Call My Bluff Women’s Congregation Names Drinking Game

Was on the diocesan website trying to remember where the MCs are in Warsaw. Haven’t found the address yet, but I have learned that there is an oncology centre on Roentgen Street.

Now, spot the bluff:

1) Benedictine Good Samaritan Sisters of the Cross of Christ

2) Dominican Missionary Sisters of Jesus and Mary

3) Sisters of St Francis Cantalicius of the Third Order of the Seraphic St Francis

4) Franciscan Sisters of Penance and Christian Mercy

5) Sisters of the Most Holy Name of Jesus under the Protection of Our Lady Help of Christians

6) Sisters of Reparation to the Holy Face

7) Sister Servants of the Immaculately-Conceived Virgin Mother of God

8} Sisters Adorers of the Blood of Christ

9) Sisters Disciples of the Divine Master

For bonus points (but not if you are an Anglosphere Catholic): what are the three things that God does not know?

 

Notburga - the illustration

   

 

Fr Mark on the Blessed Sacrament: Wondrous Exchange

Leave at the altar every desire and every prayer other the desire and prayer of Christ. This is the astonishing reality of the Eucharist: that in exchange for the limited desires we bring to it, Christ gives the immensity of His own single desire; and that in exchange for our paltry prayers, he gives us His own filial and priestly prayer to the Father. Thus does the Holy Spirit “help us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought” (Rom 8:26). Come, Holy Spirit!

Here.

 

Joy of the day

I just made 90 € in one three-minute phone call! Hooray! O.K. I only saved them. For the heavily indebted town of which I am an official resident since the beginning of May sent me a letter demanding 90 € from me for my 40-liter rubbish bin. Only I have none! Everyone told me that I probably had to pay it since I ought to have one (I don’t need it, as my landlady has enough space in her’s for what rubbish I produce). With a set resolve to fight to the blood against this injustice I phoned the city council (?) up - and marvellously, they immediately discovered they had made a mistake as this is only my secondary place of residence. The drawback is that I will probably loose money through all this, as I am going to spend these “extra” 90 € at least three times (”O, I saved those 90€! Which means I can buy this…”)

On another topic: WordPress will no longer be my friend soon. First this “related posts” nonsense, now this stupid automatically generated avatars! And I didn’t even get a green one! Grrr. It positively blackmailed me into adopting this nice picture of my namesake, St Notburga, patron saint of farm labourers, farmers, and for not working overtime. Complete with the hovering sickle next to her. For once in her life she worked for a farmer under the condition that she would be allowed to pursue her devotions after the end of work. When one Saturday evening at the ringing of the church bells she wanted to leave the field the farmer told her to work on. Refusing this, she said that God should judge between the two of them, held up her sickle, let it go - and it remained hovering in the air. That was impressive enough to make resorting to the Farm Labourers Union quite superfluous. She generally was a very diligent worker, choosing the hardest chores for herself, fasted to give the food to the poor, and nursed the Countess who had been particularly nasty to her on her deathbed, where that lady converted, preferred. No roses, I am sorry to say, in her case: once when she was caught on her way of almsgiving, bread had turned to wood shavings and wine to brine. Less romantic, somehow. But I love the sickle.

 

NFP in real life

10 Ways WIves Can Make NFP Easier On Their Husbands

10 Ways Husbands Can Make NFP Easier On Their Wives

I don’t have to worry about NFP, being a spinster, but I learned a lot about men from reading these, and about men-and-women. Read the comment box discussions. Recommended. Much recommended.

 

St Rosaline of Villaneuve

 

 

 Rosaline belonged to the noble Southern French family of the ‘de Villeneuve’, which still exists today. She was born in 1263. When the Bishop of Fréjus gave her the sacrament of confirmation in 1270 in the chapel of the family castle, a supernatural light seemed to envelope the child. At a very young age she made a private vow of virginity.  

She loved more than anything else to take care of the poor, distributing generously from the family provisions, which alarmed the servants of the castle. Once, after having filled her skirt with bread, Rosaline was on her way to the poor grouped together at the doors of the castle. She was suddenly stopped by her father who asked her what she was carrying. She answered: “These are the roses I just finished picking.” Extending her skirt she showed the said roses to the astonished eyes of her father. It is to recall this miracle that Rosaline is often represented in portraits with her skirt full of roses. When she was sixteen years old she wanted to become a Carthusian nun. She knew their life from the Charterhouse of la Celle-Roubaud close by, where her aunt Jeanne de Villeneuve was Prioress. Since that House had no novitiate, it was at Saint André de Ramires that she entered, and then she moved to the chief Charterhouse for women, Bertaud, not far from the city of Gap, in the French Alps. She made profession there in 1280.

Her aunt at Celle Roubaud was getting on in age, so after a few years the Superior General of our Order permitted Rosaline to go to that House to help her aunt. In 1288 she received virginal consecration at the hands of the Bishop of Fréjus. (1) It is told that this grace put her into a state of ecstasy which lasted the whole day. Although she assisted in the choir and followed all the activities of the community, her soul was united with the Lord. She was known for her inclination towards asceticism. For example, she reduced her sleep, and lived only on bread the days when she went to communion. (2) Prayer was for her most important in Carthusian life. Each night she used to spend long hours in prayer, thus obtaining special graces for the Order, her family and town, and for the entire Church. Owing to her purity of heart God granted her the gift of reading what is in other people’s heart. At the death of her aunt in 1300 the Superior General appointed Rosaline as Prioress. She held that office for twenty-nine years. It was during this time that her friend, the Bishop of Fréjus, became Pope as John XXII. (3) She died at the age of sixty-six with a great renown for holiness. Immediately there were miracles: blind received their sight and sick were cured. Five years after her death, in 1334, Pope John ordered to open her tomb. Her body was found entirely incorrupt and it is still so today. In 1602 it was transferred from the crypt to a newly built chapel. In 1851 Blessed Pius IX authorized her feast for the diocese of Fréjus, and in 1857 for the Carthusian Order. Today, the Carthusians celebrate her on July 6, and her feast is a solemnity for the nuns of the Order.

Prayer

Lord God, for love of You Saint Rosaline trampled underfoot the flattering allurements of the world, that she might adhere only to You. Help us to follow her example and, turning away from things of earth, find our joy in sharing Your heavenly gifts.

 

Deus, pro cuius amore beata Rossolina mundi sibi blandientis calcavit illecebras ut tibi unice adhaereret : tribue nobis ex eius imitatione terrena despicere, et caelestium donorum semper participatione gaudere

 

 text from this booklet from the Charterhouse of the Transfiguration.

 

The golden and the black thread of German history

closely intertwined on today’s trip with my parents to the Saale river.

Beautiful landscape with little villages, vineyards, and woods. The Naumburg Cathedral containing beautiful examples from late late Romanesque over Early to Late Gothic style (but now Protestant). A Cistersion monastery which established the first vineyards in the area (but dissolved after the Reformation and transformed into a rather famous school whose attendants included, alas, Nietsche and Fichte). The castles Rudelsburg and Saaleck (see below) built in the 11th and 12th century and later one of the focal points of the Romantic movement in Germany.

One of the focal points, too for the German “Studentenverbindungen” from 1848 and through the late 19th and early 20th century. In the late 19th century, these student corps started erecting a number of monuments close to the two castles. Not in a line with the reigning ideology, they were partly neglected and partly actively destroyed during GDR time. Consequently, when we walked there today, we fell from one shock into another greater one. Starting with a giant stone lion commemorating the fallen heros of World War I, we came to the following interesting obelisk:

Praising evil Prussian “Emperor” Wilhelm II. But the summit of tastelessness and dubiousity came afterwards:

Bismarck as a young corps student in a pensive (or haughty?) attitude after victory in one of the 25 “Mensuren” (semi-ritual corps student sword fights) he fought. Erected by the young corps student in honour to the then famous German chancellor for his 80th birthday. The “emperor” himself contributed 1000 of the 65000 Reichsmark it cost. The inscription is a “tasteful” poem (that seems to rhyme only because it is afraid of the huge dog in front of it):

Das deutsche Volk in Einigkeit.
Ein neues Reich in neuer Zeit.
Millionen haben darüber gedacht.
Aber nur einer hat’s fertig gebracht.
Einer der Unsern in Lieb und Zorn.
Ein Bursch von echtem Schrot und Korn.
Ein alter deutscher Corpsstudent.
Den alle Welt Fürst Bismarck nennt.
Dies Bild stellt ihn als Jungbursch dar.
Dank Gott, daß er der Unsre war.

The whole poetic beauty and intellecual profundity of this would be lost in any translation, so only those able speaking my much-reviled language will have the enjoyment of contemplating them in the original. Apparently, there was a large row when the statue was originally built on account of this depiction of Bismarck being irreverent.

Now I am all in favour of Germans developing some healthy sense of national pride again as well as a sense of tradition [Of the golden thread of German history, I must add. So leave out most of the last twohundred years.] But how some people could raise a rather immense sum of money to rebuild these monuments that are a) ugly (especially the last one) and b) commemorate exactly that part of German history that developed in a frighteningly straight way into National Socialism (most of the monuments were built during the Weimar Republic) - I fail to grasp that. There is a plaque at every memorial on which all the motivations behind building and restoring it are described in an extremely serious way… It is somewhat frightening. For these are not frustrated teenage/twen out-of-work youth in some desolate villages in Eastern Germany shaving their heads and blaming foreigners for the lack of jobs. These are studied people with, if I am allowed this judgement, appear to have rather questionable political opinions.

 

Our Lord, painted by a saint

 

One in a line with Schuman, De Gaspari, and Adenauer

Our chancellor Angela Merkel was awarded the Karlspreis in Aachen today. This international prize honours people and institutions with particular achievments for Europe and European unification. A list of the first years’ laureates:
1950 Richard Nikolaus Graf Coudenhove-Kalergi
1951 Hendrik Brugmans
1952 Alcide de Gasperi
1953 Jean Monnet
1954 Konrad Adenauer
1955 Sir Winston S. Churchill
1957 Paul Henri Spaak
1958 Robert Schuman
1959 George C. Marshall
And now Angela Merkel was awarded the prize for her crucial part in producing the Lissabon treaty.

 

Weird customs

Embarrassing my native country in the eyes of the world.

For in Germany, for some strange reason even long, in-depth research (Wikipedia) could not elucidate, Ascension day is celebrated as Father’s Day, or Men’s Day. In fact, here in heathen Eastern Germany the majority of people would only know it under that designation, I am sure.

As the feast it is called “Christi Himmelfahrt” customs include making a trip to somewhere in the country. Prefarably in non-motorised vehicles with a large transporting capacity - prerequisite for being able to get terribly drunk (for who would carry bottles and bottles of bear through the landscape, or who would be able to drive?). And getting drunk, it appears, is the thing men most want to do at their feast day.

Having the best of fathers who never would do such a thing, I am not personally affected by this custom. Nevertheless I find it somewhat disturbing.