All your cathedrals are belong to us

Cathedral of Cordoba

You might think that almost eight centuries of continuous use and control would be enough to establish title to real property, but in the case of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption in Cordoba, you would be wrong.

For more than 15 centuries ownership of the cathedral's site has been determined by conquest.  A Catholic basilica established on the site in the 5th century AD by Visigoth invaders was replaced in the 8th century by Moorish invaders, who thereupon began construction of the Great Mosque.  In 1236, once the Moors had been driven out of Cordoba, the mosque was converted into a church, and has remained so ever since.   This may be about to change due to an alliance between Muslims and anti-church Spanish politicians  which seeks to place the cathedral under public ownership.  This change of ownership, if it comes to pass, will also be due to conquest, but this time it will be a cultural conquest rather than a military one.

Explanation of this post's title here.

Our Lady of the Assumption, pray for us.

St. Teresa of Avila on Venial Sin

"St. Teresa in Ecstasy"  Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598 - 1680)

In case you thought one venial sin was not a big deal, consider what St. Teresa of Avila, mystic and Doctor of the Church, wrote on that subject:

May it please His Majesty that we fear Him whom we ought to fear, and understand that one venial sin can do us more harm than all hell together; for that is the truth.  The evil spirits keep us in terror, because we expose ourselves to the assaults of terror by our attachments to honours, possessions, and pleasures.  For the the evil spirits, uniting themselves with us, - we become our own enemies when we love and seek what we ought to hate, - do us great harm. We ourselves put weapons into their hands, that they may assail us; those very weapons with which we should defend ourselves,  It is a great pity.  But if, for the love of God we hated all this, and embraced the cross, and set about His service in earnest, Satan would fly away before such realities, as from the plague,  He is the friend of lies, and a lie himself.  He will have nothing to do with those who walk in the truth.  When he sees the understanding of any one obscured he simply helps to pluck out his eyes; if he sees any one already blind, seeking peace in vanities, - for all the things of this world are so utterly vanity, that they seem to be but the playthings of a child, - he sees at once that such a one is a child, and ventures to wrestle him - not once but often.

from "The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila," by herself

If only bishops spoke like this

"St. Teresa of Avila" Francois Gerard (1770−1837)

From "The Life of Saint Teresa," by the saint herself:

I look upon it as a most certain truth, that the devil will never deceive, and that God will not suffer him to deceive, the soul which has no confidence whatever in itself; which is strong in faith, and resolved to undergo a thousand deaths for any one article of the creed; which in its love of the faith, infused of God once for all,  - a faith living and strong, - always labours, seeking for further light on this side and on that, to mould itself on the teaching of the Church, as one already deeply grounded in the truth.  No imaginable revelations, not even if it saw the heavens open, could make that soul swerve in any degree from the doctrine of the Church.  

St. Teresa of Avila, pray for us.

"It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes."

Cool Cover

I wonder how that sounds in Chinese?

New Inigo Hicks Short Story!!

Lot and His Daughters, Jan Brueghel the Elder (17th Century)

“Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable…. To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Readers will note the great extent to which Flannery O’Connor’s dictum has inspired Inigo Hicks’ new short story,”The Suburbs of Gomorrha”, in that the story not only contains much that is grotesque, perverse and unacceptable, but also a lot of shouting, as well as several large, and sometimes startling figures. 

Which doesn't mean it isn't funny.  Malcolm Muggeridge suggested that the fall of man was just the old bananaskin joke on a cosmic scale.  The humor in "The Suburbs of Gomorrha" belongs to the bananaskin genre.

“The Suburbs of Gomorrha” is affordably priced at just 99 cents (cheap) on Amazon Kindle. Where else can you get so much perversity (seen by the light of Christian faith), not to mention laughs, for less than a dollar?