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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Vigano: Vatican Nativity is ‘expression of apostasy, immorality and vice’ | Opinion | LifeSite

Jeremiah talk:

This irreverent monstrosity is the mark of the universal religion of transhumanism hoped for by the New World Order; it is the expression of apostasy, immorality and vice – of ugliness erected as a model.

And just like everything that is constructed by man’s hands without God’s blessing, indeed against Him, it is destined to perish, to disappear, and to crumble.

Ah reverence, the first casuality of disbelief.

Biden’s Court Problem

How often it’s been said, judges guard the constitutional way of doing things. So it will go.

From the story: …the U.S. of 2021 will be very different than the Obama years in one key regard—or rather, in 233 regards. That’s the number of judges Mitch McConnell’s Senate has so far confirmed over the past four years, and Donald Trump’s most enduring legacy. Team Biden will struggle to replicate the Obama regulatory machine “because much of what they want to do will be well beyond any statutory or constitutional authority, and what we have now are a number of judges attuned to those issues and unafraid to hold the executive branch accountable,” says Don McGahn, Mr. Trump’s first White House counsel.

Our saving grace.

The Biden border surge

He don’t like no borders anyway, and border-jumpers get that.

It’s no mystery. People in Central America and Mexico follow the news. They know what is going on in the United States. They know that Biden has pledged to halt all deportations for 100 days, to create a path to citizenship for illegal entrants, to dramatically reduce detention, to allow those who enter illegally to stay in the U.S. while their cases are considered, to stop construction of the border wall — they see it all. “If you had a moratorium on deportations, you shut down a lot of ICE detention,” former Immigration and Customs Enforcement official Tom Homan told Giaritelli. “If you’re not going to be detained, you’re not going to be deported, there’s going to be no more work-site enforcement operations, we’re gonna give you your free healthcare, including COVID treatment, why would you not come?”

Even press outlets friendly to the new administration are sounding the alarm. “Swiftly reversing Trump administration policies could be construed as opening the floodgates,” the New York Times reported recently, “risking a rush to the border that could quickly devolve into a humanitarian crisis.”

Bible says. Could be biblical.