Click here for five minutes (or less) of assorted wisdom from Father Joseph Fessio, S.J., founder of Ignatius Press in San Francisco.
Father Fessio studied with Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Henri De Lubac before returning to California where he began publishing these theologians and others – including Cardinal Pell, Cardinal Sarah, novelist Michael O’Brien.
Church liberal and popular writer Andrew Greeley, S.J. called Fessio “the most powerful man in the American Church.”
is that dress a new way to display the gay pride flag colors?
Gays may use the rainbow, but they don’t own it. My comment (as a retired teacher who has supervised almost two dozen proms at a Catholic high school) is that the neckline is a little much – or rather not very much. The old nuns would be standing by with large shawl!
Actually Fr. Fessio’s commentary is most relevant — taking our very ordinariness and making it beautiful for God. The dress shown was made of duct tape. Yet how beautiful it is. I Peter 1:13ff comes to mind: the holy apostle asks us to pin our hopes on the grace to be revealed, that is, on Jesus’ coming, and gives his readers three participial clauses modifying this command which tells them how to have such hope: “preparing your minds for action”(lit: “girding up the loins of your mind”) and “being sober,” and then in v. 14: not συσχηματιζομενοι, not fashioning ourselves according to former lusts. From the Greek word shown we get the English word “schema” and “schematic.” These clauses are an invitation to be something beautiful for God, something really holy.
This podcast on The Spirit of the Liturgy supplies a very good basis for ad orientem. The first three posts above refer to an earlier podcast.