Category: Church

Church

Part of the Difference Between Mission and Agenda

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While Pope Benedict XVI is busy bracing the winds of ill-will to find a way to heal rifts of schism within the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion continues to rush breathlessly toward implosion. Harvard’s Episcopal Divinity School announced today the appointment of the Reverend Dr. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale as the new president and dean of the seminary, a woman with apparently no academic credentials whatsoever, but who luckily happens to be an ordained lesbian Episcopalian priestess. Not only that, but she is a stalwart supporter of the lega...

Church

More on Richard John Neuhaus

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I don’t often post just to provide links to content elsewhere on the web, but I’ll make an exception for this. The good folks over at First Things yesterday reposted a remarkable personal essay Fr. Richard John Neuhaus had published in the April 2002 edition of the magazine, on the matter of his conversion to Catholicism. It’s a powerful piece made all the more poignant by his recent passing – in fact, the hovering presence of his death really hammers home just how sound his thinking was. I had all I could do yesterday to resist spamming all my friends w...

Church

RJN: R.I.P.

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The Catholic Church in America lost another of her intellectual giants today. The Rev. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus died this morning, at age 72. Of course, I never met the man, and I’m not sure I would have known what to say to him had I met him, but I feel as if I have lost a friend. An old acquaintance from my adolescence was buried this morning, and perhaps that makes me think a bit about mortality, yet this priest and writer whom I never met dies, and I feel a piece of me torn away. Surely, it is vain of me to cultivate these feelings – who ...

Church

Funerals and Community

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Today was the Feast of All Saints. I slept a little late this morning, and went to Mass across town at St Linus (as I not infrequently do on Saturdays). I was surprised to see a Hearse in front of the church when I pulled up. It’s not unusual for the Saturday morning Mass at St Linus to be a funeral Mass, but with today being a Solemnity, I thought it was peculiar. But this funeral turned out to be quite different from the other Saturday morning funerals I’ve attended at St Linus. The difference? In this case, Msgr Giggi knew the deceased, wh...

Church

“The Fruit of Abortion is Nuclear War.”

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Today was the feast day of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whose profoundly wise words grace the title of this post. It’s hard to overstate what she meant to the world during the last years of her life. Everyone, regardless of religious affiliation (or lack thereof), saw her as a living saint. Just the idea that someone like that can exist in our cynical times is a testimony to the truth, one that quietly cuts through the fog of modern despair with a beacon of hope. I can do no better tonight than to let her speak here in her own words: “H...

Church

Just Griping Over Liturgy…

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Saint Augustine Church in Andover has gone onto a summer schedule. The weekday liturgies have all been moved out of the church and into a room in the new Ministry & Education Center they recently built across the parking lot from the church, one that might best be described as a cross between a foyer and a small seminar room. It features a rolling altar, which I’m guessing is usually stored behind a nearby collapsible, sliding false wall – like you see in hotel function rooms. At least there’s a small tabernacle built into the real...

Church

One Foot Out the Door, the Other in the Mouth

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I was rather taken aback by the explanations put forth by recently retired Saint Paul & Minneapolis Archbishop Harry J. Flynn, as conveyed in this article in last week’s Boston Pilot, as to why he was putting an end to the practice in his diocese of lay preachers delivering homilies during Mass. In the interest of full disclosure from the outset, I have no intention of agitating for permission for laity to preach during the Mass, and if I ever sink to suggesting that anyone somehow possess a “right” to such a role, please shoot me b...

Church

Athanasius the Great

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Today, May 2nd, is the feast day of Saint Athanasius the Great. Athanasius was, in a sense, the Saint Paul of the Constantinian era – maligned, persecuted, exiled, all for defending the triune faith against scholarly innovators, false brethren, and over-reaching politicians. It’s unrealistic to say that he defeated Arianism, since it continued to flourish as a rampant heresy long after his death, but he certainly deserves the lion’s share of the credit for repudiating it doctrinally, and it was his theological genius that gave us Trinit...

Church

Recovering from the Papal Mass

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As evidenced by my last post, I tried very hard to get myself pumped up for yesterday’s occasion of attending the papal Mass at Yankee Stadium. The Mass was very nicely done, and it was wonderful to hear a stadium full of people thunder “Amen” and the other responses, but it was still a massive crowd attending an orchestrated “event,” and both these factors, unsurprisingly, wore on me greatly. I think it probably would have been a categorical pleasure for me had the organizers of the event chosen to focus solely on the pope&...

Church

Constantinople’s Last Night

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Yesterday, I wrote that I’ve been spending some of my commute time listening to the Modern Scholar series from Recorded Books – specifically the volumes from Thomas F Madden, a Medievalist and chair of the History department at Saint Louis University. The lecture set I probably learned the most from was Empire of Gold: A History of the Byzantine Empire. I knew very little about this culture, and the lectures helped me to piece quite a few things together – in both the political and religious spheres. As the lectures wound down, I must c...