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I keep forgetting to thank the anonymous donor who, at Christmas, sent to the sacristy Quick Trip gift cards for all the servers. Thank you so very much....I have said prayers for you whoever you are. You are generous and beautiful. Sorry for the belated thanks.
Please pray for Brody Flavin, his family and his grandmother who is on deaths threshold. May God receive her with mercy and in the most expedient way. Brody and his wife Melissa were married in the EFLR at St. Anthony a few years back and are the latest young couple to join the parish. Brody also serves on the altar.
Comments at the end of posts have been enabled again though with moderator permission. I will publish all comments except for the jerk who was spamming the blog with very bad stuff...you know who you are.
Warning! Angry LanguagePlease pray for Brody Flavin, his family and his grandmother who is on deaths threshold. May God receive her with mercy and in the most expedient way. Brody and his wife Melissa were married in the EFLR at St. Anthony a few years back and are the latest young couple to join the parish. Brody also serves on the altar.
Comments at the end of posts have been enabled again though with moderator permission. I will publish all comments except for the jerk who was spamming the blog with very bad stuff...you know who you are.
Given the fact that His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI has again clarified the freedom of priests and the people to request, have and celebrate the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite where ever and whenever they choose (see posting below) I find it troubling that there are still rumblings in the Diocese of Wichita over holy-day masses held in the form of the ancient liturgy...or should I say..the lack of masses.
Quite frankly I am damn angry that we did not have an Ash Wednesday mass. Is it not bad enough that we are forced to hurdle headlong, full throttle, feverishly praying on Sunday mornings for the ridiculous reason that we have to make our time restraint for the next celebration?...leaving us with precious little time for reflection and prayer after mass before the altar is stripped bare? Frankly folks...that makes me mad as hell...tip toeing around the Diocese so as not to wake the sleeping giant in the room...whoever and whatever you perceive the sleeping giant to be.
The Latin Mass community in Wichita gets no notice or mention in The Advance, not much mention in the bulletin, barely a passing nod in our advertisement in the Advance ("the mass in Latin" describes nothing). Why does it seem like the EFLR community is the unwanted stepchild in this diocese? Someone correct me if I am wrong here...if I am off base let me know....but from where I stand, regarding his Holiness' as our staunchest advocate, it looks like we don't have to kowtow to anyone anymore for our RITE and our RIGHT to celebrate what is our spiritual nourishment.
...and now the Necessaries
Please note: St. Anthony Catholic Church is one of two local churchs celebrating the Traditional Latin Mass (EFLR) in the Wichita area. Though this blog is loosely centered around this parish and it's members, Venite Missa Est! is by no means, in any way an official voice of, or for, St. Anthony Parish or the Diocese of Wichita. Venite Missa Est! is strictly a private layman's endeavor.
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Vatican Confirms Freedom of Priests to Celebrate Extraordinary Form
by Damian Thompson
Blogs Editor of the Telegraph Media Group
Good news from Rome: the Vatican has further underlined the freedom of priests to celebrate Mass in the Extraordinary Form whenever they choose. Two important points have been clarified by Ecclesia Dei, which will make it more difficult for the English, Welsh and above all Scottish bishops to stall the implementation of Summorum Pontificum:
1. A priest does NOT have to be approached by a “stable group” of the faithful in order to schedule a PUBLIC celebration of the Extraordinary Form – he may choose to do so, for example, in order to introduce his parishioners to this ancient form of the Roman Rite. Or because it’s his aunt’s birthday. Any reason, really.
2. A Mass in the Extraordinary Form may replace a regularly scheduled Mass in the Ordinary Form.
You can find more details of the Ecclesia Dei ruling here, on the excellent New Liturgical Movement blog. I do hope that priests will be encouraged by this document to exercise their full rights under Summorum Pontificum. I know of several instances in which British bishops are trying to undermine the Pope’s wishes, though I’m not going to go public where it would make the situation worse. But it is common knowledge that the situation is particularly serious is Scotland, where EF Masses are extremely rare and official claims that there is no demand for them need to be scrutinised very carefully, shall we say. More on that later.
Meanwhile, traditionalist priests and seminarians should take heart. Your hour is coming.
St. Scholastica is a wonderful little monastic feast; its celebration is traditionally reserved to the Priorof the monastery. The feast may be especially weighty todayat Clear Creek.
St Scholastica is of course the sister of our Blessed Father St Benedict. As a young girl she was consecrated to God. Her consecration probably inspired St. Benedict to become a monk. St. Benedict's biographer, St. Gregory the Great, said the brother and sister were always of one spirit in God. Once a year St. Scholastica would visit her brother so they could speak together about the things of God for a day. Everyone knows how the last time she went to Monte Cassino, St. Benedict met her in a little house away from the monastery and as the day was coming to an end, she begged him to stay longer and when he refused she prayed our Lord to start such a storm that St Benedict could not get back to Monte Cassino. As they say, woman's will is God's will and right away a downpour started. So the two passed the night speaking of the joys of heaven, St. Gregory wrote, and in praise of God until the next day when each went back to their respective monasteries.
As you know we have new beautiful bells which were given to us by a monastery in France. They were already blessed and anointed and are ready to go in their temporary little bell tower. However, we did not ring them for Holy mass today because we wanted to save the first ringing for a big event that may take place today. Indeed, rumor has it that Clear Creek priory will very, very soon be erected as an abbey. This, by the way, would be the fourth monastery that Father Abbot has brought—quite a feat.
What does that mean to become an abbey? As a dependent priory, our superior, our abbot is the abbot of Fontgombault, the monks are all members of the Abbey of Fontgombault. When, the Lord willing, Clear Creek becomes an abbey, we will be autonomous in the sense that this monastery will be on equal footing with all the abbeys of our congregation, including Fontgombault and Solesmes, but of course submitted to the Holy Rule of St. Benedict, the constituions of our Congregation, to the General Chapter of the Abbots of our Congregation and the Holy See. Indeed, let me hasten to say: Don't be afraid, we only want to be all the more faithful to our great heritage from Solesmes and Fontgombault; we only to realize that great, realistic, so balanced, so strong and pure monastic, spiritual, and liturgical tradition on American soil.
So, pray for us monks here that we live up to this dignity, that is, basically to be true monks who seek God as Benedicinte monks, that is, according to the three major criteria St Benedict set forward, that we be zealous for obedience, prayer, and humility. That we be authentic sons of Fontgombault and the Holy Mother Church. That nothing before the love of Christ.
About a day or so after the erection as an abbey, Father Abbot of Fontgombault as founder of this monastery will name Clear Creek's first abbot—of course there is no suspense who will be chosen. An abbatial nomination is a momentous thing, and will have to be confirmed the Abbot of Solesme in the name of the Holy See. That is quickly done in these days of email. All this will have been accomplished privately in the chapter-room, but after confirmation, there will be a public ceremony in the church—with a solemen entry, the new Father Abbot will kneel a moment before the entrance, be incensed, then we will sing the Te Deum as he is escorted to his throne. The new abbot then makes a profession of faith and an oath of fidelity, and automatically receives full jurisdiction over the monastery—over the monks and in a way over guests—something like a bishop, although an abbot does not have episcopal order, he cannot ordain priests for example. He will then receive some insignia like those of the bishop-- the pectoral cross and skull-cap. After the profession of faith, there will be a little ceremony where the monks will make an act of obedience—of allegiance, of fealty really--in the hands of the new abbot. And that's it for now. Our constitutions require that the abbatial blessing take place within three months. That will be a big, big ceremony. The new Father Abbot, once again, will already have his jurisdiction, he will be abbot already but will at the blessing will receive the fullness of his paternal graces, the rest of the insignia of his office--the ring that represents the Abbot's alliance with the monastery, the crozier and mitre that mark him as its shepherd. In the meantime he will choose, again like a bishop, his blazon and his motto. The new abbey also must be provided with blazon and motto.
So that is the big change is in fact: we will have our own abbot. It will mainly be a big change for him, or at least a tremendous responsibility because the Abbot represents Christ for his monks. A Benedictine monastery turns around its abbot. The Abbot is its father, its head and heart. He is like a sacrament of Christ in our midst, an efficient presence and sign of Christ. He will continue to consult Father Abbot of course, but still, he makes the decisions. The buck now stops there.
We monks must make an act of faith, and no longer look on the new Abbot simply as a man. A Benedictine monk exercises his filial relationship with God through his Abbot. According to Dom Delatte, a monk normally is in the relationship with God according to the one he has with his abbot. He wrote: “we shall respect all prelates [all bishops and abbots], but he who is the father of our monastic family and our soul's father, has a special title to our affection.”
So, we are filled with a great joy, of course, at this great event, but here below no joy is without pain. We are all thinking of the Snyman ladies and their injuries. And we think of Fr. de Feydeau who is certainly very close to us on these days. And if it is a great thing to come of age as a monastery, the event has its sadness also, like a boy or a girl going off to found their own home must leave the home they love. Some of us were novices of Fr Abbot way back when we were 22 and he was 42; he guided our first wobbling steps. We won't have continual contacts with him now. He probably won't come here anymore except for the abbatial blessing and hopefully one day for the consecration of church. Like Scholastica we want to say: “don't leave us!” But it's time to grow up. That is the Lord's will, so that is the good. It's full of graces. St Benedict also did eventually have to go back to his monastery and leave St. Scholastica.
This is a big event for all of you also of course. The new Father Abbot will have his full paternal graces for all of you, especially the oblates among you. Let's all work together to make this monastery as well as the community that has formed around us--the parish, the families, the sisters' community--something beautiful for God.
As I said, we did not ring the new bells yet. But a chapter meeting has been announced for noon. So, if you hear them ringing a little after noon, you will know that Clear Creek monastery has become an abbey. The new abbot will be chosen and enthroned later. We will tell you ahead of time so you can be present. Let's go forward under the auspices of on St Scholastic and Our Lady of Lourdes. Deo gratias.
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Ciuseppe Maria Crespi
(1665-1747)
Galleria Sabauda, Turin Italy
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Ciuseppe Maria Crespi
(1665-1747)
Galleria Sabauda, Turin Italy
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Fr Bethel's Sermon at Clear Creek Abbey
St Scholastica, 2010
Submitted by Larry bethel
St Scholastica, 2010
Submitted by Larry bethel
St. Scholastica is a wonderful little monastic feast; its celebration is traditionally reserved to the Priorof the monastery. The feast may be especially weighty todayat Clear Creek.
St Scholastica is of course the sister of our Blessed Father St Benedict. As a young girl she was consecrated to God. Her consecration probably inspired St. Benedict to become a monk. St. Benedict's biographer, St. Gregory the Great, said the brother and sister were always of one spirit in God. Once a year St. Scholastica would visit her brother so they could speak together about the things of God for a day. Everyone knows how the last time she went to Monte Cassino, St. Benedict met her in a little house away from the monastery and as the day was coming to an end, she begged him to stay longer and when he refused she prayed our Lord to start such a storm that St Benedict could not get back to Monte Cassino. As they say, woman's will is God's will and right away a downpour started. So the two passed the night speaking of the joys of heaven, St. Gregory wrote, and in praise of God until the next day when each went back to their respective monasteries.
As you know we have new beautiful bells which were given to us by a monastery in France. They were already blessed and anointed and are ready to go in their temporary little bell tower. However, we did not ring them for Holy mass today because we wanted to save the first ringing for a big event that may take place today. Indeed, rumor has it that Clear Creek priory will very, very soon be erected as an abbey. This, by the way, would be the fourth monastery that Father Abbot has brought—quite a feat.
What does that mean to become an abbey? As a dependent priory, our superior, our abbot is the abbot of Fontgombault, the monks are all members of the Abbey of Fontgombault. When, the Lord willing, Clear Creek becomes an abbey, we will be autonomous in the sense that this monastery will be on equal footing with all the abbeys of our congregation, including Fontgombault and Solesmes, but of course submitted to the Holy Rule of St. Benedict, the constituions of our Congregation, to the General Chapter of the Abbots of our Congregation and the Holy See. Indeed, let me hasten to say: Don't be afraid, we only want to be all the more faithful to our great heritage from Solesmes and Fontgombault; we only to realize that great, realistic, so balanced, so strong and pure monastic, spiritual, and liturgical tradition on American soil.
So, pray for us monks here that we live up to this dignity, that is, basically to be true monks who seek God as Benedicinte monks, that is, according to the three major criteria St Benedict set forward, that we be zealous for obedience, prayer, and humility. That we be authentic sons of Fontgombault and the Holy Mother Church. That nothing before the love of Christ.
About a day or so after the erection as an abbey, Father Abbot of Fontgombault as founder of this monastery will name Clear Creek's first abbot—of course there is no suspense who will be chosen. An abbatial nomination is a momentous thing, and will have to be confirmed the Abbot of Solesme in the name of the Holy See. That is quickly done in these days of email. All this will have been accomplished privately in the chapter-room, but after confirmation, there will be a public ceremony in the church—with a solemen entry, the new Father Abbot will kneel a moment before the entrance, be incensed, then we will sing the Te Deum as he is escorted to his throne. The new abbot then makes a profession of faith and an oath of fidelity, and automatically receives full jurisdiction over the monastery—over the monks and in a way over guests—something like a bishop, although an abbot does not have episcopal order, he cannot ordain priests for example. He will then receive some insignia like those of the bishop-- the pectoral cross and skull-cap. After the profession of faith, there will be a little ceremony where the monks will make an act of obedience—of allegiance, of fealty really--in the hands of the new abbot. And that's it for now. Our constitutions require that the abbatial blessing take place within three months. That will be a big, big ceremony. The new Father Abbot, once again, will already have his jurisdiction, he will be abbot already but will at the blessing will receive the fullness of his paternal graces, the rest of the insignia of his office--the ring that represents the Abbot's alliance with the monastery, the crozier and mitre that mark him as its shepherd. In the meantime he will choose, again like a bishop, his blazon and his motto. The new abbey also must be provided with blazon and motto.
So that is the big change is in fact: we will have our own abbot. It will mainly be a big change for him, or at least a tremendous responsibility because the Abbot represents Christ for his monks. A Benedictine monastery turns around its abbot. The Abbot is its father, its head and heart. He is like a sacrament of Christ in our midst, an efficient presence and sign of Christ. He will continue to consult Father Abbot of course, but still, he makes the decisions. The buck now stops there.
We monks must make an act of faith, and no longer look on the new Abbot simply as a man. A Benedictine monk exercises his filial relationship with God through his Abbot. According to Dom Delatte, a monk normally is in the relationship with God according to the one he has with his abbot. He wrote: “we shall respect all prelates [all bishops and abbots], but he who is the father of our monastic family and our soul's father, has a special title to our affection.”
So, we are filled with a great joy, of course, at this great event, but here below no joy is without pain. We are all thinking of the Snyman ladies and their injuries. And we think of Fr. de Feydeau who is certainly very close to us on these days. And if it is a great thing to come of age as a monastery, the event has its sadness also, like a boy or a girl going off to found their own home must leave the home they love. Some of us were novices of Fr Abbot way back when we were 22 and he was 42; he guided our first wobbling steps. We won't have continual contacts with him now. He probably won't come here anymore except for the abbatial blessing and hopefully one day for the consecration of church. Like Scholastica we want to say: “don't leave us!” But it's time to grow up. That is the Lord's will, so that is the good. It's full of graces. St Benedict also did eventually have to go back to his monastery and leave St. Scholastica.
This is a big event for all of you also of course. The new Father Abbot will have his full paternal graces for all of you, especially the oblates among you. Let's all work together to make this monastery as well as the community that has formed around us--the parish, the families, the sisters' community--something beautiful for God.
As I said, we did not ring the new bells yet. But a chapter meeting has been announced for noon. So, if you hear them ringing a little after noon, you will know that Clear Creek monastery has become an abbey. The new abbot will be chosen and enthroned later. We will tell you ahead of time so you can be present. Let's go forward under the auspices of on St Scholastic and Our Lady of Lourdes. Deo gratias.
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Loving the Eucharist
by Supreme Chaplain Bishop William E. Lori (Knights of Columbus)
Columbia: The Online Edition
http://www.kofc.org/un/eb/en/publications/columbia/detail/549073.html#3
We Must Grow in Understanding of and Reverence for the Gift of the Holy Eucharist
Loving the Eucharist
by Supreme Chaplain Bishop William E. Lori (Knights of Columbus)
Columbia: The Online Edition
http://www.kofc.org/un/eb/en/publications/columbia/detail/549073.html#3
We Must Grow in Understanding of and Reverence for the Gift of the Holy Eucharist
The 23rd installment of Supreme Chaplain Bishop William E. Lori’s faith formation program addresses questions 271-294 of the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Not long ago, a parishioner said to me that she just didn’t see the need to go to Mass every Sunday. “I go to Mass once in a while, when I think it will help me,” she said. Unfortunately, many people who consider themselves faithful Catholics share this attitude, an attitude that is not proportionate to the gift and mystery of the Eucharist.
The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church offers a brief summary of this great mystery of faith: “The Eucharist is the very sacrifice of the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus….” It is not merely a reminder that Christ offered his Body and Blood for our sake; rather, it is that offering. Jesus himself instituted the Eucharist “to perpetuate the sacrifice of the cross throughout the ages until his return in glory” (271). The Eucharist, the heart of the Church’s life, is the banquet and living memorial of Christ’s sacrifice. When we worthily partake of the Eucharist, we participate even now in God’s own life.
THANKSGIVING AND COMMUNION
Gathered with his Apostles, Jesus entrusted the Eucharist to the Church at the Last Supper. At every Mass, the priest repeats and reenacts the words by which the Lord instituted the Eucharist: “Take this and eat it, all of you; this is my Body which will be given for you. … Take this and drink of this, all of you. This is the cup of my Blood, the Blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me” (273).
We hear these words so often, but do we realize their significance?
Since the Eucharist re-presents (makes present again) the death and resurrection of Christ, it contains the entire spiritual wealth of the Church. It brings us into union (communion) with the Trinity and with one another. It puts us in touch with the great liturgy of heaven, that utterly joyous and eternal worship of God for which we were made and for which our hearts long (274, 287).
The more we think about what the Eucharist actually is, the less “optional” it seems! The very names used to describe the Eucharist remind us of its centrality. For example, the word “Eucharist” refers to the thanksgiving we owe to God. The phrase “Holy Mass” speaks to our mission to bring Christ into our daily lives. The Scriptures refer to the Eucharist as the “Breaking of Bread” — a sharing in the Body of the Lord that makes us one. Lastly, “Holy Communion” tells us that the Eucharist unites us to the Trinity, to the saints and angels in heaven, and to one another in the Church here on earth (275).
In this Year for Priests, let us remember that the Eucharist is at the very heart of the priesthood. Only a validly ordained priest or bishop who acts in the person of Christ and in the name of the Church can offer the Eucharist (278). Through ordination, the priest is conformed to Christ — the great high priest — so that he can reenact Christ’s words and deeds.
We also should not forget that the Eucharist was prefigured in the Passover. When Jesus gathered with his Apostles in the Upper Room, they celebrated a Passover meal that commemorated the deliverance of the people of Israel from the slavery of Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land. This deliverance foreshadowed the great deliverance we experience at the Eucharist: from the slavery of sin to the freedom of the new life of grace that Christ won for us.
THE REAL PRESENCE
Each time the Eucharist is celebrated, Jesus’ sacrifice is truly made present: “The sacrifice of the cross and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one and the same sacrifice” (280). Christ is both the priest and the victim. While his sacrifice on the cross occurred in a bloody manner, the Eucharist is offered in an unbloody manner, through the signs of bread and wine (279).
Jesus makes his sacrifice of love available to us so we can offer our lives — our joys, sorrows and daily work — in union with him to the Father as an acceptable sacrifice of praise. It is the most perfect prayer that we can offer for our loved ones and for all the living and the dead.
We can understand our need for the Eucharist by focusing on how Christ is present “in a true, real, and substantial way, with his Body and his Blood, his Soul and his Divinity” (282). Indeed, the Church has coined a word to describe the complete transformation of bread and wine into Christ’s Body and Blood: “transubstantiation” (283).
This leads us to reflect on the respect we owe the eucharistic species, the bread and wine transformed into Christ’s Body and Blood. Christ is present whole and entire in each particle of the host and in each drop of the Precious Blood. The eucharistic species should therefore be treated with reverence and great care. Since Christ is truly and substantially present, we worship the Eucharist both during Mass and outside of Mass.
Given the beauty and centrality of this sublime gift, the Church rightly obliges us to take part in Mass each Sunday. While we are obliged to receive Communion at least once a year, during the Easter season, the Church encourages frequent reception (289, 290). To receive worthily, we must be members of the Catholic Church and be in the state of grace. If we are aware of any mortal sins we have committed, we should first receive the sacrament of penance. We should also prepare our hearts to receive our Lord in the Eucharist by prayerful recollection and by fasting one hour before Mass. Finally, we should show respect for the Eucharist by our prayerful demeanor and appropriate dress when attending Mass. In each of these ways, let us embrace in love this great mystery of faith.
"Why do you people care so much about externals?" my non-Trad friends sometimes ask me. And they deserve an answer. A few weeks back, my delightfully contentious colleague here, Mark Shea, waded into the conflict between those who describe themselves simply as "orthodox" Catholics, and those who consider themselves "traditionalists." (Just to save space in the comments box, I mean by this term people who favor the traditional liturgy -- not those who associate with organizations under ecclesiastical suspension.)This line has begun to blur more and more in the wake of Pope Benedict XVI's Summorum Pontificum, which we Trads greeted as a kind of Emancipation Proclamation -- even as many of our bishops answered it with liturgical Jim Crow.
Still, the division is palpable. It was lying right there on the table, for any who cared to palpate it, last week when I went to dinner with a Trad-minded colleague and a visiting author who'd come to speak at our college on G. K. Chesterton. (The presentation was riveting, and I highly recommend Dale Ahlquist's talks and books.) Like the good Mr. Shea, our speaker is a convert, and he shared with Mark a puzzlement at the apparent fixation traditionalists have on restoring former elements of the liturgy and other Catholic practices that are not essential, and resisting innovations that are not inherently evil. Having come from churches that didn't have the Eucharist, and remaining through God's grace flush with gratitude for the sacraments, many converts really don't understand what the rest of us are nattering on about. We who grew up privileged may seem like sulky, spoiled kids. We owe these good people an explanation.
Sometimes they think we just care about aesthetics. One visit to a Sunday Latin Low Mass without music, recited soundlessly into a marble altar, should put that idea to flight. Compared to a Novus Ordo liturgy in the vernacular, and from a purely human point of view, attending Low Mass can be dull. You feel like you are eavesdropping. If you follow along in the missal, you can feel that you are watching a very solemn foreign film without any subtitles, except that you have the screenplay. There's a reason the old rubrics relegated Low Mass to weekdays, and called (though they were rarely answered) for sung Solemn Mass on Sundays and holy days. Pope Pius X wasn't kidding when he asked for parishes to revive Gregorian chant and teach it to the laity. Nor is there any good reason why Latin Mass congregations don't give the responses along with the servers -- except perhaps the fear that this is somehow the first step down a long road that leads to clown Mass. Get over it, fratres.
Other people think that we are a band of Latin scholars, desperate to put our dusty declensions to practical use. Again, one conversation with the congregants at the coffee hour will dash that infant theory against the rocks. Most of us studied Latin, if at all, as part of vocabulary practice for the SATs, and follow the English side of the missal. I don't know a single Traditionalist who wouldn't prefer the old Mass, facing the altar, said in English, to the Novus Ordo chanted in Latin facing the people. While the universal language of the Church is still to be revered for all the reasons that Vatican II prescribed in Sacrosanctum Concilium, it isn't Why We Fight.
Still more people think that we cling to the ancient liturgy as a piece of nostalgia for a Church that we vaguely remember, or heard about from our parents, whose schools drummed a stark, simplistic orthodoxy into hordes of dutiful children; whose religious orders and seminaries weren't riddled with rank heresy and extensive networks of secret homosexuals; whose bishops manfully echoed the traditional teachings of centuries without constant goading from Rome; whose buildings and services at least strove for dignity and austerity, even if they sometimes descended into tedium and kitsch.
I'm tempted to say at this point: That's right. That's exactly what we want. Or at least what we'd settle for. What faithful Catholic wouldn't, if he could right now, wave a magic wand and swap the American church of 2010 for that of 1940 -- with all its acknowledged abuses and hidden worldliness? I'll take the blustering Cardinal Spellman over the scheming Archbishop Weakland any day.
But, of course, things never work like that. You can't bring back the Habsburgs by hanging their banners in your apartment (trust me, I've tried), and we cannot undo the catastrophic "renewal" launched in the name of the Second Vatican Council (often in plain defiance of its documents) by clicking our heels and reciting, "There's no place like Rome" -- even in ecclesiastical Latin. Some confrontation between the Church and late Western modernity was inevitable, and if it hadn't happened at the Council, it would have occurred some other way. The Eastern churches didn't vandalize their liturgy; have they been spared the ravages of secularization? Not according to my Greek Orthodox friends, who show up for the last ten minutes of liturgy each week to pick up blessed bread and join their friends for baklava and gossip. The liturgy is miraculous, but it doesn't work like magic: Rev. Teilhard de Chardin had said the Tridentine Mass for decades even as he invented Catholic Scientology; conversely, his sometime housemate at New York’s St. Ignatius Loyola, the holy Rev. John Hardon, obediently switched missals with every tinkering that came to him from the bishops.
Of course, there's something to be said for a liturgy whose very nature resists and defeats abuses. The Ordinary Form can be extraordinarily reverent when said by a holy priest. I've been to such liturgies hundreds of times, and I'm grateful for every one. On the other hand, the new liturgy, with all its Build-a-Bear options, is terribly easy to abuse. The old Mass reminds me of what they used to say about the Catholic Church and the U.S. Navy: "It's a machine built by geniuses so it can be operated safely by idiots." The old liturgy was crafted by saints, and can be said by schlubs without risk of sacrilege. The new rite was patched together by bureaucrats, and should only be safely celebrated by the saintly.
There are plenty of theological arguments by men more learned than I -- such as Michael Davies and, er, the current pope -- for the superiority of various elements in the traditional liturgy, such as the priest facing the altar instead of the audience. (I use that word advisedly, given the theatrical quality that took over so many parishes since the 1970s.) There are serious objections to many of the changes made in the prayers of the Novus Ordo -- and they were made by the man who used to hold the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's job at the Vatican, Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, who presented them to Pope Paul VI, begging him not to issue the Novus Ordo. (Imagine Cardinal Ratzinger begging Pope John Paul II not to impose altar girls. Who knows -- maybe he did!) Although I recommend reading these arguments, I won't rehearse them here, since all of them are prudential. Adopting Lutheran or Anglican language in the Mass probably didn't cause the current crisis of belief in the Real Presence, and cutting such language by eliminating all but the First Eucharistic Prayer might not do much to resolve it. (Still, it's worth a try!)
So what is the practical motivation that drives us Trads to schlep to distant or dangerous parishes, to irritate our spouses and incommode our pastors, to detach from local churches our grandparents scrimped to build? Why insist on external things, like kneeling for communion on the tongue, male altar servers, and the priest facing the altar? None of these, I'll admit for the 5,000th time, is essential for sacramental validity or credal orthodoxy; isn't being a stickler on such issues a wee bit pharisaical, even prissy? (I have encountered the odd Trad activist with an unnatural attachment to silk and lace -- pastors wearily call them "daughters of Trent" -- but they aren't the norm. Weary fathers of six or seven pack most Latin Mass pews.)
Here's what we Trads have realized, that the merely orthodox haven’t: Inessential things have power, which is why we bother with them in the first place. In every revolution, the first thing you change is the flag. Once that has been replaced, in the public mind all bets are off -- which is why the Commies and Nazis filled every available space with their Satanic banners. Imagine, for a moment, that a newly elected president replaced the Stars and Stripes with the Confederate battle flag. Or that he replaced our 50 stars with the flag of Mexico. Let's say he got away with doing this, and wasn't carried off by the Secret Service to an "undisclosed location." What would that signify for his administration? If people accepted the change, what else would they be likely to accept?
It's no accident that the incessant tinkerings with the liturgy came at the same time as the chaos surrounding the Church's teaching on birth control. As Anne Roche Muggeridge pointed out in her indispensable history The Desolate City, the Church's position on contraception was "under consideration" for almost a decade -- which led pastors to tell troubled couples that they could follow their consciences. If the Church could change the Mass, ordinary Catholics concluded, the nuances of marital theology were surely up for grabs. No wonder that when Paul VI reluctantly issued Humanae Vitae, people felt betrayed. (It didn't help when the Vatican refused to back a cardinal who tried to enforce the document, which made it seem like the pope was winking.)
The perception that the Church was in a constant state of doctrinal flux was confirmed by the reality that her most central, sacred mystery was being monkeyed with -- almost every year. I remember being in grammar school when they told us, "The pope wants us to receive Communion in the hand now." (He didn't; it was an abuse that was forced on the Vatican through relentless disobedience until it became a local norm, but never mind.) Then, a few years later, "The pope wants us to stand for Communion." A few more grades, and we heard, "The pope wants us to go to Confession face to face." What had seemed a solid bulwark of formality and seriousness was suddenly shifting with every year's hemlines -- which is precisely what the heretics conspiring to change the Church's teaching had in mind. That is why they pushed for these futile, pastorally destructive changes of "inessentials" -- as a way of beating down resistance to changing essentials. And, in a worldly sense, they almost succeeded.
The campaign of dissenting priests, nuns, and (let's be honest) bishops culminated, in America, with the Call to Action Conference, which its leading advocate John Francis Cardinal Dearden described in 1977 as "an assembly of the American Catholic community ." This gathering of 2,400 radical Catholic activists was composed of "people deeply involved with the life of the institutional Church and appointed by their bishops" (emphasis added). The Conference approved "progressive resolutions, ones calling for, among other things, the ordination of women and married men, female altar servers, and the right and responsibility of married couples to form their own consciences on the issue of artificial birth control." This is the mess made by the bishops appointed by the author of Humanae Vitae, which his rightly beloved successor John Paul II spent much of his pontificate trying to clean up. What we Trads feel compelled to point out is that he couldn't quite finish the job, and that the deformations of the Roman liturgy enacted by (you guessed it) appointees of Paul VI helped enable all these doctrinal abuses. They changed the flag.
At this point in my discussion of the gravest theological issues that threatened the faith of Catholics in this country, I wish to call your attention to a stupid YouTube video, which gave this essay its willfully illiterate title: "All Your Base Are Belong to Us."
For those of you too young to have experienced the incessant assault upon the sacred that was the liturgical "reform," or grateful converts who don't understand all the fuss, I beg of you: Please watch this video. In fact, stop reading and watch the video first, then come back to finish this essay. I can wait.
The film takes the Pidgin English from a cheesy Japanese computer game and places it everywhere: on street signs, in Budweiser ads, on cigarette packs. At first, the effect is funny, and you wonder about the geeks who spent their time doing all this Photoshop. But keep watching. Savor the effect as the same mindless, meaningless slogan is plastered everywhere, on every blessed thing. Pretty quickly, it starts to be creepy. By the end, you might feel like Japanese anime aliens have in fact taken over. You can see their fingerprints everywhere . . .
That is how it felt to be young and Catholic in the 1970s. Every sacred thing had to be changed, every old thing replaced with a new one, every complicated beauty plastered over by the cheap and the easy. The message was almost subliminal, but by that means all the more powerful: All Your Church Are Belong to Us.
And by changing back the flag, by taking back our Mass, we are saying: Go back to Hell. Our Church belongs to Christ.
John Zmirak is the author, most recently, of the graphic novel The Grand Inquisitor and is Writer-in-Residence at Thomas More College in New Hampshire. He writes weekly for InsideCatholic.com.
Not long ago, a parishioner said to me that she just didn’t see the need to go to Mass every Sunday. “I go to Mass once in a while, when I think it will help me,” she said. Unfortunately, many people who consider themselves faithful Catholics share this attitude, an attitude that is not proportionate to the gift and mystery of the Eucharist.
The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church offers a brief summary of this great mystery of faith: “The Eucharist is the very sacrifice of the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus….” It is not merely a reminder that Christ offered his Body and Blood for our sake; rather, it is that offering. Jesus himself instituted the Eucharist “to perpetuate the sacrifice of the cross throughout the ages until his return in glory” (271). The Eucharist, the heart of the Church’s life, is the banquet and living memorial of Christ’s sacrifice. When we worthily partake of the Eucharist, we participate even now in God’s own life.
THANKSGIVING AND COMMUNION
Gathered with his Apostles, Jesus entrusted the Eucharist to the Church at the Last Supper. At every Mass, the priest repeats and reenacts the words by which the Lord instituted the Eucharist: “Take this and eat it, all of you; this is my Body which will be given for you. … Take this and drink of this, all of you. This is the cup of my Blood, the Blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me” (273).
We hear these words so often, but do we realize their significance?
Since the Eucharist re-presents (makes present again) the death and resurrection of Christ, it contains the entire spiritual wealth of the Church. It brings us into union (communion) with the Trinity and with one another. It puts us in touch with the great liturgy of heaven, that utterly joyous and eternal worship of God for which we were made and for which our hearts long (274, 287).
The more we think about what the Eucharist actually is, the less “optional” it seems! The very names used to describe the Eucharist remind us of its centrality. For example, the word “Eucharist” refers to the thanksgiving we owe to God. The phrase “Holy Mass” speaks to our mission to bring Christ into our daily lives. The Scriptures refer to the Eucharist as the “Breaking of Bread” — a sharing in the Body of the Lord that makes us one. Lastly, “Holy Communion” tells us that the Eucharist unites us to the Trinity, to the saints and angels in heaven, and to one another in the Church here on earth (275).
In this Year for Priests, let us remember that the Eucharist is at the very heart of the priesthood. Only a validly ordained priest or bishop who acts in the person of Christ and in the name of the Church can offer the Eucharist (278). Through ordination, the priest is conformed to Christ — the great high priest — so that he can reenact Christ’s words and deeds.
We also should not forget that the Eucharist was prefigured in the Passover. When Jesus gathered with his Apostles in the Upper Room, they celebrated a Passover meal that commemorated the deliverance of the people of Israel from the slavery of Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land. This deliverance foreshadowed the great deliverance we experience at the Eucharist: from the slavery of sin to the freedom of the new life of grace that Christ won for us.
THE REAL PRESENCE
Each time the Eucharist is celebrated, Jesus’ sacrifice is truly made present: “The sacrifice of the cross and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one and the same sacrifice” (280). Christ is both the priest and the victim. While his sacrifice on the cross occurred in a bloody manner, the Eucharist is offered in an unbloody manner, through the signs of bread and wine (279).
Jesus makes his sacrifice of love available to us so we can offer our lives — our joys, sorrows and daily work — in union with him to the Father as an acceptable sacrifice of praise. It is the most perfect prayer that we can offer for our loved ones and for all the living and the dead.
We can understand our need for the Eucharist by focusing on how Christ is present “in a true, real, and substantial way, with his Body and his Blood, his Soul and his Divinity” (282). Indeed, the Church has coined a word to describe the complete transformation of bread and wine into Christ’s Body and Blood: “transubstantiation” (283).
This leads us to reflect on the respect we owe the eucharistic species, the bread and wine transformed into Christ’s Body and Blood. Christ is present whole and entire in each particle of the host and in each drop of the Precious Blood. The eucharistic species should therefore be treated with reverence and great care. Since Christ is truly and substantially present, we worship the Eucharist both during Mass and outside of Mass.
Given the beauty and centrality of this sublime gift, the Church rightly obliges us to take part in Mass each Sunday. While we are obliged to receive Communion at least once a year, during the Easter season, the Church encourages frequent reception (289, 290). To receive worthily, we must be members of the Catholic Church and be in the state of grace. If we are aware of any mortal sins we have committed, we should first receive the sacrament of penance. We should also prepare our hearts to receive our Lord in the Eucharist by prayerful recollection and by fasting one hour before Mass. Finally, we should show respect for the Eucharist by our prayerful demeanor and appropriate dress when attending Mass. In each of these ways, let us embrace in love this great mystery of faith.
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All Your Church Are Belong to Us
by John Zmirak
Inside Catholic
by John Zmirak
Inside Catholic
Blogger's note: "All your base are belong to us" (from which the title of this article is taken) is a broken English phrase that was central to an Internet phenomenon, or meme in the early 2000's. The text is taken from the opening cut scene of the 1991 European Sega Mega Drive version of the video game Zero Wing[1] by Toaplan, which was poorly translated.
"Why do you people care so much about externals?" my non-Trad friends sometimes ask me. And they deserve an answer. A few weeks back, my delightfully contentious colleague here, Mark Shea, waded into the conflict between those who describe themselves simply as "orthodox" Catholics, and those who consider themselves "traditionalists." (Just to save space in the comments box, I mean by this term people who favor the traditional liturgy -- not those who associate with organizations under ecclesiastical suspension.)This line has begun to blur more and more in the wake of Pope Benedict XVI's Summorum Pontificum, which we Trads greeted as a kind of Emancipation Proclamation -- even as many of our bishops answered it with liturgical Jim Crow.
Still, the division is palpable. It was lying right there on the table, for any who cared to palpate it, last week when I went to dinner with a Trad-minded colleague and a visiting author who'd come to speak at our college on G. K. Chesterton. (The presentation was riveting, and I highly recommend Dale Ahlquist's talks and books.) Like the good Mr. Shea, our speaker is a convert, and he shared with Mark a puzzlement at the apparent fixation traditionalists have on restoring former elements of the liturgy and other Catholic practices that are not essential, and resisting innovations that are not inherently evil. Having come from churches that didn't have the Eucharist, and remaining through God's grace flush with gratitude for the sacraments, many converts really don't understand what the rest of us are nattering on about. We who grew up privileged may seem like sulky, spoiled kids. We owe these good people an explanation.
Sometimes they think we just care about aesthetics. One visit to a Sunday Latin Low Mass without music, recited soundlessly into a marble altar, should put that idea to flight. Compared to a Novus Ordo liturgy in the vernacular, and from a purely human point of view, attending Low Mass can be dull. You feel like you are eavesdropping. If you follow along in the missal, you can feel that you are watching a very solemn foreign film without any subtitles, except that you have the screenplay. There's a reason the old rubrics relegated Low Mass to weekdays, and called (though they were rarely answered) for sung Solemn Mass on Sundays and holy days. Pope Pius X wasn't kidding when he asked for parishes to revive Gregorian chant and teach it to the laity. Nor is there any good reason why Latin Mass congregations don't give the responses along with the servers -- except perhaps the fear that this is somehow the first step down a long road that leads to clown Mass. Get over it, fratres.
Other people think that we are a band of Latin scholars, desperate to put our dusty declensions to practical use. Again, one conversation with the congregants at the coffee hour will dash that infant theory against the rocks. Most of us studied Latin, if at all, as part of vocabulary practice for the SATs, and follow the English side of the missal. I don't know a single Traditionalist who wouldn't prefer the old Mass, facing the altar, said in English, to the Novus Ordo chanted in Latin facing the people. While the universal language of the Church is still to be revered for all the reasons that Vatican II prescribed in Sacrosanctum Concilium, it isn't Why We Fight.
Still more people think that we cling to the ancient liturgy as a piece of nostalgia for a Church that we vaguely remember, or heard about from our parents, whose schools drummed a stark, simplistic orthodoxy into hordes of dutiful children; whose religious orders and seminaries weren't riddled with rank heresy and extensive networks of secret homosexuals; whose bishops manfully echoed the traditional teachings of centuries without constant goading from Rome; whose buildings and services at least strove for dignity and austerity, even if they sometimes descended into tedium and kitsch.
I'm tempted to say at this point: That's right. That's exactly what we want. Or at least what we'd settle for. What faithful Catholic wouldn't, if he could right now, wave a magic wand and swap the American church of 2010 for that of 1940 -- with all its acknowledged abuses and hidden worldliness? I'll take the blustering Cardinal Spellman over the scheming Archbishop Weakland any day.
But, of course, things never work like that. You can't bring back the Habsburgs by hanging their banners in your apartment (trust me, I've tried), and we cannot undo the catastrophic "renewal" launched in the name of the Second Vatican Council (often in plain defiance of its documents) by clicking our heels and reciting, "There's no place like Rome" -- even in ecclesiastical Latin. Some confrontation between the Church and late Western modernity was inevitable, and if it hadn't happened at the Council, it would have occurred some other way. The Eastern churches didn't vandalize their liturgy; have they been spared the ravages of secularization? Not according to my Greek Orthodox friends, who show up for the last ten minutes of liturgy each week to pick up blessed bread and join their friends for baklava and gossip. The liturgy is miraculous, but it doesn't work like magic: Rev. Teilhard de Chardin had said the Tridentine Mass for decades even as he invented Catholic Scientology; conversely, his sometime housemate at New York’s St. Ignatius Loyola, the holy Rev. John Hardon, obediently switched missals with every tinkering that came to him from the bishops.
Of course, there's something to be said for a liturgy whose very nature resists and defeats abuses. The Ordinary Form can be extraordinarily reverent when said by a holy priest. I've been to such liturgies hundreds of times, and I'm grateful for every one. On the other hand, the new liturgy, with all its Build-a-Bear options, is terribly easy to abuse. The old Mass reminds me of what they used to say about the Catholic Church and the U.S. Navy: "It's a machine built by geniuses so it can be operated safely by idiots." The old liturgy was crafted by saints, and can be said by schlubs without risk of sacrilege. The new rite was patched together by bureaucrats, and should only be safely celebrated by the saintly.
There are plenty of theological arguments by men more learned than I -- such as Michael Davies and, er, the current pope -- for the superiority of various elements in the traditional liturgy, such as the priest facing the altar instead of the audience. (I use that word advisedly, given the theatrical quality that took over so many parishes since the 1970s.) There are serious objections to many of the changes made in the prayers of the Novus Ordo -- and they were made by the man who used to hold the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's job at the Vatican, Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, who presented them to Pope Paul VI, begging him not to issue the Novus Ordo. (Imagine Cardinal Ratzinger begging Pope John Paul II not to impose altar girls. Who knows -- maybe he did!) Although I recommend reading these arguments, I won't rehearse them here, since all of them are prudential. Adopting Lutheran or Anglican language in the Mass probably didn't cause the current crisis of belief in the Real Presence, and cutting such language by eliminating all but the First Eucharistic Prayer might not do much to resolve it. (Still, it's worth a try!)
So what is the practical motivation that drives us Trads to schlep to distant or dangerous parishes, to irritate our spouses and incommode our pastors, to detach from local churches our grandparents scrimped to build? Why insist on external things, like kneeling for communion on the tongue, male altar servers, and the priest facing the altar? None of these, I'll admit for the 5,000th time, is essential for sacramental validity or credal orthodoxy; isn't being a stickler on such issues a wee bit pharisaical, even prissy? (I have encountered the odd Trad activist with an unnatural attachment to silk and lace -- pastors wearily call them "daughters of Trent" -- but they aren't the norm. Weary fathers of six or seven pack most Latin Mass pews.)
Here's what we Trads have realized, that the merely orthodox haven’t: Inessential things have power, which is why we bother with them in the first place. In every revolution, the first thing you change is the flag. Once that has been replaced, in the public mind all bets are off -- which is why the Commies and Nazis filled every available space with their Satanic banners. Imagine, for a moment, that a newly elected president replaced the Stars and Stripes with the Confederate battle flag. Or that he replaced our 50 stars with the flag of Mexico. Let's say he got away with doing this, and wasn't carried off by the Secret Service to an "undisclosed location." What would that signify for his administration? If people accepted the change, what else would they be likely to accept?
It's no accident that the incessant tinkerings with the liturgy came at the same time as the chaos surrounding the Church's teaching on birth control. As Anne Roche Muggeridge pointed out in her indispensable history The Desolate City, the Church's position on contraception was "under consideration" for almost a decade -- which led pastors to tell troubled couples that they could follow their consciences. If the Church could change the Mass, ordinary Catholics concluded, the nuances of marital theology were surely up for grabs. No wonder that when Paul VI reluctantly issued Humanae Vitae, people felt betrayed. (It didn't help when the Vatican refused to back a cardinal who tried to enforce the document, which made it seem like the pope was winking.)
The perception that the Church was in a constant state of doctrinal flux was confirmed by the reality that her most central, sacred mystery was being monkeyed with -- almost every year. I remember being in grammar school when they told us, "The pope wants us to receive Communion in the hand now." (He didn't; it was an abuse that was forced on the Vatican through relentless disobedience until it became a local norm, but never mind.) Then, a few years later, "The pope wants us to stand for Communion." A few more grades, and we heard, "The pope wants us to go to Confession face to face." What had seemed a solid bulwark of formality and seriousness was suddenly shifting with every year's hemlines -- which is precisely what the heretics conspiring to change the Church's teaching had in mind. That is why they pushed for these futile, pastorally destructive changes of "inessentials" -- as a way of beating down resistance to changing essentials. And, in a worldly sense, they almost succeeded.
The campaign of dissenting priests, nuns, and (let's be honest) bishops culminated, in America, with the Call to Action Conference, which its leading advocate John Francis Cardinal Dearden described in 1977 as "an assembly of the American Catholic community ." This gathering of 2,400 radical Catholic activists was composed of "people deeply involved with the life of the institutional Church and appointed by their bishops" (emphasis added). The Conference approved "progressive resolutions, ones calling for, among other things, the ordination of women and married men, female altar servers, and the right and responsibility of married couples to form their own consciences on the issue of artificial birth control." This is the mess made by the bishops appointed by the author of Humanae Vitae, which his rightly beloved successor John Paul II spent much of his pontificate trying to clean up. What we Trads feel compelled to point out is that he couldn't quite finish the job, and that the deformations of the Roman liturgy enacted by (you guessed it) appointees of Paul VI helped enable all these doctrinal abuses. They changed the flag.
At this point in my discussion of the gravest theological issues that threatened the faith of Catholics in this country, I wish to call your attention to a stupid YouTube video, which gave this essay its willfully illiterate title: "All Your Base Are Belong to Us."
For those of you too young to have experienced the incessant assault upon the sacred that was the liturgical "reform," or grateful converts who don't understand all the fuss, I beg of you: Please watch this video. In fact, stop reading and watch the video first, then come back to finish this essay. I can wait.
The film takes the Pidgin English from a cheesy Japanese computer game and places it everywhere: on street signs, in Budweiser ads, on cigarette packs. At first, the effect is funny, and you wonder about the geeks who spent their time doing all this Photoshop. But keep watching. Savor the effect as the same mindless, meaningless slogan is plastered everywhere, on every blessed thing. Pretty quickly, it starts to be creepy. By the end, you might feel like Japanese anime aliens have in fact taken over. You can see their fingerprints everywhere . . .
That is how it felt to be young and Catholic in the 1970s. Every sacred thing had to be changed, every old thing replaced with a new one, every complicated beauty plastered over by the cheap and the easy. The message was almost subliminal, but by that means all the more powerful: All Your Church Are Belong to Us.
And by changing back the flag, by taking back our Mass, we are saying: Go back to Hell. Our Church belongs to Christ.
John Zmirak is the author, most recently, of the graphic novel The Grand Inquisitor and is Writer-in-Residence at Thomas More College in New Hampshire. He writes weekly for InsideCatholic.com.
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Female Lay-Preaching Proponent to Help Introduce New Missal to US Priests
Catholic World News
February 19, 2010
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) announced on February 18 that it will hold a series of 22 workshops across the nation to help introduce priests and diocesan leaders to the new Roman Missal. At its November meeting, the bishops’ conference completed its approval of the new translation, whose language is more faithful to the content and eloquence of the original Latin text than the current translation is.
“Seminar attendees will study the historical and theological context of the new Missal and will look at some of the new translations to deepen understanding of their depth and richness,” according to the USCCB. The seminars will be cosponsored by the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions.
Two speakers will address each workshop. Among the pool of five speakers from whom the two will be drawn is Dr. Dolly Sokol, director of development of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, who serves on the board of directors of Partners In Preaching, an organization devoted to training the laity to preach during the sacred liturgy.
Citing the Code of Canon Law and other Vatican documents, the General Instruction of the Roman Missal notes that “the Homily should ordinarily be given by the priest celebrant himself. He may entrust it to a concelebrating priest or occasionally, according to circumstances, to the deacon, but never to a lay person.”
Partners In Preaching, on the other hand, believes that lay preaching should become part of the life of every parish. “The vision of Partners In Preaching is that every local faith community would have competent, diverse and empowered lay and ordained voices for ritual preaching,” according to its web site. To further this end, the organization offers “a Training and Formation Program for the ministry of lectionary-based, liturgical preaching, offered to beginning preaching candidates.”
The apparition consisted of three different stages. Firstly, the children beheld in a resplendent light a beautiful lady clad in a strange costume. She was seated on a rock and in tears, with her
face resting in her hands. This took place at the ravine called ravin de la Sezia
Secondly, she stood upright and talked to the children, speaking alternately in French and in the regional patois. She charged them with a message which they were to deliver to all her people. This also took place in the ravin de la Sezia. After complaining of the impiety and sinfulness of men, and threatening them with dreadful chastisements in case they should persevere in evil, she promised them the Divine mercy if they would amend. Finally, she communicated to each of the children a special secret, before disappearing into the sky. This happened on the plateau called Mont-sous-les-Baisses.
They told of their experience to their employers, Baptiste Pra and Pierre Selme. These wrote the account down September 20, 1846, the day after the apparition, in a letter.[2]
Maximin Giraud was questioned upon his story by the mayor of the village, Pierre Peytard September 21, 1846.
Pra and Selme informed Louis Perrin, the parish priest of La Salette, who himself informed the archpriest of Corps, Pierre Mélin. Impressed by the account, Perrin preached about it at Holy Mass. The bishop of Grenoble, Philibert de Bruillard, was officially informed by Mélin on October 4, 1846.
The news of the apparition spread like wildfire. Maximin's father, Jean-Maximin Giraud, not being religious at all, converted on November 8, 1846. This was the first of many conversions. Soon several miraculous cures took place on the mountain of La Salette, and pilgrimages to the place were begun. The first pilgrimage took place on November 24, 1846, with both children participating. On May 31 about 5,000 pilgrims participated in another pilgrimage, on the occasion of the planting of a crossway up the mountain.
In October 1846 Mélanie and Maximin were questioned by Mathieu Cat, a diocesan priest. In February 1847 both seers were questioned by François Lagier, a French priest who spoke the local patois fluently. On April 16, 1847 both children were interrogated by a city magistrate of Grenoble, the local juge de paix Fréderic-Joseph Long. They were reinterrogated by Pierre Lambert, another diocesan priest on the apparition May 29, 1847.[3]
The first miraculous cure that was recognised as such was that of Claire Pierron S.S.J., known as Sister Saint-Charles, of Avignon on April 16, 1847. The second was that of Mélanie Gamon, of Corps, on August 15, 1847.
On July 22, 1847 Clément Cardinal Villecourt, bishop of La Rochelle made a personal pilgrimage to La Salette. He met both children and questioned them.
One year after the apparition, September 19, 1847, over 50,000 pilgrims came to La Salette to celebrate the anniversary.
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Two shepherd children - Maximin Giraud and Mélanie Calvat - reported a vision of the Virgin Mary on a mountaintop near La Salette, France, on September 19, 1846 around 3.00 p.m. during their cowherding. They were eleven and fourteen years old at the time and had received only a very limited education.The apparition consisted of three different stages. Firstly, the children beheld in a resplendent light a beautiful lady clad in a strange costume. She was seated on a rock and in tears, with her
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face resting in her hands. This took place at the ravine called ravin de la SeziaSecondly, she stood upright and talked to the children, speaking alternately in French and in the regional patois. She charged them with a message which they were to deliver to all her people. This also took place in the ravin de la Sezia. After complaining of the impiety and sinfulness of men, and threatening them with dreadful chastisements in case they should persevere in evil, she promised them the Divine mercy if they would amend. Finally, she communicated to each of the children a special secret, before disappearing into the sky. This happened on the plateau called Mont-sous-les-Baisses.
They told of their experience to their employers, Baptiste Pra and Pierre Selme. These wrote the account down September 20, 1846, the day after the apparition, in a letter.[2]
Maximin Giraud was questioned upon his story by the mayor of the village, Pierre Peytard September 21, 1846.
Pra and Selme informed Louis Perrin, the parish priest of La Salette, who himself informed the archpriest of Corps, Pierre Mélin. Impressed by the account, Perrin preached about it at Holy Mass. The bishop of Grenoble, Philibert de Bruillard, was officially informed by Mélin on October 4, 1846.
The news of the apparition spread like wildfire. Maximin's father, Jean-Maximin Giraud, not being religious at all, converted on November 8, 1846. This was the first of many conversions. Soon several miraculous cures took place on the mountain of La Salette, and pilgrimages to the place were begun. The first pilgrimage took place on November 24, 1846, with both children participating. On May 31 about 5,000 pilgrims participated in another pilgrimage, on the occasion of the planting of a crossway up the mountain.
In October 1846 Mélanie and Maximin were questioned by Mathieu Cat, a diocesan priest. In February 1847 both seers were questioned by François Lagier, a French priest who spoke the local patois fluently. On April 16, 1847 both children were interrogated by a city magistrate of Grenoble, the local juge de paix Fréderic-Joseph Long. They were reinterrogated by Pierre Lambert, another diocesan priest on the apparition May 29, 1847.[3]
The first miraculous cure that was recognised as such was that of Claire Pierron S.S.J., known as Sister Saint-Charles, of Avignon on April 16, 1847. The second was that of Mélanie Gamon, of Corps, on August 15, 1847.
On July 22, 1847 Clément Cardinal Villecourt, bishop of La Rochelle made a personal pilgrimage to La Salette. He met both children and questioned them.
One year after the apparition, September 19, 1847, over 50,000 pilgrims came to La Salette to celebrate the anniversary.
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