Sunday Snippets - A Catholic Carnival (Pentecost 2014)

 Today is Pentecost, one of the great Feasts of the Church, in which we remember when Jesus sent the Holy Spirit upon his Disciples to guide them in their mission of Evangelization and in the governance of his Church.  In the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we read that the Apostles, Mary and others were gathered in the Upper Room when there was a rush of mighty wind, tongues of flame, and those gathered began speaking “in other tongues”.  The international crowd gathered in Jerusalem, on hearing them, was 

. . .  amazed and wondered, saying, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?  Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphyia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God." (Acts 2:5-11)

Referring to this event, St. Gregory of Agrigentum said:

           

Therefore if somebody should say to one of us, “You have received the Holy Spirit, why do you not speak in tongues?” his reply should be, “I do indeed speak in the tongues of all men, because I belong to the body of Christ, that is, the Church, and she speaks all languages. What else did the presence of the Holy Spirit indicate at Pentecost, except that God’s Church was to speak in the language of every people?”

The Church speaks to everyone because Christ is for everyone, and his language is universal.  Today we have ways of reaching people all over the globe that St. Gregory Agrigentum could not have imagined back in the 6th century, but it's the same Gospel, the same proclamation that the Apostles made 2,000 years ago.
     One of those new ways of speaking to people throughout the world is, of course, the internet, which brings us to this week's "Sunday Snippets - A Catholic Carnival", in which some of us Catholic bloggers, doing our own small part, get together every Lord's Day and share our posts from the previous week.  The main gathering place is here, at This That and the Other Thing, home blog of our host RAnn.

     It's been a crazy week here at Principium et Finis, with the end of the academic year, getting treated for tick bites and various other distractions, but the show must go on, and we did manage to do some blogging:

Tuesday - Simply gorgeous: "Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor – Kyrie" [here]

and - The abortion industry and its apologists specialize in slogans and "arguments" that only sound good if you don't think about them, such as "It's between a woman and her doctor": "Abortion Myth # 14" [here]

Wednesday - A discussion of the Great Both/And, here applied to the question of whether we should direct our efforts toward the Coming of the Kingdom, or toward problems here and now: "The Forest And The Trees" [here]

and - One of the clearest, easiest to grasp explanations of ad orientem worship, in the form of a simple little picture, taken (in my case) from Fr. Z's blog: "Food For Thought" [here]

Thursday - Another both/and thing, this time in answer to those who argue we should stop talking about morality and simply help the poor; in fact, the two go together: "Unless The Lord Builds The House: Poverty And Morality (Throwback Thursday Edition)" [here]

Friday - His wasn't the primary observance of the day, but I thought he was worth a mention: "St. Philip: Deacon and Evangelist" [here]