Knox - Out of the World of Shadows

IT IS A CURIOUS point about our Lord's teaching, or about that part of it at any rate which has been preserved for us by St John, that he is always treating the things of earth, the material things of sense which are familiar to us, as unreal, as mere shadows and appearances, while the true realities, of which these earthly things are but copies, are in heaven. It is our habit to think the other way; to assume that our own flesh and blood, our food and drink and all the comforts we enjoy, are solid realities; heaven is something distant and shadowy - we believe that we shall be happy if we attain to it, but we cannot imagine how, because it all seems so remote from this real world of our experience ...

He calls us away from a world of shadows into a world of realities; from the perplexities of our earthly citizenship to a city which has foundations whose builder and maker is God.

- Ronald A. Knox

Confounding His Critics

At First Things, William Doino, Jr. - who, incidentally, wrote this review of A Little Guide for Your Last Days - writes about a glimpse of the truth, goodness, and beauty of Pope Benedict XVI's visit to England given to, of all people, a BBC reporter in The 83-Year-Old Pontiff has Confounded His Critics!

UPDATE: Reduced to utter irrelevance

Our Lady of the Rosary

Our Lady of the Rosary

An Account of the Battle of Lepanto

Millais PRB - Autumn Redux

Chill October (1870) - Sir John Everett Millais

Knox - At the Altar Pt. 3

IT WAS NOT ONLY at the last supper that our Lord in person gave his own body and blood with his own hands. In the Passion itself he is, all the time, the principal agent; he was offered because he willed it. He neglected his own opportunities for defence at his trial; he consented to carry his own cross, co-operating , as it were, in the greatest injustice of history; while he hung on the cross, the angel legions were about him, hand on scabbard, ready to interfere and to rescue him, but he waved them back; and at the last, when he laid down his life, he laid it down of his own will, at a moment of his own choosing; no man could take his life from him, he laid it down. Always, Christus Patiens is also Christus Agens: always, Christ the victim is also Christ the priest. And wherever the bloodless sacrifice is offered to the last end of time, it is Christ continuing on earth the work he began on earth, our reconciliation with the Father. He lies upon the altar, as he lay stretched out on the cross on Good Friday. Yet he stands at the altar, as he stood in the upper room on Holy Thursday. Operating through the consecrated hands of his unworthy priest, Christ himself blesses the bread and transforms it, and breaks, and offers, and distributes that which he has transformed.

- Ronald A. Knox

Autumn as Subject - Bruegel

Return of the Herd (1565) - Pieter Bruegel the Elder