On one side of my family: Huguenot refugees, who settled in America to escape the power of Catholic France.
On the other side: Minh Mang, aka the ‘Nero of Indochina’, scourge of Vietnamese Catholic converts and missionaries.
Gives a certain frisson to the singing of ‘Faith of Our Fathers’, let me tell you.
Anonymous, c. 1500
The 29th of April is, when not displaced by Sunday, the feast-day of Saint Catherine of Siena, the great Dominican tertiary.
The wonderful Maria Lectrix has read and recorded Catherine’s dialogue with God the Father — starting here.
Also edifying: Wikimedia Commons’ gallery of Catherine-of-Siena-related pictures, including this painting of a Carmelite/Dominican/Franciscan triple threat, and some intense images of Catherine’s exchange of hearts with Our Lord.
Project Gutenberg has her Letters in multiple formats for free. The translator and editor of that volume, Vida Scudder, prefaces one of Catherine’s letters to Blessed Raimondo of Capua thus:
With all her longing to suffer for her faith, Catherine was only once, so far as we know, exposed to physical violence. This was on the occasion of which she is here speaking. She is still in Florence, faithful under the new Pope as under the old to her efforts to bring about the passionately desired peace. In a tumult in the disordered city, it came to pass that her life was threatened, and she took refuge with her “famiglia,” in a garden without the walls. Hither her enemies pursued her, but as they drew near, fell back of a sudden, awestruck, as she herself here tells us, by her words and bearing. The danger was averted, and Catherine had met one of the disappointments of her life.*
*Footnote: As she herself expresses it, “The Eternal Bridegroom played a great joke on me.”
This is Phat Diem Cathedral, built in the late 1800s in Vietnam. The cathedral complex also includes a number of freestanding chapels.
Here’s a one-minute video of a stroll around one of the complex’s courtyards:
Here’s Lonely Planet’s description.
And here’s a Sino-Vietnamese bas relief of an incense-scattering angel, crowned like a Deva King, with Genesis 28:17 carved overhead in Latin. Pretty Catholic, no?
Though for what it’s worth, my father, whose judgment I am inclined to trust in this matter, considers the Vietnamese priest who masterminded this cathedral complex — Fr Tran Luc aka ‘Pere Six’ — to have been a pro-French traitor. (Fr Tran Luc’s name comes up in this Vietnam Studies Group email thread on Vietnam-Vatican relations, which provides a few more facts and a lot more opinions.) If that’s so, then Phat Diem is a field of wheat and tares. But what excellent wheat.
Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas was kind enough to join JOB, McNabb and myself in darkest Wisconsin for the inaugural Gerasene Writer’s Conference. That’s him in the picture, walking the Way of the Cross. The picture hails from his new blog En pocas palabras. Something worth your attention, thinks me. And while you’re at it, say a prayer that he’s able to join us again this year!
The Means of Communication issue of Lapham’s Quarterly contains a fabulous collection of complains and marginal notes by the monks assigned to copy manuscripts in the era before the printing press. With their bitchy complaints—“I am very cold,” “Oh, my hand”—they insert themselves into the holy texts and often, in the process, disrupt the sanctity of the words they’re supposedly copying: “Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a drink.”
[...]
Marginalia might include comments like the ones from our miserable monks, but also an entire free-flowing range of artistic flourishes and doodles that make up the edges of medieval manuscripts. “Once the manuscript page becomes a matrix of visual signs and is no longer one of flowing linear speech,” Camille writes, “the stage is set not only for supplementation and annotation but also for disagreement and juxtaposition—what the scholastics called disputatio.”
[...]
That these psalters and books of hours often contained sacrilegious sentiments right alongside their holy piety, it seems, was perhaps the point: “We should not see medieval culture exclusively in terms of binary oppositions—sacred/profane, for example, or spiritual/worldly,” Camille explains. “Travesty, profanation, and sacrilege are essential to the continuity of the sacred in society.”
[...]
A 1323 missal illuminated by Petrus de Raimbeaucourt [...] contains [a] picture of a scribe harassed by monkeys: while he tries to copy, they mimic him, drink his ink, and distract him. One moons him, an obscene gesture suggested by a suggestive line break in the Latin above: the word culpa, “sin,” is cut at cul, so that the line reads instead Liber est a cul—“the book is to the ass.”
From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘… I rose up and am still with you.’
From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘And he brought them out of darkness, and the shadow of death; and broke their bonds in sunder.’
From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘In that day the root of Jesse, who stands for an ensign of the people, him the Gentiles shall beseech, and his sepulchre shall be glorious.’
From Cell 25 of the Convent of San Marco, by Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), 15th Century
Think on the very làmentable pain,
Think on the piteous cross of woeful Christ,
Think on His blood beat out at every vein,
Think on His precious heart carvèd in twain,
Think how for thy redemption all was wrought:
Let Him not lose what He so dear hath bought.
–Pico della Mirandola (translated by St Thomas More)
From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘… he was wounded for our iniquities, he was bruised for our sins….‘
A nod to Kierkegaard and Walker Percy: existentialist tomfoolery, political satire, literary homage, word mongering, a year-round summer reading club, Dylanesque music bits, apocalyptic marianism, poetry, fiction, meta-porn, a prisoner work-release program.
Conflicted in early life between his desire to be a weatherman for local community access cable stations and a man who wears pants in July, JOB took the middle road and now writes poems between every waking moment. [Read More …]
All you need to know is that I'm a lady, understand?
Behave yourselves accordingly. [Read More …]
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