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.
Today in our Diocesan TLM, we celebrated the Feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross, with a commemoration of the 4th Sunday after Easter. As such, the priest wore red vestments. I didn’t know about this feast day, but apparently it was done away with after the 1960s reforms (not even the 1962 missals have it). I wonder how many other TLM communities celebrated this feast today, May 3.
As is our pastor’s custom, he drew heavily from the martyrology. this is generally both edifying and educational for me and i am grateful for it. he freely crosses the streams of the two calendars. inter cetera he gave the tale of St. Amator of Auxerre. i nearly laughed out loud! A was a scion of a noble family in in the IV century and he wanted to enter the service of Holy Church, but he had been pledged to marry a noblewoman and he dutifully obeyed the paterfamilias. this grand occasion meant that the bishop had been summoned to perform the ceremony. well . . . when it came time for the climactic oration, said bishop read the rite for ordination rather than that of matrimony. the couple took this as an omen and lived as brother and sister all their days. A eventually became bishop. Our plans are just that, our plans. the One Who knows better can work all things to a better end.
We had a fairly short sermon since after our High Mass we were having a procession through the neighborhood celebrating May as the month dedicated to our Blessed Mother.
In reference to that procession, Father talked about a Protestant friend he had in seminary who came to Mass but objected to going on the Marian procession as he felt it was a worship of Mary. Father noted to his friend that just recently they had seen a procession in honor of a solider who had died in one of the Gulf Wars and if we can honor a fallen soldier in this way, why can’t we honor someone who did something even more honorable, to bear the Christ Child and to make all the sacrifices she did including being at the Cross. In the end the friend converted to Catholicism.