A new springtime? →

In a radio broadcast in 1969, Father Joseph Ratzinger famously declared that “from the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.”

The future Cardinal Ratzinger obviously did not have the COVID-19 pandemic in mind when he wrote these words. In fact, he was discussing what he thought the Catholic Church would look like in the year 2000 — 31 years later, and five years before he would take the name Pope Benedict XVI.

Yet here in 2020, his words seem prophetic, in the original sense of the term.

It is finished →

Four weeks ago, when I wrote the first of these “From the Chapel” posts, all of the office workers at OSV had transitioned to working from home, and Mass had come to an end in our chapel. Ten days later, when we decided to close the rest of the facility temporarily, Msgr. Campion removed the host from the tabernacle, and I extinguished the sanctuary light. The chapel has been dark, and the tabernacle empty, ever since.

Today, on Good Friday, Catholic churches around the world have joined our little chapel. In a normal year, the absence of his presence, indicated by the lack of that flickering flame, cuts deep. This year, it is almost unbearably heartbreaking.

Christ in our midst →

At the Easter Vigil, after weeks of Lenten Masses without the Gloria, the priest intones the opening words: “Gloria in excelsis Deo.” Then, as the choir and the rest of the congregation join in, every bell in the church is rung, and, if the church has a bell tower, those bells are tolled, too. The return of the Gloria is a glorious thing (no pun intended), and the ringing of the bells invites all who can hear them, both inside and outside the Church (in both senses of both words), to join in the joy of Christ’s resurrection.

About two weeks ago, I wrote that “In times like these — but not only in times like these — we need more bells in our lives,” to remind us both of our mortality (“It tolls for thee”) but also of our hope in the Resurrection.

Rejoice, Jerusalem →

On Thursday, we passed the midpoint of Lent 2020. The Sunday after the midpoint — today — has long been known as Laetare Sunday, after the first word (in Latin) of the entrance antiphon of Mass for the Fourth Sunday of Lent: “Rejoice, Jerusalem, and all who love her. / Be joyful, all who were in mourning; / exult and be satisfied at her consoling breast.”

Across the United States, and indeed around the world, the rose-colored vestments that we also see on Gaudete Sunday, the Third Sunday of Advent, made their appearance on video rather than in person.

Introibo ad altare Dei →

For many years, I served the Extraordinary Form of the Mass at 6:30 a.m. at St. Mary Oratory in Rockford, Illinois. Only once in that time — in the midst of a terrible winter storm, with 60-mile per hour winds raging outside — did the Mass consist of just myself and Father Brian A.T. Bovee, our priest.

Today, I celebrated my second private Mass. On this Monday of the Third Week of Lent, in the midst of our “social distancing” measures, Monsignor Campion returned to our chapel here at OSV to say Mass — not for my sake, but, as every Mass is, for the sake of all the world.