Still Working on My St. Albert the Great Website

I haven’t gotten as far as I’d like on my St. Albert translations, but I have gotten a bit further. I’ve finished translating the 2nd chapter of On the Strong Woman and will have it up soon. From my old project of translating the Eucharistic sermon series that may or may not be by St. Albert the Great, I’ve put up 8 sermons.

I hope to put up more stuff soon, if the weather will quit bouncing the air pressure up and down and hurting my poor sinuses!

It’s really interesting to see the overall positive outlook that On the Strong Woman demonstrates toward women. Women are continually painted as being capable, powerful, and important, and not just because the Strong Woman is a type of the Church or the faithful Soul. The good married woman in a healthy relationship is a good example to everyone. (Even the bad unfaithful woman is not a hopeless case, but still meant to be loved and called back by her husband. It’s the Israel as runaway bride scenario.)

The other thing that’s interesting is the issue of submission (which for whatever reason is still very hot on the Internet, so I hear a lot about it there even if not in any church I’ve ever attended). The old story about why Eve was made from Adam’s rib, not his head or foot, gets hauled out here. (With a very touching addition about the rib, which I liked.) St. Albert, the medieval monk whom our culture expects to be a woman-hating oppressor, opines only that a woman owes her husband “reverentialis subjectio” — which is to be a respectful subject of her husband as her lord — while at the same time the man and woman must both show each other “companionship” or “friendship”, depending on how you translate the word.

This is not something that any medieval person would take as being terribly oppressive or submissive. You’re talking something analogous to the position of a lord and his best old friend who works for him while hanging out with him, not of a lord and a slave. Each owes each other courtesy and respect. Which one got put in charge of which is a matter of social position and perhaps the choices made by Providence, but not of intrinsic worth. Being a companion also puts the wife on a level of being obliged to counsel her husband even if he doesn’t want to hear, albeit with respect or deference; and of the husband being obliged to listen and not be a big jerk.

Should either respect or companionship be abandoned by the woman, the husband will lose his love and trust for the woman. So a woman must behave as though she is worthy of respect from her husband (and not as dust beneath his feet), even as she is to show respect to him as her husband. It’s a nice little medieval bit of give and take.

You might even argue that the marital “debt”, which we also get mentioned in the second chapter, becomes from this point of view a sort of feudal obligation that husband and wife owe each other. [Insert joke about owing a certain number of days of service here.]

(It also leads to some pretty funny quoting of verses about THE Lord as verses about the husband as the wife’s lord. Well, I found it funny, and St. A doesn’t seem to be above choosing his Scriptural quotes for fun as well as profit.)

Interestingly, there are other Scholastic writers (revealed by a search engine scan for the word “subjectio”, not by any erudition of mine) who seemed to feel that wives owed not only a reverential submission, but also were supposed to give “subjectio servitutis”, the subjection of servitude. Because it was All Eve’s Fault. (This comes up in Alexander of Hales’ Summa Halensis, apparently. He must have been more twit than wit.) Albert seems to sees a woman’s respect for her husband as a consequence of Adam being Eve’s “mother” (or clone-matrix, or what have you) at the Creation, and that it was lived out in Eden perfectly until the Fall. Alexander admits that marital respect came before the Fall, but seems to feel that the duty was intensified and entwined with obligatory slavish obedience as a punishment after the Fall. That’s a pretty fundamental theological difference. (And I don’t think I want to hang out at Alex’s parents’ house, either.)

So this is not to say that the Middle Ages, even the high Middle Ages, was a time that was super-good for women in all times and places and in all ways. Real, bitter misogyny is fairly easy to find in the literature, and all too often justifies itself by a religious veneer. (And then there are twits.) But so far this book is evenhanded and reasonable, neither dismissive of the married state nor of anyone involved in it.

I’m surprised, really, that nobody in the Seventies attributed this work to some learned laywoman.

Hey! Let’s start a rumor! If people think it’s by Heloise, everybody will read it! (OK, it is a bit early….)

What Being a Priest Means

Bettnet and Holy Whapping report the death on May 13 of one Monsignor William Kerr, after a stroke he suffered in the middle of Mass. I never knew this priest as they did, so go over there to learn more about him.

But this is what being a priest commits you to do:

To get up in the middle of the night and administer the Last Rites to a victim of Ted Bundy, a serial killer.

To learn from a survivor about a great miracle.

To counsel Ted Bundy himself while he sits on Death Row, because even serial killers have souls and need mercy.

To spend your last words teaching your people to offer up their suffering to Jesus, and to pray.

To be on call 24/7 as another Christ, with all the sacrifice and sorrow and all the joy — that is what it means to be a priest.

May God send us many holy priests, and may our prayers strengthen them to do God’s will.

You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizadek.

St. Jerome’s Letter on Girls’ Education

St. Jerome was a notorious grump and flamewarrior. He ripped on his friends and allies as much as his enemies, and the stuff he said to his enemies was… well, not very saintly. But he knew the Bible like few others, knew a lot about pagan literature and the various Biblical languages, and was a good teacher when you could get him to do so. So Christian women interested in learning about these things — particularly those connected to circles of consecrated widows and virgins — were always asking him to write them letters and give them talks. And for them, he was actually pretty obliging. I mean, sure, he ripped on their fashion choices occasionally, but that was hardly even trying.

The man was clearly a giant marshmallow underneath the extremely crusty crust. SUCKER was tattooed on his forehead, even if in letters visible only to females and small furry things.

Anyway, he counted many women among his patrons, friends, cherished pupils, and surrogate family members. So it’s not surprising that one Laeta should have asked him for advice on how to school her baby daughter. (Apparently Laeta and her husband had promised God that if they were given a daughter, they would raise her to become a consecrated virgin.)

Letter 107 is his reply. It’s full of good quotes. There’s a very gentle piece of encouragement to her, as a Christian worried about the salvation of her pagan father. Jerome could be pretty darned rigorous, so this stuff is like watching him strip naked and fan dance:

“….look at the house of your father, a man of the highest distinction and learning, but one still walking in darkness… The one unbeliever is sanctified by his holy and believing family. For, when a man is surrounded by a believing crowd of children and grandchildren, he is as good as a candidate for the faith… Christians are not born but made… I speak thus to you, Laeta my most devout daughter in Christ, to teach you not to despair of your father’s salvation… It is never too late to mend.”

As I learned from Sr. Heinrich’s book on canonesses, St. Jerome follows the educational theories of Quintilian. So he is quick to suggest alphabet blocks or sturdy toy letters:

“Get for her a set of letters made of boxwood or of ivory and called each by its proper name. Let her play with these, so that even her play may teach her something. And not only make her grasp the right order of the letters and see that she forms their names into a rhyme, but constantly disarrange their order and put the last letters in the middle and the middle ones at the beginning that she may know them all by sight as well as by sound.”

There’s a lot of stuff here, and it needs sorting. Some stuff is shrewd. Some of it seems like the kind of advice a theory guy with no kids would come up with — ie, wacky. Some stuff makes sense only in terms of the cultures of the time, in which it was fairly common to decide a person’s life and work and spouse while he was still a baby, and apprentice them to a job or housework as soon as he could toddle.

But honestly, I think even St. Jerome realized that his program wouldn’t be fair to put on a kid living with her parents, and drew it up that way on purpose. If you were going to swear an oath and dedicate a kid to God before the child was even conceived — and woe to someone who broke a sacred oath or swore unwarily! — it would be better to let her live with other people living the same life, as an apprentice to their job, than try to cloister her at home and make her fast when others were feasting. Anything else would be exposing the girl to the danger of breaking her parents’ oath, and exposing herself and everyone else to the wrath of God. (And if the parents were going to seriously inconvenience the kid, I guess the parents have to get inconvenienced, too.)

(It sounds like some kind of Saxon dramatic poem on the consequences of swearing rashly, doesn’t it?)

This complicated situation is why medieval writers usually excerpted the bits that were useful for girls’ education, and left the rest to silence.

As did most of St. Jerome’s friends, probably….

When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a Fireman… No, a Policeman… on a Horse… No, Wait, I’ll Be a Cowgirl. Who Fights Like Joan of Arc. Except with Magic….

I have been reading St. Therese of Lisieux’s autobiography, The Story of a Soul, for my podcast, Maria Lectrix. I have been enjoying it a great deal, and possibly identifying with the story a little too much for a flawless reading. (Sorry, folks. I know, it’s a pain.)

However, every feminist and Therese-loving bone in my body has just revolted.

Now I’m aware that, for some reason, some feminists think that Therese was oppressed, because she had a brief longing to become a priest. (A goal which soon changed back to her primary dream of being a nun, and left her mostly with a great sympathy for priests and their work, and a desire to pray for them. Which she did in heaven to such effect that priests consider her one of their patron saints.) Apparently in the same spirit, one of my listeners has decided that St. Therese’s brief longing to do great deeds like Joan of Arc was quashed by cruel sexism. (In fact, it just soon changed back to her primary desire to be a nun, and she believed she had received special teaching from God on the subject of her momentary desire and why such great ambition was useful to a nun.)

Nobody ever seems to believe that St. Therese’s desire to become a girl hermit in the wilderness was quashed by cruel, cruel eeeeeevil sexism. But that one lasted for several years of structured make-believe play and was shared by someone else! Much more credibility than the priest or the Joan of Arc thing. (Though, frankly, every girl wants to be Joan of Arc sometime. She is the closest saint to a Mary Sue, but more sensible, more forced to face reality, and alas, deprived of purple eyes.)

You’ll notice that nobody ever seems supportive of St. Teresa of Avila’s desire to go on crusade as a missionary as a kid, with her brother as a knight or a missionary, and convert all the Muslims. And Jews too, which is interesting since her family were Converso Jews. What’s more, our strong-minded Teresa and her brother actually set out on the journey to Palestine before they got caught and brought back, as I recall. (Cruel, eeeeevil parents and relations!)

I’ve rambled quite a bit here. So I’d better just state my points.

Hello? Hasn’t anyone here been a kid? Is sexism the only reason any female ever reconsiders a potential career? Isn’t it sexist to assume that sexism was the problem, when all the evidence is against it?

And does anyone believe that Mademoiselle Therese Martin, a damsel so frail and easily swayed from her purpose that she planned out and attempted to strong-arm the Pope (to his face!) into doing her will (!) was prevented from doing great deeds in the world by sexism????

First of all, we are not talking about some kind of purdah country. Therese was born in 1873. In France, where plenty of women meddled in politics and literature and art, and did great deeds.

If Therese Martin had been convinced that it was God’s will for her life to do worldly great deeds or save France with military power, WWI would have been over before anyone figured out that the French army usually didn’t take orders from bourgeois ladies who hadn’t gone to the military academy. We’d have seen Therese studying military strategy and history for years ahead of time. Then we would have seen her placing artillery and leading the French Foreign Legion on death or glory charges, or hovering over the landscape in a balloon.

(And if she had decided to go into the mistress business, she probably would have turned into the Anti-Bismarck, and France would own Europe all the way to Budapest. So… probably a good thing for Luxembourg that she didn’t emulate Madame Pompadour.)

Also, her dream of being a missionary sister (yup, she went through a lot of ambitions) was certainly not anything farfetched. Frenchwomen traveled all over the world in the missions, and they certainly did all sorts of “great deeds”. Only her health and her desire to stay near her family stood as barriers to this — but of course, there are plenty of sisters who managed to finagle their way into mission orders and overseas to rough posts despite ill health. Again, if Therese had felt that God called her to the missions during life, she would have been in Pago Pago before anyone had time to blink. But again, what really happened was that Therese discarded the momentary ambition for her real goal of becoming a nun, and was left with nothing but sympathy for missionaries’ work and a great desire to pray for them. (And so, yep, she’s a patron saint for the missions.)

Therese Martin was a bright, imaginative young person who dabbled in all sorts of career dreams. She returned again and again to her dream of serving as a Carmelite nun in a cloister, and in the end chose it with such force that she dragged everyone in her way, from the Pope down, into making her dream come true, and promptly. (Not as promptly as she’d have liked, mind you, but considerably more promptly than anybody thought it could have occurred.)

Sexism? Oh, please. She was too busy getting Jesus’ will done to _notice_ sexism, much less let it block her from doing precisely what she thought God intended her to do.

If there’s an -ism villain in Therese’s story, it’s ageism, seeing as people cruelly denied her constant requests to enter the convent at the age of seven and then again, as a pre-teen. Cruel, cruel eeeeevil ageism.

(And considering how young she died, you could argue that Therese was right to have been in such a hurry.)

Fun with Translation: Distiches on Baptism by Pope St. Leo the Great

On St. Venantius’ Day, Fr. Z posted some distiches (couplets) written by Pope St. Leo the Great, in the man’s pre-papal days. Fr. Z then challenged his readers to translate them.

My Latin isn’t good, so I leaned on the translations provided. Inevitably, this meant I messed up. Here’s a revised version of my translation.

From seed the Holy Spirit’s sown,
A nation springs to be His Own –
Bound for the Heavens. God’s Breath sighed
On waters, and they fructified.
Our Mother Church, still virgin, there
Children conceived by Him does bear.
All you reborn within this spring,
Hope for the Reign of Heaven’s King!

The happy life is not for those
Born only once. The spring arose
To wash the world and wet what’s dried
With water from Christ’s wounded side.
O sinner who’d be purified,
Plunge underneath the sacred tide!

It takes the old man, makes him new.
If you’d be innocent, then do
Be washed in this bath from your sin
And from your father’s deep within!

Those reborn know no parting wall –
Font, faith, and Spirit same for all –
So in their union, they’re made one,
And none need fear their sins, no, none
Despite their count or kind. Don’t faint!
Who’s born in this flood is a saint!

Arrrr! The Pirate Priest!

From Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors: For Every Day of the Year:

Ven. GEORGE GERVASE, O.S.B., 1608

He was born at Bosham in Sussex. His father belonged to a noted family in that county, and his mother was of the ancient stock of the Shelleys. He was left an orphan when he was twelve years of age, and not long after was kidnapped by a pirate (probably a lieutenant of Drake, who was then buccaneering on the Spanish Main), and was taken to the West Indies with two of his brothers; and, considering his surroundings, the lawlessness, plunder, and bloodshed of a pirate’s life, it is not surprising to learn that he quite lost his religion.

At length he found means of returning to England, and went over to Flanders, where his eldest brother Henry was staying, both for conscience’ sake and to enjoy the free practice of his religion. By his example George was reconciled to the Catholic faith, entered Douay, was ordained priest (1603), and entered on the English Mission (1604). After two years he was apprehended and banished. His brother had provided a comfortable home for him at Lille, but his zeal for souls drew him again to England, where he was shortly apprehended, and, refusing to take the oath of allegiance, was condemned.

He suffered at Tyburn, April 11, 1608, aged thirty-seven, having been admitted to the Benedictine Order.

Quotes:

At his trial: “What I have said, my blood is ready to answer.”

At the gallows, to the minister’s final urgings: “Tut, tut, look to thyself, poor man.”

Via The Hermeneutic of Continuity.

Here’s a senior thesis that talks about pirates’ religious observations. Odd but interesting. It also mentions a French missionary, Fr. Labat, who was captured by pirates, and later wrote a memoir about it. It seems that the pirate Captain Daniels had an interesting way of enforcing reverence during Mass:

“When one of his men became offensive during the Elevation and swore, Daniels shot this crew member through the head and made an oath that to any other “who showed disrespect to the ‘Sainte Sacrifice,’ he would do the same too.’”

Spot the Assumption: The Home Game!

Here’s a history article by an anthropologist. She explains a battle’s outcome from the losers’ side, and it’s a good explanation. But alas! In doing so, she unwittingly revealed her own cultural biases, because they blinded her to the winners’ experience. Read the whole thing, and see if you can spot the huge, gaping hole in her explanation caused by this assumption.

Hint: I do not mean that she has to believe in Christianity to be a good anthropologist. But she does need to understand “things that humans experience”.

(Usually, anthropologists are pretty eager to point out that humans do experience all sorts of things, so it’s a rather odd bias to exhibit. Maybe all the sixties anthropologists are retiring.)

Ven. Pierre Toussaint — Business Saint!

Sometimes those well-meaning folks who promote multicultural saints kinda leave out huge chunks of their story. We’ve talked about how St. Martin de Porres is promoted in the US as a charitable saint, while in South America he’s more of an animal saint and in Peru he’s that wonderworker who bilocated and teleported other people.

Now, we all know Ven. Pierre Toussaint. Haitian-American slave apprenticed to a hairdresser, who became the best hairdresser in New York. Freed by his owner at her death, he went on to become a very charitable hairdresser.

Except they left out the bit where he had a mini-business empire, as well as a fairly large charity empire. He founded a credit bureau and an employment agency as well, to help the poor get off charity.

They also left out the bit where he was married to a woman he paid to free, and who was his partner in everything, include raising his dead sister’s daughter.

They also left out the bit where he funded huge chunks of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

They also left out the bit where huge numbers of people of all colors stayed at his house.

I’m not knocking the ‘kind hairdresser’ thing, you understand. But holy cow, that’s a lot of the story to leave out! Is there something wrong with a black American saint’s biography including the line, “Toussaint, you’re the richest man I know”?

As for me, I find it to be a sign of hope that Venerable Pierre Toussaint’s body lies in the crypt beneath the altar of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in the heart of New York. He was a business saint, and so it is fitting that his relics lend grace to Madison Avenue.

“Inventor Rutili” Update

You know how you tend to have a certain picture in your head of how history was, and then you find out some little bit of information that brings you up short, like you’ve just tried to walk through a glass door?

In the Pope’s Easter Vigil homily this year, he said, “Gregory of Tours recounts a practice that in some places was preserved for a long time, of lighting the new fire for the celebration of the Easter Vigil directly from the sun, using a crystal.”

ACK!

I assumed that the “petram” “silicis” in the hymn was flint. So did everybody else, apparently. But the poetic images transition much more smoothly from sun to rock, if Prudentius were referring to using rock crystal to focus sunlight the same way a magnifying glass does. Heck, the whole Easter Vigil imagery is stronger, for that matter.

We just don’t want to think of the classical world as knowing so many of the same scientific facts we do, much less of the early Church as employing science and technology in the service of religion. But many of the Fathers loved natural philosophy as much or more than regular philosophy. Also, it’s much easier for a Christian to love the wonderful things God’s creation can do, than if one were a Stoic thinking of the world as a plate that can break or a Gnostic hating all matter. So heck, if the early Christians had had a “frickin’ laserbeam” available to turn the sunlight into something that could start the Easter fire, they’d probably have used it.

(*rub hands together evilly* And you know, I have seen some calculations that lasers were possible in the classical world, given a good enough gemstone… that is, a good enough crystal…. Heh! No, I don’t really believe the early Christians had lasers. But in an alternate Greco-Roman universe, it’d be a pretty obvious liturgical development; and it would be really cool if the Vatican did something like that now. Not practical for every parish, though. And I think the frickin’ Roman laserbeams wouldn’t really have been technically possible without some real improvements in all kinds of materials. So take this all as total fiction; but it was pretty cool in a fictional way in that one James Rollins novel, and I think it might have showed up in a few more sf historical novels.)

UPDATE: Thanks, Cassandra, for the correction! At certain hours of the morning, I apparently can’t remember what Latin goes where, and… um… I was kinda in a hurry to post before work, so I didn’t do a fact check. *bloggy blush*

So silex, silicis = pebble, stone, rock, flint, boulder, stone. Not sounding very much like “rock crystal”, is it? I suppose Prudentius could have been writing about it in a way which would possibly include both flint and rock crystal, but… I don’t know that I’m buying it.

Sigh. Another beautiful crystalline boat of theory sinks slowly into the West, under the weight of a boulder of fact. Taking with it my frickin’ laserbeam.

Hornblower Audio Drama? Hornblower Fan Discussion Podcast?!?

Well, some people certainly are busy! And since I know that certain readers of this very blog are very fond of Horatio Hornblower, I have to link to it. Enjoy!

Economists Who Are Saints

Not that I ever hated economists or thought they were all evil, but “saint” and “economist” didn’t go together in my mind. Little did I know….

Clare Krishan quoted this interview, in Amy’s comment box:

“Two economists among the scholastics became saints: San Bernardino of Siena and his great student San Antonino of Florence. Let’s hope they will not be the last.”

Pretty cool, huh?

St. Bernardine is one of those saints who usually crops up only in studying St. Catherine of Siena’s life, because he was the patron saint of her city. But he did some neat things that shouldn’t be overshadowed by her, obviously!

One thing I’ve heard: after he preached against people who were addicted to playing cards and got them to stop, a printer of decks of cards complained to him that he and his family would starve now that the card bubble had burst. St. Bernardine thought about the problem, and then introduced various devotions (primarily the Holy Name) which could be printed on cardstock and put in the pocket, stuck on the wall as pictures, etc. This both helped the faithful and kept the printers in business. (Especially since they’d already bought all that cardstock.)

I believe the economics stuff normally comes in as a subset of natural law, with the Scholastics.

Patristics and Sample Chapters of The Last Centurion by John Ringo

John Ringo is an odd bird, even by comparison to the normal oddness of science fiction writers. Ringo can write really really good, bad, and creepily-unwholesome-I-need-a-shower books. Often inside the same cover. So I was more than a bit hesitant to check out the sample chapters for his upcoming book, but I did.

Anyway, I have good news. The sample chapters of The Last Centurion do not involve anything creepy. They do involve vast amounts of infodumps on real life issues combined with sf. This is the sort of near-nonfiction that a lot of sf fans enjoy, because we like absorbing large amounts of data while slotting it into what we already know. (Some people say this means too little character development. I think that, properly done, the information a character likes to impart and how he does it can define their personality. But even if it’s generic, I usually enjoy it.)

In this case, the topic is “What Not to Do in Pandemics”.

Here comes the patristics angle.

In Ringo’s fictional pandemic, the US has an unusually high survival rate despite a lot of bad decisions. This is due in large part to the way surviving Americans take care of their neighbors.

What came to my mind is that his “high trust society” and “voluntary random social alliances” are very largely the same thing as “Christians trying to be Good Samaritans”. Early Christians took care of their neighbors during the ancient pandemics, even though their neighbors couldn’t be expected to take care of them. Even though their neighbors probably thought they were creepy malefici and mathematici, and quite likely had lobbied to have them killed for offending the gods and causing earthquakes. This is why a lot of neighbors, who survived the pandemics with the help of the creepy cross-cultists next door, suddenly found the Christian religion. In great numbers.

Anywhere that Christianity has been followed heartily, you see this same behavior. The problem is that Europe in De Tocqueville’s time was a weak sort of Christendom. A lot of bad stuff had happened — wars, schisms, culture wars, religious wars, etc. The Enlightenment had followed, and that meant that many people thought they were too smart to be religious. Governments were highly suspicious of religions of which they disapproved, but almost as suspicious of the religion they were supposed to affirm. Your neighbors’ parents or grandparents probably had tried to kill your family patriarchs, and lectured them about their shameful belief that good works pleased God, to boot. So a lot of people did their best to stay away from religion, and a lot of people didn’t see a priest or a minister very often. Safer to stay home on Sunday. So traditional religious life was at a low ebb in most of Europe even before all the revolutions started. Those were the societies that DeTocqueville knew — the battered remnants of what had been.

Many immigrants came to America either to build their idea of a truly Christian society, to escape persecution and go somewhere it was safe to be their brand of Christian (or Jew, for that matter — Jews also believed that God commanded them to do certain acts of mercy and other mitzvahs). We know this! It’s not a secret. So it’s no surprise that what DeTocqueville saw was indeed a Christian society. Maybe a little standoffish, granted, but a lot of people who came here had dreamed of being left alone. (Or of having elbow room and a fresh start — the other big reason people came.) The Deist and non-denominational language used in public life and our founding documents probably ties in somewhere — by making it easier for folks of very different sects to share natural law, sort out a common theology of national purpose, and to pray together. Having the ability for outsiders to choose American citizenship makes the association voluntary, and naturalization is almost like a baptism. It’s not an analogy you want to take too far, but it’s not entirely wrong. As Chesterton pointed out, “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence….”

The Constitution has its say, too. “….establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity….” It’s all about love your neighbor as yourself, and treat him as you would be treated. Common. General. Ourselves and our. “We the People” is very close to the assembly of Israel and the ecclesia of Christendom.

So there’s your “random” social association. It’s not random association at all, if the vast majority of a society believes in some sense that all people are your neighbors and all Americans, like all Christians, are your brothers. If you’re here, you’re chosen and have chosen — you’re one of us. That assumption is sometimes stretched to breaking point, but it’s still there in our minds.

It’s not surprising that, in the next chapter, Ringo provides an example of how churches are one of our great strengths during emergencies. Even in a pandemic that would throw local areas back on their own resources, churches would be a great resource.

However, he goes the very long way around, instead of quoting Paul: “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers, to keep away from every brother who is idle and does not live according to the teaching you received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example. We were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s food without paying for it. On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you. We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to make ourselves a model for you to follow. For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: ‘If a man will not work, he shall not eat.’ We hear that some among you are idle. They are not busy; they are busybodies. Such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the bread they eat.”

(Btw, if Mr. Ringo should read this — it’s the “teller” in the bank, and the “cashier” in the grocery store. You probably hit the delete key a bit too hard.)

Since Julie Wanted to Know

In the last few days before the election, I got a bunch of ads for McCain (not totally spam, since I gave the Grand Old Party my phone number), a bunch of ads for Other People, one ad for a deserving local levy, and about 5000 zillion polls. No ads for any form of TV.

I’m afraid that I gave in to temptation, and notified one poor live body that we have the right to a secret ballot. Sigh. I don’t really take proper advantage of all this Lenten mortification.

I did, however, attempt to pray the Rosary today while having my teeth cleaned. It is a spiritual exercise which chiefly leaves one with a great deal of respect for those martyrs and confessors who managed to pray or sing hymns whilst having far worse things perpetrated upon them.

Bellarmine’s Bestsellers

Longtime readers may recall that I was looking around for books by Catholic natural law guys, and ended up on a tangent looking for online public domain books by St. Robert Bellarmine.  Well, I did find some, and now more seem to be crawling up out of the woodwork. (Check out his Wikipedia entry.)

Apparently, he’s the patron saint of my native archdiocese. Well. Who knew? (Nobody who went to school at my school, apparently….) So anyway, I apparently owe him more attention than I have given him, and since I was already thinking about doing this project… I’m going to be doing a bonus audiobook for Holy Week of his book The Seven Words on the Cross. We’ll see how it works out.

Anyway, the thing that struck me about it is that, like The Art of Dying Well and The Mind’s Ascent to God, two other popular devotional books he wrote during his retirement, The Seven Words on the Cross is based on a popular medieval devotional theme. Many of the Counter-Reformers seem to have had as much disdain for medieval piety as the Reformers did, seeing all the old ways as unlovely impurities or silly add-ons. Bellarmine does not seem to have felt this way, and his books apparently just restate the good old stuff in modern terms.

Maybe we need to pay more attention to what our patrons have to say.