Why is September 14th important?

1. It's the Feast of the Exultation of the Cross.
2. It's my birthday, as well as that of Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood.
3. It's the anniversary of the date of the implementation of Summorum Pontificum established by His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI in 2007.
4. It is the date of a meeting to which SSPX leadership has been summoned by Rome next month.

It is generally understood that this meeting will attend to the canonical situation of the Society. Pope Benedict XVI lifted the Decree of Excommunication of 1988 on January 21, 2009, leaving the canonical status of the Society unanswered. The September 14th meeting between Cardinal Levada, Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Msgr. Fellay, General Superior of the Fraternity of the Society of St. Pius X and his two assistants Fr. Niklaus Pfluger and Fr. Alain-Marc Nély, will consider the outcome of two years of doctrinal talks between representatives of the Holy See and the Priestly Fraternity. All Catholics are requested to pray for the intentions of the Holy Father and the good of the Church.

Related

• Fr. Z, "John Allen on SSPX/Rome talks. Wherein Fr. Z rants," (WDTPRS, August 25, 2011).
  
  
• "SSPX: What we really received" (Rorate Caeli, August 30, 2011).
  
  
• Christoper A. Ferrara, "Removing the Vatican II Impediment" (The Remnant, September 2, 2011).

National debt in perspective

Related

New national debt data: It's growing about $3 million a minute, even during his vacation (Los Angeles Times, Aug. 23, 2011): Obama sets record: $4,247,000,000,000 debt in just 945 days...

"The pro-life homily that rocked the world and caused 3 priests to be beheaded"

Dr. Gerard M. Nadal's August 15th post comes to you via Nina Bryhn from Deacon Greg Kendra, who posted this homily by Cardinal Clemens von Galen earlier this month on the 70th anniversary of its delivery, originally, on August 3, 1941, in Münster Cathedral. It is archived at historyplace.com, which has an excellent repository of historical speeches and commentary.

The Blessing of Herbs and Fruits for the Assumption - Part 2 of 2

Tridentine Community News (August 14, 2011):

Below we present the conclusion of the Blessing of Herbs and Fruits for the Feast of the Assumption, which will be conducted today at both St. Josaphat and Assumption Churches:

Let us pray.
O God, by Moses, Thy servant, Thou didst command the children of Israel to carry their sheaves of new grain to the priests for a blessing, to pluck the finest fruits of the orchards, and to make merry before Thee, the Lord their God. Hear Thou our supplications, and bestow blessings + in abundance upon us and upon these bundles of new grain, new herbs, and this assortment of produce which we gratefully present to Thee on this festival – blessing + them in Thy name. Grant that men, cattle, sheep, and beasts of burden find in them a remedy against sickness, pestilence, sores, injuries, spells, against the bites of serpents and other poisonous animals. May these blessed objects act as a protection against diabolical mockeries, cunnings, and deceptions wherever they are kept, carried, or other disposition made of them. And through the merits of the Blessed Virgin Mary whose Assumption we celebrate, may we likewise, laden with sheaves of good works, deserve to be lifted up to heaven. Through our Lord, Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever.
℟. Amen.
Let us pray.
O God, Who on this day hast raised up to heavenly heights the rod of Jesse, the mother of Thy Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord, that through her prayers and patronage Thou mightest communicate to our mortal nature the Fruit of her womb, Thy same Son; we pray that we may use these fruits of the soil for our temporal and eternal welfare – the power of Thy Son and the patronage of His glorious mother assisting us. Through the same Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever.
℟. Amen.
And may the blessing of almighty God, Father, Son, + and Holy Spirit come upon these creatures, and remain for all time.
℟. Amen.

[They are sprinkled with holy water and incensed.]

Jeffrey Tucker & Arlene Oost-Zinner
To Visit Assumption Church on August 28

Two of North America’s most prominent advocates of traditional sacred music will be paying a visit to our region.

Jeffrey Tucker and Arlene Oost-Zinner of the Church Music Association of America will be visiting – and singing with – the choir at Windsor’s Assumption Church on Sunday, August 28 at the 2:00 PM Extraordinary Form Mass. The CMAA is North America’s oldest and largest organization promoting the traditional repertoire of sacred music in both the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms of Holy Mass.

The prior day, Saturday, August 27, the duo will be leading a Gregorian Chant workshop at East Lansing’s St. Thomas Aquinas Church, with a focus on singing English Propers and the new translation of the Ordinary Form of Mass.

Jeffrey is the editor of Sacred Music magazine, the webmaster of musicasacra.com, and the author of the blog chantcafe.com. He is one of the most prominent advocates in the English speaking world for the singing of the Propers at the Ordinary Form of Holy Mass, both from the original Latin Graduále Románum and from English translations. He led the CMAA’s efforts to request reasonable permission from the International Commission on English in the Liturgy for composers and others to have access to the copyrighted texts of the new translation of the Ordinary Form. He was one of the prime movers behind the CMAA’s new hymnal, The Parish Book of Chant, and the editor of Simple English Propers, a new book which offers the Propers of the Ordinary Form set to traditional Gregorian Chant tones (melodies). He is the author of several books, among them Sing Like a Catholic. Arlene is a published composer of sacred music, a music instructor, and co-director with Jeffrey of the St. Cecilia Schola at St. Michael Church in Auburn, Alabama, which sings at regular Extraordinary and Ordinary Form Masses in the area. The pair co-administers a growing number of chant workshops and Sacred Music Colloquia around the U.S. We are honored that they will be making time in their schedule to see what the buzz is about with the Tridentine Mass choir at Assumption Church, the only Extraordinary Form Mass site in metro Detroit and Windsor to offer a full professional choir almost every Sunday of the year.

All are invited to meet Arlene and Jeffrey after Mass on the 28th.

Additional Masses Scheduled in Lapeer

This column has previously reported on the initiation of Extraordinary Form Masses at Immaculate Conception Parish in Lapeer, Michigan, at the initiative of Associate Pastor Fr. Clement Suhy, OSB. The parish has announced that Tridentine Masses will be held on Sunday, August 28 and Sunday, September 25 at 12:30 PM; and every Thursday at 8:45 AM.

Tridentine Masses This Coming Week

Mon. 08/15 7:00 PM: High Mass at St. Josaphat (Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary)

Tue. 08/16 7:00 PM: Low Mass at Assumption-Windsor (St. Joachim, Father of the Blessed Virgin Mary)

[Comments? Please e-mail tridnews@stjosaphatchurch.org. Previous columns are available at www.stjosaphatchurch.org. This edition of Tridentine Community News, with minor editions, is from the St. Josaphat bulletin insert for August 14, 2011. Hat tip to A.B.]

To all home-schooling moms

[Hat tip to Nina C. Bryhn]

Drudge: Barackalypse Now

No, it's not like the smell of Napalm in the morning, and it doesn't smell like ... victory. It smells like overly-ripe bananas ... or like the United States, along with the countries of the E.U., turning into China's rotting banana republics.

For the record: Vatican on Communion on tongue, kneeling

News almost a week old, but for the record, the Vatican's Prefect for Divine Worship, Cardinal Antonio Canizares Llovera recently recommended that ALL Catholics receive Communion on the tongue, while kneeling.

As reported by Catholic News Agency (July 28, 2011), the Cardinal said that "It is to simply know that we are before God himself and that He came to us and that we are undeserving."

Now, is that not refreshingly NOT about "we-ourselves-and-us," for a change? What a novel concept: we gather-us-in together at Mass, not to celebrate US, or our "COMMUNITY," but in awe, to let-all-our-mortal-flesh-keep-silence, in adoration, before the majesty of our LORD!

“If we trivialize Communion, we trivialize everything, and we cannot lose a moment as important as that of receiving Communion, of recognizing the real presence of Christ there, of the God who is the love above all loves ..." he declared.

Receiving Communion on the tongue while kneeling, the cardinal continued, “is the sign of adoration that needs to be recovered. I think the entire Church needs to receive Communion while kneeling.” (emphasis added)

Won't the "We Are Church" and "Call to Action" crowds love this!!

Bouyer and ad orientem worship

There is an interesting excerpt from a longer article on Louis Bouyer and church architecture by Uwe Michael Lang, "20th Century Liturgical Movement and Mass Facing the People," posted over at Southern Orders (August 7, 2011). In it, Lang writes: "Bouyer notes in retrospect a tendency to conceive of the Eucharist as a meal in contrast to a sacrifice, which he calls a fabricated dualism that has no warrant in the liturgical tradition."

The so-called "Liturgical Movement," whether one limits himself to the 20th century or goes back several centuries, is a complex phenomenon. I used to be a big fan of Louis Bouyer, especially after reading (back during my journey to the Catholic Church some 20 years ago) his The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism,which I still consider an excellent book, despite the poor translation. But I was not yet then aware of everything about Bouyer that I have been learning since, working, as I am, with the same disability as Friedrich Schelling, as Hegel noted, of carrying on his education in public.

Lang's quote makes it appear as if Bouyer was a staunch opponent of the liturgical revolutionaries who set their sights set on jettisoning the traditional Catholic emphasis on the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice and displacing it altogether with the notion of the Eucharist as a communal meal. The impression is that Bouyer wanted a "both/and" emphasis, rather than an "either/or." I would now disagree.

This is not the place to pursue the issue at the moment, but I have read enough now to know that, despite Bouyer's later disappointments in the direction taken by Vatican II and especially the post-Vatican II innovations that ensued, Bouyer himself played a large role in reinforcing and solidifying the 20th-century liturgical movement's commitment to the view that the Mass is primarily a communal banquet rather than a propitiatory sacrifice, a view certainly shared by Abp. Annibale Bugnini, as well as with various historical reform movements identified with Protestantism and Jansenism (I hope to post something on this in the future).

Still, Lang is not insensitive to the complexity (not to mention ambiguity) of Bouyer's own work. He writes:

Bouyer painted with a broad brush and his interpretation of historical data is sometimes questionable or even untenable. Moreover, he was inclined to express his theological positions sharply, and his taste for polemics made him at times overstate the good case he had. Like other important theologians of the years before the Second Vatican Council, he had an ambiguous relationship to post-Tridentine Catholicism and was not entirely free of an iconoclastic attitude. Later, he deplored some post-conciliar developments especially in the liturgy and in religious life, and again expressed this in the strongest possible terms.

[Hat tip to Fr. Z.]

You're gonna love this: The Blessing of Herbs and Fruits for the Assumption - Part 1 of 2

Tridentine Community News (August 7, 2011):

Next Sunday, August 14, all are invited to bring fruits, herbs, and flowers before Mass to St. Josaphat and Assumption-Windsor for the Blessing for the Feast of the Assumption. This tradition is associated with Our Lady because she is seen in biblical imagery as a vine; flowers represent her virtue; and Our Lord is her fruit. The Extraordinary Form Roman Ritual specifies that the blessing be prayed by the priest entirely in Latin; below we present an English translation:

* * *

℣. Our help is in the name of the Lord.
℟. Who made heaven and earth.

Psalm 64

Praise, O God, is due Thee in Sion, * and a vow must be offered Thee in Jerusalem.
Hear my prayer; * all flesh cometh unto Thee.
Iniquities overwhelm us, * but pardon Thou our transgressions.
Blessed be the man whom Thou dost elect and adopt, * that he may dwell in Thy courts.
We will be filled with the goodness of Thy house; * holy is Thy temple and wonderful in righteousness.
Hear us, God our Savior, * the Confidence of all ends of the earth and the sea afar off.
Girded with power, Thou settest fast the mountains by Thy strength, * Thou stillest the roaring of the seas and of their waves.
The nations are dismayed at Thy signs; also they who dwell in uttermost parts; * to the east and to the west Thou givest joy.
Thou hast helped the land with plenteous rain; * Thou hast in many ways enriched it.
God’s rain hath filled the earth and provided food, * for then does it grow.
Fill Thou the furrows, multiply their crops; * gentle rain-drops gladden the buds.
Thou crownest the year with Thy good things, * and Thy fields overflow with plenty.
The beautiful places of the wilderness grow rich, * and the hills are surrounded with joy.
The mountains are clothed with sheep, the vales abound with wheat; * they shout for joy, and sing a hymn of praise.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

℣. The Lord will be gracious.
℟. And our land bring forth its fruit.
℣. Thou waterest the mountains from the clouds.
℟. The earth is replenished from Thy rains.
℣. Giving grass for cattle.
℟. And plants to the servitors of men.
℣. Thou bringest forth wheat from the earth.
℟. And wine to cheer men’s heart.
℣. Oil to make his face lustrous.
℟. And bread to strengthen his heart.
℣. He sends His command, and heals their suffering.
℟. And snatches them from distressing want.
℣. O Lord, hear my prayer.
℟. And let my cry come unto Thee.
℣. The Lord be with you.
℟. And with thy spirit.

Let us pray.
Almighty, everlasting God, by Thy Word alone Thou hast made heaven, earth, sea, all things visible and invisible, and hast adorned the earth with plants and trees for the use of men and animals. Thou appointest each species to bring forth fruit in its kind, not only to serve as food for living creatures, but also as medicine to sick bodies. With mind and word we earnestly implore Thy unspeakable goodness to bless  these various herbs and fruits, and add to their natural powers the grace of Thy new blessing. May they ward off disease and adversity from men and beasts who use them in Thy name. Through our Lord, Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever.
℟. Amen.

[To be continued next week.]

Fifth Mass Site in Diocese of Lansing Debuts

A fifth Tridentine Mass site is debuting in our neighboring Diocese of Lansing, Michigan, at the historic St. Joseph Shrine in Brooklyn, Michigan, southwest of Ann Arbor on US 12 in the Irish Hills lakes area. Associate Pastor Fr. Tom Wasilewski, ordained in 2010, will offer the first Mass, a Low Mass, this Tuesday, August 9 at 8:30 AM. Additional Tridentine Masses may be scheduled if there is support.

Masses for the Feast of the Assumption

The Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary will be celebrated at St. Josaphat Church with a High Mass on Monday, August 15 at 7:00 PM. On Sunday, August 14 at 2:00 PM, Assumption Church in Windsor will offer a High Mass for the External Solemnity of the Assumption, the patronal feast of the parish. The rubrics of the Extraordinary Form permit the moving of a parish’s patronal feast to the nearest Sunday. Benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament will follow the Mass.

Next Mass at St. Albertus: August 21

The next Tridentine Mass at St. Albertus Church will be held in two weeks, on Sunday, August 21 at noon.

Tridentine Masses This Coming Week

Mon. 08/08 7:00 PM: Low Mass at St. Josaphat (St. John Vianney, Confessor)

Tue. 08/09 7:00 PM: Low Mass at Assumption-Windsor (Vigil of St. Lawrence, Martyr)

[Comments? Please e-mail tridnews@stjosaphatchurch.org. Previous columns are available at www.stjosaphatchurch.org. This edition of Tridentine Community News, with minor editions, is from the St. Josaphat bulletin insert for August 7, 2011. Hat tip to A.B.]

"What are all these things compared with the loss of souls?"

Under this title -- words taken from Pope Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno -- Rorate Caeli (August 6, 2011) writes:

One of the "cornerstones" of modern economy, the unassailable credit of the United States: downgraded.

Ours is an extraordinarily interesting age, of which this latest piece of news is just a very minute sign: the explosive energy that sprung up in the small western end of Eurasia in the Middle Ages, shaped by Christendom, a burst of creativity and missionary spirit which covered the whole world: the originally Christian West, whose good (and sublime) and bad (and hideous) ideas shaped the world as we know it, and that, in a kind of lifeline, lived its last decades of influence after the European disasters of the 20th century in some of its old colonial outposts - that energy seems to be finally spent. Many aspects of that civilization, enormously wealthy and yet bankrupt as well as spiritually exhausted, remain and will survive, but its hegemonic presence seems likely to be replaced. By what? And does it matter, in the eternal scheme of things?

Despite rivers of ink in "social" and "economic" doctrinal documents since "the Council", it is astounding that the best Catholic commentary on the troubles of this age was written 80 years ago.This is not the first time some of these words of Pius XI are posted here - but they never seem to get old: ...

Read more >>

A Latin hymn that could make me run from a Tridentine Mass

No more exquisite torture could be imagined to drive me positively apoplectic. I pray this isn't the "fruit" of the cross-fertilization of the two forms of the Roman rite envisioned by anyone in high places. I suppose that if I were sent to hell for my sins and Marty Haugen to heaven for his sanctity, Marty's heaven could well be my hell.

What's right and wrong with Michael Voris

Most of you know how much I appreciate Michael Voris. He's saying some things that badly need saying and that only someone of his independence seems in a position to dare say. This underscores what is right with Voris. He is something like a contemporary Jeremiah, calling God's people to repentance, sometimes with a refreshing (and doubtless offensive) bluntness. This is what gives him part of his negative reputation: he offends delicate sensibilities. Good for him. What would the redemptive history of the Chosen People have been without Jeremiah and his "Jeremiads"?

So what is wrong with Voris? Despite what Mark Shea and others like him might think, not much. There is, however, a small thin slice of Voris' messages that are a problem, not because of their bluntness, but because of their ignorance; and this applies to most of what he has to say about Protestants. While his opposition to knee-jerk "we're-all-the-same-anyway" ecumaniacs is a welcome difference from the naive and ill-informed willingness of some Catholics to embrace everyone from Bishop-Spong-vintage liberal Episcopalians to "Jesus-who?" Unitarians, he has little discernment concerning the facts of the 16th-century Protestant Reformers (De-formers, if you prefer), let alone the distinctive nuances of different kinds of Protestants, whether Calvinists, Methodists, Lutherans, Anglicans, Pentecostals, Nazarines, Baptists, Mennonites, Schwenkfelders, Moravians, or whatever.

This leads to some bald declarations that are just, well, embarrassing.

A good example is "Voris & Shea: Can't We All Just Get Along?" (Creative Minority Report). My issue is not so much the words of "Amazing Grace," which are the focus of Voris' remarks here. I do think that there are parts of that Protestant national hymn that can be interpreted in ways that are grossly inimical to traditional Catholic sensibilities (as my friend Chris Garton-Zavesky could tell you), but I don't think that interpretation is essential or, indeed, is how most people who sing that hymn interpret them. That, to my thinking, is beside the point here.

If Mr. Voris would cease attacking Protestantism, where he is often on very shaky ground, and continue to focus on the house-cleaning of our own Catholic household, I could find very little if anything not to appreciate in him, despite what Mr. Shea may wish to say. His opposition to mindless ecumenism is welcome, but there is also such a thing as gross insensitivity to baptized brothers in Christ who, through no fault of their own, were born into and raised in some Protestant ethos or another and sincerely seek the truth by the light they've been given. Some of us led, doubtless by the Holy Spirit, to discern the truth of Catholicism by means of disparate nuggets of what was true and good within our own erstwhile non-Catholic Christian traditions.

[Hat tip to J.M.]

"100 Reasons NOT to go to Graduate School"

One could offer plenty of reasons for not going to most colleges and universities today, even most high schools, if you want to preserve your love of learning, let alone your faith. On the one hand, I get the gist of the point this writer is making. On the other hand, I can think of some very good reasons for SOME individuals to pursue graduate studies -- even in the citadels of Babylon.

[Hat tip to C.B.]

Dr. Thomas Pink responds to Fr. Rhonheimer

"On the coercive authority of the Church: a response to Fr. Martin Rhonheimer by Dr. Thomas Pink" (Rorate Caeli, August 5, 2011) offers, along with a detailed chronology of the articles bearing on this subject posted by Sandro Magister at Chiesa, a thoroughgoing and programmatic discussion by Prof. Thomas Pink of King's College London.

By way of introductory summary, Rorate Caeli quotes the words of Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP, who put the critical issues as follows in the course of the discussion: "The heart of the debate is here. We all agree, in fact, that the doctrines already defined [by the dogmatic magisterium of the former Church] present in the conciliar texts are infallible. What is in discussion is if the doctrinal developments, the innovations of the Council, are also infallible."

The collapse of Catholic missions

Anthony Sistrom is a gentleman with whom I have been corresponding for some years now. He lives in California, is thoroughly conversant with Catholic literature in French as well as English, and often has interesting and provocative things to say. Recently he told me that the new pastor of his Catholic parish is so liberal that he feels practically driven out by the priest's secular homilies, which seem to reflect the priest's own loss of faith. Fortunately, he says, there is an Orthodox OCA parish with a beautiful liturgy in the area: "I hope by attending twice to remain Catholic." He also says that his hope is in the success of the Anglican ordinariate: "Small communities, committed Catholics, solemn liturgy (chanted and not rushed) in Elizabethan English."

I have profited from his correspondence and, though I have never yet had the privilege of meeting him, consider Mr. Sistrom a friend. He was the first to recommend to me the excellent book by the Australian, Geoffrey Hull, entitled Banished Heart: Origins of Heteropraxis in the Catholic Church (T&T Clark Studies In Fundamental Liturgy)(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2010), a wonderfully challenging and enriching book.

From time-to-time, Mr. Sistrom sends me a paragraph or two reflecting on a particular issue relating to the state of the Church. Let me share a few such paragraphs with you here from two emails on the related subject of missions. Whatever you may think of what he says, I think you will find it provocative food for thought. I know I always have.

No. 1:

There is no area of Church life more damaged by Vatican II than missions.¹ We had thousands of heroic men and women in the field whose priority was evangelizing. There is still a tremendous Evangelical witness but Catholics have altogether disappeared. We now have development and charitable activity instead. Missiology is a flourishing academic specialty while missions and missionaries are in total eclipse. I recently read a review (Books and Culture) of Jesuit Fr. Jacques Dupuis' Christianity and the Religions by Anglican Fr. Gerald McDermott. I quote: "Dupuis has the same problem with Jesus that the Enlightenment had. Jesus was one of the 'accidents of history' inaccessible to humanity as a whole... As Lessing famously put it, "Accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason....

"... Dupuis, in 263 pages of text, never mentions atonement through the Cross, salvation as redemption from sin, or the reign of God as discipleship to Jesus- and insists that Jesus' uniqueness and universality are not 'absolute'. For such claims would require the notion that God was fully revealed in Jesus Christ, as the early church suggested."

Fr. McDermott has nailed it. Even in Cardinal Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity one finds embarrassment in dealing with St. Anselm and the atonement.

No. 2:

I am reading Newbigin:

"There has been a long tradition which sees the mission of the Church primarily as obedience to a command... This way of putting the matter is certainly not without justification and yet it seems to me that it misses the point. It tends to make mission a burden rather than a joy, to make it part of the law rather than part of the gospel. If one looks at the NT evidence...Mission begins with a kind of explosion of joy. The news that the rejected and crucified Jesus is alive is something that cannot possibly be suppressed. It must be told. Who could be silent about such a fact? The mission of the Church in the pages of the NT is more like the fallout from a vast explosion, a radioactive fallout which is not lethal but life-giving. One searches in vain in the letters of St. Paul to find any suggestion that he anywhere lays it on the conscience of his readers that they ought to be active in mission... It is a striking fact, morover, that almost all the proclamations of the gospel which are described in Acts are in response to questions asked by those outside the Church....One of the dangers of emphasizing the concept of mission as a mandate given to the Church is that it tempts us to do what we are always tempted to do, namely to see the work of mission as a good work and to seek to justify ourselves by our works. On this view, it is we who must save the unbelievers from perishing....It is not that they must speak and act, asking the help of the Spirit to do so. It is rather that in their faithfulness to Jesus they become the place where the Spirit speaks and acts."

Like I said, food for thought ...

Notes

1. This coincides with the verdict of John Lamont, who identifies as a weakness of Vatican II it's neglect of a clear rationale for missions: "It made no reference at all to unbelief rendering salvation doubtful," he writes. (See our review of John Lamont's 2007 Blackfriars article, "What was wrong with Vatican II." [back]