Trinity Sunday
Young Adult Get-Together
This summer, we are hosting a young adult get-together. We hope to draw Traditional Catholics from across the country. Visit our event website for more information.
YAG Cincinnati Website
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Congratulations Graduates!
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Daily Sermons
May 31 – Fr. Lehtoranta – Bring Flowers to Queen Mary
June 1 – Bp. Dolan – Saints Mark the Way to Heaven
June 2 – Fr. Lehtoranta – Francisco Marto and Reparation for Sins
June 3 – Bp. Dolan – Fill the Empty
June 5 – Fr. Lehtoranta – The Holy Ghost and the Soul of the Church
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✠ The Bishop’s Corner ✠
What a beautiful Pentecost. Everything seemed, and sounded, picture perfect for these Holy Ghost days of Confirmation and First Holy Communion. I think the crowning touch was the lilies in the cloister garden. They bloomed, pure white for innocence, between Confirmation and Communion. The English call Pentecost Whitsun, White Sunday, for the Baptismal robes the neophytes used to wear. But First Communion is white Sunday as well, isn’t it?
It is customary to extend congratulations for these sacraments, as well as for graduation. But surveying the list, I see how truly are to be congratulated are these young people, and their teachers and parents. The gift of God is free, but how willingly they worked, and how perseveringly, to reach this day. Congratulations! It’s nothing to be taken for granted, and everything to be taken with gratitude.
We are indeed proud of our own St. Gertrude the Great graduates this year, five from grade school and three graduating High School Seniors. We are grateful to all of those who made this happy day possible, and also grateful to our young people for their many contributions both to church and school. God go with you now as you continue to serve Him in your new endeavors.
I was gratified at the many of you who assisted at a Pentecost Mass this week, and brought the little ones as well. The Pentecost Monday turnout was excellent, as is fitting. Did you know that in the Epistle, or Lesson of that day, we have the Holy Ghost instituting Baptism of Desire?
In Acts 10, St. Peter is sent to the house of Cornelius the Centurion, a devout Gentile. As he was preaching, “the Holy Ghost fell on all them that heard the word.” (vs 44) They were unbaptized, but St. Augustine says that they “have remission, justification and penance…They received the Holy Ghost before any Sacrament.” Of course, they were obliged to go on to receive the sacrament, and no one who just dismissed the Sacraments could ever be justified. It’s a big, deep and a complex subject, but I wanted to draw your attention to this incident in Sacred Scripture, truly a kind of institution of the Baptism of Desire, blasphemously denied by the Feenyites. God is not bound, or limited, by the sacraments.
The Feenyites, a curious American heresy, actually paved the way, a generation in advance, for the French Lefebverites. Their theological error, or heresy, is not so much about Baptism as it is about the Church’s teaching authority. Both hold the Catholic Church can teach error, and that some sort of a prophet is required to sort things out, a Fr. Feeny or an Archbishop Lefebvre. But that is why God gave us a pope, if there is one. How much damage has such error caused. The two groups share a common source, and have a sort of a silent partnership, a winking relationship in many a Pius X chapel. Pentecost is the birthday of the infallible Catholic Church. Let us renew our loyalty to the Holy Ghost which preserves her from error, and anathematize all heresy.
The cats were mightily exercised last week against a poor stray kitty who had wandered into their territory, and lapsed into a special cry which almost sounds human, to intimidate the poor thing. Otherwise they are enjoying their Summer so far, as long as the rodent and rabbit food chain holds. Caravaggio dipped into his stock not once but twice for my birthday. Usually he just drops off the offering anywhere, but on the occasion he entered, surveyed the room, and then deposited the hare right in front of my chair. Cats.
We look forward to Fr. Nkamuke’s arrival this evening, and were happy to have all of our Cincinnati priests back to home base for today’s Solemn Mass and graduation.
May the Blessed Trinity dwell in your heart forever,
–Bishop Dolan