STUDY COURSE ON THE CHURCH FATHERS

Instructor: Father Richard G. Cipolla, Ph.D., D.Phil. (Oxon)

Why a course for the laity on the Church Fathers?  And why at this particular time?  The basic answer is that an educated laity, that is, educated in the Faith, is vital and necessary for the well-being of the Church.  This is true especially at a time when the Church is beset both from without and within.  The study of the Church Fathers gives us a grounding in the development of doctrine that led to the content of the Tradition of the Church that is the basis of our Catholic Faith.

Some years ago I taught Patristics, which is the study of the Church Fathers, at Holy Apostles Seminary in Cromwell.  Now, because I am a “retired priest”, I have the time to do this course for the laity.  Each session we will read passages from one of the Church Fathers and discuss their meaning.  The discussion is as important as my commentary on the readings themselves.  

The Course will be divided into two semesters:  Fall and Spring.  There will be eight meetings in each semester. All meetings will be at St. Pius X church in Fairfield from 7:30-9:00 pm.  Below is the schedule for the Fall semester. 

The cost of the course is $100 per semester.  Included in the cost is a book that contains all of the readings from the Fathers that we will study and discuss.  There is a limit of 25 students for each semester.  To register please contact me directly by email:  richardcipolla84@gmail.com

I look forward to teaching this course and the discussions that will be a vital part of the course.

Father Richard Gennaro Cipolla

September 12                                                  Introduction, St. Clement of Rome

September 19                                                  St. Ignatius of Antioch

October 3                                                      St. Justin Martyr

October 10                                                    St. Irenaeus

October 31                                                   Tertullian

November 7                                                  Origen

November 14                                                   Athanasius

November 21                                                   The Nicene Creed

This Saturday at there will be a solemn high Mass in honor of St Rocco at 4 pm at the church of St Rocco in Glen Cove on Long Island.  (Near LIRR station.)

This is part of their big annual St Rocco feast celebration with amazing food made by Italian grandmas, rides, games, etc. They have beautiful religious events every night during the feast, and this annual High Mass is the highlight. 

More information about the feast: https://www.glencovecatholic.org/feast-of-saint-rocco

On Friday, July 26, at 7 PM, the Society of St Hugh of Cluny and Immaculate Conception parish will be sponsoring a Solemn High Mass for the feast of St Ann. The music will be directed by James Wetzel; refreshments will follow. the parish is located at 414 East 14th Street, New York.

Immaculate Conception is a historic church which was formerly an affiliate of Grace church prior to its purchase by the archdiocese of New York. The old parish of St. Ann was absorbed into Immaculate Conception after it was so tragically closed. In its last years it was the Armenian Catholic cathedral. It also was a national shrine of St Ann – as visitors may recall being proudly displayed on a lamp over an elaborate metal railing. (New York City still has a second shrine to St. Ann(e) at the church of St Jean Baptiste)

It also was the scene of the first officially approved Traditional Mass celebrated in the Archdiocese of New York since the Vatican Council. The time of the mass was maliciously set in the early afternoon on Saturday; that first Mass was cancelled by the Archdiocese on the day it was to be celebrated. But the Latin Mass did indeed resume at St Ann’s shortly thereafter and continued for many years. We know of priests and laymen involved in the Traditional Mass movement today who had their first experience of the Traditional Mass there.

We hope all of you can make it!

The Latin Mass of Sleepy Hollow, NY, is pleased to announce that Dr. Jennifer Donelson, Director of Sacred Music at St. Joseph’s Seminary (Dunwoodie), will be starting a schola for children ages 5-14 beginning in September 2019.

Weekly classes will take place after school on Wednesday afternoons in the church hall of St. John Paul II Maronite Catholic Church at Immaculate Conception in Sleepy Hollow. Exact starting date and time to be determined.

  Children will be instructed in the Ward Method, learning both Gregorian chant and music from the Church’s tradition of sacred polyphony. In addition, the children’s schola will perform several times a year alongside the adult schola at Sung Masses in the Traditional Roman Rite, which is celebrated every Sunday at 3 PM at Immaculate Conception.  

For more information, etc. contact:                                            kevincollins1@mac.com 

Just a few more days to catch the great Giovanni Battista Moroni exhibition at the Frick Gallery…

We hear sometimes of the “Catholic cultures” of the past – indeed, some fancy recreating one. But what exactly is such a culture? Is it not an all-embracing sensibility or “atmosphere” – present everywhere, yet not visible anywhere (as someone said of the hand of a great artist in his works)?  Moroni is a case in point. His main achievements are secular portraits – his religious works, still found mainly in the churches where he painted them, are said to be less successful. Further, Moroni’s world is restricted to Bergamo and its surroundings. Bergamo was one of the smaller – but not insignificant – Italian cities of that era (the middle of the 16th century)  Moroni’s world was that of the Council of Trent and the Battle of Lepanto, of Charles V and Philip II, of the last years of Michelangelo and Titian, of St Francis Xavier and St. Ignatius Loyola, of Tasso and Palestrina.

Moroni portrayed aristocrats, artisans (famously, a tailor), scholars and clergy. There are both beautiful, gorgeously attired women – who happened to be eminent poets in several languages – and an old widow, the patroness of a convent. About these people are the attributes of their status: the armor and swords of the soldier, the books of the scholar, the shears of the tailor, the dazzling garments of the aristocratic women. At times the references are mysterious: broken walls and statuary allude to some unknown event in the life of one sitter. Yet these images are all of real individuals who play a variety of specific public roles in their society. Need I say that men and women are clearly differentiated? All in complete contrast to the “gender-bending” images the media constantly thrust upon us. Indeed, recently we see in our local press women imitating men who have imitated women.….

It seems that in his day and later critical opinion looked down on Moroni as too “documentarian” or merely realistic. After all, wasn’t he competing with the painterly style of Titian and the deliberately artificial and expressive images of the Mannerists? Perhaps his art was the equivalent in painting of the realistic novel, only 250-300 years too early. But in truth, Moroni was in no way a mere photographic copyist of external reality.  For one thing, his paintings so often display a fine insight into the sitter’s character. Do we not detect a hint of a sneer on the face of one elegantly clad young lady (above)? And is there not great spiritual tranquility and religious faith depicted on the features of an aged widow? Indeed, is not the painting of such a face – not superficially beautiful at all – a subject highly original in female portraiture? 

Furthermore, in one important respect Moroni does venture into the explicitly religious. We are familiar with the depictions of donors in late medieval and renaissance painting – often shown in miniature compared to the major sacred actors. Moroni, however, is said to have created a new type of image, wherein full-sized images of the donors pray before or gaze upon a smaller scale devotional scene in the background. The curators of the exhibition trace this new style of representing the donors and their faith to the influence of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola – just then gaining prominence in the Catholic world.  For St Ignatius also emphasized forming an interior image of a sacred subject as an aid to meditation and prayer.

Working within the confines of the portrait, does not Moroni display a Christian culture as fully developed as that of the masters of the explicitly religious art of his time? Does he not show us – of course without any notion of propagandizing or arguing – what one such Christian culture could be like? And is not such a faithful recorder of his time perhaps a more accessible guide for us than those contemporaries of Moroni who left us grand and ecstatic religious images?

For more details see HERE. The exhibition closes June 2.