44 plates from an Ethiopian Christian illuminated album.
The link to the interactive section, in which you can closely examine each page.
The Association of Catholic Diocesan Archivists will sponsor a two-day conference next month on the subject “Open Wide our Archives: Truth, Transparency & Access,”
Catholic-affiliated archivists from around the country will gather in St. Louis next month for a first-of-its-kind conference assisting historians in uncovering the history of racism and slavery in their institutions.
“Open Wide our Archives: Truth, Transparency & Access,” scheduled for October 30-31 at the Cardinal Rigali Center, will feature a keynote address from Archbishop Shelton Fabre of Louisville, one of the nation’s Black Catholic prelates.
The conference is being organized by Catholic Religious Organizations Studying Slavery (CROSS), an archivist-led group founded during Fabre’s tenure as inaugural head of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism.
“[CROSS] is dedicated to exploring ways of promoting open access to these records, assisting organizations in gaining knowledge of their institution’s history, and opening a dialog about transparency and truthfulness,” Fabre said in an announcement for the conference earlier this summer.
“How do we begin to acknowledge and reconcile our sins if we do not know our past? We rely on in-depth scholarly research to illustrate the Catholic Church’s customs and practices. However, we also need to initiate our own research into our institution’s past so we can tell our own story with humility and honesty.”
Fulton Sheen, the Eucharist and Learning to Teach:
I previously outlined what might be considered the philosophy of education of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. That piece detailed some of the bishop’s impressive legacy and unpacked the philosophy that animated his teaching career and his commitment to Catholic education. Having looked closely at his principles, I would like to turn now to Sheen’s praxis. What follows will highlight three of Sheen’s pedagogical practices that made him an extraordinarily successful scholar and teacher and—if I may be so bold—the premier Catholic communicator of the American Church in the twentieth century. Believing firmly that we all have something to learn from the good bishop about teaching and handing on the faith, I hope what follows here serves as an opportunity for inspiration and reflection for those who, like Sheen, have committed themselves to the Church’s hard work of education, evangelization, and catechesis.
More art:
François Peltier: The Apocalypse of Saint-Émilion
The Apocalypse of Saint-Émilion, according to St John is a monumental painting, installed in the cloister courtyard of the Collegiate Church of Saint-Émilion, an active Catholic community near Bordeaux in the wine region of Southwestern France. The artist, François Peltier, lives locally. The painting – 38.5 metres wide and 5 metres high – was completed in 2018.
Peltier studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium. Drawn to the Flemish Primitives, he trained in the old Flemish technique of glazing, a slow way of painting with a luminous result. A turning point in his life came after completing a mural, The Way of the Cross, in the Church of Notre-Dame at Bias where Peltier lives, not far from St Émilion. He would devote the rest of his life to ‘sacred art’ in the Catholic tradition, that is art as both an apologetic of the faith and a catechesis in faith. It is art “oriented toward the infinite beauty of God … to God’s praise and glory … to the single aim of turning men’s minds devoutly toward God” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 122).
When Father Emeric de Rozières, parish priest of the Collegiate Church, saw Peltier’s The Way of the Cross, he had the idea for a series of Apocalypse paintings so beautiful they would arrest the thousands of visitors yearly passing through Saint-Emilion and its historic monolithic church. Concerned about the secularization of his nation, the loss of hope he perceived, and the widespread confusion of so many, he longed for beauty that would communicate hope and reveal God’s love.
Peltier’s first attempts were disappointing to both him and Father de Rozières, who firmly responded: “You did not achieve a satisfactory result because you do not have sufficient knowledge of the text and you are distracted by your other work. The Apocalypse requires a total immersion in the text. You are therefore going to refuse all the other proposals and devote yourself exclusively to the Apocalypse of Saint-Emilion. For this, the Parish will provide for your daily bread and we will seek donors to finance the work itself. You have a year ahead of you.” This released Peltier to immerse himself in the biblical text for six months, including discussions with theologians and priests, before setting to work again. The result is stunningly beautiful, joyful, and bright. It overwhelms you, with so much happening simultaneously at so many levels. The painting is framed at the top with a frieze referring to the Genesis creation account, for the Apocalypse involves the whole biblical story, beginning to end.
100 Great Short Books – one person’s view.
Finally – the Ethan & Maya Hawke Flannery film Wildcat screened at the Toronto Film Festival last week, and the UK Guardian reviewer was….not impressed.
Ethan Hawke’s latest directorial outing Wildcat, which taps his daughter Maya to portray the author as she returns to her Georgia home, literalizes this connection with flights of fiction taking us inside her short stories. In text-within-a-text renderings of Good Country People and Everything That Rises Must Converge, Maya plays Flannery playing her stand-ins, and every small-minded housewife becomes her maddening mother (Laura Linney). Though Ethan’s fandom for a literary genius comes across loud and clear, he’s ultimately doing a disservice to her prose by reinforcing a reductive misconception about scribes: that inspiration, the ineffable alchemy he wants to pin down with his inquest into the crannies of the mind, boils down to plucking the right elements from your immediate surroundings and simply plugging them into narrative. “The life you save may be your own,” mumbles Flannery as she passes a roadside sign painted with the phrase that would title one of her later compositions. Simple as that.
Oh my word.
This reviewer from Collider concurs:
As a film, Wildcat feels just as muted and emotionless as it portrays O’Connor herself. The film has a non-threatening runtime of 105 minutes, but the melancholic nature drags the story out to a level of near self-parody. Both of the Hawkes demonstrate the immense amount of research that they made for the film but at the cost of leaving most of the audience feeling a complete disconnect from everything that is happening on screen.
I look forward to seeing the film. That said, I am not surprised by the gist of this reviews. One of the impressions that I had from their interview with Bishop Barron was a lack of value for the transformative nature of her suffering, which I consider essential. Like the shallowness of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings;yet which led many to read the book and, hopefully, this movie also will lead people to read her works and follow the Golden String.
Exactly