Category: Blithe Spirit

The good and the bad, emphasis on Trib and Sun-Times

Pseudo-literary salute to liturgy for the sake of God continued . . .

Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

The liturgy under discussion is spelled out, encapsulated, here, in passages from “The Priority of Religion and Adoration over Communion,” by Peter Kwasniewski:

Whenever the Mass is celebrated more like a meal, versus populum [facing the people], without silence, without serious elevations and double genuflections, with a memorial acclamation breaking in on our acts of adoring faith, and an overall informal ars celebrandi [mode of celebrating], such things undermine the aforementioned Tridentine [16th-century Council of Trent] dogmas and weaken the sensus fidelium [what people believe].

In such circumstances, it is not surprising that holy communion becomes the high point of the service, indeed the only point; and if one does not receive, one is “left out.” Why go to Mass otherwise?

On the other hand:

But if the focus is the priestly offering of the holy sacrifice as an act of the virtue of religion – giving to…

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Bad, bad pseudo-literary salute to liturgy for the sake of God — with mucho benefits for men, women, and children but not pandering to their momentary interests . . .

Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

Should we fit worship to the worshipers? (Bunch of worshipers coming, what do we have for them? Something special, please.)

Or worshipers to the worship? (Solid stuff here, take it or leave it, trust us, you will not regret it, even in this life.)

Consider the first. It’s the Protestant way and successful to a degree, here and there, now and then. And it’s better than flip-floppy nothing.

But for the really serious, you’ve gotta have more. You gotta have substance, not tailored to these and those, who in the grand scheme of things are here today, gone tomorrow. (Even the cleanest-living leave sooner or later.)

Give me men to match those mountains, said Sam Walter Foss, “Poet, Librarian and Friend to Man,” in 1894.

Give us worshipers to match this worship. Ask them, Are you up to the challenge? Can you stand the truth of the matter?

— to…

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Communion in the hand(s) no safer than on the tongue? Attending mass without communion may be your best choice.

From UK’s Latin Mass Society’s spokesman, analyzing the situation with admirable sang froid:

  In [“extraordinary form,” Latin mass] celebrations, Holy Communion . . . may not be distributed in the hand, according to the universal liturgical law applicable to them.

Should the spread of COVID-19 necessitate suspension of distribution of Holy Communion on the tongue, this would mean suspension of distribution of Holy Communion to the Faithful in these celebrations.

You might call it a rock-and-hard-place situation. However:

The Communion of the Faithful is in no way necessary to the validity or [legitimacy] (in such circumstances) of the Mass.

Should prudence dictate the necessity for such a step, the Faithful should be encouraged to make a ‘Spiritual Communion’. One form of words for making such a Spiritual Communion is given below.

Standard solution, as if (in pre-Vatican 2 days) you ate or drank before (morning) mass and could not receive — and leave it to the Latin Mass fellow to bring it up.

He recommends a very good prayer:

My Jesus, I believe that thou art present in the Most Holy Sacrament. I love thee above all things, and I desire to receive thee in my soul.

Since I cannot at this moment receive thee sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. I embrace thee as if thou wert already there, and unite myself wholly to thee. Never permit me to be separated from thee. Amen.

Oh, and about that relative effectiveness of hand or tongue in warding off the plague, he comments quietly:

We wish to observe, however, that the distribution of the Host in the hand does not appear to be less likely to spread infection than the distribution on the tongue.

On the contrary, distribution on the hand has the result that the Host touches possibly infected surfaces, the palm of the left hand and the fingers of the right hand of the communicant, which is avoided in distribution by a priest directly onto the communicant’s tongue.

Sensible observation.

via RORATE CÆLI: Statement on the Corona Virus and Holy Communion from the Latin Mass Society

Don’t Fear The Wu-Flu

The lady argues well:

I confess I???ve been afraid of the Wu-flu. Oh, not the disease itself. Look, I???m at SLIGHTLY more risk than the rest of you, simply because I catch everything that passes within a block of me.

However, the REALLY important thing to remember is that we really don???t have any idea ??? yet ??? how this will play in the US, but we don???t really have that much of a reason to panic either.

Even in Italy . . .

. . . the mortality is mostly among Chinese transplants. And before you tell me I???m racist (rolls eyes), no, I???m not. Leaving aside the protein in the lungs this thing might or might not bind to, there are co-morbidity factors for Chinese (and to an extent for Italians. Definitely for Iranians, particularly Iranian males.) One of them is smoking like a chimney.

The other is that China (where the mortality seems to be way higher, honestly) is more polluted than you can imagine.?? Iran might be too. You know dictatorships don???t really much care for the environment, and I remember Portugal in the early sixties, when going out early in the morning during rush hour was like putting your face fully in the exhaust of a car.

I have no clue as to Italy air quality, and I have a full schedule ahead, so I refuse to fall down that rabbit hole.

So. Argues well but not definitively. Of course, no one is at this point.

The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization

For instance:

Diana West sees a US filled with middle-age guys playing air guitar and thinks “No wonder we can’t stop Islamic terrorism.” She sees Moms Who Mosh and wonders “Is there a single adult left anywhere?” But, the grown-ups are all gone. The disease that killed them was incubated in the sixties to a rock-and-roll score, took hold in the seventies with the help of multicultralism and left us with a nation of eternal adolescents who can’t decide between “good” and “bad”, a generation who can’t say “no”.

From the inability to nix a sixteen year-old’s request for Marilyn Manson concert tickets to offering adolescents parentally-funded motel rooms on prom night to rationalizing murderous acts of Islamic suicide bombers with platitudes of cultural equivalence, West sees us on a slippery slope that’s lead to a time when America has forgotten its place in the world. In The Death of the Grown-Up Diana West serves up a provocative critique of our dangerously indecisive world leavened with humor and shot through with insight.

Not a pretty picture.

Mayor Lori on poverty again, rejecting the implausible. . .

. . . And making at least a few hearts beat a little less abnormally. Specifically, by saying no to one of the grandest schemes out there.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot is committed to ending poverty within a generation but she isn’t convinced universal basic income will do that.

“I am about teaching people how to fish, so they can feed themselves for a lifetime,” Lightfoot said Thursday at the Solution Toward Ending Poverty Summit at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“I want people to be able to stand on their own forever.”

Plus, she is spotted by the socialists and their friends as dropping the ball. Which in the politics of the day (and election year) is that for which we can be grateful, especially in blue, blue Cook County.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot was accused Wednesday of going through the motions of a war on poverty by leaving key stakeholders out of her poverty summit and ignoring their suggested remedies.

Progressive groups and their City Council allies have pressured Lightfoot from the left to deliver on her campaign promise to raise the real estate transfer tax on high-end home sales and use the $100 million in annual revenue to reduce homelessness and chip away at Chicago’s 120,000-unit shortage of affordable units.

They want the mayor to drop her opposition to lifting the ban on rent control in Illinois and reinstate the employee head tax that business hated and Rahm Emanuel eliminated.

And . . .

They have criticized her tax-increment-financing reforms as grossly inadequate and pressured her to “municipalize” Commonwealth Edison’s expiring electricity franchise agreement and deliver the community benefits agreement she promised to prevent local residents from being priced out and pushed out by the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park.

On Wednesday, that bill of particulars against Lightfoot was aired at a City Hall news conference by a coalition of community groups that included United Working Families, the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, Democratic Socialists of America, the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council and the Jane Addams Senior Caucus.

They also questioned why they weren’t invited to the day-long poverty summit that the mayor held last week. The mayor’s office said aldermen were invited. So was the Coalition for the Homeless.

Etc. With opponents like that, she’s hard not to like, or at least prefer . . .