John XXIII once remarked that the Vatican was the hardest place on earth to remain a Christian. The pope’s impish bon mot floated like skywriting over the double canonization in St. Peter’s Square on the Second Easter Sunday. On the glittering heels of this production came advance notice of another: London’s The Tablet reported that Paul VI is on the books for beatification this coming October. Are we at the point where election to the Petrine office is itself a signal of godliness, a guarantee of eventual canonization? Continue Reading

Cathedrals And The Crosstown Bus

Maureen Mullarkey

May 8, 2014

Viewed through the radiant trefoil window of aesthetics, my love of Gothic architecture is boundless. Approached through the tighter, denser lens of prayer, however, that love shrinks. It pales and contracts to where I can barely see it. buy stendra online https://latinohealthaccess.org/wp-content/themes/twentyfourteen/inc/php/stendra.html no prescription If at all. Christianity’s great truths come to us through a Nazarene carpenter—a tekton, a builder—whose handiwork we have no clue to. Neither do we have the faintest inkling of his response to Herod’s monumental temple complex. Continue Reading

Rodin’s “Cathedrals Of France”

Maureen Mullarkey

May 5, 2014

I should like to inspire a love for this great art, to come to the rescue of as much of it as still remains intact; to save for our children the great lesson of this past which the present misunderstands. In this desire I strive to awaken intellects and hearts to understanding and to love.

—Auguste Rodin, The Cathedrals of France Auguste Rodin was an aggressive womanizer well into old age. The love of beauty that served him nobly as a sculptor served him as a man with notable difference. Continue Reading

Bible In Glass At The Cloisters

Maureen Mullarkey

May 2, 2014

The Gothics set stone upon stone, ever higher, not as the giants did, to attack God, but to reach up to Him. And God, as in the German legend, rewarded the merchants and the warriors, but to the poet what was granted?

—Auguste Rodin, Cathedrals of France To the poets in stone and glass who created the great Gothic cathedrals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, God granted the grace of anonymity. To us moderns, that seems a double-edged, if not bitter, grace. Continue Reading

Hearts, Sacred And Profane

Maureen Mullarkey

April 28, 2014

Devotion to the Sacred Heart is deeply rooted in the traditions of the Latin Church. Its prompt to compassionate meditation on the sufferings of Christ, to gratitude and contrition, is venerable. Less so is the iconography that attaches to its modern form. Promoted in conformity to Margaret Mary Alacoque’s apparitions, the devotion’s iconic motif remains edifying to many. At the same time, that excised, free-floating organ looks mawkish, even grotesque—a physiological hovercraft— to many others. Paul Zalonski, a Benedictine Oblate and ardent defender of the devotion, states it this way:

Popular piety tends to associate a devotion with its iconographic expression.

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Tammany On The Tiber

Cathedrals And The Crosstown Bus

Rodin’s “Cathedrals Of France”

Bible In Glass At The Cloisters

Hearts, Sacred And Profane

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