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Thursday 29 January 2015

Fr. Derek Cross to visit STM for Septuagesima

MUSIC FOR SUNDAY MASS 
SEPTUAGESIMA AT ST. THOMAS MORE, 1:45 p.m.
381 Sherbourne St. at Carlton, Toronto

MASS SETTING 
Communion Service in G Major 
by Francis Jackson

MOTET
Senex Puerum 
by William Byrd

FR. DEREK CROSS, C.O. 
We wish to thank Fr. Derek once again for celebrating and preaching at Sunday Mass. He has been a great supporter of the Ordinariate and we do appreciate his being available on a regular basis.

BALDWIN ACADEMY
We are pleased to announce that Fr. John Sullivan, S.J., the Pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes, has kindly invited BA to use the parish hall there on Thursday afternoons. We very much appreciate the hospitality displayed by our Jesuit neighbours and hope that we may be able to share in furthering the goal of working with home educating families and others. For the time being, STM Choristers, our children’s choir, will continue to meet after school on Thursdays in Scarborough. Check our website and Facebook Page for details.





CHANCERY TO BE BLESSED IN HOUSTON
Fr. John, as a member of the governing council of the POCSP, is attending the blessing and dedication of the new Ordinariate Chancery in Houston. On Monday he will attend a conference on the new Ordinariate Missal which is in its final stages of approval. The missal will contain the normative rites for Ordinariates around the world.

CANDLEMAS
We will not have a celebration of Candlemas this year on the feast day (tomorrow), but if you have candles to be blessed, please bring them forward at the offertory and Royden, our MC, will place them to be blessed as part of our offertory.

EVANGELIUM 
Individual instruction using Evangelium, a catechetical programme for those wanting to be received into full communion, will be offered again during Lent.  Fr. John will be meeting with some people on Thursdays. Others are invited to prepare during Lent for reception and confirmation during the Easter season. Contact Fr. John if interested.

Monday 26 January 2015

Novena for the Presentation of the Lord

Join us in the Novena for OCSP this year

Novena-for-presentation-of-lord

Chancery Blessing in Houston - Sunday, Feb. 1

POCSP Chancery nears completion in Houston

This coming week (Feb. 1 - 2) the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter (POCSP) will celebrate the blessing and dedication of its new Chancery adjacent to Our Lady of Walsingham, Houston, the principal church of POCSP.



Msgr Steenson breaks ground for the POCSP Chancery in Houston

Cloister at O.L. Walsingham, Houston TX 
For those who have asked about the new Ordinariate Missal following is an outline of the upcoming conference in Houston which brings us to the final stages of preparation.

Publication is scheduled for later this year.


Chancery Dedication 
February 1-2, 2015
Our Lady of Walsingham Church 
7809 Shadyvilla Lane, Houston, 
Texas 77055

The Chancery of the Ordinariate, 
7730 Westview Drive, Houston, 
Texas 77055


Sunday, Feb. 1, 2015

11:15 am – Mass in the presence of H.E. William Cardinal Levada, homilist.

4:00 pm – Choral Evensong and Dedication of New Chancery.  Reception follows.

Monday, Feb. 2, 2015 

Conference for clergy, clergy wives, liturgists, music directors, etc., in anticipation of the publication of Divine Worship: The Missal.

 9:00 am: Mass

10:00 am:  Welcome.  Msgr. Steven Lopes, “Introducing the New Missal”

11:30 am: Fr. Timothy Perkins, “The Rubrical Directory”

12:30 pm: Lunch

1:30 pm: Msgr. Kevin Irwin, “Ars Celebrandi in the Ordinariate”

2:30 pm: Br. John-Bede Pauly, OSB, “Singing the Minor Propers”

3:30 pm: Q & A with the Presenters

4:15 pm: Adjourn

5:30 pm: Dinner 

7:30 pm: Public lecture by Msgr. Kevin Irwin, Catholic University of America: 
“A Sacramental Church in a Technological World”

Tuesday 20 January 2015

Houston Chancery of POCSP to be dedicated Feb. 1


The dedication of the Chancery of The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter is scheduled for Sunday, February 1, 2015, at 4 p.m. The Chancery is located behind and adjacent to Our Lady of Walsingham Catholic Church at 7730 Westview Drive in Houston. The dedication will begin with the service of Choral Evensong in the parish.

Earlier that day, Mass will be celebrated at 11:15 a.m. at Our Lady of Walsingham in the presence of His Eminence William Cardinal Levada, who will also officiate at the formal service of dedication.

Our Lady of Walsingham is the principal parish of the Ordinariate, which was established on January 1, 2012, by Pope Benedict XVI as a vehicle for bringing Anglicans and Episcopalians in the United States and Canada into full communion with the Catholic Church. Our Holy Father Pope Francis has embraced and expanded the mission of the Ordinariate to take part fully in the New Evangelization of the Church.

The Ordinariate includes parishes, communities, clergy, and fellowships throughout the United States and Canada, under the leadership of Monsignor Jeffrey Steenson, our Ordinary. Companion Ordinariates were also established by the Holy See in England and in Australia.

For more information, please contact the Ordinariate office at 713 609-9292

Monday 12 January 2015

The Real History of the Crusades


 If you are as tired, as I am, of people insisting that the Crusades are the original cause of Islamist terrorism, you can refer those who say such things to recent scholarship. 

Those who repeat the unexamined prejudices of Bill Clinton and his fellows consider themselves the elite enlightened of humanity [including now - Feb. 5, 2015 - Barack Obama]. They want to shift responsibility for the current horrors of terrorism to the West and to the Church.

The excellent work debunking this revisionist view of history by Dr. Jonathan Riley-Smith of Oxford is summarized in the following article by Dr. Thomas F. Madden which can be read in its entirety at the focusequip blog.



Many historians had been trying for some time to set the record straight on the Crusades – misconceptions are all too common. These historians are not revisionists, but mainstream scholars offering the fruit of several decades of very careful, very serious scholarship. For them, current interest is a "teaching moment," an opportunity to explain the Crusades while people are actually listening. It won't last long, so here goes. 

. . .  I was frequently asked to comment on the fact that the Islamic world has a just grievance against the West. Doesn't the present violence, they persisted, have its roots in the Crusades' brutal and unprovoked attacks against a sophisticated and tolerant Muslim world? In other words, aren't the Crusades really to blame?
. . .  Ex-president Bill Clinton has also fingered the Crusades as the root cause of the present conflict. In a speech at Georgetown University, he recounted (and embellished) a massacre of Jews after the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and informed his audience that the episode was still bitterly remembered in the Middle East. (Why Islamist terrorists should be upset about the killing of Jews was not explained.) Clinton took a beating on the nation's editorial pages for wanting so much to blame the United States that he was willing to reach back to the Middle Ages. Yet no one disputed the ex-president's fundamental premise.

Well, almost no one. Many historians had been trying to set the record straight on the Crusades long before Clinton discovered them. They are not revisionists, like the American historians who manufactured the Enola Gay exhibit, but mainstream scholars offering the fruit of several decades of very careful, very serious scholarship. For them, this is a "teaching moment," an opportunity to explain the Crusades while people are actually listening. It won't last long, so here goes.
Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common. The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization in general. A breed of proto-imperialists, the Crusaders introduced Western aggression to the peaceful Middle East and then deformed the enlightened Muslim culture, leaving it in ruins. For variations on this theme, one need not look far. See, for example, Steven Runciman's famous three-volume epic, History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones. Both are terrible history yet wonderfully entertaining.
So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression – an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.
Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity – and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion – has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.
With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed's death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt – once the most heavily Christian areas in the world – quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.
That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

Pope Urban II called upon the knights of Christendom to push back the conquests of Islam at the Council of Clermont in 1095. The response was tremendous. Many thousands of warriors took the vow of the cross and prepared for war. Why did they do it? The answer to that question has been badly misunderstood. In the wake of the Enlightenment, it was usually asserted that Crusaders were merely lacklands and ne'er-do-wells who took advantage of an opportunity to rob and pillage in a faraway land. The Crusaders' expressed sentiments of piety, self-sacrifice, and love for God were obviously not to be taken seriously. They were only a front for darker designs.
During the past two decades, computer-assisted charter studies have demolished that contrivance. Scholars have discovered that crusading knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly gave up everything to undertake the holy mission. Crusading was not cheap. Even wealthy lords could easily impoverish themselves and their families by joining a Crusade. They did so not because they expected material wealth (which many of them had already) but because they hoped to store up treasure where rust and moth could not corrupt. They were keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a penitential act of charity and love. Europe is littered with thousands of medieval charters attesting to these sentiments, charters in which these men still speak to us today if we will listen. Of course, they were not opposed to capturing booty if it could be had. But the truth is that the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder. A few people got rich, but the vast majority returned with nothing.
Urban II gave the Crusaders two goals, both of which would remain central to the eastern Crusades for centuries. The first was to rescue the Christians of the East. As his successor, Pope Innocent III, later wrote:
How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held by the perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed down by the yoke of heaviest servitude, he does not devote himself to the task of freeing them?… Is it by chance that you do not know that many thousands of Christians are bound in slavery and imprisoned by the Muslims, tortured with innumerable torments?
"Crusading," Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith has rightly argued, was understood as an "an act of love" – in this case, the love of one's neighbor. The Crusade was seen as an errand of mercy to right a terrible wrong. As Pope Innocent III wrote to the Knights Templar, "You carry out in deeds the words of the Gospel, 'Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.'"
The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of Christ. The word crusade is modern. Medieval Crusaders saw themselves as pilgrims, performing acts of righteousness on their way to the Holy Sepulcher. The Crusade indulgence they received was canonically related to the pilgrimage indulgence. This goal was frequently described in feudal terms. When calling the Fifth Crusade in 1215, Innocent III wrote:
Consider most dear sons, consider carefully that if any temporal king was thrown out of his domain and perhaps captured, would he not, when he was restored to his pristine liberty and the time had come for dispensing justice look on his vassals as unfaithful and traitors… unless they had committed not only their property but also their persons to the task of freeing him?… And similarly will not Jesus Christ, the king of kings and lord of lords, whose servant you cannot deny being, who joined your soul to your body, who redeemed you with the Precious Blood… condemn you for the vice of ingratitude and the crime of infidelity if you neglect to help Him?
The reconquest of Jerusalem, therefore, was not colonialism but an act of restoration and an open declaration of one's love of God. Medieval men knew, of course, that God had the power to restore Jerusalem Himself – indeed, He had the power to restore the whole world to His rule. Yet as St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached, His refusal to do so was a blessing to His people:
Again I say, consider the Almighty's goodness and pay heed to His plans of mercy. He puts Himself under obligation to you, or rather feigns to do so, that He can help you to satisfy your obligations toward Himself… I call blessed the generation that can seize an opportunity of such rich indulgence as this.
It is often assumed that the central goal of the Crusades was forced conversion of the Muslim world. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the perspective of medieval Christians, Muslims were the enemies of Christ and His Church. It was the Crusaders' task to defeat and defend against them. That was all. Muslims who lived in Crusader-won territories were generally allowed to retain their property and livelihood, and always their religion. Indeed, throughout the history of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Muslim inhabitants far outnumbered the Catholics. It was not until the 13th century that the Franciscans began conversion efforts among Muslims. But these were mostly unsuccessful and finally abandoned. In any case, such efforts were by peaceful persuasion, not the threat of violence.
The Crusades were wars, so it would be a mistake to characterize them as nothing but piety and good intentions. Like all warfare, the violence was brutal (although not as brutal as modern wars). There were mishaps, blunders, and crimes. These are usually well-remembered today. During the early days of the First Crusade in 1095, a ragtag band of Crusaders led by Count Emicho of Leiningen made its way down the Rhine, robbing and murdering all the Jews they could find. Without success, the local bishops attempted to stop the carnage. In the eyes of these warriors, the Jews, like the Muslims, were the enemies of Christ. Plundering and killing them, then, was no vice. Indeed, they believed it was a righteous deed, since the Jews' money could be used to fund the Crusade to Jerusalem. But they were wrong, and the Church strongly condemned the anti-Jewish attacks.
Fifty years later, when the Second Crusade was gearing up, St. Bernard frequently preached that the Jews were not to be persecuted:
Ask anyone who knows the Sacred Scriptures what he finds foretold of the Jews in the Psalm. "Not for their destruction do I pray," it says. The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered… Under Christian princes they endure a hard captivity, but "they only wait for the time of their deliverance."

When the Crusader County of Edessa fell to the Turks and Kurds in 1144, there was an enormous groundswell of support for a new Crusade in Europe. It was led by two kings, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, and preached by St. Bernard himself. It failed miserably. Most of the Crusaders were killed along the way. Those who made it to Jerusalem only made things worse by attacking Muslim Damascus, which formerly had been a strong ally of the Christians. In the wake of such a disaster, Christians across Europe were forced to accept not only the continued growth of Muslim power but the certainty that God was punishing the West for its sins. Lay piety movements sprouted up throughout Europe, all rooted in the desire to purify Christian society so that it might be worthy of victory in the East.


Crusading in the late twelfth century, therefore, became a total war effort. Every person, no matter how weak or poor, was called to help. Warriors were asked to sacrifice their wealth and, if need be, their lives for the defense of the Christian East. On the home front, all Christians were called to support the Crusades through prayer, fasting, and alms. Yet still the Muslims grew in strength. Saladin, the great unifier, had forged the Muslim Near East into a single entity, all the while preaching jihad against the Christians. In 1187 at the Battle of Hattin, his forces wiped out the combined armies of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem and captured the precious relic of the True Cross. Defenseless, the Christian cities began surrendering one by one, culminating in the surrender of Jerusalem on October 2. Only a tiny handful of ports held out.
. . .  The Renaissance, born from a strange mixture of Roman values, medieval piety, and a unique respect for commerce and entrepreneurialism, had led to other movements like humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Age of Exploration. Even while fighting for its life, Europe was preparing to expand on a global scale. The Protestant Reformation, which rejected the papacy and the doctrine of indulgence, made Crusades unthinkable for many Europeans, thus leaving the fighting to the Catholics. In 1571, a Holy League, which was itself a Crusade, defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. Yet military victories like that remained rare. The Muslim threat was neutralized economically. As Europe grew in wealth and power, the once awesome and sophisticated Turks began to seem backward and pathetic – no longer worth a Crusade. The "Sick Man of Europe" limped along until the 20th century, when he finally expired, leaving behind the present mess of the modern Middle East.
From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of political ideologies. And yet, both the medieval and the modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and all that makes it up. Both are willing to suffer enormous sacrifice, provided that it is in the service of something they hold dear, something greater than themselves. Whether we admire the Crusaders or not, it is a fact that the world we know today would not exist without their efforts. The ancient faith of Christianity, with its respect for women and antipathy toward slavery, not only survived but flourished. Without the Crusades, it might well have followed Zoroastrianism, another of Islam's rivals, into extinction.
Source: Thomas F. Madden. 2002. "The Real History of the Crusades."  Crisis Magazine (20): 4(April). 
Thomas F. Madden is associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of VeniceA Concise History of the CrusadesThe Crusades: The Essential Readings, and coauthor of The Fourth Crusade.
This article is reprinted in the book, Catholic Controversies: Understanding Church Teachings and Events in History, edited by Stephen Gabriel. You can purchase this book from the FOCUS Store.

Thursday 8 January 2015

BAPTISM OF THE LORD – B 2015

                                          

I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

Eastern Christians mark this week the Feast of the Theophany, which celebrates simultaneously the birth of Jesus in the manger, the presentation of Jesus of Nazareth in the Temple, and the Baptism of Jesus, the Christ, in the Jordan River.  

Each story shows the manifestation of the true identity of Jesus Christ the true and cosmic Word (Logos), the Light of World come to redeem creation. 

One of the two kontakion (thematic hymns to be sung at Eastern Rite Morning Prayer) reveals in poetic form the themes of the feast:

Thou hast appeared today 
to the inhabited earth 
and thy light, O Lord, 
has been marked upon us
who with knowledge sing thy praise 
Thou hast come 
Thou art made manifest
The light that no man can approach. 

(translation from Fr. Apostolos Hill’s Cycles of Grace:  
Hymns from the Great Feast, Byzantine Chant in English):
  
The infant Jesus in the manger is the Light that shines into the darkness.  

Jesus, presented to Simeon in the Temple, is the true light that comes to enlighten the human race by replacing all sacrifice with his one full and complete sacrifice made ever present in the Holy Eucharist.  

Jesus, the man who descends into the Jordan River, who is proclaimed by the Father and enfolded by the Spirit, is the beloved Son of God the Father, redeeming us from sin and enlightening the world by baptizing us in the power of the Holy Spirit.

In each of these images, the manifestation of the Light shows itself in the vulnerable humanity that Jesus has assumed for our salvation.  Jesus knows the powerlessness of infancy, the incapacity to communicate our deepest needs and desires.  

Jesus is brought by Mary and Joseph to the Temple, handed over into the hands of Simeon, and then circumcised according to the Law.  He is given over to the Law.  

Likewise, Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River in submission to John’s baptism of repentance. The one born without sin lowers himself to receive a baptism of forgiveness to demonstrate to us what authentic humanity consists of:  forgiveness and self-giving love through the grace and  the power of the Holy Spirit 

What can we do before such a manifestation - we must, with the Magi, worship Jesus and give our entire identity to the Light of the Holy Spirit made manifest in Jesus, the Son of God manifest amongst us and sacramentally incorporating us into his life, the life of the Holy Spirit which brings us into his body, the Church. 

We receive this light in Holy Communion with him and are gradually transformed in the Light by the Holy Spirit through grace and mercy.  This transformation is accomplished by the Holy Spirit through the grace of the Sacraments - the water of Baptism and the Body and Blood of Christ in the Mass (and the other sacraments).

The sacramental life along with our self-giving to others by the power of the Spirit  witnesses to what St. John proclaims is  "the true Light that enlightens everyone." 

Everything that Jesus Christ touches, then, is sanctified, is transformed and transfigured, bathed in holy light not according to what is merely visible in this world but in the eternal Light of God the Holy Spirit. 

Jesus Christ in the depths of his identity is the gift of Light for the world in which we are called to live.  He is the manifestation to us that human power and position is not the true light of the world.  Jesus sends the Holy Spirit to maintain the light of God in our lives. We are immersed, baptized in the Holy Spirit.

True power, true light is bestowed upon the one who hands himself over to live in the life of the Triune God, who is immersed in the light of the Spirit – this is what is means to be truly enlightened. 

We call those so transformed, saints, ones who live in the epiphany of God’s eternal light by the power of the Holy Spirit.