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{]:¬)

Daily Rome Shot 725

Posted on 23 June 2023 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Photo from M

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I am regularly celebrating Mass for the intention of my benefactors, including those who send things from my wish list. My sandwich yesterday was magnificently augmented by great mustard, which recently arrived. Today’s Mass was for those regular donors who use Chase/Zelle. Thank you.

Today a cable should arrive, a replacement for one which I believed was damaged when water flooded the floor of my chapel when I was in Rome. It is for the “side cam” for the video stream of Mass. I hope this works.

Remind me to tell you about Federated Computer. This is really cool. I’m learning about it.

Global Chess League is taking place in Dubai from 12 June to 2 July 2 2023. The league introduces the franchise format to the sport of chess. It’s a mixed-team format of men, women and under 21 players. Six squads are involved with players like Magnus Carlsen, Vishy Anand and world champion Ding Liren. Follow the games live from 15:30 CEST (09:30 ET). Today: Carlsen vs Anand!

White to Move. Mate in 2.

NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.

Your use of my Amazon affiliate link is a major part of my income. It helps to pay for insurance, groceries, everything. Please remember me when shopping online. Thanks in advance. US HERE – UK HERE

The wonderful nuns of Gower Abbey, the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles, have a disc and digital download:

Tenebrae at Ephesus

US HERE – UK HERE

These are the RESPONSORIES of Tenebrae for all three days of the Triduum. They are, arguably, the most beautiful chants of the entire liturgical year.

Posted in SESSIUNCULA |
2 Comments

Tumbling thoughts about the Nativity of St. John the Baptist including, wort, witches and a hymn

Posted on 23 June 2023 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

There are lots of customs for the Vigil and the Feast of St. John the Baptist. Romans eat snails. Romans also would gather certain plants that were mature by this point, such as what we call St. John’s Wort, along with onions and garlic, which they thought drove off witches and demons. St. John’s Wort (Hypericum perforatum)… “Wort” is from Old English wyrt (German Würze), which means “plant”, but is used mostly in compounds. Since ancient times “singent’s wort” was known to relieve melancholy or depression, as does borage… which every garden should have. It would be hung above doors, windows and sacred images (hence the hyper-icum “above image”) to keep witches and evil spirit away. Burning those witches might have something to do with its effectiveness as well, now that I think about it. In Germanic countries witches were burned in effigy, which was handy because there is a special Blessing for Bonfires.

Also, we sing the lovely Vespers hymn Ut queant laxis.

I made a podcast about this years ago. 2007!

36 07-06-24 St. Augustine on John the Baptist; Ut queant laxis

Another world.

In 2012:

129 12-06-20 Of the solstice, and The Baptist, and summer poems

A lot of tears under the bridge since then.

It is the time of the Summer Solstice. At this point the days get shorter in the Northern Hemisphere. I looked at that HERE and HERE.

For the feast of St. John in June for centuries the Church has sung at Vespers the hymn beginning Ut queant laxis.

If you want to hear Ut queant laxis sung “in the wild”, as it were, check out the Benedictines at Norcia, a fine group of men, really living the Benedictine life in the place where Benedict is said to have been born. Chant album HERE). Also, check the monks at Le Barroux. Hard core. Fantastic chant. HERE

Those of you who are lovers of the movie The Sound of Music will instantly recognize this hymn as the source of the syllables used in solfège or solmization (the use of syllables instead of letters to denote the degrees of a musical scale). Both the ancient Chinese and Greeks had such a system.

The Benedictine monk Guido d’Arezzo (c. 990-1050) introduced the now familiar syllables ut re mi fa sol la for the tones of the hexachord c to a… or, more modally, the tonic, supertonic, mediant, etc. of a major scale. The Guidonian syllables derive from the hymn for the feast of St. John the Baptist:

UT queant laxis
REsonare fibris
MIra gestorum
FAmuli tuorum,
SOLve polluti
LAbii reatum,
Sancte Ioannes (SI).

After the medieval period (when music became less modal and more tonal) to complete the octave of the scale the other syllable was introduced (si – taken from S-ancte I-oannes, becomes “ti”) and the awkward ut was replaced sometime in the mid 17th c. with do (or also doh – not to be confused in any way with the Homeric Simpsonic epithet so adored by today’s youth, derived as it is from the 21st century’s new liturgical focal point – TV) and do came to be more or less fixed with C though in some cases do remains movable.

Posted in Our Catholic Identity |
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Daily Rome Shot 724

Posted on 22 June 2023 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

In other news, I think I found the perfect visual image of what sites like Fishwrap and the known papalotrous extremists are doing to their readers. This image is by Kiszkiloszki who also does some rather black humor things in the “Memento Mori” line.

Meanwhile, here’s a puzzle.

White to move. Mate in 2.

NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.

Interested in learning? Try THIS.. Last hours for 80% off for Father’s Day.

Get great beer. Help great traditional monks in Norcia.

Still working on Hungarian.. slowly. Still working on openings. It’s like being on an ocean without a bottom. Trying to revive my live Mass stream set up which has been mothballed for a long time. Laundry day. Starting on my weekly column. Lunch: Pastrami on rye with some great mustard that came from my wish list. Thanks CG!

Please remember me when shopping online. Thanks in advance. US HERE – UK HERE These links take you to a generic “catholic” search in Amazon, but, once in and browsing or searching, Amazon remembers that you used my link and I get the credit.

The inaugural edition of the Global Chess League is taking place in Dubai from June 21 to July 2, 2023. HERE

Posted in SESSIUNCULA |
2 Comments

“I’m delighted – if that’s the right word – to see this morning…”

Posted on 22 June 2023 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

As I was doing the first triage on my email, culling with sangfroid, I saw in the list an article alert from The Catholic Thing to which all you readers should subscribe. I saw “The Devil, You Say” by Francis X. Meier and the blurb, “Nefarious is a film about demonic possession, ….”.

Instantly, there flashed through my mind the phrase I knew I would start with in writing the post I knew I would write.

“I’m delighted – if that’s the right word – to see this morning…”

I opened the link to the article itself and read…

“One of the delights – if that’s the right word – of the recent film Nefarious …”

GMTA

Maier looks into the reactions of critics to the superbly crafted, powerfully acted film. “The pros” panned it, but El Pueblo loved it.

Nefarious is a must see movie.

US HERE – UK HERE

It is not for the very young. Don’t expect projectile vomit or levitations. Do expect a roller coaster into the psychologically cruel torture of the human participants. It is also a mini-workshop on accurate angelology from the Catholic (therefore correct and true) perspective.

A sample from Maier:

There comes a moment in Nefarious when the prison’s Catholic chaplain makes a brief appearance. The demon initially recoils in fear. . .until the priest starts blathering about how the Church has “evolved beyond” belief in devils, thanks to enlightened psycho-social tools. Later, along unintentionally similar lines, the unbelieving psychiatrist lists all the human advances in knowledge and behavior that today make religion obsolete. The demon in the human prisoner pauses. Grins. And then says, “I think I love you.”

That’s about right. The Enemy has human agents not just human objects of abuse, victims.

On that note, I read yesterday that the Jesuits have dismissed serial abuser, sex predator of those in his spiritual charge, Mark Rupnik for violations of obedience…. For being disobedient. They wanted Rupnik to “change community and to accept a new mission” and he wouldn’t do it. His puerile art is everywhere seen in the Novus world, especially in Italy. In the midst of his problems of excommunication and lifting and suspension etc he went right on publicly functioning, even giving the Lenten retreat for the VATICAN CURIA.

He was dismissed for disobedience.

I guess that, based on this, were a Jesuit superior to require a Jesuit involved in a certain type of activism that blurs distinctions of compassion and permission, and serious undermines Catholic moral teaching, to stop what he is doing he would either have to obey or be dismissed from the Jesuits. Right?

Posted in The Campus Telephone Pole | Tagged movie
6 Comments

SUMMER SOLSTICE 2023: “He must increase. I must decrease.”

Posted on 21 June 2023 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Today is the Summer Solstice. From now, our northern hemispheric days get shorter, as the world’s tilt starts changing our daily/seasonal clocks.

I was so aware of how the days were changing while I was in Rome, especially because I would post the sunrise and sunset and the Ave Maria.

Today, in Rome, the sunrise was at 05:32 and the sunset was at 20:31. The Ave Maria bells was to ring at 21:15.

An ancient Augustinian sermon made a connection between the Birth of the Lord, when the days go from shortest to getting longer, and the Birth of the Baptist, whose feast falls near the Summer Solstice.

So let both their deaths also speak of these two things: “It is necessary for him to grow, but for me to diminish.” The one grew on the Cross, the other was diminished by the sword. Their deaths have spoken of this mystery, let the days do so too. Christ is born, and the days start increasing; John is born, and the days start diminishing. So let man’s honor diminish, God’s honor increase, so that the honor of man may be found in the honor of God.

As the Baptist said, “He must increase. I must decrease.”

I said, above, “Augustinian sermon”, because s. 380, preached in a year we can’t quite figure out, might not be an authentic sermon of Augustine. Still, it is certainly Augustine in spirit and style.

Is HE increasing for you today?

Posted in Look! Up in the sky! | Tagged summer solstice
2 Comments

Meet the new Synodal (“walking together”) Mascot! “BLATHER”!

Posted on 21 June 2023 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

From my good friend and the Official Parodohymnodist of the blog, Fr. Tim Ferguson about a matter of great importance for the synodal (“walking together”) process (emphases added):

I was thinking this morning (dangerous occupation) about the Synodal Synod on Synodal Synodality, and the recent graphics issued. I’m sure there will be more, and probably even more artwork issued (who will take Fr. Rapenik’s place as artist laureate?).

But, thinking of the Olympics, what’s missing is a synodal mascot.

Since a mascot needs to exemplify the event, but also drum up interest and support in it, a mascot should be cute and cuddly.

Since the synod is largely useless, the mascot should be similarly useless. It should be something that makes little evolutionary sense and adds next to nothing to the ecosystem in which is dwells.

My first thought to propose for a synod mascot was a panda – cuddly, cute, endearing, but totally and entirely useless (I was sorely disappointed on a recent trip to Green Bay to find that the ubiquitous chain, Panda Express, offers absolutely no panda-based entrees, express or otherwise). But, upon reflection, a standard panda would not be a good mascot for the Synod, since their coloration is black and white. And if there is anything we are learning from the synod is that nothing is black and white anymore.

That led to consideration of the red panda, but it has a problematic name. For most in the world “red” is associated with socialism, and while the synod has many seemingly socialist tendencies, I’m not sure the organizers want that aspect of synodality to be widely known. Here in the States, red has become synonymous with the Republican party, and that would hardly be appropriate for an association with synodality.

So, back to Wikipedia to look for a more appropriate mascot. Then, I happened upon the quokka. It is cute, cuddly, and entirely useless. It provides little food, it has a very narrow habitat. While it appears to smile and be friendly, like the synod, these appealing aspects are largely a lie. It does not smile, it’s face is just made that way. When threatened, a mother quokka will throw her offspring in the way of the predator and make her escape. It is willing to throw the children under the bus, as it were, in order to preserve itself. Much like the synod.

Many celebrities have taken selfies with quokkas, they just love the little buggers, but again, its just for show.

Quokkas are also quickly going extinct, their population declining by half in recent decades, and are down to just a few thousand wild members, mostly in the brush around Perth.

I propose that we name him (or her) Blather, the Synodal Quokka.

He added.

I have no artistic skill, but by googling, I found this page of quokka pictures that are freely reproducible. Perhaps someone with better artistic skill than I could develop a cartoon for the synodal mascot Quokka.

Rhymes with “wokka”?

This rendition seems good, down to the selfie-stick. It’s there for others… also.

Posted in HONORED GUESTS, Lighter fare, PRAYERCAzT: What Does The (Latin) Prayer Really Sound L | Tagged Blather, mascot, synodality
11 Comments

From “The Private Diary of Bishop F. Atticus McButterpants” – 2019-02-21 – New personal stationary

Posted on 21 June 2023 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Dear Diary,

June 21st, 2023

The new personalized notes that Mrs. Kennedy ordered for me a couple of month ago arrived today. Finally! So classy! Cards and envelopes and a tear-off pad. Fr. Tommy worked with me on it because I wanted something from the Bible but with real oomph. When is Fr. Tommy coming back, I wonder? Gotta get a date on paper. Fr. Gilbert drives okay and he is a good golfer and there are fewer problems with Chester when he is here but there’s something about him that grates my cheese. From day one there has been a stream of cookies and pies sent up from the gals all over the office – that’s not bad since I get a lot. But, it’s all the special attention. And Chester just sorta goes limp.

The notes are nice white paper with a bit of a grain and the lettering is bright gold. My names on the top with a plus sign or a cross, I guess. The sides are decorated with a doohickey like tubes or sticks wrapped up in a cord. I have the sense of seeing them before somewhere. Rome maybe? I thought it might be spaghetti but something sticks out of the side. Anyway, its classy! Orlando? I know I’ve seen it.

Anyway, Fr. Tommy did a great job. I said I wanted a nice Latin inscription at the bottom. He was overjoyed. I made him happy. It’s the little things. I told him to choose it. It looks great. It says, I copied it down, “Quod Scripsi Scripsi”. More class yet! Why it has that word twice I don’t know. I asked Fr. Gilbert. He just shrugged and dimpled and went back to shaking Chester’s head by the ears saying it over and over in baby talk. If anyone else tried that with Chester, they’d get a new face. Dang, even that bugs me. Was it a typo? Nah. Tommy’s super accurate with writing stuff. Anyway, who’s gonna know? But it looks great!

Posted in Diary of Bp. McButterpants | Tagged Bp. Fatty McButterpants
6 Comments

Daily Rome Shot 723

Posted on 21 June 2023 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Four hours of OTB yesterday brought experiences good and better. Good were those in which playing black I overwhelmed strong opponents in QGD and others. Better were games with a very strong players who used the Italian Game and another who threw wild stuff at me with white like the Fried Liver and King’s Gambit. I handled the openings, losing by not being able to convert and then blundering a piece. It’s a pattern. I come into the middle game strong and don’t convert. The second, in two runs (at my request) again, I got the upper hand only to a) again blunder and b) get outplayed. With each lose I try to figure out where I went wrong, not just concretely but inside my head. All were with a clock – 15/3. I am not used to a clock, which was part of the point. I want to get used to the rhyme of moving and recording and also being forced to play faster and not move without due consideration.

Here is a puzzle. White to move and mate in 3.

NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.

Right now, 80% off on courses. Take a look Try THIS.

The Prague Chess Festival is beginning.

To demonstrate that chess is on the rise, chess.com was included in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential companies. In this I learned that Chris Prat is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son-in-law, and that Prat has not yet beaten him in chess. Both are avid.

Also, playing chess is getting so popular among kids that some school districts are banning chess.com.

“The New York Times also reported on Chess.com’s “Stealth Campaign That’s Getting Your Kids Hooked On Chess.””

College friends Erik and Jay bought the Chess.com domain for $55,000 in 2005.

Imagine.

Chess.com has hit number 1 on both Google Play and the U.S. iOS app store. In May, Chess.com’s membership went past 140 million worldwide, which represents a 355% increase since January 2020, with 150,000 new users registered each day. The site also had more than 57 million monthly active users playing 840 million games during the month, up 550% since January 2020. Chess.com is the 114th-ranked site on the internet.

I keep pounding away about learning to play and teaching your children. Some of my best memories of my grandfather stem from our playing chess together.

I’m counting on you!

Posted in SESSIUNCULA |
1 Comment

HAZMAT SUITS! Fishwrap time. UPDATE: DE-HAZ after Fishwrap!

Posted on 21 June 2023 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

I put on my hazmat suit this morning after a friend sent a link from Fishwrap to our chat group.

Vatican’s secretary of state: Clerical abuse not linked to homosexuality

Yet while the cardinal’s reflections are notable coming from the second-highest ranking person in the Vatican and indirectly push against claims from a number of right-wing prelates and activists who have repeatedly tried to tie clergy abuse to homosexuality, they are consistent with leading scientific findings on the origins of abuse.

Fishwrap… homosexuality… yeah. Never mind the percentages and ages.

River in Egypt.

Also, I learned that the Ass. of Catholic Priests met.

Assembly of US Catholic priests discusses calls for women’s ordination

If you read that one, get out your emesis basin or barf bag. No well-grounded person can keep down that quantity of sentimental Karo syrup. In short, a Hispanic woman comforted a crying young college age man (?), upset because others in his dorm were messy and wasted food. This means that women should be deaconettes and priests. We clearly need more synodality, it concludes. Beans gave a presentation. McElroy of San Diego:

Doctrine is in service to the pastoral service of the church. It cannot be erected in opposition to it or without reference to it without being more deeply and profoundly in the pastoral mission of the church,” McElroy said to applause.

Of course they applauded. That essentially means, “Put doctrine on the back shelf. Do what you will is the whole of the law”.

Fishwrap enriched our day with yet another story from the meeting of the Ass of Catholic Priests. Card. Tagle of Propaganda (aka Dicastery for Evangelization) was to address the Ass in person.

Cardinal Tagle tells US priests that resistance to pope is rooted in fear of change

He was, instead, sent to do something in the Congo so he spoke by video. The core: more synodality (“walking together”)! Anything other than leaving behind all that isn’t in keeping with a certain way of reading the Vatican II documents is rooted in “insecurity”. Sticking to tradition and reading Vatican II in keeping with tradition is “fear” and “ideology”.

Tagle said experience has taught him that fear of change can limit how the church responds to the needs of the world and works to further keep communities separated rather than unified. He expressed concern for the temptation to use faith-related matters to support ideology rather than Catholic teaching.

Am I wrong the key messaging in these stories? I don’t think so.

For the church of the future we need more homosexuality, female clergy, and wholesale jettisoning of everything that happened before about 1965.

Oh… and yoga. Yoga will help. Aimed at women and others.

Forming a sustainable Christian hope through the practice of yoga

Hmmm.

Forming a sustainable path to demonic oppression and possession through the practice of yoga

There. I fixed it.

UPDATE:

At Catholic World Report there is a lovely article by George Weigel about his high school Latin teacher who became Bishop of St. Augustine, the late Bp. Victor Galeone, who died at the end of May at 88 years of age.

A sample.

(His episcopate embodied his determination that the Novus Ordo be celebrated with dignity, including musical dignity. Thus a few years after he went to Florida, he called me one morning and said, “Hi, George, it’s Vic. You would have been very proud of me this morning.” To which I replied, “Victor, I’m always proud of you, but why should I be even more proud of you today?” “Because this morning I called the diocesan liturgy director and told her, ‘If the bishop ever hears “Gather Us In” at the beginning of a Confirmation Mass again, there will be no Confirmation!’”)

Not very synodal (“walking together”).

Posted in Deaconettes, Pò sì jiù, Sin That Cries To Heaven |
17 Comments

From “The Private Diary of Bishop F. Atticus McButterpants” – 2019-02-20 – The problem of Fr. Mark Rogers

Posted on 20 June 2023 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Editor’s Note: Due to the mention of Fr. Mark Rogers, we asked the mole to search back through previous photos to learn more. Here is something of what was turned up from 2019.

____

20 February 2019

Dear Diary,

There was a really bad storm last night that dumped a lot of snow. It was fun to see Chester drag Fr. Charlie into the big piles that the plow pushed around.

Finance meeting. It’s just not getting better. Gotta get more staff in to figure out where the money is going.

The worst part of the day was dealing with Fr. Mark Rogers. He was one of those hang overs from the time of old Bishop Hughes. Super conservative. For a long time he was at Hughes’s trad place – Shrine of the Martyrs of Islamic Terror – gotta do something about that name before the Nuncio gets on that one – because I couldn’t put him anywhere else. He used Latin and wore a cassock all the time and his parishioners were always on my case. He wouldn’t play ball. When his people visited someplace normal like Fr. Bruce’s community, they were always kneeling for Communion and causing a scene. Every time he or his people came up there was a headache. I figured he had psychological problems since he didn’t update. I sent him to that priest place out east, St. Leo’s. He really fought going. Not only that, when news got out about Fr. Mark leaving the Shrine and going to St. Leo’s an added positive was that a couple of the younger priests stopped showing up for things in cassocks. Leo’s is expensive, but two birds, and all. Some of the other bishops do this too, when they need to lay down the law and scare guys into line. The doctors reports said that they worked wonders with Fr. Mark. Odd, because he seemed sorta weird and downcast when he got back. Not happy at all.

When Fr. Mark came back I put him at Sing* so he could get into the swing of ministering in today’s Church. He came to see me several times and asked – pretty near begged – either to be moved or to be let go to do something like study or even go over to Black Duck where he knows some of the priests but I had to have bodies in the parishes. He didn’t want to live alone and wanted fellowship and community and worship with priests who were “actually Catholic”, which made me mad. He really must have been loopy because he just up and quit one day, disappeared out of the nice apartment we were paying for. I guess that proves I was right to send him in for treatment. We haven’t heard from him and don’t know where he is.

Anyway, I signed some papers and couple of letters sent word to DC and approved an announcement for the Glimpse**. Fr. Mark Rogers is suspended now and off the website. Sad, but what was I supposed to do? Fr. Charlie and Sr. Randi wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the day. It’ll blow over in a few days.

Steaks and taters tonight with Dozer who is in town.

*Sing A New Faith Community Into Being Faith Community

**The newspaper of the Diocese of Libville.