✣ Highlights from the week online
The Jedi bishop Woodworking Bishop-elect David Konderla is making his own crosier, ahead of his ordination as Bishop of Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 29. Bishop-elect Konderla, who has already made crosiers for four US bishops, told the Catholic News Agency: “Every Jedi has not completed his training until he’s made his own lightsaber that he uses to fight evil with – so this is my lightsaber.” While the bishop may be inspired by the image of the Jedi, Philip Kosloski at Aleteia explained that George Lucas’s Jedi knights were actually modelled on Catholic “warrior-monks”. Early drafts of Star Wars mention a young man going “to train as a potential Jedi-Templar”. “Like the Jedi, [the Knights Templar] practised individual poverty within a military/monastic order that commanded great material resources,” Kosloski wrote. Even the Jedi’s garb would remind a medieval historian of the robes worn by the Christian warrior-monks. Orthodox fantasy At crux, John Allen explored why the Orthodox “Holy and Great Council” is falling apart. “There’s a reason the Orthodox churches haven’t gotten together since the split between East and West in 1054, which is that they often don’t work and play well with each other,” he wrote. “The idea that such a council would come off without a hitch was always a fantasy, and the only startling part is that it’s taken this long for the crisis to erupt.” A successful council would be good for ecumenism, Allen said. But the Orthodox churches are strongly nationalistic. “The more the Orthodox come to see each other, rather than their national governments, as their primary interlocutors, the easier it may be to build a common Christian front,” Allen concluded. Dante’s Pelican Why is the image of a pelican feeding her chicks so often found in Church art That was the question posed by Daniel Esparza at Aleteia. The myth is that the pelican, “in order to prevent its chicks from starving in times of scarcity, would pierce its chest with its own beak to feed them with its own blood”. The early Christians adopted the image as a symbol of Christ who gave up his blood to save us. Dante refers to Christ as “our Pelican”, Esparza noted, and Shakespeare refers to the legend in Hamlet. “Even Aquinas, in his Adoro te devote, wrote: ‘Like what the tender tales tell of the Pelican/ Bathe me, Jesus Lord, in what Thy Bosom ran/ Blood that but one drop of has the power to win All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.’”
