We continue what be began in our last number, a three-part study of spiritual childhood by Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. (1877-1964).
St. Teresa of the Child Jesus reminds us that the principal virtues of the child of God are those in which are reproduced in an eminent degree the innate qualities of the child, minus his defects. Consequently the way of spiritual childhood will teach us to be supernaturally ourselves minus our defects.
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day
I just read on the New Advent website the Catholic Encyclopedia’s excellent account of the life of Erin’s great apostle. I would highly recommend it if you can spare fifteen minutes today. I can’t think of anything I’ve read elsewhere over the years about the saint that …
That’s the motion that was debated last week in London, at an event hosted by the Spectator and held at the Royal Geographical Society. And guess what — “the 700-strong sell-out audience voted overwhelmingly in favour of the motion”!
Excerpt from The Catholic Herald:
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, author Piers Paul Read and Dom Anthony Sutch, former headmaster of Downside, spoke for the motion.
Anime cartoons and their characters are a huge cultic phenomenon, the most popular of all escapist media venues. It is very addictive and very dangerous, to the soul and the mind. I don’t post weird stories, but this blog by Zoe Romanowski from Inside Catholic, along with another, even …
One of the commentators on the relevant CWN article expressed it well: “It’s past time someone said this. Too often ecumenism is taken to mean the weakening of the teachings of the Church and the addition of non-Catholic ritual and beliefs.” A-m-e-n-!
Past time is better than no time — or, “better late than never.” All the scandal that has transpired, and is ongoing, in the name of ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue should cease at these words of Cardinal Levada defining its purpose (or “final cause” to you Aristotelians out there): “Union with the Catholic Church is the goal of ecumenism.”
Our 2010 conference will be held on October 8 and 9 at Saint Benedict Center in Richmond, New Hampshire.
The information currently available is as follows:
Theme: “The Romance of Wisdom”
Cost: $100 for both days (Friday and Saturday). This includes meals. Single days without meals: $40.
Note: This year, Friday and Saturday will both be full days. There will be eight speakers giving presentations in addition to the master of ceremonies, our Prior, Brother Andre Marie.
Archbishop Alberto Bottari de Castello, apostolic nuncio to Japan, has a very perceptive insight into the subversive effects Buddhist doctrine has on the soul of a suffering devotee confronting hopelessness. From Sandro Magister’s latest column: “Why Life is Worth So Little in Prosperous Japan.”
“The Japanese do not have a personal …
[March 5, 2010 - Rome Reports (with hat tip to Rorate Caeli)]
Benedict XVI has formed a commission to investigate if Our Lady truly appeared in Medjugorje, a small town in Bosnia.
The commission is part of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Cardinal Camillo Ruini will preside over the commission. Ruini is the pope’s former vicar of Rome’s diocese. Ruini goal will be to explain to the pope what’s happening at the sanctuary which has become the third most visited in Europe.
Allegedly, at least 6 people have witnessed the Virgins apparitions there since 1981.
When the enemies of the Church, the enemies of Christianity in general, and those who want to “hold” the Catholic hierarchy’s “feet to the fire” constantly jabber about Pius XII’s supposed complicity in the Nazi murder of Jews, it becomes necessary to defend the truth as well as the honor of the Holy Father. He was, after all, not only innocent of the crime of which he stands accused by an angry mob, but was also proactive in the protection of innocent Jews. That’s history. Catholics have a particular duty to defend the Church’s honor, but even secular historians of the era ought to vindicate Pius XII, if only to protect the integrity of their science.
In changing the traditional Douay-Rheims rendering of Genesis 3:15 from “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel” to the Catholic Revised Standard Version translation (based on the King James Bible), “I will put enmities between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed: he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel,” the scriptural foundation for the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is compromised. So, too, is the traditional doctrine concerning Our Lady’s essential role in salvation history, which has been translated into her more modern title of “Co-redemptrix.”
“The United Nations estimated that 683 Christians fled Mosul between February 20 and February 27. Chaldean Catholic Bishop Emil Shimoun Nona of Mosul estimated that ‘about 400 families’ had left the city’s community of 4,000 Christians.”
This disheartening data comes from an article in Catholic World News. The Iraqi Catholic bishops themselves are bemoaning the situation. But that’s not all they are doing; they are also praying, fasting, and organizing their people to protest peacefully. The facts are not to be denied, and they are not the “spin” of liberal news pundits trying to make a Republican effort look bad.
The Holy Mass is an inexhaustible fountain of grace. As a most divine mystery it is an unfathomable source of wonder and contemplation. Countless spiritual writers have made it, and the divine liturgy enshrining it, the subject of their books and meditations, each attempting to glorify so great and terrible a gift, so holy a sacrifice. That is what the Mass is, first and foremost, the unbloody sacrifice of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, our Victim and Priest. It is the same identical sacrifice as that offered on Calvary near two thousand years ago, only the manner of offering being different. It is Calvary re-presented in an unbloody manner in every time and every place until the end of the world.
Four hundred years before the Incarnation of the Son of God, Malachias, the last of the Old Testament prophets, foresaw the Holy Mass, and, through him, God announced to Israel its advent with these words: “For from the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation: for my name is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of hosts” (Malachias 1:11).
The liturgy of each individual Mass, in every approved rite, honors the whole life of Our Lord. At the consecration of the bread the altar becomes Bethlehem; with that of the wine, the altar becomes Calvary; with the covering of the chalice with the pall after consecration is symbolized the burial of Christ; and with the Minor Elevation before the Pater Noster is symbolized the Resurrection. The Victim who is glorified and Immortal cannot be slain again, but He is truly made present under the sacramental species, and He appears in that guise, as the Apostle John saw Him in vision, “as a Lamb standing as it were slain” (Apoc. 5:6).
The articles in this section deal in some way with the Holy Mass and/or the liturgical life of the Church in her feasts. Gary Potter’s article, for example, on the greatest of all liturgical writers, Dom Prosper Guéranger, is a magnificent tribute to this prolific Benedictine reformer and writer. Guéanger’s masterpiece, The Liturgical Year, employs all the Church’s liturgical treasures, East and West, to immerse the reader in the life of Christ as He lives it in our sanctuaries from Advent to last day of Pentecost.
Today’s Gospel is a startling contrast to last week’s. Last week, we saw Our Lord in the desert hungry from a forty-day fast, being tempted by the devil. The Church took great pains to show us Our Lord doing penance so that we would follow Him in our observance of the Lenten fast. But today, we see Our Lord glorified, or, at least “transfigured” before his Apostles. Has the Church, so early in the Lenten season, somehow gotten distracted and lost track of what we should be considering? Read More »
You will find nothing in the world’s literature that matches St. Paul’s “sublime Canticle of Charity” (Fr. Plassmann) in today’s epistle. This encomium to the divine love that is infused in our souls at baptism is singularly precious. Far from being milquetoast and sappy, St. Paul’s noble conception of love could never be mistaken for the effeminate or perverse counterfeits the world has to offer. His idea of love is that of a Christian virtue, and it challenges human nature to rise, with the grace of God, to a supernatural height of perfection. The Apostle shows that the charismatic graces, such as prophesy, or tongues, or miracles, are nothing when compared to charity. Those things have as their purpose to build up people’s faith, but charity, as the Apostle tells us, is greater than even faith. Read More »
The Name. We are in Septuagesima season, which began last week, with Septuagesima Sunday — the name comes from the word for seventy. It’s about seventy days before Easter. Today is Sexagesima Sunday: about 60 days until Easter.
The Gospel. The Gospel today is the parable of the sower. We have the privilege of reading not only Our Lord’s words in the parable, but also his own exegesis of it, which he gave in private to the Apostles. These words in secret to the Apostles give us some insights into Our Lord’s teaching. And they may surprise us, for they sound harsh: Read More »
Today is the feast of the Holy Innocents, once known in the Anglophone world as Childermas. This curious word is an elision of “Mass of the Children,” that is, the liturgical commemoration of those little boys of Bethlehem who were massacred by Herod the Great. The suffix serves as a reminder that the principal way to observe such a day was to attend the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Read More »
Beware of saying: What use is it to hear Mass ? I am none the richer, none the happier, for it; it makes no difference to me whether I have or have not heard Mass. This is the way in which foolish and ungodly persons speak, who have no just idea of what holy Mass really is. Any one who has read this book will have learnt enough of the virtue and excellence of the Mass to make him rejoice in it. Hearing Mass is not only useful for the soul, but for the body as well; the benefit we derive from it is material as well as spiritual. Read More »
Today is the feast of Our Lady of the Expectation. This feast has an interesting history that Brother Andre reviewed for us this morning in his morning meditation in our chapel. In Spain, this feast day is Nuestra Senora de la O: Our Lady of the O, the “O” coming from the expression of longing said in the office of the Mozarabic Liturgy. In the Latin Rite, today’s feast comes in the middle of the “O” Antiphons (where we get the words for the hymn Veni, Veni, Emmanuel — in English O Come, O Come Emmanuel). Read More »
From the pen of the intrepid Dom Guéranger, that monkish powerhouse of Catholic piety and erudition, comes this brief rundown of the two battles in whose memory the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary was gratefully instituted:
Manicheism, revived under a variety of names, had established itself in the south of France, whence it hoped to spread its reign of shameless excess. But Dominic appeared with Mary’s rosary for the defence of the people. On September 12, 1213, Simon de Montfort and the crusaders of the faith, one against forty, crushed the Albigensian army at Muret. This was in the pontificate of Innocent III. Read More »
Three days ago, I posted a notice concerning a significant book by Monsignor Brunero Gherardini. Today, I would like to give a hat tip to Carlos Antonio Palad at Rorate Caeli for making public another major monsignoral moment for tradition. I mean his English translation of an interview with Monsignor Domenico Bartolucci, Maestro Perpetuo of the Sistine Chapel under five Popes. (The original Italian can be found here.) Read More »
We have an apparent contradiction between the Epistle and the Gospel today. St. Paul lays down the rule that if we live according to the flesh we shall die, but if by the spirit, we mortify the deeds of the flesh, we shall live. The Holy Ghost will assist us in this, so that we can live as worthy children of God. But in the Gospel, Our Lord holds up for our imitation a man clearly living according to the flesh: A steward losing his job because of fraud and embezzlement and then further defrauding his master when he gets caught in order to be treated well by his masters’ debtors. In addition to all this lying and thievery, we have the additional vices of pride and sloth. The man was too proud to beg and too slothful to do manual work. Read More »
July is the month of the Precious Blood. In the traditional rite, the first day of the month is the feast of that name. In the Roman Martyrology, July 1 also commemorates Aaron the High Priest, the brother of Moses. This liturgical concurrence is appropriate, since Aaron’s priesthood — part of the alliance mediated by Moses — was a priesthood that offered many sacrifices prefiguring Christ’s Precious Blood. Read More »
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