The Reverent Novus Ordo Doesn’t Scale
The extreme adaptability of the reverent Novus Ordo renders it unscale-able.
Colligite Fragmenta: 3rd Sunday of Lent
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…
Colligite Fragmenta: 2nd Sunday of Lent
If we try to put ourselves into the shoes of the ancient Roman catechumens, being prepared from the pre-Lent “Gesima” Sundays onward, we can perhaps grasp the psychological and pedagogical importance of having the Gospel reading about the Transfiguration on this 2nd Sunday of Lent. Much of the content of the Mass formularies and the…
Colligite Fragmenta: 1st Sunday of Lent
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…
Colligite Fragmenta – Septuagesima Sunday: Full, Conscious and Actual
Pre-Lent is here. With the traditional calendar of the Roman Rite, in the Vetus Ordo, you cannot be surprised by Lent sneaking up on you. You have no excuse. Start thinking about your Lenten discipline now. There are three Pre-Lent Sundays, Septuagesima Sunday, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima, which in Latin respectively mean “Seventieth, Sixtieth, Fiftieth”. These…
The Novus Ordo is Rhetorical Religion
It concerns the nature of religion itself and its political meaning.
Colligite Fragmenta – 5th Sunday after Epiphany: Bowels
Easter can fall at its latest on 25 April in the Gregorian Calendar codified by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. In this 2025th year of our salvation Easter is quite late, occurring on 20 April. This is because the first full Moon after the Vernal Equinox will be at 20:22 of 12 April EDT which…
Colligite Fragmenta: Candlemas or the Feast of the Purification
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…
Part III: Being part of the Church
Grace is at work within the visible unity of the Catholic Church.
Colligite Fragmenta: 3rd Sunday after Epiphany
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…
Colligite Fragmenta – 2nd Sunday after Epiphany
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…
