ROME 23/04 – Day 18: Viewed from afar

The sun rose at 0624 and set at 1956. The Ave Maria is at 2015.

Weather in Rome has been… unpleasant.  Very cool, breezy and off and on rainy.  So, you can’t plan easily.

Tomorrow should be nicer.  I hope to get out for a real leg stretch.

I’ve had a strong fatigue I’ve been fighting.  Spiritual?   Could be… Rome is… off.

I’ve been going early in the morning to say Mass.  Coming back to the sacristy, a young priest was waiting while one of our brothers was at the consecration at the sacristy altar.

It seems like today I’ve run into this lovely saint everywhere.

Light meal.  That’s finocchiona and gorgonzola picante.

I mentioned images with votives.

I’d like to buy this and, in the business section, open a chess cafe.  (Or not have a biz part at all.)  Good location.  Perfect.

This is for a friend of mine, MF.

St. Joseph, give me a hand with the Rome thing.  This is not just a whim now.

Meanwhile, today Ding with the black pieces used the French Defense and almost gave the commentators a heart attack.  The game seesawed and, at the end, when it looked like Ding had fought off Nepo’s vicious kingside attack, … he just froze.  He went into total brain freeze and paralysis.  Couldn’t move.  It was dramatic, shout at the screen stuff.   HERE.  So sad.  Anish Giri literally got up and walked off camera.

I’m a bit muted this evening frankly, after the roller coaster Game 7 and also my first foray into Robert Card. Sarah’s new book, which addresses the crisis in the Church in the priesthood.   Friends, make no mistake.  The Enemy hates priests with a savagery no human can truly grasp.  The Enemy knows that individual priests and the very concept of priesthood must be warped.  We are seeing that in our day, especially with the attack on the Traditional Latin Mass, which teaches priests more about being priests than most courses on priesthood could do.

From Card. Sarah:

This is the situation with the priesthood. Christ Jesus gave us a very beautiful, luminous, and clear icon of His priestly being: the Sacrament of Holy Orders is this icon of Jesus, the High Priest. But our compromises with the world have added layers of mediocre quality paint on the divine work of art. The work has lost its brilliance. It is therefore advisable to restore it, and to do that, we must strip away these additions so as to rediscover the original. Benedict XVI and I had intended to invite priests to this work of reform, of return to the form intended by God, in publishing From the Depths of Our Hearts. In this book, each of us had opened up paths toward a restoration of a fully sacerdotal way of life for priests. Some of its proposals were daring. Unfortunately, many people remembered only the most polemical and most political interpretations of those lines. Nevertheless, the book found an attentive, benevolent reader in the person of Pope Francis, who has unceasingly invited priests to renew their deepest being. In asking us to break with self-referentiality, the pope invites us to rediscover a priesthood that does not refer to itself but is an icon of Christ the Priest.  [Polite.]

How is this restoration to be carried out? How can the accumulated layers of paint and varnish be stripped off? In this book, I propose to you a simple method: Let the Church speak! Let Her saints and Her Doctors speak. Let us espouse their way of looking at things so as to renew our perspectives.

For Eternity.

US HERE – UK HERE

Please pray for cancelled priests.