Ruminations of an Amateur Monastic
Today is the first anniversary of my arrival in Santiago following my thousand-mile walking pilgrimage on the Via Podiensis and Camino Francés. From August 18 through October 23, 2023, I walked from Le Puy-en-Velay in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain on pilgrimage to the tomb of the Apostle Saint James the Greater. I received my pilgrim blessing from […]
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Everybody knows a guy who just won’t shut up. Sometimes it’s not even that he has something to say, or that he likes the sound of his own voice. Sometimes these are the folks who are genuinely frightened by silence. Sometimes, they just don’t know how not to talk. If those folks had a patron saint, it would no doubt […]
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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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What kind of life could the child possibly look forward to? He was born with a cleft palate, cerebral palsy, and spina bifida. In these progressive days, the child very well might have been aborted after the doctor showed the mother her first detailed fetal ultrasound. But the child had the great fortune to be born in 1013, a much […]
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O great work of love: death then was dead when on the Cross Life itself had died. (Antiphon 1 of Monastic Lauds for the Exaltation of the Holy Cross) Today is celebrated in the western Church as the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (Exaltatio Sanctæ Crucis). In the eastern Church, it is known as “the Universal Exaltation […]
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So saith today’s saint, the incomparable Saint John Chrysostom (c. 347–407). He was, of course, himself a bishop. It seems that this pithy quote is a popularization of the full (attributed) quote, where the saint is talking about the relatively few in number who will be saved and the bad shepherds who are responsible: The road to Hell is paved […]
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Nine months after the solemnity of her Immaculate Conception, celebrated on 8 December, today we celebrate the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a feast so ancient that it is celebrated on the same day in both East and West. Or we would, were it not a Sunday. Nevertheless, let’s dig in a bit on this feast. Scripture tells us […]
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Today is one of the more interesting feasts on the liturgical calendar, for today is the feast of the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. OK, nowadays they’ve slightly sanitized the name; it’s now officially called the “Memorial of the Passion of Saint John the Baptist”, but for the sheer Catholic joy of calling a spade a spade, I’m sticking […]
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In this very volatile moment in our history, both of the United States and of the Catholic Church, where so much anger rises to the surface so quickly, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the meaning of our times. This anger and factionalism and the accompanying doom-saying is hardly unique to our age. Indeed, I post some version […]
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Today is the feast of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. And at this moment in the history of the Church, we could very much use another like him. Born in 1090 to a noble Burgundian family near Dijon, he entered the monastery at age 23. In less than three years, he was sent by his abbot to found a new monastery […]
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It was twenty years ago today, and I was a pagan. Now when I say pagan, I don’t mean that I was unchurched or a “None”. No, I was a card-carrying member of an ancient Egyptian reconstructionist church. I am often amused by God’s little jokes. I was raised with no religion, but both my sister and I were sent […]
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“I am a Polish Catholic priest. I would like to take the place of this man, since he has a wife and children.” (Saint Maximilian Kolbe, OFM Con., taking the place of fellow prisoner Franciszek Gajowniczek at Auschwitz.) On today’s Vigil of the Assumption, we celebrate also the memory of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan Friar and priest who spent […]
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Today we celebrate the feast of Saint Mary Magdalen. In the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, this is indeed a feast again, rather than merely a memorial, thanks to a change made by Pope Francis back in 2016. In the Extraordinary Form and in my Monastic Breviary, it is a Class III feast, through prior to the reform of […]
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Saint Bonaventure, whose memorial is today in the Ordinary Form, received his (much delayed) doctorate in theology in Paris in 1257, in the same class as Saint Thomas Aquinas. Later that same year, he was elected Minister General of the Franciscan Order. Bonaventure spent much of his life as a theologian at the university, living in poverty as a Franciscan […]
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Today is the feast of Saint Benedict of Nursia, who can safely be said to be the father of western monasticism. His monastic Holy Rule, still followed today after almost 1,500 years, spread throughout the west as the Roman Empire collapsed. Pope Pius XII lauded him, for in the perilous times that followed Rome’s fall, it was Benedictine monks who […]
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Happy feast of Saint Thomas the Apostle! Today wasn’t always his feast. In fact in my Monastic Diurnal, today is the Memorial of Saints Processus and Martinian. His main feast was celebrated for centuries on 21 December, the day when tradition has it he was run though by spears, wielded by soldiers of a Greek-descended Indo-Parthian Satrap named Mazdai in […]
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A post-Protestant Non-Denominational Christian friend of mine has a particular fondness for that great Doctor of the Church, Saint Irenæus of Lyons, whose feast day is today. He occasionally quotes from the saint’s great work, Adversus Hæreses (Against Heresies), and he is particularly fond of the saint’s assertion that “the proper glory of God is man fully alive.” He refers […]
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