Dante can provide wisdom on most of the troubles of our lives. His wisdom pops up just about anywhere and in timely fashion. Thus, a wise and respected friend was lunching in Florence in the shadow of the Duomo today … Read More →
This week, the 15th Ordinary Sunday in the Novus Ordo calendar, we have a good example of the dramatic difference between the old, Obsolete ICEL version we suffered with for decades, and the Latin with the Current ICEL version. The Collect … Read More →
Perhaps you have the same reaction that I have. One of the things that provokes in me the worst sort of anxiety is being told that something is up, but not being told what it is. For example, you are … Read More →
A The Catholic Thing the scholar and translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy uses this most important of works to unpack a central issue in The Present Crisis. There are those today, such as highly tattooed gang of Team Francis, who work … Read More →
So this morning my phone goes “ding”. “What fresh hell is this!?”, quoth I, reaching. Indeed, it was “fresh hell”! At Messa in Latino a wag has posted a bit of Dantesque parody about an adulterous soul in Hell. A soul has … Read More →
The brilliant Anthony Esolen (how I envy his prose) makes a point – with napalm – at the increasingly useful Crisis today. The post confirmed me in my desire never to be on his bad side. He begins… Don’t Let A Foolish … Read More →
Today at The Catholic Thing Robert Royal has a short and suggestive piece about sex and deception. Dante – Il Poeta – gives him a lift. Royal recounts teaching Dante’s Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy, to students. One of the … Read More →
I have often written about how priests are never the same after having learned how to say the older, traditional form of Holy Mass in the Roman Rite. Many priests have related to me about how, once they learned, or … Read More →
Do you remember the little mnemonic poems? “Lenty, Penty, Crucy, Lucy”, or else “Fasting days and Emberings be Lent, Whitsun, Holyrood, and Lucie.” The Wednesday, Friday and Saturday after St. Lucy are the Advent Ember Days. In the old Julian … Read More →
I often direct you to the writings of Anthony Esolen, who contributes frequently to the increasingly-valuable Crisis. Esolen is a prof at Domincan-run Providence College. I saw this at Touchstone, where Esolen is an editor. If you have benefitted from the writings … Read More →
In the reformed calendar, we have moved into the Time called “Ordinary”, by which we mean “ordered”, not “unexceptional”. In the traditional calendar of the Extraordinary Form, this is the “Time through the year”, divided into time after Epiphany and after … Read More →
Today’s prayer survived the redactors to live on in the Novus Ordo as the Collect for the 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time. It is an ancient prayer, found in the Veronese and the Gelasian Sacramentary. COLLECT (1962MR): Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, da … Read More →
In the Extraordinary Form, Sunday’s Collect is from the ancient Veronese Sacramentary and the Gelasian and the so-called Gregorian. It survived the liturgical tailors with their scissors and thread to live on in the post-Conciliar Missale Romanum on Thursday of the 1st week of Lent. However, there is … Read More →
First, yesterday, Pope Francis went to a parish near Ostia (Rome’s ancient port where St. Augustine’s mother, St. Monica, died – today is her feast in the traditional calendar). Before saying Mass, His Holiness heard confessions! Fathers… hear confession! Second, … Read More →
Ordinary Form 18th Ordinary Sunday HERE Today’s Collect is from the ancient Veronese Sacramentary and the Gelasian and the so-called Gregorian. It survived the liturgical tailors with their scissors and thread to live on in the post-Conciliar Missale Romanum on … Read More →
At The Catholic Thing, Anthony Esolen has a great dialogue, I use the word a little loosely, which typifies much of what the LCWR is doing in the face of the CDF’s guidance. Let’s have a look at a little … Read More →
Today I have done some reading and listened to the monks of Le Barroux sing the Tenebrae office. For lunch I found a great pastrami sandwich and went to the Park. Okay… here’s a better shot of the pastrami. … Read More →
I am enjoying a break in my evening for a bit of frivolous entertainment. I was going to watch Bladerunner, but opted for something considerably lighter. However, in a moment of post-modern self-conscious connection-making I’ll make a connection between this … Read More →
Please use the sharing buttons! Today’s “Prayer over the people”, at the end of Mass in the Ordinary Form, was originally in a truncated form in various manuscripts of the Gelasian Sacramentary. However, I eventually found it also in a … Read More →
I just had a horrible though that made my blood run cold….. It just occurred to me what a Dantesque contrapasso it would be – for my black and horrible sins – were some bishops to engineer me being assigned … Read More →
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“This blog is like a fusion of the Baroque ‘salon’ with its well-tuned harpsichord around which polite society gathered for entertainment and edification and, on the other hand, a Wild West “saloon” with its out-of-tune piano and swinging doors, where everyone has a gun and something to say. Nevertheless, we try to point our discussions back to what it is to be Catholic in this increasingly difficult age, to love God, and how to get to heaven.” – Fr. Z
I'm finishing up a batch of Mass intentions right now. I'll have room in my register for more while I am in Rome. Also, I regularly say Mass for my regular benefactors and special Roman Sojourn Donors. HERE for the form I use.
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The most evident mark of God’s anger and the most terrible castigation He can inflict upon the world are manifested when He permits His people to fall into the hands of clerics who are priests more in name than in deed, priests who practice the cruelty of ravening wolves rather than the charity and affection of devoted shepherds.
St. John Eudes
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“Until the Lord be pleased to settle, through the instrumentality of the princes of the Church and the lawful ministers of His justice, the trouble aroused by the pride of a few and the ignorance of some others, let us with the help of God endeavor with calm and humble patience to render love for hatred, to avoid disputes with the silly, to keep to the truth and not fight with the weapons of falsehood, and to beg of God at all times that in all our thoughts and desires, in all our words and actions, He may hold the first place who calls Himself the origin of all things.”
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“He [Satan] will set up a counter-Church which will be the ape of the Church because, he the devil, is the ape of God. It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of the anti-Christ that will in all externals resemble the mystical body of Christ. In desperate need for God, whom he nevertheless refuses to adore, modern man in his loneliness and frustration will hunger more and more for membership in a community that will give him enlargement of purpose, but at the cost of losing himself in some vague collectivity.”
“Who is going to save our Church? Not our bishops, not our priests and religious. It is up to you, the people. You have the minds, the eyes, and the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops act like bishops.”
“The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.”
- C.S. Lewis
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As for Latin…
"But if, in any layman who is indeed imbued with literature, ignorance of the Latin language, which we can truly call the 'catholic' language, indicates a certain sluggishness in his love toward the Church, how much more fitting it is that each and every cleric should be adequately practiced and skilled in that language!" - Pius XI
"Let us realize that this remark of Cicero (Brutus 37, 140) can be in a certain way referred to [young lay people]: 'It is not so much a matter of distinction to know Latin as it is disgraceful not to know it.'" - St. John Paul II
Grant unto thy Church, we beseech Thee, O merciful God, that She, being gathered together by the Holy Ghost, may be in no wise troubled by attack from her foes. O God, who by sin art offended and by penance pacified, mercifully regard the prayers of Thy people making supplication unto Thee,and turn away the scourges of Thine anger which we deserve for our sins. Almighty and Everlasting God, in whose Hand are the power and the government of every realm: look down upon and help the Christian people that the heathen nations who trust in the fierceness of their own might may be crushed by the power of thine Arm. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. R. Amen.