De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

Today is the first day of a New Year. I want to thank everyone who has read my blog in 2013, and hope you will continue to visit in 2014. I like New Year, it is a good opportunity to take stock and make an assessment about what was good and bad in the last twelve months, and try to pledge that the next twelve months will be better. I can think of no better way to start the New Year, than with a beautiful reflection such as the one the Church gives us today: The Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God, one of the most ancient Marian feast days of the Catholic Church. In today's Office of Readings  there is this wonderful excerpt from a letter of St Athanasius: The Word took to himself the sons of Abraham, says the Apostle, and so had to be like his brothers in all things. He had then to take a body like ours. This explains the fact of Mary’s presence: she is to provide him with a body of his own, to be offered for our sake. Scripture records her giving birth, and says: She w...

Crucifix by Charles I'Anson in bronze & fibreglass (1971) Courtesy of Greg Daly. Easter has long been a confusing time for me. Growing up, as I did, in the catechetical desert which has been the legacy of the "Spirit of Vatican II", I was taught that Easter was about Jesus of Nazareth, who was convicted as a criminal and nailed to a wooden cross, and this saved us. I mean what? Saved us from what? How could that save us? Why did He have to be nailed to a cross to save us? Surely lots of people were nailed to crosses in those days, why was it this one who saved us? Answers were not forthcoming. And with hindsight, I'm not surprised. It turns out it is a multi-faceted question and one which is well worth asking. Still, I'm not sure that we are getting many answers, even today.  Last week I attended a very well done and moving Stations of the Cross liturgy at our local junior school, where my third son John attends. It was beautiful and the children...

This graphic is a piece of homework my son William produced in year 7 to answer the question 'Who was Jesus' (the tense of which I objected to and so we changed it here). Unfortunately it was rejected & he was told it was too complicated! One of the theological battles being fought currently is one that revolves around the historical study of the person of Jesus Christ. The trend over recent decades has been to separate the Jesus of faith from the Jesus of history. This approach perhaps reached its zenith with the theologian Rudolf Bultmann who proposed his final theory, which has become known as the Bultmanian dichotomy, in his work History of the Synoptic Tradition (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).  Renowned theologian Joseph Ratzinger: now Pope Benedict XVI, has tackled this dichotomy head on in his recent work Jesus of Nazareth in which he demonstrates clearly the powerful story of Jesus Christ's actions on earth, actions which drew on what had bee...