Meditations on Holy Week : The Scandal of the Cross

A Forum for Theology in the World – Volume 10 Issue 2

"Anthony Kelly''s research and writing through the years have been ceaseless. He has produced a stream of books, seeming one of those who has to have a manuscript on the go all the time in order to structure his life, not just intellectually but even psychologically and spiritually. He has always been an intellectual and spiritual pilgrim, and his books have been reports on where he is on the journey. This little book is no different as Tony moves through the later phase of his now long life. One reason why his theological voice has been so engaging and incisive is that it rises from a broad and deep human culture. Tony doesn''t do theology in a vacuum. He is a poet and a painter as well as a theologian, which gives him an eloquence not granted to all scholars, showing that how something is said and what is said are more closely connected that is often thought. Tony''s beautiful prose has always been a way of disclosing his beautiful thought and ultimately the beauty of God to which St Alphonsus Liguori was deeply attuned as we see in a text like ''Dio bello, Signor del Paradiso''. In these meditations on Holy Week, Anthony J Kelly CSsR offers that kind of defamiliarisation, in order to see and understand Holy Weck, its events, its characters, its images, in new ways. As the meditations unfold, you can sense Fr Kelly''s own astonishment at what is happening and what it means; and into this astonishment he invites the reader. He leads us far beyond ''just another Holy Week'' to a new experience of Holy Week, almost as if for the first time. The all too familiar appears in all its strangeness; and as it does a sense of astonishment emerges."

Archbishop Mark Coleridge, Brisbane