Today the Archbishop of Hartford, Christopher J. Coyne, was welcomed to the Monastery of Our Lady of Grace (North Guilford) to celebrate the Mass of the Holy Spirit and then to preside over the election of a prioress for the community of contemplative Dominican Nuns. In this case, Sister Maria of the Angels was re-elected as a prioress for a term of three years.
May God grant Sr. Maria good and fruitful years as prioress.
Our Lady of Grace and St Dominic, pray for us.
Today is one of the “idea feasts” following the close of the Easter-Pentecost cycle in the Latin Church. The Church focuses our attention on the Holy Trinity. Many people are not well-versed in the theology of the Trinity. Given here is an Angelus address of Pope Benedict XVI, for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, 11 June 2006.
On this Sunday that follows Pentecost, we are celebrating the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. Thanks to the Holy Spirit, who helps us understand Jesus’ words and guides us to the whole truth (cf. Jn 14: 26; 16: 13), believers can experience, so to speak, the intimacy of God himself, discovering that he is not infinite solitude but communion of light and love, life given and received in an eternal dialogue between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit – Lover, Loved and Love, to echo St Augustine.
In this world no one can see God, but he has made himself known so that, with the Apostle John, we can affirm: “God is love” (I Jn 4: 8, 16), and “we have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us” (Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, n. 1; cf. I Jn 4: 16).
Those who encounter Christ and enter into a friendly relationship with him welcome into their hearts Trinitarian Communion itself, in accordance with Jesus’ promise to his disciples: “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (Jn 14: 23).
For those who have faith, the entire universe speaks of the Triune God. From the spaces between the stars to microscopic particles, all that exists refers to a Being who communicates himself in the multiplicity and variety of elements, as in an immense symphony.
All beings are ordered to a dynamic harmony that we can similarly call “love”. But only in the human person, who is free and can reason, does this dynamism become spiritual, does it become responsible love, in response to God and to one’s neighbour through a sincere gift of self. It is in this love that human beings find their truth and happiness.
Among the different analogies of the ineffable mystery of the Triune God that believers are able to discern, I would like to cite that of the family. It is called to be a community of love and life where differences must contribute to forming a “parable of communion”.
The Virgin Mary, among all creatures, is a masterpiece of the Most Holy Trinity. In her humble heart full of faith, God prepared a worthy dwelling place for himself in order to bring to completion the mystery of salvation. Divine Love found perfect correspondence in her, and in her womb the Only-begotten Son was made man.
Let us turn to Mary with filial trust, so that with her help we may progress in love and make our life a hymn of praise to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit.
As we welcome a new Roman pontiff, we turn to some more images of Ss. Peter and Paul, the great patrons of Rome are worth recalling to mind. Their feast day is approaching on June 29.
(The arms shown between them are arguably the most famous and distinctive arms in all of baroque Rome; they are the arms of the Barberini family and the Barberini pope, Urban VIII). Notice the honey bees on the coat of arms.
Approaching the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, you’ll start to hear a lot of really bad and stupid arguments. One is that Constantine originally supported the Athanasian line of thought against the Arian line and that’s why the Council decided the way they did. Here’s the the thing: no! And here’s why –
“The story of 1st Nicaea and (especially) its aftermath is not just not what e.g. Dan Brown claimed: it’s literally the opposite.
Constantine didn’t interfere at the council on behalf of what is now orthodoxy. If anything, he was sympathetic to Arianism, but mainly he was against a creed that would exclude the Arians: he wanted everyone to stop *fussing*. He was complicated, but *probably* at least on many levels wanted a Christianity that was a syncretistic popular religion to tie together the empire and provide continuity with paganism, an easy fuzzy-minded baptism of Sol Invictus.
That is what he didn’t get.
He *tried* to interfere theologically at one point after the council: he commanded Athanasius to rescind Alexander’s anathematization of Arius.
Athanasius responded thusly: “What concern had the emperor with it? When did a decision of the Church receive its authority from the emperor? Or rather, when was his decree even recognized? There have been many [local] councils in times past, and many decrees made by the Church; but never did the fathers seek the consent of the emperor for them, not did the emperor busy himself in the affairs of the Church….The Apostle Paul had friends among those who belonged to the house of Caesar, and in the writing to the Philipians he sent greetings from them: but never did he take them as associates in his judgment”.
In other words, Constantine was, for at least part of his life, *really trying* to be in a Dan Brown novel. Like, his level best. Not the part about deciding what books were in the Bible, but the part about patching together an imperially helpful compromise syncretistic religion. That religion would have been Arianism: a platonic high God with a Jesus who was a sort of highest in the created order Sol Invictus divine son. Who one was allowed to worship. This religion would have been amenable to all kinds of both gnostic and demi-pagan developments: you could bolt on an emanation or two; old gods could sneak back in as Arian “saints” to be worshiped, because if you could worship a created being in Jesus, why not worship other lesser created beings? As a treat?
But that is *precisely* what was rejected at & after Nicaea.
One God. Christ Jesus, the man, is God. Consubstantial with the Father. There is no time when He was not.
All the saints who we honor, Mary herself, are simply not consubstantial with the Father. That is not and has never been orthodoxy. And this has always been entirely public and clear. The possibility of a paganized and syncretized religion presented itself, then: as long after the death of the last apostle as we are after the American Revolutionary War.
It tried its best. It looked very much like it was going to win.
Of course that religion would have lost Christianity’s Judaism, but it might have been a lot more helpful empire-building wise. Super easy to skootch any pagans you run into in to the Arian “Church”.
But what Athanasius (and, in the end, all but two of the 318 bishops who attended) said to Constantine and Arius was this: Yes I see what you mean, that would be a more straightforward religion and make things easier politically. But that is not what the apostles taught. That is a new thing. And we say no.
God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί”
– Sussanah Black Roberts, Editor of Plough Quarterly and Mere Orthodoxy
Pope Leo XIV, during his first Regina Coeli, on the Good Shepherd Sunday and the day of prayer for vocations, tells young people: “Do not be afraid” to accept the proposal from the Church!
And days after the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, Pope Leo XIV repeats, “No more war!” He called for an authentic, true and lasting peace in Ukraine, an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and for humanitarian aid to be allowed in and all Israeli hostages freed.
“I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labour…” (Address to the Cardinals 10 May 2025)
We watch and wait and expect.
The election of a Roman Pontiff, alternatively titled Supreme Pontiff, the Bishop of Rome, or the Pope. There are several titles afforded to the holder of the office but this unimportant right now. We know the one elected is the successor to St. Peter, not successor to the previous popes. Francis was the vicar of Christ, successor to St. Peter, not the successor to Pope Benedict XVI.
Catholic ecclesiology teaches us that we are to be attentive to the election of the new Roman Pontiff through prayer to the Holy Spirit. It is not a political caucus. It is not a time to arrange for someone’s election. So that’s what we do –we wait patiently and prayerfully following the line: Thy will be done. We sit in prayerful expectation and not fall prey to the media prognostications.
The image of the Book of the Gospels is opened to Matthew 4, when Jesus calls his first disciples. Hands are being placed on the spot where Jesus calls his first follower: “Simon, who is called Peter.”
Come Holy Spirit, come through Mary.
Native nutmegger, Father David Tracy, 86, died on Tuesday, April 29, the feast of St. Catherine of Siena. He was a priest of the Diocese of Bridgeport, author, and professor. Father David is consider by many –and rightly so– to be an eminent Catholic theologian and distinguished professor at the University of Chicago. One of the groups Father David was a part of was Chicago’s Lumen Christi Institute, which he played a key role in its mission. As the director of the Institute said, “Fr. Tracy shaped the culture of the Institute, as he modeled intellectual friendship and the pursuit of truth across divisions.”
Kenneth Woodward writes:
David Tracy was not just a great theologian, though he was easily the most influential Catholic fundamental theologian of his era. He was that far more capacious figure, a great Christian humanist. The range of his reading matched the range of his thought and interest. He knew classical literature, much of medieval literature and a great deal of modern literature. And sociology. And science. In fact, these insights influenced many of his later essays and led him to the concept of “fragments,” which figures so importantly in his late essays. But he was also and always a priest nourished by both the celebrating and the receiving of the sacraments. He knew the hypocrisies that can infest both the church and the academy but it didn’t matter: he was thoroughly at home in both. Oh, and he wrote some of the longest, fruitful and stand-alone interesting footnotes of any writer I know.
A very interesting 2019 interview can be read here.
Having two graduate degrees in Theology I’ve read Fr David’s writing. I would say without exaggeration that Father David and Cardinal Avery Dulles are considered “deans of Catholic Theology in the USA.”
May Father David Tracy memory be eternal.
St. Augustine, pray for us.
