Monthly Archives: August 2006

EXCERPT:
The verb foveo signifies in its basic meaning “to warm, to keep warm”. By extension it means “to cherish, foster any thing”. Interestingly, when applied to physical things and, for example, diseases it can be “to foment (whether with warm or cold remedies).” I think we have all heard tales (or maybe some of you readers have experienced yourselves) the various remedies of yesteryear. If you had “the grip” you would be smeared with a poultice or a cataplasm of something like hot goose grease. Then you would be wrapped up to bake under so many blankets that you felt rather like a combination of St. Lawrence and St. Margaret Clitherow. It is interesting that foveo is used in relationship with remedium. Concerning other physical things, foveo is used for holding a child on one’s lap, or staying warm while wintering in a military camp. In regard to mental things, foveo is as you might suspect, “to cherish, caress, love, favor, support, assist, encourage”. Continue reading →

EXCERPT:
Let me ask you. What would the last thirty some years have been like if we had had better translations all along? What would our Church be like today had the mandate of the Council to maintain Latin been obeyed? Would we have a different sense of our identity as Catholics? Would those things have helped us better influence the society we live in? Would we be better prepared to handle the pressures of daily life? Would so many people, including clergy, have been acquiescent in the face of popular cultural trends and the destruction of our education system? I think much of what we see going on today could have been averted. We can’t know anything for sure, but I have little doubt that things would have been very different indeed. This is because I believe that the true Actor at Mass is Christ Jesus the High Priest. Mass is effective and nourishing. Had things been in better shape, Catholics would be different today. Lex orandi, lex credendi! The way we pray has a reciprocal relationship with what we believe. Continue reading →

EXCERPT:
Care with the word “values” must reflect the present growing awareness of the Church’s growing conflict with relativism. Benedict XVI has already spoken eloquently and more than once about the threats we in the Church face from religious/secular relativism, the reduction of the supernatural to the natural, caving in to “the world”. “The world” has its Prince who still dominates it until Christ the King comes again. St. Paul wrote to the Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (12:2 – RSV). Christ put His Apostles on guard about “the world”: “The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify of it that its works are evil” (John 7:7). When what “the world” has to give is given preeminence over what God has to give through His Church, we have the crisis Pope Paul VI described on the ninth anniversary of his coronation (29 June 1972): “da qualche fessura sia entrato il fumo di Satana nel tempio di Dio… through some crack the smoke of Satan has entered into the temple of God”. Today’s Collect, properly translated, is a spiritual safeguard for the vicissitudes of “the world”. Continue reading →