Thursday, September 28, 2006

Ingenous beauty...for every hero and heroine.


It has been said that to be a faithful Catholic today, one must be heroic. Thanks to our Blessed Lord that He has gifted us with His Holy Mass! For some Catholics, the liturgy or liturgical calendar is a matter of no or little account.

However, when one prays the Dominican Rite in Rome and follows their liturgical calendar with all of their many saints and blesseds, one lives a correspondence with the deep-rooted and fervent saints of old! To live and drink from the fountains of the Middle Ages is such a blessing as we then carry this spirituality with us into the world.

After Mass in Rome, while walking the streets and parks with the cedars and cypresses and umbrella pines and while resting under the awnings of the cafés, one finds the apparent unmeaning of every moment turned into an implicit prayer and a moment for spiritual bridge-building. When the Mass is ended, we carry it into the world!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was this truly the old Dominican Rite? If so, do you know who celebrated the mass. I have a friend (Third Order Dominican) who has been wishing for the rite to be celebrated again. She travels to Europe from time to time so maybe she could catch a mass when next in Rome.
Thanks

John Paul Sonnen said...

Yes, our weekly Mass is prayed in the Dominican Rite. We have two Dominican friars who celebrate our Masses (one is French and the other is Czech). As far as I know, for this current academic year we will continue to have the Mass at 1.00 every Friday afternoon. I did hear that any Lain Rite cleric who is a Third Order Dominican can celebrate the Dominican Rite, too.