There are pigs, sheep and goats here. Some are ancient varieties, more popular 1,400 years ago than they are today.

Like a shaggy-haired pig described my guide, John Sadler, as "half a ton of very grumpy animal ... only interested if you feed it, or if you fall in — in which case you are food."

The animals are part of a re-creation of an Anglo-Saxon village, with timber-framed buildings and turf-covered sheds. The farm is called Gyrwe, Old English for Jarrow. It's part of a museum called Bedesworld.

Even with jets flying overhead and container ships unloading nearby, Bede's World brings to life a time and place when the English language was in its infancy.

The monk who Bede's World is named after, the Venerable Bede, lived in the monastery next door in the late seventh and early eighth centuries.

"He's famous as a writer and a teacher," says Sadler, the living history coordinator at Bede's World.

"And he has this keen interest in history and language."

Bede wrote an ecclesiastical history of the nation at the time.

"He's the first person to actually write down who it was that actually came to the British Isles," says linguist David Crystal, co-author with Hilary Crystal of Wordsmiths and Warriors.

"He talks about the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes, and discusses the range of languages that were spoken around the country."

These languages arrived in Britain after the Romans had left.

The newcomers found themselves in a place already heaving with languages — various Celtic tongues, as well as bits and pieces of languages left behind by Roman mercenaries who came from all over the empire. Continue reading

Sources

• PRI
• Image: Vita pastoralis

So if faith is not a banana smoothie, what is it? September has provided plenty of answers.

Francis's faith

Even though the 13th of September marked the sixth-month anniversary of Francis's election to the papacy, it was not the most important anniversary of the month. That occurred on September 21st, the Feast of Saint Matthew, when Francis commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of his call to the priesthood. Francis recounted the events of that extraordinary day to young people in Cagliari this past Sunday. Those events took place after the seventeen-year-old Jorge made a confession and talked with a priest at the parish of San Jose in Buenos Aires. His episcopal and now papal motto - miserando atque eligendo - recalls the experience with words taken from the Venerable Bede and appearing in the Office of Readings on the Feast of Saint Matthew. Quoting from Paul's First Letter to Timothy, Bede writes: "‘For Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. And I am the foremost of sinners; but I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience for an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life.' Thus Jesus saw the tax collector, and since he saw him by having mercy and by choosing, he said to him, ‘follow me.' But to follow means to imitate. ‘To follow' does not mean so much by foot as by one's way of life (executione morum)."

In the recent interview published in the Jesuit publication Civilta Cattolica, Francis points out the difficulty in translating the Latin gerund miserando. Perhaps "pitying" is close in English, but even that fails to catch the import of the Lord's infinite power to forgive and its inextricable connection with "calling." Where language falls short, Francis uses an image. He explains that Jesus' outstretched finger in Caravaggio's The Call of Matthew points at him in the same way it points at Matthew. "I am a sinner upon whom the Lord has cast His gaze," Francis says. The same sense of sinfulness overcame him the moment he was elected to succeed Benedict XVI. When the tally came in, he calmly whispered, "Peccator sum, sed super misericordia et infinita patientia Domini nostri Jesu Christi confisus et in spiritu penitentiae accepto" (I am a sinner, but relying on the mercy and infinite patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, in a spirit of repentance, I accept). Continue reading

Sources

• The Catholic World Report
• Image: New Europe