Paschasius of Rome

31 May

Paschasius, deacon of Rome, author of some theological works which have become lost, died c. 512.

From Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints (1275), referring to Gregory the Great, Dialogues, IV, 40:

“As touching to that that the prayers of friends profit to them, it appeareth by ensample of Paschasius, of whom Gregory telleth in the fourth book of his Dialogues, and saith that there was a man of great holiness and virtue, and two were chosen for to have been popes, but nevertheless at the last the church accorded unto one of them, and this Paschasius always by error suffered that other, and abode in this error unto the death. And when he was dead the bier was covered with a cloth named a dalmatic, and one that was vexed with a devil was brought thither and touched the cloth, and anon he was made whole. And a long time after, as Saint Germain, bishop of Capua, went to wash him in a bath for his health, he found Paschasius deacon there and served. And when he saw him he was afeard, and enquired diligently what thing so great and so holy a man made there. And he said to him that he was there for none other cause but for that he held and sustained more than right required in the cause aforesaid, and said: I require thee that thou pray our Lord for me. And know that thou shalt be heard, for when thou shalt come again, thou shalt not find me here. And then the bishop prayed for him, and when he came again he found him not.”

Constitutional issue

U. S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 1

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.

Question: If some states provide for and record legal unions, even marriages, between persons of the same sex, must not all other states give full faith and credit to such unions?

Homeless in New Orleans

The following story appears in the New York Times of 28 May 2008:

Most Homeless in New Orleans From City, Survey Finds

By SHAILA DEWAN

NEW ORLEANS — Mayor C. Ray Nagin recently suggested a way to reduce this city’s post-Katrina homeless population: give them one-way bus tickets out of town.

Mr. Nagin later insisted the off-the-cuff proposal was just a joke. But he has portrayed the dozens of people camped in a tent city under a freeway overpass near Canal Street as recalcitrant drug and alcohol abusers who refuse shelter, give passers-by the finger and, worst of all, hail from somewhere else.

While many of the homeless people do have addiction problems or mental illness, a survey by advocacy groups in February showed that 86 percent were from the New Orleans area. Sixty percent said they were homeless because of Hurricane Katrina. And about 30 percent had received rental assistance at one time from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Not far from the French Quarter, flanking Canal Street on Claiborne Avenue, they are living inside a long corridor formed not of walls and a roof but of the thick stench of human waste and sweat tinged with alcohol, crack and desperation.

And so on, about real people with terrible problems, who have to live on the streets. See the whole article here.

Mayor Nagin, are you a Christian? If you are, please observe this truth: All human beings, even smelly, diseased people living under an overpass, are necessary for all of us to live as complete persons. If we send some of them out of town, we become less than human. We become inhuman. That's what Christ teaches us. That's the tradition of the church.

Winebald and Worad

25 May

Winebald and Worad, deacons and martyrs, monks of the abbey of St Bertin in the Pas-de-Calais region of France, with monks Gerbald and Reginhard, killed by the Danes in 862.

Unread books meme

From numerous other bloggers:

What we have below is a list of the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing users. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. (I confess that I cannot always remember what I read for school or for pleasure. This is sometimes a guess.)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables (in English)
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Return of the mules

MCMINNVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - High gas prices have driven a Warren County farmer and his sons to hitch a tractor rake to a pair of mules to gather hay from their fields. T. R. Raymond bought Dolly and Molly at the Dixon mule sale last year. Son Danny Raymond trained them and also modified the tractor rake so the mules could pull it.

T. R. Raymond says the mules are slower than a petroleum-powered tractor, but there are benefits.

"This fuel's so high, you can't afford it," he said. "We can feed these mules cheaper than we can buy fuel. That's the truth."

And Danny Raymond says he just likes using the mules around the farm.

"We've been using them quite a bit," he said.

Brother Robert Raymond added, "It's the way of the future."

COMMENT: When I was growing up on Bayou Lafourche in Louisiana, we had mules for farm animals, until perhaps the end of World War II. All I can remember is that they had narrow, sharp backbones and were hard to ride. But they were fun to have around. We also had German prisoners, captured in North Africa, who worked in the sugarcane fields. They were fun too. I remember them laughing when one of the guards tried to shoot down a duck and his gun jammed.

Timothy, Polius, and Eutychius

21 May

Timothy, Polius, and Eutychius, deacons and martyrs, of the African province of Mauretania Caesariensis, killed under Diocletian, late 3rd to early 4th c.

Alcuin of York

19 May

Alcuin of York, deacon and abbot of Tours, died 19 May 804. [BCP places him on May 20.]

Flaccus Albinus Alcuinus or Ealhwine (c. 735–19 May 804) was a scholar, ecclesiastic, poet, and teacher from York in Northumbria. He was born around 735 close to York, perhaps in the city itself. He was a noble, related to Saint Willibrord, whose father founded the monastery of St Andrew, which Alcuin would later inherit. Alcuin of York had a long career as a teacher and scholar, first at the school at York now known as St Peter’s School, York (founded in 627), and later as Charlemagne’s leading advisor on ecclesiastical and educational affairs. From 796 until his death he was abbot of the great monastery of St Martin of Tours.

Alcuin came to the cathedral school of York in the golden age of Egbert and Eadbert. Egbert had been a disciple of the Venerable Bede, who urged him to have York raised to an archbishopric. Eadbert was the king and brother to Egbert. These two men oversaw the reenergizing and reorganization of the English church with an emphasis on reforming the clergy and on the tradition of learning begun under Bede. Alcuin thrived under Egbert’s tutelage. In York he formed his love of classical poetry, although he was sometimes troubled by the fact that it was written by non-Christians.

The York school was renowned as a center of learning not only in religious matters but also in literature and science, known as the seven liberal arts. It was from here that Alcuin drew inspiration for the school he would lead at the Frankish court. He revived the school with disciplines such as the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). Two codices were written, by himself on the trivium, and by his student Hraban on the quadrivium. Alcuin graduated from student to teacher sometime in the 750s. His ascendancy to the headship of the York school began after Aelbert became archbishop of York in 767. Around the same time Alcuin became a deacon. He was never ordained priest, and there is no real evidence that he became an actual monk, but he lived his life like one.

In 781, King Elfwald sent Alcuin to Rome to petition the Pope for official confirmation of York’s status as an archbishopric and to confirm the election of a new archbishop, Eanbald I. It was then, on his way home, that Alcuin met Charles, king of the Franks. Alcuin was reluctantly persuaded to join Charles’ court. His love of the church and his intellectual curiosity made the offer one he could not refuse. He was to join an already illustrious group of scholars that Charles had gathered around him like Peter of Pisa, Paulinus, Rado, and abbot Fulrad. He would later write that “the Lord was calling me to the service of King Charles.”

Alcuin was welcomed at the Palace School of Charlemagne. The school had been founded under the king’s ancestors as a place for educating the royal children, mostly in manners and the ways of the court. However, King Charles wanted more than this—he wanted to include the liberal arts and, most importantly, the study of the religion that he held sacred. From 782 to 790, Alcuin had as pupils Charlemagne himself, his sons Pepin and Louis, the young men sent for their education to the court, and the young clerics attached to the palace chapel. Bringing with him from York his assistants Pyttel, Sigewulf, and Joseph, Alcuin revolutionized the educational standards of the Palace School, introducing Charlemagne to the liberal arts and creating a personalized atmosphere of scholarship and learning to the extent that the institution came to be known as the “school of Master Albinus.”

Charlemagne was a master at gathering the best men of every nation in his court. He became far more than just the king at the center. He made many of these men his closest friends and counselors. They referred to him as “David,” a reference to the biblical King David. Alcuin soon found himself on intimate terms with the king and with the other men at court to whom he gave nicknames to be used for work and play. Alcuin himself was known as “Albinus” or “Flaccus.” Like many of his learned contemporaries, Alcuin was an astrologer. Alcuin’s friendships also extended to the ladies of the court, especially the queen mother and the daughters of the king. His relationships with these women, however, never reached the intense level of those with the men around him.

In 790 Alcuin went back to England, to which he had always been greatly attached. He dwelt there for some time, but Charlemagne then invited him back to help in the fight against the Adoptionist heresy which was making great progress in Toledo, Spain, the old capital town of the Visigoths and still a major city for the Christians under Islamic rule in Spain. He is believed to have had contacts with Beatus of Liébana, from the kingdom of Asturias, who fought against Adoptionism. At the Council of Frankfurt in 794, Alcuin upheld the orthodox doctrine and obtained the condemnation of the heresiarch Felix of Urgel.

Having failed during his stay in England to influence King Aethelraed of Northumbria in the conduct of his reign, Alcuin never returned to live in England. Alcuin was back at Charlemagne’s court by at least mid-792, writing a series of letters to Aethelraed, to Hygbald, bishop of Lindisfarne, and to Aethelheard, archbishop of Canterbury, in the succeeding months, which deal with the attack on Lindisfarne by Viking raiders in July 792. These letters, and Alcuin’s poem De clade Lindisfarnensis monasterii provide the only significant contemporary account of these events.

In 796 Alcuin was in his sixties. He hoped to be free from court duties and was given the chance when abbot Itherius of Saint Martin at Tours died. Charlemagne gave the abbey into Alcuin’s care with the understanding that he should be available if the king ever needed his counsel. He made the abbey school into a model of excellence, and many students flocked to it; he had many manuscripts copied, the calligraphy of which is of outstanding beauty. He wrote many letters to his friends in England, to Arno, bishop of Salzburg, and above all to Charlemagne. These letters, of which 311 are extant, are filled mainly with pious meditations, but they further form a mine of information as to the literary and social conditions of the time, and are the most reliable authority for the history of humanism in the Carolingian age. He also trained the numerous monks of the abbey in piety, and it was in the midst of these pursuits that he died.

Alcuin is the most prominent figure of the Carolingian renaissance, in which three main periods have been distinguished: In the first of these, up to the arrival of Alcuin at the court, the Italians occupy the central place; in the second, Alcuin and the Anglo-Saxons are dominant; in the third, which begins in 804, the influence of Theodulf the Visigoth is preponderant. We owe to Alcuin, too, some manuals used in his educational work: a grammar and works on rhetoric and dialectics. They are written in the form of dialogues, and in the two last the interlocutors are Charlemagne and Alcuin. He also wrote several theological treatises, including De fide Trinitatis and commentaries on the Bible. Alcuin transmitted to the Franks the knowledge of Latin culture that had existed in England. We still have a number of his works. They include letters and poetry. Besides some graceful epistles in the style of Fortunatus, he wrote some long poems, and notably a history in verse of the church at York: Versus de patribus, regibus et sanctis Eboracensis ecclesiae.

Alcuin died on 19 May 804, some ten years before the emperor. He was buried at Saint Martin’s Church under an epitaph that partly reads:

Dust, worms, and ashes now . . .
Alcuin my name, wisdom I always loved,
Pray, reader, for my soul.

16 deacons of Persia

16 May

Sixteen deacons (nine men and seven women), with bishop Audas (or Abdas) of Cascar in eastern Persia, and seven presbyters, martyred at Leda in Persia, in 420. Audas was martyred on a Friday in May during the reign of the emperor Sapor with 28 members of his flock, including seven presbyters, nine men deacons, and seven virgins (i.e., women deacons). Their deaths marked the beginning of a long reign of terror for Christians throughout the Persian empire.

COMMENT: The reign of terror has resumed in our time, not only for Christians.

Day of Pentecost

Myanmar relief

To donate to ERD (Episcopal Relief & Development) for Myanmar and cyclone relief, go here. I guess I don't have to tell you why. My wife asked: Will the government let them in? I have no idea, but I trust the church to find a way.

Robert Pantutun of Mota

5 May

Robert Pantutun, deacon of Mota in the Banks Group in Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides), Melanesia, 1910.

Robert Pantutun of Mota island was ordained deacon 17 Nov 1872 in “Pitcairn church” (All Saints, Norfolk Island). According to Bishop H. H. Montgomery of Auckland, The Light of Melanesia: A Record of Fifty Years’ Mission Work in the South Seas (New York: E. S. Gorham, 1904):

“In 1883 the Rev. E. Wogale died at Vipaka, on the island of Lo, where the first school had been opened. In the next year Robert Pantutun began work here. He is a Mota man, though his wife is a native of Lo. The bishop also took some boys with him, in 1880, to Norfolk Island. Two of these were brothers, and are now teachers, William Wulenew and Ernest Tughur. Robert Pantutun is a deacon. He was one of Bishop [John Coleridge] Patteson’s earliest scholars, and has been a steady worker for years. His son John is in this year (1892) the organist of the chapel at Norfolk Island, and most striking it is to watch a Melanesian in that beautiful little church, a boy with frizzly head and bare feet, making full use of the pedals, and playing with taste and feeling the music of most of the great composers of sacred music. It can easily be realized what a deprivation it is to these native organists when they return to their homes as teachers, and are debarred from the use of musical instruments, for no harmonium has yet been invented which will stand the damp and the insect pests of these tropical islands. . . .

“One hot and brilliant morning I landed at Vava, and made the acquaintance of the Rev. Robert Pantutun. . . . The road up to the village was broad and open, according to the custom of the people, for the sake of their burial rites. The church in this village is beautifully built, and is perhaps better appointed than any in these parts. Mr. Robin was away, and therefore there were no confirmations, but upon our return Robert Pantutun hoped to present a class of adults for baptism.”

Euthymius of Alexandria

5 May

Euthymius, deacon and martyr at Alexandria, date of death unknown.

Curcodomus of Auxerre

4 May

Curcodomus of Auxerre, a deacon of Rome, sent by the Pope to help Peregrinus, first bishop of Auxerre (in the Bourgogne region of central France), on a mission to Gaul, died 3rd c.

Diodorus and Rhodopianus of Aphrodisias

3 May

Diodorus and Rhodopianus, deacons and martyrs, killed at Aphrodisias in the province of Caria, Asia Minor (present Turkey), early 4th c.

As a provincial metropolis, Aphrodisias became the see city of the diocese of Caria, in the ecclesiastical arrangements institutionalized at the Council of Nicaea; the earliest attested bishop of Aphrodisias is Ammonius who attended Nicaea in 325. We know very little about Christianity at Aphrodisias before this date. A confused account of two martyrs at Aphrodisias is conserved in the Martyrologium Syriacum, the Laterculi Hieronymiani, and the Synaxaria Constantinopolitana, (all in the Acta Sanctorum), and in a Latin passion narrative, published by P. Peeters. Almost all the sources agree that the martyrdoms took place at Aphrodisias, on April 30, under Decius (Passio) or Diocletian (Synax. Const.). The names of the two martyrs vary, but are most probably Diodoretus (or Diodorus) and Rhodopianus. The name Diodorus, but not Diodoretus, is attested in inscriptions on the site; Rhodopianus is not attested, but a Rhodopaeus appears in the sixth century. According to one source, Rhodopianus was a deacon (Synax. Const.). They were attacked by a crowd in the Agora and stoned to death there (Synax. Const.) or outside the city (Passio).

Felix of Seville

2 May

Felix of Seville, deacon and martyr, killed probably at Seville, date unknown.

Acius of Amiens

1 May

Acius (or Ache), deacon and martyr, with subdeacon Aceolus, martyred near Amiens, in 303. They were taken prisoner during Emperor Diocletian’s persecution. Both are revered in Amiens (modern Picardy in northwest France).