Fr. Z's Blog | Formerly entitled: "What Does The Prayer Really Say?" – Clear, straight commentary on Catholic issues, liturgy and life by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf o{]:¬)

ASK FATHER: Hope for heaven for non-Catholic relatives

Posted on 16 February 2015 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

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From a reader…

QUAERITUR:

When I converted at Easter 2001 from an Baptist background it seemed that the Catechism of the Catholic Church implied that there was hope for Protestant salvation. Now that I have been drawn to the Traditional Latin Mass it seems that older documents did not teach that.
Obviously I am concerned for my family, but also explaining a funeral for a family friend to my daughter. It is sure to be an upbeat affair that brushes off that she was a non-practicing Baptist, divorced from a non-practicing Catholic and remarried within a week of her death from breast cancer. I guess I am wondering if Catholic teaching provides any hope to this situation.

We live in a time where the reality of hell is often either ignored or flatly denied. Our society – and our pulpits (both Catholic and Protestant) have become places where Universalism (the teaching that everyone goes to heaven) reigns. It is seen as “pastoral” to comfort the grieving by telling them that their deceased loved one is in paradise, and only a cruel or heartless preacher would dare to remind people that the dead need our prayers. And God forbid that you might raise the specter of Hell as a possible outcome of a life lived in defiance of God’s commandments.

Hell, friends, is real. It is possible to wind up there.

Church teaching has not changed. The Church still teaches, and has consistently taught, that the sure path to salvation is found in the Church that Christ Himself founded. One stays on that path by being humbly obedient to the authority of that same Church.

Those who place themselves outside of the authority of the Church do not have that surety of being on the right path.

Want to avoid Hell? Stick close to the Catholic Church, frequent the sacraments, believe her teachings, practice works of mercy, and reform your life.

I’m just trying to do my job here, people: Keep has many people out of Hell as possible.

The Church also teaches that God is both just and merciful. God has revealed this about Himself. If God were simply just, then all talk of heaven would be futile because not a single one of us deserves heaven. Nothing we can do can earn ourselves a place in heaven. No matter how good we are, or how many good works we do, or how well-intentioned we are, we can’t get to heaven on our own.

But God is not only just. He is also merciful. In His mercy, He sent His Son to die for us and through His death and resurrection, to open to us the pathway to heaven.
His Son has done this through the Church He established.

Men have, unfortunately, clouded that clear and straightforward message and have made it seem as though the path that Jesus Christ Himself laid down is some sort of option.

God’s mercy is unfathomable. We cannot impose our human limits on His mercy. We can only repeat what He revealed and do our best to cleave as tightly as possible to the path He laid out.

Remember: God’s justice we are going to get whether we want it or not. His mercy we have to ask for. And … He will give it, lavishly.

Is it possible for God to save those who live and die outside of what we see as the Catholic Church? Of course it is possible. God is not limited by our expectations and understanding.

When we see so many of our friends and family living and dying outside of the embrace of the Church, and even see loved ones within the Church living contrary to the demands of the Gospel, we are faced with two temptations.

One temptation is simply to close our eyes and hope for the best.

The other temptation is to despair.

Both these are temptations and should be avoided.

Betwixt these two temptations, we see a course of action. We do everything we can to encourage our loved ones to follow Christ, sometimes by our words, sometimes by our actions, always with our prayers. Those prayers help us to avoid the temptation to despair.

Perhaps this is why at this point in history the Church has placed before us a devotion to the Divine Mercy in addition to our other many good devotions. We can place our loved one’s in the hands of the Merciful Savior. We can beg and plead that, even though we do not see how it can be accomplished, those dear souls may somehow be welcomed into the heavenly homeland that He has prepared.

Posted in "How To..." - Practical Notes, ASK FATHER Question Box, Four Last Things, Our Catholic Identity | Tagged Four Last Things, justice, mercy, Universalism
17 Comments

Your Sunday Sermon Notes

Posted on 16 February 2015 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Was there a good point or two in the Sunday sermon you heard this weekend?

Let us know!

Posted in SESSIUNCULA |
23 Comments

A Blog Milestone and a Mass for Benefactors

Posted on 15 February 2015 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

At sometime this morning, we hit the 40 million visits mark.

That’s 40 million since I started keeping stats, which wasn’t from the beginning.

In any event, it’s a milestone.

Thanks everyone!

And in thanksgiving especially for you donors and those of you who have sent items from my wish lists, I’ll say Holy Mass for the intention of my benefactors and their fruitful Lent on Ash Wednesday at 7 pm CST (0100 GMT 19 Feb). It will be a Missa Cantata in the Extraordinary Form at the chapel of the Bishop O’Connor Center in Madison, WI. Not, perhaps, the “last chance” Mass in the city, but helpful especially for those who work during the day. Of course, ashes will be imposed.

Ash Wednesday is NOT a Holy Day of Obligation.

Posted in Fr. Z KUDOS, Just Too Cool | Tagged milestone
9 Comments

YOUR URGENT PRAYER REQUESTS

Posted on 15 February 2015 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Please use the sharing buttons! Thanks!

Registered or not, will you in your charity please take a moment look at the requests and to pray for the people about whom you read?

Continued from THESE.

I get many requests by email asking for prayers. Many requests are heart-achingly grave and urgent.

Something is up. I’m getting many more requests for prayers than last year at this time

As long as my blog reaches so many readers in so many places, let’s give each other a hand. We should support each other in works of mercy.

If you have some prayer requests, feel free to post them below. You have to be registered here to be able to post.

I still have a pressing personal petition.

Posted in SESSIUNCULA |
30 Comments

Something fun for the consistory: The Cardinal… locations

Posted on 15 February 2015 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

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Here is something fun for dire times. In honor of the consistory, I will share something sent to me by a priest friend, Fr. Robert Guessetto, OSA, in Rome.

Most of you know, I am sure, the Otto Preminger movie The Cardinal. The opening titles show the cleric walking about in Rome. Some of the places are pretty easy to identify. Others, not.

Here is a Word document that identifies all the locations.

Click HERE

BTW… The Cardinal has some great liturgical scenes.

And everyone should read the book!

Posted in Just Too Cool, Lighter fare | Tagged filming locations, movie, Otto Preminger, The Cardinal
17 Comments

25 years ago, from 4 billion miles away… a glimpse of your planet

Posted on 14 February 2015 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

From APOD comes this marvelous image:

Explanation: On another Valentine’s Day 25 years ago, cruising four billion miles from the Sun, the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back one last time to make this first ever Solar System family portrait. The complete portrait is a 60 frame mosaic made from a vantage point 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane. In it, Voyager’s wide angle camera frames sweep through the inner Solar System at the left, linking up with gas giant Neptune, the Solar System’s outermost planet, at the far right. Positions for Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are indicated by letters, while the Sun is the bright spot near the center of the circle of frames. The inset frames for each of the planets are from Voyager’s narrow field camera. Unseen in the portrait are Mercury, too close to the Sun to be detected, and Mars, unfortunately hidden by sunlight scattered in the camera’s optical system. Closer to the Sun than Neptune at the time, small, faint Pluto’s position was not covered.

Another view of the “pale blue dot”.

Earth appears to be hardly the size of a single pixel.

Posted in Just Too Cool, Look! Up in the sky! | Tagged Voyager
17 Comments

Where Fr. Hunwicke explains “Festum Ovorum”

Posted on 14 February 2015 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

The intimitable Fr Hunwicke at his place has a brilliant post which I’ll reproduce here with the urgent admonition that you visit his place, over THERE:

FESTUM OVORUM

Well, that’s how they describe the Saturday before Quinquagesima year by year in the very inferior-quality modern Oxford University Diary with its cheapo imitation-leather cover which – since the University Diary starts with the penultimate week of August – is already looking rather tatty by now.

The origin and purpose of Festum Ovorum is pretty certainly exactly what each one of you will have guessed from first principles: as on Shrove Tuesday, to have a binge before Lent. It has stayed on the University Calendar since the Middle Ages … just as, in this University, All Soul’s Day and Corpus Christi and the Assumption survived the ‘Reformation’. We know that this was not just a custom in alma academia, but flourished throughout the neighbouring country areas, where, in their illiterate vernacular way, the worthy yokels just called it Egge Satterday. However, purely by coincidence, it became, in this University, linked with an academic deadline: the last day on which bachelors were allowed to ‘determine’; that is, to complete the exercises for the degree of MA. And academics had a ‘Determination Feast’ to celebrate this, which goes back at least to the time of Lord Richard Holland (nephew of Richard II) who had his Determination Feast on the 21st and 22nd of February, 1395 (yes, I have checked that in Cheney). As late as 1603, “all the bachelors that were presented to determine did after their presentation go to every college where they were determining and there make a feast for the senior bachelors, videlicet, of muscadine and eggs; figs; raisons; almonds; sack; [It’s difficult to get true sack these days and my inner Falstaff mourns.] and such like”.

I suppose all this was quite a luxury spread in those days. Now we could buy most of it in Sainsbury’s [grocery store chain] and carry it home in those little orange bags. Except for the muscadines, which (look it up in the OED if you don’t believe me) are sweetmeats (North Americans might say ‘candies’) made from a pod near the fundament (check that as well, if you like, in the OED) of an asiatic deer (its secretion may have been a sexual attractant) and regarded as an aphrodisiac since the days when the trade routes brought both it, and its Sanskrit name, from India to Byzantiuum. It is now vastly expensive since the poor things have been hunted nearly to extinction – ah, the compulsions of homo sapiens, the so-called animal rationale. But I gather that chemists produce a synthetic version, probably every bit as authentic as the ‘leather’ covers of the University Diary. [ROFL!] The English sweetmeats made from musk were called ‘kissing cakes’ or … um …. er … ‘rising cakes’ … I bet the synthetic musk has less potent Rising Qualities than the Real Thing.

And, this year, by a neat coincidence, Festum Ovorum coincides with the Solemnity of S Valentinus! Dies bis potens!

Fr. Z kudos.

Let’s hear the Sack Speech from the Globe:

Posted in Fr. Z KUDOS, Lighter fare | Tagged Egge Satterday, Falstaff, Festum Ovorum, Fr. John Hunwicke, muscadines, Oxford University
15 Comments

“The liturgy is a permanent workshop.”

Posted on 13 February 2015 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

At the blog Musings of a Pertinacious Papist, there is a post you must see and remember. I’ll post the whole thing here, simply because I want many people to see it and because I also want to archive it here for my future reference. However, be sure to go over there to watch his combox, which is open.

Liturgist of the renewal: translation changes the form, which changes the rite

Fr. Joseph Gelineua, S.J. was described by Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, the chief architect of the New Mass, as “one of the great masters of the international liturgical world” in his The Reform of the Liturgy: 1948-1975 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), p. 221. It is interesting, and telling, to go back and read what was being written back in those days. Here is an excerpt from a book by Joseph Gelineau, S.J., The Liturgy: Today and Tomorrow, tr. by Dinah Livingstone (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), p. 11 …:

Let’s make no mistake: translating does not mean saying the same thing in equivalent words. It changes the form. And liturgy is not information or teaching, whose only importance is its content. It is also symbolic action by means of significant ‘forms’. If the forms change, the rite changes. If one element changes the total meaning changes. Think back, if you remember it, to the Latin sung High mass with Gregorian chant. Compare it with the modern post-Vatican II mass. It is not only the words, but also the tunes and even certain actions that are different. In fact it is a different liturgy of the mass. We must say it plainly: the Roman rite as we knew it exists no more. It has gone. Some walls of the structure have fallen, others have been altered; we can look at it as a ruin or as the partial foundation of a new building.

We must not weep over ruins or dream of an historical reconstruction. The liturgical renewal is a sign of the church’s will to live — just as the missionary and biblical renewals are. When the poor are dying of hunger because no one breaks the bread of the Word for them, something must be done. When we know what treasures of hope are contained in the liturgy but find that the ‘key of knowledge’ has been taken away and ‘those who were entering hindered’ (Lk. 11:52), we must open new ways to the sources of life, or we shall be condemned as Jesus condemned the Pharisees. But it would not be right to identify this liturgical renewal with the reform of rites decided on by Vatican II. This reform goes back much further and forward beyond the conciliar prescriptions. The liturgy is a permanent workshop.

One thing is abundantly clear: some of the liberals in the liturgical movement understood the radical revisionist implications of the movement far more clearly than many of the conservatives.

Kudos for finding and posting this.

This also explains why some people think that liturgical translations should be constantly changing, to fit the way people talk in any given moment.

But… change the words, and you change the meaning. To translate is, to some extent, to “betray” the original. To change the movement and gestures of Mass, is to change the rite.
When you change our Rites you change our identity.

We need Summorum Pontificum now, more than ever.

Posted in Liberals, Liturgy Science Theatre 3000, Our Catholic Identity, Pò sì jiù, SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM |
27 Comments

“Juventutem” News: Bp. Schneider Mass in DC Sunday 15 Feb, and new chapter in NYC

Posted on 13 February 2015 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

I am delighted to report something that I knew about, but didn’t post on, alas. In NYC a “Juventutem” (I wish they didn’t use that “J”) has a new chapter situated at… yes… that vibrant parish Holy Innocents. They met for the first time 31 January. Fr. Len Villa, Holy Innocents’ new pastor, is chaplain to the chapter. According to NLM, Fr. Villa spoke on “Exploring Our Liturgical Heritage,” about mutual enrichment between the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms. Congratulations.

Also, this weekend Bp. Athanasius Schneider will be in Washington DC. On Saturday, 14 Feb, he will speak at Annunciation Catholic Church at 2 PM. On Sunday 15 Feb he will celebrate Holy Mass at Old St. Mary’s at 9 AM. Paulus Institute, who did the wonderful Mass at the National Shrine in DC a few years back, is sponsoring these events.