Plenary Indulgences available during Holy Week

BLOGS | APR. 16, 2019

Here are the Plenary Indulgences Available During Holy Week
 

We all have the opportunity for receiving a plenary indulgence each day of Holy Week. Then Easter Octave. Here’s how to gain them for ourselves and loved ones in purgatory.

Joseph Pronechen for National Catholic Register

The plenary indulgences that we can receive on every day of Holy Week actually are of two kinds. Certain ones are specific to Holy Week itself. Certain ones we can actually gain anytime.

They’re listed in the Norms and Grants in the official Manual of Indulgences, fourth edition (1999), the latest and most up-to-date edition of the Manual, or Enchiridion Indulgentiarum, the one that replaces all others.

First, let’s look at the plenary indulgences specific to Holy Week. Next, we’ll look at those also available during Holy Week plus any time of the year. Then we’ll review the basic mandatory conditions that must be fulfilled for any plenary indulgence. Then we’ll check on “extras.”

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Blessed John Henry Newman to be Canonized

Blessed John Henry Newman by Sir John Everett Millais, public domain

by Edward Pentin for NCRegister.com

13 February 2019

Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman is to be canonized following a Vatican announcement on Wednesday that the Pope had formally approved a miracle attributed to his intercession.

The date of the canonization of Blessed John Henry, who will become England's first post-Reformation saint, has not yet been announced, but it is expected to take place later this year. “We are now hoping that it will be sooner rather than later,” Father Harrison said.

The founder of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in England, Cardinal Newman was one of the most prominent converts to the Catholic Church from Anglicanism in the 19th century and was a renowned preacher and theologian. 

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New Gradual Brings ‘Prayer Book English’ to the Mass

Photo: Fr Carl Reid

BLOGS | JAN. 23, 2019

New Gradual Brings ‘Prayer Book English’ to the Mass

Catholic parishes that celebrate Masses in the Ordinary Form can boost their experience of sacral English or congregational chant with the Ordinariate’s new St. Peter Gradual from Newman House Press.

by Peter Jesserer Smith

In 2009, Benedict XVI declared the Anglican patrimony was a “treasure to be shared” throughout the Universal Church and set up three ordinariates (akin to dioceses) directly under the pope himself, to provide a permanent home for this reunited English and Catholic liturgy and tradition in the Latin Church. Ten years later, Benedict XVI’s vision in Anglicanorum Coetibus that the ordinariate would provide a further source of enrichment for Catholic worship in English continues to advance with the publication of The St. Peter Gradual by Fr. Peter Stravinskas’s Newman House Press.

The St. Peter Gradual contains the minor propers for all Sundays, Solemnities, and Feasts of the Lord in modern musical notation. These chants are certain biblical verses that are prayed at different points of the Mass, such as the Introit (Entrance), Gradual (Psalm), Alleluia (or Tract in Lent), Offertory and the Communion, when using Divine Worship: The Missal. But the gradual can also enrich parishes that celebrate the ordinary form of the Roman rite and would welcome either more sacral English in the celebration of the Mass or plainchant settings that their congregations can sing without needing extensive musical training.

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Passion to Evangelize Drives New Ordinariate Catholic Communities

NATION | SEP. 17, 2018

Passion to Evangelize Drives New Ordinariate Catholic Communities
 

Young Catholics, invigorated by the ordinariate's English-Catholic expressions of faith, are actively 'church-planting' and inviting people into their fledgling Catholic communities.

Peter Jesserer Smith

NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- At 22 years old, Sarah Rodeo, a Catholic graduate student at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, is engaged in work more associated with evangelical Protestants than Catholics in the Northeast: building a new church community from the ground up.

Rodeo belongs to the Ordinariate Fellowship of Connecticut, one of the nascent groups that aspire to become an official community-in-formation for the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, a diocesan structure established by Benedict XVI that reunited the Anglican patrimony to the Catholic Church.

The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter is one of three established dioceses under the Holy See that reintegrate the Anglican patrimony with the Catholic Church.  In North America, the ordinariate began with a wave of Anglican and Episcopal communities that entered into full communion with the bishop of Rome.  But the ordinariate is seeing its own communities grow, and new communities develop, through active evangelization built on common prayer, fellowship, hard work and perseverance.

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Altar Rails

Of Altar Rails...

We are grateful to have found a home at St Mary's for many reasons, one which is that St Mary's is one of the few parishes in the area to have retained its altar rail following the liturgical reforms which came in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. The removal of these rails was not mandated (nor even envisioned) in these reforms, and now there seems to be a growing movement to restore the rails. There was a piece about the movement this week in the National Catholic Register:

In many parishes, a once-standard sanctuary staple is making a comeback: the altar rail.

“Having an altar rail has really brought back a sense of reverence,” said Laurie Biszko, a parishioner at Holy Ghost Catholic Church in Tiverton, Rhode Island.

Receiving Communion this way, she said, “You have a chance to focus, make an act of contrition, make an offering, and think about what’s going on. It contributes to making this a much more holy occasion.”

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