Ruminations of an Amateur Monastic
The mercy of God is a scandal – Christ offers His infinite mercy to every worst kind of sinner, excluding no one. This eternal upwelling of mercy overflows, cascading upon the whole of the human race. It extends to murderers. It extends to rapists. It extends to thieves, and liars, and stalkers, and vandals. It extends to tax collectors and […]
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Today on the Solemnity of Saint Joseph, we would do well to meditate on the life of the man who helped raise the Son of God. It can’t have been easy. Tradition holds that Joseph was already an old man and a widower when he married the Blessed Virgin, who was very young, perhaps 16 or so. He had several […]
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Well that got your attention, didn’t it? It’s not quite true of course; Patrick may have been born on the isle of Britain, but in a time before the Angles had arrived and started making it Angland. No, his family were Roman Catholic churchmen from the Roman Imperial province of Britannia. Today, nobody is going to go around speaking in […]
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During Lent, I am often reminded of this, one of my favourite stories from the Desert Fathers: Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my […]
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Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” And with those words, our Lent has begun. Holy Mother Church calls us to make these next forty days until Easter a time of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Lent is a pilgrimage, in a sense, through time if not space, through death to resurrection. A pilgrimage of penitence. Let […]
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Today, we begin the season of Lent with Ash Wednesday. The modern Roman Missal has a set of rubrics that cover the whole of Lent, before digging into each day separately. Most folks are familiar with number 4, and I’d venture to say that 3 is not exactly unknown to priests and ministers, if not the folks in the pews. […]
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Leading up to the great celebration of the mysteries of the death and resurrection of Christ during Holy Week, the Church calls us to forty days of penitence. The Lenten Season of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving has been observed by Christians since Apostolic times. Indeed, Christ himself retreated to the desert for forty days, where he was tempted by the […]
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Arms of Archbishop Paul Etienne of Seattle By I, SajoR, CC BY-SA 2.5, Link Fasting, almsgiving, and prayer are the three traditional disciplines of Lent. The faithful and catechumens should undertake these practices seriously in a spirit of penance and of preparation for Baptism or of renewal of Baptism at Easter. (Code of Canon Law, 1249-1252) Ash Wednesday, February 26, […]
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Most folks have seen some variation of this photo of Bernini‘s “Chair of Peter” in the Vatican. It’s a masterpiece of baroque art, found in every art textbook covering the period. The chair in question is carried aloft by four saints. The image of the dove in the Holy Spirit window has been duplicated and copied all over the world […]
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Saint Valentinus of Terni The feast of Saint Valentine was removed from the Roman calendar during the reforms of 1969. It seems a shame, since this is one of a vanishingly small number of saint’s feasts that have remained in the secular culture. It seems to me that it could be used as a touchstone for the new evangelization. Mind […]
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Saint Benedict was the founder of western monasticism; to this day, most monks and nuns worldwide follow some variation of his “Little Rule for Beginners“. Benedict had a twin sister, Scholastica, whose feast day is today. Under her brother’s guidance, she founded the first female monastery in the west. I often think that their parents had a sense of humour, […]
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Today is Septuagesima Sunday, the beginning of a liturgical season known as Septuagesima or Fore-Lent or Shrovetide. It consists of the three weeks immediately before the start of Lent, and indeed the name Septuagesima means seventy, in reference to Quadragesima – forty – which is the proper Latin name for Lent. This liturgical season, meant to prepare us for the […]
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Today was once one of the most solemn feasts of the year. It’s gone by several names over the millennia: the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, Candlemas. Coming forty days after Christmas, it was even once the end of the Christmas season. Even today there are relics of […]
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Faith and reason are the shoes on your feet. You can travel further with both than you can with just one.(J. Michael Straczynski, “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars“) Today is the Feast of the Universal Doctor of the Church and one of my name Saints, Thomas Aquinas. When (certain) people, told of my conversion, said to me “oh, you’re Catholic […]
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Today is both the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul and the twelfth anniversary of the day I wed my beautiful bride. It is, as I have said before, a “moment when everything changed, celebrated on a day when everything changed”. It’s important to mark those changes. Francine and I have a funny tradition. When I proposed to her, […]
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I can’t speak for anybody else, but I need all the help I can get. As a writer, I often find that I love having written much more than actually writing. I distract myself easily. It doesn’t help, I suppose, that I tend to write in bursts, like I’m emptying my brain. Then I rather need to recharge the brain […]
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Happy Saint Agnes Day! Saint Agnes was a young Roman lady of 12 or 13 who suffered martyrdom in the persecutions of Diocletian in about the year 304. She was one of the youngest of the early martyrs and one of the most moving and articulate. Agnes hastened to the place of torture as a bride to her wedding feast. […]
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