About the Author II

In the years prior to the Second Vatican Council, I also remember attending daily Mass before elementary school, which, because we had fasted for three hours, allowed us to eat breakfast in Mr. Sullivan’s math class. I remember bellowing out Tantum Ergo at Wednesday Evening Benediction, which I was in the habit of attending with my Mom, siblings and “Gramp,” (her Dad, John). I also remember looking forward to participating in the praying of that most sublime form of prayer, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, with my St. Joseph’s Daily Missal.

With Pope Benedict’s having granted permission for priests to offer the Extraordinary form of the Roman Rite, we hear much ado in the form of reaction against this from Catholic “progressives,” and about how the Council placed a new emphasis on the laity’s participation at Mass, the implication being that Catholics did not actively participate at Mass prior to Vatican II, opting for such devotions as the praying of the Rosary or Holy Cards. To such persons I say: you should’ve seen me (and pal Bob, for that matter) at Mass in third grade! Not only did I pray along with the priest in the Latin Missal, but I was a better-than-average singer of Gregorian chant, thanks to convert Mrs. Crowley’s daily faithful rendering of the chanted antiphons and propers in Latin. I, who failed becoming an altar server by stumbling over one Latin syllable in my tryout test, (Sr. Isabelle must have had a bad habit day that day), also remember telling my younger brother John, who passed, how he forgot the proper order in covering the communion rails before Holy Communion.

St. Eugene’s eventually closed in the Year of Our Lord 1989 due to “white flight” and demographic changes after the 1967 riots in Detroit, and with this came to an end the place where I spent some of the holiest years of my life, years in which neither I nor my classmates were ashamed to publicly give witness to our faith in Christ (yes, I too dressed in sheets and played the priest in acting out the Mass with my siblings). My memories of participation at Mass are exalted ones. There was a sense of the sacred that has since, through misimplementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium, long since evaporated at Mass (though Jesus is just as present as He always was and will be), which has manifested itself in the words of my Catholic high school students as “Why do we have to go to Mass?”

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From Columbine to Christ: "Not only did God lead me out of Columbine, he was leading me to himself." - Denver Catholic

From Columbine to Christ: "Not only did God lead me out of Columbine, he was leading me to himself." - Denver Catholic : Every school day for almost two years, Jenica Thornby would spend her lunch hour in the library at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Every day, except April 20, 1999. …

Are We in a War?

Power Line POSTED ON NOVEMBER 22, 2020 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN DEMOCRATS , LIBERALS , SOCIALISM FIGHTING WORDS, BY DAVID HOROWITZ Our friend David Horowitz wrote this essay, which he titled “Fighting Words.” It is a call for freedom-loving Americans to fight back against the totalitarian Left. By now it should be obvious – even to conservatives – that we are in a war. It is a conflict that began nearly fifty years ago when the street revolutionaries of the Sixties joined the Democrat Party. Their immediate goal was to help the Communist enemy win the war in Vietnam, but they stayed to expand their influence in the Democrat Party and create the radical force that confronts us today. The war that today’s Democrats are engaged in reflects the values and methods of those radicals. It is a war against us – against individual freedom, against America’s constitutional order, and against the capitalist engine of our prosperity. Democrat radi...

On Marriage and Family

Today should one attend a wedding, it is quite possible that the parents of either the bride or groom in attendance will be married, either in the Catholic Church or outside it, to someone other than the one they were first married to. In such a case, one would find oneself praying that the offspring of said marriage will not meet with the same fate. The state of marriage today is what it is in part due to poor sacramental preparation in the years immediately following Vatican II for reasons I take up in my book, another fruit of the “sexual revolution” . Sad, but as is well-known, many young Catholics these days are delaying marriage, hooking up, practicing birth control, and cohabiting before getting married. Traditional marriage is under assault, and many baptized Catholics are joining in the attack, especially in favoring “same-sex marriage.” Thus it is inspiring to see the shepherds of the flocks gathering in synod to discuss “the pastoral challenges o...

Blogging Disciples!

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Dancing With Mr. D: Grooming the Little Children

A former pro-transgender activist said she regretted her previous work in pro-transgender activism, adding she felt she was "indoctrinated" on gender ideology in an interview with Fox News Digital. "I started to realize that what I had been doing at my job at the LGBT Center, it was grooming," Kay Yang, a former employee of a location in New York, said. Grooming in this context means "to get into readiness for a specific objective." Kay works as a 'deprogrammer' to help parents and children who have been 'indoctrinated' by the 'cult-like' transgender agenda. Yang herself previously went by they/them and worked as a 'trans educator' in schools for years. Listen to her testimony.

On the Spirit of the Liturgy

Defending the papacy of Benedict XVI vs . the New York Times (!), Randall B. Smith has written : Like his predecessor before him, Benedict effectively carried on the authentic reforms of the Second Vatican Council, as opposed to the false “reforms” that so often led the Church astray in the post-conciliar period. A cardinal archbishop told an audience recently that the liturgy was so abused in the early seventies when he was in seminary that the faithful seminarians would say about the ersatz masses being done by their elders: “Everything in them changes but the bread and wine.” Benedict, by contrast, did a great deal to help realize the original intentions of the liturgical reformers. Given that the lex orandi (the law of praying) is intimately intertwined with the lex credendi (the law of believing)—which is another way of saying that what we pray is what we believe—reforming the liturgy has always been an absolutely essential way of helping...

Novus Motus Liturgicus

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The Dysfunctional Nations

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Fifty Shades of Pleasure

Having written about how secular social science has documented the sexualization of American culture, largely dating from the introduction of the Pill, it is hopeful to find stories such as the following in the mainstream media. Lara Johnson is a freelance writer who also recommends T he Price of Pleasure .

Who is Behind the Church That Never was?

At the close of Vatican II, Pope Paul VI remarked that Christianity, the religion of God-Incarnate, had encountered the religion of man-made God. He was of the opinion that much of the Council was given over to demonstrating the compatibility of Enlightenment belief with Catholicism. 4 Several years hence, on June 29, 1972, Paul delivered another assessment of the state of the Roman Catholic Church since the close of Vatican II. As Cardinal Silvio Oddi recalled it (in an article first published on March 17, 1990, in Il Sabato magazine in Rome) the Holy Father told a congregation: We have the impression that through some cracks in the wall the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God: it is doubt, uncertainty, questioning, dissatisfaction, confrontation. And how did this come about? We will confide to you the thought that may be, we ourselves admit in free discussion, that may be unfounded, and that is that there has been a power, an adversary power. Let us call him by his n...

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