Opening Address Welcome to Bloom’s Daily Offering for Monday, December 22, 2025. Today is a feria of the fourth week of Advent, second class, and the vestments are violet. There is no feast, no saint, no commemoration, and not one word in today’s Mass that was not said yesterday. So the whole morning belongs to […]
Tag Archives: daily offering
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Dec
Opening Address Every valley shall be filled. That line arrives late this morning, at the very end of a long stretch of reading, and by the time it comes you have already sat through five prophecies and an Epistle. This is the Ember Saturday of Advent, the last of the three Ember Days that fall […]
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Dec
Dec
Opening Address Friday of the Ember week in Advent, and the Church puts two arrivals in front of us before it says anything else. Isaias promises a shoot coming up out of a stump somebody cut down. Luke sends a young woman up into the hill country in a hurry, and when she gets where […]
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Dec
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Opening Address Bloom’s Daily Offering for Thursday, and the Lesson ends this morning on a sentence that asks nothing of you at all—a peace which surpasseth all understanding. This is the Feria V after the Third Sunday of Advent, second class, and the vestments are violet. There is no saint on the calendar, nothing displaced, […]
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Opening Address Advent has been running one formulary for days at a time, and this morning it stops and does something it does not do in any ordinary week. Two Lessons are read instead of one, each with its own Collect and its own Gradual, and the second of them ends with a sentence the […]
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Dec
Dec
Opening Address Advent goes violet for most of a month, and this morning a martyr’s red is laid across it for one day. The Church keeps St. Eusebius of Vercelli, a bishop who spent years of his life in exile a long way from the city he was given, and the Lesson it hands him […]
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Opening Address Bloom’s Daily Offering for Monday, and the Gospel this morning is a short interview in which the interesting question comes last—what sayest thou of thyself. This is the Feria II after the Third Sunday of Advent, third class, and the vestments are violet again. Yesterday they were rose for one morning; today the […]
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Oppening Address Today the Church keeps St. Lucy, and the first thing worth saying about her Mass is that almost none of it is hers. The Introit is a psalm written for a king. The Lesson is Paul writing to Corinth about his own credentials. The Gospel is the one the Church reads over half […]
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Opening Address Bloom’s Daily Offering for Friday, and the Lesson ends this morning the way it ended on Sunday and twice since: with a prayer that you may abound in hope. Not hold on to some. Not keep enough to be going on with. Abound. This is the Feria VI after the Second Sunday of […]
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Dec
Dec
Opening Address Feed my sheep. That is the whole of the order given in this morning’s Mass, and it is given three times before the Lesson has even begun. Today is white, in the middle of a violet fortnight, for a bishop of Rome who died on this day in 384. The Mass itself is […]