Undusted Texts

"Olivet, Olivet!  Where heaven robbed us And stole our Christ, and sailed Him to the sky!" His cloudy chariots snatched Him from us in a whirlwind of glory, and the Apostles were left, like Elisha, bereft—yet, like Elisha, they were to receive a mantle, and a double portion of glory. As Christ "suspended" His glory during His lifetime, and suspended His "place of glory" before the Ascension, so, too, the glory of the Apostles is suspended.  It is the shortest suspension of these: a mere ten days, compared to the forty days of the Ascension, the thirty-three years of Christ's life, or the many decades of Mary Magdalene's .  Yet it is a suspension, and painful one, nonetheless, that wait until they would "receive power, the Holy Spirit coming upon" them (Acts 1:8). In those ten days, when they were "packed and shuttered...in utter beggary, / Behind the thin doors of the Cenacle," perhaps, once again, with the "doors locked f...

Along with the announcement of my new book translation, Pierre de Bérulle's Life of Jesus , I'm also proud to announce a new article publication (also Bérullean): "The Feast of Beholding Jesus," published last month at the Homiletic & Pastoral Review .  This article discusses an interesting feast found amidst the liturgical celebrations proper to the Oratory of Jesus, founded by Bérulle.  Though the text of the office may not have been prepared by Bérulle himself, it is certainly an authentic example of his spirituality. (Though I'm not opposed to them, please note that I have no hand in choosing the artwork that accompanies my Homiletic & Pastoral Review articles.)

  Life of Jesus Pierre de Bérulle Purchase the Paperback on Amazon Purchase the eBook on Amazon As a companion to my recent publication of Bérulle's Elevation to Jesus Christ Regarding Saint Mary Magdalene , I am proud to announce the release of a new Bérullean translation, the Life of Jesus . The Life of Jesus is an unfinished work, intended to be the "Second Part" of Bérulle's chief-work, the Discourses on the State and on the Grandeurs of Jesus .  Due to Bérulle's death, the Life only covers the Annunciation and the Incarnation; it stops just before Bérulle would have treated the Visitation.  Thus, despite the title of the book, the work is heavily Marian: a more accurate title for the work as we have it might be Life of Jesus Living in Mary . Along with the Life itself, this book includes an introduction on the work, Bérulle's life, and his other writings.  In addition, it includes two appendices: one is the infamous Vows , because of which Bérulle was...

Introduction  To describe Fr. Lobbet, I can do no better than quote a Belgian biographical dictionary: "Lobbe de Lantin ( Jacques ), ecclesiastical writer and theologian, born at Liège, the 28th of September, 1592, died in that town, the 18th of June, 1672.  He entered the novitiate the 18th of October, 1613, taught philosophy at Douai, and was later rector of the colleges of Tournai, of Mons, and of Liège.  His domain was moral theology, where he was distinguished by his great surety of method."  (The dictionary fails to note that he was a Jesuit.)  The dictionary lists fifteen volumes of works, most about sin or moral questions, and a few more general moral works ( The Way of Life and Death , On Christian Fortitude and Constancy ), as well as a screed titled Temple of the Lord, or, On the Religious Worship of Temples, Against the Petulant License of This Age .  The selection below is from Lobbet de Lanthin's Treatise on the Sacred Passion and Cross of Chr...

One of the many fairly-obscure groups in the Roman Curia is the Office for Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff.  Though it has earlier roots—Pope Pius IV gave certain rights to the Masters of Our Ceremonies in 1563—it was officially instituted as a curial College by Pope Benedict XV in 1917; after Vatican II, in the course of various curial reshuffles, it became an office instead of a college .  (The Office provides a history of itself, but only in Italian .)  As its name suggests, its main role is in arranging the pope's liturgical celebrations, preparing their booklets, keeping records of them, etc.  So one can consult their online archive , going back to 2000, for lists of papal liturgical celebrations and their causes, sometimes with pictures, sometimes with bits of homilies, sometimes with videos, sometimes with PDFs of the full booklets handed out during the celebration. Yet, along with the minutiae and the bookkeeping, the Office has also prepared...

  There is an appeal in simplicity, in sparseness, in the few beautiful things of a Japanese teahouse, the joyful tidiness of Marie Kondo; this is the “classical” beauty, of bare white marble, free of pigments. (A historically inaccurate view of those once-garishly-painted Roman statues, but an accurate account of how they live today.) Taken to its extreme, there are the starkly nude walls of a Calvinist church, of “thou shalt not make unto thee any grave image” distilled to its highest proof, of (paradoxically) angelism incarnate. Yet, like most things, when not taken to such an extreme, there is a truth in simplicity and sparseness. This denuding, for instance, is a key to meditation, of any kind, from the clearing of the mind prior to lectio divina , to the imageless noetic prayer of the Greek Fathers, to—again, an extreme—the absolute mind-emptiness of Buddhist meditation. There are times when distractions must be cleared away, when a well-swept room is needed for focus. ...