Thursday, July 14, 2011

Holy Mass “free of time or geography”

"In Patrick O’Brian’s The Fortune of War Capt. Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin are prisoners of war in Boston.

At one point, Stephen goes to Sunday Mass, though he is running a bit late!
He hurried into his clothes, but even so the priest was on the altar by the time they reached the obscure chapel in a side-alley, and crept into the immensely evocative smell of old incense. There followed an interval on a completely different plane of being: with the familiar ancient words around him, always the same, in whatever country he had ever been (though now uttered in a broad Munster Latin), he lived free of time or geography, and he might have walked, a boy, into the streets of Barcelona, blazing white in the sun, or into those of Dublin under the soft rain.
Reason #3 for Summorum Pontificum."

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