Works by Frank Sheed, a superb Theologian.
Biography of Frank Sheed from Crisis Magazine
Excerpt, Orthodoxy, Gilbert K. Chesterton, The Ethics of Elfland.
"Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the unutterable things. These are my ultimate attitudes towards life; the soils for the seeds of doctrine. These in some dark way I thought before I could write, and felt before I could think: that we may proceed more easily afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate them now. I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology."
MEDITATION OF THE DAY
The Magnificat, December 23rd, 2006
"Saint Augustine tried to make clear, for himself and his faithful, the nature of the priestly service. It came to him from meditation on the figure of John the Baptist, in whom he finds a prefiguring of the role of the priest. He points out that in the New Testament John is described, with a saying borrowed from Isaiah, as a "voice," while Christ appears in the Gospel of John as "the Word." The relation of "voice" (vox) to "word" (verbum) helps to make clear the mutual relationship between Christ and the priest. The word exists in someone's heart before it is ever perceptible to the senses through the voice. Through the mediation of the voice, it then enters into the perception of the other person and is then present likewise in his heart, without the speaker's having thereby in any sense lost the word. Thus, voice that carries the word from one person to the other (or others) passes away. The word remains. Ultimately, the task of the priest is quite simply to be a voice for the word: "He must increase, but I must decrease"--the voice has no other purpose than to pass on the word; it then once more effaces itself. On this basis the stature and the humbleness of priestly service are both equally clear: the priest is, like John the Baptist, purely a forerunner, a servant of the Word. It is not he who matters, but the other. Yet he is, with his entire existence, vox; it is his mission to be a voice for the Word, and thus, precisely in his being radically referred to, dependent upon, someone else, he makes a share in the stature of the mission of the Baptist and in the mission of the Logos himself." --Pope Benedict XVI
Mr. Justice Clarence Thomas
