Wednesday, September 26, 2007

No Child Left Behind


In theory, we put the interests of children before that of adults, but in practice we limit our outrage to tangible and visible abuse. Some 150,000 children each year cease to live with one or other of their parents as a result of divorce; and children of cohabiting couples are twice as likely to see their parents split up. They cannot articulate their suffering and are not willing to blame those they most love; indeed, because of the essential egocentricity of the child, they tend to blame themselves. Where is the lobby to protect their interests? Fathers4Justice campaigns for the rights of fathers to see their sons, but what organisation promotes the rights of sons to see their fathers?

— Piers Paul Read, Sex and Society: Anyone for Chastity, Spectator, 4 March 2006.

 

An Irreligious Age

We are said to live in a secular age, as if secular could exist without religious. But we can no more have secular without religous then we can have atheism without theism. It would be better to call ours an irreligious age, and even better — if religion is true — a nonage.
 

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Death of Cultures, Life in Jesus


We observe two great and related phenomena in the global South: the fastest rate of cultural extinction in history, as well as the fastest rate of Christian evangelization in history. I do not mean to minimize the tragedy of declining cultures, but it is only because of the terrible depth of that tragedy that hundreds of millions of souls turn in fear and trembling to a religion that represents itself as standing above all human cultures: the ekklesia of individuals called out from amongst the nations to the Kingdom of God.

Whence come the fear and trembling? Christians are the adoptive children of the Jewish patriarch Abraham, in the interpretation of St Paul proposed by Michael Wyschogrod. In an important sense, the new Christians of the global South relive the life of Abraham, who left behind clan and kindred at divine command in the world of 4,000 years ago, when clan and kindred were everything. Given a son in old age, Abraham was told to sacrifice that son, thereby destroying his links to the future.


— Spengler, National extinction and natural law

 

Friday, September 14, 2007

Sancta Missa


Sancta Missa, tutorial on the Latin Mass according to the 1962 Missale Romanum, by St. John Cantius Parish, Chicago.
 

Sunday, September 9, 2007

The Liturgical Imagination

See here.
 

Pro Multus

A church that believes that all are saved cannot be very concerned with the salvation of souls.
 

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Reconciliation


Summorum Pontificum is a reconciliation with the Church's liturgical past.
— Father Uwe Michael Lang, quoted in For God, For Country, and For Yale.

 

Friday, September 7, 2007

Baptism

Baptism is not inoculation.
 

Monday, September 3, 2007

Liturgical Singing


Our goal can be formulated in a paraphrase of the famous dictum of St. Pius X: Do not merely sing during Mass, but rather sing the Mass.
— Lázló Dobszay, The Bugnini-Liturgy and the Reform of the Reform, Front Royal VA, 2003, 120.