The Sunday after the Ascension places us in a holy interval. The Lord has gone up in glory but the promised Spirit has not yet descended like fire. The Apostles have returned from the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem. They are gathered in the Upper Room with Mary, with memories still burning from the Last…
For this 5th Sunday after Easter we are still moving through John 16, Our Lord’s Last Supper Discourse, as well as the Letter of James. Liturgically, we are close to the Ascension of the Lord, when the High Priest, the Risen Savior, entered the heavenly temple where He continuously renews His once-for-all Sacrifice to the…
Our context in the liturgical year for the 4th Sunday after Easter is our preparation for the Ascension of the Lord. We are now in the second phase of Paschaltide. The first stage looked back toward the empty tomb and drew us into the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. Now the Mass formularies shift…
The 3rd Sunday after Easter in the Vetus Ordo draws us into that peculiar Christian experience of living between gift and fulfillment, between consolation remembered and consummation promised, between the joy of Easter already given and the greater joy that still presses toward Ascension and Pentecost. The whole formulary has a tensile quality. Expectancy. Movement.…
The 2nd Sunday after Easter in the traditional Roman Rite is called Good Shepherd Sunday. The nickname is well deserved. The Gospel presents Christ’s discourse in John 10, the Epistle from 1 Peter gathers into itself Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, and the Roman Station in ancient times was St. Peter’s on the Vatican Hill, at the…
We bring to completion the great Octave of Easter this Sunday, though “completion” here is to be understood in the Church’s own liturgical sense. For a full eight days, by that ancient inclusive counting which the Romans knew so well and Christians inherited, it has still been Easter Day. The Church has, as it were,…
The Church, in her ancient wisdom, does a striking thing on this greatest of feasts. After the dark austerity of Lent, after the long stripping away of liturgical ornaments and consolations, after the silence and stillness and blackness of the tomb, she sets before us on Easter morning an Epistle that glitters with Paschal theology…
Ever since we set out on this spiritual journey on the Gesima Sundays, step by step we have drawn nearer to Holy Week. Now we stand at the threshold of the remaining days of Holy Week and the Sacred Triduum, those three days which are at once the Church’s deepest descent and highest elevation. Weariness…
From the pre-Lent Sundays onward, Holy Mother Church has led us into a liturgical dying. First there was the silencing of the Alleluia and the Gloria. Violet appeared on Sundays as a herald of the coming fast. Then Lent itself deepened the deprivation day by day, save for the interruption of the greater feasts. Flowers…
It is a fact of human nature that when our senses are incessantly struck by the same impression, we begin to dull. Noise that never ceases is no longer truly heard. Color without contrast becomes flat. Images, especially wicked images, can first disturb and then stupefy. For this reason deprivation has a place in a…
The Roman Station for the Third Sunday of Lent is the Minor Papal Basilica of St. Lawrence outside-the-walls, San Lorenzo fuori le Mura. The Station is often the crowbar by which we pry open the Mass formulary. If we attend to place, structure, memory, and rite, the somewhat intricate Gospel from Luke 11 begins to…
