Tuesday, June 02, 2015

Ad Orientem

Towards The Second Coming: Facing the Liturgical East by Dom Daniel Augustine Oppenheimer, CRNJ on May 20, 2015

One should not need to be a Roman-rite traditionalist in order to agree with the argument, if one has any respect for the tradition of the Church Universal.

Ad Orientem is mentioned in this post on "power disparity": Liturgical Polarization: Clerical vs. Lay Power

The author could have elaborated on the priesthood of the faithful and the primacy of charity in holiness; his attempt to give a response to those who support the ordination of women to the priesthood merely sidesteps there objection to the restriction of holy orders to males and does not give a positive defense for it. In general, Latin Catholics are uncomfortable with giving a defense based on sex differences, even if those feminists pushing for women's ordination (or the equal participation of women in all spheres, that is those that matter in terms of authority) are guilty of the apex fallacy, while ignoring those lay Catholic males, those betas.

Of course, this is written by a Latin Catholic.

Babel, Pentecost, and the Universal Church by Steve Skojec

Instead of seeing Pentecost as God uniting people to Himself without requiring uniformity (which is what the men of Babel had in their unity of language and which they perverted in their pride), but rather, bringing about the unity of faith despite a diversity in language (and culture), and thus accomplishing the healing of humanity by turning what was the consequence of sin (the diversity of languages) into a good (diversity as reflecting the mercy and glory of God), Mr. Skojec advocates the use of Latin as the universal language of the Church, never mind that even at the beginning there were non-Latin-speaking churches:
At Pentecost, God did not heal the world of its diverse tongues, but instead superseded them. This first He accomplished through the miraculous preaching of the apostles, whereupon “every man heard them speak in his own tongue.” (Acts 2:6) Later, this supernatural provision was supplanted by a more quotidian mechanism: the embrace of Latin — the dominant language of the world at that time — as the universal, perpetual, and living language of the Church.

Indeed, if we are talking about the early Church, Greek has a greater claim to being the universal language of the Church than Latin.

Dr. Matthew Levering - Romans 1:20 and Our Knowledge of God