A Treasure To Be Shared

(CNS photo/Vatican Media) Lights, smoke, an elevated platform, guitars, drums, keyboards, and a large crowd facing the performers. A religious service or a rock concert? Candles, incense (... maybe), an elevated platform, guitars, drums, keyboards, and a large congregation facing the clergy. Same question. 'Praise and worship' is a label borrowed from evangelical and charismatic Protestant lexicons. The Catholic understands that God desires to be worshipped and praised in the Divine Liturgy. In the Mass, the Catholic can say, "I was gathered into the offering of the Son to the Father. I participated in the self-offering of God today." God has revealed to us how He wants to be worshipped. Jesus established the model for Catholic worship (St. Matthew 26:17-30). The Latin Rite liturgy has expanded or contracted over the centuries. Universal adjustments were modest until the Bugnini Concilium (1964 - 1969) instituted considerable revisions. A later council of ten faithful...

Basilica of the Holy Blood in Bruges, The Trinity, fresco above the high altar | René de Cramer Wikipedia H/T David Clayton The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection. - Michelangelo Gart is the term that a former philosophy professor of mine imparted to us students to describe something pretending to be art. Technically speaking, there is no such thing as bad art. Art, by definition, describes something - is something - that belongs in the category of excellence and the sublime. Art epitomizes the best of something. Art embodies the true, the good and the beautiful. Gart, on the other hand, is something less than art. A determination of artistic merit does not depend on the popularity of a thing. Artistic merit is determined by the degree to which something epitomizes the true, the good and the beautiful. Merit can be intuited and/or deduced. One does not necessarily need a university degree to be able to recognize art. A trained intellect corrupted by attachmen...

For Thomas, God is not the supreme being ( ens summum in his Latin), but rather ipsum esse subsistens , which means “the sheer act of to be itself.” In a word, God is not one more instance of the genus “being,” one thing, however exalted, among others; instead, he is the self-explaining source of existence as such, that great font of being in and through which all finite things subsist and act. Therefore, God does not compete for space, so to speak, on the same ontological grid as creatures; a zero-sum game does not obtain in regard to God’s activity and creaturely activity—the more we ascribe to one, the less we have to ascribe to the other. - Bishop Robert Barron If only mortals would learn how great it is to possess divine grace, how beautiful, how noble, how precious. How many riches it hides within itself, how many joys and delights! No one would complain about his cross or about troubles that may happen to him, if he would come to know the scales on which they are weighed when ...