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December 14, 2014 Church, Liturgy

Gaudete

Today is Gaudete Sunday in the Roman Church. The name is taken from the first word of the Introit at Mass, which in English reads: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice. Let your forbearance be known to all, for the Lord is near at hand; have no anxiety about anything, but in all things, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God. Lord, you have blessed your land; you have turned away the captivity of Jacob.” A large portion of the text is taken from St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, which is also the Epistle reading for this day.

Unlike the other Sundays and ferias of Advent, the somber and penitential tones are set aside for one of joyous expectation at the coming of the Lord. A parallel moment of interrupting joy can be found in the Byzantine Rite’s use of the same epistle on Palm Sunday, which looks just past the mournfulness of Holy Week to the Resurrection which triumphs over all.

It is in the Incarnation and Resurrection — not clever sermons, whimsical statements of intramundane comfort, and emotive spiritualism — that Catholics are to find true joy. We are not bound together by our participation in the ecclesial version of the United Nations and the rhetoric of social justice, but by our common faith that the Word of God, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, became a little child, suffered, died, and rose again for the life of the world.

November 7, 2014 Liturgy

Lancelot Andrewes Press

Lancelot Andrews Press (LAP) may be the most interesting Christian publishing ventures around. It is an Orthodox press which reprints Catholic books translated by and for Anglicans. Alright, maybe their situation is a bit more “nuanced” than that. After all, they did publish a very detailed (and lovely) edition of The Book of Common Prayer calibrated for use by Western Rite Orthodox (WRO). (However, I see no reason why a Catholic could not use it for private devotion after making a few reasonable modifications to certain texts.) Then there is also the St. Ambrose Prayer Book which, with the exception of the mutilated form of “The Mass of St. Gregory” the WRO enjoy, would be usable by any traditional Catholic.

While I have never been a big user of their books (though I own a few and have borrowed some others), I find little reason why a Catholic, understandably ill-disposed toward the Liturgy of the Hours and unprepared to recite either the Breviarium Monasticum (BM) or Breviarium Romanum in Latin, couldn’t pick up LAP’s Monastic Diurnal — a mostly faithful translation of the BM — and begin to recite the traditional daily office. Sure, it may be necessary to find the propers for a couple of feasts that are not properly represented in their full doctrinal maturity (e.g., December 8 for the Immaculate Conception), but that’s a minor matter in the grand scheme of things. Once familiarity with the diurnal is accomplished, then there is always their much more challenging, but exceedingly rich, Monastic Matins edition to add to one’s daily rule of prayer. Some might point out the St. Michael’s Abbey Latin/English edition of the Diurnale Monasticum as a superior option for Catholics. To some extent they would be right, though one advantage of the LAP edition is that it presents the full monastic office as it stood prior to the needless abbreviations inflicted upon it in the 1960s.

October 29, 2014 Liturgy

Cross-Ecclesial Liturgical Participation

I am pressed for time, so you get another “whimsical” post.

October 27, 2014 Eastern Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Church, Liturgy

Missing East

Given the heavier nature of the previous three posts, I thought I would post something more relaxed while also striving to answer a question that several people have posed to me over the years, namely, “Don’t you miss the Orthodox liturgy?” (Admittedly, this question has been pitched in various ways, some more “polemical” than others.) That question, when it comes from the Orthodox, is usually bound up with their not-incorrect sense that the Church of Rome, at this point in her storied and sometimes tumultuous history, is by and large a liturgical wasteland with only a handful oases to sustain the faithful.

October 26, 2014 Liturgy

Feast of Christ the King

To all of my readers, I wish a blessed Feast of Christ the King. On this day many of us are accustomed to exalting Him as all of the Angels and Saints in Heaven do continuously. Perhaps, given the times, it would be wise for us to meditate on how the world saw our King when He took the form of a servant to deliver us all from the bondage of sin.

Below is a prayer to Christ the King which, prior to the disciplinary reforms of the 1960s, carried a plenary indulgence under the usual conditions.

O Jesus Christ,
I acknowledge Thee as universal King.
All that has been made,
has been created for Thee.
Exercise all Thy rights over me.
I renew my baptismal vows,
renouncing Satan, his pomps and his works;
and I promise to live as a good Christian.
In particular do I pledge myself to labor,
to the best of my ability,
for the triumph of the rights of God and Thy Church.

Divine Heart of Jesus,
to Thee do I proffer my poor services,
laboring that all hearts may acknowledge Thy Sacred Kingship,
and that thus the reign of Thy peace
be established throughout the whole universe.

Amen.

October 22, 2014 Liturgy

Celebrating the Kingship of Christ

With this Sunday being the traditional day on which the Feast of Christ the King is celebrated, I thought it would be good to dedicate part of a series of pieces I am composing to the liturgical wreck-o-vation which was visited upon this great solemnity after the Second Vatican Council. Professor Peter Kwasniewski has beaten me to the punch, however.

So, let me encourage you to click on over to Rorate Caeli and read his interesting piece, “Should the Feast of Christ the King Be Celebrated in October or November?” From the post:

The very first expression of the Kingship of Christ over man is found in the natural moral law that comes from God Himself; the highest expression of His kingship is the sacred liturgy, where material elements and man’s own heart are offered to God in union with the divine Sacrifice that redeems creation. Today, we are witnessing the auto-demolition of the Church on earth, certainly in the Western nations, as both the faithful and their shepherds run away and hide from the reality of the Kingship of Christ, which places such great demands on our fallen nature and yet promises such immense blessings in time and eternity. The relentless questioning of basic moral doctrine (especially in the area of marriage and family), the continual watering down of theology and asceticism, the devastation of the liturgy itself—all these are so many rejections of the authority of God and of His Christ.

September 12, 2014 Liturgy

Veni, Vidi, Deus Vicit

Today, on the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary, we remember the 331st anniversary of the Battle of Vienna where Jan III Sobieski, King of Poland, led the combined forces of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to defeat the Ottoman Empire and once again save Europe from darkness. Because Sobieski had entrusted his kingdom and troops to the Blessed Virgin, Pope Innocent IX placed the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary on the General Roman Calendar in 1684. Originally assigned to the Sunday in the Octave of the Nativity of the Mother of God, St. Pius X fittingly transferred the feast to the day the Battle of Vienna was won. During the engagement, the elite Polish troops known as the husaria sang the Bogurodzica, an ancient Polish hymn. The following is an English translation:

Virgin, Mother of God, God-famed Mary!
Ask Thy Son, our Lord, God-named Mary,
To have mercy upon us and hand it over to us!
Kyrie eleison!

Son of God, for Thy Baptist’s sake,
Hear the voices, fulfill the pleas we make!
Listen to the prayer we say,
For what we ask, give us today:
Life on earth free of vice;
After life: paradise!
Kyrie eleison!

July 24, 2014 Eastern Catholicism, Liturgy

A Note on Latinizations

Today is the Feast of St. Charbel Makhluf, a Maronite monk known for his life of contemplative prayer and Eucharistic Adoration. Were he alive today and inclined to visit certain “Eastern Catholic” or “Byzantine Catholic” websites, he might be surprised to learn that piety toward our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament should not be emulated by Christians of the East, but rather reviled as a “Latinization.” That at least is the fashionable opinion of some Internet loudmouths who stumbled upon Eastern Christianity the day before yesterday and have now anointed themselves adjudicators of the “authentic” when it comes to the theology, spirituality, and liturgy of the Eastern churches in communion with Rome. They’re an obnoxious lot, but it seems their numbers may be on the rise as more and more boutique religious consumers, already bored with the fruits of Summorum Pontificum, seek ever more exotic and mysterious rituals to dabble in before either growing wise to their shallowness or, as has already happened with some notable liturgical fetishists out there, exiting the Catholic Church altogether. A large part of me wants to say, “Good riddance!,” but charity compels me to still hope they’ll recover some sense of what it means to be a Christian once their incense high wears off.