We are in the Octave of Christmas. Merry Christmas everyone!
Here is a shot from our Midnight Mass.
The word “immemorial” came to mind when I saw it. We have a beautiful continuity with our many forebears who sacrificed so much to hand down what we have. We should remember them in our grateful prayers.
Also, during Midnight Mass and the other Masses of Christmas I remembered at the Memento of the Living all of you my benefactors who contribute with donations, to me and also to our projects for the celebration of worthy sacred liturgical worship.
¡Hagan lío!
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Merry Christmas, Father! Hacemos lots of lío!
Had a most pleasant surprise for Christmas Day. First of all our parish brings in a priest from out of town to offer the TLM every Sunday at noon but he has been ill. Our parochial vicar has learned the TLM and he offered a HIGH Mass on Christmas Day! It was only his second TLM and he did marvelously. It helped that some experienced servers, home from college were also there to help. I was very happy and also there was a little schola. Beautiful!
I, too, had a pleasant surprise on Christmas Day.
Our parish has only one priest–we’re too small to have assistant priests, especially as they are thin on the ground in the diocese, even with imports from Africa, India, and South America. For Liturgies, he is assisted by an ordained deacon; an occasional seminarian; a splendid core of altar boys and altar boy emeriti; and a professional organist/cantor/choir director with a semi-professional assistant who have trained a small choir for the OF and a small schola for the EF. Naturally, everyone puts forth extra effort at Christmas–Father, especially, being the only possible Mass celebrant and Confessor. On the 16th we’d culminated a nine-day Advent Novena (with choir and organ)with a beautiful candlelit, Solemn High Rorate Mass. Christmas being on the weekend, there was “only” one “extra” Mass, at Midnight, in the OF, but, of course, everybody gives 110% for that and for the other two regularly scheduled OF Masses, what with the variations in the readings and other special “trimmings”. Our regular EF was bumped up to 11:00 this last Sunday instead of our usual 12:00, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been a Low Mass, all things considered. (This happened sometimes in the past, under a different pastor.) Instead, it was a Solemn High Mass!–organ (“Adeste fideles” replacing our usual organ prelude–got to roar out my favorite part: “Deum verum, Genitum, non factum”); variations on “In Dulci Jubilo” as a sort of leitmotif in the organ interludes; elaborate propers; elaborate vestments; candles in the special holders by the altar rail and the pews– the works. As Father said, when I thanked him with tears in my eyes, “After all, it’s Christmas.”
I’m very happy and relieved to hear about the great Christmas Masses people were able to attend. I wish it would have been that way for my family. For the first time in my life I got up and walked out of Mass, but I’m firmly convinced that what I witnessed was not a Catholic Mass but instead was the bizarre ritual for a different religion. When the Priest started off the Mass joking with the people in the pews I just sighed and figured it was going to be a bad V-II Mass. Oh was I wrong. For the homily he stodd behind the altar, called all the kids and teens up to stand in front and around the sides of the altar and started tossing bells to the kids from gift bags he had on the altar. He then got an acoustic guitar and started singing a folk song about the “love and spirit of Christmas” that he made up while the kids kept beat with the bells. Then he had someone dressed up like Santa come down the main aisle and go up to the altar and give candy canes to the kids as a reward for “good participation” and that they could have it while listening to the rest of the Mass (a violation of the Eucharistic fast). At that point I couldn’t take it anymore and left, so I have no idea if the rest of the Mass was even worse or not. Problem is, I was visiting family out of state when we went to this “Mass” so I had no other Masses I could go to and therefore couldn’t fulfill my Mass obligation :-( . Did anyone else have any weird abuses at the Masses they attended?
Had the privilege of singing at a midnight Missa Solemnis at a big downtown parish and a midmorning Missa Cantata at my home parish.
FL_Catholic, you have my empathy, and I’ll continue praying that no one ever have to go through that kind of garbage again. Right now I’m feeling like the next wiseacre who whines to me about “rigidity” is asking for a labium crassum.
Merry Christmas and Joy of this Childermas in its Octave! I enjoyed especially Nicholas Frankovich’s recently writing ” be grateful for the plural in ‘ Happy holidays,’ because people need to be reminded, or informed, that Christmas is a whole season, of which the Feast of the Nativity is not the end but the beginning” – though he could easily have multiplied his examples.