Godwin Xuereb

“Most High, glorious God, enlighten the shadows of my heart, and grant me a right faith, a certain hope and perfect charity, sense and understanding, Lord, so that I may accomplish your holy and true command. Amen.” Saint Francis of Assisi. “I plead with you! Never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.” Saint John Paul II. This Blog covers, in particular, Orthodoxy, Catholicism, the papacy and the Order of Saint John.

Friday, April 25, 2014

Cardinal Ratzinger on the Novus Ordo Missae

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Ratzinger celebrating the Tridentine Mass in Wigratzbad, Germany in 1990.

The liturgical reform, in its concrete realization, has distanced itself even more from its origin. The result has not been a reanimation, but devastation. In place of the liturgy, fruit of a continual development, they have placed a fabricated liturgy. They have deserted a vital process of growth and becoming in order to substitute a fabrication.They did not want to continue the development, the organic maturing of something living through the centuries, and they replaced it, in the manner of technical production, by a fabrication, a banal product of the moment.

(Revue Theologisches, Vol. 20, Feb. 1990, pp. 103-104)

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Cardinal Ratzinger on Ecumenical Councils

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“Not every valid council in the history of the Church has been a fruitful one; in the last analysis many of them have been just a waste of time,” ...

“The last word about the historical value of Vatican Council II has yet to be spoken.”

Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1987), p. 378.