Godzdogz

People are often quite surprised to discover that when Bl Pier Giorgio Frassati became a Dominican tertiary he took the name Girolamo Savonarola. On the face of it, their personalities and character are quite different, and while Bl Pier Giorgio could certainly be boisterous, he certainly does not seem to have the kind of temperament that one would associate with Savonarola. Read more

I know of few people who have loved Christ so much as to take a blade to their heart and inscribe the Holy Name of Jesus in their blood upon their breast. Blessed Henry Suso is one of them.  Read more

Ambrose of Milan: what sort of personality hides behind this name? Pastoral bishop, monastic doctor, poet, or political agitator? The breadth of his achievement is outstanding, particularly if we consider the troubled times he lived in. For he lived in the same century that had earlier seen Emperor Constantine’s publication of the Edict of Milan which allowed Christians to build churches and worship freely. Despite this, the Roman Empire was still deeply divided: politically, between East and West, but also religiously, between Christians and pagans, between Arians, who rejected the Council of Nicaea, and Catholics who accepted its Trinitarian teaching. Read more

This series begins, in a way, in our own country, for it was St Gregory the Great who dispatched St Augustine to England on mission. According to Bede in his Ecclesiastical History, it was as Gregory was walking through the slave markets of Rome that he encountered some Angles, and was then heard to say Non Angli, sed angeli, They are not Angles, but Angels. Anyone who has such an exalted view of the distant antecedents of today’s inhabitants of Britain can’t be too bad. Read more

Our Christmas break is over now, and so we start a new series for the coming term on the eight traditional Doctors of the Church: four from the West (Gregory, Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome) and four from the East (John Chrysostom, Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, and Athanasius). Each week the student brothers will give a short biography of the saint, as well as hopefully giving some kind of idea about their theology. 2018 also marks the sixtieth anniversary of the death of Pope Pius XII, and so throughout the year we’ll be producing a more informal series looking at the teaching documents of Pius XII. His encyclical letters tend to be quite short and he wrote on almost everything from ecclesiology to marriage. Read more

‘Remember us, O Lord, in thy goodwill to thy people, visit us with thy salvation, that we may see the good of thy chosen, the joy of thy nation, that thou mayest be praised with thine inheritance. Give glory to the Lord for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever.’ Read more