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
A blessed ‘feast’ of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom, Sedes Sapientiae, an ancient and venerable title the Virgin Mary as the Chora tou Achoretou, the ‘container of the uncontainable’, the new ‘ark of the covenant’, the ‘chosen shrine’, as the sixth century hymn by Venantius Fortunatus has it, ‘in which the Architect divine’ made His[…]
‘Tis difficult to write history in the midst of it – for any ‘story’ needs a beginning, a middle and an end, and at least the last element of that tripartite equation is unknown, and the middle, amorphous. With images of cities burning across the landscape, the looting, pillaging, vandalizing, assaulting – almost all of[…]
Saint Boniface, bishop and martyr, was hacked to death by a band of Frisian idol-worshippers on this day, June 5, 754, along with 52 of his companions. His life was one of tireless struggle to convert the pagans of Germania, steeped in dark, superstitious practices. The famous story of his boldly chopping down the ‘Donar[…]
Isaac Newton penned his treatise Opticks in 1704 – and who am I to improve upon his spelling, about which they were not exactly rigorous in those pre-O.E.D, and O.C.D., days? – in which he outlined his theory of vision, that light was a stream of corpuscles hitting the eye. Newton was responding to a[…]
Not much is known of Saints Marcellinus and Peter, except that they were martyrs, likely put to death by beheading at the 12th milestone on the Via Aurelia outside of Rome, in the persecution of Diocletian in 304, and that their executioner, Dorotheus, according to the later Pope Damasus I (+384), went on to convert[…]
We celebrate today the memorial of Mary, Mother of the Church, as mentioned, made official by Pope Paul VI in 1964. During the Council, there was debate whether to have a separate document on Our Lady, but the decision was made by the Fathers (by a narrow margin, to be sure, of forty votes, one of[…]
The controversial Pope Saint Paul VI is commemorated on May 29th, the day of his ordination to the priesthood in 1920 – this marking the hundredth anniversary. He was the second-last Italian Pope, a run of pontiffs from the nation that had last 455 years, which may seem odd for a Church that claims universality.[…]
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[…]
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[…]
