Dr. K's Weekly Roundup, December 27 Edition

Stained glass by Michael Healy (1873–1941), St. Brendan’s Cathedral, Loughrea, County Galway, Ireland

St. John and the Blessing of Wine

I wish all my readers a very happy feast of St. John the Beloved Disciple, depicted in this stained glass window as receiving divine revelation from Our Lord, the Alpha and the Omega.

St. John has always been very dear to me among all the saints. Meditating on his Gospel was instrumental in the conversion of the person who is dearest to me in all the world, and it came as no surprise that his feastday was chosen for our wedding 26 years ago. He is patron of theologians and in this capacity was never been far from my thoughts as I pursued the study of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose greatest Scripture commentary is arguably the one he wrote on the fourth gospel. Here at the Substack I devoted a post to my visit last October to the Cave of the Apocalypse on Patmos and the house of the Blessed Virgin Mary near Ephesus, where St. John was the first bishop.

And how could we not love a saint on whose feast the Church blesses our bottles and barrels of wine? At our local FSSP oratory, the priest always blesses wine on December 27th. Before Mass, everyone who wishes puts their bottles up by the St. Joseph altar on the Epistle side of the church, and retrieves them after Mass.

Here’s how the ritual goes:

At the end of the principal Mass on the feast of St. John, Apostle and Evangelist, after the last Gospel, the priest, retaining all vestments except the maniple, blesses wine brought by the people. This is done in memory and in honor of St. John, who drank without any ill effects the poisoned wine offered to him by his enemies.

Priest: Our help is in the name of the Lord.
All: Who made heaven and earth.
P: The Lord be with you.
All: And with your spirit.

Let us pray. If it please Thee, O Lord God, bless + and consecrate + this vessel of wine by the power of Thy right hand; and grant that, through the merits of St. John, apostle and evangelist, all Thy faithful who drink of it may find it a help and a protection. As the blessed John drank the poisoned potion without any ill effects, so may all who today drink the blessed wine in his honor be delivered from poisoning and similar harmful things. And as they offer themselves body and soul to Thee, may they obtain pardon of all their sins; through Christ our Lord.

All: Amen.

O Lord, bless + this creature drink, so that it may be a health-giving medicine to all who use it; and grant by Thy grace that all who taste of it may enjoy bodily and spiritual health in calling on Thy holy name, through Christ our Lord.

All: Amen.

May the blessing of almighty God, Father, Son, + and Holy Ghost, come down upon this wine and remain always.

All: Amen.

It is sprinkled with holy water. If the blessing is given privately outside of Mass, the priest is vested in surplice and stole and performs the ceremony as given above.

We used this blessing at our wedding reception.

There’s a customary toast that goes along with the day. If you drink some of the blessed wine today, you can do the following. Before dinner, the father of the house lifts his glass toward the mother and says, “I drink you the love of St. John.” The mother replies, “I thank you for the love of St. John,” and then turns to the oldest child, lifts her glass, and says, “I drink you the love of St. John…” — and on it goes down the line, until each has been toasted.

A Musical Offering

In keeping with the octave of Christmas, I thought I’d share a few seasonally relevant compositions with you, if you have a moment to listen to them. Bear in mind that the recordings are usually live, sometimes with no professional equipment, and done by amateur choirs — but good enough, in any case, to convey my intentions as a composer (and I am always grateful for the efforts of choirs who do what they do for the love of God!).

“Silent Night” (arranged by PK; score here)

“Christus Natus Est” (score and lyrics here)

“Mary’s Baby” (score and lyrics here)

“David’s Town” (score and lyrics here)

“Coventry Carol” (arranged by PK; score here)

I’ve written several more Christmas pieces — “Come, Wise Men All”; “Dormi Jesu”; “Oh My Soul, Here Behold”; “The Babies Are Sleeping”; an arrangement of the Huron Carol (“’Twas in the Moon of Wintertime”) — all of which you can find at my dedicated music site, CantaboDomino.

Now, proceeding with our regular features . . .

Good News

The good news par excellence

For a world without joy—a world that has largely forgotten how to be deeply, vibrantly, communally joyful—Christianity is too good to be true.

A providential, fatherly Creator who made us out of nothing and breathed His life into us and loves us with an infinite love? A God who became a Man so that He could teach us and heal us and enamor us and die for us? Forgiveness of sins, even the worst sins, even seventy times seven of the worst sins? The deep, psychologically transformative pleasure of knowing with certainty that some things are true and some things are false?… The sublimation of suffering, which imparts transcendent value to afflictions that we all must endure anyway? The destruction of death, which need no longer be feared? The possibility of reuniting with deceased friends and family? The hope of perfect, unalterable, everlasting joy and celebration in a celestial paradise?

How many people nowadays look out from their world—at its worst, a nihilistic, agnostic, consumeristic, relativistic, dehumanized, roboticized, skeptical, pragmatical, isolated, fragmented, increasingly substance-enhanced and tragically despair-ridden world—and simply say “No.” Christianity is implausible, improbable, inconceivable. It’s a fairly tale, a myth, a dream. Nothing that hopeful could be real. Nothing that good could be true.

And yet… as Robert Keim reminds us (for he is the author of the above passage), it IS true, and at Christmas we who are blessed with the faith that God is indeed THIS GOOD rejoice in the good news. Christ is born: glorify Him!

Even the cave of our empty, sinful, suffering heart was specially chosen by God to be the place where He will be born, writes Amelia McKee:

Although the cave is more standard in Eastern iconography than it is in Western painting, the cave is by no means foreign to Western art. It appears in some of the most famous Nativity paintings, including those by Duccio, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, and Phillippe De Champaigne. In Christian art, the cave is actually the most consistently depicted place of Jesus’s birth.

Although we may be drawn to the Nativity because of its sheer beauty and loveliness, as Sebastian [Flyte] is, if we look long enough, we will see “a child embraced by death, and embracing death.” Yet, the Nativity is a reason for joy because that child is God himself and his death saved us from death. He lights not only the darkness of the cave, but the darkness of the world and the darkness of our own hearts. Because of this, we can become an icon of the cave of Christ’s birth as we prepare to receive him on Christmas and when he comes again.

Carmelite martyrs of Compiègne

Pope Francis, using the method of “equipollent” canonization, recognized as saints the 16 Discalced Carmelite nuns executed during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, where they went to their deaths singing hymns on July 17, 1794. The story of these nuns became well known thanks in large part to the 1957 opera Dialogues of the Carmelites with libretto by Georges Bernanos and music by Francis Poulenc. Thanks to the pope’s move, they may be immediately venerated as full saints in recognition of their centuries-old veneration. (I read about this in an article from CNA in which the author inexcusably commits the error of asserting that all canonizations are infallible acts. This is a disputed theological question; yet there is certainly no reason to deny the honors of the altar to nuns killed as martyrs, that is, in odium fidei.)

Savoring the saintly Savonarola

Arouca Press has once more done the Catholic world a great favor by reprinting an excellent biography of a much-misunderstood figure who in fact deserves the grateful veneration of the Church (and may the Lord raise up more prophetic voices like his against ecclesial and urban corruption):

The figure of Girolamo Savonarola looms large over Italian secular and ecclesiastical history, but remains obscure to the English-speaking world. Now, as part of a larger project dedicated to the translation and study of the life and works of Savonarola, this highly accessible biography of the Friar of San Marco has been republished in the hopes of introducing faithful Catholics to a man that Pius XII called “an apostle who has a lively sense of things divine and eternal, who takes a stand against rampant paganism, who remains faithful to the evangelical and Pauline ideal of integral Christianity put into action in public life.” In the first part of the book, O’Neil presents the public career of Savonarola in the style of a chronicle. In the second part, he traces a portrait of the friar himself, drawing on his own writings and sermons, which are further explored in an appendix.

Latin Immersion Backpacking

I doubt there’s any other place on earth where this is happening:

Dr. Scott Olsson, Wyoming Catholic College’s Academic Dean, recently spent a week in the Wyoming backcountry and the glorious Wind River Mountains with students on one of our Fall Break trips. Unlike its sister-trips, however, this one was conducted entirely in Latin. Yes, you heard correctly; not a word of English (nor any other language) was spoken during the week-long adventure. Latin, only!

But you are not excluded from the fun and the challenge. For Latin lovers (especially teachers), COR Expeditions is offering a fantastic opportunity: Latin Immersion Backpacking: Iter Montanum in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming (Wind River Range), June 22-28, 2025.

Immerse yourself in Latin and the Wyoming wilderness as we backpack the Wind River Range. Participants should have completed an introductory sequence of Latin courses at the college level, covering all the major grammatical elements of the language. Prior experience speaking Latin will be helpful but is not required. All levels of Latin enthusiasts will benefit from our readings and conversations. Latin teachers hoping to use more active Latin in their classrooms will particularly benefit.

More details here.

A church for the TLM in São Paulo, Brazil

If you know anything about the Latin American episcopal hierarchy, you’ll know that it’s infested with Liberation Theology (among other deviations) and that it has scarcely a moment’s time for the traditional Catholicism that missionized the continent. That’s why the following, from the Institute of the Good Shepherd, can truly be called good news:

After ten years in the Archdiocese of São Paulo, Brazil, we were finally able to acquire a small plot of land in the city. However, we need all the help we can get to construct the [Our Lady of Guadalupe] Chapel, in order to guarantee the Traditional Latin Mass to more people and to keep it safe from any sort of restriction. The estimated budget for this fundamental project is about 1 million dollars. This investment will allow us to build a dedicated space for the Traditional Latin Mass, ensuring its continued celebration in São Paulo, as well as a large conference room for catechism classes for children and adults and events for the faithful.

I encourage my readers who are tithing to consider giving something to this worthwhile cause.

Tradition alive in France

Rumors of the death of Catholicism in France are greatly exaggerated (even if rumors of liberalism’s death in the United States are no less exaggerated). It’s very inspiring to read about the resilience of Catholic customs in a land so scarred by revolution and official atheism. Read more in Julia Houck’s excellent article at OnePeterFive.

Christmas octave chasuble by Daniel Mitsui

This certainly wins an award in my book for most original new vestment design. You can find a gallery with lots of close-ups over at the Liturgical Arts Journal. (Notre Dame should have commissioned Mitsui for its vestments… just sayin’…)

Liturgical Lessons

In a video released last week by Mass of the Ages, Gregory DiPippo and I, with Timothy Flanders, engage in an amicable debate about the concept of “organic development.” Gregory argues that it is a useless concept of modern vintage, while I argue that it is a useful metaphor descriptive of trends in Church history. Obviously, we both reject the liturgical reform and the ruptures it introduced. As a bonus, you can read in the comments some hilarious, nearly-autoparodistic reactions of Boomers defending the Novus Ordo. It almost deserves a bag of popcorn!

In an article at Crisis Magazine called “Deforming the Clergy,” a writer using the pen name Francis Magister issues a devastating (though very charitable) critique of the Novus Ordo based on the arguments in my book Turned Around, which he expressly recommends. An excerpt:

By “deforming the clergy,” I mean that the Novus Ordo can seem (and I emphasize “seem”) to alter the nature of the priest from one who performs a sacrifice to one who is in charge of a ceremony. His whole attitude and demeanor changes. I am sure this is unconscious and that the vast majority of priests view their celebration of the Mass as a solemn event.... But that’s the problem: despite their intent, the Novus Ordo, by its nature, can (I could say “does”) make the personality of the priest an issue. It has become second nature to the clergy just as “lining up” to receive the Eucharist has become for the laity.

A Catholic priest is different in kind from Protestant clergy. At ordination, his soul undergoes an ontological change. The fact that he is called a “priest” and not a “minister” reflects this, for a priest is, by definition, one who offers a sacrifice. Only a priest, because of the change he has undergone at ordination, can act in persona Christi and change the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of our Lord at the Consecration. He says, “This is my body,” “This is my blood.” That is what it is all about. Anything that gets in the way of that is suspect.

Matthew Hazell announced the release of the latest proceedings from Fota, the liturgical conference held every summer in Ireland. I had the joy of speaking there some years ago on the topic of useful repetition in the liturgy. This volume, which I already have on my shelf (I got it the moment it came out), is very impressive and useful if you are interested in the theme it treats. Photos courtesy of the book’s editor.

If you’d like to read about the origins of Christmas as a feast, you can do no better than to read Dr. Michael Foley’s article at NLM.

And, for a robust defense of preserving and handing on every little Christmas tradition we possibly can, read Itxu Díaz’s “A Defense of the Small Christmas Ritual” at the European Conservative.

Theological Treasury

Traditional Triads

A long-time priest of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, Fr. Bernward Deneke, delivered the keynote address at the last annual general meeting of the German traditionalist association Pro Missa Tridentina. His talk — “Tuned to the Truth: The Catholic Triad of Faith, Life, and Liturgy” — naturally appealed to me when I saw him compare the transcendentals “truth, goodness, and beauty” and the trio “doctrine, morality, and liturgy” to the three notes of the triad — the root, the third, and the fifth. I prepared a translation for New Liturgical Movement, published in three parts. Here are a few thought-provoking excerpts:

From Part 1:

Biblically speaking, “powers and principalities” dominate things that have become rootless and directionless. Or, to quote Ernst Jünger’s much-cited words from 1943: “The abandoned altars are inhabited by demons.” But the work of demons is the illusory emancipation of man in order to lead him into bondage, from pluralism into total uniformism.

But instead of falling back on lamentations critical of modernity and pessimistic about culture, we want to go in search of the root. It is important to rediscover the unifying and pivotal point, that supporting, cohesive, and ordering principle that has been obscured by subjective, relativistic, and nihilistic cloud formations. It should become obvious what the seemingly lost but in reality always lasting center consists of. The abandoned altars must be cleansed and become again places of worship of the one true God and divine truth.

From Part 2:

The answer of our serious Catholic to the question of why he has adopted this faith and no other is: “I am Catholic because I am convinced of the truth of the Christian religion.” Truth of the Christian religion” means nothing other than: This religion is objectively true. Its contents are facts even if no human being recognizes them. The events, teachings and institutions faithfully accepted in Catholic Christianity really go back to the one and only God and have validity before him.

It is obvious that this view corresponds to the biblical testimony. When the disciples on the road to Emmaus had hurried back to Jerusalem to the eleven apostles after their encounter with the risen Jesus to tell them about their experience, they learned there that the Lord had truly risen and had appeared to Simon (Luke 24:34). The true – in the original Greek text ὄντως, “genuine”, “real” – is emphasized. In the 15th chapter of 1 Corinthians, Paul also insists on the reality of the resurrection, without which faith is in vain. Inspired by this, in the Easter season, believers of Greek tongue greet each other with “Christòs anésti – alithõs anésti”, and Russians with “Christos voskres – voistinu voskres”: “Christ is risen – He is truly risen.”

The Christian faith is thus based on the truth and veracity of this event, and, as logic demands, everything that the resurrection implies as a prerequisite and what it subsequently explains is also established. Prerequisites are truths such as the Trinity of God, the incarnation of the eternal Son in the virginal womb of Mary through a conception brought about by the Holy Spirit, and his voluntary surrender of life for us on the cross. In the wake of the resurrection, we recognize the mission of the Holy Spirit, the birth of the visible Church with its sacraments and the offices authorized to represent Christ, with its perpetual sacrifice, the lasting presence of the Lord in the Eucharist, with its authority to forgive sins, its inerrancy and indestructibility. And our prospect of future bliss in the presence of God is linked to the resurrection of Jesus.

And from Part 3:

Many years ago, I met a gentleman who, having grown up Catholic, not only distanced himself from the Church during his student days, but also openly opposed it. In the left-wing circles in which he moved, this was taken for granted. Until one day, during a protest action against a church dignitary, he was awakened as if from a deep sleep and then quickly changed sides.

In short, he reconnected with his abandoned homeland, attended church services, and even went to communion despite not having gone to confession since his childhood. The conditions for receiving the body of the Lord were not mentioned anywhere, and there was nothing to indicate that he should receive another sacrament in his condition.

Until he happened to attend a Holy Mass according to the old rite, which was unknown to him until then. Fascinated, he followed the events. And when the moment of Holy Communion arrived, he remained in the pew with the intention of confessing first. Why? Not because the priest had given any indication in his sermon. Rather, it was because the whole liturgy, but especially the approach to Communion and the manner of receiving it, said to him: You are not worthy for the Lord to come under your roof; first he must speak the word of absolution, and so your soul shall be healed.

That story really resonates with me. I went through a similar experience in my younger days, and I know many others who would say the same.

Why Francis is pope, in spite of everything

Readers know that I am quite interested — and have been for some time — in the question of the apparent heresies and crimes of Jorge Mario Bergoglio (as I signed this May 2, 2024 statement bearing witness to them), and what this means for his retention of the papal office. Here at Tradition & Sanity, I have tried to be fair in representing, and sharing examples of, the different viewpoints that exist among educated Catholics. Nevertheless, my own position has never been unclear: I accept the so-called “recognize and resist” position, which means: I recognize Francis as pope and attend Masses that name him in the Canon; I resist his errors and misgovernance; and I do not believe myself to be justified, as a layman, in pronouncing that he has lost his office.

One of the best articulations of this stance has just been written by Matt Gaspers and published in two installments:

• “Pope Francis has not lost his office due to heresy: a response to Mr. McCusker and Dr. Lamont”

• “Pope Francis’ election was peacefully and universally accepted: a response to Mr. McCusker and Dr. Lamont”

Seeing through a glass darkly

Robert Lazu Kmita, “The Man, His Shadow, and the Tragedy of the Fallen”:

The theme of Adam and Eve’s ‘blindness’ after consuming the fruit from the tree of knowledge in the middle of Eden is one of the most interesting and important for all of us. Saint Hildegard summarizes everything related to the consequences of original sin and its transmission using the symbolic image of the loss of spiritual eyes. This explains the most terrible tragedy we live through until we leave this passing, evanescent world: although God and spiritual beings are everywhere, we never see them. There is no drama comparable to the inability to see your Heavenly Father or to not be able to directly know your brothers and sisters in Paradise. Throughout this fleeting life, most of us pray to God, the Holy Virgin Mary, angels, and saints without ever seeing them. That is why God sometimes allows there to be saints who can see them, albeit rarely, in mystical ecstasies: to encourage us through their testimonies.

John Byron Kuhner brilliantly demonstrates how much of a bloviator David Bentley Hart can be: the latter wrote an entire critique of Carl Jung without once quoting any of the Jungian passages that say the exact opposite of what Hart attributes to him. Personally, I found the quotations from Jung quite extraordinary and if you are interested in his “take” on modernity, I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Yes, Jung has his problems, to be sure, but he saw more deeply into most things than do most of our Church leaders at this time.

Here’s a quotation from Jung — not the Gospel, but a lot more wisdom than capitalism or progressivism will provide:

The decisive question for man is: is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as our personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted. In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship.

Can Austen and Dickens be bad for you?

Robert Keim makes a convincing case for the harm that might inadvertently come to a reader who reads exclusively modern literature, rather than maintaining a healthy diet of both modern and ancient literature:

There is such a thing as too much Jane Austen (or too much Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, etc.)…. The problem is that these books have a tendency to . . . make Sacred Scripture—and to a lesser extent, other ancient masterpieces such as the Odyssey and the Aeneid — appear rough, rudimentary, unrefined: in a word, primitive. Furthermore, they may shape our aesthetic sensibilities in such a way as to distance us, emotionally, intellectually, and artistically, from the Bible.

If you regard the Bible as the fundamental sacred text upon which your religion, and therefore your entire worldview, is built, I don’t need to convince you that such distancing is a danger to happiness in this life and the next. But this danger extends beyond the individual believer to society as a whole, because no other book — no other artistic creation of any kind — has so powerfully and thoroughly and profoundly shaped the culture and collective consciousness of the West.

Ascetical beauty

In an extensive and gripping interview, iconographer Aidan Hart — here’s a sample of his work:

— talks about his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy (from a more or less nominal Christianity), and speaks wisely about the nature of sacred art, why it is so crucial for conveying the message of the Gospel. Excerpt:

There is always an ascetic element to the icon: something not hard, but cutting. Beauty alone is ambiguous and has its limits. It can only take us so far, and then God calls us to go through and beyond it. To go back to the burning bush: Moses sees the strange sight of a bush burning without being consumed. Here is an unusual beauty, which is both material and immaterial: an icon, one could say. But Moses does not just say ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ and go on his way. Rather, he draws closer; God sees this, and calls him by name: ‘Moses, Moses.’ Then, ‘Here I am,’ says Moses. They converse and God tells him to do something—quite a big thing, in fact: to lead his people from slavery.

I was a novice monk for twelve years, for some of the time at Mount Athos, and it is hard work: a vigil can last for twelve hours. One is surrounded by beauty, but it is hard graft. One’s legs are aching; once I fell asleep on my feet! God has done everything, yet to become beautiful involves real struggle. If one follows Christ, one could die: for example, I have friends in Russia who suffered in prison for twelve years for the faith. I tell my students of iconography that they should beware: studying iconography is dangerous and will change their lives. God might ask them to do something, or they might decide that they must do something, perhaps something radical. So beauty must have an element of risk in it; it is awesome.

Let the little children come . . .

Haley Baumeister writes beautifully about “The Worthwhile Mess of Living.” Excerpt:

The generative existence of children shatters our illusions of circumventing time, place, and our bodies with unlimited options and control — and instead binds us to these human experiences. By binding us to them, we may rediscover the joyful mess of interdependence. This is a more hopeful and human way to live, which many of us desire. There is a way to re-order our lives and society. In welcoming the children, we all benefit.

For all my readers and subscribers: