Saturday, August 08, 2009

We have two sisters with St. Dominic as their patron: both use the Italian feminine version of the name, Domenica (which means "Sunday," so I suppose they would legitimately celebrate their name day every week!). I was so happy to get a few pictures of stained glass windows of St. Dominic while at St. Josaphat's in Milwaukee... It would be even nicer if I could access said pictures for my post, but they are in Chicago, while I am here in Boston. So I will just pass on to you something I learned today in the homily (the priest who celebrated our community Mass is something of a saints maven--he even used a special preface for St. Dominic): it seems that, as a highly learned man from a wealthy family, Dominic Guzman had a considerable library. That is already something; books were copied by hand and so quite rare. (Consider that three centuries later, the Loyola family only had two books in their whole house.) Traveling as the bishop's secretary, Dominic encountered the New Agers of his time, a group called the "Albigensians." Their evangelists led austere lives, and they were attracting many followers. Dominic noticed that one of the attractive things about this group was, in fact, its notable poverty. So he sold off his entire library, leaving himself only two books: The Gospel of Matthew and the Letters of St. Paul.

We have a free day today: free to learn music on our own. So naturally I am blogging. (I also finished reading "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future" by Daniel H. Pink.) I would be writing up a book review of yet another book (you can see I'm no Dominic.), but...I'm procrastinating. (Wouldn't you be?)

2 comments:

Enbrethiliel said...

+JMJ+

Sr. Anne, do you know why St. Dominic kept all of St. Paul's epistles but only one of the four Gospels?

Anonymous said...

God bless you!

For the sake of historical accuracy
the term “Cathars” derives from the Greek word Katheroi and means “Pure Ones". They were a gnostic Christian sect of tolerant pacifists that arose in the 11th century, an offshoot of a small surviving European gnostic community that emigrated to the Albigensian region in the south of France.The medieval Cathar movement flourished in the 12th century A.D. throughout Europe until its virtual extermination at the hands of the Inquisition in 1245.

There are an ever increasing number of historians and other academics engaged in serious Cathar studies. Interestingly, to date, the deeper they have dug, the more they have vindicated claims that medieval Catharism represented a survival of the earliest Christian practices.

Thank you!
Brad Hoffstetter
Communications Division
Assembly of good Christians
www.cathar.net

Some credible sources:
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html
http://www.languedoc-france.info/1212b_moreinfo.htm