The theme of the new issue of StAR is “Outside is the Night: The Wickedness and Snares of the Devil”. Subscribers should be receiving their copies shortly. Although there are indeed strange things in the night that envelopes the world beyond the sanctifying arms of Mother Church, I was reminded this past weekend of the light to be found in the Church and in the hearts of the faithful.
On Friday I flew to Louisville, Kentucky, to give three talks on Catholic civilization and the need for a true education rooted in that civilization. I was hosted by the Immaculata Classical Academy, the educational philosophy and ethos of which is encapsulated in the school’s motto: Pulchrum, Verum, Bonum (Beauty, Truth, Goodness). I had time to get to know the school’s founders and several of the teachers, and was heartened by the sheer quality of the people who offer their lives in the vocation to teach new generations of young people in the tenets of the Faith and the foundations of the civilization that the Faith has built. These wonderful folks and the school that they are running so successfully are candles in the darkness of en evil-infested world. May God continue to bless their holy and heroic efforts.
Yesterday, for the Feast of Christ the King in the Old Calendar, I had the inestimable joy of being present at a solemn choral Mass in the Extraordinary Form at Prince of Peace Catholic church in Taylors, South Carolina, which was followed by a Eucharistic Procession and Benediction. The Mass was a setting of Palestrina’s Missa “Descendit Angelus Domini”. The Prelude was Bach’s Fugue in E Major and the Postlude was Alexndre Guilmant’s Postlude in F Major. After the Blessed Sacrament had been placed in the Tabernacle following Benediction, the cantor, choir and congregation chanted the Christus Vincit.
I was so moved by the sheer majesty and beauty of the whole glorious occasion that my eyes were filled with tears at the Consecration. This is the only Reality that really matters. The rest, all the cares of the world and snares of the devil, are mere dross by comparison. Never before was I as aware that sanity and sanctity are synonymous. They are One. All else is trivia!
Deo gratias!
Mr. Pearce,
It was a great pleasure to have you out to our little school. Everyone enjoyed your talks immensely and are asking when you’ll return. I tell them “ASAP!” God bless your work!
-NJL
I like this quote from Maurice Baring;
“Well, all I have to say, Gilbert, is what I think I have already said to you, and what I have said not long ago in a printed hook. That I was received into the Church on the Eve of Candlemass 1909. and it is perhaps the only act in my Iife which I am quite certain I have never regretted. Every day I live, the Church seems to me inure and more wonderful; the Sacraments more and more solemn and sustaining; the voice or the Church, her liturgy, her rules. her discipline, her ritual, her decisions in matters of Faith and Morals more and more excellent and profoundly wise and true and right, and her children stamped with something that those outside Her are without. There I have found Truth and reality and everything outside Her is to me compared with Her as dust….’