Why is the liturgy a top priority for St. Mary Church?
Why does St. Mary Church have the Traditional Latin Mass?
Why does St. Mary Church offer the Mass facing east?
Why does St. Mary’s reserve altar serving to boys alone?
Why should I consider receiving Communion on the tongue?
Why do we use Incense in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass?
How can St. Padre Pio help us better understand the Mass?
How should you dress for Mass in the summer?
Cardinal George and Liturgical Reform
Why don’t we use extraordinary (Eucharistic) ministers very often here at St. Mary’s?

Questions relating to current issues and events

What does the Church have to say about the current immigration discussion?
Why does God allow all the recent terrorism and natural disasters?
How should Catholics approach the political process and voting?
What about all these Marian Apparitions?
What about the women who recently claimed to have been ordained priests?
Is living together before marriage good for my future?
Is Jesus Christ the only savior of the world?
Did the Catholic Church recently eliminate limbo?

Sure enough

Re. sacred polyphony: what I gathered from what I’ve read so far (and I haven’t got to the following up of research yet, I’ve been busy all week) is this: you know how some people say chant is nice but it’s better not to have it unless the people have taken the trouble to become good at it beforehand? More or less they’ve got sacred polyphony mixed up with chant. Chant is simple and doesn’t sound all that bad when even amateurs do it (and frankly, even if it did sound bad, the beauty isn’t itself why it’s in Mass). Chant Mass and get people to expect to pick it up, and not a few of them will without any training. And if not all of them do right away, it’s still the default/standard/first-place manner of the congregation’s praying most of their prayers of the Mass. Sacred polyphony on the other hand is appropriate for Mass, but doesn’t have that essential character chant does and therefore should be avoided if it would reduce the congregation to silence due to its being notably harder to just plain pick up.

For what it’s worth, I can also tell you that, on top of chant sounding better live, sacred polyphony is really difficult to record well at all due to the interplay of the different voices. Maybe not impossible — somebody who’s an expert in recording could better discuss that — but whereas chant recordings might not make you realize that it sounds hardly anything like it sounds live (I’ve yet to hear chant through speakers/headphones that sounds interesting, whereas I have yet to hear chant in person that sounds boring, despite much of what I’ve heard in both instances being technically the same!!), polyphony would be fairly to extremely likely to make you wonder if it sounds like that in person (depending on whether it was recorded such that the voices all blend into each other nicely even thoguh not in the way they’re meant to in Church, or such that you can tell the multiple voices and the microphone[s] aren’t playing nice with each other).

At least, that’s my opinion. Having sung both chant and polyphony, I have to say both are awesome. I love that sacred polyphony — which is kinda like multiple-voiced chant with the voices coordinated with each other, although the basic rhythm is usually more complex and the melody has to be by virtue of the multiple voices and it not being mere harmony — can make me, as a bass singer, feel as though I’m really doing stuff in the piece even though I still feel like I’m down there providing support — it feels like the support is important rather than secondary. Totally different from, say, the tuba section in an orchestra (no offense to tubamen, I’m sure you’re essential too, but you don’t often sound as important to the theme as the violins or even the second violins).

Again, like beauty, that’s really secondary to the act of worship itself. Chant is important because it’s one of the traditional ways the people, led by the choir (priestly or lay), would pray the Mass. (And by “one of” I mean I’m not saying anywhere in the Mass that isn’t chanted is strictly clerical; reception of Holy Communion comes to mind…) It is beautiful because of its objective order, and it is our proper way of participating, but it’s not about us getting to participate in something beautiful — it’s about us giving the most fitting we are able to God.

All this being the understanding of some choir member who reads blogs about this stuff, of course.

I don’t think that just noticing that someone is attractive or even acknowledging to oneself that someone is attractive is a sin. I think it’s if we allow our my mind to take it to the next level (ie. telling someone else how hot that guy/girl is) that crosses into sin because you risk talking about someone as an object rather than as a child of God if you let yourself go there. That kind of talk is a “near occasion of sin” that can be avoided if one knows to be on their guard against it.

A person who spends their time at work doing anything other than work when it’s not lunch/break but actual work time is indeed sinning.

Having a crisis of faith and searching for information to try to examine both sides of the argument to sort it out is not a sin. Allowing those doubts to cause you to despair of your faith, ie., keep you from Mass, the Sacraments, and prayer, is a sin. Talking about those doubts to someone else in such a way that you cause them to despair of their faith is a sin.

This happened to me very recently and actually is what drew me to this blog. Up until a few days ago, I was trying to do what I thought was my little role to play in the New Evangelization. I was a regular commenter on a local blog dedicated to the local politics of the town that I live in. So I was blogging with neighbors, some identified and some anonymous. The blog is owned by and administered by professed liberals and frequented mostly by liberals. One of the owners was raised Catholic but now describes herself as “spiritual, not religious”. If I had a nickel for everytime I heard that one…

About a month ago, a bunch of the liberal neo-atheists were debating me about the existence of God. They threw everything at me from Hitchens and Dawkins quotes (which are dopey and easy to defend if one is open to Truth) to using science to shoot down everything I said. Example: there is no such thing as an incorrupt body of a saint. It is saponification, you stupid, ignorant, Catholic fool.

This was followed by me going on a tear defending the Church’s position in opposing the HHS mandate and I have also been in a heated debate about the Church being pro-life. As the only practicing Catholic commenter who defends the Church regularly at this blog, I took a mighty beating in the personal attacks department over the HHS mandate, and my belief in God, especially. The pro-life debate wasn’t so bad because one other non-religious (but spiritual) pro-lifer jumped in to assist me, taking the position that one needn’t be religious in order to oppose murdering innocent lives.

All of these debates left me battle-worn and weary and wondering if I really knew what I thought I knew, or had I screwed it all up and done more harm than good? I had to research atheism and saponification and lots of other nonsense just to understand their side of the debate and it did start to cause me to wonder.

Fr. Z can correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t view that at all as a sin. I see it for exactly what it felt like. I volunteered to go into battle and I got the stuffing beat out of me by the enemy. He used my neighborly bloggers to try to plant seeds of doubt in me and to try to erode my faith. And it almost worked. After many, if not most of those blog posts, while I was doing my best to defend the faith as best as I understand it, I would just go sit by myself on the front porch feeling very weak and eek out a simple, little prayer. It was all I could muster the emotional strength for at the time because I felt so heavily burdened by doubt. I said all I could think to say, which was, “Lord, don’t let go of me.” I never stopped going to confession (although a few of them were spaced a few extra weeks apart) and Mass and I threw in a few rosaries and St. Michael the Archangel prayers too. The Lord brought me through it and re-strengthened my faith even more firmly than before. Then He led me here.

It’s not exactly my idea of a vacation to be in a blog full of theologians, but it’s plain as day to me that the Lord’s preparing to take me up another notch at some point so he sent me to you folks. Guess He knew I’d learn a thing or two. Seems He intends for the Latin Mass to be the next step in my journey to Him.

I like it here. I feel uneducated and clueless but at least no one calls me names!

As for EMHCs, a return to Communion under one species would clean up a majority of this problem. Much of the work needs to fall on the cooperation between pastors and their associate and assistant priests, or any other priest in residence. Basically priests have to make the effort to distribute the Communion at every Mass, whether they celebrate it or not. To touch the sacred species is a privilege of the ordained. When one priest is celebrating Mass, the other priest shows up at Communion time to distribute the Sacred Host and vice versa for the other Masses.