6th Century Image of the Apostle Paul Found

The restoration of a tomb in the catacombs of St. Gennaro in Naples, revealed a new discovery. The image of St. Paul was found, painted in the grotto. It shows the disciple turning toward the deceased, with an expressive face, seemingly honoring the person. 

Expert say the image is from the first years of the 6th century. One of the oldest images, before St. Paul became an icon of the Byzantine civilization. 

 

The earliest image of St. Paul is from the 4th century. It was found in the Roman catacomb of St.Tecla.

UPDATE:  The Daily Mail has more:

Vatican officials today described the discovery of a 1,400 year old fresco of St Paul in an ancient Roman catacomb as ‘sensational.’

The painting was found during restoration work at the Catacombs of San Gennaro (Saint Januarius) in the port city of Naples.

A photograph released by the Vatican shows the apostle, famous for his conversion to Christianity from Judaism, with a long neck, a slightly pink complexion, thinning hair, a beard and big eyes that give his face a ‘spiritual air.’

News of the discovery was announced on the feast day of St Peter and Paul which is traditionally a bank holiday in Rome.

Striking: The fresco, in a catacomb in Naples, shows St Paul approaching a dead body, his hand raised

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, who is Pope Benedict’s Culture Minister, wrote in L’Osservatore Romano: ‘The image of St Paul has an intense expression, philosophical and its discovery enriches our image of one of the principal apostles.’

Father Antonio Loffredo, director of the catacombs in Naples, said: ‘We hope that many locals and tourists will come and look at this fresco which has been wonderfully restored.’

The figure of Paul is dressed in white and beige robes with the letter ‘I’ on the hem, which may stand for ‘Iesus’ (Latin for Jesus).

He is seen approaching a dead person.

Details on the right hand side of the fresco have crumbled away but nevertheless it still remains a striking image.

The image was verified by the Pontifical Commission of Sacred Art and verified by the Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore…

Read on here

St Peter and St Paul

Are the Saints of the Day:

Peter (d. 64?). St. Mark ends the first half of his Gospel with a triumphant climax. He has recorded doubt, misunderstanding and the opposition of many to Jesus. Now Peter makes his great confession of faith: “You are the Messiah” (Mark 8:29b). It was one of the many glorious moments in Peter’s life, beginning with the day he was called from his nets along the Sea of Galilee to become a fisher of men for Jesus.

The New Testament clearly shows Peter as the leader of the apostles, chosen by Jesus to have a special relationship with him. With James and John he was privileged to witness the Transfiguration, the raising of a dead child to life and the agony in Gethsemane. His mother-in-law was cured by Jesus. He was sent with John to prepare for the last Passover before Jesus’ death. His name is first on every list of apostles.

And to Peter only did Jesus say, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father. And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 16:17b-19).

But the Gospels prove their own trustworthiness by the unflattering details they include about Peter. He clearly had no public relations person. It is a great comfort for ordinary mortals to know that Peter also has his human weakness, even in the presence of Jesus.

He generously gave up all things, yet he can ask in childish self-regard, “What are we going to get for all this?” (see Matthew 19:27). He receives the full force of Christ’s anger when he objects to the idea of a suffering Messiah: “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do” (Matthew 16:23b).

Peter is willing to accept Jesus’ doctrine of forgiveness, but suggests a limit of seven times. He walks on the water in faith, but sinks in doubt. He refuses to let Jesus wash his feet, then wants his whole body cleansed. He swears at the Last Supper that he will never deny Jesus, and then swears to a servant maid that he has never known the man. He loyally resists the first attempt to arrest Jesus by cutting off Malchus’s ear, but in the end he runs away with the others. In the depth of his sorrow, Jesus looks on him and forgives him, and he goes out and sheds bitter tears. The Risen Jesus told Peter to feed his lambs and his sheep (John 21:15-17).

Paul (d. 64?). If the most well-known preacher today suddenly began preaching that the United States should adopt Marxism and not rely on the Constitution, the angry reaction would help us understand Paul’s life when he started preaching that Christ alone can save us. He had been the most Pharisaic of Pharisees, the most legalistic of Mosaic lawyers. Now he suddenly appears to other Jews as a heretical welcomer of Gentiles, a traitor and apostate.

Paul’s central conviction was simple and absolute: Only God can save humanity. No human effort—even the most scrupulous observance of law—can create a human good which we can bring to God as reparation for sin and payment for grace. To be saved from itself, from sin, from the devil and from death, humanity must open itself completely to the saving power of Jesus.

Paul never lost his love for his Jewish family, though he carried on a lifelong debate with them about the uselessness of the Law without Christ. He reminded the Gentiles that they were grafted on the parent stock of the Jews, who were still God’s chosen people, the children of the promise.

In light of his preaching and teaching skills, Paul’s name has surfaced (among others) as a possible patron of the Internet.

Comment: We would probably go to confession to Peter sooner than to any of the other apostles. He is perhaps a more striking example of the simple fact of holiness. Jesus says to us as he said, in effect, to Peter: “It is not you who have chosen me, but I who have chosen you. Peter, it is not human wisdom that makes it possible for you to believe, but my Father’s revelation. I, not you, build my Church.” Paul’s experience of the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus was the driving force that made him one of the most zealous, dynamic and courageous ambassadors of Christ the Church has ever had. But persecution, humiliation and weakness became his day-by-day carrying of the cross, material for further transformation. The dying Christ was in him; the living Christ was his life.

The Church Built on Peter

After St. Peter died upside down on a cross in the Circus of Caligula and Nero, the surviving Christians obtained his body and buried him quickly nearby, on the steeply sloping Vatican Hill to the north of the Circus. That hill had become a makeshift graveyard four months earlier after the fire of Rome had killed so many residents of the metropolis that their loved ones began to use any open spot they could find on the roadsides radiating outside the city.The Christians buried Peter in a simple “poor man’s grave,” which consisted of a shallow hole in the ground, where they placed the apostle’s body, and covered it with a series of six terracotta tiles in the form of a gable. Since Peter’s pauper’s plot was on the side of a heavily inclined hill, it was in serious danger of being destroyed by erosion when the rains came. So the early Christians on two separate occasions built small, primitive brick walls around the tomb as protection. This was the way the prince of the apostles’ grave stood for almost a hundred years…

There’s more here.

Interesting…

Pope Launches News.VA

Reuters Pictures – A woman checks the new Vatican portal on an iPad device in Rome June 28, 2011. Pope Benedict XVI will launch the site, a news information portal that aggregates the Vatican’s various media into a one-stop site for all things papal, on Wednesday, the 60th anniversary of his ordination into the priesthood.

HT:  Overheard in the Sacristy

And he launched it with a historic Tweet:

Twitter welcomed a new user Tuesday – one who already has more than one billion followers.

Pope Benedict XVI used Twitter to announce the launch of a new Vatican website, timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of his ordination as a priest.

The website, News.va, showed a photo of the pope with what appeared to be an iPad.

“The pope sent it, but it was prepared for him,” Benedict’s spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told CNN. “The tablet was presented to him. He did the click and sent the tweet.”

It was the pope’s first tweet, Lombardi confirmed.

“Dear Friends, I just launched http://t.co/fVHpS9y Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ! With my prayers and blessings, Benedictus XVI,” the message said.

The pope himself may be new to Twitter, but the Vatican has been reasonably web-savvy for years, including launching an iPhone app and a Facebook page for the beatification of Pope John Paul II this year.

Benedict’s tweet came on the English news feed for the Vatican, @news_va_en

Vatican News.VA is here. There’s a lot to check out!

Girls as Young as One Forced to Have Sex Change Operations in India!

Appalling!

Girls as young as one are being forced into sex change operations in India by parents desperate for a son.

Surgeons in the city of Indore are reported to be ‘converting’ hundreds of girls a year, who are subsequently pumped full of hormone drugs.

A report in the respected Hindustan Times newspaper said the ‘shocking, unprecedented trend, catering to the fetish for a son, is unfolding at conservative Indore’s well-known clinics and hospitals on children who are one to five years old.

 

‘The process being used to ‘produce’ a male child from a female is known as genitoplasty.’

Indian society places a strong value on producing a son and heir, with daughters often seen as an expensive burden to be married off.

Sex determination tests during pregnancy are illegal in India to try to prevent the common practice of women choosing to abort female foetuses.

In some states such as Punjab the ratio of women to men has dropped as low as seven to ten.

Wealthy parents from Delhi and Mumbai are reportedly flocking to Indore, a city in the centre of India, for the relatively low cost £2,000 treatment to surgically ‘correct’ their daughters.

News of rampant abuse of the surgery – normally used to correct genital abnormality in fully-grown patients – led to a furious backlash on Twitter and other social networking sites on Sunday.

The author and feminist Taslima Nasreen led the outrage, tweeting: ‘Shocking! Not only do people kill unborn girls, they turn girls into boys by genitoplasty.’

She added: ‘Doctors who practice illegal Female Foeticide & Genitoplasty should get life in prison.’

The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights today announced it had asked the state government of Madhya Pradesh to investigate the doctors and the hospitals named in the report…

There is more on this outrage here.

Accused Priests Are Not Thrown Under the Bus…

So says Archbishop Chaput:

Priests aren’t being “thrown under the bus,” if the “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People” is followed correctly, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver affirmed.

During their spring general meeting in mid-June, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops approved minor changes to the charter, known popularly as the Dallas Charter, and related norms. The bishops, meeting in Seattle, resisted calls by some victims’ groups for a broader review of their framework for guarding against child sexual abuse by priests and other Church personnel.

Bishop Blase Cupich, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on the Protection of Children and Young People, argued that the recent John Jay College of Criminal Justice report on the causes and contexts of the clergy-abuse crisis, and ongoing annual audits conducted by dioceses throughout the nation, confirmed that the reforms are working and should remain in place. He predicted that the conference would review the framework within two years. In 2010, the USCCB confirmed just seven new cases of child sexual abuse.

Archbishop Chaput has confronted the problem of clergy sexual abuse in his archdiocese. He also addressed the broader impact of clergy misconduct on a global religious order as the Vatican’s U.S. apostolic investigator of the Legion of Christ. He has emerged as one of the Vatican’s “go-to” episcopal investigators.

Read more here.

Mummy Stash Found in Italian Church:

Discovery has news and photos of the find:

Hundreds of bodies stacked one of top of the other emerged during restoration work in the church of Roccapelago, a remote mountain village in north-central Italy.

About one-third of the mass grave, consisting of 281 bodies of adults, infants and children, turned out to be mummies.

“We found about 100 mummies. We can say that an entire community, who lived here from the mid-16th to the 18th centuries, has been naturally mummified. This is quite unique,” Donato Labate and colleagues from the Archaeological Superintendency of Emilia Romagna said.

More photos here.

Graduation Surprise

A California Polytechnic State grad is surprised on stage by her brother who recently returned from Afghanistan:

A Sign of Plagiarism: The Correct Use of a Semicolon

In those cases I was alerted to plagiarism by the sudden appearance, in a paper that is otherwise a morass of grammatical errors, of a series of flawless sentences with complicated structures. The correct use of a semicolon is a big red flag for me. As is the use—and often misuse—of specialized jargon or technical language that I’ve not discussed with them in class. Then I type those sentences into Google, and they all wind up being smoking-gun cases of plagiarism. My favorite case this semester was plagiarism within plagiarism. When I informed this student that I suspected her paper was plagiarized, she said to me, “I got my paper from one of the students who was in your class last semester. How was I to know that she had plagiarized?” Which indicated to me, along with a number of the other email responses I got from students, that many of them don’t even know what plagiarism is.

I’m also saddened by the instructor’s observation that “the correct use of a semicolon” is an indicator that a college student might not have written it…

Shocking isn’t it?

US Catholic Dioceses to be Reorganised

Later this year, at least, that’s according to Vatican Insider:

The huge wave of child abuse scandals has dramatically altered the life of the American church. Not only from a moral point of view – as is obvious and right – with an examination of conscience that has been going on since the 90s when US bishops met in Rome in front of John Paul II and, at the time, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger. But also, and above all, from an economic point of view.

The lawsuits brought forward demanding tens of billions of dollars in damages, which have enriched the victims of abuse from decades ago and the team of specialised lawyers in the field have forced several dioceses to seek judicial protection for bankruptcy. The first was a diocese of great importance, Portland, followed by others, including Spokane, Delaware and Wilmington.

There is great concern in the Vatican. Not just because the United States, historically, has always made large contributions to the Holy See’s budget, a budget which receives very little revenue and so is normally in the red without the contributions of the dioceses of the various donating countries throughout the world, among which the most important are the U.S., Germany and Italy. The Holy See, however, also fears that economic problems could lead to repercussions on religious life and even on maintaining the basic living conditions for priests, especially pensioners.

For this reason, the Congregation for the Clergy in agreement with other departments has prepared a specific document, which will be released after the summer, possibly in October, that is specifically dedicated to the reorganization of American dioceses. The document is currently being examined by the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, chaired by Archbishop Francis Coccopalmerio. Obviously the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is also interested in the matter. It will provide guidelines on how the U.S. Bishops’ Conference, and each individual diocese must act to rebuild its presence in their area…

There’s more here.