Please join millions in this prayer for the gift of life. The link to the novena is below.
Mystagogy X
JANUARY 19 to 27, 2022
Monday 10 January 2022
Tuesday 4 January 2022
DIVINE MICRO-CLIMATES
The following is a response to an article by Dr. Ephraim Radner in FIRST THINGS - JANUARY 2022 -- THE BACK PAGE
In his meditation on climate, culture, language and catechesis, Ephraim Radner offers an insightful look at the directions open to society in this century. He concludes with a clarion call for catechesis in the Church, a call to which many will sound a great Amen.
There are two points to add to Dr. Radner’s pastoral call for biblical focus. The first is in response to his lament: “The Book of Common Prayer (BCP) was suffused with a penitential spirit. It is no longer so.”
This is true. Myriad additions, subtractions and “woke” amendments to Anglican orders of service around the globe cover everything from Evensong to LGBTQ (add your letter) inclusivity rites and transgender “affirmations”. What is left of the BCP in the Anglican Communion (I use the term loosely) is a mess of potage, detritus on a sea of change blown by every wind of doctrine.
Fortunately, under the aegis of Pope Benedict’s farsighted Dogmatic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus (AC), there is a safe harbour for English (Anglican/Episcopalian) liturgy and patrimony. The recently published English breviary for the Ordinariates: Divine Worship: Daily Office (CTS, 2021) is mandated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) for English-speaking clergy and people worldwide. This book is a rich compilation of Anglican daily offices and other rites shaped in conformity with universal Catholic liturgical principles and approved by the CDF.
The Breviary retains the poetic English of the BCP tradition while offering all seven of the daily offices for religious communities and individuals. The breviary serves as a text and work book for grounded and ongoing catechesis.
This English form of The Liturgy of the Hours joins the previously published Divine Worship: The Missal (CTS, 2015) and Divine Worship: Occasional Services (CTS, 2014). These traditional texts provide contours for the second element we may add to Dr. Radner’s appeal – mystagogy, the learning through liturgy. Mercifully, these English prayer books have a home now in the Universal Church.
Sunday 2 January 2022
12:30 Sunday Mass
Sung Mass continues at STM, Toronto
12:30 noon on Sundays.
263 Roncesvalles Avenue, Toronto, ON
All are welcome as we continue to
observe provincial regulations
re. Covid.
In the large church building that we share with St. Vincent's parish this means that we can easily accommodate everyone.
Mystagogy continues -- Our Lady
Mary, Mother of God
January 1, 2022 STM, TORONTO
The Apostles together with the Blessed Virgin Mary, formed the Church, an indissoluble group surrounding the human life of Jesus.
Mary’s fiat, her “yes” to God, is the foundation, the undergirding and the sustaining grace of the Church which emanates from Jesus Christ, her Son. The Church finds her personal centre in Mary. Her faith response to the Divine Bridegroom complements the masculine principle and together they bear the fruit of Christ’s love for the world.
Knowing that all people are envisaged in God's plan, the Church can humbly know herself as the chosen representative of mankind before God in faith, prayer, and sacrifice, in hope for all and, still more, in love for all.
The highest priority of the Church belongs to our readiness to serve the divine love. Our “Yes” has no other purpose. Yet, this response to God appears senseless in a world caught up in what is thought to be urgent, reasonable and individualistic. This is a society in thrall to the dictatorship of relativism, the plague of self-referential gender fluidity and the mania for unlimited choice. Society slouches towards Sodom.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in discussing Mary's fiat, saw that it was necessary to show the spiritual marriage between the Son of God and human nature. Mary's "yes" stands for all God's people; making it possible for every person to pronounce their own personal fiat – Yes to God’s love.
Mary’s Immaculate Conception locates her personal existence between Heaven and human life in its fallen state. This is because her Immaculate Conception has freed her from any influence of sin.
Yet, Blessed Mary lived her human existence in this broken world of sin. Her personal life is situated at the passageway between the Old Covenant of Law and Sin and the New Covenant of Grace and Spirit.
Blessed Mary stands in direct continuity with the generations who descend from Abraham. As Virgin Mother, who became pregnant by her consent to the overshadowing Spirit; she signifies a new beginning.
Finally, her existence lies in the tension between time and eternity. Although she herself has regained Paradise in her Assumption, as Mother of all the living, she gives birth to the Messiah in the birth-pangs of the Cross.
Mary's dramatic role emerges both from her centre – as Jesus’ Mother, the Mother of God and from the whole range of her being, which embraces fallen and redeemed humanity. Her role is universal.
Two thousand years of Christian tradition bear witness to the abiding presence of the Mother of God at the heart and centre of the Church.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
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