From a reader…
QUAERITUR:
My parish priest has asked me to find a trustworthy cleaner who can clean an old, very beautiful and still in very good shape Cope. It was made in France for the local Polish church and seems to have gold thread, satin with lots of embroidery and is of a very high quality. Any thoughts? I am located in the north east of the USA but obviously am willing to mail it. Thank you.
Any thoughts?
Today is the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, the only saint mentioned in Canon Law apart from feasts. Canon Law requires that seminarians be formed especially according to the thought of St. Thomas. HA!
Remember how Aquinas was instrumentalized to justify Communion for those in objective adultery according to that infamous footnote in Amoris laetitia? For more about that, I suggest THIS and THIS. It’s quite shocking. The Angelic Doctor would be horrified.
In any event, here is an oldie but goodie.
___
In the post-Conciliar, Novus Ordo calendar today [28 Jan] is the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (+1274). Let’s hear two prayers from the Angelic Doctor, his Prayer Before Mass and Communion and his Prayer After Mass and Communion in both Latin and English.
Some of the music came from the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.
As a bonus, here is my 1st class relic of the saint.
https://zuhlsdorf.computer/podcazt/16_01_28.mp3
Photo by The Great Roman™
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Meanwhile,… white to move and win.
NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.
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Pro Chess League resumes tomorrow, 8 March.
IMPORTANT BOOK
However, the 2023 Chessable Masters is 4-7 April and it will be the last time 32-year old Magnus Carlsen completes while holding the title “World Champion”. He will remain the high rated player in the world and arguably the “GOAT”. He has been World Champion for over a decade. The upcoming world championship match will end by 1 May and either China’s Ding Liren or Russia’s Ian Nepomniachtchi will hold the title World Champion. Whether or not they will be able to beat Magnus in tournaments is another matter.
In other news, the Russian Chess Federation (largest in the world – 35K players and 200 GMs) have broken with the European Chess Union and are joining the Asia Chess Federation. It is excepted that some players will break with Russia and will join European groups. Does it make a difference what flag a play plays under? I guess it does for events like the Olympics.
March 6, 2023
Dear Diary,
“Mr. Domenico” has been the tailor here for years. Cute old guy. A true expert. Saw him just before Christmas to be fitted for some new things. He outdid himself. The new cassocks are slimming. He took my measurements, but I also gave him an old house-cassock of mine that had seen better days to compare. The old one fit me fairly well, but it had stains all over it … noticeable.
He also delivered my new vestments for the Easter season, all in white brocade. No cheeseburgers or tacos in the sacristy anymore! It’s a complete set. He said “classical”. It has one of those bizarre short stoles, same fabric as the real stole but with ties in the middle. Fr. Tommy said it was a manipulate. Domenico personalized the chasuble with a Latin saying embroidered on the inside, from the Bible. I copied it down. Domine Iam Foetet. Lord, I’m something or other. Happy? Anyway, it was nice of him.
AND it’s better than anything Dozer has. Can’t budge him out of polyester.
That reminds me. Jude wore a super-thin dalmattic last year under his chasuble when he ordained those ten new priests, so now I feel like I have to, at least for big events. Gotta talk to Domenico.
Too many people today are without good, strong preaching, to the detriment of all. Share the good stuff.
It was the 2nd Sunday of Lent in the Novus Ordo and in the Vetus Ordo.
Was there a GOOD point made in the sermon you heard at your Sunday Mass of obligation?
Tell about attendance especially for the Traditional Latin Mass. I hear that it is growing. Of COURSE.
Any local changes or (hopefully good) news?
I have some thoughts about the Sunday reading HERE.
Photo by The Great Roman™
St Peter’s dome is turning black. Why?
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Meanwhile,…
White to move. White is in serious trouble and the best outcome is to go the half-point by a draw or stalemate. Can you “not lose”?
NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.
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Pro Chess League action resumes on 8 March.
Robert Royal has a good piece today at The Catholic Thing about the twisty, tricksy, rhetoric of reality distortion that is hanging like a dense fog obscuring the swamp of synodality (“walking together-ity”).
The Ruinous Rhetoric of ‘Synodal Interpretation’
Here’s a taste.
[…]
In The Divine Project: Reflections on Creation and the Church, a series of lectures from 1985, lost but rediscovered and recently published by Ignatius Press, Joseph Ratzinger’s very first sentences read:
Our first concern in this opening lecture is to work out the standards that we will be using to interpret Scripture: How, indeed, can we properly understand a biblical text – not coming up with ideas of our own, but remaining honest with ourselves as interpreters of history – and yet, without doing violence to the text, inquire into its relevance for the present?
This strikes the ancient Catholic note, the desire to know what God has communicated, carefully distinguishing what we might like to be the case, for whatever reasons, from what is the case, and the further effort – beyond intellectualism – to discern how it should shape our lives.
Compare Ratzinger’s spirit in seeking to understand Creation with this account in “Vatican News,” the website of the Vatican Dicastery for Communication, of remarks by the General Relator of the Synod on Synodality at the Asian Continental Assembly on Synodality:
In his third and final point, Cardinal [Jean-Claude] Hollerich offered a synodal interpretation of the creation text. Rather than looking at the text as the creation of “man,” or “man and woman,” or the institution of marriage and the family, a “synodal interpretation of the text” is that “humanity” was created, he said. “We as Church are part of that humanity, and we are called to serve humanity. So, a synodal Church is a Church that is missioned by Christ, proclaiming the Gospel. And if we do not serve the world, nobody will believe in [our] proclamation of the Gospel.”
Anyone reading this might be forgiven for thinking that “a synodal interpretation” – not only of the Creation account but of the Bible in general – really seeks to correct the defects of the text. Forget those simplistic bronze-age binaries, “male and female” He created them, or on the very next page, “For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.” (Gn. 2:24)
Forget what the text – which is to say divine revelation – actually says, concrete reference to man and woman. We now have – who knows how? – “humanity.”
[…]
One more step towards being a fulltime NGO.
As we wait for more recent entries, here is an older one. Poor Fr. Tommy. He has to deal with a guy whose need not to be alone is nearly pathological.
August 8th 2022
Dear Diary,
Low-key day. Nothing on calendar. Asked Fr. Tommy at breakfast if he had any ideas about what we could do today. He looked at me like I had asked him to explain the Trinity or something, kind of flushing red and then he got real pale. For a second I thought he was gonna hurl — maybe it was that omelette? Anyway, he assured me he was fine. So we took off for the golf course and had a great time. Fr. Tommy drives a mean golf cart. Then we stopped for a nice lunch and went shopping. Bought some great stuff! Fr. Tommy lugged all of it upstairs for me, too. He’s a nice young priest, even though with spouting all that Latin I miss some of his ‘inside jokes’ – ha! Too many more episodes like this morning, though, and I’m going to have to look into sending him for evaluation at the priest funny farm. Get it together, Tommy, or I’ll call your grandmother!
Photo by The Great Roman™
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Use FATHERZ10 at checkoutMeanwhile,…
White to move. Weave the net!
NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.
Interested in learning? Try THIS.
In news from chess.com… dig this! This is about their stats for the month of February (a short month, btw.):
In total, there were an astonishing 1,057,320,754 games played on Chess.com. Of those, 576,946,832 were live games, of which 3,181,513 were daily games, and 480,373,922 were against the computer.
It works out as around 37.67 million games per day played in February. For comparison, that’s nearly 2.8 times the average number of games played per day in 2022, which was 13.53 million.
To put the numbers into context, there were a grand total of 16.83 billion games played here from September 2016 to February 2023. Unfortunately, Chess.com does not hold an accurate figure for the total amount of games played on the platform before 2016.
Records have been broken at regular intervals since the turn of the year. In fact, on December 31, the site hit 7,000,000 daily users for the first time. Within three weeks, that record had risen to 10,000,000.
This is an explosion.
The other day I was at the car dealership for the ride’s annual checkup and recall updates. I had brought a travel set and a book with opening lines to work on while I waited. Soon thereafter, one of the salesman – about 30 – approached and we chatted for bit. He told me that he had just gotten into chess recently, that he had not played as a kid. Then another worker there, younger, came by and said that he was just getting into chess and asked about the notation – “code” – in the book. He sat down and I explained how it worked. He asked for a game and we commenced. What resulted was interesting. After a few minutes some staff and the waiting customers were gathered at the table watch.
Shortly before, they had been all looking at their phones or at the big TV screen. Suddenly, zero screens and 100% human interaction.
In itself, this is an argument in favor of learning to play and then going out and playing.
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