Big day in Rome

The Holy Father took the world by surprise by announcing his resignation, and the world is abuzz with speculation.

Update: Phil Lawler, "The challenge Pope Benedict has left for his successor—and for ordinary Catholics" (CatholicCulture.org, February 11, 2013) -- an observation on resignation, with due balance [Hat tip to J.M.]

Extraordinary community news

"I will go in unto the Altar of God
To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"
Tridentine Community News (February 10, 2013):

Holy Family Church to hold Tridentine Mass and Dinner

Detroit’s beautiful historic Sicilian parish, Holy Family, is pleased to announce their second special Mass in the Extraordinary Form, a High Mass for the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, on Friday, February 22 at 7:00 PM. The Rosary will be prayed at 6:00 PM and Stations of the Cross at 6:30 PM. Fr. Mark Borkowski will be the celebrant, and the choir of Windsor’s Assumption Church will provide the music. After Mass, everyone is invited to a Parish Salad & Pasta Dinner in the lower level Social Hall. There will be no charge for the dinner, however free will offerings may be made.

Juventútem Michigan has designated this Mass for their monthly Fourth Friday gathering. Young adults age 18-35 are invited to register on the Facebook event page that has been set up.

The church is located on the southbound I-75 service drive adjacent to the Blue Cross tower downtown. Limited parking is available on the drive surrounding the church. Additional parking is available in the Blue Cross parking structure on the south side of the church; please enter the structure on Congress Street.

Holy Family has a long tradition of offering Latin Masses in the Ordinary Form. They hope to offer additional Tridentine Masses if the turnout is good for this one. Special thanks to Holy Family’s Fr. Pino and Bonnie & Bill Leone for their support.

Churches Turn to the East

Those who attend Holy Mass in the Extraordinary Form are accustomed to the celebrant facing in the same direction as the congregation as he leads them in prayer. This is known as ad oriéntem worship, facing (Liturgical) East, facing Christ, the rising Sun and Light of the world. In view of the recent news that the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship will be releasing a document suggesting that Holy Mass in the Ordinary Form be celebrated in this same traditional orientation, it is worth noting that an increasing number of churches are reinstating ad oriéntem worship for most, if not all, of their Ordinary Form Masses. Locally, St. Joseph Church in Detroit celebrates most of their scheduled Masses at their High Altar. Assumption Grotto Church recently did away with their freestanding altar; all of their Masses are now at the High Altar.

Some churches are taking even greater steps to make this sort of change. Recently, Holy Innocents Church in Long Beach, California conducted a wholesale remodel, with the approval of Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez. A Communion Rail and High Altar were installed, and all of their Masses, Ordinary and Extraordinary Form, are now celebrated facing East. The below before-and-after photos posted on various blogs this past week show the impressive results.


Before


After

Tridentine Masses This Coming Week

• Mon. 02/11 7:00 PM: Low Mass at St. Josaphat (Our Lady of Lourdes)
• Tue. 02/12 7:00 PM: High Mass at Assumption-Windsor (Seven Holy Servite Founders, Confessors) – University of Windsor Campus Ministry Visit to the Tridentine Mass. Pizza dinner and discussion about the Extraordinary Form with Juventútem after Mass in the Student Lounge at Assumption University
• Wed. 02/13: Ash Wednesday – Call St. Josaphat or Assumption Grotto for Mass times; not determined as of press time
• Sun. 02/17 Noon: High Mass at St. Albertus (First Sunday of Lent)

[Comments? Please e-mail tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org. Previous columns are available at http://www.detroitlatinmass.org. This edition of Tridentine Community News, with minor editions, is from the St. Josaphat (Detroit) and Assumption (Windsor) bulletin inserts for February 10, 2013. Hat tip to A.B., author of the column.]

Look which companies are dumping Boy Scouts

The Steady Drip displays a thorough listing of corporations, highlighting names. Craven capitulators all.

[Hat tip to Sir Anthony Sistrom]

Gun control: the other side

"Blade Runner" future in Detroit

"California's 'Blade Runner' Future comes to life ... in Detroit" (Lex Communis, February 4, 2013):

#7 Approximately one-third of Detroit's 140 square miles are either vacant or derelict.
#8 The city government of Detroit has closed dozens of schools and has decided to cut off public services to the "heavily blighted areas".
#9 According to one estimate, there are 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots in the city of Detroit today.
#10 The median price of a home in Detroit is just $9,000, and there are some areas of Detroit where you can still buy a house for $100.
#11 There are more than 85,000 streetlights in Detroit, but thieves have stripped so much copper wiring out of the lights that more than half of them are not working.
#12 Mayor Bing has announced a plan to reduce the number of streetlights in the city of Detroit to just 46,000.
#13 According to one very shocking report, 47 percent of all people living in the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate at this point..
#14 The murder rate in Detroit is 11 times higher than it is in New York City [but still lower than in Mr. Obama's beloved Chicago-- Site Mgr.].
#15 There were 377 homicides in Detroit in 2011. In 2012, that number rose to 411.
#16 Justifiable homicide in Detroit rose by an astounding 79 percent during 2011.
#17 In one recent year, the rate of self-defense killings in the city of Detroit was 2200% above the national average.
#18 Ten years ago, there were approximately 5,000 police officers in the city of Detroit. Today, there are only about 2,500 and another 100 are scheduled to be eliminated from the force soon.
#19 Due to budget cutbacks, most police stations in Detroit are now closed to the public for 16 hours a day.
#20 Crime has gotten so bad in Detroit that even the police are are telling people to "enter Detroit at your own risk".

[Hat tip to C.B.]

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga Receives Prestigious Rescher Prize

David J. Theroux, "Philosopher Alvin Plantinga Receives Prestigious Rescher Prize" (The Beacon, Feb. 2, 2013), writes:

The world-renowned philosopher Alvin C. Plantinga has recently received the prestigious Nicholas Rescher Prize for Contributions to Systematic Philosophy, awarded by the University of Pittsburgh’s Departments of Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Science, and the Center for the History and Philosophy of Science. Plantinga is widely known for his work in the philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics and Christian apologetics, and he has revolutionized scholarly interest in Christian theism, shown naturalism/atheism to be self-refuting and incoherent, and set the new standards for the defense of free will, individual agency, consciousness, rational inference, science, objective truth and morality, and more. As a result, Plantinga has both directly influenced the entire field of philosophy and has mentored and inspired new generations of top scholars who are critiquing the reductionism, relativism, materialism, collectivism, scientism, positivism, determinism, and de-humanization of the modern era. In short, Plantinga has devastated the prevailing view in Western elites that human beings are merely “matter in motion” (i.e., purposeless, accidental, robotic products of a closed, natural world ruled solely by physical laws and that truth, reason, morality, and God are illusions).

Read more >>

Canonist examines concealed carry weapon policies for churches

Canonist Ed Peters has come out with an interesting look at pending Arkansas' legislation for churches to determine concealed carry policies. Fr. Z. carries a post on Peters, offering his own feedback, which is also interesting. As the latter says, summing up: "The key concept in the issue seems to be subsidiarity – letting the decisions be made at the most local level feasible." A brief excerpt from Peters:

Assuming this bill becomes law—and setting aside some questions I can’t answer about how Arkansas defines a “church”, etc.—canonically, it seems to me that, as parishes are “juridic persons” under canon law (c. 515 § 3) and pastors represent parishes in juridic affairs (c. 532), local pastors get to make this call. For several reasons (cit. om.), I think a prohibition against carrying would have to be announced if that were desired as policy in a given parish.

That said, I think a bishop would have the authority (c. 381) to prohibit Catholics (as subjects of canon law) along with others (by dint of civil law) from carrying weapons in any Catholic sacred place (c. 1205). Of course, enacting such a policy would require of ecclesiastical leadership a conscientious weighing of its pros-s and con-s (including an assessment of the trend in recent years whereby lunatics target schools and churches as places packed with defenseless victims), of the enforceability of any policy as might be enacted, and of the consequences envisioned for violation of such a policy (which consequences might run up against certain canonical rights, say, to receive sacraments). In short, I don’t think there’s an obviously right, or wrong, answer to this one. [Fr. Z. adds: "Right or wrong? Not sure. Easy or hard? Definitely HARD! So, maybe it is one which bishops would do well to stay away from?"]

Hogan's slogans

A noble and practical-minded colleague of mine, whose surname rhymes with "Logan," recently offered this bit of down-homey Catholic wisdom over a plate of Slows slow-smoked barbecue in Corktown, the old Irish neighborhood near downtown Detroit: There are four necessary things -- indispensable things -- he said, which any Catholic needs to know in order to survive in today's world:

• The Book of Genesis,
• The Gospel of St. John,
• The Lord of the Rings trilogy (extended version of the movie), and
• Selections from the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Another recurrent theme in conversations with him is this: the family. People in Detroit never go on talking too long without the conversation coming back to the discrepancy between the latent potential in the City of Detroit and the sad state of disrepair and near-bankruptcy in which this former "Paris of the Midwest" now finds herself. No solution to the problem can ever hope to succeed, my friend is fond of saying -- not a light rail system, not a structural reorganization of the City Council, nothing -- if it does not also involve the rebuilding of robust and healthy domestic families in Detroit. I think he may be right; and part of that may depend on producing a generation familiar, minimally, with the aforementioned "four necessary things."

Shouldn't Richard III be given a Catholic burial?

Al Pacino as Kind Richard III
UK researchers confirmed that the long-lost remains of King Richard II have been found and identified, after sitting under what is now a parking lot in Leicester, in the English Midlands, for more than half a millenium. ("Remains Confirmed as King Richard II's," Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2013)


Now there is passionate talk suggesting that the Prime Minister ought to take charge and demand a ceremony that shows British schoolchildren how the English can venerate their past in a truly grand, national context, with a burial of Richard III in Westminster Abbey. ("To bury Richard III in Westminster Abbey would finally give a proper national resting place to our most unfairly maligned monarch of all," Mail Online, February 5, 2013)


King Richard, however, who was the last of the royal Plantagenet line before it was supplanted by the Tudors who famously broke with Rome over Henry VIII's libido, was a Roman Catholic. Is it proper that the contemporary descendants of the historic usurpers of the authority of the See of Peter over the Church in England impose their own novel and alien religious rites upon the remains of King Richard III? His religion was not that of the Church of England.

Miranda rights for foreign terrorists, Drone strikes on Americans, Pro-lifers now "terrorists"

• 1) Middle Eastern terrorists get the Miranda rights read to them and are tried in civil courts of law. [Source 1, & Source 2]
• 2) Drone strikes aimed at killing Americans are authorized. [Source]
• 3) Pro-lifers the new "terrorist threat." [Source]

"Saint Worship"

By Orestes Brownson

All love is demonstrative. It seeks always to express itself, and the expression of love is worship. From love springs alike the worship of God and of all that is godlike or related to the supreme and central object of love.

In every age of the Church saint-worship has obtained – never, I believe, by virtue of any positive precept, but from the overflowing of the pious Catholic heart. It is, if I may so speak, a necessity of Catholic piety. The love with which the regenerate and faithful soul is filled, cannot be satisfied without it. That love must worship, and it must worship the universal God: God in Himself and God in His works, all of which through His creative act partake of His divine being and are, through the medium of the act, identified with Him. The worship would seem to the soul incomplete, defective, if it did not embrace the creature with the Creator, and especially if it did not include the saints, who of all His creatures are the nearest and dearest to Him. The heart that does not include them in its love to God, and honor them in its honor to Him, may break no positive command, but it may be assured that it has at best only a stingy love, and no reason to applaud itself for either its logic or the fullness of its devotion.

The Protestant sects regard the worship which we render to the saints, especially to the blessed mother of our Redeemer, as idolatry. But this is because they do not consider that to worship God in His creatures, especially His saints, redeemed by His Blood and sanctified by His grace, is still to worship God; or that the worship which we render to the saints is never that which we offer to God Himself. Supreme worship is due to God alone, and to give it to another is idolatry, is treason to the Most High, to the Majesty of heaven and earth; none know this better than Catholics.

Have some nations lost the will to live?

I was listening to a radio interview this afternoon on my drive home, and a gentleman was saying that at present birth-and-death rates, within another generation or so, the Japanese will lose 58% of their population. More diapers are being sold in that country for adults than children. The Finance Minister made a public statement urging the aged and infirm, in effect, to "hurry up and die," because the younger generation could no longer sustain the financial burden of supporting them.

The interviewee went on to tell his radio audience that the problem is endemic to certain modern industrialized countries today -- including many in Western Europe -- but the worst, he said, are Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Russia, with Germany not far behind. The phenomenon is almost mystifying, he suggested. It's almost as if the human species in those countries has become asexual.

But how can that be? These are precisely those countries that are overdosing on pornography and sex. Oh, but I almost forgot: they have also completely severed the sexual act from its natural end of procreation. In other words, they are sexing themselves out of existence. Irony of ironies! For Rome it was the vomitoriums. For Moderns, it's sterile sex. What a way to go!

Related:

• Population Decline (Wiki)
• Demographic Winter - the decline of the human family (Full Movie)

KS Bp Finn tells National Catholic FISHWRAP to stuff it

As reported on ChurchMilitant.TV ...

Extraordinary Community News

"I will go in unto the Altar of God
To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"
Tridentine Community News (February 3, 2013):

The Blessing of Candles and Throats on the Feast of St. Blase

February 2 and 3 are connected days of sorts in the Liturgical Calendar. February 2 is the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This day is also known as Candlemas Day, as the Mass Propers include a Blessing of Candles and – logistics permitting – a procession with candles during the Mass.

February 3 is the Feast of St. Blase, Bishop & Martyr. St. Blase, also sometimes spelled St Blaise, was Bishop of Sebaste, Armenia and was martyred in 316 A.D. He is known for saving a child from choking on a fishbone. The Church has memorialized this in a formal way with another special blessing of candles, followed by blessing of throats of the faithful using those blessed candles. The blessing must be performed in Latin.

Blessing of Candles and Throats [1961 Colléctio Rítuum]

℣. Adjutórium nostrum in nómine Dómini.
℟. Qui fecit cælum et terram.
℣. Dóminus vobíscum.
℟. Et cum spíritu tuo.
Orémus.
Omnípotens et mitíssime Deus, qui ómnium mundi rerum diversitátes solo Verbo creásti, et ad hóminum reformatiónem illud idem Verbum per quod facta sunt ómnia, incarnári voluísti: qui magnus es, et imménsus, terríbilis atque laudábilis, ac fáciens mirabília: pro cujus fídei confessióne gloriósus Martyr et Póntifex Blásius, diversórum tormentórum génera non pavéscens, martýrii palmam felíciter est adéptus: quique eídem, inter céteras grátias, hanc prærogatívam contulísti, ut quoscúmque gútturis morbos tua virtúte curáret; majestátem tuam supplíciter exorámus, ut non inspéctu reátus nostri, sed ejus placátus méritis et précibus, hanc ceræ creatúram bene+dícere ac sancti+ficáre tua venerábili pietáte dignéris, tuam grátiam infundéndo; ut omnes, quorum colla per eam ex bona fide tacta fúerint, a quocúmque gútturis morbo ipsíus passiónis méritis liberéntur, et in Ecclésia sancta tua sani et hílares tibi gratiárum réferant actiónes, laudéntque nomen tuum gloriósum, quod est benedíctum in saécula sæculórum. Per Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum Fílium tuum: Qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti Deus, per ómnia saécula sæculórum.
℟. Amen.

[He sprinkles the candles with Holy Water.]

[Holding the candles in the form of a cross at the throat of each of the faithful, he says:]

Per intercessiónem sancti Blásii, Epíscopi et Mártyris, líberet te Deus a malo gútturis, et a quólibet álio malo. In nómine Patris, et Fílii, + et Spíritus Sancti. ℟. Amen.

Blessing of Candles and Throats [English from fisheaters.com and the 1961 Colléctio Rítuum]

℣. Our help is in the name of the Lord.
℟. Who made heaven and earth.
℣. The Lord be with you.
℟. And with thy spirit.

Almighty and most gentle God, Who didst create the multiplicity of things through Thine only Word, and didst will that same Word through Whom all things were made to take flesh for the refashioning of man; Thou, Who art great and without measure, terrible and worthy of praise, a Worker of wonders: the glorious Martyr and Bishop Blase, not fearing to suffer all sorts of diverse tortures because of his profession of faith in Thee, was suited happily to bear the palm of martyrdom: and Thou didst grant to him, among other graces, the favor that he should by Thy power cure all kinds of illnesses of the throat: we humbly beg Thy Majesty not to look upon our sins, but to be pleased by his merits and prayers and to deign in Thy venerable kindness to bless + and sanctify + this creature of wax by the outpouring of Thy grace; that all whose necks in good faith are touched by it may be freed by the merits of his sufferings from any illness of the throat, and that healthy and strong they may offer thanks to Thee within Thy Holy Church, and praise Thy glorious Name, which is blessed forever and ever. Through our Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.
℟. Amen.

[He sprinkles the candles with holy water.]

[Holding the candles in the form of a cross at the throat of each of the faithful, he says:]

Through the intercession of Saint Blase, Bishop and Martyr, may God deliver you from all disease of the throat, and from every other evil. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, + and of the Holy Ghost.
℟. Amen.

Tridentine Masses This Coming Week

• Mon. 02/04 7:00 PM: Low Mass at St. Josaphat (St. Andrew Corsini, Bishop & Confessor)
• Tue. 02/05 7:00 PM: Low Mass at Assumption-Windsor (St. Agatha, Virgin & Martyr)
• Sun. 02/10 1:00 PM: High Mass at St. Hyacinth (Quinquagésima Sunday)

[Comments? Please e-mail tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org. Previous columns are available at http://www.detroitlatinmass.org. This edition of Tridentine Community News, with minor editions, is from the St. Josaphat (Detroit) and Assumption (Windsor) bulletin inserts for February 3, 2013. Hat tip to A.B., author of the column.]

Worst fears about Cardinal Mahony confirmed

Letter from Most Reverend José H. Gomez, Archbishop of Los Angeles, posted under the title, "So we were right about what we presumed regarding the Mahony regime?..." (Rorate Caeli, February 1, 2013), who also links to George Neumayr's Cardinal Mahony's Cosa Nostra (Real Clear Religion, January 25, 2013).