Good Friday

What Killed Jesus? An excellent - but gruesome - account on Mike Aqulina's "The Way of the Fathers" blog of the forensic details of Our Lord's Passion and Crucifixion. Some excerpts:

The Gospels say little about the business of crucifixion. “And they crucified him” is all St. Mark offers (15:24), with no word of how it was done or how the cross tortured its victim.

The early Christians offered little more when they recited the Creed: “He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered, died and was buried.”

The Crucifixion comes at the climax of the Christian drama. Yet tradition records the matter as little more than a fact. “They crucified him.” “He was crucified.” History provides no coroner’s report, no painstaking medical reconstruction.

Perhaps our first Christian ancestors could not bear to say any more. They had seen men crucified. They could walk to the outskirts of town if they wanted to count the cost — in blood and pain and humiliation — of their salvation.

Unlike Christians through most of history, we today have not grown up with the experience of public executions and public torture. Still, like the family of any murder victim, we feel the need to know the truth about our Savior and brother — not least because we believe He died for our sake.

Over the past 20 years, a friend of mine, Pittsburgh surgeon Jack McKeating, has applied his professional skills to this problem — reviewing the historical and archaeological evidence in light of recent medical research. Some years back, I interviewed him on the subject for Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.

“Any serious Christian has to take an active interest in the passion of Jesus Christ,” McKeating told me. “Unfortunately, we’re often too dispassionate about it. We tend to think of it in unreal terms, as an abstraction. But it involved a real person who underwent an absolutely brutal experience out of love for me.”

...

Forensic scientists say that the better we know what killed someone, the more likely we are to find out who killed him.

Who killed Jesus? After a decade-and-a-half of study, McKeating doesn’t hesitate to respond.

“I did,” he said. “My sins did.”

[Murderous] Silence of a Shepherd

Terri Schiavo's Brother Denounces St. Petersburg Bishop Lynch "...As my letter states, 'I beg the Lord to spare us another successor of the apostles who would exhibit the same scandalous inaction and silence by which you remain complicit in my sister's murder via euthanasia'."

Serbian Orthodoxy in Kosovo

Great Lent

The Fast has come, mother of chastity, accuser of sins, advocate of repentance, life of the angels and salvation of men. Let us cry out, ye faithful: O God, have mercy on us. (Aposticha for Matins of the Monday in the First Week)

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Broken Questions (Matthew Hurford)

Live from his home studio:

The Whitewalls

My nephew Matthew's band performing at the University of Waterloo's 50th Anniversary...and I'm one proud uncle! :-) 1 - Wake Up Little Susie: 2 - Johnny B. Good:

Judgment

Imagine a poor mother obliged to let fall the blade of a guillotine upon the head of her child: such is the good God when He condemns a sinner. The Curé of Ars

The Nativity of Christ

Notre Charge Apostolique

No, Venerable Brethren, We must repeat with the utmost energy in these times of social and intellectual anarchy when everyone takes it upon himself to teach as a teacher and lawmaker - the City cannot be built otherwise than as God has built it; society cannot be setup unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy notions; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants. OMNIA INSTAURARE IN CHRISTO. Pope (St) Pius X (1910)