Ruminations of an Amateur Monastic
Today I’m going to upset some of my (Protestant) Christian friends who see the Reformation as a good thing. I don’t. Here is one of many, many reasons why. December 1 is the feast of Saint Edmund Campion, a Jesuit martyr. The matter-of-fact beginning to his entry on Wikipedia reads as follows: Saint Edmund Campion, S.J. (24 January 1540 – […]
» Read moreFifty-six years before the English Puritain refugees at Plymouth celebrated their “first Thanksgiving”, Spanish explorers and their Timucua allies celebrated one in Saint Augustine, in what is now Florida. They had bean soup. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés was a Spanish admiral under orders to root out some French colonists in the area. Sighting land in La Florida on 28 August […]
» Read moreEnter the KING WESTMORELAND. O that we now had here But one ten thousand of those men in England That do no work to-day! KING. What’s he that wishes so? My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin; If we are mark’d to die, we are enow To do our country loss; and if to live, The fewer men, the greater […]
» Read moreThis is this past Sunday’s first reading, which I read at Mass, from the 45th Chapter of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah: Thus says the LORD to his anointed, Cyrus, whose right hand I grasp, subduing nations before him, and making kings run in his service, opening doors before him and leaving the gates unbarred: For the sake of […]
» Read more
Back in high school, a group of us did an extensive report on the events of this day for my freshman history class. We had flip chart maps, reenactments, and gave three separate papers. For 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 […]
» Read moreO God of love, compassion, and healing, look on us, people of many different faiths and traditions, who gather today at this site, the scene of incredible violence and pain. We ask you in your goodness to give eternal light and peace to all who died here— the heroic first-responders: our fire fighters, police officers, emergency service workers, and Port […]
» Read moreOn July 20, 1969, man first set foot upon the Moon. On July 20, 2011, the last flight of the last Space Shuttle is heading to a close. Perhaps appropriately, the (hopefully temporary) ending of the US manned space flight was aboard Shuttle Atlantis. It certainly gave me a sinking feeling. But the project that took us to the Moon […]
» Read more
“So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending.” (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit) This week, I’ve been thinking about endings – the end of empires, of eras, of fragile human lives. The last Habsburg Crown Prince died this week. The official notice read in part: Otto von Habsburg, eldest son of the last regnant Emperor of Austria and […]
» Read moreThere are those who think that the Church is being a little hasty in the process of conferring sainthood on Blessed Pope John Paul II. He has reached the penultimate stage of the process – beatification – only six years after his death. I wonder what these folks would have thought about the process taken in the case of Saint […]
» Read moreToday is a day of many memorials. In the United States, it is a Federal holiday honouring those men and women who died in the military service. While in the popular media this has become merely an excuse for a three-day weekend and countless barbeques, many folks, myself included, hang out the flag and do our best to honour the […]
» Read morePope Benedict XVI is not typically regarded as a stern disciplinarian, despite a fearsome reputation as head of CDF when he was a Cardinal. However, the past few weeks or so has seen an Australian bishop sacked, and now this: Vatican suppresses Cistercian abbey in Rome The abbey of Santa Croce in Jerusalem, associated with the Roman basilica of the […]
» Read more
Today is the feast of a most remarkable saint, Peter Celestine. Pietro Angelerio was born in the village of Sant’Angelo Limosano, in south-central Italy, in the year 1215. At age 17, he became a Benedictine monk. By the time he was in his thirties, his abbot had given him permission to enter a hermitage in a cave. He became famed […]
» Read moreInteresting days ahead. The Holy See Press Office announces that the Instruction Universæ Ecclesiæ of the Pontifical Commission “Ecclesia Dei”, on the application of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, will be made public on Friday, May 13th, and will be published on that afternoon (May 14th edition of L’Osservatore Romano). The Instruction will be published in its Latin typical version, […]
» Read moreDid that shock you? Good. You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain […]
» Read moreToday is the reason we have Christmas in December. Seriously. There’s an ancient tradition that says that you will know the day of your death by the day of your conception, and vice versa. Christ was crucified on the 14th of Nisan – the only date we can fix with certainty in his life. When translated from the Jewish lunar […]
» Read moreToday is the Feast of Saint Thomas Becket. Even before my conversion, I always admired Saint Thomas. It might have something to do with his name—as a child the only other famous Thomases I knew were Jefferson and Edison, and I didn’t much care for Edison. I’d like to think it had more to do with talking Truth to power. […]
» Read moreChaucer’s pilgrims were on their way to the Canterbury shrine of Saint Thomas Becket, bishop and martyr. The kingly descendant of the saint’s kingly murderer later destroyed that shrine and scattered his bones. Now there is only one small flame to mark the place where the saint’s relics once lay. Here is the eyewitness account of the saint’s martyrdom, by […]
» Read more