DEATH MASKS


Ludwig Van Beethoven


John C. Calhoun


Antonio Canova


Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Heinrich Heine


Isaac Newton


Pope Pius IX


Torquato Tasso

REQUIESCAT IN PACE

QUEEN of HEAVEN MAUSOLEUM ~ HILLSIDE IL







A few weeks ago, having a few spare hours on a Sunday afternoon, my girlfriend and I visited Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside. Part of a complex of three contiguous Catholic cemeteries covering an area as large as a small suburb, it includes the largest Catholic mausoleum in the world - a towering structure with two long wings, each three stories tall, its walls and alcoves filled with tombs. Completed in the late 1950s, it was one of the last beautiful ecclesiastical structures built in Chicagoland, with a hauntingly dark chapel and a stately Gothic tower at its center.

Its wings, unfortunately, are filled with a great number of modern stained glass windows and ugly statues, but the quantity of artwork nearly compensates for the lack of quality. Almost every saint, sacred place, biblical story, doctrine, apparition and devotion imaginable has some space dedicated to it; portions of Holy Scripture and the wisdom of the Church Fathers are written in calligraphy on the walls; countless relics are displayed in cases embedded in the masonry. I know of no other place in the area in which a curious neophyte might receive a comprehensive Catholic education, simply by walking around it.

Visitors are advised to bring earplugs; a painfully high-pitched squeal is audible in many parts of the mausoleum; presumably this is some sort of animal repellant.

DIES IRAE ~ W.A. MOZART

NOVEMBER

WITHOUT a SIGNATURE



Orson Welles in F for Fake:

Now this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole western world and it's without a signature. Chartres. A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man. All that’s left, most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked, poor, forked radish. There aren’t any celebrations. Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life... we're going to die. Be of good heart, cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

RELIQUARY OF CARDINAL BESSARION

PATRONISING NONSENSE

C.S. Lewis:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

I read Mere Christianity about years ago, and this most famous paragraph in the book has since remained in my memory. But hearing a friend mention it recently, I remembered something that had occurred to me some time ago. It is a point so obvious that I am amazed that a man of Lewis's intelligence never noticed it:

Take the above paragraph, substitute the words Catholic Church for Jesus and change a few of the nouns accordingly - and the argument still holds. That is to say, the truth claims of Catholic ecclesiology are just as scandalous as those of Christology. To say I'm ready to accept the Catholic Church as a great source of moral and theological wisdom, beauty and holiness, but I don't accept her claim to be the one Holy and Apostolic Church, alone possessing the fullness of truth and the means of salvation is to speak patronising nonsense.

For if the Catholic Church is merely a great source of moral and theological wisdom, beauty and holiness - one of many, of course - then She would not make such a claim and anathemize those who reject it. The Catholic Church, like Christ her head, can be considered to be true, crazy or evil. There is no other option. And Lewis, who of all people should have known better, chose to hold a nonsensical and patronizing great moral teacher view of the Catholic Church throughout his life.

Reflecting on this, I find myself increasingly less offended by anti-Catholicism. Because faced with the truth claims of the Catholic Church, there are only two completely sane responses: conversion and anti-Catholicism. The latter is obviously the wrong response, but it reveals a healthier philosophy than the qualified admiration of certain of our "separated brethren".

The LIFE of JOB

MASTER of the HILDEGARD CODEX









Source.

GOSPELS of HENRY the LION



The Gospels of Henry the Lion (Evangeliar Heinrichs des Löwen) was illuminated at Helmarshausen Abbey for Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony (1142-1195), cousin of Frederick Barbarossa.

The manuscript went to Prague in the late fourteenth century in the reign of Emperor Charles IV, where in 1594 it was given a new cover, commissioned by the dean of the cathedral, Georg Barthold Pontanus von Breitenberg. This is decorated with silver reliefs of the four evangelists and a crystal box containing relics of St Mark and the saintly King Sigismund.

BOG BUTTER


Bog Butter in the Cork Butter Museum

More about bog butter: here, here, here, here and here.

CRKVA SVETOG SAVE

PULPIT in the VIENNA STEPHANSDOM

GREAT CLOCKS of CHRISTENDOM ~ PART XX


In the cloister of Bebenhausen Monastery.


In Cologne.


Delacorte Clock in New York City ~ Central Park. The animals march in circles as nursery rhyme tunes play.


In Nevers Cathedral.


In Sion


In Uppsala Cathedral. Built by Petrus Astronomus in 1506 and destroyed by fire in 1702.

See also parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, *, *, *, *

On NOVELTY

What is genuinely an innovation has a distinct and different identity. This comes about in a being in virtue of having a distinct and different principle or principles. Innovation in ecclesiastical tradition, therefore, is something which does not have the Church as its Mother and the Deposit of Faith as its origin; it is something which therefore must exclude what has come before, and that is why Nicea [II] anathematizes all who despise and reject what is already included in ecclesiastical tradition.

- Source.

SIGN at CLEAR CREEK MONATERY



During my retreat at Clear Creek Monastery in August, I worked on this sign. I lettered the "Construction Site" and "Mass" boards, and painted them.

The PASSION of JOAN of ARC



Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer.

The BOG, the BATMOBILE and the TRIDENTINE MASS







This post sponsored by the Village of Volo Board of Tourism.

MODERN CULTURE is NOT NEUTRAL

Rev. James V. Schall:

[quote]

The study of Tracey Rowland on the relation of culture to Thomism and more particularly to the adequacy of the treatment of culture in Gaudium et spes of Vatican II, however, causes me to reaffirm this position about incompatibility of modern culture and Catholicism but to look at its problematic in quite a new way. I understand that the spirit of renewal has, in effect, insisted that the project be one, wherever possible, of accommodating Catholicism to modernity. It has not been seen, as perhaps it should have been, as a profound critique of modernity itself by Catholicism. Rowland shows quite clearly that serious deficiencies in intellectual acumen were present within Catholicism and in the minds of many fathers in Vatican II. Gaudium et spes’ understanding of how its basic teachings related to a cultural milieu, infused, as it was, with unattended to and alien philosophic premises, was at least innocent, when not positively faulty and erroneous...

What is argued by Rowland is not that Catholic theological and philosophical principles are not in fact directly pertinent to the crisis of both liberalism and post-modernity, but that these principles have not been argued well within the Magisterium or by many of the theologians and philosophers who claim to be following its terms. Not realizing the depths to which a living culture can be penetrated by religious or philosophic principles or ways of acting that prevent any understanding of transcendent principles, an intelligent understanding of Catholicism, using such cultural principles, would be impossible.

The subsequent enthusiasm to conform to or open oneself to modern culture, so much associated with Gaudium et spes, was not, therefore, a project without serious danger to any future of a Catholic culture, let alone to the proper understanding of Catholicism embedded within any culture, even those outside the modern Western orbit. These latter cultures are now themselves increasingly related to modern ideas and practices often summed up, rather naively, under the vague and over-used term globalization. Hence, this analysis of culture has become not merely a problem of the Western tradition, but also it has become a missionary problem in which, as in the case, say, of liberation theology, its very terminology was rooted in this same philosophical problem of culture as articulated in specifically modern philosophy.

The central thesis of this most erudite and well-argued book is, contrary to many assumptions of the Fathers at Vatican II, that modern culture is not neutral but replete with customs, laws, ideas, and assumptions that either are difficult or impossible to reconcile with classical Catholic orthodoxy. This conclusion means that the famous project of opening the Church to specifically modern culture did not and could not result in any new evangelization or success in making Catholicism more acceptable to the modern mind. In fact, this opening to modern culture undermined many of the basic assumptions by which understanding and living the faith was possible. The conversion did not go from modernity to Catholicism, but from Catholicism in modernity, even though many of the words used were traditional ones with a specific theological meanings if understood in their proper contexts.

[end quote]

Read the rest of this essay here.