Wednesday, March 30, 2011

On Being Starved into Submission

I recently attended my first ever Missa Cantata, celebrated by the inimitable Fr. Andrew Szymakowski -- the first Mass in the Extraordinary Form that I have been able to attend since the beginning of January.  I was reminded that one of my favorite things about the Extraordinary Form is that the priest blesses the communicant with the Host before placing It on the tongue: a miniature benediction of the Blessed Sacrament for each person who comes to receive It.

This detail set me on a train of thought.  Why, I wondered, is this not done anymore?  Who was the great brain who considered it necessary to discontinue this practice?  I can't come up with one earthly reason why this blessing with the Host should not be done in the Ordinary Form of the Mass; yet it almost never is.  I never, ever saw a priest do it until I attended my first Mass in the Extraordinary Form; and Fr. Andrew is the only priest I have ever seen do it in the Novus Ordo.  

But then, of course, in recent decades, a great many things have been swept away in the Church's Great Leap Forward.  Beautiful altars and statues and icons, myriads of devotions and blessings, numerous disciplines and countless symbols and marks of Catholic identity  -- even the traditional language and liturgy of the Latin Rite -- have been unceremoniously dumped for the sake of the alleged "springtime" of the Church, in which we were expected to divest ourselves of the vast accretion of superfluities and get "back to basics."

Surely this infantile regression is not the work of Divine Charity.  Extras, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once observed through the lips of Sherlock Holmes, can issue only from the goodness of Providence.  This Goodness provides us with an abundance of extras that are nothing less than the effusions of a loving Heart.  Music; flowers; the sunlight on the water; the night sky; chocolate; painting and sculpture; gatherings of friends over a pint of beer or a glass of wine; we don't need these things to keep body and soul together, but we do need them to feed our souls and our humanity.

Still, the world is filled with people who have forgotten their humanity, and not only take no thought for their own souls, but believe that nobody else should, either -- and unfortunately, many such have the power to impose their whims on others.  These are the totalitarians.  Not content to lead their own lives, they must run the lives of others.  The totalitarian mindset that goes by the Orwellian name of "liberalism" always keeps people at or below the level of bare subsistence. That way, they can focus on nothing except surviving, and are thus easier to control.

This is true whether totalitarianism subsists in secular governments or in the Church. The mentality that holds that we ought to do away with all that which is not strictly "necessary" in worship, without all the little extra treats that used to nurture our devotion, is nothing but totalitarianism.  All the years the liberals have held sway, we have been kept hungry.  So hungry that we are ready to wolf down whatever poison they dole out to us -- poison that has turned our stomachs against the real food of Catholic faith and tradition  and devotion that has nourished saints for centuries.   Thus Catholics become docile foot soldiers in the armies of dissent, and loyal tools in the hands of those who hope to dismantle the Church and rebuild it according to their own ideas.

The blessing of each communicant at Mass with the Host is a very small detail -- if a blessing imparted by Christ Himself in the Eucharist can be called small.  But it does prove that real love resides in and provides for the smallest details, however easy they may be to miss.  Real love seeks to satisfy even the tiniest desires of the beloved.  Indeed, to real love, nothing is tiny or beneath notice.  Real love leaves undone nothing that can possibly be done for the beloved's happiness.  

All of which is useful in helping us to distinguish real charity from the false ethic of deprivation in mockery of charity; from the enlightened sterility  disguised as love of poverty that actually quenches the Spirit; from the pharisaical pride of the liberals, who are liberal only with their destructive powers, and who attend to the tiny details only in order to smash them.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

What's in a Name? Plenty.

Sitting here eating my lunch, I have just been reading an entry in a well-known priest's blog in which Father forthrightly and correctly identifies certain dissenting Catholics as "heretics."

This started a train of thought.  In my lifetime, the words "heretic" and "schismatic" have not been much in use.  These words only hurt people's feelings, we have been told, and serve further to alienate our separated Protestant brethren, and encourages triumphalism among Catholics, etc., etc., etc.  A booklet about the Divine Mercy devotion that I bought a few years ago even goes so far as to purge the words "heretics" and "schismatics" from the Divine Mercy novena.  St. Faustina records in her Diary that in this novena, Jesus asked her to recommend to Him various groups of people, including -- in so many words -- heretics and schismatics.

So has dropping the terms "heretic" and "schismatic" dramatically advanced the cause of ecumenism and seeking out the lost sheep of the fold?  Or has it served merely to make Catholics think that, like the monsters that used to live under our beds, there are no such things after all as heretics and schismatics?

And in whose interest is it that Catholics should dismiss as nursery fables the concepts of heresy and schism and their adherents?  Could it be that the same people who have pushed this purgation of the language would themselves have been denounced as heretics and schismatics only a few short decades ago?

I seem to recall that the ancient Egyptians believed that if you eradicated a person's name and image, that person ceased to exist.  They might have been onto something.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Happy Vernal Equinox!

Behold the intersection of the ecliptic and the celestial equator,  when the earth's axis was perpendicular to the sun's rays, at 23:21 Greenwich Mean Time on March 20, 2011 -- almost five hours before this post went up.  Spring has sprung!

Friday, March 11, 2011

Devastated Japan

What a penance the people of Japan are called upon to endure, just two days into the season of Lent.  The horrific earthquake has been upgraded to magnitude 9.1, one of the greatest in recorded history.  And, as anyone knows who has ever experienced a major earthquake, the shaking never stops.  Sometimes the aftershocks are as bad as, or even worse than, the main shock.  May St. Emedius, patron against earthquakes, obtain stillness for Japan.

May the Martyrs of Nagasaki intercede on behalf of their homeland, hallowed by their blood, in her agony.

And may St. Maximilian Kolbe, who loved the Japanese and worked to win them for the Church, fly to their aid.

Monday, March 07, 2011

Litany of St. Thomas of Aquin

Today is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas on the preconciliar calendar.  It seems appropriate to celebrate it with the Litany of St. Thomas of Aquin, published in 1913 in The Dominican Manual: A Selection of Prayers and Devotions.



O THOU, the Most High, have mercy on us.
Mighty One of Jacob, have mercy on us.
Divine Spirit, have mercy on us.
Great Triune God, have mercy on us.

Glorious Mother of the King of kings, pray for us.
Saint Thomas of Aquin, pray for us.
Worthy child of the Queen of Virgins...
Aquinas most chaste...
Aquinas most patient...
Prodigy of science...
Silently eloquent...
Reproach of the ambitious...
Lover of that life which is hidden with Christ in God...
Fragrant flower in the parterre of St. Dominic...
Glory of Friars Preachers...
Illlumined from on high...
Angel of the Schools...
Oracle of the Church...
Incomparable scribe of the Man-God...
Satiated with the odour of His perfumes...
Perfect in the school of His Cross...
Intoxicated with the strong wine of His charity...
Glittering gem in the cabinet of the Lord...
Model of perfect obedience...
Endowed with the true spirit of holy poverty...

Lamb of God, You take away the sins of the world: have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, You take away the sins of the world: have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, You take away the sins of the world: grant us peace.

Ant.— Oh, how beautiful is the chaste generation with glory, for the memory thereof is immortal, because it is known with God and man, and it triumpheth crowned for ever.
V. Oh! what have I in heaven, or what do I desire on earth?
R. Thou art the God of my heart, and my portion for ever.

Prayer:

O God, who hast ordained that blessed Thomas should enlighten Thy Church, grant that through his prayers we may practise what he taught, through Christ our Lord. Amen.