Opening Address Good morning, and welcome. Today is Friday, the twenty-first of November, and the Church keeps the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, third class, in white. The day the temporal calendar names is the Friday after the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost, and that feria is not commemorated at all. There is no other […]
Category Archives: Liturgy & Prayer
The prayer stream of Today, in Bloom.
20
Nov
Nov
Opening Address Fear not, little flock, for it hath pleased your Father to give you a kingdom. That is the first thing said this morning, and everything else in the passage comes after it. Beloved, grace and peace to you, however you arrive at this hour: rested or worn through, praying easily or not praying […]
19
Nov
Nov
Opening Address Give her of the fruit of her hands: and let her works praise her in the gates. That is the last line of a twenty-two verse poem, and it is not addressed to her. It is an instruction to everybody else in the room. Beloved, grace and peace to you, however you come […]
18
Nov
Nov
Opening Address Good morning, and grace and peace to you. Today’s Gradual says six words about the room you are standing in, whatever room that is: this place was made by God. It says it about a Roman basilica and it says it about a borrowed upstairs room with a kettle in the corner, in […]
17
Nov
Nov
Opening Address The mountain is the part everybody remembers. Three verses of Mark, a mountain thrown into the sea, and a promise about prayer so large that most of us have quietly filed it under things the Church says on a good day. What hardly anybody stops on is the sentence that arrives before any […]
16
Nov
Nov
Opening Address Bloom’s Sunday Mass, and the Church opens this one by telling you what God is thinking about you: I think thoughts of peace, and not of affliction. We offer this Mass in the Independent Catholic tradition—not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, but standing in the same Roman Rite, held […]
15
Nov
Nov
Opening Address Today the Church keeps Albert the Great, and the Mass she gives him is the Mass of a Doctor. The Collect asks that we follow the path of his teaching. The Introit says a man’s mouth was opened in the middle of the assembly and that he was filled and clothed for the […]
14
Nov
Nov
Opening Address Friday, the fourteenth of November. Today the Church keeps St. Josaphat, Bishop and Martyr, and hands him a Lesson that makes a strange claim about who is fit to stand at an altar: a high priest can deal gently with people who are ignorant and who go wrong for exactly one stated reason, […]
13
Nov
Nov
Opening Address Good morning, and welcome to the Daily Offering for Thursday, the thirteenth of November. Today is a fourth-class feria, green, the fifth weekday after the twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, and it has no feast of its own. It takes that Sunday’s Mass entire, with one commemoration laid over it: St. Didacus, a Franciscan […]
12
Nov
Nov
Opening Address The Church has one instruction for a shepherd, and today it gives that instruction three times before the homily starts. Feed my lambs, feed my sheep, says the Introit. Feed the flock of God which is among you, says the Epistle, not by constraint, but willingly. Three imperatives and one adverb, and the […]