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Posted on October 6, 2019October 6, 2019 by Msgr. Charles Pope Words of Wisdom from the Carmina Burana I was at the Kennedy Center last night with friends to hear a performance of the popular cantata Carmina Burana. It was composed by Carl Orff in the mid-1930s and consists of a collection of poems from the Middle Ages (set to music). The poems, mostly of a secular nature, were found in Benediktbeuern Abbey in Bavaria in the early 1800s.Among the poems is Estuans interius (Seething inside), a lament on the price one pays for indulging the passions (e.g., lust,...

n October 7, Catholics remember Our Lady of the Rosary.The feast was actually instituted under another name: In 1571 Pope Pius V instituted “Our Lady of Victory” as an annual feast in thanksgiving for Mary’s patronage in the victory of the Holy League over the Muslim Turks in the Battle of Lepanto. Two years later, in 1573, Pope Gregory XIII changed the title of this feastday to “Feast of the Holy Rosary.” And in 1716, Pope Clement XI extended the feast to the whole of the Latin Rite, inserting it into the Roman Catholic calendar of saints, and assigning it...

Kyle Harper’s From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Harvard, 2013) is an impressively learned and important book. Still a youngish man (which means younger than me), Harper is already a professor of classics and letters and senior vice president and provost at the University of Oklahoma. As an expert in the history of the late Roman world, Harper explores in this volume how the Christian sexual ethic, so despised and seemingly inconsequential in the first century, came to be codified in law by the sixth century. Harper does not take sides in this...

Question: "What do the terms "apocrypha" and "deuterocanonical" mean, and how does the Orthodox Church view them?" The question of the Biblical canon is a somewhat complicated one, because it developed over a very long period of time, and there certainly have been some historical disagreements on the matter. The word "canon" comes the Greek word κανών, which means a measuring rod, or a rule. And so when we speak of the canon of Scripture, we are speaking of the lists of books that affirmed to be Scripture. Christians have a precisely defined New Testament Canon, about which there...

Representatives of the Orthodox community of Ekaterinburg have been fighting for Khokhryakov Street, named after a Bolshevik revolutionary who was personally involved in the brutal murder of several clerics, to be renamed. They initially called for and collected hundreds of signatures for it to be returned to its historical name of Tikhvin Street, though authorities refused because there is now another street in the city with that name, reports Russian Line. “The name should not be identical or confusingly similar to the name of another object located on the territory of the same settlement,” the mayor’s office said. The street...

Posted on October 5, 2019October 4, 2019 by Msgr. Charles Pope Five Fundamentals for a Firm Faith – A Homily for the 27th Sunday of the Year The readings for this Sunday’s Mass richly describe some essential qualities of faith. There are five fundamentals that can be seen:Wanting – The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith” (Luke 17:5-6).There’s an old saying that what you want, you get. Many doubt this, thinking that they have wanted many things that they did not get. The reason for this, however, is usually because they didn’t want it enough. When we...

“Father de Foucauld, since his conversion, never for one day stopped thinking of that hour after which there are no others...”Immediately upon the outbreak of the Great War, Charles de Foucauld wished to return to France from the Sahara desert. He desired to rejoin the French army as a military chaplain. The bishop under whose authority he lived instructed him to stay where he was at Tamanrasset, a small village in modern-day Algeria. De Foucauld obeyed what was later to prove a death sentence. France’s empire in 1914 extended to large parts of North Africa – and that empire was...

Posted on October 3, 2019October 3, 2019 by Msgr. Charles Pope Adoration 2.0 – A Unique Insight from a Spiritual Master When we think of the word “adoration,” we think of a high form of love, perhaps the highest. Theologically, we equate adoration with latria, the worship and love due to God alone. In the vernacular, to say “I adore you” is to indicate an intense and elevated form of love.Liturgically, adoration of the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament indicates a period during which one enters into the experience of loving God and gazing upon Him in that love....

Posted on October 2, 2019October 2, 2019 by Msgr. Charles Pope What Conscience Dreads and Prayer Dares Not Ask The Collect (Opening Prayer) for this weekÂ’s Masses (27th Week of the Year), though directed to God, teaches us that our prayer is not always about things with which we are comfortable. It sometimes leads us to examine areas of our life in which we struggle with sin or we struggle to desire to be free of sin. Here is the prayer:Almighty ever-living God, who in the abundance of your kindness surpass the merits and the desires of those who...

Posted on October 1, 2019October 1, 2019 by Msgr. Charles Pope Man Is Not an Intruder in Creation There is a fundamental precept among climate change activists and radical environmentalists that man is an interloper in the natural world. All would be pristine if it weren’t for us. There seems to be little appreciation that humans are part of creation, that we are supposed to be here, part of the interplay among living organism in which there is both giving and taking.The role of the human person in creation is developed quite explicitly in the Bible. In the very...

Posted on September 30, 2019September 30, 2019 by Msgr. Charles Pope The Decline of the Church in Europe In yesterday’s post we pondered the decline of the Catholic faith in the United States. For us, the exodus began in the late 1960s. In Europe it had begun long before. Hard figures are difficult to come by, but in most Western European countries today, it is estimated that less than 10 percent of Catholics attend Mass weekly. C.S. Lewis lamented the great collapse of the faith in Europe in writings going back to the late 1940s.Of all C.S. Lewis’ works,...

Montana prevented scholarship money going to students at religious schoolsKendra Espinoza is a single mother in Montana. She didn't like the environment the public school system offered her two daughters. Espinoza wanted them in a private Christian school; to pay the tuition, she took a second job cleaning houses and she got some needed public assistance in the form of a scholarship program. The state of Montana enacted Student Scholarship Programs in 2015, which helped parents who sent their children to private schools — both secular and religious — by allowing taxpayers to redirect up to $150 of their state...

For this date in the year AD 420, the Chronicon of Prosper of Aquitaine (written in the mid-5th century) contains the following notice: Hieronimus presbyter moritur anno aetatis suae XCI pridie kalendas Octobris. That is, in English: “The priest Jerome died at the age of 91 on 30 September.” His full name was Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, but he is known to later ages simply as Saint Jerome, Doctor of the Church. Along with Augustine of Hippo, Jerome was one of the most voluminous scholars of antiquity whose works have come down to us. In his own book entitled: De Viris...

Posted on September 29, 2019September 30, 2019 by Msgr. Charles Pope A Lament for the Diminishing Church I suspect that experiencing the suffering and diminishing Church of today is more difficult for those of us who are older. There are two reasons for this: First, the scandals, decline, and disorder happened on our watch; we clergy especially have a lot of repenting to do over what we have done and what we have failed to do. Second, we remember a time when things seemed better, when the Church was strong and growing, when she was more certain of herself,...

Posted on September 28, 2019September 27, 2019 by Msgr. Charles Pope Ignoring the Poor Is a Damnable Sin—A Homily for the 26th Sunday of the Year This Sunday’s Gospel about the rich man and Lazarus contains some important teachings on judgment and Hell. We live in times in which many consider the teachings on Hell to be untenable. They struggle to understand how a God described as loving, merciful, and forgiving could assign certain souls to Hell forever. Despite the fact that the Doctrine of Hell is taught extensively in Scripture as well as by Jesus Himself, it does...

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Posted on September 26, 2019September 26, 2019 by Msgr. Charles Pope What Our Church Buildings Say About Us In the Mass for Thursday of the 25th week of the year, we read from the book of the prophet Haggai, who wrote at the time of the return of the Jews from the Babylonian exile, which had begun in 587 B.C. The Jewish people were permitted to return to the Promised Land beginning in about 538 B.C. Haggai wrote his book in the summer of 520 B.C. and in it he scolds the people for concentrating on their “paneled houses”...

Lynn Townsend White Jr., an American historian from Princeton, wrote an influential essay in 1967, at the height of the cultural revolution in Western campuses, arguing that Christianity and Judeo-Christian values are responsible for ecological disaster and climate change. The essay, naturally, was adapted by generations after, ironically almost like a document of faith.The central argument went like this. White argued, “The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture. … By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of...

Posted on September 25, 2019September 25, 2019 by Msgr. Charles Pope What Can Remnant Theology Teach Us about the Church Today? In the first reading for Wednesday of the 25th week of the Year, Ezra laments the sins of the people that led to their exile in Babylon, but he is also grateful that God has now opened a door to return to the Promised Land and left “a remnant” of the people to rebuild. There is something for us to learn in the biblical theology of the remnant.As a Catholic and a priest, I am stunned at the...

Posted on September 24, 2019September 24, 2019 by Msgr. Charles Pope Pondering a Surprising Restoration and Hoping for the Same! At daily Mass during this 25th Week of the Year, we are reading from Nehemiah and Ezra, two books dealing with the restoration of Jerusalem and the Temple. In an almost miraculous turn of events, the Persians conquered the Babylonians and then Persian rulers Cyrus and Darius not only permitted the Jews to return to their land, they even offered money to help rebuild the Temple! To fully appreciate this, we need to study the terrible demise of Jerusalem...