Beggar

  St. Anselm of Canterbury, Bishop and Doctor          Today is the memorial of St. Anselm of Canterbury, a Bishop and Doctor of the Church.  He was very much a part of the educational aspect of the Church’s amazing history.   Whatever you might think of our country’s current, corrupt universities, our civilization’s system of higher education grew from monasteries and arch-dioceses, because of Christians’ struggles to understand God—and the universe that he’s created.   An explosion of education began in the late 1000s, as the monasteries and the arch-dioceses founded universities.   The first university was founded at Bologna, Italy, by the archbishop.   Very soon came Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge.   Eighty-one  universities were founded during that 100-year period alone—all by the Church.        During the first half of the 1200s, a then-new method of investigation was created.   It was called S...

St. Martin I, Pope & Martyr      St. Martin became pope before the terrible split between the western half of the Church and the eastern half.   But already there were divisions, some of which reflected the then-current political differences.        At that time, the western part of the   Roman Empire (not the Church, but the political empire) retained only a shadow of its former world-power, while the eastern part of the Roman Empire was still a world-leader.   So, by extension, in the mind of the east, the pope, residing in Rome, seemed less important, more distant, and weaker.   And the Patriarch of the capital city of eastern Christendom, the city of Constantinople, seemed more important, closer, and stronger.        That’s the context for St. Martin, pope and martyr.   The perceived lessening in the east of the authority of the pope was the occasion, not only of political differences between we...