From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘… he came, cherub-mounted, borne up on the wings of the wind….‘
‘… Still With You.’
April 9, 2023 by at 12:00 am
From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘… I rose up and am still with you.’
‘… He Brought Them Out of Darkness …’
April 8, 2023 by at 12:00 am
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.’
‘… His Sepulchre Shall Be Glorious.’
April 7, 2023 by at 3:25 pm
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.’
‘Let Him Not Lose What He So Dear Hath Bought.’
April 7, 2023 by at 3:00 pm
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)
‘… Wounded for Our Iniquities …’
April 7, 2023 by at 12:00 pm
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….‘
‘They Parted My Garments Amongst Them….’
April 7, 2023 by at 11:50 am
From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘They parted my garments amongst them; and upon my vesture they cast lots.’
‘… He Shall Be Led as a Sheep to the Slaughter …’
April 7, 2023 by at 10:00 am
From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘He was offered because it was his own will, and he opened not his mouth: he shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and shall be dumb as a lamb before his shearer, and he shall not open his mouth.’
‘I am ready for scourges….’
April 7, 2023 by at 9:15 am
From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘For I am ready for scourges: and my sorrow is continually before me.‘
‘I have not turned away my face …’
April 7, 2023 by at 8:00 am
From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘I have given my body to the strikers, and my cheeks to them that plucked them: I have not turned away my face from them that rebuked me, and spit upon me.‘
‘… They Strike the Cheek of the Judge of Israel.’
April 7, 2023 by at 6:00 am
From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘ Now shall you be laid waste, O daughter of the robber: they have laid siege against us, with a rod shall they strike the cheek of the judge of Israel.’
‘…They Shall Bind You…’
April 6, 2023 by at 9:20 pm
From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘And you, O son of man, behold they shall put bands upon you, and they shall bind you with them: and you shall not go forth from the midst of them. And I will make your tongue stick fast to the roof of your mouth, and you shall be dumb….’
‘…Even the Man Who Ate My Bread….’
April 6, 2023 by at 9:15 pm
From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘… Even the man … in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has greatly supplanted me.’
‘…My Victim, Which I Slay for You…’
April 6, 2023 by at 6:15 pm
From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘Assemble yourselves, make haste, come together from every side to my victim, which I slay for you, a great victim upon the mountains of Israel: to eat flesh, and drink blood.’
‘…Be Clean…’
April 6, 2023 by at 5:45 pm
From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘… when you multiply prayer, I will not hear: for your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves, be clean, take away the evil of your devices from my eyes, cease to do perversely, learn to do well: seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge for the fatherless, defend the widow.’
Nicholas Frankovich on Several Things
September 25, 2017 by at 12:05 pm
At National Review Online. Like so many other writers I’ve discovered at the magazine over the years, Nicholas Frankovich has become the guy to go to for the Catholic culture overview.
On Trump’s intrusion into sports:
The Boston Red Sox won the World Series in 2004. A few months later, they went to the White House for the traditional round of presidential congratulations. Manny Ramirez was a no-show. Why? He didn’t like the president, George W. Bush, a baseball man himself, a former part-owner of the Texas Rangers? Sox officials said Ramirez was visiting his sick grandmother. Boston won the Series again a few years later, and the president invited the team back to the White House. Again, no Ramirez. Bush’s response? A shrug, a teasing smirk. “I guess his grandmother died again,” he said.
On the decline in Catholic Literature:
The traditional Catholicism that is the setting of that backward-looking novel included a lot of looking backward itself, of course. That’s what made Catholicism traditional. For believers immersed in the faith, the past was alive no less than the present. They could see ghosts. A heavyweight from the Norman Mailer generation of American letters once commented on the Catholic writers of her generation. They were sure of themselves, she recalled, though not preachy. Spend time with them and it was hard to escape the impression that they knew something you didn’t. That’s gone. So the flowers in the garden aren’t what they used to be? Blame the flowers if you like, but it remains the case that the soil has been depleted.
Here he is on reasoning behind the Novus Ordo:
In the 20th century, Church leaders began to advocate an effort, more deliberate and thorough than in the past, to enculturate the faith among the various nations of the Third World: Catholic missionaries should learn, and learn to love, local customs and languages and to translate the faith into forms that would be meaningful and appealing to indigenous peoples. Implicit in their argument was the need for the Church to pour the Romanità out of Catholicism so that vessel could accommodate the new wine of non-Western cultures.
Read Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), the Vatican II blueprint for liturgical reform, and you will notice a lot of concern for the mission lands. References to them dot the document, and in their glow the reader is led to imagine that the point of the many broadly sketched recommendations is only sensible and moderate, generous but not extravagant.
In the mission lands, let bishops adapt the liturgy to local cultures. Trust their circumspection and sober judgment: “Provisions shall also be made, when revising the liturgical books, for legitimate variations and adaptations to different groups, regions, and peoples, especially in mission lands, provided that the substantial unity of the Roman rite is preserved; and this should be borne in mind when drawing up the rites and devising rubrics.”
No sooner had Western Catholics digested and largely shrugged in agreement to the gist of this plan for liturgical reform than they discovered that Rome now counted them, too, as inhabitants of mission lands, in effect. In America, English was introduced into the Mass by increments, which meant of course that Latin was ushered out at the same pace, until the process was complete in the fall of 1970.
The movement away from the sacred, classical language and toward the vernacular was accompanied by a corresponding change in tone and style, from solemn and formal to less solemn and less formal. William F. Buckley Jr. recorded for posterity a typical reaction of many a Catholic: both a sense of loss and a glum resolve not to be sour about it. Surely some good could come of this?
October 23, 2014 by at 7:30 pm
from ‘Mystic, Comic, Everything’ — Chapter 1 of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: Her Family, Her God, Her Message
October 1, 2014 by at 6:25 pm
We are still at the dawn of the third great crisis of our civilization: it is no longer merely man confronted with his weakness (with the Greeks); no longer merely man confronted with his guilt (with Luther, at that tragic time for Europe, after the black plagues at the end of the Middle Ages); man today finds himself confronted with his solitude and with the desperate quest for a meaning to his life, confronted with the need to search for what would be an “authentic existence”, “true life”, which he fears never being able to enjoy. Among the innumerable witnesses that could be called to the stand in this interrogation, such as Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, or Kundera, I have intentionally kept two cries, because they seem to express the question that was Thérèse’s own: “Here is my old anguish, right there in the hollow of my body, like a bad wound that every movement irritates; I know its name, it is the fear of eternal solitude. And I have the fear that there may not be any answer” (Camus).
I implored, I begged for a sign, I sent messages to the heavens: no response. The heavens do not even know my name. I wondered at every moment what I might be in the eyes of God. Now I knew the answer: Nothing. God does not see me, God does not know me, God does not hear me. You see this void over our heads? That is God. You see this hole in the earth? That is God. You see this opening in the door? That is God again. The silence is God. Absence is God. God is the solitude of men. [(Jean Paul Sartre, Le Diable et le bon Dieu, tableau 10, scene 4.)]
Thérèse was familiar with this anguish:
When I want to rest my heart fatigued by the darkness which surrounds it by the memory of the luminous country after which I aspire, my torment redoubles; it seems to me that the darkness, borrowing the voice of sinners, says mockingly to me: “You are dreaming about the light, about a fatherland embalmed in the sweetest perfumes; you are dreaming about the eternal possession of the Creator of all these marvels; you believe that one day you will walk out of this fog which surrounds you! Advance, advance; rejoice in death which will give you not what you hope for but a night still more profound, the night of nothingness.” (SS 213)
snip
I have experienced it; when I am feeling nothing, when I am INCAPABLE of praying, of practicing virtue, then is the moment for seeking opportunities, nothings, which please Jesus more than mastery of the world or even martyrdom suffered with generosity. For example, a smile, a friendly word, when I would want to say nothing, or put on a look of annoyance. (LT 143, GC 2:801)
To understand her secret as a warrior, we might go back to Nehru’s admission to Malraux: “I have three enemies: the Chinese, famine, and myself. But, of the three, the most difficult is myself.” Very quickly she learned that nothing can be done on the path of what for her was the true life without fighting against herself, against illusion. She, who, up to the end, had the childish fears of a little girl, would never fear the truth, never fear to “do the truth”, as Saint John says: whether about herself, her faults, her own limits, about her family, her community, her sisters, or one day about death itself. She did not fear that the truth would diminish her. Quite the contrary. It was never a malicious truth. For she found here the true way to be victorious: by disarming, by never resisting. Instead of sidestepping an issue, cheating, trying to justify herself, telling herself stories, she disarmed, and she disarmed from the very moment when the truth was at issue. Then she found something greater: a confidence that opened up freedom to her.
Her sister Céline, older than she, who entered Carmel six years after she did, reported that one day, in watching Thérèse live, she experienced a moment of discouragement and said to her: “Oh, when I think of all I have to acquire.” And Thérèse answered her at once: “Rather, how much you have to lose” (CSG 23).
— excerpted from ‘Mystic, Comic, Everything’, Chapter 1 of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: Her Family, Her God, Her Message by Fr Bernard Bro, OP; posted on Ignatius Press’ Insight Scoop; link via Amy Welborn.
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