To save the world we need Dominicans
At thecatholicthing.org, David Warren reflects on St Dominic as a model for today’s Catholics. The saint founded his religious order just as “a new, profane intellectual order was emerging”. The Dominicans responded with “real intellectual zeal”, as well as disciplined, holy lives.
Now, as in Dominic’s time, “Faith is despised, and as the early Dominicans often were, shouted down with slogans. The Dominicans persisted. Far from retreating where they met hostility, they listened and confuted. Men can be animals, especially the young, but they may also be called to conversion, and a striking feature of the 13th century is the scale and speed of the Dominican expansion.”
The “Dominic Option” would involve this kind of courageous intellectual engagement, Warren writes. “The world needs to be told the joy of Our Saviour. It needs to be saved, from the Devil and from itself. It needs to know who is its Maker.”
It’s no accident that Jesus died in his 30s
At adw.org, Mgr Charles Pope gives a Dominican reflection of his own. He discusses St Thomas Aquinas’s answer to the question: “Why did Jesus die in his thirties?”
Jesus’s age (probably His early thirties) might seem “an unremarkable detail”, Mgr Pope says. But St Thomas works on “the premise that God does nothing arbitrarily”. So St Thomas argues that Jesus died at this age partly “to commend the more His love by giving up His life for us when He was in His most perfect state of life”.
Mgr Pope observes: “In St Thomas’s time one’s thirties was considered to be that time of perfection. This is arguably still so, though we do seem to take a lot longer to reach intellectual and emotional maturity these days.”
It was also more fitting, St Thomas says, that Jesus died before age caused “any decay of nature”. There’s a lesson for us here, Mgr Pope remarks. “We are to give the best of what we have to God in sacrifice; not merely our cast-offs, or things of which we might say, ‘This will do.’”
A sci-fi writer vows to write for Christ
At ncregister.com, sci-fi author John C Wright told Angelo Stagnaro that, after his conversion to Catholicism, he hadn’t wanted to be too preachy. That was until a fan wrote to Wright, thanking him for showing the beauty of the faith in his books. “On that instant I vowed my pen to Christ, and said I would never write another book, tale, poem or epigram not to His glory.”
But Wright added that it’s the story, not a writer’s creed, that dictates where a book goes. “Writers are a tricky bunch, who make up stories for a living, and so any attempt to deduce the writer’s stance on theology or politics based on what his characters say and do is doomed to fail. The most bitter atheistic ending I ever wrote to a tale was after my conversion, and the most uplifting spiritual ending I wrote was before.”
✣Meanwhile…
✣ A boy got more than he bargained for when he asked for Pope Francis’s autograph at a recent public appearance.
The Pope gave him a playful slap in the face, before moving on to the next young fan. The boy grinned at the gesture, reminiscent of the bishop’s traditional slap delivered to the newly confirmed.
✣ Semisonic’s Closing Time, one of the biggest hits of 1998, seemed to be a simple enough song about being asked to drink up and leave a bar.
Closing time
Time for you to go out into the world…
But as the pro-life website lifenews.com noted this week, lead singer Dan Wilson has revealed that Closing Time is in fact about his then unborn daughter.
Playing the song during a reunion at his old college, Harvard, Wilson said: “I hid it so well, in plain view, that millions and millions of people heard the song and bought the song and didn’t get it.
“They think it’s about being bounced from a bar, but it’s about being bounced from the womb.”
Among other double-meanings, the song’s rousing chorus, “I know who I want to take me home”, turns out to mean “Home from the hospital”.
✣The week in quotations
The Devil always comes in through the pocket Pope Francis Address to seminarians
We hope Trump will reconsider some of his decisions Vatican official Cardinal Turkson CNS
In America you have to invent a faith … In the UK you have to pretend not to have one Lib Dem leader Tim Farron Evening Standard
They will be tortured and killed Fr Philippe Blot on why China should not repatriate North Koreans Address to European leaders
✣Statistic of the week
80,000 The number of Syrians living at Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan Source: UNHCR
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