Francis Pope of Firsts

Working away on the next issue of Evangelium with EWTN in the background, I heard “I announce to you a great joy: We have a pope! The most eminent and most reverend lord, Lord Jorge Mario, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, Bergoglio, who has taken for himself the name Francis.” It was of course in Latin, but because of many influences including Credo, I was able to catch most of it.

So Cardinal Bergoglio has decided to call himself Francis. We have not yet learnt which Francis he means to name himself for — Francis of Assisi, Francis Xavier, or even Francis de Sales. But he is a Pope of firsts: the first Francis, the first from the New World, the first Jesuit Pope, very likely the first Pope to ask the people to pray for God to bless him before he blessed them. Probably the first Bishop of Rome to greet his new diocese with “good evening, everybody” and to close with “go get some sleep”. And the first pope properly called a son of Second Vatican.

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Saint Thomas More a Model for Our Time

It strikes me that we have in Saint Thomas More a model for our time. The question we face is similar: shall religion be supreme or shall temporal opinion? What is the extent of the accommodation that may be reached? Has truth itself a claim on our very lives? And have we the courage of Saint Thomas More to act entirely without support? Read this talk given by Hilaire Belloc in July of 1929, before Thomas More was raised to the altars, at the More Memorial Exhibition, and then let us in these days invoke the patronage of Saint Thomas More, earning it, so to speak, by our own actions, and lending him a support in posterity he has not found in England, France, or elsewhere in the ruin of Christendom.

This was delivered as a speech and has the quality of spoken word. Further, it had sentence structures more complex than we are used to and was given by an Englishman, not an American. My advice to you is to read it aloud in full voice so you will slow down and pay attention to how it sounds. At the very least, imagine you are reading aloud, moving your lips. I found it in a book compiled by Patrick Cahill titled Hilaire Belloc One Thing and Another A Miscellany from His Uncollected Essays, Hollis & Carter, 1955. In turn Cahill found it in The Fame of Blessed Thomas More, Sheed & Ward, 1929.

The Witness to Abstract Truth

by Hilaire Belloc

I come to speak to you to-day upon the Blessed Thomas More, and I come to speak of him under one aspect alone; for what one man can say in the few brief moments of a public address should not, upon such a subject, touch more than one aspect, lest his audience be confused. But that aspect is surely the chief one in connection with such a name. Read more “Saint Thomas More a Model for Our Time” →

Federico Barocci Renaissance Master

The St. Louis Art Museum has an exhibit up Federico Barocci: Renaissance Master through this coming Sunday, January 20th, that is well-worth seeing. This particular preview image here is better than many you will find online — the colors and tone-scale are pretty true, but nothing compared to seeing the real thing in person. The idea that “religious art” is dark and somber is wrong, wrong, wrong. These paintings are stunning and huge — most of them are of architectural scale, not paintings for a suburban living room.

Barocci had a truly Catholic eye — he could capture a supernatural vision within mundane (even funny) ordinary life. An example is here in the painting called La Madonna del Gatto, or roughly Our Lady of the Cat. She is holding St. John and our Lord in a domestic setting where the last prophet of the Old Testament is playing with (teasing?) a cat. The message here is that Salvation History isn’t a mere abstraction — it happened and looked at least at the time pretty ordinary (and conventionally nuts). This is what  “incarnation” means and Barocci got it on canvas. Read more “Federico Barocci Renaissance Master” →