Category Archives: WDTPRS

EXCERPT:
The really hard phrase in this is pietas actionum. We have on many occasions in the daily Lent series talked about pietas, and how hard it is to get into English, since “piety” just doesn’t sound right to our modern ears. If you are steeped in medieval things, or at least archaic usage of English, and know something of heraldry, you might remember the symbol of the pelican “in her piety”. There is a symbol of Christ and His Church as a pelican who, in time of famine and drought, pierces her own breast with her bill to feed her chicks from her own blood. This sort of piety harks to the sense of pietas as “duty”. This is what she must do for her young. Read More →

EXCERPT:
Returning to the image of the loom, which is woven into today’s vocabulary, I have in mind the incredible phrase from the Book of Job: “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and come to their end without hope. Remember that my life is a breath; my eye will never again see good.”

Our days are indeed like a shuttle. Some years ago I met a women who woven cloth with a large loom. She showed me how it worked. In her practiced hands, the shuttle lashed swiftly back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, while the loom packed the threads together. The cloth “grew” as it was woven, slowly, but surely. But the shuttle snapped back and forth with increasing speed as she found her rhythm and settled into it. Read More →

EXCERPT:
We need clear doctrine, clear prayers, and clear willingness to adhere to them on the part of her duly appointed pastors. Hopefully the ongoing project of preparing a new translation of the Missale Romanum will be a contribution, not an obstacle. Read More →

I am posting this at about "oh dark hundred" and, as it is posted, will be just about ready to catch a couple hours sleep before walking out the door to meet my ride for the airport. I am heading … Read More →

EXCERPT:
My instant reaction to this prayer is rather bittersweet. The Church’s shifting demographics in wealthy countries reveals that, while more people may be identifying themselves as Catholic, the percentage of Catholics going to Mass remains steady or is falling. This means that we are going backward. Also, in European countries which were once Catholic countries, such as Italy, the birth rate is far below replacement rate. Yet “Eur-Arabia” is swiftly muliplying. Contraception and abortion is killing off one dimension of the life of the Church. The forces of the “Prince of this world” prevail in some places. Read More →

EXCERPT:
Taking a page from St. Augustine of Hippo (+430), we the baptized who are the Body of the Mystical Person of Christ, the Church, are on a journey with the Lord, the Head of the Church, toward Jerusalem: the Jerusalem of our own passion and the new Jerusalem of our Resurrection. Christ made this journey so that we could make it and be saved in it. In our liturgy the one, whole Mystical Christ is on a Lenten journey. Each year in Lent Christ, in us, travels that road of the Passion, and we, in Him, travel the road marked out by Holy Mother Church and her duly ordained shepherds. We must unite ourselves in heart, mind and will with the mysteries expressed in the liturgy. Our passion, our road to Jerusalem, is in our examination of conscience and good confessions, our self-denial and works of mercy. Read More →

EXCERPT:
A MOCKING LAME DUCK ICELESE VERSION
God,
you are nice.
Be nice and help us love.

I think this get’s to the essence of what the old ICEL “translators” gleaned from the Latin originals, don’t you? After all, it expresses our need for the sacrament of niceness, which is the heart and soul of the old ICEL versions and the now cliché theology behind them. And don’t forget to look into everyone’s eyes at Mass, er… liturgy. As we were taught in seminary (and I am not making this up) when “community” goes forward for “bread” the sacrament takes place when you look into each other’s eyes. Read More →

EXCERPT:
This prayer today was not in the pre-Concilar Missale Romanum. It also has me scratching my head. Once I looked up all the references, I knew why. In effect, this is clearly a cut and paste joband it just doesn’t hang together well. A predecessor (Concede, quaesumus, domine, fragilitate nostrae sufficientiam conpetentem, ut suae reparationis effectum et pia conuersatione recenseat et cum exultatione suscipiat: per.) is in the Gelasianum Vetus in two places, Friday of the 3rd Week of Lent and for Septuagesima. The “et fragilitati nostrae congrua praeparasti subsidia” is in the Veronese in April and references to fragilitas and pia conversatio in a prayer in July. Read More →

EXCERPT:
Christ is the perfect model of all that is mentioned in the prayer. He is the perfect exemplar. St. Augustine, in his monumental City of God is a little cautious about presenting the Lord as being our model and exemplar. He knows that Christ, the perfect model, presents for us an unattainable challenge. For Augustine, the lives of the martyrs and other holy men and women are more helpful and realistic models. In their fully be merely human lives they show us that we fully human but merely human people can live the life to which Christ’s commands and perfect model calls us. Read More →

EXCERPT:
We need to be clear about something. What we do on our own cannot obtain anything from God on its own merits. To paraphrase St. Augustine when God crowns our merits, He crowns His own merits in us.

I wrote this next excerpt from a WDTPRS article for Super Oblata of the 8th Sunday of Ordinary Time. I think it applies. Also, I am really sick right now and just don’t have it in me to do much more, so here goes. Some of the rest of you can dig into the vocabulary and syntax. Read More →