Happy St. Crispian's Day (a day late)

St. Crispian and his twin St. Crispin were preachers from Soissons who supported themselves by cobbling and won many converts before being martyred by Diocletian.  Their feast is also the anniversary of the battle of Agincourt (1415 AD), a decisive victory won by an outnumbered English army in the Hundred Years War.   To celebrate, listen to Olivier's rousing recitation of King Henry's speech before the battle.


St. Crispin and St. Crispian, pray for us.

The Novus Ordo's bitter fruit

                                                Clearly, holy work being done here

                                                                                         Not here

"Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi" is an ancient tenet of the Church.  It translates literally as "the law of prayer, the law of believing" and it means that how we pray and what we believe are one and the same.  Nearly two generations have passed since Pope Paul VI promulgated the Novus Ordo, a new missal for the Church's central act of worship which de-emphasized the sacrificial aspect of Mass as well as the Real Presence.  It is to be expected then, that after all these years of following this watered-down rite, which, moreover, is highly susceptible to abuse and even sacrilege, 40% of American Catholics say being a good Catholic does not require belief that at Mass bread and wine become the body and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ.  American Catholics are mistaken about many other points of doctrine also.  You may read the sad details here.

St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.

"The Sacrament-Sacrifice of the Mass: Its Positive Aspect"

I may seem to have developed a fixation with books about the Eucharist.  For this I don't apologize, since Mass is the central worship of the Church, and thus for Catholics no topic can be more important.  Further, it seems to me that in recent years certain fundamental realities of Mass have become obscured.  In particular, the reality of Eucharist as sacrifice and as sacrament, as well as the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist have, to a shocking extent in some places, lost their importance to Catholics.  Indeed, it is a fair surmise that Catholics have lost their faith in these things.  Certainly, the behavior of many Catholics at Mass and in the presence of the Eucharist warrants the conclusion that they do not believe themselves to be in the presence of the body and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. 

In this atmosphere of inattention, to remind myself and others of the infinite importance of the Eucharist seems an urgent duty.   Which leads me to yet another long, but highly instructive, quotation from Abbot Vonier's  text, "A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist:"

"In the [Eucharist] the Church must act the spiritual thing with such clearness, power and directness, that no one will question her meaning; she really means to accomplish what she acts, as it were, on the stage of sacramental symbolism.  The inward reality of the sacrament is the prolongation of the signification of the sacrament.  Having gone thus far in saying and doing sacramental things we cannot stop short of the real thing.  We all know of the blasphemous gibes of the more ignoble sort of Protestant who uses the hideous word "incantation" to describe the sacramental rites of Catholicism.  An incantation is an expression of words and symbols so strong that the very spirits are tied to them.  I, for one, shall not blush for the accusation if, in my priestly office, I am supposed to use words and things so expressive that they must have the divine thing irrevocably tied to them.  I am not making arbitrary signs and pronouncing words of mere convention when I officiate at the altar and consecrate the bread and wine.  I am performing a rite which, if seen in its whole setting, must mean the Body and Blood of Christ as a sweet odor of sacrifice."

St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.

St. Paul's Cathedral closed indefinitely on account of protests

                                 Protesters have succeeded where Hitler failed



The estimable Dr. Oddie asks: does it matter?

UPDATE:  Protesters' tent city a Potemkin village.  

"The Heresy of Formlessness" (Part 3)

                                              Mass, Medieval Carmelite Usage



In "The Heresy of Formlessness" Martin Mosebach, novelist and poet, reflects on the pre-conciliar liturgy, and what was lost in the transition to the Novus Ordo.   What has been lost above all else, in Mosebach's view (and I am in complete agreement) is a sense of the real presence.  As Mosebach notes,

"If people who have been kneeling for a thousand years suddenly get to their feet, they do not think, "We're doing this like the early Christians, who stood for the Consecration"; they are not aware of returning to some particularly authentic form of worship.  They simply get up, brush the dust from their trouser-legs and say to themselves: "So it wasn't such a serious business after all."

And regarding communion patens, formerly a necessity, but now used in very few parishes, Mosebach writes,

"I repeat that I am not a theologian; but to me - someone whose task is to portray people and reconstruct human motivation - if someone allows all the communion patens to be melted down, he cannot possibly believe in the real presence of Christ in the Sacrament."

Amen to that.





 

Articles we never finished reading dept.

                                               Conversely, Jerry Seinfeld is not really the Jesus of  his day

From "America" magazine:



 

That's as far as I got.  You can read the rest here.

"The Heresy of Formlessness" (part 2)

We continue our review of "The Heresy of Formlessness," Martin Mosebach's fascinating argument for restoring the pre-conciliar Latin liturgy.  Mosebach is a novelist and poet, not a liturgist or theologian.  I find his perceptions regarding the traditional Latin rite highly insightful.   Consider, for instance, Mosebach's observations regarding the priest before the altar performing the old rite:

"What was important was the impression that he was doing something.  His standing and stretching out his arms and making the sign of the cross was an action, a doing.  The priest up there was at his work.  What he did with his hands was every bit as decisive as his words.  And his actions were directed toward things: white linen cloths, a golden chalice, a little golden plate, wax candles, little jugs for water and wine, the moonlike white Host, and a great leather-bound book. . . . We shall leave aside, for the moment, the question of precisely what the priest was sacrificing on the altar.  The main thing for me, at that time, was that he was sacrificing. "

Among the Novus Ordo's more spectacular shortcomings is that it permits and even encourages a de-emphasis of the sacrificial aspect of Mass.  This de-emphasis can easily shade into total occlusion.   By contrast, in the pre-conciliar liturgy, the fact of sacrifice, as Mosebach points out, is inescapable.