Preparation for the Holy Sacrifice

The paper cup must become more like the swimming pool if it is to receive what is poured out with divine liberality.

All good things come to their end, with the exception of God’s love and the eternal joy of Heaven. Thus, the Church, in her liturgical wisdom, allows the cycle of the year to come to its own solemn conclusion, so that we may be stirred up again to begin anew. As this series of reflections…

Let’s have some context. We are drawing toward the end of the liturgical year, when the Church’s gaze turns ever more intently to the consummation of all things, the Second Coming of the Lord, the resurrection of the dead, and judgment. Pius Parsch, in The Church’s Year of Grace, sees in these autumn Sundays a…

The dedication of a church is therefore a liturgical wedding.

As the liturgical year draws to its close, the Church’s voice takes on autumnal gravity. The Sundays after Pentecost turn our eyes toward the final harvest, when the Lord will take all things to Himself. This Sunday’s Collect, Epistle, and Gospel form a single meditation on mercy and judgment, protection and peril, the divine household…

When this Sunday comes around, with its snappy Collect, I am minded of the early fourth-century martyr St. Expeditus. The Latin text of the Collect reads: Omnipotens et misericors Deus, universa nobis adversantia propitiatus exclude: ut mente et corpore pariter expediti, quae tua sunt, liberis mentibus exsequamur. Translated slavishly: Almighty and merciful God, having been…

As the northern hemisphere drifts from the fullness of summer into the crisp melancholy of autumn, Holy Church too moves into a season of spiritual harvest. In her ancient cycle of Sundays, formed in the lands where the light fades earlier each day, she begins to turn her gaze toward the final realities – the…

The 17th Sunday after Pentecost in the Vetus Ordo sets before us Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, a prison letter written probably from Rome, probably not far from where I sit in Rome writing this, in which he exhorts: Brethren, I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of…

Is there a vice which God hates more than pride? It was pride that brought down Satan and the other apostate angels. It was pride that brought down the entire human race in our First Parents. Pride turned angels into devils, turned Paradise into this vale of tears. What does pride do to your interior…

We come now to the 15th Sunday after Pentecost, known in older Roman reckoning as Quinta post Sancti Laurentii, the fifth Sunday after St. Lawrence, so beloved by the Romans. In the ancient system, most Sundays of the year had station churches, not only the Sundays of Advent or the days of Lent. Blessed Ildefonso…