St. Ammonius and the Unwed Pregnant Girl

One time, they brought an unwed pregnant girl to Father Amun and his monks in the desert, and they said, “Give her a penance.”

But he blessed her womb with the Sign of the Cross, and ordered that pieces of cloth be given to her, to serve as a shroud in case the mother or her baby died.

And they asked, “What are you doing? Put a penance on her!”

But Father Amun said, “But my brothers, you see that she is in danger of death. What can I do?”

Amun felt unworthy to judge others. He was merciful and full of goodness toward people.

— Adapted from Anthony Alcock’s translation of the Syrian “Apothegmata of Amun.”

Our Lady of Knock Documentary: Strange Occurrences in an Irish Village

There’s an interesting Irish documentary on Amazon Prime right now: “Strange Occurrences in an Irish Village.” (The name comes from one of the early newspaper articles about the Knock apparition.)

The 2016 documentary focuses on the modern history of Knock, and how the locals are trying to help renew the pilgrimages and the Irish love for the Catholic Church. Unfortunately a lot of Irish-Americans are more interested than a lot of Irish!

Anyway, there’s a great bit at the beginning where Knock villagers read from the original depositions made by their ancestors. I didn’t realize that the apparition was first heralded by the following words:

“When did the deacon put up those new statues?”

“I didn’t know we were getting statues.”

(Of course, they weren’t statues; they were mysterious images of saints that appeared strangely solid, but could not be felt with the hand.)

The documentary does get into a lot of the history later on, and you get to see a lot of the actual local sites and landscape. County Mayo is cool.

Knock’s story tends to be retold in a syrupy way, so I really like a more matter-of-fact retelling that doesn’t minimize the miracle. I also like the locals who are featured; they are the salt of the earth. You also learn that even in these softer days, there are young Irishmen who like to make a barefoot pilgrimage to Knock.

I also didn’t realize that at least one of the witnesses, Mary O’Connell Byrne, was found to be incorrupt in her coffin when they added a family member to her grave.

The annoying bit is that they have some goofy music moments when people are being serious and solemn. But overall it’s a very beautiful documentary, and you learn a lot about how hard people work together to keep up a nice shrine for God.

(And yes, of course there’s a bit where they talk to two nuns, and one of them is faithful and conservative but painted as obsessed, but the other gets into women’s ordination. Sigh.)

It looks like Knock isn’t all that crowded for most of the year, which is kind of a shame for them; but is probably nice for you if you go there.

The Best Law Video You’ll See All Week

“The Magical Birth Canal”.

Safe for work, unless you have humorless coworkers scalded by conscience.

(So… maybe not safe for work.)

Anyway, a very cute and winning presentation of one of our society’s fundamental injustices.

Aphra Behn’s Name

One would assume that Aphra Behn’s name came from Latin or Greek, and from the martyr, St. Afra.

Actually, it’s a Puritan name. “Aphrah” is Hebrew for dust, and comes from the thing in Micah about the “house of dust.”

This and many other interesting tidbits can be found in Oddities of Puritan Nomenclature, which is also a very good book about medieval English names.

St. Erin?

Or, Why Do Good Catholics Think This Is a Good Baptismal Name?

Yes, Irish-American Catholics tend to assume that anything they like is pre-approved by the Pope. But why did American Catholics start naming their girls Erin? Why is it such a thing? Why? Why? Why?

— First off, Erin is really “Eirinn.” It’s the Gaelic dative form of Eire, or its Old Irish form, Eriu. Eire is the name of Ireland, or the island upon which Ireland and Northern Ireland are found; and Eriu is the name of its personification, the goddess Eriu. (Which in Proto-Celtic meant something like “land, fat land, abundant land.”)

So are people naming their kids “for Ireland” or “to Ireland”? Or are they really using the genitive form “Eireann,” and thus naming them “of Ireland”?

Maybe, maybe not. There are actually two dialects of Irish where the dative form Eirinn can be used as a nominative form, instead of using Eire. Obviously, these dialects were influential, since they show up in sayings like “Erin go bragh.”

— Okay. So… what does it mean to name your kid after a country? Why does the Social Security Administration show all these “Erins” showing up in 1947? I don’t know. There may have been an influential movie or novel character, but that’s just a guess, or it may have just been a general consensus that “Erin go bragh” sounds pretty.

From a Catholic point of view, though, the name “Erin” is kind of weird. Yes, Ireland is the land of saints and scholars, but it is not itself holy. (As the vote for legalized abortion has abundantly proved.)

— So there are a couple of different options. It could be referring to Our Lady’s title “Queen of Ireland,” if it were actually using the genitive form Eireann. The title “Queen of Ireland” was connected with the 19th century apparitions at Knock, where Mary appeared to a good chunk of a village, and it appears in several popular prayers and songs praising Our Lady of Knock.

There’s also a wonderworking painting of Mary in Gyor, Hungary, called “Our Lady of Ireland,” because it had originally hung in Clonfert Cathedral, and had been rescued by the exiled Bishop Lynch (who left it to the Bishop of Gyor). Calvinists, Lutherans, and even a rabbi signed a deposition talking about how the painting shed real tears of blood on March 17, 1697. Here’s an article in Hungarian, with pictures of it in the cathedral.

There is a copy of this painting in St. Stephen’s Church in Toledo, Ohio, which was given in 1913 by Toledo’s bishop to his Hungarian parish; but unfortunately I’ve never seen it. The copy was touched to the actual painting, and is thus a relic itself.

Here’s an article with pictures of the Toledo copy and the original painting, by the amazing Jeffrey Smith! And here’s a closer view of the original. Was it by an Irish painter?

So yup, a shorter version of “Rian Eireann” or “Muire na hEireann” (“Mary of Ireland,” which is the translation used in Ireland for “Our Lady, Queen of Ireland”) is a real possibility. I think all of you Erins have a lovely patroness!

— However, there’s also a very famous title of St. Brigid that comes to mind. She was called “the Mary of the Gaels” (Muire na Gael).

— The other possibility is that it’s yet another version of the Greek “Irene,” peace, and the various St. Irenes. This name is sometimes written “Erina,” “Erena,” or “Herena.”

— “Erinna” is also an ancient Greek name, associated with a pagan Greek poetess of that name, Erinna of Telos.

A Quote from the Real Life Judge Dee

“Man is like water. When water is penned up, it forms a pond. When the obstructions are moved away, it becomes a stream. Whether it is imprisoned or set free, water will flow just as far as it can.”

Young Judge Dee TV Show on Amazon Prime

Tsui Hark’s third Detective Dee movie (Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings) is due for release in July 2018. So it’s not surprising that there’s a 2014 live action TV show on Amazon Prime about young Judge Dee and young Empress Wu, with lots of martial arts, magic, and detective deduction.

The catch is that it’s not called anything resembling “Judge Dee,” “Detective Dee,” or even “Magistrate Dee.”

Yup, it was uploaded by the production company as:

Clip: Young Sherlock.

(Also, whoever did the uploading has classified each of the series episodes as separate movies. And there are 40-some episodes in a season. My advice is to search for the show on your desktop, and then click each of them onto your watchlist in episode order.)

It turns out that the official English title really is Young Sherlock. Presumably this is using “sherlock” as a generic word for a sleuth.

Anyway, it’s a pretty typical Tang Dynasty detective/martial arts show.

(Heh, I just wanted to write that sentence.)

So there’s a hotblooded hero destined to make nonfictional history and become a Chinese god, Di Ren Jie. He is a gifted young scholar and martial artist, but his dad finds him unserious. It’s almost time for him to get married off and take the bureaucrat exams, but he just wants to have fun. He’s crazy for beautiful girls. But he doesn’t want to marry his cousin and childhood friend, a girl with a sharp tongue and a mean right whose nickname is “Tigress.” He also doesn’t want to marry the other leading candidate, a rich and well-educated government minister’s daughter he’s never met, because her nickname is “Ugly.” But on his way to visit the capital, he falls in love instantly (as one does) with a gorgeous young woman who doctors the poor while hiding her face (as one does).

He also has a faithful family servant/sidekick who spends his time being ordered around by both the future Judge Dee and the aforementioned Tigress. (Though they treat him with careless generosity as well, since they were all raised together.)

And Tigress is also destined to meet mysterious love interests, as well as dressing up like a guy. Because that’s what young female martial artists of good family do!

Anyway, the first episode sets up the show with a lot of info about palace intrigue and the Emperor’s troubles, as well as introducing us to a mysterious group of magical ninja terrorists, led by a guy wearing a Western-style helmet. Emperor Gaozong gave up hope of marrying his childhood friend and true love (Wu Mei, the future Empress Wu) upon taking the throne, for an important reason. She had been married off to the now-dead emperor as a concubine, so marrying her himself would count as incest. Further, an imperial consort who didn’t have kids by an emperor was supposed to remain celibate afterwards, to avoid succession confusion, and was to be booked off to be a nun. Therefore, she became the abbess of a Buddhist shrine to the dead emperor’s memory. But for various reasons, the gods don’t seem to think this is good enough, and the omens are bad. So the young emperor, depressed and lonely, contemplates going back on his decision… and of course, there are courtiers trying to get him what he wants!

But the second episode starts with mystery, as a theater accident turns out to be no accident, and Dee shows even the gentlemen of the court just how deadly serious he can be.

On the whole, I think it’s okay for mystery-reading kids… if they are okay with lots of subtitles, scary stuff and mystery murders, as well as pagan and Buddhist Chinese altars and temples. There’s some earthy humor too. (For instance, Tigress complains that, since they were little kids together, Dee has already seen her naked when they were in the bathtub together. Since she complains about this in public, the public misinterpret it!)

There’s also a frequent repetition of a famous Chinese love poem about longing for the beloved so much that she confused green and red, which is written to a married Emperor. (Yes, maintenance of the imperial concubine system is a plot essential.) If your kids already know about King Solomon, there’s nothing shocking.

The main question, as ever, is why the evil Empress Wu has been rewritten as the purehearted Empress Wu in so many recent historical works. Obviously people really really want her to be a positive historical model for women, because many of her policies were beneficial; but that doesn’t mean she can’t also have been a model of dictatorship, cruelty, extravagance, and excess. Heck, that seems to be most Chinese rulers of note — a bunch of powercrazed weirdos, with good administrators doing all the work.

As the linked article above says, Young Sherlock was produced in Hong Kong under Communist Chinese control. Dee is played by Bosco Wong, and Empress Wu by Ruby Lin. Yuan Hong is the Emperor, Ma Tianyu is the sidekick (whose name is Wang Yuanfang), Cindy Sun Xiaoxiao is Tigress (Tong Mengyao is her actual name), and Stephy Qi is the mysterious doctor, Li Wanqing. The director is Lin Feng, and the show was produced for Hunan TV.