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Catharina Oxoniensis and I made for the indult in Syracuse on Sunday. While we prefer to attend Mary, Mother of God SSPX chapel, which is right across the street from St. Stephen, King of Hungary, I wanted to make a confession, and though I think that there is a strong counterfactual type argument to be made for the validity of confessions heard by SSPX priests, I don’t see the need to invoke it when there’s a sure thing across the street. (For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of driving down North Geddes Street in Syracuse, the SSPX chapel and the church of the Sunday indult are literally right across the street from each other.)
Archive for April, 2007
St. Stephen, King of Hungary will be closed
Reflection on the Church of Christ
Following the Liturgical Year with the good Abbot Gueranger, a reflection of merit for the Friday of the Third Week After Easter:
Church of Jesus! that wast promised by him to the earth during the days of his mortal life; that camest forth from his sacred Side when wounded by the spear upon the Cross; that wast organized and perfected by him during the last days of his sojourn here below; we lovingly greet thee as our mother; thou art the Spouse of our Redeemer, and it is through thee that we are born to him. It is thou that gavest us life by baptism; it is thou that ministerest to us the helps, whereby we are led, through our earthly pilgrimage, to heaven; it is thou that governest us, in the spiritual order, by thy holy ordinances.
Under thy maternal care we are safe; we have nothing to fear. What can error do against us? Thou art the pillar and ground of the truth! What effect can the revolutions of our earthly habitation have upon us? We know, that if everything else should fail us, thou wilt ever be with us. It was during these very days which precede the Acension, that our Lord Jesus said to his Apostles, and through them, to their successors: Behold! I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world. What a promise of duration was this! If we consult the history of these last eighteen hundred years, it will tell us that this promise has never once been broken. The gates of hell have risen up against thee innumerable times; but they have never prevailed against thee, no, not for one single moment!
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Getting marriage in FOCCUS
I’ve wondered a few times in the past months whether the Church devises Pre-Cana requirements just to test how much the couple in question really wants to tie that knot. My quest to enter the holy state of Matrimony has taken me through all kinds of thorny jurisdictional issues, and even required of me the painful concession of registering at the (very liberal) Novus parish down the street. (Because I was received into the Church in an FSSP parish outside the diocese in which I reside, no priest was in a position to be my canonical pastor and give me permission to marry outside his diocese. Needless to say, I did not explain to the very Novus priest at the local parish my precise reasons for not having registered sooner. I kept things vague, and I think he just assumed it had something to do with the frequent moving that is typical of students.)
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The Primacy of Truth
The annual day-long grind through one of Augustine’s works (or a substantial segment thereof) was, as usual, a bit of a grind, but there were also some positive things I took away from the weekend. First of all, I had the privilege of meeting a traditionalist Catholic graduate student in philosophy from another school, something that I don’t think I’ve done before. That meeting came about through the existence of this blog, which was also nice.
Second, on Sunday, I attended the indult in Albany (Troy, really) in historic St. Peter’s church. This was my first time to the indult in Troy, which is 3+ hours from Ithaca and so too far for Sunday travel. I was very impressed by their physical plant, if you will: if Mother Hubbard ever has the courage to give the place to the FSSP, they’ll inherit (as I imagine, since they’re adjacent to the church) a number of impressive stone buildings, besides the church itself, which is unwreckovated, has beautiful stain glass, marble pillars, and plenty of seating.
Modern Mass Motto
Observed on the cornerstone of the chapel of the Newman Center of the University of Toronto, modified by either some clever classical wag or a student aware of the modernist doctrines idealized therein.
A Call to Redirect
This has never been a politically-oriented blog, but I just wanted to take a moment to urge those readers who care about such things to muster up all that energy for mockery and contempt, and redirect it, for the good of the country and the Republican Party.
Just about everyone who follows politics closely (which I have done at some periods of my life, though not so much in the present) feels a need to vent negative energy once in awhile. Some pundits hardly do anything else – which is probably unhealthy – but politics is a game that needs its villains as well as its heroes, and politicians provide such excellent material for the satirical eye that it would be all but impossible not to take some shots.
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Molding hearts and minds
I went to a memorial service today, held by Cornell in honor of the students and faculty killed Monday at Virginia Tech. Non-denominational university “services” aren’t the sort of thing I normally attend, and it actually seemed a little funny to me that a memorial service would be held at all, since we have no specific connection with Virginia Tech. But my choir had been asked to sing for it, and my section was short of available people. The time was convenient for me. So I went. And actually, a surprising number of people showed up for the service.
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Distributism Today
In many ways, contemporary American society is the closest approach to Distributist ideals that has been achieved since the late Middle Ages. This is not widely appreciated, since even the few people who have heard of Distributism are generally mistaken about its ideals and aims.
The central tenant of Distributism is that the capital — materials, land, machinery, etc — necessary to production of goods and services should be owned by those who are performing the labor to produce those services. For instance: a carpenter should own his tools and workshop; a farmer should be a freeholder who owns his own tractor, rather than a renter.
“Three acres and a cow” is the slogan people typically associate with Chesterton and the Distributist-Agrarian movement of the 1920s, an association that is probably in large part responsible for the misappreciation of what Distributism is. Continue reading
Birthday wishes
It’s a wonderful thing that the current pope would choose a concert of classical music with which to celebrate his 80th birthday. Wonderful, I mean, only by comparison to the musical tastes of his predecessor, which seemed to incline towards tribal rhythms and the so-called “rock and roll” of the youth, which is obviously the music of Satan. (Don’t worry, I have this on good authority - not from Satan! - but from certain traditional priests.) I enjoyed in particular this picture from the concert: we can see Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone, the Secretary of State and Camerlengo, as well as Georg Ratzinger, the Holy Father’s brother - notice the red piping of a monsignor on his cassock.
Keeping the Faith for 45 Years
Sometimes I run across something that just stops me in my tracks. This story recently appeared in our ephemeris links and is so remarkable that I thought it should be publicized a bit more. On WDTPRS, Fr. Zuhlsdorf recently posted on Joseph Cardinal Zen (of Hong Kong) and in the comments to that post Stephen Morgan related a story about a priest he had known in Hong Kong:
Twelve years ago, when my daughter was baptised in Hong Kong, the priest who baptised her, Fr Bernard Tohill, SDB, had returned that morning from a short trip into the mainland. He had been asked to go and offer Mass in a small village about 300 miles into China for a community that had been without the Mass since 1949. He had relearned how to say the old Mass and was expecting be be saying Mass for about a dozen people.
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Limitations of Liturgy, Part II
First of all, my apologies to our readers for posting my column a bit late this week. I had a bit of a flu last night and didn’t feel quite up to writing anything, so I put it off. But I thought for this week’s column I might follow up on my last week’s theme, namely, the purpose of liturgy. A few hours after putting up my Maundy Thursday post I got an email from one of our readers. I won’t identify him since he never actually gave me permission to post this – but I expect he won’t mind and he’s welcome to identify himself in the comments if he likes. I thought he posed some worthwhile questions, and I wanted to answer them, but I didn’t have time last weekend. However, this topic is presumably of interest to many of our readers, so I thought it might as well become the topic for my column this week.
The person who wrote the letter is responding to my post from last week, The Limitations of Liturgy. You may want to go back and read that in order to see what he’s talking about. My response will follow his letter.
Easter Notes
As Clara said, it was frigid outside St. Michael’s in Scranton late on Saturday night. Yet after the new fire had been lit and we had gone back into the church, inside was all aglow with the warm light of many candles held by young and old. We had come as far as the prayer during the blessing of the holy water which ends rather uniquely:
Per Dominum nostrum . . . qui venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos, et saeculum per ignem. “Through our Lord . . . who is about to come to judge the living and the dead, and the world through fire.”
It was just as this prayer had concluded that, out of the corner of my eye, I see Clara’s head engulfed in flames! Not a moment later, she snatches the mantilla from her head in an effort to free herself of the fire, and then stamps out with her hand the remaining flames in her hair.
Gold Can Stay
I spent the Triduum this year in our nation’s capitol, visiting my older brother. The weekend was very cold there, as it was all through the Northeast (I thought we might freeze to death at St. Michael’s last night while we stood outside in fluttering snowflakes, waiting for them to bless the Paschal candle.) Nonetheless, my brother and I took a trip to the Tidal Basin to see the cherry blossoms – or rather, to see what was left of them. Apparently they were at their peak on Tuesday and Wednesday (the above picture was taken by my brother on Tuesday), but by Friday morning the veil of delicate white had already faded into a soft purple, flecked with the green of the new leaves. It’s the second year in a row that I’ve made it down for the blossoms just a day or two too late. My brother, apologetically, recalled to mind a Robert Frost poem that seemed appropriate to the occasion:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Good Friday
From Abbe Dom Prosper Gueranger’s Liturgical Year
We have reached the crux of the entire penitential season of Lent on the Second Day of the Easter Triduum. This day is necessary for there are no shortcuts to salvation; there can be no glory, no resurrection without the passion and pain of the cross. We, His friends for He has called us such, ought to compassionate our Savior by spending this day with Him in His agony to make reparation for our sins which scourged and nailed Him to the cross. Let us follow Him and walk with Him to the very last step of Calvary, fearing no rebuke from man, but realizing when push comes to shove, we had better be ready to stand with His Blessed Mother, His beloved disciple John, Mary Magdalene, and the few dear women who are the mother of the apostles John and James.
The Limitations of Liturgy
So much happens on Maundy Thursday that it’s difficult to take note of it all. The first Mass. The washing of the feet. The agony in the Garden, and Christ’s great intercessory prayer. The kiss of Judas. And Our Lord’s arrest. I know no other day in the Christian calendar that commemorates, all in the same 24-hour period, such a dramatic combination of wonderful and terrible events. This is perhaps why Maundy Thursday always draws me into reflections on the limitations of liturgy.
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St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,