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Galatians 1:15-18 is not your basic witness-to-the-Resurrection text.
Yet St. Paul’s mini-spiritual autobiography helps us understand just how radically the experience of the Risen Lord changed the first disciples’ religious worldview, and why an evangelical imperative was built into that experience.
Here’s the Pauline text:
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The reputations of the great often diminish over time. Ten years after his holy death on April 2, 2005, Karol Wojtyla, St. John Paul II, looms even larger than he did when the world figuratively gathered at his bedside a decade ago.
Tens of millions of men and women around the world felt impelled, and privileged, to pray with him through what he called his “Passover” — his liberation through death into a new life of freedom in the blazing glory of the Thrice-Holy God.
On this anniversary, as at his canonization last year, what seems most memorable about the man, at least at this historical moment, was that he refused to accommodate to the “tyranny of the possible:” the idea that some things just can’t be put right; that we’re stuck with the way things are, however much we may dislike them.
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60 Minutes, the CBS News “magazine” that helped redefine television journalism, prides itself on challenging conventional wisdom, discomfiting the comfortable, kicking shibboleths in the shins, and opening new arguments.
No such challenge, alas, was evident in the program’s recent segment on Pope Francis.
One of the principal interviewees in that piece was Robert Mickens, formerly of the London-based Tablet and currently of the National Catholic Reporter. Here’s a part of what Mickens had to say about the “Francis effect”:
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It might seem that everything that could be said, has been said, about the shepherds, the wise men, and the Christ Child.
But that’s one of the marvels of Scripture: the unfolding history of the Church draws out of the inspired Word of God allegories and images previously unrecognized.
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According to Vatican-speak, a specially scheduled session of the Synod of Bishops is an “Extraordinary Synod,” meaning Not-an-Ordinary Synod, held every three years or so.
In the case of the recently-completed Extraordinary Synod of 2014, extraordinary things did happen, in the “Oh, wow!” sense of the word. And if this year’s Extraordinary Synod was a preview of the synod for which it was to set the agenda, i.e., the Ordinary Synod of 2015, that synod, too, promises to be, well, extraordinary.
How was the Extraordinary Synod of 2014 extraordinary? With apologies to the Bard, let me count the ways:
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This coming August 3 will mark the golden anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s “Passover,” to adopt the biblical image John Paul II used to describe the Christian journey through death to eternal life.
In the 50 years since lupus erythematosus claimed her at age 39, O’Connor’s literary genius has been widely celebrated.
MADISON — The UW-Madison student organization Badger Catholic invites all students and their friends to attend the organization’s first Speaker Event, “Breaking Boundaries,” featuring George Weigel.
Weigel, distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in Washington, D.C., will speak on Wednesday, Oct. 23, at 7 p.m., in the Gordon Dining and Event Center.
During the presentation, students will have the opportunity to learn more about the topic of “Evangelical Catholicism” as the Church begins to embrace the culture of the 21st century.
Thirty-some years ago, I spent a fair amount of time on religious freedom issues: which meant, in those simpler days, trying to pry Lithuanian priests and nuns out of Perm Camp 36 and other GULAG islands.
Had you told me in 1982 that one of my “clients,” the Jesuit Sigitas Tamkevicius, would be archbishop of Kaunas in a free Lithuania in 2012, I would have thought you a bit optimistic.
If you had also told me, back then, that there would eventually be serious religious freedom problems in the United States, I would have thought you a bit mad.
Why do adults become Catholics? There are as many reasons for “converting” as there are converts.
Evelyn Waugh became a Catholic with, by his own admission, “little emotion but clear conviction”: this was the truth; one ought to adhere to it.
Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote that his journey into the Catholic Church began when, as an unbelieving Harvard undergraduate detached from his family’s staunch Presbyterianism, he noticed a leaf shimmering with raindrops while taking a walk along the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass.; such beauty could not be accidental, he thought — there must be a Creator.
In the Baltimore of the 1960s, my canny pastor devised a neat scheme for getting “Father Visitor” (as the confessional doors read) to fill in during the summer for his vacationing curates: bring over newly-ordained Australians from their studies in Rome.
There were no language issues (save for those of, er, accent); by the standards of student priests fresh from the Urban College of Propaganda Fidei, the young Aussies were recompensed handsomely and got to see something of the United States; it was win-win, all around.
Thus in the summer of 1967 I met Fr. George Pell of Ballarat, who, with the oils of ordination still wet on his forehead, spent several months at my parish before embarking on doctoral studies at Oxford.
