『Catholic Saints & Feasts』のカバーアート

Catholic Saints & Feasts

Catholic Saints & Feasts

著者： Fr. Michael Black
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概要

 "Catholic Saints & Feasts" offers a dramatic reflection on each saint and feast day of the General Calendar of the Catholic Church. The reflections are taken from the four volume book series: "Saints & Feasts of the Catholic Calendar," written by Fr. Michael Black.

These reflections profile the theological bone breakers, the verbal flame throwers, the ocean crossers, the heart-melters, and the sweet-chanting virgin-martyrs who populate the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church.Copyright Fr. Michael Black キリスト教 スピリチュアリティ 聖職・福音主義
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  • February 22: Chair of Saint Peter, Apostle

    February 22: Chair of Saint Peter, Apostle
    2025/02/22
    February 22: Chair of Saint Peter, Apostle
    Feast; Liturgical Color: White

    The gift of authority serves order and truth in the Church

    It’s unusual to have a feast day for a chair. When we think of a chair, perhaps we think of a soft recliner into which our body sinks as if into a warm bath. Or our mind turns to a classroom chair, a chair in a waiting room, or one at a restaurant. But the chair the Church commemorates today is more like the heroic-sized marble chair which holds the giant body of President Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. We commemorate today a chair like the judge’s in a courtroom or that unique high-backed chair called a throne. These are not ordinary chairs. They are seats of authority and judgment. They hold power more than people. We stand before them while their occupants sit. Judges and kings retire or die, but chairs and thrones remain to hold their successors. The Nicene Creed even describes Jesus as “seated” at God’s right hand. The fuller, symbolic meaning of the word “chair” is what today’s feast commemorates.

    Against the farthest wall of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome is not a statue of Saint Peter, as one might imagine, but a heroic-sized sculpture framing a chair. To celebrate the Chair of St. Peter is to celebrate the unity of the Church. The chair is a symbol of Saint Peter’s authority, and that authority is not meant for conquest like military power. Ecclesiastical authority is directed toward unity.

    Jesus Christ could have gathered an unorganized group of disciples united only by their common love of Him. He didn’t. He could have written the Bible Himself, handed it to His followers, and said, “Obey this text.” He didn’t. Jesus called to Himself, by name, twelve men. He endowed them with the same powers He possessed and left this organized band of brothers as an identifiable, priestly fraternity specifically commissioned to baptize and to preach. In North Africa at the time of Saint Augustine, twelve co-consecrating bishops were canonically required at the ordination of a bishop, mirroring “The Twelve” called by Christ. What a profound liturgical custom! Today the Church requires only three co-consecrators.

    What is even more striking about Christ’s establishment of an orderly Church structure is its double organizing principle. The Twelve’s headship over the many is itself subjected to the headship of Saint Peter. He is the keeper of the keys, the rock upon which the Lord built His Church. This all makes sense. What good would a constitution be without a Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes over its interpretation? Any authoritative text needs a living body to stand over it to arbitrate, interpret, and define, with authority equal to the text itself, any and all misinterpretations, confusions, or honest disputes. Just as a constitution needs a court, the Bible needs a Magisterium. And that Magisterium, in turn, needs a head as well.

    The authority of the papal office, doctrinally, is a negative charism preserving the Church from teaching error. It is not a guarantee that the pope will teach, explain, or live the faith perfectly. Christ guaranteed that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church. That’s a negative promise. But this promise also prophesies that the Office of Peter will be a lightning rod absorbing strikes from the forces of evil, that this Church, and no other, will be the target of the darkest of powers. A real Church has real enemies.

    The Church has never had an Office of Saint Paul. When the person of Paul disappeared, so did his specific role. But the Office of Peter continues, as does the Office of all the Apostles. In other words, the Church has both a foundation and a structure built on that foundation. And authority in that structure is not transmitted personally, from father to son or from one family to the next. Authority attaches to the Office of St. Peter and endows its occupant with the charisms promised by Christ to Saint Peter. And this charism will endure until the sun sets for the last time. As long as there is a Church, it will teach objective truth guaranteed by objective leadership. And that leadership, symbolized in the Chair of St. Peter, is directed toward unity. One Lord. One faith. One Shepherd. One flock. The united fabric of the Church, so fought for, so torn, so necessary, is what we honor today.

    God in Heaven, we thank You for the ordered community of faith we enjoy in the Church. Saint Peter guided the early Church and guides Her still, ensuring that we remain one, holy, catholic, and apostolic until the end of time. Continue to grace Your Church with the unity so necessary to accomplish Her mission on earth.
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    6 分
  • February 21: Saint Peter Damian, Bishop and Doctor

    February 21: Saint Peter Damian, Bishop and Doctor
    2024/02/18
    February 21: Saint Peter Damian, Bishop and Doctor
    1007–1072
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet on Lenten Weekday)
    Patron Saint of Faenza and Font-Avellana, Italy

    A wise monk becomes a Cardinal and thunders for reform

    Every Catholic knows that the Pope is elected by, and from, the Cardinals of the Church gathered in the Sistine Chapel. Every Catholic knows that the Pope then goes to a large balcony perched high in the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica to greet the faithful and receive their acceptance. This is simply the way things are done in the Church. But it’s not the way things were always done. A Catholic in the early Middle Ages would have described a papal election as something like a bar room brawl, a knife fight, or a political horse race replete with bribes, connivings, and promises made just to be broken. Everyone—far-off emperors, the nobility of Rome, military generals, influential laity—tried to steer the rudder of the Church in one direction or another. Papal elections were deeply divisive and caused lasting damage to the Body of Christ. Then along came Saint Peter Damian to save the day.

    Saint Peter headed a group of reform-minded Cardinals and others who decided in 1059 that only Cardinal Bishops could elect the Pope. No nobles. No crowds. No emperors. Saint Peter wrote that the Cardinal Bishops do the electing, the other clergy give their assent, and the people give their applause. This is exactly the program the Church has followed for almost a thousand years.

    Today’s saint sought to reform himself first, and then to pull every weed that choked life from the healthy plants in the garden of the Church. After a difficult upbringing of poverty and neglect, Peter was saved from destitution by an older brother named Damian. Out of gratitude, he added his older brother’s name to his own. He was given an excellent education, in which his natural gifts became apparent, and then entered a strict monastery to live as a monk. Peter’s extreme mortifications, learning, wisdom, uninterrupted life of prayer, and desire to right the ship of the Church put him into contact with many other Church leaders who desired the same. Peter eventually was called to Rome and became a counselor to a succession of popes. Against his will, he was ordained a Bishop, made a Cardinal, and headed a diocese. He fought against simony (the purchasing of church offices), against clerical marriage, and for the reform of papal elections. He also thundered, in the strongest language, against the scourge of homosexuality in the priesthood.

    After being personally involved in various ecclesiastical battles for reform, he requested leave to return to his monastery. His request was repeatedly denied until finally the Holy Father let him return to a life of prayer and penance, where his primary distraction was
    carving wooden spoons. After fulfilling a few more sensitive missions to France and Italy, Peter Damian died of fever in 1072. Pope Benedict XVI has described him as "one of the most significant figures of the eleventh century...a lover of solitude and at the same time a fearless man of the Church, committed personally to the task of reform." He died about one hundred years before Saint Francis of Assisi was born, yet some have referred to him as the Saint Francis of his age.

    More than two hundred years after our saint’s death, Dante wrote his Divine Comedy. The author is guided through paradise and sees a golden ladder, lit by a sunbeam, stretching into the clouds above. Dante begins to climb and meets a soul radiating the pure love of God. Dante is in awe that the heavenly choirs have fallen silent to listen to this soul speak: "The mind is light here, on earth it is smoke. Consider, then, how it can do down there what it cannot do up here with heaven’s help." God is unknowable even in heaven itself, so how much more unfathomable must He be on earth. Dante drinks in this wisdom and, transfixed, asks this soul its name. The soul then describes its prior earthly life: “In that cloister I became so steadfast in the service of our God that with food seasoned just with olive-juice lightheartedly I bore both heat and cold, content with thoughtful prayers of contemplation. I was, in that place, Peter Damian.” Dante is among refined company in the loftiest ranks of heaven with today’s saint.

    Saint Peter Damian, you never asked of others what you did not demand of yourself. You even endured the detraction and calumny of your peers. Help us to reform others by our example, learning, perseverance, mortifications, and prayers.
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    6 分
  • Ash Wednesday Reflection

    Ash Wednesday Reflection
    2026/02/18
    Ash Wednesday
    Forty-six days before Easter
    Liturgical Color: Violet

    Without God we are a tiny pile of crumbs

    The marauding pirates of the high seas had their tough skin inked with tattoos. Roman soldiers smothered their bodies in oil before a battle. Primitive peoples ritually paint a warrior’s face before a fight, stretch earlobes with hoops, or pierce noses with large rings. When American Indians wanted to emulate the ferocity or speed of an animal, a sharp bone fragment was used to carve that creature’s outline into their skin, where it was stained with dye or soot. Traditionally, when a simple man wanted to announce what tribe he ran with, what nation he would die for, or what woman he would defend, he didn’t need to say a word. He just lifted up his shirt a bit, rolled up his sleeve, or pointed to a mark on his neck. Clothes, hairstyle, and cosmetics communicate status, origin, belonging, and commitment well. But they can all be removed or changed. Tattoos, scalpings, piercings, brands, paints, and scars use the body as their canvas to permanently convey what words cannot.

    On Ash Wednesday, Catholics receive a temporary ash “tattoo” of a cross just above their eyes and nose. This primal gesture evokes the raw, uncomplicated, religious devotion at the core of our otherwise sophisticated theology. The Church consecrates the body externally with water and oil in Baptism, Confirmation, and Anointing of the Sick. The Church reads Saint Thomas Aquinas, sings refined Latin chant, and prays before luminous stained glass. And it also smudges black ashes on our faces. Real religions do things like this. A real religion has priests who smear your face with dirty ash as they whisper, “You’re gonna die.”

    Man’s earthly end, the separation of soul and body, could have come about in many ways. But due to original sin, this end always comes through death. Death is a punishment for Adam and Eve’s sin of pride in eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. This sin is not original in the sense of being authentic or unrepeatable, but in that it occurred at our common origin. As a permanent repercussion of His punishment, God made work burdensome and instituted death as the mysterious doorway through which all must walk to exit earthly life. God told this to our common parents in Genesis 3:19: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The last of these words are repeated to the faithful as the ashes are placed on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday.

    But as these words of death and destruction, of returning to the ground, are spoken, the priest does not trace an ash circle or a black question mark on our foreheads. He traces a cross. In this sign we shall conquer. In no other sign will we conquer. So with death comes a promise. With the old Adam there comes a new Adam—Jesus Christ. This is how Jesus was first understood in the early Church. Mary was the New Eve. Christ was the New Adam. They untied the knot our remote ancestors had tied. They were faithful where Adam and Eve were unfaithful. They kept the promise Adam and Eve had broken.

    The start of the forty days of Lent is a practice run. One day, we will all have to give an accounting of our lives. The balance sheet will have to be settled, the good and the bad weighed in their columns. Ash Wednesday is a reminder of something we know but don’t call to mind often enough. Without God all that remains of our greatness is a little pile of dust. We are, in a sense, marked with ourselves today. The tiny black crumbs of ash will fall away in a matter of hours, to be forgotten for another year. And life will go on. Such is our destiny. With God, everything. Without God, nothing.

    God of all, we ask that we live a fruitful Lent starting on this Ash Wednesday. Help us to be faithful to our promises of penance, sacrifice, and repentance for past sins. May we see in the ashes of today our true nature without You. May we see in the cross our true destiny with You.
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    6 分
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