) Most of them were not written out
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Gerard Manley Hopkins suffered from dark nights, too, and wrote at least four poems while he was in the midst of them; they’re often called "the Terrible Sonnets." This is one of them, written, it seems, he was starting to come out of the dark.
My own heart let me more have pity on;
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It would seem to be time to discuss what the policy on this blog should be with regard to requiring respondents to identify themselves. I believed that this is not now required, but some people seem to feel very strongly that all respondents should identify themselves. I would like to know what
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Today’s Washington Post has an essay by book critic Jonathan Yardley on J. F. Powers’ novel, Morte d’Urban, first published in 1962, winner of the National Book Award in 1963, and now back in print from, of all places, New York Review Book Classics (along with Powers’ next novel, Wheat that
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I have long admired the broad cultural perspectives and keen insights in the writings of Michael Ignatieff, former professor political science at Harvard University, who in 2005 returned to Canada and entered political life. He is now a member of the Canadian Parliament and deputy leader of the
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Karl Barth wrote that a preacher ought to go into the pulpit with the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other. The editors of the New York Times obligingly provided preachers today with a front-page story that fit perfectly with today’s Gospel-parable about the rich fool. It seems
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At Catholic marriages, before Vatican II reforms of the rite, the exhortation below was read to the couple by the priest. I think it is a very beautiful meditation, and probably richer in theological and human meaning than many a homily preached nowadays. I read portions of it during a Sunday
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I thought it might be worthwhile to devote a separate theme to Pope Benedict and the interpretation of Vatican II. I had not read until this afternoon the remarks the Pope made to the group of priests who had asked his opinion about the Council. From what had been described in other posts I I
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In Lumen gentium #8, the Second Vatican Council says that the Church of Christ "subsists in" the Roman Catholic Church. All previous drafts of this statement had said flatly that Christ’s Church is the Roman Catholic Church. The significance of the change of verbs has been controversial
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From his blog (http://www.cardinalseansblog.org/), here is Cardinal Sean O'Malley's description of the meeting at which the Vatican explained the forthcoming motu proprio on the Tridentine Rite.
From Cleveland I flew to Rome at the request of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone to participate in a meeting
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Last night at Catholic University I attended the Murnion Lecture sponsored by the Catholic Common Ground Initiative; this year it was given by Jill Kerr Conway, a personal description of the efforts of a small mission church in western Massachusetts to stay alive. It was a lovely portrait of a &
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Zenit reports (http://www.zenit.org/article-19984?l=english) that Pope Benedict XVI has gone back to the old rule that a two-thirds majority is always required for the election of a pope. Pope John Paul II had permitted a simple majority vote after 33 or 34 ballots had not resulted in a two-thirds
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At http://www.forward.com/articles/the-pope-and-i-a-debate-with-jesus-is-joined-by-b/ Jacob Neusner briefly describes his reaction at finding out that Benedict XVI's new book on Jesus engages with Neusner's own earlier book on Jesus. He particularly
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Tremendous interest has been shown in the return to the Catholic Church of Francis Beckwith, president of the Evangelical Theological Society, a post from which he has since resigned. In an interview (http://ncregister.com:80/site/article/2772), he explains the steps that led him to return to the
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After each of the four sessions of the Second Vatican Council, Joseph Ratzinger published a pamphlet with reflections on the events and achievements of that session. These were then gathered together and translated into English as Theological Highlights of Vatican II (New York: Paulist Press/Deus
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On the Commonweal Yahoo discussion group there are periodic discussions of hate-crime legislation and on differing legal systems’ approaches to it. Today’s "Washington Post"at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041902518.html reports that the
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I seem to recall Chesterton's remarking that the most important thing about the "Missing Link" was that it was missing... Which seems to be the case with the motu proprio that would restore wider use of the Tridentine Mass. It's still missing.
But while it's missing, is it worth a
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It is the death of the Eternal Word of God made flesh, which is our great lesson how to think and how to speak of this world. His Cross has put its due value upon every thing which we see, upon all fortunes, all advantages, all ranks, all dignities, all pleasures; upon the lust of the flesh, and
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In the Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 16, 2007, a review of two books on the Middle Ages begins:
"The Middle Ages never happened; they were just imagined later. From the seventeenth century onwards, historians have had the idea that the period between the death of the last Roman Emperor in
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If you’re looking for some powerful Lenten reading, I’d like to recommend a book that Bob Imbelli and I discovered when we were teaching together at the major seminary in the archdiocese of New York. I regard it as one of the modern classics of Christian spirituality. It’s Asking the Fathers
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The complaint is sometimes heard that Vatican II and its reforms "Protestantized" the Catholic Church, the liturgy, etc. Not much notice is taken of the degree to which since Vatican II, many Protestant Churches have been "Catholicized." I was reminded of
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Here’s a story about a controversy now underway in Italy over proposed legislation that would grant certain rights to unmarried couples: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0700931.htm
Concern that Cardinal Ruini, president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, might intervene and urge
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Google often offers us translations of texts in foreign languages. I decided to see what this service would make of the Nicene Creed which is usefully available in several languages as part of the second paragraph of "Dominus Iesus." Below you will find the results when the Creed was
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Sandro Magister's latest blog ( http://www.chiesa.espressonline.it/dettaglio.jsp?id=87082&eng=y) has an interesting story on the opening of the Vatican archives for the reign of Pope Pius XI. (1922-1939), along with an interview with one of the scholars who worked on
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The New York Times had a review of a new book on Italy and Italians today. The review began with this paragraph:
“In Italy, red lights come in many varieties. A rare few actually mean stop. Others, to the Italian driver, suggest different interpretations. At a pedestrian crossing at 7 a.m., with
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In today's office of readings there is a snippet from one of St. Augustine's sermons in which he warns against grumbling over difficulties and has advice for those who yearn for "the good old days":
"Is there any affliction now endured by mankind that was not endured by our fathers
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Sandro Magister (http://www.chiesa.espressonline.it/dettaglio.jsp?id=73684&eng=y) has the remarks of Pope Benedict XVI last Sunday. The extempore remarks are particularly moving:
How to be a force for peace in the world by Benedict XVI Just a quick word of meditation on the reading we have
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Today’s NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/world/africa/22tessier.html?_r=1&oref=slogin has a very good article on Msgr. Henri Tessier, archbishop of Algiers, the leader of a Catholic Church that has nearly disappeared. There is a rapid reference to seven Trappist monks who, ten years
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Here are some photos I took of Niccolo dell'Arca's "Compianto di Cristo." I forgot to mention in my earlier post that they were done in terracotta, and painted
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Here’s another Latin epitaph, this one for the Italian Renaissance sculptor, Niccolo dell’Arca (ca. 1435-1494)
Qui Vitam Saxis Dabat Et Spirantia Signa
Coelo Formabat, Proh Dolor, Hic Situs Est.
Nunc Te Praxiteles Phidias Policretus Adorant
Miranturque Tuas, O Nicolae, Manus.
I send this
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In 2005 the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain held a conference “De doctrina christiana: Hearing and Speaking the Word.” Papers from this conference have been published in the March 2006 issue of “New Blackfriars.” The introduction to the symposium was written by Nicholas
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The obituary for Philip Rieff in today’s New York Times has this as a description of his first book, Freud: the Mind of the Moralist:
It argued that Freudian ideas, which gave rise to the idea of the ‘psychological man’ as the dominant moral type in the 20th century, had had a
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The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has sent a letter to the primates of the Anglican Communion on the present difficult situation in the life of that communion.
It includes the following paragraph:
But what our Communion lacks is a set of adequately developed structures which is able
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Halfway between Milan and Turin, in a little hollow below a glacial morain, with the foothills of the Italian Alps providing the distant horizon, sits the monastery of Bose, one of the most important religious foundations in Italy since the Second Vatican Council. On the day the Council closed,
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The Independent has a column on some negative reactions to the Pope's remarks at Auschwitz.
Reactions
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The London Tablet has a piece on sex-selection abortions in India, with the astounding figure that for every 1000 male children born, only 558 female children are born. http://www.thetablet.co.uk/cgi-bin/citw.cgi/past-00276#India
This amounts to a real plague, and I've heard that it's also a
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Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east...
(Hopkins, "The Wreck of the Deutschland," 35)
And here the end of Newman’s finest sermon on Easter:
And now, to conclude, for it is hardly befitting on this Day to speak much, when God has done
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I’m an academic and yet (therefore? ) I’m reluctant to agree with the statement attributed to the president of Notre Dame (following, I believe, one of his predecessors) that the Catholic university is where the Church does her thinking. If one said "one of the places" where the
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SEVEN STANZAS AT EASTER
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the
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Michael McCarthy has an article in the 25 March issue of The Tablet in which he complains that "the Church appears not to have even the faintest notion" of the threat to the health of the planet. It appears that by "Church" here he means the hierarchy and, perhaps even more
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Walter Esler, a week or ten days back, spoke of the lack of beauty in the liturgy. I've heard the complaint before, and often enough to make me think that there are many Catholics who don't associate the liturgy with beauty, or beauty with the liturgy. Think, for example, of the lists of favorite
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Hervé Legrand, OP, a French ecclesiologist, specialist in questions of ministry, has an article (in French), available on the web at http://snv.free.fr/jv096legrand.htm, in which he reviews two 20th-century debates as to the meaning of a vocation to the priesthood. The debate was between those who
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Over the last several years I've given many talks about Vatican II, in the US, Canada, and Australia. On almost every one of those occasions, the audience was by substantial majority over (and often well over) fifty years old.
A small group of concerned Catholic lay people in Westchester Co
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Glad this is up and running. For anyone looking for Lenten reading, I recommend volume VI of John Henry Newman's [I]Parochial and Plain Sermons[/I]. The volume gathers Anglican sermons of Newman from Lenten through Trinity Sunday. Wonderful things in them! All eight volumes of these sermons,
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