✣Highlights from the week online
The time I yelled in the confessional At aleteia.com Elizabeth Scalia recalled the “strangest Confession of my life” – where she and her confessor both started yelling. “It got loud,” she wrote. “If people were waiting, I was pretty sure they could hear us hollering through the thick wooden doors.”She had been in “one of those funks” that had made her feel both rebellious and hopeless. She had missed a holy day of obligation and then a Sunday Mass. But when she was finally able to go to Confession, she said, “I was surprised to encounter a priest who wondered why I was bothering him with it”.
He asked her why she had been refraining from Communion and she “sputtered in some amazement: ‘You’re asking me? You don’t know the answer?’” He argued that there was no malice in her missing Mass, and she disagreed. “There was malice and forethought, and my formation is good enough to know that malice and forethought is an excellent reason for me to be here,” she said.
The row yielded a breakthrough, though. “All of my bad behaviour had been rooted in a grave sin of envy, yet I hadn’t been cognisant of it, or even planning to confess envy.”
The priest was triumphant, Scalia wrote. “Picking fights with a penitent – that’s one way to get to the truth.”
Why Louis CK is a model for priests
Fr Jim McDermott SJ urged priests to take inspiration from the comedian Louis CK. Writing in America magazine, he said he frequently heard the criticism that a priest recycles the same three homilies over and over again. Once, he recalled, he was joking about the “three homilies” at a Mass and a parishioner “came up to me, took me by the hand, and said emphatically: ‘Father, I know exactly what you mean.’”
The remark unsettled him. He thought of comedians, who, like priests, are continually “trying to break open truths in a way that resonates with people’s experience”.
Louis CK produces a new 60-minute set every year. “What would happen if I did a full Louis CK, threw out all my favourite stories and standard homilies, maybe even retired this ‘things I learned at seminary’ bit?
“The idea terrifies me. If I put all my bells and whistles aside, what would be left besides Jesus and me and a blank page?
“Now that’s an exciting place to start.”
The cassock is made for wear and tear
Fr Michał Lubowicki, at Aleteia in Poland, described a letter about a cassock that a seminarian friend received when he started his studies.
The cassock, it said, was “work clothes, not a dress uniform”. Its sleeves should be rolled up. It should show “white salt marks” of sweat and tears.
“May it quickly show traces of wear and tear on the knees and shoulders, signs of your prayer and bearing other people’s burdens,” the letter said.
✣ Meanwhile…
✣ A 1,600-year-old basilica found submerged in a lake is to be turned into an underwater museum.The remains, discovered at the site of the 4th-century Council of Nicaea, lie in five to seven feet of water in Lake Izmir in north-west Turkey.
The church has three naves and is similar in its structure to Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, archaeologists say.
Plans are afoot to allow visitors to explore the foundation of the church beneath the water.
Mustafa Şahin, an archaeology professor at Bursa Uludağ University, said the basilica was most likely built in honour of St Neophytos, a teenager who was martyred in AD 303 during Roman Emperor Diocletian’s mass persecution of Christians.
He told Hürriyet Daily News: “Most probably it could have been built in 325 after the first Council meeting in İznik. In any case, we think that the church was built in the 4th century or a further date.”
Archaeologists believe the basilica collapsed in 740 and was never rebuilt.
While work on the basilica is ongoing, Professor Şahin said open days to allow the public to see it would be held on the first and third Saturdays of every month.
The site was first discovered in 2014 thanks to aerial photography.
✣ The week in quotations
I am looking forward finally to having my day in court
Cardinal Pell
Vatican press conference
There is no good society without a good union
Pope Francis
Audience with union leaders
It is a beautiful job because one of the cardinals is the next pope
Tailor Raniero Mancinelli
Rome Reports
When there is a lot of poverty it should be a call for people to share tenderness
L’Arche founder Jean Vanier
The Spectator
