Sunday

• The Ukrainian Catholic Church’s new, young metropolitan. As you can see, Rome’s always told the Greek Catholics to be externally like the Orthodox and some of the new-breed clergy are doing that. I imagine he’ll switch to the Russian white klobuk for a metropolitan. Ramble: there’s a legend about the white klobuk connected to the Pope, something to do with a legend about St Peter and the patriarch of Moscow the third Rome somehow inheriting it. Then Peter the Great when he abolished the patriarchate gave all metropolitans the white one. (Also the patriarch wears a unique older version of the klobuk.) But the tradition of the Pope wearing white is only about 400 years old, based on St Pius V’s white Dominican habit.
• From the Byzantine Rite: We bow to thy cross, O Lord, and we glorify thy holy resurrection.
• Damian Thompson:
  • Teaching the TLM in mainstream seminaries?
  • The mighty biretta. The church version of the fedora revival. BTW a black fedora is part of the mid-century street uniform of an Archdiocese of New York priest (cassock and biretta on church grounds; black suit and fedora elsewhere; both with white Roman collar).
• Fr H:
  • Collect for Lent III.
  • Councils, parts one, two, three and four. Long story short: I believe in religious liberty and ecumenism rightly understood (not indifferentism) and have no problem with the vernacular. So why oppose Vatican II? Ratz, now Pope Benedict, nailed it decades ago: sure, it was valid; it couldn’t teach heresy. But it wasn’t useful. Understatement. No, it was an epic fail as the kids say. As Jeff Culbreath has said, Catholics are best off ignoring it. Because it didn’t define any doctrine, you can!
  • The cultus of the Blessed Sacrament, parts one, two and three.
  • Holy busyness. Part of the un-self-conscious traditionalism of Orthodoxy at its best. The priests do their thing, the congregation theirs and nobody says boo. Keep your nose clean enough and everybody’s happy.
  • Fr L and Fr Z remind that Archbishop Lefebvre died 20 years ago Friday. If not for him there’d probably be no Pope Benedict’s revival. So merci beaucoup.
• Fr L:
  
  • C.S. Lewis suggests that the reasons angels seem to us to be ethereal and ‘unreal’ is not because they are unreal, but because we are. The angels are not less real than we are, but more real.
  • Do beautiful churches help vocations?
• Burning incense is psychoactive. Religious leaders have contended for millennia that burning incense is good for the soul. Now, biologists have learned that it is good for our brains too. An international team of scientists, including researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describe how burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain to alleviate anxiety or depression. This suggests that an entirely new class of depression and anxiety drugs might be right under our noses.

Labels: Eastern Orthodoxy, England, fedoras, history, Russia, the Catholic faith