St. Philip Neri (+1595) was praying one night, as he often did, in the Catacombs of St. Sebastian. A ball of light came down from above and entered his mouth. He was so overwhelmed by the love of God that he cried out, “Enough, Lord! I cannot take anymore” and passed out. When he awoke,…
Two of the devil’s greatest pleasures are to plunge us into hatred and despair – his own two major emotions.
Above: the Demidoff Altarpiece, (Carlo Crivell, 1476). St. Stephen appears in the upper right corner next to St. Thomas: The Crib, the Cross and the Crown. These three objects serve different functions in the life of Christ and the reality of our salvation and yet are intertwined in an incredible way. The Church draws our…
By Dom Prosper Guéranger The Feast of the Epiphany is the continuation of the mystery of Christmas; but it appears on the Calendar of the Church with its own special character. Its very name, which signifies Manifestation, implies that it celebrates the apparition of God to his creatures. For several centuries, the Nativity of our Lord was…
Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad before the face of the Lord: because He cometh (Psalm 95:13,11 Taken from the Offertory Verse of the First Mass of Christmas) At the first stroke of midnight on December 25th, the Church in her Sacred liturgy bursts forth in joyous celebration for the birth…
From all of us at OnePeterFive, we wish you a Merry, blessed, and grace-filled Christmas and God’s abundant blessings in the new year!
There’s something rarely heard about the commercialization of Christmas. On the one hand, I can forgive the neo-pagan Marxists for the suppression of Christ—they know not what they do. On the other hand, Catholics, who should know better, have in recent decades anesthetized the Incarnation so as to empty it of all physical reality. The…
There is a great deal of grotesquery in the world and in the Church. The controversy over the Vatican Nativity Scene this year — a kind of “art” I have described as “weaponized ugliness” — has certainly driven the point home. (One might quibble with my use of “grotesque,” which implies something comical; that said,…
“My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called…
It is common to hear some people propose that Our Lord was crucified as early as 30 A.D. and born as early as 4 B.C. They also claim He was not born in December and have proposed all sorts of other dates for His birth. Is there any truth to these claims? In the below…
In this Christmas season we are invited to worship the Divine Word, the invisible Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who is made visible. “He has come to lift up all things to himself, to restore unity to creation” (Preface of Christmas II). The idea of “Christ as Jesus of Nazareth, man, not God incarnate”…
