Cardinal Wright Oratory Choir – Adoro Te Devote
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Tag Archives: liturgy
Cardinal Wright Oratory Choir CD Preview
A couple years ago I sang tenor in the Cardinal Wright Oratory Choir. The choir was disbanded when the Oratorians stopped using Heinz Chapel for Sunday masses. Before we broke up, though, we recorded several of our best songs for a CD. Unfortunately, the guy that did the recording, mixing, mastering, etc. has been dragging his feet about finishing up. Thankfully, I’ve acquired recordings of two of the songs. Enjoy. 🙂
“This Saying is Hard”
This past Sunday, the Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time, we read the feminists’ favorite passage from Ephesians 5 (the full version).
Brothers and sisters:
Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.
For the husband is head of his wife
just as Christ is head of the church,
he himself the savior of the body.
As the church is subordinate to Christ,
so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything [see my note below].
Husbands, love your wives,
even as Christ loved the church
and handed himself over for her to sanctify her,
cleansing her by the bath of water with the word,
that he might present to himself the church in splendor,
without spot or wrinkle or any such thing,
that she might be holy and without blemish.
So also husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.
He who loves his wife loves himself.
For no one hates his own flesh
but rather nourishes and cherishes it,
even as Christ does the church,
because we are members of his body.
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother
and be joined to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.
This is a great mystery,
but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.
To satisfy my curiosity, I have some questions for the Catholics who went to church this last Sunday. 1. Was the short or long version of the above read? 2. Did your homilist talk about it? 3. If yes, what did he say? 4. Did the homilist make light of the reading?
The homilist at my mass explicitly avoided talking about it. At the beginning of the homily he said, “I’m not even going to touch the second [epistle] reading.” Some of the congregation chuckled. He went on.
He said the readings talked about creeds. The Israelites after Moses’ death had to reaffirm their faith in God as the Apostles had to reaffirm their faith in Jesus. Many of the children of Israel left and served other gods and some of Jesus’ disciples left him.
Joshua, Moses’ successor, said, “As for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.” While Peter said, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We [the Apostles] have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”
By leaving out the second reading from Ephesians, it left out a deep dimension of God’s Love. In Jesus’ future act on the cross (alluded to in the Gospel reading today and explicitly the last few weeks), He gave himself up for His bride the Church to make Her holy. In a similar way, the married bridegroom gives himself up.
Should we, the Church, Holy Bride of Christ, be offended that we are to serve the Bridegroom? He gave himself, his life for us. Does that diminish our freedom or worth or relationships? Does that mean that Christ is our master and we are His slaves? He is our Brother and Friend.
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father. –John 15:13-15
A bride is not a slave; she is the first friend of her bridegroom. We are to be "subordinate to one another under Christ." Friends do things for each other out of Love. We should try to do everything for Love [note: everything].
This is a very personal topic since I try as hard as I can to base my marriage on Ephesians 5, and my wife and I had it read at our wedding (by a dear, married sister in Christ). (I also referred to it in my post on the homosexual Bible study.)
What do you think?
St. Anne’s Novena
Remember today is a great day to begin a St. Anne’s Novena. While this novena to the mother of the Blessed Virgin and Holy God-bearer may be said at any time, starting today will allow you to finish on the feast of St. Anne. Many parishes hold public novena’s during this time, so check the local churches, especially if one of them is named St. Anne’s.
EWTN’s website has the most common novena to St. Anne.
There is also the chaplet of St. Anne, which dates back to the 1800’s, to be found here.
And for those Oratoriophiles out there, a prayer translated by Ambrose St. Jean (pronounced "sinjin"), CO of the Birmingham Oratory.
The feast of St. Anne is quite old. It is celebrated as the "Dormition of St. Anne" in the East on the 25th, and the feast of St. Anne in the West is celebrated on the 26th (in the calendar of the Novus Ordo Missae the feast of St. Joaquin, the BVM’s father, is moved to this day, as well).
It is often observed that Grandmothers play a very important role in the return of many young Catholics to the Church during the last two decades. As this generation now grows older, it is an important time to pray to the grandmother of Christ for these grandparents, whose witness is still needed in the Church today. Few saints have shown the effectiveness that St. Anne has shown with countless miracles, no doubt due to the love Christ has for His own grandmother. We all have needs which St. Anne, who loves us as only grandmothers do, desires to present to her Divine grandson. So, join us in this novena, praying for your own needs as well as for the intentions of this blog and the Pittsburgh Newman Clubs.
Language and Order
Witnessing all the recent hubbub about new English mass translation that’s just been approved by US bishops and the ever-present tensions between rival Bible translators, I thought the following quite from Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion might provoke interesting discussion.
"The social world constitutes a nomos both objectively and subjectively. The objective nomos is given in the process of objectivation as such. the fact of language, even if taken by itself, can readily be seen as the imposition of order upon experience. Language nomizes by imposing differentiation and structure upon the ongoing flux of experience. As an item of experience is named, it is ipso facto, taken out of this flux and given stability as the entity so named. Language further provides a fundamental order of relationships by the addition of syntax and grammar to vocabulary. It is impossible to use language without participating in its order. Every empirical language may be said to constitute a nomos in the making, or, with equal validity, as the historical consequence of the nomizing activity of generations of men. The original nomizing act is to say that an item is this, and thus not that. As this original incorporation of the item into the order that includes other items is followed by sharper linguistic designations (the item is male and not female, singular and not plural, a noun and not a verb, and so forth), the nomizing act intends a comprehensive order of all items that may be linguistically objectivated, that is, intends a totalizing nomos.
What I primarily take from this is the importance of word choice for the recording and transmission of information, i.e., order. When we translate Scripture or liturgies to modern languages, we must be mindful of a few important questions.
- What sort of order did the original author(s) intend to impose with the words they chose?
- What sort of order do we wish to impose with the words we choose?
- If these orders do not match, why do they not, and how should that affect our translation efforts?