Imagine you’re in a movie theater watching the latest blockbuster, thoroughly captivated by the plots and subplots, the beautiful faces and lush scenery as the movie progresses inexorably toward its climax. Your cell phone alerts you to an incoming call. …
Attending the Traditional Mass: Well Worth the Effort
Doing violence to one’s family heritage is always bad, it can never be good. No less is this true of the Church, the Family of God, on her pilgrimage through history. Casting away precious gifts from the inheritance of the …
Turning “Together Toward the Lord”: Why My Parish is Facing “East” Together at Mass this Lent
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 …
Why Are Seminaries Afraid of the Extraordinary Form?
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 …
Learning the Priesthood: The Role of Altar Service in Vocational Discernment
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. …
The Parameters of Christian Orthodoxy
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 …
The Identity Crisis in the Priesthood: Diminution by Design?
Let us begin with this certitude of Catholic Faith: anything—and I do mean anything at all—that harms the priesthood or the path of priestly formation in any way most definitely comes straight from the Evil One. Of this we can …
Armor and Armament Abandoned: Priestly Prayers Purged (Part I – Júdica Me)
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 …
Nominalism and the Possibility of a Modern Liturgy
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 …
Liturgy, Adaptation, and the Need for Context
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 …
