From Pope Benedict XVI’s public address on Italy’s recent Thanksgiving Day, November 12:

Today … the annual Day of Thanksgiving is being observed…. In our families, we teach the little ones to thank the Lord always before eating, with a brief prayer and the sign of the cross. This custom must be kept or rediscovered, because it teaches [us] not to take our ‘daily bread’ for granted, but to recognize in it a gift of Providence. We should get into the habit of blessing the Creator for each thing: for air and water, precious elements which are the foundation of life on our planet; as well as for food that, through the fecundity of the earth, God gives us for our sustenance. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, asking the heavenly Father not for ‘my’ but for ‘our’ daily bread. Thus, he wanted every man to feel co-responsible for his brothers, so that no one would be without what is necessary to live. The earth’s products are a gift given by God for the whole human family.

Google has recently updated its new Book Search function with some terrific features, including more accurate search results, ’seamless’ page-by-page scrolling through the book (using the arrowkeys, page-up/page-down keys or the mouse’s scroll wheel) and other goodies such as zoomable graphics. It seems like more books are available for preview, too.

Check out Google Book Search today!

Habitual procrastination, which means ‘for tomorrow,’ is a moral sickness, for it is a weakness of the free will. Sometimes, of course, temporizing is wise: It never hurts to put off to tomorrow that angry letter, and there will be fewer regrets about sending it toned down. [But] doing God’s will should never be delayed. What is done a day late is never the same thing, for the day and the universe will have moved on.

The Apostles throught Jesus was procrastinating on the Jericho road when he delayed going to heal Lazarus in Bethany, but He knew that Lazarus must die and be raised, so that the Passion could begin. But when He cried out, “Lazarus, come forth!,” the man came out of the tomb immediately, just as the daughter of Jairus came to life immediately when the fever left her, and so too were the paralytic, the ten lepers and the woman with a hemorrhage healed immediately.

Jesus never procrastinates, and He demands, in turn, a prompt response to His bidding. When summoned, the Apostles left their fishing nets immediately. the spiritual doctors say that ‘heroic virtue,’ which is the hallmark of saints, consists in helping God effortlessly, joyfully and immediately. If I intend to be faithful starting tomorrow, I am not faithful today.

Now, why did blind Bartimæus ‘leap up’ immediately? The answer, obviously, is that he had been given sight. But that only happened because he approached Jesus, and he did that because some of the people told him, “Take heart, Jesus is calling you.” Your guardian angel and all the saints are telling you the same thing each day. It is one of the sublime sentences of Scripture, applicable to everyone, everywhere, at every moment. The voices of those angels and saints are most intense at Mass. In the waning days of the liturgical year, approaching Advent, do listen to those voices. Do not say, “Give me some time and come back tomorrow.” A Spanish proverb says that tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week — But it is never today.

… As the festal days of Christmas and Epiphany approach, do examine your conscience [for] ways to support the work of the Church in this crucial time. Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict, serenely risks his life daily. Support him immediately. Not tomorrow.

With the rectory telephone ringing off-the-hook these days with requests for baptisms, and with our CCD and RCIA class enrollments at record highs for our parish, it becomes ever more necessary to think of the importance of instruction in the faith. Wedding preparation is an excellent time to instruct more deeply in the mysteries of the faith and, very often, I realize that many young people, with the best of intentions, have come from places where there was poor instruction.

Recently, a bishop told a catechetical conference that for a couple of decades, there has been a radical shift in attitudes: the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s were times of unthinking rebellion against classical truths, but now there is less rebellion, and the real problem is simply that the young do not know the basics of Catholic teaching. He also said that many people who have drifted away from the Church do not have an axe to grind and are not angry with the Church; they just do not know much about the Church.

To this, we may add that an older generation is made up of two groups: those who have maintained the solid formation of their youth, and those who were misled by wrong representations of the Faith in the turbulent post-Vatican II period and are still stuck in the 1970s. The former have been distressed by much of the spiritual decay around them, and the later are confused that reality has not conformed to their impression of it, and they wonder why young people are beginning to prefer Gregorian chant to the faux-folksiness of guitar Masses.

When I first came to this parish, one individual actually complained that I had placed candles on the altar, for she was under the impression that the Second Vatican Council had eliminated ornament and ritual forms. I have a photograph taken many years ago showing a curtain drawn across our sanctuary and a wooden table substituted for our marble altar. There will come a time soon when people will wonder at the spiritual demolition of the last generation, but happily, our new Pope is serenely leading his universal flock to an authentic understanding of what the Holy Spirit is doing in the Church, and he is gently weaning the young away from Brady-Bunch tunes to Mozart.

Social indicators show that the Holy Church is sobering up after many trials and purgings and that many people are beginning to see in the Church a constant sanity for which a confused world longs. Gradually, vocations are rising and remarkable conversions are happening. With joyful humility, older people should acknowledge that they are as needful of constant instruction in the mysteries of the faith as are the young neophytes. For starters, consult Catholic websites and our books and tapes in the parish office.

Truth is not an option.

From CWNews.com, October 27, 2006:

The prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship spoke out sharply against liturgical abuses during an October 26 presentation in Paris.

Speaking at the Catholic Institute of Paris, Cardinal Francis Arinze decried the “banalization, desacralization and secularization of the liturgy.” He rebuked priests who take an “overtly egocentric” approach to the liturgy, violating the norms of the Church. And he also criticized priests whose ” false humility” leads them to “share their role with the laity.”

“The sacred liturgy is not a domain in which free exploration reigns,” the Nigerian-born cardinal said. He suggested that many liturgical abuses can be traced to “the undue place given to spontaneity, or creativity, or perhaps a false idea of liberty, or even that error that goes by the name of ‘horizontalism,’ which consists in placing man at the center of the liturgical celebration instead of directing attention upward, that is, toward Christ.”

Cardinal Arinze went on to say that priests should deliver homilies that are “rooted in Sacred Scripture,” rather than offering thoughts based on sociology, psychology and politics. He reminded his French audience that priests are ordained to proclaim the Word of God rather than to offer their insights on matters that lay people can study equally well. By interfering in the province of the laity, he added, priests confuse their own role, and “that always causes damage.”

In an address that repeated themes frequently set forth in Vatican documents, the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship concluded with the observation that “the liturgy is not the property of anyone — neither the celebrant nor the community in which the mysteries are celebrated.” He exhorted priests to approach the Mass with reverence and an appreciation for their own role in the Eucharistic mystery.

[From CWNews and Rorate Caeli]

A poll of 1000 French Catholics has found that nearly two-thirds would like to have the choice of attending a traditional (Tridentine) Latin Mass.

When asked whether Catholics should have a choice between the Novus Ordo Mass and a traditional liturgy, 65% of French Catholics answered that they should, while another 22% said they did not care; only 13% opposed the idea.

Sixty percent said that they would attend a Mass (in either form) celebrated in Latin with Gregorian chant, at least occasionally; and if the Tridentine Mass, specifically, were celebrated in Latin, 37% would attend.