Chicago Parish Going Ad Orientem for Advent

This was posted today on the Blog of New Liturgical Movement:

St Stanislaus Kostka Parish in Chicago, under the care of the Congregation of the Resurrection, is returning to the historical custom of the Church and facing East for the Advent and Christmas season.

To read the whole post, especially the letter from Fr. Anthony Bus, the pastor, click on the below link:

http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2017/12/chicago-parish-going-ad-orientem-for.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNewLiturgicalMovement+%28New+Liturgical+Movement%29#.WiKl9LpFyP8

THE REMNANT TURNS 50: Catholic Poland & No Enemies on the Right

Islam, Catholicism and the Fallout from Low Standards: Derya Little

From yesterday's National Catholic Register:

Every mosque has a fountain in its yard, so that the worshiper can fulfill the requirements of ritual ablutions before entering Allah’s house. There is an order to the washing of hands, face, mouth, nose, neck and the feet. With every action of physical washing, there is an accompanying prayer.

The reverence that starts well before the Muslim enters the Mosque only intensifies once inside. All superfluous and frivolous activities cease, only hushed whispers could be heard. During the prayers, the imam turns to Kaaba with everyone else to genuflect before Allah who is the ultimate master, the unreachable judge...

Catholics, on the other hand, have the Real Presence of Christ in every single church. The Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of the One True Triune God. It is unbelievable, because it is miraculous. For almost two millennia, churches attempted to provide a worthy dwelling with beautiful stained glass windows, painstakingly carved statues and breathtaking altars. The goal was to create a timeless atmosphere where Christ’s sacrifice quieted our busy minds and reached our stubborn hearts. We needed the beauty, the labor, the solemnity in the physical world to make our souls receptive. Everything pointed, or should point, to the Eucharist.

That awe and sense wonder that made us fall to our knees in silence diminishes when we decide to make the priest, not Christ, the center of attention and allow everyone to touch the Eucharist. Even the misguided Muslims understand that the one who leads the worship should first and foremost face the One that is worshipped. Centuries ago, they tapped in something we have lost recently...

Read the entire piece by clicking on the link below:

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/dlittle/islam-catholicism-and-the-fallout-from-low-standards

Pope Benedict XVI and the Great Reveal

Posted by The Bones, November 20, 2017:

The election of Pope Francis represents the definitive crossing of the rubricon for the Catholic Church. Perhaps it is temporary, perhaps it is not, but both Amoris Laetitia and Magnum Principium are documents that suggest we have reached a moment of full disclosure, a moment in the Church's history when the Church's slide into irrelevance, of being subsumed into the decaying culture of the once Catholic West is virtually guaranteed. There is no trumpet to announce the surrender of the Catholic Church from false apostles to announce the Church's surrender to the evil forces at work in the world. There will probably be no announcement to this effect. All we will receive as Catholics is mini-announcements. Praise for an abortionist here. A bishop reinventing the Mass there. The invitation of Planned Parenthood to the Vatican here. Such are, I am sure many readers will agree, the announcements of a counter-Church established within the bosom of the bride of Christ.

Read the whole essay by clicking on the link below:

http://thatthebonesyouhavecrushedmaythrill.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/pope-benedict-xvi-and-great-reveal.html

Fr. Nix: TLM Class #3

http://padreperegrino.org/2017/11/28/tlm-class-3/

Part I The Second World Wars with Victor Davis Hanson

Gregorian chants are a hit at this Nebraska seminary

Anthony Esolen: True Deiversity (Crisis Magazine)

Anthony Esolen writing today at Crisis Magazine:

You could not have, among the Christians of old, some people who still sacrificed to Bacchus and men who still went after boys and women who still procured abortions; that would have been the same old world, with a little perfume. So now we cannot have a diversity that means no more than conformity to the world. Things are clearer than ever. Unity in Christ alone can give the world the diversity it needs.

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/true-diversity-in-unity

Fr. Nix Sermon: 24th Sunday after Pentecost

                                                

This sermon is about how to get your kids to heaven in 15 minutes a day.  The featured image is Holy Ghost parish in downtown Denver.  Some families of this parish used the Baltimore Catechism in the 1980s, and it paid off.

http://padreperegrino.org/2017/11/27/24dpp17/

Fr. Rutler's Weekly: Column November 26, 2017

Father Rutler's Weekly Column

November 26th, 2017

A professor told me of two experiences he had when civilization was picking up its pieces after World War II. He was in the crowd when King George VI visited Cambridge University and was greeted with loud cheers. Then, as a U. S. soldier in occupied Japan, he watched as a vast throng became stone silent when the Emperor alighted from the imperial train, all heads bowed and eyes downcast. Hirohito no longer had divine pretensions, but the customary reverence was palpable. The one king embodied the familial aspect of a monarch as father, and the other was a reminder of a ruler transcending the ordinary commerce of life.

  On the Feast of Christ the King, the Church proposes a sovereignty both human and divine: the Holy One who walked the roads of this world as a man among men was at the same time of Heaven, the Supreme Being.

  This mystery stretches the limited intellect, as in the case of Pontius Pilate, who remains a fascinating psychological study, as he tried to figure out if Jesus was a king. Why he posed the question is not clear, and Jesus asked if the question was his own or a reaction to the cynicism of the mob. Pilate was a paramount cynic himself, not a skeptic who doubts whether something is true, but a man who doubts that truth exists at all. That is why Nietzsche, whose only god was selfish power, considered Pilate the only powerful character in the Gospel. But then, it was Nietzsche who said, “I am no man, I am dynamite.” Consistent with his claim, he ended up insane.
 
 Because Pilate was too vindictive even for the Roman imperium, the governor of Syria, Lucius Vitellius, removed him from the prefecture of Judea. One theory is that Pilate committed suicide in what is now Vienne in modern France. As for his birth, there is more confusion: possibly Tarragona in Spain, or more implausibly in the Perthshire Highlands of Scotland, or Forchheim in Germany, or most likely in the Abruzzi of Italy. You might say that he was born wherever men refuse to recognize truth when they see it, and destroy themselves when they have walked away from it. The moral chaos is more widespread now than in the academic groves of the classical world, and we see its effect in the campus riots of today and the mental floss of such philosophers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

  This much can be said for Pontius Pilate: He inscribed that sign “King of the Jews” and would not remove it. It may have been sheer irony, the cynicism of a cynic. Or perhaps when he began to roam the hills of exile, he sensed that the ultimate and only choice in life is holiness or madness: “And they will go away to eternal punishment, but the virtuous to eternal life” (Matthew 25:46).

Subscribers,

Like what you're reading? If so, please consider making a special donation to the Church of St. Michael the Archangel at 424 West 34th Street, so that we can afford to continue distributing the column! 

Say Goodbye to Hollywood, the Beatles & Bugnini

Fr. Nix Sermon: Superfruit Sunday, November 19, 2017

                                     (St. John Chrysostom & St. Gregory the Wonderworker)

http://padreperegrino.org/2017/11/19/superfuit-sunday/

FR. Schall on Sad Songs at "The Catholic Thing Blog"

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2017/11/19/on-sad-songs/

Yet all sad songs have this “remembering Zion” about them, this sense of how things might have been but were not. The Man of Sorrows’ love was and still is rejected by many. He did not abolish sadness. He redeemed us through it. It is not the greatest evil. This awareness of what is at stake is what we learn from listening to the sad songs of our kind, songs from the streams of Babylon to the waltzes danced in Tennessee.

Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column, November 19, 2017

Father Rutler's Weekly Column

November 19th, 2017

   The Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas has been made a shrine, for the massacre there has left it a hallowed place for mourners. A red rose marks where each of the victims died, and then there is one pink rose. That is for the unborn baby that died in the womb. To the frustration of some, Texas is one of 38 states that recognize an infant in utero as a victim when the mother is assaulted. Federal law also accords legal rights to the unborn in cases of federal and military crimes. A pink rose is at least a tacit acknowledgement that a human life existed before birth, and Catholics know that life is life, with no varying shades. This is one example of how truth prevails despite attempts to obscure it.

   Confusion has also muddled marriage. When marriage is refashioned into an oxymoronic “same-sex marriage,” along with ambiguity about procreation and the permanence of natural marriage, the social order loses interest in it altogether. Even among self-professed Catholics, whose population has increased in the last forty years, there has been a 60% decrease in weddings.

   As the Religious life is a consecrated form of spiritual marriage, opaqueness about such commitment has caused the virtual evaporation of many communities. In the past five years alone, with the exception of communities solid in doctrine, there has been a loss of over seven per cent among women religious, while orders of men declined somewhat less.

   St. John Paul II spoke clearly about priestly charisms, and during his pontificate the number of seminarians worldwide increased from 63,882 to 114,439. The years of Pope Benedict XVI saw the numbers grow to 118, 257. Since then, in a time of confusion in the Church and society as a whole, there has been a consistent global decline. In our own vast archdiocese, of the small handful of recent ordinations none was a native New Yorker.

   Yet often where there is clarity of doctrine and high morale, the picture is bright. In 2015, the most recent year for statistics, there was a 25% increase nationally in ordinations. The archdiocese of St. Louis, with a Catholic population roughly less than a quarter the size of the archdiocese of New York, has considerably more seminarians, and the dioceses of Madison, Wisconsin and Lincoln, Nebraska, relatively small in population, each have about twice as many seminarians as we have in “the capital of the world.”

   In the pro-life movement, on the federal level there are positive developments correcting the anti-life legislation of recent years. And where better instruction is provided, Catholic marriages are becoming more purposeful and stable. Then too, a new generation of young priests sound in doctrine and liturgy is appearing. There is strength in clarity. “For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” (1 Corinthians 14:8).

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Like what you're reading? If so, please consider making a special donation to the Church of St. Michael the Archangel at 424 West 34th Street, so that we can afford to continue distributing the column!

Fr. Nix: How To Pray At The TLM

http://padreperegrino.org/2017/11/17/meditmass/

Bishop Barron on Reaching the iGens

LUTHER'S POPE: Vatican Stamp of Approval of Protestant Revolt?

Fr. Perricone on The Cassock

Great essay on the priestly Cassock today, by Fr. John A. Perricone, at Crisis Magazine:

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/clothing-naked-catholic-square

The priest in the Roman cassock not only represents a divine institution, a legacy of illuminating dogmas, or a prestigious position in a world-respected Church. More grandly, the cassocked priest trumpets to the world a dazzling power: to summon the Word Incarnate upon altars for the salvation of the human race; to literally change the souls of men by uttering the words of absolution. Even while performing works of charity, the priest in the Roman cassock sets himself apart from those doing the same. In cassock, the priest adds a supernatural luster which brings to the work a radiance it did not have before. The habited St Vincent DePaul taking a child in his arms, or the cassocked St. John Bosco playing with his boys, is poetry; a state official, or even a good Catholic doing the same things is prose.

Fr. Schall: Does "Climate Change" Cause Hunger?

Fr. Schall writing today at Crisis Magazine:

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/climate-change-cause-hunger

“Climate change” has deftly been substituted for the notorious “earth-warming” theory, the facts of which proved so difficult to sustain on the grounds of evidence about whether warming was or was not actually happening. Thus, whether the temperature goes up or down, it is “climate change”; so we can have an ecological crisis with the temperature going either direction. In grammar school in Iowa in my day, much attention was given to the Ice Age, which had once covered the state and, in fact, was one of the reasons for the richness of its black soil. We left grammar school more concerned about freezing to death than of roasting in some future Iowa desert.

Fr. Nix: Sermon for November 12, 2017

Today at Immaculate Conception Basilica, Jacksonville, Florida.

http://padreperegrino.org/2017/11/12/23dpp17/