A Treasure To Be Shared

Saint Anthony of Padua, 'Hammer of Heretics': pray for us. No, not Saint Thomas the Apostle (Gospel according to St. John 20:24-29). Saint Thomas' doubt served/serves a divine purpose (v. 29). In due course (Part Two), we will chat about another Thomas, a man who desperately needs our prayers. - - - To the mind that submits to grace, divine revelation (and its companion: mystery) is an ever expanding opportunity to encounter the True, the Good and the Beautiful, the living God, an opportunity to explore God's self disclosure that God gifts to people in graced glimpses. Those glimpses are most reliably discovered when, by grace, God's people approach in humility the Holy Eucharist, i.e., Divine Worship, the Mass. Take note, too, that many graces flow from Eucharistic Adoration and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Where Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is celebrated, vocations to the religious life and the priesthood flourish. The Mass was i...

We live in an age when ignorance reigns in the hearts of men. Young people are routinely subjected to a diet of revisionist history, and so substantially embrace the biases of their social studies teachers that they, blinded to the similarities between their own fascist tendencies and their ideological brethren, robustly resemble members of the Hitlerjugend or the Bund Deutsche Mädel . Aged agnostics, and not particularly honest ones at that, accord more force to their doubt and often times bizarre near-conspiracy-theory beliefs than surrender those same weird biases to the cleansing perspective of history provided by reliable contemporaries of historical events. Modern armchair historians swat away ancient reports like annoying flies rather than understand that, not being troublesome insects, those same accounts could teach them something about themselves, something about their bigotry, for starters. It might do them well, those armchair historians and fascist youngsters, to ...

If you haven't read it already, go to the Catholic Herald and read the following article. What’s more astonishing than the Big Bang? Ask the man who proposed it Fr Julian Large, Cong Orat, Provost of the London Oratory 18 April, 2019 The Catholic Herald On Easter Sunday, we contemplate with wonder the empty tomb, and the circumstances of the Resurrection transport us all the way back to Genesis. That tomb is situated in a garden, just as the history of the human race began in a garden. Mary Magdalene mistakes Our Risen Lord for the gardener. Adam’s task had been to tend the garden which God entrusted to his care. Where Adam’s disobedience brought expulsion from that first garden, Our Lord defeats Satan on the Cross and, in the garden close by, reverses the consequences of Adam’s rebellion, the most terrible of which is death. All of this makes Christ the New Adam, whose Resurrection marks a New Creation which promises us an eternity infinitely more wonderful than...

https://ecclesiasticalheraldry.weebly.com/sri-lanka.html By snipping comments made by the Archbishop of Colombo in the aftermath of the attacks on the peaceful Sri Lankan Catholic community, reporters - to use the word loosely - in many mainstream media institutions have carelessly flavoured Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith's comments in ways that skew perception and might lead readers to equate him with the extremists who perpetrated a wanton act of violence on one of the most holy days, if not the most holy day, of the year for Christians. A local newspaper , not well known for its ability to cover complex (or even simple) matters in a nuanced manner, and to the exclusion of anything else Archbishop Ranjith recently said, published: The Archbishop of Colombo, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, called on Sri Lanka's government to "mercilessly" punish those responsible "because only animals can behave like that." Accurate, to a degree. The local newspaper r...

Rembrandt van Rijn: Christ and St Mary Magdalene at the Tomb (1638) CHRIST IS RISEN! ALLELUIA! HE IS RISEN INDEED! ALLELUIA! ALLELUIA! Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn) II, The Royal Collection, London http://rembrandt.louvre.fr/en/html/r12.html The day after the Crucifixion, Mary Magdalene found Christ’s tomb empty. Two angels spoke to her as she wept, and when she turned she saw a man she thought was a gardener. Rembrandt sticks closely to the passage in the Gospel of John, which poses the question of the risen Christ’s appearance, because Mary Magdalene recognizes neither his face nor his voice. The figure of Christ eludes understanding, and the rising sun symbolizes the dawn of a new era for mankind (Louvre). Witnesses of the Resurrection Blessed John Henry Newman Sermon XXII of Parochial and Plain Sermons https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/religion-and-philosophy/apologetics/witnesses-of-the-resurrection.html Why did not our Sa...

Tenebrae, Ordinariate style, was a first for yours truly: Anglican chant English plainchant loads of readings (9) and all the prescribed texts. The hearse cooperated. The dripless candles remained in place. We used a little reusable poster putty to shim and hold the candles in place - worked like a charm! Readings were distributed to and chanted by our pastor, Ordinary-elect of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of The Southern Cross Monsignor Carl Reid, yours truly and a brother Instituted Acolyte. The occasion marked a return of the traditional Tenebrae service to these Catholic shores. Members of the Latin (Extraordinary Form) Mass community attended, confirming a shared love of the received tradition of the Church. (A hearty 'thank you' and 'well done' to Mr. Perkins for informing and inviting the Latin Mass community!) I can't say how many were in the congregation - more than 15, less than 30? The service was conducted with due solemnity...

Cathedrale Notre-Dame de Paris - BBC Notre-Dame de Paris has burned. No one was physically harmed by the fire. The fire has seared the souls of all lovers of beauty, truth and goodness, i.e., all those who love God and the works inspired by His gift of salvation in Christ. Notre Dame Cathedral will be rebuilt. France and the world need it. France, especially, needs it in ways that many people may not immediately understand. The Cathedral is not merely a national treasure nor a tourist attraction nor a museum piece. It incarnates the mystery of salvation in Christ. It tells the truth of the Holy Gospel. It is a tabernacle for the living God; the Cathedral is a dwelling place for Jesus Christ present, the Holy Eucharist. The Cathedral is a sign of hope for a world that languishes in the shadows of despair and materialism. That hope is vigorous, indefatigable, and will fuel the efforts to rebuild just as it did fuel the efforts to raise the Cathedral in the first place. People ...

Quoted here, Archbishop Chaput reflects on Benedict XVI's recent essay. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/04/benedict-and-the-scandal Writing nearly half a century ago (1970), the Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce noted that I often find myself envying unbelievers: Does not contemporary history provide abundant evidence that Catholics are a mentally inferior species? Their rush to conform to the opinion about Catholicism held by rationalist secularists is stunning. Those words from his essay “The Ascendance of Eroticism” open Del Noce’s brilliant reflections—part analysis, part prophecy—on Europe’s then-current sexual revolution. At a time when a young priest named Joseph Ratzinger was predicting a smaller, more hard-pressed, but purer Church of the future in his 1969–70 German and Vatican radio interviews, Del Noce was explaining how it would happen. He foresaw that “the decisive battle against Christianity [can] be fought only at the le...

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The Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace (D&P) has come under appropriate scrutiny in recent years, far too late for those who long knew (but whose concerns were ignored) D&P was in bed with groups not well aligned with Catholic teaching. Tantrum  a fit of bad temper Certain groups, groups under investigation, now are complaining that... . https://www.catholicregister.org/item/29314-philippine-catholic-groups-criticize-canadian-agency-for-opaque-review ...the investigation, conducted by an "opaque" committee that included staff of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops and Development and Peace, was surrounded by secrecy. The four Philippine partners affected by the moratorium have never been told why Development and Peace is withholding funds raised from its Share Lent campaign. Philippine groups also have "no way to know the charges against them," said the signatories, upset that "the truth of the c...

Anthony van Dyck, Suffer Little Children To Come Unto Me Pope Emeritus Benedict has trained his brilliant mind on the topic of the abuse scandal. Retaining that luminous clarity for which he was well known, Papa Benedict identifies several trajectories (categorized by yours truly, summarized by including phrases from Benedict's essay): A forced loss of innocence: all out sexual freedom. The collapse of moral theology. The dissolution of the moral teaching authority of the Church and t he breakdown of priestly formation: the aftermath of the 1960s. The question of pedophilia: " Only where Faith no longer determines the actions of man are such offenses possible." The failure of the alter-Church. The future is a restoration of liturgical integrity. The Mystery of the Church: the triumph of God. In Benedict XVI's words: My work is divided into three parts. In the first part, I aim to present briefly the wider social context of the question, wi...

A sample of updates. Vatican News: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-04/pope-updates-norms-for-catholics-of-anglican-tradition.html http://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pubblico/2019/04/09/0300/00607.html#ing The Faithful of the Ordinariate Article 5 §1. The lay faithful originally of the Anglican tradition who wish to belong to the Ordinariate, after having made their Profession of Faith and received the Sacraments of Initiation, with due regard for Canon 845, are to be entered in the apposite register of the Ordinariate. Those who have received all of the Sacraments of Initiation outside the Ordinariate are not ordinarily eligible for membership, unless they are members of a family belonging to the Ordinariate. §2. A person who has been baptized in the Catholic Church but who has not completed the Sacraments of Initiation, and subsequently returns to the faith and practice of the Church as a result of the evangelizing mission...

Michael D. Adder Sung to the tune of God Save The Queen (My Country, 'Tis Of Thee) Our country much less free, filled with much misery: Justin's a jerk. Blaming his enemies, cause of his own defeat; Jody should kick him in his seat: Justin is a jerk. A Catholic-In-Name-Only politician could learn much from his political colleagues if he would allow himself to be instructed in the ethical management of the people's business, i.e., the proper stewardship of the people's resources. Lent, it seems, has been wasted by Prime Minister Trudeau. Given his very public antipathy toward anyone who deviates from or challenges his liberal religion, there is little hope that he would find something in the practice of the Faith that would lead him to admit, at the very least, to an error in judgement. Like so many of our Canadian Catholic brethren, the Trudeaus are more Canadian than Catholic: nice to the point of being giddily eager to tolerate threats to inalien...

Gregorian chant, says Dr. Peter Kwasniewski , is characterized by: primacy of the word; free rhythm; unison singing; unaccompanied vocalization; modality; anonymity; emotional moderation; unambiguous sacrality What is said about Gregorian chant largely applies to the single line English (plain)chant employed within communities of the Ordinariate, as found, for example, in the Saint Peter Gradual ( click here for images ). With respect to the point Dr. Kwasniewski makes regarding anonymity, unlike most of the Latin chant corpus the composers of  Anglican Chant  of the harmonized (homophonic) variety are fairly well known (e.g., Havergal, Camidge, Upton). Sir Sydney Nicholson did much to preserve the legacy of English chant. Collections such as  The Saint Mary's Chant Book  and  The Plainchant Gradual ,  produced by G. H. Palmer and completed by Francis Burgess, organize English settings of Gregorian chant.  The Saint Peter Gradu...