I was in an allegorizing mood last week when I visited the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in the heart of Rome. Designed by the 17th century architect Francesco Borromini, San Carlo is a jewel of astonishing beauty on the corner of a busy intersection.
After celebrating Mass recently for my University of Dallas students in a chapel just a few feet from the bones of St. Peter, I mused on what the fisherman would think of the overwhelming grandeur of the basilica that houses his mortal remains. Many would suspect that his simple Galilean sensibilities would be repulsed by the opulence and gilded pomp of the place, and that thought did cross my mind; but that solution strikes me as too facile and puritanical. My hunch is that Peter would consider the final resting place of his bones, the rock on which this church and the Church are built, to be a fitting reward, a capstone for his efforts to love the Lord.
At Cistercian, we had an incredible view of the total eclipse on April 8. After weeks of wondering whether the weather forecast would prove true – total cloud cover and even rain – we excitedly noticed the sun piercing through the clouds just as the school was processing to the abbey to celebrate the Solemnity of the Annunciation. Clouds continued to diminish during Mass, and afterward we walked with gratitude to the football field to await totality.
There is a tendency to picture one’s discernment, whether the lifelong vocation question or a smaller decision, as a tense and perilous choice in an all-or-nothing, heaven or hell moment.
Lent is a season dedicated to conversion. It is a period of self-reflection, resolution, and anticipation. We must change our ways and grow. Easter is dedicated to celebrating the revelation of God’s infinite mercy, the new life and grace He showers upon us as He forgives us all our sins, heals all our infirmities, and even enables us to pass through death to share in His divine love forever.
I was deeply impressed by the answer a fellow priest gave recently to a question that I ponder frequently. When asked to name one unifying cause for the troubles that plague us as American Catholics, he simply said, “I think we try to avoid suffering at any cost.”
No easy interpretation of Genesis 22 exists. The account of God’s test of Abraham is truly awe-ful. It gives us no psychological insights into the heart of Abraham or Isaac, and the sparse narrative details — the three days’ journey, the binding of Isaac upon the altar, the dramatic angelic intervention to stay Abraham’s knife — are terrifying in their raw simplicity. Yet these verses offer wondrous cause for meditation on the mystery of sacrifice.
My impression is that many people today think we live in unprecedented and negative times. They feel afraid as they watch ideologies make bold moves for economic and political power. In a certain basic sense, it is hard for me to agree that our times are unprecedented. The Church must struggle in every age, and we just don’t have that divine vision which would allow us to compare, definitively or apocalyptically, our own age with any other. On the other hand, I can easily understand the feeling that things are urgent; after all, these are our times, and so we are, quite rightly, sensitive to their dramatic character.
This Christmas I had the very edifying experience of attending for the first time a celebration of Las Posadas.
St. Paul seems to have defined the triad we know today as the theological virtues: faith, hope, and love. No Jewish source before him brings those three words together, and the pre-Christian pagans do not speak of them as interrelated virtues.
