Inspired by Truth, Enlightening Minds for the Church in Canada and Throughout the World
Inspired by Truth, Enlightening Minds for the Church in Canada and Throughout the World
The first bishop of Canterbury, Augustine (+604), pronounced in England, ‘Austin’, was a Roman citizen, like the ‘other’ Augustine, of Hippo, who lived over two centuries before, in northern Africa. Neither would have considered himself ‘African’ or ‘Italian’, but Roman, for there was but one civilization. So too, there was one ‘Church’ to which they[…]
We celebrate today one of the most joyful and idiosyncratic – the two are not unrelated – of saints, Philip Neri, (+1595), the founder of the Congregation of the Oratory named after him. From the great city of Florence, which has produced a whole host of luminaries from Dante to da Vinci to Galileo, Philip[…]
At the suggestion of a reader, here is Mozart’s Laudate Dominum, a version of the briefest of the Psalms, 117/118, from his 1780 ‘Vespers for a Confessor’, that is, a saint who struggled mightily for the Faith, but was not a martyr, a dedication written by a hand other than the composer’s. But the music[…]
Pope Emeritus Benedict wrote a brief reflection on the hundredth anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s birth, which is well worth a read, as a reflection of a friend, upon a beloved friend. In the light of today’s saint Bede, we may ponder Benedict’s thoughts on what history will ultimately think of the Polish Pope[…]
If history records good things about good people, the thoughtful hearer is encouraged to imitate what is good; or if it records the evil of wicked people, the godly listener or reader is encouraged to avoid all that is sinful and bad, and to do what he knows to be good and pleasing to God.[…]
There are many saints in the Church’s history too many ever to be celebrated liturgically, and those are only the officially canonized ones. We have the ‘old’ calendar of the usus antiquior, then the saints of the liturgical revisions under Paul VI in 1969 after Vatican II – many of them the same, but with[…]
As Thomas More and Pope John Paul II both say, all suffering is a form of punishment, but one that is – and should be – medicinal and rehabilitative. God sends us calamities, disease, pandemics and death so that we might be converted from the ways of darkness, before ’tis too late. Andrew Cuomo and[…]
Abiding, therefore, ourselves in him, when his words abide in us we shall ask what we will, and it shall be done unto us (Saint Augustine)
Here is the conclusion of some remarks Robert Cardinal Sarah recently made, in light of the Church and society’s response to the pandemic, words which we should all take to heart, not least as we meditate on Christ teaching us that His kingdom – nor our own ultimatel life – is not of this world:[…]
Few composers have lived and nonetheless thrived in such a turbulent era as William Byrd. Born sometime between 1539 and 1543, Byrd grew up in newly Protestant England, Henry VIII having passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534, which completed the separation of the English Church (later becoming known as Anglicanism) from the Roman Catholic[…]
