From The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God: In 1959, Pope John XXIII saw a true need for liturgical renewal within the Roman Rite in accordance with the metaphorical principle of organic development, the aim of the Liturgical Movement endorsed by Pope St. Pius X.  In authentic organic development, the Church listens to what liturgical scholars deem necessary for the gradual improvement of liturgical tradition, and evaluate the need for such development, always with a careful eye on the preservation of the received liturgical tradition handed down from century to century. In this way, continuity of belief and liturgical practice is ensured. As Cardinal Ratzinger wrote at the time, the principle of organic development ensures that in the Mass, “only respect for the Liturgy’s fundamental unspontaneity and pre-existing identity can give us what we hope for: the feast in which the great reality comes to us that we ourselves do not manufacture , but receive as a gift. Organic de...

  I n a 2012 interview with Terri Gross on NPR’s   Fresh Air, Tonight show host Jimmy Fallon  talked about his childhood experience of Catholicism: GROSS: So you went to Catholic school when you were young. Mr. FALLON: Oh yeah. GROSS: Did you have… Mr. FALLON: I wanted to be a priest. GROSS: Did you really? Mr. FALLON: Yeah. I loved it. GROSS: Why? Mr. FALLON: I just, I loved the church. I loved the idea of it. I loved the smell of the incense . I loved the feeling you get when you left church. I loved like how this priest can make people feel this good. I just thought it was – I loved the whole idea of it. My grandfather was very religious, so I used to go to Mass with him at like 6:45 in the morning, serve Mass. And then you made money, too, if you did weddings and funerals. You’d get like five bucks. And so I go ‘Okay, I can make money too.’ I go, ‘This could be a good deal for me.’ I thought I had the calling. GROSS: Do you still go to church? ...

Sexagesima Sunday is the second Sunday before the start of  Lent , which makes it the eighth Sunday before  Easter . Traditionally, it was the second of three Sundays ( Septuagesima  is the first and Quinquagesima is the third) of preparation for Lent. Sexagesima  literally means "sixtieth," though it only falls 56 days before Easter. It most likely takes its name from Quinquagesima Sunday, which is 49 days before Easter, or 50 if you count Easter itself. When the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar was revised in 1969, the three pre-Lenten Sundays were removed; they are now denominated simply as Sundays in Ordinary Time. Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima are all still observed in the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass.

John Allen of the Globe has opined today that there are two key words that capture why many church officials believe it’s so important to avoid what they regard as false expectations of swift change to the church’s ban on divorced and remarried Catholics receiving communion and the other sacraments: Humanae Vitae,  Paul VI's 1968 document reasserting the church’s traditional ban on birth control. It rocked the world, Allen writes, "in part because the reforming energies of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) had led people to suspect change was just around the corner, in part because the pope himself had created a commission to study the issue." The o utcome of the Pope’s evential reassertion of the ban “soured public opinion on Pope Paul, in some ways inflicting a blow from which his papacy never really recovered. ” On matters related to marriage and the family, the Church has always seen the fertility of the husband and wife as a gift from God and the end ( telos...

In the United States, the 1960s marked the beginning of a breakdown in sexual mores and a rise in family disruption, joined with a culture of dissent as many tried to rationalize deviations from traditional morality. The United States witnessed a massive social experiment linked to genuine progress for which the Church was not prepared — discrimination against African-Americans and women was coming to an end, and Catholics were ever-increasingly undergoing assimilation into contemporary culture. As a result, Catholics began placing their spiritual lives in one compartment and their daily activities in the secular arena in another, commencing to treat their Catholic faith as an entirely private matter, open to a “pick-and-choose” approach to doctrine. Many theologians, religious educators and clergy succumbed to the same temptations. So it was hard for the doctrinal teaching of Vatican II to be heard; what did get through was often not the true council, but a “spirit” of Vatican II,...

Recently Professor Martin of Franciscan University wrote: ....when preparing their homilies, priests and pastors mustn’t forget the long shadow cast by sin.  Nor, while they’re at it, the devil himself, who was the first to live in love’s shadow, and has been wandering about the world ever since trying mightily to put out the lights.  I mean, who else besides all those fallen and corrupt angels deserve the  first  word in a sermon on sin?   .... Ah, but Satan, we are told, achieved his master-stroke sometime in the nineteenth  century when he managed to persuade huge numbers of people to stop believing in him.  Once that ruse got around—and, as always, educated opinion was sinfully eager to help it along—the devil was at liberty to do his worst.  What then becomes of sin in a world more and more divested of belief in an Evil Intelligence bent on bedeviling us with its false attractions?  It doesn’t just go poof, does it? Leaving us wi...

Last fall, militant Italaian atheist Piergeorgio Oddifreddi wrote Dear Pope, I'm Writing to You. O difreddi later said he was particularly surprised that Benedict read his book from cover to cover and wanted to discuss it, as it had been billed as a “luciferian introduction to atheism.” He should not have been so surprised, had he known his man.  Odifreddi's book was a critique of certain arguments and lines of thought found in Benedict’s theological writings, beginning with his 1967 volume  Introduction to Christianity , and including his book  Jesus of Nazareth , which he wrote as pope, both of which I have  profited  from enormously. “My opinion about your book is, as a whole, rather mixed,” B16 said. “I profited from some parts, which I read with enjoyment, but in other parts I was astonished at a certain aggressiveness and thoughtless argumentation.” He noted that, several times, Odifreddi refers to theology as science fiction, and he...

WATCH: Father of the 15-year-old being held at Boston Children’s Hospital speaks out for the first time Monday, Feb 17, 2014 at 7:57 PM EST Glenn Beck has been talking about the  plight of 15-year-old Justina Pelletier  and her family for a number of months now. Justina has been kept in Boston Children’s Hospital against her parents’ will since February 2013. The medical facility took custody of her when her parents argued against their daughter’s diagnosis. Justina was diagnosed with mitochondrial disease a few years ago and was able to live a normal life. Her older sister also has the disease. In February, she got the flu and was taken to Boston Children’s Hospital to see a specialist. It was at that time the problems began. A new team of doctors took over Pelletier’s case and immediately questioned her previous diagnosis. They re-diagnosed her with ‘somatoform disorder’ – a mental illness. Her parents, Lou and Linda Pelletier, refused to sign off on this new diag...

Would that RCIA directors around the country would be mandated to use FR. Barron's Series to prepare catechuemens. When I was a sponsor, I would have given anyething had we heard something like the following, rather than the lukewarm, bubble gum Catholicism in vogue in so many parishes: In his series and book,   Catholicism , Father Robert Barron eloquently spoke to the insecure temptation to which we all...are subject. “One of the most fundamental problems in the spiritual order is that we sense within ourselves the hunger for God, but we attempt to satisfy it with some created good that is less than God. Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Sensing the void within, we attempt to fill it up with some combination of these four things, but only by emptying out the self in love can we make the space for God to fill us… When we try to satisfy the hunger for God with something less than God, we will natura...

 In 2012 I wrote: Of late, on several Catholic College campuses it has been possible to attend a performance of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues , a play which, among “celebrations” of the female experience of the vagina, contains a “romantic” scene, where a 24-year-old woman seduces a 13-year-old girl. The woman invites the girl into her car, takes her to her house, supplies her with vodka, and seduces her, calling the experience “a kind of heaven.” (One wonders what outcry would occur if priests with same-sex attractions were to come to the defense of the play). It is surely reasonable to argue that these phenomena are the result of a turning away from traditional Catholic sexual moral teaching, revealed by God for our health and well-being. This rebellion has as its fruit not “liberation” but widespread suffering : the spiraling number of STDs, the millions of abortions, unintended sterility, global pornography, the sex trade, the vast increase in rape and child abuse, pr...

From time to time a local pastor fires us up with fortitudinal e-blasts, of which this is his latest: Dear Parishioners, Every Catholic should be angry about this. Please take the time to read the editorial below that recently appeared in  Investor's Business Daily . Cheers in the Lord,  Fr. Tony United Nations Scolds Catholic Church On Human Rights             Anti-Religion:  Ignoring abhorrences such as China's one-child policy and atrocities condoned by Shariah law, a U.N. committee tells the Vatican to deal with abusive priests and change its teachings on abortion, contraception and homosexuality. That the report issued by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child would mention the instances of abuse of children by priests in the United States is not surprising.  What is surprising and unfortunate is that the U.N. would act as if the Catholic Church had done nothing about it and use the report as a ...

I post from time to time the elephant-in-the room evil of pornography , and borrowed this from the Opinionated Catholic :  There’s a situation in counseling I come across all too often: a couple will typically tell me first about how stressful their lives are. Maybe he’s lost his job. Perhaps she’s working two. Maybe their children are rowdy or the house is chaotic. But usually, if we talk long enough about their fracturing marriage, there is a sense that something else is afoot. The couple will tell me about how their sex life is near extinction. The man, she’ll tell me, is an emotional wraith, dead to intimacy with his wife. The woman will be frustrated, with what seems to him to be a wild mixture of rage and humiliation. They just don’t know what’s wrong, but they know a Christian marriage isn’t supposed to feel like this.  It’s at this point that I interrupt the discussion, look at the man, and ask, “So how long has the porn been going on?” The couple will look at eac...

T oday is Septuagesima Sunday in the Tridentine calendar.  Septuagesima    and Lent are both times of penance, Septuagesima being a time of voluntary fasting in preparation for the obligatory Great Fast of Lent. The theme is the Babylonian exile, the "mortal coil" we must endure as we await the Heavenly Jerusalem. Sobriety and somberness reign liturgically; the Alleluia and Gloria are banished The Sundays of Septugesima are named for their distance away from Easter: The first Sunday of Septuagesima gives its name to the entire season as it is known as "Septuagesima." "Septuagesima" means "seventy," and Septuagesima Sunday comes roughly seventy days before Easter. This seventy represents the seventy years of the Babylonian Captivity. It is on this Sunday that the alleluia is "put away," not to be said again until the Vigil of Easter.   The second Sunday of Septuagesima is known as "Sexagesima, which means "sixty"...

I mmediately after the Second Vatican Council  it was presumed that requests for the use of the 1962 Missal would be limited to the older generation which had grown up with it , but in the meantime  it has clearly been demonstrated that young persons too have discovered this liturgical form , felt its attraction and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Eucharist ... . ...  What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful . It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.  ( Benedict XVI ,  July 7, 2007 Letter to Bishops ) That many spiritually young people love the Tridentine Mass can no longer be in doubt!