Blogposts

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to which the entire month of June is consecrated, carries with it undoubtedly socio-political meanings which, although everything possible has been done in the last half century to condemn them to oblivion, are indelibly part of the history of this worship and are rooted in it. The worship of the Sacred Heart is a worship of adoration of the Lord Jesus with particular emphasis on his holy and true humanity, hence the hostility with which the Jansenists opposed it in the eighteenth century, considering it not very "spiritual" and even idolatrous.

Sad to say strange things, sometimes non-Catholic things, are increasingly said at Catholic funeral Masses today sometimes by clergy and sometimes by laity in a eulogy. Clergy proclaim that the deceased is in Heaven so that the funeral Mass is used as a canonization ceremony or a eulogy proclaims the whole Mass is a eulogy celebrating the life of the deceased. The funeral Mass, or for that matter, any Mass is not a human celebration of us but the supreme and perfect worship of God through Jesus Christ offering Himself on our behalf as Priest, Offering, and Altar.

Frank Furedi wrote a book called The Therapy Culture. He argues that in recent decades virtually every sphere of life has become subject to a new emotional culture. Increasing vulnerability is presented as the defining feature of people's psychology. Terms like people 'at risk', 'scarred for life' or 'emotional damage' evoke a unique sense of powerlessness. Through framing the problem of everyday life through the prism of emotions, therapeutic culture incites people to feel powerless and ill. He is on to something important.

These nineteen martyrs of Algeria, so dear to Pope Leo …Very few people know that May 8, the day of Pope Leo's election, was the day of the liturgical memory of these martyrs and that it was in Numidia, present-day Algeria, that (St) Augustine was born and lived, and Leo defined himself as his "son."… The martyrs of Algeria whose memory is celebrated are the nineteen people depicted on the icon reproduced above, painted by Sister Odile, a nun of the Little Sisters of Nazareth, all massacred between 1994 and 1996, at the height of the "black decade" of the civil war which left 150,000 dead in Algeria.