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One of the most powerful spiritual experiences I ever had was the Requiem Mass in the Extraordinary Form at the 2012 Sacred Music Colloquium in Salt Lake City. Many of the liturgies at the Colloquia have shaken me to the core; I have been overwhelmed with an unspeakable sense of awe, mystery, and joy.
Photograph of “Father Schmitt” of Boys Town taken during the 1950s.
The fundamental precondition for active participation is interior silence. Praying in silence is a particularly noble form of human activity—more active than merely speaking or singing.
“In the reforms as they were introduced after the Council, a fundamental misunderstanding took place. Namely, this was that the reforms were undertaken with the idea there had been a rupture …” —Raymond Cardinal Leo Burke
In which we music directors get to not act like the hypocrites.
Do you recall trying to memorize the “Confiteor” and the dreaded “Suscipiat” to serve at Mass?
“The altar versus populum is not a new idea brought in by the reforms of Paul VI. The Mass could always be celebrated with the priest facing the people, as indeed it was in Rome and in many other places for centuries. True, it was not the usual way, but it did exist.” — Monsignor Richard J. Schuler
I will be releasing hundreds of these B/W religious line art drawings for free and instant download. These beautiful Catholic “woodcuts” were done with magnificent skill. “Download Free Traditional Catholic Clipart”
“Could I have imagined at that time that I was sitting and conversing with the future Pope? Not in a million years!” — Fr. Christopher G. Phillips
Finding God
Owning up to the True Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Do hymns help?
Ruth Slenczynska wasn’t right about everything … but she was right about this.
What I will remember most is that I knelt side by side with my daughter during the consecration. I will remember reciting the Creed in my fidgety three-year-old son’s ear as I held him.
“In the encyclical Mediator Dei, Pius XII regarded as ‘archeologists those who presumed to speak of the altar as a simple table.” — Newsletter of the Vatican Congregation of Divine Worship.
If the conditions for recollection are never present in our lives, if we do not fight to create and guard such conditions, we will lose our awareness of divine mystery, as refreshing as springtime rains, and wander in a desert of superficiality.
