A very merry, holy and joyous Christmas to all our readers! The twelve days of Christmas traditionally goes until the solemnity of the Epiphany, on January 6th (in Canada, as with so many of our feasts, transferred to the nearest Sunday). But Christmas began yesterday, so continue the celebration! But to the point at […]
I try, in some small way, and not, I must admit, very well, to resist the celebration of Christmas before Christmas. I know this is a weathered lament, but one that merits restating: We prepare for Christ in the season of Advent, and we celebrate his arrival with Christmas. The zeitgeist of the age, outside […]
*The photo op of Justin Trudeau and Kathleen Wynne welcoming Syrian refugees at Pearson airport warmed the cockles of many hearts. There was Prime Minister Trudeau, offering a parka to one poor soul stepping off the plane, stating the obvious that ‘it gets cold in Canada’. No kidding, eh? And the current refugees are being […]
*Today is the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, declared patroness of the Americas, and bumped up to a feast day, by Pope Saint John Paul II. The image left on the tilma in those December days of 1531 resist scientific explanation to this day. No one knows why the frail tilma has not decomposed, […]
It is fitting on this feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of life, that we offer a hearty and warm congratulations to Father Alphonse de Valk who yesterday celebrated 50 years a priest. Father de Valk, a faithful member of the Congregation of Saint Basil, and the founder and editor-emeritus of both the Interim […]
*Buried in the headlines is the notice that at least 30 Afghanis are dead, killed in an attack by the Taliban at Kandahar airport. God rest their souls, and so goes life if you are unfortunate enough to live in a fundamentalist Islamic backwater almost devoid of the rule of law, except so-called Sharia ‘law’. […]
*Today is the memorial of Saint John Damascene, who lived in what is in now Syria and died on this day in 749, in a land that even back then, in the early days of Muslim expansion, lived under Islamic domination. A polymath, gifted in many subjects, he was a great foe of the then-rampant […]
On his recent visit to our college this summer, the Jesuit scholar Father Koterski mentioned a book that he described as the ‘most influential he has ever read’, his fellow Jesuit’s Father Paul Quay’s “The Mystery Hidden for Ages in God”. Upon his effusive recommendation, I made a resolve to read the book, and this […]
Today is the feast of Saint Andrew, Apostle, brother of Saint Peter, patron of Scotland, Russia, Ukraine and Greece, for what reason are somewhat historically obscure. Here is the Wikipedia take on the matter, whether accurate or not, it fits: According to legend, in 832 AD, Óengus II led an army of Picts and Scots into battle against the Angles, led by […]
I am not surprised: Peter Jackson now admits that he made up the Hobbit trilogy more or less as it went along. From the very start, I was suspicious of taking a relatively small children’s book (we would say ‘young adult’ nowadays, I suppose), and making a full three two-plus hour movies out if such […]