University Of North Carolina: CHRISTMAS VACATION Is A ‘Microagression’ Now

From Eric Owens at The Daily Caller:

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill issued a guide this week which instructs students that Christmas vacations and telling a woman “I love your shoes!” are “microagressions.”

The taxpayer-funded guide — entitled “Career corner: Understanding microaggressions” — also identifies golf outings and the words “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” as microagressions.

The UNC Chapel Hill guide, published on Thursday, covers a wide range of menacing microaggressions — which are everyday words that radical leftists have decided to be angry or frustrated about.

Christmas vacations are a microagression, the public university pontificates, because “academic calendars and encouraged vacations” which “are organized around major religious observances” centralize “the Christian faith” and diminish “non-Christian spiritual rituals and observances.”

Interestingly, the long break between semesters at UNC Chapel Hill for the 2016-2017 academic year will last from December 17 to January 10 — thus covering Christmas as well as the New Year’s Day of the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar is named for Pope Gregory XIII. The Roman Catholic Church introduced the calendar in 1582.

The microagression of liking shoes occurs when someone says “I love your shoes!” “to a woman in leadership during a Q & A after a speech.” So it’s a very specific microagression. The problem, the University of North Carolina document declares, is that the shoe admirer values appearances “more than” “intellectual contributions...” (continued)

Read More Here

• University Of North Carolina: CHRISTMAS VACATION Is A ‘Microagression’ Now

Sting - I Saw Three Ships

The Real Face of Santa Claus

By Ryan Scheel 

(uCatholic) ...According to scientific analysis and computer models, Saint Nicholas, the 4th century Bishop of Myra who Santa Claus is based on, would have looked a bit different than the Nordic woodsman of popular culture and more like a 4th century Byzantine Bishop.

According to The Saint Nicholas Center 

St. Nicholas’ remains are buried in the crypt of the Basilica di San Nicola in Bari, Italy. These bones were temporarily removed when the crypt was repaired during the 1950s. At the Vatican’s request, anatomy professor Luigi Martino from the University of Bari, took thousands of minutely-detailed measurements and x-ray photographs (roentgenography) of the skull and other bones...

Using this data, the medical artist used state-of-the-art computer software to develop the model of St. Nicholas. The virtual clay was sculpted on screen using a special tool that allows one to “feel” the clay as it is molded. Dr. Wilkinson says, “In theory you could do the same thing with real clay, but it’s much easier, far less time-consuming and more reliable to do it on a computer...”

Read More at uCatholic

Link:

• The Real Face of Santa Claus

Francis meets Benedict XVI on first Christmas as pope

Vatican City (AFP) - Pope Francis visited his predecessor Benedict XVI on Monday for an informal Christmas greeting, as the Argentine pontiff prepares to celebrate his first Christmas as leader of the world's Roman Catholics.

Francis met with the 86-year-old Benedict in a former monastery building on a hill inside the Vatican City walls where the pope emeritus has taken up residence following his historic resignation earlier this year.

The two men could be seen praying side by side in a chapel inside the residence and chatting amicably on white sofas with a Christmas garland in front of them in photographs released by the Vatican press service.

Both were dressed in the white cassocks used by popes.

Francis came to "give his best wishes for the Christmas celebrations", the Vatican said in a statement.

The 77-year-old pope earlier on Monday compared the Catholic Church to an expectant mother during a homily at one of his daily masses in the residence where he has been staying since his election by fellow cardinals in March.

"Like the Virgin Mary, the Church this week is expecting a birth," Francis said.

"Is there space for the Lord or is there space only for parties, shopping and making noise?" he asked.

The Christmas festivities begin with the unveiling on St Peter's Square of a traditional Nativity scene named in honour of Latin America's first ever pontiff at 1530 GMT.

Francis is expected to watch the ceremony from the window of the Apostolic Palace overlooking the square and light a candle for peace.

Then from 2030 GMT the Argentine will celebrate the solemn Christmas Vigil mass in St Peter's Basilica.

On Wednesday, Francis delivers the "Urbi et Orbi" ("To the City and the World") blessing at 1130 GMT on St Peter's Square -- where he first appeared after his momentous election by fellow cardinals on March 13.

Popes often use their "Urbi et Orbi" blessings to announce specific prayers, for instance, for the victims of conflicts or for global economic justice.

Link:

• Francis meets Benedict XVI on first Christmas as pope

Catholic Church and Castro in cahoots to ‘eradicate’ homosexuals? MSNBC pundit’s incoherent rant

By Hilary White

 
ROME, January 3, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Readers may be surprised to hear that Jesus Christ was the first socialist; every word of every article in the Vatican newspaper is “virtually dictated” personally by Pope Benedict; every country in Europe – indeed in the whole world – is socialist; the Catholic Church “thrives” under socialist regimes; and Fidel Castro’s mass murdering regime is on a moral par with the Catholic Church because they both allegedly want to “eradicate” homosexuals.

All of these assertions have come from the mouth of MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, who recorded a strange and confused 3.5 minute tirade  against Pope Benedict XVI’s Christmas address, in which the pope warned that abortion and the advance of the homosexualist political and social agenda is a threat to the stability of human societies.

O’Donnell included several astonishing whoppers, including the assertion that a vow of celibacy automatically renders those who make it “tragically ignorant about marriage.” This despite the indisputable fact that the Pope, as well as nearly all clergy, are themselves the product of marriage, are surrounded like everyone else by married people and minister to married people, in addition to presumably being in possession of the normal human rational capacity that would allow them understand common cultural concepts.

Mr. O’Donnell appears not to have noticed that the Catholic Church, whose clergy have been celibate for centuries, has been administering the sacrament of marriage, counselling married people and generally been intimately involved in the institution of marriage since the founding of Christian civilization.

Another jaw-dropper was the astonishing news that Jesus Christ “was the original socialist” because he fed the poor and admonished the moneychangers in the Temple. Because apparently in Mr. O’Donnell’s odd universe, no one other than socialists have ever done any of these things.

Demonstrating his deep penetration of Vatican affairs, O’Donnell goes on to say that “everything in the Vatican newspaper [L’Osservatore Romano] is virtually dictated by the pope”. To which assertion many long-time Catholic observers of the Vatican scene will doubtless respond – after they pick themselves up off the floor – “Oh, would that it were so!”

But it is when O’Donnell equates the Catholic Church’s teaching on the meaning of human sexuality with the mass murders undertaken by Fidel Castro’s regime after his takeover of Cuba, that the Wonderland Whirl really begins. So dizzyingly bizarre are the comparisons and insinuations that it becomes difficult to sort out just what point Mr. O’Donnell is trying to make.

“The most hard-core socialist practitioner of all time was also viciously anti-gay,” says O’Donnell. Castro, “who started life as a Roman Catholic,” rounded up homosexuals “and sent them to re-education camps.”

“In Fidel Castro’s socialist utopia, gay sex was a criminal act,” O’Donnell continues. “Castro believed he could actually rid his country of all homosexuality, and he did everything in his power to achieve that.” Therefore, O’Donnell said, socialism “has not been a special friend to gay people”.

At the same time, O’Donnell claims, the Catholic Church “has thrived in socialist countries around the world,” although it “this week seems to want to pretend it is suddenly threatened by socialism”. These socialist countries, he says, include Italy. “Yes, Italy is a socialist country, as is every country in Europe, as is every country in the world, to varying degrees,” he adds.

He declined, however, to mention the countless thousands of Catholic inmates who perished in the Gulag system, prisons and torture chambers of the countries of the Soviet Union. He seems also never to have heard of any of the writings of any of the popes, largely before the 1960s, warning the world of the threat of socialistic Communism.

Untangled, O’Donnell’s message seems to be that the Catholic Church is socialist, because it follows Jesus Christ, the “first socialist,” and it is therefore exactly like Castro in its desire to persecute, torture and murder homosexuals – presumably with the approval of its socialist Founder.

Fortunately, Pope Benedict, who has been known to read a book or two now and then, was rather more coherent in his message for Christmas. However little Mr. O’Donnell may be aware of it, there is very little dispute in academia or among the more serious-minded public commentators that the “gender theory” driving the far-left, homosexualist political agenda is an offshoot of radical academic feminism, that is itself the child of Marxist theory. So much can be discovered by simply Googling the search terms “Engels, monogamous, family.”

It is hardly credible to dispute the connection of the “LGBTQ” agenda with the left, particularly in Europe where it forms a cornerstone of all the socialist, leftist and green parties’ platforms. Benedict is among the many who have personally experienced the effects of socialistic theories put into practice in various totalitarian regimes in recent European history, and is well placed to issue warnings against its re-growth under new names.

In the Christmas address that Mr. O’Donnell was at such pains to ridicule, Benedict warned that the attack on the family “goes much deeper” than was previously believed. It is a product, the pope said, ultimately of a foundational error about what it means to be human. It is a refusal to accept the very notion that there is such a thing as human nature, connected to their “bodily identity,” which we all share.

“While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question,” Pope Benedict said. Gender theory’s adherents, and the many more people they have seduced, “deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves”.

In the gender ideology, “sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society.”

The theory denies the immutable, dual nature of humanity, that “being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature.” But, “this duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about,” Pope Benedict said.

“If there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation,” he said.

“The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be.”

L’Osservatore Romano followed up the pope’s address with the observation that the new theory of a mutable, essentially self-determined human nature, is part and parcel of the socialist attempt to entirely re-write the nature of human beings and human societies. Lucetta Scaraffia, an eminent Italian historian who has also presumably read a few books, wrote that gender theory and its political causes are in fact the ultimate expression of Marx and Engels’ initial call for the abolition of the two-parent, biologically-based family.

She warned that the societies will “pay a high price” for the attempt to found a society on these premises, “as has already happened in the past when we have tried to achieve a complete economic and social equality.”

Pope Benedict warned, perhaps most ominously of all, that the final results of the implementation of this theory is the total objectification of human beings, particularly children. “From being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain.”

Link:

• Catholic Church and Castro in cahoots to ‘eradicate’ homosexuals? MSNBC pundit’s incoherent rant

The Linus Van Pelt Lesson on Translation Accuracy

By Ann Barnhardt at Barnhardt.biz

That really is a sweet little clip. The child who voiced Linus had such a quintessentially warm American accent, even down to the little lisp. Magic in a bottle - from the voices to the soundtrack. It was made in 1965 and stands as a marker of the end of the Christian American culture, only recognized now in retrospect.

But, a nit to pick, and a great lesson for all in how important an accurate translation of the Bible is. Most Bibles today read Luke 2:14 as:

"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men."

The last clause is totally wrong, and was mangled intentionally and with malice.

The Vulgate Latin, which is St. Jerome's inspired synthesis of the original source texts triple cross-referenced against each other in Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew in preparation for the eventual setting of the canon of scripture at the Council of Carthage in 397 AD, reads thusly:

"...gloria in altissimis Deo et in terra pax in hominibus bonae voluntatis"

In English, in the Douay-Rheims translation this reads:

Glory to God in the highest; and on earth peace to men of good will.

These are two completely different ideas. Radically different. The bad, modern translation has peace and goodwill together as co-subjects, as unqualified universals: "peace, goodwill TOWARD men". The accurate translation clearly has goodwill not as the COMPOUND SUBJECT along with peace, but as the QUALIFIER. To men OF GOOD WILL. Good will isn't the subject, it is the OBJECT OF THE PREPOSITION.

The Peace of Our Lord is a massively qualified, and extremely rare and precious thing. When the priest says at Mass, "Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum" (The peace of the Lord be always with you), he isn't just saying "nice things" as filler. This is a profound and precious prayer.

Why would God, in His Perfect Justice, wish good will towards those men who are at war with Him, and thus His Church? Is not the Second Person, God Incarnate in the Manger in Bethlehem, the Judge of mankind? Is not the Baby wrapped in swaddling clothes He who will sort the sheep from the goats? Is He not the One who is come to sift the wheat from the chaff? Did He not say:

"Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword."

Oh, but if we are under attack by Communist-homosexualist infiltrators, and we want God reduced to an abstract philosophical construct, an "I'm okay, you're okay" joke of a deity, an effete, toothless "idea" that is merely an excuse for neo-pagan self-worship and narcissistic performance opportunities, then, by all means, mangle and rearrange the Word of God. As the infiltrators tell their victims, "It doesn't really matter what the original texts said - all that matters is what today's translation says to you . . . "

Luke 2:14 is a quick, easy way to check the veracity of any translation of the Bible. Break yours out and check right now. And then, when you find it incorrectly translated, as you almost certainly will, ask yourself what other verses have been mangled. And then ask yourself what you're missing in the seven books that Luther removed. Uh-oh.

Then, just GET A DOUAY-RHEIMS and use the Church's authoritative English translation without fear or worry that you are reading Communist-homosexualist agitprop.

Link:

• The Linus Van Pelt Lesson on Translation Accuracy

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel - Enya

O Come All Ye Faithful - Bing Crosby

Gabriel's Message - Sting

White Christmas - Bing Crosby & Frank Sinatra

Mele Kalikimaka - Bing Crosby with The Andrews Sisters and Vic Schoen

I Saw Three Ships - Sting

Silver Bells - Dean Martin

When Christmas Was Banned in Massachusetts

By Kevin Seamus Hasson

(The Wall Street Journal) Does it sometimes seem as if the Christmas wars—namely the battle between secularists and believers over how and where Christmas and Hanukkah (not to mention other faiths' holidays) should be recognized—have been around forever? If so, you're not far off. The opening shots of the war, at least in America, were fired in Plymouth Colony itself. And after nearly 400 years, it's past time we learned our lesson and ceased hostilities.

Both factions still make the same fundamental mistake the Pilgrims did in Plymouth Colony. In Plymouth, culture was served up in one simple, strong flavor: Pilgrim. The Pilgrims were in charge and they knew it. Dissidents, and they were few, were not allowed to voice their dissent, let alone protest.

The contrast between October and December 1621 in Plymouth is a telling illustration of culture Pilgrim-style. In October, the Pilgrims held what has come to be called the First Thanksgiving. It lasted several days, featuring marksmanship and other contests in addition to good food. In short, it was about as communal and festive as the Pilgrims could ever be. Two months later, however, on "the day called Christmas Day," their leader, Governor William Bradford, recorded in his journal that he "called them out to work."

That was normal. For the Pilgrims, Dec. 25 was a day just like any other. Christmas, they thought, was a "papist" invention. Unlike their feast days, they couldn't find it in the Bible, so they wouldn't celebrate it. The previous year, they had spent their first Christmas in Plymouth splitting lumber.

But a year later not everyone agreed. Some newly arrived colonists objected that "it went against their consciences to work" on Christmas. So Bradford grudgingly excused them "till they were better informed" and led the wiser, more veteran colonists away to work. Returning at noon, however, he was horrified to discover the newcomers "in the street at play, openly" engaged in various sports.

In other words, the newcomers were doing exactly what the Pilgrims had done two months earlier. But this was different. This was no Pilgrim-proclaimed holiday. This was that dangerous innovation—Christ's Mass.
The governor knew what he had to do. He confiscated their sports equipment, telling them that if they insisted on celebrating Christmas as a "matter of devotion" they could do so privately at home, "but there should be no gaming or reveling in the streets." It was no isolated tantrum. A generation later, the colony formally outlawed Christmas for 22 years.

The double standard was blatant. Only two months before they suppressed the Christmas revelers, the Pilgrims had held their own "gaming and reveling" for Thanksgiving. They knew well that it's only natural for people to want to celebrate special times together. A holiday spent in enforced privacy is not much of a holiday at all.

Suppressing the Christmas revelers was obviously a cruel thing to do. But here we are, nearly 400 years later, still debating whether to allow religious holidays out in public or, God forbid, on public property. Some alarmists fear public display of any faith tradition but their own. Others seek to paper over the nation's diversity of traditions by insisting on a homogenized, religion-free culture. (If they had lived in Plymouth Colony, no doubt their answer to Christmas would have been to ban Thanksgiving, too.)

All the alarmists agree on this much, though: Others' holiday celebrations are tolerable only in private, and never in the public square—a vintage 1621 solution. "Ah, but you see," they all say, "religion in public is uniquely divisive. That's why the Constitution restricts it."

Nonsense. Elsewhere in the world, people fight and even slaughter each other over ethnic differences at least as much as they do over religious ones. And our Constitution bars government ethnic preferences just as stringently as it does religious ones. Yet our courts are not clogged with English-Americans seeking to enjoin St. Patrick's Day parades. It's obvious that municipal embrace and even sponsorship of them is not a harbinger of ethnic cleansing to come. It's simply government acknowledgment of one of many ethnic elements in our culture.

There's no reason—constitutional or otherwise—why governments cannot do the same and welcome public displays of menorahs, Christmas trees, nativity scenes and the like as simply some of the many religious elements in our culture.

Four hundred years is plenty long enough. Let's climb out of the 17th century and call a halt to the Christmas wars.

Mr. Hasson is the founder of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the author of "The Right to be Wrong: Ending the Culture War Over Religion in America" (Image, 2012), from which this is adapted.

Link:

• When Christmas Was Banned in Massachusetts 

Related:

• The First Thanksgiving: A Tale of Squanto of The Dawn Land

In Sin and Error Pining: Christmas in an Unholy Land

By Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

Though I grew up on the North Shore of Boston, I lived for several years in Albuquerque, New Mexico. To prepare for Christmas, people in the Old Town district and other neighborhoods would place lit vigil candles in hundreds of small, sand-filled brown paper bags to encircle their homes, line their driveways, and often even adorn their flat adobe roofs. These vigil lights – called “Candelarias” – were displayed throughout the neighborhoods by the thousands, and their collective effect was a beautiful and breathtaking vigil for the birth of Christ. On Christmas Eve, families and friends from all over would crowd into their cars for a solemn drive through Old Town Albuquerque to view the Candelarias.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, even inside this prison, or at least my small corner of it. As the annual bipolar express into Christmas depression commences all around me, the walls of this cell have become covered with Christmas cards sent by TSW readers. The cards are beautiful and a stark contrast to the bleak place they now adorn.

The collective effect has transformed this captive world in sin and error pining into one of expectant hope, and the strangest thing has happened. As Christmas draws nearer, prisoners – few of whom receive many cards and some none at all – keep coming to this cell to look at the growing numbers of faith-filled cards. “How does one person know so many people?” one asked. “No,” another corrected him. “How does one person know so many GOOD people?” Pornchai loves to give tours of our cards, and tells the other prisoners that we have never even met most of the senders. He explains that they are TSW readers who think of us and pray for us – “including you,” Pornchai tells them – as we spend another Christmas here. It reminds me so much of the vigil of the Candelarias. You should take some pride in this, for it was you who provided the lights that draw them...

You can take pride in the fact that many of the cards you have sent to me and to Pornchai now serve a solemn purpose in an unholy land. They are the Candelarias that summon the alienated and alone to the Christ Child.

I’m about to mark my 19th Christmas in such an exile, living in punishment for crimes that never took place. For Pornchai, it’s his 21st Christmas in prison. But one thing is clear. Not all who dwell in this unholy land are without hope for redemption. When Jonathan finally left this prison last year at Christmas, when his daughter was one year old, he handed me a note as he was going out the door. It was one of the nicest Christmas gifts I or any priest could ever receive:

“I will always remember all the ways that I could count on you. You never take anything from anyone, but please take this: You were a better father to some of us in prison than any of our own fathers ever were in freedom.”

I don’t know that what Jonathan wrote was entirely accurate. I have a hard time measuring such things, but I got another note recently that literally knocked me on my . . . umm, priestly posterior. It was from my friend, Alberto Ramos about whom I wrote in “Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being...”  (continued)

Read More at These Stone Walls

Link:

• In Sin and Error Pining: Christmas in an Unholy Land

Fr. George Rutler: A Wider Kind of Insanity

By Father George Rutler

When people “rush” Christmas, they pay an oblique tribute to the Advent mysteries, because they want something to celebrate, and in the darkening days of the year they know that celebration has something to do with light. If only they paid attention to what Christ shows about those mysteries of death, judgment, heaven and hell, they’d have a much better celebration. “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be filled” (John 15:11).

The second mystery of Advent is God’s judgment: His design for the world and how we fit into His plan. We shall be accountable to Him in the “particular judgment” when we die, for what we have done with the gift of life He has given us. This will not be like facing a judge in court. It will be like facing one’s spouse after a long separation and reaching out. There can only be an embrace if there is love. St. John Chrysostom said that in the moment of judgment, Christ will ask only: “How much did you love?” If the temporal world was created out of eternity by God’s love, we can fit into that eternity only if love is the passport.

The essence of divine justice, then, consists in how one reciprocates the love that gives life. “Evil men do not understand justice, but those who seek the Lord understand it fully” (Proverbs 28:5). That is easier said than done, for how can the Lord’s justice be understood in part, let alone “fully”? And yet, the answer is clear. The Lord’s justice, which is the way He designs the world and all its motions and our participation in it, is beautiful, true, and good, and while we may not easily define beauty, truth and goodness, we know their result: joy.

Insanity is the inability to make right judgment. There is more insanity than we realize. The local police once gave me a special code number to call if I saw anyone in our neighborhood behaving strangely, and I told them that if I obliged them, their telephone would be ringing off the hook. But there is a wider kind of insanity, and it is life lived contrary to God’s will. It is the source of sadness, and nothing is more insane than to be sad while being alive.

There are many reasons for sorrow in “this valley of tears,” but such sorrow is not despair. The cynic may say that the light at the end of the tunnel is an approaching train, but the saints know that the light is Christ Himself. As the judge who is righteous and true, He says, “These things I have spoken to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you shall have distress: but have confidence, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

Link:

• Most Recent Column From Fr. Rutler

Advent Musical Interlude

From Ann Barnhardt at Barnhardt.biz:

Via the always interesting Vanderleun:

O Come, O come, Emmanuel,
and ransom captive Israel,
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear.

Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!

O come, Thou Wisdom, from on high,
and order all things far and nigh;
to us the path of knowledge show,
and teach us in her ways to go.

O come, o come, Thou Lord of might,
who to thy tribes on Sinai's height
in ancient times did give the law,
in cloud, and majesty, and awe.

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse's stem,
from ev'ry foe deliver them
that trust Thy mighty power to save,
and give them vict'ry o'er the grave.

O come, Thou Key of David, come,
and open wide our heav'nly home,
make safe the way that leads on high,
that we no more have cause to sigh.

O come, Thou Dayspring from on high,
and cheer us by thy drawing nigh;
disperse the gloomy clouds of night
and death's dark shadow put to flight.

O come, Desire of the nations, bind
in one the hearts of all mankind;
bid every strife and quarrel cease
and fill the world with heaven's peace. 

Link:

• Advent Musical Interlude

O Holy Night - Bing Crosby

RealCatholicTV Phone Conversation: "Have you been suppressed?"

From RealCatholicTV's Facebook Page:

Actual transcript of a recent telephone conversation : "Have you been suppressed?" "Not to the best of my knowledge, but it's never happened to me before so I wouldn't know what it feels like."

This posting silence for the octave of Christmas or thereabouts was and is and remains a planned thing over the vacation (many of our staff are traveling to see their families, who they do not see very much over the year etc.)

We have not been suppressed. At least, I don't think so . . .

For now, feast your eyes upon this - Fr Eduard Perrone, priest of the Order of Melchizedek, scholar, gentleman, composer, confessor, model for all young men, speaks about the mind-bending awesomeness of the Mass at the CTH conference 2009.

Watch Video

• RealCatholicTV on Facebook
• Father Eduard Perrone: The Treasures of the Mass Revealed
• Archdiocese of Detroit asks Michael Voris to stop using the name ‘Catholic’ 

These Stone Walls at Year’s End: Father Gordon MacRae's Hits and Misses for 2011

By Father Gordon J. MacRae

In an Advent post, “Down the Nights and Down the Days,” I described the challenges we face to offer Mass in a prison cell, and I described the obstacles we had to overcome in another post, “The Sacrifice of the Mass.”

The new translation has itself been a challenge, and I stumble here and there. I used to be able to pray the entire Roman Canon by memory at Mass. Now I have to consult the Roman Missal for every word and phrase. But it’s beautifully written, and a far more faithful translation of the Latin Mass. It is worth the effort to learn the new translation.

I read a recent criticism of the translation in a letter to the editor in a recent issue of Our Sunday Visitor. The letter writer found the new translation to be “pompous” and failing to reflect our “intimacy with God in familiar terms.” I could not disagree more. Perhaps prison has helped me reflect on the nature of my relationship with God. I speak to my friends as equals. I speak to God as my Savior, my Redeemer, my Hope and my reason for not giving up. Restoring some reverence to that dialogue is a very good thing. Not all agree, but I feel I owe a little deference to the Church on this one.  I sometimes miss the old and familiar, but only because it’s old and familiar, not because it’s correct....

...My biggest hit of 2011 goes to Suzanne, Charlene, and Leo. They are my digital eyes and ears and hands, and without them TSW could not exist and function. But you, our readers, are also a “Hit.” I apologize that when you write letters, I cannot always write back in a timely manner.  Many of you sent cards at Christmas, but I had none to send back to you. I want you to know that your cards are posted on my wall. No, not my Facebook wall, my cell wall. You have transformed these stone walls into a vivid display of good tidings, and I thank you.

One of my Scotish countrymen, the great poet, Robert Burns, began a collection of 100 songs in 1792 that he entitled, Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs. One song in this collection was “Auld Lang Syne,” which, if you can shed enough of the Scotish accent, is actually entitled “Old Long Since.” It’s a song celebrating “The Good Old Days,” which every generation forgets are the ones we are in now. I’m not sure how the song became a tradition on New Year’s Eve, but it’s a reminder never to forget home, family, and the friends who walk with us along the way. Here it is:

“Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And days of Auld Lang Syne?
For Auld Lang Syne, my dear,
For Auld Lang Syne;
We’ll take a cup o’kindness yet
For Auld Lang Syne.
And here’s a hand, my trusty friend,
And gives a hand o’thine;
We’ll take a cup o’kindness yet
For Auld Lang Syne.”

Read More At These Stone Walls