Too many people today are without good, strong preaching, to the detriment of all.
Share the good stuff.
Was there a GOOD point made in the sermon you heard at your Mass of obligation for this 24th and Last Sunday after Pentecost or the Solemnity of Christ The King in the Novus Ordo?
Tell about attendance especially for the Traditional Latin Mass.
Any local changes or (hopefully good) news?
My thoughts about the “end of the world as we know it”: HERE A taste…
[…]
Never has it been more necessary for Catholics to relearn the basics, deepen their grasp of doctrine, and avoid the snares of false teachers regardless of the colors of the trim on their cassocks.
Nowhere is this learning so embodied, nowhere is doctrine so lived, as in sacred liturgical worship, “the perfect ‘good work’,” theologia prima. The disorders we see in the Church today arise largely from a rupture of continuity in both believing and worshipping. All true reform begins in rightly ordered worship; all apostolic action flows back into the Sacrifice. “We are our rites.”
Fittingly, the Collect for this final Sunday expresses this entire spiritual program in compact majesty:
Excita, quaesumus, Domine,
tuorum fidelium voluntates:
ut, divini operis fructum propensius exsequentes;
pietatis tuae remedia maiora percipiant.[…]
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In today’s sermon (TLM), Father B. used the first part of today’s Gospel to paint a picture of a soul falling into mortal sin, paralleling the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple with the sinful soul. Father is always good about mentioning both the horror of entering eternity with sin and the Sacred Heart of Jesus as a source of mercy while we are still in time.
From the homily at the Mass of Christ the King at the Ordinariate’s Cathedral of Our Lady of Walsingham (actually the Mass in the Cathedral High School gym, put on to accommodate the huge increase in families in the parish) (as recorded by an app and transcribed by AI, as edited by me, so any errors should not be attributed to our homilist):
“ Joseph Ratzinger in the book Eschatology, Death and Eternal Life said this “Being a Christian in the sense Jesus intended is summed up in the central petition of the Our Father: “Thy Kingdom come.””
Hear that again. It’s an amazing thing. The gift that Jesus intended is summed up in the central petition of the Our Father, Thy kingdom come. At the very core of our Savior’s teaching of prayer is the instruction that we should always be seeking that the kingdom would be in our midst and that that kingdom would be the fulfilling of the will of God. Thy will be done on earth. That means in me, that means in you, on earth as it is in heaven.
How important that phrasing is when we come to this great solemnity of Christ the King. Because today on the cross Jesus Christ reveals the coming of the kingdom. Sounds like Lent, doesn’t it? Passion time or Holy Week. …It’s at the cross the penitent sinner comes to Jesus and says, remember me and the promise of the kingdom is this Today, that great kairological time.
Today you will be with me in paradise. I don’t know how many of you pray the daytime prayers of our Daily Office in the Ordinariate, but the mid afternoon None office, having wonderful praises, speaking to Jesus, the prayer says “by thy death didst unlock the gates of paradise: mercifully grant that in the hour of our death our souls may come to the true paradise, which is thyself.” Jesus Christ is the paradise into which we enter at the cross.
We are to be with him in the cross. We are to reign in his kingdom alongside him through his cross. And what in the world that can possibly mean for us as we celebrate his kingship, his kingly power, his kingdom, but that we are to be people who are shaped in the way we live our lives by the Father of the promise. And that means the same thing we heard at the beginning of Mass. Love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, soul and mind, and thy neighbor as thyself. “[Matt. 22:37-40, enunciated after the Collect for Purity at the start of every Ordinariate Mass.]
For Christ the King, Father said he used to think he was good at chess, until his nephew beat him. He said in chess you do everything you can to protect the king, contrasting that to Christ our King who died on the cross for us. He talked about kneeling or prostrating ourselves before the King. He said so much more about kindship and the Kingdom. Later when Father summoned a little boy to come up to receive his First Holy Communion with his family, instead of going up the steps, the boy knelt on the prie dieu kneeler in the aisle (an option for all). Father looked quite happy come down to him.
Our sermon was about the four last things, expanded somewhat as to what we can expect when we die. The particular judgement, heaven hell or purgatory, how we can minimize the suffering in purgatory by what we do while we are still alive on earth, what heaven will be like, the general judgement at the end of time.
One thing he brought up which I didn’t know, that in addition to each person having a guardian angel, we also are each assigned a demon. This demon will be our accuser when we come before Jesus the Judge. Some of the material for his sermon came from Fr. Martin von Cochem who wrote a book called the Four Last Things. I decided to order the book, I think it would make appropriate reading for Advent.