We prepared for the Major Orders by a week of retreat in a religious house away from the College. My subdiaconate retreat was in the monastery of the Passionist Fathers on the Caelian Hill, overlooking the Colosseum and the city. I would look at the lights at night and muse on the renunciation of the world and the flesh. A Spanish seminarian, also preparing for the subdiaconate, said to me: ' I have seen some of your English girls, and I don't think you have much to sacrifice. But a Spanish priest, now, he has to give up real women.'
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, November 06, 2023
The Renunciation of the World and the Flesh
Anthony Kenny, A Path from Rome (1985; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 96: