Conference in Napa Valley with Pontifical TLM… does it get better than that?

Posted on 9 April 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

From CNA:

Napa Institute conference to fortify Catholics for the ‘Next America’

Irvine, Calif., Apr 7, 2011 / 01:53 am (CNA).- Mother Assumpta Long, O.P., has invited Catholics to register for the inaugural Napa Institute conference to help participants respond to atheism, secularism, materialism and lukewarmness in the United States.

“I encourage you to register soon because this event should not be missed!” said Mother Assumpta, the superior of the Michigan-based Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.

The conference, titled “Catholics in the Next America,” will take place in Napa Valley at the Meritage Resort & Spa from July 28-30. [That in itself sounds great!]

“We need to bring together serious Catholics to begin to network and discuss our faith because we continue to slip into a more secular society here in America,” explained Tim Busch, the Catholic businessman and philanthropist who helped start the Napa Institute. “As Catholics, we are challenged in our ability to influence the course of American culture.”

The Napa Institute will help Catholics meet that challenge by increasing their understanding of Catholic teaching and by helping them find their voice alongside their Catholic peers, he added.

Speakers at the event include Cardinal Roger Mahony, Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento and Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, S.J., of the Magis Institute. Commentator George Weigel and Prof. Timothy Gray of the Augustine Institute will also speak at the event.

Bishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of Oakland will celebrate a Solemn Pontifical Mass in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite for conference participants.

[…]

Read the rest there.

Posted in The Campus Telephone Pole |
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QUAERITUR: Female and male duet for the Exultet

Posted on 9 April 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

From a reader:

Several years ago, our new husband & wife (talented but very Haugen/Haas loyal) music directors introduced/replaced the familiar English version of the Exultet at the Vigil with a modern(Haugen?) version sung as a duet by male (Deacon) & female (Mrs music director) voices. I am told that this is now also (performed) at all regular Easter Masses by male non-deacon & female voices. Is any of this stipulated pro or con?

PS. Would it be improper to listen to a more traditional version (say,
yours) with earphones & an iPod while this is going on? It’s still quite dark in the Church at this point.

That version of the Exultet sounds dreadful.  I believe there is some provision for an lay person to sing the Exultet, but my being recoils at the idea of a woman doing it.  That’s just wrong.  A female substituting for a deacon, or sharing in the singing of the text which means substituting for deacon.  No.  The rubric concerning what goes on with the Paschal candle explains that when it is not a deacon it is another minister, alius minister idoneus, which is masculine.  Also, concerning the lines to be omitted from the Exultet when sung by a non-deacon we find ab alio qui , which is masculine.   People might try to performed a philological fan dance in support of the obviously male language really including females.  I would respond “Piffle.  It is obviously foreign to the Roman mind to have a woman do any part of the deacon’s greatest liturgical moment of the whole year in the most sacred of our Holy Church’s liturgies.

As far as a duet is concerned… I don’t think that is permitted. Even if it were two deacons, it should not be done.

And, I don’t think it is proper to listen to anything else during the sacred action of liturgical worship, even though what is happening is … sub-optimal.

Posted in ASK FATHER Question Box | Tagged ,
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How it all goes wrong. So very wrong. So sad.

Posted on 8 April 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

What happens when you go wrong:

From the pen of Roy Bourgeois, M.M.

Rev. Edward Dougherty, M.M., Superior General
Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers
P.O. Box 303 Maryknoll, NY 10545

April 8, 2011

Dear Father Dougherty and General Council,

Maryknoll has been my community, my family, for 44 years, so it is with great sadness that I received your letter of March 18, 2011 stating I must recant my belief and public statements that support the ordination of women, or I will be dismissed from Maryknoll.

When I was a young man in the military, [Doesn’t he impress you?] I felt God was calling me to be a priest. I later entered Maryknoll and was ordained. I am grateful for finding the happiness, meaning and hope I was seeking in life. [Read: I will be sad if I must obey.]

For the past 20 years I have been speaking out and organizing against the injustice of the School of the Americas and U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. [People can disagree about this issue.] Over these years I discovered an injustice much closer to home – an injustice in my Church.  [He is attempting to set up a moral equivalence between the Church’s defined teaching on ordination and the US government School of the Americas.  See anything wrong with that?]

Devout [So?] women in our Church believe [So?] God is calling them to be priests, [He isn’t.] but they are rejected [That is the wrong word.] because the Church teaches that only baptized men can become priests. [Yes.  It does.] As a Catholic priest for 38 years, I believe our Church’s teaching that excludes women from the priesthood defies both faith and reason and cannot stand up to scrutiny for the following reasons: [He is a heretic.]

(1) As Catholics, we believe that we were created in the image and likeness of God and that men and women are equal before God. Excluding women from the priesthood implies that men are superior to women. [Does that logically follow?  All it implies is that they are different.]

(2) Catholic priests say that the call to be a priest is a gift and comes fromGod. How can we, as men, say: “Our call from God is authentic, but your call, as women, is not”? [Because Holy Church does not have the authority from God to ordain women.] Who are we to reject God’s call of women to the priesthood? [Ummm… “faithful Catholics”?] I believe our Creator who is the Source of life and called forth the sun and stars is certainly capable of calling women to be priests. [No one doubts that!  Of course He can.  He did not. ]

[Make some popcorn.] (3) We are told that women cannot be priests because Jesus chose only men as apostles. As we know, Jesus did not ordain anyone. Jesus also chose a woman, Mary Magdalene, to be the first witness to His resurrection, which is at the core of our faith. Mary Magdalene became known as “the apostle to the apostles.” [Okay.  I’m convinced.]

(4) A 1976 report by the Pontifical Biblical Commission, the Vatican’s top Scripture scholars, [He may have been a priest for a long time, but that did not make him very intelligent.  “The Vaticans” top Scripture scholars?  Is that what the members of the Biblical Commission are?] concluded that there is no valid case to be made against the ordination of women from the Scriptures.  [And when are we a “Scripture alone” Church?] In the Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian and other Christian churches, [Schismatics and heretics.  And the ordination of women has worked wonders for their groups.] God’s call of women to the priesthood is affirmed and women are ordained. Why not in the Catholic church? [He doesn’t see any difference between those groups and the Catholic Church?  Be clear: this isn’t about whether women are competent.  This is about who the Catholic Church is.]

(5) The Holy Scriptures remind us in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither male nor female. In Christ Jesus you are one.” [1 Corinthians 14:34-35] Furthermore, the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on The Church in the Modern World states: “Every type of discrimination … based on sex. .. is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God’s intent.” [Human discrimination.  And “discrimination” doesn’t imply, in this matter, inequality.  At the heart of the word is the root word concerning the ability to recognize differences.]

After much reflection and many conversations with fellow priests and women, I believe sexism is at the root of excluding women from the priesthood. Sexism, like racism, is a sin. [Again, he is trying to create a moral equivalence.] And no matter how hard we may try to justify discrimination against women, in the end, it is not the way of God. [Gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. It IS the way of God.  Holy Church has said so.] Sexism is about power. [And so we get to the essence of the bid for the ordination of wyemenn and the wymenmales who support them.] In the culture of clericalism many Catholic priests see the ordination of women as a threat to their power. [blah blah]

Our Church is in a crisis today because of the sexual abuse scandal and the closing of hundreds of churches because of a shortage of priests. [Slime.] When I entered Maryknoll we had over 300 seminarians. Today we have ten. [Why does the SSPX and FSSP and solid bishops have so many?] For years we have been praying for more vocations to the priesthood. [Roy.  Your community doesn’t have vocations is because of… men like you.] Our prayers have been answered. God is sending us women priests. Half the population are women. If we are to have a vibrant and healthy Church, we need the wisdom, experience and voices of women in the priesthood.

[The rest of this is just B as in B and S as in S.  I’ll leave it, however.  Read and weep.]

As Catholics, we believe in the primacy and sacredness of conscience. Our conscience is sacred because it gives us a sense of right and wrong and urges us to do the right thing. Conscience is what compelled Franz Jagerstatter, a humble Austrian farmer, husband and father of four young children, to refuse to join Hitler’s army, which led to his execution. Conscience is what compelled Rosa Parks to say she could no longer sit in the back of the bus. Conscience is what compels women in our Church to say they cannot be silent and deny their call from God to the priesthood. And it is my conscience that compels me to say publicly that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is a grave injustice against women, against our Church and against our God who calls both men and women to the priesthood.

In his 1968 commentary on the Second Vatican Council’s document, Gaudium et Spes, Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, said: “Over the pope … there still stands one’s own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, if necessary, even against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority.”

What you are requiring of me is not possible without betraying my conscience. In essence, you are telling me to lie and say I do not believe that God calls both men and women to the priesthood. This I cannot do, therefore I will not recant.

Like the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement and the right of women to vote, the ordination of women is inevitable because it is rooted in justice. Wherever there is an injustice, silence is the voice of consent. I respectfully ask that my fellow priests, bishops, Church leaders in the Vatican and Catholics in the pews speak out and affirm God’s call of women to the priesthood.

Your Brother in Christ,

Roy Bourgeois, M.M.
P.O. Box 3330
Columbus, GA 31903

From the pen of Roy Bourgeois, M.M.

Rev. Edward Dougherty, M.M., Superior General
Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers
P.O. Box 303 Maryknoll, NY 10545

April 8, 2011

Dear Father Dougherty and General Council,

Maryknoll has been my community, my family, for 44 years, so it is with great sadness that I received your letter of March 18, 2011 stating I must recant my belief and public statements that support the ordination of women, or I will be dismissed from Maryknoll.

When I was a young man in the military, I felt God was calling me to be a priest. I later entered Maryknoll and was ordained. I am grateful for finding the happiness, meaning and hope I was seeking in life.

For the past 20 years I have been speaking out and organizing against the injustice of the School of the Americas and U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. Over these years I discovered an injustice much closer to home – an injustice in my Church.

Devout women in our Church believe God is calling them to be priests, but they are rejected because the Church teaches that only baptized men can become priests. As a Catholic priest for 38 years, I believe our Church’s teaching that excludes women from the priesthood defies both faith and reason and cannot stand up to scrutiny for the following reasons:

(1) As Catholics, we believe that we were created in the image and likeness of God and that men and women are equal before God. Excluding women from the priesthood implies that men are superior to women.

(2) Catholic priests say that the call to be a priest is a gift and comes fromGod. How can we, as men, say: “Our call from God is authentic, but your call, as women, is not”? Who are we to reject God’s call of women to the priesthood? I believe our Creator who is the Source of life and called forth the sun and stars is certainly capable of calling women to be priests.

(3) We are told that women cannot be priests because Jesus chose only men as apostles. As we know, Jesus did not ordain anyone. Jesus also chose a woman, Mary Magdalene, to be the first witness to His resurrection, which is at the core of our faith. Mary Magdalene became known as “the apostle to the apostles.”

(4) A 1976 report by the Pontifical Biblical Commission, the Vatican’s top Scripture scholars, concluded that there is no valid case to be made against the ordination of women from the Scriptures. In the Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian and other Christian churches, God’s call of women to the priesthood is affirmed and women are ordained. Why not in the Catholic church?

(5) The Holy Scriptures remind us in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither male nor female. In Christ Jesus you are one.” Furthermore, the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on The Church in the Modern World states: “Every type of discrimination … based on sex. .. is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God’s intent.”

After much reflection and many conversations with fellow priests and women, I believe sexism is at the root of excluding women from the priesthood. Sexism, like racism, is a sin. And no matter how hard we may try to justify discrimination against women, in the end, it is not the way of God. Sexism is about power. In the culture of clericalism many Catholic priests see the ordination of women as a threat to their power.

Our Church is in a crisis today because of the sexual abuse scandal and the closing of hundreds of churches because of a shortage of priests. When I entered Maryknoll we had over 300 seminarians. Today we have ten. For years we have been praying for more vocations to the priesthood. Our prayers have been answered. God is sending us women priests. Half the population are women. If we are to have a vibrant and healthy Church, we need the wisdom, experience and voices of women in the priesthood.

As Catholics, we believe in the primacy and sacredness of conscience. Our conscience is sacred because it gives us a sense of right and wrong and urges us to do the right thing. Conscience is what compelled Franz Jagerstatter, a humble Austrian farmer, husband and father of four young children, to refuse to join Hitler’s army, which led to his execution. Conscience is what compelled Rosa Parks to say she could no longer sit in the back of the bus. Conscience is what compels women in our Church to say they cannot be silent and deny their call from God to the priesthood. And it is my conscience that compels me to say publicly that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is a grave injustice against women, against our Church and against our God who calls both men and women to the priesthood.

In his 1968 commentary on the Second Vatican Council’s document, Gaudium et Spes, Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, said: “Over the pope … there still stands one’s own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, if necessary, even against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority.”

What you are requiring of me is not possible without betraying my conscience. In essence, you are telling me to lie and say I do not believe that God calls both men and women to the priesthood. This I cannot do, therefore I will not recant.

Like the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement and the right of women to vote, the ordination of women is inevitable because it is rooted in justice. Wherever there is an injustice, silence is the voice of consent. I respectfully ask that my fellow priests, bishops, Church leaders in the Vatican and Catholics in the pews speak out and affirm God’s call of women to the priesthood.

Your Brother in Christ,

Roy Bourgeois, M.M.
P.O. Box 3330
Columbus, GA 31903

Posted in Our Catholic Identity, The Drill, Throwing a Nutty | Tagged ,
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Defending the defenseless

Posted on 8 April 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

An interesting catch from Rush’s show made by the Motley Monk:

At the beginning of “Open Line Friday,” Rush Limbaugh took President Obama to task for his priorities in the current budget debate and potential shutdown of the federal government.

El Rushbo
Limbaugh posed this question:

During a government shutdown, how can the President withhold paying the military to defend the defenseless while at the same time fighting to keep Planned Parenthood funded to provide abortions to the most defenseless among us?

Posted in Emanations from Penumbras, The Drill | Tagged , , , ,
32 Comments

Food for… thought

Posted on 8 April 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

From rougeclassicism:

The incipit of a piece at the CBC on the war in Afghanistan:

When a Canadian soldier dies in Afghanistan (as more than 150 have so far), it makes front-page news. In Ontario, a stretch of the 401 has been renamed the Highway of Heroes, and Canadians pay tribute by lining the overpasses from Trenton to Toronto.

Now cast your mind back a couple of millennia. In 216 B.C., 48,000 soldiers were killed in a single battle on a single day. The place was Cannae, on the Italian Peninsula, and the occasion was a battle in the Second Punic War between those imperial rivals, Rome and Carthage.

Not only did these 48,000 men – there were only male soldiers then – die in a single day, but they were butchered in what military historian Robert L. O’Connell calls a “massive knife fight.” As he told me on a recent Ideas episode, those men, mostly Roman, were herded together and slaughtered by the cunning Carthaginian general Hannibal. O’Connell is the author of The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic. There is no doubt in O’Connell’s mind that the most hellish place on Earth that day was a patch of ground on the Italian peninsula.

Military historians have a way of graphically presenting their facts. Based on what O’Connell estimates was the average weight of a Roman soldier – 130 pounds, or almost 59 kilograms – there was, on the battlefield, “6-7 million pounds of freshly slaughtered human meat.” A feast for carrion, a “bonanza” for foxes, wolves, vultures and other rummaging creatures.

Posted in The Drill | Tagged
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WDTPRS Friday in the 4th Week of Lent

Posted on 8 April 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Novus Ordo Composition ToolsCOLLECT
Deus, qui fragilitati nostrae congrua subsidia praeparasti,
concede, quaesumus, ut suae reparationis effectum
et cum exsultatione suscipiat,
et pia conversatione recenseat.

Glue - another toolThis 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 job and 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.

Subsidium is, you guessed it, military language. It means, “the troops stationed in reserve in the third line of battle (behind the principes), the line of reserve, reserve-ranks, triarii“. Thus, it is “support, assistance, aid, help, protection, etc.”. A reparatio is “a restoration, renewal”. Recenseo is “to count, enumerate, number, reckon, survey” and “to go over in thought, in narration, or in critical treatment, to reckon up, recount, review, revise”. Blaise/Dumas says “recolere, rappeler, célèbrer le souvenir de…”. But there is in the entry no reference to our prayer, which I find puzzling.

Scissors - another toolConversatio is a super-charged word in Christian literature, which has to do with “manner of life”, how one comports himself. This is often used in monastic literature. I now have also at my fingertips the helpful big dictionary of the indefatigable Albert Blaise, the Dictionnarie Latin-Francais des Auteurs Chrétiens reworked by Henri Chirat. This lexical tool is out of print, so I can’t suggest you buy it any time soon. I will have to start distinguishing now Blaise/Chirat from Blaise/Dumas, won’t I! Any way, Blaise/Chirat shows that Patristic sources handle conversatio in a moral sense of conversio as well as “genre de vie”. As I mentioned before, it also indicates “monastic life”, though that is outside of this context.

Pius, in the mighty Lewis & Short is “honest, upright, honorable” and “benevolent, kind, gentle, gracious”. With respect to God it points to His mercy. In respect to man, in much Latin literature, it point to his interior and exterior response to duty, the exigencies he faces.

The suae refers back to something feminine, which leaves a single candidate, fragilitas nostra.

The problem with cutting and pasting a prayer together is that you don’t get much of a unified “vision” from it. This is a good prayer, don’t get me wrong, at least I think it is a good prayer, but it is not in the same league as some of the ancient integral works we have seen, even having endured slight changes from The Redactors.

LAME-DUCK ICEL VERSION:
Father, our source of life,
you know our weakness.
May we reach out with joy to grasp your hand
and walk more readily in your ways.

LITERAL TRANSLATION
O God, who made ready suitable helps for our fragility,
grant, we beg, that it may both catch up
the effect of its own renewal in exultation,
and sum it up in upright conduct of life.

??

What on earth does this mean? I think we need …

ANOTHER VERSION TO SPIN THIS OUT
O God, who prepared the helps proportional to our (sin induced) frailty,
grant, we beg You, that our (sin induced) frailty
may both take up in joy the effect of its own renewal
(that effect being the Passion and Resurrection)
and also critically express (our sin induced frailty) by means of a proper manner of living.

I can’t tell you how much I look forward to reading your own perfect versions of this very odd Collect. Perhaps I am burning out from work on top of illness, but I am still scratching my head. I think I nailed it, however.

The “effect of our renewal” is the impact of the merits of Jesus’ Passion, Resurrection and subsequent Ascension to the right hand of the Father. The “congruent helps” are the mysteries of the Lord’s Death and Resurrection. These are our two hinges.

The sin of our First Parents opened a chasm between us and God which no mere human being (very limited) could bridge or repair. This reparation or renewal required a human being (because of justice) but no mere human was proportioned to the work of our salvation. So, from unfathomable love, God stepped into and over the chasm. In the fullness of time, the Second Person took our humanity into an indestructible bond with His divinity. Only the God/man could repair the rift. The Passion and Resurrection are the “congruent helps”, proportional to such an effect of reparation/renewal.

Realization of this must have a consequence for our lives. It must transform us. The effect, which is interior, must find outward expression. We feel joy interiorly and this must be expressed outwardly. The reordering of the disorder of our soul is an interior and invisible effect, but that effect must be brought to outward expression in proper conduct of life.

That is, I believe, what is going on in this very odd snipped and pasted prayer.

NEW CORRECTED ICEL:
O God, who have prepared
fitting helps for us in our weakness,
grant, we pray, that we may receive
their healing effects with joy
and reflect them in a holy way of life.

Posted in LENT, WDTPRS | Tagged
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NCFishwrap, Sr. Fiedler, Fr. Bourgeois… what could go wrong?

Posted on 8 April 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

The National Catholic Fishwrap continues in it open dissent against the Church’s formally and irrevocably defined doctrine concerning ordinary of males only, as in only men, exclusively men, no women, not even wymyn.

We have seen Sr. Maureen Fiedler before.  She gushed over pro-abortion Senator Kennedy, she had a nutty when Card. Burke spoke about voting, she was not pleased by the nomination of Archbp. Dolan, and she was unable to grasp what Pope Benedict said about condoms.  Therefore, we want to know what she thinks about Maryknoller (Fr.) Roy Bourgeois and the ordination of wymyn.

My emphases and comments.

Roy Bourgeois and Bill Callahan: Vive!
by Maureen Fiedler on Apr. 05, 2011

When I heard about the patriarchal ultimatum [LOL!] (recant your support of women’s ordination or be dismissed) given to Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois I was stunned, but not surprised.

It brought my mind back to the day when my good friend, Bill Callahan, then a Jesuit, was dismissed from his order. Although Bill’s dismissal was wrapped in different language, his advocacy for women’s ordination was a major part of the accusations against him. [And what were the other reasons?]

Both men provide powerful [one person’s “power” is another person’s “lunacy”] public witnesses for their beliefs. Roy preached at the 2008 [non] ordination of a woman friend in the Roman Catholic Women Priests movement. Bill was a plenary speaker at the first Women’s Ordination Conference in 1975 [were there big puppets?] and launched Priests for Equality that same year, with women’s ordination as a prominent part of the charter.

Both were told to be silent, and both refused. [So both broke their promises of obedience to their superiors.] Roy was told to recant his public stand a few months after he preached at his friend’s ordination, but continued to speak his [improperly formed] conscience publicly [and cause public scandal]. In 1980, Bill was silenced by the Jesuits on the issue of women’s ordination, but resumed his public stance a year later. Bill was dismissed from the Society of Jesus in the early 1990’s, and Roy is likely to face the same fate in the next few weeks.  [It occurs to me to ask: how contumacious did you have to be to be dismissed from the Jesuit’s in the early 90’s?  From the Maryknollers?]

Many women have suffered in this movement as well. [sniff] The 100+ women in the Roman Catholic Women Priests movement are (theoretically, at least, since they don’t accept it) excommunicated. [Excommunication depends on it being accepted?] Many are persona not grata in parishes and Catholic settings, and even among a few of their friends. [What is it we read in Scripture about eventually being treated like a tax collector after being admonished at various times?]

But male priests who are willing to stand up for justice for women in the church are few and far between. The male clerical culture works to keep them “in line.” [the inevitable reduction of the ordination to power] That’s why both Bill and Roy deserve our admiration and gratitude. They walk with the brave women who stand strong to speak out for what ought to be an obvious value in our church: the fundamental equality of women and men in all roles in our church.

One day, in not too many years, we will look back on this denial of human rights the way we look at slavery today. We will lament the ways the church gave aid and support to such sexism and injustice. And we will remember the women and men who challenged the system as prophets.

What every reader must understand is that these womymn and the malewoymymn with them (can shouldn’t be womanist, after all) are dying for approval from the very men they accuse of being patriarchal and unjust.

They crave approval from men like an addict her next needle.

Posted in Biased Media Coverage, Throwing a Nutty | Tagged , ,
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Everything a priest suffers should send him to my Heart.

Posted on 8 April 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

It is Friday and it is Lent.

Fr. Mark Kirby, OSB, had this on his blog Vultus Christi:

This painting depicts Our Lord as he appeared in the Sacred Host exposed in the monstrance at the Institute of Loreto in Bordeaux, France on Septuagesima Sunday, 3 February 1822. Read about this manifestation of the Eucharistic Face of Jesus here.

My Heart is moved to compassion by the sufferings of my priests,
by those that they inflict upon themselves
and by those that they inflict on each other.

The sins of my priests cause me an immense sorrow.
I grieve over my priests
with a tender and sorrowful love.

I want them to understand
that every trial, every suffering, every humiliation is,
for them, an occasion to turn to me with confidence
and to discover the depth and the height and the breadth
of my merciful love,
of my Divine Friendship for them.

This is the answer and the remedy
for every crisis in the life of a priest:
a return to my Divine Friendship,
a humble and confident return to my most loving Heart,
a return to the foot of my altar
and to the comforting radiance of my Eucharistic Face.

The trials and sorrows that I permit to befall my priests
will serve my designs for their holiness
and for their growth in love.
Everything a priest suffers should send him to my Heart.
And where will he find my Heart,
opened by the lance and still beating with love,
if not in the Sacrament of the Altar,
the abiding sign of my friendship of predilection
for each and every priest?

I am calling my priests back to my altars;
I am calling them into the healing radiance of my Eucharistic Face.
I am calling my priests
into the intimate friendship of my Eucharistic Heart.

Why do so few respond to my call?
It is, in effect, more than a call:
I plead with them to become entirely Eucharistic priests
living from my altar and for my altar,
and abiding as often as they can
in the radiance of my Eucharistic Face.

A priest who spurns my Divine Friendship
is an empty vessel,
a cause of sorrow to my Heart,
a blight upon the Church,
a disappointment to my faithful.

Do what you can, do what you must,
to draw your brother priests . . .
into the radiance of my Eucharistic Face.
There they will taste and will come to know the sweetness of my love
and the infinite treasures of my mercy for them.

From In Sinu Iesu, The Journal of A Priest

Posted in Our Catholic Identity, The future and our choices | Tagged , ,
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LENTCAzT 31: Friday of the 4th Week of Lent

Posted on 8 April 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

These 5 minute daily podcasts for Lent are intended to give you a small boost every day, a little encouragement in your own use of this holy season.

Today is the Friday of the 4th Week of Lent. The Roman Station is The Roman Station today is Sant’Eusebio. The titular cardinal is Daniel Nicholas DiNardo, Archbishop of Galveston Houston.

A hint at the thought: “Now it must be acknowledged that if in Jesus’ Resurrection we were dealing simply with the miracle of a resuscitated corpse, it would ultimately be of no concern to us.”

Subscribe on iTunes. Be sure to “update“!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Posted in LENT, LENTCAzT, PODCAzT, PRAYERCAzT: What Does The (Latin) Prayer Really Sound L | Tagged ,
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Br. Java wrote!

Posted on 7 April 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

I had an email from “Brother Java” of the Mystic Monk Coffee Carmelites in Wyoming.

Praised be Jesus Christ!

Dear Father Z,

We have just released our ever-popular Pascha Java, [which is like the Jingle-Bell Java].  I thought you may want to mention it to your readers.

In other news, we will be releasing a brand new line of Mystic Monk Tea next week….  Just in case you wanted to mention it to your readers also!

Did you tea drinkers see that?

By the way… if you don’t have a coffee grinder, the Monks have one for you right here.

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