Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Zeal for Your House Consumes Me: On Hairy Knees and Bra Straps

How true is this?!!!

Zeal for Your House Consumes Me: On Hairy Knees and Bra Straps: I know this is the South. I know this is summer therefore the temperatures are analagous to those in the jungle. I know we've come through...

Friday, August 19, 2011

Liturgical Renewal as Envisioned by Vatican II

I want to highly recommend an article in the August-September 2011 issue of Inside the Vatican magazine. It was written by Justin Soutar and its full title is "Missale Romanum, Third Edition: Liturgical Renewal as Envisioned by Vatican II."

Mr. Soutar provides one of the best explanations that I have seen to date about the Missale Romanum that we will begin using the First Sunday of Advent this year.  The entire article is well worth the read; however, here is one excerpt:

"In the last 45 years, the sweeping liturgical and other reforms of Vatican II have been generally misinterpreted as implying a radical change in the nature of the Mass and of the Church.  Celebration of the liturgy in Latin, strict adherence to the prescribed rubrics, the concept of the Mass as sacrifice, and the dignity of the priesthood (in the case of the liturgy)--the Church as the Bride of Christ with infallible teaching authority, preserving and handing on the deposit of faith (in the case of the Church)--all of these have become old-fashioned, 'pre-Vatican II ideas, replaced with an 'anything goes' mentality in 'the spirit of Vatican II.'  The Mass is no longer seen as the Church's worship offered to God but as a celebration of human togetherness subject to the whims of the local community.  Similarly, Vatican II transformed the Church from a monarchy into a democracy, so it's now up to the individual Catholic to believe and live as he pleases, regardless of official Church doctrine and laws.  This unfortunate heresy known as 'the spirit of Vatican II' has done catastrophic damage to the faith of millions of Catholics.  It has even spawned an opposite myth adhered to by some traditionalist Catholics that the entire Second Vatican Council was heretical and its reforms null and void."
Elsewhere in his article, Mr. Soutar reminds us, as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, "that we're supposed to worship God the way He wants to be worshiped, not the way we want to worship Him.  This is because liturgy is not our work but our participation in God's work of redemption."

A truly wonderful article!

Justin Soutar is the Catholic author of forty-plus published articles on pro-life issues, the Pope & his message, American politics and elections, terrorism, the Middle East, and other topics in a wide variety of publications, both online and in print.


Sunday, August 7, 2011

"What The World Needs Now Is..."


In his 1931 “social” encyclical Quadragesimo anno,  Pope Pius XI wrote:

“Wherefore,” to use the words of Our Predecessor, “if human society is to be healed, only a return to Christian life and institutions will heal it.” For this alone can provide effective remedy for that excessive care for passing things that is the origin of all vices; and this alone can draw away men’s eyes, fascinated by and wholly fixed on the changing things of the world, and raise them toward Heaven. Who would deny that human society is in most urgent need of this cure now?

Minds of all, it is true, are affected almost solely by temporal upheavals, disasters, and calamities. But if we examine things critically with Christian eyes, as we should, what are all these compared with the loss of souls? Yet it is not rash by any means to say that the whole scheme of social and economic life is now such as to put in the way of vast numbers of mankind most serious obstacles which prevent them from caring for the one thing necessary; namely, their eternal salvation."