Thursday, May 31, 2018
Friday, May 25, 2018
St. Bede
Bede, 672/3 – 26 May 735 A.D. , also known as Saint Bede, Venerable Bede, and Bede the Venerable, was an English Benedictine monk at the monastery of St. Peter and its companion monastery of St. Paul in the Kingdom of Northumbria of the Angles (contemporarily Monkwearmouth–Jarrow Abbey in Tyne and Wear, England). Born on lands likely belonging to the Monkwearmouth monastery, Bede was sent there at the age of seven and later joined Abbot Ceolfrith at the Jarrow monastery, both of whom survived a plague that struck in 686, an outbreak that killed a majority of the population there.
While he spent most of his life in the monastery, Bede traveled to several abbeys and monasteries across the British Isles, even visiting the archbishop of York and King Ceolwulf of Northumbria. He is well known as an author, teacher (a student of one of his pupils was Alcuin), and scholar, and his most famous work, Ecclesiastical History of the English People gained him the title "The Father of English History".
His ecumenical writings were extensive and included a number of Biblical commentaries and other theological works of exegetical erudition. Another important area of study for Bede was the academic discipline of computus, otherwise known to his contemporaries as the science of calculating calendar dates. One of the more important dates Bede tried to compute was Easter, an effort that was mired with controversy. He also helped establish the practice of dating forward from the birth of Christ (Anno Domini – in the year of our Lord), a practice which eventually became commonplace in medieval Europe.
Bede was one of the greatest teachers and writers of the Early Middle Ages and is considered by many historians to be the single most important scholar of antiquity for the period between the death of Pope Gregory I in 604 and the coronation of Charlemagne in 800.
Bede was moreover a skilled linguist and translator, and his work made the Latin and Greek writings of the early Church Fathers much more accessible to his fellow Anglo-Saxons, which contributed significantly to English Christianity. Bede's monastery had access to an impressive library which included works by Eusebius, Orosius, and many others.
His scholarship and importance to Catholicism were recognised in 1899 when he was declared a Doctor of the Church. He is the only Englishman named a Doctor of the Church.
Bede, for whom the worship of God was the whole of your life, from which flowed your learning, wisdom, and ability to pass down to others the Faith, pray for us that our whole lives might be taken up in the worship of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who’s praise you sang as your last words of your earthly life, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit”; and may all our gifts flow from our worship of God, to the building up of the Church.
Heavenly Father, you called your servant Bede, while still a child, to devote his life to your service in the disciplines of religion and scholarship: Grant that as he labored in the Spirit to bring the riches of your truth to his generation, so we, in our various vocations, may strive to make you known in all the world; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Blessed Bede, ora pro nobis.
Amen.
Wednesday, May 23, 2018
St. Vincent
Today, the Church remembers St. Vincent of Lérins.
Saint Vincent of Lérins, who died c. 445 A.D., was a Gallic monk and author of early Christian writings. One example was the Commonitorium, c. 434, which offers guidance in the orthodox teaching of Christianity. As a critic of St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Vincent was out of step with the Church of Rome, which had made of St. Augustine the center of their theology, but because of his orthodox teaching he is nevertheless venerated as a saint by the Church. He opposed the Augustinian model of Grace and held to a model of Grace more closely resembling the Eastern Orthodox Churches.
Vincent upheld tradition and seemed to have objected to much of Augustine's work as "new" theology, embedded with too much of the philosophical categories of new-Platonism, which he did not think befit the teaching of the Jesus, the apostles, and the Apostolic Fathers (a view still held by the Orthodox Churches). In the Commonitorium he listed theologians and teachers who, in his view, had made significant contributions to the defense and spreading of the Gospel; he omitted Augustine from that list.
Vincent wrote his Commonitory to provide himself with a general rule to distinguish Catholic/ Orthodox truth from non-Christian beliefs, committing it to writing as a reference. It is known for Vincent's famous maxim:
"Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all."
Blessed Vincent, you devoted your life to the learning of, and the teaching of, the Christian Faith of the undivided Early Church. Pray for us who follow the same vocation, that we may be faithful teachers of the Faith, able to discern Truth from falsehood, and so declare the Gospel of Jesus undiluted, that all the world might know the redeeming power of the Resurrected Lord.
Ora pro nobis.
Amen.
Saint Vincent of Lérins, who died c. 445 A.D., was a Gallic monk and author of early Christian writings. One example was the Commonitorium, c. 434, which offers guidance in the orthodox teaching of Christianity. As a critic of St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Vincent was out of step with the Church of Rome, which had made of St. Augustine the center of their theology, but because of his orthodox teaching he is nevertheless venerated as a saint by the Church. He opposed the Augustinian model of Grace and held to a model of Grace more closely resembling the Eastern Orthodox Churches.
Vincent upheld tradition and seemed to have objected to much of Augustine's work as "new" theology, embedded with too much of the philosophical categories of new-Platonism, which he did not think befit the teaching of the Jesus, the apostles, and the Apostolic Fathers (a view still held by the Orthodox Churches). In the Commonitorium he listed theologians and teachers who, in his view, had made significant contributions to the defense and spreading of the Gospel; he omitted Augustine from that list.
Vincent wrote his Commonitory to provide himself with a general rule to distinguish Catholic/ Orthodox truth from non-Christian beliefs, committing it to writing as a reference. It is known for Vincent's famous maxim:
"Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all."
Blessed Vincent, you devoted your life to the learning of, and the teaching of, the Christian Faith of the undivided Early Church. Pray for us who follow the same vocation, that we may be faithful teachers of the Faith, able to discern Truth from falsehood, and so declare the Gospel of Jesus undiluted, that all the world might know the redeeming power of the Resurrected Lord.
Ora pro nobis.
Amen.
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