St. Augustine speaks about why we say the Our Father at Mass. He says it is like washing one’s face before going to the altar to communicate...
When Ash Wednesday comes we will reaffirm that we are dust.
Yet here we stand, in the presence of Christ on the altar, and raise these petitions.
It was the practice of Augustine’s flock to strike their breasts at the words “forgive us our sins”, so much so that it made a great noise in the Church.
An Idol Season - Elizabeth Scalia compares the idol (in its various forms) with the icon:
We remember the story of Moses and the Golden Calf, though, so we know human beings have always created idols. If, some decades ago, we were smart enough to be a little embarrassed about fainting for Sinatra, or screaming for John, Paul, George, and Ringo, we called it adolescent silliness, and considered that idol-making was a rare and harmless pastime.
It was never so rare, or harmless. And as our post-modern society becomes increasingly post-faith, our instincts to raise up entertainers as idols become more frequently indulged, and perhaps we manufacture more of these idols now. Is there a nation that does not have a slew of “Idol-creating” television shows, where celebrity magazines don't cover the newsstands? Even our “serious” newspapers carry pages of social or celebrity profiles.
We construct these godlettes, carry them about on chairs of untoward affirmation, and then resurrect them when they die. We place them in our tin-ceilinged firmaments, and then—if they were in a film that added a catchy phrase to the lexicon, or they posed for a poster that came to define an era, or they influenced fashion in some way, or somehow came to represent some ideal we hold dear—we call them “icons.”
That, however, is where things get dicey, and where we should perhaps pay attention to our words, and our meanings. An Icon is a holy thing, meant to be a reverenced focal point for prayer and contemplation; it is a “window” to the divine. An Icon is as distinct from an idol as is a positive from a negative...
A Protestant visits St Peter's Basilica - an almost overwhelmingly positive experience - except for the distaste he felt looking at the relics of St Anthony. Reflections on Rome Part 1: Connecting the Mind and the Tongue by Carl Trueman:
It is difficult to articulate the impact that walking into Vatican City and up the avenue to St Peter's has on one's psyche. You can see all the photographs of it you want, as with the Grand Canyon, but when you are actually there, the real thing exists on an entirely different plane. As a European, I spent my childhood holidays running around large ancient buildings -- Warwick Castle was a particular favourite -- so I am not particularly impressed by size or age; but St Peter's is on a different scale. As I turned the corner and came to the square, the colonnades seemed to be sweeping out to greet me like giant arms about to embrace the world, an intentional vision of Catholic aspirations, I am sure; and as I walked into the building itself, I was cowed into complete and awesome silence. The only other experience I have had that came remotely close was my first trip to New York when I stepped down from the coach and looked up - and up and up and up - at buildings that seemed almost to disappear into the sky. I felt small. And I felt even more so as I entered the great basilica at the heart of Vatican City. The scale of the place, the paintings, the beauty, the statues, the face of Popes gazing at me, the good, the bad but not (at least as portrayed by the artists) particularly ugly.
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But St. Peter's and the Vatican Museum were not my only points of call in the city. I also stopped by the great Gregorianum, the elite university where the most brilliant minds of the Jesuit Order are trained. The building was imposing; the library impressive; and the book shop very serious: walls of biblical commentaries (many of them Protestant) and weighty tomes and textbooks of patristic theology, canon law, philosophy and of the greatest minds Catholicism has ever produced. No evangelical therapeutic psychobabble here, nor Rick Warren for that matter; indeed, I suspect he would have to be translated into Hungarian for his books to be deemed a sufficient intellectual challenge to make it on to the inventory.
I pray he comes to understand our attachment to relics eventually. :)
Also see Part II of his reflections here.
Fr Francis J. Peffley offers some practical suggestions on how to sanctify, evangelize and catechize a parish. Father mentions the Legion quite a lot:
Promote the Legion of Mary. Although the Legion of Mary is primarily known as a worldwide apostolic organization, its main purpose is sanctification—first, of its members, and second, of the society and environment in which it works. The Legion offers those who give themselves to it a system of spiritual formation based on St. Louis de Montfort's "True Devotion to Mary," Our Lady's spiritual motherhood, and the Mystical Body of Christ. The Church has accepted this sanctifying charism of the Legion by recognizing three of its members as candidates for beatification: Venerable Edel Quinn, Legion Envoy to Africa, as well as Servants of God Alfie Lambe, who was a Legion Envoy to South America, and Frank Duff, the Legion's founder.
David Mills over at First Things has two excellent articles on evangelization. In "The Reasons the Heart Wants" he writes that apologetics and arguments are not enough. 'Heart speaks unto heart,' in the words of Bl. John Henry Newman. However the heart also seeks understanding - people want to know as well - and thus arguments are essential.
In "The Apologetic Substitute" he writes of the importance of culture in evangelizing:
But a culture, a culture has more power to hold you, to restrain you, to make you see and feel the real costs of moral decisions, since they may tear you away from the world you know and love. It presents you with something you want, which is something you can lose. (This argues for much better church discipline than any church now offers.) In that, culture works apologetically. It makes an argument for the Faith, if the argument is only, “This is a life worth living, and you know that because you have lived it.”
There is much more to be said for the necessity of a specifically Catholic (or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Methodist) culture. But to put it simply, the Church, and therefore the world, would be better off if more Catholics had holy cards and knew what to do with them, even if that meant they didn't know the arguments quite as well.
Fr Schall writes about Pope Benedict and the Vatican Library:
Catholicism is not interested in destroying books, but in keeping them. In this sense, the books and writings of the "heretics" and agnostics are as important as the books of orthodox theologians. But beyond that, the vast part of the world that does not arise from the inspiration of faith is also fundamental to what it is to be Catholic. The Vatican Library is thus a source of Greek and Latin classics, of things medieval, of things from almost anywhere. In a passage worthy of emphasis, Benedict wrote: "Nothing truly human is foreign to the Church."
It is because of its openness to all that is that institutions like libraries are built and developed by Christian institutions. The Church has "always sought, gathered, and preserved, with a continuity rarely matched, the best results of the effort of human beings to rise above the purely material to the conscious or unconscious search for the Truth." The very constitution of any human being, when sorted out, is a search for truth. This search is what unsettles him and keeps moving him when he does not find it and knows that he does not find it. In Benedict's mind, this search for truth exists in the soul of every human person. It grounds the notion of freedom of religion. It explains the duty of revelation to address itself to philosophy and to the nations.
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In short, we want to keep all things directed to reason including faith. "Nothing truly human is foreign to the Church." Even our errors and our sins are human. This is why records of these too will be found in libraries, including the Vatican Library. A successor of Peter who does not know what men are at their worst, at their ordinary, and at their best is unfit to rule the Church. This independent memory of what men hold and do, of what incites them to pursue what is true, is, as Benedict notes, what is found in the Vatican Library. No wonder the popes have taken such care of it.
The US recently marked the 38th anniversary of Roe v Wade. Here are First Things articles on abortion: Caesar’s Thumb: Europeans should not forget their most pressing moral issue; and The Abortion Cocktail. The latter is written by abortionist and NARAL co-founder now turned pro-life activist, Bernard N. Nathanson.
Finally something light: Couch Cushion Architecture
Before we were influenced by Mies van der Rohe or Frank Lloyd Wright, before we had seen the visual delights of Ronchamp, Pompidou Center and the Bauhaus school in Weimar, we were driven by a greater force of design inspiration. More primal and immediate than any of the previously mentioned examples, it was couch cushion architecture that established the basic building blocks of our design logic. Unrepresented and ignored for too long in the architectural industry, today’s post pays respect to the wonders of couch cushion architecture. We’ve rounded up a (mostly) admirable collection of projects, taken from a randomly conducted search on the internet. Join us as we take a critical analysis of the architecture, methods and design philosophies of living room furniture re-appropriation.
[Copyright Jennifer Larson]
A clear derivative of the Miesian box, this handsome project is “informalized” with the use of colorful, freeform roof panels. Taking further direction from the Archigram movement, the project explores architecture as body wrap and propels couch cushion architecture to new and exciting territory. Grade: A
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