Our Lady carried into the old temple a new and living temple, a new and better temple not made of stone but of living flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of Messiah. In that strange encounter, when the new temple came to replace the former, our Lady heard Simeon’s prophetic words but doubtless she did not fully understand their [...]
In his writings St Paul makes it very clear that in his preaching he was passing on to his listeners something that he himself had been given, not something that he had invented: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I had received.” St Paul received a direct and personal revelation from Christ the Lord. That revelation transformed Saul [...]
Saint Philip Neri (1515-1595) said “The sanctity of a man lies in the breadth of three fingers (the forehead), that is to say, in mortifying the understanding, which would fain reason upon things.” The shorter version of his maxim is "Holiness is three fingers deep". With these words the saint exhorts us to mortify the razionale - our habit of trusting too much [...]
At Lauds of the Epiphany the antiphon for the Benedictus is a shining example of how liturgical texts can disclose the fuller meaning of the gospels, meanings and connexions which are easily missed when we make the mistake of reading the Bible in an excessively literalist way, as if it were a Wikipedia article. “Today the Church is joined to [...]