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

Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

By Father Richard Cipolla

And they will not leave one stone upon another in you; because you did not know the time
of your visitation.

Today’s gospel is not a parable, it is not a specific teaching of Jesus. It is one of the most
dramatic scenes in the Gospel: Jesus’ weeping over Jerusalem as he enters the city and
the driving out of the money changers from the Temple. What can we make of this
scene? What does it mean for us? It is true that it describes a particular event in Jesus’
history and that it can be analyzed in this way. But the gospel at Mass is not merely to
give information of Jesus’ life. The gospel is the making present of Christ as the living
Word, that Word that has to speak to us and penetrate our hearts.

The context is always important. Jesus weeps over Jerusalem as he enters the holy city
on Palm Sunday. This is the beginning of the events of the Passion and Death of the
Lord. Despite the shouts of hosannas from the crowd, Jesus knows that he enters
Jerusalem for the last time, that this entrance is the beginning of those events that will
lead to his crucifixion. The hosannas break his heart, for he knows that they bear no
meaning, he knows that his preaching and teaching has not borne fruit among his own
people, he knows that the very religious and political center of his people has rejected
him and await to do what has to be done to get rid of him. And he feels the deep irony:
the city whose name bears the name of peace, jeru shalom, has not a clue as to what
peace is all about, that peace that is the very presence of God. And he predicts the
destruction of the city and therefore the religious heart of the city, the temple, with its
symbol of the presence of God, with its daily offerings of animal sacrifices for the sins of
the people. And he weeps, he weeps because Jerusalem did not recognize the time of its
visitation, that is, the moment when the very truth and peace of God tented among his
people to give them that salvation for which they always longed.

Jesus goes right up to the temple, for there is the heart of the matter, there is where the
presence of God was, there the teaching of the Law, there the sacrifices for sin. And the
Lord comes to his temple. He came into this temple when he was a baby, when Mary and
Joseph brought him to be redeemed and blessed forty days after his birth, that event we
commemorate every year as the Feast of the Presentation in the Temple, or Candlemass,
when we hear Simeon’s song,” Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. For my
eyes have seen thy salvation”. And now he comes to the temple to do what has to be
done before he starts on the road to Calvary: to teach and preach within this center of the
Jewish faith and culture, to teach and preach not as one of the scribes or Pharisees, but
with the authority of God himself.

But before he begins this last phase of his life, he cleanses the temple by driving out the
sellers and money changers. “My house shall be a house of prayer; you have made it a
den of robbers”. Who were these sellers and money changers? They were in the temple
precincts for practical reasons: they sold the small and big animals that the people would then bring to the priest to offer as a sacrifice for their sins. And the money changers were there to make sure that everyone had the right change to pay the one shekel temple tax.
They must have been there in the past times Jesus had visited the temple. But this time
was different: The line from the temple to the Cross was in place: the symbolic presence
of God in the temple, the daily sacrifices: all these shadows were about to be replaced
with the reality of the fullness of the truth of God and the Lamb of God who will offer
himself once and for all for the sins of the world. So the cleansing of the temple is a
symbolic act, the signal that the end of the shadows had come and the beginning of the
light of God in the world as a real presence.

“Types and shadows have their ending”, so wrote St Thomas Aquinas. The temple was
razed to the ground by the Romans in 70 AD and was never rebuilt. And the Christian
understanding is that the Church took the place of the temple, for it is the Church as the
body of Christ in which the real presence of God in Word and Sacrament is known and
experienced in the world of time and place, the world of history. And it is the worship of
the Church that fulfills the daily sacrifices of the temple by the Mass, which is the
renewal of the one, true and eternal sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross, the source of life and love.
And yet Jesus’ act of purification of the temple reminds us as well of the need for
purification of the Church. Church history even read cursively shows times in which the
human structure of the Church threatened to stifle her very life, corruption far beyond
money-changers and sellers. These past 40 years have been one of those times when
corruption at the human level of the Church has threatened the efficacy of the missionary
effort of the Church and has wounded Her deeply. For this is church corruption as
reality, from the horrific acts of sexual abuse committed by Catholic clergy that have
destroyed lives and families, to the subculture within the Church that allowed these
priests to flourish in the bosom of holy Church, to the corruption of the Shepherds who
refused to protect their people from wolves and who prefer payouts to truth.
And today we face a deeper, if that is possible, threat to the very fabric of the Church,
that fabric that is her liturgy, the very worship of God in the Church, The publication of
Traditionis Custodes, the Motu Properio of Pope Francis that dared to make null and void
Pope Benedict’s Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum that declared the obvious truth that
the Traditional Roman Mass of the ages could never be abrogated as a form of worship in
the Catholic Church. We now live in a time in which the Mass we celebrate here today
has been declared as something now foreign to the body of the Church and that the Novus
Ordo form of the Mass to be the only true form of the Roman Mass: this has no basis in
fact nor faith. As if what we do here at this moment in this church has no relevance to
the worship of God in the Catholic Church. This corruption of the understanding of the
liturgy of the Catholic Church is deeper than that of the moral corruption of the clergy.

And yet that real corruption of the human face of the Church, and the corruption that is
the sin of those entrusted with the God-given power to exercise authority over the
Church on earth, but also our own personal sin, can never and does never prevent the
saving grace of God to be truly present in his Church. The faith of the people, despite
being shaken by these events, endures. The mission of the Church to bring Jesus Christ
to all peoples of the world, despite cynicism and broken hearts among her priests and
bishops, and despite the suffering of the faithful laity, goes on every time the Gospel is
heard and preached, every time a cup of cold water is given to someone thirsty in the
name of Christ, and in particular every time someone is deeply moved by the beauty of
the Traditional Roman Mass,. And the Real Presence of Christ, imparting healing and
saving grace to each of us here, still resides in humble glory in our tabernacle in this
church and in all of the tabernacles of the world. And for this and the reality of grace
among us every day of our lives, we can only say: Deo gratias.

         

The Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a holy day of obligation, is on Monday, August 15. The following churches will offer the Traditional Mass on August 15th. Please notify us with additional information.

Connecticut

St. Mary Church, Norwalk, CT, 8 am, low Mass.

Sts. Cyril and Methodius Oratory, Bridgeport, 7:45 am low Mass, 6 pm Solemn Mass. Blessing of herbs: Please place fresh herbs for the traditional blessing on the table by the statue of Our Lady of Grace before Mass.

St. Patrick Oratory, Watebury, CT, 8am Low Mass; 6pm High Mass and Benediction

Oratory of the Most Sacred Heart, Georgetown, CT, Missa Cantata, 6 pm.

St. Marguerite Bourgeoys, 138 Candlewood Lake Road, Brookfield, CT, 07:00 am Low Mass.

St. Pius X, Fairfield, CT, 7 pm Solemn Mass

St. Martha Church, Enfield, CT, 7 pm

New York

Holy Innocents, New York, NY, 8 am low Mass; 6 pm Missa Cantata

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, New York, NY, 7 am and 7:45 am Low Masses; 7 pm Missa Cantata.

St. Josaphat, Bayside (Queens), 7pm

St. Matthew, Dix Hills, NY (Long Island) , 10:30 AM.

St. Rocco, Glen Cove (Long Island), 7pm

St. Paul the Apostle, Yonkers, NY, 12 noon

Annunication-Our Lady of Fatima, Crestwood, NY, 7:30 pm Solemn Mass followed by a Marian Procession through Crestwood.

Immaculate Conception Church, Sleepy Hollow, NY, Low Mass, 7 pm

Sacred Heart in Esopus NY, 11 am

St Mary-St Andrew, Ellenville, NY, 7 pm Missa Cantata

New Jersey

Our Lady of Sorrows, Jersey City, 7 pm.

Our Lady of Victories, Harrington Park, NY, 5:30 pm, low Mass.

Shrine Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, 52 West Somerset St., Raritan, NJ, Solemn Mass 7 pm.

Sermon by Fr. Richard Cipolla for the Feast of St. James given this evening at the Church of St. Pius X in Fairfield, CT.

One of the most dramatic scenes in the gospels is the calling by Jesus of James and
John. They are in their fishing boat with their father, Zebedee. And Jesus calls to
them: Come, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. So they drop their
nets, get out of the boat, leave their father behind and follow Jesus as the first two
of his disciples, who will become his apostles at Pentecost. I have always been
impressed by the clarity of this scene and the cutting away of any small talk: Come
follow me. And they left their nets and followed him.

It is James and John who are chosen with Peter to walk up the mountain to witness
what we call Jesus’ transfiguration. It is James and John with Peter who
accompany Jesus after the Last Supper when he goes to pray in the Garden of
Gethsemane. But it is also James and John who pull Jesus aside one day to ask
him if he would see to it that one of them sat on his right and the other on his left
when they reached heaven. They, like Peter, did not really understand what
following Jesus meant. James found out after Pentecost, when he became a true
apostle who proclaimed the person of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior both in
Jersusalem and in Spain. Tradition tells us that he was martyred in Jerusalem and
that his body was then carried to Compostela in Spain where he was buried.

The pilgrimage to St James’ tomb in Compostela became, as we all know, one of
the most important pilgrimage sites in the Middle Ages and beyond. People
walked from all over what we now call Europe, some for hundreds of miles, to this
shrine, as pilgrims and penitents. There has been in the recent past a revival of
Catholics making this pilgrimage, as a sign of their faith in Christ and his apostle
James, who finally understood that the heart of faith in Christ is being willing to
partake of the suffering of the Cross, which alone leads to the joy of the
resurrection. I have been to Compostela and prayed at the tomb of St. James. I
wish I could tell you that I walked many miles over the mountains to get there.
The fact is that I officiated at a lovely wedding in the north part of Portugal, and
the groom graciously offered the use of his Mercedes after the wedding so I could
drive to Compostela. And so I went in style, but I did pray there, that I would
remember what Jesus told St. James about glory in heaven: no suffering, no glory.

This Saturday: Traditional Mass pilgrimage to the beautiful shrine church of Our Lady of Mt Carmel, 448 E 116th St, New York