Proclamation on 850th Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket | The White House

Thrilling account of the Becket martyrdom and influence on civil law, and then this:

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim December 29, 2020, as the 850th anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket. I invite the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches and customary places of meeting with appropriate ceremonies in commemoration of the life and legacy of Thomas Becket.

That’s Catholic, with or without a capital “C.”

Black lives do not matter in Chicago . . .

Chicago Newspapers

Where the weekend toll continues.

As this:

Saturday night, a man was found dead with a gunshot wound to the chest in Englewood on the South Side.

He was found in an alley about 10 p.m. in the 7400 block of South Stewart Avenue and pronounced dead at the scene, police said. A witness told investigators the man was talking to someone in a vehicle when shots were fired.

Wild west situation:

Hours earlier, a man was shot and killed while trying to commit a robbery on the West Side, according to police.

He walked in to a store about 6:50 p.m. in the 3200 block of West Chicago Avenue, pulled out a gun and demanded property, police said.

A store employee, a 29-year-old man, pulled out his own gun and fired shots at the robber, striking him in the chest, police said. He was taken to Stroger Hospital…

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Personal Liberty Sacrificed at the Altar of Covid Public Safety

These people are talking my language.

If science had been followed in 2020 – in all fields – we’d be much healthier and wealthier than we now are. But control freaks have used Covid-19 to justify still more government controls, still more statism.

Hot buttons: Altar of public safety, control freaks, government controls, statism. That last one, yes. “Holy mother the state,” said Dorothy Day ironically — or someone else? Tell me if you know.

Fr Hunwicke’s Mutual Enrichment: Mary Mother of God

Try this on for size, my hearties:

Once upon a time, a thousand years ago in the great basilica of Blachernae in Constantinople, high up on the ceiling near the Altar, was an enormous picture of a Palestinian teenager, that selfsame Girl who is such a lead-player in the Christmass celebrations. There she stood orans, Mediatrix of All Graces, as we Westerners would say, her hands raised in prayer, and in front of her womb, in a round circle, a painting of her Divine Son – his hand lifted in blessing. That image of Mary was called Platytera tou kosmou, the Woman Wider than the Universe. Mary was Great with Child; her Child was Almighty God. She contained the One whom the heaven of heavens is too narrow to hold. Can a foot be larger than the boot or an oyster greater than the shell? For Christians, apparently, Very Often. Mary’s slender womb enthroned within it the Maker of the Universe, the God who is greater than all the galaxies that stream across the firmament. The tummy of a Girl was wider than creation.

Then on the crisp night air came the squeal of the newly born baby. It came from the cave that was both a stable and a birth-place. That stable in Bethlehem, as C S Lewis memorably explains in The Last Battle, ‘had something in it that was bigger than our entire world’. The stable, like Mary, was great with child; very great, for that Child is God. And what is true of the womb of the Mother of God, and what is true of that stable at Bethlehem, is also the great truth of the Sacrament of the Altar. Bread becomes God Almighty; little round disks of unleavened bread are recreated by the Maker of the World to be Himself. As Mary’s Baby was bigger than all creation, than all the stars and clouds and mass of it, so the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is bigger than the Kosmos.

As you made your Christmass communion, glorious and loving Infinity came to make His dwelling in your poor body; so that, as you walked or drove home for the rest of Christmass, you were platyteroi tou Kosmou: broader than the Universe.

He spells Christmas with two s’s, you see. Not a typo. It’s what he thinks about the Mass.

Differences in the Old and New Liturgical Calendars: Slaughter of the feast days . . .

Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

More of why liturgical change. “Armchair strategy of academics,” then-mere-cardinal Ratzinger called it.

It was incomprehensible and pointless to move feast days that people have been celebrating on particular days for hundreds (or thousands) of years, thus totally disrupting the annual nature of the liturgical year. And why change the calendar all around to a three year cycle named as years A, B, or C? Whoever thought that one up?

. . . .

From “the Feast of Faith” By J. Ratzinger ( later Pope Benedict XVI) in 1986:

“One of the weaknesses of the postconciliar liturgical reform can doubtless be traced to the armchair strategy of academics, drawing up things on paper which, in fact, would presuppose years of organic growth. The most blatant example of this is the reform of the Calendar: those responsible simply did not realize how much the various annual feasts had influenced Christian people’s…

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The mentality and modus agendi of Novus Ordo reformers, in a few words . . .

Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

Key words and phrases here, help us understand what we have in Novus Ordo masses:

The feast of St. Thomas the Apostle has been kept on . . . December 21 from at least the ninth century. It was moved to July 3, the day mentioned by St. Jerome as the date of his martyrdom in India, by those who revised the calendar after the Second Vatican Council. They did this so that his feast would not interrupt the major ferial days of Advent leading to Christmas.

They wanted to tidy things up, calendar wise. They considered the feast of St. Thomas in later Advent out of place. Their liturgical rationalism made them blind to the wonderful interruption of late Advent made possible by the feast of this apostle.

You see this in the masses, where it’s almost a head trip that is offered worshipers. No room for…

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