If someone asked you to explain why Our Lord instituted the Mass, what would you say? Could you tell him why it’s necessary for our right relationship with God [i]? As a result of the cosmic tragedy of Adam and Eve, the human race is plunged in darkness, misery, and guilt. Each one of us…
It’s Valentine’s Day, which means all the drugstores are festooned in red and pink; the secular advice columns are out in force; and the really, really bad movies jockey for position on screens around the world. Secular Valentine’s day is overly indulgent and kind of weird. This article, on the contrary, is about how to…
If he lived today, would Mozart have composed a cantata like Davide penitente (The Penitent David), K. 469? Performed successfully for the first time on March 13, 1785 in Vienna’s Burgtheater, it was soon forgotten. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was asked by the Vienna Musicians’ Society (Wiener Tonkünstler-Societät), a pension fund founded in 1771 to…
With the pope’s long awaited post-synodal exhortation not far away, we can be sure that the modernists will be taking their axes to the roots of the discipline of clerical celibacy. We will hear claims that clerical celibacy was introduced only in the 12th or 5th century and that it is not a discipline that…
Despite what may be insinuated, it is yet to be established definitively that the traditional Latin Mass employs only callous garlic-breathed priests who angrily shake their fists at crying babies, loud sneezes, and mispronunciations of Habemus ad Dominum. Conversely, it is yet to be established that every Catholic who seeks a “reform of the reform”…
For many years, as a Catholic praying Pope Paul VI’s Liturgy of the Hours, I had no idea that a liturgical office called Prime — or, for that matter, a liturgical book called the Roman Martyrology — even existed. As I discovered the traditional Latin Mass, I also discovered the Roman Breviary, the monastic Divine…
“The virtue of religion gives to God that which we owe Him, and we owe Him what He has inspired us in our tradition to give Him.” – Dr. Peter Kwasniewski Many books, articles, podcasts, YouTube videos, homilies, and lectures have been produced and published on this topic, but as the calendar has turned to…
In the first part of this series we discussed the general raising of the dignity of woman in and through Marian devotion with the coming of the Gospel. We also began to explain the “truly regal throne” first perfected by Mary in which every wife and mother has the privilege to participate. In this part,…
At the end of last September in his apostolic letter Aperuit illis, Pope Francis declared that the third Sunday per annum in the Novus Ordo would be the “Sunday of the Word of God.” In his letter, the pope left the particular shape of any celebrations to local churches (not especially helpful to those of…
On January 18, 2020, Homiletic & Pastoral Review published an article by Dr. Mary Healy entitled “The Gift of the Liturgical Reform.” The author seems oddly unaware of what is known about the history of the liturgy and its governing principles, the genesis of the Novus Ordo Missae, and the scholarly considerations of those who…
The sacrament of Confession has been under attack in Australia since the conclusion of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in December of 2017. Several states have now passed legislation that requires Catholic priests to violate the confessional seal in cases where child sexual abuse is revealed in confession. The Queensland…
