Most Catholics in our world seem to take a flippant attitude towards liturgical music. It is all-too-frequently deemed something suitable for competent amateurs, of lesser concern and of secondary importance – until, of course, it isn’t. The news this week of the unexpected and noteworthy resignation of Johh Romeri as head of Liturgical Music in…
In Acts 1:2, we witness angels speaking to the Apostles who were staring into the skies into which the Lord had just ascended: “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye there gazing into heaven? This Jesus, Who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come as you have seen him going into heaven.”…
Infinite is the one great mystery of Christian faith. The more men ponder over its parts the more bewildering it appears, for the mystery of the Triune God is continually upholding its hidden power. How grandly impressive is Catholic worship! What an awful holocaust is its sacrifice! Far surpassing the power of human concept is the…
The futile closed circle of therapeutic navel-gazing hangs on like an overused joke in a few places still, one of them being the Church. The priest and people facing each other during the entire liturgy is a vestige of the illegitimate seizure and subjection of 2,000-year-old liturgical development by primitivist vandals in the post-Vatican period.…
I had just entered the seminary when Cardinal Ratzinger’s book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, came out. I had an English copy expressed to me and brought it with me into the chapel as my spiritual reading during our daily community Holy Hour. One of the older men knelt next to me as I was…
On March 15, 1994, a virtual tsunami struck the Liturgy of the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church. Cardinal Antonio Ortas wrote a document to the Episcopal conferences announcing that the Vatican had, for the first time, permitted altar girls. Over 20 years later, many question the impact of this decision as the Church continues to reap…
God willed to reveal Himself and to enter into an intimate personal relation with mankind. This revelation and plan of salvation began to unfold through Moses and the prophets, but only in Jesus Christ do we find the fulfillment. He is the Incarnate Word of God, the embodiment of all God wants us to know…
A critique of the 1965 Order of Mass, in three parts A recent online discussion of more reverent Catholic liturgy has revived consideration of the 1965 “transitional” Roman Missal and its similarities with the 1962 Roman Missal (called the Vetus Ordo, the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, or the Traditional Latin Mass). As a…
In a recent article here on OnePeterFive, “Liturgy, Adaptation, and the Need for Context,” Adam Michael Wood attempts to draw a sort of liturgical middle way between rigorist traditionalism and laxist liberalism. I recommend reading the article yourself in order to understand his argument, much of which I would agree with. (For more context on…
Historically authentic productions of Shakespearean plays are occasionally in and out of fashion. Recently a movement championing “original pronunciation” purports to let us hear Shakespeare’s words precisely as they would have been spoken when the plays were originally written and performed. It is artistically irresponsible to mount a performance of a Shakespearean play —…
Many Catholics have witnessed or read about Masses gone wild: polka Masses, life-size scary puppet Masses, and probably worst of all, Los Angeles Religious Education Congress closing Masses. In these extreme cases, it is clear that there is something fundamentally wrong with how the organizers understand the Mass. Yet even some sincere, faithful Catholics wish…
