Calendar Class of May 25, 2025

A Carpe Diem Snapshot:

This memorial, on the back wall of the chapel at the Venerable English College, is one of my favorites in Rome. We stopped to read it, or at least look at it as long as I could get the kids to stand still after Mass had finished, because it very touchingly describes a father's admiration for his little girl, Martha, lost to the world in the year 1778 at the age of 10. Apparently, she spent that one decade of life in a most productive way, as her doting father describes her impressive record of accomplishments, skills, and virtues. Her father's efforts to leave a legacy for his admirable daughter were rewarded by our attention this day, 247 years later. This morning when I took the photo I did not know the history of the Swinburne family but, thanks to Calendar Class, I can now tell you that Martha was the daughter of the English travel writer Henry Swinburne, a Catholic recusant who spent a good deal of his youth in Italy. According to their biography, Mr. and Mrs. Swinburne seemed the epitome of Grand Tour aristocrats and became friends with a number of high-standing Catholics on the continent. Emperor Joseph II was godfather to their son, also named Joseph, and they were favorites at the court of Marie-Antoinette! The Swinburnes were much more than mere tourists and gallivants, it seems. They were early "global citizens" with political and financial connections spanning the known world, from the British Isles, across the continent of Europe, to the Caribbean. In the end, Henry died of sunstroke in Trinidad in 1803, and a monument was raised to him there by a friend. We may never happen upon that monument in San Juan, but his eldest daughter Martha we will frequently recall and admire, whenever we visit her memorial in Rome.

Liturgical: Sixth Sunday of Easter

Those who live in Christ are not outside of God as petitioners or supplicants; rather, they are in God as friends, sharers in the Spirit. And this spiritual life is what gives us knowledge of God—a knowledge, if you will, from within.

When the great masters of the Christian way speak of knowing God, they do not use the term in its distanced, analytical sense; they use it in the biblical sense, implying knowledge by way of personal intimacy. This is why St. Bernard of Clairvaux, for one, insists that initiates in the spiritual life know God not simply through books and lectures but through experience, the way one friend knows another. That knowledge is what the Holy Spirit facilitates.

--From Bishop Barron's Homily today

Pope Leo XIV's Angelus Address: Let Us Walk in the Joy of Faith

Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon: The Holy Spirit Will Teach You Everything

This may be one of my favorite homilies of his so far.

Fr. Plant's Homily-Scripture Study: We will come to them and make our home with them.

Sanctoral: The Optional Memorials of St. Bede, St. Gregory VII and St. Mary Magdalene de Pazzi, which are ordinarily celebrated today, are superseded by the Sunday liturgy.

Human: First formal meeting of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, which, in the next few months, ended up writing a new constitution for the United States instead of revising the Articles of Confederation – 1787

Father Stephen Badin became first Catholic priest ordained in the U.S. – 1793

Natural: Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si! Here is a a video message from Pope Leo XIV to a gathering for the occasion in Rio de Janeiro.

Italian: Farsi mettere i piedi in testa (to let someone push you around)

Quote: “A consumerist vision of human beings, encouraged by the mechanisms of today’s globalized economy, has a levelling effect on cultures, diminishing the immense variety which is the heritage of all humanity.” (Pope Francis, Laudato Si, Paragraph 144. Here are 19 more quotes.)