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| Friday was the Feast of the Assumption |
Welcome once more
to “Sunday Snippets – A Catholic Carnival”.
Indeed, one might even call it a Catholic Blogfest (then again, one
might not) in which various of us share our posts for the week, both with each
other and with you. The main gathering is at This That and the Other Thing
[here], in the capable hands
of our fearless leader RAnn.
A Lesson Learned
Here at Principium
et Finis I’ve been learning that Summer isn’t the best blogging season,
at least not this Summer. A number of
factors have conspired to keep me away from my computer (I hope you notice that
I managed to avoid the overworked phrase “A Perfect Storm”). One result has been that I have been
including things in the “Sunday Snippets” posts that I had been trying to publish
earlier in the week, but ran out of time.
That hasn’t really been a bad thing, since I like to make this post worth
reading in its own right, and not just a laundry list of earlier pieces. And by declaring someone the “Saint of the
Week”, I can talk about him or her a few days after the official feast day
without raising too many eyebrows, can’t I?
St. Maximilian Kolbe, Saint of
the Week
This week,
unfortunately, I barely even started writing the Saint post before Sunday
afternoon. And that’s too bad, because
this past Thursday was the feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe, one of the Great
Saints of the past century, a Saint to whom I have a personal devotion, and one
of the Patrons of this blog. The good
news is that there were many wonderful tributes on the internet to St.
Maximilian (including some by other contributors to “Sunday Snippets” - here’s the main site again!). I’ll limit myself
to a few brief comments.
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| St. Maximilian Kolbe |
Maximilian Kolbe
was truly a great Saint. A Conventual
Franciscan, he was both a very learned and a very holy man, but at the same time had a wonderful
way of connecting with ordinary people.
He made teaching the faith a major part of his religious mission, for
which reason he founded the Militia Immaculatae,whose members are known as
Knights of the Immaculata, Soldiers for Christ the King under the command of His
Blessed Mother. He also made a point of
establishing publications to teach and evangelize, both in Europe and in Japan,
where he served as a missionary in the city of Nagasaki in the years before
World War II. Back in his native Poland during
the war, he was arrested and sent to the death camp at Auschwitz by the Nazis,
where he died a martyr’s death, offering to die in the place of another
prisoner.
St. Maximilian is
a Patron of this blog for several reasons. His self-sacrificing death and refusal to accommodate
himself to Nazism make him an inspiring model in a world that continues to be
threatened by inhuman ideologies. His
sense that he and his companions were missionaries not only to non-Christians
but also to a Christendom badly in need of re-Evangelization was a precursor to
the New Evangelization proclaimed by St. Maximilian’s fellow Pole St. John Paul
II (and a theme of the current Pope, as I will discuss in the coming week). Also,
his commitment to taking full advantage of modern means of communication make
him a natural Saint for Catholic bloggery (if he were with us today, he’d be
all over the internet). Finally, as a Knight of the Immaculata myself, I see my
blog as a small contribution on my part to St. Maximilian’s mission of
evangelization.
The Week That Was
In keeping with
my observations at the top of the page, it was a slow week at Principium
et Finis, but there were a few items of note:
Monday – The Haydn revival continues, with another dramatic excerpt
from Pap . . . er . . .the composer’s
Mass
in Time of War: “Joseph Haydn – Missa in Tempore Belli, ‘Agnus Dei’” [here]
Tuesday – This is
the sort of piece that my Lovely Bride calls a “screed”, but I’m just telling it the way it is. There are people out there (those Islamic
State fellows in Iraq, for instance) who play hardball, as we say here in the
U.S.A. Do you think we can buy them off
with Happy Talk and a Friendship Bracelet? “If They Do Not Rise To Meet That Challenge,
They Will Lose Their Civilization” [here]
Thursday – The
Morning Prayer piece in my series on the Liturgy of the Hours: “Lauds: Our
Daily Orientation (LOH 6 Throwback Thursday Edition)” [here]
RAnn’s Question of
the Week: What did you do on your summer vacation?
I worked full time at Wal-Mart (not a bad second job,
really), made numerous medical appointments to treat deer tick bites to both me
and one of my sons (after a couple of months, my son was finally diagnosed with
Lyme Disease), and did lots of family stuff, such as going to the beach (where
I took cool photos of my feet in the surf), watching a lot of Marx Brothers
movies and old episodes of Get Smart, and preparing my eldest
son to go off to college (a Catholic college that is actually, well, Catholic).
Oh, and a little blogging on the side . . .
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