-
-
Featured Article
Aug
18
St. Vincent of Lerins
Filed Under The Wisdom of the Saints | Leave a Comment
“Guard” says St Paul, “what has been committed”. What does it mean? It is what has been faithfully entrusted to you, not what has been discovered by you; what you have received, not what you have thought up; be not the leader but the follower!
– St. Vincent of Lerins
Aug
17
When we read the newspaper or watch television we discover very quickly that only one theme is dominant: soccer and the soccer championship. Soccer has become a global event that, irrespective of boundaries, links humanity around the world in one and the same state of tension: in its hopes, its fears, its emotions, its joys. This tells us that some primeval human instinct is at play here and raises the question as to the source of the spell this game exerts.
The pessimist will say that it was the same in ancient Rome: panem et circences: bread and circus. Even if we accept this explanation, we must still ask: Why is this game so fascinating that it ranks on an equal with bread? To find an answer we might look once more to ancient Rome: the cry for bread and games was in reality the expresssion of a longing for the paradisal life - an escape from the wearisome enslavement of daily life. It has, moreover, another characteristic that is especially pertinent in the case of children: it is a training for life.
It seems to me that the fascination of soccer consists essentialy in the fact that it links these two aspects in a very convincing manner. It teaches us first to be disciplines and fair in competition. As they watch, people are caught up in the game and so share in the togetherness and competition it engenders. All this can, of course, be destroyed by money and the spirit of commercialism. Perhaps as we ponder it, this game can really teach us anew what life is: human freedom lives by rules, by self-discipline. The game is life in miniature; when we consider it in depth, the phenomenon of a world enthralled by soccer can give us more than just entertainment.
From: Deutsche Tagespost, June 7, 1978
Aug
17
St. Francis de Sales
Filed Under The Wisdom of the Saints | Leave a Comment
Who doesn’t see that the world is an unjust judge, gracious and favorable to its own children, but harsh towards the children of God? Whatever we do the, the world will wage war against us.
— St. Francis de Sales
Aug
16
Co-Workers of the Truth 8/16
Filed Under Co-Workers of the Truth, Pope Benedict XVI | Leave a Comment
There is taking place at the present time a silent exodus from the Church. The inner consensus of belief seems, somehow, to have lost the power to control it that it would perhaps have had a generation ago…One problem here is that the Church can present to us only what she has and what she is. But we cannot begin with the way she presents herself; we must go to the roots. If there do not exist in the Church strengths that have something to offer us today, then her presentation of herself will be of little value to us.
These strengths undoubtedly do exist in the Church, for the Gospel has not become void and Christ has not departed from us. We do not place our hope in strategies; on the contrary, Christ is our hope. We must proceed to and from his presence. What is central must remain central.
The Church erred when she yielded to a perhaps half-hearted desire to prove that even without the good news of God and his Christ she was still a good and useful philantropic organization. Granted, the philanthropic contribution of the Church is of enormous importance - a task imposed on her by the Lord. But we must realize that she is not just one welfare organization among others that wants to assure her place in the social scene, but that her activity springs from the deeper power of a love that wants only to communicate itself, that she is active, not because she wants to be in the limelight, but because “the love of Christ urges us on”. It must be evident that God is something of which humanity stands in need.
The Church must proclaim her belief courageously and without embarassment, must confess what she knows is salvific: that she has to do with God and God has to do with us; that she can therefore bring humanity into contact with him…It would be a great error, however, to think we are reflecting the views of Pope John XXIII and the Council merely because we follow every fashion that is considered modern.
To be courageous can also mean to be nonconformist, to oppose something that everyone else accepts and so in a moment’s time to find oneself suddenly in the minority. In the last analysis, the world is ultimately governed by courageous minorities that really have something to offer, not by some superficial mass phenomenon.
From: Deutsche Tagespost, July 29, 1989
Aug
16
St. John Vianney
Filed Under The Wisdom of the Saints | Leave a Comment
If something uncharitable is said in your presence, either speak in favor of the absent, or withdraw, or if possible stop the conversation.
– St. John Vianney
Aug
15
Co-Workers of the Truth 8/15
Filed Under Co-Workers of the Truth, Pope Benedict XVI | Leave a Comment
The dogma of the assumption of Mary, body and soul, into the glory of the heavenly Kingdom is more confusing than otherwise for us today. Practically every word of it sounds foreign to our ears and without comprehensible meaning: Mary - heaven - glory. The only word we can really understand is body. What is said here constitutes a recognition of the body and consequently of the earth, a recognition of matter and of the future of all of these. Read more
Aug
15
St. Teresa of Avila
Filed Under The Wisdom of the Saints | Leave a Comment
See then that you keep Him company right after receiving Him. He who is your master will not fail to teach you, though you understand it not; but if you immediately fix your thoughts on something else and do not esteem Him who is within you, then complain of no one but yourself for making little progress.
– St. Teresa of Avila
Aug
14
Co-Workers of the Truth 8/14
Filed Under Co-Workers of the Truth, Pope Benedict XVI | Leave a Comment
The holy day, which is something quite different from the holiday, is the Church’s gift to man. The mere not-having-to-work does not constitute a holy day. This is one of the problems of contemporary society: that it is, on the one hand, thoroughly sated with the worship of work but, on the other hand, cannot find the alternative - which would be freedom, a break with routine - and hence comes gradually to find freedom more threatening and more uncomfortable than work.
But what makes a day a holy day? Precisely the fact that it is not dependent on our own decision; that it is, as it were, not homemade but ordained; that it is based on a precept we have not decreed. There is nothing arbitrary about a holy day. We do not make it; we receive it. Even more: a holy day possesses a reality that is lasting and by reason of which it is transformed from a pause in our occupations into a reality of another kind.
A third fact must be mentioned here: a holiday can become a holy day, in the true sense of the word, only if it stems from a precept that it be celebrated as such. The holy day, on the other hand, is an expression of the fact that we receive our time not just from the movement of the stars but from those who have lived, love, and suffered before us - in other words, that man’s time is human time. Even more significantly, it is an expression of the fact that we receive our time from him who sustains the universe. It is the invasion of the quite Other into our lives - the sign that we are not alone in this world. For its part, the the holy day has engendered art, beauty for its own sake, which we find so endlessly comforting precisely because it has no compulsion to be useful, because it does not owe its existence to a leisure that we have devised for ourselves.
We might begin here to reach into history and to ask: What would a world be like if the prescribed holy days man does not ordain for himself were to disappear in favor of the holidays he did so ordain? What would a world be like in which there no longer existed that beauty that was awakened by faith? But let us speak of the present. Every liturgy ought, in reality, to be a kind of holy day, should have about it something of the cheerful, liberating purposelessness of a geuine holy day, liberation from the compulsion of what we plan for ourselves in favor of the answer that already awaits us and that we have only to hear and accept. If that is the case, we must surely say: the Church will have to learn again how to celebrate holy days, how to radiate the brightness of a holy day. Her obeisance to t he rational world has been much too deep in latter years; she has thereby let herself be robbed of a piece of herself. The Church should invite us to the holy days she has preserved in faith. In doing so, she will enable those to rejoice for whom her glad tidings are inaccessible because they are viewed too rationally.
See: Principles of Catholic Theology, pp. 82-83
Aug
14
St. Maximillian Kolbe
Filed Under The Wisdom of the Saints | Leave a Comment
No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the hecatombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?
– St. Maximillian Kolbe
Aug
13
One who sees the deserts of stone in our growing metropolitan areas, who detects the surrender to that anonymity and manipulation that all but suffocate both physically and psychically those who live in them, such a one might well say: if there did not already exist the idea of cathedrals, of a space for reflection, for stillness, if there did not already exist a finger pointing to the mysterious, the eternal - then we should have to invent them because we have need of them.
As Christians, we need a place for recollection, which, generally speaking, cannot exist unless we ourselves are interiorly recollected. If Christians are to pray together, they must first be able to separate themselves from all the distractions of this world and to enter into the stillness that does not separate but unites. For nowhere is man so totally near to self and to the manifestation of self to others, as in shared silence then yields to meaningful speech.
Where the silent prayer of the faithful no longer exists, we might as well close the churches because they are becoming unsafe. Open churches were once the common property of all Christendom, the breath of the Eternal One in the midst of our busy world; they benefited the whole Church in a way that is indefinable but real. A church that merely “functions”, that is merely “functional”, no longer provides what was special to it: a space in which to be, a space in which to leave the world of goals and to enter ino the freedom of God. To erect such spaces is, especially today, a rewarding task that becomes all the more pressing the more we are isolated in the towering domiciles of our cities.
From: Dogma und Verkundigung, pp.266ff.
