Category: Kathleen Pluth

In this charming video, a Greek Catholic priest in Valletta, Malta, venerates St. Vincent Ferrer on his feast day.

The saint responds with a blessing.

Newsweek chronicles the ancient and timeless liturgical music of Christians fleeing ISIS.

The ancient cities of Nimrud and Nineveh that they visited proudly to show their children the glories of the Assyrian empire from which they claim descent – soon these will be bulldozed by ISIS. They leave behind the treasures of Assyria in the Mosul museum – ISIS will loot the smaller antiquities for the black market and smash the statues too big to sell. And on the way to Mar Mattai, they pass the monastery of Mar Behnam: its gates are already barred by ISIS. From the steeple flies the black flag. In a few months, it will be destroyed.

What they carry with them is their liturgical music. It preserves strains of the earliest religious chants of Mesopotamia and of court songs sung for Assyrian emperors 2,000 years before Christ. Its antiquity is matched by its simplicity: clergy and congregation sing together, dividing between boys with high voices and older, bigger men who sing more deeply. Beyond this there is no distinction of note or pitch, and no melody. The call and response format is thought to enact a conversation between man and God.

Tonight, they will again sing the old songs. They make for the inner rooms: the hermits’ cells burrowed into the cliff–face; the Saints’ Room, with its reliquaries set in niches in the rock; the chapels dug deep into the holy mountain. (more here)

On Sunday Pope Francis formally proclaimed the Armenian Saint Gregory Narek a Doctor of the Church. This exceedingly rare title is given to a saint whose writings are particularly useful for the building up of believers.

St. Gregory’s Lamentations are honest and frank, reverent, sincere, and emotional. They can be read here.

12:2 Not only do I call, but I believe in the Lord’s greatness. I pray not only for his rewards but also for himself, the essence of life, guarantor of giving and taking of breath without whom there is no movement, no progress, to whom I am tied not so much by the knot of hope as by the bonds of love. I long not so much for the gifts as for the giver. I yearn not so much for the glory as the glorified. I burn not so much with the desire for life as in memory of the giver of life. I sigh not so much with the rapture of splendor as with the heartfelt fervor for its maker. I seek not so much for rest as for the face of our comforter. I pine not so much for the bridal feast as for the distress of the groom, through whose strength I wait with certain expectation believing with unwavering hope that in spite of the weight of my transgressions I shall be saved by the Lord’s mighty hand and that I will not only receive remission of sins but that I will see the Lord himself in his mercy and compassion and receive the legacy of heaven although I richly deserve to be disowned.

St. Teresa of Jesus, famous for her mystical treatises, is less well-known for her songs of “pious recreation.” Like her daughter St. Therese and her father and brother St. John of the Cross, she had the gift of writing in the dense form of poetry. On feast days she would compose extra-liturgical texts that would be sung to familiar tunes, in procession or at recreation times.

The few lines to this song were not written as a “pious recreation” but as a personal reflection in La Madre’s breviary, and have inspired many musical treatments. The music here was written by a Carmelite nun, and nuns from around the world join together from their enclosures to sing, “Let nothing trouble you, nothing frighten you. Everything passes; God doesn’t change. Patience gains everything. The one who has God lacks nothing. God is plenty.”