What St Anthony’s face teaches us about the transcendent in man

A mesmerising digital reconstruction of the saint’s visage reminds us what it means to be human

By Francis Phillips on Friday, 13 June 2014

St Anthony by Bernado Strozzi

Today is the feast-day of St Anthony of Padua. I have just been watching a riveting YouTube clip about him on Rome Reports, entitled “What did St Anthony of Padua look like? 3D technology gives us a glimpse” (embedded below). Why did I find it so interesting? Because instead of the normal physical process of human decay, when a skull becomes a potent “memento mori”, a reminder to us all that “we are dust and unto dust we shall return” as the liturgy puts it, modern digital reconstruction has taken St Anthony’s skull and brought it back to life, so to speak.
Through the wonders of modern science and technology, you can watch the skull, with its empty eye sockets, cranium, jaws and teeth, start to form St Anthony’s face and head: flesh on bone, individual features, personhood: in its way this moving clip put me in mind of the resurrection of the body, that we believe in and pray in the Creed at Mass, when body and soul will be reunited forever with God in the life of the world to come.


It also made me think of those illustrations in children’s encyclopaedias to describe human evolution, when a primate on all fours slowly stands upright and turns into Neanderthal man. But as Christians we believe we are not just homo sapiens, the end result of the evolutionary process. We are made in the image and likeness of God, as the lives of the saints, such as St Anthony of Padua, illustrate so beautifully. When I saw life, intelligence and character digitally reanimating a grinning skull in the film clip, I could almost sense the soul returning to the human remains and imagine this great preacher and charismatic Franciscan friar as he must have appeared over 800 years ago.
I am just been reading a book that has greatly moved me, and for much the same reason: its appeal to what is transcendent in man and what gives him his elusive and mysterious dignity over and above his position at the top of the evolutionary ladder. Titled The Leaves Are Falling, by Lucy Beckett and published by Ignatius Press, it is a modern historical novel, the story of what it meant to be a Jewish intellectual (and sceptic), growing up in vibrant Jewish cultural centres such as Breslau and Vilna before the war and then being destroyed, both personally and collectively, between the Russian and the Nazi forces.
One of the protagonists, Jacob Halperin, a secular Jew from Breslau, as well as a skilled surgeon, violinist and a reserve officer in the Polish army, is captured by the Russians and shot, with thousands of fellow officers, in Katyn Forest in April 1940. Before his death he is interrogated by Zarubin, a Communist commissar, in the camp where he is being held. Zarubin mocks Halperin, saying “Are you, a Jew who says he is not religious, telling me you have sympathy for corrupt and vicious priests who kept the peasants in the darkness of superstition for centuries…?”
Halperin responds, “I am not. I am simply saying that there is something in Christianity beyond the blindness of ignorant priests, something that terror and murder will not destroy. Christianity will not wither away, as you hope, and whatever is in it that is truly good will not die with the deaths of priests so long as in the souls…in the souls of…” Zarubin scoffs, “Captain Halperin, you are a rationalist. Rationalists do not countenance the existence of the soul.” For Zarubin, as for all modern secularists and atheists, the concept of the “soul” is meaningless, “nonsense contrived and maintained by churches and rabbis and the bloodsucking classes”, as he crudely puts it. But Halperin, surrounded by evil, and soon to be murdered, intuitively understands that although “they may kill us, they cannot harm us”; a nice distinction to describe the indestructibility of the soul, despite the death of the body. I do recommend the book to anyone who is looking for a challenging read, something more than an airport novel or about the lives of the middle classes living in NW1.
St Anthony is alive now, in the company of God for all eternity; indeed, more alive than he was in his mortal existence. The 3D digital reconstruction gives us a brief, intriguing and fascinating glimpse of his attractive human features – but also points us beyond them, to what is immortal.

Pope Francis: ‘Arms manufacturers are merchants of death’

By Carol Glatz on Wednesday, 11 June 2014

Pope Francis (CNS)

Pope Francis denounced those responsible for human trafficking, slave labour and arms manufacturing during his general audience earlier today.
The Pope told the crowds gathered in St Peter’s Square that people producing weapons of war are “merchants of death”.
“One day everything comes to an end and they will be held accountable to God,” he said.
The Pope also launched an appeal to the international community to help safeguard children from forced labour, highlighting the plight of an estimated 160 million child workers worldwide.
Holding up a bright red leaflet, which had, in Italian, “All together against child labour” written on it, the Pope asked the world community to help “eradicate this scourge”.
The leaflet was part of the International Labour Organisation’s #RedCard campaign, urging people to “blow the whistle,” like a referee on a football field, and give a “red card” to those exploiting children.
Speaking at the end of his audience talk, the Pope said that tomorrow (June 12) is World Day Against Child Labour — a day meant to call attention to the millions of children forced to work in degrading conditions, “exposed to forms of slavery and exploitation, as well as abuse, maltreatment and discrimination”.
He called on everyone, especially families, to do all they could to safeguard “the dignity and possibility of a healthy upbringing” of all children so they could look to the future with hope.
During his main address, the Pope wrapped up his series of audience talks about the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord. The Pope dedicated his catechesis to the last of the gifts.
He said fear of the Lord isn’t about being afraid; it’s recognising “how small we are before God” and his immense capacity to love and forgive

Scapegoating the Sisters for the Deaths of 800 Babies

The septic tank story is falling apart, but anti-Catholic bigotry lives on.

10.06.2014  

The headlines have been sensational and the narratives grotesque. You’re probably familiar with the outlines of the story that exploded onto the front pages of newspapers around the world last week. It’s been reported that the bodies of 800 babies who died of starvation and neglect had been secretly and unceremoniously dumped into a septic tank near a now-demolished home for unmarried mothers and their children, formerly operated by the Bon Secours sisters in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland.

It hardly mattered that such assertions were based on speculation, and likely false. The Horror House story was the perfect vehicle for holier-than-thou secularist journalists and commentators to spin their case that Catholic dogma on sexuality and marriage is pernicious, and that Catholic clergy and religious are guilty of hypocrisy. (References to hypocrisy in Facebook comments on a news story are too foul to link.)

The familiar argument goes like this: While the Church preaches medieval concepts like chastity and the sanctity of every human life, it demonizes and punishes single women for having sex and getting pregnant, by forcing them to work without pay, by maltreating their children, and generally adding to the world’s suffering and misery.

There are calls for vengeance (how Christian!) against the Bon Secours sisters. Do they really deserve a place in history alongside the likes of Pol Pot and the Butcher of Treblinka?

Not to minimize in any way the harsh life, early death and undignified disposal of the remains of these little ones (wherever they are resting), looking at the known facts and considering the widespread penury that engulfed much of rural Ireland in those decades, it appears that the Bon Secours sisters were probably doing the best they could under utterly wretched circumstances.

We’re able to discard the more sensationalized claims thanks largely to four people. Catherine Corless, a local historian living near Tuam, obtained and catalogued the publicly-available death certificates of the 796 children who died at St. Mary’s Home in the 36 years it served as a shelter for unmarried mothers and their children, from 1925 to 1961. Catholic writer Caroline Farrow collated historical accounts of the property, based on archived news clippings and historical records posted by historian Liam Logan. Tim Stanley, an American historian who writes for the (U.K.) Telegraph, summarized and publicized these invaluable sources.

What’s in the tank?

Septic tanks are not the size of double-wide mobile homes. In 1975, two local boys cracked and pried up part of a cement slab covering the tank and discovered and reported finding skeletal remains. According to the Irish Times, one of them, Barry Sweeney, said the slab was about the size of his coffee table and he believes there are “about 20” bodies in the tank. At the time it was assumed that the remains were of victims of the potato famine (1845-1852) when St. Mary’s Home was a Workhouse that sheltered as many as 2,881 paupers. The famine claimed the lives of 1 million Irish. The remains of some children from the Mother and Baby Home era could, of course, be there as well, but are likely to be found in unmarked graves on the property or at a nearby children’s burial ground (one of over 400 “CBGs” in Galway alone).

The “bodies of 800 babies” assumption came from conflating the boys’ 1975 discovery with a 2012 report by local historian Catherine Corless, stating that she had reviewed the death certificates of 796 children who died at St. Mary’s in its 36 years of operation. Is it even plausible to think that anyone would open and close a septic tank filled with decaying corpses 22 times/year to toss in the newly deceased?

Are the deaths of 796 children proof of abuse or neglect by the sisters of Bon Secours?
No. The infant mortality rate in Ireland was one of the highest in Europe. One blogger researched the infant mortality rates in major cities of Ireland between 1925 and 1937. He discovered that the rate at St. Mary’s (17 deaths/year among an average of 200 children, or 8.5% mortality rate) was equal to the rate in the general population of Dublin (8.3%) and lower than infant mortality rates in Cork (8.9%), Waterford (10.2%) and Limerick (13.2%).

State-issued death certificates showed that the St. Mary’s Home children “died variously of tuberculosis, convulsions, measles, whooping cough, influenza, bronchitis and meningitis, among other illnesses.”

Caroline Farrow quotes (and links to) a letter in the Irish Times that offers context for the high infant mortality rates in homes like St. Mary’s:

Cohorting infants in institutions puts small infants at risk from cross-infection, particularly gastroenteritis. Early infection to the gastrointestinal tract can cause severe bowel damage. Without the availability of recent technology, many such infants would die from malabsorption resulting in marasmus [severe malnutrition]. …

 

In foundling homes in the U.S. in the early 20th century, mortality was sometimes reported as greater than 90 per cent among infants cared for in such institutions. Lack of understanding of nutrition, cross-infection associated with overcrowding by today’s standards, and the dangers of unpasteurized human milk substitutes were the main factors.

What do we know of how well St. Mary’s was run and the children were cared for?

Catherine Corless published a summary of her research on the Facebook page Mother/Baby Home Research. “The Bon Secours Sisters,” she writes, “were a nursing congregation who had come from Dublin to take charge of the hospital wing of Glenamaddy Workhouse.” After Ireland won its freedom, all the Workhouses were closed, but Galway County decided to open a Mother/Baby Home at the site of the Tuam Workhouse. “The Home building itself was [then] in a good structural state but needed quite a bit of repair.” The building and land belonged to the Galway County Council (GCC) which was “responsible for repairs and Maintenance.”

The GCC contracted with the Sisters of Bon Secours to provide shelter to unmarried mothers and their children for a weekly fee of 10 shillings (half a pound Irish) for the “maintenance and clothing of inmates” (Connacht Tribune, 1928), as well as the salaries of doctors. Mothers who could pay £100 for the delivery services, could leave after giving birth. Others had to agree to stay there for a year, working to reimburse these costs by “filling domestic duties, cooking, cleaning, minding the babies and children and tending to the gardens.”

The archives reveal differing opinions on how well the home operated. A Mayo Health Board report in 1935 declared, “Tuam is one of the best managed institutions I have seen in the country.” A newspaper story reporting on an inspection in 1949 stated that inspectors found “everything in very good order and congratulated the sisters on the excellent conditions.”

Yet a 1944 report by the health board stated that some children were “emaciated,” “pot-bellied,” “fragile,” and with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.” And in the 1950s, a travel writer visited the home and wrote: “The grounds are well kept and had many flower beds. … Each of the Sisters is a fully trained nurse and midwife. … The building was fresh and clean.”

The archives expose decades of tension between the desires of the sisters to provide better care for the mothers and children and the desire of the community (“ratepayers”) and Council board members to pay as little as possible for these “misfortunates.”

In November 1935, solely as a cost-cutting measure, the Mayo Board reduced the age at which the Home children could be “boarded out” to age four for both girls and boys. The nuns objected, stating that they would be unwilling to renew their contract with the Council, if that were the case. They wanted to keep the girls under their care until after they received their First Holy Communion and been properly instructed in the faith, adding, “That would be a great safeguard to the little girls going out into the world.” The Board “compromised” by reducing the boarding out age of girls to five instead of the threatened four.

Money could be found in 1929, in the midst of dire poverty, to add a “special maternity ward” to the buildings, but this was done mainly because married women (who were paying customers) were refusing to give birth at the public hospital in Connacht as long as unmarried women from the Home were giving birth there. Isolating the Home women in a ward that lacked the hospital’s level of trained staff and equipment, assuredly contributed to higher maternal and infant mortality rates.

In 1951, the “sisters were begging the board for a grant, saying the building “desperately needed renovations, the children were sleeping in attics in terrible conditions and the building [was] considered a fire risk.” Nine years later, £90,000 was appropriated for the Home, but the Council reneged, closed the “dilapidated” Home in 1961 and put the cash toward improvements to a nursing home run by the Sisters of Bon Secours.

Curiously, an article on the closure of St. Mary’s, explaining that the home “falls under the economy axe,” also noted that

the nuns have set the highest standards in the running of the institution and the care of their charges.

In those years, too, the supply of food, clothing and other necessities has been a valuable trade for local business houses, who will feel the loss when the institution is closed.

All of society failed these children. Those who would scapegoat the sisters should perhaps examine themselves first. How generous am I with my money and time in seeing to the needs of those on the margins of our society? Am I outraged by the number of children intentionally killed before birth and the barbaric manner in which their bodies are disposed of? What am I doing about it? Does it bother me that over 40% of births are now to single moms and that so many biological fathers casually escape responsibility for their children? Do I lift a finger for any of these single moms or volunteer for programs that help boys become responsible adults?

Historian denies septic tank 'dumping'

Historian denies septic tank 'dumping'

Irish children from home 1920s

Irish historian Catherine Corless, who revealed that nearly 800 children died in an Irish mother-and-baby home, has denied she said the bodies were dumped in a septic tank,

The Irish Times reports

'I never used that word 'dumped.' Catherine Corless, a local historian told The Irish Times. 'I never said to anyone that there were 800 bodies dumped in a septic tank. That word never came from me at any point. They are not my words'.

The story that emerged from her work was reported this week in dramatic headlines around the world.

Corless has been working for several years on records associated with the former St Mary’s mother-and-baby home in the town. Her research has revealed that 796 children, most of them infants, died between 1925 and 1961, the 36 years that the home, run by Bon Secours, existed.

Between 2011 and 2013 Corless paid €4 each time to get the children’s publicly available death certificates. She says the total cost was €3,184.

The children’s names, ages, places of birth and causes of death were recorded. The average number of deaths over the 36-year period was just over 22 a year. The information recorded on these State- issued certificates has been seen byThe Irish Times; the children are marked as having died variously of tuberculosis, convulsions, measles, whooping cough, influenza, bronchitis and meningitis, among other illnesses.

The deaths of these 796 children are not in doubt. Their numbers are a stark reflection of a period in Ireland when infant mortality in general was very much higher than today, particularly in institutions, where infection spread rapidly. At times during those 36 years the Tuam home housed more than 200 children and 100 mothers, plus those who worked there, according to records Corless has found.

What has upset, confused and dismayed her in recent days is the speculative nature of much of the reporting around the story, particularly about what happened to the children after they died. 'I never used that word "dumped,"' she says again, with distress. 'I just wanted those children to be remembered and for their names to go up on a plaque. That was why I did this project, and now it has taken [on] a life of its own.'

Bert Berns

Bert Berns: label boss, friend to wiseguys and foe to Van Morrison

Remembered with equal parts animosity and affection, the Bronx-born music man blazed a trail in an era of industry pimps, visionaries and gangsters

Bert Berns and Van Morrison at a recording session for Morrison’s first solo album, Blowin’ Your Mind! in March 1967 in New York. Photograph: Popsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Joel Selvin, author of a book about Berns

‘Berns liked hanging around the wiseguys. These men wielded the ultimate unfair business advantage, because implicit in all their dealings was the understanding that they would kill anyone who didn’t do what they wanted. Berns came to be friends with these people, and his music business associates were both intrigued and frightened by his new pals.”

Welcome to the the New York music industry of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when, over the course of a few short years, a random team of mavericks ripped up the old rule book and wrote a new one.

This era of industry pimps, visionaries, gangsters and artists – meticulously and vibrantly detailed by US music writer Joel Selvin in his new book, Here Comes the Night – converged on what the author describes as “the richest gold strike in music business history”.

The book is subtitled The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues , in reference to the songwriter and producer who blazed a trail that was as brief – 1961-1967 – as it was intense. The Bronx-born Berns was a consummate record businessman and a music fan through and through, and a passionate friend and then merciless foe to the likes of Van Morrison and Neil Diamond. When he died of heart failure in 1967, aged 38, he left legacies and memories that are equal parts poignant and pitiless.

Ellie Greenwich, a songwriter at New York’s Brill Building, cried throughout her interview with Selvin, the author says, such was her fondness for Berns. Yet when Selvin approached 1960s Atlantic Records boss Jerry Wexler to talk about Berns, the response was less benign: “I don’t know where he’s buried,” growled Wexler, “but if I did, I would piss on his grave.”

Moral universe
The most difficult job of writing the book, says Selvin, was to describe the moral universe within which Berns operated in such a manner that his actions could be explained. He wanted Berns to be more hero than villain – but certain stories had to be told of the man who, while a pioneer, had a bent moral compass.

“The New York independent record scene of the early 1960s was little better than a racket,” says Selvin, who talks like he writes, in terse, rugged, noirish sentences.

“There was a lot of money in it. It was not part of any established music business. It was a bunch of mavericks. It attracted pirates that plundered ports and had more than their grog ration. Even the most honourable characters – people like Greenwich and the songwriter team Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller – rub up against these people and their business methods.”

One of Berns’s flintier encounters took place in the mid-1960s when, on his first trip to the UK, he became enamoured with the taut sound of Belfast’s Them – specifically, the band’s abrasive frontman, Van Morrison.

When Them split up in the summer of 1966, following a crash-and-burn residency at LA’s Whisky a Go Go, Morrison returned to Belfast. Berns, with an ear pinned to The Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Revolver records, and an eye on the mainstream market, pursued his prey.

He signed Morrison to his Bang label, lodged the princely sum of $2,500 into a bank account and flew the singer over to New“The original Brown-Eyed Girl sessions went great,” says Selvin, “but when Van came back to New York, Morrison had moved along artistically, and was writing songs like TB Sheets , Madame George and others that would become the core of Astral Weeks .”

Far removed from the likes of Brown-Eyed Gir l – or even Them’s cranky proto-punk tunes – Morrison’s intensely introspective new material was neither appreciated nor understood by Berns.

“Bert was all about hit records,” says Selvin. “Van was stuck in a hotel room. Whenever he went to phone out of the hotel, his Irish accent was so thick that the phone operators couldn’t understand him. He’d get so angry that he’d slam down the phone. He was drinking. He was despondent. So he and Berns fell quickly into a very troubled relationship.”

The way Selvin writes it, Berns operated in a realm where morals bounced between different parameters. The mavericks, chancers and pioneers, he writes, “bribed and cheated in a world where prostitutes were routine business expenses”.

Yet Berns was beloved. Many people he spoke to for the book were “extraordinarily sentimental” about him. “He was an upbeat guy, with contagious energy.” But if you crossed him? “Well, if you did that, then there was going to be hell to pay.”

Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues, by Joel Selvin, is published by Counterpoint Press


THEY MEAN BUSINESS: ROCK’N’ROLL TOUGH GUYS

Peter Grant (1935-1995)
Grant was described by Stephen Davis in his classic music book, Hammer of the Gods , as having a “tenacious instinct for the scent of cash”. He earned Led Zeppelin more money than any rock band before them (at the time of signing the group to Atlantic, in the late 1960s, Grant negotiated the highest ever royalty rate for a band). If this meant being charged for serious assault, then so be it: Grant’s bullish business behaviour, ruthlessness and cocaine-induced paranoia gave him a reputation that was grounded more in reality than myth.

Morris Levy (1927-1990)
New York-born Levy, long associated with organised-crime bosses, systematically took false writing credits from songwriters in order to receive royalty payments. By the 1980s, he was worth in the region of $75 million, the majority coming from his publishing company, Big Seven, which boasted more than 30,000 copyrights.

“The only thing I know about organised crime,” Levy told the LA Times , in 1986, “is my five ex-wives.” Try telling that to US musician Tommy James, who claimed in his 2010 book, Me, the Mob, and the Music , that Levy’s label, Roulette Records, owed him more than $30 million in unpaid royalties.

Don Arden (1926-2007)
Arden was a 1960s London-based businessman who steered the careers of The Small Faces, The Move, ELO and Ozzy Osbourne (to whom Arden’s daughter, Sharon, is still married). Often referred to as the “Al Capone of pop”, Arden would protect his interests with a mixture of threat and action. When music manager Robert Stigwood (who would later steer the careers of Cream and The Bee Gees) tried to poach The Small Faces, Arden went to his office with a handful of heavies and dangled him out of his fourth-floor balcony. York in the spring of 1967.

‘The Diary of a Country Priest’ shows Christians are caught in a battle between good and evil

Bernanos’s novel shows life as a battle between hope and despair

By Francis Phillips on Monday, 9 June 2014

Georges Bernanos, author of Diary of a Country Priest

The next choice for our all-woman book club is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Last time we discussed The Outsider by Camus. There are nine of us: three Catholics, one Quaker, two Anglicans and three atheists. Generally speaking, questions of religion don’t arise in our discussions, except obliquely. I think I commented that I found The Outsider a book about despair, a state of mind that interests me theologically but not the other members of the club. The Solzhenitsyn, which I first read at my convent boarding school, is about survival and reflects its author’s own experiences in the Gulag – not his later Christian beliefs.
I mention these books because I would love to introduce to the club my own favourite book: The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos. I have hesitated to do so thus far partly because none of us likes something we hold dear to be trashed by others but mainly because it is a brilliant novel about the clash between theological hope and despair and I demur at offloading my own preoccupations on my friends. Now my love for Bernanos has just been rekindled by reading “What Georges Bernanos Taught Me about Saints”, an article in Patheos.com by Tod Worner. I do recommend this article (and of course the novels) to readers of this blog; with Bernanos, you enter different territory from the average Booker Prize novel, that’s for sure.
Worner quotes Bernanos’ biographer, Peter Hebblethwaite: “In spite of his sense of hell in our midst, Bernanos does not despair, because saints have existed and do exist. They are the living witnesses to the truths he holds. Christianity is not for him an ideology, but a life, begun in baptism, the incorporation into the Passion and Resurrection of Christ.”
This puts it very well. Again, quoting Pope Emeritus Benedict that “Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story; it is an event”, Worner reminds us that no-one can be argued into the Church (though reason has a critical part to play). This is the message that Pope Francis is constantly emphasising: that Christianity is about a relationship of love, with Christ; that must come before the rules and teachings, essential though they are (isn’t that what he means about not being “obsessed” about particular moral issues?); otherwise we have lost the whole meaning of Pentecost, celebrated yesterday, and being “kindled” by the fire of the love of God.
Worner admits, and he could be speaking for me, that “any time I want to piously over-intellectualise my faith into an ideology instead of a personal relationship with Christ, I need to look at a picture of St Joan of Arc, St Peter, St Thomas More, St Maximilian Kolbe or read Georges Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest…and be still.”
For Bernanos reminds us (as does Pope Francis) that Christians are caught up in the battle between good and evil, God or Satan; this is the real issue in our lives. He poses the critical question: do we want to be saints – or not? Bernanos wrote: “Our Church is the Church of the saints. If one approaches her with distrust, one sees only closed doors, barriers and fences, a sort of spiritual police force. ..To become a saint, what bishop would not give up his ring, his mitre and his crozier; what cardinal his purple; what pope his white robe, his chamberlains, his Swiss Guard …? Who would not want to have the strength to embark on this wonderful adventure; it is indeed the only adventure.” The adventures of the heroes of fairy tales, about which I wrote in my last blog, pale into insignificance besides this real-life adventure. Thank you, Georges Bernanos, for reminding me of this; perhaps I will introduce you to my book club after all.

Pentecost Sunday

Pentecost Sunday
"And when the days of Pentecost were drawing to a close, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a violent wind coming, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them parted tongues as of fire, which settled upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in foreign tongues, even as the Holy Spirit prompted them to speak" (Acts 2, 1-4). Pentecost Sunday

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Pentecost
After Jesus had ascended to heaven from Mt. Olivet, the apostles and disciples returned to the Holy City. They remained together in the Upper Room or Cenacle, the place where Jesus had appeared to them and which may well be called the first Christian church. About a hundred and twenty persons were assembled there. They chose Matthias as an apostle in place of the unhappy Judas; they prayed and waited for the Paraclete. Ten days had passed, it was Sunday, the seventh Sunday after the resurrection. At about nine o'clock in the morning, as they were together praying fervently, the Holy Spirit descended upon them. Note how all the great theophanies in Christ's life occurred during the course of prayer. After His baptism, for instance, when Jesus was praying the heavens opened and the Holy Spirit descended in the form of a dove; likewise, it was during prayer at night that the transfiguration took place on Tabor. Surely too it was while Mary was praying that Gabriel delivered his message, and the Holy Spirit overshadowed her. Pentecost followed precedent. The small community of Christians had prepared themselves through prayer for the coming of the Paraclete. The same is true at Mass today, every day; through prayer we ready our souls for the advent of the Spirit.The descent upon the apostles was internal and invisible in nature although accompanied by certain visible phenomena. There came a mighty roar, like the onrush of a violent wind. It came suddenly, from heaven; but unlike storms that strike a structure from without, this one penetrated and filled the room where the disciples were gathered. Therefore it was not a natural wind, it was a miracle peculiar to the occasion. A second visible sign consisted in tongues of fire that descended upon each one present. These fiery tongues gave visible evidence that the Holy Spirit had descended upon them.Today at Mass, particularly at holy Communion, the power of the Holy Spirit will come down upon us; fiery tongues will not be seen, but invisible tongues of fire will not be absent. There was still another external manifestation of the Holy Spirit; the apostles and disciples were enabled to speak various languages.After the roar of the wind many of Jerusalem's pilgrims hurried to the Cenacle. Pentecost was one of the three festivals which obliged all Jews to be present in Jerusalem. Jews from distant lands, and Jewish converts from paganism too, attended these feasts. As a result, a colorful crowd speaking a variety of languages surrounded the house. Now the apostles, who so shortly before had hid in fear behind locked doors, came forth and courageously walked among the multitude speaking to each in his native tongue. It was indeed amazing! Galileans, and multilingual? But the malicious too were present; they had the answer. Nothing marvelous at all! Those Galileans were simply drunk, and their drunken babble sounded like a foreign language! Peter showed no hesitation in answering the charge. None of their number, he said, were intoxicated; it was but nine o'clock in the morning, and at that hour men usually are sober. What the multitude saw was, in fact, the fulfillment of Joel's prophecy: In those days (of the Messiah), God will pour forth His Spirit upon men and they will prophesy. . . . Then the apostle pointed his words more directly against the accusers: they had killed Jesus, had nailed Him to the Cross; but God had awakened Him and after His departure to heaven, He sent the Holy Spirit. The pilgrims who had heard Peter give this first pentecostal sermon "were pierced to the heart and said: Brethren, what shall we do? But Peter said to them: Repent and be baptized; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." Three thousand responded. One final question: why the miracle of tongues? In answer, recall the story regarding the tower of Babel. Puffed up by pride, men attempted to build a tower that would touch the heavens. To punish their sin, God confused their speech. Sin causes confusion and division. Now Christ came to gather all men into His Church and thereby to unite them to Himself. This should result in creating but one family of nations again. To this blessed state the miracle of tongues points.Yes, even we as individuals have a gift of tongues which all men can understand. It is the gift of love infused into us by the Holy Spirit. Love unites, love is a common language, by means of love we can speak to all nations.