A Treasure To Be Shared

The Sacrifice of Elijah Before the Priests of Baal c.1621-22 | Domenico Fetti God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity ... down to the very roots and sea-bed of the nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him. - C. S. Lewis The first role of Catholic philosophers is to articulate the Catholic faith (or, better, Catholic wisdom) in a comprehensive, systematic, and intellectually rigorous manner and to transmit this articulation at appropriate levels of sophistication to other members of the Church--especially, but not only, to those who themselves aspire to be Catholic philosophical inquirers. [...] The second role of Catholic philosophers is to engage non-believing philosophers in intellectual exchanges, and to do so with charity, courage, and integrity, both in order to learn and in order to teach.(15) This claim, taken generally and in the abstract, is ...

Excerpt from News Notes  12 June 2021, Victoria Ordinariate Community. Those unfamiliar with the Anglican tradition might wonder as to why, in the Ordinariate, our Sundays in this summer period are ordered not ‘tempus per annum’ (‘time throughout the year’, often incorrectly translated into the rather uninspiring ‘Ordinary Time’), as in the Ordinary Form, or ‘after Pentecost’, as in the Extraordinary Form, but are instead ‘after Trinity’. Anglicans count their Sundays ‘after Trinity’ not because they want to do things differently, but rather because they inherited the practise from the pre-Reformation Catholic Church in England. St Thomas Becket was, in 1162, consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury on the Sunday after Whitsunday, and his very first act of episcopal authority was to decree that, henceforth, that Sunday would be kept as the Feast of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity. It took root and gradually spread outside of England to other parts of Christendom until, in the ...

The Trinity: Three Persons in One Nature by Frank Sheed In this excerpt from his classic work Theology and Sanity , the noted apologist addresses the “arithmetical problem” of the core Christian doctrine. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/06/07/the-trinity-three-persons-in-one-nature-by-frank-sheed/ The notion is unfortunately widespread that the mystery of the Blessed Trinity is a mystery of mathematics, that is to say, of how one can equal three. The plain Christian accepts the doctrine of the Trinity; the “advanced” Christian rejects it; but too often what is being accepted by the one and rejected by the other is that one equals three. The believer argues that God has said it, therefore it must be true; the rejecter argues it cannot be true, therefore God has not said it. A learned non-Catholic divine, being asked if he believed in the Trinity, answered, “I must confess that the arithmetical aspect of the Deity does not greatly interest me”; and if the learned can think that...

As one somewhat familiar with the counting of days according to Pentecost, an appreciation of the sequence of days that rubbed off from time served in the Latin Mass community, this blogger has become acquainted with the Ordinariate experience of or discipline of or happy encounter of numbering days according to the Most Holy Trinity. The Ordinariate, you will recall dear Reader, has preserved the Octave of Pentecost as is appropriate for the Third Person of the Holy Trinity. The phrase Ordinary Time, the ordering of the Church Year common to the New Order of the Mass (Novus Ordo Missae), hardly locates the Christian in liturgical time in a way that suggests to the Christian that to be fully Christian one must live with one foot in time and the other firmly planted in eternity. And so, the label "ordinary" has conditioned diocesan Catholics to think in ordinary terms, i.e., bland terms. Diocesan Catholics have become quite ordinary in that they have become, gener...