Episodes

  • The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)

    The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)
    Jun 2 2024
    The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)
    Thursday after Holy Trinity unless otherwise indicated.
    In the U.S, the solemnity is transferred to the Sunday after the Holy Trinity
    Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

    The gift of all gifts

    Standing at the crowded table in the dim candle light of the Upper Room during the Last Supper, Jesus Christ did not hand out Bibles to the Twelve Apostles and solemnly tell them, “Take this, all of you, and read it. This is my book, written for you.” Jesus gives us Himself, not a book. On today’s Feast, we commemorate God’s greatest gift to mankind, the person of Jesus Christ. God gives us His Son, and then Christ gives us Himself, body and blood, soul and divinity, under the accidents of bread and wine in the Holy Eucharist.  Gift, gift-giver, and receiver meld into one in this sacrament of sacraments.

    In the era of the early Church, it was customary for an excess of bread to be consecrated at Mass so that the Eucharist could be carried to the sick who had been unable to attend the Holy Sacrifice. This practice led to the adoption of the pyx as the first sacred vessel for reservation of the Eucharist. Some modern churches pay homage to these Eucharistic origins by hanging an oversized pyx on their wall to use as a tabernacle, imitating the early Church custom. Permanent reservation of the Eucharist led, over the centuries, to enthroning the Lord amidst the greatest splendor in churches. By the early medieval period, the time had long passed when the Eucharist was reserved merely to be brought to the sick. Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, street processions, chants, confraternities, songs, flowers, and all the splendid trappings of a feast day covered this dogma in glory by the High Middle Ages, and continue to wrap it in honor today.

    Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that the most necessary sacrament was Baptism but that the most excellent was the Holy Eucharist. This most excellent sacrament has been, for some, too excellent. In the Gospel of John, when Jesus tells His disciples that they must eat His body and drink His blood, many are incredulous and walk away. But Jesus does not compromise or say He was misunderstood. He lets them keep on walking. This initially hard teaching for the few was destined, over time, to be lovingly welcomed by the many.

    The Old Covenant of the Old Testament was gory. In a kind of primitive liturgy, Moses had goats and sheep slaughtered on an altar and their blood gathered into buckets. He then splashed this blood over the people, sealing their acceptance of the written law. Flying droplets of animal blood splattered against people’s skin to remind them of their promise to God. No such bloody drama breaks out at Sunday Mass. We each bless our head and torso with holy water and receive a pure white host on the tongue. The New Covenant is based not on the blood of goats, bull calves, or on the ashes of a heifer. It is rooted in the generosity of the Son of God, who “offered himself as the perfect sacrifice to God through the eternal Spirit.” Christ’s Covenant with his people is established verbally and liturgically at the Last Supper and physically on the cross the following day. The consecration of the Sacred Species at Mass continues Christ’s physical presence among us, while adoration of the Blessed Sacrament suspends the consecration of the Mass, stretching it out into hours, days, months, and years.

    We naturally desire to leave a part of ourselves to our loved ones. We send photos, solemnly pass on a cherished memento, or give a baby a family name. Soldiers used to carry a locket holding a few strands of their wife’s or girlfriend’s hair. We need to be close, physically close, to those we love in concrete, tangible ways. Jesus desired the same, and, not being constrained by the limitations of human nature, He did the same, and more. He has left us Himself! That dogma processing down the street is a person! And that dogma behind the golden doors of the parish’s tabernacle is the same person! So bend that body low and set that heart on fire, for the Saving Victim opens wide the gate of heaven to all below. We stand as close to Christ in the Holy Eucharist as the Apostles ever did on Mount Tabor.

    Lord of the Eucharist, we venerate You with heads bowed, as the old form of worship gives way to the new. With faith providing for what fails the senses, we honor the Begetter and the Begotten, loving back at what loved us first, apprentices in the school of love.
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    6 mins
  • June 21: Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Religious

    June 21: Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Religious
    Jun 19 2024
    June 21: Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Religious
    1568–1591
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of Catholic youth and plague victims

    Though he had many possessions, he did not go away sad

    The Jesuit Order, from its very founding, had a sharp sense of its educational superiority, its fidelity to the Holy Father, and its mission to educate and spiritually guide the elites among the courts and aristocracies of Europe. The Order did not, however, develop a strong community identity. There were, and are, common houses. But Jesuit communities built on common prayer, meals, and apostolates were rare. Much more common was the Jesuit alone, trekking under the canopy of a Canadian forest, riding the waves like a cork in a boat off the coast of India, or hiking the narrow mountain pathways in the mists of the high Andes. Where there was one Jesuit, there were all Jesuits. Each man embodied his entire Order. It was a community of many ones. Jesuits were united by their vows, their long education, and their common mission.  Actually living, praying, eating, relaxing, and working together, so crucial to the common life of other Orders, did not play an equivalent role among the Jesuits.

    Jesuit superiors were aware of the dangers that isolation might pose to unity. So they encouraged, and even mandated, a means to sew into one fabric the patches of a thousand lives being lived across the globe. Letters! Jesuits were required to write letters to their superiors, giving regular accounts of their work. These letters had to be detailed, instructive, and inspiring. After they were reviewed, the most edifying were published and distributed to Jesuit houses. Through these letters, the Order was made one. Every Jesuit knew what at least some of his brothers were doing for God and the Church. These collections of letters, known as the Jesuit Relations, were eventually distributed beyond the confines of the Order. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Relations were often exciting best sellers recounting the apostolic exploits of isolated Jesuits walking along the rim of Christendom.

    It was just such an inspiring letter, or relation, from India that inspired today’s saint, Aloysius Gonzaga, to become a Jesuit. Saint Aloysius was known to his family as Luigi, Aloysius being the Latinized version of his baptismal name. He was the eldest of seven children born into an aristocratic family from Northern Italy. Kings and Queens and Cardinals and Princes ate at the family table, were family themselves, or were at least friends or acquaintances. Young Luigi knew, and detested, the frivolous existence lived by so many in his aristocratic milieux. He also suffered from various physical infirmities, which produced that vulnerability and perspective which leads so clearly and directly to a deep dependence on God.

    After receiving his First Communion at about the age of twelve, he came to personally know the great future saint Cardinal Charles Borromeo, who would later be his confessor and spiritual director. Borromeo was a Jesuit. His example, together with Aloysius’ reading about the works of Jesuit missionaries, convinced him to enter the Jesuit Novitiate, against his family’s wishes. So Aloysius went to Rome to begin his studies. And there he grew to embrace those of lesser education and refinement than himself. He volunteered to work bringing victims of a plague to a Jesuit hospital, despite his personal revulsion at the patients’ decrepit physical conditions. After his own physical limitations restricted his participation in this corporal work of mercy, he still persevered and insisted on returning to the hospital over his superiors’ objections.

    While working in the hospital, Aloysius contracted the plague from a patient he personally cared for, was incapacitated shortly thereafter, and, a few months later, died on June 21, 1591. He was twenty-three. His reputation for purity, prayerfulness, and suffering led many to consider him a saint soon after his death. Aloysius was beatified just fourteen years later, in 1605, and canonized in 1726. He is buried in the Church of Saint Ignatius of Loyola in Rome. His contribution to the Jesuit canon was not a pagan tribe converted, a new ocean crossed, or an unknown language catalogued. His letter was his life, and it was to die young and to die holy.

    Saint Aloysius, you laid all your treasures, including your youth, on an altar to God. May your example of generosity, and your service to the sick and dying, inspire all Catholic youth to give God the gold of their early years, not just the silver of middle age or the bronze of their retirement.
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    7 mins
  • June 19: Saint Romuald, Abbot

    June 19: Saint Romuald, Abbot
    Jun 13 2024
    June 19: Saint Romuald, Abbot 951–c. 1025 Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White Founder of the Camaldolese Benedictine Order To be alone with God is not to be alone It is easy today to slip down a technological hole into a cave piled high with televisions, video games, and the toys of virtual reality. Many technological “hermits” disappear from meaningful contact with society, and instead marinate, perpetually, in the blue glow of their screens. Retreating from sustained contact with everyday life has always been attractive for a very small number of people. These people are called monks. But a religious monk’s motivation is not isolation for isolation’s sake. Nor is it flight from overwhelming adult responsibilities. Today’s technological monks separate themselves from society for different reasons than a religious monk does. Religious monks were not, and are not, merely recluses with antisocial or introverted personalities. They do not become monks because they are more comfortable playing war on a digital battlefield or retreating into sci-fi universes. Although they may have an innate disposition toward the interior life, religious monks do not enter a monastery primarily to flee, or hide from, something. Instead, they run toward someone—God. A monastery is not a cave. It is an oasis. Monks seek a Christ-centered community where mortification and self-discipline are easier to practice, where a chapel and the Sacraments are always available, and where spiritual direction, Church approval, and the reinforcement of fellow monks assure the community that they are doing the will of God. Since the time of Saint Benedict in the sixth century, there had essentially been only one monastic order in the Latin Rite Church, the Benedictines. Benedictine monasteries shone like stars in a broad constellation, blinking throughout Europe from east to west and north to south. Each monastery and school was like a vertebra strengthening the intellectual and spiritual skeleton of Europe. Over the centuries, however, and inevitably, the Benedictines atrophied, cracked from dryness, and needed new wine poured into their old wineskins. The saint who reformed Benedictine life and who founded the Cistercian Order was Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. But he was not born until 1090. It was today’s saint, Romuald, much less well-known, who cleared the path for Saint Bernard and for the reform of monasticism, ensuring its survival in the middle ages. Saint Romuald was born in the middle of the tenth century in Northern Italy. After his father killed a relative in a duel, Romuald entered a local monastery for a few weeks of penance. But the weeks turned into months and the months into years. He stayed. Unfortunately, the monks were as lukewarm as old bathwater, and Saint Romuald told them so. He had to leave. He put himself under the tutelage of a wise hermit, then traveled to Spain to live as a hermit on the grounds of a Benedictine monastery. He subsequently spent about thirty years walking the length and breadth of Italy. He had acquired a great reputation as an ascetic and master of prayer and so founded, or reformed, various monasteries which sought his assistance. Finally, in 1012, he settled down in Tuscany and established a reformed branch of the Benedictines. The Order was named after the man who granted Saint Romuald the beautiful land on which he first built. The donor’s name was Maldolus, and the new community was thus called the Camaldolese Order. The Order still exists in several countries and continues to attract those few men and women inclined to the radical isolation, prayer, asceticism, and deep hunger for God, which only a hermit’s life can satisfy. Saint Romuald planted the seed of his Order in the Benedictine garden. But Camaldolese monks emphasize solitude more than their monastic cousins. In a typical Benedictine monastery, every single monk places his oar in the water to pull the monastery’s school, or orchard, or farm, forward. The Camaldolese tradition is more hermit based (eremitical) while allowing some community based (cenobitical) life. Camaldolese monks generally live in individual structures but pray the Mass and Liturgy of the Hours together daily in the Church. They live simplicity, penance, and contemplation more intensely due to their total focus on these goals to the exclusion of all outside apostolates. Unlike modernity’s reclusive technological monks enraptured by their screens, the Camaldolese choose to live without phones, the internet, or television. The tabernacle is their screen, and the scene stays the same. With this intense focus on solitude and prayer, Camaldolese monks perpetuate, in their narrow, unique, and faithful way, the vision of their pioneering founder. Saint Romuald, by your intense example of prayer, penance, and solitude, assist all the faithful to put God above all things, to conquer themselves before any other mountain, and so come to know ...
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    7 mins
  • The Most Holy Trinity

    The Most Holy Trinity
    May 26 2024
    First Sunday after Pentecost: The Most Holy Trinity
    Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

    God is more like a family than a monk

    We pray in the “name” of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, not in their “names.” God must logically be only one. To hold that there is a vast government of gods is to hold that two mountains are the tallest in the world, that three oceans are the deepest, and that on four days the sun shone the brightest. Another way to say “God” is to say “the best.” God is the best. And there can only be one “best,” “tallest,” “deepest,” and “brightest.” God is the ultimate superlative adjective whose nature admits of no competing god. Christian monotheism stops us from approaching different gods for different things. We believe in one God with one will, one mind, and one plan for mankind.

    The Holy Trinity, the God of Christianity, is complex. Clear language must be used and clear thinking deployed to grasp the Christian God. There are no backyard garden statues of the Holy Trinity like there are of Saint Francis of Assisi, because the Trinity is cerebral in a way that Saint Francis is not. On this solemnity, we celebrate the dogma of all dogmas because dogma matters. We sing songs to dogma, put flowers on the altar to dogma, and wear our best clothes for dogma. The Church’s thinking about God is not child’s play. Once we accept thoughts, they own us. At some point we no longer choose our thoughts, they choose us. So we must get God right so that we get everything else right—marriage, family, work, love, war, money, philosophy, humor, religion, fun, sports, etc. Bad people can be forgiven, but bad ideas less so. And bad ideas about God are dangerous. They caused skyscrapers to crumble to the ground.

    The Church believes that God is one in His nature and three in His persons. This means that if you were in a pitch-black room and sensed a presence nearby, your first question would be “What is that?” “Is it the dog or the cat, my spouse, or the wind?” If it were God in the darkness, He would answer the question of “what” by saying “I am God.” Satisfied that the presence was a person and not an animal or the wind, the next question would be “Who are you?” And to that question, God would reply in three successive voices: “I am the Father. I am the Son. I am the Holy Spirit.” A nature is the source of operations, but a person does them. A statue has eyes but it is not its nature to see. It is not man’s nature to lay eggs or to breathe under water, but it is the nature of a bird or of a fish to do so. Our nature sets the parameters for what actions are possible for us. The daughter of a lion is a lioness and does what lions do. The son of a man is a man and does what men do. And the Son of God is God and knows, loves, and acts as God does, perfectly.

    Our Trinitarian supernova is both a unity and a plurality, both one and many at the same time. This means that God does not exist alone but in a community of love. God is not narcissistic, admiring his own beauty and perfection. Instead, the love of the Father is directed toward the Son for all eternity. And the love of the Holy Spirit animates, and passes between, the Father and the Son. The Trinity’s three persons do not share portions of the divine nature, they each possess it totally. This theology means, by extension, that because man is made in the image and likeness of God, every person is created in order to model the Trinity by living with, and for, another, just as God does in His inner life. Because God is a Trinity of persons, His perfection is more fully embodied by an earthly community, such as a family, rather than by a lone monk.

    The Trinity is not just scaffolding which obscures the true face of God. Nor are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit three masks which conceal the one face of God. The one God exists as a Trinity. The Church’s belief in God and the Church’s belief in the Trinity stand and fall together. The Trinity is not just the summit of our faith, something we work toward understanding, but also our faith’s foundation. The truth of the Holy Trinity is learned early and often. Our God, distinct in His persons, one in His essence, and equal in His majesty, is solemnly invoked as the water spills on our heads at Baptism and as the oil is traced on our palms at our anointing. God, in all of His complexity and in all of His simplicity, is with us always in this world and, hopefully, in the world to come.

    Most Holy Trinity, we look to Your three persons as a model of true love, knowledge, and community life. Help all marriages and families strive for the high ideal of perfection You set before the world, no matter the discouragement resulting from our sins and imperfections.
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    7 mins
  • June 13: Saint Anthony of Padua

    June 13: Saint Anthony of Padua
    Jun 12 2025
    June 13: Saint Anthony of Padua
    1195–1231
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of lost articles

    He mastered the Word of God

    Saint Anthony of Padua is a famous Franciscan saint especially honored at an impressive shrine in Padua, in Northern Italy. But he was not born as Anthony, was an Augustinian priest before he became a Franciscan, and was from Lisbon, Portugal, not Italy. Saint Anthony, along with Saint Bonaventure, another early Franciscan, lent theological heft to the somewhat esoteric movement founded by Saint Francis of Assisi. Saint Francis was uniquely sensitive and eccentric, unsuited to leadership, and vexed by the need to exercise authority. It was Saints Anthony and Bonaventure who gave the Franciscan Order credibility, who anchored it in sound theology, and who assured its survival and continued growth.

    Today’s saint was baptized Fernando and grew up in a privileged environment in Lisbon. He received a superior education and entered the Augustinian Order as an adolescent. While living in the city of Coimbra, he met some Franciscan brothers who had established a poor hermitage outside of the city named in honor of Saint Anthony of the Desert. Young Father Fernando was very attracted to their simple way of life. From these friars, he also heard about the martyrdom of five Franciscan brothers at the hands of Muslims in North Africa. These martyrs’ bodies were ransomed and returned for burial in Fr. Fernando’s own abbey in Coimbra. Their deaths and burials were a life-changing moment for him. The Augustinian Fr. Fernando asked, and received, permission to leave and join the Franciscans. At that point he adopted a new religious name, Anthony, from the patron saint of the hermitage where he had first come to know the Franciscan Order.

    The newly christened Father Anthony then set out to emulate his martyr heroes. He sailed for North Africa to die for the faith or to ransom himself for Christians held captive by Muslims. But it was not to be. Anthony became gravely ill, and, on the return voyage, his ship was providentially blown off course to Sicily. From there he made his way to Central Italy, where his education, mastery of Scripture, compelling preaching skills, and holiness brought him deserving renown. Paradoxically, it was because Anthony received excellent training as an Augustinian that he became a great Franciscan. Saint Francis himself soon came to know Father Anthony, a man whose learning legitimized the under-educated Franciscans. Saint Francis had been skeptical of scholarship, even prohibiting his illiterate followers from learning how to read. Francis feared they would become too prideful and then abandon their radical simplicity and poverty.  Saint Francis only reluctantly, several years after founding his Order, allowed some of his brothers to be ordained priests. He had originally relied exclusively on diocesan priests to minister to his non-ordained brothers, and he distrusted his followers who aspired to the honor of the Priesthood. The presence of Anthony, and later Bonaventure, changed all that.

    In time, Father Anthony became a famous preacher and teacher to Franciscan communities in Northern Italy and Southern France. His knowledge of Scripture was so formidable that Pope Gregory IX titled him the “Ark of the Testament.” In Anthony’s Shrine in Padua, a reliquary holding his tongue and larynx recall his fame as a preacher. These organs had not disintegrated even long after the rest of his body had returned to dust. Saint Anthony is most often shown either holding the Child Jesus in his arms or holding a book, a lily, or all three. His intercession is invoked throughout the world for the recovery of lost items and for assistance in finding a spouse.

    Anthony died at the age of just thirty-five in 1231, about five years after Saint Francis had died. He was canonized less than one year later. In 1946 Saint Anthony was declared a Doctor of the Church due to the richness of his sermons and writings. He was conscious as he succumbed to death. In his last moments, the brothers surrounding his bed asked him if he saw anything. Saint Anthony said simply, “I see the Lord.”

    Saint Anthony of Padua, we seek your powerful intercession to have the right words on our lips to inspire the faithful and to correct and guide the ignorant. Through your example, may our words also be buttressed by our powerful witness to Christ. 
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    6 mins
  • June 11: St. Barnabas, Apostle

    June 11: St. Barnabas, Apostle
    Jun 10 2025
    June 11: Saint Barnabas, Apostle
    Early First Century–c. 62
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of Cyprus

    A multi-talented disciple recruits Saint Paul

    Today’s saint was an Apostle in the exact same sense in which St. Paul was an Apostle. Saint Barnabas was not one of the Twelve original followers of Christ nor a replacement for one of the Twelve, like Saint Matthias. But the term “The Twelve” quickly disappeared after the Gospel events, because “The Twelve” themselves propagated into dozens, hundreds, and then thousands of successor Apostles, known alternatively as Episcopoi or Prebyteroi: Overseers or Elders. Saint Barnabas is among that generation of Christian leaders whose name first surfaces immediately after the Resurrection. So although he was not in the circle of “The Twelve,” he stood in the next outer ring.

    The earliest name for the movement initiated by Jesus of Nazareth was “The Way.” This term is used in the Acts of the Apostles and in the ancient catechetical document known as the Didache. But “The Way” was replaced early on by another term. The Acts of the Apostles explains: “Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, and when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. So it was that for an entire year they met with the church and taught a great many people, and it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called ‘Christians’” (Ac 11:25–26). We owe Saint Barnabas, then, the credit for the word “Christian” as the standard description of the followers of Jesus Christ.

    The persecution and martyrdom of Saint Stephen forced many Christian leaders to flee Jerusalem. The unforeseen effect of Stephen’s assassination and the subsequent persecution of Christians was the spread of the Gospel into greater Syria, the Greek Islands, and North Africa. This expansion led to contact with Greek and Roman Gentiles, or non-Jews, a growth presaging the transformation of Christianity from a localized Jewish sect into a multiethnic worldwide Church. When some converts from North Africa and Cyprus went to Antioch, the capital of the Roman province of Syria, they converted a great number of Greek speakers. And when “news of this came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem...they sent Barnabas to Antioch. When he came and saw the grace of God, he rejoiced, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast devotion; for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith” (Ac 11: 22–24a).

    Saint Barnabas played a crucial role in the first unfurling of the Gospel message beyond Palestine. Acting as a kind of talent scout, he lassoed Saul from his hometown of Tarsus to begin the extraordinary missionary efforts which would forever change the Church and the world. Saint Paul and Saint Barnabas are repeatedly mentioned together in the Acts of the Apostles as they traverse the port cities, the waters, and the dusty highways of the Eastern Mediterranean world. Together, they call down the Holy Spirit, commission new Apostles, confront Jews and Roman citizens alike, challenge a magician, speak to governors, and, of utmost consequence for the Church’s future, convince the other Apostles not to force new converts to become Jews first and Christians later.

    Saint Barnabas was a dynamic force of nature who spun like a tornado from town to town in the early Church. He was a giant of that first generation of risk-taking, manly, apostolic leaders. The citizens of Lystra in Asia Minor compared him to the Greek God Zeus. They were so impressed that they tried to crown him with garlands and to sacrifice the blood of oxen to both him and Saint Paul (Ac 14:12–18). After numerous adventures in tandem, Paul, the better preacher, writer, and organizer, ultimately sails off on his own. The last we hear of Barnabas, he is returning to the Island of Cyprus, his native land.  When Saint Paul writes from his Roman prison in about 62 A.D., he mentions that Mark, the cousin of Barnabas, is with him (Col 4:10). Barnabas’ absence at Paul’s side in his hour of need is a clue that Barnabas is likely dead by the year 62. Tradition tells us that Barnabas was martyred on Cyprus, perhaps by a Jewish mob angered at his successful preaching in the synagogue of Salamis. His relics and memory are particularly honored on Cyprus to this day.

    Saint Barnabas, you gathered infant Christianity from its cradle and carried it into the world beyond. You poured the message of salvation into new wineskins without any guile. May all Christians be so confident, so convincing, and so successful through your intercession. 
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    6 mins
  • June 9: Saint Ephrem, Deacon and Doctor

    June 9: Saint Ephrem, Deacon and Doctor
    Jun 9 2025
    June 9: Saint Ephrem, Deacon and Doctor
    Early Fourth Century–373
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of spiritual directors

    The Harp of the Holy Spirit

    The Councils of Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451 ended a centuries-long scorpion dance. Bishops, theologians, and scholars from Egypt to Syria had long circled one another with suspicion, stinging their enemies with sharp words and pointed tongues. Did Jesus Christ have one or two natures? If two natures, were they joined in His will or in His person? If united in His person, at conception? Was He one person or was He two? Smart, educated men defended every shade of every subtlety of every complex question with all of their considerable skill. The answers hacked out at Ephesus and Chalcedon, whose hurly-burly political intrigues were less than inspiring, answered the relevant questions definitively, establishing orthodox teaching for all time. The theological language coined during those fifth century debates is still familiar to the Church today: hypostatic union, monophysitism, Theotokos, etc.

    Today’s saint, Ephrem, was active a century prior to the great conclusions and clarifications of the fifth-century Councils. Although Ephrem did not deviate from what later Councils would explicitly teach, he used far different language to communicate the same truths, anticipating later teachings through poetry. Saint Ephrem was a poet and a musician first and foremost. His language is more beautiful, compelling, and memorable because it is metaphorical. Exactness in words risks dryness. You can say that the average density of the air in the ship’s hull eventually equaled the average density of the surrounding water. Or you can say that the ship sank like a stone to the ocean floor. You can write that a day’s high dew point caused the air’s water vapor content to slow evaporation. Or you can write that it was so hot and humid that people melted like candles. The Church can teach that we eat Christ’s body and blood in the Holy Eucharist. Or we can speak directly to Christ with the poet Ephrem and say, “In your bread hides the Spirit who cannot be consumed; in your wine is the fire that cannot be swallowed. The Spirit in your bread, fire in your wine: behold a wonder heard from our lips.”

    The Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon taught that the one person of Jesus Christ united in Himself a fully divine nature and a fully human nature from the moment of His conception. Saint Ephrem wrote “The Lord entered (Mary) and became a servant; the Word entered her, and became silent within her; thunder entered her and his voice was still; the Shepherd of all entered her and became a Lamb…” Poetry, metaphor, paradox, images, song, and symbols. These were tools in Saint Ephrem’s nimble hands. Theology for him was liturgy, music, and prayer. He was called the Harp of the Holy Spirit, the Sun of the Syrians, and the Column of the Church by his admirers, who included luminaries such as Saints Jerome and Basil.

    Saint Ephrem was a deacon who declined ordination to the priesthood. He lived radical poverty, wearing a patched and dirty tunic. He had a cave for his home and a rock for his pillow. Ephrem founded a theological school and was deeply involved in catechesis through preaching, liturgy, and music. He died after contracting a disease from a patient he was caring for. Saint Ephrem is the Church’s greatest Syriac language writer, proof that Christianity is not synonymous with the West or European culture. Ephrem’s world thrived for centuries with its own unique Semitic identity in today’s Syria, Iraq, Iran, and India. Saint Ephrem’s Syria was not the “Near East,” as Europeans later called the region. To him, it was just home, the deep cradle of the new way of loving God that was, and is, Christianity. Saint Ephrem was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XV in 1920.


    Saint Ephrem, you wrote tenderly and lovingly about the truths of our faith. Help all Christian artists to stay true to the Truth and to communicate Jesus Christ to the world through beauty, music, and images that raise the mind and lift the heart to God Himself.
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    6 mins
  • The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church

    The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church
    Jun 9 2025
    Monday after Pentecost: The Blessed Virgin Mary,
    Mother of the Church
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

    One Mother, two motherhoods

    Mary mothered Jesus, Jesus then gave life to the Church with water and blood from His side, and the Church then mothers us into existence through baptism. Devotion to Mary goes hand in hand with devotion to the Church because both are mothers. Mother Mary gives the world Christ. Mother Church gives the world Christians.

    The metaphorical parallels between Mother Mary and Mother Church are spiritually rich and deeply biblical. Mary was understood by many early theologians as both the mother of the Head of the Church, Jesus, and also the symbol of the Church par excellence. Mother Mary is a virgin who conceived the physical body of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit at the Annunciation. In a parallel way, Mother Church is the Mystical Body of Christ who gives every Christian rebirth through the power of the Holy Spirit received at Pentecost. Both Mary and the Church conceived through the same Spirit, without the aid of human seed. Mother Mary makes Christ’s body physically present in Palestine in the first century. Mother Church, in turn, makes Christ’s body mystically present through baptism and sacramentally present in the Eucharist, in every time and place. It was common for a baptismal font in early Christianity to be described as a sacred womb in which Mother Church gave her children life.

    The theological cross-pollination between Mother Mary and Mother Church has produced a field ripe for spiritual and theological cultivation. Christ is from Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Galilee. But He is most deeply from the Father. He is one Son but lives two sonships. Similarly, all Christians are born from one Mother expressed in two motherhoods: Mary’s and the Church’s. Mary and the Church, understood most profoundly, form one mother.  Both are the mother of Christ, but each mutually assists the other to bring Christ physically, sacramentally, and mystically into the world in all His fullness. Neither Mary nor the Church can exercise their motherhoods alone.

    Today’s feast, formally integrated into the Church’s calendar by the authority of Pope Francis in 2018, specifically commemorates Mary’s motherhood of the Church rather than her motherhood of God, a feast celebrated on January 1. Mary likely showed as much tender concern for Christ’s mystical body as it slowly matured in its native Palestine as she did for His physical body in Nazareth. Pope Pius XII perceptively noted Mary’s dual maternity in his encyclical on the Church: “It was she who was there to tend the mystical body of Christ, born of the Savior’s pierced heart, with the same motherly care that she spent on the child Jesus in the crib.” It is possible the Apostles held their first Council in about 49 A.D. in Jerusalem precisely because Mary still dwelled in the holy city. She was likely the young religion’s greatest living witness and pillar of unity. We can imagine her presiding over early Christian gatherings with reserved solemnity, nursing primitive Christianity just as she had Christ.

    Ancient pagans spoke of imperial Rome as a Domina, a divine female master. Rome was praised as a conquering mother who brought vanquished peoples close to her own heart, incorporating them as citizens into her vast, multicultural, polyglot realm. Other empires executed prisoners of war, exiled peoples, imposed a foreign culture, or displaced populations. Not Rome. Rome absorbed them all. The early fathers understood Mother Church as the successor to this Domina. In baptism this Mother does not release her children from her body but absorbs them, making them fully her own unto death. Since the early Middle Ages, feast days and devotions to the Virgin Mary have proliferated in Catholicism. Now Pope Francis has given the Church a feast to compliment that of January 1. The two motherhoods of Mary reflect one profound truth, that Christ approaches us in time and in space, in history and in sacrament, in mysterious and beautiful ways. In the words of Saint Augustine: “What (God) has bestowed on Mary in the flesh, He has bestowed on the Church in the spirit; Mary gave birth to the One, and the Church gives birth to the many, who through the One become one.” This is all cause for deep reflection.

    Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, God prepared you to be the sacred vessel to replace Mother Synagogue with Mother Church. Eve approaches you like mother to daughter, old Eve to New Eve, two mothers of the living. Help all Chritians to see both the Church and you Mary, as their mother.
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