A reflection from this morning's homily.
"No matter how grand your house, your car, or your bank account they can never love you back. We were made for divinity."
On "Rerum novarum":
Leo XIII always used the phrase RES NOVA to refer pejoratively to revolutionary change and upheaval. That is the classical Roman sense coming through. Call an old Roman consul an introducer of new things, and that's more than a critique. It is an ACCUSATION.
We in the west, and eminently in the United States, have been used to thinking of innovation as the great blessing of time and technological advancement and the coming of the Age of Aquarius. We find it hard to get it into our heads that just because you have better indoor plumbing than your grandfather had, you are not necessarily a better and wiser human being than he was. Often the reverse is true: the ancients believed that material comforts enervate the comfortable.
That is behind the Roman ideal of the military leader Cincinnatus, who resigned his commission after a few victorious weeks in battle and returned to plowing his humble farm. It is behind Homer's sense that the opulent house of Menelaus is missing something, and that rocky Ithaca and the much-enduring Odysseus are more worthy of our admiration. It is behind the serene subordination of material wealth to moral virtue and duty, in the Chinese sages.
As for "change," what is good about it, if you don't specify what is changing, how it is changing, and where it is going? I am suspicious of people who welcome "change" in some vague and yet quasi-religious sense. People devoured with envy want "change" because it will spoil the good that other people possess and that they themselves lack. Satan, musing sadly on the beautiful world around him that he cannot enjoy:
But neither here seek I, no, nor in Heaven
To dwell, unless by mastering Heaven's Supreme,
Nor hope to be myself less miserable
By what I seek, but to make others such
As I, though thereby worse to me redound,
For only in destroying I find ease
To my relentless thoughts; and him destroyed,
Or wrought to what may work his utter loss
For whom all this was made, all this will soon
Follow, as to him linked in weal or woe;
In woe then, that destruction wide may range.
Today's story from Vatican City. I'm so grateful to these lovely people for taking the time to share the story of their friendship with Pope Leo XIV (and selfies that chronicle a long friendship.)
https://t.co/0uTU8HOsHg
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#PopeLeoXIV@Suntimes
Insane if it's accurate @DuquesneLight is giving an estimate for power restoration on May 6!
I hope it's sooner! @MartyGriffinKD or @PaulRasmussenJr anyway you can ask Duquesne Light about this?