(Above and below) Cardinal Zen during his visit to New York (February 15, 2020)

Please pray for Cardinal Zen, on trial now in Hong Kong. He was our guest in New York just 2 1/2 years ago.

Our annual pilgrimage to Auriesville, New York – this year, unavoidably, in advance of the official “Pilgrimage for the Restoration.” The weather was glorious, but very few visitors or pilgrims were about. Often, however, the grounds of the shrine are most impressive, the experience most spritual, when visited in silence. The shrine in the best condition I have seen in years – the current management is a vast improvement over the Jesuits.

by Robert Browning

King Charles, and who’ll do him right now? 
King Charles, and who’s ripe for fight now? 
Give a rouse: here’s, in Hell’s despite now, 
King Charles! 

Who gave me the goods that went since? 
Who raised me the house that sank once? 
Who helped me to gold I spent since? 
Who found me in wine you drank once? 
(Chorus) 
King Charles, and who’ll do him right now? 
King Charles, and who’s ripe for fight now? 
Give a rouse: here’s, in Hell’s despite now, 
King Charles! 
To whom used my boy George quaff else, 
By the old fool’s side that begot him? 
For whom did he cheer and laugh else, 
While Noll’s damned troopers shot him? 
(Chorus) 
King Charles, and who’ll do him right now? 
King Charles, and who’s ripe for fight now? 
Give a rouse: here’s, in Hell’s despite now, 
King Charles!

Regina Pacis Academy will celebrate the opening of the school year with a Solemn Mass in honor of the Nativity of Our Lady on Thursday, September 8th at 9:15 am at St. Mary Church, Norwalk, CT.

The public is invited to attend.

St. Mary’s Church will also have a low Mass at 8 am.

Rod Dreher comments on the favorable references to the Traditional Mass by recent convert Shia LeBoeuf. Mr. Dreher compares it to his own experiences with the Eastern liturgy. I can “relate to” what Mr. Dreher says, since I participated in the Byzantine (Russian) liturgy for years before the Traditional Mass became widely available.

Mr. Dreher writes:

For me, it was attending my first Orthodox Divine Liturgy that made such a difference. Like the actor says later in the interview, it doesn’t feel like a performance designed to coax you into belief; it rather feels like you are being let into something special. I can easily recognize that some Catholics feel that way legitimately about the Latin mass (and not the contemporary Novus Ordo mass) because after sixteen years as an Orthodox Christian, I feel the same way about the Divine Liturgy. When I began attending the Divine Liturgy, I realized soon that this feeling of liturgical beauty and spiritual transcendence is what I thought I was going to get when, in my twenties, I converted to Catholicism.

At the first few Liturgies, I had scarcely any idea what was going on. It generally follows the traditional liturgical pattern of the ancient churches: liturgy of the Word, and then the Eucharist. But it’s different enough from the Western model to confuse one.

That’s fine. It’s a strength, actually. The Divine Liturgy has been in its current form for many centuries. It is called “The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom” because it was refined and defined in Constantinople under Chrysostom’s patriarchal leadership in the early fifth century. This is a thing of great antiquity. You don’t mess with it. It doesn’t try to conform itself to you, but calls you out of yourself, calls you to mold yourself around it — and to therefore allow it to mold you. Why is this a strength? Because we live in a world in which everybody is trying to sell you something, everybody — including far too many churches — are trying to make it super-easy for you to sign the contract, so they can make the sale. The Liturgy says: This Christian life is hard, but it is beautiful, and it is a pearl of great price. If you give yourself over to Christ as this community has worshipped him for well over one thousand years, you will go to places you could scarcely have imagined. Join us — leave yourself, and be raised up to heaven.

Seriously, it does. It’s not easy to get used to the Divine Liturgy, but once you “get it,” you wonder how anybody could worship in any other way, if this is what Christian worship is. The prayers, the chants, the prostrations, the incense, the candles — they all work together to bring the soul closer to God’s presence. The Liturgy is a thing out of this world. I want to invite everyone I know to come and see for themselves what it’s like. Be careful, though: once seen, you can’t unsee it, and for many people it will be difficult to go back to their modern worship elsewhere.

The Secret of the Latin Mass (the American Conservative)

We could not have a better depiction of Christian (Catholic and Orthodox) liturgical worship, which forms such a drastic contrast to the woship of both the official Catholic Church and protestant denominations. Yet the influence of the liturgy does not end at the church door. As Mr. Dreher points out – and as I myself have experienced – in so many respects making a commitment to Tradition will indeed take the believer to places he could not have imagined. Yet to understand this, one must live the liturgy, given its contrast with the world of today. As Martin Mosebach wrote just the other day:

Goethe calls attention to the anthropological fact that reverence is not a natural characteristic of man, but that he must acquire it. In the formlessness of modern society, the old liturgy is really a foreign body. She attracts those who have an internal readiness for resistance. These will always only be a small elite, not in the sense of academic titles or economic power but of spiritual force and independence of mind. It is to be found at all levels of the society.

A Traditionalist should long for a Schism of the German Church

For, though it is true that “modern man” must work to conform himself to it, this liturgy is nevertheless not the property of some “remnant” or esoteric group, but stands open to all people whatever may be their educational level, ethnicity, financial resources etc. One can verify this every Sunday and indeed every day by visiting those churches where the traditional liturgy is celebrated. The makeup of the congregations that the visitor will see will give the most eloquent possible testimony.

It seems that, under the influence of the liturgy, Mr. Dreher too has gone to places he scarcely could have imagined. I first enountered his writing when he was a “conservative Catholic” zealot raging against abuses in the “American Catholic Church.” From there he turned to Orthodoxy. Starting from a quasi-Anabaptist “remnant” theology he eventually moved to a much more systematic and explicitly Traditionalist Christian /Orthodox critique of the governing institutions and ideology of the United States and the West. One can trace this progession from The Benedict Option to Live Not By Lies to his recent full-blown enthusiasm for Viktor Orban. Mr. Dreher admittedly has been careful over the years not to step over the redlines set by the establishment. He has denounced Trump, and expressed his horror at Putin. Yet I am amazed he is able to get away with his current exposes of the deviations of American “woke” ideology. Truly, the Traditional liturgy (both Western and Eastern) can trigger major political consequences – both in the philosophy of an individual and in the life of a nation!

Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after the Octave of Pentecost

By Father Richard Cipolla

At once the man’s ears were opened: he was freed from the impediment and began to speak plainly. (Mark 7:36 ff)

And what do you think he heard?  And what did he say?  What hath God wrought?  To be or not to be?  Awesome!  Cool! Amazing! When God frees you from silence, when God releases your tongue in this singular way:  he put his fingers into the man’s ears and, spitting, touched his tongue. Then he looked up to heaven and groaned. That is the first thing the man heard, but it was not a groan. This is what the crowd heard. The crowd never hears what is really going on. The crowd is too busy gawking at what just happened, trying to figure out how this was done.  So the first news anchor comments: he touched his ears first. Touched his ears, responds his female co-anchor. She goes on: but look at what happened next, he spit and touched the man’s tongue.  He should have known better.  Has this guy never heard of Covid or monkeypox?  Back to the male half of the team:  but it worked.  But I forgot the groan. That was weird. Why don’t we cut back to the tape and listen to it again?

The sound that came from Jesus before the Ephphatha was indeed strange. And so the man host commented:  that was really strange. Maybe it’s an Amazonian mantra.  Could be, his other half said, but whatever it was it worked. The man can hear. The man can speak.  But what were his first words?. I couldn’t make them out. It sounded like a groan but it sounded almost musical to me, but not ordinary music, nothing like I have heard.

Not ordinary music indeed. Groaning indeed. The problem was that all these people were deaf, deaf to what was really going on, what was being said, or rather, sung For the first thing this man heard was music. What the crowd heard as a groan from Jesus was music and that music echoed echoed  in the man’s head, in his ears the notes in the form of neumes, square neumes, diamond shaped neumes, neumes with little squiggles and tails, these neumes converged and exploded in the man’s ears and in his head he heard what Jesus was singing:  Kyrie eleison. And that song of prayer unblocked what had been blocked for so long: and the ears of the deaf were unstop-ed. Unstopped so that he could reply, so that the first thing he could do as a response to the chant of Ephphatha was to cry out in a glorious melisma: Christe eleison!  What other fitting response to Lord, have mercy, than Christ, have mercy?  Listen, the crowd said, he does not know how to speak so he is uttering this strange sound. A groan for a groan, someone said in the crowd.

The same crowd—perhaps not the same but they all look alike—was standing on that hill where the three crosses were. Ah, the noise this time. The wind was picking up, there was distant thunder, there was the smelly noise of the crowd.  And then they heard what they thought was a groan from the man on the central cross.  Some had heard that groan before but couldn’t quite place it. If the co-hosts of the news channel had been covering this story, they may have remembered this sound, but it would not matter for this guy on the Cross was old news. Death is not news unless it is the death of someone famous, someone important.

And this groan shook the cross, and the neumes poured out of the man’s mouth like one of those medieval cartoon-like paintings where the words are written on a scroll coming directly out of the person’s mouth.  Listen! someone said. He is crying to Elijah!  But they were deaf. Their ears were not unstop-ed. All they could hear is what they wanted to hear. Their ears were tuned to hear only what would satisfy them, what would make them happy, whatever would confirm them in their willful ignorance, whatever would block out the silence, the quiet, the still whisper of God.  The noise in their heads which contained not only their own manufactured noise but the noise of the world itself blocked out anything else, so they could not and would not hear what was being sung on the cross: Eli! Eli! Lama sabachtani?

But listening closer, listening with unstopped ears, with the ears of the spheres, one could hear psalm tone 2:  Deus, deus meus, quare me dereliquisti?  The sung prayer was borne aloft into the dark sky by angels carrying each of the neumes, and straight into the presence of God who recognized the tone, the music played at the brooding orchestration of the big bang, when the neumes of God’s song of going out into the void coalesced into quarks, and the quarks coalesced into protons and neutrons, and the chant of atoms was born, spinning and singing, inventing the eight tones leaving room for one more, causing the whole universe to vibrate with the song of the life of God: Exsúltet iam angélica turba cælórum!

And the mother standing at the foot of the cross, stabat mater dolorosa, that plaintive chant, turned itself inside out, for in her heart at this hour of her son’s death, in this darkness, in her heart she heard the most joyful of the tones. And she sang, O how she sang, in the happiness of tone 8:  Magnificat anima mea dominum!  Ah, she heard the music, she whose ears and heart and body and soul were unstop-ed, whose tongue was loosened to ponder all of these things in her heart. She knew how to sing the Lord’s song, she whose womb had been opened with the word:  Ephphatha! Be opened!. Whose womb was filled with the song of the Word of God, and who gave birth to the Song of Songs, He who alone can unstop our ears to make us hear the truth and sing with joy, he alone who can put his divine spittle on our tongues to witness to his truth and life, he alone who can open our eyes to see the goodness, truth and beauty that lies at the heart of our lives that have been transformed by his grace.

Richard Cipolla