You are currently browsing the daily archive for 16 May 2009.
Who cares?
Many thanks to Anthony OPL of Chiral Capers for sharing this delightful little video:
As Anthony notes, this is one of many delightful videos created by Father Johannes Schwarz. I love the way he uses vivid pop culture images to deliver Catholic messages.
I also liked this one a lot:
I find the idea of trying to keep the Holy Spirit in a bottle extremely comical.
Tomorrow, Sunday 17 May, I will be making my temporary profession to the Order of Preachers. Having come through training as an inquirer and then a novice, I will be making a firmer pledge and commitment to live according to the rule of the Dominican Laity. I will receive a small white scapular. I will receive the privilege of including the “OP” designation after my name.
But I will be thinking much more about what I can give and what I can do as a Lay Dominican. This blog will stay around. In fact, this blog will likely take on a greater significance as I embark on the apostolic mission of the Order to preach to all the ends of the earth.
I can tell you that I have some other projects brewing in my head, including at least one additional blog. It will be devoted to issues of creation, stewardship, the welfare of animals and other creatures, and man’s proper role in it all. My aim is to provide an authentic Catholic alternative to the secular environmentalism and related movements that are sweeping our nation and our world and that are so wound up in paganism and liberalist agendas. I want to show a better, higher, truer way. At the moment, I have much to learn on the issues myself. If anybody can help me out, if anybody can recommend resources, or if anybody can point me to good Catholic blogs with the same or similar aims… it would be much appreciated. I don’t want to re-create the wheel, after all! Although there’s no content there yet, you can see what the new blog will look like.
I’m still planning to create a work about and dedicated to St. Dominic, my beloved spiritual father. I want to help everybody to know him as I do, to know him as he is. That too is in its very early, preparatory stages. I’m not even sure what form it will take.
Of course, tomorrow is also the big day for Pres. Obama and Notre Dame. I will always remember that this debacle coincided with my profession day. I wonder if that means something… I don’t believe in coincidences.
I just saw a report on a local news program about it, and it made me want to bang my head on my desk repeatedly. They were talking about the pro-lifers protesting the president’s coming to give a speech. They aired an incredibly disingenuous, very innocuous-sounding statement from some ND spokesman about how the university and Catholic values are not threatened by the president coming to give a speech, and that the university is open to all kinds of thinking, including the president’s. GAH! Among the protesters they showed were Dr. Alan Keyes, two cassock-clad priests, and various other men and women, all of them quietly and calmly praying the Rosary. But of course they just had to include a police officer remarking on how some of the protesters have gotten out of hand. GAAAHH!
I’ll tell you what’s gotten out of hand–Catholic universities honoring pro-abortion public figures, then publicly lying about it, making it sound like they’re only providing an open forum for ideas and that any protesters are just censorship-loving meanies and/or crazy fringe elements. The report also mentioned that none of the protestors shown were students. They made no mention at all of the pro-life, faithful Catholic students who are holding their own protests and even boycotting their own commencement ceremony!
Oh… Lord, please just bring a great deal of good from this situation! And please help me to do my part, whatever it may be!
From Bishop Emmanuel de Gibergues, Keep it Simple. I am not sure when Bishop de Gibergues lived, but I think these words are extremely relevant today, not only for individual Catholics but for our Catholic, or formerly-Catholic, universities and institutions:
Make Jesus the beginning, the center, and the end of all things. May His name always be for you first and last, your alpha and omega. May Jesus have the first place, the place of honor, the royal place, in your heart.
In the world, we see silly, frivolous people, vain, material creatures, who think only of the world’s opinion. This thought absorbs and guides them; they are possessed, hypnotized, by it. On rising, while dressing, when at table, at home or abroad, in their thoughts, words, or actions, always and everywhere, they ask themselves, “What will the world say?” For them, the world is a real and perpetual presence, an ever-watchful eye, by which they are governed, conquered, and enslaved. May Jesus be to you what the world is to them, and may your whole life be inspired by the desire to please Him.
Today the world expels Jesus from its midst. Today men cry as did those before them, “We will not have Him to reign over us; take Him away and crucify Him!” “The nations have trembled,” says the psalmist. “All the powers of the earth have gathered together against the Lord and against His Christ.” It is a conspiracy that savors of madness; they would abolish the very name of God.
It is for you to make amends by quietly protesting and resisting as a Christian may. It is for you to give your heart to Jesus all the more generously as the world gives Him less, and to receive Him with all the more love in proportion as others drive Him away with a more intense hatred.
The more the world rails against our Lord and King, the more faithful and devoted to Him we must be. The stronger the currents of the world, the more vigorously we must swim against them. As Chesterton said, “”A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
There is nothing and nobody more alive than a Catholic. And so there is no excuse for a Catholic not to swim against the stream. If we refuse to do so, we refuse our very selves, the greatest yearnings of our souls, not to mention all that our Lord has given us, He being the source and summit of the life we have.
Lately I’ve come across some posts in the Catholic Blogosphere about the perils of our English Catholic ancestors.
My Dominican brethren at Godzdogz post about a visit to the recusant house, Mapledurham, near Reading:
The house has several hiding holes in which priests would hide from the authorities during penal times, and we were all most impressed at how cleverly constructed these hiding holes were. They boasted many ingenious features that allowed the priest, among other things, to look out into the grounds of the house and to escape when the coast was clear. The hiding holes must have served their purpose for there is no record of a priest ever being captured at Mapledurham!
The house boasts many other interesting features, including a bureau that hides an altar, complete with tabernacle and candlesticks inside. All of this made for a very enjoyable day, particularly as we were blessed with fine weather. The house is well worth a visit, it would interest anyone but is of particular interest for Catholics of course, being such a good reminder of how much our ancestors in the faith suffered and struggled to remain true to the faith of the Catholic Church during those dark years.
Thank God for that, but you can imagine the anxiety and anguish, both of the priests and those who sheltered them? Although they may have been fortunate to escape physical punishment, their suffering was no less real or difficult to bear. They suffered white martyrdom.
Father Blake of St. Mary Magdalen Church in Brighton celebrated his 25th anniversary of ordination on 12 May, which is also the feast day of the English Carthusian martyrs–men who suffered red martyrdom. From Father Sean Finnegan’s homily on the occasion:
John Houghton, together with two other priors from the North, went to speak to Thomas Cromwell, the King’s strong arm man in religious matters. We can be sure that with his lawyer’s training, St John tried everything to make it possible to take the oath of allegiance to the King, without, however, compromising principle. Nothing availed, however, and all three were arrested, the charge being that —and I quote — ‘John Houghton says that he cannot take the King, our Sovereign Lord to be Supreme Head of the Church of England afore the apostles of Christ’s Church’, which rather makes it sound as if the apostles had also usurped what was the King’s rightful position.
In any event, he was condemned, of course—Cromwell had had to threaten the jury with treason charges themselves in order to achieve it, and the three priors together with a Bridgettine priest and a secular priest were all dragged to execution together. St Thomas More, by now in the Tower of London, watched them from the window of his cell setting off, and commented to his daughter who was visiting that they looked just like bridegrooms going to their wedding, a comparison that St John Fisher was also to use on the morning of his own death.
King Henry was insistent that the priests should be executed in their religious habits, to teach other religious a lesson, one presumes. This meant that after St John was cut down from the gallows, still alive, to be butchered, the thick hairshirt he wore under his heavy habit had to be cut through by the executioner, who had to stab down hard with the knife. And then, finally, as the executioner drew out St John’s still beating heart before his face, he spoke his last words: ‘Good Jesu’ he said, ‘what will you do with my heart?’
Father Timothy Finegan also shares the story, illustrated with paintings from the Chapter House at Parkminster.
In this picture you can see one monk hanging while another forgives the man who is about to execute him.
The stories of the English martyrs always give me a rather sound shaking. They are a powerful safeguard against complacence. The mad, cruel, and unjust persecution of good and blameless men like St. John Houghton and his Carthusian brethren, not to mention St. Thomas More, St. John Fisher, and many other English Catholics began with the lust and arrogance of just one man, and the crookedness and/or cowardice of his supporters.
How capricious temporal powers are! How tenuous the position of our Church and ourselves in this world! Things can shift in any direction at any time. Who would believe that St. Thomas More would fall from being Chancellor of England to having his head cleft off? Who would believe that St. John Fisher would be the one and only bishop to remain true to the Catholic faith? Who would believe that such innocent and holy monks could be found guilty of treason? Who would believe it if it weren’t a fact of history?
And what about us? We here in the 21st century, in the U.S. and elsewhere in the western world–do we really imagine that we are safe? We Catholics are not safe in this world. We never have been and never will be. If we are fortunate, we may be spared the red martyrdom of those Carthusian martyrs. But to escape martyrdom completely is impossible for a devoted Catholic. We will always be dealt wounds by this world, to some or other degree. We all, without exception, have our crosses to bear.
But far from calling us to fear and anxiety, the stories of the martyrs call us to fortitude, steadfastness, and ultimately victory! May they be always in our hearts and minds as we are always in their prayers.
