Welcome to the second part of Lent. As Pius Parsch puts it in The Church’s Year of Grace, in the first two weeks we put ourselves on guard against attacks by the Prince of this world, the Devil and fallen angels, with the weapon of mortifications. On this Sunday we move from defense against the…
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.
With the “Gesima”, pre-Lent Sundays we added a layer of context to our contexts: Roman Station churches. Each day of Lent has, by millennial tradition, an assigned church in Rome. On weekdays, people gathered at a nearby “collect” church and then processed singing penitential litanies and hymns to the “stopping” church, or “statio” where the…
At some points, the water reached our knees.
With Quinquagesima Sunday we are at the threshold of the season of Lent. Holy Mother Church has been preparing us for spiritual combat through these preparatory Sundays. When you follow the Vetus Ordo of the Roman Rite, Lent can never take you by surprise. As part of our arming for battle, this Sunday asks us…
There are customs in the Tradition of Christian spouses abstaining from the marital act in line with liturgical life.
The Feast we celebrate this Sunday is called the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. On this day we definitively close out the Advent/Christmas cycle. It is forty days since Christmas. According to Mosaic Law, women who had given birth were required to offer a sacrifice for ritual purification. Of course, Our Lady was not…
Because of the vagaries of your planet’s Moon, toward the end of this liturgical year and before the beginning of the next Advent, we will not have Remaining Sundays after Epiphany to fill in the calendrical gaps. This year, we sail straight through the Sundays after Pentecost all the way to the 24th and Last…
The 1962 Missal removed this feast.
The reconciliation of European Protestants with the Holy See.
Holy Church, knowing that we need more than one day to reflect manifestations of Christ’s divine nature, teased three miraculous events out into a chain of related holy days. This was not wholly obliterated in the post-Conciliar calendar, but it is greatly obscured by the juggling of Epiphany onto this or that Sunday, the ending…
