A Medieval Hymn of St Bernard
Here is a very nice medieval hymn for the feast of St Bernard of Clairvaux, which is used in the Cistercian Divine Office at both Vespers of his feast. According to the Analecta hymnica, the great...
View ArticleAn Italian Chapel in the Orkney Islands
This post is just a very brief follow-up on one we posted exactly a month ago, which showed pictures of a chapel built by Italian POWs in the British colony of Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe) during...
View ArticleThe Numinous and the Roman Rite, Part I
The concept of the numinous was first articulated by the German Lutheran Rudolf Otto in his seminal work The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its...
View ArticlePalestrina’s Canticle of Canticles
Before the Tridentine reform, very few feasts had Scriptural readings in the first nocturn of the Divine Office. On the feasts of the Saints, it was typical for readings of their lives to supply all...
View ArticleAn Altarpiece of St Bartholomew
For the feast of St Bartholomew the Apostle, here is a beautiful altarpiece dated to about 1440, which depicts a series of stories from his traditional legend, by an anonymous Spanish painter known as...
View ArticleThe Centenary of Pius XI Declaring St John of the Cross a Doctor
On this day exactly 100 years ago, Pope Pius XI declared the Carmelite friar and priest St John of the Cross to be the 26th Doctor of the Church; this was just shy of 200 years after his canonization,...
View ArticleOn Sacred Art (Part 1): Revealing the Invisible through the Visible
How style communicates theological truth, and the three authentic traditions of liturgical art: iconographic, Gothic, and BaroqueThis is the first of two related articles on the three authentic...
View ArticleArranging the Breviary for the Rest of the Liturgical Year
This is our annual posting on one of the discrepancies between the traditional arrangement of the Roman Breviary and the new rubrics of 1960; this year, the first such discrepancy appears at Vespers on...
View ArticleEyewitness Accounts of Liturgical Life Before and After the Council
In his second memoir, Traddy Daddy: Memories and Thoughts of the Father of a Catholic Family, Joseph Bevan regales us again, as he did before in Two Families, with story after story of English life...
View ArticleComplete Coetus XI Documentation on the New Lectionary Now Published in English
The Lectionary for Mass – drawn up by Group XI of the Consilium, the “super-committee” charged with carrying out Sacrosanctum Concilium – is often held up as one of the greatest achievements of the...
View ArticleThe Seven Joys of the Virgin Mary
For a fairly brief period, today was kept by the Franciscans as the feast of the Seven Joys of the Virgin Mary. As an expression of the Seraphic Order’s devotional life, it corresponds to the feast of...
View ArticleThe Numinous in the Roman Rite, Part II
In our last post, we described the importance of the numinous for Catholic worship. Here, we describe how that principle is instantiated in the traditional Roman Rite. The Numinous in the 1962 Missal...
View ArticleDurandus on the Beheading of St John the Baptist
The Church celebrates the feast of the beheading of blessed John because he died for the truth, but not as solemnly as the feast of his birth, because (when he died) he went down to hell (i.e, the...
View ArticleAn Admission Against Interest: “We Still Do Not Know How to Celebrate the...
At his Wednesday audience this week, the Holy Father Pope Leo XIV delivered the last in a series of eight discourses on Sacrosanctum Concilium, the most recent ecumenical council’s Constitution on the...
View ArticleSaint “Added-On”
Since well before the middle of the sixth century, August 30th has been the feast of two Roman martyrs of the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian (ca. 303), a priest named Felix, and a man who after...
View ArticleA Few Notes on Readings from Job
In the Roman Divine Office, the Matins readings for the first two weeks of September are taken from the book of Job. The system of Scriptural readings assigned to the Office goes back to the 6th...
View ArticleOn Sacred Art, part 2: What Governs the Style of the Traditions
How the anthropology of the Theology of the Body accounts for the iconographic, Gothic, and Baroque styles, and why the art of Leonardo and Michelangelo is not among them.This is the second of two...
View ArticleThe Legend of St Giles
On the Roman calendar, today is the feast of the abbot Aegidius, known as Giles in English, one of the most popular Saints of the Middle Ages. All hagiographical scholars recognize that the traditional...
View ArticleTLM Pilgrimages in France and the Holy Land with Dr. Kwasniewski
Over the years, I’ve noticed a happy development, and it seems to me to confirm the general trend pointed out by countless observers, namely, that where Catholicism still remains, it is becoming more...
View ArticleThe Feast of Pope St Pius X
From a discourse of His Holiness Pope Pius XII, on the canonization of Pope St Pius X. Sanctity, which was the guide and inspiration of the undertakings of Pius X, shines forth even more clearly in...
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