Category Archives: WDTPRS

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  28th Sunday in Ordinary Time ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2001 JM sent an e-missive (edited): “About this time last year you invited suggestions as to where next to take the WDTPRS column.  … Read More →

Over at Rorate Caeli there is an entry about the rumored papal document freeing up the use of the older Missale, the so-called "Tridentine" Mass. Rorate provided a translation of part of an article in Il Giornale about this, which … Read More →

EXCERPT:
So, in today’s Post Communion, the priest affirms that we are the co-heirs of Christ and the inheritance we both have now already and still do not yet have in full possession is a share in God’s own glory. We do not know fully what this glory is. It will be revealed to us eventually (cf. Romans 8:18). However, we do know that somehow participation in that glory to come involves our suffering now. If we are co-heirs of the glory that Christ obtains for us, then we are also the co-heirs of His sufferings. Each of us, in our own and individual way, must embrace the sufferings we are offered in anticipation of the glory to come. The Cross always precedes the glory. Read More →

EXCERPT:
The flowing water of the baptismal font opens the way to the other sacraments, in particular the reception and celebration of the Eucharist, the “source and summit” (fons et culmen) of our Christian lives (LG 11; CCC 1324). We are enabled by baptism to participate in Holy Mass with “full, conscious and active participation” (SC 14). The word “full” (plena) refers to the integral way the baptized take part in the liturgy, i.e., internally and externally. “Conscious” (conscia) demands knowledge of what one is doing, excluding any superstition or false piety. “Active” (actuosa) means primarily interior receptivity, made possible by baptism, resulting from an act of will to unite oneself with the sacred action being wrought in the liturgy by the real “Actor”, Jesus Christ the High Priest. This interior participation (actuosa participatio) comes to be expressed also in outward, physical participation. Through this participation, when we unite our gifts, sacrifices and aspirations to the sacrifice of the priest at the altar, the abundant blessings of God flow forth to us in a manner that we cannot hope to comprehend in this life. Non-Christians and non-Communicants can indeed “get a lot out of Mass”. But “full, conscious and active participation” has its moment of perfection: when the actively receptive and properly disposed baptized person receives Holy Communion (cf. De musica sacra 22, c). The act of reception of Communion in the state of grace perfectly unites both the interior activity of the heart, mind and soul with the exterior actions of processing forward and physically accepting the Eucharist with gestures of reverence. Communion is perfect active participation which must be prepared for interiorly.
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EXCERPT:

In our prayer today there is a theme of continuity. We even have a form of the word continuus. In the beginning of the Post communion Father refers to the constant helps we depend on from the actual graces God confers upon us. The effect of redemption will be eternal and unending. In the final line we hear of that eternal effect linking and yoking together our participation in the sacred sacramental mysteries we experience in Holy Mass, on the one hand, with the conduct and mores of our lives on the other. For the baptized Catholic Christian there must be continuity between our reception of the sacraments and the way we live. Read More →

A tip of the biretta is owed to frequent participant Henry    o{]:¬)   for the news that WDTPRS is quoted on the site of the Diocese of Knoxville, where His Excellency Bishop Joseph E. Kurtz is laboring in the Lord’s vineyard.  … Read More →

EXCERPT:
The vocabulary of our prayer today is very dense, and so our English translation will suffer if we try to come up with one-to-one equivalents for the Latin elements. For example, the word sensus has great weight. It means more than simply “sense”. Even in a non-theological source such as the preferred Latin Dictionary of fame we find that sensus carries meaning beyond what we might perceive by the five physical senses of the body or by the perceiving powers of the mind. It points to that which is common to all human beings, “common sense”. This not the “common sense” which we might have (or lack) in, for example, not standing too close with our back to the lions’ cage when posing for a photo. This is also not the Kantian a priori principle of every judgment of taste, the Kantian term for the so-called subjective principle which determines only by feeling rather than concepts, though nonetheless with universal validity, what is liked or disliked by all people. It is not quite the ancient Greek idea of koine aisthesis according to the Aristotle (De anima – II,6, 418a17-20) which applies to our capacities of perceiving objects through more than one sense. Aristotle suggests a “common sense” power by which we perceive things. Medieval Aristotelians suggest that sensus communis is the root and origin of all sensing. Thus we are able to hear the roar, feel the bite and then see the shaggy mane and realize that it is the one and the same lion gnawing us as he drags our leg into the cage … when we lack the other sort of common sense. So, we might say that this is the power of uniting mentally the impressions conveyed by the five physical senses which constitutes ordinary understanding, without which one is foolish or insane and thus prone to lack common sense.
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