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Deliver Thy Church, O Lord, from a flawed liturgy

Today (November 20) on the traditional Roman calendar is the feast of St. Felix of Valois (†1212). Who is this obscure saint, you might ask, and why is he cluttering our calendar? Would it not be fitting to cancel him out? And so, indeed, it was done in the 1969 Novus Ordo calendar: Felix evaporated into thin air, or rather, retreated to his page in the Martyrology where few souls remember him.
But I would like to suggest that, as always, Holy Mother Church proceeded with a wisdom beyond her years, and that the removal of this saint and so many others is yet another instance of ecclesiastical Alzheimer’s.
St. Felix is said to have been a member of the royal court in France. He is known, in any case, to have renounced all his worldly possessions to live as a hermit. He was sought out by St. John of Matha, who had heard of the reputation of his holiness, and together they founded the Order of the Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives, usually known as the Trinitarians. The members of this order would travel to the Holy Land and exchange themselves for the release of Christian captives held by the Moslems. A similar order was founded in 1218 by St. Peter Nolasco, St. Raymund of Peñafort, and King James of Aragon, the Order of Our Lady of Ransom.
What lessons can St. Felix teach us? Unlike so many of today’s prelates in the Church, who cling to their power, prestige, and pleasures, and who refuse to reform themselves or the institutions over which they stand in charge, Felix was willing to abandon everything for the “pearl of great price” that is Jesus Christ. He gave up his opportunities of advancement, position, and influence, in order to do that which was inherently worthwhile for his immortal soul and for the health of the Church. In this respect, Felix is the antithesis to the worldly bishop or priest, whom we may call the “anti-Felix”: unhappy in his own sins, be they of commission or omission, and the cause of an unhappy flock.
What did the order co-founded by St. Felix do? It redeemed Christians from the hand of their heathen oppressors. Today, nothing, nothing is more necessary than that the Catholic Church rediscover her radical opposition to the world, the flesh, and the devil, three enemies over which she has spiritual authority, and from whose heavy yoke she can rescue the faithful. This she does by preaching sound doctrine and feeding a holy life with the sacraments and the liturgy reverently enacted. Again, St. Felix was truly felicitous in his uncompromising battle with the forces of darkness—the darkness of Islam in particular. Would that Europe’s bishops, clergy, faithful, would recover even a fraction of the courage and conviction of these saints of the Crusades!
One last point to make. Several times each year, the Church in the sanctoral cycle of her traditional liturgy begs the Lord to deliver us from bondage or captivity. Let me offer four examples. The Collect for today’s feast of St. Felix reads:

O God, who didst vouchsafe by a voice from heaven to call blessed Felix Thy confessor to the work of the ransoming of captives: grant, we beseech Thee, that his holy prayers may free us from the bondage of sin, and may safely lead us to our heavenly fatherland. Through our Lord…

On February 8, we pray to St. Felix’s companion:

O God, who didst vouchsafe to institute by heavenly direction, through St. John [of Matha], the order of the Holy Trinity for redeeming captives from the power of the Saracens, grant, we beseech Thee, that by the suffrage of his merits, we may be delivered by Thy grace from captivity of soul and body. Through our Lord.

On September 24:

O God, who by means of the most glorious Mother of Thy Son wast pleased to give new children to Thy Church for the deliverance of Christ’s faithful from the power of the heathen; grant, we beseech Thee, that we who love and honor her as the foundress of so great a work, may by her merits and intercession be ourselves delivered from all sin and from the bondage of the evil one. Through the same our Lord…

On August 1:

O God, who didst loose the blessed apostle Peter from his bonds and didst send him forth unharmed: loose, we pray Thee, the chains of our sins, and in Thy great mercy keep us from all evil. Through our Lord.

These are prayers that we desperately need to make—for ourselves, for our loved ones, for the Church wherever she is hemmed in by the heathens, suffocated by the Saracens. The liturgy knows our needs, knows them intimately, and places these words on the lips of her priests and in the hearts of her children.
Where are these prayers in the Novus Ordo?
They are all gone. All of them. Along with the prayers that talk about “despising the things of earth and clinging to those of heaven.”
Bondage, captivity, chains? Too negative. Too difficult. Too medieval. Too otherworldly. The pathological optimists who staffed the Consilium took out their modern scissors and cut away whatever no longer conformed to the times, even if it meant discarding material that had sustained Catholic souls for centuries.* In doing so, they showed themselves to be ungrateful, self-absorbed, and short-sighted.
This is one among a thousand reasons why we must, patiently, say to our Novus Ordo friends, again and again: the problem is not “how the new liturgy is celebrated,” as if dressing it up like the fanciest Infant of Prague is all that needs to be done to make things better. No, for the problem goes much deeper: it goes to the very core of the texts and rubrics of the new liturgy, which are deformed, skewed, bowdlerized, inadequate, misleading, and corrosive of Catholicism. What is needed is not any “reform of the reform,” or any lavishment of smells and bells, fiddlebacks and candlesticks, as appropriate as these things certainly are. What is needed, ultimately, is the restoration of the true Roman liturgy in its plenitude, fully matured over centuries of faith and worship, and unambiguously Catholic in every gesture, word, and chant.
May the Lord deliver His Church from the bondage of a new liturgy simplified, abbreviated, redacted for political correctness, and give all her children access to the uninhibited rites of our salvation—which includes our deliverance from the evils that oppress us.
St. Felix of Valois, pray for us!
* St. Felix’s feast began to be celebrated in his own diocese in 1215, and was extended to the whole Church in 1679.

November 20, 2018   No Comments

Tradition is for the Young (Part 16) – A New Regular TLM in Mississippi

By Gregor DiPippo of New Liturgical Movement

Once again, we are very happy to share some photographs from a new apostolate, established by the efforts of young people who are rediscovering the traditional Latin Mass. These come to us from Jackson, Mississippi, where the local Una Voce chapter has been working diligently to restore the Extraordinary Form. Recently, the group obtained the use of a parish church, and has two young diocesan priests celebrating the EF every other Sunday evening. On Sunday, October 28, the feast of Christ the King, they celebrated the first Solemn High Mass in the Diocese of Jackson since the liturgical reform of the 1960s; a small step, but one of a great many. We can all take encouragement once again from the fact that none of the people who are working to make this happen are old enough to be doing so from any sense of “nostalgia”; what we see here is a true and sincere love for the richness of our Catholic liturgical tradition.

 

 

 

 

 

November 19, 2018   No Comments

The Resignation that continues to speak: WikiLeaks: Clinton, Obama, Soros Overthrew Pope Benedict In Vatican Coup: An Opinion Piece

Disclaimer: As all Opinion Pieces posted on this site, this Opinion Piece does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Chapter, its Officers, and its loyal members.

George Soros, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton orchestrated a coup in the Vatican to overthrow the conservative Pope Benedict and replace him with radical leftist Pope Francis, according to a group of Catholic leaders citing evidence from various sources including WikiLeaks emails.

Pope Benedict XVI reigned as Pope of the Catholic Church from 2005 to 2013 before unexpectedly resigning in unusual circumstances. Becoming the first Pope to step down since Pope Gregory XII in 1415, Benedict is widely considered the first to do so on his own initiative since Pope Celestine V in 1294.

However the group of Catholic leaders cite new evidence uncovered in emails released by WikiLeaks to claim the conservative Pope Benedict did not actually resign on his own initiative, but was pushed out of the Vatican by a coup that the group of researchers are calling the “Catholic Spring.”
Soros, Obama and Clinton used the United States’ diplomatic machinery, political muscle, and financial power to coerce, bribe and blackmail “regime change” in the Roman Catholic Church in order to replace the conservative Benedict with the current Pope Francis – who has since become an unlikely mouthpiece for the international left, stunning Catholics around the world.
Now the group of Catholic leaders have sent a letter to President Trump urging him to launch an official investigation into the activities of George Soros, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton (and others) who they allege were involved in orchestrating Catholic Spring that resulted in their goal of “regime change” in the Vatican.
The Catholic leaders cite eight specific questions they seek to have answered concerning suspect events that led to the resignation of Pope Benedict, the first papal abdication in 700 years.
“Specifically, we have reason to believe that a Vatican ‘regime change’ was engineered by the Obama administration,” say the petitioners, in their January 20

remnantnewspaper.com/…/3001-did-vatica…
.

“We were alarmed to discover,” their letter notes, “that, during the third year of the first term of the Obama administration your previous opponent, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other government officials with whom she associated proposed a Catholic ‘revolution’ in which the final demise of what was left of the Catholic Church in America would be realized.”
The letter includes links to documents and news stories underscoring their claims. It first directs attention to the notorious Soros-Clinton-Podesta e-mails disclosed last year by WikiLeaks, in which Podesta and other progressives discussed regime change to remove what they described as the “middle ages dictatorship” in the Catholic Church.
Regarding the Podesta e-mails in question, The New American

www.thenewamerican.com/…/24289-clinton-c…
last October:

“Podesta, a longtime Clinton adviser/confidante and hand-picked top activist for left-wing funder George Soros, revealed in a 2011 e-mail that he and other activists were working to effect a “Catholic Spring” revolution within the Catholic Church, an obvious reference to the disastrous “Arab Spring” coups organized that same year by the Obama-Clinton-Soros team that destabilized the Middle East and brought radical Islamist regimes and terrorist groups to power in the region. The Podesta e-mail is a response to another Soros-funded radical — Sandy Newman, founder of the “progressive” Voices for Progress. Newman had written to Podesta seeking advice on the best way to “plant the seeds of the revolution” in the Catholic Church, which he described as a “middle ages [sic] dictatorship.”
In their letter to President Trump, the group of Catholics leaders write: “Approximately a year after this e-mail discussion, which was never intended to be made public, we find that Pope Benedict XVI abdicated under highly unusual circumstances and was replaced by a pope whose apparent mission is to provide a spiritual component to the radical ideological agenda of the international left. The Pontificate of Pope Francis has subsequently called into question its own legitimacy on a multitude of occasions.”
“We remain puzzled by the behavior of this ideologically charged Pope, whose mission seems to be one of advancing secular agendas of the left rather than guiding the Catholic Church in Her sacred mission,” they say, expressing the thoughts of millions of Catholics around the world stunned by Pope Francis’s left-wing ideology. “It is simply not the proper role of a Pope to be involved in politics to the point that he is considered to be the leader of the international left.”

They

remnantnewspaper.com/…/3001-did-vatica…
:
“With all of this in mind, and wishing the best for our country as well as for Catholics worldwide, we believe it to be the responsibility of loyal and informed United States Catholics to petition you to authorize an investigation into the following questions:
– To what end was the National Security Agency monitoring the conclave that elected Pope Francis?
– What other covert operations were carried out by US government operatives concerning the resignation of Pope Benedict or the conclave that elected Pope Francis?
– Did US government operatives have contact with the “Cardinal Danneels Mafia”?
– International monetary transactions with the Vatican were suspended during the last few days prior to the resignation of Pope Benedict. Were any U.S. Government agencies involved in this?
– Why were international monetary transactions resumed on February 12, 2013, the day after Benedict XVI announced his resignation? Was this pure coincidence?
– What actions, if any, were actually taken by John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and others tied to the Obama administration who were involved in the discussion proposing the fomenting of a “Catholic Spring”?
– What was the purpose and nature of the secret meeting between Vice President Joseph Biden and Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican on or about June 3, 2011?
– What roles were played by George Soros and other international financiers who may be currently residing in United States territory?”

The investigation the group of Catholic leaders is requesting of President Trump should be of interest to more than just Catholics. George Soros’s ability to co-opt leading political figures to assist his radical plans for nation states is well known; but his ability to force “regime change” in the Catholic church, an institution previously throught impenetrable from the outside, raises serious questions about his potential for global chaos. The investigation — and punishment — should begin at once.

remnantnewspaper.com

 

November 12, 2018   No Comments

St. Jude Bulletin, November 11, 2018

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The Bulletin is the PDF attachment at the bottom of the link to gmail.

November 10, 2018   No Comments

Noon TLM’s at St. Jude’s on November 7th and 8th, and November Ninth at 7:00 p.m.

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St. Jude’s Roman Catholic Church, Eddystone, Pa.,  will have Masses at Noon on Wednesday, November 7th and Thursday, November 8th. Mass will be at 7:00 p.m., its usual time, on Friday, November 9th.

November 7, 2018   No Comments

Vatican International Exhibition Photographic Exhibition of the Church Approved Eucharistic Miracles of the World

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Come to see the  

Vatican International Exhibition

Photographic Exhibition of the Church Approved

Eucharistic Miracles of the World. 

At Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish

235 East State Street

Doylestown, PA 18901

215-348-4190

www.ourladymtcarmel.org

 St. Mary’s Hall

(Located behind the convent on Maple & East State) 

          Throughout Christian history, Our Lord has shown us that He is really present as the Blessed Sacrament. Interestingly, many Eucharistic miracles have occurred during times of weakened Faith. For instance, many Eucharist miracles have taken place as a result of someone doubting the Real Presence. Included on this exhibit are descriptions of these miracles. All of them have received full approval by the Church.          

          Exhibit Times:  

          FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2018, 8:30 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.

          SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2018, 8:30 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.

          SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2018, 7:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m. 

          MONDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2018, 8:30 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.

Fr. Harold McKale, Parish Vicar

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Rectory, 235 E. State St.,

Doylestown 18901-4770

www.ourladymtcarmel.org

www.latinmassphila.org

(215)348-4190

(215)348-3104 (fax)

November 3, 2018   No Comments

All Saints’ Day: The 48th Anniversary of the SSPX

On this occasion of the 48th Anniversary of the SSPX, a new home page was launched. Please click on the link below to peruse all the information about the SSPX at your fingertips:

https://sspx.org/en?mc_cid=6c41c7ce92&mc_eid=1ea5146073

For your weekly SSPX News update, click on the link below:

https://fsspx.news/en

November 3, 2018   No Comments

November 2018: First Friday & First Saturday Traditional Latin Masses

TLM’s for First Friday and First Saturday will be said at Immaculate Conception Church, Jenkintown, at the usual times. Fr. McKale will be the celebrant.

November 2, 2018   No Comments

TLM’s on All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days, November 1 and 2, 2018

1. Mater Ecclesiae Roman Catholic Church,

261 Berlin Cross Keys Road, Berlin New Jersey:

Sung Choral Masses:

Thursday, November 1, 7:30 p.m., All Saints’ Day

Friday, November 2, 7:30 p.m., All Souls’ Day

Rev. Father Robert C. Pasley, KCHS, Pastor, Vice-Chairman of the Latin Liturgy Assn., Philadelphia Chapter, and Chaplain for the CMAA, 1-856-753-3408, email: rpasley@newliturgicalmovement.org

2. St. Jude’s Roman Catholic Church (SSPX), (Eddystone), 1402 E. 10th Street,

Thursday, November 1, 7:00 p.m. (High Mass)

Friday, November 2, 7:00 p.m. (High Mass)

Rev. Msgr. James T. Byrnes, Pastor, Rectory (Friday to Monday) 484-480-4414, Priory (Tuesday to Thursday) 1-203-431-0201 ext. 14, email: j.byrnes@fsspx.email

3. St. Mary’s (quasi-parish), (FSSP), Conshohocken, West Elm and Oak Streets,

Thursday, November 1, 7:00 a.m. (Low Mass) and 7:00 p.m. (High Mass)

Friday, November 2, 9:00 a.m. (Low Mass) and 6:30 p.m. (High Mass)

October 30, 2018   No Comments

Sung Requiem Mass for All Souls’ Day: Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church

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We are delighted to announce that  Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church, located at 63rd St. and Lancaster Avenue, in West Philadelphia, will have a sung Requiem Mass for All Souls’ Day at 7:00 p. m. Our Lady of Lourdes is very close to Center City.

If you do not drive, you can take the 21 bus and get off at 63rd St. It’s a short walk from there. If tyou drive, go straight up Walnut Street and make a right turn onto 63rd Street. This will take you directly to the Church.

 

October 30, 2018   1 Comment