A fabulous, 'wonderful things', find by Bill White, at Project Gutenberg.

The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome, by the Rt. Rev. Monsignor Baggs, Bishop of Pella, with a Table of Contents added by the transcriber.

Excerpts from The Liturgical Year by Dom Guéranger

Since 1995 or so, a year or two after I began accessing the internet, newadvent.org has made available much basic information about the Church and the 1917 edition of the the Catholic Encyclopedia is a wonderful source, instantly available. It also has writings of the Church Fathers.

Following is part of the entry for today's saint (in the old calendar, new calendar May 14), St Matthias, the disciple chosen by lot to fill the place of the traitor Judas. E. Jacquier wrote the original article, and Joseph P. Thomas transcribed it for the online edition.

I. The Lenten fast an opportunity for restoring our purity.
II. Lent must be used for removing all our defilements, and of good works there must be no stint.
III. As with the Saviour, so with us, the devil tries to make our very piety its own snare.
IV. The perverse turn even their fasting into sin.
V. Be reasonable and seasonable in your fastingVI. Make your fasting a reality by amendment in your lives

From The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine.
Longmans, Green and Co., New York, 1941.
Translated and adapted from the Latin by Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger.

Amusing and interesting bits of history at Tomasz's blog Pod Boskim berlen - Under God's Sceptre, Cheese is Catholic!.

Excerpts from The Liturgical Year by Dom Guéranger

Catholic Haven has many selections in English from Dom Guéranger's The Liturgical Year.

Philip Blosser teaches at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, North Carolina. [ read the rest of this post ]

Sheila, in The Viewless Wings of Poesy, didn't get to read her Chesterton poetry selection(s).

She mentions some poets whose works were recited in her literature class.

I hope her failure to mention Robert Service was an oversight.

Vatican archeologists believe that they have identified the tomb in Rome´s St Paul Outside the Walls basilica, following the discovery of a stone coffin during excavations carried out over the past three years.

Officials will fly photographs of the restored 'The Adoration of the Christ Child' to Krakow, to compare a fingerprint found on the painting with a fingerprint found on a da Vinci in the Polish city.

Tomasz at Pod Boskim berlem- Under God's sceptre writes on the Ember days.

He has a different entry from The Golden Legend (eight reasons to keep the Ember days fast, rather than the four in the specific Spring Ember days section in my copy), along with differences in the Mass on these days. [ read the rest of this post ]

From The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine.
Longmans, Green and Co., New York, 1941.
Translated and adapted from the Latin by Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger.

Now comes Index Blogorum Prohibitorum, whose purpose is to alert 'readers of Fides, Spes, Caritas blog 'those Catholic weblogs and websites whose content is objectionable'.

How ... quaint. Good ideas never die, despite aggiornamento (updating, the church’s need to renew and update itself through the Second Vatican Council).

Update: the site is now either offline or closed, since the link to the blogspot.com blog is dead.

From The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine.
Longmans, Green and Co., New York, 1941.
Translated and adapted from the Latin by Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger.

The Corpus Thomisticum project aims to provide scholars with a set of instruments of research on Thomas Aquinas, freely available via Internet.

Excerpts from The Liturgical Year by Dom Guéranger

From The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine.
Longmans, Green and Co., New York, 1941.
Translated and adapted from the Latin by Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of men after the fall of Rome. Or their minds.

[F]orest, moor and fen began to invade areas which had been cultivated for centuries as city walls and buildings crumbled and squares and open spaces began to be colonized by grass and saplings.
...
[V]ast tracts of country had become wilderness, increasingly desolate and interrupted only by the ruins of churches, towns and villages. ... [Dead cities] would loom up out of the wasteland or unexpectedly block the path through the forest.
...
In the eleventh century the chronicler of the monastery of Novalesa in the Val di Susa near Turin noted that a donation of estates to the monastery had included the site of a Roman town where a number of Christians had been martyred. According to tradition, so many had been slaughtered and so much blood shed that the stones of a river running through the land had oozed blood at the moment when it was given to the monastery. The martyrs' blood was believed to have remained in the ground, hallowing the spot for ever and destining it for monastic ownership.

Beginning centuries ago, the faithful in Rome during Lent would gather and pray before processing to a particular church for Mass.

The priest would say a prayer, the oratio ad collectam (ad collectionem populi). This prayer is retained in the old rite (pre-Vatican II) during Lent, where daily Masses have prayers over the people after the Postcommunion. Collect, in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

After the prayer, the priest and faithful would go to a church appointed for that day in Lent.

Pope St. Gregory the Great (540 to 604), in his liturgical reform, established a station church for each day of Lent, thus making the whole season a pilgrimage on the path to conversion while preparing for Easter. Station Churches, A Centuries-old Roman Tradition.

St Ambrose says that the term statio came into use in reference to the fast days:

Our fasts are our encampments against the attacks of the devil; they are called stationes because we remain standing [stantes]

From The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine.
Longmans, Green and Co., New York, 1941.
Translated and adapted from the Latin by Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger.