That priest at the altar’s a nobody.

Priest as deputy . . .

Jim Bowman's avatarBlithe Spirit

You go high enough on the academic ladder, you are properly “robed” at commencement ceremonies, observes Fr. Hunwicke, explaining:

Doctoral garb distinguishes the achievement of, er, achievers.

He contrasts it with what the priest wears at mass:

‘VESTMENTS’, on the other hand, negate the individuality and achievements of the wearer. He wears them to indicate that he is nothing; that he is acting solely in the name of Another.

He did not walk proudly up to a stage to the tune of pomp and circumstance, Rather:

He is a man who was not honoured but humiliated, when, at his Ordination, he lay prostrate on the ground. He now acts clothed in the Priesthood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Far from gaining or achieving anything, he has lost individuality. ‘Initiative’ is, quite simply, not his job. Nor is ‘personality’.

He is a man whose hands and voice are not his…

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Reasons for denial of entry to canonization lobby to G K Chesterton

Would you pray to G.K. Chesterton? (Heck, I’d pray to my father, who is closer to God than I am.)

Jim Bowman's avatarBlithe Spirit

No “local cult,” said the bishop. But it used to be the opposite argument that held sway, says the learned Fr. Hunwicke — if there were a local cult, the cause would be suspect. He finds this objection puzzling.

“Nor do I find it easy to take seriously his second reason,” he continues, citing same:

“I have not been able to tease out a pattern of personal spirituality”.

GKC no paragon, worthy of imitation? Fr. H.:

The liturgical Calendar is already, arguably, overloaded with Bishops and Founders.

Each of whom had prominent, powerful lobbies to boost them.

To the nub of it:

The addition of a simple and married layperson who sought sanctity simply through the plain everyday means of grace offered by the Redeemer in His Church would seem to me a valuable affirmation of plain ‘mere’ Christian ‘spirituality’.

How true.

via Fr Hunwicke’s Mutual Enrichment.

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Why do so few Catholics believe in the real presence? A call to action.

Bishop Robert Barron explained, and Fr. Z. followed up with extended commentary, agreeing with a need for action, but issuing his own call.

[The] Bishop doesn’t seem to mean action to change the way we celebrate the Eucharist, the way we see the Eucharist, the way we sing to and about the Eucharist, the way we literally handle the Eucharist.  That is: liturgical worship, how we celebrate Holy Mass. [Emphasis added]

He wants a “call to action”? Here’s a call to action!

  • STOP COMMUNION IN THE HAND!
  • Foster kneeling for Communion put in Communion rails.
  • Get serious about music.
  • Phase out unnecessary lay ministers of Communion.
  • Clear the sanctuary of everything that distracts.
  • Celebrate ad orientem.
  • And the scariest of all … implement generously Summorum Pontificum!

Every one of those will require, yes, catechesis.  Lots of sound catechesis and patience.

Patience and more patience.

But “it’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.”

A concrete call that involves particulars, without which one blows smoke.

From Fr. Z’s blog.

Why do so few US Catholics believe in the Real Presence? Look at the liturgy

Not an accident

Jim Bowman's avatarBlithe Spirit

Casual does, belief follows, as sure as night the day.

A generation of pastors stripped the altars and passed out the Eucharist like a leaflet.

The latest Pew study shockingly states that only 31 per cent of Catholics in the United States believe that “during Catholic Mass, the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus.”

Out of the 69 per cent of Catholics surveyed who believe that the bread and wine are mere “symbols,” only 22 per cent of those understand that they are dissenting from the Church’s actual teaching. The rest are accidental Zwinglians.

More here: Catholic Herald

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The Godless Confusion and the God of Justice — sermon material here

I’d take a sermon like this any day. Has punch, gets to the heart of a major, burning issue: how react to a society that rarely hears such talk. Society? How about parish mass-attenders?

First few ‘graphs:

According to atheist Richard Dawkins in his best-selling book The God Delusion, the God of the Old Testament is “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

That remark indicates far more familiarity with the dictionary than with the Bible. I wonder, how much fiction has Dawkins read? More seriously, how carefully has he actually read the Bible?

Sadly, Dawkins merely appeals to the tired notion that the “God of the Old Testament” is a cruel tyrant with little love for His creation. I suspect that even many Christians have the vague sense that such is the case. And today’s reading from the Old Testament is the sort of passage that can, rather easily, be misinterpreted to provide evidence for that view.

Etc.

Like this, I say. Would need editing, sprucing up for average Sunday attendance, explaining this and that, cutting a bit, etc. Priest would have to get it in the first place, of course.

via Catholic World Report

Inside baseball: Pope St. Paul VI’s cathedral in his home town has no altar!

Something there is that makes a fellow love it.

The newer of the two [Brescia] Cathedrals intrigues. Within it, a ‘shrine’ to S Paul VI ‘Brixiensis’ [the Brescia native]. It contains, apparently, neither relics of the Saint nor an altar.

Speculation arose in our group [of insiders, attending a convention] about whether this latter fact was a piece of subtle symbolism indicating his desire to abolish the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. [Paul had approved the new, post-Vatican 2 mass, which traditionalists abhor.]

I [Fr. Hunwicke, as insider] strongly disagreed, arguing that his condemnation of ‘Transignification‘ [denial of the orthodox-traditional transubstantiation] showed that at least his heart, or part of it, was in the right place.

And the evidence ([Louis] Bouyer [who had told his friend Paul VI of Annibal Bugnini’s duplicity] inter alios [among others]) indicates that the the worst excesses of ‘his’ [Paul’s] rite can be blamed on Hannibal’s deceptions.

I like it for various reasons. One is how it contains so much in so few references — if you know what he’s talking about. And if you didn’t before I explained it, now you do. Maybe.

How Fr. Weinandy decided to write his letter of complaint to Pope Francis

Prayer matters . . .

Jim Bowman's avatarBlithe Spirit

In Rome in late May of 2017, arriving early for a meeting of Vatican theologians, Fr. Thomas Weinandy took himself to prayer “about the . . . state of the Church and the anxieties [he] had about the present Pontificate.”

He spent most of an afternoon in St. Peter’s,

beseeching Jesus and Mary, St. Peter and all of the saintly popes who are buried there to do something to rectify the confusion and turmoil within the Church today, a chaos and an uncertainty that I felt Pope Francis had himself caused . . . and pondering whether [to] write and publish something expressing my concerns and anxiety.

A few days later, the meeting completed, he “went again to St. Peter’s and prayed in the same manner.”

That night, he couldn’t sleep. Unable to get Francis off his mind, at 1:15 he left his room and went outside “for a short…

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Reform or Dismantle the Church? Commonweal Magazine

Serious discussion here.

Gives idea of current mindset of Catholic libs.

Villanova historian Massimo Faggioli says Chaput, Cordileone, and Strickland are ‘devout schismatics’

Hey, public intellectual makes splash.

However . . .

Faggioli could not be reached for comment.

Tsk, tsk.

The new mass: a Protestantizing of Catholic worship

Its architect was explicit on the point.

The Novus Ordo Missae [New Order mass] was introduced in April 1969 by Pope Paul VI. From the start, this new rite was intended to have an ecumenical nature as declared by its chief architect, Fr. Annibale Bugnini in 1965 . . . 

.  . . who made no bones about his slash-and-burn philosophy.

“We must strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren-that is, for the Protestants.”

From which we gain an idea of where we stand with this general-in-charge of the century’s liturgical wrecking crew.

Pope Paul VI reportedly adopted the Bugnini view:

. . .  the intention of Pope Paul VI with regard to . . . the Mass was to reform the Catholic liturgy in such a way that it should almost coincide with the Protestant liturgy . . .  there was with Pope Paul VI an ecumenical intention to remove, or at least to correct, or at least to relax, what was too Catholic, in the traditional sense, in the Mass and, I repeat, to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist service  . . .

This is from “an intimate friend” of the pope,  Jean Guitton, referenced in October 1994, in Christian Order.  Paul VI had 116 of Guitton’s books and had made marginal study notes in 17 of them.

Along with mass-Protestantizing came belief changes, argues Michael Davies, prolific traditionalist writer and defender of the Tridentine Latin mass.

When I began work on this trilogy [Liturgical Revolution] I was concerned at the extent to which the Catholic liturgy was being Protestantized. The more detailed my study of the Revolution, the more evident it has become that it has by-passed Protestantism and its final goal is humanism.

Fighting words, to be sure.