The purpose of this post is to follow up my last one on why the Last Supper was not the First Mass. The next post on Holy Thursday will try to explain exactly what it was: An eschatological banquet enacting a surrogate for sacrifice. But first things first. Four points: 1. A Mass requires the whole Paschal Mystery. The Mass is an anamnetic moment. It is a moment in which the believing community is brought back to the dynamic movement... Read more
Dr. Karen Kilby offers in this video interview one of the fairest and most balanced assessments of von Balthasar’s work that I have come across in the past 25 years. Read more
From Daily Gospel Online, this was the selected reading for March 5, when the gospel was the parable of the two servants, MT 18:21-35. What is human mercy like? It makes you concerned for the hardship of the poor. What is divine mercy like? It forgives sinners… In this world God is cold and hungry in all the poor, as he himself said (Mt 25,40)… What sort of people are we? When God gives, we want to receive, when he... Read more
An important liturgical event may soon take place: The pope could wash the feet of both male and female inmates next Thursday when he goes to to a juvenile facility. This would constitute some kind of authoritative statement on the longstanding argument about whether the feet of men alone should be washed on Holy Thursday. The current rubric reads: “The men who have been chosen (viri selecti) are led by the ministers to chairs prepared at a suitable place.” This... Read more
I’ve been quickly becoming smitten with our new Holy Father, despite (like most everyone, it seems) not having given him much consideration before he was elected. The homily he gave at his inaugural Mass sealed my positive impression. First, in recognition of the feast of St. Joseph, patron of the universal Church, he expounded beautifully on St. Joseph’s role as “protector” as a universal model. How does Joseph respond to his calling to be the protector of Mary, Jesus and the Church?... Read more
For my spring break I have decamped to Munich to visit a colleague at Ludwig-Maximilliam Universitat. On Sunday, my wife and I went to an English language mass at the the Church of St. Boniface in central Munich. The mass is one of several English masses in Munich originally organized by Irish priests in the 1980s for Irish guest workers. The community has expanded since then, and now includes a variety of English speakers including filipinos and people from a... Read more
Please check out this wonderful open letter over at Solidarity Hall. It stands out for both its clarity and its charity. At a time when Catholics all over the world are rejoicing in the election of a new pope, Weigel retreats to a neocon journal to inform us that the pope will not be “Paul Krugman in a white cassock”. Well no, George, I don’t expect the pope to emulate a secular Jewish Nobel prize-winning economist whose main argument is that the Keynesian understanding of... Read more
Vox Nova is happy to present this guest post from Leah Perrault. It’s me, too. I’ve been turning over magazines in grocery line-ups. I’m sick of the silence on the portrayal of women and girls as sex objects and our shared constant exposure to unreal and over-sexualized images of women and men in advertising and media. Alongside the other voices in the blogosphere who have been taking up this issue of late, I have had a series of fascinating conversations... Read more
As the Jesuit contributor to this blog, I feel like I’m expected to say something about Pope Francis. Needless to say, when my phone exploded with texts like “Is he a Jesuit!!!” I knew as little as anyone else. I immediately did some research and… sure enough. Quite exciting. I almost felt like I had done something right myself I was getting so many congratulations. There has already been some good commentary on this, and I can already see some... Read more
We have a pope: Cardinal Bergoglio of Agentina, a Jesuit, and he will rule as Francesco I (Pope Francis). Cardinal Bergoglio was, according to rumor at the time, the strong contender against Joseph Ratzinger in 2005, but he attracted little attention this round. He will not fit easily into the conservative/liberal dichotomy that the secular media (and many Catholic commentators) will want to impose on him. He is a strong defender of social justice and a harsh critic of the... Read more
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