We continue what be began in our last number, a three-part study of spiritual childhood by Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. (1877-1964).
St. Teresa of the Child Jesus reminds us that the principal virtues of the child of God are those in which are reproduced in an eminent degree the innate qualities of the child, minus his defects. Consequently the way of spiritual childhood will teach us to be supernaturally ourselves minus our defects.
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day
I just read on the New Advent website the Catholic Encyclopedia’s excellent account of the life of Erin’s great apostle. I would highly recommend it if you can spare fifteen minutes today. I can’t think of anything I’ve read elsewhere over the years about the saint that …
That’s the motion that was debated last week in London, at an event hosted by the Spectator and held at the Royal Geographical Society. And guess what — “the 700-strong sell-out audience voted overwhelmingly in favour of the motion”!
Excerpt from The Catholic Herald:
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, author Piers Paul Read and Dom Anthony Sutch, former headmaster of Downside, spoke for the motion.
Anime cartoons and their characters are a huge cultic phenomenon, the most popular of all escapist media venues. It is very addictive and very dangerous, to the soul and the mind. I don’t post weird stories, but this blog by Zoe Romanowski from Inside Catholic, along with another, even …
One of the commentators on the relevant CWN article expressed it well: “It’s past time someone said this. Too often ecumenism is taken to mean the weakening of the teachings of the Church and the addition of non-Catholic ritual and beliefs.” A-m-e-n-!
Past time is better than no time — or, “better late than never.” All the scandal that has transpired, and is ongoing, in the name of ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue should cease at these words of Cardinal Levada defining its purpose (or “final cause” to you Aristotelians out there): “Union with the Catholic Church is the goal of ecumenism.”
Our 2010 conference will be held on October 8 and 9 at Saint Benedict Center in Richmond, New Hampshire.
The information currently available is as follows:
Theme: “The Romance of Wisdom”
Cost: $100 for both days (Friday and Saturday). This includes meals. Single days without meals: $40.
Note: This year, Friday and Saturday will both be full days. There will be eight speakers giving presentations in addition to the master of ceremonies, our Prior, Brother Andre Marie.
Archbishop Alberto Bottari de Castello, apostolic nuncio to Japan, has a very perceptive insight into the subversive effects Buddhist doctrine has on the soul of a suffering devotee confronting hopelessness. From Sandro Magister’s latest column: “Why Life is Worth So Little in Prosperous Japan.”
“The Japanese do not have a personal …
[March 5, 2010 - Rome Reports (with hat tip to Rorate Caeli)]
Benedict XVI has formed a commission to investigate if Our Lady truly appeared in Medjugorje, a small town in Bosnia.
The commission is part of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Cardinal Camillo Ruini will preside over the commission. Ruini is the pope’s former vicar of Rome’s diocese. Ruini goal will be to explain to the pope what’s happening at the sanctuary which has become the third most visited in Europe.
Allegedly, at least 6 people have witnessed the Virgins apparitions there since 1981.
When the enemies of the Church, the enemies of Christianity in general, and those who want to “hold” the Catholic hierarchy’s “feet to the fire” constantly jabber about Pius XII’s supposed complicity in the Nazi murder of Jews, it becomes necessary to defend the truth as well as the honor of the Holy Father. He was, after all, not only innocent of the crime of which he stands accused by an angry mob, but was also proactive in the protection of innocent Jews. That’s history. Catholics have a particular duty to defend the Church’s honor, but even secular historians of the era ought to vindicate Pius XII, if only to protect the integrity of their science.
In changing the traditional Douay-Rheims rendering of Genesis 3:15 from “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel” to the Catholic Revised Standard Version translation (based on the King James Bible), “I will put enmities between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed: he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel,” the scriptural foundation for the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is compromised. So, too, is the traditional doctrine concerning Our Lady’s essential role in salvation history, which has been translated into her more modern title of “Co-redemptrix.”
“The United Nations estimated that 683 Christians fled Mosul between February 20 and February 27. Chaldean Catholic Bishop Emil Shimoun Nona of Mosul estimated that ‘about 400 families’ had left the city’s community of 4,000 Christians.”
This disheartening data comes from an article in Catholic World News. The Iraqi Catholic bishops themselves are bemoaning the situation. But that’s not all they are doing; they are also praying, fasting, and organizing their people to protest peacefully. The facts are not to be denied, and they are not the “spin” of liberal news pundits trying to make a Republican effort look bad.
To all our readers: Happy Thanksgiving! And lest you think that heathens and heretics dining on maize and turkey is the historical “first Thanksgiving” in America, we present a myth-shattering article by Adam Miller, who truly tells the story of “The First Thanksgiving.” (Hint: It was Catholic!)
Today is also the feast of the Miraculous Medal. As I only recently visited the Church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, where the most well-known Miraculous Medal miracle took place, I would like to tell the story of that miracle (but not before mentioning a fact music buffs may appreciate: the composer Alessandro Scarlatti was married in this historic church in 1678).
The miracle is the conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne, a French Jew who hated the Catholic Church, especially since the conversion of his older brother, Theodore, who became a priest. Alphonse’s whole life changed when, while traveling around Europe, he Providentially came under the influence of a Baron de Bussieres, himself a convert to the Faith from Protestantism. The Baron, an older man, gave the cynical Ratisbonne a Miraculous Medal and presented him with a challenge to wear it daily and to recite the Memorare every morning and evening. Ratisbonne took this challenge, considering himself impervious to such superstition. The date was January 17th, 1842 (only about twelve years after Saint Catherine Labouré received the revelation of the medal). Three days later, on the 20th, Alphonse was supposed to be leaving Rome for the next stop on his travel itinerary. Instead, he found himself taking a walk with the Baron. The two stopped at Sant’Andrea delle Fratte (Saint Andrew of the Thickets), where the Baron had to consult with one of the monks about a friend’s funeral arrangements. De Bussieres left Ratisbonne outside, but when he returned, the young Jew was nowhere in sight.
He looked in the Church, where he found Alphonse prostrate on the floor of a side chapel, his face bathed in tears. The young Jew would barely speak to the Baron, but he kept kissing the medal and asked to see a priest. As he kissed the medal, he repeated, “I have seen her. I have seen her.”
Here is how Ratisbonne himself related what happened: “I had been but a minute or two in the church when I became a prey to an indescribable feeling of distress. When I looked up the whole building around me seemed to have disappeared. I could only see one chapel, which had, as it were, gathered all light unto itself, and there, in the midst of the light, standing on an altar, beautiful and majestic, was the Blessed Virgin Mary as represented on this medal. I was drawn towards her as if by an irresistible impulse. She made a sign to me to kneel down, and then seemed to say: ‘that is well.’ She did not speak, but I understood everything.”
Alphonse became a Catholic and joined his formerly estranged brother, Abbe Theodore Ratisbonne, and the two founded an institute known as L’Oeurve de Notre Dame di Sion (the Work of Our Lady of Sion), which worked for the conversion of the Jews. (This apostolate would later be instumental in the baptism of Hermann Cohen, a former student of Franz Liszt.)
Seventy-five years after this famous conversion, the rector of the international Franciscan theology college in Rome, Father Stephane Ignudi, read and commented on the story of Ratisbonne to a group of Capuchin Franciscan seminarians. Ignudi was a confessor and confidant of Pope Saint Pius X. One of the young Friars in the chapel was Brother Maximilian Kolbe, who would later receive his doctorate in theology under Ignudi’s direction. Upon the hearing of this story, Brother Maximilian was fired to a zeal for the conversion of the Jews. It was then that he resolved to start a Marian association known as the Militia of the Immaculate, which had the conversion of Jews as one of its goals. And each member — or knight — would have as a weapon, the Miraculous Medal.
The year was 1917: the four-hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Revolt, the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Freemasonry, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and, also, the year of the Balfour Declaration, by which England promised a Zionist state in Palestine. Finally, it was also the year of the Fatima apparitions.
Saint Maximilian was so moved by the conversion of Ratisbonne that he made it a regular topic of his conversation. He frequently returned to the altar where the apparition took place, called the altar of the Virgin of the Miracle. He said his first Mass there on the 29th of April, 1918.
Two busts flank that side-altar in Sant’Andrea delle Fratte: one is of Ratisbonne, the other of Saint Maximilian.
Tags: Alphonse Ratisbonne, Catherine Labouré, Father Stephane Ignudi, Maximilian Kolbe, Miraculous Medal, Sant'Andrea delle Fratte, Thanksgiving, Theodore Ratisbonne
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