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Advent Antiphons: O Adonai

18th December 2020

The CHC blog

18th December - O Adonai

“O Adonai and leader of Israel, you appeared to Moses in a burning bush and you gave him the Law on Sinai.
O come and save us with your mighty power.”

The word “Adonai” is a particular Hebrew term for “Lord”. Yet it is retained in the original Latin antiphon, rather than being translated to “Dominus”. The term is only used twice in the Vulgate (Latin) Bible. The only explanation for its usage in the antiphon is the author’s intended acrostic (see here)!

The first time “Adonai” is used in the Bible is when God reveals His name as “the LORD” to Moses. And so this second antiphon points us to the second essential thing that we, with our Jewish ancestors, can say about God: He is the Lawgiver.

The Latin words that refer to the Lord’s appearance in the burning bush are not taken directly from Exodus, but are a literal quotation from St Stephen’s speech in the Acts of the Apostles. Thus a discrete reference is inserted to the New Testament and to Christ.

The words either side of that phrase – referring to the leader of Israel and the Law on Sinai – are not found directly anywhere in the Old Testament, although they refer to Israel’s exodus from Egypt and to the Covenant formed with them. Equally, the last phrase, “Come and save us…” seems to refer to Moses’ song of thanksgiving after the crossing of the Red Sea.

So how does all this relate to Christmas? According to ancient Christian tradition, the revelation of the Old Testament was considered to be the Revelation, however veiled, of the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. The God Who spoke to our ancestors spoke through His Word, Who becomes incarnate in the Christmas mystery. Hence Catholic theology has always seen a spiritual prefigurement or foreshadowing of the New Testament in the physical events of the Old Testament.

The leader of Israel, the One Who sets us free from the land of slavery, Who leads us through the waters of Baptism that wipe away all evil, and Who forms an irrevocable covenant in His blood on the mount, is Christ the Lord: the One Whose coming we await.

Listen to the O Adonai antiphon here

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Stefan Kaminski

Director, The Christian Heritage Centre

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Advent Antiphons: O Sapientia

17th December 2020

The CHC blog

17th December - O Sapientia

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“O Wisdom, you come forth from the mouth of the Most High. You fill the universe and hold all things together in a strong yet gentle manner. O come to teach us the way of truth.”

Wisdom is the explicit theme of seven of the Old Testament books, all of which personify her as coexistent with God.

In the Book of Sirach, she says of herself, “I came forth from the mouth of the Most High”: a reference to the creative Word of God in Genesis 1. This is the same Word through whom all things were made (cf. John 1:3): the Incarnate Lord, Jesus Christ.

In the Book of Wisdom, Solomon writes of her, “She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well”. Thus the antiphon picks up the long-held understanding of creation as, not simply a momentary act akin to setting things off, but a continuous and permanent act of holding all things in being. As St Augustine is keen to emphasise, though Christ became incarnate and therefore mortal insofar as He took on our human nature, in His Divinity He remained present everywhere and in all things.

Finally, Wisdom invites us to “walk in the way of insight”, following her invitation to her banquet (Proverbs 9). And so the antiphon concludes by asking Him who is “the way, the truth and the light” (John 14) to teach us His way as we walk towards the great Mystery of His birth on earth.

And so the first of the seven antiphons sets the metaphysical scene, pointing us to “the beginning” of both the Old Testament and the New, to the Coming of the Almighty One in human form.

Listen to the O Sapientia antiphon here

Stefan Kaminski

Director, The Christian Heritage Centre

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The “Great Os”: the Advent Antiphons

16th December 2020

The CHC blog

The Great Os: The Seven Advent Antiphons

The Scriptural roots and theology of the "O Antiphons"

Have you ever wondered what the “O Antiphons” of Advent are? You might have heard religious or priests getting excited about these every year; the “great Os”, as they are also known.

These are the seven antiphons that accompany the recitation of the Magnificat at Evening Prayer, over the seven days from 17th to 23rd December.

Each begins with an “O”, invoking the Lord Jesus who is to come, with a different title. They were instituted in the 7th century, and each has deep theological roots in the Old Testament. Reading the first letter of each title (in the Latin) provides an interesting acrostic in reverse:

Sapientia – Wisdom

Adonai – Lord

Radix – Root

Clavis – Key

Oriens – Dayspring

Rex – King

Emmanuel – Emmanuel

“Ero cras” means “I will be [there] tomorrow”.

Beginning tomorrow, we will examine each of the antiphons on its proper day, offering some reflections and insights into the Scriptural roots and the theology of each of the seven acclamations.

Stefan Kaminski

Director, The Christian Heritage Centre

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Media Video

St Francis of Assisi

Saints, Scholars & Spiritual Masters #8 St Francis of Assisi

***The talks are made available freely with the request for a donation to support our costs.***

Please donate here:


St Francis of Assisi built the first crib on a hillside above Greccio, in the Rieti valley, Italy. His love for the mystery of God’s Incarnation spilt over into his radical choice of a life of poverty and prayer, following in the footsteps of his master, Jesus Christ. His profound and intense spiritual life powered a charismatic life of preaching. Fr Gabriel Kyte, of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, offers insights into the Christmas-orientated spirituality of this ever-popular saint.

About the speaker:

Fr Gabriel Kyte, CFR is a Canadian national and was ordained a priest at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in 2014.  He is a member of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and currently the Local Servant at St Pio Friary in Bradford.  He has a passion for Franciscan spirituality and uncovering it’s authentic roots in the character and life of St Francis.  His Master’s thesis was on the Mariology of Benedict XVI. For more information about the Friars at Bradford, click here.

Other videos in the series:

St John Henry Newman

#3 St John Henry Newman

#4 St Thomas Aquinas

#5 St Francis de Sales

#6 The Spanish Mystics

#7 St Benedict of Nursia

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Articles Media

Christian Leadership Formation programme launched

Friday 1st January 2021

Christian Leadership Formation programme launched for Sixth Form students

Stefan Kaminski

Government leaders are easy targets for our criticisms, however justified these may be. But we cannot escape the fact that leaders do not grow on trees. They emerge from our very own society, and their shortcomings to some extent reflect our own collective failures in educating and forming our young people.

 As Catholics, we have a duty to provide a solid philosophical and theological formation for those whom we wish to see safeguarding and promoting a Christian society. We cannot expect future government ministers and legislators to formulate and implement ethically-coherent laws that distinguish between morally-licit surgery and invasive operations, genuine rights and the demands of lobbyists, if we have not given them the framework for such judgements.

 

The Lord Alton of Liverpool is one of many who have long recognised the need for a greater preparation of potential leaders. When he founded The Christian Heritage Centre charity, he dovetailed his desire for such a preparation with the charity’s objectives.

The Centre is delighted to now announce the launch of its first Christian Leadership Formation course. It has partnered with St Mary’s University, Twickenham and the Catholic Union of Great Britain to offer a course consisting of three, residential modules delivered over a nine-month period. Organisations such as Alliance Defending Freedom and Catholic Voices, besides other independent, Catholic academics, are also contributing to the course, so that participants will receive a variety of top-quality input from experts in different fields.

“In an increasingly fast moving and complex world where decision makers have to grapple with ethical challenges, about which they feel ill-equipped to deal with, a course which provides formation, maps and sign posts will be greatly welcomed by many,” noted Lord Alton.

Applications for the course are now being welcomed from Lower Sixth students until the end of March, when fifteen students will be selected on the basis of their personal statements, recommendations from their school, academic grades and personal references. The students who will be offered a place will be those who are motivated by their faith to help shape and create a society founded on Christian values; those who are driven towards public life by a love of God and of neighbour.

The successful applicants will gather at the charity’s Theodore House, in Lancashire, at the end of July for the first, five-day residential. Two shorter residentials will follow in London, during the October half-term and the Easter break of their last year of school

Each residential will have a particular focus. The first will consider the prerequisite “Philosophical Foundations for the Common Good”, providing the students with a grounding in concepts such as human dignity, natural law and conscience. The bedrock of Catholic ethics, these concepts today remain mostly in name whilst their origins have been lost from view and their meaning substantially mutated. The course will seek to offer students the necessary vision and tools to engage both faith and reason in pursuit of the truth that is common to all people, and which is the only source of a genuine and common good.

 The second residential will offer input on “Human Life and Ethical Considerations”, covering a range of issues from the basic definition and understanding of human life, through stem cell research and end-of-life care. As St John Paul II noted, “A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members; and amongst the most vulnerable are surely the unborn and the dying.” This second module will thus aim at instilling in our future leaders a profound sense of the full dignity of life at all its stages, and a clear, moral framework to tackle the continually-growing field of ethical issues around the existence and the nurture of human life.

 The final module will focus on “Applied Political Leadership”. It will examine Catholic Social Teaching in the context of the current political field, providing students with a clear, applied understanding of the purpose and role of politics as well as the essential principles that are necessary for a pursuit of the common good. One particular field that will also be addressed, which so many are particularly sensitive to today, is that of the management of public finances. Economic interests are often at the heart of political divisions, and yet the Church has long-since elaborated clear principles for the structuring of a fair and just fiscal policy.

Interspersed with the lectures provided on these different themes will be workshops on practical skills such as public speaking, policy making, political virtues and statesmanship. Learning and team-building activities, as well as social time, will complete a daily routine framed by communal meals, prayer and liturgy.

 The charity has been securing sponsorships from various organisations and trusts to cover the costs of the participants, in order to make this course free of any financial burden. However, the current pandemic has not made this process easy, and several places remain awaiting sponsorship.

 The charity will therefore not only be very grateful for any further support it receives towards meeting the costs of the course, but particularly for prayers offered for the course’s success. Please do also signpost your local Catholic secondary schools and Lower Sixth students to the details below!

 For more information about the course and for the Information and Application Pack, visit www.christianheritagecentre.com/clf or contact [email protected]

To donate towards the cost of this programme, please use the link below:
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Media Video

St Benedict of Nursia

Saints, Scholars & Spiritual Masters
#7 St Benedict of Nursia

***The talks are made available freely with the request for a donation to support our costs.***

Please donate here:


The seventh talk of Saints, Scholars and Spiritual Masters turns to the “Father of Western Monasticism” and his Rule of life, which  still guides religious life around the world 1,500 years later. Benedict fled Rome, with the degenerate and empty lifestyle that he found amongst his fellow students, to become a hermit in the hills outside the city. His saintliness soon attracted diverse followers, and set him on the path of establishing monastic communities and writing a Rule. Though these were not primarily centres of learning, Benedictine monasteries, and others following their example, became the repositories of learning and culture. Europe thus owes not only its monastic tradition to Benedict, but also the continuity of its development through the medieval era.

About the speaker:

Father Cassian Folsom, O.S.B., is the founding prior of the Monastery of San Benedetto, located in Norcia, Italy, the birthplace of Saint Benedict. He was born in Massachusetts in 1955, and has been a monk since 1979 and a priest since 1984. Fr. Cassian studied music before joining the monastic community of Saint Meinrad in 1974. He has served as the pro-president of the Pontifical Liturgical Institute at Sant’ Anselmo from 1997 to 2000. He founded his monastic community in Rome in 1998 and transferred it to Norcia in the year 2000. Father Cassian has been a consulter to the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments since 2010, and is the author of numerous studies on Roman Catholic liturgy.

Other videos in the series:

St John Henry Newman

#3 St John Henry Newman

#4 St Thomas Aquinas

#5 St Francis de Sales

#6 The Spanish Mystics

#8 St Francis of Assisi

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Media Video

The Spanish Mystics

Saints, Scholars & Spiritual Masters
#6 Saints Teresa of Avila & John of the Cross

***The talks are made available freely with the request for a donation to support our costs.***

Please donate here:


The sixth talk of Saints, Scholars and Spiritual Masters looks at two giants of the interior life: St Theresa of Avila and St John of the Cross. The profound mysticism of these two well-loved, Spanish saints did not detract from their pragmatic determinedness. Together, they reformed the Carmelite order in Spain, founding no less than 23 monasteries between them and effectively establishing the order of Discalced Carmelites. The hardships and difficulties they both endured in pursuing their vocation and in reforming their order were only met with a strength that was founded on their deep love for Christ, which was also the foundation of the great friendship between them.

About the speaker:

Fr Matthew Blake is a Carmelite priest. Originally from Ireland, he has lived and worked  in the UK for more than thirty years. His ministry has mainly involved retreat direction, for which he is well-known in the UK, and he has also worked in many different parishes.

A selection of Fr Blake’s talks can be found here.

 

Other videos in the series:

St John Henry Newman

#3 St John Henry Newman

#4 St Thomas Aquinas

#5 St Francis de Sales

#7 St Benedict of Nursia

#8 St Francis of Assisi

Categories
Articles Media

Newman: A Light between the Reformation and Modernity

Friday 6th November 2020

The CHC @ The Catholic Universe

Newman: A Light between the Reformation and Modernity

Stefan Kaminski

St John Henry Newman’s journey to the Catholic faith remains a powerful testimony to an increasingly-secularised world

Last month, two important anniversaries of English saints coincided. We saw the fiftieth anniversary of the canonisation of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, and we celebrated the first anniversary of John Henry Newman’s canonisation.

Although the Martyrs and Newman lived and died several centuries apart, they are united by the experience of the protestant Reformation and the ensuing split of the English State’s Church from the Catholic. However, they both experienced this split in rather different ways. The Martyrs experienced it from without: being persecuted and executed for not adhering to the new, Protestant Church. Newman, as a member of that Protestant Church, experienced it from within; from there, finding his way to Catholicism.

Oriel College, Oxford, where St Newman was elected Fellow in 1822.

Although Newman was no longer subject to laws that penalised the practice of Catholicism in England, he was nonetheless ostracised following his public conversion, and lost – at least for a period – many of his friends. A large dose of prejudice and suspicion of Catholics remained from the Reformation era, and in this sense too, his experience was in continuity with the Martyrs. 

However, Newman also faced a prejudice and suspicion from different quarters, which, in our turn, we can identify with too. The philosophical current known as modernity had already taken root by Newman’s day. The “modern” way of thinking rejected the possibility of acknowledging any religious belief to be true. It declared, in the words of Newman, that “revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous.” Modernity meant that all interpretations of reality were equally valid: meaning that none were ultimately true. In this milieu of an increasingly secular culture and an embedded hostility to Catholicism, Newman found his way to God and to the Church.

The statue of Cardinal Newman in front of the Brompton Oratory, London

It was not, as is often the case, a simple and immediate conversion. Rather, as Pope Benedict XVI observed when he beatified Newman, it consisted of three, distinct phases. The first is, in part, a response to the secular world: it is basically the thought that there exist “two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator”. In effect, this was a conversion to a properly Christian way of thinking, which we are increasingly alienated from due to the contrary assumptions that secular thinking makes. For “modern man”, reality is defined by the empirical: that which science can tell us. For the Christian, reality is defined by the spiritual: God and one’s soul.

This truth applies not only to our own, physical existence in this world, but also to every person around us and, indeed, to the entire world that surrounds us. It leads to the understanding that the meaning of things is given by God; their existence itself is guaranteed by God, rather than by the laws of nature (which are themselves an expression of God’s will). And so, the second of Newman’s conversions is summed up in his insistence that it is not enough to hold one’s faith as an abstract state of consciousness: Christianity means “’looking to Jesus’ (Heb 2:9) … and acting according to His will.” It is a trusting in the Lord to lead us concretely through along the path of life, perhaps best summed up by Newman’s hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light”.

The third conversion was, in a sense, the most difficult. If there was a stigma attached to the rejection of his own, Anglican Church, it was increasingly counter-cultural to profess adherence to the doctrines of the Catholic Church. As Benedict XVI noted, this step involved giving up his rank, profession and many of his academic and personal ties; and yet Newman resolutely took this step in October 1845. If it was a step that involved a great interior struggle; it was also a step that finally brought a peace to his mind. Despite the corruption, divisions and imperfections that Newman saw vividly in the Catholic Church, he understood that these were not relevant to the question of faith. For in the Church, Newman saw the same objectivity that he identified in God: the reality of the Church as the real and living, Body of Christ. The Church, with its frail and human outward appearance, is the real place of God’s presence, that the Creator made for Himself upon entering into the world. In that Church, Newman “found a power, a resource, a comfort, a consolation in our Lord’s Real Presence, in communion in His Divine and Human Person, which all good Catholics indeed have.”

Contrary to what is sometimes, sceptically, asserted: becoming a Catholic did not involve a handing over of his own powers of thinking and autonomy. Becoming a Catholic meant finding the freedom to be transformed by what is true, and therefore to discover oneself ever more authentically. It is the same freedom that the Martyrs possessed in giving their lives readily for God, the Church and their flock. It is a freedom that appears contradictory to the secular mind, which can only conceive of freedom as pure, unstructured (and therefore meaningless) liberty.

St Newman thus retains an enormous relevance to today’s Christians. He stands as a powerful reminder that authentically seeking God entails neither freedom from the Church nor freedom from religion.

This article draws from a talk given by Dr. Giuseppe Pezzini’s on St Newman for The Christian Heritage Centre. It is accessible at www.christianheritagecentre.com/media/sssm3newman/

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Media Video

St Francis de Sales

Saints, Scholars & Spiritual Masters
#5 St Francis de Sales

***The talks are made available freely with the request for a donation to support our costs.***

Please donate here:


The fifth talk of Saints, Scholars and Spiritual Masters explores the spirituality of a great Bishop and director of souls: St Francis de Sales. Known for his deep love of God and his determination to bring every person – be they lay or religious – to a real holiness of life, he paid special attention to lay people living working lives. Much of his writing was directed to showing such people how to grow in holiness through their day-to-day activity. His fame as a spiritual director brought him into demand from Popes, royalty and nobility. Despite this, he lived out the last word of advice he gave from his deathbed: “humility”.

About the speaker:

Canon Scott Tanner is a priest of the Institute of Christ the King, Soverign Priest. After studying Theology and Religious Studies at Nottingham University, he studied for the priest at St Philip Neri Seminary, near Florence, Italy. He was ordained in 2015 and worked in the Diocese of Shrewsbury before joining the parish of St Walburge’s in Preston, Lancashire.

 

Other videos in the series:

St John Henry Newman

#3 St John Henry Newman

#4 St Thomas Aquinas

#6 The Spanish Mystics

#7 St Benedict of Nursia

#8 St Francis of Assisi

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Media Video

Newman 101 conference

Newman 101: Why Newman Matters Today

Recordings of the online colloquium celebrating St Newman’s 10th anniversary of beatification and 1st anniversary of canonisation.

Introduction

***The recordings are made available freely with the request for a donation to support our costs.***

Please donate here:



Newman's Marian Turn

For more information about Dr Lamb, please click here.

 

Newman as Friend & Pastor
in the Work of Meriol Trevor

For more information about Mrs Caldecott, please click here.

Newman on Imagination:
Callista Revisited

For more information about Dr Pezzini, please click here.

Newman on Why Culture Matters

For more information about Dr Phillips, please click here.

Questions & Conclusion