McGrath Institute Blog

Our secular society may speak too much about renewal in mundane, temporary terms (“renewing” a driver’s license) or as an impersonal, policy-driven turnaround (“urban renewal”). But on August 21, the feast day of Pope St. Pius X, it’s helpful to ponder how the Catholic Church thinks about renewal, especially in light of the motto associated with this first Pope elected in the 20th century: “to renew all things in Christ.”

Today the Church celebrates the feast of St. Stephen, King of Hungary. History remembers him for his unification and establishment of Hungary around the year 1000, but the Church venerates him because of his dedication to God and the welfare of his people.

Today marks the feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan priest executed at Auschwitz on August 14, 1941, offering his life in the place of a fellow prisoner who had been condemned to death. 

This past June, Archbishop José Gomez visited the University of Notre Dame to address Catholic leaders from around the country who were on campus for Liturgy Week and other conferences hosted by the McGrath Institute for Church Life. In keeping with Liturgy Week’s theme, “Liturgy and the Domestic Church,” the Archbishop’s talk centered on the importance of the family and the need to discover ways that the Church can nourish and support family life.

2019 marks the fifteenth anniversary of Sufjan Stevens’ remarkable album Seven Swans. Apart from his Christmas albums, the twelve songs on Seven Swans are by far the most overtly Christian in Stevens’ catalog: track one, “All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands,” takes its title from Isaiah 55:12; track two, “Abraham,” meditates on the patriarch’s near-sacrifice of his only beloved son, Isaac. These sometimes scriptural, sometimes literary (“A Good Man is Hard to Find”), always spiritual musical meditations culminate in the final track of the album, “The Transfiguration.”