Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Pædocommunion: discuss! I’ll start. It’s obviously not doctrine so saying it’s necessary, like claiming services must be in the vernacular to be valid like some Protestants did, was condemned by Trent. That is, you can do it in your rite but a Catholic doesn’t have to. BTW I’ve been told some Metropolia Slav parishes — Russian Orthodox dioceses, Ruthenian parishioners — in the rust belt at least used to have Solemn First Communion for the 7-year-olds right after they first go to confession, because these churches used to be Greek Catholic.
• Old article on English in the Byzantine Rite. Thanks to Isabel Hapgood who AFAIK published the first complete translation of the Orthodox services about 100 years ago you hear a lot of Coverdale; the Russian Church Abroad recently printed a psalter using it. Greek Catholics seem stuck with Novus Ordo-ey English, a problem that’s getting worse (more).
• Of course baroque is da bomb but NLM also rightly appreciates The Other Modern, the artistic branch of the legit liturgical movement (Mass-and-office and really interested in the East as well). The first half of the 20th century, through the early 1960s, the good ’60s: not pastiche but original art that follows the principles of Catholic doctrine and the old Roman Rite.
• History: As the Continuum turns.
• Why Fort Worth has gone for 1970s-1980s Episcopalianism doing business as ACNA not Rome. Typical mainline thing. There still will be a small American ordinariate including the Texan parishes that are most of the Anglican Use now; of course I don’t know yet where else.
• Some of my comments in that thread (warning: long convert manifestos but with a few nuggets of Catholic truth), one and two. Not to be harsh, and like Perry I don’t believe in the thing either, but I appreciate the irony of writing a 2,500-word post about being completely over something. Then again there’s Newman’s autobiography.
• For articles more learned and spiritual than I can come up with there’s Fr Stephen Freeman.

Labels: Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Catholic faith