A bad odour and a traditional Catholic

My last post concerned a prominent female blogger who appears to view traditional Catholics rather less favourably than something nasty found on the sole of her shoe.

This is not an uncommon reaction but, many years ago it was only one's work colleagues (non Catholics) who would curl their lips and wrinkle their noses when it came out that you were Catholic.

I believe that this was a show of both distaste  and fear born out of a form of grudging respect that they held for those of the Catholic Faith.

They knew that our Faith was black and white, no shades of grey, no prevaricating, something was either right or wrong (and then the whole world believed that homosexual acts were wrong).

Today it appears as if it matters not to the world if we are Catholic or Newt worshippers - we are worthless and to be ignored.

And now it is fellow Catholics who make silly faces when they learn that you are at the traditional end of the swimming pool, (the deep end).

Earlier this year I was making a return journey from up North (sorry, oop North) when I had to change trains at Stockport.

Who should be sitting in the platform waiting room, resplendent in his habit, but a Dominican Friar.

There is no sight more wonderful on our streets than a Dominican in full fig.

White stockings, black, highly polished shoes and a black and white habit with a set of large Rosary
beads interwoven into the hem of the garment.

As a child of the Order I felt compelled to sit alongside this epitome of the Faith and strike up a conversation with him.
We spoke of my Dominican school (St James' Burnt Oak) and of current affairs with regard to HMC.

And then I blew it. Our pleasant chat came to an abrupt halt when I asked the question:
" Do you celebrate Mass in the Extraordinary Form Father?"

His face betrayed him as if he had just taken a mouthful of dead rat.

"No, never" he spluttered, coming up for air.

And that, sadly, was the end of that. He made some feeble excuse such as having to catch a train and departed pdq.

He is, how shall I put it? One of the most senior Dominicans in the country and his name (which I shall not divulge) is very similar to a highly notorious brother Dominican with extreme left wing tendencies.

And therein lies the clue to his response.
If he had been a young OP he would have not made the silly face but, as a member of the old guard he had already made one somersault back in 1969 and he was not going to chuck away his "Spirit of Vatican II" shroud to make another about turn in 2013.
Fr Z's words, which have been taken out of context and twisted to make them appear uncharitable, ring true here.
I paraphrase:
The biological clock is running out on the old guard and, when they finally shuffle off, the Catholic world will be left with a stronger orthodox base.

Trouble is, many of us will have shuffled off by then also.

I am far from a paragon of virtue but, if I learn that someone only attends the OF Mass or, indeed, shows a dislike of the EF one, I do not pull a face.

And I wish our allegedly liberal friends would not do so either.
 

St Dominic, the Rosary saint

What better way to celebrate the Feast of this great saint than by singing the Salve Regina, followed by
O Spem Miram - and not a dog joke in sight.

Have no fear of failure.....

First preached under the heading: NO FEAR OF FAILURE by Fr Aidan Nichols OP and reproduced by kind permission of Torch.op.org 

Aidan Nichols O.P.

'When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.' One of the sayings in the Gospel tradition, then, that registers the merciful love of Christ for his own people, the consecrated nation.

In this spirit, he sends out his twelve closest friends, his inner group of disciples, on mission. He sees them as the new 'twelve patriarchs' of the people, destined to give the House of Israel a fresh beginning, just as the great heroes of the past, the sons of Jacob, had done before. And what was the result? A flop. The Twelve do not convert Israel. Jesus will weep over the Jerusalem that rejects him. Whatever else we may say about his Sacrifice, he goes to his death in the awareness that he had been unable to bring his people to share through him the life of the Father.

This tells us two things -- something about God and something about ourselves. First, something about God. When God involves himself in our world and becomes incarnate, his life is, in human terms, a failure, and a spectacular one at that. This seems like nonsense. How can divinity which, among other things, is omnipotence, fail?

God is indeed omnipotent, but his omnipotence is in function of his love. His power realizes what his love intends. It does not compel assent when the 'Yes' of creatures is withheld. If God is to show himself in our world precisely in his love, he must be open to possibilities of defeat. And in a world affected through and through by original sin, by the warp that makes ordinary respectable people do the things we read about in newspapers, it's morally inevitable that God will be defeated -- at first.

Boundlessly exigent, ennobling love such as God's must be: this puts limitless demands on us, and hence we want to blot it out. That is something already presented to us in the Passion narrative of St Matthew, the first Gospel, though it will not be analysed until the fourth Gospel, St John.

Secondly, the failure in human terms of Jesus's ministry tells us something about ourselves. If the incarnate Son of God accepted the defeat of the Cross as the right way to witness to the love that is his Father, why are we so frightened of failure? In countries like Britain, the Catholic Church today seems paralysed by the thought of seemingly inevitable decline. For the liberal press, it is certain that Christendom is over, and for the more traditionally minded newspaper, the question is only, 'How long, O Lord?'

How long before a multi-faith society is constitutionally recognized -- a prospect which is only a half-way house before we move on to acknowledging a global ethic -- we might call it 'ecological humanism' -- as the religion of the future, in comparison with which all historic religions will look parochial and out of date.

Such a prospect should not make us defeatist and passive. The Church has known many setbacks in history, many unpropitious sets of circumstances in which to work. She has known situations where whole populations have fallen away, leaving only tiny remnants to carry the precious burden of revelation, the message of salvation, through history.

Let them do their worst. They will not say 'No' more vociferously, or (for that matter) with greater indifference, than many of the participants in the Passion of Christ.

Whatever happens, our task is to be faithful to the mission our Lord has given us, and, if we are young, to consider by what means we can best serve the Kingdom of God -- it may be to live and work directly for the Church as a priest or in a religious order, perhaps helping to revive one that has become moribund yet represents something valuable. If we are middle-aged, and at the height of our influence in our particular milieu, 'being faithful' will mean using that influence. If we are old, it will mean counselling others by what we say and do, and praying that the Church be kept Catholic and not fritter away her commission in platitudes and blandness.

Our Lady who is "younger than sin"

 

I Have not yet heard Fr Pereira OP preach in the flesh so to speak but I have read some of his online sermons and they are very inspiring and heartening.

I was particularly taken by the content of this sermon on Our Lady on the feast of The Immaculate Conception, and so, with the kind permission of the Dominican online sermon database at http://torch.op.org/ here, in Our Lady's month, is the sermon in full:



Fr Leon Pereira OP



One of the frustrating features of life is the constant feeling of never quite getting there. When I was simply professed, people said, 'Ah, but you're not solemnly professed'. When I was solemnly professed, I wasn't yet ordained. When I became a deacon, my brothers pointed out that I was only a deacon.

And when I became a priest and came to Rome, I discovered that a distinction is made between junior and senior priests! The same is true in all walks of life; no matter how far you get, you are never quite there.
Do we value seniority so much because it is almost God-like? God, after all, is terribly senior; he's been around since before the world began. That would be true if God were a creature like us, temporal. But God is not old or senior. He is eternal, and that does not mean he is older than all things. It means he is prior to all things. From our perspective within time, God is 'ever ancient, ever new'.
So in a sense, God is newer than the newest thought you've just had. Because God is paradoxically 'ever ancient, ever new', his action in our lives is similar. Even though everything grows old and dies, the action of God's grace makes us young somehow.
At the end of Georges Bernanos's Diary of A Country Priest, the junior priest lies dying. His mentor, the senior priest, tells him to fix his mind on Our Lady: Our Lady 'the youngest daughter of the human race,' Our Lady who is 'younger than sin'. Because she is full of grace, Mary is so young in the order of grace that she does not and never did have that deficit of grace we call original sin.
This great mystery, the Immaculate Conception, is what we celebrate today.(sermon issued on December 8th) No matter what her age is in the order of nature, in the order of grace Mary is so young that she is untouched by sin and unrestrained by death, the first-fruits of Christ's victory.
This unique privilege of Mary, completely unmerited by her, seems to make her a super-human, beyond the reach of us mere mortals. But this is a problem with our perspective. Mary is the complete human being, and we are the defective ones. We are the hollow men, the badly drawn boys and girls, incomplete like the stick figures on the door of a public convenience. But Mary is a human being as she ought to be, replete with and completed in grace, fleshed out, perfect in her voluptuousness.
As a song by Mary Black puts it,

'She is the perfect creature, natural in every feature'

Our Lady is perfect because she is most perfectly natural, and she is utterly natural because she is filled-with-grace. Mary is full of grace because Christ is the fullness of grace, and it is from his grace, as Scripture says, that we have all received grace upon grace.
The salvation of Mary, the Immaculate Conception, is a pre-sacramental salvation. Mary does not need baptism. From the beginning of her existence she was utterly filled with God's grace. And this is why the Immaculate Conception is so important for us. Mary's pre-sacramental salvation is a sign of our post-sacramental life in the Kingdom of heaven.
What this feast means for us is that Christ's love does not stop with us merely being forgiven sinners, but it will transform us as though sin had never been. Our redemption will not be simply the happy end of a fraught journey. In our redemption we will be somehow mysteriously freed from our history. Even our sins will form the weave of a completed holiness. There will be no more striving to get there, because we will have arrived.

As Mary already is, so shall the whole Church be, as Scripture says, 'without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and immaculate' (Ephesians 5.27).