I’m on my way to FCO from ORY.
This afternoon, Mass at SS. Trinità and then a serious Roman supper.
Then the work begins.
UPDATE:
Arrived.
Traffic was chaos at the Porta Capena and there is a demonstration at P.za Santi Apostoli… situation normal. Now to Ss. Trinità and Mass.
Some years ago I posted a “Patristic Rosary Project”. Here is the post for the…
2nd Glorious Mystery: The Ascension
Everything about the life of the Lord is a blessing for us. After His resurrection the Lord blessed the Apostles with His presence, gloriously risen. When His earthly work with them was completed, He very explicitly blessed them. “Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven.” (Luke 24:50-51). Even the Lord’s departure from us was a blessing and it occurred in the midst of Christ’s explicit blessing of His apostles. Venerable Bede (+735) speaks of the Lord’s blessing:
Our Redeemer appeared in the flesh to take away sins, remove what humans deserved because of the first curse, and grant believers an inheritance of everlasting blessing. He rightly concluded all that He did in the world with words of blessing. He showed that He was the very one of whom it was said, “For indeed He who gave the law will give a blessing.” (Ps 83:8 Vulgate) It is appropriate that He led those who He blessed out to Bethany, which is interpreted “house of obedience”. Contempt and pride deserved a curse, but obedience deserved a blessing. The Lord Himself was made obedient to His Father even unto death, so that He might restore the lost grace of blessing to the world. He gives the blessing of heavenly life only to those who strive in the holy Church to comply with the divine commands. [Homilies on the Gospels 11.15]
Remember that for Bede, like most of the Fathers, the details have spiritual meanings. Even the place to which the Lord led the Apostles meant something:
We must not pass over the fact that Bethany is on the slope of the Mount of Olives. Just as Bethany represents a Church obedient to the commands of the Lord, so the Mount of Olives quite fittingly represents the very Person of our Lord. Appearing in the flesh, he excels all the saints, who are simply human beings, by the loftiness of His dignity and the grace of His spiritual power.
St. Cyril of Alexandria (+444) speaks of the blessing the Lord confers:
Having blessed them and gone ahead a little, he was carried up into heaven so that He might share the Father’s throne even with the flesh that was united to Him. The Word made this new pathway for us when He appeared in human form. After this, and in due time, He will come again in the glory of His Father with the angels and will take us up to be with Him. Let is glorify Him.
We may not at all times remember that even at this very instant our human nature is, in the divine Person of Our Lord, seated at the right hand of the Father. We are therefore in a state of “already but not yet”: humanity is enthroned in heaven sharing something of God’s glory, and yet we are still here, awaiting the final realization of all Christ accomplished. St. Leo the Great (+461) pries this open:
Dearly beloved, through all this time between the resurrection of the Lord and His ascension, the providence of God thought of this, taught this and penetrated their eyes and hearts. He wanted them to recognize the Lord Jesus Christ as truly risen, who was truly born, truly suffered and truly died. The manifest truth strengthened the blessed apostles and all the disciples who were frightened by His death on the
There are many images of the Lord’s Ascension to heaven.
The one’s I like the most are the medieval depictions which show the Apostles and Mary looking up and all you see above are a pair of lordly Feet.
There is a good reflection at the site Ignatius Insight, which provides an excerpt from “The Ascension: The Beginning of a New Nearness,” from Joseph Ratzinger’s Images of Hope: Meditations on Major Feasts (Ignatius Press, 2006). My emphases and comments:
You are surely familiar with all those precious, naïve images in which only the feet of Jesus are visible, sticking out of the cloud, at the heads of the apostles. The cloud, for its part, is a dark circle on the perimeter; on the inside, however, blazing light. It occurs to me that precisely in the apparent naïveté of this representation something very deep comes into view. All we see of Christ in the time of history are his feet and the cloud. His feet—what are they?
We are reminded, first of all, of a peculiar sentence from the Resurrection account in Matthew’s Gospel, where it is said that the women held onto the feet of the Risen Lord and worshipped him. As the Risen One, he towers over earthly proportions. We can still only touch his feet; and we touch them in adoration. Here we could reflect that we come as worshippers, following his trail, close to his footsteps. Praying, we go to him; praying, we touch him, even if in this world, so to speak, always only from below, only from afar, always only on the trail of his earthly steps. At the same time it becomes clear that we do not find the footprints of Christ when we look only below, when we measure only footprints and want to subsume faith in the obvious. The Lord is movement toward above, and only in moving ourselves, in looking up and ascending, do we recognize him.
When we read the Church Fathers something important is added. The correct ascent of man occurs precisely where he learns, in humbly turning toward his neighbor, to bow very deeply, down to his feet, down to the gesture of the washing of feet. It is precisely humility, which can bow low, that carries man upward. This is the dynamic of ascent that the feast of the Ascension wants to teach us.
From Deseret News:
NEW YORK — The Rev. Martin Schlag is a trained economist as well as a Catholic moral theologian, and when he first read some of Pope Francis’ powerful critiques of the current free market system he had the same thought a lot of Americans did: “Just horrible.”
But at a meeting on Monday at the Harvard Club, Schlag, an Austrian-born priest who teaches economics at an Opus Dei-run university in Rome, reassured a group of Catholics, many from the world of business and finance, that Francis’ views on capitalism aren’t actually as bad as he feared.
“You can get the impression that the pope is against capitalism,” said Schlag, who heads the Markets, Culture and Ethics Research Centre at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, located near the Vatican.
But he explained that what Francis — the first Latin American pope — understands as capitalism is in fact the “crony capitalism” that is found in the pontiff’s native Argentina and much of Latin America. Schlag defined “crony capitalism” as “a form of capitalism where people get rich not because of their work but because of their friendships and political connections and the privileges they have.”
That is quite different from the American system, he said.
“Does the pope understand the United States? I think he doesn’t know the United States,” said Schlag, who is also an adviser to the Vatican department that deals with social and economic issues.
Schlag’s view that Francis is conditioned by his Argentine experience is shared by many who seek to contextualize the pope’s criticisms, but it is not shared by all those who know the pope.
“Of course he knows” the U.S. because he has been meeting with U.S. bishops for years, and even more frequently since he became pope, Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras, a senior adviser to Francis, said during a visit to Washington last month. [So… His Holiness knows about economics in these USA because he has been meeting with US bishops?]
“He knows the Americans and he knows the culture as well,” said Rodriguez Maradiaga, who is also an outspoken critic of U.S.-style capitalism. [I am eager to see this knowledge of (USA) Americans made manifest!]
Still, Schlag said he believes that the pontiff’s Sept. 22-27 visit to the U.S., his first to the country, will be an opportunity for Francis to learn more about America and to appreciate the positive aspects of what Schlag said is the most successful economy in history.
[…]
Read the rest over there.
We know with holy and Catholic Faith that what was not assumed, was not redeemed (St. Gregory of Nazianzus – +389/90).
Our humanity, both body and soul, was assumed by the Son into an unbreakable bond with His divinity.
When Christ rose from the tomb, our humanity rose in Him.
When He ascended to heaven, so also did we ascend.
In Christ, our humanity now sits at the Father’s right hand. His presence, there, is our great promise and hope, here. It is already fulfilled, but not yet in its fullness. That hope informs our trials in this life.
The liturgical celebration of Ascension by the Latin Church has become a little confused in recent years.
In the post-Conciliar calendar used with the Novus Ordo editions of the Missale Romanum for this coming Sunday we ought – in my opinion – to be observing the 7th Sunday of Easter. Ascension Thursday should fall, appropriately, on Thursday. However, by the same logical that dislocated Epiphany (“Twelfth Night”) from its proper place twelve days, appropriately, after Christmas, some years ago the Holy See allowed bishops to transfer the celebration of Ascension Thursday to the following Sunday.
I call this liturgical caper “Ascension Thursday Sunday”.
Those who are participating at Holy Mass with the 1962MR avoid all this. Ascension Thursday is, logically, on Thursday.
Since we should, when examining issues, pay attention to cult, code and creed, and since we have looked at the theological point of the liturgical observance of the Ascension (creed and cult) let’s look also at some law (code).
In the 1983 Code of Canon Law, can. 1246, Ascension Thursday is indicated as one of the few Holy Days of Obligation.
Nota bene: There are some dioceses where Ascension Thursday has not been transferred.
Among them are – I believe – Boston, Hartford, New York, Newark, Omaha, and Philadelphia. To be sure, look at your parish bulletin from last Sunday, check your diocese’s newspaper, call your local diocesan chancery, etc. In other words, do some homework if you are not sure.
You fulfill your obligation by going to Mass either Ascension Thursday or the Vigil of Ascension.
I have a separate post about fulfilling one’s obligation for Ascension Thursday when travelling, which may involve being in a place or being from a place where the Thursday obligation remains because Ascension wasn’t, in that place, transferred. Go HERE.
The bishops who did transfer the feast to Sunday were, I am sure, hoping to expose more people to the mystery of the Ascension of the Lord. Probably included in that calculation was also the notion that it is tooo haaard for people to go to Mass also on Thursday. “Mass twice in a week? Tooo haaard!”
I am no doubt under the the influence of having read so much St. Augustine. My present view of humanity suggests that when Holy Mother Church lowers expectations regarding the liturgy, people get the hint and lower their own personal expectations of themselves. They get the hint that the feast just isn’t that important. As a matter of fact, maybe none of this Catholic stuff, with all these rules, is that important. 
This is what happened with lowering expectations about Friday abstinence (hardly anyone pays attention to it anymore), going to confession regularly and confession all mortal sins, the Eucharistic fast, dressing appropriately for Mass, etc. etc. etc. If you change how people pray (or tell them they don’t have to) you change the way people believe. There is a reciprocal relationship between our prayer and our belief. Lex ordandi – Lex credendi.
I am left with the opinion that the option to dislocate such an important and ancient feast falls into the category of a Really Bad Idea™. As a matter of fact, it isn’t a Really Bad Idea™ just because it could undermine our Catholic identity, it is also a Really Bad Idea™ because it smacks of arrogant novelty.
The celebration of Ascension on a particular Thursday is rooted in Scripture. Celebration on Thursday reflects the ancient practice of the Churches of the East and West alike. We read in Holy Scripture that nine days, not six, intervened between the Lord’s physical ascent to the Father’s right hand and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. If Pentecost was the 50th day, seven weeks – as the ancients counted the starting day itself is included so you get 50 rather than 49), then Ascension Thursday was fixed at the 40th day after Easter.
The observance of Ascension Thursday was fixed from about the end of the 4th century. In the Latin West, St. Augustine of Hippo (+430) called it Quadragesima (“fortieth”) Ascensionis. In the Greek East, St. Gregory of Nyssa spoke of it in 388. That’s only a 16 century tradition.
And how, I ask you, is transferring Ascension Thursday to Sunday in conformity with the “spirit of Vatican II” as actually printed in the documents of Vatican II?
Didn’t the Council Fathers in Sacrosanctum Concilium require that in the reform of the liturgy? Check our SC 23.
23. That sound tradition may be retained, and yet the way remain open to legitimate progress Careful investigation is always to be made into each part of the liturgy which is to be revised. This investigation should be theological, historical, and pastoral. Also the general laws governing the structure and meaning of the liturgy must be studied in conjunction with the experience derived from recent liturgical reforms and from the indults conceded to various places. Finally, there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing.
As far as possible, notable d
This morning took us to Saint Etienne-du-mont to visit the church and venerate the tomb (alas, missing most of its borrower), St. Genevieve.
Here you will also find the grave of Pascal and of Racine.
Who wants to do the perfect, and yet smooth, English for us? I did it standing there.
It’s nice to see that people still venerate the saint.
Then across the street to the Pantheon, which I find sort of creepy. Down in the crypt you can find writers such as Voltaire, the horrid Rousseau, Hugo, Dumas… scientists Marie and Pierre Curie, etc.
Voltaire…
Off the the Grand Palais for the Velasquez exhibit. I couldn’t take pictures, but we spent hours. I took lots of notes, as is my wont.
Outside the Grand Palais, there were flowering bushes. Anyone know what this is?
Then onto the Metro for a ride to Saint Denis… heads attached.
Work is being done, but we could still view the vaults.
Not bad.
Tomb on the left, middle, Charles Martel! When shall we see his like again?
Back in town, we went to Saint Sévèrin.
Let’s all play: “What’s Wrong With This Picture?”
Tonight, our final supper in Paris. Tomorrow, off to Roma.
My friend Kishore Jayabalan has a great response to some left-leaning vaticanisti. Take a few minutes. He has good explanations and little bite.
Michael Sean Winters at the National Schismatic Reporter (aka Fishwrap) is upset that over 800 priests and some bishops signed a letter asking that traditional Catholic doctrine be upheld at the next Synod of Bishops.
It’s strange simply to write that.
I can’t help shake the thought that Fishwrap/MSW is not as concerned about marriage as he is about the other stuff that came up at the synod.
Furthermore, and this is a hoot, MSW thinks the bishops and priests should withdraw their signatures from the petition.
HA HA HA HA HA!
All the more reason for priests and bishops to sign. If MSW doesn’t like it, it is probably good for the Church.
Father, follow this link HERE. Go sign.
There is an incredible exhibit at the Musée D’Orsay of Pierre Bonnard.
The exhibit nearly did me in. There were pieces from all over the world, but photos were only possible of those from Paris. I’ll have to share later, because those are on my camera rather than my phone.
By the way… not all museum audio guides are good, but do use the guide at the Musée D’Orsay. It’s helpful. I work museums systematically until I know them well, taking lots of notes and even sketching in my Moleskine books.
A couple famous pieces by Millet. I’ve always liked The Gleaners, with its contrast of abundance and poverty, the mounted horseman in the background.
The Angelus. Millet seems not to have been observant but his grandmother would always stop to pray the Angelus three times a day. That piety shows through here.
From the deck.
I am starting to like Cézanne more and more.
Both Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe in one view.
Break time …. apéro…
Then a visit to the Church of St Thomas Aquinas near the Rue du Bac.
Again, let’s all play “What’s wrong with this picture?”
As one does, we had a stroll in the Tuileries Garden.
Chestnuts are blooming.
We went to the Orangeries to see some Monet, the monumental water lily and pond panels from 1927, in two oval rooms that represent infinity.
I didn’t realize that there was such a good collection there.
A visit to the Madaleine.
It is a great barn of the place, but it tells you something about the Catholicism of its era.
Then to Our Lady of Victories.
There were zillions of people in church praying the Rosary.
Also in the church were relics of St. Therese and, in a small chapel soon to be saints, Martin and Zelie.
In the even we took care of a Bresse chicken.
Next… an exhibit of Velasquez!
Coat of Arms by D Burkart
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