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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Does it matter what papal documents said before the Second Vatican Council? I guess it depends on your point of view. In my point of view, yes–they are at least as important today as they were when they were written, and therefore deserve careful reading and implementation. One of them from the mid-20th century is…
What our time needs now is conversions. Lots of grace, and lots of conversions, repentance and amendment of lives. Recently I discovered an aid for the faithful in calling down these graces: the Green Scapular, also known as “The Badge of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.” What a beautiful gift from Heaven! The Green Scapular…
There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants. –Outline of Sanity, G. K. Chesterton
St. Catherine Catholic Culture Center 