Patience Obtains All Things
I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. With these words of today’s Gospel, Our Blessed Lord wishes to help us understand the ways of God. God is not like man. Man is weak, and because he is weak, he seeks feverishly to amass knowledge and wealth. God […]
Just A Little While
Just a little while, and I will see you again. These words are without a doubt some of the most consoling in the Holy Gospel, designed as they are to ward off that most deadly of temptations: give up and turn back. Our human frailty is such that we all too often listen to those […]
St Joseph’s Magnum Opus
Today the Church honours St Joseph under the title of “Worker”. In the face of the Communist ideology of human work as a means to temporal prosperity and conquest, reducing human work to just another cog in the great wheel of evolutionary “progress”, the Church through Pope Pius XII wanted to remind us that the […]
Quasimodo Geniti Infantes
Today’s oration has us ask the Lord that, having celebrated the paschal solemnities, we may keep them in our way of living, moribus et vita. Yesterday, a similar oration asked that having celebrated the paschal solemnities, we might attain to eternal joys, gaudia aeterna. Easter is truly the celebration of eternity, eternal life. This it […]
Everything Can Change At Easter
The wicked had just achieved the most devastating victory in history. The Son of God had been defeated. He was dead. He was gone. And with him all hope of anything good ever happening again. There was nothing to do but despair. No wonder the two disciples go off to Emmaus to try and drown […]
Notre Dame And Holy Saturday
Here in Australia it is already Holy Saturday. Holy Saturday is Our Lady’s day par excellence. She alone kept the faith in that dark night when everyone else, including all the apostles, had lost it. This is the origin of Saturday as Our Lady’s day. Yesterday just before the Mass of the Presanctified, a couple […]
Priest, Victim And Altar
Maundy Thursday 18 April 2019 With the celebration of the Sacred Triduum, we arrive at the climax of the Church’s liturgical life. To the events commemorated and relived during these days, we can trace the very foundations of all that we hold to be true and sacred. Indeed, it all came about quite unexpectedly. The […]
Patientiae Documenta
Only a very inattentive observer could fail to observe the contrast in today’s liturgy. We began in triumph, processing with the palms of victory and the olive branches of peace and soothing mercy, singing the glory of Christ Our King with joy and jubilation. Like the Hebrews of that first Palm Sunday, we could easily […]
The Word Of The Cross
With today’s liturgy we enter into what the Church calls passiontide, that is, the two weeks leading up to Easter, and during which our thoughts and meditations are continually drawn into the mystery of the sufferings of the God Man, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Oddly enough, at the very time we are invited to contemplate […]