Friday 14 June 2013 About Today G.K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936) On this day in 1936 died G.K. Chesterton, writer and journalist. His writings – stories, essays, poems, books, journalism – are infused with an unequalled joy and love of truth. In youth, he went through a crisis of nihilistic pessimism and it was his recovery from this that led him to God and ultimately to conversion. “The Devil made me a Catholic,” he said – meaning that it was the experience of evil and nothingness that convinced him of the goodness and sanity of the world and his creator. His poem “The Ballade of a Suicide” celebrates the salvific value of ordinary things; his novel, “The Man who was Thursday,” narrates the fight for sanity in an insane world and ponders the paradox of God; and “Orthodoxy”, written long before he became a Catholic, highlights orthodoxy not as a dead and static thing but as the only possible point of equilibrium between crazy heresies any one of which would drive us mad. He took part in all the major controversies of his age, and was a lifelong adversary and friend of socialists and atheists such as George Bernard Shaw. These controversies were conducted with passion but with unfailing charity: he never sought to defeat his opponents, only to defeat their ideas. He would never cheat to score a point: and his love for the people he fought against is something that all controversialists should imitate, however hard it may be. Read him, and pray for him. Other saints: Saint Davnet She is the patron saint of the diocese of Clogher. Nothing is known about her for certain. She may have lived and died at Tydavnet in County Monaghan, possibly in the seventh century. Other saints: St Lidwina (1380 - 1433) She was born in Schiedam in Holland. At the age of 15 she was ice-skating when she fell and broke a rib. Contemporary accounts describe how gangrene appeared in the wound and spread through her whole body. She had lost the use of her legs by the age of 19 and eventually was completely paralysed except for her left hand. Living in constantly increasing pain, she had a wonderful gift of prayer and contemplation; suffering an incurable disease, she yet had the power to heal others. Some thought that she was under the influence of an evil spirit, but she was greatly revered by many holy men, one of whom wrote a pious tract in her honour. On the morning of Easter Day 1433, she was in deep contemplation and saw a vision of Christ coming towards her to administer the sacrament of Extreme Unction, and two days later, on 14 April, she died. Her grave immediately became a place of pilgrimage. Joannes Brugmann and Thomas à Kempis wrote biographies of her, and she was more and more venerated as time went on. Finally, in 1890 Pope Leo XIII gave the Church’s official sanction to this centuries-old devotion by canonizing St Lidwina. The details in the contemporary biographies have enabled modern medical opinion to reach the conclusion that St Lidwina suffered from a form of multiple sclerosis, making her (by some centuries) the earliest documented case of this disease.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:51:34 +0000
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