Maynooth Open Day

I'm delighted to see that there was a decent turn out at Sunday's open day at the seminary in Maynooth.

About 80 men aged between 20 and 35 attended the Open Day at Maynooth last Sunday, Vocations Sunday.

The initiative which marked the close of the Year of Vocation, was the first of its kind for St Patrick’s College, and organisers were surprised and impressed at the numbers of young men who showed up to get an insight into what life is like in the seminary and as a priest.

The idea for the day, came from the seminarians, who were all present for the event.

After talks by the President of Maynooth, Mgr Hugh Connolly, and other members of the formation team on the four foundations of formation: spiritual, intellectual, pastoral and human, four seminarians from different diocese shared the stories of their own calls to the priesthood. The four are all at different stages of their training – from second year to already being a deacon.

The Priest's Wife...

When I was in seminary, we jokingly referred to the breviary as 'the wife'. I was bemused to learn that Don Marco finds a similar description in the Dialogue of St Catherine of Siena.

The bride they hold ought to be the breviary, and the books of Holy Scripture their children. There they should take their pleasure in sharing instruction with their neighbors and in finding a holy life for themselves.

--The Eternal Father to Saint Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue

Secundum Scripturas

An American friend sent me this link. Sandro Magister writes:

ROME, May 1, 2009 – In a few days, the daily "la Repubblica" and the weekly "L'espresso" will offer to the Italian public, in hundreds of thousands of copies and at a reasonable price, the entire Christian Bible, in a new translation edited by the bishops' conference (CEI), accompanied by extensive notes and illustrated with artistic masterpieces from all time periods.
The work will be published in three volumes: the first with the Pentateuch and the historical books; the second with the wisdom books and the prophets; the third with the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the letters, and Revelation.
The initiative is all the more unusual in that "la Repubblica" and "L'espresso" are the leading publications for secular opinion in Italy, and are often critical of the Catholic Church and the Christian faith itself.

Can you imagine anything like that happening in Ireland?

Even more interesting is the article in L'Espresso which accompanies this project. It reads in part:

But be careful, the Christian Bible can punish those who venture into it blindly. It is an extremely special book, or rather collection of books, seventy-three in all, produced over a thousand years and divided into two major collections, the Old and the New Testament. These absolutely cannot be separated, at the cost of understanding nothing. The Mass shows why this is. The Gospel is never read without a prior reading from the Old Testament, which anticipates it "in allegory." Jesus is incomprehensible without the prophets. If he is risen from the dead, as the Gospels attest and the "Credo" proclaims, this took place "according to the Scriptures." If blood and water gush from the pierced side of Jesus, It is impossible not to think of the second chapter of Genesis, and the sleeping Adam from whose side God takes Eve, the mother of the living. The cross is the new tree of life of paradise, like the magnificent cross in bloom in the mosaic in the Roman basilica of Saint Clement. It is the fountainhead of the Church, it is the beginning of the new creation.
One should begin by reading Genesis in the Old Testament. It should come as no surprise that there are not one but two accounts of creation, one after the other and very different in style and content. The Bible does not intend to say how the world came about, but why. And also why, in a world that is indeed blessed by God as "good," so much evil should be unleashed, not by destiny but according to free and voluntary choice, disrupting both man and nature. From Cain to Lamech, from the Tower of Babel to the flood, wickedness invades the earth. But there is Noah the just man, in the ark that is saved from the waters. Then there is the calling of another just man, Abraham. And there is also justice beyond the chosen people, in a mysterious Melchizedek, "without father, without mother, without genealogy," as the author of the letter to the Hebrews would write in the New Testament. And there is God who visits Abraham in the person of the three anonymous guests whom Rublev, in the 15th century, would depict as an icon of the Trinity. And again, God who fights with Jacob on the shore of the river Jabbok. God? The Bible doesn't say so. It hints at it. Maybe.
In this, the Bible is truly extremely modern. It never says everything. On the contrary, it requires the reader to enter into the plot and decide. "The divine words grow with him who reads them," Pope Gregory the Great said in a homily on the prophet Ezekiel. It is as if the Scriptures were sleeping, before the reader came to wake them up. They were written this way, full of enigmas, ellipses, narrative leaps, obscurity. Rabbinical exegesis has always been this way: the "midrash" is an inexhaustible accumulation of readings and re-readings, reconstructions and reinterpretations, reality and vision. A painting by Chagall illustrates this perfectly. And the Christian liturgy is the same way: there, the Word of God is not a bookish reading, but becomes a living reality in the sacramental symbols. The Word of God takes on body and blood.