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The readings for Holy Family Sunday…
The Sunday that falls in the Octave of the Solemnity of Christmas is dedicated to celebrating the Holy Family. The Readings for this Sunday focus on the rights and responsibilities of family members toward each other, and the Gospel focuses on the role of the “most forgotten” member of the Holy Family, St. Joseph, who cared for and protected the Blessed Mother and infant Jesus through the dangerous early years of Jesus’ childhood. God sets a father in honor over his children;a mother’s authority he confirms over her sons.Whoever honors his father atones for sins,and preserves himself from them.When he prays, he is heard;he stores up riches who reveres his mother.Whoever honors his father is gladdened by children,and, when he prays, is heard.Whoever reveres his father will live a long...
The suffering love of the Savior…
The love of Jesus saves because it has the power to bear away sin. The witness of the Holy Innocents shows us that the powerful of this world do not have the final say about humanity. At the end of the day, no matter how much violence is unleashed, Christ’s saving love will raise up the lowly and the powerless – even if they are as helpless as infants and children. Because of Christ, they suffered, but because of Him, they testify to something good and true about humanity – that the most vulnerable of our society to not admit of being used as a means to and end, that those who do so will never thwart the plan of God. For the saving power of God is greater than the power of evil. If the Savior has so much power over the affairs of the world, what about the movements of the...
Hector Berlioz’s long-lost “Solemn Mass” for the Holy Innocents…
“By God, you will be no doctor or apothecary, but a great composer.”—Jean-François Le Sueur, to Hector Berlioz, upon hearing the premier of the Messe Solennelle Saint-Roch Church, Paris Its premier in 1825 marked one of the most remarkable musical debuts ever by a composer, and the score’s rediscovery 167 years later in a church attic is one of the most astounding events in musicological history. For the composer of this work eventually destroyed all but one of the surviving copies of the score. This is the Messe solennelle of the young Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), who had defied his parents’ wishes for him to be a doctor—earning him the curse of his mother that would haunt him for the rest of his life—fleeing his home to study with the composer Jean-François Le Sueur. Berlioz had little mu...
Why Catholicism’s two traumas of the 2010s didn’t draw the same attention…
ROME – Suppose that, looking back at the close of a decade, there were two great narratives about a given group of people, one a tale of scandal and dark deeds coming to light, the other a story of suffering, victimization, and vulnerability. Suppose, further, that the former storyline dominated global headlines, finishing as one of the most covered stories of the decade along with Donald Trump and climate change, while the other was second- or third-tier, with many average people not even aware it was happening. Suppose the scandal produced an Academy Award-winning movie that grossed $100 million worldwide, but the suffering had no movie, no anthem, no real pop culture footprint. That group might well have a beef, and Christmas 2019 has offered another grisly reminder of the point. On Dec...
The 15 most awe-inspiring space images of the decade…
The field of astronomy this decade delivered an embarrassment of riches: stunning accomplishment after stunning accomplishment from the exploration of space. Humans sent robots to the farthest reaches of the solar system, to the sun, to the gas giant Jupiter, and more. Meanwhile, our telescopes peered deeper into the cosmos. They showed us images never seen before, like the first-ever image of a black hole, which was just declared to be Science’s “breakthrough of the year.” We put together our favorite astronomy images and videos from the 2010s, in no particular order. Some of these images are awe inspiring for their beauty, or their remoteness, or for helping us understand our tiny place in the universe. Others are awe inspiring for the engineering achievements they represent, and give ho...
On the Feast of the Holy Family, the biblical teaching on marriage and family…
It is not difficult to demonstrate that most of our modern problems center around struggles and misunderstandings regarding marriage, sexuality, and the family. Collectively as a nation and the culture, we have departed significantly from the teachings of God and common sense, when it comes to our thinking and behavior regarding these three fundamental pillars. Today’s Feast of the Holy Family presents us an opportunity to reflect, and provides a rich tapestry of Scriptures. Many of these teachings are not “politically correct,” but for that, no apology should be made. They remain God’s teachings and it is hard to argue that modern notions of sexuality, marriage and family have produced anything short of catastrophe and disaster. And as is usually the case, it is the children suffer the mo...
Pope Francis asks families to put down their phones on Holy Family Sunday…
Vatican City, Dec 29, 2019 / 05:30 am (CNA).- On feast of the Holy Family of Nazareth Sunday, Pope Francis encouraged families to get off their cell phones and talk to one another. “In your family, do you know how to communicate with each other, or are you like those kids at the table — each one has their own cell phone, chatting? In that table there is a silence as if they were at Mass, but they don’t communicate with each other,” Pope Francis said in his Angelus address Dec. 29. “We need to retake communication within the family: parents, children, grandparents and siblings must communicate with each other,” the pope said. “This is your assignment for today for the feast of the Holy Family.” Pope Francis said that the Holy Family is a model for families today in “following th...
As long as Catholics continue feasting, Christendom still exists…
What is a perennial truth if nothing other than a truth which springs up every year? We who are strangers and sojourners in the city of man, we who aspire towards citizenship in the city of God, we know that Christmas is all about celebrating Christ’s birth. All of Christian literature, all of the literature that celebrates or dimly shadows Christendom stands in testimony that Christendom is the Feast! Search your Homer. Search your Virgil. Sit with Beowulf at the mead-benches in Hrothgar’s Heorot or with Gawain at the halls of Arthur or King Bertilak. All of us, pilgrims proceeding to Canterbury know that our pilgrimage begins and ends with feasting! The culmination of Christendom is centered around the sacrum convivium, the sacred feast in which Christ Himself is ultimately consumed! And...
From Scrooge to the Grinch, Christmas conversions in classic Hollywood films…
Celluloid glimpses of the Glory of God, from Miracle on 34th Street to Home Alone 2. So I was talking to Matt Swaim on the Son Rise Morning Show about G.K. Chesterton’s great appreciation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and he mentioned that many Christmas-themed movies feature conversions like Scrooge’s: he brought up The Grinch Who Stole Christmas or The Grinch as an example, and It’s a Wonderful Life. But as Turner Classic Movies and other cable stations are showing movies with Christmas settings, I began to think of many more Christmas conversions — changes of heart, family reconciliations, and renewed hope brought about by the “spirit of Christmas.” Even all those Hallmark Channel Christmas movies are about some kind of conversion: from career ...
Muslim Jihadists claim execution of 11 blindfolded Christians in Nigeria…
ISIS-aligned jihadists have released a video claiming to show the execution of 11 blindfolded Christian men in Nigeria, in what analysts say was a barbaric act that was clearly timed to coincide with Christmas, according to reports. “This is a message to Christians all over the world,” a masked man says in the one-minute video posted online late Thursday by the terror group’s Amaq news agency. He claimed the killings at the hands of jihadists from the Islamic State West African Province were in retaliation for the death of ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his spokesman. Baghdadi committed suicide in October during a US special forces operation in Syria. No details were given about the victims, but ISIS said they were “captured in the past weeks” in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state, ac...
Pope Francis on Christmas: Christ’s light is greater than the darkness of world’s conflicts…
Vatican City, Dec 25, 2019 / 05:30 am (CNA).- On Christmas, Pope Francis prayed for Christ to bring light to the instability in Iraq, Lebanon, Venezuela, Yemen, Ukraine, Burkina Faso, and other parts of the world experiencing conflict. “The Son is born, like a small light flickering in the cold and darkness of the night. That Child, born of the Virgin Mary, is the Word of God made flesh … There is darkness in human hearts, yet the light of Christ is greater still,” Pope Francis said from the center loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica Dec. 25. In his “Urbi et Orbi” blessing, Pope Francis said that the light of Christ is greater than the darkness of broken family relationships or the suffering endured in economic, geopolitical, and ecological conflicts. “May Christ bring his light to the many chi...
100 gallons of holy water blesses town via crop dusting plane in Louisiana…
We should do this everywhere! St. Anne Church of the Cow Island community in Abbeville, La., blessed their town and farms with 100 gallons of holy water with the help of a crop dusting plane. The Diocese of Lafayette posted several photos of the blessing on Facebook. They also wished readers a Merry Christmas. Here’s the post below: The full text reads, “Fr. Matthew Barzare and parishioners of St. Anne Church in Cow Island enlisted the help of a crop duster pilot to bless their community. They loaded 100 gallons of holy water into the plane and the pilot sprayed the water onto the town and the nearby farms. “Parishioners also brought water from home to the airstrip to be blessed by Fr. Barzare. The blessing was the brainchild of L’Eryn Detraz, a missionary currently stationed in Ohio who i...
