Ladydale Diary
St. Pius V, 2021
Today’s saint is one of my favourites. I devote a chapter to him in my book, Heroes of the Catholic Reformation. A great reformer in the spirit of the Council of Trent, Pius V is also the pope who inspired the Holy League to defeat the Islamic fleet of the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Lepanto. As such, he is celebrated by Chesterton in his poem about this historic naval battle, which led to Pius instituting the feast of Our Lady of Victory in thanksgiving. And we mustn’t forget that this great saint was the pope who excommunicated Bloody Bess, more prosaically known as Elizabeth I, in punishment for her war on the Church. Oh, for popes and bishops with similar courage to excommunicate heads of state in this day and age!
Enough!
So, what have I been up to this week?
Since I last wrote, which was nine days ago on April 21, I’ve spent several days in Fort Worth, Texas, giving a talk on Solzhenitsyn and visiting friends. It was from my friends’ home on Friday that I gave my weekly online lecture for Red Cultural in Chile. Last week, I lectured on the Aeneid; this week, which was this morning to be precise, I spoke on Beowulf.
I returned home from Texas on Sunday, early enough to spend the afternoon with my family.
I should say, by the way, that I’ve been living with a poison ivy rash covering most of my body since the previous weekend, the consequence of clearing the edge of the wood. As I write, it’s been thirteen days and counting. Much lost sleep in consequence! But we soldier on….
On Monday, we continued the discussion of Cardinal Zen’s book on the Church in China, which has been an eye-opener for me, not in the sense that Benedict XVI responded with courage and conviction to the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party, which is not a surprise, but in the way in which some members of the Roman Curia have worked to undermine the underground Church in China, the Church in the catacombs, betraying these heroic Christians to Caesar.
On Tuesday morning, I gave an hour-long video interview to a young Englishman, living in Denmark, who is working on a Masters’ thesis on the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. I’m hoping that he will send me the interview so that I can share it with my friends in the inner Sanctum. I then took the afternoon off so that I could go to the gym and thence to a local bar to watch Chelsea play Real Madrid in the semi-final of the European Champions League. A couple of pints of craft ale in the company of friends, watching the “beautiful game” played beautifully.
On Wednesday I wrote an essay for the Imaginative Conservative entitled “When Hitler Seduced Marx” (the mind boggles!) and also the editorial for the next issue of the St. Austin Review, which will be on the theme of “Poland: Europe’s Heroic Heart”. This will be the July/August issue. The May/June issue, which subscribers should be receiving in the next week or so, is a Tolkien theme issue. I’m particularly happy with it, not merely in terms of the quality of the published articles but in terms of the beautiful art which illustrates the issue. StAR subscribers are in for a treat!
Much of yesterday was spent in meetings with my colleagues at the Augustine Institute as we work to get two books to the printers: Edward Sri’s The Art of Living (on the Cardinal Virtues) and Susan Treacy’s The Music of Christendom. Both these titles will be co-published by the Augustine Institute and Ignatius Press.
This morning, I gave my lecture to the folks in Chile, as I’ve already said, and this afternoon I’ve been recording the podcasts for the Inner Sanctum. Check them out!
On the home front, Evangeline tested successfully for her red belt in Taekwondo yesterday. The coveted black belt is now almost within reach. Evangeline also spotted the first snake of the year, which was on our porch. It was a harmless black snake. Harmless, that is, to people but a nuisance in the sense that they have an insatiable appetite for chicken eggs. We’ll need to be more diligent in collecting eggs in a timely fashion now that snake season is upon us.
Yesterday there was a swarming of honeybees just outside the house. Another sign of spring. And this morning we saw a migrating female rose breasted grosbeak, which was stopping to refuel at our feeder on its journey north. Susannah noticed on her Facebook page that this is exactly a year to the day that she had photographed (above) presumably the same grosbeak at the feeder. Truly a creature of habit! And Susannah has just shouted upstairs to tell me that the cardinal chicks have hatched in the nest visible from our dining room window. Spring is indeed in the air!
Evangeline is currently awaiting the arrival of a friend, who is having a sleepover every Friday while they work their way through The Pirates of the Caribbean films. Tonight, I believe that they’ll be watching On Stranger Tides, based on the novel by Tim Powers, a friend of mine who’s work I admire greatly. But that’s another story.
Thanks so much for being a member of the Inner Sanctum. May St. Pius V pray for us.
