Fr. Leo Joseph Camurati, O.P., offered his first traditional Mass this Sunday at the Church of St. Agnes in New York. Photo courtesy of Diana Yuan.

Monsignor Gilles Wach, Prior General of the Institute of Christ the King celebrated Solemn High Mass and the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity in Saints Cyril and Methodius Oratory in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Photo courtesy of Institute of Christ the King

The Feast of Corpus Christi is on Thursday May 31 this year.  Many churches will celebrate the external solemnity on Sunday, June 3.

Thursday May 31

Church of St. Pius X, Fairfield, CT:  Solemn Mass at 7 pm. A procession in the church and benediction will follow the Mass. Fr. Timothy Iannacone will be the celebrant, with Fr. Michael Novajosky as deacon and Fr. Donal Kloster as subdeacon. The pastor of St. Pius X, Fr. Samuel Kachuba, will give the sermon.

St. Mary Church, Norwalk, CT, Low Mass at 7:30 am  (St. Mary’s will offer a Solemn Mass and procession on the external solemnity, Sunday at 10 am)

Sts. Cyril and Methodius Oratory, Bridgeport, CT, 6 pm followed by a procession

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Pontifical Shrine, New York, NY, Solemn Mass, 7 pm followed by outdoor procession and benediction.

Church of the Holy Innocents, New York, NY, 6 pm.  Immediately following the Mass, there will be an outdoor Procession (with triple Benediction) around midtown Manhattan. This year will be Holy Innocents’ 9th annual outdoor Blessed Sacrament Procession for this traditional celebration.  Newly ordained Fr. Leo Joseph Camurati will be the Celebrant of this Solemn Mass. At the end of the Mass and Procession, Fr. Leo Joseph will confer his priestly blessing.

St. Mary’s Church, Roslyn Harbor, NY, Missa Cantata, 7 p,

St. Anthony of Padua Church, Jersey City, NJ, 7 pm followed by procession and benediction.

Our Lady of Fatima Chapel, Pequannock, NJ, 7 am, , 8 am, 7 pm

St. Anthony of Padua Oratory, West Orange, NJ, 9 am, 7 pm

St. Catherine Laboure, Middletown, NJ, 9 am

Sunday, June 3, External Solemnity

St. Mary Church, Norwalk, CT, Solemn Mass, 10 am (note time change) followed by a procession through the neighborhood and benediction.

Sts. Cyril and Methodius, Bridgeport, CT, Outdoor Corpus Christi procession after the 10:15 Mass.

St. Stanislaus Church, New Haven, CT, Missa Cantata, 2 pm

Our Lady of Peace, Brooklyn, Solemn Mass at 9:30 am with an outdoor procession and annual Communion breakfast.  Celebrant will be Bishop James Massa.

Immaculate Conception Church, Sleepy Hollow, NY, Missa Cantata, 3 pm, procession and benediction.

St. John the Baptist Church, Allentown, NJ,  12:30 pm followed by a procession and the annual parish picnic

Our Lady of Fatima Chapel, Pequannock, NJ, 11 am followed by a procession

Saint Agnes Church in Manhattan is pleased to announce that Father Leo Camurati, O.P. will offer his first Solemn Mass in the traditional Roman Rite at the church on Sunday, May 27th, at 9am. The Mass will be followed by a coffee and cake reception and Fr. Camurati’s bestowing of First Blessings in the undercroft of the church.

Solemn Mass for the Feast of Corpus Christi on Thursday, May 31 at 7 pm. A procession in the church and benediction will follow the Mass. Fr. Timothy Iannacone will be the celebrant, with Fr. Michael Novajosky as deacon and Fr. Donal Kloster as subdeacon. The pastor of St. Pius X, Fr. Samuel Kachuba, will give the sermon.

Music will include the Missa Caça by Cristobal Morales, “Gustate et Videte” by Giovanni Matteo Asola and the “Ave Verum” by William Byrd.

Immediately following the Mass at Holy Innocents, there will be an outdoor Procession (with triple Benediction) around midtown Manhattan. This year will be Holy Innocents’ 9th annual outdoor Blessed Sacrament Procession for this traditional celebration.

Newly ordained Fr. Leo Joseph Camurati will be the Celebrant of this Solemn Mass. At the end of the Mass and Procession, Fr. Leo Joseph will confer his priestly blessing.

Our Society will be sponsoring a Solemn Mass at St. Agnes Church in Brooklyn for the Feast of St. Joan of Arc on Wednesday,  May 30 at 7 pm.

A historic church lovingly called the “Cathedral of Brooklyn,” by locals,  St. Agnes is located at 433 Sackett Street in Carroll Gardens. This will be the first Traditional Mass in this church since the Second Vatican Council.

The F & G trains and the B57 buses are a short walk from the church on the next street over (Smith Street).

A Solemn Mass votive Mass to Our Lady Help of Christians was offered yesterday for the persecuted Church in China at the Basilica of St. John the Evangelist in Stamford, CT. The celebrant was Fr. Cyprian La Pastina. This Mass anticipates Annual World Day of Prayers for China on May 24, which was instituted in 2008 by His Holiness Benedict XVI. The Mass was sponsored by the Cardinal Kung Foundation.

The high point of the exhibition is this early original work by Bernini – a portrait bust of St Robert Bellarmine.

The Holy Name: Art of the Gesu: Bernini and his Age. (At Fairfield University Art Museum)

Taking refuge from the overblown, paganistic megashows of Gotham City, we turn to a smaller, more focused but more artistically significant exhibition that illustrates a time when the “Catholic Imagination” did indeed set the standard for European taste. The 16th century church of the Gesu (the main church of the Jesuit order) was one of a number of great Roman churches of the late renaissance that created the model for church construction all over Europe. Much later, in the second half of the 17th century, the original sober appearance of this structure was transformed by a late Baroque decoration of unsurpassed splendor. The main contributor here was the painter Giovanni Battista Gaulli, a pupil of the dominant master of the Roman baroque, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Gaulli’s ecstatic works, which seem to open up the ceiling of the church to the heavens, likewise helped to stimulate similar ceiling paintings all over Europe – but especially in Germany and Austria. For the central Roman church of the Jesuits was bound to have extraordinary influence all over Europe and even beyond.

This exhibition includes valuable original works by Bernini, Gaulli and many others. Paintings, altar cards, statues and vestments are on display. The narrative of the building and decoration of the Gesu is filled out by engravings and original documents. Yes, we encounter in this exhibition the energy and creativity of the counter-reforamntion – which received its complement and completion in the splendid decorative art of the late baroque. We are not informed, however, why the Church and specificailly the Jesuit order has for fifty years now rejected such “triumphalistic” tendencies and themes – except, of course, for exhibitions hoping to attract visitors by visions of past glories.

(Above) Lavishly decorated altar cards created for the Gesu. The artist was a German working in Italy.

(Above and below) Models for the paintings of the apse of the Gesu by Gaulli. Inspired by such examples, this type of “perspectivist” painting reached its fullest flowering north of the Alps in Germany and the rest of Central Europe.

(Below) The model of Gaulli’s vast painting in the nave of the Gesu “The Triumph of the Name of Jesus.”

You will have to move fast if you want to catch this exhibition, for it is only open for one more week – Tuesday through Saturday, May 19, 11 to 4 PM. For further information see HERE.

Heavenly Bodies! Part II

(We conclude our coverage of the new Met exhibition. Part I can be found HERE. No photography was permitted in the Vatican exhibition space – your reporter was one of the minority adhering to the rules.)

Now what of the “Vatican” part of the exhibition?

Actually, it’s “much ado about nothing.” In two smallish rooms apart and downstairs from the rest of the show are displayed items connected to the papacy mainly from the 19th and 20th centuries. In one room are precious tiaras, clasps, a monstrance and other metalwork. In the other room is a variety of chasubles, dalmatics, copes and other liturgical vestments. Most of the exhibits are gifts from religious orders, nobles and rulers, both Catholic and non-Catholic. May we surmise that, in contrast to the Renaissance papacy, more recent supreme pontiffs lacked the financial resources to commission such things themselves? It’s not an exhibition of great art but more like a collection of papal knick-knacks.

Except for certain items from the 18th and early 19th centuries, most of the works shown here were executed in historical revival styles, particularly a kind of neo-baroque. We have to admit that, even if originality is lacking, a distinct continuity of splendor and dignity is maintained. Especially three beautiful white copes from different eras testify to a persisting sense of beauty, balance and yes, of style utterly absent among the creations of the champions of the “Catholic Imagination” upstairs. Only as the 20th century progressed do we note here and there lapses in judgement: a lavish chasuble given to Pius XI is marred by a small panel copying what is obviously a photograph of the Pope. At the entrance to the exhibit is displayed about the only representative of a modern style that can be found: an original vestment by Matisse from around 1950. I believe it actually belongs to the Modern Art museum here, for this much-ballyhooed creation was almost immediately traded away by the chapel for which it had been created- allegedly because it was too heavy.

But undoubtedly not the art critic but the historian will be most interested in these Vatican rooms. For so many of the items were specifically commissioned for a pope on an important occasion: a significant anniversary or a major event of state(like the signing of the Lateran treaty). There’s a real fascination in viewing items closely associated with each individual pope from 1800 to the present.

As in the rest of Heavenly Bodies, howlers are to be found among the descriptions of the items displayed. I learn that the city of Regensburg is in Switzerland. Saint Pius XII is mentioned; John Paul II is not so styled (Is there a Traditionalist mole at work?) But I think the issues with the Vatican rooms are more fundamental that this.

First, the Vatican exhibit establishes no direct link to the fashions that are the main subject of the overall exhibition. For their inane parodies and travesties the show’s featured designers looked not in the first instance to Papal regalia, but to the images and signs of popular Catholic devotion (or least those which existed in the now dimly remembered pre-conciliar past): rosaries, nuns’ habits, soutanes, images of pilgrim statues, of the Mater Dolorosa, of the Sacred Heart , etc.

Second, there is no attempt to explain the contrasts between the exhibits and the practices in the Church today. Vestments of the baroque style have been mostly retired or even destroyed. We see a series of splendid tiaras and are then told Pope Paul VI abolished their use – why? John Paul II’s red shoes are on display. But wasn’t Pope Benedict XVI vilified for wearing such shoes – falsely described as Pradas? And in one of his first ostentatious media events the current Pope ditched them for black shoes. If this show is about the “”Catholic imagination,” isn’t the viewer entitled to an explanation why the current Catholic imagination has departed so radically from what is on display here?

A word should be said about the merchandizing connected with the exhibition. Now a primary goal of Heavenly Bodies is to motivate the eagerly anticipated hordes of female tourists to buy products of the industry. The sponsors obviously hope these visitors will head further south on Fifth Avenue to shop in Saks and Versace (in the display windows there: black leather, sequined crosses and Byzantine icons). But for the more impecunious, the Met offers on its own premises a dedicated Heavenly Bodies store. In addition to the usual scarves and jewelry, it features racks of clothing (like denim jackets with images of St Michael). And in a new first (and a new low) for both the Met and the Catholic Church, a line of cosmetics is available for purchase as well:

The makeup offerings will comprise of her latest launch, Lust: Gloss, in a hue she’s named “Aliengelic.” The gloss, which retails for $28, will be making its exclusive debut at the Met, and is described by Pat as “an extravagantly ethereal gloss inspired by celestial beings and opulent textures I saw woven throughout ‘Heavenly Bodies.'” Additionally, a special edition version of her Mothership IV: Decadence Eyeshadow Palette, which retails for $125, will feature unique packaging, inspired by paintings of the Renaissance and Baroque periods that figure heavily in the exhibit. All products will be launching tomorrow, May 8, at the exhibition store at The Met Fifth Avenue, with select items stocked at The Met Cloisters as well as online. (SOURCE)

The “Catholic Imagination” unleashed – especially where big bucks are to be made. (Above)Versace on Fifth Avenue – with your photographer. (Below) At Saks, a vestment-based creation by Dior – with images from Tarot cards?

(Below) Also at Saks, from Dolce & Gabbana. By the way, I read that these Saks windows will only be on display until May 14.

Certain commentators (like Ross Douthat) claim to dislike Heavenly Bodies but nevertheless enter into dialectical gymnastics as to how it could conceivably benefit the Catholic faith. The reader of our review should be able to form his own judgment of the feasibility of that. But to make a long story short, I’d just add that given this show’s sponsors, it never would have seen the light of day if there had been even the remotest chance of advancing Christianity. The Met does not make all its medieval galleries (and the Cloisters too!) available to stir up Catholic religious belief!

Indeed there is a long history of similar events in Europe, where the hierarchy ( as exemplified by Cardinal Ravasi) collaborates with the moneyed (and often state-supported)art establishment in exhibitions – often with churches and cathedrals as venues. Of course, the cooperation is entirely one-sided in favor of an art scene striving for the blasphemous, the disorienting and the shocking. A succession of well-informed (secular)French authors have written extensively on this subject. In a sense, Heavenly Bodies is just a bigger, bolder, cruder version of the same. What is implicit in the European precedents is in the USA explicit: the direct integration of the Church establishment into the world of money, media and entertainment on that world’s terms, with Catholic doctrine and morality jettisoned. With the point hammered home by a thousand images transmitted all over the world.

Yes, it is a great show for the hierarchy, in the tradition of analogous spectacles like the Assisi meetings or the Papal tours. Heavenly Bodies, as a show, is intended to convey an image of harmony between the hierarchy and the powers of the secular world – a harmony that does not in fact exist. But by agreeing to participate in a show – an inherently mendacious, areligious form of entertainment – the Vatican also puts on display to anyone who can see the collapse of its own moral authority.

Solemn Latin High Mass will be offered at the Basilica of Saint John the Evangelist, Stamford, Connecticut, on Friday, May 18, 2018 at 7PM for the persecuted Church in China.
Your prayers, sacrifices and Masses for the Church in China are especially urgent now.