Free Republic

Franciscan Media Image: Icon of Saint Adrian of Canterbury Saint Adrian of Canterbury Saint of the Day for January 9 (d. January 9, 710)  Saint Adrian of Canterbury’s Story Though Saint Adrian turned down a papal request to become Archbishop of Canterbury, England, Pope Saint Vitalian accepted the rejection on the condition that Adrian serve as the Holy Father’s assistant and adviser. Adrian accepted, but ended up spending most of his life and doing most of his work in Canterbury.Born in Africa, Adrian was serving as an abbot in Italy when the new Archbishop of Canterbury appointed him abbot...

Basics of Christian Anthropology (part 1 of 2) Msgr. Charles Pope • January 8, 2019 • Creation of Adam – Michelangelo Buonarroti (1510)Anthropology is, most simply, the science or study of human beings through time and space. Different specialties focus on the analysis of biological/physiological characteristics and the examination of societies/cultures. In the religious sense, anthropology deals with the origin, nature, and destiny of human beings.In our times there are many moral issues emerging from viewpoints that diverge widely from our given nature, both physical and spiritual. Numerous false notions (e.g., “transgenderism”) have arisen that either disregard or even...

Franciscan Media Image: Statue of Saint Angela of Foligno (as a Blessed) Saint Angela of Foligno Saint of the Day for January 8 (1248 – January 4, 1309)  Saint Angela of Foligno’s story Some saints show marks of holiness very early. Not Angela! Born of a leading family in Foligno, Italy, she became immersed in the quest for wealth and social position. As a wife and mother, she continued this life of distraction.Around the age of 40, she recognized the emptiness of her life and sought God’s help in the Sacrament of Penance. Her Franciscan confessor helped Angela to...

ROME, January 8, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – An article at Vatican News, in recognition of the 60th anniversary of the Cuban revolution, disappeared from the Holy See’s website just one day after it appeared on January 1. No explanation was offered for the self-censorship of the article, which marked the rise to power of Fidel Castro and his anti-clerical Marxist government, which has long been marked by grievous human rights violations. The Vatican News article, in Spanish, was titled “Cuba celebrates 60th year of the Revolution.” It read, “The historic anniversary was celebrated with an official ceremony in which the former...

Christmas Wrap-up: Some Less-Obvious Questions about the Incarnation Msgr. Charles Pope • January 7, 2019 • Flight to Egypt – Francesco ManciniWelcome to Epiphany-tide. In this week we transition from Christmas to the public ministry of Christ, with the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord scheduled for this coming Sunday. Before we leave Christmas altogether, we do well to ponder certain less-obvious questions about the Lord’s incarnation and birth. These questions are taken from St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. St. Thomas’s answers are presented in italics, while my inferior commentary appears in plain red text.Whether Christ was born...

Franciscan Media Image: Saint Raymond of Peñafort’s Miracle by Jacopo Ligozzi | photo by Sailko Saint Raymond of Peñafort Saint of the Day for January 7 (1175 – January 6, 1275)  Saint Raymond of Peñafort’s Story Since Raymond lived into his hundredth year, he had a chance to do many things. As a member of the Spanish nobility, he had the resources and the education to get a good start in life.By the time he was 20, he was teaching philosophy. In his early 30s he earned a doctorate in both canon and civil law. At 41 he became...

Have You Ever Really Seen the Stars? Msgr. Charles Pope • January 6, 2019 • One of the central elements in the Epiphany story is the star. There are numerous theories as to what exactly it was. It may not have been a star at all, but Jupiter or Saturn, which are said to have come quite close to Earth around the year 6 B.C. I thought of that the other day because Jupiter is currently bright in the southeastern sky a couple of hours before sunrise along the East Coast of the U.S. With high-powered binoculars one can...

Franciscan Media Image: photograph of Saint Andre Bessette | Wikimedia Saint André Bessette Saint of the Day for January 6 (August 9, 1845 – January 6, 1937)  Saint André Bessette’s Story Brother André expressed a saint’s faith by a lifelong devotion to Saint Joseph.Sickness and weakness dogged André from birth. He was the eighth of 12 children born to a French Canadian couple near Montreal. Adopted at 12, when both parents had died, he became a farmhand. Various trades followed: shoemaker, baker, blacksmith—all failures. He was a factory worker in the United States during the boom times of the...

The Journey of Faith – A Homily for the Feast of Epiphany Msgr. Charles Pope • January 5, 2019 • There are so many wonderful details in the Epiphany story: the call of the Gentiles, their enthusiastic response, the significance of the star they seek, the gifts they bring, the dramatic interaction with Herod, and their ultimate rejection of Herod in favor of Christ.In this meditation, I would like to follow these Magi in their journey of faith to become “Wise Men.” As magi, they followed the faint stars, distant points of light; as wise men, they follow Jesus,...

We Three Kings of Orient are, Bearing gifts we traverse afar. . . . Who were these gift-bearing kings, these Wise Men of the East? What has their mission meant to Christians across the ages? The Wise Men—not yet called kings—make only a single appearance in Holy Scripture. St. Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 2:1-12) tells of their arrival in Jerusalem shortly after the birth of Jesus. In ancient texts of Scripture the Wise Men are Magoi in Greek and Magi in Latin. The singular form, Magos/Magus, is the source of our English word “magician” but had multiple meanings in Biblical times....

Hi everyone! I usually post these on Wednesdays but in the holiday rush I haven't had much time so either film a video or write a new blog. So I decided to just make the last Why the New Testament Was Written video as a substitute for my usual Saturday blogs.I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! This week's concluding video is on why Revelation was written. Rather than delve into the divisive theological issues of eschatology, I decided to focus solely on the historical context of John's vision and the book's authorship.Why John...

Franciscan Media Image: Saint Joan of Arc Catholic Church, Powell, Ohio (interior, stained glass) St. John Neumann | photo by Nheyob Saint John Neumann Saint of the Day for January 5 (March 28, 1811 – January 5, 1860)  Saint John Neumann’s Story Perhaps because the United States got a later start in the history of the world, it has relatively few canonized saints, but their number is increasing.John Neumann was born in what is now the Czech Republic. After studying in Prague, he came to New York at 25 and was ordained a priest. He did missionary work in...

The Pain of Divorce and Remarriage in a Beer Commercial? Msgr. Charles Pope • January 4, 2019 • The Heineken Beer holiday commercial below “taps” into a sad reality for many families: divorce and “remarriage.”In these situations, most of the focus is on the happiness of the couple, with little to no attention paid to the effects on the children involved. For children, it typically means being shuttled between two different “homes” on a regular basis. They also must endure the pain and awkwardness of seeing their parents dating and possibly “marrying” others. As their parents set down the...

Franciscan Media Image: Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton in St. Paul Catholic Church, Westerville, Ohio | photo by Nheyob Saint of the Day for January 4 (August 28, 1774 – January 4, 1821)  Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton’s Story Mother Seton is one of the keystones of the American Catholic Church. She founded the first American religious community for women, the Sisters of Charity. She opened the first American parish school and established the first American Catholic orphanage. All this she did in the span of 46 years while raising her five children.Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton is a true daughter of...

In late November, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew traveled to Romania to participate in the consecration of the newly-constructed national cathedral in Bucharest. While there, he attended a meeting of the Romanian Holy Synod and gave an address on the topic of Ukraine. In that speech, Patriarch Bartholomew states that the Ecumenical Patriarchate has decided to grant autocephaly to “the ecclesiastical body in Ukraine.” Critically, for the first time, he publicly acknowledges that this unilateral decision of the Ecumenical Patriarchate is in conflict with the procedure for granting autocephaly that had been agreed upon at the Pan-Orthodox Pre-Conciliar Commission in 1993. Patriarch...

Don’t Be a Liar Msgr. Charles Pope • January 3, 2019 • Rest on Flight to Egypt, by Caravaggio (1597)At Christmas we celebrate the Word becoming Flesh, but what does this mean for us today? Fundamentally, it means that our faith is about things that are tangible. As human beings, we have bodies. We have a soul that is spiritual, but it is joined with a body that is physical and material. Hence, it is never enough for our faith to be only about thoughts, philosophies, concepts, or ideas. Their truth must touch the physical part of who we...

Franciscan Media Image: IHS monogram, on top of the main altar of the Gesù, Rome, Italy | Jastrow Most Holy Name of Jesus Saint of the Day for January 3  The Story of the Most Holy Name of Jesus Although Saint Paul might claim credit for promoting devotion to the Holy Name because Paul wrote in Philippians that God the Father gave Christ Jesus “that name that is above every name” (see 2:9), this devotion became popular because of 12th-century Cistercian monks and nuns but especially through the preaching of Saint Bernardine of Siena, a 15th-century Franciscan.Bernardine used devotion...

The head of the Vatican’s dicastery for religious life blames ‘a mafia’ for the cover-up, adding those responsible ‘were not the Church.’Cardinal João Bráz de Aviz, the prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, has disclosed that the Vatican had documents on the abusive conduct of the disgraced founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Father Marcial Maciel, from as long ago as 1943. The Brazilian cardinal said “those who covered it up were a mafia, they were not the Church,” according to the Spanish Catholic online magazine Vida Nueva. Cardinal Bráz de Aviz...

The real problem is that the crisis is deeper and its reasons can’t in any way be reduced to politics or the question of autocephaly. And the people who live in Ukraine and the Ukrainian church bear in themselves exactly the same wounds of Soviet authority that people in the modern Russian Federation bear. They are not free of Soviet times just as we are not free; they haven’t repented and haven’t been reborn either. And that rebirth cannot happen if people continue to insist that the reasons for the horror of the 20th century are external, rather than within...

The Gospel in Miniature Msgr. Charles Pope • January 2, 2019 • Most of us are familiar with this famous passage from the Gospel of John: For God so loved the world that he gave us his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him might not perish but might have everlasting life (John 3:16). For many people it serves as a kind of mini-gospel.There is something of that same quality in St. Paul’s beautiful summary of salvation and of the gospel message: For we were, by nature, children of wrath, like the others. But God, who is rich...