Bishop Javier Ecchevaria Rodgriguez, the Prelate of the personal prelature Opus Dei, died yesterday of complications arising from pneumonia. He had been chosen personally by Saint Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, to lead the worldwide lay apostolate, which fosters piety, spirituality in its members. Bishop Rodriguez oversaw Opus Dei from 1994 until his […]
We celebrate Our Lady of Guadalupe today, a commemoration elevated to a feast on the eve of the Third Millennium by Pope John Paul II, who also declared her patroness of all of ‘America’, south, central, and north. Appearing to (now saint) Juan Diego in 1531, while the Protestant ‘Reformation’ was wreaking havoc across the […]
I am the Immaculate Conception These are the words Our Lady said to Saint Bernadette Sobirous, when asked by the young saint who she was. This was in 1858, four years after Pope Blessed Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, with the bull Ineffabilis Deus, on this day, December 8th, 1854, […]
Today is the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception (see my post above), so it as with some dismay that I read this lead article on this glorious morning, a male teacher at an elite private school in British Columbia, fired for uttering four words that may soon become illegal: “I am against abortion”. He was […]
Today is the feast of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a woman ‘renowned for her learning’, put to death as a virgin martyr in 305 under Emperor Maximiam (whose wife the saint converted, and who was also thereby condemned). The emperor brought in the best and brightest pagan philosophers to convince Catherine of the folly of […]
Today is the feast of Saint Caecelia, a young virgin martyr in Rome, put to death either in the late second or early third century. She was married, against her will, during which ceremony she ‘sang in her heart to the Lord’. For that one phrase, she was adopted as the patroness of music (her […]
Saint Albert was called the ‘great’ even during his lifetime, rumoured to have known everything there was to be known, which may have been sort of possible in the early thirteenth century. He certainly wrote on almost every subject, and his insights provided much of the basis of what we now know as ‘science’. One […]
Today we celebrate Remembrance Day (in the United States, Memorial Day), commemorating the cessation of hostilities in World War I, on the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day, in the eleventh month, with the signing of the Armistice in Germany between 5:12 and 5:20 in the morning, their time (even though the war officially did […]
It will all be over later today, one way or the other, after a bizarre and unenviable election process: The United States of America, still the greatest economic and military force on the planet, at least for now, will have, to all intents and purposes, a new leader, either Mr. Trump or Ms. Clinton, neither […]
There was another earthquake in Italy the other day (October 30th), in the town of Norcia, the birthplace of Saint Benedict, where there are a group of Benedictines, men and women’s Orders, that adhere to the way things were done in the days of their founder in the 6th century. Well, not exactly, since they […]