From the folks at Daily Gospel Online comes a commentary by St. John Chrysostom: Is there anything more ridiculous than a christian who couldn’t care less about other people? Don’t use your poverty as an excuse. The widow who put two small coins in the Temple coffer (Mk 12,42) would rise up against you; Peter, too, who said to the lame man: “Gold or silver have I none” (Acts 3,6) and Paul, who was so poor he often went hungry.... Read more
Watching certain groups of Catholics respond the Pope Francis has been fascinating to say the least. LifeSiteNews has been an interesting study since the election of Pope Francis. They are keen to highlight Francis’ pro-life and traditional family comments, of course, but seem uncertain as to how to process his priorities. They are baffled, for instance, when he indicates that something other than abortion might be “the most serious moral evil” of our time, even when Francis’ candidates for such... Read more
On Tuesday, December 10, Caritas International, the umbrella organization of 164 Catholic organizations that provide disaster relief and human development, is launching a campaign to combat world hunger through prayer and action. In the United States the campaign is being led by Catholic Relief Services and Catholic Charities. The campaign will begin with a 24 hour prayer vigil. It will begin at noon, local time, in Samoa (the first country west of the International Date Line) and continue around the... Read more
I ran across something today that got me thinking about the revised English translation of the liturgy again. I guess I should let this go, but things I read keep bringing it back up. Maybe I am obsessed, or maybe this is a case of a process Richard Feynman described: you keep a bunch of problems in your head, and every time you learn something new, you try to apply it to one of them to see if you can... Read more
Yesterday, the Vatican released Pope Francis’ first formal document, the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, available here in English translation, with both HTML and PDF versions. I have not read it yet; at 51,000 words I think I can be excused for not having done more than print it out. So it may seem presumptuous to blog about it but I have a few quick thoughts on the reception and presentation of the text. Both the secular press and the... Read more
I love the story of the loaves and fishes. Jesus answers the doubts of his disciples with overflowing love – love not only from Him, but spread by and through each member of the crowd. There can be no limit to His generosity, and the more His followers shared it, the more comes pouring out. The company I work for occasionally offers the opportunity to do a volunteer day feeding the homeless of San Francisco at Glide Memorial Church in... Read more
The second reading for today’s Feast of Christ the King is Colossians 1:12-20. St. Paul, in a paean to God the Father, describes Jesus by saying that “in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible” (Col 1:16) As I was preparing this reading (I am a lector for today’s mass) I was struck by the use of visible and invisible. Last week I blogged about this turn of phrase in the new... Read more
Attending daily Mass this morning, I was reminded of two observances taking place today, in an ironic intersection of liturgical and national calendars. For the Catholic Church, it is the feast of St. Martin of Tours, a 4th-century convert who experienced an irreconcilable tension between his Christian faith and his career as a soldier. Meanwhile, in the United States, Veterans’ Day is being celebrated, and along with it the broader mythos that is a formative part of the culture –... Read more
The French have a marvelous turn of phrase “l’esprit de l’escalier” which might best be translated as “staircase wit.” It is used to refer to those situations where you think of the perfect retort far too late to say it—e.g., on the stairs as you are leaving. I think of this because I ran across a passage from Blessed John Henry Newman that I wish I had seen when we were discussing the revised translation of the Missal. (more…) Read more
Since I’ve been more transient than usual of late, I’ve experienced parish life and worship in a variety of settings within recent weeks and moths. And since I’ve been endowed with a critical mind that was hard enough to tone down even before seriously studying theology and liturgy, there is always something I end up mentally picking on – all the more so as my preferences fall on different sides of the “liturgy wars” that are hashed out in countless parishes, academic... Read more
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