Owing to certain circumstances ABS was required to fulfill his Sunday Obligation at the local Novus Ordo Parish - St Rita's in Wellington, Florida.
The liturgical Presider made a point - at least twice - that the Mass is not mine, he said, and it is not yours, he said; the Mass is ours.
Well, no, the Mass is not about either the Presider or the congregation; it is the action of Jesus, who is both Priest and Victim, acting through His priesthood, in the unbloody recapitulation of the Salvific Sacrifice on Calvary.
But, that is the orientation of the new rite; it is about the Presider and the congregation and Jesus has had to decrease so they could increase.
The presider talked about the readings for the day, the healing of the daughter of Jairus and the women who was healed of her blood issue of a dozen years; There his no connection between these two stories.
Some might have seen a connection existing owing to the two miracles of Jesus in each instance...
The Presider went on to decry how much fear has riven and driven all of us this past year and he recommended that we trust in Jesus and banish fear.
The Presider also talked about how Jesus sweated blood in the garden because He was fearful of death -yes, that is apparently what has been taught in seminaries for who knows how long?
What does the Exegesis of Catena Aurea have to teach about that?
HILARY. These words, He began to be sorrowful and very heavy, are interpreted by heretics that fear of death assailed the Son of God, being (as they allege) neither begotten from eternity, nor existing in the Father’s infinite substance, but produced out of nothing by Him who created all things; and that hence He was liable to anguish of grief, and fear of death. And He who can fear death can also die; and He who can die, though He shall exist after death, yet is not eternal through Him who begot Him in past time. Had these faith to receive the Gospels, they would know that the Word was in the beginning God, and from the beginning with God, and that the eternity of Him who begets and Him who is begotten is one and the same. But if the assumption of flesh infected with its natural infirmity the virtue of that incorruptible substance, so that it became subject to pain, and shrinking from death, it would also become thereby liable to corruption, and thus its immortality being changed into fear, that which is in it is capable of at some time ceasing to be. But God ever is without measure of time, and such as He is, He continues to be eternally. Nothing then in God can die, nor can God have any fear springing out of Himself.
JEROME. (non. occ.) But we say that passible man was so taken by God the Son, that His Deity remained impassible. Indeed the Son of God suffered, not by imputation but actually, all that Scripture testifies, in respect of that part of Him which could suffer, viz. in respect of the substance that He had taken on Him.
HILARY. (de Trin. x. 10.) I suppose that there are some who offer here no other cause of His fear than His passion and death. I ask those who think thus, whether it stands with reason that He should have feared to die, who banished from the Apostles all fear of death, and exhorted them to the glory of martyrdom? How can we suppose Him to have felt pain and grief in the sacrament of death, who rewards with life those who die for Him? And what pangs of death could He fear, who came to death of the free choice of His own power? And if His Passion was to do Him honour, how could the fear of His Passion make Him sorrowful?
HILARY. (in loc.) Since then we read that the Lord was sorrowful, let us discover the causes of His agony. He had forewarned them all that they would be offended, and Peter that he would thrice deny his Lord; and taking him and James and John, He began to be sorrowful. Therefore He was not sorrowful till He took them, but all His fear began after He had taken them; so that His agony was not for Himself, but for them whom He had taken.
JEROME. The Lord therefore sorrowed not from fear of suffering, for for this cause He had come that He should suffer, and had rebuked Peter for his fearfulness; (Matt. 14:31.) but for the wretched Judas, for the offence of the rest of the Apostles, for the rejection and reprobation of the Jewish nation, and the overthrow of unhappy Jerusalem.
DAMASCENE. (Fid. Orth. iii. 23.) Or otherwise; All things which have not yet been brought into existence by their Maker have a natural desire of existence, and naturally shun non-existence. God the Word then, having been made Man, had this desire, through which He desired food, drink, and sleep, by which life is supported, and naturally used them, and contrariwise shunned the things that are destructive of life. Hence in the season of His Passion which He endured voluntarily, He had the natural fear and sorrow for death. For there is a natural fear wherewith the soul shrinks from separation from the body, by reason of that close sympathy implanted from the first by the Maker of all things.
JEROME. Our Lord therefore sorrowed to prove the reality of the Man which He had taken upon Him; but that passion might bear no sway in His mind, He began to be sorrowful by pro-passion;s for it is one thing to be sorrowful, and another to be very sorrowful.
REMIGIUS. By this place are overthrown the Manichæans, who said that He took an unreal body; and those also who said that He had not a real soul, but His Divinity in place of a soul1
AUGUSTINE. (Lib. 83. Quæst. q. 80.) We have the narratives of the Evangelists, by which we know that Christ was both born of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was seized by the Jews, scourged, crucified, put to death, and buried in a tomb, all which cannot be supposed to have taken place without a body, and not even the maddest will say that these things are to be understood figuratively, when they are told by men who wrote what they remembered to have happened. These then are witnesses that He had a body, as those affections which cannot be without mind prove Him to have had a mind, and which we read in the accounts of the same Evangelists, that Jesus wondered, was angry, was sorrowful.
AUGUSTINE. (de. Civ. Dei, xiv. 9.) Since then these things are related in the Evangelists, they are not surely false, but as when He willed He became Man, so likewise when He willed He took into His human soul these passions for the sake of adding assurance to the dispensation. We indeed have these passions by reason of the weakness of our human nature; not so the Lord Jesus, whose weakness was of power.
DAMASCENE. (Fid. Orth. iii. 20.) Wherefore the passions of our nature were in Christ both by nature and beyond nature. By nature, because He left His flesh to suffer the things incidental to it; beyond nature, because these natural emotions did not in Him precede the will. For in Christ nothing befel of compulsion, but all was voluntary; with His will He hungered, with His will He feared, or was sorrowful. Here His sorrow is declared, Then saith he unto them, My soul is sorrowful even unto death.
AMBROSE. (ill. Luc. 22:43.) He is sorrowful, yet not Himself, but His soul; not His Wisdom, not His divine Substance, but His soul, for He took upon Him my soul, and my body.
JEROME. He is sorrowful not because of death, but unto death, until He has set the Apostles free by His Passion. Let those who imagine Jesus to have taken an irrational soul, say how it is that He is thus sorrowful, and knows the season of His sorrow, for though the brute animals have sorrow, yet they know neither the causes of it, nor the time for which it must endure.
ORIGEN. Or otherwise; My soul is sorrowful even unto death; as much as to say, Sorrow is begun in me, but not to endure for ever, but only till the hour of death; that when I shall die for sin, I shall die also to all sorrow, whose beginnings only are in me. Tarry ye here, and watch with me; as much as to say, The rest I bade sit yonder as weak, removing them from this struggle; but you I have brought hither as being stronger, that ye may toil with me in watching and prayer. But abide you here, that every man may stay in his own rank and station; since all grace, however great, has its superior.
The poor Presider was prolly taught this in a modern seminary and he is just repeating what he was taught.
Sadly, he did not have the intellectual curiosity, or the sensus catholicus, to search out the exegesis of Tradition.
He then went on to caution those who had taken the jab twice to be very cautious because there are no guarantees...and then he put on a mask to consecrate the sacred species because, O, who knows, maybe Jesus has covid?
The music was, as anticipated, lifted from some peppy evangelical sources prolly the sort of stuff one could hear on the local "christian radio" networks.
Lord have mercy, the Lil' Licit Liturgy results in an entirely here and now atmosphere.
There was very loud talking prior to the liturgy and there was applause after the celebrant's homily....
