Ruminations of an Amateur Monastic
Mary’s month of May begins with a day for her husband. Today, celebrated around the world as “International Workers’ Day” is the Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker. There’s poetry to the fact that the month dedicated to the Blessed Virgin begins by putting the focus on her husband, and therefore on their family life. Imagine the Holy Family of […]
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With all due respect to Saint Catherine of Siena, one of my favourite saints and whose feast day is celebrated today on the calendar of the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, today (at least on the Benedictine calendar!) is the feast of four great Abbots of the Benedictine Order: Saints Odo, Majolus, Odilo, and Hugh. They were all good […]
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John Mark was one of the original seventy disciples (Luke 10:1 ff). Tradition holds that he was one of those who left Christ when he preached on the Bread of Life (John 6:44-6:66). Saint Peter brought him back to the faith. He traveled with Paul and Barnabas, who thought him unreliable (Acts 15:37-41). Again he left, again he came back […]
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For the Order of Saint Benedict, today is the Solemnity of the Transitus of Saint Benedict, the anniversary of his death and birth into life eternal, in the year of our Lord 547. Of the transitus, Benedict’s biographer Pope Saint Gregory the Great writes: The same year in which he departed this life, he told the day of his holy […]
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Today on the transferred Solemnity of Saint Joseph, we would do well to meditate on the life of the man who helped raise the Son of God. It can’t have been easy. Tradition holds that Joseph was already an old man and a widower when he married the Blessed Virgin, who was very young, perhaps 16 or so. He had […]
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Well that got your attention, didn’t it? It’s not quite true of course; Patrick may have been born on the isle of Britain, but in a time before the Angles had arrived and started making it Angland. No, his family were Roman Catholic churchmen from the Roman Imperial province of Britannia. Today, nobody is going to go around speaking in […]
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During Lent, I am often reminded of this, one of my favourite stories from the Desert Fathers: Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my […]
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Archbishop Paul Etienne has granted to the faithful of the Archdiocese of Seattle a dispensation from the obligation to abstain from meat on Friday, March 17, 2023 the commemoration of Saint Patrick. Of course, I belong to Saint Patrick parish in Tacoma, and this day is our patronal solemnity. Therefore, we were dispensed anyway – but it’s nice to see […]
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Saint Valentinus of Terni The feast of Saint Valentine was removed from the Roman calendar during the calendar reform of 1970. It seems a shame, since this is one of a vanishingly small number of saint’s feasts that have remained in the secular culture. It seems to me that it could be used as a touchstone for the new evangelization. […]
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Saint Benedict was the founder of western monasticism; to this day, most monks and nuns worldwide follow some variation of his “Little Rule for Beginners“. Benedict had a twin sister, Scholastica, whose feast day is today. Under her brother’s guidance, she founded the first female monastery in the west. I often think that their parents had a sense of humour, […]
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Today is both the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, and the fifteenth anniversary of the day I wed my beautiful bride. It is, as I have said before, a “moment when everything changed, celebrated on a day when everything changed”. It’s important to mark those changes in our lives. I realized a couple of weeks ago that Francine […]
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I can’t speak for anybody else, but I need all the help I can get. As a writer, I often find that I love having written much more than actually writing. I distract myself easily. It doesn’t help, I suppose, that I tend to write in bursts, like I’m emptying my brain. Then I rather need to recharge the brain […]
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Happy Saint Agnes Day! Saint Agnes was a young Roman lady of 12 or 13 years old who suffered martyrdom in the persecutions of the Emperor Diocletian in about AD 304. She was one of the youngest of the early martyrs and one of the most moving and articulate. Agnes hastened to the place of torture as a bride to […]
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Today is the feast of the man many consider to be the founder of Christian monasticism, Saint Anthony the Great of Egypt, the “Father of Monks”. He was born in the middle of the third century in decidedly Pagan Middle Egypt to a well-to-do, comfortable family. He spent much of his life avoiding the sorts of comforts available to him […]
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Happy twelfth day of Christmas! This evening is called Twelfth Night, traditionally the vigil of the Epiphany. In my Monastic Diurnal, Epiphany begins with tonight’s Vespers. This was traditionally a time of feasting and festivity (all of which seem to include various varieties of enormous pastries) marking the end of Christmastide and the beginning of Epiphanytide. This year, that celebration […]
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Happy Eleventh Day of Christmas! Today we honour a more modern saint than those of recent days. Elizabeth Ann Seton was the first native-born American citizen to be canonized. Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton (by Amabilia Filicchi, 1888) She was born in 1774 and grew up in a home in upperclass New York society. Her father was frequently absent in London […]
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Happy Ninth Day of Christmas! Today is the Memorial of Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen, Bishops and Doctors of the Church. Well, it is in the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite. On the older calendar, it is an entirely different feast, which we’ll talk about tomorrow. Saints Basil and Gregory Nazianzen were contemporaries from Cappadocia and great […]
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