On Worship

The other day I was having my hair done in a local salon. A lady came in whose daughter was getting married. She said that the problem was that although the daughter had been reared as a Catholic, she wanted to be married in her boyfriend's Protestant church. One of the (many) reasons was that she (the bride) did not get anything out of Mass. In spite of 12 years at Catholic school, the young lady is obviously ignorant as to what Mass is. Mass is the unbloody sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, the central act of worship offered to our Creator. When you receive Holy Communion you receive God into yourself. But if that is not enough for you, then think of it this way: the Omnipotent Almighty Eternal God, Who keeps the universe in existence, has invited you to His table. He owes us nothing; we owe Him all of our love and adoration. When we assist at Mass, it is to worship God and ask for forgiveness of our sins and the sins of the world, not to be filled with warm fuzzy feelings.

Liturgical Obedience, the Imitation of Christ, and the Seductions of Autonomy

From Vultus Christi:

Given what I have said about liturgy as inherently hierarchical, otherworldly, ecstatic, and absolute in its demands over us, it is entirely in keeping with the devil’s strategy to destabilize, democratize, secularize, and relativize the liturgy here on earth. He seeks to loosen our bond with a fixed and efficacious tradition. He seeks to smudge in our perceptions, and, eventually, to obliterate in our minds, the distinction between sacred and profane, formal and informal, fitting and unfitting.  He seeks to darken or blot out the manifestation of the heavenly hierarchy in the earthly distinctions of sacred ministers and their complementary but non-interchangeable roles.  He seeks to persuade us — particularly the clergy — that the liturgy is not the font and apex of the Christian life, but only one means among many for advancing a “Christian agenda.”

The devil knows he cannot prevent some advancement of the Christian faith, but he is well aware that nothing comes close to the liturgy’s power for hallowing the Name of God and establishing His kingdom in our midst, giving us our daily nourishment, and moving us to the forgiveness of sins and the avoidance of sins. In truth, liturgy is an end in itself because it is God’s peculiar possession and makes us His peculiar possession. If the devil can convince us that liturgy is not an end in itself, but rather, that it is a helpful tool we should manipulate for ulterior ends, then he has already won half the battle for souls. He has shaken our fundamental orientation to the heavenly Jerusalem and the kingdom that will have no end.

One of the great strengths of the traditional Latin liturgy is that it leaves nothing to the will or imagination of the priest (and the same may be said of every minister in the sanctuary). It choreographs his moves, dictates his words, shapes his mind and heart to itself, to make it utterly clear that it is Christ who is acting in and through him.  In the words of the Psalmist: “Know ye that the Lord he is God: he made us, and not we ourselves. We are his people and the sheep of his pasture” (Psa 99:3). Sheep are to follow the lead of their shepherd. The clergy is not and will never be the first principle of the liturgy; as St. Thomas Aquinas says with sobering humility, the priest or other cleric is an “animate instrument” of the Eternal High Priest: “Holy orders does not constitute a principal agent, but a minister and a certain instrument of divine operation.” Ministers are like rational hammers or chisels or saws, by which a greater artisan will accomplish His work of sanctification, while conferring on them the immense dignity of resting in His hand and partaking of His action.

[…] The clergy are privileged tools, to be sure, but they are still tools; and the liturgy remains the work of Christ, the High Craftsman, the carpenter of the ark of the covenant, the architect of the heavenly Jerusalem, the New Song and its cantor. In its external form, in text and music and ceremonial, the liturgy should luminously proclaim that it is the work of Christ and His Church, not the product of a charismatic individual or a grassroots community.

[S]ince free choice is antithetical to liturgy as a fixed ritual received from our forebears and handed down faithfully to our successors, choice tends rather to be a principle of distraction, dilution, or dissolution in the liturgy than of its well-being. The same critique may be given of all of the ways in which the new liturgy permits the celebrant an indeterminate freedom of speech, bodily bearing, and movement. Such voluntarism strikes at the very essence of liturgy, which is a public, objective, formal, solemn, and common prayer, in which all Christians are equally participants, even when they are performing irreducibly distinct acts. The prayer of Christians belongs to everyone in common, which means it cannot belong to anyone in particular. The moment a priest invents something that is not common, he sets himself up as a clerical overlord vis-à-vis the people, who must now submit not to a rule of Christ and the Church, but to the arbitrary rule of this individual.

Go to this link to listen to or download the audio of the entire lecture. (Read more.)

St. Michael's Lent

From Unveiling the Apocalypse:

According to the biblical chronology established by St. Bede the Venerable (who was made a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIII in 1899), we can determine that this period of the unbinding of Satan occurred at the end of the Sabbath Millennium discussed by the Early Church Fathers - which consisted of a prophetic week of millennia beginning from the biblical date of Creation. So Pope Leo XIII's vision of the convergence of a host of demons upon the Eternal City of Rome directly parallels the armies of Satan surrounding the camp of the saints at the end of the thousand years described in Rev 20:

When the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, in order to gather them for battle; they are as numerous as the sands of the sea. (Rev 20:7-8)

(For a more in-depth analysis, see the recent posts The Sign of Jonah and the Binding of Satan, Pope Leo XIII and the Unbinding of Satan, and Our Lady of Knock and the Opening of the Sealed Book.)

We have already noted how the 2017 solar eclipse occurs 40 days before the Jewish feast of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), on 29th/30th September, 2017. According to Jewish tradition, the month of Elul marks a 40-day period of repentance before the feast of Yom Kippur, and was the time during which Moses spent 40 days on Mount Sinai after the incident of the Golden Calf, in order to prepare for the reception of the second set of tablets containing the Decalogue.

Given the fact that the date of Yom Kippur this year falls on the feast of St. Michael and the Archangels (Michaelmas), there is yet another disparate period of 40 days of repentance coming into play around the time of the solar eclipse, this time rooted in a long-standing Catholic tradition. Although it is not widely celebrated today, there is a custom in Catholicism dating back to the Middle Ages known as St. Michael's Lent, which was a 40-day period of fasting in preparation for the feast of Michaelmas, lasting from the Solemnity of the Assumption on 15th August to Michaelmas on 29th September. We should note that while the period of St. Michael's Lent actually extends to 45 days, it is still held to be a symbolic 40-day fast in keeping with Lent itself. If we are to count 40 days back from Yom Kippur/Michaelmas on 29th-30th September this year, we arrive at the date of the solar eclipse itself on the Feast of Our Lady of Knock, 21st August, 2017, rather than the Solemnity of the Assumption.

While the practice of St. Michael's Lent has largely fallen out of use today (being kept only by a few Franciscan groups), it was vastly more popular in medieval times. The most famous adherent of St. Michael's Lent was St. Francis of Assisi, who practised this custom annually. Indeed, St. Francis received his stigmata while he was on spiritual retreat to observe St. Michael's Lent on Mount La Verna (Alverna) with three of his Franciscan brothers. The Stigmatization of St. Francis occurred when he received a vision of a crucified seraph, and although the exact date was not stipulated by his earliest chroniclers, it was said to have taken place around the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross on 14th September, 1224, just two years before his death. The Stigmatization of St. Francis was commemorated in a feast day of its own on 17th September, before being removed from the General Calendar in 1969. However, as we shall see, there is good reason to believe that St. Francis actually received the stigmata on the 15th of September - the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows (which commemorates when the Blessed Virgin partook of the suffering of her Son). (Read more.)