✣ Highlights from the week online
Transfiguring our view of the world At Father Ed’s Blog, Fr Ed Tomlinson reflected on the Transfiguration and its significance for our spiritual lives. “The Transfiguration occurs when Jesus’s enemies are closing in,” Fr Tomlinson wrote. Our Lord “provided this glimpse of his divine nature to save them from that awful defeatist view we tend to have in life when we lose sight of God’s power and majesty.” Defeatism is a risk today, when “our culture has clearly abandoned the Christian faith that formed it”, and within the Church “the heresy of liberal modernism attempts to overthrow the true faith of the ages. An attempt that will ultimately fail, for God really is sovereign, but until the crisis is defeated it remains the gravest Christian scandal since the Arian heresy.” Even at “the highest levels of the Church”, there is confusion. Lent reminds us that we can only respond by being “faithful to the Gospel” – by showing “sacrifice” and love” to our friends and enemies alike. That is what we will be judged on. “So don’t get hung up on politics, in this world or in the Church, we will not be judged on these transitory things which are, in truth, beyond our control.” An astonishing survival in Italy Is it a miracle? It certainly raises some unusual questions. Forty consecrated Hosts have been discovered in an Italian church, more than a year after it was destroyed by an earthquake. At the National Catholic Register, Edward Pentin observed that the Hosts had no bacteria or mould on them – which would normally “appear after a few weeks, according to the Italian bishops’ newspaper Avvenire”.Pentin also quoted Bishop Giovanni D’Ercole of Ascoli Piceno, in which the church is located, who advised some caution: “Faith requires prudence.” But the bishop said the discovery was “a sign of hope for everyone”: in the face of the discovery, “one has to surely remain silent. It simply touches and strengthens faith in Jesus who remains alive to console the earthquake-stricken population of Arquata.” The one-word refutation of materalist ideas “Materialists want us to believe that there is nothing greater than pleasure,” wrote Clifford Staples at Crisis. “Anything that does not look like hedonism – a life devoted to ideas, to honour, to God, even to philosophical materialism – must be ignored, explained away, or understood to be something other than what it clearly is.” The most obvious counter-argument, said Staples, is the existence of joy. “It is the soul that is joyful or joyless, not the body.” Joy arises from knowing and from loving – which are not simply bodily experiences. And so “materialism is an anti-human philosophy because, like others of its kind, it involves denying the ‘whole truth about man,’ as St Pope John Paul II put it.”
