I had an email today from the Brothers of the Little Oratory in San Diego who have a blog.
They have received a shipment of Mystic Monk Coffee.
Their cats were ensorceled, mostly, though they both had to crawl into the box.
They need WDTPRS mugs, I think.
Those are just two of the photos. Hijinx abounded.
Mystic Monk Coffee! Refresh your coffee supply now and help the Carmelites in Wyoming.
The nickname Laetare originated from the first word of the Introit chant for the today’s Mass, “Rejoice!”
On Laetare Sunday there is a slight relaxation of Lent’s penitential spirit, because today we have a glimpse of the joy that is coming at Easter, now near at hand.
As WDTPRS has explained before, the custom of rose vestments is tied to the Station churches in Rome. The Station for Laetare Sunday is the Basilica of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem where the relics of Cross and Passion brought from the Holy Land by St. Helena (+c. 329), mother of the Emperor Constantine (+337), were deposited. It was the custom on this day for Popes to bless roses made of gold, some amazingly elaborate and bejeweled, which were to be sent to Catholic kings, queens and other notables. The biblical reference is Christ as the “flower” sprung forth from the root of Jesse (Is 11:1 – in the Vulgate flos “flower” and RSV “branch”). Thus Laetare was also called Dominica de rosa…. Sunday of the Rose. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to develop rose colored vestments from this. Remember, the color of the vestments is called rosacea, not pink. This Roman custom spread by means of the Roman Missal to the whole of the world.
Our Collect is a new composition for the 1970MR and subsequent editions of the Novus Ordo based on a prayer in the Gelasian Sacramentary and a section of a sermon by St. Pope Leo I, the Great (+461). There is some similarity between this Collect with those of Advent. On the 2nd Sunday of Advent, we heard: in tui occursum Filii festinantes… “those hurrying to meet your Son.” On the 3rd Sunday (this Sunday’s fraternal twin Gaudete, the only other day for rose vestments) we heard: votis sollemnibus alacri laetitia celebrare…”, to celebrate…with eager jubilation by means of solemn offerings.” There is rosy anticipation in today’s Collect just as there was in Advent. Without further delay, here is the beautiful Latin followed immediately by the atrocious but happily lame-duck ICEL version.
COLLECT – LATIN TEXT (2002MR):
Deus, qui per Verbum tuum
humani generis reconciliationem mirabiliter operaris,
praesta, quaesumus, ut populus christianus
prompta devotione et alacri fide
ad ventura sollemnia valeat festinare.
Sollemnia is the neuter plural of the adjective sollemnis meaning “yearly”, that which is established to be done each year. In religious contexts, it comes out as “religious, festive”. As a substantive, it is “a religious or solemn rite, ceremony, feast, sacrifice, solemn games, a festival, solemnity”. Sollemne, the neuter noun, is also, “usage, custom, practice”. In legal contexts, it can be “formality”. In later, Christian Latin words related to sollemnis came to indicate the celebration of the Eucharist. Alacer is “lively, brisk, quick, eager, active; glad, happy, cheerful”. Promptus, a, um is from the verb promo. Promptus indicates, “brought to light, exposed to view” and by extension “at hand, i. e. prepared, ready, quick, prompt, inclined or disposed to or for any thing.”
WDTPRS LITERAL RENDERING:
O God, who by Your Word
wondrously effect the reconciliation of the human race,
grant, we beg, that the Christian people
may be able to hasten toward the upcoming solemnities
with ready devotion and eager faith.
NEW CORRECTED ICEL TRANSLATION:
O God, who through your Word
reconcile the human race to yourself in a wonderful way,
grant, we pray,
that with prompt devotion and eager faith
the Christian people may hasten
toward the solemn celebrations to come.
Note the marvelous parings of alacer fides and prompta devotio … “eager faith” and “ready devotion”. We know that fides “faith” can refer to the supernatural virtue which is given to us in baptism and also to the content of what we believe. This content must be understood as both the things we can learn and memorize with love, but more importantly the divine Person whom we must learn and contemplate with love. There is a faith by which we believe, the virtue God gives us, and a faith in which we believe, the content of the Faith. On the other hand, whereas fides is a supernatural virtue, devotio is an “active” virtue according to St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica. The Angelic Doctor wrote: “The intrinsic or human cause of devotion is contemplation or meditation. Devotion is an act of the will by which a man promptly gives himself to the service of God. Every act of the will proceeds from some consideration of the intellect, since the object of the will is a known good; or as Augustine says, willing proceeds from understanding. Consequently, meditation is the cause of devotion since through meditation man conceives the idea of giving himself to the service of God” (STh II-II 82, 3). The Jesuit preacher Louis Bourdaloue (1632-1704) underscored devotion as especially “a devotion to duty”. What we do, including our “devotions”, must help us keep the commandments of God and stick to the duties of one’s state in life before all else. There is an interplay between our devotions and our devotion.
Each of us has a state in life, a God-given vocation we are duty bound to follow.
We must be devoted to that state in life, and the duties that come with it, as they are in the here and now. That “here and now” is important. We must not focus on the state we had once upon a time, or wish we had, or should have had, or might have someday: those are unreal and misleading fantasies that distract us from reality and God’s will. If we are truly devoted and devout (in the sense of the active virtue) to fulfilling the duties of our state as it truly is here and now, then God will give us every actual grace we need to fulfill our vocation. Why can we boldly depend on God to help us? If we are fulfilling the duties of our state of life, then we are also fulfilling our proper roles in His great plan, His design from before the creation of the universe. God is therefore sure to help us. And if we are devoted to our state as it truly is, then God can also guide us to a new vocation when and if that is His will for us. Faithful in what we must do here and now, we will be open to something God wants us to do later.
This attachment to reality and sense of dutiful obedience through the active virtue devotio is a necessary part of religion in keeping with the biblical principle in 1 John 2:3-5:
“And by this we may be sure that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. He who says ‘I know Him’ but disobeys His commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him; but whoever keeps his word, in him truly love for God is perfected. By this we may be sure that we are in Him: he who says he bides in Him ought to walk in the same way in which He walked.”
LAME-DUCK ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Father of peace,
we are joyful in your Word,
your Son Jesus Christ,
who reconciles us to you.
Let us hasten toward Easter
with the eagerness of faith and love.
This makes you want to pound your head against the table.
What would happen if we translated the ICELese back into Latin? If the ICEL were accurate, you might expect some similarities, right?
WARNING: Do not attempt this at home. Spiritual harm and damage to property can be caused by thinking about these ICEL versions. Leave this sort of thing to trained professionals and people with tough foreheads.
LATIN REVERSION of the LAME-DUCK ICEL:
Pater pacis,
in tuo Verbo, Iesu Christo filio tuo,
qui nos tibi reconciliat, laetamur.
Fidei studio et amoris
ad diem Paschalis festinemus.
Let’s see the
GOOGLE TRANSLATOR MACHINE VERSION:
O God, who by your word
reconciliation of the human race dost wonderfully,
grant, we beseech Thee, that the Christian people
with ready devotion and eager faith
the formalities to come to the be able to hurry up.
Oookaayyy… ‘nuf said about that, I think.
The other day I mentioned that I had heard that Msgr. Keith Newton of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham would be received by Pope Benedict XVI.
This is on VIS:
LE UDIENZE
Il Santo Padre ha ricevuto questa mattina in Udienza:
Em.mo Card. William Joseph Levada, Prefetto della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, con:
S.E. Mons. Alan Stephen Hopes, Vescovo tit. di Cuncacestre, Ausiliare di Westminster (Gran Bretagna), e
il Rev.mo Mons. Keith Newton, Ordinario dell’Ordinariato Personale di Our Lady of Walsingham.
This Pope does not receive nearly as many people as the late John Paul II. Many high-powered figures don’t see the Pope when they go to Rome. The fact that Pope Benedict received Msgr. Newton is a sign of His Holiness personal commitment to the success of the provisions of Anglicanorum coetibus.
Benedict XVI is the Pope of Christian Unity.
It is April and the world is slowly coming back to life. Baseball season is back.
I have made some PODCAzTs with seasonal poetry. I am contemplating one for Spring.
If you have a suggestion, perhaps you could drop me a line. Perhaps I’ll use it.
My friend the nearly ubiquitous John L. Allen, Jr., sadly still writing for the ultra-liberal dissenting National Catholic Reporter has a in his Friday saddle-bag a piece about the sport God loves which I must share with the readership here. My emphases:
I’ve always wondered how anyone born in St. Louis, great baseball town that it is, could possibly regard April as the cruelest month. With all due respect to T.S. Eliot, any month that usually features both Easter and Opening Day just can’t be that bad. (Bear in mind that by the time Eliot was born in 1888, the St. Louis Brown Stockings, who eventually morphed into the Cardinals, had already won four American Association pennants in a row as well as the 1886 World Series against the forerunner of the Chicago Cubs, so it’s not like he could be excused on the grounds of getting there too early.)
Yesterday marked the opening of the 2011 campaign, so in honor of the occasion, I’ll roll out my personal list of the “Top Nine Reasons why Baseball is to Sports what Catholicism is to Religion.” Why nine? It’s a key number in both traditions — nine players on a diamond, nine innings in a game, and nine days to a novena. [And let us not forget the NINTH Beatitude, the one that alas didn’t make it into the pages of Holy Writ: Beati qui non expectant, quia non disappointabuntur. Each year millions of fans, many of them in places like Chicago and Cleveland, start with high expectations, after all.]
The following are nine reasons why Catholicism and baseball are, quite literally, a match made in Heaven:
- Both baseball and Catholicism venerate the past. Both have a Communion of Saints, all the way down to popular shrines and holy cards.
- Both feature obscure rules that make sense only to initiates. (Think the Infield Fly rule for baseball fans and the Pauline privilege for Catholics.)
- Both have a keen sense of ritual, in which pace is critically important. (As a footnote, that’s why basketball is more akin to Pentecostalism; both are breathless affairs premised largely on ecstatic experience.)
- Both generate oceans of statistics, arcana, and lore. For entry-level examples, try: Who has the highest lifetime batting average, with a minimum of 1,000 at-bats? (Ty Cobb). Which popes had the longest and the shortest reigns? (Pius IX and Urban VII). [I wonder if Urban VII’s threat to excommunicate anyone who used tobacco had anything to do with his death. Until that is resolved, perhaps he should have an * by his name.]
- In both baseball and Catholicism, you can dip in and out, but for serious devotees the liturgy is a daily affair.
- Both are global games which are especially big right now in Latin America. (Though I’m principally a Yankees fan, [UGH. You know, John, that’s just sad. That’s another thing you have to give up, along with the NCR.] I live in Denver, where the Rockies’ starting rotation is composed of two pitchers from the Dominican Republic, a Venezuelan, a Mexican, and a guy from South Carolina. In a lot of dioceses, that’s not unlike the makeup of the presbyterate these days.)
- Both baseball and Catholicism have been badly tainted by scandal, with the legacies of erstwhile superstars utterly ruined. Yet both have proved surprisingly resilient — perhaps demonstrating that the game is great enough to survive even the best efforts of those in charge at any given moment to ruin it. [Just as the Lord never said the Church would survive everywhere, so too teams such as the Braves and the A’s moved around. The Senators became the Twins, etc. Then new teams set up shop. New Evangelization?]
- Both have a complex farm system, and fans love to speculate about who the next hot commodity will be in “The Show.”
- Both reward patience. If you’re the kind of person who needs immediate results, neither baseball nor Catholicism is really your game.
As an “extra innings” bonus, I’ll toss in my theory as to why the American League represents the Catholic instinct in baseball, while the National League is more Protestant. [Okay… I think he may be showing his NCR stripe here. Though I am from an AL town, I look upon the DH as something like heresy. Let’s read what he has to say with an open mind.]
Famously, the National League does not permit the designated hitter, reflecting a sort of fundamentalist Puritanism. [?!? Oh, John. That’s just sad.] It’s not the way the game was originally played, and no power on earth has the authority to add or subtract to scripture. [Hmmmm…] The American League, however, has adopted the designated hitter, striking a balance between scripture and tradition. The designated hitter rule, in fact, is arguably an athletic analogue of what Pope Benedict XVI talks about as a “hermeneutics of continuity,” of reform without rupture. [Or… it could be an example of the false archeologizing against which Pius XII warned us!]
By the way, if I’m right about that, a great irony presents itself: Both the Cardinals and the Padres play in the more “Protestant” National League! [I think there is a great deal to be learned from that fact. Think about it.]
VATICAN CITY, 31 MAR 2011 (VIS) – Pope Benedict’s general prayer intention for April is: “That through its compelling preaching of the Gospel, the Church may give young people new reasons for life and hope”.
His mission intention is: Father’s mission prayer intention for April 2011 is “That by proclamation of the Gospel and the witness of their lives, missionaries may bring Christ to those who do not yet know Him.”
I posted about the USCCB’s Doctrine Committee and their examination of Sr. Elizabeth Johnson’s book on the Trinity which seems to be heretical.
NCFishwrap covered this too. Bottom line: Feminist theologian = good. USCCB Doctrine Committee = bad.
Sr. Johnson, CSJ, has responded to the USCCB’s statement. Her response is worth a glance with my emphases and comments.
Response by Dr. Elizabeth Johnson C.S.J., March 30, 2011:
It is heartening to see the Bishops Conference give such serious attention to the subject of the living God. [/sarcasm] I appreciate how this statement acknowledges the laudable nature of the task of crafting a theology of God, and the number of issues on which the statement judges that I am “entirely correct.” [Imagine yourself reading Sr. Johnson’s book. Now imagine yourself walk into a shop full of broken clocks.] The book itself endeavors to present new insights about God arising from people living out their Catholic faith in different cultures around the world. [I think that is code for “different religions”. I could be wrong.] My hope is that any conversation that may be triggered by this statement will but enrich that faith, encouraging robust relationship to the Holy Mystery of the living God as the church moves into the future. [Perhaps Sr. Johnson is a small-c catholic. And the church will move into the “future”, when it abandons traditional Catholic teaching about the Trinity and the language we use to describe the Trinity.]
I would like to express two serious concerns. [Rather than all the other serious concerns? Rather than the concerns that aren’t serious?] First, I would have been glad to enter into conversation to clarify critical points, but was never invited to do so. [“conversation… invited”.] This book was discussed and finally assessed by the Committee before I knew any discussion had taken place. [At this point I must ask… because I don’t know… did Sr. Johnson submit her book to a bishop or his delegated censor librorum? Also, why should anyone have to alert her that her book is being studied? She put it out in public in the first place!] Second, one result of this absence of dialogue [read = invited conversation] is that in several key instances this statement radically misinterprets what I think, and what I in fact wrote. [Indeed?] The conclusions thus drawn paint an incorrect picture of the fundamental line of thought the book develops. [NB: “fundamental line of thought”. That is a noteworthy phrase.] A conversation, which I still hope to have, would have very likely avoided these misrepresentations. [We’ll never know. Sr. Johnson can now print an explanation of her “fundamental line of thought”. If she wasn’t able to make her thought clear enough to be understood by the very smart people who studied her book for the USCCB, perhaps she can take another run at it. Are people in the CDF who can help? ]
That being said, as a scholar I have always taken criticism as a valuable opportunity to delve more deeply into a subject. [Fair enough.] The task of theology, classically defined as “faith seeking understanding,” calls for theologians to wrestle with mystery. [But… Catholic theologians are not autonomous.] The issues are always complex, especially on frontiers where the church’s living tradition is growing. [Am I wrong, or does this sound like “evolving”, but not in the sense of “development in doctrine” along the lines Newman might recognize.] Committed to the faith of the church, [And what is the church?] I take this statement as an occasion to ponder yet further the mystery of the living God who is ineffable. [It is a good thing. Bp. Trautman isn’t on the USCCB’s Doctrine Committee. Er…um… well… you know what I mean. Did I just write that? You see… I didn’t make the fundamental line of my thought clear. Bp. Trautman objected to the use of “ineffable” in the new, corrected English translation of Mass. See? It is possible to get at that fundamental line of thought!]
At this time I will make no further statements nor give any interviews. [I suspect that the reason for this is that she is worried that the next step is that the powers that be will remove her mandate to teach in a Catholic school.]
If Sr. Johnson can indeed remain silent in this regard and then make corrections to how she expresses her “fundamental line of thought”, then the system will have worked.
It might have worked a while back, but it is working now.
We have talked about iPad Roman Missals on the altar. We have talked about ATMs in the narthex of church’s for your weekly donations. We have talked about electric vigil lights, and recorded music, and microphones, hand sanitizer at Communion. We have talked about iPhone apps to help you examine your conscience.
How about drive through confession?
It doesn’t matter if this is a 1 April thing or not.
From the Herald Sun of Australia.
Your sins forgiven on the run
Terry Brown
From: Herald SunSINFUL drivers can repent on the run with the opening today of Australia’s first drive-through confessional.
The pray-as-you-go service is to become slicker, with a sin-selection board to be installed by Easter and a smartphone app on the way.
South Melbourne Catholic priest Fr Bob McGuire said yesterday that the move brought the church up to speed with modern life.
“Everybody drives past this place but no one comes in,” Fr McGuire said.
“Now they can stop at the window, open their window and confess their sins. Then I’ll reassure them that they’ll be right.”
Do you think the drive-through confessional is a good idea? Tell us below
The 60-second car wash for the soul includes a symbolically refreshing spray of rose water. [Why not just call it McPenance?]
A flashing green light will signal when a driver’s sins have been forgiven. “When you’re driving out you’ll be clean as a whistle,” Fr McGuire said. [So… it’s like a car wash. And it had better be a touchless car wash.]
The seven cardinal sins – lust, gluttony, greed, laziness, wrath, envy and pride – will be numbered on a sign, Chinese menu-style. [Or a Taco Bell window.]
From 6.30am, sinners will repent at a mobile unit dubbed the Hopemobile in the St Peter and Paul’s church driveway, confessing, for instance, to three No.7s and a No.4.
Fr McGuire said the coded response was meant to maintain confidentiality.
A more permanent set-up should be in place by Easter and Fr McGuire is hoping for a sponsor to cover set-up costs.
He said some overseas churches had confessional sponsors. At least one had a bookmaker as the backer. “They called it O’Flaherty’s sin bin or something,” he said. [They… did?]
The phone app, sourced from the US, will let drivers select deadly sins from a list, which will appear in front of the priest on a screen when the car pulls up. [We are straying onto more difficult ground now. Absolution, the form, must be pronounced to a person who is actually present. The matter of the confession is concerned, the communication of the sins themselves in number and kind, can be conveyed in different ways.]
It will also advise on the correct form of words to use.
“Part of it’s being already used in one church in the US,” Fr McGuire said. [It is?]
“I think it’s even been passed by the church police. [Okay… that’s glib, but who would that be? The local bishop? The CDF? The CDW?]
“It’s the combining it with being forgiven for your sins in the flesh that hasn’t been tried.”
Fr McGuire ran a trial of drive-by prayer three weeks ago, on Ash Wednesday, but gave it up for Lent.
It is all very sly and funny that way, right?
But … is there something to this? Seriously?
There is a poll at that newspaper site. I think their question is wrong: “Is the quickie confession a good idea?” Yes. No. It seems to me that the length of the confession is not the point. Was the confession complete and sincere?
Okay. Let’s have a poll and a focused look at this, regardless of the calendar.
Chose the best answer (yes, I know there are other possible answers) and give your reasons in the combox. Let’s keep this as focused as possible.
Coat of Arms by D Burkart
A Daily Prayer for Priests
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