Statue of Our Lady of Fatima formerly (?) in Our Lady of Peace Church, Manhattan

We have found out about a valuable website that lists the Traditional Mass schedule for churches throughout New York City.  Kudos to Diana Yuan for providing this service.  She asks that you get in touch  for any news or corrections.  (Any Masses on Staten Island?)   The website is latinmassnyc.com

Here is the schedule as of today.

Manhattan

Mt. Carmel (East Harlem)
* Sunday – 10:25am Sung Mass
* Monday-Saturday – 7:45am Low Mass (except First Saturdays, for which there is 9am Sung Mass instead)
* First Thursday – 7pm Sung Mass
* First Saturday – 9am Sung Mass
* contact: Mr. Teddy Thongratnachat, tbtcom1213@yahoo.com

Holy Innocents (Midtown West)
* Sunday – 9am Low Mass; 10:30am Sung Mass
* Monday-Friday – 6pm Low Mass
* Saturday – 1pm Low Mass
* contact: Mr. Eddy Toribio, ejtm83@aol.com

St. Agnes (Midtown East)
* Sunday – 9am Sung Mass

St. Christopher’s Mission – SSPX (Midtown East)
* Sunday – 2:30pm

Brooklyn

Our Lady of Peace (Carroll Gardens)
* Sunday – 9:30am

Queens

St. John’s Cemetery Chapel (Middle Village)
* Sunday – 9:30am

St. Fidelis (College Point)
* First Friday – 7:15am
* Third Friday – 7:15am

St. Matthias (Ridgewood)
* Second Monday – 7pm

Bronx

St. Anthony
* Sunday – 9am Sung Mass

Outside NYC

St. Ladislaus (Hempstead, Long Island)
* Sunday – 9am

St. Matthew (Dix Hills, Long Island)
* Sunday – 12:30pm

We are happy to announce that the Society of St Hugh of Cluny and St. Mary’s parish, Norwalk, Connecticut are sponsoring a conference and mass on Thursday, October 19 at St Mary’s Church. The conference and mass commemorate the tenth anniversary of Summorum Pontificum. The proceedings will be as follows:

5:30 PM. Bishop Athanasius Schneider and Fr. Innocent Smith OP will give presentations.

7:30 PM. Pontifical Solemn Mass celebrated by Bishop Schneider.

9:00 PM. Reception in the parish hall.

We are proud once again to welcome Bishop Schneider back to Connecticut. I hope that many of you will be able to participate in this special evening!

No registration necessary.  Free-will donation suggested.

Music for the Pontifical Mass:

At reception of the bishop: Ecce sacerdos magnus (Hans Leo Hassler, 1564-1612)
At the vesting: Versets on Verbum supernum (Nicolas de Grigny, 1672-1703)
Coronation Mass (Mass in C Major, K. 317) (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1756-1791)
Gregorian Votive Mass of the Blessed Sacrament: Cibavit eos
Qui manducat meam carnem (David Hughes, b.1980)
O sacrum convivium (Olivier Messiaen, 1908-1992)
Ave verum corpus (Mozart)
Postlude: Prelude in C Major (9/8) (BWV 547/1) (Johann Sebastian Bach, 1685-1750)

Thursday, October 26, 2017
7:30 PM
The Church of Saint Vincent Ferrer
869 Lexington Avenue at 66th Street
New York, N.Y. 10065

Brompton Oratory Choir in Concert
The London Oratory Schola Cantorum Boys Choir, under the direction of Charles Cole, will offer a free choral concert with works of Byrd, Tallis, Victoria, Monteverdi, and Bruckner. One of the most prominent Catholic ensembles in the world, the Schola is comprised of boys who study at London’s Oratory School and sings every weekend in term at the famous Brompton Oratory. The choir can be heard on the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter soundtracks and recently recorded Sacred Treasures of England, a CD of Tudor music on the Sony Classical label. Touring frequently, the Schola sang at High Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and was the first visiting choir in history to sing at Vespers there in 2013. For more information, contact (212) 744-2080 or email jwetzel@svsc.info.

On Tuesday, October 10th at 7:30 p.m., the Pontifical Shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in East Harlem, Manhattan, New York will celebrate a Solemn Traditional Latin Mass in honor of Saint Helen of Laurino.

August 18th is the Feast Day of Sant’Elena (St. Helen), patroness of both Laurino and Pruno in the Province of Salerno . One of four major observances held in her honor (May 22nd, June 29th and October 10th are the others), the Feast should not be confused with that of Saint Helena of the Cross, also celebrated on August 18th. Born in Laurino in the first half of the sixth century (some say late eighth- or early ninth-century), Sant’Elena was a beautiful and pious maiden. Abused at home, she fled to the nearby mountains of Pruno to live the ascetic life of a hermit in solitude and prayer. After 21 years she died. Her remains were discovered in the grotto and translated to the Cathedral of Capaccio-Paestum. Over the centuries, her relics were moved several times before finally being interred in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Laurino. According to legend, neighboring Valle dell’Angelo contested the ownership of the relics. To appease the rival claimants it was decided her body would be put onto a cart driven by two heifers and they would decide. When the oxen reached a fork in the road leading to the two towns, they chose Laurino.

In 1923 Italian immigrants from Laurino in East Harlem created a replica of their hometown’s Shrine of Sant’Elena at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. They obtained a major relic of the saint that will be venerated after Mass.

Sermon for the 17th Sunday after Pentecost
by Fr. Richard Cipolla, St. Mary Church, Norwalk, Oct. 1, 2017

“You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and with your whole soul, and with your whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22: 37-39)

“To be or not to be: that is the question.” So said the melancholy Dane, Hamlet, the prince of Denmark in one of the most famous lines in all of English literature. The question of existence is itself asked here. But it is the wrong question in the end. The question to ask, the fundamental question to ask is not “to be or not to be”. It is rather: “To love or not to love: that is the question”.

Post -modern man finds the very idea of love something difficult and perhaps in the end impossible. In the post modern world of distrust of accepted truths, where subjectivism is seen to be the only way to function in the world, a world of fragmentation and liquidity, the ability to love and the reality of love is put into question. Surely this is one of the reasons for the decline of marriage as one of the fundamental institutions of society. But postmodern man also understands that the question of the possibility of love is somehow linked to the possibility of truth. The rejection of one possibility almost demands the rejection of the other. This is just one of the ironies of postmodern man: that at least he knows the real questions that modern man often did not even ask, such as the link between love and truth.

But this is something that the Catholic understands. Because for the Catholic the possibility of love in a selfish world—and the world has always been selfish– is real only because of the reality of truth in the man Jesus Christ and his supreme act of love on the Cross. For the Christian love cannot be separated from faith in Jesus Christ as the way, the truth and the life. For the Christian. love cannot be separated from the God who gave his only begotten Son to die precisely for those who refuse to love.

For the Christian to be IS to love. The God we worship is the one whose name is “I am who am:” Being itself.   But the God we worship is also Love, and so for us, to be is to love. Existence itself, in the most basic and profound sense not only is grounded in love, but also for me the measure of my being is the measure of my love. It is Jesus himself who grounds being in love in today’s Gospel. Ah, those familiar words! “You shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself.” Those words are so familiar that we forget what they mean. All too often they come across as some general ethical principle: do good things for other people. And this is the definition of Christianity for too many people. Thus the Christian is the one who is active in social programs, who is obviously out there helping those in need. That is the way we find out who is really Christian and who is not. But no, this is wrong headed. The Christian is not identified merely by the person who does good for his neighbor. For there are those who do not identify themselves as Christians in any way, certainly not Catholic, who do good for their neighbors, who work in shelters and soup kitchens, who are kind and gentle, who go out of their way to be attentive to and to respond to the needs of others.

What then marks the Christian from the rest of those who do good to their neighbor? What marks the Christian is the reason, the ground, for his doing good for his neighbor. The grounding, the reason is one and simple: he can and does good because of the love of God: the love of God for him or her and the response of love for God by each person. It cannot be said too often: I am able to love, that is, I am able to do good in an unselfish, un-egotistic way, only because of my love for God. I can do good, that is, I can love my neighbor, only because I love God and only when I love God. That separates us from secular humanists, those who ground love of neighbor is some sort of abstract notion of the good, or in some basic ethical principle that they assume is obvious to all, or in some generally optimistic view of the general goodness of all men and women. They are wrong, deeply wrong. For the fact is that left on our own, we will not love, we will play the love-game, but we will love because it gives us personal satisfaction to be doing the right thing, the noble thing.

This caring for neighbor does not mean caring for the homeless man in the subway. It means caring for your wife, your husband, your parents, your children, yes, even your priest. This is not something natural that we do, something nice. It is rather unnatural, and that we can care and love is a gift of grace. It is the grace of God that enables me to love my neighbor, that enables me to love at all. I do not love, when I do love, because of something within me that enables me to love, something I draw from, something that is within me as a man or woman. I do not love because of some fidelity to an ethical system, some principle. I can love, when I do love, because of the sheer grace of God, because my being is grounded, depends on, Love itself.

And when we understand this, what Jesus is telling the Pharisees and us today in the Gospel, then we are humbled, we are brought down to the ground, we come into contact with reality, a reality shorn of the warm fuzzies of romantic love, to a reality of the love that is shown forth supremely in the Cross of Jesus Christ. I can love at all because God loved me so much that he sacrificed Love in the flesh on the wood of the Cross so that my sins can be forgiven and so that I can love in the deepest sense. When I realize this, the scales of secular humanism fall from my eyes. And I no longer see my Catholic faith as merely a set of rules to help me and my family do the right thing. I no longer use my faith and the Church as only a moral association meant to keep my children in line.   No: I see clearly and fearfully and humbly that the question to ask is not “to be or not to be”, but rather “to love or not to love” And the answer does not depend on me, it does not hang on me. It depends, or rather, it hangs on the crucified Christ, which image hangs in this church over the altar rail that separates earth and heaven.

A well-attended Solemn Mass for the Feast of St. Michael on September 29 in the Shrine Church of the Most Precious Blood in Little Italy, New York, sponsored by the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St. George. Photos courtesy of Diana Yuan.