Ruminations of an Amateur Monastic
The Dies Iræ is the traditional sequence for Requiem Masses and the Masses of All Souls. While this sequence no longer appears at Mass in the Ordinary Form of the modern Roman Rite, it remains in both the Extraordinary Form and in the Benedictine liturgies – and I note that it is sung during the All Souls Mass at Seattle’s […]
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Once again we come to a feast of All Saints. “But wait!” I hear you cry, “wasn’t that back on the first of November?” Right you are! But today on the Benedictine calendar is the feast of All Saints of the Benedictine Order. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside […]
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It seems fitting that Veterans’ Day – Armistice Day – is celebrated on November 11, for this is the memorial of the soldier-saint, Martin of Tours. He was a soldier turned monk turned reluctant bishop, and he was one of the first saints to be venerated who wasn’t a martyr. Saint Martin of Tours was born in A.D. 336 in […]
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You would be forgiven for thinking that the Pope’s main church is St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. It’s certainly the largest. But no. The Pope’s own church, his episcopal seat as Bishop of Rome, is the Basilica of Saint John Lateran. Which Saint John? Good question. Two of them, actually, for the full name of this church is the […]
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On this day in 1605, a cabal of Catholic plotters, hoping to turn back the tides of reformation and restore a Catholic monarch to the throne of Great Britain, attempted to assassinate the very Protestant King James. Their plan—if you can dignify it by calling it a plan—was to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of […]
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Happy Feast of All Saints! This is the day when we celebrate all the saints, known and unknown: the Church Triumphant. We ask them to pray for us. I, for one, could use all the help I can get! This day has been a feast since the sixth or seventh century, thanks to the abbots of Cluny, and it was […]
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Protestants all over the world celebrate “Reformation Day” on October 31. I don’t. In 2017, on the five-hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s revolt, I wrote a lengthy essay on exactly why not. It has become my custom to reprint it on this day each year. Five Hundred Years Today is the five hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant […]
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Let us prepare our souls for the graces heaven is about to shower upon the earth in return for its homage. To-morrow the Church will be so overflowing with joy, that she will seem to be already in possession of eternal happiness; but to-day she appears in the garb of penance, confessing that she is still an exile. Let us […]
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Joseph Stalin famously demanded to know, “How many divisions does the Pope of Rome have?” Stalin was, of course, asking the wrong question, as the saint whose feast is today finally proved. When Karol Wojtyła was elected Pope John Paul II in October of 1978, I was not only just 11 years old—I wasn’t even Catholic. It’s safe to say […]
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On this day in 1571, the naval forces of a Holy League, consisting of several maritime Catholic countries, met the main Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto. In later years, the anniversary of this day was celebrated as the Feast of Our Lady of Victory, and later, as the Feast of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary. Back in […]
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Today, October 7 is the Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary. For those of us who were once parishioners of Holy Rosary parish in Tacoma, it was our patronal feast. In years past, we could celebrate this on a Sunday. I thought it would be nice to mark the feast in some way, in addition to praying a daily […]
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Today is the feast day of Sainte-Foy, a saint almost entirely unknown in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, she is one of my favourite saints, and I wear a medal with her image. She has become very dear to me. Sainte-Foy was born around AD 291 in the Gallo-Roman city of Aginnum, modern-day Agen in France. She suffered martyrdom in 303 at the grand old […]
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Do you pray to your Guardian Angel? Do you ask them for advice or help? Why not? The Church teaches that we all receive a guardian angel at birth, an angel assigned to guide and protect us, to watch over us. As it says in scripture: There shall no evil come to thee: nor shall the scourge come near thy […]
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Saint Jerome should be the patron saint of grumpy old men. Born in the Roman province of Dalmatia in modern Slovenia, he studied in Rome starting in about the year 360. During a journey to Syria in 373, he fell ill and had a vision that caused him to devote the rest of his long life to the service of […]
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Today is the “Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, Archangels” or, in the old calendar, the “Dedication of the Basilica of Saint Michael the Archangel”. Whatever you call it, the most common name is Michaelmas. It is one of several harvest festivals celebrated throughout Christian Europe. So happy Michaelmas! In England this is one of the “quarter days”, which […]
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Saint Hildegard of Bingen is one of those medieval figures who can cause a lot of confusion to people not paying close attention. She (or, rather, a version of her with her Christianity stripped out) has been adopted by some of the New Agers as one of their own. Of course, if you strip the Christianity out of the life […]
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Whither is thy Beloved gone, O thou most beautiful among women? Whither is thy Beloved turned aside, and we will seek Him with thee? We begin with the first antiphon of Lauds for today’s feast of The Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Monastic Diurnal. It has always affected me, but perhaps just now it’s affecting me […]
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