If you haven’t moved over to my new address and subscribed, http://familyfeastandferia.com and subscribed, now is the time to do it! I’m hosting a giveaway of two Trapp Family Books, Around the Year with the Trapp Family and Trapp Family Book of Christmas Songs, both rare gems!
Click here to enter:
My blog has moved to http://familyfeastandferia.com. You will need to update your blog readers and reenter a subscription if you want to receive emails when I post on my site.
Right now I’m offering a rare out-of-print “Cooking for Christ” giveaway, so please come visit!
Thank you for all the years following me at this WordPress.com blog. I’ve been here since 2006 and am finally moving to my own domain name.
You can find me at http://familyfeastandferia.com. Just remove the “wordpress” from the old url.
I still have lots of editing and tweaking to make my new “home” comfortable, but I shall not let the perfectionist hold me back.
Please update all your bookmarks.
I hope to see you in the new site. I have a few giveaways planned to celebrate the upgrade!
God bless,
Jenifer
August 21 (today) marks the hundredth anniversary of the death of Pope St. Pius X, who reigned from 1903 to 1914. When I think of St. Pius X, there are notables from his papacy that come to mind: the changing the age of reception of First Communion from 12 or 14 to the age of reason, around the age of 7 and the issuing of the Motu Proprio Tra le sollecitudini which gave directives on sacred music.This was the first time the pope used the term actuosa participatio (active participation) of the people during the celebration of Mass. The Motu Proprio and his later encyclical E Supremi (On The Restoration Of All Things In Christ) launched the worldwide Liturgical Movement.
Over the years I’ve read many wonderful writers of the Liturgical Movement, such as Dom Gueranger, Virgil Michel, Martin Hellriegel, Gerald Ellard, Justine Ward, Pius Parsch, and Romano Guardini, to name a few. I have been particularly influenced by the female authors such as Mary Reed Newland, Maria von Trapp, Mary Perkins Ryan and Florence Berger who wrote particularly on the living the liturgy in the family. All these authors were working together with St. Pius X’s motto in mind: restoring all things in Christ with the liturgy as the center of all action… (Read the rest at Catholic Culture.)
This feast means a lot to me, because it marks the anniversary of my heart diagnosis. Friday will be one year since I found out that I have a faulty ticker. It is also the date that I made my Total Consecration to Mary when I was in my late teens. I have placed all these concerns in Mary’s hands, and she has kept me close in her mantle, being such a good Queen Mother to me.
I just posted some short thoughts at Catholic Culture:
The Queenship of Mary on August 22nd is a title of Mary that is more difficult to grasp in this more “democratic” era. Most queens around the world are ceremonial and symbolic and do not rule a county. Revisionist history presents most queens as corrupt or power-hungry. The Blessed Virgin Mary as Queen does not fit any of these descriptions.
This is one of the more recent feast days of Mary, established by Pius XII in 1954 for the Universal Church on May 31st. The revision in 1969 of the General Roman Calendar moved it to the eighth or octave day of the solemnity of the Assumption to stress the connectedness of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Assumption and Queenship.
Read the rest at Catholicculture.org:
The month of August has only one solemnity, and it is also a Holy day of Obligation: August 15, the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, body and soul into heaven. This feast has the juxtaposition of being one of the oldest feasts of Mary dating back to the 6th century but also has the most recent declaration of the dogma of Mary’s assumption in 1950.
The feast of the Assumption is closely connected to the other Marian dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Mary was conceived without Original Sin, which we celebrate on December 8. She remained stainless from sin, and so the Assumption is the result or outcome of being sinless. Her body was too pure to remain on earth to decompose, so it was taken up by God to be united with her soul.
The main tradition of the Assumption is that the Blessed Mother died in the presence of most of the Apostles (St. Thomas was missing) and her body was laid in a tomb. Later the apostles brought St. Thomas to see the tomb. It was then they discovered that Mary’s body was gone and the tomb was filled with beautiful and fragrant flowers. Read the rest at Catholic Culture
I’m currently reading Eternity in Time: Christopher Dawson and the Catholic Idea of History edited by Stratford Caldecott and John Morrill. It is a collection of essays by various authors honoring Christopher Dawson’s life and work as a Catholic historian. Throughout the years I have been influenced by Dawson in his vision and purpose of his work. His daughter Christina Scott explains “he was inspired by a single idea, namely, that religion is the soul of a culture, or to put it simply, faith and culture are one…he saw how Western civilization was born from a complete fusion of the Christian faith and a Christian way of life, which came be called Christendom.” (p. 15).
Dawson saw Europe in the Middle Ages as the time this spiritual unity was very closely achieved. Further in the book in the essay Christopher Dawson and the Catholic idea of history, Dermot Quinn explained:
It was…an age in which the implications of spiritual unity were worked out and made manifest in the life of a society. In the secular sphere, ‘a new democratic spirit of brotherhood and social co-operation’ arose, along with growth in communal and corporate activity. In the ecclesiastical sphere, the Church became responsible for education, art, literature, the care of the poor, the comfort of they dying: not institutional obligations but the duties felt by men towards men….But medieval spirituality joyfully embraced the goal of Christian brotherhood…. Separation between faith and life, or between the spiritual and material was avoided, ‘since the two worlds [had] become fused together in the living reality of a practical experience’. Francis made that Augustinian fusion a reality, St Thomas gave it philosophical authority. It was Aquinas who recognized the autonomy of natural reason in epistemology, ethics, and politics, precisely because he recognized the incarnational implications of that autonomy….
This was the medievalism Dawson celebrated: an era and a people transformed by the power of the gospel. Here was no exercise in mere pietas, no lament for lost centuries. The importance of those centuries was ‘not to be found in the external order they created or attempted to create, but in the internal change they brought about in the soul of Western man’. Dawson loved Langland’s great visionary poem Piers Plowman, thinking it ‘the last…most uncompromising expression of the medieval ideal of the unity of religion and culture’. Notice the implication: culture was not swallowed up by religion by was transformed and transcended it, so that Incarnation itself begins to be understood in and through culture, not apart from it. (pp. 80-81)
Now we can’t turn back the clock to try to live as medievalists, but restoring and living a Catholic culture should be our daily aim. And the Liturgy especially through the Liturgical Year is the gift of the Church as the central guide to help us live that Catholic culture…..
My little sister Frances (or affectionately known as “Fuzzy”) is expecting number 5, due in early October. She’s having problems with one of her kidneys again. She has a kidney stone and had a procedure to insert a nephrostomy today.
She was feeling much better earlier in the day, but now there seems to be some complications and they are suspecting a blood clot.
To make it even harder, today is her second son’s (my godson) 6th birthday. I was in the hospital for my son’s 6th birthday, so I know how hard that can tug on a mother’s heart.
Please pray that she can come home soon feeling better with the baby still tucked in safely.
Update 9:00: No blood clot, but pneumonia in the right lung and fluid in the left. She is beginning antibiotics and steroid shot for the baby’s lungs.
Interspersed throughout the Season of the Year (Ordinary Time) are feasts of Our Lord that are not directly connected to the Temporal Cycle, but integrated in the Sanctoral Cycle. There are two cycles within the Liturgical Year, Temporal (or Proper of Time) and Sanctoral. The Temporal Cycle celebrates the mystery of the redemption and takes preeminence over other celebrations outside of the cycle. It is not just composed of the Easter and Christmas cycles of feasts, but the 33 or 34 weeks of Ordinary Time are also an integral part of the Temporal Cycle. The Sanctoral Cycle consists of the feasts of devotion of Our Lord and Our Lady and feasts and memorials of the saints through the year.
The Feast of the Transfiguration on August 6th is an example of this type of feast of Our Lord. The placement of this feast within the Liturgical Year has no relation to any other feasts or seasons. This feast was established early in the East Syrian Church in the 5th century, and then it appeared in the 10th century in the Western church and quickly spread due to the enthusiasm and interest in the Holy Land and the sites related to the events of Jesus’ life. Pope Calixtus III added the feast to the universal calendar in 1457 in gratitude for the victory of the Franciscan monk John Capistran and John Hunyadi of Hungary had over the Turks the preceding year…..Read the rest at Catholic Culture
I can’t believe I omitted one of the biggest categories of e-clutter for me. Want to know that area?
It is Organizational Help.
I am naturally an organized person, but there is always room for improvement, especially when it seems like this is a sinking ship in cleanliness and schoolwork. Years of crisis adds more problems.
And that is the category that is offered most online. It seems everyone needs help in this area. I had so many printables and files in this subject area.
First there are the Planners, whether they be daily, monthly, yearly.
There is the Educational scheduling or lesson plans, whether they are oriented to out-of-the-box curriculum, Charlotte Mason, Classical, generic, Traditional Catholic or the current calendar.
Then there fabulous schedules and planning helps for different subjects: Nature study, Art, etc. History is a big category. There are so many timelines or Book of Centuries interpretations.
Finally there is the area of housecleaning and home management with all the schedule helps and task lists.
Buying or downloading these will not make me more organized. They have to be utilized. The problem I see if I constantly am looking for the perfect planner and schedule and always starting over, the real work at home doesn’t happen. I’m bogged down by the details.
For me, I need to pick one and stick to it. If there are kinks it will take some time to iron it out. Truly there is no perfect planner….because everyone is unique. We have to tweak to find the right thing.
But this is where I try to apply the principle of sticking to something. Unless it is seriously broken, we need to continue with the time and money invested, whether it’s with my planner or curriculum. Next year maybe I will try something new, but I need to be honest. Is the problem with my implementation and NOT the planner or curriculum?
Family in Feast and Feria 