Fr Christopher Poore

Oh yeah no worries. I thought your joke was very funny.

Nah we can just have an endless library of online PDFs and rectors can spend their time copying and pasting from that and printing it up fresh each week.

Did he not walk so we could run??

Truly the most threatening thing anyone has ever said to me on Bluesky. 😂 I admire your passion and clarity on this issue.

You do realize that if Hooker beats Cranmer, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity immediately becomes an authorized liturgy of the Episcopal Church, and we'll just start reading that aloud for Sunday service?

btw the point of spiritual direction is not for your director to say: “Ignore your conscience and listen to me!”

Who Was Raïssa Maritain? The Spiritual Mother Behind Vatican II Raïssa Maritain's writings on the importance of spiritual liberty appear as premonitions of the positions taken by the Church during Vatican II.

I’m just convinced. Raïssa Maritain’s life as a contemplative in the world informed the positions taken at Vatican II.

Her reflections on conscience should strike fear into every abusive spiritual director, even as her words on spiritual freedom will give courage to the timid.

I believe this.

The most recurrent and persistent insight spoken by retreatants, visitors, guests, and students is that we monks are so peaceful and welcoming to them.

My honest response to them usually entails something akin to, "Yes, it's because we take naps, and don't work ourselves to death."

I've been waiting for this to come out! Thank you for posting about it in advance. It was a very interesting read, and a good introduction for me to Lonergan.

hey if the article can help the first-year seminarian and the 76 year-old priest, that is great news. Thanks for taking an interest.

What is wrong with the modern liturgy? On technocracy, spiritual avarice, and liturgical ascesis

"I wish every seminarian would read it on their first day of liturgical studies."

Just one of the heartening comments on my latest. Thank you for the warm responses! ⚓

My own training/tradition is that stoles are removed for the foot-washing, but to see the Bishop of Rome in a deacon's stole says some very good things.

I did not notice that! Thanks for pointing that out. A beautiful testament to the way Pope Francis carried his diaconal ordination all the way into the papacy.

we can then say that each country also belongs to the foreigner, inasmuch as a territory’s goods must not be denied to a needy person coming from elsewhere.

Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti 124

we are obliged to respect the right of all individuals to find a place that meets their basic needs and those of their families ... Our response to the arrival of migrating persons can be summarized by four words: welcome, protect, promote and integrate.

Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti 129

If every human being possesses an inalienable dignity ... and if the world truly belongs to everyone, then it matters little whether my neighbour was born in my country or elsewhere. My own country also shares responsibility for his or her development.

Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti 125

Whatever is opposed to life itself … whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation … all these things … poison human society … Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator.

Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes 27

As someone very interested in trying to help theology along in the university, I love both the daring and the humility of this approach. Universities study things that exist. God exists—ineffably so. Therefore universities should include a place for the study of God.

A beautiful definition of reason from Rowan Williams: reason as our capacity to behold the world together, to listen to one another.

"We’ve lost sight of the notion that what God gives us is the capacity to listen to one another and learn from one another in a common world."

Photo of James Cone speaking at the Rall Lectures in 1969 in the Chapel of the Unnamed Faithful.

But in his passion to become superhuman, man becomes subhuman, estranged from the source of his being, threatening and threatened by his neighbor, transforming a situation destined for intimate human fellowship into a spider web of conspiracy and violence.

—James H. Cone

Amazing! Congratulations!

Theo-Drama vol. 5

This crisis, and the insistence that God ought not be violent to His own creature’s “inalienable core,” funds Balthasar’s most radical speculative seeking of the “most” lost soul, following it into the very depths of Hell.

It ends abruptly in silence and indecision. He can reason into it no more.

Wake Up Dead Man and the New Seductions of the Cloth Wake Up Dead Man reimagines clerical corruption, shifting the threat from lust or greed to rage, grievance, and culture-war ideology for modern times.

"Rage... can feel like moral seriousness. It can masquerade as courage. It can even borrow the language of prophetic witness. But it corrodes the very capacities that priesthood is meant to cultivate: patience, attentiveness, the willingness to remain with people rather than reduce them..."

... Nay, let us either deserve to have a good prince or let us patiently suffer and obey such as we deserve." Second Book of Homilies, Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion.

Perhaps another place where @adalehunt.bsky.social's word of caution about idealizing formularies should be heard again.

While we are examining these formularies, note what the Homilies say about wicked rulers. They are punishment for people's sins. One of these sins is disobedience against rulers. "for subjects to deserve through their sins to have an evil prince and then to rebel... were double and treble evil...

And then the homilist might add that they shouldn't cease doing things like contributing to the commonwealth through acts of sharing, but they should instead look to Christ for their salvation and hope.

I don't know for certain. I can imagine they would introduce some bleak philosophy of civil obedience as a way of maintaining order: thus there is a sort of enforced civic virtue—not stealing, not murdering—that (seen theologically) is really vice or at least does not contain some "degree of grace."

But others will know more, so please correct me if I'm wrong!

Quoting Ambrose: "He that by nature would withstand vice, either by natural will or reason [note: no reference to currying favor with God, intentions seem noble], he doth in vain furnish the time of this life ... for without the worshipping of the true God that which seemeth to be virtue is vice."