The sacrifice of Christ was totally effective. It could not be otherwise, given that He Who offered it was God. But it is important to grasp what it effected. Whatever it was meant to effect, it did effect. But what was it? At the moment of His death on Calvary, Christ Our Lord said, “It [...]
Several years ago, when I was in Europe leading a pilgrimage tour to England with Joseph Pearce, I learned that the Shroud of Turin was to be on display for veneration in Turin. After the pilgrimage in England I made my way to Italy where I was joined by a friend. After a few days [...]
God searches for every soul like the Lover searches for his Beloved in the Garden. The soul of the believer is the beautiful daughter, lovely like Jerusalem. As God walked in paradise with Adam, so he now dwells in the believer through grace. Before I entered the Order, I had the privilege of spending an [...]
The only question that matters is this: Is the Church to give the world a Christian shape, or must she instead shape Christianity to the world? Everything turns on the answer we give to that question. As often happens with the most portentous and far-reaching events, the learned and the clever will be the last to [...]
Guiding the reader through the seven-week Easter season, Laura Bedingfeld's "Arise" offers daily meditations from Sacred Scripture, showing how the theme of resurrection is woven through the great saga of salvation history from the beginning. There are plenty of devotional aids produced for the penitential seasons of Advent and Lent, but not enough for the [...]
Glenn W. Olsen’s "The Turn to Transcendence" is a must-read for us who desire to topple the dictatorship of relativism and culture of death, and replace it with the only alternative: a civilization of love turned to the Face of Transcendence revealed in Jesus Christ. The Turn to Transcendence: The Role of Religion in the [...]
Irenaeus’s doctrine of divine pedagogy has definite application to the intellectual and spiritual life: It sets the tone for a lifestyle of quiet, patient growth in knowledge, through prayer and learning at the feet of the Lord. “Behold, I make all things new.” (Revelation 21:5) St. Irenaeus of Lyons is one of the major Christian [...]
For those doing all right by themselves like Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, Christ’s Resurrection from the dead throws everything off balance because it introduces something entirely new. To believe the testimony of the Gospels opens avenues to happiness that are entirely discomfiting to the complacency of mere identity. Flannery O’Connor had a way of compressing whole [...]
St Mary Magdalen came very early to the tomb on Easter Morning. There is something crucial in the timing: it was still dark. Mary at this point was still going through a trial that had started with Jesus' arrest. She had very little to sustain her, knowing only the destruction of her Master's body on the [...]
The Resurrection means nothing if it doesn’t mean that we, too, will be raised from the dead in body and soul by Christ’s power. Tucked away in a dusty valley in the South of France, in the hill country that slopes up from the Mediterranean, there shines in the darkness of a medieval church a [...]
Holy Saturday, nestled between two days of such great weight, gives us a chance to ponder the extent of God’s saving plan. Christ descended to the bowels of the earth so that he could bring us up from the pit of sin. When we find ourselves in an abyss of sinfulness, we need not despair: [...]
Christ descended into hell to deliver His loved ones from their exile. He came to reward those who, from our first father, Adam, to His own foster-father, St. Joseph, had fought the good fight and had finished the race. The second reading from the Office of Readings for Holy Saturday is taken from an ancient homily on Christ’s [...]
The Blessed Virgin did not leave the Temple without shedding many tears. She thought over the destruction of the Temple of the Body of Jesus which had been brought about by his enemies, and she sighed with a longing desire for the dawning of that third day when the words of eternal truth were to [...]
“Behold the wood of the cross on which hung the salvation of the world.” When we hear the priest proclaim these words at the liturgy later today, perhaps we should also recall the annual proclamation of our optometrists. Gesturing toward yet another set of letters on the wall, he asks: “Now, what do you see here?” [...]