Liberty and Death

Hat tip to Ryan Sayre Patrico over at First Things. This article by O'Rourke in the LA Times is a good one.

And This News Just Makes Me Sad

Tim Russert died today of an apparent heart attack. He was 58 years old.

Memory Eternal!

Pavarotti

Memory Eternal!

HT: Ad Orientem

Malcolm Muggeridge: On Being Catholic

I saw this blurb over at Pontifications.

"Rome, sweet Rome, be you never so sinful, there's no place like Rome." So, mockingly, wrote the wisest man I ever knew, Malcolm Muggeridge. A few years later, at the age of 80, Muggeridge knelt before an altar and was received into the Catholic Church. When I asked him why, he said: "The day will come, dear boy, when you must decide whether to die within the Church or outside the Church. I have decided to die within the Church." A few years later, he did. And so may I, I pray, when the silence of eternity beckons.

- Ian Hunter

Why I Am Catholic, XII

"I believe in ... the communion of saints." This statement, pulled from the Apostles' Creed, means two things to me currently: (1) Believers are to be one, and (2) When believers die, they are not wholly lost to us.

Love necessitates prayers for or to or about the dead. And if we close off such an important part of our life from Him, how are we to be honest with God? Or do we simply die piecemeal with those we love, as they die?

"Of course I pray for the dead ... At our age, the majority of those we love best are dead. What sort of intercourse with God could I have if what I love best were unmentionable to him?" (C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, 107).