A military chaplain's story

This week's issue of The Tidings, the Archdiocesan newspaper, has a first-person account (click on this post's title) by Fr. Jose Antonio Bautista of his service with the U.S. Marines in Iraq.

Fr. Bautista, 42, is from Guadalajara and was ordained here in 1999 from St. John's Seminary.

This is a moving and powerful article about our Marines, our Catholic chaplains, and the priesthood. You won't want to miss it.

Would a liberal ever say the Tridentine Mass in the vernacular?

After hearing yet another homily filled with all the usual absolutely ignorant statements about the Tridentine Mass, I have to comment.

The homilist claimed that people want the Tridentine Mass because of "nostalgia," and that before the New Mass the congregation couldn't hear the priests, the priests rushed through the Mass, and some priests even went so fast that they didn't understand the words.

As for the first point: How could today's young priests, young families, and young people in general, be "nostalgic" for the Tridentine Mass, when they were not even born when the liberals threw out that Tridentine Mass 40 years ago?

To claim that "nostalgia" is why Catholics today want the Tridentine Mass is to wrongly imply that no one could have a good reason for wanting it.

As for the other points: I know men, now getting up there in years, who became altar boys as 4th graders. At their young age they learned, and understood, the Latin of the Mass. They could fluently recite their altar boys' responses, and they understood the priest's words.

I have met many priests who said the Latin Mass. They were highly educated men. They had studied Latin in the seminary, and many of them could speak it. They were students of the Mass and the liturgy, and they knew what they were doing and saying all the way through.

I also know Catholics who attended the Latin Mass. They had Latin-English missals! They knew every step of the Mass. They knew what the priest and the altar boys were saying at each of those steps.

The real reason that liberals fiercely dislike the Tridentine Mass is that it is so Catholic -- so oriented toward sacrifice, repentance, forgiveness of sins, atonement, mercy, the Communion of Saints, and more.

As Alice von Hildebrand has said, liberals do not want to hear about personal sins ("Mea culpa," "my fault") but societal faults ("Tua culpa," "your fault").

If Latin is really the problem, then what legitimate objection could a liberal have to saying the Tridentine Mass in the vernacular?

Click on this post's title to read what retired Bishop Rene Gracida has written about saying the Tridentine Mass in the vernacular. He says it is permitted under the Motu Proprio.

You can get excellent Latin-English Mass booklets from the Coalition in Support of Ecclesia Dei at:
http://www.ecclesiadei.org/

Tidings and CNS premature about Surgeon General nominee

This week's issue of The Tidings, the Archdiocese of L.A.'s newspaper, has a Catholic News Service article (click on this post's title) that praises Barack H. Obama's surgeon general nominee, Regina Benjamin, and quotes some as calling her a good Catholic.

Let's see if Catholic News Service and The Tidings next week run articles of equal prominence that note that an Obama spokesman has now said that Regina Benjamin agrees with pro-abortion Obama's policies.

Liberal Catholics are eager to praise and defend the pro-abortion Vichy [traitorous] Catholics (as one Catholic blogger, whose name escapes me, has called them) whom Obama keeps appointing.

It's absurd to pretend that the abortion ideologue Obama is ever going to appoint anyone, including any Catholic, to a major post who is not pro-abortion.

With his many appointments of Vichy Catholics, Obama is playing a divide and conquer strategy against us Catholics. He is weakening us -- by dividing us into two camps, one of them the pro-life faithful camp, and the other a traitorous camp that swallows the sick liberal lie that you can be Catholic and support aborting babies.

Journalists, including Catholic ones, are supposed to be savvy enough to see through politicians' wiles, and independent enough to never perpetuate politicians' deceptions.

Tidings, are you listening?

Pray for Pope Benedict, who has broken his wrist

Let's pray for Pope Benedict! Reports (click on this post's title) say that he has broken his right wrist in a fall in his room, early in his summer vacation in the Italian Alps.

The Holy Father is tough! After breaking his wrist, he still celebrated morning Mass. Then he had some breakfast, and only after that did he go to the hospital for treatment. He had only local anesthetic for surgery to align the fracture.

The docs say the surgery went well.

Our Lady, Health of the Sick, pray for Pope Benedict XVI!

Baby-saving sidewalk counselor Rev. Walter B. Hoye makes L.A. Times front page

Today's Los Angeles Times has a front-page article (click on this post's title) about a true pro-life hero, the Rev. Walter B. Hoye, who is shown in the Times photo above.

He is continuing his baby-saving sidewalk counseling outside an abortion business in Oakland, even though the city government jailed him earlier this year for doing that.

He is now using what he calls a "potted plant strategy" -- just standing in place instead of approaching anyone, so the abortion business employees and volunteers cannot make false claims about him again.

As the Rev. Hoye's lawyers point out, the abortion staffers and volunters hate him because, as a black minister, he has a lot of credibility with ladies who are potential customers of the abortion business.

The L.A. Times article breaks very welcome and much-needed new ground in current newspaper practice by giving readers these two blockbuster paragraphs:

"In March, Hoye was a featured speaker at the California Students for Life conference at UC Berkeley. He was lauded by the Rev. Clenard Childress, a national figure who founded blackgenocide.org and coined the phrase 'womb lynching' to describe the disproportionate number of abortions in the black community.

"(At 12.4% of the U.S. female population, black women have 37% of the country's abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, whose statistics are widely cited by both sides of the abortion debate.)"

Wouldn't it be wonderful if our Catholic hierarchy, clergy and consecrated religious here in the vast Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and everywhere, actually, would become pro-life heroes and heroines -- become mom-helpers and baby-savers like the Rev. Walter Hoye?

How about printing out copies of the Times article, giving them to anyone and everyone you know in our Catholic hierarchy, clergy and consecrated religious, and then asking them why don't they start helping moms and saving babies as does the Rev. Walter B. Hoye of Oakland?

And then please let Ole Q, and the rest of our friends at this blogspot, know what you hear from them.

Pope Benedict gives Obama a pro-life document

When they met for 36 minutes today, Pope Benedict XVI gave Obama a copy of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's 2008 pro-life bioethics instruction Dignitas Personae, reports the Catholic News Agency (click on this post's title).

The document is online at: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20081208_dignitas-personae_en.html

Maybe we'll get some glimmers from somewhere, soon, about what the Pope told Obama.

Manifesto: A wish list of essentials for the ordinary of every diocese

With the following wish list, Ole Q is not seeking to place impossible burdens on any ordinary, or to imply that many bishops are not already doing many of the things suggested below.

We have many wonderful bishops. But we all know that big problems remain in our Church in America. So I think it's fair to suggest some things that could help.

Now, obviously, no bishop can do these things all by himself. But they can enlist a lot of help if they can point the clergy, the religious, and all the lay Catholics in the right direction and seek a genuine change in the way we have been doing things in the Church in recent decades.

So, with that in mind:

Would it be too much to wish that the bishop, archbishop or cardinal in charge of every diocese or archdiocese -- and while we're at it, the superiors of all the religious orders -- would:

Constantly teach and emphasize to all the Christian flock the astounding reality and majesty of the Real Presence of Jesus Christ, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, in the Holy Eucharist, and the reverence and praise and thanks we each owe Him

Constantly teach, and emphasize to, all the Christian flock the astounding reality and treasure of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and what really takes place in it, and all the graces in it

Teach the Christian flock the dignity and glory of the Catholic priesthood, and the calling to it, and the prayers and kindness we owe every priest of Jesus Christ

Teach the Christian flock the necessity of imitating Jesus in being a sign of contradiction, a witness to the Faith and morality in contrast to the evils of our time

Teach the flock that the most important thing on Earth is the salvation of your soul and mine and our neighbor's -- that love, holiness, sanctity, and closeness to God and Our Lady are what count

Constantly emphasize the necessity of prayer, including Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, and the necessity of penance as Our Lady of Fatima has asked

Reform and overhaul catechesis so that all of it teaches the actual truths of the Faith, and only those truths, not dissent and irrelevancies

Teach the flock that there is absolutely no such thing as a "spirit of Vatican II" that did away with everything in the past

Admit to the flock that much of what was done and taught in the last 40 years was defective

Do as Pope Benedict XVI has asked, in his Motu Proprio, and institute a widespread comeback for the "Extraordinary Form" Latin Mass

Do what Pope Benedict XVI said in Sacramentum Caritatis (click on this post's title), para. 62: "I ask that future priests, from their time in the seminary, receive the preparation needed to understand and to celebrate Mass in Latin, and also to use Latin texts and execute Gregorian chant; nor should we forget that the faithful can be taught to recite the more common prayers in Latin, and also to sing parts of the liturgy to Gregorian chant"

To encourage reverence for the Real Presence and the Mass, and respect for the priesthood, have priests and deacons be the ones to distribute Communion at Masses, and make the use of lay extraordinary ministers truly extraordinary, not ordinary as it has become

Constantly teach and emphasize the necessity of the Sacrament of Confession, and all the graces it confers, and have priests institute more hours for Confession

Teach and encourage true Catholic family life, love for children, openness to having children, and the evil of artificial contraception, sterilization and aborting babies

Lead the clergy and laity in being -- actively, publicly and constantly -- prayerful and effective anti-abortion baby-savers, in every parish

Move out of any elaborate bishop's residence, turn it into a home for unwed moms, and find smaller quarters

Learn, and teach the Christian flock, all the pro-life, pro-family, pro-chastity truths in Pope John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae

Remind the flock, as Jesus does, that "Adulterers and fornicators will not see the Kingdom of heaven"

Constantly teach the flock that the Roman Catholic Church is the one, true, Catholic and apostolic Church that Our Lord Jesus Christ founded and has given to us

Actively and pervasively teach the truths of the Faith, counter the errors and lies of the denominations, sects, cults, and new age, and reach out to bring back the fallen-away

Reach out to the newly arrived, so they will stay in the Church

Actively keep "gays" out of all seminaries

Not ordain "gays" to the priesthood

Cut expenses by slashing the size of the chancery staffs

Devote resources not to building new cathedrals and churches but to keeping venerable traditional churches open

Devote resources to making Catholic schools truly affordable for families

Foster homeschooling

Devote more resources to poor parishes

Eliminate the influence of dissent and radical feminism in the chancery and the parishes

Teach the glory and beauty of the calling to the women's religious orders, and promote those vocations; and do the same for vocations to men's religious orders

Admonish pro-abortion, pro-homosexual-agenda politicians, avoid appearing with them, and excommunicate the reprobate ones

Recommend, as candidates to become new bishops, the truly worthy ones, not cronies or members of any "old boys' club"

Remember and absorb the words of Jesus, "sicut parvuli" -- "[unless ye become] as little ones" -- and seek to truly discourage the influence of money and power in the Church

All right, this is a long list, and a tall order to follow. But who can deny that doing these things would save souls and help our Church? It is up to each of us, you and me, to swing into action.

Jesus, King and Center of All Hearts, have mercy on us! Our Lady, Mother of the Church and Help of Christians, pray for us! Amen.

Obama met with Catholic journalists today

The National Catholic Register today (Thursday) reported (click on this post's title) on what went down at a meeting at the White House today that pro-abortion Barack Hussein Obama held with Catholic journalists (including two priests) and a WaPo reporter.

Obama mostly sounded nice -- let's never be taken in by him! -- but still, as always, he was totally and unapologetically unyielding about his promotion of artificial contraception, sex miseducation and so-called rights for homosexuals. And, naturally, he never considered the possibility of making the aborting of babies illegal once again in our Republic.