Worthy reading. More Pachamama and more from Archbp. Viganò.

At the Pontifical Mass at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception last week (HERE with VIDEO), you could tell that quite a few of the congregants were unfamiliar with the Traditional Mass by the fact that they sang the Pater Noster with the celebrant (at 1:29:30 in the video). (And the person who directed the choir also didn’t have a clue what to do either.)

I was struck by the large presence of the unfamiliar. It added to my growing suspicion that The Present Crisis of the Church in this pontificate is bringing more and more people to explore the option of the TLM rather than or in addition to the NO. It could be that the blatantly weird things perpetrated in Rome and elsewhere, especially in October, are starting to get to people. The phrase “red pill” is showing up more frequently these days. I am reminded of something I saw in a gun store a few years ago: a framed picture of Pres. Obama with various prize ribbons appended with the sign, “Salesman Of The Year”. Something like that is going on right now, it seems to me, in the Church as well.

My friend Fr. David Nix has a good piece today which touches on this.  In reference to a podcast he heard with the author of Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (US HERE – UK HERE), He cites the experience of the British during WWII, when the Blitz brought people together. Facing adversity together knit them together in a way that many would long for after the war. We in these USA also had a few fleeting moments of that after 9/11. Nix applies this to The Present Crisis with a couple of bullet points. Here they are. Go there for his fuller explication.

1) Stop blaming God for the crisis of bad leadership in the Catholic Church, even implicitly in your heart, since “we know that for those who love God all things work together for good for those who are called according to His purpose.”—Rom 8:28.

[…]

2) Welcome the stragglers into traditional communities. Many neo-cons tell me they don’t go to the TLM because trad families are too judgmental. Now, half of this is an excuse (as there really are many humble families at the TLM) but half of it is true: Some TLMers reject neo-con stragglers as Johnnies-come-lately. Some newcomers are rejected from the TLM as “less-holy” for having come from the Novus Ordo.

[…]

On the point of “belonging”, I guide the readership to my ranting about how “We Are Our Rites”.    Think about how the Novus Ordo has atomized Roman Catholics into smaller communities with hardly any points of contact.  Think about how there is a Rite which cut across boundaries, cultures and even centuries into a common body of worshiping believers.  That Rite produced the saints we venerate and many patrimonies which have been denied to so many for so long since the 60s.

I am also reminded of Anthony Esolen’s book Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World.  My post HERE.  Nostalgia, as the Greek indicates, a pain (algea) we feel for our “return home” (nostron): “pain for the return, ache for the homecoming.”  It is an essential longing.   It has nothing to do with the wacky charge often leveled at those who desire traditional liturgy.

One of my frequent correspondents happens to be in Venice right now.  As you may know, there was record flooding recently which shut down the unique city.  I was sent the photo of a sign on a shop door.

Such is life.  You fall seven times and you get back up eight.  We need a few days to get back on track… with a smile and energy as always.

In the matter of birettas… some people ask me if seminarians can or should use them when in choir.

Yes, I think so.

It looks like those birettas have four, rather than three, points.

Please consider the ongoing BIRETTAS FOR SEMINARIANS PROJECT.

Next, if you haven’t seen it, check out a piece by George Weigel at First Things about a week ago.   He offers a summary in the wake of the disastrous Amazon Synod (“walking together”), which clearly also involved veneration of a pagan, demonic idol.  I wish we had in English as apt a word as the Italian smascherare… to unmask.  That’s what Weigel does to the synodal rhetoric and the fawning gobbledygook from the papalotrous camp followers, in particular relentless tweeter and self-promoter Massimo “Beans” Faggioli.

Finally, read about an amazing little Chinese girl martyr who loved the Blessed Sacrament.  HERE  She inspired Fulton J. Sheen, who will be beatified in December.

UPDATE:

This, in Spanish, from INFOVATICANA. A week or so ago in Madrid, some Jesuits had a conference at a parish in which members of REPAM participated. REPAM was a driving forcing behind the crazy stuff, and the pagan stuff, at the Synod (“walking together”). There were, at that conference, Pachamama idols. Some people who call themselves “Comando San Bonifacio… St. Boniface Commandos” took pamphlets and posters and dumpsterized them.

Also, Archbp. Viganò has issued at Inside the Vatican an essay about the danger of syncretism.  He is especially concerned about the inter-faith project in Abu Dhabi.

“[T]he Temple of the world syncretistic Neo-Religion is about to rise with its anti-Christian dogmas. Not even the most hopeful of the Freemasons would have imagined so much!”

 

 

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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9 Comments

  1. JimWi says:

    I’m intrigued by the photo of altar boys in birettas – was that ever a norm in some part of the world?

    Probably cost-prohibitive, but certainly a spectacle!

  2. THREEHEARTS says:

    mike hurcum writes
    wait ’til the minaret, sorry modern tower, rises high above Notre Dame in Paris and the call to prayer rings out. It certainly will not br for the Angelus

  3. Lurker 59 says:

    –>Think about how the Novus Ordo has atomized Roman Catholics into smaller communities with hardly any points of contact.which clearly also involved veneration of a pagan, demonic idol. “Comando San Bonifacio… St. Boniface Commandos”<— It would not be a bad idea for this to be the calling card and there to be some limited organization of things where a priest, whose hands are tied due to various reasons might dead drop information about the location of certain items and then certain items would suddenly walk off.

  4. Lurker 59 says:

    – – > Think about how the Novus Ordo has atomized Roman Catholics into smaller communities with hardly any points of contact. < –

    Over the years, the parishes that I have attended have been mixed ethnic. So too is my current one. What inevitably happens, or is set up from the very start, is that specific Masses belong to specific ethnic backgrounds. This causes there to be a divide in the parish and generates alternative/competing ethnic parish groups and activities. The less dominant ethnic background can easily be seen as a redheaded stepchild, both by the majority and the minority. This is doubly more so if the specific Masses are conducted in the vernacular of the ethnic background that goes to that Mass.

    My current parish has three Sunday Masses — One early morning, one late morning, (both in English), and then a Spanish Mass at 3:00pm. Obviously the ethnic communities are implicitly encouraged to remain atomized and the parish doesn't have a united mission. At a previous parish, I saw the structure change from English being the vernacular one of two minority ethnic communities, with another ethnic community being the majority, to being the dominant of two, to being the minority of one. At other parishes that I have passed through, though English was the vernacular for both, you would have a "traditional" (not very) and a "modern" (really gray hairs stuck in the 70's) communities. Of course in all of those experiences, you don't have the various implicit communities working together with very limited points of contact.

    I don't think that your average parish priest understands how much of a problem that this institutionalized segregation is for Mission.

    – – < which clearly also involved veneration of a pagan, demonic idol. < — Thank you Fr. Z. It is important that we keep clearly stating that 1.) that is an idol 2.) it is an idol of a demon 3.) that Catholics were venerating and adoring it.

  5. robtbrown says:

    THREEHEARTS says:

    mike hurcum writes
    wait ’til the minaret, sorry modern tower, rises high above Notre Dame in Paris and the call to prayer rings out. It certainly will not br for the Angelus

    No longer Europa, instead now Eurabia– Oriana Fallaci

  6. albinus1 says:

    It’s not just ethnic language communities that can segregate a parish into subgroups. In the early 70s the parish in which I grew up started having a “contemporary Mass” in the parish hall. Essentially, all the people who wanted “contemporary” worship with guitars, felt banners, etc. were segregated from the rest of the parish. I didn’t mind much at the time, since it meant that guitars and “contemporary” music rarely intruded into the “regular” Masses celebrated in the parish church. But it did mean that the “contemporary Mass” people began for form their own sub-community, which seldom interacted with the rest of the parish. There was one priest in particular (out of three assigned to the parish at the time) who customarily celebrated the “contemporary” Mass, which meant that the people who attended that Mass seldom saw, or heard from, the other priests of the parish.

    Reflecting on this, I understand why Fr. Z encourages those of us who attend an EF Mass at a parish that also celebrates the NO to become actively involved in the life of the parish, so that we don’t act, and are perceived, as just doing our own thing without regard for the parish as a whole.

    Fr. Z's Gold Star Award

  7. ex seaxe says:

    My father was at St Edmunds, Ware, then the junior seminary for Westminster, in the latter 1920s. He had a biretta with ONE flange. I have wondered how common that might have been.

    [One! Interesting.]

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  9. Semper Gumby says:

    Thanks Fr. Z, great reading. God bless that Chinese girl martyr.

    From the Fr. Nix article:

    “Thirty men and boys on the Texas/Mexican border worshipping God, living in tents for a few nights, hiking 10 miles while praying the Rosary and hunkering down to be a battle-worthy but joyful Church Militant is the answer to the Church crisis in the Vatican…The fact is that the crisis in the Church (reaching boiling point after 100 years of modernism) is oddly producing more converts to traditional Catholicism than anything I or another priest could say to encourage a return to tradition.”

    “…One traditional priest at a parish in California told me that many Novus Ordo Catholics are now coming to his TLM parish in the middle of a Mexican barrio in his big SoCal city. Surprisingly, this priest told me that the new-comers are not coming specifically for the Latin Mass, but “just because it’s the only thing that even looks like Catholicism in this city anymore.””

    George Weigel’s article on the Amazon Synod and Massimo Faggioli’s spin on the Synod:

    “Serious consultation and collaboration are essential to effective pastoral leadership, including the leadership of the Bishop of Rome. But over the 50-plus years of its existence, no one has figured out how to make the Synod of Bishops really work. Propaganda about “synodality” that functions as rhetorical cover for the imposition of the progressive Catholic agenda on the whole Church is not an improvement on that track record; it’s a masquerade, behind which is an agenda.”

    Weigel also quoted Faggioli as saying: “Francis has turned the Synods into real events.” Then, Weigel unleashed a “Baloney” at Faggioli. Weigel also referred to “Amazon Synod spin doctors” and wondered aloud at “Amazonians who spoke in progressive German Catholic accents, emphasizing “issues” that may be agitated in the Biergärten of Munich.”

    This is epic. George Weigel picked up the handset to his tactical radio and called down, Chesty Puller-style, a verbal bombardment on the NewChurch trenches. Ah, the smell of printers-ink napalm in the morning…smells like victory.

    Speaking of victory, Abp. Vigano opened his letter by addressing those “…who have peace and communion with the Apostolic See in the defense of the Truth revealed by Jesus Christ, health and Apostolic Blessing.”

    Masterful wording there by the Archbishop. He went on to say something about those four planned buildings in Abu Dhabi:

    “The building of the House of the Abramitic Family seems to be a Babelic enterprise, concocted by the enemies of God, of the Catholic Church and of the only true religion capable of saving man and the whole creation from destruction, both now and in eternity, and definitively.”

    (Fishwrap readers, Pachamama (anti-Mary) worshippers, and syncretists: Put that in your pipe and smoke it. And have a nice day.)

    My comment has apparently turned into a rant. The last word goes to General Patton or Anthony Esolen. Let’s go with Anthony Esolen from his book “Nostalgia”:

    “The trumpet sounds, and the sleepers wake…Let us resume the pilgrimage.”

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