Daily Archives: 18 May 2009

Wonderful Italian newstory: a first Communion in a TLM

From the site Rinascimento Sacro … this is great, even if you don’t understand Italian. A little boy named "Beniamino", an altar boy, received his 1st Holy Communion. [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3wBYs2hun0]

Posted in Brick by Brick, Just Too Cool, Lighter fare, SESSIUNCULA, SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM |
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Mortarboards

Thank you to Vincenzo:

Posted in SESSIUNCULA |
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What a cool blog name

Ventures ‘Neath Aeviternity This reminds me of my drillings into sempiternitas.  

Posted in Just Too Cool, Lighter fare |
2 Comments

A very small poll

This weekend I zoomed to help sick priest who called me a plea for help. In I came for some innings of relief pitching: the Sunday Masses. After the Sunday Masses, in casual conversation, I found three alumni of Notre … Read More

Posted in SESSIUNCULA |
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My take on Sunday at Notre Dame

I urge all priests and bishops who read this blog with any slight quaver of resonance or benevolence, to consider this with care:

If you sense that something quite serious and important is going on right now, for the love of God rethink your approach to how you foster Holy Church’s proper public worship.

Do all in your power and through your influence to foster a worship of God which conforms not to worldly goals – as praiseworthy as they may be in a world still dominated by its dire prince – but rather to the real point of religion: an encounter with mystery.

Our worship must become more and more focused on the one who is Other. Seek what is truly above in your rites and raise people to encounter mystery.

You will be challenged and reviled, blocked and attacked as you do. You will be worn down and afraid under the weight of resistance.

But I think that to save the world we must save the liturgy.

Sunday reaffirmed this for me.

They can’t compete with the fullness of Catholic liturgy and sound preaching.

Reforming the liturgy along the lines Pope Benedict has proposed may be the most loving and effective option we have in these ever hotter times.

People will have to keep working very much in the sphere of the secular. Of course! Our inward Catholic Christian identity must find outward expression and bring concrete fruits.

But I think the real work now – where we will make some effective headway – must be done at the level of our public worship.

In the present circumstances, we are not going to argue most people out of danger or error. But together we can draw them in and along and back through worship.

So long as we remain doctrinally faithful and active in works of mercy both spiritual and especially temporal, if we get our public worship together we will have a strong bastion against error.

Holy Catholic worship will be an attractive force for conversion.

We need to foster worship which stuns, which leaves the newcomer, long-time practicing Catholic, above all the fallen-away simply thunder stuck. Worship must at some point leave people speechless in awe. We need language and music and gesture which in its beauty floods the mind with light even while it swells the heart to bursting.

The more people encounter mystery through liturgy, the more hollow will clang the false or incomplete messages of those who have strayed from the good path, either to the left or to the right.

Our goal must be that which is good and beautiful because it is true, that which reflects what is of God, not man’s image merely. Give us mystery, not fabrications smacking of the world, fallen and transitory.

Fathers, and you Reverend Bishops, if anything of alarm has sounded in your hearts and minds of late, rethink your approach to our worship. Examine your approach with an eye on the signs of the times. Take a new approach.

The approach we have had least last few decades isn’t getting it done. Really … it isn’t

Going neither left nor right along the road toward the Lord, even as He comes to us, take the flock now deeper, now higher on that path, but always to encounter the mystery which distinguishes truly Catholic liturgy… and therefore true Catholics.

Lines are being drawn, sides taken, choices made.

More than ever we need what Christ, the true Actor of our liturgy, desires to offer us through Holy Church’s worship. Read More

Posted in Brick by Brick, Classic Posts, SESSIUNCULA, The future and our choices |
228 Comments