The TLM was offered this morning for you and your benefactors, as well as those souls in purgatory for whom you and your benefactors pray.
I was struck, so to speak, by the Collect for Tuesday of the Second week in Lent:
“Mercifully perfect within us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the aid given us by this holy observance: that what by Thine instruction we know we should do, by Thine assistance we may do it.”
This, combined with the encouragement from the Introit:
I have been seeking His face, and thus His Light and His Truth for all of my adult life… conversion after conversion, sacrifice after sacrifice, and each time the blessings far outweigh the losses. Now, after I thought my soul had found rest from the errors of the enemy, and that I could seek Him in peace within the safety and stability of the Catholic Church, I find that I am being drawn, or driven, into a wilderness that exists within the Church herself. I know that our Lord can make the desert blossom… as you may be finding where you are now. I know that when Truth has instructed me in the past I have been assisted by His grace to do what I know to be His will.
Here I go again, Lord help me.
As you know, I have, with some difficulty, learned the true Mass of the Ages. In addition, I have with some effort begun to think, act and speak like a Catholic because I have taken the time to read more of that which should have formed my thinking in seminary. The further I travel down this uncommon back-road, the more I find myself attracted to the wilderness that is growing up on every side of me. There are, in fact, blossoms here. And springs. He will care for me here, I know. I will fear no evil, as per the Introit.
The Holy and August Sacrifice of the Mass in the Venerable Gregorian Rite, being offered at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Munster, Germany, ARSH 1946. Perhaps someday we will live in a world in which the Church is as strong, healthy and resplendent as it was in this photograph.