Amy Welborn

Today's the memorial of St. John Henry Newman (and St. Denis and St. John Leonardi...)

A post linked below. Images are first, from BE SAINTS, inspired by a talk to young people that Pope Benedict XVI gave on his visit to England in 2010 - I edited/arranged words, but Ann Engelhart 95% of the heavy lifting in her paintings, this one of Newman.

The text images are from PRAYING WITH THE PIVOTAL PLAYERS, written for @WordOnFire - and one of the chapters on Newman. Go to the link in replies for the full chapter.

Finally, from B16:

"While it is John Henry Newman’s intellectual legacy that has understandably received most attention in the vast literature devoted to his life and work, I prefer on this occasion to conclude with a brief reflection on his life as a priest, a pastor of souls….

....He lived out that profoundly human vision of priestly ministry in his devoted care for the people of Birmingham during the years that he spent at the Oratory he founded, visiting the sick and the poor, comforting the bereaved, caring for those in prison. No wonder that on his death so many thousands of people lined the local streets as his body was taken to its place of burial not half a mile from here. "

One more day of free

Here's an historical nugget that confounds the caricature that maintains that the laity were not entrusted with ministering in the name of Christ and the Church beyond their vocations in the home and world.

One example:

In some areas of medieval and Renaissance Italy, lay people were entrusted with the pastoral care of prisoners facing execution. More, from a book on these confraternities, "The Art of Executing Well" -

"These confraternities produced a rich literature of works aimed at helping comforters to prepare for and carry out their work with condemned prisoners through the night before execution and on the difficult journey to the scaffold. From at least the fourteenth century, authors across Europe had been penning sermons and treatises on how to prepare oneself for death, articulating a form of spiritual discipline known as the Ars moriendi or “Art of Dying Well.” The confraternities dedicated to helping prisoners drew heavily on this literature as they developed a customized literature that would train them in how to use persuasion and argument, stories and prayers, images and songs to divert a condemned man’s attention from his impending death and so reconcile him to his fate."

More at link in reply

Here is the starting list of signatories on the Pledge Against AI Catholic Content and Text.

Institutions:

Catholic Culture
Catholic World Report @cworldreport
Wiseblood Books @WisebloodBooks
Humanum Review
MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of St. Thomas
The Colosseum
Dappled Things @DappledThings1

Individuals:

Phil Lawler @PhilLawler
Matthew Levering
John C. Cavadini
James Matthew Wilson @JMWSPT
Edward Feser @FeserEdward
D.C. Schindler
Erick Ybarra @ErickYbarra3
Katy Carl @MrsKatyCarl
Larry Chapp @LarryChappGS22
R.J. Snell
J. Budziszewski
Emily Stimpson Chapman
Amy Welborn @amywelborn2
Trevor Cribben Merrill @cribbenMerrill

We will continue adding signatures to the page as more people request to sign it!

More Our Lady of the Rosary: images gleaned from a "rosary" search at the International Mission Photography Archive:

(More at link in reply)

Also for Our Lady of the Rosary - from a 2025 post in which I looked at an article about how Catholic concentration camp prisoners tried to keep the faith. Included is this detail about a type of rosary:

"The first of these rosaries was made out of small granite cubes from the quarry in Gusen, in mid-1943. The second was sculpted towards the end of 1943 from a piece of wood from the camp gallows, while the third was made in 1944 out of a piece of plastic taken from the window of an American aircraft which had been shot down near the camp.

These strings of beads were intended to symbolize the three mysteries of the Rosary – the joyful, the sorrowful and the glorious. The cubes used for the beads of the rosaries are filled with the ashes of prisoners incinerated at the camp crematorium – among others those of seminarian Władysław Woźniak (1915–1945) from the diocese of Łomża, who was murdered on 22 April 1945."

amywelborn.wordpress.com/2025/09/17/a-l…

For the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary - images from my Loyola Kids Book of Catholic Signs and Symbols:

This is excellent - and reminds me a bit of the growing conversation among creative people about how AI could actually serve as a clarifying moment, forcing us to look at what the act of creation actually is and why it's important:

"But the news isn’t all bad. Here’s something else that the disruption of the AI revolution has done: we now have a golden opportunity to re-member our traditional Catholic understanding of health care and make a case for it to the world. The very nature of health care itself is explicitly up for cultural grabs. We have a golden opportunity to critique and resist a system run by the bean-counters and efficiency mongers—and put the radical love of Christ back at the center of patient care."

I just wrote a bit about Mother Teresa, and this reminds me of the claims and counter-claims about her origins.

I was reading a Reddit thread on this (no NOT my research tool, sheesh, just entertainment) - and the claims and counterclaims and the increasingly hostile tone - even on that one thread - led one person to comment something like:

"I see why there's so much war in the Balkans now."

(She was Albanian)

A look at a new book on social media use, which seemed, at first glance to resonate with some of my favorite themes - how our social media use shapes our sense of self. For me, I'm interested in how it shapes our faith and spiritual self-understanding.

The latter is not one of this author's topics, but I thought the book still might be interesting. It was - for a few elements she includes, but mostly for what she *doesn't* consider in her analysis:

amywelborn.wordpress.com/2026/10/06/the…

On this feast of St. Bruno, founder of the Carthusians, you might want to read this talk that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI gave in 2011 at the Charterhouse of Serra San Bruno.

The talk speaks to the particular Carthusian charism, of course, but reading deeply, and listening, perhaps we can hear sound advice, no matter what our state in life: about quiet, about the presence of God, about the time it takes to engage deeply with life, and, as I have highlighted – the value of every part of the Body of Christ.

"This is why I have come here, dear Brothers who make up the Carthusian Community of Serra San Bruno, to tell you that the Church needs you and that you need the Church! Your place is not on the fringes: no vocation in the People of God is on the fringes. We are one body, in which every member is important and has the same dignity, and is inseparable from the whole. You too, who live in voluntary isolation, are in the heart of the Church and make the pure blood of contemplation and of the love of God course through your veins."

A few more thoughts, not complete, but a few more:

amywelborn.wordpress.com/2026/10/05/dig…

Unforgiveable.

Free today:

amzn.to/3VMWRsU

Image from today's Daily Sticky Post

(I pull a post from my archives and stick it to the top of the blog every day)

See what the occasion was, back 2019 - link in replies (and in profile, just takes a bit more work to get there)

Make it a triple: +Eddington

By the way, publishers, my book ADVENTURES IN ASSISI, illustrated by the wonderful Ann Engelhart, is out of print and if anyone would like to reprint it, well, you know where to find me. We'd love to see it back.

On my "What was life like for Catholics right after Vatican II or thereabouts" space:

In defense of Brother Sun, Sister Moon, sorry guys:

amywelborn.substack.com/p/if-you-want-…

I do think one of the reasons some are mad at Digger is that it coolly rejects the usual self-congratulatory affirmation of Art as #Resistance in The Present Darkness, affirming instead that yes, art and artists can be coopted, can aid and abet as easily as anyone else, and that some "art" might even sometimes be less authentic human expression than simply profitable bread and circuses useful for channeling rage at fictions and away from the reality that's actually harming us and that we do, indeed, have the power to change.

Also: I'm finding *this* conversation far more enjoyable than the Great Odyssey Debate of '26!

Todos, todos, todos!