Fr. Z on Q (uinquagesima)

WDTRPS: Quinquagesima Sunday – Prepare for battle!

Posted on 6 February 2016 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

In our traditional Roman calendar tomorrow, Sunday, is Quinquagesima, Latin for the symbolic “Fiftieth” day before Easter. Today is one of the pre-Lenten Sundays which prepare us for the discipline of Lent. The priest’s vestments are purple. NoAlleluia. The prayers and readings for the pre-Lenten Sundays were compiled by St. Gregory the Great (+604). The Consilium’s liturgical engineers under Annibale Bugnini and others eliminated these pre-Lent Sundays, much to our detriment. (Cf. BugniniCare).

Those who participate at Holy Mass in the Extraordinary Form will see that the priest’s vestments are purple. A Tract is sung in place of anAlleluia, which has been “buried” until Easter. The Introit refers to the “rock” and the Roman Station today is at St. Peter’s on the Vatican Hill.

COLLECT:

Preces nostras, quaesumus, Domine, clementer exaudi: atque, a peccatorum vinculis absolutos, ab omni nos adversitate custodi.

This prayer is found in the ancient Liber Sacramentorum Augustodunensis and the L.S. Engolismensis. I cannot find this prayer in any form in the post-Conciliar editions of the Missale Romanum.

You won’t find Quinquagesima either!

The ponderous Lewis & Short Dictionary reminds us that absolvo means “to loosen from, to make loose, set free, detach, untie” or in juridical language “to absolve from a charge, to acquit, declare innocent”. The priest uses this word when he absolves you of the bonds of your sins. Vinculum is “that with which any thing is bound, a band, bond, rope, cord, fetter, tie”. This bond can be literal, as in physical fetters, or it can be moral or some sort of state. You can be bound in charity or peace, or bound in damnation or sin. In the case if sin, in liturgical prayer we find a form of vinculum or its plural with “loosing” verbs such as absolvo or resolvo or dissolvo. In ancient prayer the state of sin conceived as a place in which we are bound. The bonds must be loosed so that we can escape and be free.

In the whole of the post-Conciliar Missal I don’t believe the combination peccata absolvere is found, but it is in ancient collections. One finds the phrase with some additional term such as “bonds” or “ties” of sins.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:

We beseech You, O Lord, graciously attend to our prayers: and, having been loosed from the fetters of sins, guard us from every adversity.

What is the first thing an enemy does to you, once you are captured?

He disarms you.

He shackles you.

He renders you powerless to do your own will.

Even when we have fallen into sin, we retain free will, but our will is already weakened due to original and actual sin. We can become so mired in sin that we can’t rule ourselves.

The Sacrament of Penance is a great gift. It frees us from our self-inflicted chains.

We must strive to live without mortal sin.

But we fall. In mortal sin we divest ourselves, as it were, of our spiritual armor. We make ourselves prisoners.

We pray to God to protect us from the dire consequences of sin, including the attacks of the Enemy, which on our own without God’s help we cannot resist.

Among the benefits of the Sacrament of Penance, along with being freed from the chains of sins, is a strengthening to resist sin in the future.

These prayers of the pre-Lenten Sundays are meant to help us ready the stores in our interior fortresses before the spiritual battle of Lent.

We must empty out what does not serve and be filled with that which does.

Prepare yourselves for battle and Lent’s discipline.

GO TO CONFESSION!

Comments

This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News

DANCING WITH MR. D: This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News : 'via Blog this'

On the Smoke of Modernism

A S is well known to all but those who choose not to see, the broken or irregular home has gone from being the exception to the rule. The family is the building block upon which all secular and Christian civilization is built. Marriage is a divine and natural institution perfectly portrayed by Christ the bridegroom and His Church, the bride. Though the world has been trying to change both, we find ourselves with a gap between how the world sees family and marriage and what the Church knows about them. The Fourteenth General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops took place from October 4 to October 25, 2015, in Vatican City. While it is inspiring that the Church fathers are attempting to develop pastoral solutions to the overwhelming problems we face as a global society concerning marriage and family, it is rewarding to know the roots of the problems that we face. If we untangle the modernism on both topics we will discover that the problem lies in the contraceptive mindset. ...

On Marriage

Marriage comes to us from nature. In Catholic teaching Jesus sanctifies marriage as a sacrament for the baptized, giving it significance beyond its natural reality. Traditionally the state has safeguarded marriage because it is indispensable to family and thus to the common good of society. But neither Church nor State instituted marriage, and neither can change its nature. God created two mutually complementary sexes, able to transmit life through marital union. Consummated sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is ideally based on mutual love and must always be based on mutual consent, if they are genuinely human actions. No matter how strong a friendship or deep a love between persons of the same sex might be, it is physically impossible for two men, or two women, to consummate a marital union. (In civil law, non-consummation of a marriage constitutes grounds for annulment). It is easy to see that sexual intercourse between a man and a w...

Signs of These Times, or "Life Under the Relativist Dictatorship"

While reading Ralph Martin’s A Church in Crisis I encontered an endnote reference to a blog post by Fr. Longenecker, which sheds light on the roots of contemporary secular befuddlement: RELATIVISM, IRRATIONAL RAGE AND REVOLUTION One of the most disturbing aspects of the troubles of 2020 has been the confusion and bewilderment caused by so much uncertainty. When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic every other news report or social media link or comment has been contradictory. “Masks are useless. Everybody must wear a mask! Only sick old people will get this disease. My friend knows a guy in his forties who is an athlete and very fit and he nearly died! You can get it just from touching your groceries. The virus doesn’t transmit that way. The threat is global. Only New York City is being hit. Not us.” We’ve seen the most amazing contradictions over the last week with the massive demonstrations. We’re supposed to observe social distancing, but thousands are encouraged ...

Our Lord Refuses to Dance With Mr. D

During his weekly Angelus address on Sunday, Pope Francis spoke about the day’s Gospel reading, which focused on the temptation of Jesus in the desert. Satan, the Pope said, tried “to divert Jesus from the Father’s plan” by tempting Him “to take an easy path,” a path “of success and power.” Jesus definitively rejects these temptations, reaffirming His “firm intention to follow the path established by the Father, without any compromise with sin or with the logic of the world.” This commitment to follow the plan of the Father is realized in Jesus actions; “His absolute fidelity to the Father's plan of love will lead Him, after about three years, to the final confrontation with the “prince of this world” (Jn 16:11), in the hour of the Passion and of the Cross, and there Jesus will achieve His final victory, the victory of love!” The Holy Father encouraged all of us to take the opportunity afforded by Lent to renew our Baptismal promises, renouncing Satan and his seductions, “i...

On Prideful, Utopian Thought

( Continued from September 13 ) T he Church believes that we can change. She teachs that all sacraments, but most importantly the Eucharist, can and do change our lives. This belief in the power of the Eucharist is manifest in Thomas Merton, the great twentieth-century Catholic mystic: “the grace of the Eucharist is not confined to the moments of thanksgiving after Mass and communion, but reaches out into our whole day and into all the affairs of our life, in order to sanctify and transform them in Christ.” Change, conversion through the Eucharist does not happen overnight. But the Church believes at her core that Her sacramental life, over time, leads us towards holiness, the call of Vatican II. At the same time, we as Catholics scrap the idea that as a society we will ever arrive at a Morean utopia. To cite only one example, Jesus said: “you always will have the poor with you” (Mark 14:7). Pope Paul VI, about whom I wrote my book, stated in his 1971 en...

Divide et Impera

Mr. Patrick Boyden has penned a reflection worth noting. In 2013 I wrote: Lest we forget, there were indeed reform-minded Council Fathers who responded to Pope John’s vision of the Church growing in spiritual riches as a fruit of the Council under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the hope that the faithful might through grace be aided in turning hearts and minds toward heavenly things. Given what has been said thus far, it should not surprise the reader that many “liberal Catholics” view the pontificate of John Paul II as too “conservative,” and out of touch with the modern world, while the traditionalists view the writings and teachings of the Holy Father as modernist! Thus the schema of “liberal” (progressive, left) vs. conservative (traditional, right) which followed upon the close of Vatican II is wholly inadequate for explaining the present-day crisis of faith within the Church of Jesus Christ, though it is most unfortunate that usage of these terms persist...

Homosexual Marriage

The urgency of the issue of gay marriage at this time and the compelling arguments raised against it here, make this paper an important resource: Answering Advocates of Gay Marriage KATHERINE YOUNG AND PAUL NATHANSON Claim 1 : Marriage is an institution designed to foster the love between two people. Gay people can love each other just as straight people can. Ergo, marriage should be open to gay people. Claim 2 : Not all straight couples have children, but no one argues that their marriages are unacceptable Claim 3 : Some gay couples do have children and therefore need marriage to provide the appropriate context. Claim 4 : Marriage and the family are always changing anyway, so why not allow this change? Claim 5 : Marriage and the family have already changed, so why not acknowledge the reality? Claim 6 : Children would be no worse off with happily married gay parents than they are with unhappily married straight ones. Claim 7 : Given global overpopulation, why w...

Archangels

On Monday’s feast of the archangels, Pope Francis spoke of the ongoing battle between the devil and mankind, encouraging attendees to pray to the angels, who have been charged to defend us. “He presents things as if they were good, but his intention is destruction. And the angels defend us,” the Holy Father told those gathered for his Sept. 29 Mass in the Vatican’s Saint Martha residence. Francis began by pointing to the day’s readings, taken from Daniel Chapter 7, in which the prophet has a vision of God the Father on a throne of fire giving Jesus dominion over the world, and Revelation Chapter 12, which recounts the battle in which Satan, as a large dragon, is cast out of heaven by St. Michael. Noting how these are strong images portraying “the great dragon, the ancient serpent,” who “seduces all of inhabited earth,” the Pope also drew attention to Jesus’ words to the prophet Nathanael in the day’s Gospel from John, when he tells him: “You will see heaven opened and the ange...

A Good Shepherd....

Bottom of Form Indianapolis archbishop revokes Jesuit prep school's Catholic identity 7.4K1313 Top of Form Bottom of Form Indianapolis, Ind., Jun 20, 2019 / 01:49 pm ( CNA ).- The Archdiocese of Indianapolis announced Thursday that a local Jesuit high school will no longer be recognized as a Catholic school, due to a disagreement about the employment of a teacher who attempted to contract a same-sex marriage. “All those who minister in Catholic educational institutions carry out an important ministry in communicating the fullness of Catholic teaching to students both by word and action inside and outside the classroom,” the archdiocese said in a statement Thursday. “In the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, every archdiocesan Catholic school and private Catholic school has been instructed to clearly state in its contracts and ministerial job descriptions that all ministers must convey and be supportive of all teachings of the Catholic Church.” Teachers, the ar...

Search This Blog