Too many people today are without good, strong preaching, to the detriment of all. Share the good stuff.
Was there a GOOD point made in the sermon you heard at your Mass of obligation for this 4th Sunday after Easter (N.O. 5th Sunday OF Easter)?
Tell us about attendance especially for the Traditional Latin Mass.
Any local changes or (hopefully good) news?
A taste of what I offered at 1 Peter 5 this week:
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Desursum, “from above”, so that our hearts may be sursum, “upward”. Every good gift comes down from the Father of lights, with whom, as James says, there is “no variation or shadow due to change.” God is immutable. God is the source of all that is truly good. If the gift is not good, perhaps we should look elsewhere for its origin. Perhaps toward the “prince of this world”.
That phrase in the Gospel deserves attention. The Lord says that “the prince of this world is already judged,” or, in the RSV, “the ruler of this world is judged.” The “árchon toútou kósmou… princeps huius mundi” is the Devil. The same image of “archon… princeps” appears in the Synoptic tradition when the Lord’s enemies speak of Beelzebub as the “prince of the devils” (cf. Matthew 9:34; 12:24; Mark 3:22). In John 14:30, Christ says, “the prince of this world is coming. He has no power over me.” See also John 12:31.
There is no dualism here. God alone is King. The Devil, however marvelous a creature he once was before his fall, can never be king of anything. He can be a ruler in the sense of a tyrant. He can dominate, seduce, accuse, claim. Fallen angels have a measure of domination over material creation, always under the restraint of Almighty God. Because of Original Sin, we too fell under the domination of the Enemy of the Soul.
This explains the sober realism of the traditional Roman rites.
In the ancient rites of Baptism there are exorcisms. In the traditional Rituale Romanum, when priests bless certain objects, especially important sacramentals, there are exorcisms before constitutive blessings. When Father blesses an object in that way, he tears it away from the “prince of this world” and hands it over to the King. It is no longer ordered to ordinary, temporal, profane use. Profane comes from pro-fanum, “outside the sacred place”. After a constitutive blessing, the thing or place is sacred and demands reverent treatment. It now belongs, invisibly and juridically in the realm of sacred signs, to the dominion of Christ.
The new-fangled Book of Blessings, in its Preface, explicitly seeks to eliminate the distinction between invocative blessings and constitutive blessings. An invocative blessing calls down God’s favor here and now. A constitutive blessing renders a place, thing, or person sacred. That distinction matters. When we flatten such distinctions, we become poorer in our spiritual grammar.
When we eliminate, say, the Leonine Prayers after Low Mass, with their invocation of St. Michael the Archangel, and when we eliminate constitutive blessings, we are cruising for spiritual bruising. Look around.
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Father sounded like he didn’t have a voice today (probably sore throat) so rather than a sermon, it being May, we sang the litany to Mary in Latin at the end of Mass, with him and servers stood at the foot of Our Lady’s statue in the church.
40 year old cradle catholic here – never experienced that before. Beautiful, and moving.