The driver’s license registration hall of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is a great equalizer. All classes, ages, and races huddle together on the benches. A rich man cannot send his chauffeur as a surrogate. Even if you live in New York City where a driver’s license is usually only symbolic for those without … Read more
As this parable of Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) is the only one with a proper name, some have thought it an actual account. You might as well say the same of Jack and the Beanstalk, since there are a lot of Jacks about. Lazarus was a name common enough, although events leading to the Passion will … Read more
Seeking the solace of a cup of tea as I began to write this column, I took the first tea bag I could find, and it happened to be the sort of gift the People of God bestow upon their clergy when the ordinary is not good enough. It was “a green tea and herbal … Read more
Chartres is the cathedral of cathedrals, and here is the parable of parables. Nothing is wanting in the other parables. All are from the lips of the Lord. As the taste in a certain mood might prefer Cologne or Siena to Chartres, so someone might prefer to make a point with the parable of the … Read more
The parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin (Luke 15:1-10) mean the same, in the style of Hebrew repetition found especially in the Psalter with couplets like: “Praise the Lord, all nations! / Extol him, all peoples!” (Psalm 117:1). The shepherd who loses one of his hundred sheep and the woman who has … Read more
A plaque in a church naming the donor of a larger plaque naming the donor of a shrine reminded me recently of how some people do like to be honored for honoring God. One runs the risk of sounding Bolshevik in condemning all titles and honoraria among the faithful. It was said that Soviet egalitarianism … Read more
Citation of disasters to challenge the doctrine of God’s omnipotence and mercy is commonplace: Why did God permit such and such if He is what He is said to be? Jesus is asked about a massacre of Galileans by Pontius Pilate. Now Pilate was not such a remote aristocrat that he refused to slaughter, and … Read more
This column is being written by a man who is grateful for having just offered the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and who is also trying to suppress his customary chagrin at the foul translation he was obliged to use. Today, the opening collect turned the Latin meaning practically upside down, and then a rubric … Read more
Legend has Alexander the Great giving a beggar command of five cities in response to his plea for five coins: “You ask as a beggar. I give as a king.” A scribe asked Christ the King for the key to eternal life, but he did so with the spiritual coquetry of the religious dilettante. He … Read more
Few vandals in the corridors of history have done as much damage as princes who were not gentlemen. Populations have fled from raucous tyrants, but they have grimaced at Charles VII as they remembered Louis IX and at Cardinal Wolsey who served no majesty higher than his king’s. Even in constitutionally unprincely states where there … Read more
In the line of other parables about productivity (the sower, the mustard seed, and the tares of the field), the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:12-27) could be called “the industrious and static managers.” Much pastoral teaching continues in the uninformed mode of static economics even after an encyclical, Centesimus Annus, has argued … Read more
If the Basiclica of St. Peter in Rome were destroyed by an earthquake, the Catholic Church would go on a bit dusted but without missing a beat. Lost, though, would be any aesthete whose faith was founded on a fondness for the architecture of Michelangelo. I am perhaps belaboring the obvious, but the obvious was … Read more
Many of us have pulsing in our heads the Coleridge verses from the “Ancient Mariner” that are, or were until recent reforms in education wiped out learning, a staple of a child’s literary education. “The feast is set, the guests are met….” One can hear the merry din. Weddings are the great feasts of life, … Read more
Following the parable of the two sons and leading up to that of the marriage of the king’s son, the second of the high messianic parables preached in Jerusalem cannot be enjoyable to the Temple officials. They must roll their eyes as Jesus says, “Hear another parable.” The common crowd relishes the discomfort of the … Read more
As the atmosphere grew tense in Jerusalem, our Lord spoke the parable of the two sons (Matthew 21:28-32). When the priestly cast and constituted authorities challenge His claims, Christ throws off any mantle of harm less philanthropy in which the lukewarm souls would cloak Him. Here is no romantic “Sage of Galilee.” At the age … Read more
Lord Palmerston, or certainly some such confident Victorian, said: “If you do well here, you’ll do well there.” Many Christians may now approve that outline of salvation, although its lightweight account of grace and goodness is the seductive Pelagian heresy. The rich young man who had kept the commandments and asked our Lord to finish … Read more
St. Peter was an impetuous man, unlike his most recent successors, and so his reserve through our Lord’s discourse in Matthew 18 up to verse 20 is note worthy. The disciples’ question about who is greatest may have been urged by him, or they may have asked it ironically in oblique reference to him. … Read more
Without a “sense” of the Church, Jesus’ parables can be reduced to exercises in moralism. Fundamentalist readers, or even those who would call themselves evangelicals, may miss the fundamentals of what Christ says about the Church, for the Church tends to be peripheral to a congenially de-historicized vision. In previous parables, Jesus rivets the eye … Read more
Just as the parable of the mustard seed has its counterpart in the parable of the yeast, the parable of the hidden treasure is twinned with that of the pearl of great price. No twins are absolutely identical. Twinship can show up differences more vividly than an ordinary match of siblings. The finding of the … Read more
In the heart of noisy Manhattan, when silence falls outside the window, I suspect something has gone wrong. St. Gregory the Great extended this feeling of alarm at silence to the moral order of the Church: “When one of his flock sins morally through his own fault, then he who is set above, because he … Read more
