The Catholic Thing

I am an inveterate rummager in the ruins of an ancient civilization. Our own. But I am only one man. That is why I believe that the Church must take up this task of preservation, or rather must seize the opportunity to become, once again and in the broadest sense, Mater et Magistra (Mother and Teacher) to a barbarian world.

Let me suggest one means for doing this.

Recently I found, online, a copy of Wordsworth's famous "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," re-published in Boston in 1884 by Daniel Lothrop and Company, long after the poet wrote it. It contains two portraits of the poet, furnished by the Wordsworth Society, and ten additional illustrations by a variety of artists.

Appended to the poem are notes from the secretary of the Wordsworth Society, taken from an edition of the poet's collected works. And in these notes, we find the bulk of an important letter describing an incident the writer witnessed when the poet said he had, when he was young, sometimes to grasp something hard like a tree or a wall to persuade himself that the material world really existed.

In this discussion, the annotator is careful to point out what similarity there was - and was not - between Wordsworth's idealism and that of Plato. For Wordsworth was somehow still Christian, and indeed his nephew Christopher became an Anglican bishop and a hymn writer of some importance. From him we get the mighty hymn for Epiphany, "Songs of Thankfulness and Praise."

This slim book was not intended for college professors, but for any lover of poetry; I imagine it might be presented as a birthday gift. The publisher, Daniel Lothrop, had devoted his life to bringing good and great literature to the common people, and especially to children.

A brief glance at his life gives us a look into a lost world. At age 14, Lothrop was ready to enter college, but he decided to wait a year, and during that year he was pitched instead into business concerns, helping his brother run a drug store, and selling books at the store too, on the side.

Three years later, still as only a 17-year-old boy, he bought and stocked another store, this one devoted more to selling books than nostrums, to be run by another brother.

At age 19, he bought out a bookstore in New Hampshire and built it up into one of the most important in New England, a center of literary culture. That became the source of Lothrop and Company, which specialized in books for children - as Lothrop himself put it, books that would encourage them in right living and right thinking.

The man's tastes were neither sectarian nor prissy. They were, shall we say, catholic. I am looking at another of his firm's works, a book he himself put together, Ideal Poems, from the English Poets (1883), containing poems by Burns, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, both of the Brownings, and others.

Apparently, Lothrop and the people who bought such books believed that "A Man's a Man for A' That," "To a Skylark," and "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" were perfectly fit for children to read, to understand, and to take into their hearts.

I have often done my rummaging in antique stores and, well, junk shops, where I have found, among thousands of individual books, a complete and original set of The Catholic Encyclopedia, itself an immense compendium of cultural, historical, linguistic, philosophical, and theological learning; hard-cover classics in Latin, Greek, German, French, and Italian; complete hard-cover sets of the works of Moliere, Washington Irving, Sir Walter Scott, William Thackeray, George Eliot, and Somerset

Maugham; invaluable bound copies, six or twelve months' worth at a time, of old literary and cultural magazines such as The Century, Harper's, and Scribner's.

These are things I have myself acquired, and for every one such that I have culled, I have left countless books and collections where they were. For most of these, I have paid very little, and sometimes nothing at all: the sets of Irving and Eliot were at t...

The Dante's post-election crowing and whinging are both already wearying. The race is decided. What matters now is not endless analyses of how or why the winners won (that's best left to journalists, political consultants, and other practitioners of dark arts), but what they will do. I expect a lot. But before the recent campaign passes into the merciful mists of time, it has uncovered some more interesting and longer-lasting matters, Catholic matters, about our democratic peoples just now and several recent developments in the Church.

Something we heard a lot about during the long years of the Synod on Synodality was the need to "listen," especially to the poor. Indeed, Pope Francis says that when he was elected, his friend, Brazilian Cardinal Hummes embraced him and told him "Don't forget about the poor."

As if. . . .

But what secular politicians and, sorry to say, many Catholic prelates usually mean when they talk about "the poor" is not real people living in hard circumstances, but something already turned into an ideological concept.

What if, when they're asked and listened to via the crude tabulation of the ballot box, growing numbers of "the poor" prefer an opportunity society rather than the "social assistance state" that Pope St. John Paul II warned us about in Centesimus Annus? Do we - and the Church - listen? And perhaps rethink our idea of who the poor are and what they need, other than more government programs?

Or are poor people who think that way - like the black Americans Joe Biden instructed "ain't black" if they didn't vote for him - not really "poor"? Are they suffering from what the Marxists called "false consciousness"? Who decides whether to "listen" to them - or not?

Or why is it, if capitalism is as rapacious as many in the Church hierarchy seem to think, that the most capitalist society on earth - the United States of America - is the desired destination of hundreds of millions of "poor" people around the globe? Do they, too, just want to be rapacious and greedy, or are they mistakenly willing to subject themselves and their families to the running dogs of capitalism? In either case, does anyone listen to them?

All this is somehow connected in my mind with another phrase that we heard during the elections - and by a strange synchronicity - during the Synod, too: "We aren't going back." This slogan expresses belief in a single-lane superhighway to progress, by people who are sure what the future should be and what is deplorable "backwardism."

But as Chesterton says somewhere - and the dark wood at beginning of Dante's Commedia also confirms - if you've gone off the right road, going back is the most progressive thing you can do. You, of course, don't go back to following that road in the direction that got you into the ditch in the first place. You go back a sadder and a wiser person, with eyes open to where you really need to go.

It's curious that it's not only in America that the people have chosen a different path than what has been presented to us as the shining progressive pathway. In several European countries, peoples tired of being ignored - and denigrated - by their own elites have sought another way.

Italy, Hungary, and the Netherlands already have governments that reject the immigration schemes and woke policies of the European Union. In addition, Austria, Germany, and France have growing, strongly populist parties - "far-right" in the journalese, which means they are now far distant from the progressive rulers who have moved to the far-left.

The elite apologists have been trying to impose a kind of cordon sanitaire around the populist movements by claiming that they are "fascist." Yet they only grow the more they are denounced. There's plenty to criticize about any political or social movement, to be sure, but maybe they ought to be listened to, really listened to, first.

I'm sorry to have to say that almost no one in the Church pays any attention - "listens" - to these voices now emergin...

By David G Bonagura, Jr.

Rummaging through my desk last month, I uncovered a single sheet of white paper. A dozen names were written in black ink. I knew immediately what the sheet was for.

Each November, my high school and college almae matres invite their alumni to submit names of deceased loved ones to be remembered at Masses in their chapels. This lost page was my attempt some years ago to list my cloud of witnesses who, for reasons I cannot recall, did not make it to the chapel. But Catholicism is the religion of second chances. With the discovered sheet, the Holy Spirit inspired a new idea.

I scheduled time to visit the Blessed Sacrament, with a black pen and three white sheets of paper. I genuflected, knelt, said a prayer to the Holy Spirit and to my guardian angel to help me recall those who had gone before me and need my prayers. I began to record names.

I proceeded by category. Family first: grandparents, the three great-grandparents whom I knew, great aunts and uncles, my cousin Andrew. Then friends, both my own and those of my parents. Then priests from my parishes and schools. Acquaintances from the town of my youth. Acquaintances in my current town of seventeen years. Victims of September 11 whom I knew. Students. Colleagues. Neighbors. Teachers. Mentors. One hundred and ten people in all.

With each person surfaced a memory, an image of the deceased in action in my life. None of these were overly profound. My five-year-old self hiding under the kitchen table from my grandfather. Everyday actions of colleagues and neighbors. Smiles of students in class. Meals with friends.

These memories bind me to them, and them to me, across the chasm of time. In this month dedicated to the faithful departed, I am fulfilling my duty to each one, which is the final act of our relationship this side of eternity: I pray to God to have mercy on them and to take them to Himself.

At the end of the Apostles' Creed, we profess in succession the Communion of Saints and the forgiveness of sins. The latter, wrought by Christ's blood, makes possible the former. Through baptism we enter the Communion of Saints, for God adopts us as His children. We may not feel very saintly, but we march in that number not because of what we do, but because God has chosen us. Baptism, then, is not an end. It is the beginning of a journey that ends in unmediated union with God, one that we can enter only after we have been purged of every stain of sin.

This is not a task we can complete alone. "The God who created you without you," St. Augustine taught us, "will not save you without you." To this thesis, without meaning any disrespect to the Doctor of Grace, we can add, "And without your brethren."

Our cooperation with God's grace always falls short. We need our fellow Christians, brothers and sisters through baptism, to contribute to our salvation too. They do so in this life through the countless ways they interact with us, for good and for the trying of our patience. And they do so after our deaths through their prayers.

Memento mori, be mindful of death, and indeed we should be this month, as the end of the year and the coming of winter intone the refrain that our ends, too, will come, so we should act accordingly. But at the same time a second command beckons: Memento mortuorum, be mindful of the dead, of those who have gone before us. Our prayers are salutary for them. They are also salutary for us.

With each prayer comes a memory, and with each memory we feel our membership in the Communion of Saints that transcends time. "Society," wrote Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, is a partnership "between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." Born of God rather than the will of men, baptism into the Communion of Saints confers a deeper relationship, for in Christ all - living and dead - are a family together on pilgrimage. Some have already arrived at the destination. Some have barely begun. And ...

By Auguste Meyrat

The Catholic Church recently celebrated the feast of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, in which "hundreds of British men and women died for their [Catholic] faith in wake of the dispute between the Pope and King Henry VIII during the 16th century," forty of whom were selected to represent people who made the mistake of contradicting their king's decision to break with the Catholic Church.

Almost all of this had to do with politics, not religion. Because the British king's authority was legitimized and administered by the Catholic Church, Henry treated British Catholics as dissenters from his rule even if they never publicly dissented or rebelled against it. Presumably, Henry believed that imprisoning and beheading Catholics, including his friend and Lord High Chancellor St. Thomas More, would help safeguard his rule.

Instead of a prosperous time of peace, the threat of a Catholic usurpation along with a foreign invasion from a Catholic monarch loomed large in those decades, and a civil war erupted between the Anglican Royalists and non-Anglican Parliamentarians nearly a century later. In brutally suppressing would-be dissenters, Henry cultivated a multitude of actual dissenters who in time really did overthrow the monarchy.

As Joseph Pearce discusses in his excellent history, Faith of Our Fathers: A History of True England, the English Catholic community went underground during this time, yet reemerged under the influence of some of the Church's most eloquent and powerful voices such as John Henry Newman, Ronald Knox, and G.K. Chesterton. As they did in the medieval era, modern British Catholics largely worked to conserve the faith and British culture, not disrupt it or overturn its political order.

This short history of religious persecution and its aftermath illustrates a few key truths. First, murdering and imprisoning Catholics will not make a non-Catholic government stronger, but weaker. Second, the systemic persecution of any community sets a dangerous precedent that inevitably results in more persecution, as happened in Ireland and most of the British colonies. And third, there is no valid reason, moral or political, that justifies the persecution of any Christian community.

Nevertheless, the U.K. is currently in the process of reviving the persecution of Christians (Catholic, Anglican, and every other denomination of "Easter worshippers").

In a recent essay, provocatively titled "She Was Arrested for Praying in Her Head," Madeline Kearns reports that British police are arresting Christians for praying in the vicinity of abortion clinics: "the UK's brand-new 'Safe Access' law, which came into effect September 24 and made it a criminal offense to do anything within 200 meters of an abortion facility that could 'influence' someone's decision to access, provide, or facilitate an abortion."

Rather than address the problem of violent protesters, this law seems tailor-made to target the quiet ones who simply stand nearby and offer a peaceful witness to life.

British legislators and law enforcement may try to compare this law to others that discourage loitering and public intimidation of private citizens, but this comparison is completely false. Pro-lifers who pray are not loitering, but peacefully objecting to abortion. Moreover, they are doing so in the least intimidating way possible, internally appealing to God for redemption and justice.

Contrast these "threats" to public order with the hundreds of thousands of protesters in England supporting Hamas by chanting antisemitic slogans and defacing property. Not only do British authorities largely allow this, but they will even discourage counter-protesters who dare to fly a British or Israeli flag.

This suggests that the real reason for British police arresting people for praying near abortion clinics is not to promote law and order, but to crack down on dissenters. It's not about what they're doing, but about what they are. Thus, much like King Hen...

By Brad Miner

It's odd and wonderful that these things happen. I'm speaking of the discovery or re-discovery of paintings by great artists. In some cases, they are complete surprises (a masterwork previously unknown or, anyway, lost to history); in other cases, a work well-known, but misattributed. I've written previously here about two such occurrences involving the Baroque master Caravaggio. This column is about a third.

The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew was found in a Hampton Court Palace storeroom, forgotten for hundreds of years, after having been purchased by King Charles I in 1637. Then came the Commonwealth and Charles' execution in 1649, at which point the painting was sold.

English history being what it is, then came the 1660 Restoration and Charles II, who re-purchased The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew. And then . . .

I pause for clarity: The House of Stuart's Charles I, ostensibly Protestant, married Henrietta Maria of France, definitely Catholic. This did not sit well with English Protestants, who were also angry at the king's tolerance of Catholics. Thus, the English Civil War, at the end of which the king was beheaded. Then came the Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy following the line of succession, meaning Charles II became king.

Then, two years later, came the exile of Charles II, who was rumored (correctly) to be a secret Catholic, and, not so many years later, the Act of Settlement that banned anyone Catholic (or a Protestant who simply married a Catholic) from ascending to the throne. Charles II did return to England and died at Whitehall. Thus, the uneasy, brief Restoration followed by the enduring Glorious (Protestant) Revolution. Clear as mud, right?

This is how The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew by a Catholic artist ended up in a royal closet gathering dust.

The English are more tolerant of Catholics today, of course, except when it comes to the line of succession. Whenever someone in that line acknowledges and embraces the Four Marks of the Church, that person's name is erased from the line. (A 2013 law did eliminate the previous disqualification for just marrying a Catholic, but it remains the case that no Catholic may be king or queen.)

It's not entirely certain how the notion arose that the painting was just a copy of a lost original: a Caravaggisti's imitation of the master's work. In any case, it sat in storage for three-and-a-half centuries until conservators began removing dust and grime in 1987, and the restored, 4 ft. x 5 ft. painting was confirmed to be by Caravaggio himself.

Among other revelations, cleaning showed Caravaggio's attention to detail in rendering the hands of the three figures. Peter and Andrew have the tanned and weathered hands of fishermen. The beardless Christ, in Caravaggio's mind a much younger man, points the way forward, and his fingers seem unnaturally long, especially his left thumb.

The scene is from Mark 1:16-18:

And passing along by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net in the sea; for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, "Follow me and I will make you become fishers of men." And immediately they left their nets and followed him.

It's fair to ask if Caravaggio got the scene just right. Peter's face is shrouded in shadow. He holds a fish in his right hand and the gesture of his left seems to suggest either Wait or Lead on. Andrew seems to be indicating, You want ME?

But in the fourth Gospel, John relates a different version of the calling of Andrew - and of himself - and it's an eyewitness account (1:35-37):

The next day John the Baptist was standing with two of his own followers. Jesus walked by. John looked at Him and said, "See! The Lamb of God." John's two followers heard him say this and followed Jesus.

From this, we might suppose Caravaggio meant to indicate that Andrew is telling his older brother either, This is the man I told you about or I'm going; you should come too. But tho...

By Stephen P. White

No one esteems a man for having lived an easy life. No one thinks more of a man for never having faced hardship, trials, or want. We pray that we might be spared such trials ourselves. We are grateful when those we love are spared such sufferings. But we do not admire them for it.

There are certain kinds of ease - the ease that comes with inheriting great wealth, for example - that we generally hold in suspicion, if not outright contempt. We may occasionally envy those who live such lives of unmerited luxury, but no one ever mentions a silver spoon by way of a compliment. Still, we know what it is to desire for ourselves what we do not admire in others.

By contrast, we often admire those who have suffered much. We admire those who have overcome great adversity, seeing in their perseverance proof of some virtue or other. The suffering of others can move us to compassion, which is natural and good. There are even some forms of suffering that inspire not just compassion but a certain awe or reverence for the sufferer.

Such people have endured or faced evils the rest of us tremble to contemplate and they grow in our estimation for it: a young widow, a patient facing a terminal diagnosis, a combat veteran. In this last case, our admiration is often combined with gratitude. Our veterans chose to stand in the face of danger - physical and moral danger - for the sake of the rest of us. We honor them accordingly.

We set aside the anniversary of the armistice, which brought the Great War to its close as a yearly remembrance.

This week we celebrated Veterans' Day. We honor most those who have given most. We honor them for their sacrifice, and they honor us by receiving the gratitude and esteem of their nation.

To borrow a line from Lincoln, it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But it is not just remembrance and gratitude that we owe to our veterans. We honor them, which is something different and something more than offering thanks or rewarding virtue and sacrifice. We don't speak of honor much these days, at least outside of the military, but it is a vitally important part of social life. What honor adds to gratitude is worth closer consideration.

To honor someone is to confer upon them some measure of our own esteem. One cannot give what one does not possess, so in a real sense, one cannot honor another unless one is himself, in some sense, honorable. The more honorable, the more dignified, the more prestigious (in the best sense) the one conferring honors, the greater the significance of the honor conferred.

Thus, the greatest honors are bestowed on behalf of a whole people, not simply as a sign of private appreciation. The highest formal honor conferred by the United States is given in the name of the institution that represents the sovereign people of this nation: the Congressional Medal of Honor.

We bestow honors as much for the sake of ourselves as for those upon whom we bestow them. We honor a soldier, it is true, for his own bravery and gallantry. But we also honor him because we want to publicly associate ourselves with those virtues and with the one who possesses them. In bestowing an honor, we elevate for ourselves, and for all, an example of those merits and virtues to which we aspire.

An honor bestowed is not a wage, not a compensation for services rendered. Which is why an honor, well bestowed and well received, usually elicits from the honoree, not a sense of a just remuneration, but a very different response. Honor has this strange quality: it is the source of mutual pride and humility, for both the honoree and the one by whom he is honored.

This mutuality also explains why refusing an honor can be such a stinging rebuke to the one who offers it. There are honorable (as it were) ways to decline an honor, but refusal of an honor sometimes constitutes a public insult, that is, a declaration that the person or group bestowing honor lacks the honor and dignity to confer an honor ...

By Casey Chalk

Almost twenty years ago, the ecumenical magazine First Things published an article by the great American theologian Cardinal Avery Dulles entitled "Who Can Be Saved?" After a history of Christian discussion of this question, the print edition of the article abruptly ended with the phrase "Who knows." In the full version, available on the magazine's website, Dulles ends by arguing that "adherents of other religions," and even atheists can be saved by the grace of God, "if they worship God under

some other name and place their lives at the service of truth and justice." Back then, as a rigid Calvinist seminarian, I interpreted the magazine's error as a form of divine intervention against a soteriological heresy.

Since then, I've very much warmed to the writings of Cardinal Dulles (his book on the magisterium is excellent), though I retain a certain skepticism towards the idea that an atheist could "worship God under some other name" and thus be saved.

Besides the obvious issue with the very definition of an atheist, what name might that be? Even if His Eminence aimed only to describe what might under very unusual circumstances be in the realm of possibility for someone suffering invincible ignorance, how can this be squared with Catholic teaching that salvation requires the gift of faith? And why, in a time of increased unbelief and even antagonism towards Catholicism, would we make excuses for people who need the Gospel?

I'm not sure how theologian (and sometime TCT contributor) Eduardo Echeverria would react to Dulles. He shares my concerns about a certain ecumenical approach, increasingly popular in certain Catholic circles, that so downplays differences between religious differences that the claims of the Church are no longer viewed as absolute.

His concerns about relativism serve as a backdrop to his new book, Jesus Christ, Scandal of Particularity: Vatican II, a Catholic Theology of Religions, Justification, and Truth, a collection of previously published essays.

"Religious relativism, namely, the idea that all religions are equally vehicles of salvation," writes Echeverria, "has become 'ever more common.'" This demands a reassertion of the "definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ," according to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith's 2000 document, Dominus Iesus.

One of the qualities I admire most about Echeverria's scholarship is his irenic approach to the Protestant tradition from which he once came. His writing is peppered with citations from a diverse group of Protestant thinkers: Robert W. Jenson, Herman Ridderbos, Peter Leithart, Paul Helm, Paul Ricoeur, G. C. Berkouwer, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Alistair McGrath, and Kevin Vanhoozer among them.

Few Catholic academics demonstrate such a familiarity with Protestant scholarship, and fewer still are the Protestants knowledgeable about Catholicism (Carl Trueman is a notable exception).

Echeverria also employs an impressive diversity of Catholic sources in favor of his arguments regarding the possible salvation of non-Christians. Lumen Gentium §14, for example, explicitly states that faith, baptism, and the Church are necessary for salvation.

Citing Ralph Martin's analysis of Vatican I, Echeverria notes that one of the necessary conditions of salvation for the invincibly ignorant is "that non-Christians seek God [my emphasis] with a sincere heart." Rejecting the universalist teachings of such thinkers as Bernard Lonergan, S.J., Echeverria argues that accessibilism - which is the hope that God's salvation in Christ is present for all, but not that non-Christian religions can be instrumental in salvation - best aligns with magisterial

teaching and Catholic tradition.

There are good reasons to repudiate universalism. The Council of Trent, for example, declares that although Christ died for all, "still not all do receive the benefit of his death," while Aquinas argues: "Because the price of his blood is sufficient for the salvati...

By Randall Smith

I read an article recently by a professor who described how, years ago, she was expressing enthusiasm at an English Department meeting at her Jesuit university about a course on Catholic poetry that she had developed. She experienced some resistance. Finally, a senior member of the department "who seemed to be speaking for both himself and his skeptical colleagues" announced: "Someone is going to have to prove to me that this is a legitimate way to approach the study of literature." I heard a similar sentiment recently from a student at a Catholic university; she has an English professor who insisted that "Catholic literature" is not a useful category.

There are courses in Spanish poetry, French literature, Renaissance poetry, nineteenth-century literature, and ancient lesbian poetry. But a course on Catholic poetry or literature is beyond the pale? This wouldn't be evidence of anti-Catholic bigotry, would it?

Courses dealing with various influences on art and literature are ubiquitous. Why not the author's Catholic faith? Can Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dante's Commedia, Manzoni's The Betrothed, or Flannery O'Connor's short stories be understood if you ignore the authors' Catholic faith? Some people seem to believe that "art" and the Catholic faith are mutually exclusive - this despite the nearly endless numbers of works of great art, literature, and music inspired by the Catholic or Christian faith of the artist.

I had the privilege recently of attending a wonderful conference at the University of Notre Dame on "The Catholic Imagination" sponsored by the incomparable de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. My experience there solidified something I have been noticing for several years.

There is a renaissance in art, architecture, poetry, and literature in this country. Beautiful classical churches are being designed and built again rather than ugly shopping mall churches. Young people are studying the crafts of the classical arts of building, sculpture, and painting. Poets are writing in verse again, and people are inviting them to read their work. Composers are composing symphonic music of great beauty that appeals to general working-class audiences and not merely elites trying to show off their more sophisticated taste in "culture." Elementary and secondary schools are offering Latin and Greek again and teaching courses on the classics of Western literature.

And who's in the avant-garde of this counter-cultural "classical" revolution? Catholics. By this, I don't mean the Catholic Church or Catholic authorities. I mean Catholics - mostly laypeople, but also some priests - who have decided that truth, goodness, and beauty should have a prominent place again in our culture and in the education of our youth. For whatever reason, "classical" these days is almost always paired with "Catholic."

Where is classical architecture being taught? Catholic schools. Where can you get courses in writing like the great poets and fiction writers of the Western tradition? Well, I don't mean to brag about my own institution, but the best place for that would be in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. Where do you find growing numbers of young people learning polyphony and chant? In Catholic schools. Who commissioned and produced the first new classical ballet written in decades, Rafaella? A Catholic. And who wrote the classical score to accompany it? A Catholic. Catholics aren't the only ones involved, but they're often found suspiciously lurking about.

At a friend's house recently, the seven-year-old seated on the stool next to me suddenly asked: "Have you read the Iliad?" "Well, yes I have," I said. "Do you like stories with a lot of battles and warriors?" I asked, thinking I might encourage him to read it. "Oh yes," he told me eagerly. "Well, then, you might like the Iliad," I told him.

To my surprise, he had already read a version of it and recounted for me the entire story. "No o...

By Michele McAloon

Born on the plains of Pannonia, in present-day Hungary, raised in Italy, and eventually becoming known in modern-day France as the apostle to the Gauls, Saint Martin of Tours (316 AD - 397 AD) left a legacy that spans the European continent. The name of the man who only ever wanted to be a holy hermit adorns many towns, schools, churches, and even bottles of wine from the Czech Republic to Croatia to France.

November 11, his feast day, is an auspicious date in the history of Europe and the world. In 1918, the "war to end all wars" was declared ended on this date in Compiegne, France, a mere four hours away from Tours. The soldier saint would have smiled. He knew from experience that the cycle of human quarrels and violence never ends, Only the names change: barbarism, Arianism, Nazism . . . or Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Fallen Man's recurrent interaction with sin is endless.

The young Martin was born to a high-ranking and successful Roman legionnaire at a time when Christianity was young. Surrounded by Christian servants throughout his youth, he noticed the markedly different behavior between those who followed Christ and those who worshiped Roman deities. At ten, he requested baptism, but his father, who remained adamantly loyal to the pagan gods of Rome, wouldn't allow it.

As a young man, Martin attended what was basically a Roman military academy and became a cavalry officer in Milan. As a Roman Legionnaire, Martin was assigned to present-day Amiens where he was baptized and given minor orders. It was also there that he would have an experience that would change his life forever.

Returning from maneuvers, Martin saw an impoverished and lightly clad beggar lying before the city gate. He offered half of his Roman cloak to the wretched soul. Later, he dreamed that the man to whom he had given the cloak was Christ himself.

Two years later Martin resigned from the army and returned home to try to convert his father. He failed but did have the happiness of seeing his mother baptized before her death. Returning to Gaul, Saint Martin became a disciple of Saint Hilary of Poitiers, a renowned bishop of the time.

Despite Saint Martin's desire to live a simple, holy life as a monk, his fame grew owing to his piety and his ability to perform miracles. Against his will, he was made a bishop. Legend says that he hid in a goose pen to avoid meeting the emissaries who were bringing the news of his elevation. To this day, families all over Europe gather together to feast on roast goose - oddly reminiscent of our Thanksgiving - on the eleventh of November.

As a bishop, he lived an impoverished life, tirelessly trying to convert the Germanic tribes that had settled in the forests of northern France. Hagiography, therefore, often associates him with trees.

In one such account, pagan woodsmen were cutting a pine tree and challenged Bishop Martin to stand under the tree as it was being felled. If he remained unharmed, they promised to convert. The woodsmen were in the Church the next day being baptized by St Martin himself.

Saint Martin's reputation was so great that he became a friend and advisor to many who would become pillars and saints of the Church, including Saint Ambrose, Saint Augustine, and Saint Jerome. He entered eternity on November 8, 397.

During the Middle Ages, his tomb became a site of pilgrimage and miracles, often for those traveling the Camino of Saint James to Compostela in Spain.

In northern Europe, daylight is short in November. Night falls early and fast. Beginning with All Saints Day, the steel grey dome of the winter sky lowers and remains, seemingly impenetrable to light for several months. Mozart's Requiem is featured in concert halls, an ode to the memory of a once-agricultural society that recognized the harvest was over and the world was falling asleep until the Resurrection of the spring.

Oddly, it is also in the midst of the darkness of an increasingly post-Christian Europe that Saint Mart...

By Fr. Jeffrey Kirby

In the Roman Canon of the Catholic Mass, we speak of "the catholic and apostolic faith." It is a faith grounded in the firm belief that the eternal Son of God became man and dwelt among us, and by His Passion, Death, and Resurrection ransomed us from Hell and opened for us the hope of eternal life in Him. And so, there is nothing more awesome or powerful than the universal and apostolically grounded faith that livs, holds, and passes on the saving mystery of Jesus Christ.

As the Church has been entrusted with these mysteries, she has a vast and inexhaustible supernatural treasury. It is a treasury that is guided by the Holy Spirit and contains the holy sacraments, especially the Holy Sacrifice of the New Covenant, the written Word of God, the Sacred Tradition orally passed from one generation to the next, the teachings of the early Fathers, the writings of the saints, and the testimony of the martyrs.

The Church's treasury also contains her intellectual and artistic traditions. Such traditions include treatises, essays, poems, sacred music, sculptures, paintings, mosaics, and other expressions of sacred art. They contain experiences and depictions, symbols, and other representations of the things of God. Without question, the supernatural treasury of the Church is magnificent, beautiful, and filled with divine splendor on every level.

Such an array of truth and beauty, therefore, calls for serious discernment when it comes to applying the supernatural treasury to the life and traditions of the Church. The Church must exercise the wisdom of the master of a household who "brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old" (Matthew 13:52). As something new is brought forward, it must complement and organically flow from what was before it.

Like a master of a household, the Church must be cautious about innovation or eclectic creativity. The old and the new must flow together and always point to the mystery of Jesus Christ and His saving work among us.

As the Ordinary Jubilee of the Year 2025 approaches, the Church is given an opportunity to manifest Jesus Christ, announce salvation in Him alone, show the glory of His way of love, and highlight the splendors of the supernatural treasury that flow from our faith in Him.

And so, when Pope Francis announced that the Jubilee 2025 would be a Jubilee of Hope, it fit - and showed wisdom. Our fallen world has forgotten hope. The false hope that humanity has put in itself, in its political structures, in the market, and in the passing things of our world has only brought disappointment and bred desolation. People have become suspicious of hope, and so a Jubilee of Hope is exactly what our world needs.

A Jubilee of Hope is an immense opportunity to teach about hope, clarify the wayward and incomplete hopes of our day, to point to the love and providence of God in the good things and the bad, to explain the meaning of the Paschal Mystery to a world that thinks it knows but does not, to stress the connection between love and suffering, to highlight the call to redemptive suffering, to give examples of redemptive suffering from among our holy ones, to share the testimonies of the martyrs, to talk

about the joys of Heaven and the pains of Hell, and in all other ways to develop and announce to the world: "Christ Jesus, our Hope." (1 Timothy 1:1)

From such teaching, we have the opportunity to introduce and celebrate symbols and representations of hope from the supernatural treasury of the Church.

We can point to the Cross itself, or the rooster of Saint Peter's repentance, or to the palm branches of victory carried by the holy martyrs, or to the grill and humor of Saint Lawrence, or the anchor of Saint Clement (or Saint Barbara), or in more contemporary times, the blue-and-white prison uniform of Saint Maximillian Kolbe, or the Star of David of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein). The possibilities are endless, but the moment is fleeting.

Prudence is nee...