Online confession? I only wish it were that easy. Being able to type things out emboldens us to say things we normally wouldn’t, and that might make things easier. But that doesn’t make it any more right than consulting with an online “doctor” to get a “Canadian” prescription for Viagra. Less so, actually–you might get real Viagra through the mail, but no real absolution over TCP/IP.
(I can’t wait to see the Google hits I’ll get from this post.)
Last week I slept in and missed Latin Mass. Which is kind of sad, since it’s at noon. Today I slept through my alarms and somehow woke up twenty minutes before the start of mass. I hurried to wash my face and put decent clothes on, then grabbed my veil and missal but failed to bring my directions to the church. I had a vague sense of what street it was on, but I don’t know that city well at all, and I was traveling there more or less blind. And late.
Somehow I made an accurate guess as to where to get off the highway, then made a left turn, scanned the skyline for a familiar-looking steeple, and found a sign pointing to the church. Yay! There I was, with other people toting missals heading in late, too. I felt bad, but not as bad as I would have if I had been the only one heading in then.
Using missals is completely foreign to my generation of liberal Catholics. I’ve never had one before, and even with bookmarking the Pentecost pages ahead of time, I got a little lost, gave up, and just sat there absorbing the atmosphere instead of following along. I felt sort of secluded in my veil, which added to the meditative feel.
Receiving communion kneeling at a rail was a first for me, too, and like most of what went on during the hour and a half that the Low Mass took (!!), felt foreign but also somehow “right.”
The parish has a luncheon for Latin Mass folks to socialize. I grabbed lunch and ran away, not really talking to anyone. I hate being shy sometimes.
Since I started getting serious about reversion during Lent, my struggle with going back to confession got worse as I examined my conscience more. The last time I went was 10 years ago, when I was required to before my confirmation. I’ve been trying to gather up the courage to do it for months now, but always failed. I had an incentive today, though…I’m busy all day tomorrow, attending my first Tridentine Mass this Sunday, and I wanted to do so able to receive communion.
“Joan,” I told myself in the car as I fought the urge to go to the pet store instead, “being an adult means making yourself do things that you don’t want to do, even when only you and God are watching.”
Finding a church with open reconciliation hours I could make it to has been really tricky, since most churches around here only have about half an hour on Saturdays, if any time at all. (Doesn’t anyone in the Northeastern USA confess?) After some digging, I found a chapel that has priest taking confessions all day, from 10:30 AM to 7:30 PM. I went to mass yesterday for the Ascension at the same chapel, to check out the layout and the atmosphere.
It was my first time confessing with a screen separating me and the priest, which I found wonderfully liberating. Apart from the sacrament, I found the priest’s empathy and advice much more useful than that of my last few psychotherapists.
I feel so serene, from both the absolution and the way I framed and categorized the last few years of my life and saw the threads of my various weaknesses that seem to have intertwined and formed a net that I didn’t even realize was there.
Enough serious talk. There was one funny thing–in the reconciliation room, when you kneel down, there’s a doorbell button set in the cushioned bench, so it sets off a bell and the priest knowsthat someone is there. I found this very funny for some reason.
*Ding-dong!* “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“The point is, you should not apologize for your religion. You don’t see me apologizing for what Catholics did in the past: the Crusades, the Inquisition, guitar Mass….” - The Colbert Report, 5/14/07
Since August, I’ve worked on Sunday afternoons. I really like this job and value the experience, but it keeps me from attending my favored masses at 11:00 or 12:00 (different parishes and different cities.) Now that it’s summer, my job is over, so I’m enjoying my last day of getting paid to sit and read the Sunday New York Times.
Poking through the Times today, I noticed articles in two different sections of the paper that fit together beautifully, even if the editors might not admit that they did.
First, “Modern Love: My First Lesson in Motherhood” tells the story of a couple who adopted a baby girl in China, discovered some potentially serious health problems, and were offered the opportunity to, to put it crudely, exchange her for a healthier baby. In the end, they made the decision to keep her, and further tests back in the US showed that her health problems were not as serious as they had initially feared. The author concludes:
It’s tempting to think that our decision was validated by the fact that everything turned out O.K. But for me that’s not the point. Our decision was right because she was our daughter and we loved her. We would not have chosen the burdens we anticipated, and in fact we declared upfront our inability to handle such burdens. But we are stronger than we thought.
“Genetic Testing + Abortion = ??” is the same issue in different words. It discusses the problems when two core liberal values–reproductive choice and acceptance of diversity–clash in one genetic test. The only difference is that before making the decision whether a disabled fetus has a right to live, the prospective parents do not have a chance to see its face, hear it laugh, or cuddle it. Instead of denying a child a chance to live in the United States or with their particular family, children with “unfavorable” genetic profiles will likely be denied the opportunity to live at all.
Abortion rights supporters — who believe that a woman has the right to make decisions about her own body — have had to grapple with the reality that the right to choose may well be used selectively to abort fetuses deemed genetically undesirable. And many are finding that, while they support a woman’s right to have an abortion if she does not want to have a baby, they are less comfortable when abortion is used by women who don’t want to have a particular baby.
Even before my return to Catholicism, abortion made me uneasy, since I hated the idea that the fate of a healthy child hinged on whether or not it was wanted. Two more or less identical fetuses would be a much-wanted “baby” to one woman, and an inconvenient parasite to another. It creates so many ethical lines that are hard to draw. When one supports abortion, what’s the difference, if any, between an unwanted healthy child and a wanted child with an unwanted serious disability? How about gender selection? What happens when people who can’t afford genetic testing have proportionately more children who require expensive health care?
If I had definitive answers to these questions, I’d be in a very different line of work.
You scored as New Catholic. The years following the Second Vatican Council was a time of collapse of the Catholic faith and its traditions. But you are a young person who has rediscovered this lost faith, probably due to the evangelization of Pope John Paul II. You are enthusiastic, refreshing, and somewhat traditional, and you may be considering a vocation to the priesthood or religious life. You reject relativism and the decline in society that you see among your peers. You are seen as being good for the Church.A possible problem is that you may have a too narrow a view of orthodoxy, and anyway, you are still a youth and not yet mature in your faith.http://saint-louis.blogspot.com - Rome of the West
Zach at The Road to Reform posted a link to a short clip from a video sent from SSPX (”Letter to our brother priests”) to all of the priests in France, showing how to conduct a Tridentine Mass “on the eve of the liberalization of the Latin Mass by Pope Benedict XVI,” if I’m recalling the titles correctly. It’s interesting to note that nothing in the notes on Google about the film mentioned who produced it.
France is a strange case. If what the video claims is true, 20% of priests in France preside solely over Latin Masses. I don’t doubt this…only because of the large traditionalist population in France, and the relatively small number of French people who celebrate…well, regular modern Catholicism.
It feels strange that the priest in this video can’t be any older than I am. The music in the beginning sounds incongruously like something out of the new Battlestar Galactica series.
I’ve done a rough translation of the titles and voiceover in this video, which I hope will be helpful for Tridentine Mass fans who don’t speak French.
The Mass of ages:
Frequently banned
Never forbidden
One priest out of five ordained today in France celebrates exclusively the traditional rite of the Mass.
Numerous priests express the desire to discover the traditional Mass, and to celebrate it.
65% of French Catholics support wider use of the traditional Mass.
At a time when Pope Benedict XVI is on the verge of allowing wider use of the Tridentine rite of the Mass, the Society of St. Pius X proposes this high quality educational tool which will allow all priests to discover this rite.
CELEBRATE THE MASS OF AGES
Voiceover: He unfolds the altar cloth. The altar cloth is placed two fingers’ width from the edge of the altar. Several times during the duration fo the mass, the priest must place his joined hands on the alter, like this. His hands must not touch the altar cloth. At the words “A reading from the Gospel,” he places is left hand on the edge of the missal, and makes with his right thumb a sign of the cross over the spot on the page where the Gospel starts. Then, with his left hand on his chest, he makes the sign of the cross on himself with his right thumb, first on the forehead, then on the lips, and then on the chest. Then, he joins his hands together.
He takes the paten, and holding it in both hands at chest height, he raises his eyes for one moment to the alter crucifix. With his eyes focused on the host, he begins the prayer of consecration. To set down the host, the priest proceeds as follows. He lowers the paten, tracing with it a sign of the cross on the altar. He sets the host down on the altar cloth, taking the paten with his right hand and slides it halfway under the corporale.
He recites the [unclear] in a deep bow, joined hands placed on the altear. Then he bends down to the altar, stands back up, and then traces a sign of the cross on the host and over teh chalice. He then makes the sign over himself before joining his hands again.
This film is a production from the “Letter to our brother priests.” a means of connection between the Society of St. Pius X and the priests of France.
Halo Works is running a great Mother’s Day sale right now on some of their chapel veils and many other items. I took the opportunity to order two–the Junior V in white and the Spanish Essence in silver. I normally wouldn’t have bought two, but the sale made the prices very reasonable.
I have two antique chapel veils that I need to be careful with, one white and one black. I haven’t had the nerve to wear them to Mass, though. I might be able to pull it off at the cathedral, but not when I go to little churches here in the city. At those churches, everyone wears jeans (even the lectors) and I stand out for wearing skirts and dresses (aka my work clothes from my Sunday job) and my insistence on kneeling at all during any part of the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Even the church’s staff sister doesn’t wear a veil, so I think I might frighten people by wearing one.
I was getting ready to go to bed, and couldn’t find my cell phone, which I use as an alarm. It wasn’t anywhere–house, car, I looked everywhere and even called it. No sign. I knew I’d never sleep until I found it, and it wasn’t anywhere.
So it was 5 AM and, frantic, I decided to drive to the strip mall where my roommate and I went out for ice cream last night, trying to calm myself down, budget for a new phone, and pray all at once.
I didn’t expect to actually find it…but there it was, sitting open on the ground next to where I had parked. I didn’t notice it when I got back in the car.
