A Missa Cantata will be celebrated according the the 1962 Missal for the intention of the beatification of Pope Pius XII on Saturday, September 6 at 1 pm at the Church of the Holy Innocents, 128 West 37th Street, New York, NY. The Mass will be followed by a display of personal relics of Pius XII (relic, zucchetto and pontifical slippers). Sister Margherita Marchione, RTF will speak on his life and papacy.
directions

A High Requiem Mass will be celebrated according to the 1962 Missal on Thursday, September 11 at 7 pm at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Waterbury, CT. The Mass intention is for the souls of the victims of 9/11.
directions
Incidentally, the Holy See recently bestowed on the church the distinction of the title of minor basilica, making it the only basilica in Connecticut. For more information go to http://www.archdioceseofhartford.org/news/transcriptnews_200806_1.htm

This Sunday, September 7, St. Mary Church, Norwalk, will offer a magnicent Solemn High Mass to celebrate the move of the traditional Mass out of the lower church to the main church upstairs. The new Mass time will be 9:30 am, and a Solemn High Mass will now be celebrated on most Sundays.

In addition, the traditional Mass will be celebrated in honor of Our Lady of Fatima on Friday, September 12 at 7:30 pm. There will be confessions at 6:30, and enrollment in the brown scapular.

Directions to St. Mary Church

Beginning on Sunday, September 14, the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, St. Gabriel Church in Stamford will offer the Mass according to the 1962 missal every Sunday at 12:30 pm. St. Gabriel is located at 914 Newfield Avenue. A low Mass is planned with the possibility of high Masses in the future. The pastor of St. Gabriel is Father Cyprian La Pastina.

On the “Big Island” of Hawaii a Belgian priest and confrere of Father Damien, Father John Berchmans Velghe, created within a tiny Victorian church an extraordinary series of paintings in the years 1900-04. St Benedict’s Church enjoys a location of unmatched splendor high above above Kealakekua bay. For his congregation – then Hawaiian – Father Velghe transformed the ceiling of the nave into a forest and the sanctuary into a vast cathedral ambulatory. yet most interesting are the paintings on the walls of the nave. For, in stark contrast to today’s pastoral approach, Father Velghe sought out images that are unusual, drastic or ecstatic. Daniel and the handwriting on the wall, St. Francis receiving the Stigmata, Eve weeping over the dead Abel…and finally, a horrifying if sadly damaged rendering of hell. The Hawaiian inscriptions on the columns accord well with the striking pictures.

For more on the church: http://www.thepaintedchurch.org/about.asp

http://articles.latimes.com/1998/mar/01/travel/tr-24226

Hell!

The handwriting on the wall.

The soul of the dying awaiting immortality.

The nave becomes a forest of trees – a recollection of the origin of the column in Greek architecture?

NLM provided full coverage of the recent “extraordinary” (in several senses) Byrd festival in Portland, Oregon. Jeffrey Tucker reported on a sermon given by our chaplain, Fr. Richard Cipolla here:http://thenewliturgicalmovement.blogspot.com/2008/08/making-ordinary-extraordinary.html

In the interest of completeness we give the full text of the sermon below.

From the Gospel: Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

How do we understand these words of Jesus, these very famous and oft heard words? If the truth be told, they make us uneasy, and they make us uneasy because of the culture in which we live, or, one could say because of a lack of culture in the world in which we live. For these words go against that ingrained work ethic that is part of American culture, that work ethic that is certainly older than our own country, for it finds its roots in the post-reformation European thought that forgot what Western man understood until then: that work and difficult work at that is part of man’s life, that it is related to the fall of man, but that it can be used for good ends. But everyone understood as well that leisure, non work, the time for contemplation, is what makes possible humanitas, the art of being human, the art of living well, the basis, in the words of Josef Pieper, of culture itself.

Unfortunately the very word “leisure” in modern Western society has a slightly malodorous quality about it. Think of the phrase: leisure suit. It brings a picture of the worst taste possible: something made of polyester that perhaps John Travolta would have worn in 1976. Leisure is also, because of the Protestant roots of American culture, contrasted unfavorably with work, as if leisure is a form of idleness, as if it were the product of laziness. Or leisure is defined in terms of work: as taking off a few days from work to restore oneself, to restore oneself before one does what is good for you: namely good, hard work. We live in a society in which, perversely, the verb to do is synonymous with the verb to be, facere is essere.

Jesus’ words in the gospel: consider the lilies, presents a very different way of being. To consider the lilies is not to deny that their life does not depend on chemical reactions, need for sunlight, water, carbon dioxide: all processes, all part of the work of nature. And yet when one considers the lilies, that is, when one contemplates them instead of observing them, one sees their beauty and sees what a lily is. When one begins, on the other hand, to observe the lily, one immediately begins to dissect and examine, to tear apart if need be, to find out how these things, yes, things not lilies, manage to live. This is work and as all work can lead to a good end. But to consider the lily is to contemplate the lily, to allow its givenness to enrich us and to delight us. You notice that this contemplation has no end outside of itself. Observation, the basis of modern science, always has an end outside of itself. Consideration, contemplation, has no end other than itself. It is always completely open to being surprised by joy, surprised by beauty, surprised by truth. This is always opposed to that striving that wants to make sure that I have all the material goods I need and more, that striving that occupies so much time and energy and never fills the big hole inside us, that striving that causes anxiety, that anxiety that may be the sickness unto death.

But our Lord is not telling us to chill out and wander through the fields looking at flowers as some cartoon version of St Francis of Assisi that omits the stigmata. But first seek his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well. What the Christian must do is to keep his gaze on the God of glory and majesty who is Love, and in this act of gazing, he will see clearly what he must do in his life. Contemplation of God is the necessary foundation for the living out of a Christian life. Love of God must be the foundation for love of neighbor. Knowing how to live a Christian life can never the result of work, be it Bible study, a theology degree, a course in ethics, a sermon, or any like thing. Just as one can understand the lily only in the act of considering, of contemplation, and never by observing it in an objective way, so too, the Christian faith is not grasped by working at it in the worldly sense, but by exercising that human freedom to let oneself be seized by the reality of God, and this is impossible without leisure in one’s life.

For leisure affords the opportunity to let oneself go. Leisure affords the opportunity of entering into that silence in which the listener can hear. Leisure brings about serenity that comes from the acknowledgment of the ultimate mystery of things, that comes with a giving over of the reins, those reins that have been held so tightly that our hands are deeply calloused. “O Sabbath rest by Galilee, O calm of hills above, Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee, the silence of eternity, interpreted by love.”

Leisure allows for the feast, for the festival, for celebration, that is, for a rejoicing in someone or something that calls us from ourselves. Celebration: that word in this culture has a false ring, like a sappy Hallmark card, like something we conjure up or work at to force everyone to be happy, and there is that word happy, whose stuffing has been knocked out of it by a world that confuses blessed with happy. And no where is this state of affairs seen more clearly than in the worship life of the Church today, where terms like celebration, participation, and liturgy, torn away from their proper context of contemplation, have become part of the terrible misunderstanding of what Catholic worship is about, a misunderstanding that threatens the very life of the Church. And the basis of this misunderstanding is thinking that worship can ever be the product of work, that worship can ever be embedded in facere, that worship can ever have a purpose beyond itself.

The liturgy that is the ordinary worship of the Church today is the product of the opposite of consider the lilies. It is the result of a liturgical movement that sought to recover the living experience of the liturgy for the whole Church in a time when that experience had been stifled by legalism and clericalism. But along the way this movement made the fatal error of falling into believing that observation of the liturgical texts, that the study of the sociology of contemporary man, that historical research into the development of the liturgy, that all of this WORK, could do what had to be DONE. And of course it failed, and what it produced is a piece of work, and unlike lilies, a piece of work cannot be considered nor contemplated. It is something always artificially constructed, never something given to be contemplated. It turns participation into multifarious acts, hoping that if enough different people are given different things to do that the whole thing will add up to a worship experience. It is still born, because it does not understand that celebration is inextricably linked to contemplation that is the basis of divine worship. And no matter how well or beautifully the piece of work is done, it can never be that experience of playing in the fields of the Lord that is Christian divine worship.

And so today we celebrate this Mass in what is now known as the extraordinary use of the Roman rite. That title is almost incomprehensible. But this Mass is extraordinary firstly because this is not what the ordinary parish church does at Mass. But it is truly extraordinary because it is precisely what has been given to the Church as that divine worship that is sacrifice and sacrament. It is precisely this Mass, the Mass of the Catholic tradition, the Mass of Gregory the Great, of Pius V, of Pius X, of Blessed John XXIII, that is the place where culture and leisure meet, this is the place where what makes leisure possible and what is its goal is found and experienced. This Mass is given to us, not made: it is given, and at the heart of that givenness is that Sacrifice that is at the heart of all worship, but here not sacrifice in general but the Sacrifice of the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit, and this givenness is in the very physicality of the use of the senses: the chant that is not something one uses for some purpose like reducing stress but rather that is the distillation of prayer, as frolicking among the neumes; the polyphony that is like a waterfall that diffracts the words of the Ordinary into a contemplative rainbow: the Latin whose very state as a dead language allows mere words to transcend their literal meaning and to allow oneself to escape the prison of rational intellectualism and to taste the freedom of heaven; the ceremonial, archaic yet contemporary in the sense of engendering an understanding that goes beyond what liturgical research could ever tell us. And the silence, the silence, especially during the canon of the Mass, that allows us to participate at leisure and therefore actively, in the offering of the Holy Sacrifice.

Now it is true that this Mass takes rehearsal, study, time and effort: it takes work, but work can never bring us to the consideration of the lilies and the contemplation of God. But the work that goes into the learning of this Mass, the hours spent by the sacred ministers and acolytes learning the ceremonial, the hours of practice by the choir, the time needed by all who assist at Mass to discover, to remember what has been almost forgotten. But, and this is crucial, this work is not labor, this work is not related to the fall of man, this is not sweat and toil: this work is the preparation for what makes us most human, what makes us able to participate in the life of God, this work is part of the offering that is the Holy Sacrifice, this work is how we engraft ourselves to the givenness of the cultus, the divine worship that is never doing but being, being in the presence of God. All of this is not the labor hominis. It is the opus Dei, what is never forced, what is never planned by a committee, but rather what is delighted in, what is enjoyed, what is played in, what is considered, what is contemplated: that Beauty, ever ancient and ever new.

The following churches are offering the Traditional Latin Mass for the feast of the Assumption, this Friday, August 15:

Connecticut:

St. Mary Church, Norwalk, CT, Missa Cantata, 5:30 pm. directions

Music:
Prelude: Toccata avanti la Messa della Madonna (Girolamo Frescobaldi, 1583-1643)
Missa de Beata Virgine (Gregor Aichinger, c.1565-1628)
Gregorian Mass of the Assumption: Signum magnum
Motet at the Offertory: Ave Maria (Tomás Luis de Victoria, 1548-1611)
Motet at the Communion: Ave maris stella (Claudio Monteverdi, 1567-1643)
Postlude: Ricercare dopo il Credo (per la Messa “In Festis Beatae Mariae Virginis”) (Frescobaldi)

St. Bridget of Kildare, Moodus, CT, Missa Cantata, 10 am. directions

The music at St. Bridget’s will include a Gregorian Mass and chant sung by the schola, the Gregorian Ave Maris Stella with organ verses by Jehan Titelouze, and the Ave Maria of Saint-Saëns sung by visiting vocal artist Lorna Mulvaney.

Sacred Heart Church, New Haven, low Mass, 5:30 pm. directions

Church of St. Mary, 544 Main St., New Britain, 5:30 pm

New York

Immaculate Conception Church, Sleepy Hollow, NY, low Mass, 5 pm. directions

Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, the Bronx, 8:30 am. directions

Church of Our Saviour, 38th and Park Avenue, New York, NY, low Mass, 12:05 pm.

Church of the Holy Innocents, W. 37th St. between 7th Ave. and Broadway, New York, NY, 6:15 pm.

St. Matthew Chapel, 35 N. Service Rd., Dix Hill, Long Island, low Mass, 9 am.

New Jersey

St. Anthony of Padua Chapel, West Orange, NJ, 9:00 a.m. Low Mass; 7:00 p.m. Missa Cantata. directions

Our Lady of Fatima Chapel, 32 W. Franklin Ave., Pequannock, 7 am, 8 am, 12 noon, 7 pm.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Newark, 7:00 p.m. Low Mass

Holy Rosary Church, Jersey City, 5:30 p.m. Missa Cantata

The music at Holy Rosary Church will include Missa Te Deum Laudamus by Lorenzo Perosi, Ave Maria by Saint Saens, and Ave Maris Stella by Grieg sung by the choir; Gregorian chant sung by the schola; and Ave Maria by Giulio Caccini, Panis Angelicus by Cesar Franck, and La Vergine degli Angeli by Giuseppe Verdi from La Forza del Destino sung by visiting soprano Paula Scalera.

Cathedral of Immaculate Conception, Broadway and Market St., Camden, Solemn Mass, 7:00 pm.

The musical selections are as follows: The Ordinary of the Mass is the Messa della Cappella (1641), by Claudio Monteverdi. Other selections: Canzon XII a 8, Giovanni Gabrielli; Sonata Sopra “Sancta Maria”, C. Monteverdi; Venite Populi and Sonata #12 in C major, K 263, W.A. Mozart; Pulchra est amica mea, Palestrina-Bassano; Ave Maria, Harold Boatrite; Hymns – Repeat My Soul, Walter Greatorex and Sing We of the Blessed Mother, Timothy McDonnell. The preacher of the Mass is Father John Zuhlsdorf, a renowned commentator and the author of the Blog, “What does the Prayer Really Say.” We are also honored to have in attendance, a long time friend of Mater Ecclesiae and pastor of St. Athanasius Parish, Phila., the Bishop Elect of the Diocese of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, Reverend Monsignor Herbert Bevard.

We are grateful to our many readers who sent in information to help make this list complete.

St. Mary Church, Norwalk, CT is offering at chant camp for children of all ages to learn about singing and reading music, and in particular Gregorian chant. The camp will take place from Monday August 18 to Friday August 22, from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm each day. No prior musical experience is required, and there is no charge for the camp. For further information and to register for the chant camp, please contact David Hughes, St. Mary’s organist and choirmaster: 203-866-5546 x 115 or music@stmarynorwalk.net.

Certainly one of the most tragic losses inflicted by the Council and its implementers was the disappearance of the liturgical “black” vestments for the requiem mass, Good Friday etc. This color however happily survives in the ‘Gregorian” (Traditional) Mass. We say “black” in quotation marks because such vestments, in my experience, are always worked with silver, producing a most wondrous effect, as in these images. Twice in the last few weeks due to tragic circumstances the Catholic community in Fairfield county has had a chance to experience the Solemn Requiem mass.

The erudite Prof. Arkady P. Nebolsine has written perceptively and poetically about the inner meaning of these colors in his “O Serebre” (On Silver)(Christianskoe Izdatelstvo, 1995 -only in Russian). Speaking of the intimate connection between black and silver:

“If gold is more like the sun and its blazing heat, then silver resembles more the moon and her cold nocturnal light. The radiance (of silver) should penetrate the darkness like the light of the stars and moon, while leaving unbroken the silence of the nocturne-Nachtstuecke -the music of silence reserved only to her.

(Silver)expresses the the poetry of the night, founded upon mystical experience ( the “Dark night of the soul” of St. John of the Cross…the “Hymns to the Night’ of Novalis…)..In connection with black drapery or the bier, silver is associated with the Requiem. It is, however, not redolent of annihilation. Rather, the night is transfixed and transfigured by its own light – like Death, transfigured by the Resurrection.” ( 5-6, my translation)

Recent days have seen the death of two men who had maintained their devotion to the Traditional liturgy even in the most hostile times immediately prior to the promulgation of Summorum Pontificum. They were called by God just after a brighter future for the Mass of Tradition started to dawn. But as a sign of the new era, a magnificent Solemn Requiem Mass was celebrated for each of the deceased. First, on Friday, July 25 a Solemn Requiem Mass was celebrated for the repose of the soul of Father Kevin Fitzpatrick at St. John the Evangelist Church, Stamford.

On Saturday, August 2, a large congregation of the faithful was present for the Solemn Requiem Mass for the repose of the soul of Gerald Luff,Jr. in the main church of St. Mary, Norwalk. Mr. Luff was a member of our society and regularly attended the Sunday mass at St. Mary until a few weeks ago. We grieve with Gerald Luff’s family and join with them in prayers for the repose of his soul.

Celebrant of the Mass was our chaplain, the Reverend Richard G. Cipolla. The deacon was the The Reverend Greg J. Markey; the subdeacon, the Reverend Paul N. Check. David J. Hughes led the music – in particular the Dies Irae was incomparable.

A representative of his Excellency William E. Lori, Bishop of Bridgeport, was present in choir.