The Institution of the Eucharist
Joos van Wassenhove (Giusto da Guanto), c. 1474
I once read in Catholic World Report a letter from Mrs. Vivian Dudro, a Catholic laywoman who begs the Holy Father’s attention to a simple, but profound matter that may restore reverence to the Mass: the right to kneel whilst receiving Holy Communion.

This happens to be a matter very close to my heart. One reason I love the traditional (Tridentine) Mass is that the Eucharist is received in genuflection at the communion rail. Most churches that feature the novus ordo Mass have done away with the communion rail in favor of a procession. Fr. Rutler, of the Church of Our Saviour in NYC, graciously allowed me to receive Communion on the tongue, in genuflection, as I reached the head of the line; but because this practice tended to distract the rest of the congregation (rather than influence others to do the same, as it should have), I stopped kneeling and now receive Communion standing — though still upon the tongue.

Not all pastors are as sensible, nor as humble, nor as orthodox: My mother tells me of her pastor who actually admonished her for curtseying prior to receiving Communion by saying, in a nasty tone, “You know better than that!” — She didn’t even fully genuflect; she merely curtseyed in respect of the Body of Christ she was about to receive. When she inquired, after Mass, why he had said that to her, he reiterated that one shouldn’t curtsey or genuflect, but at most should bow at the waist, lest he interfere with the procession; and added that “if you don’t like it, you should find another church.” This mindset and attitude are clearly the deleterious effects of his Vatican II upbringing. Had he read more of the Classics, he might choose to reign in some of his hubris, lest he one day meet a very tragic end.

I think I should forward him Mrs. Dudro’s letter, excerpts of which are below:

The right of the faithful to receive the Eucharist kneeling is practically impossible to exercise in most churches in the United States, in spite of a clarification by the Congregation for Divine Worship on this point. Why is this?

• Many of our altar rails have been removed, and few of those still standing are used. Churches built since the Council are without altar rails. Indeed, some of them have no place whatever for any kind of kneeling.
• We have been instructed through statements made by our bishops and pastors that the only proper way to receive Communion in the United States is to stand erect. I have seen priests ignore or chastise people who kneel.
• We Americans cue up for Communion as if we are at the bank or the movie theater. Sometimes ushers tell us when we may enter the aisle and direct us to the closest line. Kneeling at the terminus of such a line is unthinkable.
• Even receiving Communion on the tongue is difficult. For one thing, the practice is discouraged as outdated and unsanitary. For another, most of us receive Communion nowadays from laymen who do not have the use of a paten; most priests do not use patens either. As a resutl, it is not uncommon for the Host to fall to the ground. After it happened to me, I never again tried to receive Communion on the tongue from a layman.

Twice a month we drive to another town, in another diocese, so we can attend an indult Tridentine Rite Mass. There we can receive the Body of Christ at the altar rail, on our knees, and on our tongues from the sacred hands of a willing priest. There we are free from the worry that we are attracting attention to ourselves and giving the appearance of defying a bishop. We are not alone in this. Other families such as ours, scattered all over this country, are being drawn to more traditional forms of the Mass. Some are driving far from home in order to attend Eastern Rite liturgies. We know those who go out of their way to locate orders such as the Fraternity of St. Peter. And, sadly, we know those who go to illicit Tridentine Masses. […] Unfortunately, there are Catholics, and their numbers are growing, who have come to believe that it is the Holy See that has abandoned them, not the other way around. […]

Some bishops perhaps are alarmed by the […] widespread lack of faith in the Real Presence. Perhaps some are seeking ways to encourage greater respect for the Blessed Sacrament. I am depending upon you, Holy Father, to show them the way, to tell them that there is no simpler means to begin restoring what has been lost than by allowing us to kneel for Communion.

And certainly, there are so many other things to try to correct in the Church — How about all the members of the congregation who receive Communion each week without ever going to Confession, regardless of their habitual sins… Such as the teenagers who are known to engage in premarital sex or morning-after-pill abortions. What about those who dress for Church like they are going to the beach or a night club? How about those who receive Communion in the hand as irreverently and nonchalantly as if they’re being given a potato chip. What about the popular music that has supplanted the grand hymns of days of yore? No one dares to preach on sin and Hell anymore. Everything has to be so ‘politically correct’ nowadays, for fear of offending someone’s selfish attitudes and ‘lifestyle choices.’

The Church has become so liberal that it has lost its direction. In the words of G. K. Chesterton, “Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.”

When a priest incorrectly admonishes good Christians for adhering to Tradition, he has gotten caught up in the novelty of Vatican II. Instead, he should turn his attention to what matters: Preach dogma, and people will listen.

P.S. — I also draw your attention that many people consider Communion in the hand to be a sacrilege. Take, for instance, the following: As reported by Fr. George Rutler in his Good Friday sermon at St. Agnes Church, New York in 1989, when Mother Teresa of Calcutta was asked by Fr. Rutler, “What do you think is the worst problem in the world today?” She more than anyone could name any number of candidates: famine, plague, disease, the breakdown of the family, rebellion against God, the corruption of the media, world debt, nuclear threat and so on. “Without pausing a second she said, ‘Wherever I go in the whole world, the thing that makes me the saddest is watching people receive Communion in the hand.’”. Read more here.)

See also:

• “The Theology of Kneeling,” an excerpt from Pope Benedict XVI, then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy, published by Ignatius Press in 2000.
• The right (and duty) to kneel — Part II

September 23 is the feast day of St.  Pio of Pietrelcina, belovèd padre and miraculous stigmatist.

To help keep him in your heart always, and today especially, check out the following resources:

• Special devotions are available on Padre Pio Devotions.
• One of the nicest sites, EWTN’s Padre Pio site features a wealth of background information, as well as audio links to Fr. Andrew Apostoli’s excellent Padre Pio: He Bore Christ’s Wounds lecture series.
• If Fr. Apostoli’s lecture series leaves you hungering for more information, you can read the Wikipedia article or these biographies.
• Have you ever wondered what his voice sounded like? This site has many recordings, including the Pater Noster (Our Father) — in Latin, of course.
• Read the Voice of Padre Pio newsletter.
• Check out the ‘official site’, with many important links.
• Pilgrimage to San Giovanni Rotondo or the National Center for Padre Pio in Pennsylvania.

Some things just make you seethe with anger. Consider the recent muslim outrage over the comments of Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, in an academic address in Regensburg, Germany, this past week:

In the seventh conversation [between the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian, in 1391,] the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). … [H]e turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words:

Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.

The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.

God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death….

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.

Now, remember first that this is a citation from a medieval text. Moreover, it is part of a long thesis, the conclusion of which is that violence should not be used to spread religion, and that blindly following a call to violence without use of reason is morally wrong. [For those interested, the entirety of the Pope’s address at Regensburg can be found here (Catholic World News).] In truth, the Pope’s thesis is not only historically accurate, but also quite non-judgmental and unbiased.

And the reaction by muslims worldwide? “We want to make it clear that if the pope does not appear on TV and apologize for his comments, we will blow up all of Gaza�??s churches!” [The Sword of Islam]

Actions speak louder than words, and Islam doesn’t disappoint: Automatic weapons and bombs have left their signature on many churches in the Arab world. One Catholic nun was murdered in Mogadishu, Somalia. Muslim protestors burn statues of the Pope in effigy and carry posters saying “Trinity of evil,” “Jesus is slave to Allah” and “Islam will conquer Rome.”

The Pope, shocked by the outburst, expressed regret over the muslims’ misunderstanding (and malrepresentation) of the excerpt from his treatise. But, regarding the “evil and inhuman” comment — case-in-point, quod erat demonstrandum, I say. This is all the more alarming if one considers that the Emperor, cited by the Pope, was referring to an Islam that existed in the Dark Ages; how sad (and scary) that nothing much has changed in six hundred years.

Concurrent with this madness, we mourn the recent loss of Oriana Fallaci. Andrew Cusack provides the best eulogy:

Oriana Fallaci, that indomitable and cantankerous Italian, has finally succumbed to cancer in her native land. … While an ardent leftist, she was an unrepentant foe of what she saw as the Islamic colonization of Europe. Her diatribes against the Muslim immigrants who habitually pissed on the walls of Florence cathedral [nice way to treat your host country, no?] earned her the ire of many, and legal proceedings were initiated against her in France. The liberal commentator Christopher Hitchens described her work as “an example of how not to write about Islam”. She began writing her infamous The Rage and the Pride, a book teeming with passion and righteous indignation, on September 11, 2001 at her home in New York. … Oriana Fallaci will be buried tommorrow [19 September 2006] … in Florence. There will be no funeral.

After she vented her ire in The Rage and the Pride, Fallaci responded to criticism with the more rational and eloquent The Force of Reason.

But I assure you now, if she heard and saw these muslims today, she’d tell them to take their Sword of Islam and shove it up their…

The West needs to stop trying to be so P.C. and realize that their does exist Truth. The truth here is that the Pope did nothing wrong: His comments were statement of historical fact, not accusatory or defamatory, but said to illustrate a point. The truth is that Islam has once again demonstrated itself to be violent and intolerant. The truth is that muslims seize any opportunity (e.g., political cartoons, an academic treatise, etc.) to create new violence. The truth is that it is muslims who have injured and blasphemed. They are the ones who murdered a poor, innocent 65-year-old nun. They are the ones who have bombed churches. They are the ones who hijacked planes and murdered thousands on September 11. They are the ones who continually plot to hurt and kill thousands of others, each and every day. If anyone needs to ‘apologize publicly,’ it is Islam.

I don’t watch television much anymore, but tonight I happened to catch ABC Primetime’s exposé entitled “Cruel Intentions.”

This documentary went behind the scenes to reveal to us outsiders (i.e., those over 20) what social interaction is now like for adolescents in the modern world. That is, in such a world — where every techno-savvy teen is equipped with a camera-snapping cell phone, where IM [instant messaging] and wireless texting are preferred to face-to-face communication and where “Dear Diary” is supplanted by public profiles on web sites like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal or Xanga — interpersonal relationships are an order of magnitude more complex and dynamic than ever before.

Every generation has had its bullies. And every generation that survived high school can attest that girls are often meaner, crueler and more vicious than the boys. The boys might fall into fisticuffs by the creek after school; but the girls would go for the emotional jugular.

And now, in the digital age, the emotional jugular is published on the web for everyone to see… Enter cyberbullying.

To demonstrate teen-teen interaction (or destruction, as it were), an experiment was conducted by sociologists such that different sets of teen girls were placed in isolated rooms for three days and allowed to communicate with other groups only by computer — via instant messaging, e-mail exchanges, updates to personal profiles on various web sites, cell-phone messages, even webcam chat sessions. To fuel a desire for communication, the experiment began with the instruction that a few of the groups should want to be accepted by a ‘popular’ group. However, the need for that premise was short, as the nightmarish experiment took on a life of its own: Like Dr. Jekyll becoming Mr. Hyde, young girls (who appear polite and well-mannered to parents and other adults in public) in no time revealed themselves to be veritable shrews. It is frightening how competitive cut-throat they became, stopping at nothing to criticize tear the other girls to shreds. Insults would become double-talk. Profiles were sabotaged and doctored to say different things. Photos were digitally manipulated to make the target look like a fool or a whore… and this e-ssault and batterblogging was made public in order to really sting. (And you thought rumors, told verbally, spread like wildfire?!)

And when the girls got a chance to chat with the ‘popular’ group (which was the only group to include boys), the talk from these 14 year-olds — fourteen year-olds — was enough to make Howard Stern blush — and in the Real World, this talk is invariably accompanied by revealing photos or video striptease.

The experimental scenario, while contrived, nonetheless served to reveal patterns of behavior that these dozen kids had already established and enacted full-force in their Real-World lives. Having endured listening to the teens’ inane, vacuous chitter-chatter, incredibly poor grammar (and spelling) and vitriolic attacks, I can only come to the following conclusion (in their words): Like, 2 much tech iz sooo f@#ing gay, u know what I'm sayin, B%tch?

Even kids who seem nice become really nasty when they have the cloak of secrecy. Give them the anonymity that comes with a screen name, and these kids prove that the pen web is mightier than the sword. Problem is, this isn’t playful banter — some kids have actually been driven to depression and suicide from such profiling attacks.

So gone are the relatively “good ol’ days” of recent past, when all you had to worry about for your child’s online safety was internet porn. Now you have to screen blogs; and flickr/shutterbug accounts; and MySpace/Facebook/Xanga profiles; and keep tabs on text messages; and snoop to see what kind of pictures they snapped with their cell phones. There’s not really a solution, here. Definitely keep the family computer in the family room, not in their bedrooms. Don’t get them their own computer until they leave for college. Limit cell phone use, perhaps even disabling text messaging for their phones. Above all, try to instill in them manners, Christian morals and a sense of self-worth; but be cognizant that even this, sometimes, isn’t enough to prevent the worst part of human nature from rearing its ugly head.

Not enough time for reading? Want to catch up on the classics? Then DailyLit might be just what the doctor ordered: This simple service will e-mail you sections from a work of classic literature at a specified interval. There are hundreds of novels to choose from, and you can browse by title or author to make your selection. It works just as well on your PocketPC, Blackberry or other PDA of choice. Check it out!

I’m not one to usually talk politics. It always leads to argument, and that’s a tiring business. But, assuredly, I do hold very particular views, which tend to be on-par with most social conservatives and traditional Catholics. The problem for us, of course, is always the same: There is no party which really represents orthodoxy.

Andrew Cusack just published a short piece entitled “Elephant Season Begins November 7.” With his standard wit and humor, Mr.Cusack eloquently summarizes how G.W. and the G.O.P. have let us Catholics down these past eight years and what to expect after the political overturn that’s bound to happen.

Five years ago, evil men turned deaf ears to God and committed one of the worst acts of horror to ever hit our shores. After the massacre, cars and taxis and buses and television commercials somberly but resolutely displayed the motto, We shall never forget.

But do we still remember? Have we kept, with full vigor, the spiritual vows we made five years ago? Or have we, too, been deafened by the white noise of the world?

For our Lord Jesus

took him off by himself away from the crowd.
He put his finger into the man�??s ears
and, spitting, touched his tongue;
then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him,
Ephphatha! — that is, �??Be opened!�?�
[Mk 36-40]

Now is the time to be opened — to stop, reflect and renew our dedication toward living truly Catholic lives and remaining the steadfast and stalwart Church militant.

I pray for those who perished, for their family and friends, for the United States of America and its leaders, for Europe, and for the conversion of souls.