A Treasure To Be Shared

Cartoonish or Cultivated? Are Latin Rite Catholics—bishops, priests, and laypeople—ignoring the signs? Many voices are being continuously raised warning Latin Rite Catholics to repent of their superficial faith, and turn to God—who remains the same yesterday and today—and stop polluting the temple with profane music, irreverent conduct, and worldly philosophies. These calls for renewal urge the faithful to embrace a deeper, more authentic relationship with God. By fostering genuine worship and a commitment to spiritual growth, parishes can reclaim an authentic Catholic identity and inspire a transformative faith among its members. St John 2:13-17 | The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers at their business. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all, with the sheep and oxen, out of the temple; and he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned t...

Say 'no' to communion in the hand... to say 'yes' to the profound adoration of God by receiving the Holy Eucharist on the tongue. I mention, for example, a change not proposed by the Council Fathers or by the Sacrosanctum Concilium, Holy Communion received in the hand. This has contributed to some extent to a weakening of faith in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This, and the removal of altar rails and kneelers in church and the introduction of practices which oblige the faithful to sit or stand at the elevation of the Sacred Host, weakens the genuine significance of the Eucharist and the Church’s profound sense of adoration for the Lord, the Only Son of God. Albert Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith (November, 2007) | Behind communion-in-the-hand – I wish to repeat and make as plain as I can – is a weakening, a conscious, a deliberate weakening of faith in the Real Presence.  Father John Hardon, S.J., November, 1997 |  One receives in the mouth what one believes ...

It's understandable that those who haven't experienced ad orientem worship would ask, "Why is the priest's back to us when he is at the altar?" The simplest response might be to state that the priest is actually facing in the same direction as the people to worship Almighty God. This is the understanding in the Personal Ordinariates and among those who attend the older form of the Mass in Latin.  The unified sense of direction reinforces a theological understanding of rightly ordered intention, that of directing our prayers to God in a way that acknowledges the priest as alter Christus without the temptation to make him, the celebrant, the chief actor in the Mass and thus the focus of attention. Jesus is the Chief Actor in the Mass, and through the actions of the priest wed to the action of the Holy Ghost, Jesus is made present. As circumstances of the past 50 years confirm, an unfortunate cult of personality has grown up around the priest-celebrant in many or m...

[ 7 minute read ] What's on the menu? Decades of impromptu and unsanctioned changes to form and content by clergy and laity have frequently rendered celebrations of the Novus Ordo liturgy a mess, even a disaster. Those who have participated in liturgical abuses of one kind or another may have their ideas and actions judged as those of: the rebel Catholic: a willfully disobedient individual who imagines there are no absolutes except those he or she demands the right to impose. His or her disdain for liturgical law, rubrics, norms and principles that preserve the ars celebrandi and the integrity of the Mass , reveals a latent hostility toward the authority of Jesus Christ and His Church. the woefully ignorant child of a rebel whose comfortable religion (of compromise) is the predictable outcome of a well entrenched generational bias. the enthusiastic but woefully ignorant proponent of popularism (liturgical democracy?) emanating in various forms that pretend at authentic engagement....

[12 minute read] The liturgy is the action of Jesus Christ. How, then, can it be anything other than the answer to our divisions and also the most fundamental source of the renewal of the Church? - Pope Benedict XVI Catholics of the Latin Rite have for decades endured something of a slurry of strange practices - liturgical experiments and gooey devotions - to a degree that many parishes appear to trap people in superficial religion. The most unsettling symptom of a pseudo-faith is that the very source and summit of the life of the Church, the Holy Eucharist, Jesus Himself present among us, is treated with casual indifference, like a snack or mere treat. While there are pockets of zealous disciples in Europe and the Americas, the mission to bring the Faith to the heart of every society and culture has been significantly inhibited by an abundance of timid witnesses who lack a clear identity, a Eucharistic identity in Christ. Catholic politicians, a rather obvious cohort manifesting the ...

Ad Orientem Worship https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/man-vandalizes-altar-at-church-engulfed [ READ TIME - 6 minutes] An article at The Pillar captures the - at times - heated debate in our sister church, the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church. After years of debate over variations in the way that the Syro-Malabar Eucharistic liturgy was celebrated, the majority of bishops endorsed a formula known as the “uniform mode,” in which the priest faces the people during the Liturgy of the Word, turns toward the altar for the Liturgy of the Eucharist, and then faces the people again after Communion. But in the Ernakulam-Angamaly archeparchy, the vast majority of priests and lay people rejected the uniform mode, demanding that their preference for the Holy Qurbana facing the people be recognized as a legitimate liturgical variant. They noted that the variant has been used in the archdiocese for more than 50 years and argued that it embodied Vatican II’s liturgical priorities more faithfully than the ...

Pope Trudeau | AP The Generational Divide in the Priesthood by Darrick Taylor That younger priests are drawn to the older rite and to traditional spirituality I have long known, but seeing this priest made visible for me the generational divide within the priesthood today. It is one of those topics that can be delicate to speak of but is almost impossible to ignore: younger priests care more about orthodoxy, liturgy, and tradition than those ordained in previous decades. Many could produce anecdotes like the one above, but a recent survey of priests in the United States confirms this. https://www.crisismagazine.com/2022/the-generational-divide-in-the-priesthood https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3951931 The Politicization of Ad Orientem by Eric Sammons When I first arrived at the Diocese of Venice, my family were happy Novus Ordo-attending Catholics. We explored the parishes around us, but what we found were variations on the same theme: the priest was a performer, cel...