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The man who built his own cathedral…
One late spring evening in 2018, Justo Gallego Martínez said he would show me his grave. The old man was warming his hands by a stove in the dim back room of his cathedral. A dusty film coated the concrete floor. The shelves and tables were full of relics, screws, chipped wood, crushed glass, half-eaten loaves of bread. A bare hanging bulb cast the room in jaundiced light. “I want to be buried here,” Justo said, signalling around him to the cathedral’s cavernous nave and the 20 trembling towers sprawled across thousands of square feet of his own land on the outskirts of Madrid. The cathedral’s crypt would be his burial place. And he’d be buried there because it was his cathedral. He’d designed it entirely in his head, without a single measurement or calculation on paper, without a record o...
Scientists have finally figured out why mice are scared of bananas…
Chemical compounds in bananas triggered a stressful response in the male mice (Picture: Getty) Researchers have made an odd discovery about male mice: bananas stress them out. The discovery was made unintentionally while scientists were studying the reaction of male mice to pregnant and lactating female mice. During the course of the study, researchers observed that chemical compounds in bananas triggered a stressful response in the male mice. ‘Male mice display stress and stress-induced [pain inhibition] in the close proximity of late-pregnant or lactating female mice,’ said the study published in Science Advances. The team from McGill University in Montreal also found that pregnant and lactating female mice responded to stranger male mice with ‘aggression and urine marking’. Th...
Pope’s Trinity Sunday Angelus: ‘Does Your Life Reflect the God You Believe In?’…
Leading the crowd in self-examination, the pope asked, “do I, who profess faith in God the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, truly believe that I need others in order to live, I need to give myself to others, I need to serve others? Do I affirm this in words, or do I affirm it with my life?” The one, triune God must be manifested in deeds, not words, he said. “God, who is the author of life, is transmitted not so much through books as through witness of life,” Pope Francis said. “He, who, as the evangelist John writes, ‘is love’ (1 Jn 4:16), reveals himself through love.” Pope Francis encouraged the crowd to think about “good, generous, gentle” people they have met and reflect on their way of thinking and their actions. More in Vatican By doing this, “we can have a small reflection...
What if the “walking together” results in a walking apart? Here are 6 points of division in the synodal process…..
In his Pentecost homily the Holy Father noted that “oddly, the Holy Spirit is the author of division, of ruckus, of a certain disorder.” “Yet at the same time, he is the author of harmony,” Pope Francis continued. “He divides with the variety of charisms, but it is a false division, because true division is part of harmony. He creates division with charisms, and he creates harmony with all this division. This is the richness of the Church.” He used the same image of the Holy Spirit as an agent of disorder when addressing the Catholic-Anglican ecumenical commission on May 13: “The Holy Spirit is the one who creates ‘disorder’ — we can think of the morning of Pentecost — but then the one who creates harmony.” In that same address he spoke of an Anglican contribution to the ...
The appointment of cardinals is personal for Francis. Were John Paul II and Benedict XVI any different?
SAN DIEGO — When reporters asked Cardinal-designate Robert McElroy of San Diego to explain why Pope Francis passed over two California-based metropolitan archbishops to give him the red biretta, his explanation was simple and uncomplicated. “Pope Francis has a series of initiatives that he’s trying to bring to the life of the Church,” said the San Diego bishop, during a May 31 press conference, “and I have tried to take those initiatives and plant them here.” The cardinal-designate went on to explain that he embraced Francis’ teaching on the promotion of environmental justice, care for migrants and “a more pastoral orientation rather than a strict doctrinal orientation within the life of the Church.” When Pope Francis announced May 29 the creation of 16 new cardinal-electors, who will rece...
Jesus says that it is only by living in the Trinity that we learn about the Trinity…..
The Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity Year C — Trinity Sunday this weekend to help us discover who God is, so that we can understand who we are, and what we should do with our lives. When we know God made us like himself, we become more confident in who we are in ourselves, more humble in who we are in the universe, and more loving in who we are to each other. In the Gospel, Jesus says that it is only by living in the Trinity that we learn about the Trinity. “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth,” Jesus says. At the time that he said it, one truth we needed to be guided into included the particulars of the dogma of the Trinity as it would come to be defined. But in his next wo...
So many questions after that symbolic Tampa Bay Rays conflict over ‘Pride’ logos…
Symbolism often plays a major role in tense clashes between people with competing religious beliefs (or secular beliefs, for that matter). You could see evidence of this fact during and after the recent kerfuffle about a small group of Tampa Bay Rays players who declined to wear special rainbow-logo uniforms during the team’s recent celebration of Pride Month. The media coverage of this clash was the subject of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), in part because the stories raised more questions than they answered. I’ll get to some of those questions, but first let’s look at the Washington Post coverage. Note that this means the Rays conflict was a national story, since the Post doesn’t cover mere regional stories and disputes (see this classic M.Z. Hemingway pos...
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[Must-Read] If there is anything I learned during my time as an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, it is the importance of a well-formed conscience…
If there is anything I learned during my time as an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, it is the importance of a well-formed conscience. Too seldom do we use periods of ease to ready our souls for the great challenges each of us must face. I certainly didn’t, and I wish I had. “I want to be an interrogator!” was a thought that never crossed my mind while I was an undergraduate at Stanford, studying in the university’s erstwhile Great Books program and then its political science department. I thought I might join the Foreign Service some day. Instead I earned a Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic studies at Yale. After September 11, I became an intelligence officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency, which included a stint from 2004 to 2006 as an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay. While still a teenage...
Explorers find wreck of 17th-century warship off English coast; once carried the Catholic heir to the British throne…
LONDON — Explorers and historians are telling the world about the discovery of the wreck of a royal warship that sank in 1682 while carrying a future king of England, Ireland and Scotland. The HMS Gloucester, traveling from southern England to Scotland, ran aground while navigating sandbanks off the town of Great Yarmouth on the eastern English coast. It sank within an hour, killing an estimated 130 to 250 crew and passengers. James Stuart, the son of King Charles I, survived. He went on to reign as King James II of England and Ireland, and as James VII of Scotland from 1685 to 1688, when he was deposed by the Glorious Revolution. This undated photo provided by Royal Museums shows the artwork The Wreck of the Gloucester off Yarmouth, 6 May 1682, by Johan Danckerts. Excavators and historian...
Scientists say crows may be as smart, in some ways, as 7-year-old humans…
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Pope Francis postpones trip to Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan…
By Hannah Brockhaus Vatican City, Jun 10, 2022 / 05:45 am Pope Francis’ July trip to the African countries of the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan has been postponed for health reasons, the Vatican said on Friday. “At the request of his doctors, and in order not to jeopardize the results of the therapy that he is undergoing for his knee, the Holy Father has been forced to postpone, with regret, his Apostolic Journey to the Democratic Republic of Congo and to South Sudan,” Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said on June 10. The trip, planned for July 2-7, will be moved “to a later date to be determined,” the statement said. Pope Francis was planning to spend July 2-5 in the Congolese cities of Kinshasa and Goma, and July 5-7 in the South Sudanese capital Juba. Join Our Telegram Grou...
Doing Jesus’ work (even at Mass) is a kindness, not a distraction…
The old man a couple rows ahead of us at Mass kept waving at the two little boys, one maybe 3 and the other maybe 4, sitting in the fourth row, about eight rows ahead of him. Their mother had an infant to care for and he diverted them for a while. Sometimes he waved his hand rapidly from side to side and sometimes flapped it up and down, but he kept their attention for a few seconds each time, and they kept looking back hoping for more. Later, as their mother nursed the infant, his wife started waving at the boys. She clenched her hand into a fist and then extended her fingers, spreading them out as she did so. She kept doing that until the boys lost interest. She then looked at her husband and smiled. They had given up some of their attention to worship to help a mother in need.&nbs...
