Laudetur Iesus Christus! Greetings on this 3rd day in the Octave of Pentecost and during the Whit Embertide week. As you may recall, the Ember Days are when the Church traditionally devoted 3 days (Wednesday, Friday & Saturday) each season to prayer and fasting & partial abstinence (now optional) to give thanks to God for His creation and growth in holiness the upcoming season.
The traditional Latin Mass calendar has many feasts and customs devoted to the land, agriculture and creation which are worth exploring sometime. The summertime Ember Days which we commemorate this week falls during the week of Pentecost. If you do consider fasting & partial abstinence for the Ember Days, please consider offering it up for our priests, Bishops, and those who will be ordained in our diocese later this summer. As usual Fisheaters.com has a great summary which you can read here: http://www.fisheaters.com/emberdays.html
Ember Week Masses in Charlotte (note Friday cancellations)
Wednesday June 3: 6pm Low Mass St. Ann parish; 7pm High Mass, St. Thomas Aquinas parish (with chant and polyphony)
1st Friday June 5: Sadly, there are no Latin Masses scheduled for 1st Friday. St. Ann and St. Mark have cancelled their Friday Latin Masses for this week
1st Saturday June 6: St. Thomas Aquinas, 10am High Mass (with chant and polyphony)
No Latin Mass at Sacred Heart or St. Michael parishes
As noted last week, there will be no 1st Sunday Latin Mass at Sacred Heart for June. The Latin Mass at St. Michael is also on hiatus for the time being.
New Sunday Latin Mass in Diocese
We are pleased to share that St. Elizabeth of the Hill Country parish in Boone, NC has just announced it is adding an 11:00AM Sunday High Mass effective immediately. It also has added a Thursday morning Mass in addition to Tuesday, Friday & First Saturday. St. Elizabeth has quickly overtaken St. Ann in offering the most Latin Masses each week in the diocese. If you’re thinking of vacationing in the mountains (or moving there permanently after all the craziness this year) please stop by their new webpage at: https://www.saintecc.org/
Other news
The Separation of Church & state is incompatible with the Catholic faith: Exorcist & Theologian Fr. Chad Ripperger (who offers the Latin Mass exclusively) has republished his article on why the legal principle of separation of Church and state is unjust and is condemned by the Church. This is especially helpful to know when governments continue to try and exert authority over the Catholic Church during COVID-19 regulations. We encourage you to learn the unchanging teaching of the Church:
http://sensustraditionis.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Ascendancy.pdf
Errors in Vatican II must be corrected: Bishop Athanasius Schneider has penned a great piece on how Vatican II’s document on religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, contains erroneous statements that should be corrected as these statements currently promote false teachings and theories that divert from the traditional teachings such as “God wills the diversity of religions”. He also addresses how other ecumenical councils (besides Vatican II) have contained errors that the Church had to later correct:
Modernism & COVID-19 are part of the same brand: Archbishop Viganò has published an interesting letter to cloistered nuns in which he compares the reasoning used to support the COVID-19 lockdown protocols to that of the modernist prelates who tried suppress the Traditional Latin Mass after Vatican II and insisted this was “the new normal”. He encourages the faithful to be informed and reject these false narratives as the Latin Mass proponents did in the 1970s and 1980s.
“If we have not understood the causal relationship between Vatican II and its logical and necessary consequences over the course of the last sixty years, it will not be possible to steer the rudder of the Church back to the direction given it by her Divine Helmsman, the course that it maintained for two thousand years. For decades they catechized us with the hateful phrase “there is no going back” with regard to the Liturgy, the Faith, moral teaching, penance, asceticism.
Today we hear the same expressions slavishly repeated in the civil sphere, through which the attempt is made to indoctrinate the masses that “nothing will be as it was before.” Modernism and Covid-19 are part of the same brand, and for anyone who has their gaze towards the transcendent it is not difficult to understand that the greatest fear of those who want us to believe that the race towards the abyss is both unavoidable and unstoppable is that we will not believe them, ignore them, and unmask their conspiracy.” – Abp. Viganò
Let us be thankful for the faithful Catholics who in the 1970s and 1980s – including some here in Charlotte – refused to believe the narrative that the Traditional Latin Mass was dead and instead fought for its restoration, and have handed it down to our generation. This is a story worth publishing sometime.
Charlotte Latin Mass Community 