Ruminations of an Amateur Monastic
O Wisdom! Advent is drawing to its close, and it’s time again for our annual look at the O Antiphons. These antiphons are part of the prayers at the liturgical hour of Vespers for the 17th through the 23rd of December – the 24th is of course the Christmas Vigil itself. They are ancient prayers, possibly dating back to the […]
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This morning for the first time I served at a public Mass in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. It was a votive Mass of Saint Joseph, celebrated at Saint Joseph church in Tacoma by the Rev. Caleb Insco, F.S.S.P. This is only the second time I’ve served at the Vetus Ordo, and I was extremely nervous. Throughout the […]
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This Advent, as in past years, our parish of Holy Rosary in Tacoma will be celebrating Vespers in the church on Sundays at 6:00 PM. Please join us! There’s nothing like chanted Vespers in a beautiful, echoing church to pull the heart and mind towards the Lord.
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You are invited to an Advent tradition: a Rorate Mass on Saturday, December 16 at 6:00 AM. I can already hear the questions forming. What is a Rorate Mass? And why on earth would you have one at six in the morning? Well, here’s the FAQ, as the kids say. What is a Rorate Mass? It is a Solemn Votive […]
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Saint Cecilia is one of the most famous and most venerated of Roman martyrs. Legend has it that she, her husband Valerian, and her brother-in-law Tiburtius were martyred during the reign of Emperor Alexander Severus, about the year 230. Her name appears in the First Eucharistic Prayer (the Roman Canon) among Rome’s other beloved martyrs, and when Christianity became legal […]
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Appropriate to today – the Feast of All Souls of the Benedictine Order – we once again have the Dies Iræ, the traditional sequence for Requiem Masses and the Masses of All Souls. Today we pray for the souls of all Benedictine monks, nuns, sisters, and oblates in purgatory. Most probably written by Servant of God Thomas of Celano near […]
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Once again we come to a feast of All Saints. “But wait!” I hear you cry, “wasn’t that back on the first of November?” Right you are! But today on the Benedictine calendar is the feast of All Saints of the Benedictine Order. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside […]
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Can we talk about Gregorian chant? Because All Souls Day – coming up on November 2nd – has some doozies. I confess that I was a fan of chant long before I was a Catholic. In part, God used the beauty of this kind of music to draw me to Him. Specific chants are prescribed for each Mass in both […]
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Saint Luke is my kind of writer. Luke the historian and Luke the lyrical poet are both in evidence in his New Testament writings, his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. He freely admits that he never met Christ in the flesh, that he was not a witness to the events he describes in his Gospel. Like any good […]
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In the past week or so, I have spoken with several people about our liturgical strategic plan at our parish of Holy Rosary. We talk about the ideal liturgical life of the parish, about our constraints in terms of people and resources, and about what steps we can take to transcend our limitations and move forward. I thought I might […]
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Today is the feast of the Most Holy Rosary. For most of the Catholic world, this is a memorial of various sorts. Since, however, my parish is dedicated to Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, for us it is a Solemnity. Huzzah! If you are in the Tacoma area, please join us for the Mass of the feast, either tonight […]
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At our parish of Holy Rosary, we sometimes celebrate Mass on the High Altar. This method, where for much of the Eucharistic prayer the Priest and the people are facing the same direction, is known as ad Orientem. For many years, we have celebrated Mass this way at the Solemnity of Corpus Christi and at least one Sunday in Advent. […]
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Whither is thy Beloved gone, O thou most beautiful among women? Whither is thy Beloved turned aside, and we will seek Him with thee? We begin with the first antiphon of Lauds for today’s feast of The Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Monastic Diurnal. The Blessed Virgin Mary is sometimes called Our Lady of Sorrows – […]
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Last Thursday, we celebrated a funeral in our parish of Holy Rosary. Nothing unusual in that. The one constant of life is the inevitability of death. This particular funeral was that of a priest, Rev. Dominic Hahn. He was born in 1937, was baptized and grew up in our parish, graduated from our parish school, became a Benedictine monk, and […]
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Dom Matthew Britt, O.S.B. is one of the great writers of practical liturgics in the twentieth century. His classic How to Serve was republished by Tan in 2011. This book is a treasure, and I have made extensive use of it, both in planning for Ordinary Form Masses and for learning to serve the Extraordinary Form. I also have a […]
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Chanted from the version given in the Codex Calixtinus. Neither Ordinary nor Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, but rather from the Mozarabic Rite.
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There is a tendency in the modern world to minimize the use of vestments in the liturgy. In my early days as a Catholic, it was not unusual to see a priest celebrate Mass wearing only an alb and a stole. Often, this was taken as a sign of humility on the part of the celebrant. It is, in fact, […]
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