Monday, September 4, 2017

Living Catholic Culture in North Dakota



I have spent years of my life along the US-Canada border.  God's country.  So nice to see these little communities flourishing.  

And so pleased and thrilled to see my relatives serving Mass here in North Dakota!  Bismark has become a little beacon of Catholic culture.  I am beaming with pride to see my nephews learning the Roman rite, in the footsteps of their ancestors.   

I studied in Rome with the priest.  Congratulations to this lovely little community.  And keep up the very fine work of education in this area of sacred liturgy.

In a time when many liturgies - thanks to a deplorable arbitrariness in liturgical practice - do not fulfill the pastoral goal of dignity in the liturgy, here we see a fine example of the best that the Roman rite has to offer.  For Latin rite Catholics, only the Extraordinary Form possesses a mature Christian musical culture.

The liturgical reform brought an irreparable loss of the whole musical art in the liturgy of the Roman rite.

The other rites did not suffer this loss as we did.  Pope Pius X rates the pastoral value of Gregorian chant and polyphony so highly that he dedicated his first papal letter, the Motu proprio, Inter Pastoralis Officii Sollicitudines, Nov. 22, 1903, entirely to the subject of sacred music.  Please, everyone, read this document (the official Vatican site does not have it available in English...so good thing we have taught our kids Latin: http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-x/la/motu_proprio/documents/hf_p-x_motu-proprio_19031122_sollecitudini.html).

See the article on the North Dakota Mass with photos here: 

https://bismarckdiocese.com/documents/2017/8/Sept.2017DCA.pdf

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