tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63124472024-03-09T21:47:51.189-05:00Musings of a Pertinacious PapistThe Blog of Dr. Philip Blosser, Professor of Philosophy at Sacred Heart Major Seminary.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger6460125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-82606483461033800202023-09-09T16:40:00.026-04:002023-09-09T17:40:50.016-04:00Laughter, tears, & how the visible signifies the invisible: children and liturgyIf there ever was such a thing as an apostle of the sacramental worldview, it would be the late, great Thomas Howard. And by "sacramental" I mean something beyond the seven Catholic sacraments. If a sacrament is and outward sign of an inward grace, then the "sacramental" perspective sees in the visible world a panoply signs that point beyond themselves, in a way that Plato might have nearly understood, to how things ultimately are in the transcendent unseen world.
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Howard, with whom I had the privilege of corresponding after he was received into the Catholic Church some decades ago, died in 2020. He was a convert from evangelical Protestantism to Anglicanism and then, finally, to Catholicism. His books, like his correspondence, are both thoughtful and profound. He is a master of English, and one sometimes needs a dictionary to catch up with his extensive and colorful vocabulary. Some of his titles include <i>Evangelical Is Not Enough</i>; <i>Lead, Kindly Light</i>; <i>On Being Catholic</i>; <i>Splendor in the Ordinary</i>; <i>The Night Is Far Spent</i>; but by far my favorite is a book he published before becoming Catholic entitled, <i>An Antique Drum</i> (introduced to me at Francis Schaeffer's L'Abri in Switzerland), which was later published after his conversion by Ignatius Press under the implausible title of <i>Chance, or the Dance?</i> Peter Kreeft called it his favorite book.
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I have been reading yet another book by Thomas Howard, <i>The Secret of New York Revealed: Being the Autobiographical Fragments of the Then Recently Married Thomas Howard Chronicling His Numerous Discoveries in the City of That Name</i> (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2002). And what a book! I do not intend to review the book here, but only to illustrate what I call his "sacramental" outlook from two experiences related in his chapter entitled "The Infata Comes." The two experiences have to do with <i>children</i> and <i>liturgy</i>. What binds his descriptions of the two experiences together is his ability to move from the <i>external</i> perception of ugliness as a skeptical onlooker to a transforming <i>internal</i> perception of the at-first-hidden depths of beauty.
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First: children.
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In my bachelor days I would look at young couples in airports with their babies, and my soul would fill with horror. All this baggage. The babe in arms with sour milk dribbling down the front, leaning out in feverish, squalling dissatisfaction from his mother's arms, reaching petulantly into the air for he knew not what (and putting out a generally noxious miasma from both ends). And the two-year-old with a lollipop, wallowing on the floor, dragging at his mother's skirts. And the four-year-old with a dripping popsicle running down over his fist and chocolate smeared about his mouth, pulling his father to the newsstand to see some plastic Batman car. And the father all the while trying to riffle through the tickets to see what the flight number was, and the mother trying to keep tabs on the diaper bag, the stroller, the plastic car seat, the baby carrier, the folding bassinet, the bottle warmer, and the suitcases. Eheu! . . . Who are the clods who will opt for all this when you can be so patently free? . . .
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Come at from that angle, it is difficult to find any rationale for the phenomenon. But you back into these things. It does not all gape upon you at once. First one thing happens (the child is conceived), then another (morning sickness, sleepiness), then another (maternity dresses), then another (natural childbirth classes), then another (the birthing). You don't suddenly find yourself one fine morning standing in LaGuardia beleaguered with a family. And the anxious bachelor has left one thing out of his reckoning: that beleaguered man loves that lady and those ragtag besiegers.</blockquote>
There is more here that comes toward the end of the chapter, but I shan't dally. The point is that he eventually sees beyond his external first impression into something at the heart of things and beautiful.
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Second: liturgy
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One of the things that happened in those early weeks of the new tack was that I set out one Sunday morning alone to scout out a church that we had heard about. We had visited a number of churches in the city, as churchgoing people are wont to do in a new place, and were still looking. We had seen in the <i>New York Times</i> on the page where all the churches announce themselves a little box giving the following information for one of the churches: "Catholic worship, liturgical music, gospel preaching." It was the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, just off Times Square, known to its friends as Smokey Mary's. I had heard of this church before coming to the city and thought it might be an idea to visit it one day. I was not sure the incense would be the thing for Lovelace's present delicately poisoned gastronomic situation, so I set out alone.
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I took the subway north to Times Square. This is a train that, on an early Sunday morning, looks very much like the Damnation Local. . . . The train clanks and screeches balefully along, swaying and jolting violently over what must surely be a raw rock roadbed. You sit in the wan dusk of the empty care with newspapers and candy wrappers shifting about the floor. A solitary derelict in a far corner slumps in a sodden torpor. The sliding doors between the cars bang to and fro. The train lurches to a halt at the stops, but no one gets on or off. No traffic for hell today. . . .
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If the subway is the Damnation Local, Times Square on a Sunday morning lies somewhere in the precincts of perdition itself. One widespread picture of hell is of a region of feverish activity, with great crowds of souls, worn out from their bacchanalia, prodded on by demons, twittering about in the ghastly search for one more diversion. You can see this in the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, or in Times Square on any night. But surely the windy and vacuous desolation of Times Square on a Sunday morning, when it is all over and no one but the odd straggler is left, is a far more melancholy picture of perdition? On Saturday night at least the illusion is still flying through the air like silver dust thrown in our eyes. On Sunday morning the dust has settled into the gutters, along with the spit and the wet tissues, and what sparkled the night before gapes flatly at you in the blank light of day. Massage parlors, "adult" book shops, moth-eaten cinemas, pinball machine arcades, souvenir stands, and restaurants sit like stupefied whores, their makeup dulled and flaking after the night's work.
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Saint Mary's stands half a block from Times Square. You can pass it easily enough without noticing it, since the facade is flush with the other buildings. If you do happen to look, you will see the gray stone and the nineteenth-century gothic of the doorways. If you go into the narthex and look down the nave aisle toward the high altar, you will see what most people expect to see in a church of ancient tradition: candles, crucifixes, arches, rich brocades, and all the furniture of the church.
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You can find other furnishings -- leatherette and formica and ashtrays -- in the restaurants in Times Square, and there you can droop over the sticky counter nursing your coffee and trying to collect your wits. What a terrible hand of cards life has dealt me. How did I land here? Where is someone to lift this burden off me and love me?
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There are no leatherette and formica here in Saint Mary's. Only this particular assemblage of ornaments and furniture, most of it spiky and uncomfortable, and all of it grossly out of date. You travel a thousand years when you step across this threshold. Everything in here has been assembled in obedience to a vision of things that seems remote indeed from the stark realities outside. It's real life outside there, surely: people creep into a church like this only as a last resort.
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For me in that Sunday morning it was something like a visit to a shrine that one has heart about. The vestments, the music, the incense, the ceremonial -- these were what people mentioned when they spoke of this church.
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The Christian mysteries were celebrated that morning as they always are at Saint Mary's, and I, like all newcomers there, was overwhelmed. It was all very far removed from what you find in the "typical" American church, if by that we mean the white clapboard edifice that shows up in calendars of New England or on<i> Saturday Evening Post covers</i>. I was familiar with Christian rites that were plain, and this seemed lavish. The whole business of ceremony seemed to matter here. Every gesture seemed to carry some freight of significance. One minute the priest had his hands up like this, and the next they were out like that. One minute he was facing you, and the next he was sideways, and then he had his back to you. He even changed his vestments during the hour, from a cope to a chasuble. Nothing was natural or spontaneous or unstructured. In order to get from one place to another, they processed. They never merely <i>said</i> anything: it was all chanted. And nothing could be done without scattering smoke hither and thither. They walked around the altar with it, they swung it over books, shot it out at the priest, and finally waved it at us.
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If everything else had put me off forever (which it hadn't), I would have gone back again for the music. All the antiphons were sung in Gregorian chant, the most pure, most austere of all musical forms, perfectly suited to the text of Scripture, since it liberates the words from the distracting style of any individual reader and sets them out, free from ornament, where there is nothing to do but listen to them. And the music of the Mass itself -- the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Sanctus and Benedictus, and the Agnus dei -- was sung from a loft in the back of the church: no visible choir in robes, putting on a performance for us, but rather voices articulating these ancient canticles that utter the Church's response to the great mysteries of the gospel, and all of it sung, not by tremulous, warbling concert voices, but in that "white" tone, wholly free from vibrato, that again sets the text free from any individual's efforts to impress. And the hymns! Here were no racy, breathless tent-meetin' sentiments, dilating on one's private experience, nor any enfeebled twentieth-century World Council of Churches attempts at hymnody where you end up singing about nothing closer to the Christian mysteries than aspirations toward world brotherhood. No. Here were "Christ Is Mad the Sure Foundation" and "Deck Thyself, My Soul, with Gladness" and "O Food of Men Wayfaring."
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What is one to make of the liturgy? It thought. It is at a polar extreme from our era's attempts at getting things unstructured and spontaneous. A chance passerby might well think it is all horribly repressive and restricting. But what he would be missing would be the way in which all this structure, lo and behold, lifts us away from the poor little tiny circumference of our own private feelings and experience and liberates us into something that is infinitely more vast than ourselves -- the way any great ceremony does. It is odd, how the whole race, in all tribes and cultures and centuries, has always resorted to ceremony -- in the presence of life's deepest mysteries. Birth, marriage, and death: What do we all do with these purely organic, purely functional, events? We deck them and order them and set them about with ritual. Birthday cakes, wedding solemnities, funeral obsequies. What are they all about? Well, we are clearly ritual creatures. Perhaps our own era's efforts to replace pomp and ceremony with spontaneity are a tragic betrayal of the sort of creatures we are. The stars in their courses move in solemn dance; we read of seraphim and cherubim covering their faces in adoration; we see the whole world of flora and fauna repeating its yearly rituals in exuberant obedience to the rubric Shall we, alone in the universe, insist that our freedom is to be found in the random, the ad hoc, and the unstructured? Surely one way of describing the difference between hell and the City of God is to say that the former is wholly unstructured and the latter magnificently structured?
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I had, I thought, seen a diagram of that structured magnificence in the liturgy on that morning at Saint Mary's.
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At this point Howard returns to his first subject of children, or, rather, his experience of the birth of his first child. It is a beautifully engaging discussion, and no less profound than his observations about liturgy in teasing out the splendor and transcendent from beneath the banal and ordinary.
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Twice during my reading of the chapter -- and this is not uncommon for me while reading Howard -- I am not sure whether I caught myself laughing or crying. If felt like both simultaneously. He touches something deep within.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-50613492474177576512023-08-09T16:16:00.003-04:002023-08-10T21:55:05.719-04:00Review of Speaking in Tongues, vol. 1, The Modern Redefinition of Tongues, by Fr. Titus KieningerFr. Titus Klieninger, of the Canons Regular of the Holy Cross (ORC), has written a generous review of vol. 1 of our historical study of SPEAKING IN TONGUES. Fr. Klieninger used to live in Michigan but is now working in Brazil. Although he speaks both English and Portuguese, his native language is German. Please keep that in mind as you read his review, published in <i>Recensões de Livros</i>:<blockquote>
Philip E. BLOSSER & Charles A. SULLIVAN, <i>Speaking in Tongues. A critical Historical Examination.</i> Vol. 1: The Modern Redefinition of Tongues, Forewords by Dale M. Coulter and James Likoudis, Pickwick Publications, Eugene, Oregon, 2022. Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-6667-9761-9, US $50; Paperback ISBN: 978-1-6667-3777-6, US $35; E-book ISBN: 978-1-6667-9762-6; US $35.
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In a time, when the Church puts in the mouth of her Bishops at the celebration of the Sacrament of Confirmation the phrase: <i>Hodie adventus Spiritus Sancti dono linguarum non amplius declaratur</i> ("In our day the coming of the Holy Spirit in confirmation is no longer marked by the gift of tongues”), the phenomenon of speaking in tongues” [is] widely called [to our] attention, and people are confused by it. For this reason the study of Prof. Blosser and Mr. Sullivan is so valuable. It is a study three volumes which of itself indicates the seriousness of the work.
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The biographical notes on the two authors awake confidence in this “ecumenical venture”: Charles Sullivan “is a Protestant” and “has been involved in the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement for over thirty years” and Professor Blosser, “was born in China and raised in Japan by Protestant missionary parents … and is a Catholic since 1993” (cf. p. 7-10).
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The fact that they found “that the current Pentecostal-Charismatic practice of speaking, praying, and singing in tongues is a historical novelty with no antecedents in Church history before the nineteenth century” (p. 6) raises interest. Among the “over half a billion adherents” of “the Charismatic movement … and combined with the world’s Pentecostal Christians” (p. 43; cf. p. 182), many manifestations (cf. p. 41) “present a dizzying and seemingly endless variety of subdivisions and sub-movements” (p. 43). These are “the point of departure for our investigation”, but require a “much needed larger framework” (p. 41). This is then the purpose of this study: the search for the causes and roots.” The present study is structured after the model of an archeological excavation or ‘dig’. Starting at the surface level with the current state of affairs … digging down … down through Church history to the New Testament; then even deeper …” (p. 10).
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Still more interesting are the many questions right away in the first chapter of this volume (cf. pp. 16, 18, 22, 39, 40 …) which show the authors’ familiarity with the theme and its understanding in depth. The calm and sober approach, with “caution and circumspection” (p. 27), having listened to many, permits the authors to distinguish all the different understandings of the subject, but also points to danger “under the ambiguities of various words which attempt to introduce their errors” (Francisco Suarez, p. 39). The discussion revolves around the biblical references (Rom 12; 1 Cor 12-14; Eph 4 and 1 Pet 4). The first step is the clarification of the term, subject of the first chapter: Are we dealing with speaking or just hearing and understanding? Is it something natural or preternatural? … (p. 16-39). They continue with the “Contemporary Charismatic Culture, from 1994 back to 1967”, the third of the three waves in the twenties century (p. 40-61), followed by “The Pentecostal Crisis and Its Background, from 1906 back to 1830” (p. 62-94) which lead to the origin of “the word <i>glossolalia</i>” by the “German Higher Critics” in the 19th century (cf. p. 95-140).
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This detailed search for historical facets and roots of the phenomena of the last two centuries shows it to be something arbitrary which leads them to find deceptions. For example, the “father of the doctrine of tongues” (p. 76), Parham, who started in 1901 in Topeka, USA (p. 64-71) pointed out to Ed. Irving in England (+ 1834; p. 77-84). Who, to justify the apparent gift of the Holy Spirit, changed the identification of “tongues”, first as unknown foreign language, to a “heavenly language unknown on earth” (p. 83). The end, what it is, remains obscure, so that people walked away from “the verge of bottomless abysses of Madness” (p. 80; Irving ”was defrocked”, p. 83).
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The study of “<i>glossolalia</i>” is unique: “The story of <i>glossolalia</i>” is shown with an astonishing accuracy: “The word <i>glossolalia</i> is nowhere in the Bible” (p. 96). “The new interpretation of the ‘gift of tongues’ as <i>glossolalia</i> was first introduced in Germany around 1830” (p. 110) by “German Protestant theologians” (p. 97). A strong contribution came through “F. Schleiermacher (1768-1834), often called the ‘father of the modern liberal theology’” (p. 102) and through various disciples of his, some very influential such as F. Baur, “the celebrated professor at the Tübinger School of Theology” (p. 102), with his “new approach to biblical interpretation that purposely avoided the trappings of traditional, ecclesiastically-authorized interpretations of biblical texts” (p. 101)”. The term <i>glossolalia</i> found not “its way into English publications until Farrar introduced it in 1879” (p. 110).
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The rich documentation of def enders and opposers (“early objections”, p. 121-124) of the new theory as “unintelligible tongues” (p. 101), “ecstatic tongues” (p. 103) or “heavenly language” (p. 111), just demanded the authors’ serious confrontation of this “virtually unquestionable dogma” with “primary, secondary, and even tertiary source books from this period,” including the examination of“translations of the Bible” (p. 120; 185-187),the consultation of many “Dictionaries before 1879” in Syriac, Greek, Latin and of modern languages and it’s just partial acceptance after 1879 until the present day (p.110-120); they humbly indicate where still further studies would be appropriated (p. 112, 120).
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Due to an unsolid biblical reference, the “theological Higher Critics discovered an alternative way of explaining the idea, … the ancient ecstatic utterances of the Oracle of Delphi” (p. 99). However, our authors submitted “The Delphic Oracles and Christian Tongues” (p. 124-131) to their study. Capable of reading in the ancient languages, they analyzed the “major sources” and came to the conclusion: “The works of Herodotus, Aristophanes, Plato, Virgil, Lucan, Plutarch, Strabo, Michael Psellos, and Erwin Rhode demonstrate no viable connection between the ancient Greek prophetesses of Delphi and the modern revisionist Christian doctrine of ‘tongues’.” (p. 130): These oracles “spoke clearly in classic hexameter verse… nothing remotely like glossolalic tongues’-speech” (p.125).
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The authors also “offer a critical examination of” “the bizarre babblings of the Montanists (a heretical Christian sect” (p. 99 and 131-140), with “three primary sources: Eusebius of Caesarea, Epiphanius of Salamis, and Tertullian, who was himself a Montanist” (p. 131). Finding “arguments on both sides,” having found “the issue requires a closer look” (p. 135), they went to more sources like Serapion of Thumris or examined “the issue in light of both classical Greek and ecclesiastical literature” (p. 136), including their interpretations (cf. p. 137-139). The result is: that “the Montanists were not exercising the Christian gift of tongues” so that “the modern Pentecostal-Charismatic attempt to connect Christian tongues-speaking with Montanism, in the light of these facts, is a non-starter” (p. 139-140).
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Another claim of the founders of the movements with the gift of tongues is their affirmation that after the time of the apostles the gift of tongues was not granted anymore, but is [granted] now once again through them, the Pentecostals and Charismatics of today. This led Blosser and Sullivan to study what is called “Cessationism, the belief that miraculous gifts ceased in apostolic times” (p. 141–183). It “arose as a Protestant response to what was perceived as an excessive and misguided Catholic preoccupation with miracles and the veneration of miracle-working saints” (p. 143), and “developed as a counterargument against Catholics” (p. 144). The authors took it as a serious historical fact, and studied the “medieval” (p. 145-151) and “Patristic Background” (p. 152-156) and then its “Protestant beginnings” with Luther, Calvin and the development with the Puritans, Presbyterians … and Deists (cf. 156-171), first on the British Island, then its “later developments in England and the United States” (p. 171-183). What they discovered and show is the “adjective ‘unknown’ or ‘other’ or ‘strange’ as a modifier of the word ‘tongues’ in Protestant translations of the Bible” (p. 183; not something yet in Luther's translation!) [was intended] “to win the Reformation debate against Rome” (p. 183), because the Catholic Church continued to believe in miracles. “Most Charismatic and Pentecostal leaders today are unaware of the history of the ‘other tongues’ interpolation and its root in the Protestant Reformation.” (p. 184) But since 1534, including the King James Bible since 1611 (cf. p. 185f; 7 times in 1 Cor 14), the adjectives “found their way into English Bible translation, (and) became key aids in facilitating their reappraisal of the gift of tongues” (p. 184). As an example, they give: “the Baptist old world tradition was Cessationist” (p. 175); “on May 13, 2015, however, the Southern Baptist Convention changed its traditional policy and the denomination’s International Mission Board now admits missionary applicants who identify as speaking in tongues” (p. 176).
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This shows one reason for the necessity of the “investigation into the origins and development of the other tongues doctrine” (p. 185). Another reason is ignorance of the rich “ecclesiastical literature through Church history” (p. 152). The entire contemporary discussion about the “speaking in tongues” seems not to be about the objective truth; this however [is] what is of interest of our authors. Consequently, what we have seen so far provoked them to go still deeper in the second volume, to see through a solid study on “how ‘speaking in tongues’ was understood through Church history”. In the third volume, they look at the biblical references themselves, and see them in their cultural and historical framework (cf. p. 12-13).
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This book is written in a colloquial style, easy reading. It clears up much of what one wants to know about this current topic. And yet it is a dense and deep study that offers a very wide spectrum of information, which might rarely be found anywhere else. The authors documented everything with first sources (see the rich bibliography, p 201-217). Here, digging deeper and deeper in history, the importance of the knowledge of many ancient languages becomes clear (cf. pp. 7-9). One example is the access to “a visual survey of half the volumes of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca conducted between 1993-2003” (161 volumes, in Greek with some translations in Latin).
The authors approach is sober and neutral, follows the necessary sources and still does not hesitate to declare what is sufficiently justified and what is rather just based on good faith. It is acknowledged from the Catholic and Protestant side. The authors do not dispense, themselves or the reader, from a critical attitude (“I look back and think… How I thought…”, p. 46; “this claim is debatable”, “this still does not explain …”, p. 60).
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The “conclusion” of this first part summarizes, in a very simple and clear way, seven “black-and-white historical facts” which “cannot be reasonably denied” (cf. p. 193-196). “At the conclusion of the present volume, we can say with certainty that the understanding and practice of ‘speaking in tongues’ found in the Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition today is based on a nineteenth-century theory of <i>glossolalia</i> and a twentieth-century redefinition of ‘tongues’ that are complete historical novelties. … In this respect, we may paraphrase John Henry Newman and say, ‘To go deep into history is to cease to accept the Pentecostal-Charismatic understanding of tongues’.” (p. 199). May God help the authors to complete the work started. It brings the necessary light into the obscurity of a religious “zeal for God, but that lacks discernment” (Rom 10:2). It brings clarity to those who seek the truth and want to serve and worship God according to his will, “in Spirit and truth” (Jn 4:24).
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Titus Kieninger ORC
</blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-2413389241822023272023-07-13T15:09:00.002-04:002023-07-13T15:11:55.437-04:00What to make of Vatican II?What to make of Vatican II? <br><br>
Pope Paul VI, in his General Audience of Jan. 12, 1966, stated: <blockquote>There are those who ask what authority, what theological qualification, the Council intended to give to its teachings, knowing that it avoided issuing solemn dogmatic definitions backed by the Church’s infallible teaching authority. The answer is known by those who remember the conciliar declaration of March 6, 1964, repeated on November 16, 1964. In view of the pastoral nature of the Council, it avoided proclaiming in an extraordinary matter any dogmata carrying the mark of infallibility.</blockquote>
This does not mean, of course, that conciliar documents did not contain references to Catholic doctrine previously defined as dogma and therefore infallibly authoritative, such as the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, the virgin birth of Christ, and so forth. Nor does it mean that conciliar documents did not contain anything new, such as its statements about ecumenism, religious freedom, etc. What it does mean is that nothing new in these documents was defined as infallible dogma.
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The “new springtime” in the Church heralded by the post-conciliar popes and others who hoped that the simplified and more-accessible vernacular liturgy would promote the “new evangelization” seems not to have yielded quite the hoped-for results. It was not as if the police had to be summoned to Catholic churches each Sunday “to hold back the hordes of lapsed Catholics whose faith had been rekindled at the prospect of saying the Confiteor in English,” as Michael Davies quipped in his book, _Pope Paul’s New Mass_.
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Can Ecumenical Councils of the Church fail in their objectives? Fr. John Zuhlsdorf writes: <blockquote>Regarding General or Ecumenical Councils (all 21 of them), it is possible to be a valid council but a failed one. Consider Lateran V. Utter failure. Its legislation on ecclesiastical pawn shops went nowhere, which is a darn shame. I’d really appreciate well-regulated ecclesiastical pawn shops. And – hey! – what ever happened to the “spirit of Lateran V”? Moreover, Lateran I and Lateran II weren’t even classified as General or Ecumenical Councils until after the Council of Trent (500 years later).</blockquote>
In the same vein, Saint Gregory Nazianzus writes: <blockquote>If I must speak the truth, I feel disposed to shun every conference of Bishops; because I never saw a Synod brought to a happy issue, not remedying but rather increasing, existing evils. For ever is there rivalry and ambition, and these have the mastery of reason; -- do not think me extravagant for saying so; -- and a mediator is more likely to be attacked himself, than to succeed in his pacification. Accordingly, I have fallen back upon myself and consider quiet the only security of life.</blockquote>
Again, Joseph Ratzinger, writing in <i>Principles of Catholic Theology</i>, 378, writes:<blockquote>Not every valid council in the history of the Church hs been a fruitful one; in the last analysis, many of them have been a waste of time. Despite all the good to be found in the texts produced, the last word about the historical value of Vatican II has yet to be spoken.</blockquote>
There are some Catholic scholars and clerics who speak or write as if Vatican II is a sort of 'SuperDogma.' The litmus test for the fellowship of kindred spirits or its opposite -- something bordering on excommunication or being tarred and feathered – is whether or not one “accepts” Vatican II. But what does this mean, exactly?
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A good friend of mine, whom I sometimes refer to as “L’Autre Phil,” says that one can never make sense of the Second Vatican Council by trying to get at it strictly in terms of its textual content. Why? Because either it functions as a wax nose that can be made to “say” whatever one wants it to say or, worse, because almost nobody cares about the text. What everyone cares about, however, is the “event” of Vatican II and what it’s made to symbolize.
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Cardinal Ratzinger, in his address to Chilean Bishops (July 13, 1988), said this about the last council:<blockquote>There are many accounts of it which give the impression that, from Vatican II onward, everything has been changed, and that what preceded it has no value or, at best, has value only in the light of Vatican II. <br><br>
The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero. The truth is that this particular Council define no dogma at all, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat it as though it had made itself into a sort of 'super-dogma' which takes away the importance of all the rest. “This idea is made stronger by things that are now happening. That which previously was considered most holy – the form in which the liturgy was handed down – suddenly appears as the most forbidden of all things, the one thing that can safely be prohibited. It is intolerable to criticize decisions which have been taken since the Council; on the other hand, if men make question of anciet rules, or even of the great truths of the Faith – for instance, the corporal virginity of Mary, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the immortality of the soul, etc. – nobody complains or only does so with the greatest moderation.</blockquote>
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(Hat tip to a couple of my Catholic colleagues.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-36736387089393462322023-06-10T09:37:00.000-04:002023-06-10T09:37:53.968-04:00Does Good Liturgy Beget Moral Virtue?A BOOK CRITIC’S IMPRESSIONS OF A LIVING CLASSIC
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by Kenneth Colston
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<img src="https://www.newoxfordreview.org/wp-content/uploads/importedmedia/0705-rose.jpg" align=left hspace=4 vspace=4>One scorching Corpus Christi in the first decade of this millennium, as an occasional book critic with a little time on my hands, I checked out the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) that had been recently imported from France into my violent American city. I entered a surprisingly crowded but spookily silent neo-Gothic church that had been marked for demolition until the French order of priests took it over. It wasn’t hard to find: the steeple was 300 feet high. The gilded 52-foot-high reredos and a 40-foot-wide carved altar rail would have dropped Attila the Hun to his knees. Cassocks and fiddleback chasubles were back, auricular-only confession lines jammed, genuflections and signs of the cross abundant, brown scapulars visible, long dresses and covered shoulders <i>de rigueur</i>, fasting obvious, and fertility robust.
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Even though I taught Latin at a classical school, I couldn’t keep up with the intoned rises and falls. No worry, a priest said later, I<i> wasn’t talking to you</i>. Procession and benediction around a decrepit inner-city block left thousands of rose petals on potholed streets. I didn’t get loose for three hours and felt that I had fallen in and out of an artistic and sartorial time warp. Thinking as a book critic, I suspected, even at first glance, that this blast from the past portended more than a restoration in liturgy alone.
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I was in the presence of a living classic.
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Two movements were slowly trending together in this diocese. Month after month, year after year, the suburban pews in Pizza Hut pagodas purged themselves of polo shirts and Bermuda shorts, of music ministries imitating the 1970s pop group Tony Orlando and Dawn, and of jolly priests roaming the pews with mics like local reporters at a ribs festival. Meanwhile, this German-crafted church was filling with young faces behind fine-lace veils and shoulders-back pressed suits. Inside a nave 130 feet long and 70 feet high, congregants said they were drawn by a more fitting beauty, and they professed piety and virtue with the example of their lives. What do they mean, why are their many children so well behaved, and why do they have their stuff so manifestly together?
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First, more precisely, what accounts for this kind of antique beauty, and why should it animate followers of Christ, who wrote no treatise on aesthetics? An account of beauty challenged St. Thomas Aquinas, who no doubt occasionally heard Latin in Cologne or Paris, if not in Orvieto, chanted flat, out of measure, or poorly phrased. He wondered how the transcendentals were associated. Is <i>pulchrum</i> a universal transcendental property of being, he asked, like bonum and verum? He made the following distinction:<blockquote>Although the beautiful and the good are the same in the subject — because both clarity and consonance are included in the nature of the good — they are conceptually different. For beauty adds something to the good, namely, an order which enables cognition to know that a thing is of such a kind. (<i>De Divinis Nominibus</i>)</blockquote>
There it is: beauty helps us recognize the good and true. Moreover, it “gives pleasure.” The good and the beautiful are the same in the subject but are different notions. Aquinas explicates:<blockquote>
For the good, which is what all things desire, properly has to do with the idea of an end; for appetite is a kind of movement toward an end. Beauty, however, has to do with knowledge, for we call those things beautiful which please us when they are seen. (<i>Summa Theologiae</i>)</blockquote>
What are the necessary elements of the beautiful things, which “please us when they are seen”? Aquinas names them: <i>integritas</i> (“perfection” or “lacking nothing”), <i>consonantia</i> (“proportion” or “harmony”), and <i>claritas</i> (“brightly colored”). Apply them to any artwork or liturgy, modest or grand, miniature or magnificent, and you can judge whether it’s beautiful and whether it can be associated with the true and good. Unlike pornography, which is brightly colored but out of proportion and lacking nearly everything, you both know beauty when you see it and you can define it. Thomas adds a gentle touch: Beauty gives not only pleasure but also “peace.”
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This classical, objective view of beauty cannot, however, completely account for the majestic aesthetics of the <i>usus antiquior</i>, for the post-Vatican II <i>Novus Ordo</i> Mass (<i>NO</i>) that knows its place within the genre can have a restrained integrity, minimalist harmony, and spare clarity. The <i>NO</i> has the lean suggestiveness of Henry David Thoreau’s prose, Seneca rather than Cicero: short, sober homilies; simple hymns <i>a cappella</i> (sometimes no music at all); the priest occasionally unaccompanied — provided the congregation be generally silent and prayerful enough for the Word to soak in and evangelize, which happens sometimes in early-morning weekday Masses but is almost always absent on Sundays. Sometimes, even in wall-to-wall, indoor-outdoor carpet, I actually enjoy the <i>NO</i>, as I am fond of E.B. White’s essays and folk tales and Shaker hymns, especially when it approaches the quality of a first-rate Wednesday-night Protestant Bible study or when, as J.F. Powers once joked, I don’t hear much.
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What is lacking in Aquinas’s account — but certainly not in the <i>usus antiquior</i> itself, as Aquinas would have known it — is perhaps best explained by the famous Romantic element of the “sublime” elaborated by Edmund Burke in <i>A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful</i> (1759), by which the object of beauty arouses <i>subjective feelings of terror</i>. Nobody in the long procession of a Solemn Pontifical High Mass, not even the grammar-school altar boys, cracks a smile, glad hands, or forgets that it heads toward a <i>commemorated sacrifice</i>. The rumbling bass notes of the organ can freeze you in the pew; the clanking thurifer chases away demons and occupies the kids; the plaintively chanted <i>mea culpas</i> and lingering kyries beg for mercy through vowels that ache for infinite pardon. The Solemn High Mass is not merely reverential, for good manners and appropriate silence can achieve that. It is <i>sublime</i> because we are brought to the edge of death, to the bar rail of a holy Niagara Falls, to the rim of a sacred volcano of sacrificial love.
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The sublime is part of high aesthetic appreciation, but, contrary to the beautiful, it does not immediately give peace, pleasure, or relaxation. Burke claims it is “terrible,” “painful,” “tragic,” and “great.” The sublime is not “clear” but “obscure,” and the <i>usus antiquior</i>, even the low version, solemnizes and imitates a mystery with its unfamiliar, complicated, even strange language, sounds, and vestments. The beautiful, arousing pleasure is “smooth, polished, light, delicate”; the sublime, arousing pain is “great, massive, dark, gloomy.” Though the sublime can even be “rugged and ugly,” these are not its defining qualities. Burke occasionally allows the same object to be both beautiful and sublime, but the categories are nonetheless distinct. The sublime exhibits “power,” “violence,” and “strength.” Its sources are “magnificence” and “magnitude,” like the “starry heavens,” a “rugged and broken vastness,” and the several “privations” of “darkness, solitude, and silence.” Verily, the sublime characterizes “the God of scripture,” in Burke’s account, for “wherever [He] is represented as appearing or speaking, everything terrible in nature is called up to heighten the awe and solemnity of the divine presence.”
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Job testifies to God’s power over men, who cannot draw out Leviathan with a hook, and over the young, who hide from Him seated in the streets. In the Psalms, God’s anger makes the earth tremble, and He bows the heavens. Burke notes that the sublime also characterizes Satan, God’s counterfeit in John Milton’s Paradise Lost: Burke does not wish to make the sublime a transcendental of being. We don’t know whether Burke’s Catholic mother took him to Holy Mass, but his account of the sublime captures it perfectly. Through endless “succession and uniformity,” not only in Ciceronian collects and prefaces but also in the pillars and domes of “old cathedrals,” in which the <i>usus antiquior</i> emerged and still prospers, one source of the sublime is “artificial infinity.” The associations with the majestic Creator are manifold.
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Occasionally handsome, but never sublime, the NO makes no one tremble. It is meant to put one at ease, to reach out to the nations, to welcome into the fold, and so it soft-pedals its duty of propitiation, of atonement for sin. Today especially, however, comfortable sinners need to be afflicted. No less of a classical pianist and book critic than Pope Benedict XVI noticed the frequent absence of the sense of sacrifice and propitiation in the modern spirit of the liturgy. On the other hand, giving pleasure <i>and</i> pain, the <i>usus antiquior</i> is both beautiful <i>and</i> sublime, even if it is not so in every respect of each, and it is particularly appropriate for our swollen times.
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Alas, <i>mea maxima culpa</i>, as dawn only suspends night, <i>post hoc</i> if not <i>propter hoc</i>, is it a surprise that divorce and apostasy often follow tepidity? Can the liturgy turn marriage away from sin, and children from infidelity? Over many years, as I attended the TLM and eventually joined the parish, I came to know the community. It is not composed, as a friend accused, of aesthetes merely “re-enacting,” like Confederate play-actors mustering once a year for a long-lost battle. The congregants are dead serious about worshiping in such a profound way that beauty should elevate their moral lives and so, as one put it, “eventually restore Christendom.” Even more stunning than the gorgeous Masses and devotions are the old-form parish activities that keep springing up: ballroom dancing, sacred-art studios, medieval craft guilds, chant classes, etc. Did the liturgy inspire these?
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To put the question more expansively: Does liturgical exactitude, even the good taste acquired simply by following scrupulously the work of superior minds, beget moral virtues? Old forms, Burke and G.K. Chesterton agreed, contain forgotten but still valid and active wisdom, for sane conventions make it easier to be good even when they are not understood. <i>Lex orandi, lex credendi</i> is the old formula: the manner of praying is the manner of believing. We might add, <i>lex orandi, lex vivendi</i>, for why do the partisans of the TLM, especially the young, seem to have their catechism down cold and their many children <i>gently</i> in tow, even if the occasional tattoo bespeaks wild oats gone to seed? Burke’s analysis offers two answers: the sublime evokes “terror, fear, astonishment, amazement, wonder, and awe” — words, he claims, etymologically interrelated in Latin and Greek (and in French and English) — and fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Second, “beauty,” Burke claims, “is a name I shall apply to all such qualities in things as induce in us a sense of affection and tenderness.”
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Platonic aesthetics may say even more. Socrates, “no expert on modes” but a lover of moral wisdom, notes in the Republic that the various musical modes encourage specific characters: the Lydian encourages lamenting; the Ionian, drinking and relaxing; the Dorian, courage; and the Phrygian, moderation. For his well-ordered city, which both forms and flows from well-ordered souls, Socrates banned the first two sets of modes encouraging disorder, but he prized the virtues of courage and moderation promoted by the latter two, one “pleasant,” one “stern.” In addition, amateur musicologist Socrates banned certain instruments: the many-stringed harp and zither and the wide-ranging flute, which promote “luxury.” His musicology exhausted, he suggested that the maestro Damon be consulted for banning words and rhythms that express “meanness, insolence, madness, and other evils,” and for keeping those that express their opposites.
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The eight basic Gregorian modes, derived from three of these Greek modes, similarly contain liturgical “affects,” which is a way of saying that they operate on our will through our bodies. In order, they include one solemn mode, one somber (Dorian courage), one mystic, one eternal (Phrygian moderation), two happy (Lydian lamentation), one grave, and one perfect (Mixolydian). It’s fascinating and fitting that the Ionian, or relaxing, Greek mode is absent from Pope Gregory’s scheme, and that the other one Socrates banned from his militarized <i>polis</i>; the Lydian, or lamenting, is present twice (pure and mixed), paradoxically, with an incongruous “happy” affect. These surviving three, lamenting, courageous, and moderate, depend scrupulously on the echoing Latin vowels of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate and are always at the service of the two theological benchmarks of the Church seasons: the Incarnation and the Resurrection, or Advent-Christmas-Epiphany and Lent-Easter-Pentecost. The muted modes of the third short season, Septuaginta, unique to the TLM, initiating the 70 years of Babylonian captivity, when idolaters were in exile, seem written for our benighted, chaotic age, as does the “somber,” lonely <i>kyriale</i> of Lent, when the organ is silent. Not alone in explaining comportment and not even its primary cause, these liturgical affects counsel in gentle sound-sermons sympathy, strength, and temperance. Unlike the classical city, moreover, the Christian <i>polis</i> (the fading form of Western conglomerations), more aware of its own sinfulness, needs especially to express Lydian sorrow, a sorrow that expresses also, not so surprisingly for a Christian, a sighing happiness of the <i>felix culpa</i> (“fortunate fault”).
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Do you want to know why TLM families have their stuff together, why these web designers and IT experts read classics, learn chant, look after farm animals, sit still at classical-guitar concerts, churn raw-milk butter, form sewing guilds, organize black-tie ballroom dances, produce sacred art, and, of all things, bore wood with drill braces? “Mark the music,” answers Lorenzo in Shakespeare’s <i>Merchant of Venice</i>. “The man who hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils.”
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Of course, steadfast catechesis in a moral theology built on the natural moral law, the universal blueprint for human happiness, forms minds, but hearts are inspired and cultivated by the solemnized human voice and the resounding pipe organ, respectively “given pride of place” and “high esteem” by <i>Sacrosanctum Concilium</i>, Vatican II’s “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.” They lift “up the mind” to “God and heavenly things,” with the domes and arched walls the powerful soundboard of fitting architecture. Sacred music is the ancient school of Christ, and an electric mic <i>non decet</i>.
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Is any direction other than “up” more needed in deeply fallen times? The two ancient throwback instruments of created grace — voice and organ — generate solemn order, quiet joy, humble piety, steadfast courage, and a gentleness that comes from looking <i>up</i> and looking <i>for</i>, along with a constant dose of the sobering “fear and trembling” of the sublime. As the U.S. Catholic bishops wrote, the human voice, “created in the likeness of God, is the primary liturgical instrument,” and it is best supported by the pipe organ, which resounds for large gatherings with “the fullness of human sentiments” and reminds us of “the immensity and magnificence of God” (<i>Sing to the Lord: Music in Divine Worship</i>, 2007).
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I know less about Gregorian modes than Socrates knew about the Greek ones, but maybe they stanch the flow of adrenalin and help us love our enemies. Or maybe it’s the curious do-si and fa-mi half steps, the single-sex monophony, or the haunting Solesmes <i>arsis</i> and <i>thesis</i> (rise and fall). I only know this: Stumble out into the mean streets after such otherworldly high-brow worship, like leaving a movie theater set in a magical land, and weep that cacophony, tom-toms, primal screams, and rap educate vice. “If music be the food of love, play on,” said Orsino in <i>Twelfth Night</i>. He might as well have been talking about the voice and pipe organ’s “most holy foreplay” in the TLM. The adults become both more responsible and child-like, <i>mirabile dictu</i>, and their children more ordered and wholesomely playful. Let’s face it: Good liturgy involves good taste, and, as Burke said in “On Taste,” taste depends on rational judgment, emotional maturity, and education — that is to say, the virtues.
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My desperate hope for the TLM in the present pontificate, therefore, clings to reports that Pope Francis loves Italian opera and tango and doesn’t use a computer.
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I’m not saying that chant cures skin cancer or shields off tornadoes, but I have watched this “nuclear fission of love,” as Benedict XVI called the Eucharist, mushroom in this gang-infested city even in the year his successor slammed down <i>Traditionis Custodes</i>. A Chesterbellocian distributist Guild of SS Joachim and Anne sprang up and called for members to learn and teach the traditional crafts of sewing and woodworking. A homeschool cooperative with children’s catechisms took off, along with a sacred artist’s atelier, which had produced an oil portrait of St. Augustine commissioned for Benedict XVI and a towering study of Tiepolo’s <i>Immaculate Conception</i>.
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<i>Bonum diffusum est</i> — it is the nature of the good to flow forth, even into the barren spaces of blighted neighborhoods. One sermon boldly proposed the rare “thirty-fold harvest” of Josephite marriage, the “sixty-fold harvest” of widowed continence, and the “hundred-fold harvest” of perpetual virginity. The priests, including a few sent from generous bishops, were clocking a thousand confessions a month. Parishioners petitioned for adult catechism: first sessions covered three hours on <i>acedia</i>, the sin of our <i>saeculum</i>, as expounded by Evagrius of Pontus and Aquinas, followed by chanted Vespers. I swear I saw a six-year-old return on his knees across the marble floor during the consecration of a First Friday Mass. The young rector rules as a prudent <i>paterfamilias</i>; French manners <i>d’une bonne éducation</i> rule the oblates. Unafraid of manual labor, the French priest — in <i>soutane en laine</i>, not <i>bleu de travail</i> — helped restore the former convent’s slate roof and install a 58-rank Wilhelm organ with 2,760 pipes. Wise scholastic aphorisms whisper from confessionals and resound from the pulpit. The bulletin has warned with Salesian wisdom against would-be liturgy warriors on the front page: “The Holy Spirit does not enter the house where there is complaining, arguing, or quarrels.” (I hope I’m not guilty with this panegyric.) A Lenten pledge to fast from electronic media was promoted. A longstanding St. Vincent de Paul conference increased its activity during the pandemic. A 380-mile penitential pilgrimage to a backwoods monastery in Oklahoma carried several cars southwest.
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I know I gush, but might the TLM be a material cause of this stately, measured, and sublime outpouring of the Spirit? It exposes an exception to Burke’s thinking that the great could not be beautiful but only sublime. And yet the staggering surprise of the orderly resurgence of behavioral orthodoxy from partisans of the <i>usus antiquior</i> itself offers evidence that the natural elements of chant and finely tailored vestments beg also for a supernatural explanation. The Holy Spirit is evidently pleased with not only charismatic ecstasy but also quiet awe and joy in age-old forms. Seen up close or heard at a distance, who could wish this gone (our present Pope notwithstanding)?
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Indeed, when <i>Traditionis Custodes</i> fell like a hammer, a modest counter-reformation within the diocese was quietly infusing suburban worship, where a few energetic priests were taking up the cassock, singing Vespers with traditional canons, and peppering plainsong antiphonies and commons onto the music selections. Once chalice veil and burse showed up on the altar, and candle-bearers began to illumine the Gospel, modest veils popped up, reception on the tongue and kneeling occurred spontaneously, and confession lines and processions lengthened. In one parish, just off the soccer field, a life-size, outdoor <i>corpus</i> was mounted by crafty sons of Bavaria, and an outdoor Corpus Christi procession intrigued unbaptized children, like pagan babies carried away by a Eucharistic revival. A dynamic diocesan seminary professor mounted another TLM oratory with studied schola within another gasping city parish. A Catholic study center at a local Jesuit university offered a kneeler, and veiled coeds sprang from the dorms. The extraordinary form was sowing tangy mustard seeds of penitential liturgical fusion back into the Roman rite, even as attendance shrank from COVID restrictions. <i>Summorum Pontificum</i> had propagated this ressourcement. In the foreseeable distance was a time when an enriched <i>NO</i> might have blended into a low TLM. If <i>Traditionis Custodes</i> is ever read in continuity with the earlier motu proprio on the liturgy, however, it will find its fruit in a simultaneously more terrible and more peaceful beauty.
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One more point: especially in middle-brow times, the <i>usus antiquior</i> takes work and study by all, as the Greek root of “liturgy” suggests. It is an acquired taste, close to tragic opera in genre, and yet, at the same time, like opera, while unflinchingly highbrow, the Solemn Pontifical High Mass commands awe in first-time participants, whether peasant, accountant, or tinkerer. To be sure, holy Catholics attend NO Masses, and I still attend them by convenience and find them particularly satisfying when accompanied by chant, organ, and expressive lectors. To master a sublime spiritual experience is a way to get closer to a challenging God, however, and the traditional missal, Latin language, architectural setting, and music theory are huge helps. The payoff is that something this immediately arresting and yet also so complicated is less likely to become boring. It cannot be an argument against it, however, that we no longer have enough time for it. That might be only an explanation for why some wish it to disappear. There’s a Greek pun that sums up it and the Great Books: <i>kalepa ta kala</i> (“Difficult, the beautiful things”).
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What do the explosions and subsequent suspensions of the TLM portend for culture generally? Russell Kirk claimed that conservatives humbly look to the past because they are more aware of their own endemic sinfulness, marked, in St. John Henry Newman’s magnificent peroration, by some “terrible aboriginal calamity out of joint with the purposes of the Creator” (<i>Apologia pro Vita Sua</i>), throwing a “curtain” over man’s “futurity” and yielding “the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries.” Penance is one of the distinctive rhetorical notes of both traditional worship and personal responsibility. It yields wizened joy rather than mere joviality, attempts to bring back ignored transcendence in the world, and is sorely needed now. I’ve been surprised to find sorrowful personal stories, cases of neglect and abandonment and self-abuse, alongside the teeming wholesome young families, at the <i>usus antiquior</i>. I’ve seen the broken homeless there on their knees. They are drawn to sublimity, solemnity, and reverence, to be sure, but also to the minor-key, grief-stricken <i>mea maxima culpas</i> of the second Confiteor, when fists triple-thump the broken heart. Who can’t notice the enormous desire to make resolute amendments of life in cooperation with mercy and the cry for propitiation? The irony of ironies that bites both sets of liturgy warriors, traditionalists and inculturalists, in different ways is that the <i>usus antiquior</i> has flourished in the very culture credited with the supposed innovation or “development of doctrine” of Vatican II — America, Land of Religious Liberty — and yet is now resisted by the supposed defenders of Vatican II with the repressive, ultramontane tactics of which those defenders accused the pre-Vatican II Church.
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As a patient priest one generation younger than the recently empowered Guardians of the New Tradition once told me, “We’ve got these guys a while longer.” The true believers of a New Order in pastoral practice now possess, like aging college administrators, the authority they once questioned. They pushed iconoclasm in their youth, and it is genuinely hard for them to see the jewels they had regarded as bling. Such custodians cannot go gently into the night. Their resistance to restoration is also, in part, a question of taste, and unexamined taste cannot be disputed. It can only be brought to examination. They bristled in their youth at Latin, moral-theology manuals, rote memory, votive candles and altar rails, genuflection and reception on the tongue, and all manner of formality as liturgical fussiness and intellectual narrow-mindedness, and so they can’t believe today’s abandoned young crave that from which they had worked so hard to liberate the Church, which they see as vain and speechless idols, sounding gongs, or even amulets. They judge lacework vestments not as exquisite offerings to God but as the “dress of grandmothers.” They once misread the human heart and material reality, and now, in their graying years, as this book critic judges, they are misreading the times.
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If not gently, the Guardians of the New Tradition will still go. And yet I do not believe that restorationists in aesthetics and culture, given to formalism in poetry, the natural law in morality, draftsmanship in painting, complementarity and chastity in male-female relations, balance and detail in architecture, mystery in dramaturgy, dignity in dress and speech, gentleness in manners, awe in attitude, and judicious humility in all things, however slight and circumscribed, will perish from the earth.
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<i>Kenneth Colston’s articles and reviews have appeared in Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Saint Austin Review, The New Criterion, Homiletic & Pastoral Review, Crisis, and First Things.</i>
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©2023 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.
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<i>The foregoing article,</i> "<a href="https://www.newoxfordreview.org/documents/does-good-liturgy-beget-moral-virtue/">Does Good Liturgy Beget Moral Virtue?</a>,"<i> was originally published in the June, 2023 issue of the</i> <a href="http://www.newoxfordreview.org/" target="_blank">New Oxford Review</a> <i>and is reproduced here by kind permission of </i>New Oxford Review<i>, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.</i><font face="Times">
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-34343061463489280302023-05-09T14:21:00.004-04:002023-05-09T14:24:29.104-04:00What to make of Vatican II?What to make of Vatican II? Pope Paul VI, in his General Audience of Jan. 12, 1966, stated: “There are those who ask what authority, what theological qualification, the Council intended to give to its teachings, knowing that it avoided issuing solemn dogmatic definitions backed by the Church’s infallible teaching authority. The answer is known by those who remember the conciliar declaration of March 6, 1964, repeated on November 16, 1964. In view of the pastoral nature of the Council, it avoided proclaiming in an extraordinary matter any dogmata carrying the mark of infallibility.”
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This does not mean, of course, that conciliar documents do not contain references to Catholic doctrine previously defined as dogma and therefore infallibly authoritative, such as the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, the virgin birth of Christ, and so forth. Nor does it mean that conciliar documents do not contain anything new, such as its statements about ecumenism, religious freedom, etc. What it does mean is that nothing new in these documents is defined as infallible dogma.
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The “new springtime” in the Church heralded by the post-conciliar popes and others who hoped that the simplified and more-accessible vernacular liturgy would promote the “new evangelization” seems not to have yielded quite the hoped-for results. It was not as if the police had to be summoned to Catholic churches each Sunday “to hold back the hordes of lapsed Catholics whose faith had been rekindled at the prospect of saying the Confiteor in English,” as Michael Davies quipped in his book, <i>Pope Paul’s New Mass</i>.
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Can Ecumenical Councils of the Church fail in their objectives? Fr. John Zuhlsdorf writes: “Regarding General or Ecumenical Councils (all 21 of them), it is possible to be a valid council but a failed one. Consider Lateran V. Utter failure. Its legislation on ecclesiastical pawn shops went nowhere, which is a darn shame. I’d really appreciate well-regulated ecclesiastical pawn shops. And – hey! – what ever happened to the “spirit of Lateran V”? Moreover, Lateran I and Lateran II weren’t even classified as General or Ecumenical Councils until after the Council of Trent (500 years later).”
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In the same vein, Saint Gregory Nazianzus writes: “If I must speak the truth, I feel disposed to shun every conference of Bishops; because I never saw a Synod brought to a happy issue, not remedying but rather increasing, existing evils. For ever is there rivalry and ambition, and these have the mastery of reason; -- do not think me extravagant for saying so; -- and a mediator is more likely to be attacked himself, than to succeed in his pacification. Accordingly, I have fallen back upon myself and consider quiet the only security of life.”
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Again, Joseph Ratzinger, writing in <i>Principles of Catholic Theology</i>, 378, writes: “Not every valid council in the history of the Church has been a fruitful one; in the last analysis, many of them have been a waste of time. Despite all the good to be found in the texts produced, the last word about the historical value of Vatican II has yet to be spoken.”
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There are some Catholic scholars and clerics who speak or write as if Vatican II is a sort of “Super Dogma.” The litmus test for the fellowship of kindred spirits or its opposite -- something bordering on excommunication or being tarred and feathered – is whether or not one “accepts” Vatican II. But what does this mean, exactly? A good friend of mine, whom I sometimes refer to as “L’Autre Phil,” says that one can never make sense of the Second Vatican Council by trying to get at it strictly in terms of its textual content. Why? Because either it functions as a wax nose that can be made to “say” whatever one wants it to say or, worse, because almost nobody cares about the text. What everyone cares about, however, is the “event” of Vatican II and what it’s made to symbolize.
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Cardinal Ratzinger, in his address to Chilean Bishops (July 13, 1988), said this about the last council: “There are many accounts of it which give the impression that, from Vatican II onward, everything has been changed, and that what preceded it has no value or, at best, has value only in the light of Vatican II. The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero. The truth is that this particular Council define no dogma at all, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat it as though it had made itself into a sort of “super-dogma” which takes away the importance of all the rest.
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“This idea is made stronger by things that are now happening," the Cardinal continued. "That which previously was considered most holy – the form in which the liturgy was handed down – suddenly appears as the most forbidden of all things, the one thing that can safely be prohibited. It is intolerable to criticize decisions which have been taken since the Council; on the other hand, if men make question of ancient rules, or even of the great truths of the Faith – for instance, the corporal virginity of Mary, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the immortality of the soul, etc. – nobody complains or only does so with the greatest moderation.”
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(Hat tip to a couple of my Catholic colleagues.)
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-55147721134351454172023-02-11T18:58:00.002-05:002023-02-17T12:45:49.109-05:00Tridentine Community News - Detroit's Palestrina Institute, TLMs this coming week<font size=4><b>February 12, 2023 – Sexagésima Sunday</font size=4></b>
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<center><img src="http://multimedia.detnews.com/pix/be/a6/cb/ef/02/5f/20090313010554_0301-cvt-traditon298.jpg"><br><font color=red face=Times Roman><i><b>"I will go in unto the Altar of God<br>To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"</i></b></font color=red face=Times roman></center><br><a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org" target="_blank"">Tridentine Community News</a> by Alex Begin (February 12, 2023):<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/LAT.jpg" align=left hspace=8 vspace=4><blockquote>
<i><b>Detroit's Palestrina Institute</i></b>
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To understand our present and future, we must have some understanding of our past. The question regularly comes up, how did metro Detroit become such a hot spot for the Latin Mass? One reason is that in the years following Vatican II, before the indults that reauthorized public celebration of the Tridentine Mass, there was a thriving Novus Ordo Latin Mass scene in the Archdiocese of Detroit. Three parishes in particular stood out for offering the Latin Mass in that time period:
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Old St. Mary’s did and still does offer a Novus Ordo Latin Mass on most Sundays. Fr. Eduard Perrone was the music director there before entering seminary.
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St. Hyacinth Church during the pastorate of Fr. Francis Skalski offered a Novus Ordo Latin Mass one Sunday per month.
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Holy Family Church offered an odd hybrid Tridentine-Novus Ordo Latin Mass ad oriéntem. Mass began with the Tridentine Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, then morphed into a Novus Ordo Latin Mass once the priest ascended the altar.
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<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/TK135.jpg" align=left hspace=8 vspace=4>
St. Joseph Church offered the most Tridentine-y Novus Ordo Latin Mass of all, celebrated ad oriéntem with a full crew of altar servers and an ambitious music program led by the late Thomas M. Kuras. Tom offered a comprehensive repertoire encompassing Gregorian Chant, Ambrosian Chant, and sacred polyphony, with an Aspérges at the beginning of Mass and Benediction after Mass every Sunday. This writer served at the altar there during the heady years of the 1980s and 90s when the holy and tradition-friendly Fr. Thomas Bresnahan was pastor.
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Tom was able to offer such an unusual choral program in large part because of the formation he received as one of the last students of the Palestrina Institute, a unique formation program for church musicians that the Archdiocese of Detroit operated from 1941 – 1971. It was a diploma-granting, five-year course of study. Tom’s mentor there was Lode Van Dessel, a composer and then-organist at St. Aloysius Church. (Information taken from biography of Thomas Kuras at:<a href="http://www.musimem.com/kuras_eng.htm">http://www.musimem.com<br>/kuras_eng.htm</a>)
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Prayer Pilgrimages bus tour director and current St. Joseph Shrine music director Michael Semaan brought to our attention a history of the Palestrina Institute by former student Francis Brancaleone published in the Spring, 2018 edition of Sacred Music, the magazine of the Church Music Association of America:
<a href="https://media.musicasacra.com/publications/sacredmusic/pdf/sm145-1.pdf">https://media.musicasacra.com/publications<br>/sacredmusic/pdf/sm145-1.pdf</a>
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The article explains that Archbishop Edward Mooney in 1938 endorsed the formation of the Palestrina Institute as an outgrowth of a Liturgical Music Summer School that had been held at Detroit’s Academy of the Sacred Heart, interestingly the same school that later relocated to Bloomfield Hills and whose chapel has hosted the Oakland County Latin Mass Association.
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The Institute’s mission was “to provide for the instruction of Choirmasters, Organists, and Singers in the understanding, appreciation, and execution of the approved music of the Church.”
In a quote obtained from longtime Archdiocese of Detroit archivist Roman Godzak, “The time is rapidly approaching, when the Church in the Archdiocese of Detroit will insist that all liturgical functions in her places of worship be conducted according to the regulations set down by the Sacred Congregation of Rites and the Apostolic See.”
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<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/1962PIHS.jpg" align=center hspace=8 vspace=4>
From the article: “The curriculum was thorough and well-conceived with instruction in Gregorian chant, chant notation, singing, breathing (an important element in the proper rendition of chant), chironomy (chant conducting), and accompaniment. Instruction in the liturgy, church law, music theory, ear training, history, choir technique, vocal pedagogy with a specialty in boy choirs, organ registration, modulation, improvisation, diocesan legislation, bibliography, how to deal with pastors and choirs, and the deportment of a church musician.” The full curriculum is documented in great detail in the article. [Photo of Palestrina Institute Assistant Director Fr. Robert Ryan from the 1962 Dominican High School Yearbook]
Though one might think that the glory days of the Palestrina Institute are in the past, as recently as 2018, there was a short-lived effort to bring back the Institute, this time with a primary focus on instruction on playing the pipe organ. However, the two individuals who were pushing for its resuscitation ended up leaving the employ of the Archdiocese of Detroit, and the idea has been shelved for the time being. Hopefully diocesan leadership will see the value of training the next generation of music directors and keeping Detroit a center for traditional liturgy.
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<i><b>Tridentine Masses This Coming Week</i></b>
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Sun. 02/19 10:00 AM: High Mass at Old St. Mary’s (Quinquagésima Sunday) – Celebrant: Fr. Cy Whitaker, SJ
</blockquote><center><a href="https://www.facebook.com/JuventutemMichigan/"target=_blank><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/juv1.jpg"></center></a><span style="font-size:78%;">[Comments? Please e-mail <a href="mailto:tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org">tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org</a>. Previous columns are available at <a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org"target=_blank>http://www.detroitlatinmass.org</a>. This edition of <span style="font-style: italic;">Tridentine Community News</span>, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for January 4, 2023. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-21587209091294500502022-10-25T10:27:00.026-04:002022-10-25T19:29:48.478-04:00Guy Noir again!![Advisory: See <a href="http://pblosser.blogspot.com/2005/11/da-rulz.html">Da Rulz</a> #9]
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<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/GuyN.jpg" align=right hspace=5 vspace=4><font face=times>The underground correspondent we used to keep on retainer in an Atlantic seaboard city that knows how to keep its secrets, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8lawOGn1zo">Guy Noir - Private Eye</a>, just sent me an email, of all things, rather than a message delivered by carrier pigeon or by a courior in a tuxedo riding in a limo.
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Some of you may remember our intrepid detective, who provided timely and sometimes scandalously-amusing reports, sent to us regularly -- yes, by carrier pigeon or by courier in a bow tie and tux. Well, it seems that our intrepid undercover correspondent has now taken on a job somewhere as a professor, which is likely as amusing as it may be scandalous if only his students only knew his previous employment as the mysterious Guy Noir. In any case, here's your chance to read some <i>écriture noire</i> at your own risk in yet another report from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8lawOGn1zo">Guy Noir - Private Eye</a>: <blockquote>
This week my public speaking students have to choose an informative speech topic. The parameters are the topic must be someone or something commemorated on a U.S. Postage Stamp, because, well, you have to be dead and significant to land yourself on a stamp, right?
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Wrong, apparently, since 2011.
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<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/us/postal-service-will-begin-honoring-living-people-on-stamps.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/us/postal-service-will-begin-honoring-living-people-on-stamps.html</a>
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Because "Having really nice, relevant, interesting, fun stamps might make a difference in people’s decisions to mail a letter,” said Stephen Kearney, the Postal Service’s manager of stamp services. “This is such a sea change.”
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One point one, he was wrong: letter-sending continues to drop, even with Michael Jordan (and Harry Potter, a Brit!) now on envelopes. On point two, he’s right: we continue to tread water in a cultural sea change that has elapsed in the last 61 years.
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61? Yes, that is how old I am. And when I was born, Vatican II was just convening. Even when I was 12, the old-school Catholic vibe prevailed to such an extent that my Catholic best friend was not allowed to follow me to a Methodist potluck (though his mother let me take communion with them once at Mass).
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All of which makes me think of Vatican II on its anniversary:
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<a href="https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/pope-marks-60th-anniversary-vatican-council-91320061">https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/pope-marks-60th-anniversary-vatican-council-91320061></a>
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As the dust finally begins to settle, despite the current and last few popes’ determined propaganda campaigns to keep the Council’s relevance alive, some surprising counter-verdicts are in:
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Blogger Amy Welborn muses, "It doesn’t seem to me to be unreasonable to label the Second Vatican Council as a failure.” How very different from the genial attempts in the 1980s by guys like Steubenville charismatic Alan Schrenk to claim it as part of glorious arc.
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Read all of Welborn’s thoughts:
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<a href="https://amywelborn.wordpress.com/2022/10/06/expression-formulated/">https://amywelborn.wordpress.com/2022/10/06/expression-formulated/></a>
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And her remembrance of the all-but-forgotten pop icon Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
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<a href="https://amywelborn.wordpress.com/2022/10/12/jesus-livingston-seagull/">https://amywelborn.wordpress.com/2022/10/12/jesus-livingston-seagull/></a>
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Or hear the NYT’s Ross Douthat also flatly declaring. "The council was a failure.” His concluding note is a bit depressing, sort of like saying even when you regain civility with an ex-wife, damage done remains. That’s nice.
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<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/12/opinion/catholic-church-second-vatican-council.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/12/opinion/catholic-church-second-vatican-council.html></a>
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At National Review, <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/60-years-since-vatican-ii/">MBD says this</a>:<blockquote>
"Catholic theologians and bishops have been turned into sponges, soaked in metaphors that have no precise theological content but which retain an acid-wash quality, an iconoclasm aimed at a church and a theology of the past that is half understood, at best. So modernists such as Hans Kung could say that Vatican II promoted a “communio model of the church” over and against an “absolutist pyramidal model.
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None of this was meant with any real conviction. It was an ad hoc theology developed for the sole purpose of legitimating dissent on moral issues touching sexuality. In Kung’s model, if the pew sitters could be shown to not be following this teaching, then the teaching itself should be jettisoned. But this has lately been junked for more papal primacy, because the current pope is seen as more progressive than some of the pew sitters.
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The church has thus proceeded from slogan to slogan, as if theological reflection or — more ominously — the development of doctrine were mere rumination on the latest sets of buzzwords, usually coming from bishops or the pope. The people of God in transit, the listening church, the new evangelization, the field hospital. The synodal church. Catholics used to be known by their distinctive devotional life — prayers to the saints, rosaries, abstaining from meat on Fridays. Now, devoted Catholics spend their time reading papal encyclicals and mastering this pseudo-theological jargon."</blockquote>
Rod Dreher provides illustration of those thoughts by sharing a painfully crass but on-point video (at least the fictional priest avoids mentioning the ‘evidential power of beauty’).
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUeShUhnZnk">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUeShUhnZnk</a>
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Part of me wonders if we may ever again have a pope or council who flatly declares anything dogmatic to be true. There seems to be a lack of confidence in hard-edged doctrine as even a possibility if it attempts to narrow the confines of belief. We know something has to be true, but what that something is, well ... ‘Love and let live!’
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In all of this, today’s American Church, much like the seven sisters of the Protestant mainlines, has become the uncertain guardian of a tradition that gathers dust in volumes no one reads, and is heard only in muffled explanations at parishes when people do bother to attend.
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Everyone manifests strong symptoms reflecting Unitarianism and Quakerism, and endures settings animated by American Idol- and YoungLife-like liturgics.
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Which is why Robert Barron’s recent interview with Shia LeBouf was like an episode of <i>Quantum Leap</i>.
</blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-58885549852993864782022-09-16T21:12:00.002-04:002022-09-16T21:15:05.783-04:00Neocon Hubris & the Battle for Ukraine<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOjdL58ndTw2OhQtWV1kzjUNthqLsU2HYjcIUWlXqo6aVx0cvlPv8ePE3zvagJaaihTFOc2HLPg00o0dJuT2ISGMTK8nCLK1qFKKk5Fr5l9MNjnNZoxaSWMM0whDQPhSknghv91QwaGPp6qbeP1wtbi2Bka0hdwe_X1esWak0bAe659cStFa0/s202/0596-delaney.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="155" data-original-width="202" height="155" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOjdL58ndTw2OhQtWV1kzjUNthqLsU2HYjcIUWlXqo6aVx0cvlPv8ePE3zvagJaaihTFOc2HLPg00o0dJuT2ISGMTK8nCLK1qFKKk5Fr5l9MNjnNZoxaSWMM0whDQPhSknghv91QwaGPp6qbeP1wtbi2Bka0hdwe_X1esWak0bAe659cStFa0/s1600/0596-delaney.jpg" width="202" /></a></div><br />By Pieter Vree | September 2022
NEW OXFORD NOTEBOOK
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And here we thought they’d exited the world stage, heads lowered, hats in hand. The entire lot of them seemingly had faded into the sunset.
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Not so. The neoconservatives are back.
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Or, more accurately, they never left. They merely blended into the background, working as assiduously as ever toward their ultimate goal: U.S. military and economic hegemony in every corner of the world.
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If you thought the neocons were effectively exiled from the halls of American political power when they failed to force a successor to George W. Bush into the White House, think again. (Who remembers Sarah Palin? In 2008 an official at the neocon American Enterprise Institute said of the vice-presidential hopeful, “She’s bright and she’s a blank page. She’s going places, and it’s worth going there with her.” Hey, stop snickering!)
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Palin (and her running mate, John McCain) went nowhere and is a mere historical footnote. But the neocons? They regrouped, rebranded, and resumed their nefarious activities. You see, party affiliation doesn’t matter to them as much as power and influence. You’re a Republican? Fine. You’re a Democrat? Not a problem. To the neocons, the labels are interchangeable.
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Opportunistic malleability is in their DNA. Neoconservatism, in the words of its founder, ex-Trotskyite Irving Kristol, “is not a ‘movement’…[but] a persuasion, one that manifests itself over time, but erratically, and one whose meaning we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.” Neoconservatism, which began in the Democratic Party in the 1960s, eventually became associated with the Republican Party in the 1980s (its roots are in the Trotskyism of the 1930s). But it isn’t tied to the GOP.
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Scott McConnell, former editor of <i>The American Conservative</i>, described the neocons as “resilient and tactically flexible.” In 1991, when George H.W. Bush “tried to put America’s weight behind settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” McConnell wrote (Dec. 18, 2006), “many neoconservatives suddenly remembered their Democratic Party roots and bolted.” In the next election cycle, “a significant group of neocons signed on as advisers to Bill Clinton.”
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From Bush Sr. to Clinton to Bush Jr. to Barack Obama, the neocons managed to exert influence over a succession of U.S. presidents.
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Obama? Yes. During the height of the Arab Spring, Charles Krauthammer, a neoconservative syndicated columnist (who previously was a self-described Great Society Democrat), wrote that the Obama administration “is rushing to keep up with the new dispensation, repeating the fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine that Arabs are no exception to the universal thirst for dignity and freedom” (March 4, 2011).
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Even William Kristol, son of Irving and founder of the (now-defunct) neocon rag The Weekly Standard, called Obama “a born-again neocon.”
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Only Donald Trump interrupted the flow. Glenn Greenwald, former editor of The Intercept, wrote during Trump’s term that “one of the most under-discussed yet consequential changes in the American political landscape is the reunion between the Democratic Party and the country’s most extreme and discredited neocons.” The latter, Greenwald observed, “loathe” Trump, who has “accelerated this realignment,” though it “began <i>long before the ascension of Trump</i> and is driven by far more common beliefs than contempt for the current president” (July 17, 2017; emphasis in original).
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Trump notwithstanding, neoconservatism truly is a bipartisan project. Democrats, Republicans — it doesn’t matter who’s in charge. The neocons will adapt.
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And adapt they have — to the current presidency. “The Biden Administration,” writes Jeffrey Sachs in <i>Tikkun</i> (June 29, 2022), “is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
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It is as it always was.
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By any rational standard, the neocons’ track record “is one of unmitigated disaster,” Sachs writes. Yet that hasn’t prevented Biden from bending his ear to them.
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Given the neocons’ penchant for warmongering to advance the American empire, it should come as no surprise that their fingerprints are all over the latest international crisis. “As a result” of the neocons’ abiding influence, Sachs writes, “Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle…. The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement.”
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According to Sachs, the neoconservatives “championed” the expansion of NATO “even before that became official US policy under George W. Bush, Jr. in 2008. They viewed Ukraine’s NATO membership as key to US regional and global dominance.
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In fact, two years earlier, Robert Kagan, cofounder of the neocon think tank Project for the New American Century, spelled out the case for Ukraine’s admission to NATO. “Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, urged and supported by the Western democracies,” he wrote in the <i>Washington Post</i> (April 30, 2006), “be but the prelude to the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union — in short, the expansion of Western liberal hegemony?”
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Kagan knew full well the implications of this strategy. If Russia continues to be one of the “sturdy pillars of autocracy over the coming decades,” then that nation will be an obstacle to “the West’s vision of humanity’s inexorable evolution toward democracy.” (Democracy is neocon code for the end to which any and all means are acceptable.)
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Russia, Kagan said, can be expected to “resist the encroachments of liberalism in the interest of [its] own long-term survival.” He quotes Dmitri Trenin, a former member of Russia’s Foreign and Defense Policy Council, as saying, “The Kremlin is getting ready for the ‘battle for Ukraine’ in all seriousness.” Mind you, this was <i>16 years ago</i>. (Kagan, true to form, was so incensed by Trump’s nomination in 2016 that he left the GOP and endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.)
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Seven years before Kagan, paleoconservative pundit Patrick J. Buchanan sounded the warning bell about expanding NATO to include Ukraine. “By moving NATO onto Russia’s front porch,” he wrote in his book <i>A Republic, Not an Empire</i> (1999), “we have scheduled a twenty-first-century confrontation.”
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That, however, was all part of the neocons’ master plan. Says Sachs:
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The neocon outlook is based on an overriding false premise: that the US military, financial, technological, and economic superiority enables it to dictate terms in all regions of the world. It is a position of both remarkable hubris and remarkable disdain of evidence. Since the 1950s, the US has been stymied or defeated in nearly every regional conflict in which it has participated. Yet in the “battle for Ukraine,” the neocons were ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO over Russia’s vehement objections because they fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by US financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.
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And here we are.
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After Russia invaded Ukraine in February, did you ever stop to wonder why the overwhelming sentiment among American pundits and politicos, Democratic and Republican alike — not to mention the corporate media — is virulently pro-Ukraine and vehemently anti-Russia? Dissent from the parties’ line was difficult to come by. The whole thing was presented to the American public as a real-life version of Star Wars, with Ukraine’s plucky president Volodymyr Zelenskyy (a former actor, by the way) cast in the role of Luke Skywalker against Russian president Vladimir Putin’s Darth Vader.
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Many Americans swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. As Wayne Allsworth, author of <i>The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia</i>, put it, the invasion “prompted a firestorm of anti-Russian propaganda in Western mass media reminiscent of the disinformation campaign to which we were subjected prior to the 2003 Iraq war” (Chronicles, May 2022). History has a way of repeating itself, especially when different players are acting out the same old parts in the same old plot but on a different stage.
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Did you ever stop to wonder why Pope Francis took so much flak for suggesting that the invasion was “perhaps somehow provoked” by NATO’s “barking at the gates of Russia”? The Holy Father was onto something. And he was wise to warn us to “move away from the usual Little Red Riding Hood pattern, in that Little Red Riding Hood [i.e., Ukraine] was good and the wolf [i.e., Russia] was the bad one. Something global is emerging and the elements are very much entwined.”
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This is not to say that Russia was justified in invading a sovereign nation. Far from it. The very act of invasion violates Catholic just-war principles, and Ukraine is well within her rights to defend herself against the aggressor. But America has blood on her hands as well, and our continued involvement will only add accelerant to the fire.
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Nobody wants all-out war — nobody, that is, except the neocons. And Biden, like Bush Jr. and Palin, might be enough of a “blank page” to do their bidding, at which point the neocon’s “remarkable hubris” could set the entire world aflame.
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Observe: Ever the bumbler, Biden let slip this March that Putin “cannot remain in power.” Though Biden did backtrack, saying he wasn’t expressing support for a Russian regime change, the cat was out of the proverbial bag and the plot laid bare. Who knows what Biden really thinks? He himself might not know!
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But one thing is clear: Biden is heavily invested in managing the outcome of the invasion. Already in fiscal year 2022, the United States has provided $950 million in “security assistance” to Ukraine — including aircraft, artillery, and ammunition — and over $5 billion total since the beginning of the Biden administration. And though the president insists he has “no intention of fighting Russia,” he has increased the number of U.S. troops in Europe to 100,000. How is Russia to take this allocation of U.S. money, materiel, and manpower if not as an act of aggression? What does the United States stand to gain by continuing to meddle in another far-flung regional conflict?
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Pat Buchanan, who saw this coming over two decades ago, said it best. “In 230 years,” he wrote in his syndicated column (May 20, 2022), “the United States has never gone to war with Russia. Not with the Romanovs nor with the Stalinists, not with the Cold War Communists nor with the Putinists. U.S. vital interests dictate that we maintain that tradition.”
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©2022 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.
<br /><br />
<i>The foregoing article,</i> "<a href="https://www.newoxfordreview.org/documents/neocon-hubris-the-battle-for-ukraine/">Neocon Hubris & the Battle for Ukraine</a>,"<i> was originally published in the September, 2022 issue of the</i> <a href="http://www.newoxfordreview.org/" target="_blank">New Oxford Review</a> <i>and is reproduced here by kind permission of </i>New Oxford Review<i>, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.</i><font face="Times">
</font>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-77762080367453632052022-08-19T11:08:00.005-04:002022-08-19T11:20:44.803-04:00A Life’s Worth of Failure, an Abundance of Gratitude By Karl Keating | <i>The New Oxford Revies</i>, July-August 2022
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I came to hiking and backpacking late in life. I remember exactly when it was that I went on my first backpacking trip. It was in California’s Sierra Nevada, south of Mammoth Lakes. The first day I hiked to Duck Lake and camped there. The second day I hiked farther, to Purple Lake, and camped there. The third day I began to retrace my steps. Along the way, I met a ranger. We spoke for a few moments, and then she said, “I don’t know if I should tell you this. I don’t want to ruin the rest of your hike.”
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“Well, now you’ve got me wondering,” I said. “So you may as well tell me.”
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“New York’s Twin Towers have been destroyed.”
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That first backpacking trip sticks in my memory for more than one reason, as do two preparatory day hikes I took in the months immediately prior.
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In July 2001 I hiked up White Mountain. At 14,252 feet, it’s the third-tallest peak in California and, by general consensus, the easiest of the fourteeners to summit. But I didn’t find it easy. Once I passed 13,000 feet, my leg muscles turned to Jell-O. The farther I ascended, the more often I had to stop to catch my breath: every hundred paces, every fifty, every twenty. At length, I reached the summit, and, at length and thoroughly exhausted, I returned to the trailhead, where I said to myself, “This, by far, is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.”
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I changed my mind a month later.
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In August I did a day hike of Mt. Whitney. At 14,505 feet, it’s the tallest peak in the 48 contiguous states. The Mt. Whitney trail is half again as long as the White Mountain trail, and the elevation gain is twice as much.
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I reached the summit later than I had hoped, but I reached it. On the way down, I passed Trail Crest, at 13,600 feet, and was about to enter the infamous 97 switchbacks. They take you, in a precipitous mile and a half, down 1,600 feet to Trail Camp, roughly the midpoint of the route.
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At the top of the switchbacks, one of my toes began to bother me. I suspected a blister was in the works. I knew what I should do: sit down right there, take off my shoe and sock, examine the toe, and tape it up as necessary. “No,” I thought, “I’ll wait until I get to the relative comfort of Trail Camp.” It was a capital mistake.
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When hiking, if your foot starts to go bad, your leg tries to compensate. The compensation isn’t always successful. Partway down the switchbacks, my knee went out. The pain was substantial, but worse was that I couldn’t bend my leg at all. I hobbled into Trail Camp, found a large granite slab to lie on, and, while watching the clouds go by, I contemplated what I should do.
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At first I thought, “I’ll stay right here for the rest of the afternoon and tonight. My leg is bound to be better in the morning.” On reflection I thought, “No, I can’t do that. I’m a day hiker, not an overnight hiker. I have no tent, no sleeping pad, and no sleeping bag. In two hours the sun will set behind the surrounding mountains, and the temperature will plummet. I don’t have clothing warm enough for the night. I’ll lie awake the whole time, shivering, and I’ll greet the dawn in worse shape than I am now.”
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I got up and, like Festus in Gunsmoke, dragged my bum leg behind me for the remaining six miles. Those six miles should have taken me fewer than three hours. They took me more than seven, and I arrived at the trailhead late at night.
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My first ascent of Mt. Whitney was both a success and a failure. I would go on to summit another half dozen times — and fail to summit three other times. It is that first summit that sticks in my mind, not so much because it was the first time I reached the peak but because that hike has become emblematic of my life. It’s been a life with several — mostly undeserved — successes, but the failures have predominated and are more representative than the successes.
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In this I am like others. How should we react to such a realization? What should our attitude be toward failure? I propose that our attitude should be one of gratitude, as strange as that may seem.
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I have a favorite line from Pope Leo XIII. It’s from <i>Rerum Novarum</i> (1891), the first of the social encyclicals. Nearly every pope since his time has written one or more social encyclicals. The line I remember isn’t quite as Leo wrote it. Often we remember lines a little differently from the way they actually were written or spoken. This is the way the line has settled in my mind: “There is nothing so salutary as to view the world as it really is.” I have drawn my own corollary: “There is nothing so salutary as to view ourselves as we really are.”
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It isn’t easy to view ourselves as we really are, but it becomes easier with age. Looking back from my present vantage point — I have passed the biblical three score and ten — I can appreciate and weigh things in my life in a way I couldn’t ten or even five years ago. I can view my life at something like arm’s length, with a clarity I didn’t enjoy before. The view isn’t particularly inspiring.
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I can hardly think of a department of life in which I have succeeded more often than I have failed: as a son, brother, husband, or father; as a friend, neighbor, or mere acquaintance; as an employer, employee, or coworker; as a writer, editor, or publisher; as a speaker or a listener; as a believer or a pray-er. Take the last one as an example.
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If there is a poetic phrase that applies to me, it’s from T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton.” It’s only five words: “Distracted from distraction by distraction.” I pray the Rosary every morning, but I wonder whether I ever have been able to pray it through without getting distracted. I suspect not. If I ever had prayed it through without distraction, I’d have been so startled that the event would have been etched in my memory indelibly.
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It may be no surprise, then, that my reigning defect is procrastination. It is the only art I have perfected. I am perpetually busy, yet my to-do list reads almost the same today as it did last month — or last year. Because of procrastination, I have let many opportunities slip. Sometimes I recall the line Marlon Brando uttered in On the Waterfront: “I coulda been a contender.” So many times I could have done something useful, but I put it off and put it off until it was too late.
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Seeking success (and so often failing to achieve it) is largely a “guy thing.” Men tend to strive for success; most women don’t. In most matters, women take the smarter route. They usually don’t think in terms of success. In most matters, men do. It’s in our nature. We exist, most of us, in competition, whether in athletics, at work, or in the innocent pleasures of daily life. We’re in competition with others — and even with ourselves.
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Seeking success, we often fail, and the failures sting. We tend to put them out of our minds. The result is that the lesser number of successes seems to outweigh the greater number of failures. This is a form of unreality, and, in the long run, unreality isn’t satisfying.
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We should try to understand our failures: why they occurred and how we can prevent ourselves from replicating them. If they are moral failures, we need to resolve them in the confessional. If they are failures of wisdom or knowledge, we need to study and reflect. If they are failures of ability, skill, or advancing age, we need to ameliorate them as we can. And if they are failures beyond our control, such as those caused by natural forces or by other people’s actions, we need to learn to assess them properly.
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We ought to be, oddly enough, grateful for our failures. It’s easy to be grateful for successes, so it may seem counterintuitive to be grateful for failures. Who wants to fail? Who wants to rejoice in failure? Given our fallen nature, you might think failure not only should be shunned but put out of our minds entirely, as having nothing useful in it. But we can profit from failure, even while trying to avoid it.
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In life we learn two ways: from positive instruction and from observing the mistakes of others — and our own. We learn more the second way than the first. We learn more by way of tears than by way of smiles. We ought to be grateful to learn this less enjoyable way. For some people, it may be the only way they learn.
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I began with backpacking. Here I am, two decades beyond my first backpacking trip, still backpacking, but now with little success. Two years ago, on a failed hike (not feeling well, I turned around early), I passed along a fine but not spectacular alpine meadow. I stopped to catch my breath and take in the view. Then something happened that never had happened to me before.
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It was as though I had been standing in the shallows of a calm lake when, suddenly and without warning, a great wave rose up and washed over me, not fearful but refreshing. As I looked across the meadow, a wave of gratitude washed over me. I don’t know what prompted it, but it was deep and wide and refreshing, and the sense of gratitude extended beyond my immediate surroundings.
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It wasn’t so much a sense of gratitude for being there, at that meadow, but rather a sense of gratitude for just being — for existing, for living. I never felt quite like that before and don’t expect ever to feel like it again. It was a kind of grace.
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None of us has a right to be. That we exist at all is a gift from God, who owes us nothing, not even our being. We can add nothing to His glory or happiness; not even if we were saints would we add anything. God doesn’t need us, but He made us anyway. This is a mystery. We should see it as a humbling one. In God’s eyes, we are, at once, both nothing and everything.
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The British writer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) once said that a young man could make something of himself if he read five hours a day. I once could do that, when I was young, but I am young no longer and no longer have the stamina, either physical or mental (although, ironically, now that I’m retired, I have the time).
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My largest collection of books consists of Johnsoniana. I have two bookcases devoted to works by him or about him or about his era. I have so many such books that I have to count Johnson as my favorite writer. Yet, when I page through his works, as a writer I become discouraged. If I am graced to live as long as he did, and if, between now and then, I can be as persistently productive a writer as in the distant past I occasionally was, I still would end up with only half as many volumes to my name, and their quality would be only a quarter of that of his works.
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I appreciate Johnson not only for his writings but for his life — a life much different from mine, though I can see parallels. I share many of his foibles and weaknesses. Like him, I make self-improvement resolutions that go nowhere. Like him, I am afraid of dying ignorant. Like him, I feel that I have squandered my time and have ill-used the few talents given to me. Like him, I live by failure.
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As an infant, Johnson was given out to a wet nurse. Like my not stopping to tend to my toe, it was a capital mistake, but an innocent one. From the wet nurse Johnson contracted scrofula, a disease that left him nearly blind in one eye, nearly deaf in one ear, and with deep scars, as though from smallpox, on his face and neck. Ever after he would suffer from nervous tics, wheezes, and groans. Fortunately for us, his mind was unaffected.
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Johnson grew up in poverty. He was able to spend almost a year studying at Oxford, but only because of the generosity of a relative. When the stipend was gone, he returned to Lichfield, his birthplace, where his father ran a bookstore that didn’t bring in much money. Johnson worked there for a while and then struck out on his own.
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He tried several times to start his own school. He failed each time. Until his dictionary brought him fame — but not yet much money — he was a failure in just about everything he did. Until middle age he literally wrote to live. Even when he became comfortable financially — after the king granted him a pension of £300 per year, a substantial sum in those days — he saw himself failing repeatedly, particularly in religious matters, but also in his writing life. He kept something like a diary, and in it, until the end of his life, he kept making plans for self-improvement: more regular attendance at church, more prayer, more study, more reading.
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Johnson was charitable in a way few of us ever could be. In London one can visit his one-time home in Gough Square. It’s where he composed his dictionary, up on the third floor. It’s now a museum. He didn’t live there alone. He lived with an assortment of oddballs he took in.
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There was Anna Williams, an elderly, crabby, and blind Welsh poet. There was Poll Carmichael, a former prostitute. There was Robert Levet, known as Dr. Levet, though he wasn’t a real doctor. (He once had visited France and observed physicians, and he came back to London where, when he wasn’t overdrinking, he tended to the needs of the poor, there being no real physicians for them.) Williams, Carmichael, Levet, and others Johnson housed didn’t get along, yet Johnson somehow put up with them.
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Occasionally, we hear about, or even meet, someone who seems to go from success to success. He comes from a good family and is brought up well. He marries well. He excels as a father and in business. He may not be wealthy, but he is comfortable. He has a fine home and fine neighbors. He has innumerable friends and no enemies. He is respected and admired. His health is preternaturally good, even to the day of his death.
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This is not the normal human condition. For most people, now and historically, a comment from Johnson applies: “In life there is much to be endured and little to be enjoyed.”
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Johnson lived when London was the wealthiest city in the world. “When a man is tired of London,” he said, “he is tired of life.” But what a life it was, even in London! I have a book called Dr. Johnson’s London. It’s an appalling book. I don’t mean that it was appallingly written. It was written finely. No, it’s the London of Johnson’s time that we would consider appalling, by modern standards.
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This was a time when there were no pain medications beyond the boiled bark of a few trees — and several stiff shots of whiskey. The first modern pain-relieving medication was aspirin, and it wasn’t developed until 1892, more than a century after Johnson’s time. You needed surgery? You could have it, but without anesthesia. You wanted fresh air? You couldn’t find it in London in those years. The city literally stank. Ancient Rome had a better sewer system than did 18th-century London.
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You took your life in your hands — or, at least, you took your well-being in your hands — if you walked the streets early in the morning. That was when people tossed onto the streets, from their upper-story windows, what euphemistically was called night soil. If the stuff fell on you, how would you clean your woolen clothing? Dry cleaning didn’t yet exist.
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As I said, Samuel Johnson has been a major influence on me, for multiple reasons. He has given me insights into the human condition I never would have reached on my own. Something similar can be said of a more ancient writer, St. Augustine. His most important book was <i>The City of God</i>, published in 426, four years before his death. He wrote it to defend the Church against the charge, levied by pagan writers, that the decline of Rome was the fault of Christianity. As it happened, Augustine’s own city, Hippo in North Africa, would fall to barbarians three years after his death.
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Sometimes it takes centuries for civilizations to decline and fall. Literate people of the late fourth and early fifth centuries — both Christians and pagans — were aware that the Roman Empire was in decline, not just geographically or militarily but culturally and even morally, and they knew that the decline had been ongoing for generations. The old pagan virtues — honor, courage, magnanimity — were becoming scarce.
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Most people who lived when Augustine wrote had little sense of a decline. Knowing no history, they assumed that things as they knew them were pretty much how things always had been. Few of them, except those who joined the Roman legions, ever traveled more than 20 miles from their homes in their entire lives. None of them went to school, there being no schools in our sense of the term. Almost all of them were illiterate. For generations they and their forebears had been unaware that their civilization was on a downward slope.
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Rome fell in 476, when the last emperor, a young man with the ironic double name of Romulus Augustulus, was shoved aside by a barbarian general. His name was ironic because Romulus had been the name of the legendary founder of Rome, and Augustulus — which means Little Augustus — had been the name of the first and greatest of the Roman emperors. Romulus Augustulus is mentioned one or two times after his removal and then just disappears, like Roman civilization itself.
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It’s much the same today. As late as 1946, in his famous “Iron Curtain Speech” at Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill could refer to “Christian civilization.” He was being generous, even at that late date. The descriptor has dropped out of usage in the past 76 years: our society no longer is Christian in any meaningful sense, even if Christians, most of them only nominal, still comprise the majority of its members. And there is reason to wonder whether the term civilization applies as much as it did three generations ago.
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Most people today are oblivious to the fact of our civilization’s decline. We shouldn’t be surprised at that. It’s the standard state of things. People go about their day-to-day lives, worrying about this week’s paycheck, next week’s mortgage payment, next month’s un-looked-forward-to visit by unwelcome relatives. They don’t, in general, see the larger picture. That isn’t necessarily their fault. In the fourth chapter of the Book of Wisdom we are told, “The world looks on, uncomprehending.” That’s pretty much as it always has been. Most people are uncomprehending about many things.
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In my childhood, it was easy to be a Catholic. We Catholics were respected. (We had Fulton Sheen on television, and he got higher ratings than Milton Berle!) The Church was respected, even when opposed. We had considerable influence over what was published in newspapers and magazines, what was shown in movie theaters, and what was within the legitimate bounds of public morality. Now we have almost no influence outside our own circles, and even inside, things have fallen apart.
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Yet there is much that each of us can do, even if only privately and quietly. Recall the parable of the talents. The master was going on a long journey. He entrusted his property to his servants. To one he gave five talents, to another two, and to the third servant one. The first and second servants invested what they were given and doubled their holdings, while the third servant, out of fear of his master, buried his single talent in the ground. When the master returned, he praised the first two servants and condemned the third to the outer darkness.
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A curious thing about this passage is the word <i>talent</i>. Unlike in most other languages, the translation of the underlying Greek has two meanings in English, not just one. The word still retains the ancient meaning of a large unit of money, but today the word primarily means a skill or an aptitude. It’s a happy chance that for us there is more meaning in the parable than there was for the original listeners.
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We all are given talents, of various sorts — some people more than others, but none of us is talentless. If my own life is in any way representative, we don’t make good use of most of those talents. Some we might not ever use at all. We ineptly miss so many opportunities to do things that are useful, good, or beautiful. In other words, we fail — but we can be grateful even for our failures, if we learn from them.
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<i>Karl Keating, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, has engaged in Catholic apologetics for more than four decades and is the author of 20 books. His most recent is Sun, Storm, and Solitude: Discovering Hidden Italy on the Cammino di San Benedetto. He is completing the last of a series of four books on hiking and backpacking. The series title is How to Fail at Hiking. This article is based on a talk he gave at the Diocese of Scranton’s sixth annual Catholic Men’s Conference on October 30, 2021.</i>
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©2022 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.
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<i>The foregoing article,</i> "<a href="https://www.newoxfordreview.org/documents/a-lifes-worth-of-failure-an-abundance-of-gratitude/">A Life’s Worth of Failure, an Abundance of Gratitude</a>,"<i> was originally published in the July-Auagust 2022 issue of the</i> <a href="http://www.newoxfordreview.org/" target="_blank">New Oxford Review</a> <i>and is reproduced here by kind permission of </i>New Oxford Review<i>, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.</i><font face=Times>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-62749587461805463992022-06-01T13:17:00.001-04:002022-06-01T13:17:09.406-04:00How political correct language undermines the Gospel (and much more)The world, according to Christianity and much of classical antiquity, is populated by things with stable natures, like fire and water, gold and silver, dogs and cats, and men and women. These things are what they are, and are not somethe else. The strength of this view lies in seeing the world as it is, rather than as some might wish it to be. But a war is being waged against this ancient view. Examples include: <i>Nominalism</i> (from the Latin 'nomen' for 'name'), which attacked this view, insisting that common names like 'dog' and 'cat' don't refer to anything real outside our minds but are only 'names' arbitrarily assigned to things. <i>Darwinism</i> attacked it, insisting that 'species' is a term arbitrarily assigned to a phase of an evolutionary continuum, and that nothing remains unchanging. <i>Postmodern Deconstructionsism</i> attacked it, insisting that it was part of a metanarrative that was no more than a social construct.
<i>Transgenderism</i> attacks it, insisting that one's 'gender' is also a social construct arbirarily assigned at birth. As R. R. Reno recently noted in his <i>First Things</i> column:
<blockquote>Ze and Zir are easy to mock and ridicule. But the now-ubiquitous use of “them” as a singular pronoun shows how deeply all of us are now implicated in the rebellion against bodily reality. -- R. R. Reno, "Transgenderism: Escaping Limits," <i>First Things</i> (June 2022).</blockquote>Students these days end up writing the most tortured grammatical contortions, like this:<blockquote>If a human being is not an end in themselves, they can more easily be seen as a 'burden to society' if they cannot make a 'contribution.'</blockquote>Or:<blockquote>Everyone thinks they are a theologian, and begin misapplying theological arguments, or even argue themselves headlong over the edge, into sedevacantism.</blockquote>Any foreigner trying to master the logic of English grammar would find such sentences, for all their 'political correctness,' grammatically unintelligible. I don't know of any European language being flogged into such torgured contortions as English over politically correct allergies. Almost all continue to use masculine pronouns inclusively. And Asian languages, so far as I know, have not succumbed to the contortions now fashionable in English.
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Peter Kreeft noted the problems with language of this kind in a footnote in one of his philosophy books:
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"Man" means "mankind," not "males." It is traditional inclusive language. "Humanity" does not go with "God" ("God and humanity") because "God " and "man" are concrete nouns, like "dog" and "cat," while "divinity" and "humanity" are abstract nouns, like "canininity" and "felinity" or "dogginess" and "cattiness." Whatever the political or psychological uses or misuses of these words, that is what they mean. We do not undo old injustices against women by doing new injustices against language." -- Peter Kreeft, <i>Philosophy 101 By Socrates: An Introduction to Philosophy Via Plato's Apology</i> (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2002), p. 9n1.</blockquote>
Kreeft notes the tendency towards abstraction in such language, a retreat from the concrete and the real. But I would go farther. I would retrieve Reno's point about our complicity in the rebellion against bodily reality when we use such language.
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In the earlier form of the English Mass, when I was first received into the Catholic Church in 1993, when we came to the response: "Let us give Him thanks and praise," many individuals with an allergy to masculine inclusive pronouns for God would subsitutute: "Let us give God thanks and praise." It sounded innocent enough. But there is a Gnostic presumption at work here that one can get behind the language of Scripture and the Church to the supposed 'reality' of a God beyond gender. Woe betide the day God became Incarnate as a man! Such deconstructionists want to unmake the genetic design revealed in Scripture.
One can imagine where such logic might lead. Imagine the resulting translatin of John 3:16 --<blockquote>For God so loved God's world that God gave God's only Child that whoever believes in them/Zem/Xem shall not perish but have eternal life.</blockquote>
Again, as Reno says about 'Ze' and 'Zir,' it's easy to mock and ridicule such caricatures, but the challenge is real. Once we capitulate to using the language of the revolt against nature, we undermine the metaphysical foundations of the Gospel. If St. Paul's syllogism in 1 Corinthians 15 about Christ's resurrection means anything, it is that our own redemption rests on Christ's being the New Adam and having taken on the human nature of the Old Adam and redeemed it. If He rose from the dead, we may hope that we, too, who have been incorporated into His mystical Body, shall also be resurrected in the world to come.
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But all of this depends on there being such a thing as "human nature" for Christ to take on and redeem as the New Adam. If there is no such thing and if Christ be not risen, then as Paul says, "we are of all men the most miserable."
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What does resistance require? Is it enough that we resist using <i>Ze, Zir, Zem, Zeir, Xe, Xir, Xem, Xeir</i>? Is it enough that we use good grammar and refuse to mix singular nouns with plural pronouns like <i>they, them, themselves</i>, etc? Is it enough to avoid using <i>God</i> or <i>Godself</i> repeatedly instead of personal pronouns for God? All of that would help, of course. But my own view is that we have to return to the inclusive use of the masculine pronouns as suggested by Peter Kreeft above. As he notes elsewhere, a consolation to the contemporary feminist might be found in metaphor of the Church as the Bride of Christ, since, in relation to the Bridegroom, all men, along with women, are <i>feminine</i> in relation to the heavenly Bridegroom! I will not go into the metaphysical foundations for the inclusive use of masculine pronouns represented in Genesis, where Eve was created from a rib removed from the sleeping body of the Adam, or in biblical passages like 1 Corinthians 11:1-16, long unfamiliar with Catholics because excluded from the 'short form' of their Novus Ordo lectionary readings.<br><br>
But in the transgender movement, one can more clearly see the animus at work, and that it isn't just about language. It is about unmaking the objective order of nature, or, if you prefer, the Creation Order. J. Budziszewski, in his book about natural law, <i>What We Can't Not Know</i>, references in this connection a very ancient Greek word: γοητεία (goēteía). The word is associated with occult demonology and witchcraft, and Budzieszewski links it to the sorts of impulses one finds in the revolt against being, not merely in radical examples like Aleister Crowley, but even in the currently more mainstreamed dispositions found in LGBTQ+ communities. The point would be that even in subtle and now widely-accepted ways, the revolt against nature has found a home in contemporary language and habits.<br><br>
The resistence can also begin with language that used to be mainstream. The contemporary allergy against use of expressions like 'mankind' involves neither a recent discovery that women are also members of the human family nor an effort to clarify a puzzling expression. I don't know of any woman visiting a zoo who saw a sign on a door that said "DANGER! MAN EATING TIGER" and would assume the warning didn't apply to her because she wasn't a biological man. As Kreeft notes, words like "man" and "woman" are strong nouns, not anemic abstractions like "humanity." They deserve to be recalled into service. I will not reference the contraction H. L. Mencken made of "he-or-she-ior-it," but it's clear enough what he would have thought of our contemporary lingistic inclinations.<br><br>
Let me conclude by 'correcting' the earlier sentences butchered by political correctness. Let the reader judge whether he would agree with me that the traditional inclusive forms are much more natural and lucid.
<blockquote>If a human being is not an end in themselves, they can more easily be seen as a 'burden to society' if they cannot make a 'contribution.'<br><br>
<u>Corrected</u>: <i>If a man is not an end-in-himself, he an more easily be seen as a 'burden to society.'</i></blockquote>Again:<blockquote>Everyone thinks they are a theologian, and begin misapplying theological arguments, or even argue themselves headlong over the edge, into sedevacantism.<br><br>
<u>Corrected</u>: <i>Everyone thinks he is a theolgian and begins misapplying theological arguments or even to argue himself headlong over the edge into sedevacantism.</i>
</blockquote>And finally:<blockquote>For God so loved God's world that God gave God's only Child that whoever believes in them/Zem/Xem shall not perish but have eternal life.<br><br>
<u>Corrected</u>: <i>For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.</i></blockquote>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-8095303112532815312022-05-23T08:53:00.000-04:002022-05-23T08:53:16.848-04:00Tridentine Community News -- San Francisco TLM Celebrant Training Report #6; Seminarians of the Franciscans of the Holy Spirit<center><img src="http://multimedia.detnews.com/pix/be/a6/cb/ef/02/5f/20090313010554_0301-cvt-traditon298.jpg"><br><font color=red face=Times Roman><i><b>"I will go in unto the Altar of God<br>To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"</i></b></font color=red face=Times roman></center><br><a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org" target="_blank"">Tridentine Community News</a> by Alex Begin (May 22, 2022):<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/LAT.jpg" align=left hspace=8 vspace=4><blockquote>
<i><b>San Francisco TLM Celebrant Training Report #6 </i></b>
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<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/DGVTLMT2.jpg">
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For the sixth time, Extraordinary Faith was invited to provide Traditional Mass celebrant training in the Archdiocese of San Francisco. We are delighted to report that with the approval of Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, soon-to-be-ordained Reverend Mr. Gerardo Vazquez will celebrate his second Holy Mass after ordination to the priesthood in the Extraordinary Form. It will be a Solemn High Mass on Sunday, June 12, 2022 at 1:30 PM, at historic St. Monica Church in San Francisco, and everyone is invited. The schola of the Benedict XVI Institute, a.k.a. the Archbishop’s Schola, will provide the music.
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Deacon Gerardo took Extraordinary Faith’s training program on the Traditional Latin Mass on May 12 & 13. Pictured with Deacon Gerardo is Fr. Kevin Kennedy, Administrator of St. Monica Parish, who also pastors a nearby Byzantine Rite parish.
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<i><b>Seminarians of the Franciscans of the Holy Spirit </i></b>
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<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/FHSSs.jpg">
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The Franciscans of the Holy Spirit have become familiar faces at Traditional Latin Masses around metro Detroit, in their home parish of St. Mary of Redford and at the Oakland County Latin Mass Association at the Orchard Lake Shrine Chapel, Old St. Mary’s, Our Lady of Good Counsel, and other sites. The FHS seminarians – whom you may recognize but whose names you may not know – are now featured with bios on their own web page: <a href="https://becomefire.faith/about/meet-seminarians">https://becomefire.faith/about/meet-seminarians</a>. There you can meet Br. Paul Graupmann, Br. Elijah Delello, and Br. Lawrence Hogue.
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The “oldest” of them, Deacon John of the Cross, returned this week to the FHS home base of Phoenix, Arizona, to be ordained to the sacred priesthood. He will be assigned to one of their apostolates in Phoenix, but we can expect to see him visit Detroit from time to time. And yes, rest assured that he intends to make the Traditional Mass a part of his priesthood, as the TLM is written into the FHS constitutions.
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<b><i>Tridentine Masses This Coming Week</i></b>
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<li><u>Wed. 05/25 7:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i>Old St. Patrick, Ann Arbor</i> (Rogation Day) – Outdoor procession precedes Mass
<li><u>Thu. 05/26 7:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i>Our Lady of the Scapular, Wyandotte</i> (Ascension Thursday)
<li><u>Thu. 05/26 7:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i>St. Priscilla, Livonia</i> (Ascension Thursday)
<li><u>Thu. 05/26 7:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i>St. Thomas the Apostle, Ann Arbor</i> (Ascension Thursday)
<li><u>Sun. 05/29 2:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i>St. Alphonsus, Windsor</i> (Sunday After the Ascension) – May Crowning and procession follows Mass</ul>
</blockquote><center><a href="https://www.facebook.com/JuventutemMichigan/"target=_blank><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/juv1.jpg"></center></a><span style="font-size:78%;">[Comments? Please e-mail <a href="mailto:tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org">tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org</a>. Previous columns are available at <a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org"target=_blank>http://www.detroitlatinmass.org</a>. This edition of <span style="font-style: italic;">Tridentine Community News</span>, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for May 22, 2022. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]</span> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-32906070294699707082022-05-03T10:38:00.003-04:002022-05-03T10:51:10.085-04:00Tridentine Community News - Fr. Perrone Celebrates Mass at OCLMA and Old St. Mary's; Romeo Knights Photo Album of Historic Detroit Churches; Detroit Catholic Podcast Interviews Wassim Sarweh; TLMs This Coming Week<font size=4> May 1, 2022 - St. Joseph the Worker</font size=4>
<br><br>
<center><img src="http://multimedia.detnews.com/pix/be/a6/cb/ef/02/5f/20090313010554_0301-cvt-traditon298.jpg"><br><font color=red face=Times Roman><i><b>"I will go in unto the Altar of God<br>To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"</i></b></font color=red face=Times roman></center><br><a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org" target="_blank"">Tridentine Community News</a> by Alex Begin (May 1, 2022):<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/LAT.jpg" align=left hspace=8 vspace=4><blockquote>
<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/FEP23.jpg"><b><i>Fr. Eduard Perrone to Celebrate Masses at the Oakland County Latin Mass Association and Old St. Mary’s</i></b>
<br><br>
A familiar face is returning to the altar in the Archdiocese of Detroit: Fr. Eduard Perrone celebrated the Sunday 9:00 AM High Mass for the Oakland County Latin Mass Association at the Orchard Lake Shrine Chapel on May 1 [and will do so again on May] 8, and 22. He will also celebrate the 10:00 AM High Mass at Old St. Mary’s on May 15. We hope you can join us and welcome Fr. Perrone back to the traditional liturgy.
<br><br>
Fun fact: Prior to becoming a priest, Fr. Perrone was the music director at Old St. Mary’s and even released a now highly collectible LP recording of the Novus Ordo Latin Mass choir there.
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<b><i>Romeo Knights Photo Album of Historic Detroit Churches</b></i>
<br><br>
<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/RKSH94.jpg">
<br><br>
<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/RKF12.jpg">
<br><br>
Brian O’Curran of the Romeo Knights of Columbus has posted a beautiful collection of photos of historic Detroit churches taken during a recent Prayer Pilgrimages bus tour. Rarely can one see such architectural splendor all in one place. [Photos of the naves of St. Hedwig and St. Florian above].
<br><br>
See the full album at:
<a href=https://romeoknights.com/2022/01/16/prayer-pilgrimage-2022/>https://romeoknights.com/2022/01/16/prayer-pilgrimage-2022/</a>
<br><br>
<i><b>Detroit Catholic Podcast Interviews Wassim Sarweh</b></i>
<br><br>
<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/DETST43.jpg">
Those attending the March 20, 2022 Tridentine Mass at Old St. Mary’s may have noticed a sound crew recording the choir that day. The Detroit Catholic was there to capture some background music to be used in an interview of Oakland County Latin Mass Association/Orchard Lake, Old St. Mary’s, and Holy Family Saginaw Tridentine Mass music director Wassim Sarweh.
<br><br>
<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/DCPR24.jpg">
<br><br>
The podcast, entitled “Does the Music Matter?” and part of their Detroit Stories series, was posted on the Detroit Catholic web site this week:
<a href=https://www.detroitcatholic.com/news/detroit-stories-episode-30-does-the-music-matter-podcast>https://www.detroitcatholic.com/news/detroit-stories-episode-30-does-the-music-matter-podcast</a>
<br><br>
Full disclosure: The podcast emphasizes the diversity of musical styles available at Archdiocese of Detroit Masses and therefore includes some decidedly untraditional music alongside our beloved Gregorian Chant.
<br><br>
<i><b>Tridentine Masses This Coming Week</b></i>
<u>Fri. 05/07 7:00 PM</u>: Solemn High Mass at <i>Old St. Mary’s</i> (Feria of the Second Sunday After Easter) – Celebrant: Fr. Steve Mateja, Deacon: Fr. Michael Suhy, Subdeacon: Br. Lawrence Hogue, FHS. Reception after Mass.
</blockquote><center><a href="https://www.facebook.com/JuventutemMichigan/"target=_blank><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/juv1.jpg"></center></a><span style="font-size:78%;">[Comments? Please e-mail <a href="mailto:tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org">tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org</a>. Previous columns are available at <a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org"target=_blank>http://www.detroitlatinmass.org</a>. This edition of <span style="font-style: italic;">Tridentine Community News</span>, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for May 1, 2022. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]</span>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-51875762477535998152022-01-02T18:04:00.003-05:002022-01-02T18:17:43.555-05:00Tridentine Community News - Exorcisms in the Blessing of Epiphany Water; Plenary Indulgence for Prayers During Pandemic; Tridentine Masses This Coming Week<center><img src="http://multimedia.detnews.com/pix/be/a6/cb/ef/02/5f/20090313010554_0301-cvt-traditon298.jpg"><br><font color=red face=Times Roman><i><b>"I will go in unto the Altar of God<br>To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"</i></b></font color=red face=Times roman></center><br><a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org" target="_blank"">Tridentine Community News</a> by Alex Begin (January 2, 2022):<blockquote>
<font size=4>January 2, 2022 – Holy Name of Jesus</font size=4>
<b><i?Exorcisms in the Blessing of Epiphany Water</b></i>
<br><br>
<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/Epi23.jpg"><br><br>
A priest reader of this column who happens to be a diocesan exorcist pointed out that the prayers of exorcism in the Blessing of Epiphany Water are similarly worded to the prayers in the Rite of Exorcism. These prayers are more detailed than the prayers of exorcism of salt and water used in the blessing of regular Holy Water. The pure and exorcised Epiphany Water is customarily taken home and sprinkled in the rooms of the house as a protection against evil.
<br><br>
As a result this priest has decided to use Epiphany Water for other blessings he conducts during the year. For reference, one of those exorcism prayers from the Epiphany Water Blessing is provided below. Note that the Traditional Roman Ritual requires that it be prayed in Latin.
<br><br>
The full English translations of the Blessings of Epiphany Chalk and Water were published in our January 3 and January 10, 2010 columns and are available on the Tridentine Community News page of <a href="www.windsorlatinmass.org">www.windsorlatinmass.org</a><blockquote>
<i>Exorcism Against Satan and the Apostate Angels</i>
<br><br>
We cast thee out, every unclean spirit, every devilish power, every assault of the infernal adversary, every legion, every diabolical group and sect, by the Name and power of our Lord Jesus <font color=red><font size=5><b>+</b></font size=5></font color=red> Christ, and command thee to fly far from the Church of God and from all who are made to the image of God and redeemed by the Precious Blood of the Divine Lamb <font color=red><font size=5><b>+</b></font size=5></font color=red>. Presume never again, thou cunning serpent, to deceive the human race, to persecute the Church of God, nor to strike the chosen of God and sift them as wheat <font color=red><font size=5><b>+</b></font size=5></font color=red>. For the Most High commands thee, <font color=red><font size=5><b>+</b></font size=5></font color=red> He to Whom thou didst hitherto in thy great pride presume thyself equal; He Who desireth that all men might be saved, and come to the knowledge of truth. God the Father <font color=red><font size=5><b>+</b></font size=5></font color=red> commandeth thee! God the Son <font color=red><font size=5><b>+</b></font size=5></font color=red> commandeth thee! God the Holy <font color=red><font size=5><b>+</b></font size=5></font color=red> Spirit commandeth thee! The majesty of Christ commands thee, the Eternal Word of God made flesh, <font color=red><font size=5><b>+</b></font size=5></font color=red> Who for the salvation of our race, lost through thy envy, humbled Himself and was made obedient even unto death; Who built His Church upon a solid rock, and proclaimed that the gates of hell should never prevail against her, and that He would remain with her all days, even to the end of the world! The Sacred Mystery of the Cross <font color=red><font size=5><b>+</b></font size=5></font color=red> commands thee, as well as the power of all Mysteries of Christian faith! <font color=red><font size=5><b>+</b></font size=5></font color=red> The most excellent Virgin Mary, Mother of God <font color=red><font size=5><b>+</b></font size=5></font color=red> commands thee, who in her lowliness crushed thy proud head from the first moment of her Immaculate Conception! The faith of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul and the other apostles <font color=red><font size=5><b>+</b></font size=5></font color=red> commands thee! The blood of the martyrs commands thee, as well as the pious intercession <font color=red><font size=5><b>+</b></font size=5></font color=red> of holy men and women!
<br><br>
Therefore, accursed dragon and every diabolical legion, we adjure thee by the living <font color=red><font size=5><b>+</b></font size=5></font color=red> God, by the true God, by the holy <font color=red><font size=5><b>+</b></font size=5></font color=red> God, by the God Who so loved the world that He gave His Sole-Begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish, but shall have life everlasting – cease thy deception of men and thy giving them to drink of the poison of eternal damnation; desist from harming the Church and fettering her freedom! Get thee gone, Satan, founder and master of all falsity, enemy of mankind! Give place to Christ in Whom thou didst find none of thy works; give place to the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church which Christ Himself bought with His Blood! Be thou brought low under God’s mighty hand; tremble and flee as we call upon the holy and awesome name of Jesus, before Whom hell trembles, and to Whom the Virtues, Powers, and Dominations are subject; Whom the Cherubim and Seraphim praise with unfailing voices, saying: Holy, Holy, Holy, the Lord God of Hosts!</blockquote>
<b><i>Plenary Indulgence for Prayers During Pandemic</b></i>
<br><br>
With the ending of the Year of St. Joseph on December 8, 2021, many easy ways to gain a Plenary Indulgence every day have expired. However one can still take advantage of the several simple means to gain a Plenary Indulgence during the time of pandemic, some of which can be done in your own home.
<br><br>
Holy Mother Church granted a simple way to gain a Plenary Indulgence during this time of pandemic “to those faithful who offer a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, or Eucharistic adoration, or reading the Holy Scriptures for at least half an hour, or the recitation of the Holy Rosary, or the pious exercise of the Way of the Cross, or the recitation of the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, to implore from Almighty God the end of the epidemic, relief for those who are afflicted and eternal salvation for those whom the Lord has called to Himself.” The usual conditions of Confession within 20 days, reception of Holy Communion once per indulgence sought, prayers for the Holy Father’s intentions, and freedom from attachment to sin apply in those locales where churches have reopened since the indulgence opportunity was first published.
For complete details, see:
<a href="https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2020/03/20/200320c.html">https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2020/03/20/200320c.html</a>
<br><br>
<b><i>Tridentine Masses This Coming Week</b></i><li>
<li><u>Thu. 01/06 7:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i>OCLMA/Orchard Lake Shrine Chapel</i> (Epiphany) – Celebrant: Fr. Clint McDonell. Blessing of Epiphany Water at 6:15 PM. Please bring bottles if you would like to take some home. A limited number of small bottles will also be available for those who do not bring their own.
<li><u>Fri. 01/07 7:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i>Old St. Mary’s</i> (Feria of Epiphany) – Celebrant: Fr. Derik Peterman. Devotions to the Sacred Heart before Mass. Benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament at the end of Mass. A reception follows in the Parish Hall.</li>
</blockquote><center><a href="https://www.facebook.com/JuventutemMichigan/"target=_blank><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/juv1.jpg"></center></a><span style="font-size:78%;">[Comments? Please e-mail <a href="mailto:tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org">tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org</a>. Previous columns are available at <a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org"target=_blank>http://www.detroitlatinmass.org</a>. This edition of <span style="font-style: italic;">Tridentine Community News</span>, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for January 2, 2022. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-9489642925767422542021-11-01T15:35:00.005-04:002021-11-01T15:58:21.795-04:00Christ the King. What does it mean?Yesterday was the Feast of Christ the King. Here is what was written by Fr. John Bustamante in his "A Vicarious Descant," <i>Assumption Grotto News</i> (October 31, 2021): <blockquote>
Today is the Feast of Christ the King as instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925 in the encyclical <i>Quas primas</i>. In accordance with the directives regarding this feast day, after Mass will follow the Act of Consecration of the Human Race to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
<br><br>
Our Collect prayer today is:<blockquote>
Almighty and everlasting God, who in Thy beloved Son, the King of the whole world, has willed to restore all things, mercifully grant that all the kindreds of the nations that are divided by the wound of sin, may be brought under the sweet yoke of His rule. Who liveth and reigneth ....</blockquote>
Pope Pius XI crealy taught what the Kingship of Christ means. He shows that while this Kingship is spiritual, it is a grave error "to say that Christ has no authority whatever in civil affairs ..." (#17). In paragraph 18 we read:<blockquote>
[Thus] the empire of our Redeemer embraces all men. To use the words of Our immortal predecessor, Pope Leo XIII: "His empire includes not only Catholic nations, not only baptized persons who, though of right belonging to the Church, have been led astray by error, or have been cut off from her by schism, but also those who are outside the Christian faith; so that truly the whole of mankind is subject to the power of Jesus Christ." Nor is there any difference in this matter between the individual and the family or the State; for all men, whether collectively or individually, are under the dominion of Christ. In him is the salvation of the individual, in him is the salvation of society. "Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given to men whereby we must be saved." He is the author of happiness and true prosperity for every man and for every nation. "For a nation is happy when its citizens are happy. What else is a nation but a number of men living in concord?" If, therefore, the rulers of nations with to preserve their authority, to promote and increase the prosperity of their countries, they will not neglect the public duty of reverence and obedience to the rule of Christ. What We said at the beginning of our Pontificate concerning the decline of public authority, and the lack of respect for the same, is equally true at the present day. "With God and Jesus Christ," we said, "excluded from political life, with authority derived not from God but from man, the very basis of that authority has been taken away, because the chief reason of the distinction between ruler and subject has been eliminated. The result is that the human society is tottering to its fall, because it has no longer a secure and solid foundation.</blockquote>
The very last encyclical Pope Pius XI promulgated was titled, <i>Ingravescentibus malis</i> or "Ever increasing evils." In this last encyclical, Pius calls upon all mankind to turn to Christ by calling upon the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, saying:<blockquote>
More than once have We asserted -- and We recently repeated this in the Encyclical Letter <i>Divini Redemptoris</i> that there is no remedy for the ever-growing evils of our times except a return to Our Lord Jesus Christ and to His most holy precepts. Truly, only He "hath the words of eternal life" (Cf. John 6:69), and individuals and society can only fall into immediate and miserable ruin if they ignore the majesty of God and repudiate His Law .... [A]nyone who studies with diligence the records of the Catholic Church will easily recognize that the true patronage of the Virgin Mother of God is linked with all the annals of the Christian name. When, in fact, errors everywhere diffused were bent upon rending the seamless robe of the Church and upon throwing the Catholic world into confusion, our fathers turned with confident soul to her "alone who destroys all heresies in the world" (Roman Breviary), and the victory won through her brought the return of tranquility .... Therefore why should We supplicate Our Heavenly Mother in this manner with due disposition and holiness? We desire very earnestly, Venerable Brethren, that the Holy Rosary should be recited in a special manner in the month of October and with increased devotion both in the churches and in homes. And so much the more must it be done since the enemies of the Divine Name -- that is, those who have rebelled against and denied and scorned the Eternal God -- spread snares for the Catholic Faith and the liberty due to the Church, and finally rebel with insane efforts against divine and human rights, to send manking to ruin and perdition. Through efficacious recourse to the Virgin Mother of God, they may be finally bent and led to penance and return to the straight path, trusting to the care and protection of Mary.</blockquote>
The Month dedicated to Our Lady of the Holy Rosary has drawn to a close, but let us all have been renewed in our fervent prayer of the Rosary and continue to pray the Rosary as often as we are able.
<br><br>
May be turn to our Blessed Mother whose Immaculate Heart is the "cause of our joy" and make our urgent pleas that she guide our nation back to God and may we put our confidence and trust in the Lord Jesus' most merciful Heart.
<br><br>
Our month of prayers for the Holy Souls of Purgatory begins tomorrow, November 1. A plenary indulgence, applicable only to the Holy Souls in Purgatory, is granted to those who visit a cemetary and pray, even if only mentally, for the departed on each of the first eight days of November.
<br><br>
In two weeks, beginning November 12, we will have our annual 40 Hours Devotion. Please consider visiting our Lord for Adoration after the morning Mass until 6:00 PM on Friday and Saturday. The Friday morning Mass will be followed by Exposition, the Litany of the Saints, and a Procession in the church. Likewise, the Sunday Close of 40 Hours will be at noon with the Litany of the Saints and a Procession in the church, followed by Benediction....</blockquote>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-47569647620277498782021-10-21T16:10:00.000-04:002021-10-21T16:10:00.479-04:00"Costa Rican bishop suspends priest for saying Ordinary Form Mass in Latin and ad orientem"As Fr. Joseph Fession, S.J., asks in the Editor's column in the Ignatius Press catalog, "How's that for a headline?" (<a href="https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/248744/costa-rican-bishop-suspends-priest-who-said-novus-ordo-mass-in-latin">Here's the CNA report</a>.)
Fessio, founding editor of Ignatius Press, goes on to observe that the Costa Rican bishop (and bishops -- see below) are "either not serious Catholics or terribly ignorant." What does he mean?<blockquote>The 'typical edition" or primary and original text of the Mass -- whether in the "Ordinary" or "Extraordinary" form is Latin. And celebrating "facing East" or "facing the Lord" is not only a legitimate option, it is <i>presupposed</i> by the Roman Missal (both in Latin and in its official English translation). Otherwise why, if the celebrant is already facing the people, would the rubrics instruct him to face the people at the "Pray, brethren" ("<i>Orate fratres</i>")?</blockquote>Fessio continues:<blockquote>Why would a bishop do something like this? There's a major clue in a statement by the bishops' conference that "the use of the Missale Romanum of 1962 or <b>any other of the expressions of the liturgy</b> prior to 1970 is no longer authorized," including "<b>prayers, vestments or rites</b>" associated with the pre-1970 missal (Fessio's emphasis).<br><br>
Do they really know what they are saying? "Prayers," like the Collects that have been used since the earliest centuries? or like Euchaistic Prayer I (the Roman Canon)? "Vestments," like, say, and alb or stole? "Rites," such as the "Lord, have mercy" in the Introductory Rite?</blockquote>Gestures like those of the Costa Rican bishop give bishops a bad name. They give the impression that our spiritual shepherds have no love for Catholic traditions that have been the spiritual nourishment of Catholics from the earliest years of the Church. They give the impression of pitiful ignorance of Church history any time before 1970 and even of the rubrics of the <i>Novus Ordo Missae</i> implimented under Pope Paul VI in 1970. Catholicism is nothing if not traditional (1 Cor 15:3). There is no future in the shallow puddle of historically-oblivious Catholicism.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-64860556879012865752021-07-29T07:56:00.006-04:002021-07-29T07:56:52.269-04:00Tridentine Community News - Vatican Phase-Out of Latin Books for the Ordinary Form; San Francisco Training Report; Paducah, Kentucky Priest Training Report; San Francisco Archbishop's Secretary Training Report; Tridentine Masses This Coming Week<b>Vatican Phase-Out of Latin Books for the Ordinary Form</b>
<br><br>
Author and speaker Fr. Peter Stravinskas wrote in an article for
Catholic World Report on June 30 that Libreria Editrice Vaticana,
the Vatican publishing house, has discontinued offering its Latin
books for the Ordinary Form Mass and Divine Office. This writer
has noticed that their web site, <a href="www.vaticanum.com"><u><font color=blue>www.vaticanum.com</u></font color=blue></a>, has for many
months shown only a travel-sized version of the Latin Altar
Missal for the Ordinary Form; the full-sized version is no longer
to be found. Likewise the Ordinary Form Breviary is no longer
offered in Latin.
<br><br>
Fr. Stravinskas also writes that the Congregation
for Divine Worship has rescinded permission
for third party publishers to offer these books.
The most noteworthy of these, Midwest
Theological Forum, continues to advertise its
Latin Ordinary Form altar missal [pictured] and
Latin Ordinary Form Breviary for sale, but
perhaps will not be allowed to reprint them
when current inventory runs out.
<br><br>
If this information is true, it puts a firm nail in the coffin of the
Latin Novus Ordo Mass. There are few who still hold out much
hope for the Ordinary Form in Latin, but if the books that support
that liturgy are intentionally made unavailable, then the only
future for Latin in the life of the Church is in the Extraordinary
Form.
<br><br>
<b>San Francisco Seminarian Training Report</b>
<br><br>
On Wednesday, July 7, 2021, eight seminarians of the
Archdiocese of San Francisco took part in Traditional Latin Mass
altar serving training taught by Extraordinary Faith at St. Patrick
Seminary in Menlo Park, California. Archbishop Cordileone has
recommended that his seminarians learn the Extraordinary Form,
both for its own merits and for learning how better to offer the
Ordinary Form. The seminarians will use their skills to serve a
weekly Saturday Low Mass offered at the seminary by Fr. Samuel
Weber.
<br><br>
<b>Paducah, Kentucky Priest Training Report</b>
<br><br>
Fr. Bruce Fogle, Pastor of historic St. John the Evangelist Parish
in Paducah, Kentucky, celebrated his first Traditional Latin Mass
on Tuesday, July 13, 2021 after training from Extraordinary Faith.
Three of his altar servers also took part. Fr. Fogle intends to start a
Sunday Low Mass later this summer, which will be the first one in
the larger region that includes southern Illinois. He would like to
turn this into a High Mass eventually.
<br><br>
<b>San Francisco Archbishop’s Secretary Training Report</b>
<br><br>
Fr. Armando Gutierrez, priest secretary to Archbishop Salvatore
Cordileone, celebrated his first Traditional Latin Mass on Friday,
July 16, 2021 at Star of the Sea Parish in San Francisco, after
training from Extraordinary Faith. Fr. Armando will be part of the
archbishop’s initiative to expand the number of priests available to
offer the Extraordinary Form in his archdiocese.
<br><br>
<b>Tridentine Masses This Coming Week</b><ul>
<li><u>Fri. 08/06 7:00 PM</u>: High Mass at Old St. Mary’s (Transfiguration
of the Lord) – Celebrant: Fr. Stephen Pullis. Reception after Mass.</ul>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-49372972516292126202021-06-28T17:15:00.005-04:002021-06-28T17:17:12.235-04:00Topic: Pro-Abortion Catholic Politicians Receiving Communion[Advisory: I recently received the following contained in an email]
<br><br>
<b>Statement:</b>
<br><br>
Nobody who is obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin should be given Holy Communion. But
pro-abortion politicians are obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin for, by being politicians,
their support of abortion — the murder of babies in the womb — is an extremely grave sin, and it is
publicly manifest. Moreover, they do so in a manner that is obstinate to the clear teachings of the
Church, and they persevere in this; thus, they are obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin. Thus,
again, nobody who publicly supports abortion should be given Holy Communion.
<br><br>
<b>Justification:</b>
<br><br>
Greetings in the Lord to the faithful of Christ and His Holy Church.
The greatest evil, at least on the natural level, in our world today is, by far, the massive slaughter of God’s
children in the womb through abortion. With each abortion, an innocent child’s life is snuffed out, and, with
legalized abortion, the number of these murders of children in the womb is mind-numbing (an estimated 5<i>0
million children murdered by abortion throughout the world each year — over 100,000 daily!</i>) For good
reason, then, does the Catechism of the Catholic Church call this sin an “abominable crime.”
With each abortion, not only is an innocent baby’s life ended but, along with that, many other lives are deeply
devastated: We priests know all too well the indescribably deep pain inflicted on the hearts and souls of the
mothers and fathers of these children (to whom our hearts go out with deep fatherly affection) as well as so
many others wounded by this horrible scourge, a scourge that is of — or beyond — biblical
proportions. <i>“Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils and shed innocent blood, even
the blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan: And the land
was polluted with blood”</i> (Psalm 106: 37–38).
<br><br>
With all this in mind concerning the absolute horror and injustice of abortion, we, the PFC and our supporting
clergy, want the faithful to know that Catholic politicians who <i>publicly</i> support this mass murder of God’s
children ought not be given Our Lord’s Body and Blood in Holy Communion! For, by publicly supporting
abortion, such politicians are contributing to the shedding of the blood of many children, precious children for
whom Our Lord shed <i>His</i> Blood, that same Blood that is received in Holy Communion. Concerning the
unworthy reception of Holy Communion, i.e., the reception of Holy Communion in a state of mortal sin, the
Apostle Paul flat out declares, <i>“He that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to
himself, not discerning the Lord's body”</i> (1 Corinthians 11:29). Based on these words of the Apostle, the
Church herself, in her Code of Canon Law (Canon 915) declares that anyone who is “obstinately persevering
in manifest grave sin” (e.g., pro-abortion politicians) is “not to be admitted to Holy Communion.” Thus, these
politicians ought not to be given Holy Communion, for, in presenting themselves for the sacrament, they are
causing scandal to the faithful and offending Our Eucharistic Lord, who, again, shed that very Blood of His,
present in the Holy Eucharist, for each and every poor, innocent child who is so very unjustly killed by
abortion.
<br><br>
In fact, more than that, we, the PFC, do not understand why these politicians are not required, under
ecclesiastical obedience, by our fathers, the bishops, to publicly recant and repent from their pro-abortion
positions under pain of receiving a <i>formal, public excommunication</i> should they fail to do so! Nobody who
persists in the support of mass baby-murder (which is what legalized abortion is) — especially one who does
so publicly — has any right to call himself Catholic! To allow this is to do a disservice to the very names
“Catholic” and “Christian”!
<br><br>
The fact that pro-baby-murder politicians are being permitted to receive Our Sacred Lord has the potential to
undermine both our awareness of the indescribable evil of this massive child-sacrifice known as legalized
abortion, as well as the indescribable sacredness of the Blessed Sacrament — both truths we must uphold as
Catholics. In the end, the permitting of such politicians to receive Our Lord amounts, objectively, to a serious
lack of charity towards, first, the children in the womb who, daily, are slaughtered by the tens of thousands
throughout the world and, second, Our Lord Himself, truly present in the Blessed Sacrament, who is treated in
a sacrilegious manner by each and every one of these public sacrilegious Communions. If these little ones of
God and the Eucharistic Lord Himself are <i>truly</i> loved, how can this be permitted? It cannot.
<br><br>
So, in the face of such scandalous actions taking place, we, the PFC, urge the faithful to hold fast to their utter
hatred of the evil of abortion (and their love of those killed by abortion, as well as those so very deeply
wounded by abortion, especially the parents of these children) and to their utter love of the Blessed
Sacrament (and, consequently, to their hatred of anything that denigrates this Most Holy of Sacraments, such
as is taking place with these publicly scandalous and sacrilegious Communions).
<br><br>
We <i>urgently</i> call upon our spiritual fathers, the bishops, to stop this horrific and unjust (and uncharitable)
scandal, even as we also call upon these pro-abortion Catholic politicians (most especially our son in the Lord
and in His Church, Joseph Biden) to repent of their sins against, first, the unborn, and, secondly, against Our
Lord Himself (for, to these politicians, sons and daughters of ours in the Church, we say that, when your lives
are over, you will no longer have power but, rather, will face Our Lord and all His little ones, and you will then
have to give an account of your actions: If you do not repent, you will face everlasting condemnation; and, so,
out of love for you, our sons and daughters in the Lord and the Church, we call you to repentance today!)
<br><br>
In Christ,<br>
<i>Patres Fidelium Christi (PFC)</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-41111298979586362212020-12-15T08:23:00.004-05:002020-12-15T08:31:43.776-05:00Why Conservative Justices Run Interference for Liberal CausesTHE CONSTITUTIONAL FLAW IN THE CONSERVATIVE MIND<br><br>
by Edwin Dyga<br><br>
<i>Edwin Dyga is the Chief of Staff to the Parliamentary leader of the Christian Democratic Party in New South Wales, Australia. He was the founder and convenor of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum.</i><br><br>
The passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the consequent appointment of a third justice to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Donald Trump reignited debate about the impact of jurisprudence on American society. As the debate often revolves around questions of morality and its role in contemporary governance, conservatives cannot boast about their track record. Even if they exert cultural influence over large sections of the public, this is seldom reflected in legislative or judicial outcomes. This disconnect is the result of a political approach on the putative Right that seems to focus on diagnosis — why things are as they are — instead of on self-reflection and a reassessment of the tactics used to arrive at the status quo. What do recent developments in the judicial arena teach us about how we have arrived at this juncture?
<br><br>
Prof. David Flint, former dean of law at the University of Technology Sydney, wrote that the Supreme Court was the American Founding Fathers’ “biggest mistake, a disaster our [Australian] founders followed, even awarding the federal government an untrammeled discretion in choosing judges” (The Spectator, June 27). Flint argues that the Founders should have foreseen the rise of the kritarchy (i.e., rule by the judiciary) in much the same way Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw the potential decay of American democracy. Perhaps Flint is right, but intuition suggests that no matter how a judicial institution is established, politics, like greed and corruption, will make its presence felt. The seismic cultural shifts experienced in recent decades confirm this as we witness the continuing hyper-politicization of the public square. The problem of institutional collapse lies elsewhere, and the Founders of both nations can be forgiven for what seems, in retrospect, to be no more than the sin of gallant naïveté.
<br><br>
The formal structure of an institution, its constitutional order and the framework of rules and regulations according to which it operates, is not enough to guarantee its integrity. To believe otherwise is to indulge in a dangerous utopianism that ignores the primacy of an institution’s animating force: the people who constitute it, their attitudes and dispositions, and their culture, which is never a rigid force and inevitably changes the way organizations operate over time. The cultural impact of a judicial system does not, therefore, depend on whether judges are elected or appointed but on the cultural milieu in which its jurisprudence is shaped. Just as the milieu changes, so does its jurisprudence. Much like the human-resource departments in both the private and public sectors today, fill an organization with revolutionaries and it will reflect their values and act according to their imperatives — sometimes in a manner hostile to the organization’s original purpose.
<br><br>
Collapse is evident when those dedicated to preservation or renewal appear to strike at the foundations of the social order or actively fail to protect its integrity. Consider President Trump’s second appointee, Brett Kavanaugh, who, in his first act as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 2018, sided with his liberal colleagues in refusing to hear an argument in support of a state law that purported to prevent Planned Parenthood, a billion-dollar corporation dedicated to the promotion of abortion, from receiving additional taxpayer funds. Catholic commentator Michael Warren Davis put it delicately when he said this development “doesn’t bode well” for the pro-life cause (theDoveTV, Dec. 17, 2018). Kavanaugh, Davis said, “didn’t even want to hear the case…. He is invincibly certain that Planned Parenthood is entitled to taxpayer money.”
<br><br>
Similarly, President Trump’s first appointee as associate justice, Neil Gorsuch, wrote the decision in June this year that effectively extended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to people who profess exotic sexual identities, consequently imposing the next stage of the sexual revolution on the public square and further restricting the public and private rights of citizens who prefer to live by normative values. In an unrelated case decided that same day, he did not dissent from a decision that effectively upheld California’s so-called sanctuary laws that prohibit local law-enforcement officials from aiding federal agents in enforcing federal law.
<br><br>
These decisions are nothing short of a colossal humiliation to the Christians and conservatives who supported Kavanaugh and Gorsuch during their confirmation hearings. What inclines these supposedly conservative appointees to score such “own goals,” and so consistently? Flint writes that the “long term solution is to reverse unaccountable judicial supremacy and the deleterious effect it has had,” but reliance on “originalist” appointments (i.e., judges who claim to uphold original intent of the law) is obviously not enough.
<br><br>
Gorsuch’s decision on the scope of Title VII in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) was made on the basis of a strict reading of the law. Ironically, this is what conservatives have been demanding of their court officials since the era of judicial activism came to dominate social policy. However, it remains somewhat of a mystery that a self-described originalist would hold that the drafters of the Civil Rights Act had the incessantly expanding matrix of performative sexual identities in mind over half a century ago, in 1964. What strikes the observer is that a commitment to due process and the letter of the law, however flawed in this case, has led Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, ostensible opponents of jurisprudential progressivist overreach, to effectively defend a status quo they were expected to nudge to the Right, if not at least reform to something approximating a legal order untainted by the mischief of contemporary identity politics.
<br><br>
While this may seem counterintuitive, conservatives’ rejection of the political Left’s messianic disposition and methodology is to blame for its inability to reclaim ground lost to the so-called Enlightenment project in the field of law reform. That disposition may be anathema due to the perceived crudity of the Left’s revolutionary character: The nature of a conservative prohibits him from taking revolutionary steps to promote his agenda. By eschewing the Left’s tactics, the conservative does not “lead by example” to “shame his opponents”; instead, he is led by his opponents who are unshackled by the sensibilities of “polite society.” As a consequence, conservatives have been gamed by their own commitments to decorum and process.
<br><br>
Thus, jurisprudential orthodoxy has been turned on itself to further entrench an inherently hostile cultural revolution, and it has done so as a function of its own animating principles: seeming acceptance of the letter of the law (which is increasingly drafted by unapologetic leftist ideologues), restraint in the novel application of precedent (i.e., refusal to engage the Left at its own game), and, of course, compromise in the face of progressive pressure. The result has been a gradual and successive defeat over the past half century for those who would maintain a traditional social order, facilitated by their own judicial appointments.
<br><br>
The historical legacy of this conservative failure can be seen in a number of significant Supreme Court decisions, all of which were facilitated by Republican-appointed justices. In <i>Engel v. Vitale</i> (1962) Chief Justice Earl Warren (an Eisenhower appointee) sided with the majority in banning prayer in public schools. In <i>Griswold v. Connecticut</i> (1965) Warren again, along with Justice John Marshall Harlan II (also an Eisenhower appointee), held for the majority in legalizing the free availability of artificial contraception. In <i>Roe v. Wade</i> (1973) Chief Justice Warren Burger (a Nixon appointee) and Justices Harry Blackmun and William Brennan Jr. (Nixon and Eisenhower appointees, respectively) held for the majority in legalizing abortion. In <i>Lawrence v. Texas</i> (2003) Justice Anthony Kennedy (a Reagan appointee and a Catholic) joined Justice David Souter (a Bush appointee) for the majority, with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (another Reagan appointee) concurring, effectively normalizing paraphilia nationally.
<br><br>
Though the rationale for those decisions is open to debate, the weakness of the conservative elements on the bench could be identified in their commitment to reason while their opponents’ was a function of their commitment to social engineering at the service of “progress.”
<br><br>
If Justice Kavanaugh were indeed motivated by a desire to retard the hijacking of the judicial system by militant progressives, he would be receptive to any opportunity that might expose the bench to a legal argument that could rationally justify an interpretation of law amiable to advocates of normative values. Yet in Andersen v. Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri (2018) he seemed to agree that the state should not consider evidence of alleged organ-harvesting from aborted children, evidence which an experienced legal team believed had reasonable prospects of being persuasive in a court of law. Where does this urge to err on the side of the enemy’s program originate?
<br><br>
Giving a hearing to arguments, however tenuous, is the leftist strategy for shifting public opinion and creating rhetorical space for the development of legal precedent. Forever on the lookout for implications and inferences, judges committed to “progressive” social engineering through judicial fiat have set a now-long-standing precedent for this jurisprudential strategy — one their erstwhile opponents refuse to follow. It is difficult to imagine that there wouldn’t be a prima facie case to consider in Andersen, given the complex legal and moral arguments cited by both sides in what is one of the most passionately contested debates in the American public square: When does human life begin? Yet the conservative disposition, forever disinclined to learn from the victories of the Left — and therefore incapable of applying strategies that actually succeed — is thus constitutionally handicapped in the culture war.
<br><br>
What, then, are we to make of alleged champions of judicial originalism who lead the charge for the continuing revolution in social mores? The coalition on which Trump was delivered to office in 2016 had to squint at Gorsuch’s “long history of espousing progressive opinions,” Davis writes at CrisisMagazine.com (June 17), in order to avoid the potential disaster of Hillary Clinton appointments to the Supreme Court. “What do we have to show for it?” Davis asks. Not much, it seems. Gorsuch was preferred over Amy Coney Barrett, whose cultural traditionalism suggested that her Senate confirmation hearings would be excruciating and, therefore, intolerable. The torturous process endured by the compromise appointee Gorsuch and his family illustrated that the Trump administration and its Christian and conservative supporters suffered the indignities of a contentious confirmation process anyway, for little in return.
<br><br>
While it is true that both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have shaped, and will likely continue to shape, the future of American jurisprudence the right way in other areas, their milquetoast resistance — or effective defection — on these civilization-defining issues is unforgivable. Victory in “most cases” isn’t the point; victory in the difficult cases is crucial.
<br><br>
The passing of Justice Ginsburg in September opened the path for yet another appointment by the Trump administration. Amy Coney Barrett’s successful appointment to the position this October — on the auspicious date of Hillary Clinton’s birthday, no less — unsurprisingly infuriated the political and cultural Left. But legal traditionalists would do well to restrain themselves from pre-emptive celebration. Constitutional scholar Patrick Deneen gave a cautious endorsement of the charismatic Catholic jurist while noting that she may well be susceptible to the “gentry liberal” ethos that has seen a successive number of allegedly conservative appointees to the Supreme Court lean Left or defect to the progressive side of the bench altogether (First Things, Sept. 29).
<br><br>
An early portent of failure might be seen in the manner in which conservatives promoted Barrett’s candidacy in the media: her status as a woman, the “diversity” of her family, and in some cases playing down her Catholicity. These were highlighted as assets or advantages, but all of them are markers of politically progressive legitimacy. How can a conservative prevail by reaffirming an allegiance to liberalism? Would it really be a disqualifier to say that the only equality she intends to promote is equality before the law, that she will bring the wealth of Aquinas to the bench and reintroduce the spirit of Antonin Scalia?
<br><br>
These unhappy developments bring to mind my own experiences, a decade ago, as an advisor to the New South Wales attorney general and minister for justice. New South Wales is the most populous and litigious state in Australia and, as such, sets the tone for legal reform throughout the Commonwealth. Under the Australian system, ministers (and the AG) are appointed from among elected parliamentarians. The AG was elected to the Lower House in an atmosphere of considerable acrimony, mostly caused by activist elements who targeted his Catholic faith and history of pro-life advocacy as a “threat to democracy.” They denounced him as an “extremist,” called his appointment evidence of a “creeping theocracy,” and accused him of other such predictable nonsense. While in the privacy of personal conversation he did profess a commitment to fighting a culture war, this was more rhetoric than praxis.
<br><br>
The invectives took their toll, however, and the preferred strategy was to “prove” to those who despised him that he wasn’t the incarnation of their greatest fears. The result was an unremarkable policy agenda that terminated with his eventual removal from the Ministry and retirement from politics shortly thereafter.
<br><br>
Advice can be given, but it cannot be compelled. I recall a conversation with a senior colleague about the perils of judicial activism in which I suggested that the one way to put a stop to it would be to engage in it from our side of politics. The appointment of judges and magistrates is the responsibility of the minister; there are no confirmation hearings. Surely the specter of activist judges pushing the acceptable scope of debate on contentious issues to the Right would have roused an outcry against conservative judicial activism. Today, the brazen impudence of the Left comes down exclusively on the activism of conservative justices. A decade ago, however, there might still have been a desire to manifest a semblance of impartiality in the eyes of the public. Thus, the whole culture of “legislating from the bench” might have been put in the spotlight, irrespective of the politics involved. Whatever the outcome, either judges committed to normative values and legal orthodoxy would populate the bench or the whole concept of activism might face critical scrutiny.
<br><br>
Yet the blissful incomprehension that glazed over the eyes of my senior colleague in response to my suggestion of confronting the Left at its own game was telling — and deflating. Instead, a steady stream of “sensible” judges (his description) was appointed, one of whom actually boasted of his feminist credentials in a press release. I asked the then-convenor of the Samuel Griffith Society (the Australian equivalent of American Federalists) whether they were ever consulted about judicial appointments during that period. His answer was a simple “no.” I felt a fool for even asking.
<br><br>
The pathology of meekness among main stream conservatives is evidently shared across the Anglosphere. There simply doesn’t seem to be any real desire to prevail. The heart is cold, and the fight is gone. The root of this flaccidity of character is as much a function of allowing their political foes to set the boundaries of acceptable discourse as it is with adhering to rules that are no longer applicable to modern political combat. Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch are undoubtedly brilliant judicial scholars in their own right, but they (and their appointers) do not seem to appreciate that one cannot wear red and march in a straight line when fighting a guerrilla war.
<br><br>
The same could be said of my colleague, who, in another exchange concerning the reasons why conservatives are losing the culture war, stated laconically, without the slightest tone of concern or urgency, “There are more of them than there are of us.” When asked why he thought that was the case, he chuckled condescendingly and walked away. These exchanges are memorable because they are shocking; they fill a person concerned about the future of his nation with bitter dread.
<br><br>
Is this a conflict between generational perspectives? Opposition to Australia’s legislative redefinition of “family” in 2018 was organized through a corporate entity presided over by three directors, two of whom were born in the 1930s, the other being not much younger. The campaign, evidence of which was difficult to discern on the streets or in cyberspace — where cultural and political questions are determined by a growing cohort of engaged citizenry — failed spectacularly and unsurprisingly. Anything that was effective in drawing the public’s attention to the creeping totalitarianism of the “woke Left” (such as an Internet meme that was cited in parliamentary debates) was, of course, dutifully withdrawn in an attempt never to give offense to the enemy. These people might be described as “beautiful losers,” but the “beautiful” aspect relates to their oft-professed principles, which might be true in a teleological sense but which are no longer valid in light of contemporary rules of engagement. They are trapped in an Ernstfall in which they meander blindly, wondering why the times keep passing them by. The tragedy is that they seem incapable or unwilling to learn from their, or anyone else’s, mistakes.
<br><br>
The perennial complaint that I and some of my younger colleagues had against our senior leaders was the utter lack of mentorship or support, outside of the simple world of party politics, which would be aimed at fostering a future cadre of community leaders capable of forming an alternative cultural and political elite. But under these circumstances, even with such mentorship, all we can hope for is a litany of future judicial, political, and managerial officers who “sensibly” — if unwittingly — comply with the leftist program and steer the course of “progress.”
<br><br>
<i>Pace </i>Flint, the biggest mistake does not lie with the Founders (whether American or Australian) but with those charged with the task of defending the institutions the Founders established. An effective defense requires an offensive strategy in the cultural sphere. But this is rarely accomplished, much less tried. It is past time for conservatives to recalibrate their methodologies if they are to have any real hope of achieving their objectives. Political history is a record of competing rules of engagement between opposing cultures, worldviews, and systems. Contemporary conservatives are historically illiterate, for they are unable to recognize where tactical changes in approach to defending those institutions have become necessary. It is time to realize that a different kind of leadership is required.
<br><br>
©2020 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.
<br><br>
Edwin Dyga's "<a href="https://www.newoxfordreview.org/documents/why-conservative-justices-run-interference-for-liberal-causes/" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Why Conservative Justices Run Interference for Liberal Causes</a></font color=blue>" was originally published in the <i>New Oxford Review</i> (December 2020), and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave. Berkeley CA 94706-2260.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-24606000129686092812020-09-13T15:01:00.000-04:002020-09-13T15:01:46.770-04:00Tridentine Masses coming this week to metro Detroit and south-eastern Michigan<center>
<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/qui2.jpg" /></center>
<br />
<b><i>Tridentine Masses This Coming Week</i></b><br />
<br />
<u><b>Sunday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Sun. 7:30 AM and 10:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions 45 minutes before and after Masses) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 8:00 and 10:30AM</u> Low Mass (Confessions 1/2 hour before Mass: call beforehand) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!other-parishes-in-mi/c1gkh">St. Ann's Church, Livonia</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 8:00 AM (& Holy Days at 12:00 Noon)</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://www.stedwardonthelake.com/">St. Edward on the Lake Catholic Church, Lakeport</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:00 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:30 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:45 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.ashmi.org/page.cfm?p=165">OCLMA/Academy of the Sacred Heart, Bloomfield Hills</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun.</u>: [occasional Tridentine Masses: contact parish] at <i><a href="http://www.ourladyofmountcarmel.org/OLMCBulletin.html">Our Lady of the Scapular Parish</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 11:00 AM</u>: Solemn High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 11:30</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.ststephennewboston.org/">St. Stephen, New Boston</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 12:00 noon</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://www.lapeercatholic.org/">Immaculate Conception, Lapeer</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 12:00 noon</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://stanthonytemperance.org/">St. Anthony, Temperance</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 12:30 PM (2nd Sundays)</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://stpatricka2.org/">Old St. Patrick's, Ann Arbor</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 1:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://stmaryjackson.com/mass-times">St. Mary Star of the Sea, Jackson</a></i>
</li>
<li><i><u>Sun. 2:00 PM (1st Sundays only)</u>:<a href="http://wp.dol.ca/webportal/parish/web/view_parish/St._Alphonsus_Parish/1/130">St. Alphonsus Church, Windsor, Canada</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 2:00 PM (every Sunday except 1st)</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.thecatholicdirectory.com/directory.cfm?fuseaction=display_site_info&siteid=84954">Holy Name of Mary, Canada</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 3:00 PM (<i>2nd and 4th Sundays</i>)</u>: Tridentine Mass (call ahead for Confession times, 989-892-5936) at <i><a href="http://www.latinmasstimes.com/Michigan/611">Infant of Prague, Bay City</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 3:00 PM</u>: High Mass <i><a href="https://plus.google.com/103711137570595024543/about?gl=us&hl=en">St. Matthew Catholic Church, Flint</a></i>
</li></ul>
<br>
<b><u>Monday</u></b>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Mon. 7:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Mon. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Mon. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions by appointment) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Mon. 5:30 PM</u>: High Mass <i><a href="https://plus.google.com/103711137570595024543/about?gl=us&hl=en">St. Matthew Catholic Church, Flint</a></i>
</li> (Exaltation of the Holy Cross)
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Tuesday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Tue. 7:00 AM</u> Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Tue. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Tue. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions by appointment) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Tue. 8:45 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="https://www.lapeercatholic.org/">Immaculate Conception, Lapeer</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Tue. 7:00 PM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.thecatholicdirectory.com/directory.cfm?fuseaction=display_site_info&siteid=84954">Holy Name of Mary, Canada</a></i>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Wednesday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Wed. 7:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Wed. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions by appointment) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Wed. 12:00 Noon</u>: Low Mass <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i> followed by Perpetual Novena to St. Joseph
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Thursday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Thu. 7:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Thu. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Thu. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions Thursdays: 7:00 - 7:30 PM during Benediction) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Thu. 8:45 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://www.lapeercatholic.org/">Immaculate Conception, Lapeer</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Thu. 7:00 PM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://stanthonytemperance.org/">St. Anthony, Temperance</a></i>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Friday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Fri. 7:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM during Holy Hour) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 7:00 PM</u> (First Fridays only): Tridentine Mass (usually Low Mass) at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 7:00 PM (First Fridays only)</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://oldstmarysdetroit.com/">Old St. Mary's, Greektown, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 7:00 PM Second Fridays only</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://wp.dol.ca/webportal/parish/web/view_parish/St._Joseph_Parish/1/56">St. Joseph, Sarnia, Ontario</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 7:00 PM (after 6:00 PM Holy Hour, 1st Fridays only)</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
<li><u>7:00 PM during Lent only</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Saturday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Sat. 7:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.stmarysofredford.com/">St. Mary, Redford</a></i>. </li>
<li><u>8:00 AM (1st Saturdays only)</u>: Low Mass at <a href="http://www.stedwardonthelake.com/">St. Edward on the Lake, Lakeport</a>
</li>
<li><u>8:00 AM Second through last Saturdays only</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.ststephennewboston.org/">St. Stephen, New Boston</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions 8:30 AM to 9:30 AM) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions 1/2 hour before Mass: call beforehand) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!other-parishes-in-mi/c1gkh">St. Ann's Church, Livonia</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="https://www.mileschristi.org/family-center/">Miles Christi</a></i>, South Lyon, MI
</li>
<li><u>9:00 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://stmarystclair.org/">St. Mary, St. Clair</a></i>
<li><u>Sat. 9:00 AM (1st Saturdays)</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://stanthonytemperance.org/">St. Anthony, Temperance</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 9:00 AM</u>: Low Mass and Novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Sunday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Sun. 7:30 AM and 10:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions 45 minutes before and after Masses) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 8:00 and 10:30AM</u> Low Mass (Confessions 1/2 hour before Mass: call beforehand) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!other-parishes-in-mi/c1gkh">St. Ann's Church, Livonia</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 8:00 AM (& Holy Days at 12:00 Noon)</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://www.stedwardonthelake.com/">St. Edward on the Lake Catholic Church, Lakeport</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:00 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:30 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:45 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.ashmi.org/page.cfm?p=165">OCLMA/Academy of the Sacred Heart, Bloomfield Hills</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun.</u>: [occasional Tridentine Masses: contact parish] at <i><a href="http://www.ourladyofmountcarmel.org/OLMCBulletin.html">Our Lady of the Scapular Parish</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 11:00 AM</u>: Solemn High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 11:30</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.ststephennewboston.org/">St. Stephen, New Boston</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 12:00 noon</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://www.lapeercatholic.org/">Immaculate Conception, Lapeer</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 12:00 noon</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://stanthonytemperance.org/">St. Anthony, Temperance</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 12:30 PM (2nd Sundays)</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://stpatricka2.org/">Old St. Patrick's, Ann Arbor</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 1:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://stmaryjackson.com/mass-times">St. Mary Star of the Sea, Jackson</a></i>
</li>
<li><i><u>Sun. 2:00 PM (1st Sundays only)</u>:<a href="http://wp.dol.ca/webportal/parish/web/view_parish/St._Alphonsus_Parish/1/130">St. Alphonsus Church, Windsor, Canada</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 2:00 PM (every Sunday except 1st)</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.thecatholicdirectory.com/directory.cfm?fuseaction=display_site_info&siteid=84954">Holy Name of Mary, Canada</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 3:00 PM (<i>2nd and 4th Sundays</i>)</u>: Tridentine Mass (call ahead for Confession times, 989-892-5936) at <i><a href="http://www.latinmasstimes.com/Michigan/611">Infant of Prague, Bay City</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 3:00 PM</u>: High Mass <i><a href="https://plus.google.com/103711137570595024543/about?gl=us&hl=en">St. Matthew Catholic Church, Flint</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 6:00 PM</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://www.saintcyrils.org/">SS. Cyril & Methodius Slovak Catholic Church, Sterling Heights</a></i>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>* NB: The SSPX chapels among those Mass sites listed above are posted here because the Holy Father has <a href="http://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2015/09/01/0637/01386.html#ing">announced</a> that "those who during the Holy Year of Mercy approach these priests of the Fraternity of St Pius X to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation shall validly and licitly receive the absolution of their sins," and subsequently extended this privilege beyond the Year of Mercy. These chapels are not listed among the approved parishes and worship sites on <a href="http://www.aod.org/parishes/churches-and-clergy-directory/catholic-churches/">archdiocesan websites</a>. </i>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br />
<center>
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</li>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-22934831945720449492020-09-13T07:39:00.001-04:002020-09-13T07:39:12.435-04:00Tridentine Community News - Thirteenth Metro Detroit Weekly Sunday Tridentine Mass Site Debuts Today: St. Thomas the Apostle, Ann Arbor; Sage Advice from Cleveland; Archdiocese of Portland Liturgical Handbook; First of Two Pittsburgh Episodes of Extraordinary Faith Now Viewable on YouTube and Vimeo; Tridentine Masses This Coming Week<center><img src="http://multimedia.detnews.com/pix/be/a6/cb/ef/02/5f/20090313010554_0301-cvt-traditon298.jpg"><br><font color=red face=Times Roman><i><b>"I will go in unto the Altar of God<br>To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"</i></b></font color=red face=Times roman></center><br><a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org" target="_blank"">Tridentine Community News</a> by Alex Begin (September 13, 2020):<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/LAT.jpg" align=left hspace=8 vspace=4><blockquote>
<font size=4>September 13, 2020 – Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost</font size=4>
<br><br>
<b><i>Thirteenth Metro Detroit Weekly Sunday Tridentine Mass Site Debuts Today: St. Thomas the Apostle, Ann Arbor</b></i>
<br><br>
The thirteenth weekly Sunday Tridentine Mass, and the 37th Traditional Mass site in metro Detroit and Windsor, debuts on <u>Sunday, September 13 at 11:00 AM</u> at St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Ann Arbor. Fr. Gerald Gawronski, a longtime celebrant of the Traditional Mass in the Diocese of Lansing, will be the celebrant. Professional, paid choir members are being sought.
<br><br>
Since <i>Summórum Pontíficum</i> was published in 2007, there have been repeated attempts to establish a weekly Sunday Mass in Ann Arbor. Until now the best that has been possible was a monthly Mass at Old St. Patrick’s and sporadic special occasion Masses at St. Thomas the Apostle. The debut of this Mass is a testament to the years of patient and persistent work of Juventútem Michigan founder Paul Schultz and Ann Arbor TLM organizer Joe Lipa. St. Thomas offers a central location in downtown Ann Arbor, and 11:00 AM is a surprisingly prime time hour.
<br><br>
<b><i>Sage Advice from Cleveland</b></i>
<br><br>
Along similar lines, an August 29, 2020 post on the Cleveland TLM Friends blog (<a href="http://www.clevelandtlmfriends.com" target="_blank">www.clevelandtlmfriends.com</a>) explains how new TLM sites typical start up. Asking the diocese, the bishop, or chancery officials for assistance rarely helps and often introduces unnecessary red tape. New Mass sites are most successfully initiated at the ground level through joint efforts of laypeople and clergy, as the post so eloquently states:<blockqutoe>
“But for those who live on the outermost eastern and western edges, there is still room for growth. Cleveland TLM Friends has been contacted by quite a few Faithful Catholics over the years, asking if there is any known effort to get the Mass started in these outlying areas. My opinion has always been the same: it starts with a stable group and a faithful pastor. Part of the success of the Traditional Catholic Movement in Cleveland has been its grass-roots development, never relying upon diocesan involvement to get the ball rolling. This isn’t to insinuate a separatist attitude. Rather, the Traditional Catholic Movement finds its success in having a pure heart, one based upon love for Tradition and the Mass; its success is not the result of a manufactured accommodation by the less-than-interested.”</blockquote>
<b><i>Archdiocese of Portland Liturgical Handbook</b></i>
<br><br>
<center><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/LH12345.jpg"></center>
<br>
The Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon has issued a 350 page Liturgical Handbook establishing norms for celebration of the Ordinary and Extraordinary Form Mass and Sacraments in their diocese. Impressive in scope and orthodoxy, it devotes special attention to the role of appropriate sacred music. Many problems could be solved if other dioceses followed this lead. For more details, see this story on The New Liturgical Movement blog:<br>
<a href="http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2020/02/liturgical-handbook-published-by.html" target="_blank">http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2020/02/liturgical-handbook-published-by.html</a>. The book can be downloaded free here: <a href="https://archdpdx.org/divine-worship" target="_blank">https://archdpdx.org/divine-worship</a>, or purchased for Amazon Kindle.
<br><br>
<i><b>First of Two Pittsburgh Episodes of Extraordinary Faith Now Viewable on YouTube and Vimeo</i></b>
<br><br>
<center><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/DMMCC541.jpg"></center>
<br>
<center><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/CMMAP425.jpg"></center>
<br>
Episode 21 of Extraordinary Faith – Pittsburgh Part 1 of 2 – is now available for viewing on the Extraordinary Faith channel on YouTube and Vimeo. Church Music Association of America General Manager Janet Gorbitz introduces us to the organization and welcomes us to its Sacred Music Colloquium, held at Duquesne University. This annual gathering attracts approximately 250 people of all levels of experience seeking to increase their understanding of Gregorian Chant and Sacred Polyphony, while offering exemplary liturgies. We speak with symposium instructors from Camden, New Jersey; San Diego; and Chattanooga, and learn how they are implementing innovative traditional sacred music programs in their home parishes.
<br><br>
<b><i>Tridentine Masses This Coming Week</b></i><ul>
<li><u>Mon. 09/14</u>: No Mass at <i>Holy Family, Detroit</i>
<li><u>Tue. 09/15 7:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i>Holy Name of Mary, Windsor</i> (Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary)
<li><u>Wed. 09/16</u>: No Mass at <i>Holy Family</i>
<li><u>Fri. 09/18</u>: No Mass at <i>Holy Family</i>
<li><u>Sat. 09/19 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i>Miles Christi</i> (St. Januarius, Bishop, & Companions, Martyrs)</ul>
</blockquote><center><a href="https://www.facebook.com/JuventutemMichigan/"target=_blank><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/juv1.jpg"></center></a><span style="font-size:78%;">[Comments? Please e-mail <a href="mailto:tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org">tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org</a>. Previous columns are available at <a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org"target=_blank>http://www.detroitlatinmass.org</a>. This edition of <span style="font-style: italic;">Tridentine Community News</span>, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for September 13, 2020. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-60117922216555192652020-09-06T13:45:00.000-04:002020-09-06T13:45:25.632-04:00Tridentine Community News - Twelfth Metro Detroit Weekly Sunday Tridentine Mass Site Debuts on September 13: St. Priscilla, Livonia; St. Aloysius Mass Report; Side Altar Spotted in Use at St. Hugo; Simultaneous TLMs at Orchard Lake Shrine Chapel; No Weekday TLMs at Holy Family Sept. 14-25; Tridentine Masses This Coming Week<center><img src="http://multimedia.detnews.com/pix/be/a6/cb/ef/02/5f/20090313010554_0301-cvt-traditon298.jpg"><br><font color=red face=Times Roman><i><b>"I will go in unto the Altar of God<br>To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"</i></b></font color=red face=Times roman></center><br><a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org" target="_blank"">Tridentine Community News</a> by Alex Begin (September 6, 2020):<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/LAT.jpg" align=left hspace=8 vspace=4><blockquote>
<font size=4>September 6, 2020 – Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost</font size=4>
<br><br>
<b><i>Twelfth Metro Detroit Weekly Sunday Tridentine Mass Site Debuts on September 13: St. Priscilla, Livonia</i></b>
The twelfth weekly Sunday Tridentine Mass, and the 36th Traditional Mass site in metro Detroit and Windsor, debuts on <u>Sunday, September 13 at 1:00 PM</u> at St. Priscilla Church in Livonia. Administrator Fr. Joe Tuskiewicz, one of metro Detroit’s best-known roving celebrants of the TLM, will be offering this Mass at the request of some parishioners and with the support of his Parish Council. Music for this High Mass will be supplied by parish music director Felicity Long, a member of the family whose multi-generational members have served as music directors for Latin Masses at Assumption Grotto, St. Edward on the Lake, Immaculate Conception Lapeer, and Ss. Cyril & Methodius Sterling Heights.
<br><br>
<b><i>St. Aloysius Mass Report</i></b>
<br><br>
<center><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/SAMVV345.jpg"></center>
<br>
Thanks to everyone who turned out on Friday, August 28 for the first Traditional Mass in the lower level church at St. Aloysius in Detroit. The acoustics were amazing! And Administrator Fr. Mario Amore invited us to hold more Masses there in the future. A little-known fact: The lower level High Altar came from the original St. Aloysius Church and dates to 1873. Imagine how many thousands of Holy Masses must have been celebrated on that altar up until it got idled around 1965. A perfect setting for the Traditional Mass. [Photo by Fr. Mario]
<br><br><br><br>
<b><i>Side Altar Spotted in Use at St. Hugo</b></i>
<br><br>
<center><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/SHSA14.jpg"></center>
<br>
On Saturday, August 29, this writer randomly walked into the St. Hugo Stone Chapel and found a priest saying a private Mass at a Side Altar. In over 50 years of visiting this chapel, never, ever has a Side Altar been seen in use. How beautiful and appropriate to see these architectural elements once again used for the Holy Sacrifice.
<br><br>
<b><i>Simultaneous TLMs at Orchard Lake Shrine Chapel</b></i>
<br><br>
<center><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/OLSCSC1.jpg"></center>
<br>
In a further sign of the times, that same Saturday, August 29 at 12:00 Noon, two <i>simultaneous</i> Traditional Masses were offered at Orchard Lake Seminary’s Archdiocesan Shrine Chapel of St. John Paul II: In the main church there was a scheduled High Requiem Mass celebrated by Msgr. Ronald Browne, while in one of the chapels in the sacristy, an unscheduled Low Mass was offered by Fr. Lukasz Iwanczuk at the request of two seminarians. For those who have not been back there, the expansive sacristy has six private chapels – six small rooms with ad oriéntem altars and seating for two faithful each – in which seminary priests can and do offer their daily Masses.
<br><br>
<i><b>No Weekday TLMs at Holy Family Sept. 14-25</b></i>
<br><br>
Because of Fr. Paul Ward’s planned time away from the parish, there will be no Traditional Masses at Holy Family Church in Detroit on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, September 14, 16, 18, 21, 23, and 25. Weekday Masses will resume at 12:00 Noon on Monday, September 28.
<br><br>
Interesting tidbit: Franciscan Friars of the Holy Spirit from St. Mary of Redford serve the Monday Masses at Holy Family.
<br><br>
<i><b>Tridentine Masses This Coming Week</b></i><ul>
<li><u>Tue. 09/08 7:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i>Holy Name of Mary, Windsor</i> (Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary)
<li><u>Sat. 09/12 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i>Miles Christi</i> (Most Holy Name of Mary)</ul>
</blockquote><center><a href="https://www.facebook.com/JuventutemMichigan/"target=_blank><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/juv1.jpg"></center></a><span style="font-size:78%;">[Comments? Please e-mail <a href="mailto:tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org">tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org</a>. Previous columns are available at <a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org"target=_blank>http://www.detroitlatinmass.org</a>. This edition of <span style="font-style: italic;">Tridentine Community News</span>, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for September 6, 2020. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-55800625180832574872020-08-16T13:27:00.002-04:002020-08-16T13:27:28.853-04:00Tridentine Community News - The Missal for the Blind; Bishops Saying Private Masses During Vatican II; Miles Christi Mass Time Change; Tridentine Masses This Coming Week<center><img src="http://multimedia.detnews.com/pix/be/a6/cb/ef/02/5f/20090313010554_0301-cvt-traditon298.jpg"><br><font color=red face=Times Roman><i><b>"I will go in unto the Altar of God<br>To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"</i></b></font color=red face=Times roman></center><br><a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org" target="_blank"">Tridentine Community News</a> by Alex Begin (August 16, 2020):<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/LAT.jpg" align=left hspace=8 vspace=4><blockquote>
<font size=4>August 16, 2020 – Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost</font size=4>
<br><br>
<b><i>The Missal for the Blind</b></i>
<br><br>
One of the more interesting obscure liturgical books is the Missále Cæcutiéntium, the so-called Missal for the Blind, more accurately described as an altar missal for priests with poor eyesight. It is a large format book with very large print. It contains the Ordinary of the Mass and only two sets of Propers, the Daily Mass for the Dead and the five seasonal Votive Masses of Our Lady. Presumably priests with poor eyesight were given dispensation to be able to use those two sets of Propers even on other Feast Days, through most likely not on the most important Feasts. This writer has only seen editions of this book from prior to 1955; the one whose pages are excerpted below was published in 1921. Nevertheless these missals are not all that rare and turn up with used book vendors relatively frequently.
<br><br>
<center><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/MCCP132.jpg"></center>
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<center><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/MCBVM97.jpg"></center>
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With our current technology, a priest with poor eyesight can supplement one of these missals with copies of the actual Mass Propers for the day blown up on a photocopier for easier readability. One such priest in Florida using this missal actively does just that.
<br><br>
One must appreciate the care and concern that the Church showed for its priests with special needs back when such a specialized book with limited appeal needed to be created and kept up to date via a painstaking manual process, without the convenient computerized typesetting tools we enjoy today.
<br><br>
<b><i>Bishops Saying Private Masses During Vatican II</b></i>
<br><br>
This 2018 post on Fr. Z’s blog contains a link to a video of bishops saying their daily private Masses during the meetings of the Second Vatican Council:
<a href="https://wdtprs.com/2018/07/video-bishops-saying-private-masses-during-vatican-ii/">https://wdtprs.com/2018/07/video-bishops-saying-private-masses-during-vatican-ii/</a>
<br><br>
<center><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/BOPM354.jpg"></center>
<br>
Reader comments following the post remind us of the immense value of daily Masses celebrated individually by priests: Each Holy Mass that is offered brings tremendous graces to the world. When priests concelebrate a Mass, there is only one Mass being offered, not many, and thus the world does not receive as many graces as it would if multiple individual Masses had been offered instead. The Side Altars one sees in older churches were not placed there primarily to serve as devotional shrines, but as functioning altars on which the various priests serving that church would offer their daily Masses.
<br><br>
As the Extraordinary Form of Holy Mass continues to regain popularity, the practice of celebrating individual daily Masses is slowly being recovered. As this column has previously pointed out, the gallery of Side Altars in the main chapel at Detroit’s Sacred Heart Major Seminary is once again seeing regular use, as several priests who teach there offer their daily private Tridentine Masses on them. Some prominent churches known for Traditional Liturgy, such as the Birmingham, Oxford, and London Oratories in England, have always made frequent use of their Side Altars for private Masses. Last but not least, here in metro Detroit and Windsor you can witness multiple priests offering simultaneous Low Masses on the Side Altars of a church on All Souls Day, a tradition we hope to continue in 2020 at a church yet to be announced.
<br><br>
<b><i>Miles Christi Mass Time Change</b></i>
<br><br>
The weekly Saturday Low Mass at Miles Christi’s Family Center Chapel is now being held at 8:00 AM, 30 minutes earlier than before.
<br><br>
<b><i>Tridentine Masses This Coming Week</b></i><ul>
<li><u>Tue. 08/18 7:00 PM</u>: Low Mass at <i>Holy Name of Mary, Windsor</i> (St. Agapitus, Martyr)
<li><u>Sat. 08/22 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i>Miles Christi</i> (Immaculate Heart of Mary)</ul>
</blockquote><center><a href="https://www.facebook.com/JuventutemMichigan/"target=_blank><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/juv1.jpg"></center></a><span style="font-size:78%;">[Comments? Please e-mail <a href="mailto:tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org">tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org</a>. Previous columns are available at <a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org"target=_blank>http://www.detroitlatinmass.org</a>. This edition of <span style="font-style: italic;">Tridentine Community News</span>, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for August 16, 2020. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]</span>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-26468411247224376562020-08-09T15:22:00.002-04:002020-08-09T15:22:08.854-04:00Tridentine Masses coming this week to metro Detroit and southeastern Michigan<center>
<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/qui2.jpg" /></center>
<br />
<b><i>Tridentine Masses This Coming Week</i></b><br />
<br />
<u><b>Sunday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Sun. 7:30 AM and 10:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions 45 minutes before and after Masses) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 8:00 and 10:30AM</u> Low Mass (Confessions 1/2 hour before Mass: call beforehand) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!other-parishes-in-mi/c1gkh">St. Ann's Church, Livonia</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 8:00 AM (& Holy Days at 12:00 Noon)</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://www.stedwardonthelake.com/">St. Edward on the Lake Catholic Church, Lakeport</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:00 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:30 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:45 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.ashmi.org/page.cfm?p=165">OCLMA/Academy of the Sacred Heart, Bloomfield Hills</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun.</u>: [occasional Tridentine Masses: contact parish] at <i><a href="http://www.ourladyofmountcarmel.org/OLMCBulletin.html">Our Lady of the Scapular Parish</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 11:00 AM</u>: Solemn High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 11:30</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.ststephennewboston.org/">St. Stephen, New Boston</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 12:00 noon</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://www.lapeercatholic.org/">Immaculate Conception, Lapeer</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 12:00 noon</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://stanthonytemperance.org/">St. Anthony, Temperance</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 12:30 PM (2nd Sundays)</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://stpatricka2.org/">Old St. Patrick's, Ann Arbor</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 1:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://stmaryjackson.com/mass-times">St. Mary Star of the Sea, Jackson</a></i>
</li>
<li><i><u>Sun. 2:00 PM (1st Sundays only)</u>:<a href="http://wp.dol.ca/webportal/parish/web/view_parish/St._Alphonsus_Parish/1/130">St. Alphonsus Church, Windsor, Canada</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 2:00 PM (every Sunday except 1st)</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.thecatholicdirectory.com/directory.cfm?fuseaction=display_site_info&siteid=84954">Holy Name of Mary, Canada</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 3:00 PM (<i>2nd and 4th Sundays</i>)</u>: Tridentine Mass (call ahead for Confession times, 989-892-5936) at <i><a href="http://www.latinmasstimes.com/Michigan/611">Infant of Prague, Bay City</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 3:00 PM</u>: High Mass <i><a href="https://plus.google.com/103711137570595024543/about?gl=us&hl=en">St. Matthew Catholic Church, Flint</a></i>
</li></ul>
<br>
<b><u>Monday</u></b>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Mon. 7:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Mon. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Mon. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions by appointment) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Tuesday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Tue. 7:00 AM</u> Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Tue. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Tue. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions by appointment) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Tue. 8:45 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="https://www.lapeercatholic.org/">Immaculate Conception, Lapeer</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Tue. 7:00 PM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.thecatholicdirectory.com/directory.cfm?fuseaction=display_site_info&siteid=84954">Holy Name of Mary, Canada</a></i>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Wednesday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Wed. 7:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Wed. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions by appointment) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Wed. 12:00 Noon</u>: Low Mass <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i> followed by Perpetual Novena to St. Joseph
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Thursday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Thu. 7:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Thu. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Thu. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions Thursdays: 7:00 - 7:30 PM during Benediction) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Thu. 8:45 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://www.lapeercatholic.org/">Immaculate Conception, Lapeer</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Thu. 7:00 PM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://stanthonytemperance.org/">St. Anthony, Temperance</a></i>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Friday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Fri. 7:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM during Holy Hour) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 7:00 PM</u> (First Fridays only): Tridentine Mass (usually Low Mass) at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 7:00 PM (First Fridays only)</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://oldstmarysdetroit.com/">Old St. Mary's, Greektown, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 7:00 PM Second Fridays only</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://wp.dol.ca/webportal/parish/web/view_parish/St._Joseph_Parish/1/56">St. Joseph, Sarnia, Ontario</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 7:00 PM (after 6:00 PM Holy Hour, 1st Fridays only)</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
<li><u>7:00 PM during Lent only</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Saturday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Sat. 08/15 8:00 AM</u>: Solemn High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.stmarysofredford.com/">St. Mary, Redford</a></i> (Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary) - <i>Marian procession follows, with relics of Our Lady's house, St. Louis de Montfort and St. Maximilian Kilbe.</i> </li>
<li><u>8:00 AM (1st Saturdays only)</u>: Low Mass at <a href="http://www.stedwardonthelake.com/">St. Edward on the Lake, Lakeport</a>
</li>
<li><u>8:00 AM Second through last Saturdays only</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.ststephennewboston.org/">St. Stephen, New Boston</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions 8:30 AM to 9:30 AM) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions 1/2 hour before Mass: call beforehand) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!other-parishes-in-mi/c1gkh">St. Ann's Church, Livonia</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 8:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="https://www.mileschristi.org/family-center/">Miles Christi</a></i>, South Lyon, MI
</li>
<li><u>9:00 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://stmarystclair.org/">St. Mary, St. Clair</a></i>
<li><u>Sat. 9:00 AM (1st Saturdays)</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://stanthonytemperance.org/">St. Anthony, Temperance</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 08/15/ 10:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://plus.google.com/103711137570595024543/about?gl=us&hl=en">St. Matthew Catholic Church, Flint</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 08/15 11:00 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i> (Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary)
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 08/15 7:00 PM</u>: Solemn High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i> (Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary) - Held at the outdoor grotto with choir and candlelight procession following.
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Sunday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Sun. 7:30 AM and 10:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions 45 minutes before and after Masses) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 8:00 and 10:30AM</u> Low Mass (Confessions 1/2 hour before Mass: call beforehand) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!other-parishes-in-mi/c1gkh">St. Ann's Church, Livonia</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 8:00 AM (& Holy Days at 12:00 Noon)</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://www.stedwardonthelake.com/">St. Edward on the Lake Catholic Church, Lakeport</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:00 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:30 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:45 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.ashmi.org/page.cfm?p=165">OCLMA/Academy of the Sacred Heart, Bloomfield Hills</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun.</u>: [occasional Tridentine Masses: contact parish] at <i><a href="http://www.ourladyofmountcarmel.org/OLMCBulletin.html">Our Lady of the Scapular Parish</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 11:00 AM</u>: Solemn High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 11:30</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.ststephennewboston.org/">St. Stephen, New Boston</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 12:00 noon</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://www.lapeercatholic.org/">Immaculate Conception, Lapeer</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 12:00 noon</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://stanthonytemperance.org/">St. Anthony, Temperance</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 12:30 PM (2nd Sundays)</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://stpatricka2.org/">Old St. Patrick's, Ann Arbor</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 1:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://stmaryjackson.com/mass-times">St. Mary Star of the Sea, Jackson</a></i>
</li>
<li><i><u>Sun. 2:00 PM (1st Sundays only)</u>:<a href="http://wp.dol.ca/webportal/parish/web/view_parish/St._Alphonsus_Parish/1/130">St. Alphonsus Church, Windsor, Canada</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 2:00 PM (every Sunday except 1st)</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.thecatholicdirectory.com/directory.cfm?fuseaction=display_site_info&siteid=84954">Holy Name of Mary, Canada</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 3:00 PM (<i>2nd and 4th Sundays</i>)</u>: Tridentine Mass (call ahead for Confession times, 989-892-5936) at <i><a href="http://www.latinmasstimes.com/Michigan/611">Infant of Prague, Bay City</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 3:00 PM</u>: High Mass <i><a href="https://plus.google.com/103711137570595024543/about?gl=us&hl=en">St. Matthew Catholic Church, Flint</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 6:00 PM</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://www.saintcyrils.org/">SS. Cyril & Methodius Slovak Catholic Church, Sterling Heights</a></i>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>* NB: The SSPX chapels among those Mass sites listed above are posted here because the Holy Father has <a href="http://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2015/09/01/0637/01386.html#ing">announced</a> that "those who during the Holy Year of Mercy approach these priests of the Fraternity of St Pius X to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation shall validly and licitly receive the absolution of their sins," and subsequently extended this privilege beyond the Year of Mercy. These chapels are not listed among the approved parishes and worship sites on <a href="http://www.aod.org/parishes/churches-and-clergy-directory/catholic-churches/">archdiocesan websites</a>. </i>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br />
<center>
<img src="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/0b/bd/00/0bbd006a4bb192c4193f14eeab1e28f5.jpg" /></center>
</li>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-58949565305329176762020-08-09T15:00:00.004-04:002020-08-09T15:08:18.844-04:00Tridentine Community News - The Ánima Christi; Altar Servers Needed for New TLM Sites; Eye Candy from Tridentine Mass Homecomings; Tridentine Masses This Coming Week<center><img src="http://multimedia.detnews.com/pix/be/a6/cb/ef/02/5f/20090313010554_0301-cvt-traditon298.jpg"><br><font color=red face=Times Roman><i><b>"I will go in unto the Altar of God<br>To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"</i></b></font color=red face=Times roman></center><br><a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org" target="_blank"">Tridentine Community News</a> by Alex Begin (August 9, 2020):<blockquote>
<font size=4>August 9, 2020 – Tenth Sunday After Pentecost</font size>
<br><br>
<i><b>The Ánima Christi</i></b>
<br><br>
One of the most famous prayers in the Catholic canon, sometimes set to music, is the <i>Ánima Christi</i>. Holy Mother Church has enriched this prayer with a Partial Indulgence when said as an act of thanksgiving after Holy Communion.<blockquote>
Ánima Christi, sanctífica me.
Corpus Christi, salva me.
Sanguis Christi, inébria me.
Aqua láteris Christi, lava me.
Pássio Christi, confórta me.
O bone Jesu, exáudi me.
Intra tua vúlnera abscónde me.
Ne permíttas me separári a te.
Ab hoste malígno defénde me.
In hora mortis meæ voca me:
et jube me veníre ad te,
ut cum Sanctis tuis laudem te,
in saécula sæculórum. Amen.
<br><br>
Soul of Christ, sanctify me.
Body of Christ, save me.
Blood of Christ, inebriate me.
Water from the side of Christ, wash me.
Passion of Christ, strengthen me.
O good Jesus, hear me.
Within Thy wounds hide me.
Suffer me not to be separated from Thee.
From the malicious enemy defend me.
In the hour of my death call me.
And bid me come to Thee,
That with Thy Saints I may praise Thee
for ever and ever. Amen.</blockquote>
<i><b>Altar Servers Needed for New TLM Sites</i></b>
<br><br>
Every time a new Tridentine Mass sites debuts – which has become a relatively frequent occurrence in the Archdiocese of Detroit of late – there arises a need for altar servers, singers, and volunteers of many sorts. Presently two new sites are in need of assistance:
<br><br>
Ss. Peter & Paul Westside needs altar servers for their First Saturday 9:00 AM Low Mass. The parish is considering adding additional Masses, including occasional High Masses, if sufficient servers are found. Contact Pastor Fr. Jerry Pilus if you can help.
<br><br>
Holy Family Church in Detroit needs altar servers for its 12:00 Noon Low Masses on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Contact Pastor Fr. Paul Ward if you are able to assist.
<br><br>
<i><b>Eye Candy from Tridentine Mass Homecomings</b></i>
<br><br>
In recent months there seems to have been an abundance of beautiful historic churches around the world hosting the Traditional Mass for the first time in decades. This is most fitting, considering that their ornate architecture was intended to complement the ceremonies of the immemorial Mass. One particularly eye-catching recent photo was of the first TLM celebrated at the Cathedral of St. Maurice in Angers, France. One gets a sense of something at long last coming home.
<br><br>
<center><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/CSMA135.jpg"></center>
<br>
<i><b>Tridentine Masses This Coming Week</b></i><ul>
<li><u>Tue. 08/11 7:00 PM</u>: Low Requiem Mass at <i>Holy Name of Mary, Windsor<i> (Daily Mass for the Dead)
<li><u>Sat. 08/15 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i>Miles Christi</i> (Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary)
<li><u>Sat. 08/15 8:00 AM</u>: Solemn High Mass at <i>St. Mary of Redford</i> (Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary) – Marian procession follows, with relics of Our Lady’s house, St. Louis de Montfort, and St. Maximilian Kolbe.
<li><u>Sat. 08/15 10:00 AM</u>: High Mass at <i>St. Matthew, Flint</i> (Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary)
<li><u>Sat. 08/15 11:00 AM</u>: High Mass at <i>St. Joseph</i> (Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary)
<li><u>Sat. 08/15 7:00 PM</u>: Solemn High Mass at <i>Assumption Grotto</i> (Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary) – Held at the outdoor grotto with candlelight procession following.</ul>
</blockquote><center><a href="https://www.facebook.com/JuventutemMichigan/"target=_blank><img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/juv1.jpg"></center></a><span style="font-size:78%;">[Comments? Please e-mail <a href="mailto:tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org">tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org</a>. Previous columns are available at <a href="http://www.detroitlatinmass.org"target=_blank>http://www.detroitlatinmass.org</a>. This edition of <span style="font-style: italic;">Tridentine Community News</span>, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for August 9, 2020. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6312447.post-26768683471362343912020-08-02T14:46:00.003-04:002020-08-02T14:46:57.763-04:00Tridentine Masses coming this week to metro Detroit and southeast Michigan<center>
<img src="http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/pertin/qui2.jpg" /></center>
<br />
<b><i>Tridentine Masses This Coming Week</i></b><br />
<br />
<u><b>Sunday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Sun. 7:30 AM and 10:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions 45 minutes before and after Masses) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 8:00 and 10:30AM</u> Low Mass (Confessions 1/2 hour before Mass: call beforehand) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!other-parishes-in-mi/c1gkh">St. Ann's Church, Livonia</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 8:00 AM (& Holy Days at 12:00 Noon)</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://www.stedwardonthelake.com/">St. Edward on the Lake Catholic Church, Lakeport</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:00 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:30 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:45 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.ashmi.org/page.cfm?p=165">OCLMA/Academy of the Sacred Heart, Bloomfield Hills</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun.</u>: [occasional Tridentine Masses: contact parish] at <i><a href="http://www.ourladyofmountcarmel.org/OLMCBulletin.html">Our Lady of the Scapular Parish</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 11:00 AM</u>: Solemn High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 11:30</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.ststephennewboston.org/">St. Stephen, New Boston</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 12:00 noon</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://www.lapeercatholic.org/">Immaculate Conception, Lapeer</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 12:00 noon</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://stanthonytemperance.org/">St. Anthony, Temperance</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 12:30 PM (2nd Sundays)</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://stpatricka2.org/">Old St. Patrick's, Ann Arbor</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 1:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://stmaryjackson.com/mass-times">St. Mary Star of the Sea, Jackson</a></i>
</li>
<li><i><u>Sun. 2:00 PM (1st Sundays only)</u>:<a href="http://wp.dol.ca/webportal/parish/web/view_parish/St._Alphonsus_Parish/1/130">St. Alphonsus Church, Windsor, Canada</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 2:00 PM (every Sunday except 1st)</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.thecatholicdirectory.com/directory.cfm?fuseaction=display_site_info&siteid=84954">Holy Name of Mary, Canada</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 3:00 PM (<i>2nd and 4th Sundays</i>)</u>: Tridentine Mass (call ahead for Confession times, 989-892-5936) at <i><a href="http://www.latinmasstimes.com/Michigan/611">Infant of Prague, Bay City</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 3:00 PM</u>: High Mass <i><a href="https://plus.google.com/103711137570595024543/about?gl=us&hl=en">St. Matthew Catholic Church, Flint</a></i>
</li></ul>
<br>
<b><u>Monday</u></b>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Mon. 7:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Mon. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Mon. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions by appointment) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Mon. 12:00 Noon</u>: Low Mass at <b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/hfc641/">Holy Family, Detroit</a></b>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Tuesday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Tue. 7:00 AM</u> Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Tue. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Tue. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions by appointment) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Tue. 8:45 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="https://www.lapeercatholic.org/">Immaculate Conception, Lapeer</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Tue. 7:00 PM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.thecatholicdirectory.com/directory.cfm?fuseaction=display_site_info&siteid=84954">Holy Name of Mary, Canada</a></i>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Wednesday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Wed. 7:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Wed. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions by appointment) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Wed. 12:00 Noon</u>: Low Mass <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i> followed by Perpetual Novena to St. Joseph
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Thursday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Thu. 7:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Thu. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Thu. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions Thursdays: 7:00 - 7:30 PM during Benediction) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Thu. 8:45 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://www.lapeercatholic.org/">Immaculate Conception, Lapeer</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Thu. 7:00 PM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://stanthonytemperance.org/">St. Anthony, Temperance</a></i>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Friday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Fri. 7:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM during Holy Hour) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 7:00 PM</u> (First Fridays only): Tridentine Mass (usually Low Mass) at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 7:00 PM</u>: High Requiem Mass at <i><a href="http://oldstmarysdetroit.com/">Old St. Mary's, Greektown, Detroit</a></i> (Requiem After the Announcement of a Death) - For the repose of the soul of recently deceased Pastor of Old St. Mary's Fr. Wayne Epperly, C.S.Sp. Celebrant: Msgr. Ronald Browne, Judicial Vicar of the Archdiocese of Detroit. Choir will sing Missa O Quam Gloriosum by Tomas Luis de Victoria, Dies Irae by Louis Homet, and Lux Aeterna by Maurice Durufle.
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 7:00 PM Second Fridays only</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://wp.dol.ca/webportal/parish/web/view_parish/St._Joseph_Parish/1/56">St. Joseph, Sarnia, Ontario</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Fri. 7:00 PM (after 6:00 PM Holy Hour, 1st Fridays only)</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
<li><u>7:00 PM during Lent only</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Saturday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Sat. 7:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.stmarysofredford.com/">St. Mary, Redford</a></i>. </li>
<li><u>8:00 AM (1st Saturdays only)</u>: Low Mass at <a href="http://www.stedwardonthelake.com/">St. Edward on the Lake, Lakeport</a>
</li>
<li><u>8:00 AM Second through last Saturdays only</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.ststephennewboston.org/">St. Stephen, New Boston</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions 8:30 AM to 9:30 AM) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 8:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions 1/2 hour before Mass: call beforehand) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!other-parishes-in-mi/c1gkh">St. Ann's Church, Livonia</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 8:30 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="https://www.mileschristi.org/family-center/">Miles Christi</a></i>, South Lyon, MI
</li>
<li><u>9:00 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://stmarystclair.org/">St. Mary, St. Clair</a></i>
<li><u>Sat. 9:00 AM (1st Saturdays)</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://stanthonytemperance.org/">St. Anthony, Temperance</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 9:00 AM</u>: Low Mass and Novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<u><b>Sunday</b></u>
<br><br>
<ul>
<li><u>Sun. 7:30 AM and 10:00 AM</u>: Low Mass (Confessions 45 minutes before and after Masses) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!schedule/c24jx">St. Joseph's Church, Ray Township</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 8:00 and 10:30AM</u> Low Mass (Confessions 1/2 hour before Mass: call beforehand) at <i><a href="http://www.sspxmichigan.com/#!other-parishes-in-mi/c1gkh">St. Ann's Church, Livonia</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 8:00 AM (& Holy Days at 12:00 Noon)</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://www.stedwardonthelake.com/">St. Edward on the Lake Catholic Church, Lakeport</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:00 AM</u>: Low Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:30 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.assumptiongrotto.com/">Assumption Grotto, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 9:45 AM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.ashmi.org/page.cfm?p=165">OCLMA/Academy of the Sacred Heart, Bloomfield Hills</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun.</u>: [occasional Tridentine Masses: contact parish] at <i><a href="http://www.ourladyofmountcarmel.org/OLMCBulletin.html">Our Lady of the Scapular Parish</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 11:00 AM</u>: Solemn High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.institute-christ-king.org/detroit/">St. Joseph Oratory, Detroit</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 11:30</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.ststephennewboston.org/">St. Stephen, New Boston</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 12:00 noon</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://www.lapeercatholic.org/">Immaculate Conception, Lapeer</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 12:00 noon</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://stanthonytemperance.org/">St. Anthony, Temperance</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sat. 12:30 PM (2nd Sundays)</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://stpatricka2.org/">Old St. Patrick's, Ann Arbor</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 1:00 PM</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="https://stmaryjackson.com/mass-times">St. Mary Star of the Sea, Jackson</a></i>
</li>
<li><i><u>Sun. 2:00 PM (1st Sundays only)</u>:<a href="http://wp.dol.ca/webportal/parish/web/view_parish/St._Alphonsus_Parish/1/130">St. Alphonsus Church, Windsor, Canada</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 2:00 PM (every Sunday except 1st)</u>: High Mass at <i><a href="http://www.thecatholicdirectory.com/directory.cfm?fuseaction=display_site_info&siteid=84954">Holy Name of Mary, Canada</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 3:00 PM (<i>2nd and 4th Sundays</i>)</u>: Tridentine Mass (call ahead for Confession times, 989-892-5936) at <i><a href="http://www.latinmasstimes.com/Michigan/611">Infant of Prague, Bay City</a></i> [NB: See note at bottom of this post about SSPX sites.]*
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 3:00 PM</u>: High Mass <i><a href="https://plus.google.com/103711137570595024543/about?gl=us&hl=en">St. Matthew Catholic Church, Flint</a></i>
</li>
<li><u>Sun. 6:00 PM</u>: Tridentine Mass at <i><a href="http://www.saintcyrils.org/">SS. Cyril & Methodius Slovak Catholic Church, Sterling Heights</a></i>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>* NB: The SSPX chapels among those Mass sites listed above are posted here because the Holy Father has <a href="http://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2015/09/01/0637/01386.html#ing">announced</a> that "those who during the Holy Year of Mercy approach these priests of the Fraternity of St Pius X to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation shall validly and licitly receive the absolution of their sins," and subsequently extended this privilege beyond the Year of Mercy. These chapels are not listed among the approved parishes and worship sites on <a href="http://www.aod.org/parishes/churches-and-clergy-directory/catholic-churches/">archdiocesan websites</a>. </i>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br />
<center>
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</li>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0