Manage Account

<div>What is the Black Madonna?</div><div>A &#8220;black Madonna&#8221; is a state or image of Mary that depicts her with black or dark skin. The most famous one is Our Lady of Czestochowa, a Polish image that has been proclaimed the &#8220;Queen of Poland.&#8221; Various pious legends abound as to its origins. One claims it was originally painted by St. Luke. Another claims that it was discovered by Emperor Constantine&#8217;s mother in the fourth century, and the Emperor built a shrine to venerate it. Various miracles are also attributed to it, and it is credited with saving various Christian armies and communities from destruction.
</div>

The Black Madonna

<div>What are the suggested readings for a funeral Mass?</div><div>The readings for a funeral Mass may be found in the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/lectionary">Lectionary</a> in the volume that has the Ritual Masses and Votive Masses. Often a parish has a commercially produced booklet that provides a selection of readings for a funeral along with other possible choices for the Mass. These booklets rarely give all the available options. It would be good to ask to see the actual Lectionary, rather than just the planning pamphlet if you want to have the greatest selection possible.
All this being said, letting the family choose the readings is a courtesy. It is actually the right of the priest or deacon celebrant of the funeral to choose the readings, since he will base his homily on them. So, if one is given the opportunity to choose the readings, one might politely choose them while making clear that one is happy with any choice the celebrant may prefer.
Another point, added here for the fun of it: those reading at the funeral should read from the actual Lectionary rather than off sheets of paper or from pamphlets. This is due to the reverence due to the word of God. If such sheets have to be used, at least they should be in some nice, Lectionary-like binder. The best practice is to photocopy the readings from the lectionary that will be used at the Mass and have the readers practice the readings from those. Then the text in the lectionary will appear exactly as they practiced it, but they won&#8217;t have to bring a floppy or folded piece of paper to the ambo, which would be something like bringing up the bread on a paper plate at the offertory.
</div>

Readings for a Funeral Mass

When does a fetus become a ‘person?’

Today’s feast is rare in that it falls on Sunday only once or twice a decade. But even on other days, it is unusual.
In every church, it is normal to observe the anniversary of the dedication, much in the way that we might observe our own birthday, date of baptism, or wedding anniversary. The four major Roman basilicas have, at least in recent centuries, had their anniversaries observed by the whole Latin Church—that is, St. Mary Major, St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John Lateran. But most of these are optional memorials, whereas today’s feast not only is obligatory, but outranks a Sunday in Ordinary Time.
Though those writing calendar rubrics rarely leave a complete set of explanatory notes about their decisions, we can suggest two primary reasons for this unusual pre-eminence of a particular church building. First, the proper title of the Lateran Basilica is in fact the Archbasilica of the Most Holy Savior and Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist at the Lateran. Quite a mouthful, that—no wonder we shorten the name. But the point is that whereas dedications to both St. Johns were added in the ninth century, the original dedication was to Christ the Redeemer, and so this effect makes the day a feast of Our Lord under that title. Second, the Lateran Basilica has long been considered the “mother” of all the churches of the world. Yes, even more so than St. Peter’s. So we honor this particular building, as Pope Benedict declared at an Angelus address in 2008, as “an expression of love and veneration for the Roman Church, ‘which,’ as St. Ignatius of Antioch affirms, ‘presides in charity’ over the entire Catholic communion.”
What a beautiful gesture for us—especially those of us who have chosen, from much prayer and wrestling, union with the Holy Roman and Apostolic See.
Perhaps we should say something about this particular basilica and why it is so significant. It is probably the oldest building made specifically for public Christian worship in Rome. It was dedicated on this day in the year 324 by Pope Sylvester I. Its construction was thanks to not the pope, but the emperor Constantine, who, when he entered Rome in triumph in 312, wanted to offer some sign and gift to the God of Jesus Christ.
This is not the place to judge the extent of Constantine’s personal faith. Whatever his theology at that point, it seems his conviction that it was this God who gave him victory was firm enough that he refused, on entering the city, to offer the customary sacrifices to the gods. Supposedly the Roman establishment was so scandalized by this sleight that Constantine hid from public view for a while.
The site he chose for a new temple was not in the midst of the city alongside the temples of Jupiter or Vesta or Mars, but to the southeast, just inside the walls, next to the Celian Hill on the site of an old barracks and adjacent to a palace that was part of the dowry of Constantine’s wife, Fausta. Yet a traditional Roman temple was a place for the deity, not for the people, hence unsuited for Christian worship, in which the new sacrifice offered was integrally related to the people offering it and the form of offering. So when the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer was built, Constantine used as a model the Roman basilica, a multipurpose rectangular building designed to hold large numbers of people.
The Lateran Basilica, as it came to be called, was the first such building made as a church. But whereas Roman basilicas were modest structures, this church was built on a grand scale, with opulence and beauty, designed to hold 3,000 people. Though Constantine was careful in not thrusting this too much into the face of the Roman establishment, the symbolism was clear enough: this was a symbol of the triumph of Christianity.
The Lateran Basilica from that point became the seat of the bishops of Rome, the popes. And the palace attached to it came to be their official residence all the way up to the Avignon papacy in 1309. The original basilica was destroyed by earthquake in the ninth century and rebuilt; it was destroyed again by fire in the fourteenth century and rebuilt. Later in that same century, it was destroyed by another fire and rebuilt.
Although the popes haven’t lived in the palace since the fourteenth century, the church remains the seat and throne of the bishop of Rome. When Pope Leo took possession of the church and celebrated Mass there for the first time this past spring, he was formally taking up the most tangible aspect of his ministry: the pope leads the universal Church because he leads a particular church with a particular relationship to the universal Church.
There is a concrete, material aspect to the Church that we disregard at our peril. There was something of a modern trend, a moment in history that I think is blessedly now fading away, suggesting that, because ultimately the Church is the people, not a building, the buildings are merely functional and can just as well look like a supermarket or a sports arena as a place of solemnity. This was taking a certain truth and using it as a weapon against other corollary truths. As a comparison, we might remember that the Christian tradition has always insisted on the priority of spiritual things. The state of a person’s soul is ultimately more significant than the state of his body. But this does not mean we can do whatever we want with our bodies, that they are of no significance at all, or that material things are of no significance. We often seem to live, in the twenty-first century, in a constant swinging pendulum between the gnostic extremes of materialism and spiritualism. The fact that many people in this world act as if temporal, bodily things are the only things that matter does not permit us to discard them for some supposedly pure realm of spirit.
“You are God’s building,” St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 3. “You are the temple of God.” And so the basilica, in the imagination of the early Roman Church, became a kind of temple of temples, a holy of holies. Rather than something in competition with the ecclesia as people, they saw it as proof and a sign of that reality. How we house Christ’s body tells an important story to the world, and to ourselves, about what we value and how we treat God’s gifts.
The Church’s greatest “treasures” were, and are, God’s people, as St. Lawrence famously told the pagan authorities of Rome less than a century before the construction of the Lateran basilica. All the more reason to consecrate for them a place worthy of that high calling. Again we can see this in Constantine’s architectural decisions in the fourth century. As far back as we can find them, the rites of the dedication of a church building echo the initiatory rites of the faithful themselves: the building is instructed in the faith through a symbolic writing on the ground; it is purified with salt and washed with holy water; it is anointed with holy oil; upon the altar, which is its heart, incense is burned in the fire of charity; and there, at last, it becomes a place of sacrifice, like the human body and soul, where God’s own creation is returned to him in love and where the fire of God’s own love comes down to us to give life and power.
The story of Christ’s cleansing of the temple in John gives an interesting window into the early Church’s understanding of this dynamic. The old Temple was, they knew, soon to become almost irrelevant in view of the temple that was Christ’s own body. Even so, his disciples could look back and recall the words of Scripture: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” If the Temple was of no consequence in comparison with the true temple to come, why was the Lord so consumed with zeal for it?
The simple answer is that zeal for the Lord’s ultimate abode in heaven must take concrete form on earth, even while we know that here we have, in the words of Hebrews, “no lasting city” (13:14), but seek “a city which is to come.” The movement, emphasized over and over again in the great tradition, from visible things to invisible things, rarely means that we must discard the visible things.
The sacraments are the first and most obvious proof of this. We are asked to look beyond the visible form of bread and wine to the truth of the substantial body and blood hidden within, but this vision of faith does not destroy our sight. Our senses are elevated, educated, vivified, clarified. But they remain, because the Lord died not for us to become some sort of gnostic pure spirit, but to become human beings fully alive, body and soul, shining with the glory of God. The streams of grace flowing out from the holy temple, like in Ezekiel’s vision, bring new life to all creation. The many tangible and visible things that the tradition gives us, from the historical church of St. John Lateran to this and every parish church, are not merely doorways to some secret spiritual realm; they are engines of our sanctification, vehicles that invite us to peer through the mystical veil not just once, as some paltry symbol that can be discarded, its meaning spent, but over and over again as we move further into the beauty of God.
We are on our way home to heaven. To go there, we must first learn to love the home he gives us here, even while we look through and beyond it to the world to come.

‘St. John Lateran, Pray for Us’

<div>Why did Nicodemus bring such a large amount of spices to the tomb?</div><div>As with the sinful woman who anointed the Lord&#8217;s feet in the house of Simon, the amount used was not dictated by practical necessity but was a sign of the honor due and given to the Lord himself. Forty pounds were used for the funeral of the Rabbi Gamaliel, so a hundred pounds (or more likely about seventy-five of our pounds) would be a sign of extreme veneration of the person of Jesus. This excess is a sign both of the love of Our Lord&#8217;s followers and of his surpassing dignity.
</div>

Why Did Nicodemus Bring So Much Spice?

The gospel is central to the Christian faith, but few people realize how the Bible itself understands the concept.
Previously, I showed that—based on passages in the Old Testament—the New Testament understands the gospel to be the message that <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-does-scripture-say-about-the-gospel">the time has arrived</a> for God to inaugurate his kingdom and begin ruling in the world.
Once you realize this, you find echoes of the gospel in other passages that don’t even use the term. For example, if God’s kingdom is now arriving, who has been ruling the world up to now?
There are two answers to this question. One is the human kingdoms that have ruled the world thus far and oppressed God’s people. But now these kingdoms are being supplanted by the kingdom of God. In Revelation, we read,
<blockquote>Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (11:15).</blockquote>
So the kingdom of the world has been replaced by the kingdom of God and Christ. But this announcement—like the gospel itself—is not coming out of the blue. It’s also predicted in the Old Testament. For example, the prophet Zechariah predicts that there will be a day when “the Lord will be king over all the earth” (Zech. 14:9).
In Daniel, we read of a series of pagan kingdoms that oppress God’s people, and then we are told,
<blockquote>And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever (Dan. 2:44).</blockquote>
Later, we read about a similar line of pagan kingdoms, and we learn about the role of the Son of Man in their overthrow. Daniel says,
<blockquote>I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed (7:13-14).</blockquote>
The idea of the pagan kingdoms of the world being replaced by God’s kingdom through the Son of Man—or Christ—is one of the expectations established in the Old Testament.
However, the pagan kingdoms of the world are not the only answer to the question of who was ruling before the time of God’s kingdom. The other answer is found on the angelic level—in the invisible world that operates behind the visible, earthly kingdoms.
Scripture gives us glimpses of that invisible world, such as when John tells us, “The whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19).
And when Jesus was tested in the desert, we read:
<blockquote>The devil took [Jesus] up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”
And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve’” (Luke 4:5-8).</blockquote>
So God had allowed the devil to have spiritual control on the angelic level of all the nations of the earth. And to test Jesus, the devil offered him all these nations in exchange for worship, but Jesus knew that this was not God’s plan and rejected the offer.
Consequently, John tells us, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8).
And in John’s Gospel, as Jesus is preparing to go to the cross, he says,
<blockquote>Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself (12:31-32).</blockquote>
Thus, Hebrews says that Jesus partook of flesh and blood so that
<blockquote>through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil (2:14).</blockquote>
All this forms the conceptual background to the New Testament understanding of the gospel. It’s the good news that—although the devil has reigned in the world up to now, and there have been a series of pagan empires that have oppressed God’s people—the time has finally arrived for God to come and begin reigning through his kingdom.
This happens because his Son defeats the powers of darkness by his atoning death on the cross and by his resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God, where he now sits and reigns while the final defeat of the powers of darkness and death is implemented. As St. Paul says:
<blockquote>As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.
Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death (1 Cor. 15:22-26).</blockquote>
We thus see that there is a central role for Jesus as the Son of God in the New Testament’s conception of the gospel, and that’s not surprising.
Of the more than thirty references you’ll turn up if you search for the “gospel of” or the “good news of,” they don’t all refer to God and the kingdom. Eleven of them—or about a third—refer to variations on the gospel “of Christ,” “of Jesus Christ,” “of our Lord Jesus,” and “of his Son” (Mark 1:1; Rom. 1:9, 15:19; 1 Cor. 9:12; 2 Cor. 2:12, 9:13, 10:14; Gal. 1:7; Phil. 1:27; 1 Thess. 3:2; 2 Thess. 1:8).
In addition, the four documents about the life of Christ are called Gospels—a usage that dates back to the apostolic age.
So Jesus has a very prominent place in the New Testament understanding of the gospel, but this is not the original way it was conceptualized. The Old Testament prophets, John the Baptist, and Jesus all initially announced the gospel as the arrival of God’s kingdom, and this is how it was publicly announced for years—all through Christ’s earthly ministry.
Only Jesus fully understood the role he would play in bringing that kingdom about, he disclosed this only gradually, and even his own disciples did not understand it until he rose from the dead.
Therefore, the role of the Son in the gospel was a secondary announcement. It was added to the original, primary understanding of the gospel of God and his kingdom at a later stage to explain how that kingdom would come about. That’s why the earliest announcements of the gospel put all the focus on God and his kingdom, and the announcements of the gospel in connection with the Son were all given later.
The primary proclamation of the gospel is thus the announcement that the time for God to inaugurate his kingdom has arrived, and the secondary proclamation is that this kingdom will be implemented through God’s Son.
But notice that there’s still something missing from the way the New Testament conceptualizes the gospel. The passages where the New Testament refers to the gospel just do not focus on individuals. They don’t focus on you, your sin, your forgiveness, you being delivered from hell, or you being united with God in heaven.
That’s not what we find in these passages, and that understanding reframes the gospel away from the New Testament’s conception to present the gospel as if it were about what happens to individuals like you and me. To put it bluntly, the gospel is not about us. It’s about God, his Son, and his kingdom.
Of the more than thirty references to the “gospel of” and the “good news of,” only one of them explicitly refers to salvation. In that passage, Paul says,
<blockquote>In [Christ] you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit (Eph. 1:13).</blockquote>
Here Paul identifies “the word of truth” with “the gospel of your salvation.” Salvation is one of the implications of the gospel for us. It is because of the gospel that we can be saved. But a single verse that mentions this fact does not radically change the focus of the New Testament in how its authors think of the gospel.
The primary proclamation of the gospel is still that the time for God’s kingdom has arrived. The secondary proclamation of the gospel is still that God’s kingdom will be implemented through his Son. And the fact that we can be saved through the Son is an addendum to these proclamations of the gospel, but it is not the essence of the gospel itself.
We thus see that there are a lot of misconceptions about the gospel—at least if people are taking their own definitions to be what the New Testament means by the word. I covered many of these alternate conceptions <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/misunderstanding-the-gospel">here</a>.
Different groups can use terms however they like, but they are not representing the New Testament understanding of the gospel if they say it is equivalent to
<ul>
<li>the whole of Scripture,</li>
<li>the whole of Christian doctrine,</li>
<li>the whole of Christ’s teachings,</li>
<li>Lutheranism’s idea of anything that preaches God’s grace and forgiveness,</li>
<li>the distinctive doctrines of Full Gospel Pentecostals,</li>
<li>the distinctive doctrines of Calvinism,</li>
<li>the idea of justification by faith alone,</li>
<li>the idea of justification by grace alone, or even</li>
<li>the idea that God has saved us—as individuals—through the death of his Son since we could not save ourselves.</li>
</ul>
No, the core of the gospel, beginning with texts in the Old Testament, is that the time for God’s kingdom has arrived and all opposing powers will be overthrown. The elaboration of the gospel is that God’s kingdom will be implemented through his Son. And a happy consequence of that fact is that we can be saved through his Son.
The New Testament’s understanding is not about us as individuals and how we can benefit. The gospel is not about us. Instead, the good news is about what God and his Son are doing in the world, what they’re doing to their enemies—like the devil and the pagan world order. How we can benefit as individuals, how we can get on board with God’s plan, is a consequence of the gospel, but it’s not the essence of the good news.
So what do we need to do to benefit from the good news? Jesus himself told us:
<blockquote>The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel (Mark 1:15).</blockquote>
Or, as St. Peter put it on the day of Pentecost:
<blockquote>Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38).</blockquote>