Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Do you remember doing Venn diagrams in elementary school? Overlapping circles to demonstrate how different sets of things share common traits? Perhaps children today don’t do that sort of thing, except maybe to reinforce triggers and pressure them into thinking about how exclusionary and racist “other” people are. In any event, in our Gospel passage…

Consider where we have been so far in Advent. On the first Sunday of Advent, we heard in the texts of Holy Mass that the Lord was still distant, but that He was coming. Then the pace picked up. In the Second Sunday’s Gospel, Christ explained that John the Baptist’s followers should tell the great…

The Gospel for our 2nd Sunday of Advent according to the Vetus Ordo, the Roman Mass, has two sections which need to be addressed separately, though they are connected. Firstly, in Matthew 11 John the Baptist is in prison because he preached about Herod’s unlawful marriage. He learned of the wonders his cousin Jesus was…

The essence of a cliché is that it is unoriginal and often repeated. However, as the old Latin phrase goes, repetita iuvant… repeated things help. Allow me to get an initial cliché out of the way: with the 1st Sunday of Advent we begin a new liturgical year. There. But wait. Perhaps it isn’t cliché…

Excita, quaesumus, Domine, tuorum fidelium voluntates… Stir up the wills of your people, O Lord… Thus begins the Collect for Holy Mass for this 24th and Last Sunday after Pentecost. In a few short days, shorter and shorter in the Northern Hemisphere, we will again come to Advent and a new liturgical year. Meanwhile, this…

Year in and year out we celebrate the liturgical cycles. Year in and year out the cycles do not change. We do. With each round through the sacred liturgical year, we are different. We’ve had our ups and downs, our good and bad, our growth and decline, our gains and losses. We therefore are able…

Some people might be scratching their heads wondering how we wind up with a “resumed” Sunday, sometimes called “remaining” or “left over” (Latin superfuit), after Epiphany in the month of November. Isn’t Epiphany at the beginning of January? So how can Sundays be “left over” and then “resumed”? Here is what happened. In the historic…

The royal families of Europe were falling one by one. Secularist atheistic materialism was on the rise.  In the wake of the gory First World War Pope Pius XI looked out over the world and, in 1922, issued an encyclical letter Ubi arcano which directed people to the “Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of…