Saint of the Day for July 8: Gregory Grassi and Companions (d. July 9, 1900)
July 8, 2019Mess of Pottage, by Brad Miner
July 8, 2019
By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine, July 8, 2019
These last few years, my wife and I have been restoring an old Victorian house that once was a rectory on our island in Nova Scotia, where we live in the summer. I can draw an analogy to between what we have done so far and what should be done in the Church. We might call it de-novation: the removal of worthless or banal or ugly stuff, once hailed as new, in order to reveal de novo the good things that have been hidden or forgotten. So when we tore out the old linoleum and plywood, we found, lying beneath, original maple floors, laid in strips to make parquet patters of squares and diamonds. Beauty, buried.
The last dweller in the rectory was a dear friend, Father J. J. MacDonald. He was one of the chief players in the credit union movement in Canada; a founder of the local hospital and of our island’s television station dedicated to local affairs; a Scot who taught himself to speak French with ease; a farmer from youth and by avocation; a liberal in politics when that did not imply Moloch or Sodom; a faithful son of the Church.
