Our last two Popes, namely John Paul II and Benedict XVI, have taken very seriously their obligation to teach the Church and the world. For that reason, they embarked upon a campaign of explaining the thought and writings of our church fathers and doctors to help those of us in this century to penetrate the minds and hearts of those men who were so imbued with the Spirit of Our Lord Jesus Christ early on in the history of the Christian community in this world. They lived and taught, and in many cases, died by martyrdom in what is now Israel or Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq and Iran, and then throughout the Roman Empire: Italy, Spain, the Germanic lands north of the Danube, France, and the entire northern coast of Africa, from Morocco in the west to Egypt in the east. So if you look back over the talks given by our Supreme Pontiffs in the past thirty years, you will hear a lot about Saints Jerome, Augustine, John Chrysostom, Gregory Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa, Hilary of Poitiers, Ignatius of Antioch, Anthony of Egypt, Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and many others to whom the Christian community is deeply indebted for our knowledge of divine revelation.You might be aware that the Jewish people divided their bible, which is our Old Testament, into three sections: the Law, the Writings, and the Prophets. We do it somewhat differently; we speak of the Historical Books, which contain the Law or the Torah and the other historical books describing the history of the Jewish people before the time of Christ; then the Wisdom Literature which contains most especially the Book of Psalms, which has served as the prayerbook of Jew and Christian alike from long before the time of Our Lord, and then finally the Prophets: the four major writing prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and the twelve minor writing prophets who are of lesser importance in describing the Messiah, the Savior who was to come.
I would like to take a cue from Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI and devote my Catholic Daily Message to passages from the book of Psalms, or the Psalter as it is often called. There are 150 psalms in the psalter, some as short as two lines; others as long as several pages. They have been used by Jews and Christians of many different churches and divisions to express prayer and worship of God. We Catholics cannot go to Mass without praying parts of the psalms; the Mass is shot through with them, and they are especially to be found after the first reading in the Liturgy of the Word which is followed by what we call the “responsorial psalm” because it is a sort of meditation on the reading that was proclaimed just before it.
That is enough for today; tomorrow we will begin to examine particular passages from the book of psalms which have shaped and formed the spiritual lives of millions, including Our Divine Lord and His Immaculate Mother down through sacred history. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.
