Fr Ray in England is priest at an old Catholic Church in Brighton and considers whether to use the high altar and celebrate mass ad orientem. He decides not to because his diocesan authorities would never allow it. Now this confuses me. I am no liturgical scholar, nor I am a canon lawyer, but are there actually instructions anywhere that mandate the versus poplulum position for saying Mass? I’m really asking those of you who know more than I do about... Read more

Charges of racism have been thrown around in the comment box and it caused me to ponder the matter more deeply. Is it possible to criticize our President elect without being racist? Let’s put it the other way around and ask whether it is possible to be pleased with his election without being racist. It seems to me that one might be either critical of Obama or uncritical of Obama because of racism. In one instance I might be critical... Read more

My post on our new President elect has elicited an awful lot of comments. I’ve found some of the comments of those who agree with me to be pretty creepy. They compare the new president to Hitler and go over the top with hints of secret movers and shakers and Illuminati and sound crazily conspiratorial. Oooh! Scary! He might even be a vampire! However, the most spooky ones are those who take me to task–not over the veracity of anything... Read more

What is it, from a priest’s point of view that I love about celebrating the Mass ad orientem?  A number of things: 1. I no longer have to worry about being in ‘performance mode’. When I am facing the people, no matter how much I try, I am looking more at them and focussing more on them as ‘audience’ than I am on what I am doing at the altar. I am concerned therefore about what I look like. Is... Read more

Educate yourself about the history of Catholicism’s mother church and the cathedral church of the Bishop of Rome here. There is so much that can be said about the image of the temple in the Scriptures. We are called to be temples of the Holy Spirit, all of us are living stones built up into God’s temple. The church is a temple built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.  Is there a theology of architecture? Check out these... Read more

Click on the picture to enlarge. Fr Ray has more pictures and a video tour here. Read more

Two photographs of the Ad Orientem celebration of Mass at St Mary’s, Greenville. More photos of the whole Mass here. For Fr Newman’s parish catechesis on the ad orientem position, click here. Read more

From time to time I think I will pack in the blog. Quit. Pack up the old blogger and put my tapping fingers to my other projects. Then I get comments and emails: “Please don’t pack up the blogging Father!” Or I meet people at a conference or in a parish, “Oh you’re Father Longenecker! I read your blog everyday. I love it. Keep up the good work!” Even better, I get an email, “Father, I’m a Protestant, and I’ve... Read more

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.  In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his... Read more

Another question from RCIA: the old Protestant challenge: “Jesus says, ‘Call no man Father.’ Why do Catholics call their priest ‘father’ and the Pope ‘the Holy Father.’ This challenge usually flummoxes the ordinary Catholic. Sometimes he’s bewildered because he really doesn’t know his Bible that well and he’s confused. But he’s also bewildered because he hasn’t been taught to read the Bible in such a literal way. Now we can give this a serious answer, and perhaps we should. We... Read more