... (and I'll especially miss it since he and I have been friends since around 1995, so I enjoyed our time blogging together on HMS), check out his other blog, Classic Catholic.

Check out especially this post.

And if you have any of those kinds of opportunities to offer, put Robert at the top of your list.

This is an amazing story. A student of the Royal College of Art is using rapid prototyping technology to turn MRI images of developing fetuses into 3D plastic models.  Remarkable.

 

 

A foetus at 21 weeks

On Monday, we celebrate the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. The Church will thus conclude her observance of the Year of St. Paul. And we have just begun the Year for Priests. I would like to focus my brief reflection on the Mass readings for the feast especially on the latter. I would like to consider the importance of both St. Peter and St. Paul for the priesthood - the ways in which priests need to be faithful to both of these great saints.

St. Paul is the "Apostle to the Gentiles." As he writes to St. Timothy in the passage that we hear as our second reading, the Lord stood by him and gave him strength, so that through him the proclamation might be completed and all the Gentiles might hear it. Paul was not the only important preacher of the Gospel in the New Testament era. St. Peter preached; so did the other Apostles; so did their various co-workers. But when we think of the first preaching of the Gospel of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ to all the nations, we rightly think especially of St. Paul.

Priests are more than preachers. Most especially, they celebrate the sacraments for and with the Church. But the preaching of the Gospel is integral to their mission - including, but not only, as part of the liturgical celebration of the sacraments. The Church would not be the Church were it not for her faith, received from God and preached in every age by, especially, the bishops and their priests. Priests need to preach the faith that St. Paul preached, with the same spirit of dedication and sacrifice with which Paul preached it.

In our Mass readings this Sunday, we learn something about God's plan regarding life and death. We hear from the book of Wisdom that "God did not make death"; rather, "he fashioned all things that they might have being." Death is a reality, but it was not God's original plan. And there is indication here that it will also not have the final word. God will somehow save from it those who belong to him. In our Gospel reading, we hear how Jesus raised a dead girl, and also healed a woman who was experiencing a great bodily affliction. God does not promise such miracles to most of us. But he promises us something greater, something of which these miracles recorded in the Gospel are but a sign. He promises us perfect life with himself in heaven.

We hear in our second reading St. Paul's words about "the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ," by which we were made "rich" with divine life and the promise of heaven. And St. Paul tells us that we are called to perform the "gracious act" of loving and caring for others. Let us give just a bit of consideration to the connection between God's great gift to us, and the gift that we are to give to others. Probably most of us sometimes feel like God and other people are asking too much of us, are asking from us more than we have. And there is a sense in which this is true. Of ourselves, we would not be capable of responding to God's call and to others' needs. But perhaps the most important thing for us to remember is that God does not leave us alone. He calls us, first, to accept his gift to us, and only then to give to others.