The International House of Pancakes (IHOP) restaurant chain is offering a free short stack of pancakes today, between 7 a.m. and 2 p.m. I assume that's local time. I won't be joining in, only because for one day back in college, I was a busboy at an IHOP, and from cleaning up those customers' messes, have lost any interest whatsoever in eating pancakes.

For Shrove Tuesday information, see Shrovetide (raw herring in oil?, now that sounds tasty), Shrove Tuesday traditions (which has two interesting images, one of penitents making their confessions and the other of a pancake race), Shrove Tuesday today! and Absolutely Perfect! Be careful which IHOP you show up at, because the Seething Midwest Explodes Over Lombardi Cartoons.

Someone visited this blog through the technorati search: Pristas and latin, which lead me to this blog in Dutch: Ad mentem Sancti Thomae Aquinatis. Using technorati search myself, I came across this one in Portuguese: A Casa de Sarto, which links to a number of fine blogs.

The Guardian reports on an 'exquisitely carved limestone figure of [the Archangel Gabriel from before the Norman Conquest] ... discovered under the nave of Lichfield Cathedral', and from the original church, predating the present cathedral. Much of the original surface painting is intact. See the article with an image at Archangel sculpture rises from Lichfield nave. Quoting from Maev Kennedy's article:

Britain's heritage of Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical art and architecture was almost obliterated by the scale and splendour of the Norman rebuilding, and the firestorm of later iconoclasts. Much of what painted decoration survived then fell to the renovating Victorians, and the fallacy that historic churches should have pure bleached stone interiors ...

Most carvings that survived the changing fashions were destroyed during the waves of image smashing following Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and the many subsequent religious upheavals. Angels in particular were often targeted, and hands and heads destroyed if there was no time to smash the entire figure.

Thanks, one more time, to Christine's mirabilus.ca, this time for Archangel sculpture rises from Lichfield nave.

So ends Prof Philip Blosser's post Fr. James McLucas on the MOTIVES for restoring the Mass of Pius V.

The post discusses Fr James McLucas' editorial in the Winter 2006 issue of The Latin Mass magazine, which returns to the question 'why the traditional Latin Mass?''.

Fr McLucas refers to two essays by Dr Lauren Pristas, one in The Thomist, the other in Nova et Vetera.

Commenting on the first article, Fr McLucas suggests that the amnesia inflicted after the Council extends to the Latin texts. Prf Blosser quotes from The Latin Mass:

[I]it [sic] may be the case that all the texts of our missal [the Missal of paul VI] reflect the strengths and weaknesses the insights and biases, the achievements and the limitations of but one age, our own.... If this is indeed so, then Catholics of today, in spite of the access made possible by vernacular celebrations, have far less liturgical exposure to the wisdom of our past and the wondrous diversity of Catholic experience and tradition than did the Catholics of earlier generations.

The second article 'offers an analysis comparing the vocabulary and theological content of the original Latin texts of the 1970 Pauline Missal [for the Advent Sundays] with those of the 1962 Missal of Pius V' (emphasis supplied). Note that this is not an examination of the dreadful American English version heard by essentially every layman, but the approved, official Latin.

Prof Blosser provides these excerpts of Dr Pristas' conclusions:

[The Paul VI Missal] is not the revival of either a Roman or non-Roman Latin liturtical [sic] tradition that fell into disuse over the centuries, but something essentially new....

In these four [collects for Advent Sundays], however, we discern a markedly different presentation of our spiritual situation and the way in which God involves himself with us. If the 1970 collects bring to mind the psalmist's petition "give success to the work of our hands," the 1962 collects remind us of Augustine's graced realization that God is more intimate to each of us than we are to ourselves.

These are not inconsequential changes... [T]he anthropological shift that we see in the new Advent prayers toward what might be described as a more capable human person is not nearly so arresting as the corresponding theological shift according to which God's dealings with us are less direct and more extrinsic....

Prof Blosser rightly infers that the worship supported and encouraged by these prayers

is often more about the worshippers than the One Who is to be worshipped. For nearly fourty [sic] years, says McLucas, millions of the Church's children have protested that their Catholic sensibilities have felt violated by post-conciliar liturgical rites -- only to be told that their disquiet was a figment of their antiquated imaginations. However, candid academic research is destroying the myth that Catholics who favor traditional liturgy as [sic] simply neurotic nostalgics.

The entire post is worth examining.

It was inevitable. Just as traditional vestments become so popular that they have to go on back order, and small neo-Catholic family size destines them to extinction, now that the Donegal Express blog is a finalist for the Catholic Blog Awards, the awards site goes off line.

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The best reason to vote for him is not that the success of the SSPX talks hangs by a thread, it's because he can write a post with the title It’s a UNIX system! I know this! – Lex Murphy.

The Una Voce America Northeastern Regional Conference 2005 blog announced on Monday, February 13, 2006, that audio tapes and a DVD of the Braga Rite Mass are now available: the blog post is Order Conference Tapes - DVDs. I see only the one DVD, of the Mass and Bp Rifan's talk, so maybe they're planning more. Maybe His Excellency playing the accordion? I assume Mr Maynard's jokes are on one of the audio tapes.

Mr Fitzpatrick's post, Blessed Anna Catherine Emmerich, points to an e-text edition of The Dolorous Passion. Another place to obtain it is at manybooks.net, which has it in several formats, including .pdf, Doc and iPod Notes. Download it from manybooks.net here.