Click!
As I wing my way away from Gotham.
Just a glimpse or two of some wonderful moments from my stay.
A stroll in Central Park with all the leaves changing.
A detail of a medieval Sacramentary from the Hildesheim exhibit at the Met (presently my phone’s wallpaper).
And, people skating at Bryant Park.
Finally, painted by you know who… that unmistakable style…
It was great to catch up with friends and meet some new people. I must return to catch the Vermeer exhibit before it leaves in January.
It seems that the staff of the National Schismatic Reporter (aka Fishwrap) didn’t get the memo.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in March 2012, issued a “Notification” (i.e., a really serious warning, an authoritative and official judgment from the Church) about the bad theology of Sr. Margaret Farley, RSM, in her spectacularly bad book Just Love. A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. HERE
You will remember Sr. Margaret from the now infamous post NUNS GONE WILD (If you are a relatively new reader here, go read that post!) A reminder:
Margaret Farley: over the years, she has taken positions favorable to abortion, same-sex “marriage,” sterilization of women, divorce and the “ordination” of women to the priesthood. Farley, who taught Christian ethics at Yale Divinity School, is well known for her radical feminist ideas and open dissent from Church teaching. In 1982, when the Sisters of Mercy sent a letter to all their hospitals recommending that tubal ligations be performed in violation of Church teaching against sterilization, Pope John Paul II gave the Sisters an ultimatum, causing them to withdraw their letter. Farley justified their “capitulation” on the ground that “material cooperation in evil for the sake of a ‘proportionate good’” was morally permissible. In other words, she declared that obedience to the Pope was tantamount to cooperation in evil, and that the Sisters were justified in doing it only because their obedience prevented “greater harm, namely the loss of the institutions that expressed the Mercy ministry.” In her presidential address to the Catholic Theological Society of America in 2000 she attacked the Vatican for its “overwhelming preoccupation” with abortion, calling its defense of babies “scandalous” and asking for an end to its “opposition to abortion” until the “credibility gap regarding women and the church” has been closed. In her book Just Love she offers a full-throated defense of homosexual relationships, including a defense of their right to marry. She admits that the Church “officially” endorses the morality of “the past,” but rejoices that moral theologians like Charles Curran and Richard McCormick embrace “pluralism” on the issues of premarital sex and homosexual acts. She says that sex and gender are “unstable, debatable categories,” which feminists like her see as “socially constructed.” She has nothing but disdain for traditional morality, as when she remarks that we already know the “dangers” and “ineffectiveness of moralism” and of “narrowly construed moral systems.”
Fishwrap has a post about Women resistant to Pope Francis’ call for new theology.
At the end, they present a bunch of books which the Fishwrappers think should be starting points for a theology of women (whatever that is). The list concludes:
A book that isn’t explicitly about women, but offers a corrective to some of the church’s outdated teaching on sexuality, which Francis will certainly have to reexamine if the Christian community is to move forward with a transformed understanding of women, is Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics by Margaret A. Farley (Continuum, 2006).
— Dennis Coday
A “corrective”! ROFL!
Head on over to the CDF and read what Sr. Margaret thinks about a range of issues such as masturbation and same-sex stuff. HERE
From a reader:
I know that the Immaculate Conception is transferred to December 9th this year. Is it obligatory to attend mass on that day?
This year, 2013, 8 December falls on a Sunday. For this reason, according to the Ordinary Form calendar, the celebration of the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception has been transferred to Monday 9 December.
In these USA, the Immaculate Conception is also our national patronal feast.
For good or for ill, the bishops conference usually waives obligations of Holy Days which are too close to a Sunday (which is always a day of Obligation). We can’t have people arranging their oh so busy lives around something like Mass! Imagine such a thing! But I digress.
My understanding is that, barring particular law in some diocese, this year 9 December is NOT a Holy Day of Obligation in most dioceses.
Call your local chancery and ask, just to be sure. I have seen some variations when cruising on diocesan pages looking for their liturgical calendars. Feel free to report your findings in the combox.
In the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite Immaculate Conception is a 1st class feast that trumps the Sunday (which gets a commemoration). In the EF we don’t transfer Immaculate Conception to Monday (which would be a ferial day in Advent).
In other words, in the EF we know exactly what to do this year.
However, had Monday 9 December been retained as a Holy Obligation then … and this is where I briefly open and then instantly close the rabbit hole … there is a disputed question about whether evening Mass on Sunday, 8 December would satisfy both the Sunday and the Monday obligation. But this is NOT the case this year and we don’t have to worry about this, nor do we need to discuss it. I bring it up here before someone else does. Rabbit hole closed.
Let me tell you a little about Holy Innocents Church in Manhattan.
I have written about the place many times but usually from the point of view of their upcoming Masses and events. It has also been my honor to be celebrant there sometimes.
On this trip, however, I had the occasion to wait for a friend for a while. I sat myself in the back of the church. I resolved my office, said some prayers, and then watched.
There were about a dozen people in the church at any given moment. Some were kneeling, some coming, some going. They were of every race and, judging from their clothing, every economic level. One homeless guy caught forty winks in a dark niche. Most people parked in a pew to pray for a while in the relative quiet. Quite a few would then rise and seek out one of the many statues or shrines of saints or our Lord or Lady in the church.
One frequented point for pious prayer is a statue of Our Lord, dead, after being deposed from the Cross.
There was a steady stream to this image, placed at about hip level.
Person after person went over to Him and stood and gazed at His Body. Sometimes they reached out to touch His wounds.
I saw one particularly tough looking hombre, whom life was clearly riding pretty hard, go over to the shrine and stand and gaze.
He then reached out and stroked the Lord’s head, as if smoothing His hair. He put his hand on His hand.
He bent down and kissed His feet.
There was a constant stream of people in and out of the church, one after another, each with their private cares and prayers.
They just sit. They pray. They light candles. They visit the statues and images. They kneel at the altar rail close to the Blessed Sacrament. They go on their way, with their shopping bags or brief cases or back packs.
In my reading about Pope Francis, Papa Bergoglio, I learned that he has an interest in a theology which stems from the popular devotion that people have without straying into the dangerous morass of Marxism, which infects Liberation theology. I wonder if what I was watching in Holy Innocents didn’t have something to do with that theological line. I shall have to drill into this more in the future. But I digress.
This church is in a great location for many people who pass through midtown Manhattan. It is close to subway stops, in the Garment District. There are Masses at convenient times. Every day of the week there are TLM’s, often Sung Masses. I am told that there are on average three or four Sung Masses a week! There are, as a matter of fact, often Solemn Masses (with deacon and subdeacon). The quality of the music is amazing. The Masses are often polyphonic as well as in Gregorian chant. There is Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament during the afternoon and Benediction before the evening Mass. On Sunday there are Rosary, Vespers in Gregorian chant, and Benediction.
Also, since Fr. George Rutler has taken charge of the place, one of the old confessionals that had been used as a storage closet has been reclaimed as a confessional! Confessions are being heard there even more often now, before Masses and sometimes during (as is recommended by the Congregation for Divine Worship HERE).
If you are ever in Manhattan, I recommend that you plan a stop, especially for Mass.
This parish is an example of how the use of the older form, the Extraordinary Form, and the hard, sometimes backbreaking work, the very-much thankless work, of a dedicated core group of lay people, transfused life and activity back into a tired church where demographics shifts had all but euthanized its life.
This, friends, is the New Evangelization. All the fancy talk about this committee or that program or this or that poster isn’t going to get it done on its own.
The devotion and piety of the people coming and going was a powerful witness to what we need to reclaim. Churches have to be places where people can go to “be devout”, to feel themselves in the company of the saints and angels, to be with the Lord in private moments. The images and statues are important. They can’t be too abstract or heady or intellectualized. They have to be accessible. So too with the architecture.
It’s not rocket science. There are a lot of parishes out there, especially inner city parishes, which are in trouble. These parishes often have beautiful churches that, for various reasons, are languishing.
Why not try something different with these parishes? Why not try something new/old? Why not implement the older, traditional form of sacred worship in these places? What is there to lose? A place such as St. John Cantius in Chicago revived by emphasizing its ethnic origins and implementing excellent liturgical worship in both the Ordinary and Extraordinary Form. Holy Innocents is making a go of it.
If you are looking for a good Catholic cause to donate money to (for your end of the year giving, etc.), please consider Our Lady of Hope Clinic, in Madison. And they have a DONATE page.
I wrote last year about Our Lady of Hope Clinic. A new/old model for Catholic health care? An interesting small clinic.
Our Lady of Hope Clinic, located in Madison, provides 100% pro-life primary care to all patients; and free care to the community’s uninsured population. The Clinic, the only one of its kind in the State, is based on St. Luke’s Family Practice in Modesto, CA. Our Lady of Hope Clinic is primarily funded by benefactor patients who pay a modest annual fee for concierge medicine. Their fee entitles our benefactors to direct access to a personal physician, Dr. Michael Kloess, twenty-four hours a day, seven days each week, as well as additional benefits. More importantly, because benefactors pay an annual fee for unlimited medical care, Our Lady of Hope Clinic does not bill insurance providers. Our patients and our medical provider are empowered to make important medical decisions, not a representative of an insurance company. The benefactor fees are then available to support the Clinic’s philanthropic mission of treating uninsured individuals free of charge.
Recently there was an article about this great little clinic in the Wisconsin State Journal. The article goes into the plight many people are/will be in because of loss of employment and loss of insurance because of our friends the Dems and Obamacare.
I was in the clinic recently for something. I saw a sign on the wall explaining that
“Our Lady of Hope Clinic practices medicine consistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church”
Therefore, they will not refer for abortion, prescribe contraception, refer for sterilization, refer for in vitro fertilization, etc.
And…
“We will practice in complete accord with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.”
Again, this is a worthy cause. I suggest that it is a model that may be duplicated in other places, especially as the chaos really starts to begin in healthcare in these USA.
Do you know about the group called Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good? Are alarm bells ringing? Read about them HERE. And HERE. Sharing staff with catholics United… HERE.
This is in from the Fishwrap (aka National Schismatic Reporter):
Group steps in for US bishops, collects Vatican-requested data
WASHINGTON A Catholic nonprofit in the D.C. area is offering to collect responses from Catholics to a Vatican survey asking their opinions on church teachings on contraception, same-sex marriage and divorce. [Sure! Let them circulate the survey and then let them have the raw data. What could possibly go wrong?]
The survey was sent by the Vatican in mid-October to national bishops’ conferences around the world. An accompanying letter signed by Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri asks that the conferences distribute the poll “immediately as widely as possible to deaneries and parishes so that input from local sources can be received.”But it is unclear what steps the U.S. bishops’ conference, currently headed by New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, will take to pursue such an effort.
The nonprofit, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, has made a survey based on the Vatican’s questionnaire available online. [So, let’s be clear about this. The catholic Left is driving their readership to the survey, and then a catholic Left group is going to handle the data.]
Christopher Hale, a senior fellow with the group, said in an email that his organization sent a link to the survey via email to its some 30,000 members Friday morning. Within two hours, Hale said, the group had seen more than 300 responses.
“Our response has been overwhelming,” Hale said. “We’ve already hundreds of people answer the survey with beautiful or distressing stories about their experience with their local church life.”
[…]
Who can guess what happens next?
You can imagine what they might think were thousands of people to chime in saying that they want more celebrations of the older, Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. I’m just sayin’.
Today I will say Mass using the formulary for the 4th Sunday “left over” after Epiphany.
“But Father! But Father!”, some of you in Columbia Heights may be saying, “Isn’t Epiphany in, like, January or something?”
At the end of the liturgical year with the traditional Roman calendar, there are some oddities to counting the Sundays.
As we approach the end of another liturgical year, a strange thing happens in the Church’s traditional, pre-Conciliar calendar. After the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost, the Sundays left over after Epiphany, way back after Christmas, are pulled out of the freezer, warmed up and served. And “left over” is not a flippant description. In the older Missale Romanum our Sunday is “Dominca quarta quae superfuit post Epiphaniam”. Superfuit is from super-sum, which the super Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary , indicates is “to be over and above, either as a remainder or as a superfluity”.
So how can Sundays be ‘left over’?” Here is what happened.
In structuring our liturgical calendar we Christians depend on the vagaries of the moon. The date of Easter each year is fixed according to when the spring full moon occurs. Since the moon isn’t always full on the same date, the date of Easter Sunday shifts. Lent, however, has a fixed length. Thus the beginning of Lent slides around, earlier or later depending on that spring full moon. At the other end of the equation, Epiphany (the real Epiphany) is a fixed date: 6 January. Since the beginning of Lent slides around, the time between Epiphany, which begins on 14 January, and Ash Wednesday and Septuagesima (three weeks before), is longer or shorter depending on when the moon is full in the spring.
There can be many as six Sundays between Epiphany and Septuagesima which can fall from 18 January to 22 February, that is from the 2nd until the 6th Sunday after Epiphany.
Therefore, when Lent begins earlier the texts for as many as four Sundays after Epiphany slated to be celebrated up to Septuagesima must be skipped. On the other end of the Lent/Easter cycle, Pentecost also shifts its date. Pentecost is always the same number of days after the movable Easter. The twenty-four Sundays allotted after Pentecost are not enough to get us all the way to the end of the liturgical year, back around to Advent. Depending on the date of the spring full moon, there can be a gap of a several Sundays between the 22nd after Pentecost and last Sunday before Advent.
Therefore, Holy Church uses those “movable” Sundays left over after Epiphany as fillers until the final Sunday of the year, which liturgically is always the 24th Sunday after Pentecost … even if it isn’t ordinally the 24th. So, at the end of the Church’s year, in the traditional calendar, we usually get left over Sundays.
In the newer, post-Conciliar calendar the shift in the moon also changes how many Sundays of “Ordinary Time” we can squeeze in after the Christmas season ends with the Baptism of the Lord (a mystery yanked away from the Feast of Epiphany). Again, due to the shifting dates of Pentecost some of the Sundays of Ordinary Time in the middle of the calendar are blotted out by the tail end of the Easter season.
At the end of the liturgical year in the newer calendar, the last Sunday is always fixed as the 34th Sunday of Ordinary Time, celebrated as the Solemnity of Christ the King. In the older calendar Christ the King is observed on the last Sunday of October.
In the older, traditional calendar we have not only the far more interesting Septuagesima and the pre-Lent Sundays, we also have the Seasons of Epiphany and Pentecost for what is called our tempus per annum… “time through the year”. In the post-Conciliar calendar we call the tempus per annum “Ordinary Time”. “Ordinary” refers to “order” rather than “ordinariness”. Perhaps it would be better to call it “Ordinal Time”.
The Novus Ordo’s “ordered” time is split into two unequal parts. An old clerical friend of mine, dear Harold – R.I.P – called them “Greater and Lesser ‘Meatloaf’”. I preferred the traditional reckoning. Whereas in the ordinary Novus Ordo calendar we just throw the unconsumed “meatloaf” Sundays away, in the Church’s extraordinary calendar we conserve the left over Sundays in the back of the liturgical ice-box and pull them out later if needed.
Either way, as is the case with many things preserved lovingly in the refrigerator for a long time, these Sundays are green… with hope, of course.
From Jihad Watch by Robert Spencer:
Kenyan pastors ask for AK-47s to counter Islamic jihad attacks
Christianity has never opposed self-defense. “Kenyan Pastors Ask for AK-47s Amid Radical Muslim Persecution,” by Fredrick Nzwili for RNS, November 1 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
As attacks on Christians mount in Kenya’s coastal region, some evangelical pastors in the Mombasa area may no longer be willing to turn the other cheek.Worried about attacks against their churches and congregations, some pastors are asking for rifles to protect themselves from suspected Islamic extremists.
The violence intensified on Oct. 20 and 21, when two evangelical church pastors were killed inside their churches. Pastor Charles Mathole, 41, was killed Oct. 20 as he prayed inside his Vikwatani Redeemed Gospel Church. The following day, East African Pentecostal Church pastor Ibrahim Kithaka was found dead in Kilifi, about 35 miles north of Mombasa.
Christian leaders blame the attacks on increased radicalization of Muslim youth. The attacks have occurred amid protests by Muslims that they were being targeted in Nairobi’s war against terrorism.
“Our many churches are not under any protection. They do not have walls or gates. The government should issue AK-47 rifles to every church so that we can stop them from being burnt, our property from being looted and our pastors and Christians from being killed,” said Lambert Mbela, a pastor at Mathole’s church, during his funeral.
Three weeks before the latest murders, Muslim youth torched a Salvation Army church in the Majengo area in Mombasa to protest the killing of the popular Sheikh Ibrahim “Rogo” Omar and three others by unknown gunmen on Oct.4. The same church was torched last year after the murder of another prominent Muslim cleric, Sheikh Aboud Rogo Mohammed.
Some church officials say the request for arms reflects a growing frustration with the rising insecurity, but others say the move contradicts traditional biblical teachings on nonviolence, [non-violence doesn’t mean that we are obliged to let our loved one’s be killed…] or could put churches and congregations at more risk. [?!?]
“I don’t think arming Kenyan (clerics) will ensure security,” said the Rev. Peter Karanja, the general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Kenya, at a news conference in Limuru, near Nairobi, on Wednesday (Oct. 30). [Perhaps he should go out to Vikwatani to take over for the pastor who was killed.]
[…]
Interfaith initiatives in the coastal region have allowed different faiths to live in relative calm, but the attacks are threatening decades of peaceful coexistence, according to the Rev. Wilybard Lagho, vicar general of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Mombasa.
“I think we need to restrengthen interreligious dialogue. The problem is in the minds, and we need to win them back,” said Lagho, calling the request for guns a shallow solution to a complex problem.
Yes, dialogue will certainly fix the problem. It always has before, right?
Some Muslim leaders, meanwhile, have backed the pastors’ call for arms but said there should be a thorough vetting of who gets a gun.“It is a good idea, but not all clerics should get the guns. Some are rogue clerics and may pose more danger to other religious leaders,” said Sheikh Juma Ngao, chairman of the Kenya Muslim National Advisory Council.
Yes, of course. It’s the Christian clerics who are the problem, not the innumerable Muslim clerics preaching jihad and hatred of the kuffar.
The storm is rising more quickly in Africa than elsewhere, but it is rising everywhere.
Does this surprise anyone? From the Iona Institute:
Irish birthrate slips below replacement level
Ireland’s birthrate has dropped below replacement level, new figures have revealed.
The figures, published yesterday in the Central Statistics Office Statistical Yearbook, show that overall, the total fertility rate, the TPFR, which is the number of children born per woman of child-bearing age fell to 2.01 from 2.04 in 2011.
This is just below 2.1, which is considered to be the rate at which a country replaces its population.
The figures also show that over a third of all births last year were outside marriage. Thirty five percent, or 25,344 of the 72,225 registered births in 2012 were outside marriage.
In 2011, 33.7pc of all births were outside marriage. In 2004, the comparable figure was 31.9.
A wealth of research suggests that children raised outside marriage fare worse emotionally, economically and educationally.
[…]
I will, in large part, blame liberal Irish priests and bishops.
If people in the wealthy West don’t give up their selfish materialism and start having babies, we may see the “annihilation of nations”.
The thousands of refugees fleeing Africa into the EU through Italy can have a new place to hang their hats, with ready made infrastructure and everything!
I direct the Irish people, and everyone else, to Benedict XVI’s Letter to the Irish Catholics HERE.
Coat of Arms by D Burkart
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