From CNA:
Pope Benedict XVI composes prayer for the unborn
Vatican City, Nov 30, 2010 / 05:50 pm (CNA).- The Pope prayed for the protection of life and the family at the conclusion of the Prayer Vigil for the Unborn on Nov. 27. The prayer, which was composed by Benedict XVI, asks God to bless families and to inspire society to embrace each and every life.
Below is the complete prayer translated into English by Vatican Radio:
Lord Jesus,
You who faithfully visit and fulfill with your Presence
the Church and the history of men;
You who in the miraculous Sacrament of your Body and Blood
render us participants in divine Life
and allow us a foretaste of the joy of eternal Life;
We adore and bless you.Prostrated before You, source and lover of Life,
truly present and alive among us, we beg you.Reawaken in us respect for every unborn life,
make us capable of seeing in the fruit of the maternal womb
the miraculous work of the Creator,
open our hearts to generously welcoming every child
that comes into life.Bless all families,
sanctify the union of spouses,
render fruitful their love.Accompany the choices of legislative assemblies
with the light of your Spirit,
so that peoples and nations may recognize and respect
the sacred nature of life, of every human life.Guide the work of scientists and doctors,
so that all progress contributes to the integral well-being of the person,
and no one endures suppression or injustice.Give creative charity to administrators and economists,
so they may realize and promote sufficient conditions
so that young families can serenely embrace
the birth of new children.Console the married couples who suffer
because they are unable to have children
and in Your goodness provide for them.Teach us all to care for orphaned or abandoned children,
so they may experience the warmth of your Charity,
the consolation of your divine Heart.Together with Mary, Your Mother, the great believer,
in whose womb you took on our human nature,
we wait to receive from You, our Only True Good and Savior,
the strength to love and serve life,
in anticipation of living forever in You,
in communion with the Blessed Trinity.
Do you remember that I suggested that to do penance for the crimes against minors by priests and bishops, and the damage they have done to the Church, bishops
especially should prostrate themselves in public view before their cathedrals before going inside to say Holy Mass?
I received some news from Taquoriaan, a long time viewer of the Z-Cam and participant in Z-Chat (when I have it, which hasn’t been too often lately).
Dear Father Z,
I don’t know if you heard about it, probably you did, but Bp. Bode has been making a lot of POSITIVE press headlines by doing a full prostration during a penance service last Sunday in the Osnabrück Cathedral and asked again forgiveness to the victims of child abuse in the Church. I posted a video in German on my blog and also translated the sermon he did to English.
WDTPRS kudos to Bishop Bode.
I have often mentioned that I think Gregorian chant sung by women only is ethereally beautiful. Listening to the new chant disk by the Benedictine nuns of Abbaye de Notre-Dame de l’Annonciation has confirmed my view.
The Benedictine nuns of the sister abbey of the male monastery at La Barroux in France near Avignon have produced a stunning collection of chants.
Rather than try to describe their chant and the sound of the bells of their monastery, listen to a few little samples I stitched together. Then order the disk. AMAZON UK LINK HERE.
This would be a great stocking stuffer, especially for girls.
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Brick by brick!
Did you see this good news?
This is for your Brick By Brick file.
This is from a press release of the Diocese of Rockville Centre. This is just the beginning…. of the press release, that is.
DIOCESE OF ROCKVILLE CENTRE
OFFICE OF COMMUNICATIONS
For Immediate Release
29 November 2010
New Order of Priests Coming to Diocese of Rockville CentreCanons Regular of Saint Augustine of Klosterneuburg to Establish Foundation in Diocese of Rockville Centre; will assume Pastoral Care for Two Parishes
ROCKVILLE CENTRE, N.Y. ? November 29, 2010 ? The Canons Regular of Saint Augustine of Klosterneuburg have accepted Bishop Murphy?s invitation to found an Institute of the Stift Klosterneuburg in the Diocese of Rockville Centre.
In doing so, they have accepted the pastoral care of the parishes of Saint Patrick and Saint Rocco in Glen Cove, New York effective June 2011. Each parish will have its own pastor and continue to maintain its own separate identity. Initially, three priests will arrive in June with the hope of more priests to come in the future.
?We look forward to the presence of the Canons in our diocese and we are very excited that they will be sharing their rich traditions and spiritual life with us,? said the Most Reverend William Murphy, bishop, Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre.
[…]
This is from my friend Jeffrey Tucker’s The Chant Cafe
Last February (it seems like years ago), InsideCatholic ran my article called Pay to Pray: The Church’s Simony Problem. Based on years of thought and research, I took aim at the practice of using civil law to maintain legal exclusivity to liturgical texts and charge for their use. It works like a tax for evangelization. The practice not only contradicts Christian experience and ethics, I argued; it might be classified as a form of simony.
A primary example concerns the secret dealings over the Revised Grail Psalter. Relatively few people have actually seen this book; it has not been published. But if it so happened to land in my hands and I posted it on this blog, I would be hearing from the GIA – the agent that manages international rights on this book – in about 20 minutes. If I didn’t take it down, I would hear from lawyers. If I didn’t respond after that, I would probably face a DMCA attack from the government. Regardless of the merits of the book, I find it deeply regrettable that the U.S. Bishops seemed to have embraced it for liturgical use.
I’ve written many articles on this entire topic, but I’ve dropped the topic recently because it would appear that the Grail will not be introduced for the Responsorial Psalm text in the Roman Rite anytime within the next decade.
Imagine my surprise when yesterday, composer Paul Innwood, notes in a comment box that the Leaked Missal, or what is being called the Moroney Missal, seems to have relied on the Revised Grail for the re-rendering of the approved Missal proper texts submitted to Rome. To what extent we cannot know because we do not have a copy of the Revised Grail; it has not yet leaked. Thanks to other internet leaks, however, we do have a copy of the Gray Book submitted by the conferences and the leaked Missal, with its legendary 10,000 plus changes, from the CDW, and it is clear that the texts of the propers are very different. I had assumed that it was some committee doing what committees do, which is mostly make a mess of things, but perhaps there was a purpose for the changes after all.
In other words, the Revised Grail seems to have made an early appearance in the newly translated Missal, the one we will be using one year from now. What this implies about royalties, copyrights, permissions, or other dealings between interested parties is pure speculation at this point. But we can be sure that such speculations are going to be rampant in the coming weeks, and the search for more evidence will continue.
The Italian daily La Stampa had an article yesterday about the US diplomatic documents leaked on the internet. In this case, they concerned the papal conclave of 2005.
The highlights of the article.
Before the election the staff of the US embassy to the Holy See sent speculations to Washington about the one to be elected.
“The first factor will be age, the cardinals will seek someone who is neither too young nor too old, because they don’t want to have another funeral and conclave quickly” but “they also want to avoid having a long pontificate like that of John Paul II.” Furthermore, “it will be a person in reasonably good health”. Another element will be “linguistic ability” and he will have to know Italian.
Yes, folks, this is penetrating analysis from the US embassy to the Holy See.
Going on… they opined that it would be a Latin American cardinal. Perhaps they were glued to CNN. Had they been listening to FoxNews and people like me (was a contributor at the time) they would have gotten it right. But I digress.
On the day of the election itself, there was a cable to Washington which pooh-poohed the possible election of Ratzinger. Apparently the election shocked them. They were also bamboolzed by media reports that Ratzinger was an “autocratic despot”. That’s what you get when your remote TV control is stuck on CNN and you hang only with liberal clergy in Rome. On the other hand, when one of them high up in the embassy met Cardinal Ratzinger he was described as “surprisingly humble, spiritual and easy to deal with”.
There were speculations about a Rome/Germany axis for the Church. Lord… did they really have people that dense working in the US embassy back then? And that was during an administration friendly toward the Holy See.
On 12 May 2005 there was the aforementioned 7 page document “Benedict XVI: Looking Ahead to the New Pontificate” which projected what was going to happen with an “identikit” of the new Pope. It suggested that this Pope would act in continuity with his predecessor. It included the line: “in time of crisis the Church finds refuge in European identity. They also suggested that this new Pope would battle secularism in the USA and the rest of the West, turning his attention also to developing nations, in particular Latin America were there are many disappointed Catholics because a Latin American Pope wasn’t elected.
From what I can glean from the article in La Stampa, the folks in the US embassy to the Holy See were mired in cliches and working from preconceptions which blinded them to the facts in front of their faces before the election. As a personal aside: about a year before the death of John Paul, I made a bet with another journalist about who would be elected… not whom we wanted to see elected, but whom we thought actually would be. We could choose three in order of likelihood. My choice of Ratzinger at the top of the list brought out a laugh of incredulity. But to be fair I laughed also at his choice of Cardinal Danneels. That anecdote serves to show something of the mindset of a lot of people floating close to the center of things, those most “in the know” and involved in speculation (a Vatican watcher obsession).
It seems to me that the Catholic Church is fairly important. The US State Department would do well to put competent, serious people who really understand the workings of the Church in their embassy to the Holy See.
His Hermeneuticalness offered a story about modern martyrs on his blog recommending that we read more about them.
I agree.
To begin, here is what he posted at his place:
Theresa Marie Moreau at Veritas Est Libertas writes of the story of the 33 martyrs of the Trappist Monastery of Yang Kia Ping.
The photo to the right is of Father Chrysostomus. Theresa tells of his fortitude at the final ludicrously unjust people’s trial before he was shot with several of his brothers. Here is just a small section:
Father Chrysostomus Chang plumbed the depths of his human will for a supernatural strength. With only a few minutes remaining of his life in the material world, he lifted his thoughts to the spiritual. Through screams from the mob, he addressed his confreres at his side one last time, to prepare them not for death, but for life, everlasting life.
“We’re going to die for God. Let us lift our hearts one more time, in offering our total beings,” he said.After being shot, the bodies of the holy monks were thrown into a sewage ditch where wild dogs came to lick their blood.
The whole account tells of unspeakable active cruelty combined with the deliberate neglect of basic human needs. To make people walk around in soiled clothes because they have not been allowed to relieve themselves seems to me a particularly diabolical aspect of persecution from the French revolution onwards. It is designed to degrade the humanity of a person and break their spirit. It did not succeed with these holy monks.
On the other hand, Theresa tells a tale of heroism, and the spiritual life lived with perfect fidelity even under the pressure of cruel physical and mental torture.
Do read the whole story. These men should be canonised.
I haven’t posted a sermon in quite some time.
Here is a Sunday offering.
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I wonder about this one…
A billboard in New Jersey is promoting atheism by asking motorists to question certain holiday traditions and to “celebrate reason,” MyFoxNY.com reports.
The billboard, near the Lincoln Tunnel in North Bergen, N.J., depicts a silhouette of the Three Wise Men approaching a manger alongside the words: “You KNOW it’s a Myth. This Season, Celebrate REASON!”
An organization called the American Atheists paid $20,000 for the billboard, which is not designed to convert Christians to atheism. Dave Silverman, a spokesman for the group, said it’s rather designed to encourage existing atheists who are going through the motions of celebrating Christmas to stop, MyFoxNY.com reports.
The billboard is also meant to “attack the myth that Christianity owns the solstice season” and to “raise the awareness of the organization and the movement,” according to a statement on the group’s website.
The billboard will reportedly remain on Route 495 for the remainder of the holiday season.
I wonder… is this hate speech? A form of bigotry? A legitimate use of free speech?
What do you think?
Choose your best answer and then give your reasons in the combox, below.
Coat of Arms by D Burkart
emmatag1126 on Thoughts about the collision of the Holy See and the SSPX. Wherein Fr. Z rants.: “Also, the Declaration said that we can be saved only through the Roman Catholic Church, which unfortunately leaves out my…” on Thoughts about the collision of the Holy See and the SSPX. Wherein Fr. Z rants.: “I just wanted to say how much I appreciate your charity and well-worded wishes/prayers for hearts to change. Whenever I’m…”
on ROME 26/5– Day 52: lace imitates God’s beauty enlaced in flowers: “Fr. Z: It wasn’t until I started reading your writings a few years back that I realized how important vestments…” on ROME 26/5– Day 52: lace imitates God’s beauty enlaced in flowers: “Speaking of age, I think I am lucky not to be in my teens or even early twenties right now.…”
on ROME 26/5– Day 52: lace imitates God’s beauty enlaced in flowers: “The “seriously cool APP” Father Z is referring to is the Ava Maria Clock which if you have not downloaded…”
on ROME 26/5– Day 53: Persevere!: “Black to move and mate in 4 1) … Qd1+ 2) RxQd1 (or Kh2) RxRd1+ 3) Kh2 (forced) Be5+ 4)…”
on ROME 26/5– Day 52: lace imitates God’s beauty enlaced in flowers: “@Charivari Rob: How about calling it the Old Chestnut Award? It will probably only be slightly less feared than the…”
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