From Season to Season

We celebrate this day made holy for us by the Apostles' blood. Let us embrace what they believed, their life, their labors, their sufferings, their preaching and their confession of faith. - Saint Augustine of Hippo    Saints Peter and Paul by El Greco   The great Apostles, Peter and Paul, so different in temperament and mission, have been honored with a common feast (June 29) since the first half of the fourth century. Peter, the first among the Apostles, and Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, were martyred in Rome, probably around the year 67, during the persecution of the emperor Nero.   The Collect for the Mass for this Solemnity reminds us that it was first through the preaching of Peter and Paul, and indeed all the Apostles, that the Church first received the Faith. This Apostolic Faith is manifested in our day in the celebration of the Church's sacraments, in the communion of prayer and faith in charity, and in the ministry of the Pope and the ...

The question Jesus poses to his closest followers in this Sunday’s Gospel is one of the most essential in all of Scripture: “Who do you say that I am?” For many of us today, this question has lost some of its power to surprise and intrigue us. After all, wasn’t all that settled centuries ago?    Icon of Christ, the Divine Bridegroom   If we only want to approach the question of who (or even what) Jesus is from the perspective of orthodox, historical theology, then the answer is yes—ecumenical councils and some of the greatest minds of the Early Church worked to understand and explain Jesus’ relationship to the Father/Creator, his place within in the Trinity, and the interplay of his human and divine natures. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§423) sums it up in this way: We believe and confess that Jesus of Nazareth, born a Jew of a daughter of Israel at Bethlehem at the time of King Herod the Great and the emperor Caesar Augustus, a carpenter by t...

Born in 1568, Aloysius was the son and heir of the powerful Gonzaga family of Castiglione and a prince of the Holy Roman Empire. At an early age he manifested habits of prayer and virtue which formed a strong spiritual foundation for his later life. Sometimes given to excess in his penances, he was nonetheless unrelenting in his desires to please God and see God's will above all things. Feeling called to religious life, he entered into a battle of wills with his father, who refused to allow his son to abdicate his title and the right of succession. However, after years of prayer, sacrifice, and struggle, Aloysius was given the necessary permission by his family to enter the Society of Jesus at Rome. Well-liked by his superiors and confreres, he was an outstanding student and desired to serve in the Society's Asian missions. In the spring of 1591, he contracted the plague after carrying a dying man from the street to a hospital. Aloysius died during the night of June 20-21, afte...

What was it that prompted the unnamed woman to break social convention and approach Jesus,  doing something as intimate as washing his feet (with her tears and hair, no less), kissing them, and anointing them with expensive ointment? (cf. Luke 7:36-8:3 ) Had she heard him preaching? Was she one of those who had witnessed his wonders? Saint Luke, who makes those on the fringes of society a special focus of his gospel, doesn’t give the woman a name, although her identity is clear: “a woman in the city, who was a sinner.” For Simon “the Pharisee” and the other guests at that dinner so long ago, who the woman was mattered nothing compared to what she was—a sinner. Her act not only brought on the derision of the dinner guests—“Who is this woman who would dare touch this man?”—but also placed Jesus in the position of having to defend her and his own willingness to receive and forgive her: “If this man were a prophet, he would know who and what sort of woman this is who is touc...

In 1928, Myles Connolly published a small novel entitled Mr. Blue . A compliment to G.K. Chesterton’s life of Saint Francis of Assisi and as a sort of anti-Gatsby (Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby had been published three years before), Mr. Blue tells the story of a young man—Blue himself—who decides to live out the Christian Faith in a serious, transforming way. Like J. Gatsby, Blue lives a life of extremes, we might even say of excess, but it is a far cry from the extravagance of the 1920s. Blue’s love affair with St. Francis’ “Lady Poverty” leads him to live in a packing crate atop a skyscraper, in mansions, in a Boston lodging house and, finally, the ward of a public hospital. He works odd jobs and survives on “backdoor begging.” He prays and he shares his faith with everyone he meets. Mr. Blue has much to say to us about how faith in Christ can shape a life, transforming a person’s very existence into an act of Eucharist—an act of Thanksgiving—that by its very nature draws oth...