I like to sing the simple tone Marian antiphons with my daughter, who hasn’t had any Latin yet. I sing first the original Latin chant, and then I sing it again, putting English words to the chant melody. That is, if I have an English version of the chant! Maria A. Trapp’s book Around the…
Church Year / Lent / Life / Liturgical Year / Penance / Recipes
Start getting those Lent meals planned! Here’s a late 19th-century gem from England that I found scanned and uploaded one day: Cookery book for fasting and abstinence days. Eel Pie for the very brave, and Macaroni Pie (baked Mac’n’Cheese) for the rest of us! Although the variety of cookery books at present in circulation is…
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Happy New Year–today’s the perfect day to talk about calendars, of course! If you’ve got a young family, you won’t want to miss the wonderful work done by Michaela Harrison, a Catholic wife and mother living near–and very inspired by!–Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma. Even if you don’t have children at home, your own faith…
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Any study of late medieval religion must begin with the liturgy, for within that great cycle of fast and festival, of ritual observance and symbolic gesture, lay Christians found the paradigms and the stories which shaped their perception of the world and their place in it….In the liturgy and the sacramental celebrations which were its…
Age of Faith / Catholic Living / Church Year / Divine Office / Family prayer / Gregorian Chant / Liturgy / Prayer / Traditions
A riddle for you, with six parts, one answer: What is Catholic worship? What is Gregorian Chant? What do “professional Catholics”–priests, monks, nuns–do all day? What converted and settled Catholic Europe? How do we work to “order our days aright,” optimally patterning our personal praying and working each day? What is the basis, bedrock, seedbed,…
People used to sing together–on pilgrimage, on Crusade, on the way to battle. It kept up the marchers’ morale for the cause, shared beauty of melody and lyric, handed down and passed on noble ideas. The songs were really love songs: proclaiming love for Christ, and His mother, the saints, the Church, and the good…
Charles II: The Last Rally by Hilaire Belloc, 1939 (2003). 223pp. I’ve actually never read a history book by Belloc before. Economic essays and children’s poems, yes, but not any of the history that was his trade and legacy. From what I knew of his reputation, I assumed he would be a very good Catholic…
This photo is a page from a delightful book called An Alphabet of Saints, by Fr. Robert Hugh Benson, Reginald Balfour, S.C. Ritchie, and illustrated by L. D. Symington. I made this happy discovery when searching for available scanned versions of Msgr. Benson’s fiction books (Lord of the World is probably his best-known work). Immediately…
The fundamental fact about the liturgical year is that it is a sanctification of time. Certain key events in the history of salvation, and certain key elements of faith, have become attached to certain dates of the calendar like gems on a bracelet. This bracelet is like a magnificent rosary. We cannot handle it without…
Originally posted on Learn Church Latin:
Catholics have accepted some of the worst distortions of their Faith in the order of music, art, and literature without a shiver of discontent because they never really heard the “Tantum Ergo” or the “Ave Maris Stella” –not for lack of faith, but because there had never been ordinary…
“Church Latin” is the informal, snappier-sounding term for the more scholarly phrase Ecclesiastical Latin, or the occasionally-used Medieval Latin. All of these terms are used to denote something different from “Classical Latin”–the Latin used by, say, Julius Caesar. Church Latin was (and is!) the Latin used by the Catholic Church for two thousand years–thus, where the “Church” part comes in.
We recently celebrated a Nameday for a family member–great fun! Namedays are very happy days for little ones. A nameday is the feast day of the saint for whom a person is named (assuming, of course, that when he was baptized he was given a Christian name). Until he is old enough to receive the…
Reading this book is like sitting at the dinner table while listening to the conversation of a man who knows everything. (Which is an incredible experience, as you might imagine.)
When you need strength in your daily spiritual warfare, remember this Spanish saint’s quiet and heroic life, and this beautiful sonnet about him…
A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton (1917) In my opinion, this book is wrongly-titled: it should be called A Short Commentary on How the History of England Is So Badly Taught. Chesterton put his pen to paper for this book in order to combat the many errors in early 20th Century England’s…
St. Catherine Catholic Culture Center 