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…
He identified the rationalistic theology influenced by the rise of Aristotelianism with the “smoke rising from the abyss” (Apocalypse 9:21).
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…
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…
On 6 January Epiphany, the Magi – at the octave, 13 January, the Lord’s Baptism – on the 2nd Sunday after Epiphany, the Wedding at Cana which in John 1 and 2 is the “octave” of the Baptism.
Keep in mind not only love for the Name but also the fear which is Its due.
In our Epistle reading for this Sunday in the Octave of Christmas we hear from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians 4:1-7. There are two special points to underscore. Let’s see the reading: [Brethren] [T]he heir, as long as he is a child, is no better than a slave, though he is the owner of all…
Whether we are Western Latin Catholics or Eastern Catholics we ought to be interested in what our forebears did in Rome for these Sundays of Advent. Our traditions run deep. We know better who we are by knowing who they were. On this 3rd Sunday of Advent the Roman Station is at St. Peter’s on…
On the 1st Sunday of Advent it was the Church’s duty, which as a good Mother she fulfilled, to urge us to do penance in view of the end times and judgement at the Second Coming. This week she points to the joy that awaits us after penance and judgement, encapsulated in “Jerusalem”. We are…
Dom Prosper Guéranger wrote in his The Liturgical Year: The whole world is in expectation of its Redeemer; come, dear Jesus, show Thyself to it by granting it salvation. The Church, Thy bride, is now commencing another year, and her first word is to Thee, a word which she speaks in the anxious solicitude of…
With the exceptions of God’s loving mercy and the eternal joy of Heaven, all good things come to their end. This year’s series concludes with a glimpse into the Church’s final Sunday of our liturgical whirl about the Sun. Although this Sunday is – this year – numerically the 27th after Pentecost, we use the…
