At the National Catholic Register, Steven Greydanus took aim at a favourite Catholic legend: that St Nicholas, the origin of Santa Claus, punched the heretic Arius in the face. For one thing, said Greydanus, the story is very doubtful: its earliest records date from the 14th century. Even those accounts say Nicholas punched not Arius himself, but “a certain Arian”.
There’s another reason to give the legend a rest: “It’s perilously easy to embrace this irascible anecdote as cover for irascible tendencies on our own parts for which we would certainly not be vindicated by Our Lord and Our Lady.” Getting angry at people is easy; Jesus’s teachings about gentleness, turning the other cheek and “loving and praying for your enemies” are harder.
From attraction to deep misgivings
At First Things, Matthew Schmitz told the story of how he changed his mind about Pope Francis. His first feeling, in 2013, was “an instinctive attraction to the new Pope”. He loved Laudato Si’. In 2013, when the Pope said that Catholics shouldn’t just denounce abortion and gay marriage, Schmitz compared Francis’s teaching methods to Jesus’s, writing: “The point here is not to compromise on or back away from truth, but rather to reject its caricature.”
But looking back now, Schmitz said, this kind of statement “makes me grit my teeth”. The family synod and Amoris Laetitia changed his view. The attempt to accommodate divorce by reforming the sacraments seemed to lead the Pope “to contradict his predecessors, the faith, and Christ himself”. Other young people, born after the divorce revolution, feel the same. “Francis wants the Church rebuilt to suit the freewheeling ways of the baby boomers,” he said. “It’s no accident that their children don’t like the changes.”
Frodo Baggins, image of the Virgin Mary
At truemyths.org, John Carswell read The Lord of the Rings through a Marian frame. Not that Tolkien’s characters were “allegorical depictions of Mary” – but there were “certain resemblances”. Tolkien himself referred to Mary as the one “upon which all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded”. He also admitted a resemblance between Mary and the elf Galadriel – though
Galadriel was not sinless.
Among Tolkien’s other creations are Varda, “Queen of the Stars”: when Sam Gamgee is attacked by a giant spider, he cries out to her and is suddenly protected – recalling “the invocation of Mary by countless Christians over the centuries”.
And Frodo, in his way, is Marian. “Like Mary at the Annunciation, when faced with the prospect of a task seemingly beyond his stature and capability, Frodo proved himself to have a greater heart than any of the great ones gathered around him.” His acceptance of providence, in the face of pain and suffering, means that he “crushes the head of Sauron, much like Mary, as the New Eve, crushed the head of the Serpent”.
✣Meanwhile…
✣ A Spanish cardinal has told the story of how he once rescued a woman working in a brothel. The brothel had confiscated the woman’s passport to force her to work there. She met Cardinal Carlos Osoro Sierra by chance outside a hospital, and asked for his help.
“I went dressed as a bishop, and at first I felt an absolute and great silence in the place where I entered. It was not exactly a place of prayer,” Cardinal Sierra told romereports.com. When he arrived, he was told to wait. “I ordered a beer and waited there for her, in a silence that was so thick one could almost cut it.
“Then she came down and I asked the boss for the passport of the girl. I said I would not make any complaint if they gave it to me. After a while, they gave me the passport.” He is still in touch with her today.
✣ A cloistered nun has obtained a doctorate in aerospace engineering. Before joining the Benedictine Sisters of the Reparation of the Holy Face last year, Sister Benedicta studied for her PhD at the Defence Institute of Advanced Technology in Pune, 90 miles from Bombay.
She was researching scramjet engines, which are used mainly in hypersonic and space vehicles. She was given permission to leave the convent to receive the doctorate.
✣The week in quotations
Every full ‘Yes’ to God gives origin to a new history Pope Francis Angelus address on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception
The phrases ‘reign of terror’ and ‘Vatican martial law’ are … bandied around Edward Pentin On the atmosphere in the Roman Curia, Regina Magazine interview
He doesn’t seem rattled by that sort of thing Archbishop Mark Coleridge On the Pope and his critics, America magazine interview
I am obsessed by the spiritual Martin Scorsese Interview with La Civiltà Cattolica
✣Statistic of the week
82 The height in feet of the Christmas tree in St Peter’s Square Source: cruxnow.com
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