Posted on 11/10/2014 10:39:40 AM PST by Mrs. Don-o
I’m sorry, I must have misconstrued you. I apologize. Please distinguish Christian art from graven images.
Cool story...
If you are ever in the area take the time to visit the Mount Angel Abbey library. It was designed by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and is simply amazing.
“most church windows” are clear
Nice! I can’t stand tattoos, personally, but one of my daughters got a couple of very pretty “art deco” tattoos (on her shoulders or places you don’t normally see at work). The tattoo artist was actually a person with years of art training who couldn’t support herself through art, wasn’t an academic type personality, and thus was trying to do something she thought was beautiful. I wouldn’t have it done, and my other daughter said one of her friends reminded her of how it would look when she got older...but they actually look very nice on the daughter who has them.
My son, having been in the Navy, has tats. That’s ok and to be expected.
The only thing I really hate are the “angry tats,” which run heavily to black, are splashed all over the wearer’s body, and usually have ugly images and ugly messages. A lot of the girls who go to the small college in my town have them, for some reason that I have never understood. How angry are they at life, and why? They’re privileged children going to a nice college in a wonderful town. What makes them think they have to cover their bodies with permanent angry messages?
Hope this monk does well. He seems to have some understanding of what’s going on.
Not around here.
Why is that to be expected?
Because guys in the Navy always get tattoos. That’s how it is.
All of them? I doubt it.
Tattoos used to be (historically) a typical thing in the Navy, and I honestly haven’t met a single Navy man who hasn’t had one. My son was in Naval Aviation, and while people didn’t cover themselves with tats, they all got them.
A personal testimony and not a single word about Jesus Christ...At least he got religion...
worship those icons and tats
Jesus is not very important in Catholicism and he has no power, he needs “intercessors” to bring him messages of your prayers. He is a bureaucrat or something
ridiculous
I was sort-of thinking we’d get some nuns with tramp stamps....just thinkin’..../s
(I applaud him coming to Christ first and all other things second, regardless his past carnality.)
For instance, before Andre Love was able to be received into the Church he took a 9-month, roughly 30-lesson course (RCIA) which involves explicit repentance for sin, commitment to Jesus Christ, acknowledging Him as the sole source of salvation. I can tell you, as an RCIA teacher, that he was intensively taught from a Biblical, spiritual and moral point of view to know this Jesus, love Him, and serve Him. This is our purpose in life.
Although you call this article a "personal testimony," it is not quite that in the sense that he did not control its focus or its content: what was emphasized and what disappeared with the lightning speed of the delete button. Keep in mind that this is, rather, a feature article by a journalist writing for a secular news outlet. Neither the journalist nor the editor may be a Christian. You may be sure that even if they talked with Brother Andre for hours, they may have left 90% of what he said out of the print version.
In which case, your edit-search function would yield what the author, Tom Mayhall Rastrelli, and Oregon-dotnewz thought was important, not what Brother Andre thought was most important.
I have been on both sides of this process --- interviewee and interviewer --- and I know well how this works.
It is not becoming to bring negative judgments against a man on the basis of such superficial evidence. Still less is it right to take this superficial judgment and then apply it to a whole faith community: in this case, Catholicism. It makes your comment seem unserious.
his real name isn’t even Andre
... and your isn’t GeronL.
“Excuse me? Are you saying God doesn’t like art?”
God doesn’t hate art, but many Protestants hate beauty.
No less a Protestant authority than the Protestant Ralph Adams Cram once wrote:
“From the outbreak of the Protestant revolution, the old kinship between beauty and religion was deprecated and often forgotten. Not only was there, amongst the reformers and their adherents, a definite hatred of beauty and a determination to destroy it when found; there was also a conscientious elimination of everything of the sort from the formularies, services, and structures that applied to their new religion. This unprecedented break between religion and beauty had a good deal to do with that waning interest in religion itself. Protestantism, with its derivative materialistic rationalism, divested religion of its essential elements of mystery and wonder, and worship of its equally essential elements of beauty. Under this powerful combination of destructive influences, it is not to be wondered at that, of the once faithful, many have fallen away. Man is, by instinct, not only a lover of beauty, he is also by nature a ‘ritualist,’ that is to say, he does, when left alone, desire form and ceremony, if significant. If this instinctive craving for ceremonial is denied to man in religion, where it preeminently belongs, he takes it on for himself in secular fields; elaborates ritual in secret societies, in the fashion of his dress, in the details of social custom. He also, in desperation, invents new religions and curious sects working up for them strange rituals . . . extravagant and vulgar devices that are now the sardonic delight of the ungodly. ... If once more beauty can be restored to the offices of religion, many who are now self-excommunicated from their Church will thankfully find their way back to the House they have abandoned. The whole Catholic Faith is shot through and through with this vital and essential quality of beauty. It is this beauty implicit in the Christian revelation and its operative system that was explicit in the material and visible Churches and their art. We must contend against the strongest imaginable combination of prejudices and superstitions. These are of two sorts. There is first, the heritage of ignorance and fear from the dark ages of the sixteenth century. I am speaking of non-Catholic Christianity. Ignorance of authentic history, instigated by protagonists of propaganda; fear of beauty, because all that we now have in Christian art was engendered and formulated by and through Catholicism; fear that the acceptance of beauty means that awful thing—’surrender to superstition.’ It is fear that lies at the root of the matter, as it does in so many other fields of mental activity.” (Radio Replies, vol. 2: 1052)
“A personal testimony and not a single word about Jesus Christ...At least he got religion...”
It’s not a personal testimony. It’s just an article written by the man who interviewed the monk.
A dear friend of mine, owner of a woodworking business, had wanted to redo the pews and walls, anyway, with beautiful carved wood in the manner of old Bavarian churches he had seen. Poor Sam! He died just last week, and I mourn both his death and the loss of his vision for our parish.
It’s an interview not an altar call.
Catholic ping!
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