What Does The Prayer Really Say?
W D T P R S

I’ll get to the oddity but first a pretty picture.

Let me preface this by saying there are robins right now.  I have never seen so many robins.

I got a few snaps in the dimming light, but these are fairly good.





Click for larger image.

Clearly they are flocking before their migration southward. 

It was odd.

All of these were taken with my phone and this post was created directly from my phone.

BTW… today at the Vatican Basilica it is the feast of Bl. John XXIII.



Today is also the 46th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council.

I found a very engaging post at Damian Thompson’s place Holy Smoke:

Let’s have a glance with my emphases and comments.

The fight against Futurechurch: seminarians

Posted By: Damian Thompson at Oct 10, 2008 at 14:38:45

Do you know what makes liberal Catholic clergy wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night? It’s not the return of the Tridentine Mass. It’s not the fact that Ratzinger is Pope. It’s not their rapidly dwindling congregations.


Seminarians are taking over the world

What terrifies the old trendies is a new generation of conservative seminarians, who are gradually turning into a new generation of conservative priests - just as the supply of liberals is drying up.  [This is certainly the case in the USA as well.  The seminary I was in the US was a hell-hole of heresy and sheer dopiness.  But then the student body began to shift.  The faculty simply couldn’t throw that many guys out, and word was getting back to bishops about how bad things were there.  Slowly but surely the student body changed the seminary, and eventually the bishop made some changes as well, good ones.  Now that seminary is for the most part sound.  The aging hippies now openly lament the loss of their 60’s dreams and mutter gloomy warnings about how "conserrrrrvativvvve" the seminarians now are.]

Until very recently, seminaries managed to screen out the more orthodox candidates. "Psychologically immature" was the code for "obedient to the Magisterium", and so effective was the process that dozens of vocations were successfully squashed. In the 1980s and 90s, English seminaries were run by a grey-shirted Magic Circle politburo, assisted (not to say bullied) by frightful middle-aged women whose liturgical preferences were only just the right side of Wicca.  [LOL!  Well put.  But I must say that they weren’t to the right of Wicca where I was.  At our place there were invocations of the "earth mother goddess", "Sophia", and the "Bringer of Light" – all blended with tacky silliness.]

One or two conservatives slipped through the net, by hiding copies of Fortescue under their beds and slipping each other photographs of fiddleback chasubles that they could admire in private. In public, however, they were careful to wear the seminary uniform of jeans and CND T-shirt, and even to swallow the Bitter Pill without gagging.  [The "Bitter Pill" is the lefty UK weekly "The Tablet".]

But times are changing. Dreary Leftist seminary rectors have retired or became Magic Circle bishops, the Wiccan "pastoral advisers" have fallen out of favour, and conservative candidates for the seminary have started presenting themselves faster than they can be turned down. "It’s a bit like the Somme - no sooner have you wiped out one wave of infantry than another appears," says my source.  [LOL!]

Futurechurch is losing this battle. Some Magic Circle rectors are ready to run up the white flag. I could mention a couple of English seminaries where orthodox doctrine is taught pretty rigorously. That’s in sharp contrast to the situation 20 years ago. (As one London priest told me this week, "I came away from seminary knowing only two things - that St Augustine of Hippo and St Augustine of Canterbury were different people, and that Julian of Norwich was a woman.")

The other day, I saw a photograph of seminarians and staff at Allen Hall, Westminster. I reckon you could tell just by looking at them that the students were more conservative than their teachers. [YES] The same is true of the Venerable English College in Rome, where – perhaps because it is a breeding ground for bishops – the Magic Circle is clinging on to power. "Students still have to don a false beard if they slip out to attend a Tridentine Mass," I’m told. [I think rubber nose and glasses might work better.]

Some of the really Left-wing dioceses have adopted a disgraceful tactic: rather than put forward conservative candidates for ordination, they’ve stopped looking for future priests completely. Hence all this guff about "lay empowerment": the lay people being empowered are all "made men" (if I can use such a sexist term) in the mafia of the mediocre.

But don’t despair. Conservative seminarians are getting ordained, and in a few years’ time the dioceses will run out of goody-goody Tabletistas on whom to bestow plum parishes. And then, who knows? A conservative bishop? Stranger things have happened.

Just what are the odds these days on His Hermenuticalness being named the next Archbishop of Westminster?  Are odds still being offered?

A question via e-mail:

With the common occurrence of white vestments at funerals and a corresponding color funeral pall, I wondered about the practice of a black funeral pall for the OF. While black vestments can be used for funerals in the OF, can the funeral pall also be black as it was in the EF? Is the connection between the white funeral pall and the white garment worn at baptism something that might prevent the use of a black funeral pall?

 

Yes… we must remember that before the post-Conciliar innovations the pall, if one was used, was always black, as were the draperies for a catafalque.

I do not believe in the new rite the color of the pall is prescribed.  I have seen various palls, most white, but some of other colors, of elaborate fabrics, brocade, etc. 

The idea behind white is that the last "clothing" of the body echoes the first "clothing" with the white baptismal garment in the rite of baptism. 

However, I haven’t seen anywhere – maybe I simply missed it – anything that prescribes that the color of the pall must be white in the Novus Ordo.

I assume a black pall could be used in the newer funeral rites.