Thursday, August 29, 2019

Young Catholic Adults annual retreat 25-27 Oct

During the weekend of the 25-27 October 2019, Young Catholic Adults will be running a retreat at Douai Abbey, it will feature author and associate editor of the Catholic Herald Stephen Bullivant, Fr. Stewart Foster (Brentwood Diocese), Canon Poucin ICKSP, Dom. Jonathan Rollinson (Bemont Abbey) and Dom. Christopher Greener (Douai Abbey).

The weekend will be full-board. YCA will be running the weekend with the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge who will be holding Gregorian Chant workshops.

There will also be a Marian Procession, Rosaries, Sung Masses, Confession and socials. All Masses will be celebrated in the Extraordinary form.

Please note to guarantee your place this year Douai Abbey have requested that everyone books in 3 weeks before the start of the weekend i.e.4th Oct 2019.

More information: http://youngcatholicadults-latestnews.blogspot.co.uk/

To book:- https://bookwhen.com/youngcatholicadults-douai2019

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Young Catholics deserve answers, not scorn

Cross-posted from Rorate Caeli.
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LMS Pilgrims at the site of the Holy House in Walsingham on Sunday.
Recent days have seen one of those waves of attacks on Traditional Catholics on social media. I have responded to one aspect of it, that of simple charity, with a Twitter-thread you can see here. Here I want to look at another aspect of it: the kinds of things the supposedly hateful traddies are talking about.

We all know how anti-trad moral panics work. Some one claims to have experienced ‘bossybitter’, or ‘extreme’ views, not from an established writer, but by some Twitter or Facebook account with 12 followers, if we are allowed to know who it is. Other people then chime in to say, Wow, I’ve had the same experience: not pausing to consider the fact that, unless they live under a stone, they’ll also have had one or two bad experiences with every other category of human being on the planet with more than a handful of members.

It doesn’t seem to occur to those making this criticism that they are doing precisely what they are usually accusing Traditional Catholics of doing: of being rather quick to condemn others. Those of them who are not obscure Twitter accounts with 12 followers ought to know better. But let that pass. The other question is whether we should be having these discussions which the trads are having, and if so, what they should be like.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

More photos of the Walingham Pilgrimage 2019

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 Fr Terrance Naughton OFM Conv was the celebrant at the High Mass in the Catholic Shrine's Reconciliation Chapel. Since it was a Sunday, we had the Asperges, though in the Shrine it is possible to have a Votive Mass of Our Lady.

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The chapel presents a challenge for photography, with strong sunlight pouring through the windows behind the altar.

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We begin the procession to the site of the Medieval Shrine in the ruined Priory: the Holy Mile.

Photos of the Walsingham Pilgrimage

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High Mass in St Ethelreda's, Ely. We had four priests with us so High Mass was possible every day of the pilgrimage. (Votive Mass for Pilgrims.)

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Fr Michael Rowe, who is based in Perth, Australia, blesses the pilgrims before the start of the walking, in the Methodist Hall in Ely, where we had breakfast (and dinner the evening before).

Saturday, August 17, 2019

SCT Summer School: more photos

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Asperges at Mass on the first day (Sunday)

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Benediction in St Augustine's Shrine

Friday, August 16, 2019

SCT Summer School: some photos

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I have had trouble getting my photos of the St Catherine's Trust Summer School off the memory cards, but here are some, at last. The Summer School took place 27th July to 3rd August, in the Divine Retreat Centre, which is over the road from St Augustine's Shrine in Ramsgate.

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It was a great privilege to be able to have Mass during the Summer School in the Shrine church, which thanks to recent restoration, now looks as Pugin intended it, with a splendid Rood Screen. In these photographs Fr Andrew Southwell, our Chaplain, is celebrating Mass.

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As the historian Eamon Duffy has pointed out, the Medieval Rood Screnn, which Pugin tried to revive, served not to hide the action in the sanctuary, as curtains had done in more ancient times, but more to frame it: we see what is going on through a series of windows.


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Sohrab Ahmari: the story of his conversion

My latest on LifeSite.
I have just finished reading ’s From Fire by Water (Ignatius, 2019), an engaging, perceptive, and edifying account of his spiritual and intellectual journey from a not-very observant Islamic early childhood, to Catholicism, with a lot of secular modern allegiances in between.
Ahmari was born in Iran to a secularized, middle class, intellectual family. Having some access to American culture, especially films, Ahmari was thoroughly seduced by the American way of life before he had any personal contact with it. When he and his mother managed to emigrate to America when he was 13, the reality of a financially precarious life in rural Utah was a letdown. He was a precocious reader and in time discovered Nietzsche and the Existentialists, drifting into Trotskyite Communism and then Post Modernism as he passed through college. 

Thursday, August 15, 2019

Patreon page launched

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I thought I would experiment with a Patreon page. My thought is that I am producing a fair mumber of articles, and from time to time doing long audio interviews, for which I am not paid, and often are not easily seen by my regular readers.

If people would like to support this work, and the other things I do, they can do so through Patreon, and I can make some of this material available to them.

So here is the link: Become a Patron!

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Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Roosh takes the 'God' pill

My latest on LifeSite is about Roosh, the writer of 'Game' books: books about how to pick up women. Particularly in light of his repudiation of meaningless sex, I am planning to write more about him, probably on this blog.

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It is good to hear every now and then of someone who has turned away from a self-destructive way of life. The conversion of Daryush Valizadeh, known as “Roosh,” is an example that deserves some attention. It has received less, I think, at least partly because he has not become a Catholic, but joined the Armenian Apostolic Church, presumably because of his own religious and cultural heritage (he describes himself as half-Armenian and half-Iranian), and partly because he still harbors some peculiar views (more on that later). But it is still an astonishing turnaround. He announced his Christian commitment on March 29, 2019.
So what was he before? To put it bluntly, he made his living from fornication. On the basis of vast experience persuading women to sleep with him, he wrote books and gave talks and workshops about it, facilitating the sexual sins of other men. He was one of the premier “pick-up artists” of the world.
Continue reading.

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New Mass of Ages

In this issue:
• We celebrate the Ordination of four men, in the Traditional Rite, by Bishop Philip Egan in his Cathedral in Portsmouth • Joseph Shaw explains the ‘Confirmation slap’
• A selection of pictures from our recent pilgrimage to Holywell
• Maurice Quinn remembers the Dorset men who died for the Faith – the Chideock Martyrs
• Jonathan Luxmoore explains why Polish Catholics rally to their Church undeterred by a new crisis
• Fr Lawrence Lew OP on the traditional liturgy and Catholic masculinity
• Joseph Shaw explains how Catholic Linguistic Survivals from the Ancient Liturgy are embedded in the fabric of our lives

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Friday, August 09, 2019

Schola Sainte-Cécile in England 2019

Programme                                                                             1 August 2019

Monday August the 19th
Oxford Oratory
Oratory Church of St Aloysius Gonzaga, 25 Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6HA
by courtesy of the Fathers of the Oratory and Fr Oliver Craddock, Cong.Orat., Prefect of Music
6:30 pm       Vespers and benediction (Trad Roman Rite - 2nd Vespers of St John Eudes)

Tuesday August the 20th
Balliol College chapel
The Broad, Oxford OX1 3BJ
by courtesy of the Revd Dr Bruce Kinsey, Chaplain, Balliol College.
9:30 am       Solemn mass of St Bernard of Clairvaux (Trad Roman Rite)

Wednesday August the 21st
Oxford Oratory
11:00 am     Solemn mass of St Jeanne de Chantal (Trad Roman Rite)

2:00 pm       Visit to Littlemore
International Centre of Newman Friends, 9 College Lane, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4LQ
Blessed Newman commemoration and devotions

Balliol College chapel
6:30 pm       Vespers (Sarum Rite - of the Octave of Assumption, memory of the Martyrs Timotheus and Symphorian)

Thursday, August 08, 2019

Review of Stephen Bullivant in Catholic Herald

I'm late posting this on here but my latest in the Catholic Herald is a review of Mass Exodus by Stephen Bullivant. It begins:

Was Vatican II in some way responsible for declining Catholic practice and “affiliation” (people calling themselves Catholics), or is this phenomenon a matter of trends beyond the Church’s control? Focusing on Britain and the United States, Professor Stephen Bullivant, a sociologist of religion at St Mary’s University, London, presents the evidence with precision, while still producing a highly readable book. The thesis of Mass Exodus is that the Church, like other ecclesial bodies, has clearly faced considerable headwinds since the 1960s as a result of wider social forces, but has also made things worse for itself.

Bullivant’s analysis revolves around three key sociological concepts. The first is the role of networks in nurturing belief, or “social network theory”. The denser the social network of believers, the more they are connected with each other (as opposed to non-believers), and the lower will be the rate of lapsation and disaffiliation. The Amish, for example, with their distinctive way of life and close-knit community, have a very low level of disaffiliation. Catholics were never like them, but up to the 1960s there was, to some degree, a “Catholic ghetto” in both the US and Britain where, in a hostile world, they had social support from fellow believers. The community was marked out by customs such as eating fish on Friday, distinctive forms of worship and spirituality, and interest in a common history, particularly of persecution.

Carry on reading.

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