Catholic Links — 8.14.10

In a L’Osservatore Romano article titled “Jesus and the Children,” the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments declared that “delaying first communion deprive[s] children . . . of this grace, work and presence of Jesus, of this encounter of friendship with him, of this singular participation of Jesus himself to be able to mature and thus reach fullness.”

In another article in  L’Osservatore Romano , the writer claims that Raphael’s painting of the Transfiguration ought to be hanging in a church and not in a museum. “A work of sacred art placed in a museum, even with the best intentions and perhaps better protected, loses three-quarters of its verbal capacity just for the fact that it is placed outside of the context for which it was created.” The painting is currently in the Vatican museum.

In the National Catholic Register , the philosopher Peter Kreeft asks whether Dominus Iesus is liberal or conservative . He finds it conservative, by a score of 38 to 30.

An article from 1935, by the Dominican theologian Walter Farrell, On Behalf of the Angels , who writes that “among many excellent means of challenging “pessimism of materialism,” not enough mention is made of an aid “so satisfying to the human nature and reason that men of all ages have had recourse to it, or some perversion of it, as a response to their craving for spiritual companionship, namely—the Angelic world.”

Saints “are the evidence of divine grace, and to acknowledge their existence is to acknowledge that grace,” observes Father George Rutler , author of Cloud of Witnesses: Dead People I Knew When They Were Alive , and friend of First Things , interviewed by Kathryn Jean Lopez. ”So most of our schools prefer to destroy the evidence. Thus the greatest people who ever lived are treated nervously or ignored altogether.”