Catholic Pocket Dictionary/T

TE DEUM

TEMPERANCE

TEMPORAL POWER

THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES

TE DEUM

A hymn in the form of a psalm, recited at the end of Matins on all feasts except Holy Innocents, and on all Sundays except during penitential seasons.

TEMPERANCE

Temperance is equivalent to restraint or moderation; but it is commonly used for moderation in certain strong appetites which are concerned with the preservation of the individual or of the race, such as eating, drinking, and generation. Modesty, chastity, sobriety, and similar virtues come under the head of temperance.

Among us, the word temperance is still further restricted to mean moderation in the use of intoxicants, and sometimes, but incorrectly, it is taken to mean total abstinence from these. The Catholic Church teaches that the use of wine is, in itself, perfectly lawful. At the same time, the Church holds that drunkenness is a mortal sin. Hence, all her children are bound at least to be temperate.

TEMPORAL POWER

Temporal power was formerly exercised by the Pope as king of the states of the Church. The Popes have not ceased to declare, that the preservation of their temporal independence is necessary, as human affairs are constituted, to the free and full exercise of their spiritual authority.

THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES

Faith, Hope, and Charity are called the theological virtues, because they relate immediately to God. The moral or cardinal virtues are concerned with our duties, and so relate to Him indirectly; but the theological virtues have Him for their immediate object – it is God in whom we believe and hope and whom we love. These virtues are supernatural because they are beyond the reach of man's natural powers, and because they enable him to attain a supernatural end.

THURIBLES

A vessel as old as the use of incense in the Church, in which the incense is carried.

TIARA

A head-dress surrounded with three crowns, which the Pope wears as a symbol of sovereignty.

TITHES

Tithes are the tenth part of all fruits and profits justly squired, owed to God in recognition of His supreme dominion over man, and to be paid to the ministers of the Church.

TONSURE

The shaving of the crown in a circle, which is a distinguishing mark of clerics. Among some of the monastic orders and friars the tonsure leaves only a circle of hair round the head; the tonsure of secular clerks, on the other hand, is small.

TRADITION

Properly the act of handing down. Christ left His Church with no written books, and with nothing but tradition to guide it. St. Paul insists on the necessity of holding to the Christian tradition.

TRANSEPT

In architecture the part of the church which forms the short arms of the cross on which the plan is laid. It extends on the north and south side of the area between the nave and the choir.

TRAPPISTS

A branch of the Cistercian order. The founder Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé, born in 1626, was of a noble family, He was ordained priest in 1651. In 1660 he resigned all his benefices except the abbacy of La Trappe, and told the monks that they would thenceforth have to live by the rule of what was called the "Strict Observance” of the Cistercian order. La Trappe was an ancient monastery lying in the heart of La Perche, not far from Séez, founded as a Cistercian house in 1140 by Rotrou, count of Perche. The final result was the discipline of La Trappe. They are not free to choose the kind of work which they like best. The abbot himself works and often takes up the most abject sort of employment. Their indoor employments, when the weather does not allow of outdoor labor, include carpentry, joinery, copying, binding, sweeping, and many other useful toils.

Probably the most trying part of all the discipline is the silence, no monk being allowed to speak to his brother on any occasion. The abbot and the guest-master are the only persons in the convent who are permitted to speak to strangers.

TRENT, COUNCIL OF

The general councils of the fifteenth century succeeded on the whole in one of the principal objects for which they were convened, that of restoring or maintaining the units of Christendom. At Constance the great schism was closed; at Basle the difficulty with the Hussites was arranged; at Ferrara-Florence East and West were momentarily reunited. Hence it was natural, that when religious dimension and disturbance broke out in the sixteenth century, a general council should be confidently looked to aa the remedy. And yet, as Pallavicini remarks, the remembrance that the Nicene Council did not put down Arianism, nor that of Chalcedon Eutychianism, with other like instances, might have served to moderate expectation and check disappointment, if it should prove that the great Ecumenical Council of the sixteenth century, though inferior in no respect to any, even the very greatest of its predecessors, nevertheless, far from suppressing Protestantism, ushered in a long period of strife between Catholics and the various heterodox bodies in every land – a strife of which the end appears to be still distant.

TRINITY,HOLY

The mystery of the Trinity consists in this, that God, being numerically and individually one, exists in three Persons, or, in other words, that the Divine essence, which is one and the same in the strictest and most absolute sense, exists in three Persons, really distinct from each other, and yet each really identical with the same Divine essence. The Father is unbegotten, the Son begotten, the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and Son. Each Person is really distinct from the other, each is the true, eternal God, and yet there is only one God. We can understand how three individual men are distinct from each other and yet possess humanity in common. The unity of the three Divine Persons is altogether different. When we speak of them as one God, we mean not only that each is God, but that each is one and the same God, and herein is the mystery, incomprehensible to any created intelligence.

TUNIC

A vestment proper to subdeacons, who are clothed in it by the bishop at ordination, and like the dalmatic. Even this distinction is not, so far as we know, generally observed. It is also worn by bishops under the dalmatic when they pontificate.

TWELFTH DAY

Another name for the Epiphany, it being the twelfth day after Christmas.

TYPE

Types are persons, things, actions, and events of the Old Testament ordained by God to foreshadow the future. The existence of types is expressly set forth in both the Old and the New Testament. The term "type," which originally means model, form, or figure, is taken from the New Testament. St. Paul says that the first Adam was "a figure of Him that was to come," inasmuch as his carnal paternity is an image of the spiritual paternity of Christ.