It’s been a while since the Crusades. As a general rule, when our president goes abroad, he does not get waylaid and find himself in the hands of brigands who send back to the vice president wax-sealed notes saying, “Give us forty thousand ducats and we will release your dread sovereign, that he may return […]
The conviction that Christ makes clean what was unclean animates the Christian tradition and urges on us the duty to visit the sick. This conviction also links, in the Catholic tradition, two sacraments in particular as the “sacraments of healing”: reconciliation and anointing of the sick. The connection is already present, of course, in the […]
We moderns can be awfully smug when it comes to Old Testament taboos. Many people assume such taboos were nothing but superstitious, prescientific attempts to avoid disease—as though the Israelites meant to ask, “How do I avoid trichinosis?” but kept slipping into “How do I keep the cooties away?” All this leads, of course, to […]
Yet we are commanded to harbor the harborless. We can become personally involved, and we can supply financial support. For instance, a small non-denominational church in Seattle started sponsoring refugees in the 1980s. I remember it well because it was my church. Our pastor arranged with a relief agency to help a Vietnamese family who […]
One of the most exasperating bits of exegetical trendiness to afflict First World Catholics for the past thirty years or so has been the endless recirculation, like that of a bad penny, of the “True Meaning of the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes” homily. It goes like this: Jesus found himself in the wilderness […]
Other considerations enter in too. On the one hand, clothes symbolize our external lives—the junk that doesn’t matter in the end. So Jesus tells us that the body is more than clothes (see Luke 12:23). But on the other hand, clothes also express the heart of the wearer. In the parable of the wedding banquet, […]
Nake is an extinct English verb meaning “to strip clothes off.” To be “naked” is therefore to be in a state of having had your clothes stripped off. Why does this bit of pedantry matter? Because it speaks volumes about what our ancestors regarded as the natural state of man. While a couple of loopy […]
It is worth noting that when the early Christians thought about thirst—and especially the thirst of “the least of these my brethren” ––there was one thing they could readily connect these sayings to: After this Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the scripture), “I thirst.” A bowl full of vinegar stood […]
