Liturgy Wars: What’s Latin Got To Do With It?
Who would have expected the Glorified Body of Christ, the eternal perfected Body, to include the horrible wounds inflicted on the flesh-and-blood human body here on Earth?
Eucharistic Adoration: Sitting at the Feet of the Lord
Most of us can probably identify with Martha: always “worried about many things”, and too distracted to notice the Lord. Adoration is a great opportunity to give our “inner Martha” a rest and, like Mary, choose “the better part”. After all, what is Eucharistic Adoration, if not watching and listening at the feet of Jesus?
Finding the Future in the Past: Why The Latin Mass is not Going Away
The scene is a parish church. A congregation has assembled for Sunday Mass. The opening hymn begins with a grand flourish. The celebrant processes into the church amid alleluias and mighty blasts from the organ. We reach a mini-climax. The music ends. Then, there is a moment of silence while the celebrant adjusts his microphone. He smiles. And what […]
Cardinal Sarah was Right: Darmok and Jalod Ad Orientem
Experiences communicate as words cannot, both for humans and fictional extraterrestrials.
Discerning the Body: The Bishops, The Politicians, and The Eucharist
The issue here is not that the politicians in question are politicians per se, it is that that as prominent people they are publicly using their influence to promote things that are gravely sinful. When those responsible for teaching, governing, and sanctifying fail to distinguish the true dimensions of the problem, and fail to govern by allowing those who persist in openly promoting sin to receive communion they are teaching, by their actions, that the Body and Blood of Our Lord is simply not that important.
Who’s really “politicizing” the Body of Christ?
An unusual and unfamiliar expression, “Eucharistic Coherence”, has been showing up on a lot of Catholic websites lately. I’ve written about the abuse of language on more than one occasion in the recent past (here and here, for instance), but this term is not itself abusive, rather it’s intended to expose and correct abuse. It refers […]
The Church’s First Decision and The First Successor to the Apostles: St. Mathias
Not everyone, it would seem, is pleased with the current Roman Pontiff. If that hadn’t been clear to me already, it would certainly be apparent in many of the comments some of my recent posts (this one and this one, for instance) have received in various online venues. Who would have thought it? Happily, I’m not writing […]
What Do We Do When Our Priest Is A Communist? (Part II)
Our culture has become toxic, and it is actively hostile to Christian belief and practice. Not only that, the toxicity has infected a large part of the institutional Church. What can we do if leaving the Catholic Church itself is not an option?
What Do We Do When Our Priest Is A Communist? (Part I)
“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68) We live in scary times. It looks like our secular institutions in the West are collapsing, to be replaced by mob rule (which really means, as always, a tyranny of the elite who manipulate the mob). More frightening still for Catholics, the […]
Why the Church is not a Granfalloon
The point is that the Church doesn’t exist as a community for the sake of the community itself, it exists to bring us into communion with the Trinitarian God. Even fundamentally good and essential communities such as the family can’t do that.