Post #87

Topics: Litany of the Week: Litany of Loreto....Poem: By James Spencer....
Impovershed Landscape: For Whom the Bells Toll Not....Anti-Witchcraft Catholic:
May Become Saint....Picture of Holy Mass: His Excellency Bishop James D. Conley...It Just Makes Sense: Bishop Promulgates Norms for Tabernacle Placement

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Litany of the Week

Litany of Loreto ("Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary") - Litaniae Lauretanae

Recently while visiting a cemetery I found, in my mother's old 1950's Marian Missal, a beautiful Litany for the Faithful Departed which I prayed for my parents, my relatives and all lying in repose. Note that the missal stated that this litany was for private use only (and is not one of the official litanies). Ever since blog contributor Larry Bethel urged us to pray the Litany of Saints for Rogation Days (see Post #78) I have been fascinated with the different Litanies. I find them to be beautiful, meditative and edifying. Venite Missa Est! will feature the various litanies over the coming weeks. Enjoy (and pray!)

Litany of Loreto

Lord, have mercy on us. (Christ have mercy on us.)

Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, hear us. (Christ graciously hear us.)

God, the Father of heaven, (have mercy on us.)
God the Son, Redeemer of the world, (have mercy on us.)

God the Holy Ghost, (have mercy on us.)

Holy Trinity, one God, (have mercy on us.)

Holy Mary, (pray for us).....response repeated until break below

Holy Mother of God,

Holy Virgin of virgins,

Mother of Christ,

Mother of the Church Mother of divine grace,

Mother most pure,

Mother most chaste,

Mother inviolate,

Mother undefiled,

Mother most amiable,

Mother most admirable,

Mother of good counsel,

Mother of our Creator,

Mother of our Savior,

Virgin most prudent,

Virgin most venerable,

Virgin most renouned,

Virgin most powerful,

Virgin most merciful,

Virgin most faithful,

Mirror of justice,
Seat of wisdom,

Cause of our joy,

Spiritual vessel,

Vessel of honor,

Singular vessel of devotion,

Mystical rose,

Tower of David,

Tower of ivory,

House of gold,

Ark of the covenant,

Gate of heaven,

Morning star,

Health of the sick,
Refuge of sinners,

Comforter of the afflicted,

help of Christians,

Queen of Angels,

Queen of Patriarchs,

Queen of Prophets,

Queen of Apostles,

Queen of Martyrs,

Queen of Confessors,
Queen of Virgins,

Queen of all Saints,

Queen conceived without original sin,

Queen assumed into heaven,

Queen of the most holy Rosary.

Queen of the family,

Queen of Peace,

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, (spare us, O Lord.)

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, (graciously hear us O Lord.)

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, (have mercy on us.)

Pray for us, O holy Mother of God. (That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.)

Let us pray.

Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord God, unto us Thy servants, that we may rejoice in continual health of mind and body; and, by the glorious intercession of Blessed Mary ever Virgin, may be delivered from present sadness, and enter into the joy of Thine eternal gladness. Through Chrsit our Lord. (Amen.)

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By James Spencer

Plump little worm on your moistened clod,
Why do you so cower and cling, and fear a fall to that placid pool?
What but ignorance could hold you back? Let me speak to you:
Become a meal for that gaudy trout and you’ll be a part of him!
You might soon be a splash of white pure on his ventral fin,
Or a bright red spot, or a purple ring, there on his brilliant side.
But even if you’d never be more than one of his worm-like markings,
You’d still be raised unthinkably high up nature’s unscalable ladder.
So jump, little worm, and do jump quickly! What I say cannot be wrong,
For as I’m now urging you, so God once urged me.

--- James B. Spencer, 1951

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IMPOVERISHED LANDSCAPE

For Whom the Bells Toll Not
June 2009By R. Kenton Craven

The New Oxford Review
Dr. R. Kenton Craven describes himself as a scholar-in-exile in Sparta, Tennessee.

When I awoke as a boy, it was always to bells; first to the slow, dipodic clanging of the switch engine bells on the Norfolk and Western Line, the main yard of which ran past our house and carried millions of tons of freight and coal, troop and passenger trains, and shrouded armaments for war. No matter the time of day or night, the bells were there, a part of consciousness as sure as the fog and drizzle of the Appalachian valleys. Then, from the Spanish gothic bell tower of Sacred Heart, the lesser bell rang out the Angelus, serving notice to the world that the Word had become flesh and dwelt among us, calling us to kneel and pray.

At Mass the triple hand bells I rang insisted on the greatest happening in the universe, and they echoed in the stone of the sanctuary, a place where bells said, "Awake! Awake to these Mysteries!" At Easter, when the Gloria was sung for the first time since Ash Wednesday, we rose exulting as two bell-ringers were lifted off their feet, pulling hard on the bell ropes, and the great bells pealed out the news that He is risen.

On school mornings, Sister Innocentia stood in the school door and rang the large hand bell, which must have reminded her of school and her own youth in Germany. And, a special memory: One morning my mother and I were on the way to church when every train and church bell (and steam whistle) sounded together. I looked to her in fear and amazement; she explained through her tears, "The war is over!" Bells permeated my existence then: life meant bells; church meant bells; bells called me to the mystery of things.

A world without bells was unimaginable, but in the grim modern process of unimagining, the unimaginable happened when I wasn’t looking. The railroad locomotives and their bells disappeared, to be replaced by the rude blatting of diesel horns; and churches gave up their real bells for electronic chimes. Bell towers were abandoned as unsafe or primitive, and new suburban churches simply ignored 1,500 years of Church history, from the times when the monks of Ireland marked the liturgical hours first with hand bells and then with larger ones, which they had to bury when the Danes came. From something like cow bells — which have also mostly vanished, soon to be replaced by microchips — the monks’ hand bells developed into the great cast bells that began to define the sacred time of Europe and beyond. Then, for more than a thousand years, Europe was not only the Faith, it was the daily sense of the hours marked by prayer, and even the humblest of churches strove to have the best and most melodious of bells. Bells meant prayer; bells meant the holy; bells meant the Church universal; and more, to borrow a phrase from Belloc, they meant "the physical network upon which the soul depends."

Testimony to that need is ancient. Human beings have been striking wood and metal as far back as known, doubtless for various purposes, but most often in connection with religion. Some of the bells from the Orient seem clunky and have little tone. Apparently, the first hand bells used by Irish monks were little more than cow bells. But monasticism, as it came out of the desert and into Europe, required larger bells, and a proud art of great sophistication grew. At present in the West, only a few major church bell-makers exist, mostly in Poland and Russia, though Verdin’s and McShane continue the tradition in the U.S.

When one reads the history and literature of the Christian West from the sixth century onward, one is struck by the omnipresence of bells. As bell-making grew with Christian art and architecture, bells grew larger and the making of many great tones required both wizardry and tonnage, until the point that a bell commissioned by the Tsars weighed 220 tons, and required a warning before it was rung to keep the populace from thinking the apocalypse was upon them. (By comparison, the largest church bell in the West, in Cologne, weighs 27 tons; the great bell of St. Peter’s, nine tons). Simultaneously, through the cunning of metallurgists, bells were developed to exact tones, and groups of bells became veritable orchestras. Bell-ringers became prized as artists, and were even invested with the minor order of ostiarius. Today, here and there, the great bells ring out the monastic hours with soul-moving force, as at Abbaye Fontgombault, where the Benedictines keep the ancient rule and liturgy, prompting one visitor, then-Cardinal Ratzinger, to say, "Now that is the Catholic Church!"

Despite some silly controversies in the 16th century over the "baptism of the bells," instigated by those who hate "the physical network on which the soul depends," Catholics have felt the mystery of the bells to be tied up with the mysteries of the Faith, which gave rise to the practice of the blessing and even naming of bells, for one blesses and names what is beloved of the soul.

In 1991, I awoke in Kuwait to the sounds of a dozen mosques roaring that Allah is Awesome! and all must come to prayer. The shock ran up and down my spine. In several countries, I lived six years among the Muslims and daily felt the powerful presence of a serious religion that knows that the consciousness of man requires constant reminders of prayer. Even in the Arab countries that permit a few churches enclosed by walls, no bells are permitted. Islam instinctively understands the religious truth that time must be defined as sacred time, for their muezzins call their faithful to prayer five times a day, wailing away even during a sermon by Pope John Paul II. No phony ecumenism for them; they know that minarets and bells speak different and absolutely opposed languages.

The Protestant Reformers sensed it too, and so Zwingli and others were much exercised to ban them altogether from the bleak Protestant landscape. So, too, atheists and humanists. During the French Revolution, the ideologues who murdered thousands of priests and nuns and sacked the churches and convents did not neglect to melt nationalized church bells into metal for cannon. In the U.S., fellow ideologue Thomas Paine wanted to eliminate those Romish bells because they meant Europe — and Europe, of course, meant the Faith. Later, the rage of revolution would turn against the ten thousand bells of Russia — but about that, more anon.

After Vatican II, even the hand bells of the Mass disappeared from our sanctuaries, as the boundaries of the sanctuaries themselves dissolved into the misty Land of Nuance. I have heard of Catholic priests, the sort who like to be called Mister or Presider, telling their flocks to eschew the Sign of the Cross as potentially offensive to "those of other belief systems," and I suspect that they, too, would prefer the electronic chimes set to the Harry Potter theme or Buddhist gongs. Shall we call it the New Puritanism? As the New Oxford Review’s Michael S. Rose demonstrates with great clarity in Ugly as Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces and How We Can Change Them Back Again (re-released in paperback this year), American neo-Protestant theology translates churches into suburban meeting halls without aspiring bell towers or bells. No bells, no calling of souls to the highest.

Yet Christian bells do call to us. Dolefully, joyfully, peremptorily, insistently, grandly, slowly, powerfully, undeniably. A bell requires silence; it speaks out of the silence that surrounds it. A bell must be rung with human hands, and ring into something, and it depends on a landscape and a faithful body of hearers for its fulfillment. In a Catholic world, grace flows through God’s created things, not the least of which is sound.

Recently, I have been re-reading with great pleasure the careful fictions of Maurice Baring who, like all Catholic novelists of the 20th century, faced the problem of how to bring the reader into contact with a Catholic sense of reality without straying into didacticism. In one of his best novels, Cat’s Cradle, in which Providence and chance often seem to trade places unexpectedly, the very secular English woman Blanche Clifford marries into an Italian Catholic family, unfortunately to a cruel and despotic Count. The setting is not propitious for her awaking to grace. But early in the novel, the catholicized Roman landscape momentarily breaks in upon her selfish preoccupations: "All at once the church bells began to ring. She seemed to be in a crystal kingdom of ringing sound. The man behind the donkey stopped and took off his hat. It was the Ave Maria."

Suddenly, all around her, people are silent and immobile. And hardly had the Angelus ceased, when she heard the sound of another bell:

In the distance of the dark street she saw lighted torches waving and coming towards her...and then the sound of many voices.... People crying "Il San­tissimo! Il Santissimo!" Those who were indoors snatched lamps from the table — lamps as old in shape as those of the Vestal Virgins, or the Wise and Foolish Virgins — and the whole street was bright with a sudden spontaneous illumination. It was a priest bearing the Blessed Sacrament to a sick man to give him the Viaticum. Beside him was a boy ringing a bell....

The crowd follows, kneels, and breaks into a Te Deum at the sick man’s house. At the time, the scene seems to make only a brief, aesthetic impression on Blanche, but it heralds a great and long spiritual struggle as she resists grace time and again. Self-obsessed, worshipping her own beauty and charm, Blanche leaves the insanely jealous Guido and takes on the task of nursing her devoutly Catholic Uncle Charles in Spain. As Charles weakens and makes his peace with all around him, Blanche looks out the window. Above the sounds of the noisy street, she "heard the sound of a bell, and saw the priest walking in his white stole, and by his side was a boy carrying a taper; and the years rolled back for her, and she was once more in a narrow street near the Palazzo Fabrini, looking on a procession.... She was a different woman now — the ghost of the Blanche of those days...." Uncle Charles is "shriven, houseled, and annealed," and at the end smiles and says, Eccoti! — "There you are!" — quoting a moment of divine surprise from a play.

Finally, guided through more years by a holy priest, it is Blanche’s turn. Lying ill, she asks for the last sacraments, and "she thought of three things: the procession of the Viaticum she had seen years before in Rome, the death of her Uncle Charles in Seville, and his last words, and the evening when Rose Mary [her step-daughter] was given the last Sacraments in Mansfield Street.... The priest talked of a ‘sick call’; she felt that it was a call that had been sounding all her life: she was now answering it." The sounds of bells had been a grace that called her from one way of life to another, and through them Baring is able to preach more than a dozen sermons.

Years before he wrote his novels, but after his conversion, Baring had written his autobiography, The Puppet Show of Memory, a brilliant portrait of the years before the First World War and his life as a journalist in them. The concluding chapters give us priceless portraits of Russia before the revolution, one of which is the birth of a bell in a Christian culture. The full portrait requires reading to get the full flavor, but "on the day the bell was to be," Baring finds the entire village jammed into the bazaar for the ceremony, in which two priests and a deacon lead the crowd in a majestic procession from the church accompanied by plainsong in deep Russian bass voices.

They surround a giant open furnace where the molten metal is to be blessed with holy water and a Te Deum. At the climax of two hours of fervent prayer, the crowd asks Baring to toss in a piece of silver just as the flow of the metal begins in a sheet of flame. "The bell was born. I hoped the silver rouble which I threw into it, and which now formed part of it, would sweeten its utterance, and that it would never have to sound the alarm which signifies battle, murder, and sudden death. A vain hope — and idle wish."

In a few years, Baring’s suspicions were more than realized and, throughout Russia, churches were destroyed or turned to other uses, and the ten thousand bells of Rus silenced by the forces that hate God and truth. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, already new bells were being cast, and old bells that had been hidden were brought back joyfully. In some places the bells had been buried, but when the people dug for them, they found the remains of murdered counter-revolutionaries, and left the bells with them.

Catholicism will not unashamedly live its full cultural life again until a Catholic people reclaims its ancient liberty in the building of church towers, and the making and hearing of bells that remember the monastic hours and the Angelus. In England and many European countries, the landscape rings not with bells, but with the raucous Islamic call to prayer. In America we have neither; we have an insidious modernist denial of the thunderous pealing our bodies and souls need.

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Anti-Witchcraft Catholic May Become Saint Posted
CISA (Catholic Information Service for Africa) News 14 July 2009 http://www.cisanewsafrica.org/story.asp?ID=4016

Pretoria — A Catholic who was killed 19 years ago for rejecting his people's belief in witchcraft could become South Africa's first saint.

The Diocese of Tzaneen has completed the first phase of the cause for beatification and canonization of the Servant of God Benedict Daswa. The phase took five years to complete.

The final documents addressed to Archbishop Angelo Amato SDB, Prefect of the Congregation for Causes of Saints, were signed on July 2 by Bishop Hugh Slattery MSC, Bishop of Tzaneen, Sr Sally Duigan OLSH, Daughter of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart and Chancellor of the Diocese, Fr Andre Bohas MSC, Postulator of the Cause and Fr Eddie O'Neill SDB, the Promoter of Justice.

The documents consist of over 850 pages of testimonies of reliable witnesses to the life and death of the Servant of God. The original copy, which was sealed first, remains in the archives of the Diocese of Tzaneen. The transcript copy and public copy were then sealed and are to be taken to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome, through the the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop James Green.

The Transcript and Public Copies will remain sealed until the Congregation for the Causes of Saints approves a Roman Postulator to proceed with the next phase of the process. Information about the Servant of God and the Cause may now be made known to the public.

It is thought that Benedict Daswa led a holy life and became a genuine martyr for the faith.
The next stage will be to prepare prayer cards and a novena to enable people to pray for favours through the intercession of the Servant of God.

A short biography and DVD will be produced to make Benedict Daswa more widely known here in South Africa and in other African countries, as a role model for all and a great witness to the faith.

According to a biographical note published by the Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference, Benedict grew up in a traditionalist family who belonged to the small Lemba tribe who live mainly among the Venda people in the Limpopo Province. He became a Catholic while training to become a primary school teacher.

Benedict soon realized that witchcraft was against his Catholic faith. From then on in his private life and also in public he took a strong stand against witchcraft because he said it led to the killing of innocent people accused of witchcraft activities.

He also rejected the use of muti or medicines for protection against evil or for success in sport or other activities. It was this stand against witchcraft which eventually led to his death. A few days after refusing to give money for the purpose of smelling out witches, he was stoned and bludgeoned to death on February 2, 1990. He was just four months short of his 44th birthday.

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Picture:Holy Mass Celebrated by His Excellency Bishop James D. Conley
Submitted by Luke Headley

Bloggers note: The following picture is a photo of a photo but none the less shows the awesome beauty of Holy Mass. How fortunate we are...

Formerly of the Wichita diocese, His Excellency Bishop James D. Conley of Denver CO. celebrated Holy Mass at St. Anthony, Wichita, Sunday June 21 in the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite.

Previously as Monsignor, Bishop Conley served St. Anthony as both celebrant (alternating with Fr. Jarrod Lies) and as liaison for the EFLR community of St. Anthony to Bishop Jackels.

Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M Cap., ordained the Most Rev. James D. Conley as the new auxiliary bishop on May 30, 2008 the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, at Denver’s Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.

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Just for Fun

Burns and Allen

Though I was born in 1961, I have a fondness for the popular culture of America from the forties including such classic songs as I'm Beginning to See the Light by Kitty Kallen and the Harry James Orchestra, to the Burns and Allen comedy duo.

Burns and Allen, an American comedy duo consisting of George Burns and his wife, Gracie Allen, worked together as a comedy team in vaudeville, films, radio. and television and achieved substantial success over three decades from the mid twenties to the late 50's.

Enjoy this....just for fun.

Gracie Allen: "My mother said I used to be a twin."

George Burns: "Oh yeah?"

Gracie: "Yes......when I was two."

Gracie Allen: "When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.”

George: Stop![music stops]Gracie, how is your cousin?
Gracie: You mean the one who died?
George: Yeah.
Gracie: Oh, he's fine now.

Gracie Allen "They laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went right ahead and built it."

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Devotion to My Immaculate Heart

Excerpt: by Sr. Lucia dos Santos

http://www.ewtn.com/fatima/apparitions/third_secret/fatima.htm#3rd

Submitted by Micheal O'Neil

Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear.

The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent. This vision lasted but an instant. How can we ever be grateful enough to our kind heavenly Mother, who had already prepared us by promising, in the first Apparition, to take us to Heaven. Otherwise, I think we would have died of fear and terror.
Sr. Lucia dos Santos

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It Just Makes Sense
Bishop Promulgates Norms for Tabernacle Placement
By Bishop John M. D’Arcy, Diocese of Fort Wayne- South Bend
http://www.diocesefwsb.org/COMMUNICATIONS/statements.htm

To Priests, Deacons, Religious, and to All the Faithful,
The presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament is at the center of our faith and of the devotional life of our Catholic people.

In recent years, the place of the tabernacle in our churches has become a source of controversy. This should not be. The Eucharist, whether we are referring to its celebration or to the place of reservation, should always be a means of unity and communion, and never of division.

The place of the tabernacle in our church should reflect our faith in the real presence of Christ, and should always be guided by church documents.

My experience is that our people, with their instinct of faith, have always desired that the tabernacle be central and visible. They find it confusing when the tabernacle in their churches is not visible, and if possible, central.

Because of my responsibility to foster the devotional life of our people, and to keep it sound, I have asked our Office of Worship to prepare norms for the placement and design of the tabernacle in this diocese. These norms were brought before the Presbyteral Council, the Liturgical Commission and the Environment and Arts Committee. Suitable refinements and improvements were prepared.

These norms are promulgated to the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend on June 14, 2009, the feast of Corpus Christi, the Body and Blood of the Lord. They will be effective on Aug. 4, 2009, the feast of St. John Mary Vianney, the patron saint of priests, in whose honor the present Year for Priests has been dedicated by the Holy Father Benedict XVI.

I urge all priests to follow these norms carefully and completely, and most importantly — to foster devotion to the Blessed Sacrament.

Sincerely yours in our Lord,

Most Reverend John M. D’Arcy