Godzdogz

Yesterday in Oxford the English Province witnessed and celebrated the solemn professions of four of our brothers (and all contributors to Godzdogz): Toby Lees, Luke Doherty, Samuel Burke, and Jordan Scott. Read more

‘For the love of God’: it’s an utterance of exasperation at an unwelcome or intimidating task and said with sincerity characterises the proper disposition for all Christians to all their labours, both welcome and unwelcome. As far as unwelcome tasks go, being Pope when all your deepest desire – save for doing God’s will – is to be a monk living a quiet, cloistered life of prayer, has to pretty high up there, and, therefore I think ‘for the love of God’ would have been a very appropriate papal motto for Pope St Gregory the Great. Read more

Yesterday the English Province of the Order of Preachers celebrated the first profession of our brother, Albert Robertson, who has now completed his noviciate, and will move to Oxford imminently to settle in before the full swing of academic studies begins. Please keep brother Albert in your prayers, and for the six men who intend to begin the noviciate in early September. Read more

After a remarkable life, Bl. Adrian Fortescue died a martyr at the strike of an executioner's blade at Tower Hill in 1539. A husband and father, a Justice of the Peace, a Knight of the Realm, a Knight of Malta, and a Dominican Tertiary (Lay Dominican); he was at once a loyal servant of the Crown so far as he could be, but still more, he was a man of unshakeable faith.  Read more

Along with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, over the last couple of weeks, I've done my fair share of mountain climbing. In my case, first on the Polish-Slovak border, before World Youth Day and afterwards in Styria, Austria. Beyond the spectacular vistas, one of the beautiful things about the mountains is the quiet. There is a stillness which is conducive to prayer, and a sense of the beauty of the Father's creation in nature. Our Lord, Peter, John, and James went there to pray, but the latter three were to behold more than they bargained for.

The three disciples saw and understood fully for the first time that Jesus is at once one of the prophets and the one that was prophesied by them; and that he is God, and lives eternally and manifests Himself in a blaze of powerful, radiant light. Thus He came both to fulfil scripture and to make it new.

St. Thomas Aquinas gives over a whole section in his Summa Theologiae to this event in which he draws on the writings of the Church Fathers. Echoing the Venerable Bede, he writes that it was fitting that Christ should reveal his glory at the Transfiguration so that the disciples would know the purpose of their journey: eternal joy in heavenly glory in which our bodies will be transformed. For this reason, Thomas declares that the Transfiguration was "the greatest miracle" because it complemented baptism and revealed the perfection of life in Heaven. Though we have not seen the event like the disciples, today we are challenged to contemplate this miraculous revelation and make it our own. The mind boggles, and so it should. Read more

The Godzdogz team will be travelling by coach from our Priory of St Dominic in London with around 50 young pilgrims to Krakow, the city hosting this year's World Youth Day. The journey will be long, but a days visit to Cologne will help break-up it up.  Read more