Something splendid in a sermon which all you PRIESTS should read!

This comes by way of intermediaries of the best sort.  First, my friend Fr. Tim Finigan, His Hermeneuticalness, tweeted.  He tweeted about a meeting of the wonderful Confraternity of Catholic Clergy in the UK, which had a meeting.  That Confraternity had a Mass at which their preaches dom Mark Kirby OSB of Silverstream Priory.  Fr. Kirby said something splendid in his sermon and I want all you PRIESTS to know about it.

The Sermon Text: HERE  Sample:

I believe, dear brothers, in the liturgical providence of God. The liturgical providence of God is something, I think, that all of you have experienced, perhaps, even, at certain critical moments in your lives. “The Spirit helpeth our infirmity. For we know not what we should pray for as we ought; but the Spirit himself asketh for us with unspeakable groanings” (Romans 8:26). What is the sacred liturgy if not the articulation in the Church of the unspeakable groanings of the Spirit? “The Spirit helpeth our infirmity”, and this in the phrase of an antiphon that seems to leap off the page and lodge itself in the heart, in the verse of a psalm, in the word of the Gospel that appears, all of a sudden, to be mysteriously illumined from within, or underscored by an invisible hand, the dextrae Dei digitus.

“The Spirit helpeth our infirmity.” It is a great grace to discover one’s infirmity in prayer, to finally come to terms with one’s inability to pray, and so, to be obliged to utter the words and perform the gestures of the sacred liturgy in a kind of abandonment to the liturgical providence of God, trusting that by saying what the Missal or the Breviary make me say, and by doing what the rubrics tell me to do, I am cooperating with the Holy Spirit. “And God, who can read our hearts, knows well what the Spirit’s intent is”, in providing the Church with this antiphon, with this Collect, with this Gospel on any given day, “for indeed it is according to the mind of God”, says the Apostle, “that the Holy Spirit makes intercession for the saints” (Romans 8:27). Open the Missal or the Breviary with the absolute certainty of finding there the very prayer that God is waiting to hear, and waiting to answer, because it is the prayer that He Himself, knowing our infirmity, has given, through the Holy Spirit, to the Church.

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And wait until he drills into St. Charles Borromeo!