Donkeys and ‘space’ Skip to content Pillar subscribers can listen to this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR Hey everybody, It’s the 14th of January, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post. In the Church’s contemporary calendar, today is Tuesday in the First Week of Ordinary Time, a relatively unremarkable liturgical date. But in medieval France, January 14 was something altogether different: it was the day on which Catholics celebrated the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt — and celebrated the donkey who took the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Jesus himself, to safety. On the Feast of the Ass, as it was known, French cities held festivals and dramatic pageants, and processions in which the flight into Egypt was depicted by townspeople. They were followed by Masses, at which a wooden donkey wa...
COMMENTARY: Pope Francis, on Jan. 11, became the third pope to be given the highest civilian honor in the U.S. Careful observers of papal-presidential relations were mildly surprised when President Joe Biden did not include Pope Francis in his final list of Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients on Jan. 4. Alongside the Congressional Gold Medal, which is voted upon by both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the Presidential Medal of Freedom is the nation’s highest civilian honor. Biden awarded it in 2022 to Sister of Social Service Simone Campbell (2022) of “Nuns on the Bus” fame, and Jesuit Father Greg Boyle, who worked with troubled youth in Homeboy Industries. It would follow that a Catholic president who has given the medal to Catholic leaders would do the same with the Hol...
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The Italian naval ship “Amerigo Vespucci,” currently completing its global tour, has been designated a Jubilee church for the Holy Year 2025, transforming its onboard chapel into a pilgrimage destination at sea. The ship, a three-masted sailing ship that dates back to 1931 and is named after the 15th-century Italian explorer for whom “America” is named, has been touring the world as a cultural ambassador for Italy since July 2023. Archbishop Santo Marcianò of the Military Ordinariate of Italy officially designated the ship’s chapel as a Jubilee church for 2025, according to a Jan. 9 statement from the ship’s press office. The chapel onboard the “Amerigo Vespucci” will be a Jubilee site “for sacred pilgrimages and for pious visits among its missions at sea,” the stateme...
Presidents begin their terms with great attention paid to what will be done on “Day One” or during the first 100 days. But the end of their terms also tells a story. The “interregnum” between the election and the inauguration of the next president can be a fraught time. In recent decades, the new president is usually of a different party than the incumbent, meaning that the outgoing chief executive has been in part rejected. How he handles that in the last months in office is thus an important signal. President Joe Biden decided to take his last foreign trip in the final fortnight of his presidency, traveling to Rome to meet Pope Francis. The meeting was scheduled for Friday but was canceled on Wednesday night due to the California wildfires and Biden’s decision to remain at home to attend...
Let it linger, hail Caesar, and the politics of heraldry Skip to content Pillar subscribers can listen to Ed read this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR Happy Friday friends, The Twelve Days of Christmas are over, though we still have the feast of the Baptism of the Lord to look forward to this weekend. So I am holding on to the trappings of the season — if not always the spirit of it — as tightly as I can for a few more days yet. I’m pleased to note that around where I live there are still a good few holdouts with their decorations up. It seems weirdly significant to me that the wider culture has evolved so as to decorate early and hard for any and all feasts, then tear down immediately when the day is gone — our local Target had Valentine’s decorations up before December was even over. ...
ROME (AP) — Pope Francis on Monday named the first woman to head a major Vatican office, appointing an Italian nun, Sister Simona Brambilla, to become prefect of the department responsible for all the Catholic Church’s religious orders. The appointment marks a major step in Francis’ aim to give women more leadership roles in governing the church. While women have been named to No. 2 spots in some Vatican offices, never before has a woman been named prefect of a dicastery or congregation of the Holy See Curia, the central governing organ of the Catholic Church. The historic nature of Brambilla’s appointment was confirmed by Vatican Media, which headlined its report “Sister Simona Brambilla is the first woman prefect in the Vatican.” The office is one of the most important in the Vatican. Kn...
“My dear God, how stupid we people are until You give us something. Even in praying it is You who have to pray in us.” — Flannery O’Connor As usual, I’m late to a 7 a.m. weekday Mass, and I sneak into the last pew for the Gospel. It’s the one about God knowing every sparrow and counting all our hairs. I figure he must know, then, that I intended to get to church on time. “The Gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.” I yawn. After the homily, Father Andrew launches into the liturgy of the Eucharist, and I’m starting to perk up a bit. The Preface, the Sanctus, and we drop to our knees. During the Canon, I become conscious of an irritation in my left eye — no doubt some leftover sleep crusties had eluded my morning splash of water. Just as I begin to rub it away, Father Andrew l...
The Pietà, Michelangelo’s masterful marble sculpture that so mournfully depicts the Virgin Mary cradling Christ’s lifeless body after his crucifixion, is one of history’s most revered and recognizable works of Christian art. It dwells behind a glass encasement in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where it has been for as long as most can remember. Since its astonishing creation, it has never left the Eternal City — except for once, that is. The amazing story of when, why and how is chronicled in Our Lady of the World’s Fair, a new book written by Ruth Nelson, which recounts the time Michelangelo’s Pietà made the transatlantic journey from St. Peter’s Basilica to Queens, New York, for the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. The likelihood of such a feat occurring in today’s internet age is next to i...
As the Jubilee of 2025 begins, the legacy of two great millennial Churchmen has prepared the Church for the “Greater Jubilee of 2033,” now on the horizon. The millennial primate, Blessed Stefan Wyszyński, and millennial pope, St. John Paul the Great, brought to the universal Church the Polish sense of Providence in history. Jubilee 2025 is an “ordinary” jubilee year, held every 25 years. Yet it falls in between, as it were, the millennial jubilees of the year 2000, when John Paul put anniversary-marking at the heart of the New Evangelization, and 2033, two millennia since the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. From time to time, “extraordinary” jubilee years are called by the reigning pontiff. The last one was the 2015-2016 Jubilee of Mercy, called by Pope Francis. Before tha...
JERUSALEM (OSV News) — Speaking just hours after his wartime Christmas visit to Gaza City Holy Family Parish, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, delivered a poignant Christmas message during a press conference at the Latin Patriarchate Dec. 23. The cardinal called for renewed hope and solidarity in a region marked by violence, displacement and despair. Advertisements “The Lord’s Nativity is near, and as every year, despite everything, we want it to be a moment of peace, joy and hope,” Cardinal Pizzaballa said. “This year, the Nativity also marks the beginning of the Jubilee, a year dedicated to hope. We need hope in this land, marked by so much violence, hatred and wounded by contempt and fear.” The cardinal drew from the Gospel account of the shepherds in Beth...
By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio – articles – email ) | Dec 26, 2024 Have you ever stopped to consider how closely joy is associated with hope? This is so true that the Latin verb which means “to be without hope” is desparare, from which we get the English word despair. And despair is also what destroys joy. It is the ultimate sadness. I mention this during the Christmas Season because it is the answer to the riddle of our modern pursuit of pleasure. It is obviously desirable to feel pleasure, but pleasure is a hideous trap without hope. We will pursue pleasure with increasing desperation when we are without hope, to stave off the temptation to suicide. Thus pleasure without hope tends to degenerate into a frenetic attempt to distract ourselves from the emptiness we feel inside. This is...
Notes from the Author: 1) First and foremost–I offer this post to Our Lord through the intercession of His Mother, St. Joseph, and St. Jerome: in reparation for my sins and the sins of the world, for our repentance, and for an enduring peace throughout the Middle East and the world as quickly as possible. 2) As a reminder, copy/paste GPS Coordinates listed below into Google Maps to see or travel to each location. 3) I apologize for any annoying ads wordpress.com automatically and randomly posts within this article–they are not of my choosing. 4) Lastly, if you enjoy this post and want to learn more, check out my one-of-a-kind book, The Second Person of the Trinity in Time and Space: What is Known Historically About Jesus and the Holy Sites of the New Testament, sold o...