Painful puns and even culinary punning, all in honor of St. Bartholomew, at Fr. Z’s place.
Author: Mike Aquilina
The Holy Grail of Brazil
Good news for those of you who’ve been waiting sleeplessly for the Brazilian Portuguese edition of The Grail Code. It’s here. I’m holding it in my hands. Here’s the good word:
“O Código Graal”, Mike Aquilina e Christopher Bailey vão muito além das versões popularizadas por historiadores e arqueólogos sobre a busca do Graal,um tema recorrente, mas não menos instigante na literatura ocidental. A busca pelo cálice usado por Jesus na Última Ceia e, depois, por José de Arimatéia para recolher o sangue de Cristo crucificado impulsiona as lendas sobre o Rei Arthur, estimulou as maiores aventuras de Indiana Jones e mobilizou as pessoas a virarem as páginas de “O Código Da Vinci”. “O Código Graal” representa um tratamento lúcido para as lendas do Graal, baseado na história real, sem falsas teorias conspiratórias ou elementos da mitologia céltica. Para discorrer sobre a história verdadeira do Santo Graal, os autores estudaram séculos de crenças sobre a Santa Comunhão – da Palestina de Jesus Cristo até a Grã-Bretanha nas sombras da Idade Média, das cortes coloridas da França medieval até a Alemanha de Hitler -, a história da literatura européia e as diferentes idéias de amor e pecado. Ao fundamentar as lendas em seu contexto histórico e teológico, os autores, ambos jornalistas, corrigem grande parte das distorções da lenda, tal qual a conhecemos hoje, e mostram por que ela se tornou tão popular e como mudou ao longo do tempo.
I find it for sale — and immediate shipment — right here.
Bart from the Start
Today is the feast of St. Bartholomew, who’s called Nathanael in John’s Gospel (Jn 1:45-51). St. Augustine paid tribute to our apostle in his Tractates on the Gospel of John. Here’s a snippet:
What sort of a man was this? … Hear the Lord bearing testimony to Nathanael: “Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and said of him, ‘Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!'” Great testimony! Not of Andrew, nor of Peter, nor of Philip was that said which was said of Nathanael, “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.” What great testimony! What was said of Nathanael was said not of Andrew, nor Peter, nor Philip, “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.” …
Jesus then saw this man in whom was no guile, and said, “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.” Nathanael said to Him, “How do You know me?” Jesus answered him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” Nathanael answered and said to Him, “Rabbi, You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” … His words, “You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel,” were not dissimilar to those of Peter so long afterwards, when the Lord said to him, “Blessed art you, Simon Bar Jona, for flesh and blood has not revealed it to you, but My Father in heaven.” And there He named the rock, and praised the strength of the Church’s support in this faith. Here already Nathanael says, “You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!”
Read the rest here (scroll down to number 16 and following).
(Today’s also my firstborn‘s birthday. He attained the mighty rank of Star Scout last night.)
Meme of Noble Descent
The Curt Jester tagged me for this meme. But it’s only right to trace its lineage back to Michelle Arnold of Catholic Answers, who took her inspiration from no less than Brooke Shields. Brookie had bragged to a reporter that her family tree included Catherine de Medici and Lucrezia Borgia, Charlemagne and El Cid, William the Conqueror and King Harold II.
I did a little digging on genealogy sites a few years back. All my grandparents hailed from two little villages in Sicily, and a priest in the area told me that those villages had been settlements of refugees from Napoleon’s invasion of Malta. Since “Aquilina” is to Malta what “Smith” is to Pittsburgh, his history seems plausible. One of the leaders of Malta’s resistance against Napoleon was Salvo Aquilina, who was executed for his efforts. Maybe Salvo’s survivors weren’t as eager to go to the gallows, and so took the midnight boat to Sicily instead.
My correspondence with Aquilinas throughout the world has turned up an Aquilina in the rolls of Byzantine nobility, and a deed from the 1670s that refers to a parcel of land granted to the Aquilinas in the 1430s. If Malta still wants me, I’m ready to claim that land.
As for other famous forebears … Well, readers of this blog already know all about St. Aquilina of Byblos. She’s got the name, but we’ve yet to draw DNA from her relics. So I can’t claim her yet.
But all this is connected by dotted lines (or imaginary lines), since I didn’t do anything resembling real research. My father long ago warned me: “Don’t shake the family tree too hard, you never know what’ll fall out.”
As my “research” stands, it permits me to imagine a lineage even more illustrious than Brookie’s. Heck, everybody owned Sicily for a month — Athenians, Byzantines, Germans, Africans, Arabs. And how about Malta? St. Paul and St. Luke, the Knights Templar — I could be a walking Da Vinci Code.
Thus I proceed with this meme, assuming, like Dan Brown, that everything I declare is FACT.
1. Which famous person would you most like to learn that you are descended from? St. Mary Magdalene. Even in reality, what a bloodline that would be!
2. Which famous person would you hate to learn that you are descended from? Nero. He was about as creepy a guy as I can imagine. The London Observer recently summed him up as “a psychopathic, debauched, wife-beating matricide.”
3. If you could be ancestor to any living famous person, who would it be and why? My son Michael, because he wrote a great book on St. Jude, which made him world-famous on the street where I live.
4. If you could go back in time and meet any known ancestor(s) of yours, who would it be? My grandfather, Calogero. My accurate genealogical information ends with him. He was a coal miner and, later, a school janitor, who was so beloved in our town that his obituary was a full-page news item in 1926, thirty-seven years before I was born.
5. Tag five others: you, you, you, you, and you.
Five People Meme
The Divine Lamp tagged me for the “Five People Meme.” The question is: “If you could meet and have a deep conversation with any five people on earth, living or dead, from any time period, who would they be?” It’s hard to know what to make of the question. Some of my favorite authors (William Faulkner, Robert Frost) were not known for their sparkling and genial conversation. (Come to think of it, neither am I.) And I don’t know if I could emerge alive from a conversation with Evelyn Waugh or St. Jerome. I can’t imagine what I’d say to St. Augustine, other than “Can I have your autograph — and your blessing?” So some folks probably made my lists just because I know precious little about their biographies or personalities — or because I’ve heard one or two anecdotes that make them seem to be good company. As for the celebrities: At least for some of them, I’d like our conversations to turn into lessons. If I could host all five of them at once, it would make for quite a jam session.
SAINTS
1) The Blessed Virgin Mary (Hi, Mom)
2) St. Josemaria Escriva
3) St. Maximilian Kolbe
4) St. Ambrose of Milan
5) St. Ignatius of Antioch
THOSE IN THE PROCESS OF BEING CANONIZED
1) Alvaro del Portillo
2) Solanus Casey
3) John Henry Newman
4) Pope John Paul II
5) Pope John Paul I
HEROES FROM YOUR NATIVE COUNTRY
1) St. John Neumann
2) Bl. Francis X. Seelos
3) Bishop Michael O’Connor
4) Demetrius Gallitzin
5) Boniface Wimmer
AUTHORS
1) Theodore Roethke
2) Wilfrid Sheed
3) David Scott
4) Phyllis McGinley
5) Flannery O’Connor
CELEBRITIES
1) Paul Simon
2) Dion DiMucci
3) Eric Clapton
4) Scott Hahn
5) Rod Argent
War Wounds
The ancient Lebanese port of Byblos “has survived the Romans, the Crusades and the armies of Alexander the Great but now it faces a 21st century menace, brought to its shores on a tide of war — oil pollution.” A heavy oil slick, produced by the bombing of a power plant, is now lapping at the old city’s fortified stone walls. It’s an estimated 10,000-15,000 tons of oil washing up on an 87-mile stretch of coastline. (Read more of the story here.)
A few months back, we posted on St. Aquilina, Byblos’s famous little-girl martyr of the third century. Pray for Lebanon. Pray for peace.
St. Neon: Light in a Dark Time
Neon and his brothers Claudius and Asterius met their death in the persecution of the Emperor Diocletian (around 303 A.D.). Their stepmother denounced them as Christians to the proconsul of Cilicia, who tortured them and had them crucified. On the same day, a woman named Domnina chose to be scourged to death rather than renounce the faith. A widow named Theonilla was scourged before meeting her death by burial in hot coals.
All you holy men and women, pray for us!
Friends, Romans, Christians … in Ancient India?
Back in July, I posted on the traditions of St. Thomas the Apostle’s work in India, suggesting a strong case for their plausibility, given the state of Roman trade with India in the mid-first century. Recent archeological excavations confirm what we read in the ancient geographers and naturalists: Rome was dependent on India’s spices, textiles, gems, dyes, and perfumes. Moreover, there were already well established Jewish settlements in India, and the synagogues would have been natural starting points for Thomas, as the synagogues of Europe were for other apostles.
Now come further hints that the evidence for Roman commerce has been plentiful all along, but suppressed. Pottery, coins, and other artifacts turn up regularly, but people in the villages would rather not have archeologists disrupt their lives (certainly a difficult situation). Rumor has it, too, that nationalist movements do not welcome evidence of ancient Indian Christianity or contact with the Roman West. It’s un-PC. Thus, the best policy is often to sweep the shards under the porch.
IOL carried a story yesterday, “Ancient Indian Port Faces Extinction,” by Jeemon Jacob. It concerns a village in Kerala, a region traditionally associated with St. Thomas’s apostolate. In fact, it concerns a port that might have been St. Thomas’s landing in India. Excerpts follow:
Pattanam, India — Pottery shards, beads, Roman copper coins and ancient wine bottles litter the strata beneath this small seaside village in India’s southern Kerala state.
The 250 families, mostly agricultural labourers, who live in Pattanam, 260km north of Kerala’s capital Thiruvananthapuram, find the objects pretty, but would rather dig up the ground and build larger homes.
But according to archaeologists KP Shajan and V Selvakumar, they may be destroying the remnants of Muziris, a well-documented trading port where Rome and India met almost 3 000 years ago.
Muziris mysteriously dropped off the map.
They say that, based on remote sensing data, a river close to Pattanam had changed its course and the ancient port may have been buried due to earthquakes or floods.
The two are worried construction activity in the village will destroy evidence about the existence of the port before they get the chance to examine it scientifically.
“There is no doubt that Pattanam was a major port that is linked to Indo-Roman trade,” Shajan said. “But we can’t confirm whether it was Muziris. We need more collaborative evidence to support our findings.”
A majority of the families that live in Pattanam are demolishing old tiled-roof structures and replacing them with concrete buildings right in the middle of the 1,5km zone where Shajan and Selvakumar say Muziris was possibly located.
Muziris was a port city mentioned in several ancient travelogues and scholarly texts as a major centre of trade between India and Rome, especially in pepper and other spices around the second century BC to probably as late as the sixth century AD.
Christianity may have been introduced to the sub-continent through Muziris, historians say. But Muziris mysteriously dropped off the map – maybe to war, plague, or disaster.
The two archaeologists say they want to find out for sure and have asked local preservation groups to help.
Kerala’s Historical Research Council, an independent body that promotes research in history, says it has written to the Archaeological Survey of India, which is in charge of protecting monuments and historical places, to take steps to protect Pattanam.
But KV Kunjikrishnan, a professor of history, says neither the government nor the Archaeological Survey of India has responded.
“The construction activity in the area may destroy vital evidence of historical importance,” says Kunjikrishnan.
Pattanam housewife Sheeba Murali says ancient beads pop out from the ground after heavy rains and the 30-year-old history graduate, like some other villagers, collects them and hands them over to the archaeologists.
Villagers say they used to get gold coins from the site, but kept the finds quiet.
“Nobody admits whatever things they get. We are scared that the government may take over our land for archaeological survey,” says villager Arun Rajagopal.
It was from Rajagopal’s land that the two archaeologists discovered beads, layer of bricks, wine bottles, jars, pendants and copper coins.
Selvakumar says the ancient bricks, which the villagers used to build their homes, bore a close resemblance to those used 2 500 years ago.
“During my excavations I collected a wide range of pottery which goes back to the historic date. Amphorae, roulette ware, beads, nails and several other artefacts such as copper coins were also recovered,” he says.
But Sheeba says villagers will continue building new homes.
“My children need a decent place to stay when they grow up. But I am thrilled to live in a place where history sleeps,” she says.
I’d quibble with the estimate of 2,500-3,000 years ago. Roman trade with India seems to have begun to boom right around the middle of the first century, with the discovery of the trade winds that made open-sea sailing possible. Other than that, the story — like so much of the painstaking Indian research I mentioned in my July post — gives us a clearer vision of a certain world, a lost world — a world where, I believe, St. Thomas walked.
UPDATE: Bread and Circuses posts links to useful background material on the port of Muziris.
The Queenship of Mary
Today’s feast, the Queenship of Mary, was fixed on the calendar by Pope Pius XII in 1954. But, of course, it has deep roots in the age of the Fathers. In the fourth century, St. Ephrem addressed the Blessed Virgin as “Queen.” In the eighth, so did St. Andrew of Crete, who called her “queen of the whole human race.” But my favorite Father on Mary’s queenship is St. John of Damascus, a contemporary of St. Andrew. In his Three Sermons on the Dormition of the Virgin, St. John imagines King David, who danced before the Ark of the Covenant, dancing as Mary, the Ark of the New Covenant, arrives in heaven. Such should be our festive attitude on this great day. St. John says: “Let us dance in spirit with David; today the Ark of God is at rest. With Gabriel, the great archangel, let us exclaim, ‘Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Hail, inexhaustible ocean of grace. Hail, sole refuge in grief. Hail, cure of hearts. Hail, through whom death is expelled and life is installed.'”
If you’re so inclined, you can pick up audio of St. John’s first homily on the Dormition at the site of Maria Lectrix.
Letters, We Get Letters
This is a very cool glimpse at the correspondence between St. Augustine and Pope St. Sixtus III. The subject at hand is the Pelagian controversy. Augustine had heard rumors that the new pope was on the other side. Their letters produce some lovely passages, including one that Catholics will recognize from a commonly used preface of the Mass. Thanks, Fr. Z!
Fantasy Baseball
Darrell Pursiful at Disert Paths has posted his list for the “League of Extraordinary Christians” (pre-1054), a takeoff on the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It’s an entertaining read, complete with a Rogue, a Muscle guy, a Mastermind, and a Guy with a Boat. Many of our faves make at least cameo appearances.
Sid Virtuous
Following upon Saturday’s virtual tour of the Roman Forum … today’s the feast of a bishop whose statue once stood in that very place. That was long before he became a bishop, though, when he was merely the son-in-law of the emperor. Sidonius Apollinaris was a convert, and a poet, too. The following is boiled down from the old Catholic Encyclopedia.
Sidonius Apollinaris was a Christian author and bishop, born at Lyons about 430; died at Clermont, about August, 480. He was of noble descent, his father and grandfather being Christians and prefects of the pretorium of the Gauls. About 452 he married Papianilla, daughter of Avitus, who was proclaimed emperor at the end of 455, and who set up in the Forum of Trajan a statue of his son-in-law. Sidonius wrote a panegyric in honor of his father who had become consul on 1 Jan., 456. A year had elapsed before Avitus was overthrown by Ricimer and Majorian. Sidonius at first resisted, then yielded and wrote a second panegyric on the occasion of Majorian’s journey to Lyons (458). After the fall of Majorian, Sidonius supported Theodoric II, King of the Visigoths, and after Theodoric’s assassination hoped to see the empire arise anew during the consulate of Anthemius. He went to Rome, where he eulogized the second consulate of Anthemius (1 Jan., 468) in a panegyric, and became prefect of the city. About 470 he returned to Gaul, where contrary to his wishes he was elected Bishop of the Arveni (Clermont in Auvergne). He had been chosen as the only one capable of maintaining the Roman power against the attacks of Euric, Theodoric’s successor. With the general Ecdicius, he resisted the barbarian army up to the time when Clermont fell, abandoned by Rome (474). He was for some time a prisoner of Euric, and was later exposed to the attacks of two priests of his diocese. He finally returned to Clermont, where he died.
His works form two groups, poems and letters After his conversion to Christianity, Sidonius ceased to write profane poetry. Sidonius wished to unite the service of Christ and that of the Empire. He is the last representative of the ancient culture in Gaul. By his works as well as by his career, he strove to perpetuate it under the aegis of Rome; eventually he had to be content with saving its last vestiges under a barbarian prince.
Make Ravenna Your Screen-Saver
Bread and Circuses points us to a website devoted to the Ravenna exhibit I mentioned a few days ago. It’s complete with a well-stocked photo gallery.
Quote Meme (Non-Patristic)
My great blog patroness, Julie at Happy Catholic, tagged me on a Quote Meme. The idea is to go here, to the random quotes generator, and look through random quotes until you find five that you think (a) reflect who you are or (b) what you believe. I’m not sure what these represent, but they rang true and made me smile:
If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865)
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Tom Stoppard (1937 – )
We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.
W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973)
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973)
All power corrupts, but we need the electricity.
Unknown
Assyrians on the Comeback Trail
Assyrian Christians, with the faith and the very churches they used in the age of the Fathers, are experiencing a revival in Turkey. Hat tip: PaleoJudaica.