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Views from the Choir Loft

Masculine Spirituality

Fr. David Friel · August 29, 2011

Today (29 August 2011) has been the memorial of the Beheading of John the Baptist—one of the more colorful feasts on the Church calendar. Beyond the blood and guts, it has something deep to teach us, I believe, about masculine spirituality.

The Gospel passage that recounts this story (c.f., Mark 6:17-29) strikes me as having three main characters. The first is John the Baptist; the second is Herod the Tetrarch; and the third, though unmentioned, is Jesus the Christ.

John has a decision to make. Which side should he take? He could take the side of King Herod, the earthly king who wants his unlawful marriage to his brother’s wife to be sanctioned. Or he could take the side of the Eternal King, Who gave us the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony.

How strikingly similar the Baptizer’s situation was to the situation of Sir Thomas More, fifteen centuries later. Thomas could have sided with King Henry VIII, who wanted his divorce and remarriage to be approved by the Pope. Or he could remain faithful to the Lord and to His Church by upholding the sanctity and permanence of marriage.

Both St. John the Baptist and St. Thomas More had the same decision to make. They both made the same decision. They were both imprisoned for it. And they both were beheaded as a consequence.

On the scaffold, Thomas More declared: “I die the king’s good servant, but God’s first.” We need to look no further for the model of authentically masculine spirituality.

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

Filed Under: Articles Last Updated: January 1, 2020

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Fr. David Friel

About Fr. David Friel

Ordained in 2011, Father Friel served as Parochial Vicar at St. Anselm Parish in Northeast Philly. He is currently a doctoral candidate in liturgical theology at The Catholic University of America.—(Read full biography).

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Surprising Popularity!

One of our most popular downloads has proven to be the organ accompaniment to “The Monastery Hymnal” (131 pages). This book was compiled, arranged, and edited by Achille P. Bragers, who studied at the Lemmensinstituut (Belgium) about thirty years before that school produced the NOH. Bragers might be considered an example of Belgium “Stile Antico” whereas Flor Peeters and Jules Van Nuffel represented Belgium “Prima Pratica.” You can download the hymnal by Bragers at this link.

—Jeff Ostrowski
15 February 2021 • To Capitalize…?

In the Introit for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost, there is a question regarding whether to capitalize the word “christi.” The Vulgata does not, because Psalm 27 is not specifically referring to Our Lord, but rather to God’s “anointed one.” However, Missals tend to capitalize it, such as the official 1962 Missal and also a book from 1777 called Missel de Paris. Something tells me Monsignor Knox would not capitalize it.

—Jeff Ostrowski
15 February 2021 • “Sung vs. Spoken”

We have spoken quite a bit about “sung vs. spoken” antiphons. We have also noted that the texts of the Graduale Romanum sometimes don’t match the Missal texts (in the Extraordinary Form) because the Mass Propers are older than Saint Jerome’s Vulgate, and sometimes came from the ITALA versions of Sacred Scripture. On occasion, the Missal itself doesn’t match the Vulgate—cf. the Introit “Esto Mihi.” The Vulgate has: “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in domum refúgii…” but the Missal and Graduale Romanum use “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in locum refúgii…” The 1970s “spoken propers” use the traditional version, as you can see.

—Jeff Ostrowski

Random Quote

They were not ashamed to lay their hands on Sedulius, on Prudentius, on St. Ambrose himself. Only in one or two cases does some sense of shame seem to have stopped their nefarious work. They left “Ave maris stella,” “Jam lucis orto sidere,” and St. Thomas Aquinas’s hymns alone (they would have made pretty work of “Sacris solemniis”). In 1629 their mangled remnants were published.

— Rev’d Adrian Knottesford Fortescue (25 March 1916)

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