THE SAINTS: STORIES, IMAGES, MEDITATIONS

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TERESA BENEDETTA
00lunedì 12 febbraio 2007 22:36
SOME 'LIVES' COMMEMORATED ON FEBRUARY 12
Since there appears to be no 'major' saint for today, Feb. 12 ('major', of course, only in the sense that they are
better-known, or in most cases, universally known), I picked out trhee from some 16 individuals, pairs and groups listed
for the day for different reasons.

First, obviously, not all the saints (especially those who were canonized de facto or per ecclesiam) come well-documented.

And equally obvious, while every saint's life is worthy of praise and emulation, among those who come well-documented,
some have inherently more interesting personal stories. And lastly, probably a majority of them are 'local' saints, who do
not have a 'universal cult' but are largely venerated only in their place or region of origin.

The first one I picked is a peasant saint from France's Age of Enlightenment:


Nicholas Herman
Born in Lorraine, France, 1610; died in 1691.

Better known as Brother Lawrence, Nicholas was a contemporary of Pascal, though, unlike him, a simple and ignorant man,
reared in a peasant's cottage. He enlisted as a soldier and narrowly escaped being shot as a spy. He was wounded and
remained lame for life. He then found employment as a footman, but was so clumsy that he was always breaking things.
Later he became a lay brother in a Carmelite monastery in Paris, where he worked in the kitchen.

He had been converted at the age of 18. Like Jeremiah he had seen a tree in winter stripped bare yet with signs of
the promise of spring, and from that moment he loved and served God with a simple and unquestioning faith. His book
Practice of the Presence of God is the story of his heart, and is a lively devotional classic, in which
he sets down the intimate details of his daily drudgery and is never afraid to laugh at himself.

When sent to Burgundy to buy wine for the monastery with but little idea how to set about it, having no head
for business, and being so lame that he had to roll himself over the casks, he had no worry, he tells us,
but left himself in God's hands. It was God's business and God would see it done. And the business, he adds,
went through well.

In the kitchen also, where he was set to work, 'having accustomed himself to do everything there for the love of God
and with prayer upon all occasions for His grace to do His work well, he had found everything easy, during 15 years
he had been employed there.' The times of prayer, he declared, should be no different from other times, and he found himself
more united to God in his outward employments than when he retired to pray.

Of all the stories of the saints, few are more remarkable than that of this simple man, this big, clumsy ex-serviceman
with his lame foot and awkward movements, hobbling round the kitchen, disliking his work but full of gentleness
and good humor, laughing at mishaps, content to serve God in a humble way. And when after many years he was too old
for the kitchen, he continued, until his death at 82, to potter around and make himself useful.

"Lift up your heart to God," he said, "sometimes even at your meals, and when you are in company. . . . It is not necessary
for being with God to be always at church: we may make an oratory of our hearts
."

To a soldier on active service he wrote: "A little lifting up of the heart suffices: a little remembrance of God,
one act of inward worship, though upon a march and sword in hand, are prayers which, however short, are nevertheless
very acceptable to God."

"The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen,
while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility
as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament"
.


The second saint is unusual in that there are no dates given! But if there is an icon of her dating to the 8th-9th
century in Cyprus, then she was obviously a first-millenium saint. Her story reads like an opera plot
.

Marina, Virgin
(also known as Pelagia)

Date unknown.

Marina is said to be the daughter of Eugenius, a Bithynian who became a monk. She was brought into the monastery as a boy
by her father so that he could keep her with him. She dressed as a boy and lived the life of a monk until her father died
when she was 17. Marina was accused of impregnating the daughter of the local innkeeper but concealed her identity
and was dismissed from the monastery.

She became a beggar at the gates of the monastery and still maintained her silence about her sex when the innkeeper's
daughter made her take custody of the child. Marina was readmitted to the monastery with her 'son' five years later.
She was assigned the lowliest tasks and made to perform the most severe penances.

Her sex was finally revealed at her death, when of course all concerned in the affair were filled with remorse.
The whole story is typical of the pious fictions telling of women saints masquerading as men.

In art, Saint Marina is generally pictured with a child in a cradle by her as she kneels in prayer. Sometimes she
may be shown (1) in a monk's habit carrying the child, (2) nursing the child in a hermitage, (3) drawing a woodcart
to the monastery, or (4) kneeling by an open tomb with a dove descending.

She is venerated in Galicia, a Carpathian region thst's now psrt of thr Ukraine (chief city, Lvov).

[The biographical note says "Click here to view a 8th/9th-century icon from Cyprus" but the link does not work, unfortunately.]


Lastly, this longish entry about a saint who is supposed to be fictitious? Or is it just his storty that is fictitious? Read on:


Julian the Hospitaler
(also known as Julian the Poor Man)

Fictitious; feast day of January 29 in the Acta Sanctorum appears to be arbitrary.

Of the many churches, hospitals, and other charitable institutions in western Europe which bore or bear the name
of Saint Julian, most commemorate this hero of a romance, a pious fiction that was very popular in the Middle Ages.
There is no evidence to suggest any historicity whatsoever.

According to the James Voragine's Golden Legend, Julian the Hospitaler accidentally committed one of the worst crimes
possible: He killed his parents. This was predicted one day while the nobleman was hunting. A deer reproached Julian
for hunting him and said that in the future he would commit the crime.

Afraid of committing such a terrible crime, Julian migrated to a far land and served the king there so well that he was
knighted and given a rich widow in marriage with a castle for her dowry.

One day he returned to his castle and went to the bedroom. Unknown to him, his parents had arrived unexpectedly,
and being tired had got into Julian's own bed. Julian saw two figures there and not recognizing them under the bedclothes,
he supposed them to be intruders and impetuously stabbed them both to death.

He suspected that another man had been in bed with Julian's own wife. However, he met her as she was returning home
from church. Distraught with grief and guilt, he told her he was about to leave her, no longer fit to live with decent
people. She refused to abandon him.

Together they set out to attempt to make amends for his crime. They forsook their fine castle and journeyed first to Rome
to obtain absolution, then as far as a swiftly flowing, wide river where they built a hospital for the poor and
an inn for travellers. In addition to this work, they did penance for Julian's crime by helping travellers
across the swift river.

After many years Julian was awakened one freezing night by a voice from the other side of the river crying for help.
He got up, crossed over, and discovered a man almost frozen to death. Julian carried the man across the river and
warmed him back to life in his own bed. The poor sufferer appeared to be a leper, but this did not stop Julian.

And when the man recovered, he revealed himself to be a special messenger from God, sent to test the saint's
kindness. "Julian," the leper said, "Our Lord sends you word that He has accepted your penance"

There are many saints named Julian. Some of their stories have mixed with the tale of the Hospitaler and vice versa.
The one with which he is most confused is Julian the Martyr, whose wife was also named Basilissa.

Nevertheless, Julian the Hospitaller's story is recorded in the sermons of Antoninus of Florence, the 13th-century work
of Vincent of Beauvais, and in one of Gustave Flaubert's Trois Contes.

Saint Julian is depicted in his identifying scene: killing his parents in bed. Sometimes he is shown (1) as young,
richly dressed with a hawk on his finger (making him difficult to distinguish from Saint Bavo); (2) holding an oar;
(3) wearing a fur-lined cloak, sword, and gloves;
(4) with a stag; or (5) carrying a leper over the river to his waiting wife Saint Basilissa. Julian's legend is portrayed
in several important cycles of 13th-century stained glass at both Chartres and Rouen, as well as medieval paintings elsewhere.

He is the patron of boatmen, ferrymen, innkeepers, musicians, travellers, and wandering minstrels.

[Obviously, I wish the calendar came with pictures, as well!

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/02/2007 16.30]

TERESA BENEDETTA
00martedì 13 febbraio 2007 00:02
IS THERE AN EARLIER 'ANNUNCIATION'?

The earliest Annunciation (Western, I hasten to add, as I don't doubt there must be Orthodox and Byzantine icons earlier)
that I can trace online dates to 1291, a mosaic by the Roman artist Pietro Cavallini (1250-1330) in the apse of one of
the most accessible churches in Rome, Santa Maria in Trastevere. It is one of six mosaics he did for that Church on the life of Mary.


Pietro Cavallini, Annunciation, 1291. Mosaic, Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome.

A Roman art guide comments:
"The Virgin, seated on a throne, receives the news from the Angel. The Eternal is above. The Virgin is not working
at the loom as the apocryphal Gospels say, but she holds a prayer book, and near her, the vase of flowers (according
to St. Bernard) indicates that the Annunciation took place in spring...The center of attention in the frame is the throne
which defines the perspective of the frame. It also gives scale to both the figures and the space, creating a
verisimilitude which brings profound renewal to this religious theme."


This is a view of the apse of S. Maria.
The 'life of Mary' cycle is painted right below the row of sheep.


One online biography of the artist says:
"Although he is such an obscure figure, Cavallini occupies an important place in the history of Italian painting.
He was the first artist to make a significant break with the stylization of Byzantine art, and his majestic figures
have a real sense of weight and three-dimensionality. His work undoubtedly influenced his great contemporary
Giotto, whose Last Judgment in the Arena Chapel at Padua features Apostles enthroned exactly as in
Cavallini's fresco of the subject [found in Rome's Santa Cecilia in Trastevere]."

Vasari's Lives mentions Cavallini only as having been one of Giotto's pupils, but Cavallini actually pioneered
a style called Roman naturalism which is believed to have influenced Giotto. Vasari's account is thought to
have been pure bias in favor of the Florentine school over any other.

Tragically, a major part of Cavallini's work was lost in the fire that ruined St. Paul's outside the Walls in 1863.
Between 1277-1285, Cavallini painted two series of 22 pictures each lining both sides of the nave - one cycle
represented scenes from the Acts of the Apostles, mostly about the life of St. Paul; the other cycle was his
restoration of Old Testament scenes painted as early as the 5th century. They were ranged above the medallion
portraits of the Popes (which we are familiar with, because Benedict's portrait was added there in 2005).
Copies survive of some paintings because in 1634, a Barberini cardinal ordered the copies made. In 1315,
he returned to paint frescoes on the exterior walls. Those, too, vanished in the 1863 fire.

P.S. About this Annunciation mosaic, one of the reasons I am in awe of Byzantine mosaic art is that it takes
a special kind of genius and unbelievable patience for any artist to put together a mosaic painting, let alone
on the scale that much Byzantine work was done (to decorate huge spaces inside Churches). So I find it awesome
for Cavallini to have undertaken a 6-subject cycle of this magnitude at a time when he could simply have painted it.
Also, I find Cavallini's colors for this mosaic quite Byzantine - the green and gold remind me of the mosaics
in Ravenna's Sant'Apollinario, though his figures are decidedly not hieratic.



TERESA BENEDETTA
00mercoledì 14 febbraio 2007 05:39
A SECOND ST. CATHERINE - OF FLORENCE, NOT SIENA
Of 32 saints and blesseds listed for Feb. 13, easily the most dramatic of the documented stories is this one.
I did not realize Italy had another St. Catherine whose life and story are in many ways as remarkable as Catherine
of Siena's.


Catherine dei Ricci
Born in Florence, Italy, April 23, 1522; died in Prato (near Florence), February 2, 1590; beatified by Clement XII in 1732;
canonized in 1747 by Benedict XIV; feast day formerly February 2.




Pierre Subleyras, The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine dei Ricci, 1740.

Alexandrina dei Ricci was born of a patrician family, but Catharine Bonza died leaving her motherless in her infancy.
She was trained in virtue by a very pious godmother. The little girl took Our Lady as her mother and had for her
a tender devotion. The child held familiar conversations with her guardian angel, who taught her a special manner
of saying the rosary and assisted her in the practice of virtue.

As soon as Alexandrina was old enough to go away from home (age 6 or 7), she was sent to the convent school of
Monticelli, where her aunt, Louisa dei Ricci, was the abbess. Besides learning her lessons for which she was sent,
the little girl developed a great devotion to the Passion. She prayed often before a certain picture of Our Lord,
and at the foot of a crucifix, which is still treasured as "Alexandrina's crucifix." Returning from the monastery
when her education was completed according to the norm for girls, she turned her attention to her vocation.

In her plans to enter a monastery of strict observance, she met with great opposition from her father Peter.
She loved the community life that had allowed her to serve God without impediment or distraction. She continued
her usual exercises at home as much as she was able, but the interruptions and dissipations that were inseparable
from her station, made her uneasy.

Finally, Peter allowed her to visit St. Vincent's convent in Prato, Tuscany, which had been founded by nine
Third Order Dominicans who were great admirers of Savonarola. Alexandrina begged to remain with them; however,
her father took her away, promising to let her return. He did not keep his promise, and the girl fell so ill
that everyone despaired of her life. Frightened into agreement, her father gave his consent; Alexandrina, soon
recovering, entered the convent of Saint Vincent.

In May 1535, Alexandrina received the habit from her uncle, Fr. Timothy dei Ricci, who was confessor to the convent.
She was given the name Catherine in religion, and she very happily set about imitating her beloved patron.
Lost in celestial visions, she was quite unaware that the sisters had begun to wonder about her qualifications
for the religious life: for in her ecstasies she seemed merely sleepy, and at times extremely stupid. Some thought
her insane. Her companions did not suspect her of ecstasy when she dozed at community exercises, spilled food,
or broke dishes.

Neither did it occur to Sister Catherine that other people were not, like herself, rapt in ecstasy. She was about
to be dismissed from the community when she became aware of the heavenly favors she had received. From then on
there was no question of dismissing the young novice, but fresh trials moved in upon her in the form of agonizing pain
from a complication of diseases that remedies seemed only to aggravate. She endured her sufferings patiently by
constantly meditating on the passion of Christ, until she was suddenly healed. After her recovery, she was left
in frail health.

Like Saint John of Egypt and Saint Antony, Catherine met Philip Neri in a vision while he was still alive and in Rome.
They had corresponded for a long time and wanted to meet each other but were unable to arrange it. Catherine
appeared to Philip in a vision and they conversed for a long time. Saint Philip, who was also cautious in giving
credence to or publishing visions, confirmed this. This blessed ability to bilocate, like Padre Pio, was confirmed by
the oaths of five witnesses. Also like those desert fathers, Antony and John, she fasted two or three times weekly
on only bread and water, and sometimes passed an entire day without taking any nourishment.

Like Saint Catherine of Siena, she is said to have received a ring from the Lord as a sign of her espousal to him -
a mysterious ring made of gold set with a diamond, invisible to all except the mystic. Others saw only a red lozenge a
nd a circlet around her finder.

Sister Catherine was 20 when she began a 12-year cycle of weekly ecstasies of the Passion from noon each
Thursday until 4:00 p.m. each Friday.
The first time, during Lent 1542, she meditated so heart-rendingly
on the crucifixion of Jesus that she became seriously ill, until a vision of the Risen Lord talking with Mary Magdalene
restored her to health on Holy Saturday.

She received the sacred stigmata, which remained with her always. In addition to the five wounds, she received,
in the course of her Thursday-Friday ecstasies, many of the other wounds which our Lord suffered. Watching
her face and body, the sisters could follow the course of the Passion, as she was mystically scourged and crowned
with thorns. When the ecstasy was finished, she would be covered with wounds and her shoulder remained deeply
indented where the Cross had been laid.


Soon all Italy was attentive and crowds came to see her. Skeptics and the indifferent, sinners and unbelievers,
were transformed at the sight of her. Soon there was no day nor hour at which people did not come, people in need and
in sin, people full of doubt and tribulation, who sought her help, and, of course, the merely curious. Because of
the publicity that these favors attracted, she and her entire community asked our Lord to make the wounds less visible,
and He did in 1554.

Her patience and healing impressed her sisters. While still very young, Catherine was chosen to serve the community
as novice- mistress, then sub-prioress, and, at age 30, she was appointed prioress in perpetuity, despite her intense
mystical life of prayer and penance. She managed the material details of running a large household were well, and
became known as a kind and considerate superior. Catherine was particularly gentle with the sick.

Troubled people, both within the convent and in the town, came to her for advice and prayer, and her participation
in the Passion exerted a great influence for good among all who saw it. Three future popes (Cardinals Cervini
later known as Pope Marcellus II, Alexander de Medici (Pope Leo XI), and Aldobrandini (Pope Clement VIII)
were among the thousands who flocked to the convent to beseech her intercession
.

Of the cloister that Catherine directed, a widow who had entered it observed: "If the world only knew how blessed
is life in this cloister, the doors would not suffice and the thronging people would clamber in over all the walls."

A contemporary painting of Catherine attributed to Nardini (at the Pinacoteca of Montepulciano) shows a not unattractive,
though relatively plain woman. Her eyes protrude a bit too much and her nose is too flared to account her
a classic beauty, but she possessed high cheekbones, dark hair, widely spaced eyes, and full lips. Her mein is that
of a sensitive woman who has experience pain and now has compassion.

Catherine's influence was not confined within the walls of her convent. She was greatly preoccupied by the need for
reform in the Church, as is apparent from her letters, many of them addressed to highly-placed persons. This accounts,
too, for her reverence for the memory of Savonarola, who had defied the evil-living Pope Alexander VI and been
hanged in Florence in 1498. Saint Catherine was in touch with such contemporary, highly-orthodox reformers
as Saint Charles Borromeo and Saint Pius V.


After Catherine's long and painful death in 1589, many miracles were performed at her tomb. Her cultus soon spread
from Prato throughout the whole of Italy and thence to the whole world. The future Pope Benedict XIV,
the "devil's advocate" in Catherine's cause for canonization
, critically examined all relevant claims.
As in the case of her younger contemporary, Saint Mary Magdalene de'Pazzi, canonization was not granted because
of the extraordinary phenomenon surrounding her life, but for heroic virtue and complete union with Christ.

================================================================

The stigmata of Christ and the marks of the Passion! That's another phenomenon I have long wanted to read about.
And now, here's bilocation. And incorrupt bodies. And all sorts of suspension of natural laws - i.e. miracles -
that God decides to show us when He sees fit! Obviously, they are not necesary for the faith, but that they happen
can only strengthen the faith...

P.S. Let me correct a big oversight when I failed to post the two major saints commemorated by the Universal Church
on Feb. 14



Cyril, Monk, and Methodius, Bishop
Born in Thessalonika, Greece; Cyril in 827, Methodius in 815 (some say 826);
died respectively in Rome on February 14, 869, and probably
at Stare Mesto (Velehrad, Czechoslovakia) on April 6, 884; feast day formerly on July 7 (or March 9);
Pope John Paul II in 1981 declared them joint patrons of Europe with Saint Benedict.


". . . We pray Thee, Lord, give to us, Thy servants, in all time of our life on earth, a mind forgetful of past
ill-will, a pure conscience and sincere thoughts, and a heart to love our brethren; for the sake of Jesus Christ,
Thy Son, our Lord and only Savior."- From the Coptic Liturgy of Saint Cyril.



Cyril and Methodius were brothers, born into a senatorial family, who both rose to high positions in the world -
Methodius became governor of a colony in the Slav province of Opsikion; Cyril, a leading philosopher at the
University of Constantinople.

Cyril, the younger of the two, was baptized Constantine and sent at an early age to study at the imperial
university at Constantinople under Leo the Grammarian and Photius, was ordained deacon, and in time took
over Photius's position at the university. Cyril also served as librarian at the church of Santa Sophia, where
he earned the reputation and surname 'the Philosopher.' Methodius was also ordained. Both renounced
the life of this world and went to live in a monastery on the
Bosphorus.

In 861, Emperor Michael III sent Cyril deep into the Dnieper-Volga regions of Russia to convert the Khazars,
who were Jews. His brother accompanied him. Both brothers were brilliant linguists and soon familiarized
themselves with the Khazar language. They came back to their monastery after a successful mission, and
Methodius became abbot of an important monastery in Greece.

Almost immediately (863) they were sent by the then Patriarch Photius of Constantinople to convert
the Moravians at the request of Prince Rostislav. German missionaries had been unsuccessful in their
attempts to convert the Moravians; Cyril and Methodius met with success because of their knowledge of the
Slavonic tongue.

They invented an alphabet called glagolitic, which marked the beginning of Slavonic literature (the Cyrillic
alphabet traditionally ascribed to Cyril was probably the work of his followers in Bulgaria, although both
could have been inventions of Saint Cyril). Cyril, with the help of his brother, translated the liturgical
books into Slavonic.

Meanwhile, they incurred the enmity of the German clergy because of their free use of Slavonic in Church
services and because they were from Constantinople, which was suspect to many in the West because of
the heresy rife in the East. Further, their missionary efforts were hampered by the refusal of the German bishop
of Passau to ordain their candidates for the priesthood.

In Rome the pope had heard of their good work. Pope Nicholas I summoned them to meet him, but when they
reached Rome he had died. They travelled at an unfortunate time; Photius had incurred excommunication
(because he had been illegally appointed) and their liturgical use of Slavonic was strongly criticized.

Nicholas's successor, Adrian II, received them warmly. They presented him with the alleged relics of
Pope Saint Clement, which Cyril was said to have miraculously recovered from the sea in Crimea on his way back
from the Khazars.

Adrian was convinced of their orthodoxy, approved their use of Slavonic in the liturgy, and was so delighted
and impressed by Cyril and Methodius that he determined that they should be consecrated bishops. It is
believed that before this could happen, Constantine became a monk at SS. Boniface and Alexus in Rome and
took the name Cyril, but probably died before his consecration as bishop.

He was buried in the beautiful church of San Clemente on the Coelian in Rome, where there is an ancient
fresco depicting Cyril's funeral. (His earthly remains were discovered in the lower part of the church
in 1880 and now lie in a chapel dedicated to him and his brother, set off the right aisle of this church.)

Methodius was consecrated bishop and struggled on alone, often in dangerously hostile lands. He bore a letter
from the Holy See commending him as a man of "exact understanding and orthodoxy."

At the request of Prince Kosel of Moravia and Pannonia, Pope Adrian revived the ancient archdiocese of
Sirmium (now Mitrovitsa), consisting of Moravia and Pannonia, independent of the German hierarchy, and made
Methodius archbishop at Velehrad, Czechoslovakia.

Although he was supported by the pope, many German bishops resented his work among the Moravians (and
probably the loss of territory). King Ludwig (Louis the German), urged on by the bishops, deposed Methodius
at a synod at Ratisbon (Regensburg) and actually imprisoned him for two years in 870.

Pope John VIII secured his release and returned him to his see, but thought it politic to forbid his use of
Slavonic in the liturgy, although Methodius was authorized to use it in preaching. At the same time John
reminded the German bishops that Pannonia and the disposition of sees throughout Illyricum belonged to
the Holy See.

During the following years, Methodius continued his work of evangelization in Moravia, but he made an enemy
of Rostislav's nephew, Svatopluk, who had driven his uncle out. Methodius rebuked Svatopluk for his wicked ways.

Accordingly, in 878, the archbishop was reported to the Holy See for continuing to hold Mass in Slavonic and
for heresy, in that he omitted the words "and the Son (filioque)" from the creed, which at that time had
not been introduced everywhere in the West, not even in Rome.

Methodius was summoned again to Rome in 879. John was convinced that he was not heterodox, and impressed
by Methodius's arguments, again permitted the use of Slavonic in the Mass and public prayers.

Finally, Methodius returned to Constantinople to complete a translation of the Bible that he and Cyril had
begun together. Methodius's struggle with the Germans continued throughout the balance of his life.

Methodius was subjected to serious vexations, especially from his suffragan Bishop Wiching of Nitra, who was
so unscrupulous as to forge a papal letter in his own favor. After Methodius's death, Wiching drove out his
principal followers, including Saint Clement Slovensky, who took refuge in Bulgaria.

These two heroes of the faith are considered the "Apostles of the Slavs" or "of the Southern Slavs."
Even today the liturgical language of the Russians, Serbians, Ukranians, and Bulgars is that designed by the
two brothers. Their feast was extended to the universal Church by Pope Leo XIII in 1880.

Methodius is regarded as a pioneer in the use of the vernacular in the liturgy and as a patron of ecumenism.

In art, the two can be identified as an Oriental bishop and monk holding up a church between them. Sometimes
Bulgarian converts surround them; at other times Methodius holds up a picture of the Last Judgement.
Cyril is sometimes portrayed in a long philosopher's coat. They are especially venerated by the Bulgarians.
Their patronage includes Europe and the former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/02/2007 3.17]

Wulfrune
00mercoledì 14 febbraio 2007 11:53
Here is an eastern Annunciation, but not particularly early



Istanbul, Turkey: Chora Church (Kariye Museum): mosaic of the Annunciation (c 1315)
Wulfrune
00mercoledì 14 febbraio 2007 12:02
How can this be?
The Biblical Archaeology Society has a wonderful article on the Annunciation in art

HERE

and if this doesn't work, it's at 18:06 Dec 2002

How Can This Be? - Picturing the Word Made Flesh, by David Cartlidge.

I recommend this very readable article as it has some fascinating things about the prior influences on artists; the fables, the traditions, the theology and also some stunning artwork - I was about to lift some but realised that the piece in its entirety is worth a look.
TERESA BENEDETTA
00mercoledì 14 febbraio 2007 14:05
That was a great article, Wulfrune, thanks for finding it!... And the Byzantine Annunciation from Turkey is an appropriate
companion piece to the Cavallini mosaic since they both date to the same period (1291 and 1315, respectively). Later,
I will come to two other Annunciations of that time - by two Italian masters, Giotto and Duccio, no less - to sort of
bring us up to date chronologically, up to a certain point, with the surviving Annunciations before the spate that followed.

A further note on the Chora Annunciation from Turkey, which I came across when researching early Annunciation icons
(but without seeing an illustration): "The tendency toward emotionalism in icons continued in the Paleologan period,
which began in 1261. Paleologan art reached its pinnacle in mosaics such as those of the Kariye Camii (the former
Chora Monastery)."

It struck me because before Regensburg, I had never even heard the word Paleologus, which as we now know, was the
last imperial line of Byzantium before its fall.

Meanwhile, to go back to the very beginning- this is considered the oldest Annunciation that survives to our day.
It's from the Catacombs of St. Priscilla (a name with new resonance for us, too, thanks again to the Holy Father and
his catechesis last week - in fact he referred to this particular Catacomb).


Early Christian artist, The Annunciation, 2nd century, fresco.
Catacombs of St. Priscilla, Rome.


A small commentary in the source says: "Christ's human life began with
the promise of the Angel Gabriel that Mary would conceive without knowing man.
Christ's entry into the world meant the possibility of salvation for fallen
man and eternal life when this one ends."

Companion piece to that is this one, which is the oldest known surviving
representation of the Madonna, but much of it was already damaged at
the time it came to light.



A commentary says: The figure to Mary's right is probably the prophet Balaam,
who foresaw that "a star would come forth out of Jacob," understood as
a reference to Christ. I think it is remarkable how closeely this image resembles,
from a distance of centuries, those that would come to be recognized
as 'traditional' images of the Madonna.


We then flash-forward almost nine centuries (the lapse is partly explained in the brief
history of religious imagery that I cite further down) to the earliest Annunciation that
I could find online after the Catacomb fresco - a Russian one, although the commentary in
the article said: "The Annunciation theme had been well established in icon painting
and could be traced, like many other themes, to the traditional Byzantine prototypes."
I have not had luck trying to find these prototypes online. [Oh yes, one still needs
to go to a library even these days - I just have not had the time].


Annunciation from Ustyug, Novgorod School, c. 1110-1130.

The accompanying commentary: "One of the most admired icons of this type,
The Annunciation of Ustyug, demonstrates how closely the early Russian icons preserved
the Byzantine heritage, while infusing it with a new Russian style."

Just for curiosity value, I am posting this smaller representation of the Ustyug Annunciation,
in which the color scheme is decidedly different, and I don't know that photography alone
could account for the difference.



As the reproductions posted here did not come from catalogs but from general articles, I regret they do not come
with dimensions.

I know we have been working backwards, but here is a brief backgrounder on Christian religious imagery from Wikipedia
:

============================================================

The earliest written records of Christian images treated like icons in a pagan or Gnostic context are offered by the
fourth-century Christian Aelius Lampridius in the
Life of Alexander Severus (xxix) that was part of Augustan History.

According to Lampridius, Alexander Severus (222–235) had kept a domestic chapel for the veneration of images of
deified emperors, of portraits of his ancestors, and of Christ, Apollonius, Orpheus and Abraham.

Irenaeus, in his Against Heresies (1:25;6) says scornfully of the Gnostic Carpocratians, “They also possess
images, some of them painted, and others formed from different kinds of material; while they maintain that a likeness
of Christ was made by Pilate at that time when Jesus lived among them. They crown these images, and set them up
along with the images of the philosophers of the world that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato, and
Aristotle, and the rest. They have also other modes of honouring these images, after the same manner of the
Gentiles [pagans].”

After Christianity was legalized by the emperor Constantine within the Roman Empire in 313, huge numbers of pagans
became converts. This created the necessity for the transfer of allegiance and practice from the old gods and heroes
to the new religion, and for the gradual adaptation of the old system of image making and veneration to a Christian
context, in the process of Christianization.

Robin Lane Fox states: "By the early fifth century, we know of the ownership of private icons of saints; by c. 480-500,
we can be sure that the inside of a saint's shrine would be adorned with images and votive portraits, a practice
which had probably begun earlier".

It is in a context attributed to the fifth century that the first mention of an image of Mary painted from life appears,
though earlier paintings on cave walls bear resemblance to modern icons of Mary. [Probably refers to the catacomb
frescoes
].

Theodorus Lector, in his sixth-century History of the Church stated that Eudokia (wife of Theodosius II, died 460)
sent an image of “the Mother of God” from Jerusalem to Pulcheria, daughter of the Emperor Arcadius: the image
was specified to have been “painted by the Apostle Luke.” In later tradition the number of icons of Mary attributed
to Luke would greatly multiply. [Has someone seen any representation of this?]

Augustine of Hippo (354-430)said that no one knew the appearance of Jesus or that of Mary, though it should be
noted that Augustine wasn't a resident of the Holy Land and therefore wasn't familiar with the local populations
and their oral traditions.

...We can date the full-blown appearance and general ecclesiastical (as opposed to simply popular or local)
acceptance of Christian images as venerated and miracle-working objects to the sixth century, when, as Hans Belting
writes, "we first hear of the church's use of religious images...As we reach the second half of the sixth century,
we find that images are attracting direct veneration and some of them are credited with the performance of miracles."

Cyril Mango writes, "In the post-Justinianic period the icon assumes an ever increasing role in popular devotion,
and there is a proliferation of miracle stories connected with icons, some of them rather shocking to our eyes."

The Iconoclastic Period began when images were banned by Emperor Leo III the Isaurian sometime between
726 and 730
. Under his son Constantine V, a council forbidding image veneration was held at Hieria near
Constantinople in 754.

Image veneration was later reinstated by the Empress Regent Irene, under whom another council was held reversing
the decisions of the previous iconoclast council and taking its title as Seventh Ecumenical Council. The council
anathemized all who hold to iconoclasm, i.e. those who held that veneration of images constitutes idolatry.

Then the ban was enforced again by Leo V in 815. And finally icon veneration was decisively restored by Empress
Regent Theodora (ca 855).


Of the icon painting tradition that developed in Byzantium, with Constantinople as the chief city, we have only
a few icons from the eleventh century and none preceding them
, in part because of the Iconoclastic reforms during
which many were destroyed, and also because of plundering by Venetians in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and
finally the taking of the city by the Islamic Turks in 1453.

It was only in the Comnenian period (1081-1185) that the cult of the icon became widespread in the Byzantine
world, partly on account of the dearth of richer materials (such as mosaics, ivory, and enamels), but also because
an iconostasis - a special screen for icons - was introduced then in ecclesiastical practice. The style of the time was
severe, hieratic and distant.

In the late Comnenian period this severity softened, and emotion, formerly avoided, entered icon painting.
Major monuments for this change include the murals at Daphni (ca. 1100) and Nerezi near Skopje (1164).
The Theotokos of Vladimir (ca. 1115) is probably the most representative example of the new trend towards
spirituality and emotion.


Theotokos of Vladimir (12th century), the holy protectress of Russia,
now in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/02/2007 19.37]

|lily|
00mercoledì 14 febbraio 2007 21:09
Early portrayals of the Annunciation
In response to your question, Teresa, "Is there an earlier Annunciation?" I am posting a couple that pre-date
the Cavallini mosaics in Santa Maria in Trastevere. (I'm glad you pointed that church out because it really is worth
examining.)

The first was mentioned in the article that Wulfrune bought to our attention. (Thanks very much Wulfrune! I've bookmarked
that site for future reference.) It is the depiction of the Annunciation on the triumphal arch of Santa Maria Maggiore
in Rome. It is part of a large decorative cycle, with the mosaics in the nave depicting scenes from the Old Testament
and the arch scenes from the New.


This is a highly unusual portrayal and has been the subject of much scholarly speculation. The reason for this is
that the Virgin at the time the mosaic was made (432) was not normally shown in royal attire but modestly dressed.
Some art historians question whether it is Mary who is portrayed. She really looks like an empress with her gold
robe and retinue of angels! But one also sees the dove of the Holy Spirit with a flying Gabriel pointing him out.
In addition, Joseph appears at the right and an angel is announcing Christ's birth to him also.

Another version of the Annunciation, this time from the 6th century, is found in the Eufrasian Basilica in Porec,
Croatia. This is another example of an Early Christian church and it contains some lovely mosaics, including
a portrayal of the Annunciation.



This version is much closer to what becomes the norm in later centuries: the Virgin, alone, confronted by Gabriel.
My guidebook to the church describes this scene as follows:
"The Archangel Gabriel, with his clothes fluttering, steps from transcendence into human reality, coming to the Virgin,
who sits in front of a stylized house of Nazareth, which resembles the Basilica.

"The Archangel's coming is convincingly portrayed, as well as Mary's innocent perplexity (due to which she drops her
knitting)and her clothes which we can see through a transparent purple silk veil....In the back of the mosaic we can
sense the atmosphere of a sunset, represented by the shades of blue, white and red. It is the tranquility of Angelus
over the recognizable landscape of the west coast of Istria." Istria is the peninsula, east of Italy, that juts out
into the Adriatic Sea.


Dear Lily - I hope you don't mind. I went in to adjust the line lengths to make the text more convenient
to read. One of the larger reproductions is causing the skew (I think my post of the Leonardo panel. Sorry...
Teresa

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/02/2007 23.25]

TERESA BENEDETTA
00giovedì 15 febbraio 2007 01:56
What a great thing to have that mosaic from Santa Maria Maggiore. Frankly, it had completely escaped my mind to think
about the 5th-century mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore when I posted the Cavallini! And the 6th century mosaic from
Croatia is a real find.

Both pieces fill up my current image void between the 4th century when Christian imagery became common (probably
also because it was only then that they started to build Christian churches, as once again, a very recent
Benedict(XVI)ine catechesis informed us) and the early 8th century when the brief (and literal) iconoclastic period
occurred.

As the guidebooks say, the triumphal arch bearing the Annunciation mosaic in Santa Maria Maggiore marks the entrance
to the apse - rather stunning, as seen here:



The arch features New Testament stories focusing on the Incarnation of Christ (compared to the mosaics
below the clerestory windows which feature scenes from the Old Testament, starting with the story of Abraham).

Here are two more illustrations of the Annunciation mosaic - the first one showing where it is located in the arch,
as well as the panel that is right below it, while the second one is a 'brighter' reproduction.





One commentary notes:

The dominant figure in the scenes on the arch is the Virgin Mary. In the top-left corner, she sits enthroned for the Annunciation,
bejewelled and in a golden robe. Her pride of place and her regal appearance reflect the fact that the church is dedicated to her.
But this is also a political gesture by the pope (Pope Sixtus III, 432-440, who had the Church restored, or more likely rebuilt,
to commemorate the declaration of St Mary's Divine Motherhood by the Council of Ephesus.)

The most controversial issue in church politics of this period was the nature of the Virgin Mary. Is she theotokos (the 'bearer of God')?
Nestorius, who denies that she is, hac been condemned as a heretic only a few years previously by the council of Ephesus.

In commissioning Santa Maria Maggiore and its mosaics the pope makes plain where he stands. A regal Mary in the first scene,
surrounded by angels, receives the news that she will give birth to Christ; and the following scenes concentrate on her son's childhood.

Another commentary addresses the iconographic choices made:

Now we see what the artists (and, more importantly, their commissioners) had in mind when they envisioned the Virgin Mary.
Look at her regal dress (remarkably similar to that of Pharaoh’s daughter), her jeweled decorations, and her enthronement.
It seems as though the entire picture is focused on her, as if she almost expected angels to seek her out and announce her
appointment as the Mother of God.

The panel below shows an unusual Adoration of the Magi. Note that Jesus as well is on a throne (almost like a bed, actually -
it reminds me of the 'thrones' used by the Dalai Lama and other venerated 'incarnations' in Tibet
), and that his complexion is somewhat dark.
Both he and Mary are very Eastern looking in this depiction, particularly Mary, who is dressed as a Byzantine empress. [Frankly,
I cannot distinguish that they look any darker than the others in this reproduction
.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/02/2007 2.05]

Wulfrune
00giovedì 15 febbraio 2007 16:20
Such wonderful images!! I've been spending hours contemplating all these riches....

Here's a wonderful illustration by the Flemish artist, Simon Bening. It's from a book of hours,
so was painted to be seen at close hand.


Flemish, Bruges, about 1525 - 1530; 6 5/8 x 4 1/2 in.
Tempera colors, gold paint, gold leaf, and ink on parchment.
Getty Museum, California [currently not on display]

Mary has not yet seen the angel; she's reading her own book of hours - he is floating between heaven and earth,
with a little group of angels watching... For once he seems to be hovering to one side, slightly behind her.
Despite the rich architectural detail there is a workbag at her feet and a basket (mending?) a little further away.
The domestic details are simple and humble. Considering the size of the original, Bening must have worked with
a brush with very few hairs (perhaps just one for facial features etc) - and probably under a magnifying glass
but even so... his eyesight!! The blue of the mantle is very likely crushed lapis lazuli - the book would have been
expensive to produce and he was no doubt expected to do his finest work.

note: The Mysteries Of Christ: A Scriptural Rosary, with meditations by John Paul II and illustrations by Simon Bening
(20 mysteries, each with own text and illustration) is currently available and I note that Amazon have some at excellent prices
in their Marketplace section - sorry about the Mammon interlude....

[Modificato da Wulfrune 15/02/2007 16.33]



Clare, I simply adjusted the line lengths. Sorry for the continuing inconvenience caused by that large repro I posted.
The information about the JP-II Rosary book is certainly very pertinent and welcome! Thanks a lot.

TERESA

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/02/2007 2.50]



Clare
No worries!! Good idea to do this!!

[Modificato da Wulfrune 16/02/2007 12.46]

TERESA BENEDETTA
00venerdì 16 febbraio 2007 04:21
WHAT WOULD 'DEUS CARITAS EST' SUGGEST TO YOU IN ART?
Time out! Last year, when Deus caritas est first came out, ZENIT published an interview with an art crtic who was asked to suggest
what paintings might illustrate DCE. Her answers were surprising - for one, all the paintings she suggested are very 'busy' paintings
on a large scale, but then again, the message of DCE is cosmic as well as very human. Let's use this thread to illustate her answers.

Art critic Sister Maria Gloria Riva, a contemplative religious of the Perpetual Adorers of the Most Blessed Sacrament, at the time had just
published a book entitled "Nell'arte lo stupore di una Presenza" (The Wonder of a Presence in Art). She was asked:
What does the encyclical letter "Deus Caritas Est" suggest?


Sister Riva: That light and love are one thing. In his first encyclical the Pope traces, from Aristotle to Dante, the itinerary of love,
from "eros" to that divine "caritas" that Christ revealed in full, an attractive subject which has always conquered man, including our time
which, though it has abused it, as the Pope observes, feels the fascination of love and needs to rediscover this primordial sentiment in its entirety;
it needs to purify it.

Among the innumerable artistic representations of love, which one would you choose to explain this encyclical?
In art, the mystery of the "love that moves the sun" and of the eternal light that finds its perfect manifestation in the human face of Christ,
has been masterfully represented by Blessed Angelico, who, precisely following Dante's lesson, painted the blessed in "The Last Judgment"
as elegant and dancing figures …

[Click on thumbnail to get larger picture]

Fra Angelico, Last Judgement, 1432-35.
Tempera on wood, 105 x 210 cm, Museo di San Marco, Florence



Fra Angelico, The Last Judgment. Detail.


An artist who has tried to paint man's confusion in face of "eros" and love is Flemish Hieronymus Bosch.

[Click on thumbnail to get larger picture]

Hieronymus Bosch, Triptych of Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1500
Oil on panel, central panel: 220 x 195 cm; wings: 220 x 97 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid



Sister Riva: I recall Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights," which so scandalized the men of the 17th century. At the center of the triptych
is man who abandons himself without discernment to his pleasure.

The source of adultery governs over the chaos of the couples that avidly swallow fruits like strawberries and blackberries -symbol of sexual union.



Flemish Bosch painted in the 16th century, but his manner of narrating is more contemporary than ever.

This unbridled enjoyment has no exit, it drags man to the kingdom without color or light of the loss of himself, of the loss of meaning,
described by the artist in the triptych's last panel.

Thus the "eros," unless it becomes "agape" - notes the Holy Father - comes to an end and makes man unhappy. Christ is not against "eros,"
but in "agape" he leads it to fullness.

Bosch expresses it well in the triptych's first panel, in which he represents the original couple exactly as they issued from the mind of the Creator.
Following a frequent iconography in miniatures, Bosch painted Adam seated and awake while he waits for Eve as gift. God the Father, whose face is
that of Christ, leads her to him, complaisant. God has sanctified the love of man and woman, making of it the root of creation's perpetuity.



There is peace here, there is unity of the two: unique not because they are alone but because they are unrepeatable.
Love makes the many unique and unrepeatable.

Michelangelo also thought this when he planned the enormous fresco of the Sistine Chapel.

Michelangelo, Last Judgment, 1537-41.
Fresco, 1370 x 1220 cm, Cappella Sistina, Vatican


The beauty of bodies, the harmony of forms, the history of the luminous "caritas" over the shadows of "eros,"
is described as the epic of a people that, finding their root in the Creator, attains its full realization
in Christ.



Christ reveals to man his ultimate end: that of Love, a "love that has impelled God to assume a human face,
more than that, to assume flesh and blood, the whole human being."

This people live today in the Church and precisely there, in the Sistine Chapel, celebrate its renewal and
its miraculous "being" in history as a permanent reflection of the beauty of God.

==============================================================

I just posed the question to myself of what DCE might suggest to me in the visual arts. I need time to think
because my immediate association is what the Pope said about Dante when he announced its release date, and so I have
Dali's (not at all surrrealistic!) watercolor series of the Divina Commedia in mind, but I need to check out the images if
I can find an online catalog
!

|lily|
00venerdì 16 febbraio 2007 20:33
Lovely illustration Wulfrune. It is amazing how those manuscript artists are able to get such a great number of very fine details into such a small space. And so beautifully done too!
I just wanted to introduce one more Annunciation portrayal that is quite different from what we have seen. It is a sculptural group from the Cathedral of St. Remi (begun1211) in Rheims, France. The artist, breaking from sculptural tradition, gives his angel an radiantly joyful expression. He has, after all, come to announce a message of tremendous import that will mean the salvation of all mankind.

Mary, also, smiles serenely while seeming to contemplate this message.



These works must have surely surprised the faithful of the 13th century who were the first to see them on the cathedral's west portal, as they portray, not so much the momentous solemnity of the occasion, but its profound joyfulness.
Btw, you pose a very interesting question Teresa regarding illustrating Deus caritas est. I shall certainly have to don my thinking cap....
benefan
00sabato 17 febbraio 2007 05:35


The Annunciation
Sandro Botticelli
Mclellan Gallery, Glasgow


The Annunciation
c.1500
49.5 x 61.9 cm
Tempera on wood panel

The archangel Gabriel holds a lily in his hand as he tells Mary that she will give birth to Jesus the Son of God. The golden rays that shoot across the picture towards Mary represent God's grace penetrating the Virgin.

The architecture in the background would have been recognised by contemporaries of Botticelli. The series of rooms and loggias (open sided galleries) were very fashionable in Botticelli's city of Florence and also enabled the artist to show off his skill with perspective.

The golden rays disappear behind the central pillar and then reappear again to give a greater illusion of depth.

[Modificato da benefan 17/02/2007 5.39]

TERESA BENEDETTA
00sabato 17 febbraio 2007 12:43
I never imagined our excursion into religious art would turn out to be so 'interactive'! Lily has introduced
the Annunciation in sculpture with that lovely 13th century detail from a cathedral facade in Rheims (which
struck me that both the angel and Mary look 'Chinese'!) - and Lord knows the wealth of catechetical artistic
subjects there are in church facades, sculptural deocrations and doors (usually reliefs).

And now Benefan gives us this totally unexpected Botticelli from his late works. I went back online to check
what I could and find, to my amazement, he had three Annunciations. Most interesting to compare how he
portrays the angel and Mary in each of them!

His earliest was quite similar in treatment to the one above, although the setting is more like the one in
the so-called Cestello Annunciation, but with the central pillars he uses in the Glasgow painting.
[Click on image to get larger size]


Sandro Botticelli, The Annunciation, c. 1485
Tempera and gold on wood, 19.1 x 31.4 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

It's a small picture as you can see from the dimensions - roughly 7-1/2" by 12", and the online repro is
almost as big as the original, hence the thumbnail presentation.

It is the intermediate one below, posted earlier by Wulfrune, and pictured here in its frame, that is the most familiar,
of course - it is huge (roughly 5 ft x 5 ft) compared to the other two.


Botticelli, Cestello Annunciation (in frame), 1489-90
Tempera on panel, 150 x 156 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/02/2007 16.43]

benefan
00domenica 18 febbraio 2007 03:26

THE ANNUNCIATION
by Salvador Dali
1947, Private collection

[I need this one explained to me.]


TERESA BENEDETTA
00domenica 18 febbraio 2007 14:19
It's a lovely Dali watercolor, and one I have not seen before (but then his output is literally in the thousands).
Obviously, it's not one of his surrealist visions. Whatever else one may think of his paintings (in which he is
so protean and can sometimes be banal), he really is a master craftsman. I like the way he shapes mass and form
here, and the way he suggests the light that bathes the scene.

However, I could not find any other information about it online except that it measures 36.5 x 42 cm! Maybe
someone else has more information about it who has access to an art encyclopedia or library - see, libraries
are still necessary!

Dali has obviously not included Mary in this painting, although he has two angels in it, and the way the painting
is composed, they are really looking at someone outside the frame. I don't know why he decided to do it this way,
but it is an original idea. Anyone looking at it could not mistake the scene. And except for the absence of Mary
in the frame, it is clearly in the spirit of traditional Annunciation art.

Even with a magnifying glass, I can't make out the faint figures in pale sepia to the right of the feet of
the angel in blue. Can you?


It reminded me of some of his watercolors to illustrate the Divine Comedy,
where in fact, he has an image called 'Our Lady of the Annunciation'
to illustrate Canto 10 of Purgatorio, but as we see below, there was nothing
'Annunciation' about it, and in fact, gives a 'cubist' effect (all because of
a slight distortion of the eyes and nose).





Dali was commissioned by the Italian government in the early 1950s
to illustrate the DIVINA COMMEDIA for the 700th anniversary of Dante's
birth in 1965. He drew 100 watercolors to illustrate the cantos
in all his styles from the realistic to the surreal but seemed to reserve
'traditional' treatment for illustrating Dante, Beatrice and sacred images
as the following sampling shows.
.


The images above show Dante (Paradiso Canto 1), Dante and Beatrice
(Purgatorio 29 and Paradiso 18), and Dante before St. Peter (Paradiso 28).



Above, Dante and Virgil (Pur 12, in which they have 'ecstatic visions' of what awaits them - the Christlike figure on the right
is actually 2 faces, where the mouth of the top figure are the eyes of the second); the Angel Gabriel (Par 32), and
St. Bernard's prayer to the Virgin (Par 33).

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 18/02/2007 19.51]

TERESA BENEDETTA
00lunedì 19 febbraio 2007 02:36
I've not checked the Saints of the Day since Feb. 14, but my pick for today (Feb. 18) was easy, because the story
resonates with the catecheses that the Holy Father has been giving us about the Apostles and early Christian saints.



Simeon of Jerusalem, Bishop and Martyr
(also known as Simon of Jerusalem)

Died c. 107.


Both illustrations I could find, strangely enough, come from churches in the USA -
the one on the left, from St. Joseph's Church in Macon, Georgia; and on the right, from the
Immaculate Conception Church in Earlington, Kentucky
.




Not all of Jesus's relatives understood His teaching or recognized His divinity. One who did was Simeon,
his first cousin. Tradition says that Simeon was the son of Cleophas (Alpheus, brother to Saint Joseph) and
Mary (sister-in-law of the Blessed Virgin).

Some think that Simeon was the bridegroom for which Jesus changed the water into wine at Cana.

Some Christians believe that this Simeon was the same person as Jesus's disciple who was nicknamed
'the Zealot' because he belonged to a party of strongly nationalistic Jews.

If Simeon and Simon are one, he was also brother to Saint James the Lesser and Saint Jude, apostles,
and of Joseph (which Joseph? Can't be Joseph the foster-father of Jesus nor Jseph iof Arimathea!).

If they are identical, Simeon was among the band of followers, who, after His Resurrection, devoted themselves
to prayer in Jerusalem until the descent of the Holy Spirit to bless and inspire them all.

Saint Epiphanius relates in Panarion seu adversus LXXX haereses (78, c. 14) that when the Jews
massacred Saint James the Lesser in 62 AD, Simeon reproached them for their atrocious cruelty. Simeon was
unanimously chosen successor to his brother as patriarch of Jerusalem. He was the natural choice because
he had probably assisted his brother in the government of that church.

Tradition says that, like Lot in Sodom, Simeon was supernaturally warned of the destruction of Jerusalem
by the Romans in AD 66, and withdrew with many fellow-Christians to the small city of Pella, where they
remained until it was safe for them to return to Jerusalem after its destruction in AD 70.

Epiphanius and Eusebius assure us, that the church flourished at Pella, and that multitudes of Jews were
converted by the great number of prodigies and miracles wrought in it.

Nevertheless, already during this early period the Church saw the rise of heresy in the form of the Nazareans,
who thought Jesus to be the greatest of prophets but only a man, and the Ebonites and Docetists, which seems
to be gnostic sects. The Nazareans joined all the ceremonies of the old law with the new, and observed both the
Jewish Sabbath and the Lord's Day (Sunday). Ebion added other errors to these, which Cerenthus had also
espoused, and taught many superstitions, permitted divorces, and allowed of the most infamous abominations.

The authority of Simeon kept the heretics in some awe during his life, which was the longest upon earth
of any of our Lord's disciples.
But, as Eusebius says, he was no sooner dead than a deluge of execrable
heresies broke out of hell upon the Church, which dared not openly appear during his life.

Simeon's life was never free of danger. He escaped the death ordered by Emperors Vespasian and Domitian
when they decreed that all of Jewish origin were to be executed, but finally, during the persecutions of Atticus
under the Emperor Trajan in 107, Simeon was caught, tortured, and crucified like his Lord.

Reputedly, he was well over 100 (120 by most accounts) years old at the time of his death. Atticus and
the executioners expressed admiration of Simeon's fortitude and strength in martyrdom. Tradition places
the site of his martyrdom in far-flung Persia, Egypt, or the British Isles.

In art, Saint Simeon is portrayed as an ancient bishop being crucified (easily confused with Saint Nestor).



And how appropriate for this thread, Feb. 18 is also the feast of Fra Angelico, formally known as
Blessed John of Fiesole
c. 1400-1455



Luca Signorelli, 'Fra Angelico', 1500,
detail of fresco, Chapel of
S. Brizio, Orvieto


Fra Angelico, Christ the Judge, 1447, Fresco, Chapel of S. Brizio, Orvieto

The best 'likeness' I could find of Fra Angelico is the detail above from
a fresco painted by Luca Signorelli in the Chapel of San Brizio, in
Orvieto's magnificent cathedral. I cannot find the fresco itself from which
the detail was taken. Signorelli finished painting the chapel in 1499-1500.
Fra Angelico and his pupils had worked on it in 1447. The fresco above
of Christ the Judge is attributed to Fra Angelico
.



The patron of Christian artists was born around 1400 in a village overlooking Florence. He took up painting
as a young boy and studied under the watchful eye of a local painting master. He joined the Dominicans at
about age 20, taking the name Fra Giovanni.

He eventually came to be known as Fra Angelico, perhaps a tribute to his own angelic qualities or maybe
the devotional tone of his works.

He continued to study painting and perfect his own techniques, which included broad-brush strokes, vivid colors
and generous, lifelike figures.

Michelangelo once said of Fra Angelico: “One has to believe that this good monk has visited paradise and
been allowed to choose his models there.”


Whatever his subject matter, Fra Angelico sought to generate feelings of religious devotion in response
to his paintings. Among his most famous works are the Annunciation and Descent from the Cross as well as
frescoes in the monastery of San Marco in Florence.

Fra Angelico initially received training as an illuminator, possibly working with his older brother
Benedetto who was also a Dominican. From 1408 to 1418 Fra Angelico was at the Dominican Convent of
Cortona where he painted frescoes, now destroyed, in the Dominican Church. Between 1418 and 1436
he was at the convent of Fiesole where he also executed a number of frescoes for the church.

In 1445 Pope Eugenius IV summoned him to Rome to paint the frescoes of the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament
at St Peter's, later demolished by Pope Paul III. Vasari claims that at this time Fra Angelico was offered
by Pope Nicholas V the Archbishopric of Florence, and that he refused it, recommending another Friar for
the position.

In 1447 Fra Angelico was in Orvieto with his pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, executing works for the Cathedral.
Among his other pupils were Gentile da Fabriano and Zanobi Strozzi.

From 1447 to 1449 he was back at the Vatican designing the frescoes for the Chapel of Pope Nicholas V.
From 1449 until 1452, Il Beato Angelico was back at his old convent of Fiesole, where he was the Prior.
In 1455 he was staying at a Dominican Convent in Rome, perhaps in order to work on Pope Nicholas' Chapel.
It was there that he died, his body being buried in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.


Tomb of Fra Angelico at Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome.

Fra Angelico was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1982. The Pope said:
"Angelico was reported to say "He who does Christ's work must stay with Christ always".
This motto earned him the epithet 'Blessed Angelico', because of the perfect integrity of
his life and the almost divine beauty of the images he painted, to a superlative extent
those of the Blessed Virgin Mary."

W.M.Rossetti writes:
"From various accounts of Fra Angelico's life, it is possible to gain some sense of why he was deserving
of canonization. He led the devout and ascetic life of a Dominican friar, and never rose above that rank;
he followed the dictates of the order in caring for the poor; he was always good-humored. All of his many
paintings were of divine subjects, and it seems that he never altered or retouched them, perhaps from
a religious conviction that, because his paintings were divinely inspired, they should retain their original form.
He was wont to say that he who illustrates the acts of Christ should be with Christ. It is averred
that he never handled a brush without fervent prayer and he wept when he painted a Crucifixion.
The Last Judgment and the Annunciation were two of the subjects he most frequently treated."

The words engraved on Fra Angelico's tomb translate as follows:

When singing my praise, don't liken my talents to those of Apelles.
Say, rather, that, in the name of Christ, I gave all I had to the poor.
The deeds that count on Earth are not the ones that count in Heaven.
I, Giovanni, am the flower of Tuscany
.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/02/2007 4.46]

TERESA BENEDETTA
00martedì 20 febbraio 2007 19:56
TALES OF MARTYRDOM
Martyrdom in the most unimaginable ways is what sanctified many of the saints for today, Feb. 20.
Their stories offer fascinating but sobering thoughts for contemplation
.



It is understandably not easy to find an illustration for these early Christian martyrs online, but since Tyre
is in present-day Lebanon, perhaps this picture of candles offered in Beirut's Martyrs /square (named for
civilian victims of present-day terrorism) is an appropriate image
.


Martyrs of Tyre
Died 302-310



The historian Eusebius relates:

"Several Christians of Egypt, whereof some had settled in Palestine, others at Tyre, gave astonishing proofs of their patience and constancy in the faith. After innumerable blows, which they cheerfully underwent, they were exposed to wild beasts, such as leopards, wild bears, boars, and bulls.

"I myself was present when these savage creatures, accustomed to human blood, being let out upon them, instead of devouring them or tearing them to pieces, as it was natural to expect, stood off, refusing even to touch or approach them, at the same time that they fell foul on their keepers, and others that came in their way.

"The soldiers of Christ were the only persons they refused, though these martyrs, pursuant to the order given them, tossed about their arms, which was thought a ready way to provoke the beasts, and stir them up against them.

"Sometimes, indeed, they were perceived to rush towards them with their usual impetuosity, but, withheld by a divine power, they suddenly withdrew; and this many times to the great admiration of all present.

"The first having done no execution, others were a second and a third time let out upon them, but in vain; the martyrs standing all the while unshaken, though many of them very young.

"Among them was a youth not yet twenty, who had his eyes lifted up to heaven, and his arms extended in the form of a cross, not in the least daunted, nor trembling, nor shifting his place, while the bears and leopards, with their jaws wide open, threatening immediate death, seemed most ready to tear him to pieces; but, by a miracle, not being suffered to touch him, they speedily withdrew.

"Others were exposed to a furious bull, which had already gored and tossed into the air several infidels who had ventured too near, and left them half dead: only the martyrs he could not approach; he stopped, and stood scraping the dust with his feet, and though he seemed to endeavor it with his utmost might, butting with his horns on every side, and pawing the ground with his feet, being also urged on by red-hot iron goads, it was all to no purpose.

"After repeated trials of this kind with other wild beasts, with as little success as the former, the saints were slain by the sword, and their bodies cast into the sea. Others who refused to sacrifice were beaten to death, or burned, or executed diverse other ways."

This happened in 304 under Veturius, a Roman general, in the reign of Diocletian.



Tyrannio, Zenobius & Martyrs of Tyre
Died 310.


Tyrannio, Silvanus, Peleus, Nilus and Zenobius were other martyrs who won the crown in Phoenicia.

Tyrannio was the bishop of Tyre, who had been present during the victory of the Martyrs of Tyre described in Eusebius, but did not follow their footsteps for another six years. At Antioch he was tortured and thrown into the sea or, perhaps, the Orontes River.

Saint Zenobius was a holy priest and physician of Sidon, who had accompanied Tyrannio, died on the rack as his sides and body were torn open with iron hooks and nails. His body was thrown into the River Orontes.

After governing as bishop of Emesa, Phoenicia, for more than forty years, Saint Silvanus, was some time after (under Maximinus) devoured by wild beasts in the midst of his own city with two companions. Peleus and Nilus, two other Egyptian priests in Palestine, were consumed by fire with some others.

Saint Silvanus, bishop of Gaza, was condemned to the copper mines of Phoenon near Petra in Arabia, and afterward beheaded there with 39 others. Peleus and Nilus were, according to Eusebius, Eygptian bishops, among the martyrs of Palestine.



Sadoth, Bishop and Martyr, & Companions, Martyrs
(also known as Shahdost, Schadost, Schiadustes)
Died c. 342


Sadoth, meaning friend of the king in Persian, succeeded Saint Simeon Barsabba'e as bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the two main cities of Persia situated on the Tigris River.

A new persecution of Christians by King Shapur II began soon after his election. Sadoth and his clergy hid, although they remained in close contact with their flock.

During this time, Sadoth had a vision the God was calling him to shed his blood. He called his clergy together to relate the message:

"I saw in my sleep, a ladder environed with light and reaching from earth to the heavens. Saint Simeon was at the top of it, and in great glory. He beheld me at the bottom, and said to me, with a smiling countenance: 'Mount up, Sadoth, fear not. I mounted yesterday, and it is your turn today': which means, that as he was slain last year, so I am to follow him this."

He urged them to serve God with increased zeal to ensure they were ready to take possession of their inheritance. They did not seek death be were ready to embrace it.

Saint Maruthas, who wrote Sadoth's acta, meditated: "A man that is guided by the Spirit, fears not death. He loves God, and goes to him with an incredible ardor; but he who lives according to the desires of the flesh, trembles, and is in despair at its approach: he loves the world, and it is with grief that he leaves it."

During the second year of the persecution, Sadoth and 128 others were arrested. Most of these were martyred immediately after their arrest, but Sadoth and eight others were detained for five months in a filthy dungeon at Bei-Lapat and tortured before being executed. Three times they were racked and questioned.

Amid the sound of bones being broken and urgings to apostatize, Sadoth answered in the name of all, that the sun was but a creature, the work of God, made for the good of mankind; that they would pay supreme adoration to none but the Creator of heaven and earth, and never be unfaithful to him; that it was indeed in their power to take away their lives, but that this would be the greatest favor they could do them. And the soldiers urged them to renounce Christ.

As with one voice the martyrs cried: "We shall not die, but live and reign eternally with God and his Son Jesus Christ. Kill us as soon as you please; for we repeat it to you that we will not adore the sun." The king sentenced them to death.

The martyrs thanked God and encouraged one another. They were chained two and two together, and led out of the city to execution, singing psalms and canticles of joy as they went. At the place of their martyrdom they sang louder and even more joyfully, giving thanks to God for his mercy, and begging for the grace of perseverance and that by this baptism of their blood they might enter into his glory. These prayers and praises of God did not cease until the last of this blessed company was beheaded.

Shapur II ordered that Sadoth be separated from his flock and sent into the province of the Huzites, where he was beheaded and rejoined his happy flock in the kingdom of glory. Ancient Chaldaic writers say that Simeon Barsabba'e was Sadoth's maternal uncle. In art, Saint Simeon appears on a ladder and invites Sadoth to ascend to heaven.

===============================================================

From
www.saintpatrickdc.org/ss/0220.htm

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/02/2007 20.20]

benefan
00giovedì 22 febbraio 2007 05:52
SAINT CECILIA

I think this painting is interesting with the musical instruments. Don't know the artist or the significance of the instruments. I'm sure Cecilia didn't get to be a saint sitting around playing songs. Maybe somebody can shed some light on the subject.


Carlo Saraceni, St. Cecilia and the Angel, c. 1510
Oil on canvas, 172 x 139 cm
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome


From Teresa -

Benefan, I am adding what I could find about this particular painting, whose authorship is attributed by most art historians to Saraceni, but attributed by French critics to Frenchman Guy Francois, even if there was no evidence he did any work in Rome. The usual instruments associated with St. Cecilia in the various paintings are the lute and the organ; roses are also an attribute in some paintings.

Here is a commentary on the Saraceni:

The most distinctive element of the picture is the extraordinarily inventive composition, dominated by the enormous wings of the angel and by the diagonal of the bass viol. This instrument, along with the large lute in the foreground, stretches across the entire surface of the canvas, as if to measure the space within....

The depiction of the subject is related to the vigorous revival of the cult of Saint Cecilia in the first few decades of the seventeenth century, following the 1599 discovery of the virgin martyr's incorrupt body during the course of excavations at the Roman church of Santa Cecilia. [Also, see below]

And this short biography will tell us why she became a saint and why she is associated with music:

SAINT CECILIA, Virgin and Martyr
Died c. 230


Saint Cecilia in the Roman Catholic Church is the patron saint of musicians and of the blind [Cecilia means 'blindness']. Her feast day, celebrated both in the Catholic and Orthodox Church, is November 22. She is one of seven women, excluding the Blessed Virgin, commemorated by name in the Canon of the Mass. .

Cultivated young patrician woman whose ancestors loomed large in Rome's history. She vowed her virginity to God, but her parents married her to Valerian of Trastevere. Cecilia told her new husband that she was accompanied by an angel, but in order to see it, he must be purified. He agreed to the purification, and was baptised; returning from the ceremony, he found her in prayer accompanied by a praying angel. The angel placed a crown on each of their heads, and offered Valerian a favor; the new convert asked that his brother be baptised.

The two brothers developed a ministry of giving proper burial to martyred Christians. In their turn they were arrested and martyred for their faith. Cecilia buried them at her villa on the Apprian Way, and was arrested for the action. She was ordered to sacrifice to false gods; when she refused, she was martyred in her turn.

The Acta of Cecilia includes the following: "While the profane music of her wedding was heard, Cecilia was singing in her heart a hymn of love for Jesus, her true spouse." It was this phrase that led to her association with music, singers, musicians, etc.

She suffered martyrdom, C. 230, under the emperor Alexander Severus. The legend is that she was suffocated for a while, and when that didn't kill her, she was beheaded; her grave was discovered in 817, and her body removed to the church of Saint Cecilia in Rome; the tomb was opened in 1599, and her body found to be incorrupt.

Cecilia, whose musical fame rests on a passing notice in her legend that she praised God by instrumental as well as vocal music, has inspired many a masterpiece in art, including the The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia by Raphael at Bologna, the Rubens in Berlin, the Domenichino in Paris and at San Luigi dei Francesi, and works by Artemisia Gentileschi, and in literature, where she is commemorated especially by Chaucer's Seconde Nonnes Tale, and by John Dryden's famous ode, set to music by Handel in 1736, and later by Sir Hubert Parry (1889). Other music dedicated to Cecilia includes Benjamin Britten's Hymn to St. Cecilia, A Hymn for St Cecilia by Herbert Howells, a mass by Alessandro Scarlatti, Charles Gounod's Messe Solennelle de Sainte Cécile, and Hail, bright Cecilia! by Henry Purcell.

The number and variety of depictions of this saint in art is astounding, from what I have seen online so far.
Here is the one by Raphael:


Raphael, The Ecstasis of St. Cecilia, 1514
Oil transferred from panel to canvas, 220 × 136 cm
Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna


Commentary in Wikipedia:

The glorification of purity is the central idea behind this painting. This is expressed by the figures seen on both sides of the principal figure: St. John the Evangelist is the patron saint of the church, and St. Paul symbolizes innocence, while St. Augustine and St. Mary Magdalene stand for purity regained through atonement after sinful aberration.

The four saints who surround the protagonist form a niche which is strengthened by the poses and gestures of the figures (the glances of the Evangelist and St. Augustine cross, St. Paul's is lowered and the Magdalene turns hers toward the spectator).

Only St. Cecilia raises her face toward the sky, where a chorus of angels appears through a hole in the clouds. The monumentality of the figures, typical of Raphael's activity during this period, dominates the other figurative elements.

In the legend of St. Cecilia, too, the painter emphasizes her desire to preserve her purity. As they were escorting Cecilia to the house of her betrothed, to the accompaniment of musical instruments, in her heart she called out only to God, beseeching Him to preserve the chastity of her heart and her body.

So runs the fifth-century legend, and accordingly in this picture Cecilia does not hear the profane music, her eyes raised toward the heavens connects her directly with the choir of angels. This much is in complete agreement with the story of the Roman martyr.

We will probably revisit St. Cecilia on her feast day.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/02/2007 6.07]

TERESA BENEDETTA
00giovedì 22 febbraio 2007 12:50
Peter Damian, Bishop and Doctor
Born in Ravenna, Italy, 1007;
died at Faenza, Italy, February 22, 1072;
declared Doctor of the Church in 1828.



"Here they live in endless being:
Passingness hath passed away:
Here they bloom, they thrive, they flourish,
For decayed is all decay."

--Saint Peter Damian from his Hymn on the Glory of Paradise.


The parents of this brilliant teacher and writer died shortly after his birth. Peter's elder brother used the young lad as an unpaid servant until another brother, Damian, found Peter tending pigs and rescued him, sending him to be educated at Faenza and Parma. This brother was a priest and Peter took his Christian name - Damian - as his own surname.

Peter Damian responded readily to his teachers and became proficient enough in grammar, rhetoric, and law that he later taught at Ravenna. He began to practice austerities by himself, gave liberal alms, seldom went without some poor persons at his table, and took pleasure in serving them with his own hands. But he longed to do more for his Lord.

The Lord answered his prayer by sending two religious of Fonte Avellana to visit his home. They told him much about their way of life. So, at age 34 (1035) he became a Benedictine monk at Fonte Avellana, a monastery founded 20 years earlier by Blessed Rudolph.

The brothers of Fonte Avellana lived as hermits in bare cells, utterly disciplined and given to constant study of the Bible. Their regimen was so austere that, for a time, Peter's health broke down. Nevertheless, Peter became a model monk who occupied himself by studying Scripture and patristic theology, and transcribing manuscripts. He was elected prior of this small, poor community in 1043.

Others were attracted to imitate his life, and Peter founded five more religious houses for them. He became famous for his uncompromising attitude toward worldliness and denunciations of simony and clerical marriage.

In 1057, Peter was named cardinal-bishop of Ostia by Pope Stephen IX. His fame spread as he took a leading role in the Gregorian Reform. In 1059, he participated in the Lateran synod that proclaimed the right of the cardinals alone to elect future bishops of Rome.

After a brief time as bishop, with the permission of Pope Alexander II (which previously had been denied by Nicholas II) and under the condition that he continue to serve the Holy See as needed, Peter returned to his cell.

There he wrote unceasingly, on purgatory, the Eucharist, and other theological and ascetical topics, but he also wrote poetry. While his Latin verse is among the very best of the Middle Ages, especially that in honor of Pope Saint Gregory, which begins "Anglorum iam Apostolus," Peter Damian never considered his learning something of which to boast. What counted, he said, was to worship God, not to write about Him. What use was it to construct a grammatically correct sentence containing the word 'God,' if you could not pray to him properly?

In his ideas about monasticism, the saint always looked back to the example of the early desert monks. Although he regarded the monastic life as inferior to eremitic life, he advocated regular canoical life for cathedral clergy, and was a precursor of the devotional development to the Passion of Christ.

In some respects he was not unlike the highly-critical Saint Jerome in character, fervor, and impatience. Although he was kind to his monks and indulgent to penitents, his writings reveal his severity.

It may seem odd to us that Peter Damian reproved the bishop of Florence for playing a single game of chess, or objected strenuously to monks seating themselves as they chanted the Divine Office.

His onslaught on clerical misconduct is called The Gomorrah Book. But the austerities he prescribed for others, he practiced himself. When not employed in prayer or work, he made wooden spoons and other utensils to get his hands from idleness.

Peter also continued the work of ecclesiastical reform. He opposed the antipopes, especially Honorius II. And he went on missions for the pope - once even managing to persuade the king of Germany not to divorce his wife, Bertha.

When Henry, archbishop of Ravenna, had been excommunicated for grievous enormities, Peter was sent by Alexander II as legate to settle the troubles. When he arrived at Ravenna, he found the bishop had died and brought his accomplices to repentance. Peter died at Faenza on route back to from Ravenna, which he had just reconciled with the Holy See.

There werer 21 popes in his lifetime, and seven of them in succession made him their constant adviser, before he was named
bishop and cardinal.

His vita was written by his disciple John of Lodi. Although he was never formally canonized, local cults arose at his death. Dante placed Peter Damian in one of the highest circles of Paradiso as a great predecessor of Saint Francis. In 1828, Pope Leo XII extended his feast to the Universal Church.



In art, Saint Peter is portrayed as a cardinal archbishop holding a birch and a book. Sometimes he may be shown (1) as a bishop with the cardinal's hat above his head or by his side, (2) as an old hermit, dead in a cave, lying on a stone slab with a crucifix on his breast; books, miter, cardinal's hat, and angels near him, or (3) praying before a cross with a miter and cardinal's hat on the ground.

==============================================================

This biography of St. Peter Damian must be supplemented by Pope Benedict XVI's tribute to him in a letter that he wrote to the Rf. Fr. Guido Innocenzo Gargano, superior of the Monastery of San Gregorio al Celio, and the Camaldolese Order on the occasion of the saint's feast day (and the millennial year of his birth). Here is a translation:

POPE BENEDICT XVI
ON SAN PIER DAMIANI



The feast of San Pier Damiani gives me the pleasant occasion of addressing a heartfelt greeting to all the members of the worthy Order of Camaldolese, as well as to all those who, with admiration, are inspired by the personality and work of this great witness to the Gospel, who was one of the protgonists of our medieval Church history and was without doubt the most prolific writer of the 1th century.

The millennial anniverary of his birth is an opportunity to look deeper into the charateristic aspects of his polyhedric personality as a scholar, a hermit, a man of the Church, but above all, lover of Christ.

In his life, San Pier Damiani showed a happy synthesis between a hermit's life and pastoral activity. As a hermit, he embodied that evangelical radicalism and unreserved love for Christ so felicitously expressed in t. Benedict's Rule: "Nothing, absolutely nothing, must come before the love of Christ."

As a man of the Church, he worked with wide-ranging wisdom, fulfilling daring and courageous tasks when necessary. His entire human and spiritual life is is symbolized by that tension between the hermit’s life and churchly mission.

San Pier Damiani was above all a hermit – indeed, the last theoretician of the hermit’s life in the Latin Church, at the very moment when the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches was taking place. In his interesting work entitled Vita Beati Romualdi (Life of Blessed Romualdo), he left us one of the most significant fruits of monastic experience in the pre-schism Church.

For him, the hermit’s life was a strong reminder to all Christians of the primary of Christ and His Lordship, an invitation to discover the love that Christ – through His relationship to the Father – has for the Church, a love that, in turn, the hermit should nourish with, for and in Christ, in behalf of the entire People of God.

He felt so strongly the presence of the universal Church in the hermit’s life that he wrote in his ecclesiastical tract Dominus vobiscum, that the Church is at the same time, one in all, and all in each of its members.

But this great hermit saint was also an eminent man of the Church, agreeing to leave his hermitage to go wherever his presence was needed to mediate among opposing parties, whether they were ecclesiastics, monks or simple faithful. And although he was radically focused on the unum necessarium, the only One needed, he did not back away from the practical exigencies imposed on him by his love for the Church.

He was impelled by the desire that the church community should always manifest itself as the holy and immaculate Bride of Christ, ever ready for her celestial Spouse, and he expressed with lively ars oratoria his sincere and disinterested zeal for the holiness of the Church.

After every ecclesiastical mission, he returned to his hermitage at Fonte Avellana, and free from any ambition, he even renounced his cardinal’s honors in order not to be taken away from his hermit’s solitude, from his hidden life in Jesus.

San Pier Damiani was, finally, the soul of Gregorian reform which marked the passage of the Church from first millenium to the second, of which St. Gregory VII was the heart and motor. Concretely, these reforms meant carrying out institutional choices of a theological, disciplinary and spiriitual character which would permit a greater libertas Ecclesiae, to recover the ample breath of theology that the Fathers of the Church had, particularly St. Augustine, St. Jerome and St. Gregory the Great.

With his pen and in oratory, he addressed everyone: from his fellow hermits, he asked the courage of a radical giving of oneself to the Lord as close as possible to martyrdom; from the Pope, the bishops and ecclesiastics of high rank, he urged an evangelical detachment from honors and privileges in the execution of their functions; and he reminded all priests of the highest ideals of their mission to be exercised by cultivating the purity of their own behavior and true personal poverty.

In an era lacking unifying principles and therefore marked by partisanship and uncertainty, San Pier Damiani, conscious of his own limitations – he loved to describe himself as peccator monachus, sinner monk – conveyed to his contemporaries the message that effective Christian witness was possible only though a constant harmonious tension between two fundamental poles of life – solitude and communion. And is his teaching not valid even for us today?

I wish that the millenary celebration of his birth will contribute not only to discover the relevance and profundity of his thought and action, but may be a propitious occasion for personal and community renewal, always based on Jesus Christ, “I who am the same today, yesterday, always” (Heb 13,8).

I assure you of remembrance in my prayers for you and all the Camaldolese monks, to whom I extend a special Apostolic Blessing, in which I gladly include everyone who shares their spirituality.

The Vatican
February 20 2007

===============================================================

Feast of Peter's Chair


February 22 is also the Feast of Peter's Chair, and I am reproducing here some photos taken by Father Z(uhlsdorf) who lives in Rome when he went to the Vatican yesterday, and posted on his blog www.wdtprs.com/blog/

(In case you haven't visited his blog before, 'wdtprs' stands for 'What does the prayer really say?' where he translates some prayers of the day and comments on them in a most edifying way.)

For background and to introduce the pictures, the following is excerpted from the Pope's homily on this feast day last year:

"The Latin liturgy celebrates today the feast of the Chair of St. Peter. It comes from a very ancient tradition, chronicled at Rome from the end of the 4th century, which renders thanks to God for the mission entrusted to the Apostle Peter and to his successors.

"The cathedra, literally, is the fixed seat of the Bishop, found in the mother church in a diocese, which for this reason is called "cathedral," and is the symbol of the authority of the Bishop and, in particular, of his "magisterium," the evangelical teaching which he, as a successor of the Apostles, is called to maintain and pass on to the Christian community.

"When the Bishop takes possession of the particular Church entrusted to him, he, wearing the mitre and carrying the pastoral staff, is seated in the cathedra. From that seat he will guide, as teacher and pastor, the path of the faithful in faith, in hope and in love....

"Dear Brothers and Sisters, in the apse of St. Peter's Basilica, as you know, can be found the monument to the Chair of the Apostle, Bernini's oldest work, realized in the form of a great bronze throne, held up by statues of four Doctors of the Church, two from the West, St. Augustine and St. Ambrose, two from the east, St. John Chrysostom and St. Athanasius.

"I invite you to stand before this evocative work, which today is decorated with many candles, and pray in a particular way for the ministry which God has entrusted to me. Raising our gaze to the alabaster window which opens over the Chair, invoking the Holy Spirit, may He always sustain with his light and strength my daily service to all the Church."


The following caption commentary to the pictures is by Fr. Z:
"The bronze Cathedra is decorated with lighted candles only once a year, today. The black bronse statue of St. Peter attributed to the marvelous Arnulfo di Cambio was always dressed up in his cope and tiara, with a ring on his finger and pectoral Cross on two days, 29 June and today. Then the modernists in the Fabbrica [the in-house workshop of St. Peter's for the repair and restoration of its works of art] started fooling around. Too triumphalistic. They started cutting out elements [including the triple tiara] But all of them were back today ...


[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/02/2007 5.57]

benefan
00sabato 24 febbraio 2007 20:03



On Efforts to Discredit Mother Teresa

by Fr. Richard Neuhaus
First Things
Feb. 23, 2007

How fiercely the children of darkness rage against the light of holiness. Christopher Hitchens has additional company in the effort to trash the icon who is Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The British edition of Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity? by Gezim Alpon is reviewed by Stuart Derbyshire, a psychologist at the University of Birmingham.

The subtitle assumes that she is one or the other, saint or celebrity. Another way of saying, as Alpon says repeatedly, that she protected her privacy and carefully polished her “image” is to say that she subordinated person to her message and work. In short, she did exactly what celebrities do not do. A great deal is now known about the price of that disciplined subordination. See, for instance, Carol Zaleski’s “Mother Teresa’s Dark Night of the Soul,” in the May 2003 issue of First Things. But, no matter what she did or didn’t do, the debunkers of sanctity will have it their way. For instance, Derbyshire writes that her apparent devotion was a sublimation of her sorrow over the death of her father when she was a child. “Her devotion to Jesus was a personal attempt to deal with grief, and her dedication to the poor of Calcutta part of her effort towards self-salvation. Similar to many celebrity figures, it was all about me, me, me. This puts her work into a whole new and rather less flattering light.”

My, my, my. One had not noticed that so many celebrity figures devote their lives to serving the poorest of the poor in loving response to God’s gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. That, by the grace of God, grief may have been the instrument by which Mother Teresa sought refuge in Christ is apparently beyond the psychological imagination of Prof. Derbyshire. Which, of course, is understandable if one assumes that there is no Christ in whom to find refuge.

The vulgarity of the debunking projects of such as Alpon, Derbyshire, and Hitchens is worthy of note. Driving their projects, however, is a more noteworthy and hardly concealed desperation to discredit the human capacity for moral and spiritual greatness by which our own inadequate lives are judged. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” The light continues to shine in the lives of the saints, and the darkness will never, never, ever overcome it. Although it will surely keep on trying.

[Modificato da benefan 24/02/2007 20.31]

benefan
00sabato 24 febbraio 2007 20:11

[This is the article referred to in the post above. I know it is REALLY long but I really love Mother Teresa.]


The Dark Night of Mother Teresa

by Carol Zaleski
First Things (May 2003)

On October 19, 2003, Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997) will be beatified in Rome. During the three-and-a-half-year investigation into her cause, no less thorough for having been hastened by the waiver of the customary five-year waiting period, every nook and cranny of her life was studied for evidence that she is the great saint, the Christian Mahatma, that the world already believes her to be. The date chosen for her beatification, Mission Sunday, is the Sunday closest to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the pontificate of John Paul II and to the end of the Year of the Rosary. This may be taken as a sign of how close Mother Teresa’s cause is to the Pope’s heart. In any case, the beatification of Mother Teresa makes a fitting colophon to the era of turbulence and grace that will always be associated with his name. Since the pontificate of Gregory the Great (590-604), nearly every generation of Christians has felt itself living in a Church too old to produce heroic saints. If during the days of John Paul II we are inclined to a similar despondency, we have only to consider Mother Teresa to be reminded of how young the Church really is, how capable of fidelity and passionate witness to Christ.

One would expect the canonization process to be steady and sure and, aside from a few marginal detractors, uncontroversial, for no saint has ever been more in the public eye. In her life-long service to Christ in the poorest of the poor, and her simple and consistent teachings on the law of love, she was an open book. She tried always to be transparent to Christ, and in that very transparency her inner life was hidden, making her a difficult subject for biographers. Malcolm Muggeridge observed that when the eighteen-year-old Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu left her family to join the Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto, it was “the end of her biography and the beginning of her life.” It is only now with the end of her life, and the beginning of her cause, that the biography resumes, and new dimensions of her character are revealed.

During November and December of last year, the ZENIT News Agency published in four installments a study of The Soul of Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life, by the Postulator of Mother Teresa’s cause, Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. In this study a new portrait of Mother Teresa’s interior life emerges, drawn largely from letters she sent to her spiritual directors. She had wanted the letters to be destroyed, not intending to leave behind any record of her spiritual life (“I want the work to remain only His”), but they were preserved nonetheless; and who among us would willingly dispatch them to the shredder? Fr. Kolodiejchuk’s study is just the tip of the iceberg-the documentation submitted to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints runs to eight volumes-but what it shows us is Mother Teresa as a classic Christian mystic whose inner life was burned through by the fire of charity, and whose fidelity was tested and purified by an intense trial of faith, a true dark night of the soul.

Fr. Kolodiejchuk sees Mother Teresa’s life as unfolding in four phases:
Her childhood and youth, when from the time of her First Communion at age five and a half she felt her heart captivated by the love of Jesus and of neighbor, and discovered her call to join the missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto. While it was difficult to leave her family, she found her time as a Loreto nun, teaching in the convent school in Calcutta, immensely rewarding. She was by all accounts a happy though not particularly brilliant nun (she is remembered, among other things, for having fumbled the candles at Benediction). The keynote of this period is youthful zeal and joy.

The Vow of 1942. At age thirty-two, at the end of her annual retreat, with the permission of her spiritual director, Mother Teresa made a vow to give herself utterly and unreservedly to Christ: “To give God anything that He may ask . . . not to refuse Him anything.”

The Call within a Call. On September 10, 1946, the day celebrated by the Missionaries of Charity as “Inspiration Day,” Mother Teresa was traveling by train from Calcutta to a retreat house in Darjeeling. During this trip, the realization came to her that Jesus was calling her to serve him radically in the poorest of the poor.

Only in private letters to her spiritual director, Fr. Celeste Van Exem, S.J., and (under Fr. Van Exem’s cautious instruction) to Archbishop Ferdinand Périer, S.J., did she reveal that this call was more than just an inner prompting. Jesus appeared and spoke to her, in a series of interior locutions and visions. “Wouldst thou not help?” Jesus asked her. “How can I?” Mother Teresa responded, expressing her fear of incurring ridicule, loneliness, deprivation, and failure should she leave her happy life as a Loreto nun, exchange her habit for a rough sari, and take up the uncertain life Jesus was demanding of her. Repeatedly he asked her, “Wilt thou refuse? You have become my spouse for my love. You have come to India for me. The thirst you had for souls brought you so far. Are you afraid now to take one more step for your spouse, for me, for souls?” And again: “I want Indian nuns, Missionaries of Charity, who would be my fire of love amongst the poor, the sick, the dying, and the little children. . . .” The chief motivation for the Missionaries of Charity, as she would often say, was not to do social work, but to adore Christ in the littlest and weakest of his children, and to bring Christ the souls for which he thirsts.

The Dark Night. Throughout 1946 and 1947, Mother Teresa experienced a profound union with Christ. But soon after she left the convent and began her work among the destitute and dying on the street, the visions and locutions ceased, and she experienced a spiritual darkness that would remain with her until her death. It is hard to know what is more to be marveled at: that this twentieth-century commander of a worldwide apostolate and army of charity should have been a visionary contemplative at heart; or that she should have persisted in radiating invincible faith and love while suffering inwardly from the loss of spiritual consolation. In letters written during the 1950s and 1960s to Fr. Van Exem, Archbishop Périer, and to later spiritual directors, Fr. L. T. Picachy, S.J., and Fr. J. Neuner, S.J., she disclosed feelings of doubt, loneliness, and abandonment. God seemed absent, heaven empty, and bitterest of all, her own suffering seemed to count for nothing, “. . . just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing.”

The dark night of Mother Teresa presents us with an even greater interpretive challenge than her visions and locutions. It means that the missionary foundress who called herself “God’s pencil” was not the God-intoxicated saint many of us had assumed her to be. We may prefer to think that she spent her days in a state of ecstatic mystical union with God, because that would get us ordinary worldlings off the hook. How else could this unremarkable woman, no different from the rest of us, bear to throw her lot in with the poorest of the poor, sharing their meager diet and rough clothing, wiping leprous sores and enduring the agonies of the dying, for so many years without respite, unless she were somehow lifted above it all, shielded by spiritual endorphins? Yet we have her own testimony that what made her self-negating work possible was not a subjective experience of ecstasy but an objective relationship to God shorn of the sensible awareness of God’s presence.

In the history of Christian theology and spirituality, there have been many accounts of divine darkness, with a host of different implications. It is an ancient doctrine, emphasized by apophatic theologians and mystics, that God dwells in inaccessible light, a light so searingly absolute that it cancels out all images and ideas we may form of Him, veiling the divine glory in a dark “cloud of unknowing.” This tradition owes much to the Christian Neoplatonist Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite and his liturgically inspired vision of ascent to the divine throne; as such, it says more about divine transcendence than about human desolation.

Among the monastic writers who flourished during the sunlit years of the twelfth century, divine darkness was an essentially cheerful idea. William of St. Thierry positively delighted in our mind’s incapacity to see that God is present, for he counted on love to make good the deficiencies of our feeble intellect. Love is the eye with which we see God, William said; love itself is understanding. But love is not to be confused with mere feelings. Feelings burn out too easily; they can be manipulated or seduced. The love by which we see God must be an act of the will rather than a passing affection of the heart.

Later generations of Christian mystics dwelt upon the more desolate kinds of darkness to which the spiritual life can lead: the darkness in which all modes of prayer and spiritual practice become arid, and all consolation in the love of God seems lost. Even in the desolate dark night of the soul, indeed especially there, St. John of the Cross taught, God is present, purifying the soul of all passions and hindrances, and preparing her for the inconceivable blessedness of divine union. Along with dark knowing, there is dark loving, no less ardent for being deprived of all sensible and spiritual vision of the beloved. Therefore St. John can say, “Oh, night more lovely than the dawn, Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!”

Yet only in the modern period has the dark night of the soul taken the form of radical doubt, doubting not only one’s own state of grace, but God’s promises and even God’s existence. A wise Benedictine, John Chapman of Downside Abbey, made this point in a 1923 letter to a non-monastic friend: “n the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries most pious souls seem to have gone through a period in which they felt sure that God had reprobated them. . . . This doesn’t seem to happen nowadays. But the corresponding trial of our contemporaries seems to be the feeling of not having any faith; not temptations against any particular article, but a mere feeling that religion is not true.”

For this annihilating temptation, Chapman wrote, “the only remedy is to despise the whole thing, and pay no attention to it-except (of course) to assure our Lord that one is ready to suffer from it as long as he wishes.” The “feeling of not having any faith” is painful because it is an authentic purgation, during which “faith is really particularly strong all the time,” and one is being brought into closer union with the suffering Christ.

This was exactly the way Mother Teresa learned to deal with her trial of faith: by converting her feeling of abandonment by God into an act of abandonment to God. It would be her Gethsemane, she came to believe, and her participation in the thirst Jesus suffered on the Cross. And it gave her access to the deepest poverty of the modern world: the poverty of meaninglessness and loneliness. To endure this trial of faith would be to bear witness to the fidelity for which the world is starving. “Keep smiling,” Mother Teresa used to tell her community and guests, and somehow, coming from her, it doesn’t seem trite. For when she kept smiling during her night of faith, it was not a cover-up but a manifestation of her loving resolve to be “an apostle of joy.”

One can better understand, having read The Soul of Mother Teresa, why she insisted that adoration of Christ present in the Blessed Sacrament should occupy the center of the Missionaries’ daily work; and why she felt it imperative to establish purely contemplative communities that would make the Missionaries of Charity an order of adoration as well as apostolic service. Adoring Christ in the Sacrament is also a way of dark knowing and dark loving. To all appearances he is absent, as Aquinas says in the Tantum ergo Sacramentum, so faith must supply what is lacking to our feeble senses. Humanly, there were times when Mother Teresa felt burnt out, but faith supplied what was lacking even to troubled faith; spiritually she was often desolate, but her vow endured and her visible radiance-to which everyone attests-was undiminished. This lifelong fidelity should not be confused with a Stoic determination to keep going in the face of defeat. It was something else entirely: objective Christian joy.

Mother Teresa is not the only modern saint to have undergone such a trial of faith; one thinks also of precursors like St. Paul of the Cross (1694-1775), founder of the Passionists, and St. Jane Frances de Chantal (1572-1641), foundress of the Visitandines, but above all of Mother Teresa’s namesake, St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), the French Carmelite famous for her “Little Way.” The parallels between Mother Teresa (Teresa of the Child Jesus) and St. Thérèse (Teresa of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face) are really quite remarkable. Thérèse also made a vow, informally as a young child, and formally on two occasions as a professed Carmelite nun, to refuse nothing to Jesus. Like Mother Teresa, she had longed to be sent forth in the missions as a herald of God’s love; since her frailty prevented this, she rejoiced in being assigned missionaries for whom she prayed and whom she regarded with great affection as her spiritual brothers. She, too, felt multiple calls; indeed, she felt all calls at once: “I feel the vocation of the warrior, the priest, the apostle, the doctor, the martyr,” she wrote. “I feel within my soul the courage of the Crusader, the Papal Guard, and I would want to die on the field of battle in defense of the Church.” Not for feminist reasons did she say, “I feel in me the vocation of the priest,” but rather because of a youthful desire to be all in all for Christ. The “Little Way” was her solution: “I understood that love comprised all vocations, that love was everything . . . my vocation is love! . . . In the heart of the Church, my Mother, I shall be Love.” If love were dependent on mere feelings, however, her vocation would have foundered, for as Thérèse wrote, “Do not believe I am swimming in consolations; oh, no, my consolation is to have none on earth.”

From Easter 1896 until her death from tuberculosis on September 30, 1897, at age twenty-four, Thérèse endured a trial of faith of the modern kind, which she described as like being enclosed in a dark tunnel. She seemed to hear the darkness mocking her: “You are dreaming about the light, about a fatherland embalmed in the sweetest perfumes; you are dreaming about the eternal possession of the Creator of all these marvels; you believe that one day you will walk out of this fog which surrounds you! Advance, advance; rejoice in death which will give you not what you hope for but a night still more profound, the night of nothingness.” According to tradition she died trusting and loving God in the very grip of this doubt, and promising to spend her heaven doing good on earth.

Is it fanciful to consider the possibility that Mother Teresa, who died in the same month one hundred years later, who experienced the same ardent call, made the same vow of surrender, suffered the same desolation of faith, and embodied in the face of that dark night the same teaching of fidelity in small things, may have in some way been completing the mission of St. Thérèse? Could it be that this missionary contemplative and this contemplative missionary are companions in a joint work of grace?

However that may be, it was the same objective Christian joy that made Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu become a Saint Teresa for our time, and a saint-maker for our future. When we consider her life and the ongoing life of her community, the Church seems young again, and everything seems possible. If these days are in any sense a dark night for the Church, then Mother Teresa shows the way forward: faith that we are undergoing a purification rather than a free-fall, and fidelity, in small things as well as big, to the vows that bind in order to set free.

Carol Zaleski is a professor of religion at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Friend, in the Desolate Time

Friend, in the desolate time, when your soul
is enshrouded in darkness
When, in a deep abyss, memory and feeling
die out,
Intellect timidly gropes among shadowy forms
and illusions
Heart can no longer sigh, eye is unable
to weep;
When, from your night-clouded soul the wings
of fire have fallen
And you, to nothing, afraid, feel
yourself sinking once more,
Say, who rescues you then?-Who is the
comforting angel
Brings to your innermost soul order and
beauty again,
Building once more your fragmented world,
restoring the fallen
Altar, and when it is raised, lighting
the sacred flame?—
None but the powerful being who first from
the limitless darkness
Kissed to life seraphs and woke
numberless suns to their dance.
None but the holy Word who called the worlds
into existence
And in whose power the worlds move on
their paths to this day.
Therefore, rejoice, oh friend, and sing in
the darkness of sorrow:
Night is the mother of day, Chaos the
neighbor of God.

by Erik Johan Stagnelius
Translated from the Swedish by Bill Coyle
TERESA BENEDETTA
00domenica 25 febbraio 2007 23:43
Dear Benefan....Thank you for the article on Mother Teresa. It has helped me very much to find an explanation for the conflicting feelings I had, when I had the undeserved privilege of meeting her and observing her for several minutes at close range when she made a brief visit to Manila in 1980.

It's hard to say it even now. I had expected to experience in her presence the radiant spirituality that Pope John Paul II shed so naturally. But what I saw was a frail woman who appeared ravaged by her experiences - saintly because one was aware of all the loving work that she put into her mission, but not because I 'experienced' it as a force emanating from her.

For days afterwards, I asked myself, why? My mind and heart were certainly prepared to see this 'living saint" whom the whole world recognized as such by then. Especially since we shared a name. Why then was I so 'disappointed' at my fleeting contact with living holiness?

I have since asked the Lord over and over to forgive me for whatever lack of merit I had that made me fail to respond more positively to one of His authentic and great apostles of love. And since her death, Blessed Teresa's forgiveness as well.

Perhaps her 'dark night of the soul' weighed as much on her physically as did the physical and emotional burdens of caring for the 'poorest of the poor.' What I would give to go back to that day in 1980 and undo my 'disappointment'.

P.S. The point about a possible conjoining of Therese of Lisieux's mission with Teresa of Calcutta's is worth a lot of reflection.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 26/02/2007 1.36]

TERESA BENEDETTA
00lunedì 26 febbraio 2007 01:02
POPE BENEDICT ON SACRED ART
This part of the Holy Father's dialog with the Roman clergy on 2/22/07 was not reported in the few Italian articles written about it [the international media, of course, totally ignored it because he did not speak about any of their 'buzz' issues!

But I found it a great incentive for us to continue what we have been doing in this section: looking at religious art not just for aesthetic pleasure but for the spiritual significance and content of the images, and the inspiration and spiritual enrichment we may take from it.

I am re-posting it here as the Pope's own statement of what Wulfrune intended when she started this thread.


===============================================================

[The last question to the Pope was about sacred art, from Don Luigi Veturi, parish priest of San Giovanni Battista dei Fiorentini, who asked whether it should not be more appropriately valued as a means of communicating the faith.]


The answer can be very simple: YES! I came here today a little late because I visited the Pauline Chapel, which has been under restoration for years, and they told me it will take two more years. I was able to see a little between the scaffoldings some part of this miraculous work. It deserves to be restored properly, so it can be seen again in its splendor and serve as a living catechism.

Italy is, of course, particularly rich in art, and art is an inexhaustible and incredibly rich catechetical treasure. For us, it is even an obligation to know religious art and understand it. Not the way art historians do, who only interpret in formal and technical terms. But we should enter into the content of art and seek to bring to life the inspiration for such great art.

I really think it is a duty - even in the formation of priests -to recognize these treasures and to be capable of transforming into living catechism what is present in a work of art that speaks to us even today.

It is even a way to show that the Church is an organism neither of oppression or of power but of a spiritual fecundity that is irrepeatable in history, or at least, I dare to say, not possible to find outside the Catholic Church.

It is a sign of the vitality of the Church, that with all its weaknesses and the sins of its members, she has always remained a great spiritual reality, the inspiration that has given us all these treasures.

So I think it is our duty to be able to enter this spiritual wealth and be able to interpret it [as a catechetical tool]. And this is true for painting and sculpture as it is for sacred music, which is a branch of music that deserves to be revived.

I would say that the Gospel, as it is lived in diverse ways, remains an inspirational force which gives us art and will always inspire art. We see beautiful sculptures today, as well as musical compositions, which prove that the fecundity of the faith and of the Gospel is far from exhausted.

One can probably show a contradictory situation in the arts today, a situation that, in general, may be called a bit desperate. Whereas the Church even today continues to inspire, because the faith and the Word of God are inexhaustible. Which gives great courage to us all. It gives us the hope that even in the future, the world will have new visions of the faith, and at the same time, we have the certainty that the 2000 years of Christian art that came before remain always alive and are always 'today' for the faith.
benefan
00lunedì 26 febbraio 2007 05:42
Teresa,

Regarding Mother Teresa,

I am even more impressed by her after reading the article above. I have about 8 biographies about her, some collections of her writings and remarks, and a couple of videotapes of some of her activities and appearances but none of them touches on the dark night of the soul she apparently experienced for years. In trying to find a decent photo of her to post with the article above, I scanned a number of articles online, some of which showed her in the midst of people she had rescued from the streets who were in absolutely horrific condition. When I think of how difficult it had to be working in those circumstances, surrounded by absolute poverty, agony, death, and despair, I can only imagine her holding up through it all because of tremendous faith and with nourishment from God. To think that she didn't feel that nourishment and even struggled with faith, I can't grasp how she managed.

Under the circumstances, I can understand why she didn't emanate the radiance that you were expecting, Teresa. The many wrinkles and shadows on her face reflect the interior struggle and sadness she was experiencing, which, in my opinion, must have been even more horrifying than the struggles and misery she was seeing all around her on the streets of Calcutta. Quite a few saints have experienced a dark night of the soul. I would be very interested in hearing about any good research on that subject.

[Modificato da benefan 26/02/2007 5.45]

Wulfrune
00lunedì 26 febbraio 2007 14:50
St Walberga
Sorry to appear to interrupt this very edifying discussion about Blessed Mother Theresa; it would be good to discuss the effect of the Dark Night - it happens to many people and they don't always realise what it is.


On our travels we went to Eichstadt, the shrine of St Walburga, whose bones are said to exude holy oil for about four months of the year. This oil is collected and distributed free to all pilgrims (we got it in the gift shop, a 'gift' indeed). Chemical tests on the 'oil' show it to be water, but miracles of healing have been associated with it. The most notable one (that I know of) is Jennifer Paterson, one of the 'Two Fat Ladies' on British TV, and a devout Catholic, she lost her hearing as a child and a phial of oil was placed under her pillow. She woke up the following morning able to hear. I got a phial for Bernie.

The bones are locked away in a wall behind the altar, and one can pay respects in a small room accessed by a door behind the altar. The remains are interred behind a locked door, and there is a lovely carving around it, showing the Annunciation. So I took a picture for you!!



I haven't been able to find a date for the carving, but would think it is late medieval. Around the walls are plaques with paintings and written messages of thanksgiving for favours received. The paintings are usually amateur ones, possibly made by the donors. It's a rural area so one does see pictures or horses and other farm animals. There are many of these pictures in Altoetting too.

St Walburga, 710-777, was a nun of Wimborne, England, the daughter of aristocrats. Her parents and two brothers are also regarded as saints. She went to Germany with another nun in response to a request for help from St Boniface (another English saint who is venerated in Germany). Walburga wasn't a missionary, she was a contemplative, but her holiness became legendary in her lifetime and after death many miracles were attributed to her intercession. Walpurgis Night is named after her.

I don't have any photos of Eichstadt itself, so am posting this here.

[Modificato da Wulfrune 26/02/2007 14.51]

TERESA BENEDETTA
00lunedì 26 febbraio 2007 21:05
Dear Clare - Speaking of synchronicity, when I saw your post late last night (it was still 2/25 here in New York), I said, Omigosh, I was just reading about this saint because she is one of the saints of the day for February 25, and three things came to mind when I was reading it - one, how many saints from the now-United-Kingdom there are; everyday, there's at least one of them in the saints-of-the-day list; two, how many of them are abbots or abbessses, as Walburga was - and most of them seem to be BENEDICTINE, too!; and 3) because of the Saxon(?) name, I was immediately reminded of your nick, Wulfrune.....And all of that came together in your visit to Eichstaat! Even in little things, the Lord moves in mysterious ways, indeed...[I probably should add a fourth observation - the English-German connection!

So, I'm sure you don't mind that I add on here what the St. Patrick's Church (Washington, DC) website tells us about her.



Walburga, OSB Abbess
(also known as Bugga, Gaudurge, Vaubourg, Walpurga, Walpurgis)
Born in Devonshire, Wessex, England; died at Heidenheim, Swabia, Germany, February 25, 779; feasts of her translation are celebrated May 1, October 12 (to Eichstätt), and September 24 (to Zutphen).


When Saint Boniface evangelized the Germans, he took with him as fellow apostles his two nephews, Willibald and Winebald, who were the sons of Saint Richard, king of the West Saxons. So successful was their enterprise that fresh reinforcements of missionaries were requested and the monasteries of England were stirred by the news of their progress. Indeed, it was hardly possible to restrain the ardent faith and enthusiasm of those who wanted to join them, and there sailed boat after boat of eager volunteers.

Nor in that stirring hour were the womenfolk unmoved in their wish to follow, and Boniface asked for a colony of nuns to be sent out. Among them was his own niece, Walburga, a nun of Wimborne under Saint Tatta and sister of Willibald and Winebald, for she, too, had heard the call and had immediately followed Saint Lioba to Germany.

Walburga had been educated at the double monastery of Wimbourne in Dorset and decided there to consecrate her life to God by becoming a nun. When she answered the call to Germany, she spent two years evangelizing in Bischofsheim, impressing the pagans with her medical skills.

Winebald founded a double monastery at Heidenheim, where she was appointed abbess and Winebald ruled the men. She must have been a remarkable woman, for so great was her influence that on his death the bishop of Eichstätt appointed Walburga in his place and gave her charge over both the men's and women's congregations. Walburga died as abbess of Heidenheim, whence her relics were translated to Eichstätt.

This English woman had the curious destiny of attaining a place in German folklore. The night of May 1 (the date of the transfer of her relics to Eichstätt in 870) became known as Walpurgisnacht. May 1 had been a pagan festival marking the beginning of summer and the revels of witches, hence the traditions of Walpurgisnacht, which have no intrinsic connection with the saint. Nevertheless, her name became associated with witchcraft and other superstitions (cf. Goethe's Faust, pt. i, Walpurgis night in the Hartz mountains).

It is possible, however, that the protection of crops ascribed to her, represented by the three ears of corn in her icons, may have been transferred to her from Mother Earth (Walborg).

Her shrine was an important pilgrimage site because of the 'miraculous oil' that exudes from the rock on which her shrine is placed. A fine collection of 16th- to 20th-century phials for its distribution is kept at Eichstätt.

In 893, Walburga's relics were inspected and diffused, some to the Rhineland, others to Flanders and France, which spread her cultus to other countries. One important center was Attigny, where Charles the Simple established a shrine in his palace chapel and named her patron of his kingdom.

Today she lies peacefully in the vault of the 17th- century Baroque church bearing her name - a symbol not of witchcraft, but of Christian healing and mission (


Image of Saint Walburga
courtesy of Saint Charles Borromeo Church


In art, Saint Walburga is generally portrayed as a royal abbess with a small flask of oil on a book. At times (1) she may have three ears of corn in her hand; (2) angels hold a crown over her; (3) she is shown in a family tree of the Kings of England; (4) she is shown together with her saintly brothers; or (5) miracles are taking place because of the oil extruding from her tomb. She is venerated at Eichstätt.

Walburga has been portrayed by artists from the 11th until the 19th centuries. Especially noteworthy is a 15th-century tapestry cycle of her life.

A modern abbess of Eichstätt was sufficiently important to be selected to negotiate the surrender of the town to the Americans at the end of the Second World War.

Saint Walburga is invoked against coughs, dog bite (rabies), plague, and for good harvests .

================================================================


We all pray that St. Walpurga's oil and intercession, along with that of the Virgin of Lourdes and St. Bernadette, will bring spiritual comfort and physical healing to Bernie.

About the 'dark night of the soul,' you are right. The literature about this holy ordeal is vast, even if we only stick to St. John of the Cross, whose original phrase it was, I believe. I went back and checked just to make sure, and yes, Karol Wojtyla's doctoral dissertation for his doctorate in Theology from the Angelicum in Rome (he spent two years there soon after his ordination as a priest), was on St. John of the Cross, "The Doctrine of the Faith in St. John of the Cross." George Weigel devotes several paragraphs to it, pp 85-87, in his "Witness to Hope." (Very edifying about the nature of mysticism, even though John's 'dark night of the soul' isn't specifically mentioned in Weigel's summary).

This is incidental, but as St. John was Spanish, his Spanish name is San Juan de la Cruz - and I have always wondered why when the Spaniards colonized the Philippines for over 350 years, they called the average Filipino 'Juan de la Cruz' as in 'John Doe'!

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 26/02/2007 22.54]

TERESA BENEDETTA
00mercoledì 28 febbraio 2007 11:02
A MICHELANGELO CRUCIFIX

Michelangelo, Crucifix, 1492.
Polychrome wood, 142 × 35 cm
Santa Maria del Santo Spirito di Firenze



From the Wikipedia entry on Michelangelo:

After the death of Lorenzo de' Medici on April 8, 1492, for whom Michelangelo had become a kind of son, Michelangelo quit the Medici court. In the following months he produced a Wooden crucifix (1493), as a thanksgiving gift to the prior of the church of Santa Maria del Santo Spirito who had permitted him some studies of anatomy on the corpses of the church's Hospital.
[He was only 17 when he did this Crucifix. Eight years later, he would sculpt the Pieta!]

But a separate Wikipedia entry on the Crucifix says this:

The Crucifix is a polychrome wood sculpture by High Renaissance master Michelangelo, finished in 1492. It is located at the high altar of the church of Santa Maria del Santo Spirito in Florence, Italy.

Although some art historians have identified this work found in the sacristy of Santo Spirito as the wooden cross mentioned by early writers as having been carved by Michelangelo in 1492, the way the head and legs are treated in contrapposto suggests a search for classical harmony.

The extremely soft modelling of Christ, his tender facial expression, and the complex anatomical structure have no counterpart in any of Michelangelo's youthful works, and some critics have reservations about its attribution to that artist.

Specifically, the handling of the hair and the lack of precise anatomy strongly suggest that this work was inspired by Michelangelo's work, but created by some unknown artist well after Michelangelo's death.

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We'll let the art critics and historians fight that out, but meanwhile, the guidebooks all identify it as Michelangelo's Curcifix, and I'll go by them. ..Isn't the Pieta a youthful work, and doesn't it have the soft modelling of this CruciFix - softer even? And would the anatomical detail not be due to the fact that the artist had just spent time studying corpses at the Church Hospital?...BTW, is there another Jesus painting or sculpture that shows him totally nude this way?

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 28/02/2007 11.22]

|lily|
00mercoledì 28 febbraio 2007 21:29
As for your question regarding Christ nude upon the Cross, Teresa, there is the Crucifixion scene by Jan van Eyck (or his brother Hubert, or both) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.



It is part of a diptych.



The Museum site has this to say about it:

The Crucifixion; The Last Judgment, ca. 1430
Jan van Eyck (act. by 1422, d. 1441) and Assistant
Oil on canvas, transferred from wood
Inscribed: (on frames) verses from Isaiah, Revelation, and Deuteronomy; (within pictures) verses from Matthew and Revelation
Fletcher Fund, 1933 (33.92a, b)

These two pictures, juxtaposing Christ’s sacrifice for the salvation of humankind with the Last Judgment at the end of time, are early works by Jan van Eyck, the most famous painter in fifteenth-century Europe and the artist who, more than any other, defined the boundaries of realism. The Crucifixion is presented as an eyewitness account, set against a distant landscape astonishing for its depth and subtlety of description. By contrast, the Last Judgment is organized hieratically in three tiers, with the scale of the figures manipulated to indicate their relative importance.


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MANY THANKS FOR THE VAN EYCK REFERENCE, IMAGES AND INFO, LILY!

TERESA

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/03/2007 16.48]

TERESA BENEDETTA
00venerdì 2 marzo 2007 16:52
BRAZIL'S FIRST SAINT
Nessuna today posted this cover pciture from the 2/28/07 issue of the Brazilian magazine VEJA on Fr. Galvao, who will be canonized by Pope Benedict XVI at the Mass he will celebrate in Sao Paolo's Campo Marte on May 11. The accompanying cover
story is excellent. I will post a translation as soon as I can.

annux
00venerdì 2 marzo 2007 22:28
Saint Anne









This is my favourite saint, and I'm proud to have her name ! [SM=g27811] [SM=g27821] [SM=g27821] [SM=g27821]
[SM=x40800]

ANNUX THE RAPPER

=============================================================

Dear Annux - I am answering within your space so that your post remains visible on the board. THANK YOU FOR A BEAUTIFUL COLLECTION OF SAINT ANNE PICTURES, and you have reason to be proud you have her name, certainly one of the most popular and beautiful female names. I will see if I can find an appropriate 'biography' of her to post here also. - TERESA

Here's a story I found, written by Father Peter Grace, C.P. for the site of St. Ann's Basilica in Scranton, Pennsylvania. They use the short form Ann instead of Anne. Even if it is not historical, the story certainly provided the basis for all of the representations we see in art about St. Ann, St. Joachim and Mary's early life.


THE STORY OF ANN & JOACHIM
AND MARY'S EARLY LIFE


Christians, from the earliest times had an interest in knowing more about Jesus' family, especially about his mother and his grandmother. Ann is the name of the Jewish woman who was Jesus' randmother. Ann is the Virgin Mary's mother. We know nothing about Ann from the Bible.

A third century Greek manuscript called "The Revelation of James" tells a fictional story about Mary and her parents Joachim and Ann. The story was probably written around the year 160 a.d. by a non-Jewish Christian.

According to this story, Ann the mother of Mary, was born in Bethlehem, where, years later, Jesus would be born. She married Joachim from Nazareth in Galilee. Their marriage was blessed in many ways. They loved each other very much and over the years
their love only grew stronger.

The couple prospered when they moved to Jerusalem. Joachim, a shepherd who owned a large herd of sheep, was given the task of supplying the temple in Jerusalem with sheep for its sacrifices from his flocks, which grazed in the hills nearby the city.

Unfortunately, after twenty years of marriage Ann and Joachim had no children. They prayed and prayed, and even vowed to dedicate to God any child they would have. Year after year they entered the Temple to plead with God for help. But no child came.

Once, when Joachim went to the Temple for the feast of Dedication, he overheard someone ridiculing him for not being able to father a child. Stung by the remark, he went out into the hill country near Jerusalem where shepherds tended his flocks and cried to God over his disappointment of so many years.

After many days there alone, pouring out the sadness in his heart before God, an angel appeared to Joachim in dazzling light. The vision frightened him, but the angel said: "Don't be afraid. I have come to tell you the Lord has heard your prayers. He knows how good you are and he knows your many years of sorrow for having no child. God will give your wife a child just as he did Sarah, the wife of Abraham, and Anna, the mother of Samuel. Your wife Ann will bear you a daughter. You shall call her Mary and dedicate her to God, for she will be filled with the Holy Spirit from her mother's womb."

"I will give you a sign", the angel continued. "Go back to Jerusalem. You will meet your wife at the Golden Gate, and your sorrow will be turned into joy."

Meanwhile, Ann, not knowing where her husband had gone, grew anxious and afraid. She, too, was hurt that she had no children and felt as though she were being punished by God. Going into the garden, she noticed some sparrows building a nest in a laurel tree, for it was springtime, and she began to cry: "Why was I born, O Lord? The birds build nests for their young yet I have no child of my own. The animals of the earth, the fish of the sea are fruitful, yet I have nothing. The land produces fruit in due season, but I have no infant to hold in my arms."

Suddenly, the angel of the Lord came to her and said, "Ann, the Lord has heard your prayer. You shall conceive a child whom the whole world will praise. Go to the Golden Gate in Jerusalem and meet your husband there." So she quickly went to the city gate. The two met there and embraced, and joyfully shared the news the angel had given them.

Returning home, Ann conceived and bore a daughter, and called her Mary. Mary was a common name for Jewish women of the time. The name is derived from Miriam, who was the sister of Moses. Perhaps the Jewish people then, longing for someone like
Moses to lead them from their long slavery to foreigners like the Greeks and the Romans, chose that name for so many of their daughters, hoping that a new Moses would come and find another Miriam at his side.

When Mary was three years old, her parents presented her in the Temple in Jerusalem as a gift to the Lord. Their family then lived close by that great center of Jewish life. Even from her first days, Mary as a child seemed to know that her life was to serve God. The temple of God so near her home was a place she loved and there was nowhere else she would rather be.

So as a little girl just three years old, her parents watched her ascend the fifteen great steps to the temple courtyard and
approach the altar of sacrifice. God was there and she wished to be near him. And that is what her parents, Ann and Joachim wished, that their daughter be near her God. The early story says that Mary spent most of her childhood in that holy place.

When Mary was 14, the age Jewish girls married at that time, she wondered what her future would be. Her parents knew their child had a special place in God's plan, but what it was they did not know. They began to arrange for her marriage, as customary in those days, and sought advice from the Jewish high priest himself.

After praying for guidance, the high priest called every unmarried man from the tribe of David to come to the temple
with a branch from the fields and lay it on the altar. The one whose branch flowered, he decided, would marry Mary.

Joseph was among those who came at the high priest's call, but he brought no branch with him. Yet God pointed him out as the one who should be Mary's husband. When Joseph finally placed a branch on the altar, it immediately flowered. The two were betrothed in marriage and Mary returned to her parent's home at Nazareth to wait some months and to prepare for the wedding.

While she was there, the angel Gabriel appeared to her and announced that she was to be the mother of Jesus. By the power of the Holy Spirit she conceived the Child.

After Jesus was born, Mary and Joseph returned to Nazareth where they would live and bring up their young son. Ann and Joachim visited them there and helped to care for the child. They told Jesus many stories about Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, Moses and the ten commandments. They watched Jesus play and walk, they fed him his favorite meals, bathed him, and gently rocked him to sleep.

When Ann and Joachim died, or where, we do not know, none of the ancient stories tell us. But a later tradition says, and we can believe that it is true, that Jesus was with Ann and Joachim when they passed away.

The story of Jesus' mother and grandmother as written in the Gospel of James was very popular among early Christians. It had a great influence on Christian worship, art and devotion.

Around the year 550 a church in honor of Saint Ann was built in Jerusalem near the temple area on the site where Ann, Joachim and their daughter Mary were believed to have lived. In the 6th century the churches in the East celebrated two Feasts honoring Mary based on the story: Mary's birth and her presentation in the Temple.

Since the 7th century the Greek and Russian Churches have celebrated feasts in honor of Saint Joachim and Ann, the conception of Saint Ann, and the feast of Saint Ann. The western churches have celebrated the feast of Saint Ann since the 16th century.

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[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/03/2007 23.27]

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