Last Sunday, May 22, St. Mary’s Church held a beautiful May crowning after the 10 am Traditional Mass.

This Thursday, May 26, is Ascension Thursday, a holy day of obligation. The following churches have scheduled traditional Masses.

Connecticut

St. Mary Church, Norwalk, CT, low Mass 8 am; Solemn Mass 7 pm.

St. Pius X Church, Fairfield, CT, Missa Cantata, 7 pm, Father Richard Cipolla, celebrant.

St. Marguerite Bourgeoys, Brookfield, CT, 7 am.

Sts. Cyril and Methodius Oratory, Bridgeport, CT, 7:45 am, 6 pm

St. Stanislaus Church, New Haven, CT, low Mass, 5:30 pm, Fr. Peter Lenox, celebrant.

St. Patrick Oratory, Waterbury, CT, low Mass, 8 am; Solemn Mass 6 pm celebrated by Canon Matthew Talarico

St Martha, Enfield, CT, 7 pm

New York

Church of the Holy Innocents, New York, NY, 8 am, 6 pm

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Pontifical Shrine, New York, NY, 7 am, 7:45 am, Missa Cantata 7 pm

Monastery of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel and St. Joseph, Brooklyn, NY, 7:30 a.m.

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

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

St. Josaphat, Bayside (Queens), NY, 7 am and 7 pm

St. Rocco, Glen Cove, NY, 7 pm

St. Matthew, Dix Hills, NY, 10:30 am

Sacred Heart, Esopus, 11 am

Holy Trinity, Poughkeepsie, 7 pm, Missa Cantata

St Mary’s St Andrews, Ellenville, 7 pm

New Jersey

Our Lady of Sorrows, Jersey City, 7:30 pm; followed by fellowship for young Catholic professionals at Zeppelin Hall Restuarant and Biergarten, 88 LIberty View Dr., Jersey City.

St. Anthony Oratory, West Orange, 9 am, Missa Cantata at 7 pm preceded by a Rosary procession at 6:15

Our Lady of Fatima Chapel, Pequannock, NJ, 7 am, 9 am, 12 noon, 7 pm

We are happy to see that there is a weekly Sunday traditional Mass scheduled at the Shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville, NY at 12 pm in the Martyrs Chapel.

If you are interested in a teaching career, consider Regina Pacis Academy in Norwalk, CT.   Please read this notice.  Teachers and students here can attend the Traditional Latin Mass right next door at St. Mary’s every day at 8 am.  

Seeking a career at Regina Pacis Academy is not just any job at just any school. It is not your typical 9 to 5 job. Nor is it the typical Catholic school. Regina Pacis Academy is quite literally on the front lines of the battle for the eternal souls of our children. Parents choose us to educate their children because we are the best at what we do: forming young men and women who—through their commitment to live by the Catholic faith — will transform and advance human culture. That advancement is not for the purposes of nebulous vague social justice principles or for comfort, money, or power. Our students go out into the world and seek to advance the culture around them toward virtue and heavenly beatitude.

At Regina Pacis Academy, this admissions season, more families have come to tour our school than ever before. We have received a record number of applications from families all over Fairfield County and beyond, and to date, we will open the 2022-2023 Academic Year this September with our largest enrollment in our school’s short history. Over the past 5 years, our enrollment has grown from 59 students in 2017 to 81 students this Academic Year and projected to be over 110 this coming year.  We are welcoming 15 new families into the strong, traditional Catholic community at RPA.

We are a classical school that unapologetically integrates the intellectual and cultural traditions of the Catholic Church into everything we do and every class we teach. If that sounds like your personal mission in life, then we want to hear from you! Please contact Kim Quatela at k.quatela@reginapacisacademy.org to learn about possible faculty opportunities.   Our website:    https://www.reginapacisacademy.org/career-opportunities

Finally, a published announcement of the termination of the 9:00 AM Sunday Traditional Mass at St. Agnes Parish, New York. From the 4/17/2022 bulletin of the parish.

The Mass had already disappeared from the bulletin on 1/9/2022 “to comply with Traditionis Custodes” it was allegedly stated.

The reason given by the pastor seems improbable. After all, the Opus Dei priests staffing this parish could learn to celebrate this liturgy themselves. That they have not done, and the continued celebration of the traditional Mass has been assured by visiting priests. I would think, however, that these priests would still be available. I have heard, moreover, of one such priest who, a while ago, was refused permission to continue celebrating the 9:00 AM Mass. Nor do I understand why there is a “trade-off” between a Latin Mass and a Spanish Mass……

Bucha and Covered Crucifixes:  A Mediation for Monday in Holy Week

by Father Richard Gennaro Cipolla

The images from Bucha and now from other villages outside of Kyiv that show the terrible slaughter of Ukrainian civilians of all ages by the departing Russian army are indeed difficult to look upon.  I suspect that there were similar images to be seen after the Russian destruction of parts of Syria, but we did not pay attention to those atrocities because that area of the world does not resonate very much with us. But Ukraine is part of Europe, and for all of our ambivalent feelings towards Europe, that is where most Americans come from. For most Americans today, Europe is a place to go to see beautiful things and to eat wonderful food.  There are few left today with the memory of World War II and what Europe looked like after the terrible devastation of that war.  Even the memory of the Cold War has faded—but perhaps that memory has been jolted by the war in Ukraine.

The bodies of the men, women and children lying dead in the streets of the villages north of Kyiv are shown in the news footage, some with their hands tied behind their backs, some facing upward with bullet-ridden bodies.  But in all these photos, the victims’ faces are blurred out.  This is out of respect, for the face and the eyes of a person are the signs of the identity of a person, the sign of what it means to be a man or woman in the image of God, and the eyes are a window to the soul. Even in an age in which social violence is accepted as part of the contemporary scene, these images strike deeply the cords of human compassion. 

The.number of Catholic parishes that are observing the traditional custom of veiling crucifixes and images from the First Sunday of the Passion increases every year. This is a small but real sign of the recovery of the liturgical Tradition that was the object of a mindless and virulent attack in the two decades after the Second Vatican Council and that surpassed the iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation. For this destruction of sacred art and architecture was carried out not by “enemies” of the Catholic Church but rather by Catholics themselves in the name of the “spirit” of the Second Vatican Council, a “spirit” that had little to do with the Council documents. The good news is that this “spirit” is dying with the generation that invented this “spirit”, whose weak stronghold  is the current Roman bureaucracy and their appointees in the hierarchy. 

The origin of the custom of covering crucifixes and images during Passiontide is often traced to the end of the Gospel for the First Sunday of the Passion:  “So they took up stones to throw at him; but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple.” (John 8:59)  But like other elements of Tradition one must be content to allow those origins to lie happily within the sacred womb of liturgical Tradition. To walk into one’s parish church and be struck by the radically changed appearance of the church with the altar crucifix and the statues covered in purple fabric is startling. It is a signal that those signs of transcendent faith must be withheld from view, for the heart of the matter is now at hand and it is not the eyes but rather the heart that is now called to see what is the Heart of the Matter. The focus now cannot be those visual aids of great beauty. The focus must now be on the eyes of the heart in imitation of the joining of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary at the Crucifixion.  The eyes of faith must be turned inward to contemplate what the Cross of Jesus Christ means for me and the world. This is the preparation for the unveiling of the Cross on Good Friday, for it is then that the reality of the Cross in one’s heart is seen in all of its wonder and objectivity and life-giving grace, sealed by the physical act of the kissing of the Cross. And so too,  when the statues of the saints are uncovered during the Gloria of the Easter Vigil Mass the reality of the Resurrection and the promise of eternal life shine forth like a thunderclap of beauty.

The recovery of the Liturgical Tradition of the Church cannot be stopped by those who have deliberately forgotten that Beauty has saved the world. For young Catholics are not carrying around a false spirit that seeks to accommodate the present age. They understand that the Liturgy is grounded in eternity and that the Liturgy must always be a reflection not of a deChristianized age but rather of the eternity of heaven.