Duck with Bamboo Shoots

I had a rather interesting culinary experience last night: I ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant behind the Pantheon. The whole thing was under five Euro, which ain't bad. They never did pick up on the fact, besides the entree, I ordered steamed rice on the side, but for that price I'm very forgiving. It was on the whole, very pleasant. Ordering from a waitstaff whose second language is Italian and third (probably) is English was much easier than I would have supposed (pointing at the menu helps), and the duck was excellent. I shall have to return, though tonight I'm in the mood for something a bit more local. Like, I dunno...any meal which ends in gelato?

One fly in the ointment: I walked around the Pantheon neighborhood afterwards and sadly, all the religious articles stores pull down their metal security blinds after they close up. So much for window-shopping. Drat.

Lumen de Lumine: The Abbey Church of St.-Denis in the Light of Its History
by Matthew Alderman



Part VI: The Conservatism of Innovation
(Part I, II, III, IV, V)

Our pilgrim passes into the narthex, where he sees both the heavy new piers of the grafted-on western front, the old Cariolingian nave, perhaps partially demolished, and the luminous, astonishing chevet far beyond him, glittering with gold and gems, altars and relics. Until the 1940s, when Sumner Crosby discovered footings that pointed towards an unfinished Sugerian nave, some thought that Suger’s whole project simply consisted of the amplification of the east and west ends which would be grafted onto a Carolingian middle. The question, up to that point, had largely been left to Latinists and interpreters of Suger’s writings rather than archaeologists. Crosby’s extensive excavations indicate the proposed nave was to be built "as a double-aisle structure as wide as the choir itself," which would have only retained the Carolingian piers and destroyed everything else. Its design influenced that of Notre-Dame du Paris on the Île de la Cite. The Carolingian nave stood throughout Suger’s rule, and the present nave--as well as a large portion of the upper chevet--was built in the thirteenth century under the tenure of Abbot Eudes Clement. It belongs to a later period within the Gothic tradition, more interested in prima facia rationalism.

The off-center door meant that the western bays, also essentially Romanesque, were marked by "irregular spacing of the piers resulted in irregularities in the plan and shape of the groin vaults on the south side, but..., produced no deviation from the high level of precision in...vault construction." This conservatism is not surprising. The old church, after all, had been supposedly consecrated by God Himself, and this tradition "weighed heavily on abbots Suger and Eudes in their reconstructions..." An unprecedented number of old stones were reused by Suger in his campaign, and his own writings tell of the esteem he held for these sacred blocks. Suger, in his quest for history, also brought in marble and capitals from Rome for the new church. More evocative of the remarkable conservatism of the enterprise, is that "the [completed church] of 1140 [would have] revived the...five-aisle basilica of the Constantinian age." It seems, then, that Suger’s main concern was not merely invention but the recasting of precedents around a relatively new idea to create a Pseudo-Dionysian whole. As Von Simson notes, the "empiricism mitigated by fantasy that characterizes mediaeval buildings was rendered possible by an extremely conservative attitude."

The Joys of Ecclesiastical Window-Shopping

By the way, I discovered that Notre Dame's Architecture Center here in Rome is around the corner from the Pantheon today, which makes for some excitement. You see, that's where all the high-class religious articles stores and clerical...er...boutiques (?) are to be found, one pressed up right next to the other in all their liturgical, embroidered and gilded glory. I spotted a spectacular fiddleback chausible in one shop-window this afternoon, thick crimson velvet all worked with golden wheat-sheaves and a sunbursted IHS monogram. Yowza. That alone would be enough to make me exclaim Nunc dimittis but then there are the monstrances, the silver and gold thuribles, and the dozens of mitres, croziers and God-knows-what-else in every display case. This link'll give you an idea, I think. Check out the Maltese knight uniform while you're puttering around their website. Just imagine. And I haven't even gotten to Gamarelli's yet, and he dresses the Pope. It's enough to make a Catholic Nerd cry.

I expect I'll be hanging around the Pantheon a lot from now on.

Great Churches of the World:
Mass at Sant' Eustachio

Sant' Eustachio lies in the fantastic corkscrew shadow of the spire of La Sapienza, the old university of Rome and now the state archives. It's about two minutes walk from my studio in Via Monterone and one can even glimpse the Pantheon from its steps if you stretch your neck a little. Talk about good neighbors. It has a pleasant, rather unassuming facade, which would be an ornament to any city or town, though here it is just another exemplar of the surfeit of excellence that marks Rome's baroque architecture. The pale blue stucco is weathered to a placid grey, marked off by creamy pilasters and wild ear-like volutes flanking the lofty pediment, crowned whimsically by the sculpted head of St. Eustace's stag.

Inside, it is a miniature tromp l'oeil Catholic-Reformation version of St. Peter's, all painted faux-marble and gilding, antique funerary monuments winking at you out of the afternoon semidarkness of the side-chapels. The titular saint's deer-head follows you inside from the piazza, as you catch glimpses of it on the ornate tent-like ciborium above the slender candles of the high altar. St. Philip Neri once prayed here, and ages before the present church was built, St. Raymond Nonnatus was the parish's cardinal. Today, it is staffed by a handful of Brazilian Carmelite nuns and a sweet, elderly and slightly disheveled Italian priest.

Behind the altar, in the shadow of the reredos, sits a tiny curvilinear oratory with an immense music-stand at the center, all shadows and dark wood. A marble pulpit rises on the left of the nave, crimson and green perfectly matching the painted imitation stonework of the nave. Sadly, the detached keyboard of the organ seems to block the steps leading up to it. The organ loft, above the narthex, is a wonder, though, supported by a sweeping gilded bracket and flanked by grasping angels. The church has weathered the liturgical struggles of the last forty years reasonably well, though the current altar in use is an unexceptional wooden table set out on a small raised platform beyond the embrace of the altar rail, and two strange clay lamps sit at one corner rather than the more traditional candles of the ultramontane past.

That aside, our opening mass for the school year was really quite splendid. It was celebrated there last night by our part-time chaplain Fr. B----. He's quite young, which nowadays is usually a good sign. I assisted him as an altar server, and I can report the sacristy is well-appointed with wood cabinets, enamelled gold chalices, and elegant (although modern) vestments. Fr. B----, who works full-time in the Vatican (in addition to taking us students on), seems very much a good and holy priest. He took pains to celebrate the liturgy with great dignity, in accordance with the latest set of rubrics, and much to my delight, even used the antiphons of the day. Providentially, St. Eustace's stag even found its way into one of them, as one text speaks aptly of the deer that longs for the waters as the soul thirsts for God.

I can't think of a better way to start my stay in Rome by the waters of the Tiber. Though I'm not sure I long to drink from that stream.

Albrecht Dürer's The Birth of the Virgin, 1511

On the feast day of the birth of the Virgin and of Blessed Alan...

Why not check out this page about the origins of the Rosary from the international Dominican web site? You'll find some interesting and unexpected characters here, including Michaelangelo and Inquisitor Jakob Sprenger, O.P., better known as the author of the famous witch-hunter's handbook, the Malleus Maleficarum. Ya never know who you'll run into around here...

And Now, Back to our Regularly Scheduled Saint of the Day, Live from Rome

Today, most importantly, commemorates the Birth of the Virgin, but there are some interesting hagiographic arcana in the nooks and crannies if one knows where to look. Among others, remembered today is the martyr St. Adrian and his newly-wedded wife, St. Natalia. You may remember encountering St. Adrian in this feature on his feast day according to the Eastern calendar and perhaps might recall his patronage of arms-dealers. St. Natalia seems to have visited her holy husband in prison disguised as a boy, that staple of melodramas; though she did not, however, pull an Apollinaris Syncletica and become a transvestite Egyptian hermitess, another, more distinctly sanctoral, cliche. His martyrdom was quite ingenious, even by Roman standards, featuring dismemberment on an anvil used as a chopping-block. St. Natalia died peacefully sometime thereafter, after having to flee Nicomedia because of a Roman pagan official's amorous and troublesome overtures.

Today is also the feast of Bl. Alanus de Rupe, a Dominican who is said to have been the initiator, reviser, or primary popularizer of the Rosary, though he himself repeats the legend that St. Dominic received it from the Virgin while in ecstasy. The boring Bollandists naturally pour cold water on any such legendary suggestions. Besides Bl. Alanus, there's also the "apostle of Bavaria," St. Corbinian of Freysing, baptized Waldegiso but renamed by his mother after herself for some unfathomable reason. And in the weird names department, today marks the feast of St. Kingsmark, a disciple of the Welsh St. Dyfrig and the namesake of the town of Llangynfarch. He also is called Kynvarch or Cynfarch and no doubt his close friends had even sillier things to call him. Also, today is the feast of St. Sergius I, Pope, who baptized St. Caedwalla, King of the West Saxons, and consecrated St. Willibroard a bishop. He also decreed the Agnus Dei be sung at mass. Once again, parents, please feel free to name your children after saints like Mark, Thomas, Matthew or Andrew, as Caedwalla is very hard to fit on a nametag.

Lumen de Lumine: The Abbey Church of St.-Denis in the Light of Its History
by Matthew Alderman



Part V: The Iconographies of the True Light Seated in Judgment
(Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV)

Pamela Blum and Sumner Crosby’s research on the subject has shown that, unlike the rest of the façade, the central portal managed to survive Debret’s restoration fairly unscathed. Its symbolic content, particularly the complicated and possibly indecipherable imagery of the central Judgment tympanum, remain in dispute. Some call it Pseudo-Dionysian, others Augustinian, and many doubt whether the abbot was even fully aware of the symbolic import of his program. Barber has derided Suger’s iconographic and inscription program as “inconsistent fluff.” While, perhaps, St.-Denis’s novelty has been overemphasized, nonetheless the prescription of some to simply ignore it and go elsewhere to understand Gothic, as Barber has suggested, is surely throwing the infant Jesus out with the holy water. A careful examination of the portals reveals that Suger was no fluff-brain.

The great tympanum of the last judgment is not a jumble; it is a synthesis that "casts light on Suger’s style and method as well as on his intentions and the quality of his mind." It is both Augustinian and pseudo-Dionysian, and it is more than both, it is uniquely Sugerian.

A pilgrim approaches the central portal and sees Suger’s great bronze doors. If he was a well-educated cleric he would have been able to read the Latin poem that the abbot has placed on the doors, inviting the viewer to travel through the portal "to the True Light where Christ is the True Door." The Pseudo-Dionysian light-theology, which will illuminate the chevet, is undeniable here: the inscription paraphrases a passage in the Celestial Hierarchy.

In the tympanum, above the doors, is an image of the Last Judgement that has no precedent before or parallel after in the whole of Christian art. Rudolph describes it thus: "One of the most obscure elements of Suger’s program is the unusual iconography of the [L]ast [J]udgement sculptures which were fixed to the west portal [...] Christ sits enthroned in judgement, with only the lower part of [H]is body encompassed in the mandorla, which usually surrounds the entire body. He sits in front of the cross, his arms outstretched...and holding two scrolls..."

The tympanum derives its iconography unusually from St. Matthew’s Gospel. Only three other contemporary Judgments that derive from the twenty-fourth chapter of St. Matthew are extant today. Furthermore, "[a]lthough superficial resemblances exist between Beaulieu and Saint-Denis, ultimately each of the four Last Judgment doorways is unique in its use of Matthew..." Suger's sometimes-derided fondness for texts actually organizes and orients the scene both explicitly and implicitly. It is simply a matter of figuring out what text he was referring to, as he is "predisposed...[to] visually translating the literary source." The inscriptions on Christ’s scrolls to the left and right, which refer back to Matthew 25:34-41, are fairly straightforward and organize the composition into the saved and the damned. Other details are fairly easy to organize according to this "armature of quotes," and Gerson notes references to the parable of the wheat and tares (Matthew 13:24-30), the presence of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (8:11-12) and trumpeting angels (24:31).

It is more difficult to explain, following St. Matthew, the peculiar (perhaps wholly unique) half-mandorla and the presence of the cross behind the upper body of Christ. The reference to the crucifixion remains puzzling and seemingly out of context. To a reader of St. Augustine, it makes perfect sense and even refers back to Matthew’s Gospel. It is not surprising, given his love of the neo-Platonist Pseudo-Dionysius that the abbot should have turned to another Christian neo-Platonist to inform his image of the Last Judgment.

In De Trinitate, St. Augustine reconciles the apparently contradictory statements of Matthew 25:31-32 and John 12:47 which respectively say that Christ will judge at the Last Judgment and that Christ will not judge at the Last Judgment. St. Augustine’s solution is to state "both good and bad shall see the Judge of the quick and dead, without doubt the bad will not be able to see Him, except after the form in which He is the Son of man [i.e., the crucified Jesus]; but yet in the glory wherein He will judge, not in the lowliness wherein He was judged. But the ungodly without doubt will not see that form of God in which He is equal to the Father [i.e., the glorified Christ surrounded by the mandorla]" (Augustine n.p.)

This is an ingenious solution, but it also raises more questions and seems to give credence to those theories that deny a Pseudo-Dionysian influence in the church’s iconography in favor of a wholly Augustinian system. Nonetheless, the Pseudo-Dionysian language of the door and the iconography of the chevet solidly point towards a hybrid system in the church. Furthermore, St. Augustine's solution in may not have been chosen simply because it was Augustinian. Augustine's text presents the Crucified Christ presiding over the Last Judgment, an image that relates back to the composite life of St. Denis in circulation in the twelfth century. Jacobus de Voragine quotes a letter ascribed to Denis sent to St. Polycarp that details his conversion. Dionysius, then in Egypt, witnessed the miraculous eclipse that occurred on Good Friday and then "applied the rule of Philip Arrhideus and found...that the sun was not due to suffer an eclipse." Haunted by the experience, when he discovered that the new god that St. Paul preached in Athens had been the source of the unsettling phenomena he had witnessed in Heliopolis, he converted on the spot. The Cross relates back to the unique story of St. Denis in a sophisticated way, belying the argument that Suger was an ingenuous and clumsy iconographer.

Do as the Romans Do?

Or, good idea, bad reason: a functionary in Berlusconi's government wants to reinstate Friday as a day of fast and abstinence...to combat obesity. I like Silvio a great deal, but this is just strange, even by Italy's rigorous standards. Anyway, it's nearly midnight here and I'm too full of gnocchi right now to think straight. So much for holy suffering. I better stagger down the Corso towards my hotel and my bed and my ever-patient roommate. Who does not snore, mercifully. Details on my first full day in Rome tomorrow (and, God willing, our saint of the day) about my adventures, including my serving evening mass at Sant' Eustachio, which is the one of those wonderful baroque churches that puts a cathedral to shame and are, nonetheless, a dime-a-dozen in Rome. I love this city.

Mass of the Day: Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Notre Dame, IN

Opening Hymn: God We Praise You, God We Bless You (Nettleton)
Gloria: New Mass for Congregations, Andrews
Responsorial Psalm: My soul give praise to the Lord, Bower
Offertory Anthem: Zion's Walls, Copland
Sanctus, Memorial Acclamation, Amen, Agnus Dei: Mass for the City, Proulx
Communion Hymn: Amen El Cuerpo de Cristo, Schiavone
Communion Motet: O Sacrum Convivium, Moore
Alma Mater: Notre Dame, Our Mother
Closing Hymn: O God, Our Help in Ages Past (St. Anne)

Report from Rome

Ciao, everyone! I just wanted to let youall know I finally reached Rome yesterday and am in the process of acclimating myself to the city. It looks like Emily and Dan have been keeping up well in my absence. Thanks, Em, for continuing to post my St. Denis paper! The iMac computers in the lab here are rather primitive, and so my blogging will probably be a bit restricted until I can get used to them over the next few days/weeks. Rome looks to be great: this morning I walked up Via del Corso and caught the tail end of an indult Tridentine mass at the church of Gesu e Maria (Discalced Augustinians) and blundered into the Pantheon as well. We have a class mass at Sant' Eugenio tonight, followed by dinner in Trastevere. Niiice. Several cassock sightings so far, and plenty of nuns in semi-traditional habits. And two Mercedarian friars! Sweet. Also, one ugly moment when I wandered into an oratory dedicated to St. Francis Xavier and found it set up in Voskoite antiphonal-fashion with a weirdly-placed pulpit. Baroque church with folding chairs...yeech.

One life lesson I have picked up this far: Italian salesclerks make a religion out of exact change. Funny; you'd think they'd be a bit less uptight about it. Live and learn. Anyway, I gotta dash now, but I wanted to check in and say hi.

Lumen de Lumine: The Abbey Church of St.-Denis in the Light of Its History
by Matthew Alderman



Part IV: The Geometry of Rebuilt Ruins
(Part I, Part II, Part III)

Panofsky’s interpretation of Gothic misses, I believe, the point of Suger’s program. Suger was more concerned with the harmonization of the foundations and spoliae of the old church into a Pseudo-Dionysian and possibly Augustinian gestalt rather than a Scholastic one. St.-Denis foremost conservative in its form--let us not forget that then the Scholastics were new and radical--though rather discretely innovative in the ideas that those forms express. The geometry of St.-Denis is by nature not all-encompassing or as rational as later examples because of the constraints of the site and the history of the site. In St.-Denis, there was no fully-cohesive geometric ordering system, which Clark suspects means "the geometric basis serving as the starting point...was flexible enough to accommodate program changes," a very sensible idea that seems in keeping with the mind of the practical Suger. At the same time, it is not too loose, as the apse is based on a complex but regular polygon.

This is evident in the first part of Suger's building program, the western portals and façade of the church. They were begun around 1140 and consecrated in 1144, around the time the second part of the new structure, the eastern chevet, was begun. A twelfth-century pilgrim arriving to venerate the relics of St. Denis would have entered the new abbey church through these portals. The church façade loomed over a market square like innumerable others in France, dominating the flat plains north of Paris. Then only one of the twin towers, the south pinnacle, was complete, while the other, begun shortly before the old abbot’s death in 1151, was still under construction. As seen in a lively reconstruction drawing by Gregory Robeson based on radiographic studies showing how Suger saw the façade in his mind—fairly close to the original execution--the west end would seem surprisingly stark, even anticlimactic, to modern eyes accustomed to the opulent weightlessness of Amiens, Rheims or Beauvais.

The façade as it stands today was substantially altered in 1837 by the restorer Francois Debret: "Almost every stone was transformed." He added ornamentation to the blind arcades and, most disastrously, rebuilt the thirteenth-century spire of the north tower, which itself diverged substantially from Suger’s own symmetrical design. His top-heavy reconstruction so compromised building’s structure that it had to be dismantled, and St.-Denis is again short one tower.

Some of the old façade’s ponderousness is still evident in the "restored" west front even today. There is a touch of Romanesque heaviness about the composition. Erlande-Brandenberg goes as far as to say it belongs "to the Romanesque tradition." Pointed arches are largely absent. Some of this awkwardness is actually deliberate. Many of the dimensional imperfections of the Carolingian basilica were retained in the geometry of the new structure, evidenced by Sumner Crosby’s extensive photogrammetric research: "[T]he south portal is 30 cm. wider than the north..., a measurement corresponding to the difference in aisle widths of the eighth-century nave...[the] result of the extension of the dimensions of the old nave into the new west bays."

This discrepancy, which subtly skews the symmetry of the whole façade is not simply crudity, nor is there a practical or structural reason the bays should align in that irregular manner. Instead it is attributable to the veneration in which the site and the old church was held. Suger and his masons thus tried to disguise this necessary irregularity with simple yet "amazingly precise" geometry. Crosby theorizes that the extensive use of plane geometry produce some of these "curious differences" in the upper part of the not-quite symmetrical façade. Clark supposes these differences might be an attempt to achieve balance with the slightly off-center door, a logical assumption given the precision elsewhere.

The starkness of the façade conservatively draws on the Anglo-Norman forms that Bony sees as the ultimate font of the early Gothic of the Ile-de-France. The only relief comes in the dense iconography of the three portals, by turns incoherent, irrelevant and perhaps, after all that, full of illumination.

Calling all theologians.......



We had an interesting discussion yesterday in seminar about On Faith. There were disputes about several passages, one most notably. In Question 10 of On Faith, St. Thomas discusses different kinds of unfaithfulness, basically distinguished by whether one has had the Faith fairly presented or not. Of the latter case, he says that "Those who are unfaithful in this sense are damned for other sins, which cannot be remitted without faith; they are not damned on account of the sin of unfaithfulness." The question, basically, is whether St. Thomas thinks all in this "unfaithful" situation are damned, or whether it is only whether they commit these serious "other sins". I don't think so, but I've been charged by my professor to figure this question out more exactly. I'd like to get some sort of "baptism by desire" out of St. Thomas, but am I grasping at straws? Please feel free to comment with any insights.

Lumen de Lumine: The Abbey Church of St.-Denis in the Light of Its History
by Matthew Alderman



Part III: A Complete Self-Identification
(see also Part I and Part II)

By the twelfth century, the time had come for renewal at the abbey. Suger, the guiding force of this renewal, served as abbot from 1122 until his death in 1151. He was of obscure but noble birth, and had been an oblate at St.-Denis since 1091. Though his program at St. Denis shows, depending on which author one consults, varying degrees of theological and philosophical literacy, he was a practical man, "a first minister of confidence, power and achievement." It is no surprise he was the "loyal advisor and friend" of the French monarchy.

The motivations guiding Suger's reconstruction of the church are sometimes in dispute. Panofsky, the noted interpreter of Gothic architecture, sees Suger as a capable and clever man possessed of two ambitions: strengthening the Crown and aggrandizing the abbey, two institutions that were inexorably linked in the abbot's eyes. It was also, in a sense, self-aggrandizement as he himself came to identify himself with the abbey where he had lived since he was ten years of age. As Rudolf writes of Panofsky's theory, "it was on the level of personal psychology--the will to self-perpetuation, overcompensation for his humble birth, a complete self-identification with the monastery of St.-Denis..."

Panofsky also sees in the reconstruction a rivalry with and a need to justify himself to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a contemporary of more "puritan" outlook than the abbot. Otto von Simson, however, sees St. Bernard and Suger as being in agreement, and notes that Suger's most important contribution is not the actual style of the church, Gothic, which, after all, had similarities to other slightly earlier structures, but his incorporation of the light mysticism erroneously associated with the patronal saint of the church. Panofsky seems correct in his assessment of Suger's character, which squares with the picture given by Suger's own writings. De Consecratione and De Administratione are less interested in theological clarity than glorifying the abbey and, as we shall see below, justifying his project to St. Bernard. His sentences are "complex and torturous," stuffed with so much information about the abbey's dense history.

However, Panofsky's general interpretation of Gothic as scholastic subdivision which "in the period between about 1130-1140...[can be observed as] a connection between Gothic art and Scholasticism which is more complete than a mere 'parallelism'" falls short of the Gothic of St.-Denis on several marks. In Panofsky's own book, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, his concern, despite the claim above, is primary High Gothic, and indeed he begins with the thirteenth-century nave of St. Denis rather than the twelfth-century west front and chevet. There is the complaint among art historians that Suger's dense verbosity does not show the mind of a scholastic at work, leading Von Simson to ask "To what extent was Suger himself responsible for St.-Denis?" This is hardly fair, as the circumstances of his writing were not ideal; he rushed and abbreviated much of his work due to his impending death in 1151. Furthermore, the delicacy and intricacy of the iconographic program of the west end and the chevet seems to point to another answer.

Lumen de Lumine: The Abbey Church of St.-Denis in the Light of Its History
by Matthew Alderman



Part II: The Tale of the Headless Martyr (see Part I here)
The life of the abbey’s patronal saint and the monastery’s early history are essential to understanding the building program that Suger initated at St.-Denis. The legend, as Suger would have known it ran thus. St. Denis, better known as the philosopher Dionysius the Areopagite of Acts 7:34, was a disciple of St. Paul and was appointed the first bishop of Paris by Pope St. Clement. He was later martyred; after he was executed, he miraculously walked to Montmartre, his decapitated head clutched in his hands, where the church now stands.

Denis/Dionysius was considered to have written the mystical Celestial Hierarchy on the mystical phenomena of light. This identification came late, in Hilduin’s ninth-century Historia Sancti Dionysii. The texts themselves had only been in circulation since the sixth century, and had originally been viewed as tainted by the Monophysite heresy. In all likelihood, the works were forgeries by a writer now known as Pseudo-Dionysius. Denis and Dionysius were also probably two different men. Peter Abelard had suggested that Denis and Dionysius were two different men, though, naturally, this did not please Suger or his monks. Even when, in 1216, Pope Innocent III sent the newly-unearthed relics of the actual St. Dionysius the Araepagite to the abbey, little effort was made to distinguish between the two saints who were now buried in the same church.

The abbey’s origins are also marked by the same schism between legend and fact. Supposedly, a basilica (later destroyed) was constructed in the fourth century. However, the most reliable documents point towards 520 as the date of the first church, linking St. Geneviève to its foundation. The sixth-century Vita Genovefae states that St. Geneviève had a chapel constructed in St. Denis’s honor, fearing that Dionysius’s tomb was “a terrible and fearful place” unworthy of the martyr. Its foundations still stand under the southern nave.

This early chapel was enlarged in the next century by Dagobert I, probably by extending the nave towards the present-day transept. The next principle addition to the church came under Abbot Fulrad, whose Carolingian-era church Suger intended to replace. By Suger, the abbey had grown in political stature as well as physical size. Fulrad’s church had been consecrated in the presence of Charlemagne on February 24, 775, and Charles the Bald had assumed the title of lay abbot to further enlarge and protect the abbey as a royal prerogative. While, according to Crosby, it cannot be said why St.-Denis was chosen as the royal necropolis, the custom was quickly established. Royal burials had occurred at the church as early as 570, less than a hundred years after its construction. This was due to, the decision of the Metrovingians Clotaire II, Dagobert I and Clovis II to be buried there. As a consequence, St. Denis became “the singular protector” of the realm of France. The kings of France were vassals to the abbey since they held the title of Count of Vexin, and the Vexin itself was a possession of the monastery. By the twelfth century, the abbey’s wealth and political clout easily outstripped most bishoprics.

The site was full of sacred, historical and regnal reverberations. The very stones were holy: a legend contemporary with Suger states that Christ Himself had come down from heaven and consecrated one of the early churches on the site.

Editor's (Emily) note: The original paper from Matt included citations but, since they don't make much sense without the bibliography, and bibliographies don't make for very good blogging, I have omitted them here. If you're interested, let me know and I can send the unaltered version your way. -E

Well, it's a little late to have the saints of the day with your morning coffee...



When I got up this morning, I forgot that Matt and his obscure hagiographic knowledge were in transit to the Eternal City today, thus placing this resposibility squarely on my shoulders. So, better late than never, and, without further ado:

Today marks the feast of St. Rosalia, a descendant of Charlemagne and the daughter of Sinibald, Lord of Quisquina and of Rosa (say that three times fast). She became a hermitess at a young age, taking up her abode in a cave and inscribing upon its walls:"He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of aaaaaagggh." [Lighning bolt comes from out of clear sky and lands dangerously close to Emily] Alright, alright, actually, the inscription read: "I, Rosalia, daughter of Sinibald, Lord of Roses and Quisquina, have taken the resolution to live in this cave for the love of my Lord, Jesus Christ." St. Rosalia is the patroness of Palermo. She died around 1160.

Also on the calendar for today is St. Ultan of Ardbraccan, illustrator of manuscripts and the paternal uncle of St. Brigid. Legend has it that he simultaneously fed poor children with his right hand, while fighting off Norse invaders with his left. Not bad for someone who also apparently lived to be around 180 years old.

Also, today: St. Candida the Elder, a Neopolitan woman who was cured by St. Peter, and St. Hermione (no relation to a certain best-selling children's series).

Lumen de Lumine: The Abbey Church of St.-Denis in the Light of Its History
by Matthew Alderman



Part I: Of Great Men and Plagiarists

Et in unum Dominum Iesum Christum, Filium Dei unigenitum, et ex Patre natum, ante omnia saecula. Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine, Deum vero de Deo vero.
—Nicene Creed

The material lights, both those which are disposed by nature in the spaces of the heavens and those produced on earth by human artifice are images of the intelligible lights, and above all of the True Light itself.
—Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy

When, out of delight in the beauty of the house of God, the loveliness of the many-colored stones has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues, and that by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior world to that higher world in an anagogical manner.
—Suger of St. Denis

When the popular mind considers Suger’s twelfth-century church at St.-Denis, as tourist or amateur historian, the structure looms preternaturally large over the whole of the Middle Ages as a paradigmatic Parthenon (or, at least, a Paestum) for the Gothic style, which, like Athena, sprang fully-grown from the mind of Abbot Suger, one of an architectural subset of “History’s Great Men.” Or, on the other end of the spectrum, some academics have suggested he had little role in forming the ethos that infuses the great church, which indicates “a powerful mind at work…that mind was not Suger” (Peter Kidson). Yet others have derided St.-Denis as an exalted plagiarism of earlier works.

Such monolithic views neglects the true genius of Suger, who, rather than simply inventing, did the far more interesting and intellectual task of weaving together a new architecture and an iconographic synthesis from the rich history which pervaded the Royal Abbey of St.-Denis. He transformed past precedent; he did not destroy it or ignore it, but created an experience that is both familiar and new.

Santa Susanna, the American Church in Rome

I'm leaving for Rome tomorrow to start my year abroad. I intend to keep you all updated of my doings, my comings, my goings, my various ecclesial and secular adventures and much, much more. In my absence, Emily has graciously consented to post extracts from a paper I wrote entitled Lumen de Lumine, about the origins of Gothic architecture in the abbey of St. Denis in France, over the next few days. However, before I go, a fragment of one of my favorite poems about the apostolic City, coming from the pen of the last person from whom you would expect it.

An except of Rome Unvisited
from Oscar Wilde's cycle Rosa Mystica.

A pilgrim from the northern seas--
What joy for me to seek alone
The wondrous Temple, and the throne
Of Him who holds the awful keys!

When, bright with purple and with gold,
Come priest and holy Cardinal,
And borne above the heads of all
The gentle Shepherd of the Fold.

O joy to see before I die
The only God-anointed King,
And hear the silver trumpets ring
A triumph as He passes by.

Or at the altar of the shrine
Holds high the mystic sacrifice,
And shows a God to human eyes
Beneath the veil of bread and wine.

And with that, I bid you all addio until this weekend, when I shall be standing on the holy soil of the Eternal City as a student of the Rome Program of the Notre Dame School of Architecture.

I owe Erik Keilholtz an apology.

More comnsiderations on the state of architecture, innovation and the monetary restrictions of the profession below in the comments box for my post on one of my favorite innovators, the Ven. Antoni Gaudi, and one of my favorite living architects, Duncan Stroik.

Not Gaudi versus Stroik, Gaudi and Stroik together!

Catholic blogger Erik Keilholtz had an interesting response to the latest post in my Incarnational Architecture series. Here he has some interesting comments on the government regulation of modern art, which I have to agree with at most levels (though I am highly skeptical of the NEA's work myself: excepting Venice, only an absolute monarchy can produce really good government-funded art, and I say that with my tongue only slightly straying into my cheek). I have to agree, after having heard some of Sister Wendy Beckett's thoughts on the subject, that there is some intellectual worth in some modern art, though perhaps not for the reasons the artist intended.

Regarding the post on Gaudi versus Stroik at Irish Elk regarding Erik's and Jim Cork's thoughts on the Catalan, I think the two are ultimately part of the same tradition and love both dearly.However, I am rather shocked by Erik's description of Stroik's work as uncreative and derivative and pedestrian, which really misunderstands the nature of traditional architecture and building within a heritage. I would never call Duncan Stroik a pedestrian architect; confusing the neo-classical trash that has cluttered up hotels and office parks with the real thing, real classicism, is a very grave error. There is a difference, a huge difference between slavish copying and applying past solutions to new problems judiciously.

Gaudi was a genius and a saint, and I think, in his own way, a classicist who stands ultimately apart from the mainstream of the twentieth century. Classicism is a much bigger tent, especially today, than is often imagined, and I would call just about anyone from Vitruvius to Otto Wagner a member of that heritage. Let's not fall into the Corbusian trap of assuming we classicists just cut-and-pasted the Parthenon onto warehouses (in the ninteenth century we did, and that's why we failed, but that was not the way the Renaissance masters worked). I'm not sure Gaudi would make a good model though for the future of Church architecture. I wish he could be, but he is also, both for good and for bad, simply unique, sui generis and perhaps the lessons he teachers are too distinctly related to his own situation to be brought forward into the future. Though I hope perhaps that I am wrong here. Nonetheless, I think we can learn from both Stroik's work and Gaudi's work. I'll try and explain some time when I have a moment.

Roman Roundup

Herr Doktor Gregory Popcack is looking for limericks and other "good" bad poetry about the Church for possible inclusion (or lack thereof) in the Pope's new book Roman Triptych. Hey Greg, check out Secret Archives Man while you're here...I mean, it rhymes, doesn't it? Read here about the homes of the saints in Rome (handled by a branch, no doubt, of Century XI Real Estate). Theresa MF leaves for Rome in eight days (I wish I had eight days to pack). Show your support and check out her blog. Lastly, the site for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum which is actually based on a real ancient Roman play. Really. Would I lie to you?

St. Gregory the Great. Matthias Stom (1600-?1650). Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basle.

The Insanity is Already Beginning

I leave for Rome tomorrow, and after today you probably will not hear from me until Saturday at the earliest. However, I trust that my fellow Whapsters will keep youall in good hands. Things here are rather coming apart at the seams. My luggage may be too big to fit past the weight requirements, my room is still a mess, and I still have about fifteen things to do at once, all of them annoying, to quote Lt. Cmdr. Susan Ivanova. That being said, I think I probably can still handle it. I hope. Pray for me, please, that I don't go crazy trying to deal with Alitalia's primitive automated phone system. AAAARGHHH. Okay, now I'm better.

Now, a happy Pope St. Gregory's day to you all. He is, of course, the Pope most famous for devising Gregorian chant, sending St. Augustine to convert the English (non Angli, etc.) and whose mom was St. Silvia, my mother's own patroness. According to the Golden Legend, he was described as being "debonair," and also, the same source tells us that somehow his prayers were able to get the Emperor Trajan out of Hell, though I find that stretches even my credulity (though not the bit about being debonair...popes can be hip). Today we've also got St. Marinus, the stonemason namesake of San Marino and patron of bachelors, deacons, falsely accused people and San Marino. But strangely enough, not stamp collectors (that's a link to a page about fictional detectives on stamps...well, why not?). Then there's Bl. Herman (brother of Bl. Otto) of Heidelberg, a Benedictine monk even if his name sounds like it should belong to a mad scientist.

Look carefully: they've got Roman collars on. From the Father Ted TV series.

Eighties Song Parody Ahead

Okay, here and only here: a revision of Jefferson Starship's We Built This City in honor of early music enthusiasts about the struggle between a capella music and choral-orchestral works. Yes, I know, I am a sick, sick man. Eighties Pop and Palestrina...yikes. Blame my father, he listens to it in the car. Starship, I mean. I don't listen to anything written after 1764.

We Built this Chapel
by Vatican Starship (formerly the Sistine Choir)

From their album Knee-Bent in the Pope-la, which also features the Missa super Cyndi Lauper à 6.

We built this Chapel, we built this Chapel on polyphones
Built this Chapel, we built this Chapel on polyphones.

Say you don’t know Condé, or recognize Des Pres,
Say you don’t care who does L’homme armé
Knee-bent at the altar, Venice’s sinkin’ in the night,
Too many Turks gone and beaten up your fight,
Gabrieli plays the bombard, listens to continuo, don’t you remember:

We built this Chapel, we built this Chapel on polyphones.

We built this Chapel, we built this Chapel on polyphones
Built this Chapel, we built this Chapel on polyphones.

Someone’s always playing Odhecaton strains,
Who cares, they’re always changing those instrumentation names:
We just want to sing here, knock those sackbuts off the page,
They call us a capella, while modal Ionians stole the stage,
Alfonso’s on organistrum, Praetorius likes continuo, don’t you remember:

We built this Chapel, we built this Chapel on polyphones.

We built this Chapel, we built this Chapel on polyphones
Built this Chapel, we built this Chapel on polyphones.
It’s just another Sunday, in a Papal church,
Haugen has the chokehold, and we just got the lurch,
Who counts the notes spaced along the bar,
Who wrecked our organ and replaced it with guitars?
Don’t tell us you like us, we’re just antiphonals
Looking for Palestrina, scholas, not just schools,

(Uncomfortable silence when they realize they don’t have any orchestral backup)

(Uhh…I’m looking out over that Pont Sant’ Angelo on another gorgeous sunny Sabbato and I’m seeing bumper to bumper pilgrims!)

Don't you remember (remember)
(Here’s your favorite camerata in your favorite pizzicato city,
The city by the Tiber, the city that prays, the city that never sleeps).
Vittoria does falsetto, we don’t use continuo, don’t you remember,
We built this Chapel, we built this Chapel on polyphones.

We built this Chapel, we built this Chapel on polyphones
Built this Chapel, we built this Chapel on polyphones.
We built this Chapel, we built this Chapel on polyphones.
We built this Chapel, we built this Chapel on polyphones
Built this Chapel, we built this Chapel on polyphones...

(fade out).

The execution of Louis XVI, 1792: today we celebrate other, less famous martyrs of that brutal hecatomb

The Horrors of September or, No, not that Ingrid

Well, if you remember some weeks ago, we ran into St. Magnus of Avignon. Today is his son's feast day. St. Agricola of Avignon is, among other things, patron saint of storks, and of good weather and rain. Nothing on if good weather means no rain, however. Today there's also a whole raft of martyrs of unknown date and provenance with some funky names: St. Hesychius, St. Menalippus, St. Pantagapes, as well as the seventh-century confessor and monk St. Nonossus, as well as two guys named Elpidius, one of whom has the emblem of a vine leaf in winter. There are also, most notably, the Martyrs of September, a group of 191 imprisoned priests and laymen (including Bl. Charles de la Calmette, Count of Valfons), brutally butchered by frenzied revolutionary mobs who broke into their cells in a wave of riots that rocked Paris on this day and the following in 1792 at the height of the Terror. They had refused to collaborate with the Civil Constitution on the Clergy, which would have put the Church under the thumb of the monstrous revolutionary government. They are also memorialized with another feast tomorrow. Let them, and the bloody tyranny they opposed, be remembered. Vive le roi, vive le Foi.

Also have a gander at this Imperial Catechism, showing the way a later despot, Napoleon, tried to bend the Church to his will, leading to the sufferings of another great martyr, this one the "dry martyr" Pope Pius VII.

Today is also the feast of St. Ingrid of Sweden, who has a peculiar resonance with me because first, she was the first Dominican nun in Sweden (go O.P.!), and secondly, Ingrid is a cool name, which reminds me of my favorite (if less than saintly) actress, the redoubtable (and late) Miss Bergman, also Swedish (hey, she played Joan of Arc, doesn't that count for something?) I guess those are hardly earth-shattering reasons to promote St. Ingrid's cultus (which seems to be largely unofficial anyway, and was extinguished by the Protestant iconoclasts long after her death) but still, she seems cool.

The Meeting of David and Abigail. Peter Paul Rubens. National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Fun with Sheep and Lighted Candles

Today, we have a rather interesting memorial listed in some calendars, that of the prophetess St. Abigail, wife of King David the Prophet. Old Testament saints are few and far-between on most calendars; in the west, the Maccabean Martyrs were the only so honored in the Tridentine rite (but for some reason were relegated to local calendars in 1969: so much for ecumenism). Farther on back, in western Europe during the Middle Ages, Abel's feast was celebrated on the second of January and Adam and Eve's on the vigil of Christmas. However, in the east, the Old Testament saints were widely honored, and still are in both the Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic church year. In eastern-influenced Venice one can find icons of the long-suffering St. Job (sometimes oddly conflated with St. Humphrey the nudist) and a church dedicated to Moses. Indeed, until the most recent edition of the Ramsgate Book of Saints, they were given equal billing with their more recent Christian cousins in the text, with references to St. Isaiah, St. Ezekiel, St. Zechariah, ad infinitum. Incidentally, today is also the feast of St. Joshua, Moses' successor and the first of the Judges of Israel, and also that of another judge, St. Gideon. We seem to be up to our neck in Israelites today, and I think I like it.

In this vein it is perhaps appropriate that St. Anna the Prophetess, one of the last saints of the old dispensation, be remembered today as well. She, in addition to her notable role at Christ's presentation in the Temple with St. Simeon Senex (meaning "old man" in Latin, the root of both senator and senile which isn't a surprise), also watched over the Virgin while She lived in the Temple previous to Her betrothal to Joseph.

More recently, today is also the feast of three different saints all named Giles. The most famous, also called Aegidius, seems to have some sort of weird association with sheep I can't quite fathom. According to one source, in Spain it "was formerly the custom to wash the rams and color their wool a bright shade on Giles' feast day, tie lighted candles to their horns, and bring the animals down the mountain paths to the chapels and churches to have them blessed." Frankly, I feel sorry for the sheep with that whole circus-esque death-defying flaming candles of doom hullabaloo. Among the Basques, today the shepherds return from the mountains and attend Mass with the utmost ceremony with their crooks and their best rams (which must be rather messy), kicking off a big day of processions, dancing, and more sheepish fun.

In England, convicted criminals were presented with a "St. Giles' bowl" of ale before they were hanged. He seems to be another one of those saints invoked against sterility, and is also invoked by people afraid of the night, lepers, the insane, cripples, handicapped people, spur-makers, people associated with sheep and rams in particular, epileptics, those breast-feeding (huh?), breast-cancer victims, and hermits, who probably need someone to talk to anyway. The other two Giles didn't do nearly as much and are rather on the esoteric side of hagiography. The only thing which really distinguishes one from the other is the friendship the Giles from Borgo San Sepolcro had with St. Arcanus, though bear in mind that Arcanus means something close to "obscure" in Latin. There's also St. Constantius today, a former bishop of Aquino mentioned by St. Gregory the Great, which suggests there must just be something holy in the groundwater there, what with a certain plus-sized Dominican being from that general area.

Sunday Mass: Basilica of the Sacred Heart

Opening Hymn: When in Our Music God is Glorified (Engleberg)
Gloria: New Mass for Congregations, Andrews
Responsorial Psalm: The just will live in the presence of the Lord, Batastini
Offertory Anthem: All My Hope on God is Founded, Howells
Sanctus, Memorial Acclamation, Amen, Agnus Dei: Mass for the City, Proulx
Communion Hymn: The vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel, Guimont
Communion Motet: The Call, Smith
Closing Hymn: I Sing the Mighty Power of God (Ellacombe)

Special Mass of the Day: Profession of Final Vows, Congregation of Holy Cross

Opening Hymn: All Creatures of Our God and King (Laast Uns Erfreuen)
Gloria: Notre Dame Mass, Isele
Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 116, Bower
Litany of the Saints: Becker (OCP)
Offertory Anthem: I Was Glad, Parry
Sanctus, Memorial Acclamation, Amen, Agnus Dei: Mass of Creation, Haugen
Communion Hymn: Gift of Finest Wheat, Kreutz/Westendorf
Communion Anthem: Ego Sum Panis Vivus, Palestrina
Closing Hymn: Lift High the Cross (Crucifer)

On the whole, a beautiful liturgy. Some of the music could've been a little better, but watching seven men dedicate their lives to Holy Cross, the first time I had been to such a ceremony, was quite inspiring. I know several good young (and old) Holy Cross priests, and am confident that these men will continue the recent improvements to Catholic identity here at Notre Dame and elsewhere.

A belated saints of the day post.......

Today has no universal feast, but the Martyrology contains 14 entries. Among the highlights:


1. Saints Felix and Adauctus, Roman martyrs who, side by side confessing Christ in chaste faith, side by side made haste as victors to Heaven.
2. Commemoration of the sixty martyrs who, at the colony of Suffetulana in Africa, having destroyed the image of Hermes, were killed by a pagan mob.
8. Saint Margaret Ward, English martyr of Tyburn who was killed uner Elizabeth for helping Father Richard Watson to escape Bridewelll Prison.

Prayerful Intercession
From the desk of the Shrine’s Censor Librorum, of sorts

Recently at the Shrine questions have arisen regarding the nature and efficacy of prayer. Of particular concern was the question as to whether or not prayer has any purpose that extends beyond conditioning ourselves to accept God’s will; specifically, does prayer change the world, or just those who pray?

The position has been put forth that our intercessions before God serve simply to prepare us to accept God’s will. This was particularly captured in the opinion that St. Monica’s tears did not really effect the conversion of St. Augustine, for example. However, I would like to address this belief by raising a few points for consideration. If there are any deficiencies in this little reflection, however, I am quite sure our readers will quickly bring them to light ;).

In the 1967 Apostolic Constitution Indulgentiarum Doctrina, Paul VI clarifies that the members of Christ’s body efficaciously pray for one another. By “efficaciously,” I mean that God acts in part because of the prayer of these Christians, and would not have acted without their prayers.

“5. For after [Christians] have been received into their heavenly home and are present to the Lord (11 Cor 5:8), through Him and with Him and in Him, they do not cease to intervene with the Father for us, showing forth the merits which they have won on earth through the one Mediator between God and Man, Jesus Christ (1 Tim 2:5), by serving God in all things and filling up in their flesh those things which are lacking of the sufferings of Christ for His body which is the Church (Col 1:24). Thus by their brotherly interest, our weakness is greatly strengthened…"

"6. The Church… appl[ies] the fruits of the Lord’s redemption to the individual faithful… leading them to cooperate in the salvation of their brothers. The Apostles themselves exhorted their disciples to pray for the salvation of sinners,” clearly, from the full context of the document, with the belief that these prayers would actually call down the graces of conversion.

Thus the Council of Trent was able to declare, in its twenty-fifth session, “it is good and beneficial to invoke [the saints] and to have recourse to their prayers, assistance and suport in order to obtain favors from God through His Son…”

Drawing on Pope Paul’s words, I would propose the following model to understand the nature of intercessory prayer in the Church. In the thread to which I am responding, there was universal agreement that prayer does not change the will of God. Nonetheless, there is a grand difference between the will of God and the state of the world; God can will the world to be one way when in fact the world as it actually exists is very different. I assume that God wants the entire world to be perfected in holiness, but I can tell you that I am not. Because of our free will, God permits the world to exist in a state which He does not desire it to exist. For this reason Our Lord instructed us to pray, “Thy will be done on earth.”

Respecting the dignity of our free will, God waits to execute His will until He can do so through His servants. This is, in a sense, the incarnational nature of Catholicism -- God works through Man, through Christ and His Body the Church. Therefore, it is the work of Christ (His paschal mystery, His passion and death) which makes the will of God real on fallen earth.

For example, before Christ came no one entered heaven. After Christ came, people could enter heaven. God’s will did not change; He always desired to save Creation. But it was not until after the work of Christ that redemption could take place. Before Christ‘s work, God wanted for forgive all humankind; after Christ, God wanted to forgive all humankind. His will did not change, but the reality did. It was only with Christ’s work that God’s will was MADE REAL.

Both Paul VI and John Paul II have in recent years reiterated the classic position that the work of Christ (which is the manner in which God’s will is made real on earth) is carried on and completed by the Church, which is the Body of Christ (cf. Col 1:23-24). As part of the Body of Christ, Christians continue the redemptive work which makes God’s will real on earth. This work consists in work and prayer, so that the works and prayers we offer to God are truly efficacious in making God’s will present. Without the work of the Church (that is, without the work of Christ in His mystical Body the Church), God’s will would not be made real. (Marialis Cultus, 19: “the Virgin-Church becomes herself a mother.... For by her preaching and by baptism she brings forth to a new and immortal life children who are conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of God.) Therefore, by the prayers and works of the Church, God’s will is realized, and we can truly say that our prayers effect the Kingdom of God and call down real grace and favors, rather than simply preparing us to receive these graces and favors.

In this way, for example, the tears and prayers of St. Monica did, as the Missal tells us, call down the mercy and grace of God.

God of mercy,
comfort of those in sorrow,
the tears of Saint Monica moved you
to convert her son Saint Augustine to the faith of Christ.
By their prayers, help us to turn from our sins
and to find your loving forgiveness.

St. Monica, baptized into the universal priesthood of Christ, served the mediator of Divine Will by her participation in the Body of Christ. It was immutably God’s will to save and bless Augustine, we might say, but it was the work of Christ, through the person of St. Monica (her prayer and tears), which made the will realized on earth. If Monica had not been open to serve as an instrument of Divine Will, can we really say that Augustine would ever have become a Saint? Because of her baptized participation in the redemptive work of God, saying that her tears moved God to convert Augustine is little different than saying that the Passion of Our Lord moved the Father to convert Augustine. Certainly it was always the Father’s will that Augustine be saved, but it was by the work of Christ (and the work of Christ in Monica and as applied by the Church of which Monica is part) that Augustine WAS converted.

A closing thought. At all times, but especially when speaking lofty principles such as immutability and Pauline co-redemption (Col 1:23) we must be careful not to surrender belief in a God who loves us as “abba,” as “daddy,” who really does delight in blessing his children in ways great and small, spiritual and physical. Off the top of my head I can recall two miracles mentioned by St. Therese in her “Story of a Soul.” The first was a Marian vision. The second, however, was a miracle she cherished far more: that God made snow fall on the day of her profession. And why shouldn’t it be the will of God that he loves to indulge even the smallest longings of his beloveds? To suggest otherwise may well approach Deism, which dismissed the active, material affect of God's intervention and intercession in the world as "un-rational."

“We pay God a great compliment when we ask great favors of him.”

PS - I look forward to any comments and criticisms of this post. However, due to the complex nature of the topic, all significant points made in the comment box MUST be backed up by a direct citation from Scripture, Church documents, or the Doctors of the Church. Any post which makes a significant claim without a specific citation risks deletion.

Seaside, Florida, two hours' drive from my home town and five minutes from the water

I'll be at the seashore today, enjoying one last gasp of the Florida sunshine. The town's an interesting one, Seaside, a perfect model of New Urbanist town planning and a modern interpretation of vernacular and classical traditional architecture; it's also where they filmed that wonderful movie The Truman Show.

Yes, I know, I'm going to the beach and I'm talking about houses and "The Cinema." Shame on me.

Anyway, enjoy St. Fiacre's Day in my absence! He's patron of gardening and taxi-drivers, so if you are going to take a cab to the local plant nursery, he's the one to call. He also is patron of hemorrhoids, hosiers, the piles, box-makers (huh?), tile makers and pewterers, as well as sterility, syphilis and venereal disease in general, but let's not go there, shall we? Also, for Sergei Eisenstein silent movie enthusiasts, today is the day the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates St. Alexander Nevsky's memory, but I always kinda have had a soft spot for his enemies the Teutonic Knights (hello, crusaders, big swords, chain mail, crosses...I don't see any problems here...yeah, yeah, I know, they were Germanic interlopers on the soil of Holy Mother Russia, yada yada yada...), so that's something else I'll just set aside for the time being... Incidentally, his son was St. Daniel of Moscow, which might be of interest to at least one member of this 'blog. Oh yeah, and Bl. Bronislava, a hermitess, is on today. She has a super-cool name: girls, why not consider her for your confirmation patron this year? I mean, she's holy, and Polish, and plus, her name makes her sound like she could beat the snot out of someone in a dark alley. What's not to like?

Vegetarianism, German Baroque and Three-Headed Saints

Fr. Rutler lets fly on Manichaean Vegetarians at Gerard Serafin's blog. Don't skip over the final sentence--but don't read it if you're eating blueberry yogurt because it stains when you spray it. Don Jim gives a hilarious commentary on my favorite Baroque church (likely to induce a coronary in Le Corbusier). He is right, you know: it is pretty little: which probably makes the claustrophobia even worse. Also, check out another post on Dappled Things concerning the wanderings of St. John's skull(s). Christopher may have had the face of a dog, but from the number of places that claim the Baptist's skull, well, he has had to have had at least three heads (which reminds me of a trippy-but-kinda-cool antique painting I once saw representing the Trinity). No, I don't think I'm going to take that ball and run with it.

Switching classes.............



Well, I decided that maybe a doctoral Greek seminar was not the best way to go for someone who doesn't want to be a Scripture scholar. Instead, I'm taking a philosophy seminar on the thought of Soren Kierkegaard. This nineteenth-century Danish philosopher is usually credited with having founded modern existential philosophy and ethics, or at least having developed the concepts that Aquinas laid down for this area. For those interested in John Paul II's theology of the body, Kierkegaard is key to this because existential ethics paved the way for phenomenology, the 20th century school of philosophy upon which the theology of the body is based. From my own perspective, Kierkegaard was an important influence on Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of, if not the greatest theologian of the last century, whom I hope to study in depth. In the class we'll be looking primarily at Kierkegaard's Works of Love, an important work that I read over the summer, not knowing I would take this class - it doesn't usually get regarded as Kierkegaard's most significant work, but my professor seems to think that maybe it ought to be. Whatever the case may be, this class should make an already interesting semester even more so.

Notre Dame graduate William Heyer's proposed design for a new Oratory to St. Philip Neri in Chicago

Traditional Church Architecture Alert

If you like Churches That Look Like Churches, and I do, have a browse around architect extraordinaire Professor Duncan Stroik's portfolio and weep for joy (as opposed to just plain weeping, which is an appropriate response to the work of the Rev. Father Richard "Dynamiter Dick" Vosko). Today, on St. Sabina's feast, check out his plans for Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity, featured here before, at Thomas Aquinas College, a Spanish Baroque structure with an interior in part inspired by Santa Sabina in Rome. Professor Stroik is a long-standing fixture at Notre Dame, one of the first of the traditional architects to be invited to teach here after architectural genius Professor Thomas Gordon Smith brought about his great classical reforms in the curriculum in the early part of the last decade. Also have a look at the supercool stuff by various architects and students here, especially Michael Imber's designs for Our Lady of Corpus Christi parish in Texas and the proposed St. Philip Oratory for the Chicago Loop, seen above. Sweet! Church building and art may have gotten worse of late, but the tide, hopefully, is starting to turn.

Tomb of St. Ambrose of Milan

Great Churches of the World:
Sant' Ambrogio, Milan

Sant' Ambrogio, the oldest and most important of Milan's churches, was founded in 379 by its titular saint, Ambrose, then the formidable bishop of the city and baptizer of St. Augustine. Today he lies beneath its altar in a dim and solemn crypt. The whole church is filled with the grime and weight of history, making a visit there a contemplative and almost melancholic experience. As you approach it through the arcades of its atrim, the church's facade is low and solid with its great round Romanesque arches and mouldering brickwork, sparsely decorated save for weathered marble spoliae and a few sinister festoons of spiky ironwork. Two heavy Lombard-style square belfries flank the immense triangular gable, dating from the twelfth and eleventh centuries, but seeming even earlier, recalling some tarnished version of the glories of Ravenna. A great octagonal lantern marks the crossing, ringed with delicate arcading. Inside, you glimpse sparks of gold mosaic in the apse amid the darkness. You see the massive tenth-century pulpit that is set atop an ancient Roman sarcophagus, showing both the triumph of the Faith and the inescapability of history, and the death that makes life into history. Wonders stand in the farthest nooks and crannies, like the Sacello di San Vittore, decorated with stiff Byzantine mosaic'd saints in splendid blue and gold.

It is a trip back in time, to Old St. Peter's, to Old St. Peter's after it had stood for a thousand years at the dawn of the Renaissance, and like St. Peter's, the memory of its titular saint is omnipresent. He lies below in a new tomb, placed there after his relics were re-unearthed in the 1850s. It stands in the low-vaulted crypt, in a magnificent and strange glass ciborium framed with magnificent silver angels and arcane Greek inscriptions. Behind the glass lie the dusty, age-picked bones of Ambrose, his mitred skull giving off a strange, varnished gleam in the murky light. Faded scarlet vestments cover in baroque brocade cloth the recumbent corpse, flanked by the even more ancient outlines of St. Gervase and St. Protase, their bare brows crowned with gilded circlets, the golden martyr's palm clutched in what once was a hand. Their relics were discovered during his rule, fitting to lay beside him in death in recognition of his holiness and their bloody witness. And after you leave, there is something strange when you, filled with ecclesial quiet, meditate on his ancient heroism and holiness walking through the teeming, student-crowded Bramante cloisters of the Catholic university that stands nearby.

Very interesting comments-box discussion on prayer, grace, changing God's mind and other gripping theological issues going on at my entry for St. Monica's day. Don't miss it.

On this feast of Santa Sabina, why not do the Dominican thing and re-read Dan's account of his visit there as part of our Great Churches series? Of course, very soon I too will be able to give my thoughts on that very same church! I leave for Rome on the fourth of this coming month, and so expect the unexpected with my blogging accounts of my Roman adventures!

Russian nineteenth century icon of the head of St. John

Today is the feast of the beheading of St. John the Baptist. He was decapitated by order of the tetrarch Herod Antipas after being imprisoned by condemning the tetrarch's illicit marriage to the former wife of his half-brother, Philip. Herod himself seemed to take strange pleasure in hearing the Baptist's sermons, but Herodias, his wife, and her daughter Salome, were greatly perturbed by this and schemed to have him killed. The famous story of the prurient dance of the Seven Veils and Herod's rash and criminal oath to his step-daughter are already well-known. The story itself has been told and re-told and had a peculiar (and perhaps somewhat grotesque) resonance among the decadent authors of the turn of the last century, having been celebrated in Richard Strauss's Salome which perhaps over-romanticizes the tale, as well as the strange and sinister illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley for Oscar Wilde's own French-language retelling of the story (Wilde himself threatened to defect to France if his strange play was banned in England). The decapitation of the Forerunner also plays a great role in the Grail legends, and of the four Grail hallows (the chalice, the lance, the platter and the sword), one of them, the sword, is almost always said to be that which decapitated him, while in several versions the platter is said to also be that on which his head was placed after his death. He is the patron of the Knights Hospitallers, now known as the Order of Malta, whose three-story building in Rome is considered the smallest sovereign nation on earth.

Today is also the feast of St. Merry or Medericus of Autun, an eighth-century Benedictine whose reputation for holiness became so troublesome he actually ran away from the monastery to become a hermit. He later returned after his brethren discovered his hideout. He is shown in art as an abbot with prisoners and chains near him. He may also be shown experiencing a vision of God the Father or teaching monks. Today is also the feast of St. Sabina, the titular of the Dominican church of Santa Sabina in Rome, and indeed St. Dominic is said to have been greatly devoted to her. The basilica is said to have been built on the site of her house, as before her martyrdom, she was a rich Roman widow who gave over her residence to Christian worship during the persecutions. A patroness of Rome, she also watches over children who have difficulty in walking and of housewives and is invoked against hemorrhage. Today is also the feast of St. Sebbe, King of the East Saxons, the husband of St. Osyth and a hermit after resigning his crown in 694. He is said to be the founder of the first monastery at Westminster. The Catholic Forum saints' calender also lists a saint venerated today named "Hyperdulia," but that has got to be some sort of weird mistake. I mean, really.

Subtle as Snakes

According to someone or something called the Truth Laid Bear (oh, now I get it), Holy Whapping is, in the Blog ecosystem, a slithering reptile. Huh. Who'd've thunk it?

Sublimity and Beauty: The Chair of Peter

Towards an Incarnational Architecture:
Part V: A Phenomenology of the Sublime and the Beautiful

Author's Note: Originally, Part V was intended to be devoted to the Trinity, human and divine relationships, and their manifestation in architecture in order to help bring the soul to the ascent through sursumactivity. However, I realize that perhaps I should touch upon this topic first before continuing. [See Parts I, II, III and IV of this series].

Over the last three centuries, a debate has raged in the realm of aesthetics concerning the nature of beauty. The Renaissance spoke of beauty as a fixed, measured, and almost sacral thing, defined by the canons and traditions of the ancients and tempered by the love of God, a thing of contemplation. With the coming of Baroque in the Church, this abstract, almost Platonic view of beauty was replaced by a desire to seek an emotional and intellectual response from the viewer in grasping the whole sum of the building, the concetto or focus of the whole structure, and thus help lead them, by this half-artificial ecstasy, further towards heaven. However, by the time of the Romantics, neither Teresian ecstasy nor quiet Augustinian contemplation was the ultimate goal of art and architecture. Instead, it was to seek out the Sublime.

Chesterton once criticized the over-used word sublime, saying that saying "It is sublime" was inferior to saying "It is beautiful." One stated, truly, that the person viewing the object felt sublime, rather than appreciating the objective nature of the object, which is beauty, not "sublimity." Herein lies the problem with the search for the sublime that obsessed poets and artists from Wordsworth to Turner and beyond to even the Impressionists: it hinges on feelings, and feelings are notoriously slippery things in a fallen world.

The sublime was a feeling of great awe, sometimes verging on fear; there was a hint always of Thanatos amid the Eros among the Romantics with their invented Gothic claustrophobias and morbid ruinous mansions, from the perversions of Beckford to the grotesqueries of Swinburne. The sublime was, at heart, beneath the sacral trappings, a form of titillation, voyeurism: people wanted to be stunned and shocked. The same emotion that caused people to tramp through the Alps leads people to defy death in the neatly hermetic capsules of thrill rides at amusement parks today.

Awe is a wonderful feeling; however, except in the presence of the Divine it never remains steady. Humanity is fickle, and novelty is the only thing that keeps it thrilled. Thus, as the decades passed, the search for the sublime became an all-consuming search for the latest fads, both decadent and wholesome. It became obsessed with the Zeitgeist, with Impressionism and Art Nouveau riding the crest of popularity until they were forgotten. While at first much beauty came of that search--no man can stand before a Monet and not feel God's hand on his shoulder--humanity became bored with beauty, and soon sought to create the ugliest things possible to further thrill themselves.

This is why the art of our epoch includes sliced cows in formaldehyde.

This is a very difficult conclusion to stomach. Should we simply throw out all the good things that have come from this modernity? Certainly the more rancid fruit of the Sublime can be thrown out without a second glance, Jackson Pollock, Gehry, and whatever performance artist du jour is soaking the NEA. But do we cast Tolouse Lautrec's posters on the bonfire of the vanities, burn Degas's sweet ballerinas at the stake, take a wrecking ball to the Horta house? Are we morally obliged to turn our back on the last two hundred years of art?

Mercifully, no. Monet and Manet still had not fully taken on the consequences of this artistic fall from grace, and the residual ghost of beauty still hung over their works. As the centuries past, Beauty's spirit withered, and thus we got things like Francis Bacon and excrement sealed in jars, and scatological Virgin Maries.

This does not mean that rush, that holy rush of excitement we get when we first glimpse the Grand Canyon or see the mountain valleys at our feet is blasphemous. In art, the sublime is, at its core, still something worthy to seek, as is the beautiful. However, one cannot exist without the other. Pope John Paul II's Christian phenomenology speaks of a subjective response to an objective truth, and both are necessary to understand that truth. The man trained in virtue, to use an Aristotelian trope, will love truth with the intensity of the romantic, and he will see true beauty with the awe of the sublime.

The underlying objective rationality of good art is ratified by our subjective and deep response within our souls. Likewise, the sublime within our souls is given resonance by our scholarly and intellectual contemplation of an object. Faith and reason, justice and peace, ecstasy and silence. The concetto of the Baroque, the iconographies of Gothic: both unite truth and beauty, and only there can we find them in their most pure and complete form. It is to these we must look in the future in our search for an Incarnational Architecture.

The sublime seemingly responds to many things: chacon son gout. Taste is fickle, yes, and it is dangerous to tie it down to the timeless canons of classicism. However, even allowing that our minds, as well as our hearts, are marred by the fallenness of the world, there is an underlying frame to all that is beautiful. The pale Nordic maiden and the Asiatic beauty ultimately have the same harmonies and resonances in their proportions. Every human body follows a divine logic in the way it is knit: they even say that, by the scale of the length of our own feet, each one of us has the ideal height of six feet. Thus, the Renaissance philosopher and architect Alberti speaks of concinnitas, "sympathy and consonance of the parts" (ix, 5), and it is this that ultimately underlies the beauty in the earliest paintings of Lascaux to the last canvas of Gaughin, and especially all that lies between. And this beauty, however flawed, ultimately is a response to our own need for the most perfect "ancient Beauty" that St. Augustine sought.

Thus, it is right and just that we be moved by many different beauties in art, as long as we seek to see the links between them. Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto. I am a human being: nothing human is foreign to me. Nothing human is foreign to me because God created it and redeemed it by Himself taking on humanity. Let us search for the sublime, but let us never forget to return to see the beauty that lies beneath it after the thrill has been exhausted.

A detail of Botticelli's St. Augustine

Like Mother, Like Son

Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient, O Beauty so new. Too late have I loved you! You were within me but I was outside myself, and there I sought you! In my weakness I ran after the beauty of the things you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The things you have made kept me from you - the things which would have no being unless they existed in you! You have called, you have cried, and you have pierced my deafness. You have radiated forth, you have shined out brightly, and you have dispelled my blindness. You have sent forth your fragrance, and I have breathed it in, and I long for you. I have tasted you, and I hunger and thirst for you. You have touched me, and I ardently desire your peace.

--St. Augustine

The feast of St. Augustine of Hippo, bishop, doctor of Grace, father of the Church, is remembered today, following on the heels of his mother's memorialization yesterday. St. Augustine died this day at Hippo in the year 430 after a life full of virtue, prayer and scholarship, as well as his earlier life of debauchery, Manichaenism and a common-law marriage. Like St. Peter, he is living proof that when one is open to the grace of God, all things are possible. He is patron of brewers, sore eyes, and numerous dioceses, including St. Augustine in Florida, Kalamazoo and Superior in Wisconsin. He is the ultimate origin of the epigram, familiar in misquoted form as "When in Rome, do as the Romans do," in reference to his observance of local fasting and feasting customs as he travelled from diocese to diocese. He is also one of the saints depicted in the wall-paintings of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame.His emblem is a flaming heart, recalling his words: Our hearts were made for You, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in you.

Today is also the feast of St. Edmund Arrowsmith, one of the forty martyrs of England and Wales, executed today in 1628 by being hanged, drawn and quartered. His hand is preserved at St. Oswald's in Ashton-at-Makerfeld, England. His birth name was Brian, but he preferred his confirmation name of Edmund instead. So today, all Edmunds, Eds, Eddies and Brians out there, rejoice in the memory of their patron.

Today we also recall the Egyptian ex-robber, monk and martyr St. Moses the Black; St. Julian of Auvergne; the Elizabethan ex-Protestant cleric Bl. William Dean and a St. Vivian, who seems to be identical with St. Bibiana or Vibiana, formerly patroness of the ill-fated old Cathedral at Los Angeles and invoked to ward off hangovers, which is what ensues after having seen the new Cathedral there.

Interesting story I heard last night........


Apparently this is the most happening place on the Chicago campus.

The University of Chicago has had 473 convocations in its history (one each quarter of the academic year, plus on special occasions). Some students scanned in the texts of all the speeches given at each of these convocations, and were able to do term searches. The words "Plato" and "Aristotle," for example, came up very often, but when they typed in the word "fun"........nothing. For those familiar with Chicago's reputation, this won't come as a surprise, but I find it quite amusing, especially in the face of those who say the Notre Dame administration won't let us have any fun.

I know alot of our readers have been following this case

Finally, Gov. Jeb Bush has made an attempt to intervene in the Terry Schiavo case. Keep praying, though, as the Florida court so far doesn't seem inclined to honor his request, and still intend on setting a date for her feeding tube to be removed.

Fr. George William Rutler and Ann Coulter in the same room. With cocktails.

Somehow, though, it sounds to me like the beginning of a joke about a bartender. All for a good cause, of course: restoring the splendid Church of Our Saviour (S-A-V-I-O-U-R) in New York. Sounds like an evening of fun. (I wonder what the liberal equivalent would be, Janeane Garofalo and Gene Robertson eating tofu together to raise funds for the repair of the Taj Mahoney?). I guess it proves that even conversion to Catholicism can't rid an ex-Anglican of his love for martinis. I kid. I make joke. Miss Coulter, you can remove your hand from my windpipe now.

Marcel Duchamp’s Dadaist painting L.H.O.O.Q. I don’t get it, either

The Da Vinci Code Cracked, at Long Last

Carl E. Olsen at Envoy Encore, the "banana republic" of Catholic blogs (according to Mark Shea), finally does all Catholics and historians and Catholic historians a great service by refuting the Übercrap known as The Da Vinci Code. He plans to post even more on the subject soon. Keep it coming. I love a good historical conspiracy thriller as much as the next man, but both the history and the writing and the sanctimonious tone of this ponderous tome were utterly unbearable (robed albino Opus Dei assassins? Gee whiz...). I, much to my regret, wasted an evening in the airport reading it after having exhausted my portable library. You may wonder why I read it in the first place; I'm not sure myself. I was out of books, and stuck overnight at an airport with an indefinitely-delayed plane, and had finished my edifying reading during the wait. Sadly, I didn’t have my backup books, either. So I dropped by the bookstore, I see art, I see mystery, I see some hints of conspiracy and the Templars, and then I think, hey, it’s like Foucault's Pendulum. Hardly. In your dreams, Dan Brown.

Foucault was weird and paranoid but at least it didn't take itself so seriously: plus it was written by someone with an attention-span longer than a ten-year-old. It also may have been anticlerical but it pretty much smeared everyone and had a serious undercurrent of self-critical satire regarding our own age's fixation with hidden plots and secret societies, something the deadly dull Da Vinci desperately needed. Plus, heck, Umberto Eco is a real intellectual instead of a pseudo or a posseur. It got to the point I was so bored with Da Vinci I started doodling in the end-pages and writing sarcastic remarks in the margins, something I never do. Amy Welborn has already done her best to point out the book’s numerous shortcomings in her on-target review, while the boberia was so bad has even managed to get a refutation in the secular press, which comes as a great relief. Finally. Mr. Dan Brown, please, before you write another horrible novel with yourself as the thinly-disguised "hero" and go off on another tangent on the frickin' sacred feminine, please remember we Catholics invented it. Ever heard of the Virgin Mary?

St. Monica. Icon by Lu Bro.

Mothers Know Best

A blessed St. Monica's Day to all and sundry, especially Andy on his birthday and confirmation name day (well, in pectore, at least). St. Monica of Tagaste is living proof that a persistent mother is always heard, by both God and her son: her prayers and supplications after seventeen years of sadness and struggle finally led her son, St. Augustine, to become a Catholic after a long stretch as a Manichee (a long stretch in which he even fathered an illegitimate child, Adeodatus, who later was himself canonized). She also secured the conversion of her pagan husband, Patricius, who died shortly after being baptized in much happiness. St. Monica herself overcame many problems of her own, including what seems to have been a youthful addiction to alcohol, as well as the insults of her servants and finally perservered to attain the crown of heaven as the prize of all her sufferings. She is, among other things, patroness of alcoholics, victims of verbal abuse and disappointing children.

Rather interestingly, yesterday (not today as I thought) in the Carmelite calendar, was the Feast of the Transverberation of the Heart of St. Teresa of Avila. I feel bad I missed the bus. Today is also the feast of the Persian St. Anthusa, who was sewn into a sack and thrown into a well. Also today we remember St. David Lewis, a priest-martyr of the Titus Oates plot in England; as well as the Welsh hermit St. Decuman; St. Margaret the Barefoot, another patient mother and husband; St. Ebbo of Sens; Bl. Ebbo of Hamburg; Bl. Dominic of the Mother of God, a Passionist apostle to ninteenth-century England; and St. Gebhard of Konstanze, who has the singular attribute in art of a skull wearing a papal tiara. Today was also recalled in some calendars the spurious "Little Saint Hugh" of Lincoln, the less said of whose legend, probably the better. He is not to be confused of his full-size counterpart, St. Hugh of Lincoln, who was a bishop who had a pet goose who liked to eat from the sleeve of his robe.

Cryptology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Here you can find a fascinating article on the origins of secret codes developed and used during the Renaissance. As someone who is not very good at figuring out cryptologies but finds them fascinating (I spent a good part of my afternoon experimenting with Abbot Trithemius of Spannheim's polyalphabetic tabula recta), this is a very interesting and informative article, detailing everything from substitution codes to messages hidden in musical notation, knot cyphers and even a primitive form of binary encoding! Most ingenious. Enigma has got nothing on these guys.

Moretto da Brescia. Allegory of Faith. c. 1530. In the Hermitage, St. Petersburg

Holy Orthodoxy

From Cardinal Ratzinger: "For the early Christians, there was no difference between what today is distinguished as orthodoxy and orthopraxis, as right doctrine and right action. Indeed, when this distinction is made, there generally is a suggestion that the word orthodoxy is to be disdained: those who hold fast to rigid doctrine are seen as people of narrow sympathy, rigid, potentially intolerant [...]. Such a [distinction] would have been incomprehensible and unacceptible for those in the ancient Church, for they rightly understood the word "orthodoxy" not to mean "right doctrine" but [...] the authentic adoration and glorification of God. They were convinced that everything depended on being in the right relationship with God, on knowing what pleases Him and what one can do to respond to Him in the right way. For this reason, Israel loved the law: from it, they knew God's will, they knew how to live justly and how to honor God in the right way: by acting in accord with His will, bringing order into the world, opening it to the transcendent." Thus Ratzinger.

Frater Shortstop

Oh, from the otherwise unremarkable comic strip Kudzu today. The local Protestant preacher's amateur baseball team is facing off against some Catholic monks.

PREACHER: Those Trappists are a bunch of big show-offs!
PLAYER: They're disciplined, all right--you mean the Gregorian infield chatter!?
PREACHER: The illuminated stat sheets!

The Martyrdom of the Theban Legion. St. Alexander of Bergamo, commemorated today, was a member, though he escaped their torture only to relent and lay down his life for Christ soon afterwards. From Jacopo Pontormo's painting (1531) at the Pitti Palace, Florence.

Today is one of those days on the sanctoral cycle where there are so many possibilities, it's hard to pick a favorite. There are numerous early martyrs commemorated today. Among others, there's St. Alexander of Bergamo, who is associated with the legendary Theban legion of St. Maurice; St. Ireneus and St. Abundius of Rome, who was drowned in the Roman sewers; St. Adrian of Nicomedia, husband of St. Natalia and patron saint of arms dealers, soldiers and butchers; and the relatively late St. Victor of Cerezo, who was crucified by the Muslims in North Africa around 950. There's also St. Gelasinus of Heliopolis, a Phonecian actor stoned to death on stage (while in a bathtub, no less) in 297 (tough crowd), who sounds eerily like yesterday's comedic convert, Genesius of Rome. We also recall Bl. Thomas Percy, martyred under Elizabeth in 1572 and the bishop Bl. Vyvain of York, who died more peacefully before him in 1285. On the calendar today is also St. Teresa of Jesus Journet e Ibars, a Catalonian nun and foundress from the nineteenth century who is patroness of people rejected by religious orders, old people and pensioners. On the Russian Calendar, a post-schism monk with the unfortunate name of Adrian of Uglich is recalled today, though he also has a feast-day on something called Cheesefare Sunday. We also, more importantly, recall the martyred Pope St. Zephyrinus today, an early pastor of the universal Church who endured the ridicule of heretics, the fall of Tertullian to the Montanists, and the persecutions of the Romans. A most noble pontiff.

A new semester begins......

And here's the list of classes that will be keeping me busy:

PLS 341: Fine Arts TH 9:30=10:45
PLS 343: Mechanics/Life Sciences MWF 8:30-9:20
PLS 347: Ethics MW 11:00-12:15
PLS 381: Great Books Seminar III TH 1:05-2:45
THEO 610A: Advanced Greek MW 3:00-4:15
Directed Readings on the Enyclicals of John Paul II: TBA

"Inclusivized" Hymns and other nonsense............

Today we had combined choir rehearsal for the opening school year Mass, including practice of a version of "All Creatures of Our God and King" that replaces all instances of the phrase, "O Praise Him," with another "Alleluia." Besides simply being unnecessary and a shot at the faterhood of God, the change also causes the song to make no sense. The verses are addressed as a command to those "all creatures" to praise God; as far as I can tell, "Alleluia" is not an imperative verb, and certainly not with respect to the subject of the command. The whole affair is pretty ridiculous, especially since we do the real, non-inclusived version of this hymn at Easter each year - it seems that the whole student body (or faculty) can't deal with this. Appealing to the lowest common denominator, or most easily offended, is one of my pet peeves in youth ministry, and it does creep into the atmosphere here at times. In the first category, place our constant use of the "Mass of Creation" at schoolwide Masses, when there are plenty of other well-known or easily learnable settings out there.

More Commentary on Theology of the Body

Anonymous the Elder, I'm terribly sorry about the delay in my response about Theology of the Body below. Things have been a bit crazygonuts around here. I've written some more thoughts on the subject. Fellow Whapsters, please feel free to chime in at the comments box under the post entitled "They're Using Coconuts!"

El Greco, St. Louis of France with His Son Philip III; at the Louvre, Paris

Rex Christianissimus

A happy (and slightly belated) St. Louis's Day to all, especially Franciscans, Missouri residents, and French kings in our audience. St. Louis IX, son of Bl. Blanche of Castille (whose strong personality irritated him), was a noble paragon of Christian monarchy, a friend of St. Thomas Aquinas, an exemplar of chivalry in his crusading spirit, and notable for his humility. After building the gem-like court chapel of Ste. Chapelle to house the holy relics of Christ's passion he brought back from the Levant, St. Louis walked in procession in sackcloth, bearing the reliquary on his shoulder. St. Louis also once said, to an impious courtier who posed him the question of whether it would be worse to be a leper or a mortal sinner, "he is healed of leprosy in his body; but when a man who has committed a mortal sin dies he cannot know of a certainty that he has in his lifetime repented in such sort that God has forgiven him; wherefore he must stand in great fear lest that leprosy of sin last as long as God is in Paradise." Thus St. Louis. He died today in the year 1270 at Tunis on the Barbary coast, and is invoked by parishioners of the archdiocese of St. Louis, barbers, builders, button makers, construction workers, Crusaders, dying children, those in difficult marriages, distillers, embroiderers, French monarchs, grooms, haberdashers, hairdressers, hair stylists, kings, masons, needle workers, parents, parents of large families, prisoners, sculptors, sick people, soldiers, stone masons, stonecutters and tertiaries. Charpentier wrote a splendid hymn in his honor entitled Dies Tubae. St. Louis was also the patron of a shortlived Spanish mission, San Luis de Talimali, situated near my hometown of Tallahassee, which was burned to the ground in 1704 by British soldiers and their Creek allies.

Today is also the feast of St. Genesius the Comedian, the noted legendary martyr who converted to Christianity while on stage in the midst of a pagan Roman farce mocking the Church. He is patron of, among other things, comedians, torture victims, and lawyers, which perhaps suggests the Church has a bigger sense of humor than that She is usually credited with. Today is also the feast of St. Genesius of Arles, another martyr; the nun St. Hunegund; St. Joseph Calasanz, founder of the Piarists; Bl. Maria of the Translation of the Holy Sacrament, from Argentina; and lastly the Constantinopolitan nun St. Patricia, whose blood is preserved in Naples and liquefies miraculously around the time of her feast-day. Naples and environs are a site of many blood relic prodigies; the most famous is St. Januarius, whose blood liquefies several times yearly. In addition to St. Patricia's, the blood of St. Pantaleon kept at Ravello (also, unfortunately, the adopted hometown of Gore Vidal) changes from brown to red on his feast-day. I actually saw the blood with my own eyes on my travels; it is kept in a glass phial and remains liquid much of the year, a dark, murky brown, and dew often fogs the upper part of the container. It is a strange thing to see.

Due to the popularity of my last post (what do you mean I'm not humble??), here's another one.

A Dominican, a Benedictine and a Baptist preacher are all fishing in a boat in the middle of a small lake. Around noon, the Dominican says, "I'm hungry. I think I'll go to shore and get a sandwich." So he steps out of the boat, walks across the water and goes to the shop on shore. A few minutes later he comes out with a sandwich, walks across the water, sits down in the boat and starts eating.

A while later, the Benedictine says, "I'm thirsty. I think I'll go to shore and get a coke." So he steps out of the boat, walks across the water and goes to the shop on shore. A few minutes later he comes out with a coke, walks across the water, sits down in the boat and starts drinking.

The Baptist preacher starts thinking to himself. "All denominations are equal right? If they can do it why can't I?" He says, "I need some more bait." So he steps out of the boat, and sinks like a rock.

While he's under water, the Dominican leans over to the Benedictine and says, "Do you think we should tell him about the stepping stones?"

A severe scheduling conflict



The idea couldn't be better: "For those with serious Hobbit habits longing to venture into Middle Earth for more than a few hours, New Line plans to screen all three films back-to-back-to-back on December 16 in a daylong marathon that will carry over with The Return of the King's global release on December 17."

The timing couldn't be worse... finals week.
I must be obsessed, because I'm still trying to figure out if I could possibly swing it. Who needs to study anyway, right?

Thanks to Dom Bettinelli for the link.

On a side note, shouldn't the trailer be out by now?

At the Dome again, Just can't wait to be back at the Dome again...



After a rather extended blogging hiatus (it's kind of tough when one's computer is packed up somewhere), I have returned to The 'Bend. Since attending the much missed 10:00 Basilica Mass (see Dan's post below), I've been shelving my beloved books, hanging up my Pope on a Slope poster (You know you're a Catholic Nerd when...), and just making the place homey in general. At any rate, my new and improved blogging (now with ND news!) should be picking up again in a day or two. Until then, happy St. Bartholomew's Day!

Mass of the Day

Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Notre Dame, Indiana (Televised on Hallmark Channel)
Opening Hymn: Joyful, Joyful We Adore You (Hymn to Joy)
Gloria: New Mass For Congregations, Andrews
Responsorial Psalm: Taste and see the goodness of the Lord (Proulx)
Alleluia: Murray, OSB
Offertory Anthem: Cantique de Jean Racine, Faure
Sanctus/Memorial Acclamation/Amen/Agnus Dei: Proulx, Mass for the City
Communion Hymn: Take and Eat, Joncas
Communion Motet: Ego Sum Panis Vivus, Palestrina
Closing Hymn: In Christ There is no East or West (McKee)

St. Rose of Lima. Bartolome Esteban Murillo, undated. Museo Lazaro Galdiano, Madrid.

And a happy St. Rose of Lima's day to St. Blog's Parish, especially to all Dominican tertiaries, to Emily on her middle-name-day and to the three generations of Rosas among my relatives. St. Rose, baptized Isabel, was given her more well-known name at Confirmation, a sacrament dispensed to her by none other than Bishop St. Turibius de Mogrovenjo, and later went on, after founding the first social work institutions in Peru and receiving invisible stigmata and a mystical marriage from Christ, to become the first canonized Saint of the Americas, proclaimed in 1671 by Pope Clement X. In addition to being patroness of Peru, Central America, the Americas, Latin America, florists, embroiderers, needleworkers, South America, and the Phillipines, she is also the patroness of those ridiculed for their piety, a protectress I'm sure my fellow Whapsters can appreciate. Check out this image of her from Notre Dame's Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

Today is also the feast of a St. Zaccheus, who may either be the Gospel figure or the martyred deacon Zaccheus whose feast day is more typically celebrated with his cousin Alphaeus on November 17. Today is also the day which recalls St. Ebbe or Aebbe the Younger, an abbess of a double monastery at Coldingham in Scotland, who with her nuns was burned to death by Viking raiders on 2 April 870 after she and her charges had mutilated themselves to escape being raped. Lastly, today is the feast of Bl. James of Mevania (or Bevagna), a Dominican friar known for his life of strict poverty and has the peculiar honor of having been beatified (or at least having his cult confirmed) by two popes on two separate occasions. Well, why not?

So it's a spin off of another joke, but it's still funny. Also check out the Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club


Karl Rahner, Hans Kung and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger all die on the same day, and
go to meet St. Peter to know their fate.

St. Peter approaches the three of them, and tells them that he will interview each
of them to discuss their views on various issues.

He then points at Rahner and says "Karl! In my office..." After 4 hours, the door
opens, and Rahner comes stumbling out of St. Peter's office. He is highly
distraught, and is mumbling things like "That was the hardest thing I've ever done!
How could I have been so wrong! So sorry...never knew..." He stumbles off into
Heaven, a testament to the mercy of Our God.

St. Peter follows him out, and sticks his finger in Kung's direction and "Hans! You're
next..." After 8 hours, the door opens, and Kung comes out, barely able to stand.
He is near collapse with weakness and a crushed spirit. He , too, is mumbling
things like "That was the hardest thing I've ever done! How could I have been so
wrong! So sorry...never knew..." He stumbles off into Heaven, a testament to the
mercy of Our God.

Lastly, St. Peter, emerging from his office, says to Cardinal Ratzinger, "Joseph,
your turn." TWELVE HOURS LATER, St. Peter stumbles out the door, apparently
exhausted, saying "That's the hardest thing I've ever done..."

Coronation of Mary by Enguerrand Quarton (1410-1461), 1454.

Regina Coeli Laetare, Alleluja

Today we remember the Queenship of Mary, promulgated by Pope Pius XII in 1954 in his encyclical Ad Caeli Reginam: "[T]he Blessed Virgin Mary should be called Queen, not only because of her Divine Motherhood, but also because God has willed her to have an exceptional role in the work of our eternal salvation." And furthermore, he tells us, "We ask that on the feast day be renewed the consecration of the human race to the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Upon this is founded a great hope that there may arise an era of happiness which will rejoice in the triumph of religion and Christian peace. Therefore let all approach, with greater confidence than ever before, to the throne of mercy and grace of our Queen and Mother, to beg help in difficulty, light in darkness and solace in trouble and sorrow." Thus Pius. As a member of the Knights of the Immaculata, who make the consecration to Jesus Christ through the Virgin, I can think of no more fitting devotion.

Today is also the feast of St. Gunifort of Pavia, an Englishman martyred at Pavia in unknown times and circumstances. His legends resemble that of the curious figure of St. Richard the King from Lucca, and by no means should be confused with the spurious "St." Guinefort who seems to have been a greyhound (why do I keep bringing that up? Because I am incorrigible).

Today we also recall St. John Kemble and St. John Wall, two of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales who were executed for their alleged complicity in the trumped-up Titus Oates plot in 1678. Also on the calendar today are St. Sigfrid of Wearmouth, a Benedictine abbot who died this day in 686 and St. Arnulf of Eynesbury, a hermit who seems to have been forgotten about the turn of the last millenium and may actually be identified with St. Arnulf or Arnold of Metz, the patron saint of beer and protector of brewers.

Lastly, today is the feast day of the ninth-century churchman St. Andrew of Ireland, sometimes called Andrew of Fiesole or of Tuscany. He seems to have been an Irish travelling-companion of St. Donatus of Fiesole and later his archdeacon or the restorer of the abbey of San Martino in Mensula. In art, he is portrayed as a deacon curing a paralytic girl. Sometimes he is shown appearing to a sleeping priest; with his sister St. Brigid miraculously transported to his death-bed by angels; or with an Irish wolfhound at his feet. (What is it with dogs and saints this week, anyway?) His cultus is largely confined to the environs of Florence.

Nonetheless, our primary joy today flows from Mary: Ora pro nobis Deum. Alleluja!

"Show Thyself as a Mother!": The Miraculous Lactation of St. Bernard, by Alonso Cano, 1650, in the Prado, Madrid

"I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.

"I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night. I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them?"

--Canticle of Canticles v, 1-5

"They're Using Coconuts!"

In thiiiiiis corner, Mark "The Albino Mole Rat" Shea... In the otherrrrrr, the corpse of His Grace the late Archbishop Marcel "Not Marcel Marceau that Stupid Mime Who Was Probably a Heretic Anyway" Lefevbre... Fr. Johansen has a splendid look at the major Rad-Trad smackdown going on at Mark Shea's blog concerning Theology of the Body and Greg Popcack. I don't have the strength anymore to follow it myself as it's all too depressing, but his more humorous digest of the latest round of shouting-matches sounds about right. Suffice to say, my position is thus: Lefevbre, if you mess-a with the Theology of the Body, I break-a you face, even if you're speaking in flawless Latin and surrounded by lovely clouds of incense. However, I lack the initiative or energy to throw myself against Mark's wild detractors.

I realize that not all who attack the Theo of the Body are Lefevbrists, and not all Lefevbrists necessarily dislike the Theo of the Body...but the attacks have been coming from a RadTrad quarter...so sorry if my snap judgement is given to stereotyping. Whatever the case, Fr. Johansen manages to cheer me up. An excerpt:

"Don't you eroticize the Blessed Mother! She didn't have breasts. The Lord was nursed by a bird which gave him to drink milk from a Blessed Coconut. I read about it in the visions of Grunhilde of Thuringia. I have a deep devotion to the Holy Coconut of Nazareth."

I wonder what they'd make of the Miraculous Lactation of St. Bernard? Come on, people, we're Catholics, not a bunch of body-hating Gnostics! Haven't we handled all this already? Anyway, tough crowd. I imagine they'd probably burn us at the stake over St. Flutius.

By the way, for the record, I see nothing wrong per se with being monarchist...but, come now, crowning the Duke of Orleans King of America? That nouveau-riche upstart? You want a Hapsburg in charge. Jeez. Come on, you know, Charles the Fifth, Maria Theresa, they knew their stuff...

I mean, come now, an Orleanist? You ever heard of Louis-Philippe with that idiotic umbrella--

(Sound of duct tape being placed over Matt's mouth. Assorted mumbling).

Angels, Good, Bad and Ugly

After introducing you to St. Uriel the other day, I think it only appropriate to dispense more esoterica from my mental treasury of Angelic lore. Particularly the story of the Council of Rome that lead to Uriel's temporary excision from the calendar, as well as the more permanent removal of several other angelic figures.

While I have a great love of obscure and arcane scraps from the realm of Catholic legend, the trouble with angels is that their seizure by various occult groups has made most tradition about them difficult to sift through, as sometimes the source of many of these pious traditions is somewhat murky. Even a dictionary on the subject written by the usually-trustworthy Catholic Matthew Bunson (of Our Sunday Visitor and well-known for his eclectic encyclopedias on the Papacy, vampirism, Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes) too readily dips into dubious sources. For example, I discovered in his book the other day that someone had identified the angel "who encamps around those who fear [the Lord]" from Psalm xxxiv as Midael, a high-ranking officer in the heavenly army. Unfortunately the source of this was Francis Barrett's 1801 work The Magus, whose name alone sounds toxic.

Still, with a watchful eye, one can sift the folklore from the pseudo-magical nonsense. St. Uriel, having been rehabilitated from his condemnation and a constant in all lists of the seven archangels, is a good place to begin. His name means "fire of God" and some have called him both a member of the Cherubim and Seraphim, one curiosity of some of the archangels being their apparent ability to belong to several choirs of the heavenly host simultaneously. Other accounts call him the heavenly choirmaster, angel of music, and regent or prince of the sun.

St. Uriel's personality in legend and literature is one of great submission to the Divine will. He'll endure just about anything. Milton, in Paradise Lost himself praises his sharpness of mind and sight, while the apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter reports that such was his devotion to God's will that he was able to watch over Hell without flinching, thus keeping an eye on the devil's machinations. The Sibylline Oracles report that on the day of Judgment he will shatter the gates of Gehenna and call out its inhabitants to their final condemnation. He also seems to have been the cherub who guarded the gate of Eden and the angel who wrestled with Jacob.

But what about his companions? We know there are seven archangel, for sure. Beyond that point, it gets confusing. The Catholic Encyclopedia also names Sariel, Idzikiel, Hanael, Kepharel and Jeremiel or Remiel as possible candidates. At Palermo, in addition to Uriel, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, Shealtiel, Jehudiel and Berachiel are commemorated on April 20 as yet more members of the Seven. Consulting lists compiled by St. Gregory, pseudo-Dionysius and other theologians throw in even wilder names such as Chamuel and Zadkiel and further bury us under a confusing angelic morass.

In that morass, there's a few fun tidbits. Jeremiel, for example, may act as bailiff on Judgment Day. Chamuel might have comforted Christ in the Gethsemane and wrestled with Jacob (though he will have to fight St. Uriel for that legend). Zadkiel spared Isaac on Mount Moria and seems to be in charge of the choir of Dominations.

Now what happened to the other de-comissioned extra-scriptural Angels I spoke of previously? On October 25, 745, a synod was convened at Rome by Pope St. Zachary, who feared that the devotion given to many of these angelic figures was growing wildly out of proportion, and that their role in faith had to be further defined. Given the modern-day manias concerning Angels and auras and spirits, perhaps this does not seem as paranoid as it might at first glance. The result was to re-ground the faithful and set the stage for the golden age of Angelology which would come under such commonsensical individuals as St. Thomas Aquinas. This is not to say that there weren't a few interesting legendary casualties along the way. On the whole, though, excepting St. Uriel, the most interesting thing about the rest of this de-haloed crowd are their names.

The angels, besides St. Uriel, who were removed from the calendar in 745, were Tubuas, Inias, Simiel, Raguel, Sabaoc (or Sabaoth, misspelled by me as Sadoc) and Adimus. On the whole, most of these names have little legendary associated with them.

With a few exceptions. Raguel seems to have been the angel who took Enoch to heaven. Where, a preposterous Hebrew legend relates, that patriarch was transformed into the "Lesser YHWH," the ridiculously powerful angel Metatron. Yes, I know, metaphysically impossible. I don't know, I just work here. Raguel himself, the "friend of God" has a few tales associated with him, being in charge of watching over his fellow angels' behavior like a sort of one-man Internal Affairs Department, as well as being in charge of the motion of the Earth. He also is known as Rasuil, Rufael or Akrasiel, which is doubtlessly very confusing for him. Pope St. Zachary had his suspicions and had him axed from the calendar, and he would know, wouldn't he?

Besides him, legends are pretty sparse about the outcasts. Inias (not "Sadoc" as I thought earlier) is known in popular folklore for his reaction to his demotion, not for anything he did before. He was the one whose "means of striking back is to disturb the sermons or profound speeches of churchmen by performing a loud and particularly obnoxious episode of flatulence."

So maybe we didn't lose too much but a handful of funny names and some methane. St. Uriel is respected and back on the calendar and still a big deal in parts of South America. And he's about the most interesting one in the bunch. Though maybe invoking Inias might come in handy after going to a Mexican restaurant. On the other hand, doubtless his duties have been taken over by St. Bean the Great of Mortlach.

I'm sorry I have to part after leaving that image in your head. Never mind.

A Further Apology to Chris over at Maine Catholic, Socio-Religious Gender Problems of Fifth-Century Egypt and some remarks on various St. Alans

Chris, I have to apologize for my semi-humorous treatment of your patron saint over here on his last couple of feast days! St. Christopher deserves better than to be confused with Rin Tin Tin, and there are plenty more legends associated with him than just having a dog's head. Though I still think those icons are kinda cool. Incidentally, the Vatican never culled him completely from the calendar. Unlike the hatchet-jobs done on St. Catherine and St. Barbara, he was removed to local calendars, which vary from nation to nation, diocese to diocese or province to province.

By the way, what's so bad about keeping St. Apollinaris Syncletica on the calendar? I happen to be quite fond of the old girl (presuming she existed, of course). The scary thing is I knew about her before you ever mentioned her on your blog. Funny about all those cross-dressing Egyptian hermitesses, that seems to have been a common problem back in the fifth century. Or even the eleventh, if the Cistercian martyrology is to be believed. Anyway, back to reality.

One more thing about Chris's patrons, since he mentioned he knew of no St. Alan for his middle name. There happen to be several canonized or beatified men named Alan or Alanus: I hope this cheers you up! Here they are:

St. Alanus or Almus of Melrose (d. 1270), a Cistercian abbot at Balmarino in Scotland whose feast is celebrated on June 28.

Bl. Alanus de Rupe or Alaine de la Roche (c. 1428-1475), a Dominican confessor with a popular but unconfirmed cultus and who was noted for spreading devotion to the Rosary and whose feast is given as Sept. 8.

St. Alanus of Quimper (5th cent.), a bishop whose feastday (Oct. 26) is shared with that of St. Alorus, another bishop of Quimper, and of little certain is known besides the antiquity of their liturgical cultus.

And lastly, there is St. Alanus of Gascony (7th c.), a Benedictine monk and founder of the monastery at Lavauer in France, whose feast is celebrated on Nov. 25.

"Saint Beppi," workaholic Russians and Our Lady of Knock

Today is the feast of St. Pius X, Pope, a great man whose holiness in no way should be clouded by the unfortunate schismatic associations that have clouded his name. St. Pius X is the latest pope to be canonized (1954), after his namesake St. Pius V, who had been raised to the glory of the altar in 1672 by Clement X. He was a man of humble origins (with the nickname of "Beppi"), the son of a mailman from Riese, and his humility carried over even when he had risen to the Apostolic See. His papacy was marked by a landmark devotion to the Eucharist, encouraging daily reception, as well as his well-known motu proprio on Church music, Tra le Sollecitudini. On the whole it concentrates on polyphony and Gregorian chant, two pillars of the reforms since encouraged by Vatican II, though perhaps not followed through as much as we would like. Pius X once wrote that preparation for Holy Communion was crucially important and said, even after he died to take the young communicants before his tomb, for "even there, I will bless them." He also coined the phrase "summation of all heresies" for Modernism and authorized the famous Oath against it. He died, it is claimed of grief, on August 20, 1914, fearing the destruction of the First World War.

Today is recalled also Our Lady of Knock, the famed Irish apparition well-known for having been completely mimed, or at the least, wordless. It occurred at 8 PM on this day (also a Thursday) in 1879, and was approved by the local archbishop as worthy of devotion in 1936. We also remember St. Gilbert, a French Benedictine monk of Soissons, later Abbot at Valenciennes, persecuted by a wicked count. While little is known of him, why not read something from the pen of his most famous namesake today? Today is also the feast of St. Bernard (or Giovanni) of Tolomeo, founder of the Olivetan Benedictine congregation. Today is also, in the Russian Orthodox Church, the feast of St. Abraham of Smolensk, sometimes called the "Venerable Abraham the lover of work, of the Kievan Caves." If only we could be all lovers of our work as well!

Melius tarde quam nunquam...

This is actually from Monday's Office of Readings, but it's something like 1500 years old, so what's a couple of days, really?



From Saint Gregory the Great:

"Holy men beset by tribulation must endure the assaults of those who use violence and verbal attacks. The former they resist with the shield of patience, but against the latter they launch the sharp arrows of true doctrine. In both types of fighting they win the day through the wonderful arts that virtue bestows, for with wisdom they teach the wayward while showing a courageous contempt for outward hostility; the straying sheep they set on the right path by their teaching; the attacker they suffer and overcome."

How's that for marching orders? (I always did prefer the term "Church Militant" to the rather boring "Pilgrim Church") Even amongst the warfare imagery, though, there's also a pertinant reminder to use prudence in our evengelization and to speak the truth in love, which can be all too easy to forget when Prostestants, liberals, and the culture in general start calling Mom names.

My favorite part of this passage, though, is the assurance that we will "win the day" through virtue, wisdom, and courage. Something to remember in the dark days of our culture.

The Muscular Sadness of Tomas Luis de Victoria
CD Review: Tomas Luis de Victoria. Requiem: Officium Defunctorum, 1605. Gabrieli Consort and Players. Deutsche Grammophon GmbH.

By far, the Requiem of Tomas Luis de Victoria, is the best of the Gabrieli Consort's musical offerings. Which is why, with all that marvelous intensity, it is almost unbearable to listen to. It is perfect recording of a perfect work, capturing a deep, powerful and beautiful sadness. The Requiem is a pure work of Renaissance genius embued ever-so-subtly with the first emotional stirrings of the dawn of the Baroque age. In particular, two pieces stand out, a splendid Taedet animam meam that introduces the Requiem mass proper, an extract from the Matins that would have preceded the burial of the Empress Mari­a of Austria, and the remarkable quadripartite Absolutio that would have been performed immediately after the liturgy to the accompanying polyphonic singing of the Libera me domine. In between are plenty of marvels as well, combining the openness of Spanish polyphony with the luxuriousness of the Italian school, as well as a majestic chanted Dies Irae.

These two motets, at beginning and end, in particular are expressed with remarkable vigor and power, a muscular, palpable sadness. Once again, the Gabrieli Consort excells at setting the scene for these pieces, providing the physical feel of the Requiem service by accompanying the singing with continuo provided by a dulzian (an archaic form of bassoon), sometimes called a bajon. This was a custom at Spanish Imperial funerals, as records of the time testify, and gives the work a degree of color and realism lacking in other more monochromatic recordings. Such attention to detail is genius, and the genius of Victoria is worthy of such care.

These realistic liturgical touches bring us back to the first time the Requiem was sung. The origins of the Requiem, published in 1605,lie in the remarkable funeral of Empress Maria of Austria, the daughter of Charles V and wife of Maximilian II. She had retired to Spain in 1581, spending the end of her days at the Convent of the Descalzas Reales, where she died in 1603. Victoria, the Empress's choirmaster at the convent, wrote the music for her obsequies. It was a splendid scene, as a manuscript preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional at Madrid tells us.

At the Vigil, according to this account, "...all the servants of Her Majesty [were] dressed in mourning capes, their heads covered with hoods... The royal chapel was hung with black velvet and damasks, as also were the pillars of the church crested with escucheons of the Imperial arms. In the centre, the sumptuous catafalque was supported on a frame 18 feet wide and 54 feet high without counting the Imperial crown at its pinnacle... [F]rom the corners of the catafalque sprung four spires with four candlesticks, each made of gratings of square wood filled with lights, being two thousand surrounding it; at the corners...stood mace-bearers with cowls, black cloaks, and maces of gilded silver..." The Vigil lasted from two to five in the afternoon, being followed the next day by three solemn Pontifical Masses, the final one being the Requiem, celebrated by the Bishop of Zaragoza, concluded by a pangyric in her honor and the incensation and absolution of her remains. "[W]ith this were concluded the royal obsequies of Her Majesty, which were the most solemn and sumptuous there have ever been in Spain." It is a testament to Victoria that you can see the Imperial obsequies in your mind's eye, for the music is truly worthy of such magnificent funereal pomp.

This recording would make a splendid addition to any CD library. Listen to it, meditate on it: this isn't just Gregorian for the bubble bath. This is a window on earthly grief transfigured by heavenly glory.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, circa 1898; reprinted with the kindly permission of the Archives Department of the Annexe of the Albion Museum, London

A Caligari Cabinet of Curiosities:
A Journey into the Warped Comic-Book World of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Last week, I spent a very pleasant, albeit unorthodox, evening with my father. We sat in the big dark wood-paneled living room of the white elephant we call our home, and read together the first two sections of the old League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic book. We like to call the living room the house’s Great Hall, which makes us sound as if we conducted ourselves like Regency gentlemen (not entirely a false impression) but is nonetheless, architecturally speaking, hyperbole.

By now, you’re wondering what the heck is going on here. Why is this young nerdling reading comic books (ahem…graphic novels, whatever) instead of something more edifying? Say Summa or, at the very least, the Manuale Exorcismorum. And why me? Dan’s our X-Men fanatic around here, always mumbling about Dark Phoenixes or something. Of course, the only thing I recall about X-Men was thinking Famke Janssen almost has the same last name as a sixteenth-century Dutch semi-heretic.

You, of course, mustn’t confuse the X-Men with the sedevacantalist graphic novel SSPX-Men (involving Archbishop Lefebre and some radioactive grains of incense…I kid). Nor should you confuse it with the League, though some people are calling it a nineteenth-century incarnation of the theme.

For a brief synopsis, League, authored by Alan Moore, takes well-known characters from nineteenth-century fiction and place them together in a slightly-warped version of the turn of the last century and pits them against vintage villains as Fu Manchu and Moriarty. Mina Murray, the spunky heroine of Dracula, acts as the group’s leader. H. Rider Haggard’s adventurer Alan Quatermain played this role in the film; here the White Hunter shows up, in a flawed, age-worn and perhaps more interesting version of the movie character. I have to admit it was great fun, and almost...almost intellectually stimulating. The movie based on it was a tedious video-gamey shootout, though it had some charmingly hokey moments, lovely period sets and fun steam-powered gadgetry. However, the comic has an interesting edge to it, and it spares us from being subjected to Dorian Grey. Moore has a weird, imaginative genius, and the comic seems like a Jules Verne story illustrated by Edward Gorey to a script by Tim Burton. It may be creepy, but gosh darn, it’s certainly not tedious. Plus, I’d place Mina Murray up there with Irene Adler (i.e. The Woman to fellow Holmesians in the audience) in terms of totally sweet headstrong Victorian Women.

It’s well-drawn, clever even. You’ll find obscure references to Sherlockiana, “steampunk,” Victorian scientific romances and even real literature. It’s the only comic where you’ll find allusions to Trollope, Dracula, and James Bond on the same page. On top of that, the fake Victorian advertisements are twistedly funny, including a paint-by-numbers portrait of Dorian Grey (!!), the “Caligari Self-Assembly Cabinet” and Holmes “Play in a Day Violin Course,” which, if you’re a silent-film buff or a mystery fan are hysterically funny. Be warned, though, fellow Nerds: there’s some unfortunate prurient bits in Chapter Two (so skip over that part, please, trust me here...uck). However, besides the expected murder and mayhem there’s not much else objectionable (compared to, say, Father Ted...I'm kidding, Dan). Plus, the villain’s a Freemason: what’s not to like?

As an artist and a writer the concepts behind comic books have a certain intellectual interest. It potentially is a format that combines the strengths of filmmaking, novel-writing, and serial television in a package which seems in a sense almost like the modern equivalent of a medieval manuscript. Comics remind us Catholics the profound respect the Faith has for the communicative power of images, and their embellishment of and unity with the more “Protestant” written word in expressing the glory of God. It’s no surprise that the first “comic strips” were in illustrations for the Spanish codices containing the Cantigas de Santa Maria, songs in praise of the miracles of the Blessed Virgin. These episodic illuminations showed the healing of lepers, grateful offerings to the shrine of the Virgin, and myriad other wonders. Comics were invented by Catholics!

In the future, I’ll stick to real books, but nonetheless it was a fun divertissement. If you’re the sort of person who reads the footnotes to the Annotated Sherlock Holmes or are curious to see what Captain Nemo does on his day off, you couldn’t find a better way to spend a quiet Victorian evening than with Alan Moore and his wild imagination.

I have to dash. Our heroes are, at present, trying to stop the aerial bombardment of Limehouse by the insidious Dr. Moriarty’s Cavorite-powered superweapon, and time and the Napoleon of Crime wait for no man.

A Cathartic Trip Through the Blogosphere

Curt Jester has an idea for getting your average Catholic in top condition: Liturgical Boot Camp.
If I may suggest an addition to Basic Training: "You call that a profound bow soldier? I can't see the back of your head! This is the Incarnation we're talking about here! Give me 100 genuflections now! I want to see that knee hit the ground!"

While I'm on the subject of great rants on the blogosphere, take a look at Victor Lams' thoughts on Marty Haugen. Since Marty is from my area, he's a bit of a local celebrity here in the Twin Cities. Thankfully, my home parish doesn't use much of The Great Liturgical Composer's pieces of work, but I can get my fill of his systematic attempt to rob the liturgy of its meaning at almost any other church in the diocese. Personally, I'd love to see this New Age-y hack's music banned from our churches. Of course, if the Mass of Creation were suddenly to be put on the index, half of our music ministries would probably be rendered unable to sing the ordinary, anything else having too much actual musical value for them to handle. Maybe we should also have a Music Ministry Boot Camp. ("You call that polyphony?")

OK, I feel better now. And now, back to your regularly scheduled blogging, already in progress.

Another Ghost of Saturday Night Live Past Returns to Haunt Us

Okay, it was loopy enough when Ahhhnuld and Arianna Huffington were in the race, but now the California recall election (alias the Battle of the Funny Accents) has been joined by none other than Fr. Guido Sarducci, the only comedian ever officially banned from St. Peter's Basilica, according to the inimitable Fr. Sibley. Fr. Sarducci did color commentary for Weekend Update during the Papal Elections of 1978 and is a noted expert in many fields, teaching numerous courses at the Five-Minute University: Religious Journalism, Principles of Existentialist Continualism, Theology and the Art of RV Maintenance, Biofeedback and How to Stop It, Basic Kitchen Taxidermy and Self-Actualization through Macrame. He also seems to wish he were a gondolier and is translating the works of Steven Foster into Italian.

Of St. Bernard in General, St. Bernards, Wolves, Domini canes and An Apology Concerning Dog-Face

Today is the feast of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. Every day this great saint would wake up and ask himself, "Why am I here" and unlike most existentialists, he always had an answer: "to lead a holy life." He revived and reformed the great order of the Cistercians, as well as helping bring about the foundation of the Knights Templar at the Council of Troyes. The Templars had nothing to do with any of that baloney in the Da Vinci Code, pace Dan Brown, though, if Umberto Eco is to be believed, nonetheless "The Templars have something to do with everything." (See this link for a source to satisfy all your Templar memorabilia needs, yeah right, like you have any...). St. Bernard composed a marvellous rhythmic prayer to the members of Christ Crucified and is patron of all professions associated with bees, especially wax-melters and candlestick-makers (probably because of his mellifluous, or honeyed, tongue). One of his emblems is a white dog, which goes along well with the wolf of St. Francis, the swan of St. Hugh and the black-and-white Dominican hound of St. Dominic. And of course, there's a whole breed of canine named after the guy. Woof!

Speaking of dogs and saints, today is also another feast of the martyr St. Christopher, who is said, according to some rather dubious legends, to have belonged to a race of men with dog's heads instead of human ones. Though perhaps this is a garbled version of another account which reduces this rather fabulous image to merely being a facial deformity (at least according to the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate's website, which sports one of these odd icons). An even more clear and less weird picture of the linguistic origin of this strange story about cyncecephoroi and cannibals comes from here. Check it out. I'm afraid in the past I've given the saint a terrible time about his curious physique (sorry, Chris). Strictly speaking, the canons of iconography dictate he be depicted with a normal face, though not everyone seemed to pay attention to this.

Today is also the feast of the Martyrs of Thrace, a Persian martyr named Heliodorus and another St. Bernard, this one a Cistercian from Valdeiglesias, who is patron of the town of Candelada in Spain. Today is also the feast of St. Gobert, a Benedictine monk, a former count and crusader, who died in Brabant in the Low Countries in 1263. Today is also the feast of St. Lucius, a martyr who is not to be confused with the more famous and dubious St. Lucius of Britain (otherwise Llewrug Mar, or, the Great, grandson of St. Cyllinus), the legendary first Christian king of the island who seems to be associated with the Grail legend and was eventually been made bishop of Chur, where he was martyred about 176. But that's not our St. Lucius. The odds are he's probably just a duplicate of King Abgar the Ninth of Edessa, anyway. Drat.

Domeward Bound........



Sorry for the lack of posts this evening, but I've had to pack the car and take care of other loose ends - I should have new material by Thursday night or Friday. Tomorrow, I'll be on the road from New York to Cleveland, catching the Indians-Twins game at Jacobs Field, a ballpark I've long wanted to visit. Thursday, I complete the journey to Notre Dame and move back into Keenan Hall. Everyone have a nice day and a half in my absence, and I can't wait to begin posting from the University so tied in with the mission of this weblog.

Continuing the "Marxist" Theme for Today

Jeff Miller over at The Curt Jester says he looks forward to our "daily church/saint whap up"! Cool! Glad someone enjoys our warped forays into hagiography! Jeff has also contributed a useful addition to the worlds of theology and humor with his A Night at the Jesus Seminar parodying the deathless Contract Scene from A Night at the Opera! So, are you following me here? "Well, stop following me, or I'll have you arrested!"

Sorry for the absence.......

This has been sort of a busy week at work, and I've also had packing and personal engagements to take care of. Expect some new blogging this evening; tomorrow I leave for ND, but by Thursday night I'll be bringing you reports straight from stately Keenan Hall.

I enjoy the Marx Brothers' movies because they remind me other people also realize what it's like living in a small dorm room.

"I am a Marxist, of the Groucho Variety"
Movie Review: A Night at the Opera. The Marx Brothers, Kitty Carlisle, and Margaret Dumont. MGM, 1935.

Classic movies are big around the Shrine. Dan introduced us to the labyrinthine world of Hitchcock fairly early along in our friendships with him, a recommendation I am indebted to. I'm always singing the praises of Casablanca, myself, and Em enjoys To Catch a Thief. Andy, well, he's sticking to Jackie Chan for the moment (and the Hong Kong master really does have his own particular genius, I must admit) but just give us time.

Why the Marx Brothers? It's usually a thankless task to dissect humor, but it's worth considering. I love the guys, I really do, but what makes it better to watch some black-and-white actor with a bad Italian accent hit a fat policeman over the head with a frying pan than, say, any gag from Jim Carrey's oeuvre? Is it just because it's old? Some of the tricks may be the same, for people have been laughing at the same jokes since the days of Mausoleus of Halicarnassus, but there's a real comic genius at the heart of the Marx Brother's uproarious work. In A Night at the Opera, it's the wonderful combination of three of my favorite things: opera, anarchic wit, and of course, the inevitable frying pan gag.

Sure, it's just comedy, but it's well-made comedy. There's a certain pure pleasure in seeing something done well, even if it may seem a trifle plebean. Like the perfect hamburger, for example: it may not be coq au vin, but if done properly it is still heavenly. Not a moment is wasted in A Night at the Opera: everything advances both the plot and is also hysterically funny. Even something so seemingly-simple as signing a contract (with duplicate copies--you know what duplicates are, right? "Sure, they's five kids up in Canada," says Chico, obliviously) culminates in Groucho and Chico essentially ripping the thing to shreds and then Chico can't even sign the thing because he's illiterate.

Surprisingly, those obligatory moments where Chico demonstrates his piano skills and Harpo plucks his harp don't bring the show to a screeching halt; Harpo's music is heavenly, a bit of a chaser for our ears, while Chico has the funniest hands in show-business. Even so, the best demonstration of their ability to make even the most mundane moments seem comic comes in the more leisurely Animal Crackers, where Chico pounds out the song Somewhere my Love Lies Sleeping (With a Male Chorus). But A Night at the Opera is still wonderful nonetheless.

For here they manage to take pure physical humor to a whole new level, as in the famous "Overcrowded Cabin" routine, which defies description and must be seen to be believed. Slapstick is punctuated by uproarious bon-mots and verbal humor gets a spike of juice by the occasional kick in the pants. Even a sight gag gets its very own caption:

Groucho: You see that man over there eating spaghetti?
Mrs. Claypool: No...
Groucho: Well, you see the spaghetti, don't ya?

Nothing's absurdist here: that can be funny in its own way, but for two hours, it's a bit much. Instead, the real joy is seeing Groucho, Chico and Harpo in supreme control of every humorous jot or tittle, even in situations where Our Heros (disguised as ridculously bearded Russian aviators) find themselves being pursued by an angry mob down the steps of New York's City Hall.

It helps, of course, their supporting cast is almost as good as they are. Margaret Dumont is possibly the best straight-man (person?) Groucho could ever ask for, acting both as love interest and shocked foil to his insanity. Walter W. King does a good job of chewing the scenery as the evil tenor Lasspari, though he also gets a couple of good laughs out of us simply by having played the lead from I Paggliaci, which requires him to wear a ridiculous clown costume (with the sourest of looks on his face, no less). Kitty Carlisle is somewhat of a cypher, but a lovely cyper. Her role may be rather sketchy beyond here serene beauty, but at the same time, she gives her part enough spunk and class to make it interesting. Plus, as the female half of the obligatory sweet Young Lovers, she helps bring the movie to a suitably operatic and uplifting close. You can't ask for much more than that, especially after having just watched Harpo brilliantly demolish the entire backstage of the New York Opera Company.

Hearts and Fish, Storks and Bishops

A Christian has a union with Jesus Christ more noble, more intimate and more perfect than the members of a human body have with their head.

--St. John Eudes

Today we have a rather mixed bag when it comes to saints; none too famous, none too obscure (well, some too obscure), but all with stories to tell. Most prominent of them is the seventeenth-century St. John Eudes, founder of the Congregation of Jesus and Mary and the Sisters of Charity, and author of the devotion to the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Today, around the same time St. John was propigating his message of submission to the Sacred Heart, Bl. Peter Zuñiga and the Japanese crew of the ship carrying him were beheaded at Nagasaki. Today we also remember St. Louis of Tolouse, a reluctant bishop, son of the King of Naples, who was a great-nephew of St. Louis of France and of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. He is shown in art as a Franciscan vested in an episcopal cope spattered with the fleur-de-lys emblem of his royal house of Anjou. Today as well is the feast of St. Magnus, a widower, monk and bishop who was the father of St. Agricola of Avignon. St. Magnus is patron of fish-mongers while his son is considered a protector of storks. Also on the calendar today are St. Guenninus and Bl. Guerricus, who share nothing save a similar-sounding and peculiar name.

St. Uriel, Archangel, from a Peruvian Spanish Colonial work

Angels of the Andes:
An Appreciation of the Heavenly Side of Spanish Colonial Art

I was recently in Denver, and had time to stop and view one of my favorite American museums, the Denver Art Museum. It may not be on par with the Chicago Art Institute or the Metropolitan, but nonetheless it has an excellent and rather sizable collection of lesser-know (but still high-quality art). While I tend not to stray beyond the European and Chinese galleries in museums, it also has a fascinating selection of American Indian and Western American art, including some spectacular examples of Northwest Coast Indian woodwork.

My favorite floor is the one devoted to Spain's reign in the Americas. I have a great love of Spanish colonial art and music, as anyone who's followed this 'blog knows, and Denver was the first place I was introduced to it in great detail. Rather than merely being limited to the crude (but engaging) santos carvings of New Mexico as in many other American museums, their Hispanic collection includes sophisticated and ornate works from Mexico to Peru, including numerous lace-bedecked images of the Virgin, intricate allegories and a remarkable sample of a series showing the Seven Archangels vanquishing the demons of the Seven Deadly Sins. The cultus of the Archangels was particularly strong in Spanish America, a land then still without the great panoply of local saints seen in Europe and thus in need of more universal protectors. Indeed, it's one of the few places in art you can glimpse the elusive Archangel Uriel.

Pious tradition holds that the choir of archangels has seven members; the rolls of their membership, both Catholic and heterodox, vary wildly. Since the revival of their cultus in the eighteenth century after laying dormant since the ninth, the current list seems to be the usual Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, as well as Uriel, Shealtiel, Jehudiel and Berachiel (though the Catholic Encyclopedia gives another list). These names were rediscovered when, three centuries ago, an ancient fresco containing their images and appelations was uncovered in an old church in Palermo dedicated to them. Besides that, there's a church in Germany which honors them.

However, in general, they're scarce in Europe. The unfortunate association of St. Uriel and some of those more obscure angels with the occult and the unorthodox Jewish mystical school of Kabbala tended to leave a bad taste in the mouth (as will any web search devoted to ferreting out useful information on him, as it seems to turn up a host of crackpot new-age sites with little interest in fact and less in holiness). One negative account even made Uriel, rather than being the "fire of God," the hellish "President of Tartarus." Though, in all fairness, that title might also indicate the heavenly angel who locks the Devil into Gehenna at the end of time. Whatever the case, he'd been stricken from the calendar before, in 745, when a number of other angels of apocryphal provenance were removed. Legend has it that one of them, an angel named Sadoc, was so annoyed at his demotion that he would interrupt Mass with loud flatulent noises. Another account places his excision from the calendar at the time of the Renaissance. Nonetheless, St. Uriel proved resilient and ended up getting a new feast for him and his six archangelic compatriots on April 20, celebrated to this day at Palermo.

Whatever the case, the Seven enflamed the imagination of Spanish America, particularly the lands once under the rule of the Inca, already so high in the mountains as to scrape the angelic firmament. Angels are all over the place in Peruvian art, holding up the sudarium, trampling devils, lauding the Virgin and Her Child, or even firing off matchlock muskets. Some of these angels seem so androgynous to us in their lacy skirts and curls that modern art historians have branded them "female-dressed angels," who recall the bodiless nature of the Heavenly Hosts. I'm inclined to think this supposed effeminacy has more to do with the Baroque mania for filigree than anything else. But then, there are the ones with guns, quite masculine. They verge on being sacred dandies in their fine swaggering military clothes, modelled on the uniforms of Spanish soldiers. So close is that correspondence that many of them are shown drilling with muskets in poses straight out of a seventeenth-century drill handbook. St. Uriel is typically one of them, a very suitable candidate for a marksman with his association with divine fire. It is a strange and picturesque note, reminding us of the psychological affect that European weaponry had on the Indians of our continent.

The "Angels with Guns," as they are called today, were first painted to impress the newly-conquered Incas by the power of God's bodiless agents. In time, however, the weapons became tokens of Divine protection, a bellicose comfort against demonic temptation. In many ways, it's no stranger than seeing St. Michael in medieval armor, St. Barbara in the clothes of a German princess or St. George dressed as a fashionable Renaissance gentleman. Though somehow the image of St. Michael in camoflage with an AK-47 doesn't quite strike the same quaint note.

Be that as they may, I find them quite charming, and at the same time, the recollection of Spain's military might, the sight of that belch of flame, and the memory of the smell of black powder from my father's shotgun still makes me wonder at how much more magnificent and powerful the Host of Heaven must be on parade.

Scuola San Rocco, after John Singer Sargent

Coryats Crudities and Gabrieli’s Delicacies
CD Review: Music for San Rocco, 1608. Gabrieli Consort and Players. Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, 1996.

“...to laud and prayse God and His Saints with Psalmes, Hymnes, spirituall songs and melodious musicke...”

—Coryats Crudities, London, 1611

The Gabrieli Consort’s Music for San Rocco, 1608 was the third CD I bought when I began my love-affair with early music about two years ago. It’s a splendid recording, both wonderful as an introduction to the music of Baroque Venice and as an addition to a much larger collection. It reconstructs a concert given at the Scuola San Rocco in honor of their patron saint (whose feast came only a few days ago, on 16 August) which was described with great gusto by the English traveler Thomas Coryat in his book Coryats Crudities. Indeed, this CD was recorded on-site at the Scuola itself! Talk about authentic. It doesn't get much better than this.

Many historians have traditionally interpreted this event as a Vespers service, but the Gabrieli Consort decides here instead to treat it as a “spiritual recreation,” or sacred concert, a distinctly Venetian para-liturgical practice. Recreated here, it gives us a marvelous window into the life of the Scuola. Thus we are treated to a program simply of music, rather than one of the Gabrieli Consort’s liturgical reconstructions with their chanted prayers and clacking thuribles. While I derive great pleasure from these atmospheric additions, they’re a bit perplexing to the laymen. Furthermore, it’s hard to resist the unadulterated Italian joy of just hearing one marvelous Gabrieli piece after another.

Though they won’t wear you out, I promise. The star attractions, Giovanni Gabrieli’s motets, are interspersed with instrumental toccatas and canzonas dominated that serve to cleanse the palate and soothe the ears with their gentle festivity. Gabrieli’s occasional bombast can wear thin if overdone, but the Consort does an admirable job of balancing extravagance with subtlety within the choral pieces. There are quite a few elegantly understated works here. We can hear the sonorous sound of Suscipe, clementissime Deus, where six low voices are paired with six sackbutts (a splendid but rare combination showing off the elegance of the Renaissance proto-trombone) in praise of San Rocco, as well as two subtle and sweet Bartolomeo Barbarino countertenor solos sung to the delicate pluckings of a lute.

The CD’s highlights, however, are wonderfully grandiose. There’s the Gabrieli staple In Ecclesiis, played here with an exciting raw vigor lacking in other recordings. There is also the concert’s final piece, a 33-part Magnificat. It's a wonder. It exists only in partial form in a choirbook discovered in Graz, Austria, though Paul McCreesh, the Consort’s director, has lovingly reconstructed the missing parts from a comparable and more famous 17-part Magnificat. However, that smaller version (which has been recorded by the Taverner Consort in their pleasant albeit timid Venetian Church Music compilation) pales next to this glorious hymn of the Virgin, sung to the extravagant accompaniment of a dozen sackbutts and seven chamber organs. This piece alone makes the CD worth the cost.

Every time I listen to this recording, I find a new favorite piece on it. Gabrieli’s sacred music is timeless, and never fails to uplift the soul with its joyous and infinite variety.

St. Helen, Discoverer of the True Cross, and More

Today is the feast of St. Helena, Empress, widow and discoverer of the True Cross. Relics of that holy wood can be seen at the basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome, along with the crossbar of the Good Thief's own scaffold and the titulum or sign that stood over the cross of Christ. A new theory proposes that the titulum displayed there is authentic for the following reasons: the languages written on it are in a different order than in the gospels, something a forger would have never thought of, and even more interesting is that the inscriptions are actually written backwards, as it would have been done by a Hebrew working in Roman service, or intended for people for which Latin was a second (or third) language and were used to reading right-to-left.

Today we also remember St. Florus and St. Laurus, two brother-stonemasons, whose martyrdom in Illyria (with St. Proclus and St. Maximilus) seems a duplicate of that of the Four Crowned Martyrs of Rome; as well as Bl. Aimo Taparelli, O.P., noted as being one of the few Inquisitors-General of Lombardy and Liguria to live to a ripe and happy old age, unlike the more unfortunate St. Peter Martyr, another Lombard, and Aimo's own predecessor, Bl. Bartolomew Cervario. There's also the martyr St. Agapitus of Palestrina, catalogued in the Gelasian Sacramentary, and who has nothing to do with Renaissance polyphony. In Greece today, they remember the Thousand Martyrs of Armenia, two patriarchs of Constantinople, and Four Ascetics whose names are unknown to history.

Thanks to Earl at the new Times Against Humanity............

For highlighting my piece on Catholicism in America in his weekly "best of" roundup of different blog material. Welcome to the blogosphere, Earl!

Our blog turns a month old........


"A blog? That's like that place where they found those 'blog-people,' right, Ted?"

Thanks to all our readers for their insigthful comments, for recommending us to others, and for putting up
with our personalities and at times madcap humor............


"No Dougal, those are bog people......blog people are far stranger than the simple, ancient bog people."

.......Look forward in the coming weeks to more book and music reviews, "appreciations," and other typical material, as well as some class-based material once school starts, Matt's reports from Rome, and a series about the traditions of different religious orders. Let us know if there's anything else you'd like to see us do here, and feel free to contact us personally, as some of you have, with regards to important issues like Catholic identity at Notre Dame - we're here to serve.


"Drink!"

The liturgical odyssey that has been my summer comes to an end...........

With today's High Mass at Saint Agnes Church on 43rd Street between Lexington Ave. and Third Ave. in New York. First, a note on this church. Saint Agnes is about five years old now, the replacement for a Victorian Gothic structure that burned down in 1993. Built in a restrained baroque, the current church features one main altar effectively designed for use either ad orientem or versus populum, as well as side shrines to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Sacred Heart, Saint Pius X, Saint Francis, Saint Therese, and others. Behind the main altar is a beautifully vivid painting of Saint Agnes, the Blessed Mother and other saints, with Saint Agnes situated in a sort of Romanesque gazebo - the painting has been criticized by some due to the fact that Saint Agnes's skirt stops above the knee - this seems to me rather ridiculous, especially since the figure in the painting is tall enough that this is not really high at all. The traditional design also includes an altar rail, used at every liturgy. The church also features a very good bookstore that, while tending to skew more traditionalist than my preferred Pauline Books and Media (I went on a shopping spree there yesterday, I shouldn't be allowed there alone.......), does feature some gems, including a selection of Tridentine missals and the beautiful Rosary I bought there a while back. That said, here are the details of today's liturgy:


Prelude: Nigra sum, sed formosa, Opus 18, No. 3 by Marcel Dupre
Introit: Dum clamarem ad Dominum, exaudivit vocem meam (Psalm 54)
Kyrie and Gloria: Mass XI, Orbis factor
Gradual: Custodi me, Domine, ut pupillam oculi (Psalm 16)
Credo:Credo III
Offertory: Ad te, Domine, levavi animam meam (Psalm 24)
Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei: Mass XI, Orbis Factor
Communion Antiphon: Acceptabis sacrificum justitiae (Psalm 50)
Antiphon of Our Lady: Salve Regina, Plainsong (note: after hearing Dominicans sing the tonus monasticus version, there's really no going back to this one)
Postlude: Magnificat du premier ton; Dialgue sur les grands jeux by Jean-Adam Guilain

Beginning next Sunday: Weekly Mass postings from the Basilica of the Sacred Heart - for those of you who get the Hallmark Channel, tune in!

Glorification of St. Roch, after Tintoretto

A King, an Empress, and a Pilgrim

Well, anyway, while I sweep up the crumpled confetti off the floor and try to wash away the stale beer smell out of the Shrine after the wild and crazy Assumption party we had here last night (yeah right, as if), let's have a look at the saints of the day. Today's most important feast is that of King St. Stephen of Hungary, who was baptized by St. Adalbert (or Voitech) of Prague in 985. He grew, surprisingly, into a devout Christian and converted his nation, gaining the title of Apostolic Majesty from Pope Silvester II, used by his descendents and subsequent dynasties ruling Hungary well until 1918. The Holy Crown of St. Stephen, another gift of the Pope, is Hungary's most prized relic, and even today, a thousand years later, remains a sign of the Hungarian people's sovereignty and independence. Interestingly enough, it sat out much of the Cold War in a vault in Fort Knox (along with Indiana Jones's ark of the covenant, probably...I'm kidding) but now is displayed proudly in Budapest after being returned in 1978. St. Stephen was married to Bl. Gisele (the sister of St. Henry II, the Holy Roman Emperor), and their son was St. Emericus (also known as Americus, Imre or Emeric), the namesake of Amerigo Vespucci and a minor patron of the Americas.

I wore a red shirt and green socks to remember St. Stephen today. Hungarian colors, and all that. Hey, it works for me.

Today is the feast, also, of St. Uguzo of Milan, whose origins are obscure, and seems to have been an alpine shepherd killed by his employer who grew jealous of his virtues. The Roman Martyrology also tells us today of St. Serena of Rome, the sometime wife of the Emperor Diocletian, though this information derives from the spurious acta of St. Cyriacus. We can also find reference in the Martyrology to St. Roch of Montpellier (or Rock, or San Rocco in Italian) whose feast remains popular with Italians in their native land or abroad. He had a long and rather melodramatic history which revolves around his adventures as a pilgrim as well as his work as a healer during the plague. Arriving home, unrecognizably transformed by the ravages of disease, his uncle, the local governor, mistook him for a spy and had him arrested. Only after his death did a birthmark vindicate his identity. St. Roch is the patron of plague victims and cancer survivors, as well as physicians, surgeons, cattle, prisoners, Istanbul, street-pavers, old clothes dealers, cooks, and invoked against all contagious disease,. He is portrayed in art as a pilgrim with an open wound on his leg. He has a marvellous Scuola Grande named after him in Venice with some of the finest paintings of him extant as well as numerous scenes of salvation history, done by Tintoretto. The story goes that there was a contest held to have the paintings done, and each artist was given a small stretch of wall, but Tintoretto broke the rules and painted the entire space of the room. Fortunately, he won and his work was not painted over!

In San Rocco and his Scuola's honor tonight, we're eating risotto and saltimbocca (strictly speaking, Roman, not Venetian, but we do what we can), and listening to Music for San Rocco, 1608 by the inimitable Gabrieli Consort, actually recorded on site at the Scuola! I love feast days!

Even More Occulted Saints!



Bl. Isidore Bakanja, Martyr of the Scapular

Since Emily and Dan have done so admirably in digging up the saints occulted by this feast day, I feel obliged to have a bit of hagiographical fun as well, lest my fellow Whappers think I'm losing my touch! Today is also the feast day of St. Napoleon (or Neopolus) of Alexandria, an early martyr about which little is known, though his cult was heavily promoted in France during the years of his namesake's reign (surprise surprise). I've even seen some rather remarkable Bonapartist illustrations of him published after the restoration of Louis XVIII that show him with the facial features of the Corsican upstart. Rather a bit much, since Old Boney was excommunicated for his dealings with the Papal States. As a consequence, he seems to have become an unofficial patron of soldiers. Weird. Vive le vrai Roi tres chretien, à bas l'empereur!

Today, furthermore, recalls Bl. Isidore Bakanja, a Catholic African convert and devotee of the Scapular martyred by the Belgians during the darkest days of the Congo Free State. For attempting to disseminate Christianity among the African serfs (and thus awaken them to the missionaries' fight for justice and native rights), and for refusing to surrender his scapular, agents of the thuggish colonial administration had him beaten mercilessly with a spiked elephant-hide scourge and left him chained from a tree for days. A colonial inspector rescued him and took him home, and heard his tale just before two missionaries could give him the last rites on this day in 1909. Today is also the memorial of Bl. Claudio Grazotto, a Franciscan brother and well-known and talented sculptor of the first half of the twentieth century. Speaking as an artist, that's pretty darn cool.

Continuing Dan's parade of feasts occulted by the Solemnity of the Assumption...


Today also marks the feast of Saint Tarsicius of Rome, the patron of altar boys. (some of my favorite people are altar boys!) According to Damasus I, Tarsicius was martyred defending the Holy Eucharist. Tradition has it that he was carrying the Eucharist to prisoners awaiting martyrdom when he was waylaid by bystanders curious to see what he was carrying. When he refused, they beat him and tried to pry his arms away from his chest to relieve him of his precious cargo. As he prayed, his arms miraculously became stronger than iron. He was rescued by friends, but refused to open his arms until he was brought before the Pope. As he was carried into the Pope's presence, he died, his arms fell away from his chest, and the air was filled with an odor like lilies.

Saint Tarsicius, pray for us, that we may have the fortitude to defend the Blessed Sacrament against all forms of irreverence and profanation!

Gregg the Obscure has coined the term "Whapsters" for contributors to this blog........


We present our Top Ten Criteria for Being a "Whapster":
10. Pilgrimage from South Bend, IN to Bologna.........on foot!
9. Wear the ankle chaplet given to St. Flutius in his vision of the Holy Whapping
8. Sit with us in LaFortune Student Center until it closes........then get up for 9:00 a.m. Saturday Mass!
7. Memorization test featuring saints in the Roman Canon, Litany of Dominican Saints and Blesseds, and Litany of Carmelite Saints and Blesseds
6. Humiliating initiation ritual featuring a crown of roses.
5. Take strenuous psychological test. Fail.
4. When giving advice, you always manage to cram in the phrase, "With great power comes great responsibility." Bonus points if you can also say, "My gift is my curse."
3. You consider buying an ostentatious luxury condo and naming it "Alexander VI House"
2. Your first instinct when you see a girl in a denim skirt or a guy in a polo shirt and khakis is to call the nearest vocation director.
1. When watching Mel Gibson's Passion, you plan to look very closely at the scene where Jesus walks up the stairs of Pilate's palace.

A good resource for learning more about the Assumption.......


The parade of paintings continues.......

...........is On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies, edited by Brian E. Daley, S.J. of the Notre Dame theology dept. Featuring both accounts of the Assumption and more theological homilies, the inexpensive volume contains work by John of Thessalonica, St. Andrew of Crete, St. Germanus, St. John Damascene, and others. As I've said before, Daley is a superb teacher, a superb scholar, and a superb Jesuit, and is also very much involved in Orthodox-Catholic ecumenical relations. He is a great asset to Notre Dame, and is book a great asset to any theological library.

A Theological Reflection on the Assumption


Can our blog use every painting of the Assumption on the Internet? Stay tuned.

Because of its rather recent dogmatic definition and its Mariological (and thus, to some "un-ecumenical") nature, the Assumption can be a stumbling block to many, such as Nicholas Kristof in today's NY Times. (Thanks to Mark Shea for the link) But I think that upon further reflection, it's easy to see how the Assumption would flow out of other doctrines about Mary; in essence, it is the natural conclusion of her entire life, and the fulfillment of two important passages from St. Paul.
In Colossians 3:3, St. Paul says that "If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God." Thus, the Assumption rests on the same hinge as the Immaculate Conception: in order for Mary to have "been raised with Christ," her life has to have been formed, from the very beginning by an experience of His saving grace. As Karl Rahner puts it in Theological Investigations, "Mary is she who is taken into predestining grace in Christ's becoming flesh as the victorious and definitive presence of God's mercy in the world, overcoming all sin; and therefore in her case this temporal interval has no meaning. Not because she did not require redemption, but because she is the one member of the redeemed without whom it is impossible to think of the Redemption as victorious." Von Speyr puts it a little differently, writing in Mary in the Redemption: "It cannot simply be said that the Son suffers on the Cross from the Mother. She is redeemed in a pre-light of the Cross. This demonstrates the magnanimity of the Father, a gift in advance from the Father to the Son." Thus, Mary has "been raised with Christ" with the grace of the Immaculate Conception and with her fiat at the Annunciation, that is, her acceptance of the mission that comes with that grace. Moving to the second part of the Colossians quote, regarding Mary's hiddenness, let us turn to Saint Louis de Montfort, writing in True Devotion to Mary: "Mary was singularly hidden during her life. It is on this account that the Holy Ghost and the Church call her Alma Mater - 'Mother secret and hidden.'" Mary is the exemplar of being "hid with Christ in God," appearing very little in the New Testament - St. Paul's ideal in Colossians is her reality. Thus, she is "raised with Christ" immediately, since in death (perhaps) as in life she is the model and example of the Church.
The same applies to Ephesians 1:12: "We who first hoped in Christ have been destined and appointed to live for the praise of his glory." This idea of being the "praise of glory" is the center of the mystical theology of Bl. Elizabeth of the Trinity, and this is nowhere more evident than in her Last Retreat, written just weeks before her death. "Her soul is so simple," Elizabeth says of Mary, "Its movements are so profound that they cannot be detected. She seems to reproduce on earth the life which is that of the divine Being, the simple Being. And she is so transparent, so luminous, that one would mistake her for the light, yet she is but the 'mirror' of the Sun of Justice: 'Speculum jusititiae'!" What a beautiful image to reflect upon, on this feast of the Assumption. By perfectly living this life as "praise of glory" on earth through her hiddenness and prayer, Mary, as von Speyr would say, allowed her mission to be absorbed completely in Christ, and thus became the first to share bodily in His Resureection. We are called to be, like Mary, "hid with Christ," and "the praise of his glory." The closer we exemplify this ideals, the more joy we will have in experiencing one day the life that Mary alone lives now, body and soul with Christ. I don't claim to have offered a definitive, airtight, theological proof for the dogma of the Assumption here, but I hope I've at least provided some material for reflection.

The ever-interesting Gregg the Obscure, Colorado native, likes my comments on Denver's Catholic Churches. Thanks!

From the "Huh?" Subsecretariat of the the "You Gotta Be Kidding Me" Department

Via Fr. Sibley's rectory. Popetown, the latest BBC cartoon, is about office politics in the Vatican...and a very stupid-looking Pontiff on a pogo stick. Scary, and not in a good way. Okay, if Fr. Ted makes any guest appearances on this series I am going to be extremely cross. Sheesh, has the BBC run out of ideas?

L'etat, c'est moi, literally

Funny. I just took this Country Quiz, and it says I'm France. Yeah, yeah. France's taking a lotta ribbing these days, and I'm not much of a fan of the Fifth Republic, but the actual place and people, when you get down to it, are pretty nifty. Remember that the same country that produced Robespierre and Gallicanism also gave us St. Louis IX, Gothic architecture, impressionism, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Moliere and a whole lotta freakin' good cheese. And chateaubriand, a delicacy which almost rivals gaspacho, which is a remarkable admission coming from a partisan of Spain like myself. So I'm cool with this, mes amis. Though I liked that animal personality test from Fr. Jim's page that said I was a wolf (sweet!) a bit better. Still, France is good. Better than this test, which said I was the crazy henchman Renfield from Dracula, who, worst of all, wasn't even in the book! I am so not Renfield. Dr. Van Helsing, maybe (after all, he does have Papal permission to carry the Host about with him), but Renfield...criminy. "Yeeees, master..."

A Hymn to Our Lady on Her Assumption:

from the Stanbrook Abbey Hymnal:

The ark which God has sanctified,
Which he has filled with grace,
Within the temple of the Lord
Has found a resting-place.

More glorious than the seraphim,
This ark of love divine,
Corruption could not blemish her
Whom death could not confine.

God-bearing Mother, Virgin chaste,
Who shines in heaven's sight;
She wears a royal crown of stars
Who is the door of Light.

To Father, Son and Spirit blest
may we give endless praise
With Mary, who is Queen of heaven,
Through everlasting days.

(For more, see here. And thanks to Jane for bringing this marvellous image by Murillo to my attention!).

Pious Customs and Impious Oddities in celebration of the Assumption of Our Lady

In Malta, it is said a man born on this day will become a successful jockey and be well-known in racing circles. A more edifying tradition from Germany, suggests that bouquets of wildflowers and medicinal herbs should be blessed today. They decorate the home for weeks afterward to freshen the air and the soul. In Lithuania, this feast is also called the "Herbal Holy Day," "Cabbage Day," or the "Meadow Grass Festival." As in Germany, herbs were blessed, along with apples, oats, carrots and a whole panoply of newly-harvested produce. Blessed herbs were said to ward off the touch of the Devil's tail or lightning strikes. Lithuanians also have the rather interesting tradition that Our Lady distributes apples today to all those in heaven who died as infants, unless, of course, their mothers inadvertently ate an apple in the days preceding the Assumption: "Your mother ate your apple."

These vegetal images may derive from much earlier agricultural traditions. In the first millenium of Christianity, when the harvest was reaped in July, the Assumption marked the high point of the agricultural year, the end of the harvest festival that had begun at Lammastide, otherwise known as the feast of the First Fruits, usually held towards the begining of August. The custom held fast even after further developments in agriculture allowed there to be two harvests in the year. In Scotland, where the Assumption was called Marymass (or Marymas, depending on the source), the Lammas bannock (or cake, hence the famous battlefield of Bannockburn literally means "Cake Stream") were dedicated to the Virgin. Some German paintings even show Our Lady wearing robes marked with sheaves of wheat. This was most fitting: "So the glorious culmination of the Virgin's life was celebrated at the culmination of the farming year."

Saint Stanislaus Kostka and Saint Hyacinth



For such a beloved saint, "Saint Stan" rarely gets his day celebrated, because he died on the Feast of the Assumption. A Jesuit who died young, he prayed to Mary that he would be with her to celebrate with her the feast of her Assumption, and that prayer was fulfilled. He was canonized in 1605, and now has countless churches named after him; let us pray for his interecession along with Mary's on this feast of the Assumption and also his day.


In Cracow, Poland, today, is honored the memory of Saint Hyacinth, a priest from the Order of Preachers, who was designated by Saint Dominic so that he might propagate the Order in that nation. He preached the Gospel with his brethren blessed Ceslaus and Henricus Germanicus (Henry the German?) in Bohemia and Silesia. He is often known as "The Apostle to the North."

I liked this piece in NCR

... and when it's not by John Allen, that's a fact worthy of a headline.

Read it here.

Signum magnum apparuit in coelo: mulier amicta sole, et luna sub pedibus ejus, et in capite ejus corona stellarum duodecim.

Today marks the glorious solemnity of Our Lady's bodily Assumption into heaven, long held in tradition and made infallibly part of the Deposit of Faith by the pronouncement of Pope Pius XII in 1950. In the East, this event is overshadowed by the celebration of the Virgin's Dormition, or death; theology remains silent on whether Our Lady was assumed alive into glory or chose to undergo death in order that she might be more united with Her Son. Legend tells us, according to Bl. Jacobus de Voragine, Bishop of Genoa, the chronicler of the Golden Legend that the apostles were present at Her tomb in the Vale of Jehosephat at the Assumption, and saw Her taken amid adoring hosts of angels. Naturally, St. Thomas wasn't there, having had a bad track record for this sort of thing (he was probably out buying ice cream) and when he came back, surprise surprise, he thought the apostles had been imagining things. The bishop writes: "And Saint Thomas was not there, and when he came he would not believe this. And anon the girdle with which her body was girt came to him from the air, which he received, and thereby he understood that she was assumpt into heaven."

Poor Thomas. He always gives hope to those of us, though, that, like Peter at the cock-crow, divine Grace is always ready to transform us if only we will let it.

There are numerous other pious traditions regarding the Assumption and the date of its celebration. It was said to be anywhere between three and fifteen years after the Ascension, and either in Ephesus or Jerusalem. Ephesus is, according to the Ven. Anne-Catherine Emmerich, the site of Her house, while Jerusalem has claimed the site of Her empty tomb. The feast itself, seems to have begun after the Council of Ephesus, and was celebrated in August in Palestine around 500, while in Gaul, following the Egyptian monastic usage, it was placed on January 18. Special feasts of the Assumption, instituted in the eighteenth century, were held in Italian dioceses on 20 February and 19 November, in commemoration of certain miracles. However, the Greek Emperor Maurice, according to the Liber Pontificalis, set the feast for its present date on the fifteenth . An octave was added to the feast by Pope Leo IV in 847, though it was, of course, lost amid the calendarical reforms of the 1960s. The Greek Church continues the feast from the fifteenth to the 23 or 29 August (as was customary in times past at Athos), while in the middle ages, a thirtieth day of the Assumption was celebrated on 13 September in Germany. This custom continued at Augsburg to this century. Bavaria further expands upon this custom, and celebrated a "Second Assumption" on 23 September, following the revelation of St. Elizabeth of Schönau, who wrote that the Virgin was assumed on the fortieth day after Her death.

But whatever the day it is celebrated, Our Lady's submissive love for God and Her fervent intercession remain an example and a shield to the faithful here on earth.

Assumpta est Maria in coelum: gaudet exercitus Angelorum. Alleluja.

Via Fr. Jim Tucker:

In two months, they're opening the rooftop passage along the wall that connects the Vatican to Castel Sant' Angelo. How awesome does that sound? Matt: You. Have. No. Excuse. Not. To. Do. This.

Reporting from the heart of the blackout........


Saint Agnes Cathedral, Rockville Centre

My town, Rockville Centre, NY, seem to be one of few around here largely unaffected by the huge power outage, thanks to having our own power plant. Pray for everyone trying to get out of New York City and other municipalities - it's not a good situation, and a lot of terrorism fears linger in the wake of September 11.

Following up on Emily's antipope post.........


In the words of his website, "Long live His Holiness Pope Gregory XVII!"

...........and Mark Shea's piece about schismatic bishops in gaudy clothing, I thought I'd mention my favorite antipope, Gregory XVII. Now, most antipopes are real bitter and serious in the way they conduct themselves, and have interesting stories about how they're really Pope. This guy claims that "Rome has apostatized," and has a story of Paul VI appointing him that has to be read to be believed. But what really gets me is how much this guy looks like he's enjoying the job. Having had my own stint as antipope, I suspect that God will have much mercy on this guy, since he's not exactly attracting a huge following anyway.

Other Saints of the Day, Including some interesting connections to St. Maximilian

Today the Church of Nagasaki in Japan commemorates the martyrs Dominic Ibanez of Erquicia, a priest of the Order of Preachers, and Francis Shoyemon, a novice of the same Order of catechists, who in hatred for the name of Christian were killed under the supreme leader Tokugawa Yemitsu. What a wonderful coincidence (well, then again with God there is no such thing) that St. Maximilian's feast would fall on the same day as theirs. Truly a day to pray for the people of Japan, and Nagaski in particular.

Today the Church at Apamea in Syria honors Saint Marcellus, bishop and martyr, who, when he demolished the temple of Jove, was killed by angry pagans.

More saints over at Catholic Forum

On the topic of Kolbe.......


Fr. James McCurry is an awesome guy


I'd like to give a shoutout to Fr. James McCurry, OFMConv, who gave our COM/KOI retreat last year. He helped push through St. Maximilian's cause for canonization, and is a fascinating, holy, and very funny priest. Some of his material is featured on Immaculata Mediatrix Online, a very nice site.

Blogging for the 5,000



Mar 6:44 And they that did eat of the loaves were about five thousand men.

Entertaining the Catholic masses -- Our Lord brings the bread, we bring the circus. Here's to 5,000 visits!

Huguenots?!

The last week I was on vacation in Charleston, SC (with a day trip to Savannah). Beautiful country, elegant cities, fascinating history -- I recommend going there if you get the chance! Nonetheless, I'm naturally thrilled to return home to the sacred soil of Wisconsin and subsequent daily contact with the Shrine.

Perhaps the least-expected part of my trip to the Deep-enough South was the very strong French influence in Charleston, formerly the most significant of the English colonial ports in America. Appearently Charsleston was the refuge of French Huguenots following their expulsion from France, and the city hosts America's last remaining Huguenot congregation. I was rather surprised to discover they're still out there, somewhere; does anyone know if there are any Huguenot congregations left outside of the US?

At anyrate, their presence 200 years ago insured plenty of mousse in the local restaurants, so it's plenty justified in my book ;)

Wishing I spoke Polish ...



A Polish University is offering a degree in studies on Poland's favorite son, John Paul II. Professors include George Weigel, as well as personal friends of the Pope. I wonder if we can get them to start an English-language branch of the program?

The Knight of the Immaculate

It is my duty to be a saint and a great saint.

--St. Maximilian Kolbe.

Today we remember St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe, OFM Conv. (born as Raymond Kolbe), martyr of charity, apostle of Consecration, saint of Auschwitz, knight of the Immaculate. Most are familiar with the basic lineaments of his story: the death camp, the escape, the retribution by the camp commandant, his heroic replacement of another condemned man in the starvation bunker, and his holy death at the point of a needleful of carbolic acid. It was, in fact, on this very day in 1941 when that fateful injection occurred, and shortly thereafter, as he had unwittingly prophesized years earlier, he was cremated in the camp's ovens, on the vigil of the Assumption of his most beloved Immaculata. (A handful of hairs from his beard were saved shortly before his arrest, without his knowledge, and they, seemingly, are the only first-class relics that remain of this great and humble man).

But he would have been a saint even if it were not for his remarkable death of sacrificial love. Today holds great significance for me for two reasons: Maximilian is my confirmation name, and I also belong to a youth group on campus which is peripherally descended from his Militia Immaculatae, and certainly created in its spirit. St. Maximilian was greatly inspired in all his trials by the chivalric and knightly ideal (something close to my heart in today's darkness), even then still living in the imagination of the Polish nation, as most poignantly recalled by the heroic and doomed charge of the Polish lancers against the onslaught of German tanks. As a youth, he even imagined himself as a worldly general conquering the world for Our Lady with the sword, only to realize it could be accomplished only with the spiritus gladius of St. Paul. His founding of the Militia Immaculatae, his opposition to secularism which existed in his day in the form of tyrants and Freemasonry and exists today in equally potent but different guises, his legacy of consecration to the Virgin, and his innovative use of modern technology in the cause of the glory of God make him a model to all Christians today, especially those of us who enjoy blogging. Even the minutiae of his life fascinate: his monastery, Niepokalanow, was one of the largest foundations in history; his mind was ever-restless in the pursuit of knowledge, and he even conducted thought-experiments about space travel; and, when he made a long missionary trip to Japan, a premonition told him to build his "Garden of the Immaculate" at Nagasaki in a seemingly-inconvenient place. It was the only building to survive the atomic bomb a handful of years later.

St. Maximilian is patron and protector of the pro-life movement, of political prisoners, families, recovering drug addicts, and, in the words of John Paul II, "our suffering century." Let us hope that the twenty-first will emulate his holiness just as the twentieth recalled his pain.

Sancte Maximiliane, eques Immaculatae, ora pro nobis.

I think I'm a clone now 'Cause every chromosome is a hand-me-down

Keeping with Weird Al's parody of "I think we're alone now", Chinese scientists have cloned human/rabbit combos in order to harvest stem cells. I don't even want to think about what would have happened if the embryos were brought to term; it scares me. Talk about Sci-Fi brought to life.

If you were at Mass today.......

Then you would have recited the best psalm response ever: Blessed be God who filled my soul with fire!
It's sort of reminiscent of Luke 12:49 "I have come to set fire to the earth, and would that it were already ablaze!" If this stuff doesn't get you pumped up to evangelize, I don't know what will.

Immaculate Conception Window, Denver Cathedral

Great Churches of the World:
The Churches of Denver

Denver may seem a counterintuitive place to look for ecclesiastical splendor, but nonetheless, the Mile-High City's sanctuaries are equally glorious evocations of God's majesty as the purple mountains that loom over its skyscrapers. I had the morning to myself when we stopped over in the capital of Colorado, and, following the advice of area resident Gregg the Obscure, I decided to seek out the Church of the Holy Ghost and the Basilica-Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

The Church of the Holy Ghost is a gem of art and faith. Soft morning light filled the dim interior, alighting on pale golden calligraphy and the rich dark wood of the horseshoe-shaped ciborium over the altar. Iconography is everywhere, peacocks drinking from chalices, the names of Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and even the forgotten Uriel, the archangelic "light of God." Elaborately-carved confessionals lined the aisles. While small, the church's mixed Romanesque-Gothic interior is almost perfect in its preservation, with a sanctuary that would be the pride of any cathedral. Ornate chartreuse-green hangings and frontals graced the altar and the lofty, canopied pulpit, while overhead, the wooden ceiling soared above the elaborate arts-and-crafts style chandeliers that bathed the nave in a gentle light. When I entered, the church was almost empty, save for one woman and the Host, displayed in a monstrance beneath the ciborium. The Church is locally notable for its day-long Adoration and its Sunday Latin Masses, and I can think of no more splendid setting for either than here, in this silence.

The Cathedral is lofty and Gothic, its interior a pure white Gothic forest of colonettes and capitals, as if it were carved from solid ivory like an intricate medieval reliquary. Huge clerestory windows flood the interior with luminous grey-white light, occasional sparks of color alighting on pillars or candelabra. The old high altar stands beneath a crocketed reredos with pinnacles almost as soaring as the belltowers outside, ensconcing a veiled tabernacle beneath a windblown half-baroque Virgin enthroned in the highest niche. The cathedra is an elaborate three-part sedilia, balanced by a high ambo carved with the evangelists and St. Peter and St. Paul, grasping their keys and sword. Above stand ranks of stained-glass angels in leaf-green and purple and gold and bloody violet-scarlet.

The windows are the church's glory, one part neo-Gothic, two parts Pre-Raphaelite, with vivid, watercolor-bright quattrocento colors that look almost like melted lifesavers. Vermilions, pinks, sea-green and blue-green, worked into vast scenes of salvation history and a procession of bishops and doctors. Blasts of waved light from stormy purple clouds, spiky green palm trees with fronds like wings, celadon seraphim, framed by Gothic flourishes on the verge of retrogressing to nature, like a Corinthian capitol returning to its roots. I can still see some of them now, bishops, deacons, martyrs. St. Andrew of Crete in a leaf-green cope fringed in aquamarine, a purple-red gospel-book cradled in the crook of his arm. Or the head of St. John Chrysostom, his halo against a background of foliage almost like seaweed, or the drooping lavender-white ecclesiastical gauntlets of St. Maximus. And behind me, in the rose window above the bristling brass pipes of the organ, sat St. Cecilia, ringed by a green-winged angelic orchestra straight out of van Eyck, with fiddle, trumpet, psaltery and even the great serpentine bastard-trombone shape of a sackbutt.

On the way out, I noticed Archbishop Chaput has his name on one of the confessionals.

And it was strange to leave and enter into the noisy world of downtown Denver, where the Hard Rock Cafe has a pantheist slogan on its marquee and where the Virgin is only a place to buy records.

A Big Texas Hello to Becket, Life with the Blogfathers, Papal Elephants, and Lego Baroque

Becket, you're showing that thing in PUBLIC? There goes our credibility. Right, I know, we never had any, what with the blessing of ankles and the Trogdor parodies. I kid. I kid. We had a very, very, very long laugh after 10:30 mass at Zahm hall when he and Good Old Rich whipped that thing out. It's Dan, you know, though by the time the picture becomes reality, I think it may be an image of Pope Sixtus VI (come on, Dan, it'd be the perfect name for you...does this mean I still get to be Pontifical Umbrella Bearer?). Anyway, glad to finally see the Texas Ranger is on board!

Just a general update on the state of things in St. Blog's. Gratias agimus tibi to Fr. Jim at Dappled Things for the continuing fun with defrocking (thanks for taking the ball and running with it after my little display of hilarity a few weeks back) as well as these two cool little posts on Catholic folklore and science fiction. Thanks also for enjoying my Venetian civic ritual post. I hope in the near future to touch upon the ceremonial of the Holy Roman Emperor's coronation (no, not Mark Shea's) as sacerdos et rex in the near future. Once my head stops spinning: things have been hectic around here lately.

Also, have a gander in general at Fr. Sibley's site for info on Papal Elephants, Our Lady under her totally sweet title as Exterminator of Heretics, bananas foster, and a really cool looking-church in New Orleans, though I must confess it looks faintly as if it were made of legos. But not like these churches, which actually are.

Wow, talk about overhype. First things first, I've got to show my best work to date. It took many hours of slaving over a computer, with lots of help from Rich. Without further ado, voila, our masterpiece. (For those who don't know or can't tell, this is Dan in his favorite chasuble located, of course, in the Basilique)

Your heretic friends have failed you.......





Now prepare to witness the firepower of this FULLY ARMED AND OPERATIONAL weblog!!! HA HA HA!!!!

Introducing.........


Hopefully this doesn't happen to our Becket

Holy Whapping's secret weapon, perhaps the greatest weapon of heresy destruction ever devised........faster than an inquisitorial questioning........who can quote 50 Church Fathers in a single post..................yes, our prodigal son who was lost is now found...............please welcome Becket to the blog.

The patron saint of ... antipopes?

As Matt mentioned earlier, today marks the feast of St. Hippolytus of Rome, the only Saint who was also an antipope! Hippolytus, who was martyred around 236, combated several Christological heresies, but became frustrated with Pope Zephyrinus, who wasn't as heavy-handed against the heretics as he would have liked. (I'm sure none of us can relate) When Zephyrinus died, Hippolytus had himself elected antipope by a small group of followers. He continued as antipope through the reigns of three legitimate popes, Callistus, Urban, and Pontius. In 236, he was banished to Sardinia. Around this time, he entered back into communion with Rome, and died on Sardinia as one of her martyrs.

While I wouldn't necessarily recommend following his example, Hippolytus certainly is one of the more interesting lives of the Saints. And maybe our favorite antipope could learn a thing or two from him.

The ever-insightful Domenico Bettinelli delivers again.....

With a sound refutation of Svend Robinson's bitter screed about the Church and the gay marriage issue in Canada. I've talked before about the neo-Donatism that says "because people in the Church (specifically priests and bishops) have sinned, the Church has no right to speak on any moral issues." Besides being a modification of an ancient heresy, this is, as Bettinelli points out, a copout. And for all that I discussed in my previous post about the Church in America, the Church in Canada is in even greater need of our prayers, so that the land of the Jesuit martyrs and my beloved Basilique may not have to face more persecutions.

Some Thoughts on the Future of the Church in America

Recent events, such as judicial nominations, the gay-marriage issue, and the CBS nonsense, have gotten me to thinking about the state of the Church in America, and I've drawn some conclusions:

1. Catholics in America have always had a very tenuous status with regards to government office - both in the Know-Nothing days of the past and in the present the attitude has been, "We'll tolerate you, but if your views in any way conflict with the mainstream of American culture, you sure as heck better line up on our side." (See: John F. Kennedy)

2. The Church needs to look seriously at situations in which things like tax-exempt status could be taken away because of views considered incompatible with American law - I don't see this being totally out of the question, and y recent post about Catholic education also discusses this issue. My point basically is that if the Church runs into legal or economic hot water with the government, it's necessary not to give in but to be prepared so that we can face the consequences bravely but also practically, so that we can continue to perform the necessary works of the Church with lesser financial resources and legal status.

3. The mainstream media does not understand the Church, because it sees everything she does in terms of a power struggle, usually one in which old men in the Vatican are trying to assert their power over people's lives, specificaly their sex lives. While I don't agree with those who say the media blew the priest scandals out of all proportion (if one priest does something like that, it's horrific), I do think that if the media doesn't at least try to understand what the Church is doing, the rift between Catholicism and American culture will grow even larger, and a new wave of anti-Catholicism will develop. Perhaps media outlets that propagate the view of Mel Gibson's Passion as anti-Semitic, ought to consider what they're doing when they lionize activists who protest "oppressive" teachings by desecrating the Eucharist and throwing condoms at cathedrals. Of course, this double standard is nothing new, but the consequences will become more grave if it is not righted.

4. The pressing need right now is to embrace the new evangelization and the universal call to holiness rather than Call to Action and Voice of the Faithful's universal call to power and ordination. Our culture is in bad need of evangelization, and if we stand on the sidelines and just let it decay, we do no one any favors. In our daily lives, we need to be unafraid to embrace all that comes with being a follower of Christ, and, in charity, inviting others to do the same. Glorious as martyrdom might be when necessary, woe to our generation if we do not do all that we can to prevent it.

Dan's Not the Only Parodist Around Here

With CBS going all medieval (to use a term I don't like) on us with warped tales of hidden protocols, excommunications, conspiracies and the Vatican Secret Archives (which has a gift-shop, incidentally, and isn't that sinister), I suddenly feel in the mood for a song. Because a Secret Archive needs Secret Agents. Maybe, say, Johnny River's Secret Agent Man, or, in this case...

Secret Archives Man

There’s a priest who keeps the records full of danger
In service to the Man born in a manger.
With every book he takes,
Another myth he breaks,
Odds are he’ll talk to Warren Carroll tomorrow.

Secret archives man, secret archives man,
Write down the call number and I’ll take down your own name.

Beware of Daniel Goldhagen, though he might seem quite kind
A stupid name can hide a screwy mind
Ah, be careful what you write,
Or he’ll scribble something trite,
Odds are it will be in The New Republic on the morrow.

(lead chamber organ solo)

Secret archives man, secret archives man,
Write down the call number and I’ll take down your own name.

Swingin’ a thurible in Lateran one day,
And then stuck in some Montana parish straight away,
Oh no, they played the wrong part of the script,
Who cares what’s from your lips:
Odds are CNN will forget it by tomorrow.

Secret archives man, secret archives man,
Write down the call number and I’ll take down your own name.

Buchenwald: Never Forget
Martyrs of Tyranny

Today is the feast of Bl. Otto Neurer, the protomartyr of the Nazi persecutions. He was an Austrian priest who found himself in the midst of a persecution as the Germans occupied his country. Thousands of his parishioners at Gotzens were detained, tortured, harassed or even murdered. He provoked the tyrant by opposing the marriage of one of his flock to a divorced man, who happened to be a friend of the Gauleiter of Tirol. He died by being hung upside-down at Buchenwald, after offering to baptize a prisoner who turned out to be a camp spy for the Germans. He died of his tortures on May 30, 1940, and relics of his ashes remain at Gotzens. Today is also the feast day of Bl. Jakob Gapp, an Austrian Marianist priest who opposed the Nazis and later went into voluntary exile in France. He later fled to Spain, but returned to France to minister to what seemed to be Jews who wished to convert. It turned out that they were actually Gestapo agents, and he was abducted from Hendaye across the border and sent to Berlin, where he was decapitated on this day in 1943.

This seems to be a big month, thematically, for the martyrs of the Second World War: we've had St. Edith last week, Bl. Karl yesterday, and these two martyrs today, nicely rounded out by the Knight of the Immaculate, St. Maximilian, tomorrow. God works through coincidences sometimes.

Today's saints also include St. Hippolytus, an early martyr inadvertently split into two saints by a clerical error, and who was dragged to death by horses. (Not having had my coffee, I neglected to mention this morning that he also was an anti-pope: check out Em's post above for more on that rather unusual story.) Today's also the feast day for St. Nerses Glaietsi, otherwise known as Chnorhali, the uncle of St. Nerses Lambronazi. He was a well-known Armenian bishop-poet of the tenth century. There's also St. Gertrude of Altenberg, another holy relative, this time the daughter of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and St. Maximus the Confessor, a Byzantine theologian.

Books, books, books, books, books ...

In honor of their new sidebar link on our blog, I've decided to offer a review or, more properly, a tribute, to one of my favorite haunts, Loome Theological Booksellers, of Stillwater, MN. If you come out to see this place, be sure to set aside several hours, even a whole day if you're as committed a bibliophile as I.

Upon entering the old Swedish church in which it is housed, one is greeted by the sweet scent of hundreds of thousands of used books, each with its own story to tell. Once the pilgrim (If you'll allow the usage) has traversed beyond this initial siren scent, 2,000 years of theological treasure awaits him. Whether one is in search of 10¢ encyclicals or $1000 all-vellum sacramentaries, Loome's will have it somewhere deep within its shoddy bookshelves (it's obvious where the money goes). Their staff will travel anywhere in North America or Europe in search of a particular volume (I want that job!) If Loome's can't find it, I would question its existence. I've heard rumors of volumes supposedly lost in the Fire of Alexandria turning up in their back room ...

Seriously, though, if you're looking for anything rare, Catholic , and out-of-print (we all know what OP stands for, after all), drop them a line. If you're ever in the area, stop by, you won't regret it. And while you're in town, let me know and I'll buy you a cup of coffee!

Music Review: Missa Salve Regina/Missa Solennelle by Jean Langlais


Ste-Clotilde, Paris

Jean Langlais (1907-1991), longtime organist at Ste-Clotilde, a beautiful basilica on the Left Bank of Paris, composed many works during his lifetime, but few are as spectacular as the first part of this disc. The Kyrie of the Missa Salve Regina kicks off with the first notes of the monastic tone "Salve Regina" on trumpet and organ, soon followed by men's voices singing "Kyrie Eleison" in the the notes of this beautiful chant. The tone continues and deepens in the Gloria, where treble voices are introduced to great effect, lending even greater solemnity to such an already-solemn Mass setting. Following the Gloria is an organ piece called "Rosa Mystica," taking the same essential "Salve" theme and elaborating on it a bit more than the Mass parts did. The "Sanctus" continues in the theme of the Gloria, with majestic organ and voice preparing the way for the coming of Christ onto the altar. The Benedictus provides a typical post-Consecration calm until building up the sound again for the final "hosanna in excelsis." The Agnus Dei is similar, with a quiet beginning, but ending in the sort of medieval chorus that one expects to hear in movies like Becket. The disc also contains Langlais's better known Missa Solennelle, which is, as the title suggests, a quite solemn setting, and two other organ works, "La Nativite" and the masterful "Te Deum." But, in my opinion, the true highlight of this disc is the Missa Salve Regina. Seldom will you hear music more majestic or more Catholic - listen to the clips on Amazon and you'll agree.

We've linked to Teen Girl Squad.......but are you ready for TEEN NUN SQUAD?

Starring........The Dominican (Denim Skirt!), the Franciscan (Humble!), the Carmelite (Intense!), and the Polyester One (Few vocations!)

Dominican: Hey gals, let's go look SO GOOD in our habits!
Franciscan: Word!
Carmelite: (sends a letter saying Word!)
Dominican (to polyester one): why don't you go to the mall and look at pantsuits?
Polyester One: Okay! (thinks: maybe if I dress like a man, they'll make me a priest!)
Cardinal Ratzinger: censured!
(Trying on habits)
Dominican: This cappa: so good or no good?
Franciscan: So good! (from Our Lady of Sorrows to Easter, at least) How do you like my summer habit?
(Puts on white habit, black veil)
Dominican: No good! (not for your Order, anyway)
Franciscan: How about this one
(puts on brown habit)
Dominican: So good!
Carmelite: (writes letter) does this wedding dress look good for my vestition?
Dominican and Franciscan: So good!
(leave store; Dominican and Franciscan see Polyester One)
Franciscan: she looks censured or ORTHODOX!
Polyester One: I'm becoming a Sister of Life!
Dominican and Franciscan: That blue habit looks SO GOOD!
Carmelite (writes): I feel the indwelling of Jesus in my soul.........oh, that he would take me now so that I could sit forever by His left ankle.
All Three: SO GOOD!
Look for future adventures of TEEN NUN SQUAD!

A Quiz - I make blogging FUN!

This NY Daily News Op-ed by Richard Chesnoff features the quote "I was pretty relieved when the papal order known as Vatican II proclaimed in 1965 that 'the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God.'" I would like to commend Mr. Chesnoff, but I'm going to let you guess why (only one answer is correct):
a. Scrupulous citation of sources
b. Deep understanding of how Church councils and papal authority work
c. Citing what is really the perennial teaching of the Church - albeit one that was much-misrepresented, even by those in authority
d. Understanding that a presentation of the Passion of Christ that implicates Jews along with the cowardly and guilty Pilate does not consitute a justification for violence against Jews by any honest Christian standard

Since we've been talking about religious Orders.......


Cell at Santa Sabina where Saint Dominic met with Saint Francis and Angelus the Carmelite

I thought I'd bring up something from a discussion that Andy and I had a while ago about the present state of the Church. We both agreed that with Protestantism slowly dying (see: both the Gene Robinson affair in the Anglican Church and all the evangelical converts to Catholicism) and things inside the Church gettings straightened out (see: recent episcopal appointments) that a real renaissance (not like the Renaissance, luckily, at least as far as the virtue of the Pope goes) for the Church is dawning. That said, we agreed that most major renewals of the Church in the past have led to a new religious Order (that is, not just a congregation) rising up to take the lead: for example, the Jesuits in the counter-Reformation. However, we were wondering if that would be the case this time around. Andy seemed to think so, while it's my perspective that since the current state of the Church is formed by Vatican II, what we'll experience instead is a revitalization of the existing Orders to serve the new evangelization (one that is already going on). Thus, I think the existing Orders will take the lead, and I don't yet see any new group that I think is really in a position to rise up as that possible new Order. That said, what do you think? Will there be a new Order to take the lead? If so, who will it be, what wil its charism be? Does it already exist? Feel free to comment.

Bl. Karl Leisner (1915-1945), "Dry Martyr" of Dachau

In regards to saints, today might seem a comparatively quiet day on the calendar, but there are many great lives buried amid the obscure names. There's St. Felicissima, martyred after her sight was restored by St. Gracilian, another martyr, who, like her, was executed under Diocletian. In the Greek Church, many martyrs of that period are recalled today as well, including the military official Anicetas and his nephew Photius, who were burned to death. Today, in the West, is also the feast of St. Hilaria, who was also burned around the same time, as well as the bishop, Canterbury, St. Jambert. Today is also the feast of St. James Nam, a Vietnamese priest who was beheaded in 1838, as well as two slightly better-known beati.

First, there is Pope Bl. Innocent IX, who reigned for two months in 1591, a former Patriarch of Jerusalem and Cardinal of the Church of the Quattro Coronati. He had great ideas for the papacy, but died before they could be realized. Second, and last, is Bl. Karl Leisner, a "dry martyr" of the Nazi regime. He was a seminarian and deacon who attempted to form Catholic youth groups, but received much opposition from the dictatorship running his nation, and even had to arrange "camping trips" into neighboring nations in order to discuss doctrine safely with his charges. His home was raided by the Gestapo, and he spent six months in an agricultural work-camp, where he dodged Nazi officials to secretly arrange masses for his fellow inmates. He was later imprisoned at Freiburg, Mannheim and Sachsenahusen before being transferred to the fearful Dachau camp, where he was secretly ordained a priest by a visiting French bishop. He was so sick he had to postpone his first mass for a week. He survived the war, but not for long, dying of tuberculosis on this day in 1945, three months after the liberation of Dachau.

St. Clare Receiving the Palm from the Bishop of Assisi as a Foreshadowing of
Her Entrance into the Consecrated Life, c. 1360

A Fond Fairwell to St. Clare, Foundress of the Order of Poor Ladies (and a little bit of Lawrence, too)

I have been very excited to see some of the responses of our well-educated readers on the subject of Franciscan art history. Philemon, in particular, your contribution was very much appreciated. So, before we retire, or sing our compline (Franciscan, Dominican or Carmelite), or even before we just decide to not sleep tonight (if you're one of the Acoemetae), one last post in honor of a fair flower of Catholic virginity, St. Clare. Her life was truly amazing, daughter of a beata, her mother Bl. Ortolana Fiumi, and sister of another, St. Agnes of Assisi, she strove against all odds to revive the heavenly life in the Church by a rejection of earthly life, and securing the unheard-of Privilegium Paupertatis, a liberty of constraint, a freedom through boundaries, a treasure from poverty. And anyone who has to watch over television has to have had amazing willpower.

But, before I say goodbye, a few more minor (and Minorite) links:

The Franciscans took over the custody of the Holy Land from the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, and later the prior of the Franciscan house at Zion became the Order's Custodian for some years. The Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepuchre, which was fully revived in 1847 under the Latin Patriarch, remains close links to the Friars Minor, and is second only to the Maltese Knights in the chivalric heart of the Faith. Read about the liturgy of the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre as it was celebrated centuries before St. Clare, as witnessed by the great pilgrim Egeria (also known as St. Silvia). You can also find information on the Franciscan custody of the Holy Land here.

Assisi was the font that brought forth these two noble saints. You can read about the flags (and flag conflicts) of the city's districts here. More importantly, you can also find some spectacular images of the local shrines: tomb of St. Clare, Santa Maria degli Angeli, Santo Stefano, and the Benedictine Church of San Pietro, which, I am told, is an excellent setting for liturgy. Santa Chiara, where the saint is buried, is presently the home of the famous crucifix of San Damiano, where St. Francis first heard the call to rebuild the Church. Farther afield, at San Francesco in Arezzo, there are some spectacular frescoes on par with the Upper Church of Assisi by Piero della Francesca.

Also, I neglected to post on the feast of St. Lawrence because his memorial had been occulted by the Sunday Proper and was travelling for much of the day. Nonetheless, it's hard to pass up the patron saint of El Escorial, a building dear to my melancholic Spanish soul. Also, the ever-informative Philemon tells me that the Perseid meteor shower is called the Tears of St. Lawrence. Of course, you all know already he is one of the patron saints of comedians because he told the executioners to turn him over because he was done on that side. As recorded by Bl. Jacobus de Voragine (who was, naturally, a Dominican, and thus never told a lie): "And after this he said with a glad cheer unto Decius, Thou cursed wretch, thou hast roasted that one side, turn that other, and eat." (cap. cxvii). If you don't believe me, see here. But back to St. Clare.

Lastly, what Franciscan holy day would be complete without some mention of the Wolf of Gubbio? I don't know why, but I've always liked that story. "Then the wolf grew old and died. And the people were sorry, because whenever it went through the town, its peaceful kindness and patience reminded them of the virtues and the holiness of St. Francis." I like to fancifully imagine that, while peaceful and no longer ferocious, the animal lost none of its elemental courage and nobility. As G.K. Chesterton once asked and answered, "The real problem is--Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved."

And there was both that royal ferocity and gentleness in the two saints of Assisi, and that indeed was a miracle to behold.

Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperatThe Intimacy of Respect:
An Appreciation of Thees and Thous, and a Few Thoughts on the Nature of Fatherhood

I remember, when I was quite young, correcting an even younger friend of mine on his way of saying the Hail Mary: “Blessed are You among women.” I’d been taught it with Thees and Thous, and I’d never really thought about it any other way; it wasn’t conservative to me; that was just the way you said it. I remember much later reading an essay by William F. Buckley describing his reaction to the bowdlerized Novus Ordo he had been subjected to for a daughter’s wedding in the late sixties, and coming across a similar problem: “It’s Thee to you, buster!”

It seems easy enough to understand. Not using Thee in regard to God and the saints seems, to those of antiquarian bent, disrespectful. The modernizers assume they’re just cleaning out another cobweb, while it looks to some as if the traditionalists are afraid we’re going to grab Our Lord around the neck and give Him a noogie.

However, you couldn’t be farther from the truth. When you examine the grammar, the error is not that we take liberties today by addressing the Deity with You, but that we’re being much too formal, in a liturgical “place” where we should not be formal. Indeed, a stiff, businesslike formality seems to pervade the entire Englishing of the Novus Ordo: sometimes, the collect can verge on sounding like a Dear Sir or Madam letter. Thee and Thou and Thine are actually the long-lost familiar form of You, something English has seemingly lost but exists in many languages, such as the Tu form in Spanish and equivalent Romance languages (remember my Te igitur post last week?) and even in German with, I believe, the du form. Dear Sir.

You don’t send your dad Dear Sir letters, do you? Or worse, To Whom It May Concern.

The difficulty here is that we don’t understand the idea of reverent familiarity. Perhaps this comes from the disappearance of monarchy as a viable political system and, in general, a devaluation of the paterfamilias as an authority figure. A king stood at the head of all his subjects, and was owed loyalty and obeisance. But, in much of the political theory of the Middle ages and Renaissance, he was also, quite literally, the father of his country, the bridegroom of the state. In Venice, this was made most real in rituals such as the Marriage of the Sea, where the Doge wedded himself to the state’s symbolic lifeblood, the Adriatic. And while a monarch was His Majesty, he was also the subject of the populace’s adulation, ideally, an approachable figure who could be loved and who would watch over his subjects with paternal kindness. Some echo of this could be seen in the American “Olive Branch” petition which begged George III, like a father, to intervene in Parliament, or in the long Russian tradition of assuming that, “If only the Tzar knew,” all would be well. We'll ignore for the moment that both ideas were utter failures. You get the point.

The same goes for fathers. We’ve heard the stories of how few fathers are portrayed as good men on television, and certainly too many dads today want to be friends first and fathers later. I'm not suggesting we go back to Ward Cleaver, but something's wrong here. We don't know how to respect people we love, how to honor them with intimacy. Respect is, on the whole, a lost virtue, and when we think of respect it is too often the dry, half-resentful, half-fearful respect we owe to the mandarins of an elected government. There is no intimacy in respect today. You’d never think of applauding a senator or a state governor as the nourishing head of a national family. I’m not sure you should, either, but intimate respect is a virtue that the family needs, both for mothers and fathers.

No monarchy was perfect, and no father is perfect, as I said above. However, human nature still needs fathers, and while true democracy is indeed rooted in natural law, we still have a monarch, Christ the King, despite all our attempts to dethrone Him. Heaven is a monarchy, and its court ceremonial is the Mass, studded with phrases and gestures that recall the age of Kings, beseeches and thees and thous, formal bows and genuflections. In attempting to modernize this, we risk turning worship from the audience of a king to a circuit court hearing. A king is king, but he is also father. The familiarity of Thee should be balanced with the distancing of a bow; instead, we call God the unfamiliar, distant “You” of a man we don’t know, and forget even to cross ourselves. The supplications recall God is far above us, but the Thees and Thous, the language you’d use to your father or mother, recall the incomparable tender compassion of His divine Fatherhood.

Let’s stop sending the Ocean of Divine Love “To Whom it May Concern” letters, shall we?

The Upper Basilica, AssisiTreasures of Franciscan Art

In the vein of Dan's post below, I thought I'd share some marvellous examples of Franciscan art. While the Friars Minor and Poor Clares are not known as much for their spectacular artistic abilities like the Dominicans with St. John of Fiesole (Fra Angelico), nonetheless they managed to snag Giotto, the first painter of the Renaissance, to do the marvelous frescoes for the Upper Basilica at Assisi. It makes perfect sense, upon reflection, that the lover of God's creation, St. Francis, should be celebrated by a painter who so lovingly recorded the details of that creation in paint and plaster. Remember from which order comes the principle of sursumactivity!

On the 'net, there's some pictures of other famous Franciscan churches in Assisi, including the Portiuncula and San Damiano. One can also find a very interesting neoclassical Franciscan church at Limerick in Ireland, as well as the Franciscan monastery at Tepeyanco de los Flores, Tlaxcala, in Mexico. Also, for a touch of my favorite style, there's the Baroque (and partially Gothic) Franciscan Church at Plzen in the Czech Republic. There is also the ex-Jesuit Franciscan mission San Xavier del Bac in Arizona, known as the "White Dove of the Desert," and the better-known "rosary" of Franciscan missions strung along the California coast, founded by Bl. Junipero Serra in the eighteenth century. There is also a lovely neo-Gothic Poor Clare convent at Woodchester in Britain. Check out the habits!

But, anyway, one can see even amid their holy poverty, the Franciscans and Poor Clares still gave the highest praise in their churches and monasteries to the glory of God.

In Praise of Franciscans
Considering that we normally focus so much on Dominicans and Carmelites around this place, I thought that on the Feast of Saint Claire I would link to some Franciscan communities of both men and women that are worth checking out:

Men:
Franciscan Friars of the Renewal - these guys are awesome, humble and have a New York attitude - what more could you ask for?
Capuchin Franciscan Friars - Archbishop O'Malley, Archbishop Chaput, and lots of other good things going for these guys.
Conventual Franciscan Friars - they look good to me, and the inimitable Fr. James McCurry is one of them.

Women:
Sisters of Saint Francis of Perpetual Adoration: A few miles away from Notre Dame, these sisters often show up on campus for Vespers, Lucernarium, or lectures - a good bunch with a nice Perpetual Adoration chapel.
Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration: Mother Angelica's group. 'Nuff said.
Poor Clares: The general worldwide website - they seem to be pretty on the ball in terms of who they link to.

Tenemos un problema

Uh, does anyone know what happened to our comments boxes?
(insertion by Dan: Haloscan appears to be, not entirely untypically, on the fritz)

Reason #457 Why I Have to Learn Latin

I fixed the translational error in my Te igitur post below. Thanks to Alan Phipps for the head's up!

Danke, mein Herr

A hearty Guten Tag to all German-speaking visitors! Last week, on August 3, we went international, and I learned how to say "Holy Whapping" in German. From Credo ut Intelligam:

Schrein der Heiligen Schläge

In der katholischen Weblog-Szene hat sich blitzschnell der Shrine of the Holy Whapping einen herausragenden Namen gemacht, den einige Studenten der Universität of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, IN, pflegen. Obskurste Dinge werden uns da präsentiert; Paradebeispiel ist ein Posting über obskurste und wohl meist ausgestorbene katholische Gemeinschaften wie die Agonizanten, die Träger des Sterns, die Brüder vom Sack, die Regularkanoniker der Priorei der Zwei Liebenden, die Bedlam-Bettler, die Ritter vom Grünen Schild und die Blinden Schwestern vom Hl. Paulus ("some of whom can see, and still exist today"). Nicht schlecht auch die Legende vom Hl. Flutius von Bologna, von dem sich der Weblog-Name herleitet. (Oder ist es umgekehrt?). Ernsthaftes gibt es auch, und nicht zu wenig. Katholische Vielfalt at its best.

Now only if I sprechened the Deutsch. Thanks, nonetheless, for the interest and for enjoying my obscure orders post!

On a related note to my previous post........
St. Therese's Retreat Center in Columbus has to be the nicest retreat place I've ever seen. In my experience, the most one can usually hope for in a retreat place is maybe a decent chapel from the 50's or something tasteful from the past decade or so. Not in this case - this place has a Romanesque chapel built in 1930 but that feels more like something out of the 900's. It has beautiful Carmelite-themed phrases (some of them from St. Therese herself) painted on the walls, and a wonderful painting in the apse with the Blessed Mother surrounded by the Apostles. The retreat center as a whole has a monastic feel, and if it weren't for the lack of a choir in the chapel one would wonder if this was really built as a retreat center (which it was). A great place for any type of retreat, and quite appropriate for a Dominican retreat, considering the long, fruitful association between the Dominicans and the Carmelites that has influenced such greats as St. Teresa of Avila and Bl. Elizabeth of the Trinity (and Lord knows how many Dominicans through their prayers). For more on this subject, it's worth reading about Saint Teresa's vision of Saint Dominic towards the end of her Autobiography. Truly amazing reading. (Yes, I realize that so far on St. Clare's feast day I've posted about Dominicans and Carmelites - but don't worry, there'll be some Franciscan material forthcoming. On a side note, you know you're on a Dominican retreat when someone, in a conversation, compares Franciscans to Protestants owing to their many divisions.)
P.S. Thanks to Matt for posting about Saint Clare before I could even publish this, thus negating my parenthetical apology above.

Today Memorializes Saint Clare



Saint Francis and Saint Clare of Assisi
Today is, most importantly, one of the three feast days of St. Clare, founder of the Poor Clares or Clarisses, and patroness of Television. She is said to have loved music and well-composed sermons (amen!) and was humble, merciful, charming, optimistic, and chivalrous. She would get up late at night to tuck in her sisters who'd kicked off their covers, and chased away an invading army with the consecrated Host. You go, girl. Today also commemorates a Franciscan martyr, Bl. Agathangelus Nourry, strangled to death with his own cinctures by Abyssinians in 1638.

There's also, today, in the realm of more obscure saints, St. Philomena of Rome, a supposed virgin martyr whose cult was forbidden in 1961 because of a misidentification in relics. You can recognize her in art by her arrows, anchor and wreath of flowers (she seems to have been martyred in a very complicated way). There seems to be another saint by that name venerated in San Severino with a similar vita and a more well-established background, so I guess, no biggie. St. Philomena owes her shortlived existence to the nineteenth-century phenomena of "catacomb saints," whose relics were unearthed in Rome's cemetaries and then divided and dispersed to the Church abroad in order to share the wealth. Unfortunately, it was later discovered the marks identifying a martyr's tomb were not quite as clear-cut as the archaeologists of the day thought. Still, some seem to have been authentic as several martyrs of this type are still venerated, such as a martyred St. Christopher in Mexico and the bones of St. Severa that are displayed at Notre Dame. St. Philomena isn't heard much about these days, though she seems to be the namesake of a website featuring both beauty tips and a Nun of the Month. It looks like a cross between Teen Girl Squad and the Legion of Mary. (Arrowed!!!).

Today we also have Bl. John Becchetti, an Augustinian hermit and Italian relative of St. Thomas a Becket, as well as the "fool for Christ"St. Alexander the Charcoal-Burner. Today is also the feast of the subdeacon-martyr Tiburtius, who also worked a miracle of raising a dying man back to health after he had fallen out of a window. Today is also, in the Greek church, the feast of St. Mary the Senator, who was healed by a wonderworking icon of the Virgin sometime in the sixth century and also that of St. Feodor and St. Vasilii of the Kievan Caves, martyred by arrows (a favorite theme today) at the close of the eleventh century by a jealous drunkard king.

A retreat is a retreat.....
And so I won't be posting any details from my weekend experience. That said, notice that our sidebar link to the Dominican Province of Saint Joseph is not going anywhere. Also, in my estimation, it seems that the Province is doing the same thing for men (and appealing to a similar demographic) as a certain Tennessee-based group of Sisters, of whom you may have heard (if you read this website for long, it's sort of hard to avoid them), is doing for women. Basically, these guys are doing a really good job - worth checking out.

Sanctuary, Cathedral of Christ the King, Atlanta (completed 1937)
Mass: Sunday, August 10, Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Time and Location: 12:00 Noon, Cathedral of Christ the King, Atlanta, Georgia
Hymnal: Printed Handout (Worship in pews, and referred to in sheet)
Opening Hymn: Alleluia! Sing to Jesus
Gloria: Unspecified Organ Setting (Modern)
Offertory Hymn: I am the Bread of Life
Sanctus/Memorial Acclamation/Amen/Agnus Dei: Unspecified Organ Setting (Modern)
Communion Song: Eat this Bread
Closing Hymn: I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light

On the whole, a good vernacular mass in a beautiful church, with excellent organ accompaniment to the otherwise nondescript (though serviceable) Ordinary setting. My only complaint on the music selection, besides the use of the omnipresent Voice-of-God piece "I am the Bread of Life," was that the closing hymn's lyrics tended towards saccharineness, though there were a few good phrases buried beneath the sugar. Getting to sing "Alleluia! Sing to Jesus" virtually makes up for it. The hymnal included extensive settings for the Liturgy of the Hours, which was a good sign, though it did not include the actual text of the Readings, which struck me as unfortunate.