(Last time, I promised to follow up Ad Rem 89 with some concrete advice. This will come, God willing, but first something more timely for November.)
Fingerprints burned into a prayer book. A clearly visible charred hand print on a wooden table. Similar marks on shirt sleeves, a night cap, and aprons. These are among the curiosities to be seen in Rome’s Purgatory Museum.
When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi appeared on Meet the Press a few weeks ago, she was asked about her consistent approval of abortion. Repeating her frequently stated stand, she insisted that she is “an ardent, practicing Catholic” and then claimed that no one knows when life begins. Moderator Tom Brokaw promptly told her [...]
Today, the Feast of the Dedication of the Basilicas of Saints Peter and Paul, there is an interview with me published on the Renew America web site. Brian Mershon, a traditional Catholic journalist interviewed me several months ago, and this is the result:
One year later…the forgotten document: A reaffirmation of the one true Church of [...]
Every evening we come before our Blessed Mother, bringing her a collection of our day’s efforts. She gracefully produces a gift of value and, in November, we are emboldened to ask if any of it could be applied to the Holy Souls in Purgatory.
November is the month dedicated to the Holy Souls, and they are [...]
One of the earliest and most popular editors of the Catholic newspaper, The Boston Pilot, was an escaped “convict.” John Boyle O’Reilly (1844-90) was unjustly sentenced in 1867, by the English, to twenty-three years of penal servitude in Australia for his anti-British activism as a member of the Irish Fenians. He escaped the [...]
In Catholic religious art the color blue, not white, is symbolic of purity. The white wedding gown originated in the nineteenth century in imitation of Queen Victoria who wore white for her wedding to Prince Albert. The blue that brides were instructed to wear “something borrowed, something blue” on the wedding day was in honor [...]
I’m back from this two-week trip to Rome, but I haven’t gotten the Eternal City out of my mind. Not by a long shot. Thus, this entry, which has a ghoulish picture in it. I think it’s an appropriate meditation on death for November.
In Rome there is a famous church dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, [...]
The following is a press release from the Catholic Action League, condemning a deal between Boston College and Victoria’s Secret:
The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts today criticized Jesuit administered Boston College for entering into a business relationship with Victoria’s Secret, the self-described distributor of the “world’s sexiest brands” in women’s lingerie, sleepwear [...]
The first diocese established in North America was not Mexico City or Quebec but Greenland. Viking Leif Erikson, son of Erik the Red, brought along Catholic missionaries when he sailed to Greenland from Norway in the year 1000. His father, exiled from Norway, had established a colony there in 986 at Brattahlid. Leif was raised [...]
The word “saunter,” which means to “wander about,” is derived from Saint Terre (Holy Land). The connection is this: After the age of the catacombs, with the ascent of Constantine and Theodosius to the imperial Roman throne, Christians were free to make pilgrimages to Palestine. This was always a dangerous journey, especially after the seventh [...]
Zenit News has a very interesting article affirming the fact, with documentation, that Pius XII saw the sun dance in the sky and change colors four times, October 30, 31, November 1, and November 8, 1950. He defined the dogma of Our Lady’s Assumption on November 1 that year. The pope testified to this in [...]
Summary:
» Conference Registration. We are now accepting registrations for the conference. For very easy directions on how to register, please go here. If you have not received the conference flyer in the mail, or if you would like to print extra copies for friends, a PDF is now posted.
» Recent additions to our web site. We are pleased to present the following study on the Father Feeney of the nineteenth century, a German Redemptorist missionary in America: The Case of Father Michael Mueller. (This is the same Father Mueller who is so famous for his spiritual books.) A polemical/apologetical piece on the Mormons has also been added: Joseph Smith and the Mormons. For the spiritual life, we have Meditations Upon The Seven Daily Prayers of Saint John Fisher.
On the Feast of the Sacred Heart
God has told us that He loves us. In the Old Testament — a mere “shadow of the good things to come” (Heb. 10:1) — we are told of God’s love: “I have loved thee with an everlasting love” (Jer. 31:3); “I have loved you, saith the Lord” (Mal. 1:2). But in the Incarnation, He showed us — in the most divinely human of ways — how real that love is.
Before the creation of the world, in His blissful eternity, God was an abyss of love, an ocean of charity. And although Israel, God’s firstborn (Ex. 4:22), received the Father’s love, the breadth, and length, and height, and depth of that love was largely hidden from view. For all their glory and majesty, none of the prodigies of the Old Law — the pestilences upon Egypt, the Red-Sea crossing, the fire and storm on Sinai — none of them were as powerful an expression of God’s love as is the narrowly circumscribed, vulnerable, and human Heart of Jesus.
Christ being God, we must never forget that He is ineffable, immense, and eternal, ever worthy of empire, praise, and dominion over angels and men. So, too, is His charity unfathomable, majestic, and utterly beyond human comprehension. But if we do not try to fathom it, we will end up being deists who worship a distant god, or Buddhists, for whom annihilation is the spiritual quest. To help us fathom His love, the Son of God became the Son of Mary, took upon Himself our small dimensions, and made His divine love beat in human rhythms.
The Feast of the Sacred Heart gives us both sides of this: the grand majesty of the eternal God and the tender littleness of Mary’s Child. We need the first to keep us from descending into drippy sentimentality; we need the second to keep us human as we strive to become divine.
Saint Paul, whose epistles often “contain certain things hard to be understood” (2 Pet. 3), majors in the big and cosmic. The epistle for today’s Mass is from Ephesians 3:
“To me, the least of all the saints, is given this grace, to preach among the Gentiles, the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to enlighten all men, that they may see what is the dispensation of the mystery which hath been hidden from eternity in God, who created all things: that the manifold wisdom of God may be made known to the principalities and powers in heavenly places through the church, according to the eternal purpose, which he made, in Christ Jesus our Lord. … For this cause I bow my knees to the Father … That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened by his Spirit with might unto the inward man, that Christ may dwell by faith in your hearts; that being rooted and founded in charity, you may be able to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth, and length, and height, and depth: to know also the charity of Christ, which surpasseth all knowledge, that you may be filled unto all the fulness of God.”
The feast’s gospel is from Saint John, who rested on the Sacred Heart at the Last Supper, and who reveals the intimate details of Christ’s love: “But one of the soldiers with a spear opened his side, and immediately there came out blood and water” (John 19:34).
A mystery hidden from all eternity, made known to principalities and powers, concerning the wisdom of God, who reveals to us his immense dimensions and who wishes to fill us with His very fullness: That’s big. A Man on a cross, bleeding for love of us: That’s easier to put in our minds. Both are revealed for our salvation.
The theologians tell us that the material object of the Sacred Heart devotion is Our Lord’s human heart, and that the formal object is God’s immense love for man. Hopefully, the foregoing considerations have put some flesh on the bones of that neat philosophical distinction. Hopefully, too, we will all come “to know also the charity of Christ” and be as excited and assured by it as was Saint John:
“And he that saw it, hath given testimony, and his testimony is true. And he knoweth that he saith true; that you also may believe” (John 19:35).
Nos, cum Prole pia, benedicat Virgo Maria!
In the Immaculate Heart of Mary,
Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M.
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