Saturday, November 02, 2013

Pray for the dead this November

I was struck by this lovely stained glass window captured by Fr Lawrence Lew OP; click on the photo or see his photostream here. It comes from St Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham.

Libera Animas Omnium Fidelium Defunctorum

Pray for the dead! We'll all be dead one day, and we won't think a moment of the living's time wasted if spent on the souls in Purgatory. November is their month.

This week - every day until the 8th - a Plenary Indulgence can be gained for the Faithful Departed by saying prayers for them in a cemetery, upon the usual conditions: communion within a couple of days, confession within a week, and prayers for the Holy Father. Don't miss you chance!

1 comment:

  1. Yes, I remember putting a photo of that on our Birmingham LMS blog. I felt it was almost a logo for our work - the Traditional Mass depicted in our very mother church. Pugin obviously designed it (Hardman made it I think, a Birmingham company still running), with Gothic vestments; the medieval blue chasuble. If nothing else your work is comparable to his in it's intention of reinstating liturgical traditions which had been abruptly severed - in his case English Catholic medieval liturgical practice destroyed at the reformation. In your case, well... I don't need to spell it out.

    The other interesting similarity is that it is a lay-led affair. Bishops and clergy were more interested in following Rome (perhaps as a result of identifying more closely with Catholicism as opposed to gothic Anglicanism) and the status quo, picking to fight more intellectual doctrinal battles. For example, the preferences for the Birmingham Oratory by Bl JH Newman being Romanesque rather than English.

    Nowadays it is quite similar with neo-conservatives disregarding liturgical matters in favour of intellectual ones.

    Of course the two are inseparable! I feel sorry for the High Anglicans now who convert to a Catholicism which is altogether un-English, and perpetuates the cliché of us being the "Roman Mission Church"! The liturgical mess they find themselves in must be an extra suffering for them to endure with Christian charity.

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