Here’s something fun. The Great Roman alerted me to a podcast from Madison’s best radio host – she should be national – Vicki McKenna: the voice of reason in a city of chaos.
POLITICALLY CORRECT NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
So, word reached me about the local podcast via Rome. Ho ho ho.
Enjoy!
UPDATE:
Also,
A Politically Correct Night Before Christmas | Vicki McKenna | 1310 WIBA https://t.co/Ov9xdlyqXT
— Vicki McKenna (@VickiMcKenna) December 22, 2018
Originally, the second Mass of Christmas went together with Lauds. The antiphons of Lauds form a kind of call and response, or question and answer cant about the experience of the shepherds coming to find the Christ Child. Sometimes the Second Mass of Christmas is nicknamed the “Mass of the Shepherds” and we call it by the name of the Introit as well. Lux fulgebit (Isaiah 9 with Ps 92).
COLLECT:
Da nobis, quaesumus, omnipotens Deus: ut, qui nova incarnati Verbi tui luce perfundimur; hoc in nostro resplendeat opere, quod per fidem fulget in mente.
This is an ancient prayer, found in manuscripts of the Gregorian Sacramentary, such as the Hadrianum and Paduense. It survived the experts of Bugnini’s Consilium to live on in the same moment in the Novus Ordo.
Your Lewis & Short will enlighten you that perfundo is “to pour over, to wet, moisten, bedew, besprinkle”. But it comes to mean also, in a poetic sense and in post-Augustan prose, “of the sun’s beams or fire, to flood or fill”. Thus it also means “to imbue, inspire, fill with any thing”, as with joy or with fear or with awe.
The theme of light plays through all the texts of this Mass, as it does, but in a different sense, in the Mass in Nocte, Dixit Dominus. Playing out through the Mass is the rising sun and the shepherd’s at the manger.
Light in the morning shines through the Mass, as it does right at this moment of writing for me – the sun streaming into the window its low beams in the depths of winter as it rises far toward the south and late in the morning. Remember also that in the Introit, though we have just a snippet of the Ps 92, we are supposed to remember from that single line the whole of the psalm. Monks could do that. Pious Jews could do that. We should at least look up the psalms cited in the verses of the Antiphon and consider what the Church is saying to us by citing it.
Opus is certainly work or labor, but it goes a bit farther to embrace alse “action” or “business” in the wider sense of all we do outwardly.
LITERAL VERSION:
We beseech You, Almighty God, grant to us
who are bathed in the new light of Your incarnate Word;
that this which gleams in the mind through faith,
may shine brightly in our action.
Note all the “light” words.
Briefly, there is a play between the inward and the outward. Light can shine in our eyes and it is very visible. But sacramental grace is “insensible”, but its presence in us is known to others by our outward deeds.
Latch into that word perfundimur, “we are bathed” in new light. This sounds like baptism, in a sense.
Also, we ask God to illumine our faith. In this life we walk in darkness. We see through St. Paul’s glass, “darkly”. In heaven we will not have faith, but rather knowledge. But there are those moments of realization, when we have encountered mystery when we we have a transforming or illuminating experience which, as a consequence, changes us in ways that are discernible in our outward lives and inward peace.
Also, remember from all eternity the Word, the Logos, was the perfect invisible image of the invisible Father God. In the incarnation he becomes the perfect visible image of the invisible God. We are images of God. In our words and deeds, that image should shine in us so that others may see it.
We ask for transforming graces. But in receiving them, we can be a shining mirror, though still dark and cracked in places it is admitted, to reflect God’s light to others.
There is so much more to say about this oration, and all the others, but that’s what we have time for today.
Merry Christmas!
From a reader…
QUAERITUR:
What is your favorite Christmas image?
Well, a rather personal and extremely difficult question.
Without a lot of reflection, what came quickly to mind is the 1597 painting in the Prado by Federico Barocci.
There’s stillness and there’s action. The composition is simple. Follow the lines. Look for the light source!
Favorite? This is one of them.
The late, great Extraordinary Ordinary, Most Rev. Robert C. Morlino, Bishop of Madison, enjoyed Christmas. On Christmas Eve he had priest friends come for supper before his vigil Mass. That’s where, surely, we would be as I type this.
Alas.
A dear friend sent me this video, which I had not seen when it came out. Coming right now, it has a sweetly bitter taste, like the panettone and prosecco which I have unfailingly had at this time of year for some 3o years, remembrance of a bitter sweet Christmas.
The loss of Bp. Morlino during The Present Crisis was a heavy blow. Many around the world now watch to see whom Rome will select to fill the empty shoes in Madison. I have handed my names up to God and I have offered the sufferings of my last weeks for the sake of his successor’s appointment.
I ask you, too, to pray. Ask God for a beautiful gift.
Thank you to Michael Matt and The Remnant for that video.
Was there a good point made in the sermon you heard at your Mass of Obligation for the Nativity of Our Lord? Or perhaps you went to more than one Mass?
Let us know what it was!
Yes, a good point!
UPDATE 26 Dec:
The bishop “corrected” things – he thinks – in a sermon. HERE
UPDATE 24 Dec:
Note below that I wrote: “what they are reported to have said”
From a reader …
Quick update: as expected Bp. Linda has now denied saying what he said. According to his (I think) note to Observador, he will “proclaim his total adherence to the faith of the Church regarding the virginity of Our Lady”
(He will proclaim [it]…) tomorrow at Mass, during the Homily, which will be broadcasted by Radio Renascença (Portugal’s ‘c’atholic radio).
I will try to get that and send it to you
If the bishop was misquoted, what about the other guy?
___
Originally Published on: Dec 24, 2018
Observador, a Portuguese site, posts the responses of Bp. Manuel Linda, Bishop of Porto, and Fr. Anselmo Borges, essayist and university professor at Coimbra University, to seven questions.
Their responses include that Mary was not a virgin and that Christ, conceived in the normal human way, was not born in Bethlehem.
This, a contradiction of the clear teaching of the Church, is heresy. These men should be investigated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and required publicly to correct what they are reported to have said.
Try this on for size…
3. And how can Jesus be the son of a virgin?
Jesus is not the son of a virgin woman, both Father Borges and Bishop Linda explain. He was conceived by Mary and Joseph like any other person and he is “truly man”. Virginity is only associated with Mary as a metaphor to prove that Jesus was a very special person.
The gospel of St. Luke, one of the most trustworthy in the Bible, tells us that an angel called Gabriel was sent by God to the city of Nazareth, in Galilee, to visit Mary, presented as “a virgin wedded to a man”. The angel said to her: “Mary, do not fear, because you have found grace before God. And in your womb, you will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be grand and he will be called the son of the Highest. And our Lord God will give to him the throne of David, his father. He will reign eternally in the house of Jacob and his kingdom will have no end”.
Mary was confused because she had never had sexual relations with any man. But the angel Gabriel explained it to her: “The Holy Spirit will descend upon you and the virtue of the Highest will cover you with his shadow. For that, the Saint, who will be born from you, will also be called Son of God. And also, your cousin Elizabeth has conceived a son in her old age. And this is the sixth month for that who was called sterile. Nothing is impossible for God”.
Regardless of these words, Bp. Linda told Observador that “we should never refer to the physical virginity of the Virgin Mary”: “The Old Testament says many times that Jesus would be born from a damsel, daughter of Israel, who would be simple, poor and humble. But, in truth, that is only a reference to that woman’s total devotion to God. The gift of being mother of God was given to Mary because because she had an undivided heart. What matters is the total donation”, Bp. Linda explains. And he adds: “There certainly exist women with a broken hymen [which is associated to the physical sign of a woman losing her virginity] who are more virgin in the sense of total devotion to God that other women with an intact hymen”.
[…]
So, to say that Jesus was born of a virgin woman is a theological truth but not necessarily a biological truth. Fr. Borges even adds that “theology is not a treatise in biology” and that the virginity of Mary only serves to “underline the importance of Jesus as God’s special son”: “Mary and Joseph only later realized the special son they had had. Any mother is amazed at her sons and with Mary and Joseph the same thing happened. Our Lady is special because she converted to the message of Jesus. Sometimes she understood it, sometimes she didn’t”, Fr. Borges concludes.
There are other wrong ideas about the life of Jesus beside having been born from a virgin woman. For example, it is a custom to say that Mary’s parents were called Anna and Joaquim, but that is nowhere to be found in the Bible. It is just that those aspects became “tradition”, Bp. Linda explains.
Fr. Borges agrees and says that happens because Jesus’ biography started to be written backwards. Jesus was, probably, not born in Bethlehem as the Bible says: in truth, he must have been born in Nazareth. But since for Christians Jesus is “the true Messiah”, then that means in theory that, like Joseph, he is part of the lineage of king David, who was from Bethlehem. Jesus must have also been exiled in Egypt, as the Bible suggests. Only he is the “true liberator”. Now, Moses is from Egyptian origins and was a liberator of the people of Israel. That is why a parallel was drawn between both.
The Church teaches clear that Mary always a virgin ante partum, in partu, post partum, before, during and after the birth of Jesus Christ.
So much for the prophecy that the Messiah, from the line of David, would be born in David’s city, Bethlehem (“house of bread”), where David was crowned.
There is an old but good piece about the virginity of Mary by Fr. William Most. HERE He lays out various point at which the Church clarified the doctrine of the virgin birth and perpetual virginity of Mary. It is a good reference.
The doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary was was taught very early by Fathers, including, Sts. Athanasius, Ambrose, and Augustine. It was taught dogmatically at Constantinople II in 553 that Mary is “ever-virgin.” Pope Martin I (+655) taught that “ever-virgin” meant Mary was a virgin before, during, and after Christ’s birth. This has been reaffirmed so many times through the centuries that summing them up here would take too much space. As Fr. Most puts it:
A doctrine taught with multiple papal approval plus that of Vatican II should be called infallible, for these texts show the intention to make it definitive by their repetition. It shows the way the texts of the Church are to be understood. So the Holy Office was right in calling the ideas of [Viennese theologian Albert] Mitterer and others, “flagrant contradiction to the doctrinal tradition of the Church.”
Mitterer and others, such as Walter Kasper and Jean Galot have bought into same garbage that these Portuguese clerics have peddled.
“Flagrant contradiction to the doctrinal tradition of the Church.”
This is the poison fruit of too great an emphasis on those tools of modern scholarship which wind up destroying that to which they are applied. The inevitable result is the sowing of confusion and the erosion of faith of good people. What these men did was nothing short of scandalous.
The best examination of what this improper approach to the data of faith does – and its corrective – is from Benedict XVI in the first volume of his three part Jesus of Nazareth series. In his forward, he lays it all out.
Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration US HERE – UK HERE
And don’t forget, in this season, his volumn on the Infancy Narratives. US HERE – UK HERE
From CH:
Senators quiz nominee about membership of ‘extreme’ Knights of Columbus
A spokesperson said the Knights were ‘extremely disappointed’ with the questioning
Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have questioned a candidate for the federal bench over his membership of the Knights of Columbus, with some calling the group’s Catholic views on abortion and same-sex marriage “extreme.” Senators also questioned if belonging to the Catholic charitable organization could prevent judges from hearing cases “fairly and impartially.”
Senators Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and Kamala Harris (D-CA) raised membership of the Knights as a point of concern during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s consideration of Brian C. Buescher, an Omaha-based lawyer nominated by President Trump to sit on the United States District Court for the District of Nebraska.
In written questions sent to Mr. Buescher by committee members on December 5, Sen. Hirono stated that “the Knights of Columbus has taken a number of extreme positions. For example, it was reportedly one of the top contributors to California’s Proposition 8 campaign to ban same-sex marriage.”
[…]
Anti-Catholicism alive and well in the Democrat Party.
You might remember the shameful and hate-filled performances of Hirono and Harris during the Kavanaugh hearings.
Let’s view the Collect in the Novus Ordo for the 4th Sunday of Advent, which is also the Post Communion for the Feast of the Annunciation (25 March) in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite (1962MR).
The Annunciation was the moment of the Incarnation of our Lord.
Therefore, on that feast and on Christmas, during the Creed of Holy Mass according to the Ordinary Form, we bend our knees instead of merely bowing at the words “Et incarnatus est…”.
Alas! Only on those two days do we kneel during the Creed with the Ordinary Form!
In the Extraordinary Form we always kneel during the Creed at that profound moment. Such gestures serve to build and reinforce our Catholic Christian identity. But I digress.
If you recite the Angelus (which has an indulgence), you know today’s Collect. It was already in the 8th century Gelasian Sacramentary.
Gratiam tuam, quaesumus Domine, mentibus nostris infunde, ut qui, Angelo nuntiante, Christi Filii tui incarnationem cognovimus, per passionem eius et crucem ad resurrectionis gloriam perducamur.
The last lines have wonderful alliteration and a snappy final cadence (glóriam perducámur). Collects are often little treasure boxes.
Cognosco is, generally, “to become thoroughly acquainted with (by the senses or mentally), to learn by inquiring…”, but in the perfect tenses (cognovimus) it is “to know” in all periods of Latin. Infundo basically is “to pour in, upon, or into” but in the construction (which we see today) infundere alicui aliquid) it is “to pour out for, to administer to, present to, lay before”. It can mean, “communicate, impart”. Perduco, “to lead or bring through”, is “guide a person or thing to a certain goal”. It can also mean “to drink off, quaff”, a nice counterpoint to infundo.
A LITERAL RENDERING:
We beg You, O Lord, pour Your grace into our minds and hearts, so that we who came to know the incarnation of Christ Your Son in the moment the Angel was heralding the news, may be guided through His Passion and Cross to the glory of the resurrection.
That angelo nuntiante is an ablative absolute. By its “present” tense it is contemporary with the time of the past tense in cognovimus. Thus, in the very moment the Angel was heralding the good news, we (collectively in the shepherds) knew about how God the Son, who had taken our whole human nature into an indestructible bond with His divinity, was being born into this world. The shepherds then rushed to the Coming of the Lord to see the Word made flesh lying in His wooden manger, which foreshadowed His wooden Cross.
OBSOLETE ICEL (1973):
Lord, fill our hearts with your love, and as you revealed to us by an angel the coming of your Son as man, so lead us through his suffering and death to the glory of his resurrection.
NEW CORRECTED ICEL (2011):
Pour forth, we beseech you, O Lord, your grace into our hearts, that we, to whom the Incarnation of Christ your Son was made known by the message of an Angel, may by his Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of his Resurrection.
“Seeing is believing”, they say, but believing makes us want to see. “Crede ut intellegas! Believe that you may understand!” is a common theme for St. Augustine of Hippo (+430 – e.g., s. 43,4.7; 118,1; Io. eu. tr. 29,6).
Today many people pit faith against reason, authority against intellect, as if they were mutually exclusive.
Faith and authority are indispensible for a fuller rational, intellectual apprehension of anything. In all the deeper questions of human existence, we need the illumination that comes from grace and revelation. We must receive and believe. Faith is the foundation of our hope, which leads to love and communion with God, as Augustine would say (trin. 8,6).
When we hear about something or learn a new thing we often rush to know more, to have personal experience, to see.
This is a paradigm for our life of faith.
There is an interlocking cycle of hearing a proclamation (such as the Gospel at Mass, a homily, or a teaching of the Church) or observing the living testimony of a holy person’s life (such as Theresa of Calcutta).
Because of an experience of reception, and subsequent pondering, we come to love the content of that which we received.
The content of the prayers which Holy Church gives us is the Man God Jesus Christ.
By hearing and pondering and using well these prayers, we come all the better to know Christ and to love Him. In loving Him we desire all the more to know Him.
Acceptance of the authority of the content of our orations at Mass opens previously unknown treasuries which would otherwise be locked.
This is why our translations are so important.
Remember! Our prayers at Mass were composed in Latin.
Some of them are ancient indeed. They are, indeed, like treasure boxes which, with the right keys, we can open to find irreplaceable riches.
Our Blessed Mother, so closely associated with today’s Collect, first received the message of the Angel.
She accepted and believed the message, and made it her own.
She pondered it in her heart.
She pronounced her Magnificat.
She brought our Savior into the light of the world.
The angel heralded with authority once again.
The shepherds accepted and believed.
They rushed to Bethlehem and pondered.
They saw the Infant.
They understood the message of the Word made flesh.
They knelt.
They worshiped.
This is the cycle of our experience of the reception of the content of our Faith in worship.
From a reader…
QUAERITUR:
The Christmas Proclamation (from the Martyrology). I know it is sung prior to Midnight Mass in the OF. Does it fit in the Traditional Mass, or is it relegated to the hour of Prime?
We are talking here about the Kalendas, the solemn announcement of the birth of the Savior. It was sung at Prime. Since Prime isn’t being sung in many places, and since we need to have these good customs in far greater use, I say go ahead and sing it before Midnight Mass in the Usus Antiquior.
In the proclamation, the birth of Christ follows a list of important events, set points in history, which therefore puts the birth of Christ into the context of the history of salvation, beginning with the Creation of the world and culminating in the Nativity.
Remember that in the ancient world there was no standard calendar. So, one way to pinpoint events was to say what else was going on at the time according to other reckonings of time. The overlap of the dates would then give you the desired result, like a chronological Venn Diagram. The overlapping of the dates of the events cited in the Proclamation results in an accurate dating of the Nativity, that is 3/2 BC. There is good scholarship that reinforces 3/2 BC and cleans up a dating error for the year of Herod’s death.
I wrote about it at some length last year and made a recording for those who had to practice it. HERE I found a good Gregorian notation for the 2018 Kalendas (for the 2019 dates) at the site of Cappella Gregoriana Sanctæ Cæciliæ olim Xicatunensis.
Here is a fast recording for this year.
I must say that Francis hasn’t lost his penchant for springing surprises.
Yesterday was the annual audience with the Roman Curia for their exchange of Christmas greetings, etc. The “etc.” has also in years past included a couple of brutal verbal beatings. This year, he went on at length about types of abuse.
What left me rather gobsmacked was the gift Francis gave to everyone. HERE
A new edition of the Compendio di teologia ascetica e mistica di Adolphe Tanquerey. This would be, I think, The Spiritual Life: A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology. US HERE – UK HERE What Francis gave them is a new Italian edition by an auxiliary of Diocese of Rome and the spiritual director of the seminary.
He said, off the cuff, “Credo che è bene, magari non leggerlo tutto ma cercare nell’indice su questa virtù, su questo atteggiamento… I think it would be good, maybe not to read the whole thing but to look in the index for this or that virtue, this or that attitude…”. He made a connection between personal and then institutional reform, which is logical.
The works of Tanquerey are classics of early 20th c. French theology and spirituality, and the delight of unreconstructed ossified manualists, like myself.
In the background you see the books being distributed. I didn’t see any of them burst into flames at its touch.
Coat of Arms by D Burkart
Brian64 on ROME 26/10– Day 27: Vigil: “I think father was referring to the cars: “Say the black; do the red.””
on You knew this had to happen: “If the traditionalist pilgrimage couldn’t have Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica because the Mass last year was “instrumentalized,” it follows…”
on ASK FATHER: Definition and the duties of a pastoral associate. : “I have a question. Did the Catholic Church use the terms rector or vicar before Vatican II. I always thought…”
on ASK FATHER: Definition and the duties of a pastoral associate. : “Spot on. My understanding is that the standard term per Canon Law 545 is “parochial vicar” and that the other…”
on You knew this had to happen: ““Gee, if all religions lead to the same place, and these ladies have a vocation to the priesthood, why don’t…”
on You knew this had to happen: “Two blasts from the past: http://archive.wf-f.org/JFH-Schism.html https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/shape-schism-yet-to-come/”
on ASK FATHER: Definition and the duties of a pastoral associate. : “When was the good old term “curate” abandoned?”
on ROME 26/10 – Day 28: Natalis Dies: “Happy Birthday, Father! (Slightly belated,but still within the octave.)”
A Daily Prayer for Priests
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