A Little Experimental Liturgy: old on the new: prayer and silence

Struck by how prayerful people find the TLM I thought I would try an experiment.

I had Mass for children from our school, Years 4 and 5 today, 9 and 10 year olds, yesterday we had session in school looking at the Eucharistic Prayer, I got them to list all those we pray with and for during the Eucharistic Prayer, they had the text of EP 2. They shouted out: angels and saints, the Pope our bishop, the clergy, the departed, us, other believers. I was trying to get over to them the breadth of the Church and that the Eucharistic Prayer was actually prayer and they were expected to pray really ernestly during it.


This morning at Mass during the sermon I got them to repeat what we had learnt yesterday, and also to list everyone and evrerything else we should pray for. They came up with what you might expect: peace, love, help, I tried to tie them down to specific things and people, family, friends, deceased members of their families etc. I told them that in the other way we celebrate Mass (the Usus Antiquor) there is great deal of silence, and it is in ancient language, so people can pray quietly for everything and everyone they are concerned about.


The Experiment: It was our normal weekday Mass, with the normal congregation. There was no singing at Mass, except I sang the per ipsum but I said the Eucharistic Prayer as quietly as possible, barely above a whisper, except for the Consecration* and words like angels, saints, Mary, Pope, Bishop, clergy, departed brothers and sisters, there was and tangible, prayerful silence, just before communion I told them briefly to pray especially for those things they had already been asking God for.


The children are normally well behaved when they come to Mass but today I thought they actually prayed. I suspect it was the first time they had actually be told how to pray at Mass, maybe it was the first time the adults had been told. I don't know if it was the novelty of saying Mass in this way, I hope not, I would like to think it was that they were able to see the Mass as prayer.
I ended Mass by saying, "In this parish we care for asylum seekers, we feed the hungry but the most important thing we do is pray for people in the way you did this morning, thank you for doing that".

*The rubrics say that the words of consecration, "should be said in a clear and distinct voice", presumably it is possible to say the rest quietly. Spirit of the Liturgy by J Ratzinger, actually suggests this.

Nota Bene

No dancers are ever involved in liturgy in this Church, nor were their massaged in this experiment.

Folly of Contemporary Atheism

Father Baron talks about the foolishnes of contemporary atheism.

He says the slogan, "God probably doesn't exist, so stop worrying and enjoy life" is nonsense because the absence of belief in God doesn't cause us to stop worrying or desiring something beyond us and the absence of these concerns doesn't result us enjoying life. He says on the contrary our desire for God is a craving for what is beyond us, which only God can satisfy.

thanks Creative Minority

New Mass Translations

The new translations of the Mass, prepared by ICEL, a more theologically accurate translation of the Latin, are due to come into use in use in Advent 2011.

In parts of South Africa they are already in use, Rocco Palmo says they are not being well received, in fact he describes it as a fiasco.

They can be seen here.

Bad Lent

Gosh! Isn't Lent Depressing?
Maybe it is a sign of gently aging, not being able to cope with change and all that stuff, but as far as I remember Lent hs alays been pretty depressing.

The first week one embraces the fasting with vigour, little food on Wednesdays and Fridays, no meat except on Sundays, getting up earlier for prayer, spending more time in prayer during the day, trying to say the hours of the Office at the proper time, cutting down on noise in the house, keeping the telivison off, and within a week, the knees begin to buckle.

Getting up early means you fall asleep during the day, spending more time in prayer leads you to getting annoyed when the doorbell or the phone rings and disturbs your prayer time, the same when you go into the Church to say Sext at noon and you are halfway through and someone needs you for half an hour, and dispite your good intention it is past 11 o'clock before you say Vesper and you doze off during Compline and have to restart the psalms because you are not sure you've said them. As for fasting, that too just makes you grumpy, no radical purification of the soul, just thoughts of how dull lentil soup is, and dissappointment at how easily distracted you are.
After just a week I have started to long for the end of Lent, normally I start mitigating things a little after a couple of weeks, or just looking forward to the Lord's Day just to relax things a bit, then by Passiontide when the statues are veiled become a bit more rigorous, but always by the end of Lent I am pretty convinced I have had a pretty bad Lent.
I am sure that the main purpose of Lent is to teach us that we really are frail human beings without the ability too change ourselves much. Our own attempts at virtue are revealed as mere vanity. We end up by realising the folly of a Pelagian self improvement scheme, which tends to be the result of a good Lent, a bad Lent tends to teach us that everything that is good or virtuous comes from God and without him - well, it's disaster...
Non nobis Domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam...

Maybe we learn more from losing battles in the Spiritual Life than winning them.

Not to us, O Lord but to Your Name be the Glory.

Holy Land Itinerary

Zenit reports unofficially the Holy Father's itinerary for his visit to the Holy Land.

Israeli President Shimon Peres is set to welcome the Holy Father on May 11, and together they will visit the Yad Vashem, according to the report. Later that evening, the Pontiff will attend an interreligious meeting before proceeding to the apostolic nunciature where he will reside during his stay,

On his second day in Israel, the Holy Father will meet with the mufti of Jerusalem and then go to the Wailing Wall to take part in a ceremony that will also be attended by the grand rabbis of Israel. Later that morning, he will visit the rabbinate of Israel.

At noon, the Holy Father will pray in the Cenacle, where Jesus held his Last Supper. And then he will visit the Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem to meet and lunch with the Catholic ordinaries of the Holy Land. That evening he will visit Gethsemane and celebrate a solemn Mass.

On May 13, the unofficial itinerary has Benedict XVI visiting Bethlehem, where he will be welcomed by the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and other Palestinian leaders. There he will visit the Basilica of the Nativity and celebrate Mass.

In the afternoon, he is set to visit a refugee camp near Bethlehem, as well as a work of charity, though this latter site has not been determined.

The program for Thursday, May 14, is still being considered, but the Holy Father is expected to celebrate Mass in the morning in Nazareth and meet with religious leaders of Galilee.

On his last day, the Bishop of Rome will visit the Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem in the patriarchate. Then he will go to the Holy Sepulcher where he will be received by the Franciscan Custos of the Holy Land, and where he will be spend time in prayer.

Later that morning, he will visit the Armenian neighborhood of the Old City of Jerusalem and meet with the Armenian Orthodox patriarch.

He is scheduled to leave Israel around 2 p.m. that afternoon.

Franciscan of the Immaculate prefer the Old Rite

The Franciscans of the Immaculate, are one of those thriving new religious communities , in Rome they seem to be everywhere. There are a couple of small communities in this country. Their charism seems to be essentially about contemplation and preaching
They have announced their predilection for the Usus Antiquor. Here is an excerpt from La Stampa on NLM:

The Franciscans of the Immaculate avail themselves, with joy and grateful appreciation, of the initiative taken by Pope Benedict XVI with the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. [...] The choice to predilect the "extraordinary form" corresponds to a legitimate internal choice of the religious family, as foreseen in the same motu proprio, in a Catholic spirit of fidelity to the Pope and to the liturgical tradition of the Order founded by St. Francis of Assisi. [...] The spirit of St. Francis, in fact, tends to the greatest possible glorification of God through the good and beautiful things of the world and has always led us to seek what most helps to elevate the mind and heart to the "Most High, Almighty and Good Lord" to whom alone are due "praises, glory, honor and all blessing"(Canticle of the Sun). The extraordinary form of the liturgy of the Vetus Ordo - which is accompanied by that of the Novus Ordo (Missal of Paul VI) - offers, indeed, the happy possibility to live more intensely the vocation and mission of St. Francis of Assisi, within the universality of the Church and its wealth of expression.

Rorate Caeli carries the interesting story of their young Sisters in Cornwall, and the implementation of this preference there. This story originally appeared in the LMS Magazine.

The last I heard the Friars are looking for a Church and a house within reach of London, any suggestions?

The 40 Martyrs of Sebaste

Icon from Georgia, s.XIII. In the year 320, Licinius ordered his soldiers to repudiate Christ on pain of death. In the "Thundering Legion," stationed near Sebaste, in the Roman Armenia, forty soldiers refused. They were stripped naked one evening and herded onto the middle of a frozen lake, and told, "You may come ashore when you are ready to deny your faith." To tempt them, fires were built on shore, with warm baths, blankets, clothing, and hot food and drink close by. As night deepened, thirty-nine men stood firm, while one broke and ran to the shore. However, one of the soldiers standing guard on shore was so moved by the steadfastness of the Christians that he stripped off his clothes and ran out to join them. They welcomed him into their company, and so the number of the martyrs remained at forty, and by morning, all were dead of exposure.