August 27 and 28 are the feast days of St. Monica and St. Augustine, perhaps the two most well-known mother and son saints in the Catholic Church.  The image above is a depiction of a scene from the Confessions where Augustine describes a moment with his mom as they wait for the boat that will bring them back to North Africa from his Italian sojourn.  He has just been baptized and she is just content that her prayers for her son have been granted.  The painter’s brush captures them at the moment when — as Augustine narrates — they have a foretaste of the blessed life.  The description of the experience is found in the Confessions IX, 10.

Tomorrow we celebrate the Solemnity of the Assumption. Catholics have become so used to the idea that when fundamentalists confront them with a question about the feast itself and the dogma of Pius XII declared in 1950, they are led to believe that their celebration in August 15 is due to the whimsy of a Pope. Thing is, the feast of the Assumption is much much older than the dogma of the Assumption, and the belief that Mary did not die but was preserved from corruption is a belief that is connected to her Immaculate Conception which in turn is directly linked to her Divine Motherhood. This latter, a dogma defined in Ephesus, is linked to the belief that Jesus is God (Jn. 1:1-18). This "chain" which shows how the different dogmas are linked together is what Catholics refer to as analogia fidei. Thus, if one does not accept the Assumption, one also does not accept the Divinity of Christ and therefore, as Pius XII puts it, "let him know that he has fallen away completely from the divine and Catholic Faith", and for that matter, from the Christian faith.

Someone has called him "The First Modern Man." Both Catholics and Non-Catholic Mainline Churches claim him as their own. Eastern Catholics number him among their "fathers" prompting a scholar to suggest that he be named "Common Father of the East and West." Descartes was flattered when he was told that his "Cogito ergo sum" echoes this man's "Dubito ergo sum."

I am referring to Augustine of Hippo (354-430). And this is a short retelling of his life:

The following is lifted from Augustine’s Confessions as presented in a Logos Software acknowledged at the end of the page.  I have annotated it so that it would be easier to read.  The subject of this page is Monica herself, Augustine’s mom.  We know her generally as the mother who suffered on account of her son.  But that is only a part of the picture.  She also had to bear being the wife of a husband who was both unfaithful and violent.  Augustine praises her for having lived with his father Patricius without having her face bashed in like the battered wives in their neighborhood who dared question their husbands’ virtues.  But I wouldn’t expect the woman of our times to accept Monica’s strategy.  Submissiveness, specially to husbands, is not considered a virtue nowadays.  Augustine also writes about his mother’s ways towards her mother-in-law and her attitude towards the neighborhood gossips.  In the end, Monica won her husband to the Church and her own wayward son.

It is August once more, and for us Augustinians, the month reminds us of Augustine of Hippo. I visited the website of the Order yesterday hoping to find any new materials about Augustine or the Order's spirituality and found this news item about the discovery in Erfurt of six previously unheard of sermons of Augustine. The news report is syndicated from the Tablet dated 5 April 2008 and authored by a certain Christa Pongratz-Lippit. She describes how these manuscripts have come to Erfurt thus

I have just posted two articles at Res Biblica on the book of Isaiah.  The first is on Isaiah 22:15–25, which narrates how Isaiah is instrumental in the demotion of the king’s chancellor Shebnah and how Eliakim takes his place.  The second part of this section from Isaiah is the background for the “keys of the kingdom of heaven” mentioned in Matthew 16:19.

I was going through some of my archived posts from the Bible Notes website I used to maintain back in 2005 and found some articles on Matthew which may still come in handy this year, if they happen to coincide with the Sunday readings. I have written newer versions for some of the sections from the Gospel of Matthew (e.g., Jesus Walking on the Waters, the Canaanite Woman). Reading these just now reminds me of what I read somewhere from Origen: that the student of the Scriptures understands a passage better each time he studies it at different stages of his life. While 2005 isn't really that far off I can truthfully say that going back to the same passages I have already reflected on did allow me to see something that I missed the first time I worked on them.

It was I think in the year 1985 when I first heard about “Humanae Vitae”.  I was in first year theology then taking up Moral Theology.  In one lesson under the section Family and Marriage, the professor, a Spanish Dominican discussing the Church’s teaching on contraception mentioned Paul VI’s “Humanae Vitae” as a controversial document of the Church.  When he discussed the contents of the document, I remember wondering to myself how it was that Humanae Vitae became controversial.  Now in its fortieth year, and after I have seen how the teachings in “Humanae Vitae” have been continuously reaffirmed by the Church here in the Philippines in the face of Congress and by Catholics directly involved in two UN Population Congresses (1994 and 1996), I no longer wonder why.  The population issue is an issue linked to the world’s natural resources, and when a group decides to have all those resources for themselves, the rest of humanity will have to stop — or be made to stop — from being “fruitful and multiply.”

The Gospel reading for the 21^st is taken from Matthew 16:13-23. The first part of the selection -- Mt. 16:13-19 -- is about the Confession of Peter. The theme of the 21st Sunday is about the keys of the kingdom of David that Jesus gives to Peter, the chancellor of the Kingdom. In what follows, we have two Fathers of the Church meditating on this authority given to Peter. The first is on the service of unity that the Petrine office renders. The second is on the apostolic tradition that is guaranteed by the apostolic succession. This second is specially interesting because of the background: the gnostics were boasting that they have a secret knowledge passed on to them that is more efficacious than that of the Catholic Church. Irenaeus' argument is simple: if the Lord would have given a secret knowledge, he would have given it to the apostles and the apostles in turn would have given it to their successors, the ones who will later on take care of the Lord's flock in their absence. Irenaeus then how the knowledge of the apostles is handed down in a faithful traditioning that is guaranteed by the succession of bishops. The selection is also interesting because it provides us the list of the successors of Peter in Rome until the time of Irenaeus who lived between 115 and 202.