First and foremost, a blessed Corpus Christi (and its octave!) to one and all.
New priests for the FSSP
On Wednesday, I had the great privilege and blessing of attending a pontifical Mass in Omaha with ordinations of 11 new priests for the Fraternity of St. Peter. Deo gratias!
What a sublime experience it was, with a congregation that must have been 2,000 people strong, judging from every pew being packed and folks standing in the vestibule, side aisles, and side chapels. The responses in the Litany of Saints sounded like thunder rolling off the mountains and made my eyes fill with tears. Archbishop emeritus Terrence Prendergast of Ottawa did splendidly. I don't remember the last time I've seen such a huge procession of clergy. Members of several religious communities were also present. The men’s schola lifted us into the angelic heavens and the organ playing was spectacular. And the sheer number of young people and babies there made it clear that Catholic tradition isn’t about to vanish. A day full of hope and joy!
I’ll pick my favorite nine from this gallery (a hard choice to make):
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If you’d like to watch some or all of the ceremony, you will find it here:
It’s always moving to see the newly ordained priests giving their special blessing to the bishop who ordained them:
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A first Mass
Yesterday for the feast of Corpus Christi, I had the privilege of singing for the First Mass of Fr. Benjamin Feuerborn, FSSP, at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Lincoln, Nebraska.
It was a solemn High Mass with a coped assistant priest (as foreseen by the rubrics on such an occasion). The little gothic church was, as you may have guessed, quite full! Mass was followed by a short procession to an outdoor altar for Benediction and then, back in the church, a concluding Benediction.
The mixed choir sang Tallis’s Mass for Four Voices, Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus, and Palestrina’s Ego Sum Panis; the schola sang the propers for the feast of Corpus Christi. How could one ever get tired of singing such magnificent music? (In fact, these days my #1 difficulty is that my eyes will start tearing up from time to time at the sheer beauty of the music, or with the joy of seeing such a fervent congregation, or from the melancholy of knowing how many more Catholics have no clue that all this vast treasury is theirs—and this makes my voice wobble. A funny problem to have, I know, but there you have it.)
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Back from California
I went out to California for a family wedding near the south entrance of Yosemite and to give a talk in Fresno itself. (The video of that talk will soon be posted.) I took advantage of being so close to the national park to spend half a day hiking around Yosemite Valley, which was breathtaking. I’d never been there before and was told that the waterfalls were at their fullest and most explosive. I would just stand there for long periods of time gazing at the descending falls, with their ethereal armlike spouts of water shooting into the air; it was utterly mesmerizing. Here’s a little gallery:
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Here’s my humble video of Bridalveil Falls. (I had to rotate it 90%, hence the watermark.)
At one point I just sat down by a river and listened to the birds singing their hearts out, and decided to take a little video. Then I thought about Olivier Messiaen pulling out his music notebook and jotting down birdsong…
I was deeply impressed by the cross-section of a giant redwood tree outside a museum in the village there. This tree fell in 1919, and when it was cut, was found to be nearly 1,000 years old. Markers positioned on the rings indicate the tree’s state of growth at such historic moments as the Battle of Hastings (1066), the Magna Charta (1215), Columbus’s discovery of America (1492—this is the missing label but you can deduce that that’s what it has to be), the landing of the pilgrims (1620), and so on.
I was also delighted with the old-fashioned post office there, which clearly looks over a hundred years old. Why don’t we make simple things like post offices beautiful any more? I was remarking to a friend the other day about old automobiles that they are almost universally more handsome, more stylishly designed, than any recent ones except for a few sportscars.
One last shot of the valley on the way out:
Coming away from this enchanted place, I wondered why people no longer look out of their windows on airplane flights.
Ever since I was a boy, I found it fascinating—and I still do—to see the world from up in the air, whether it be cities or countryside. As a kid I remember pilots making announcements like “Below us to the left is Mt. Such-and-such,” or “Lake Whatsit,” or “You’ll see City X to your right.” Now they just leave people to their own private worlds. It’s as if we are no longer interested in THE world, in spite of lip service to the contrary. As I look at row after row of little screens that absorb the attention of their users, and see the window shades resolutely shut, Heraclitus’s fragment comes to mind: “The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.”
On my flight from San Jose to Denver, over Nevada and Utah and part of Colorado, I was treated to some of the most gorgeous from above that I've ever seen—wildly undulating and ever-changing landscape, mountains, hills, snow, lakes, dramatic shadows. It was so beautiful. And I think I might have been the only one looking at it.
Sicily Trip
Quick reminder that on June 4, at 7pm ET, there will be a free info meeting via Zoom on the upcoming pilgrimage to Sicily, February 3-15, 2025. Fr Thomas Crean will be our chaplain offering a daily Latin Mass (Dominican Rite), and I will be there too, enjoying the masterpieces of art with you. There are so many reasons to go to Sicily — beginning with the massive celebration of Sicily’s patroness St. Agatha on February 5th, which we will attend.
To get all the details, including the link for the Zoom call, visit the page at St Charles Pilgrimages here. To see more photos of the glorious churches we’ll be visiting, see my earlier post at T&S here.
I hope and pray that these 11 men remain faithful, do not succumb to the Zeitgeist, and be true Catholic priests. I made many errors in my life [viz, sins] that cost me dearly. I would not trade any of the 44 years of ordained ministry as priest for anything else in the world; I only wish that striving to cooperate with God's grace for holiness of life would have been higher on the list of priorities in community and in formation. It pains and angers me every time I hear another report/expose on the corruption in the Church, especially in the seminaries and in the higher echalons of the Vatican and dioceses. It actually sickens me to think that I succumbed to some of it, and that had a pernicious effect on my life, my soul. Sadly, the more I hear and read, the more it seems true that the Reformers, mistaken as they were about many things, had their finger on corruption and its corrosive effect on the faithful, the Faith, and the Church. God send us holy, committed and supported me to become the leaders we need in the mold of Gregory VII, Pius V, Pius X. Thank you for your kindness in "listening" to me, and may the Lord abundantly bless these new priests and the FSSP and all the ministries, communities, and parishes struggling to serve the Lord in the midst of a "wicked and perverse generation."
I watched the video of the ordination three times! One of the ordinands was a parishioner of my parish: St Stephen First Martyr. It is sad knowing that so many Catholics don’t know what they have been deprived of however there is one thing that is more melancholy: the ones who don’t care. I have tried to interest some cradle Catholics I know to try the TLM. Just to give it a try. They don’t want to know. They don’t care. It breaks my heart.