[Note, if you wish to read the following article in its entirety, complete with footnotes and credits, click on the link at the end of this excerpt.]
by Peter A. Kwasniewski
There is no question that the 11th Ordinance Synod of Bishops that took place in Oct. 2005, dedicated to the theme of "The Eucharist: Source and Summit of the Life and Mission of the Church" -- a synod already announced by John Paul II but carried into effect by his successor, a theologian noted especially for his liturgical and Eucharistic focus -- was in many ways a fruitful ecclesial event, making allowances for the limitations of any such enormous gatherings of prelates.[1] Pope Benedict XVI was unusually present and accessible in the sense that he came to all the plenary sessions, listened with great care to the discussions, and participated from time to time spontaneously, as a brother bishop. He is clearly at home in discussions of this sort, the give-and-take of theological debate and pastoral deliberations. For their part, the bishops spoke freely, at times movingly, but without saying anything that could be described as a real surprise. The 700 or so media agents approved for the event had to leave somewhat disappointed that no items of a liberal agenda (such as married clergy in the Latin rite, or communion for divorced and remarried Catholics) were taken seriously, much less proclaimed to a world waiting for more validation of its habitual permissiveness.
What surprised me the most, however, was the astonishing lack of discussion or even the awareness of the most fundamental point of all in any attempt to come to grips with the Church of today and her Eucharistic life -- namely, the extent to which the so-called reform of the liturgy has been a disastrous failure. Here was a golden opportunity for some honest soul-searching, for the admission of collective guilt in allowing the riches of the Western liturgical heritage to be pitilessly scattered and buried, for the proposal of radical cures to confront a disease already far advanced. Here was a chance, dare we say it, for humble acknowledgement that what the
majority of the Fathers of Vatican II had expected and desired in a liturgical reform was far, far different from what actually transpired at the hands of Bugnini's band, that the de facto abolition of the unbroken custom of
ad orientem worship[2] and the associated destruction of sanctuaries and tabernacles across the world was a wretched mistake.[3] Indeed, though one cannot expect the pope of today to declare that the helmsman of the barque of Peter in the 1970s was asleep on the job and did not wake up until he sent Bugnini off to a foretaste of purgatory in Tehran, one could have expected the pope, or at any rate some of the bishops, to confront directly the key question: What has happened to the Roman liturgy of the Mass? Could it be that there was some connection between unprecedented liturgical experimentation and church redesign on the one hand, and the massive drop in devotional life on the other? In short, did something go drastically wrong, and can we take steps to undo the damage?
But my hopes that this would happen were repeatedly dashed. The first indication that the synod would be dealing with worthy but, in a way, second-level questions (as compared with the burning heart of the matter, the Mass) was when the ZENIT news service reported on some comments made by the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, Cardinal Francis Arinze, at a press conference on October 13.[4] According to Cardinal Arinze, up until that point
no bishop had mentioned the "Tridentine rite" at the synod -- which means no one had directly raised the painful question of the faulty reform and the inheritance it so grievously distorted, not only by wretched translations into the vernacular but also by the rationalist presuppositions and execution of the reform as such, which constitute nothing less than a break with Tradition, as Cardinal Ratzinger himself had observed in more than one publication.[5] Cardinal Arinze went on to say: "If there are groups that desire the Tridentine Mass, this is already provided for. Bishops may allow it for groups. It is not a priority for the synod, as no one has spoken about it." If you imagine a group of hundreds of bishops and even more assistants, and not one of them brings up a matter that is, for many reasons, at the heart of all that the synod is supposed to be about, does this not sound a bit like a conspiracy of silence?
As I contended above, the burning heart of the matter is the Mass
in concreto, not he Eucharist
in abstracto. One of the most common mistakes today is when people think that since the Eucharist is the greatest mystery of the faith, we should focus our attention only on
it, and not bother so much about he liturgy, which is a secondary affair, (rather like the shell of a hard-boiled egg: when it comes time for eating, you break the shell and eat the egg). But it is not like that. The only way in which our Lord gives himself to us is
through the liturgy that His Spirit has lovingly created inside the heart of His Bride, who is our Mother. The Eucharist is not a free-floating entity but a distinctively sacramental, liturgical reality. We cannot be transformed eucharistically apart from being habituated to a life of meditation and contemplation by the sacred rites of the Church. The attempt to cut off the sacraments and view them as independent wholes, almost like Platonic Ideas, forgets altogether the way in which sacramental life is always and essentially a liturgical life, inculturated in forms of a given age and place.
We have been through many phases in the history of Western liturgy, and there have been peaks and valleys. Yet never have we been through a collective desacralization and ideological rewriting of the rites such as the past forty years have witnessed.
This is the true crisis that stands behind the more attention-getting crises in the Church; this is the deepest reason for the Church's amnesia of identity, her loss of political nerve, slackened missionary impulse, abandonment of pure contemplation, and whatever other evils we are suffering from (and there are truly very many evils, as Amerio, Ferrara, and Woods, among others have documented all too well).[6]
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Buggy Driver, Cop Consent To Plea Bargain - The Greater Philadelphia NBC10.COM post reads as follows:
I remember some of the Protestant churches my parents would take me to when I was a child on furlough in the United States (they were missionaries in Japan) were filled with women with veiled heads. That was long ago, of course. Well, maybe not so long ago: some of you may remember pictures of Jacqueline Kennedy coming out of church after Mass with her husband, J.F.K., and their two children. Still today, however, if you darken the doorway of a church where the Traditional Latin Mass is celebrated, you will find yourself in a similar world -- similarly 'strange' by contemporary standards. One feels immediately plunged deep into history and into a world that is distant from cell phones, Reality TV, consumerism, and the 'McDonaldization' of American culture.
Tom, my brother, had died of a heart attack last night, my father said. The finality was jolting when my father called with the news on Friday, March 24th. The next morning, my wife and daughter and I packed up and headed down to Birmingham, where Tom had been living the last twenty years. We were not quite sure what to expect, since Tom had virtually dropped off the face of the earth after the death of his wife in 1987. He had called once or twice, but he left no forwarding address, and no telephone number where he could be reached. We didn't even know he was living in Birmingham. Apparently, he never quite regained his footing after Wendy died. 
"genius of television," and you should know which one is more effective. Communist propaganda was crude; American propaganda is smooth as silk.
Leonard Klein, the former Editor of the Lutheran Forum and Lutheran minister, who was received into the Catholic Church 2003, will be ordained to the Catholic Priesthood in Wilmington, Delaware, on Saturday, April 1, 2006. This is no April Fool's joke! According to the web page of the 
] (TAN). Today many of them have been eliminated. It is most unlikely that young priests know either their names or their symbolic meanings. What is particularly regrettable is that priests are likely to be much less conscious of the fact that Holy Mass is essentially a non bloody re-enactment of the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, a fact of which the priestly vestments they were wearing physically and forcefully reminded them.
I would like to enter this as a subject for discussion in our series on the sacramental hermeneutics of fittingness. Why was the Communion rail removed? What good rationale was offered for its removal? What is signified by its removal? Communicants no longer have a natural place to kneel to receive Communion. Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion ('civilians,' or 'pedestrians') now freely move about and behind the free-standing Altar after the consecration. What is the purpose of this? What has been lost by the removal of the Communion rail? What did it symbolize, signify, and facilitate? Was it in any way a hinderance, an obstacle? Is Communion more fittingly administered and received at a Communion rail, or without one? Why? Which conduces to more reverent and intimate participation in the Sacrifice of the Mass? Why? 
St. Patrick's Sterling Silver Rosary.
six months old," was kept warm "in the kitchen by the oven," and kept in a sock drawer at night. Here's the kicker: "... but in spite of her smallness at birth, she lived to have fifteen children" of her own! The second of her children was my father's mother, Ada (pictured right, with Perry, my grandfather). My father, the second youngest of nine children, just renewed his driver's license and will turn 89 next week. I am in awe of what people used to do, and what some still do, to support large families. It's not so much even the size of families that impresses me -- though that is impressive -- as the fact that it never seemed to even cross their minds that a newcomer (a baby) could be viewed as an unwanted encumbrance.