While its significance is ancient the phrase ‘Eucharistic coherence’ has appeared only recently in the life of the Church. Unless I am mistaken it was first used in the concluding document of the conference of the bishops of Latin American and the Caribbean held in…
Category: Advancing the Kingdom
Follow the science – Whither?
Lamentable, isn’t it – the diminished presence in our vocabulary of the word whither? Is its desuetude another consequence of the culling homogenization of our culture, a process which with biting irony is labeled multiculturalism? Or, is it simply a response to time’s ravaging touch?…
Birthday greetings
Happy Birthday, Christians. Today, the Feast of the Pentecost, is the birthday of the Church. So, Happy Birthday to all you baptized members. May the coming year bring us closer to the Lord and to each other, and in doing so enable us to offer…
Masks and muzzles
Citizenship is a liberal art. If liberty is understood to be the freedom to avoid natural law rather than the freedom to embrace natural law the term ‘free society’ becomes a self-contradiction. Ruminate on these two provocative concepts which are found in Fr. John Courtney…
Hollow hallowing
“Dumb Ox”. Each time I find myself several steps behind in conversations with our grandchildren I relate to this moniker given to St. Thomas Aquinas by his confreres. In fairness, in his case it had to do with his laconicism and physical size and not…
Laborless leisure
“The only access to Heaven is the servants’ door” With our dependence on labor-saving devices and DYI (do-it-yourself) technology household ‘help’ today, and therefore service entrances, are a relic of a bygone era. Will the concept of service itself experience a similar fate? The heroic…
Higherarchy
Yes, it is misspelled, just as it is misunderstood. ‘Hierarchy’ derives from the Greek words for ‘sacred’ and ‘order’. With homophonic confusion many think the word refers principally to a ranking system of superiors and inferiors as in military or corporate management. With our democratic…
The irrepressible ‘why’
Readers who attended schools where history was taught may remember learning about the so-called ‘dark ages’, the saeculum obscurum, those centuries between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Renaissance. In what was then a still embryonic Europe civil order had…
The leaven of the Gospel
Depending on whether one’s ‘spective’ is ‘pro’ or ‘retro’ sixty years can be either a long or short time. To borrow Oscar Hammerstein’s lyric: “I am of the latter brand”. It seems to me just yesterday when in the early 1960s two giants, both named…
Even the pagans do as much
The question has been addressed by scholars before. My intention is not to answer it but rather to propose its consideration as a Lenten exercise. What is the relationship between orthodoxy and orthopraxy and how present are they today? Does orthodoxy, ‘right belief’, require or…