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David Sonnier, a 1981 West Point graduate, loved the Army and worked to be a model soldier. A bend in his career path brought him into contact for the first time with the traditional Mass. His life, with that of his family, was changed forever—something quite a few Catholics can relate to! Naturally, he wanted to share this great good with fellow soldiers, many of whom, as he di...

Here is another big win for the YouTube suggestion algorithm, a motet by Palestrina which has the first two verses of the epistle of Corpus Christi (1 Corinthians 11, 23-29) as its text. For simplicity’s sake, I have titled this post “for Corpus Christi”. But our friend Thomas Neal, who is an expert on Palestrina, tells me that the exact occasion for which it was composed is unk...

Today is the feast of St Norbert, the founder of the Premonstratensian Order, who died in 1134 as archbishop of Magdeburg, in the modern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, and was buried in the choir of his order’s local church. The city was one of the first to turn Protestant in the 16th-century, and although the Saint’s relics were not profaned, as were those of so many others, it...

When Pope Urban IV promulgated the feast of Corpus Christi in 1264, he also offered a complete set of Mass and Office texts composed at his behest by St Thomas Aquinas. These are rightly recognized to be among the finest of the High Middle Ages, and have been treasured by Catholics as the official liturgical expression of Eucharistic devotion for many centuries. However, the fea...

Having surveyed the Offertory Rite in the 1962 Roman Missal and its theological rationale last week, we turn now to the Offertory Rite in the 1970 Roman Missal. Modern Revision Several liturgists of the twentieth century were either unaware or unimpressed with the explanations offered in our last post. They deplored the Offertory’s sacrificial language, its alleged clericaliza...