Kwasniewski breaks down exactly how we got to this self-indulging and self-destructive point in the Church as well as establishes the foundations for genuine worship that is laid out in tradition.

One of the most damming perspectives that puts shame to the entire Novus Ordo enterprise is that The Mass is guided by the Holy Spirit*,* as shown in John 16:13 when Christ says

But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; He will speak only what He hears, and He will tell you what is yet to come.

Therefore, any drastic or sudden changes, restrictions, admissions, abandonments and mutilations is undoubtedly against the Holy Spirit and His guiding power, even if instituted by a Pope.

The Once and Future Roman Rite is a must-read for Catholics who have been newly introduced to the Roman Rite. When one hears of the Vatican instituting restrictions on the Latin Mass, when one hears scoffs and pompous remarks by the Novus Ordo against Latin Mass communities, when one sees the liturgical abuses and ill-will of modernist reformers - anger is the only feeling that comes to mind.

Perhaps anger is necessary. It is difficult to comprehend that this beauty of tradition was so hastily and unanimously thrown out, and replaced by something so dull and impersonal. I hope that this information will be part of the understanding Catholics can receive for how to truly worship God.

One thing became clear to me: the liturgical catastrophe wasn’t just the work of presumptuous prelates who threw together with suspicious haste a protestantizing worship service. Rather, it was preceded by a lack of understanding that had grown up over many decades.

We are just beginning to see the Catholic renaissance, even while the rest of the modern Western world rushes at a mad pace to populate the circles of hell.

Glorifying God and sanctifying our souls cannot be divorced from the fittingness of the worship we offer Him.

Our clothing is metaphysically extrinsic to us, but for all that, we are not nudists: our clothing is an extension of our humanity, a manifestation of our personality. We need not go so far as to say “the clothing makes the man,” but without a doubt it presents the man, typifies him, readies him for one task and not another, and also disguises or hides or shields him.

dominical tradition is like the soul, divino-apostolic tradition is like the body, and the remaining two (humano-apostolic and ecclesiastical) are like the clothing worn over the body. All three come together to “make the man.”

Augustine once wrote: “God who created you without you, will not save you without you.”

These antiphons and orations cover, with total honesty and integrity, the whole of Christian doctrine and belief, not sweeping any uncomfortable matters under the carpet. In this way the liturgy will speak often of human frailty, sinfulness, concupiscence, our need for divine grace in order to be saved, the danger of damnation, our need to resist demons and infidels, our calling to convert pagans, the evil of heresy and schism, the good of fasting, abstinence, and chastity, the primacy of heavenly and spiritual goods over temporal and earthly ones, the kingship of Christ over states and societies, and other such themes—all of which are prominent in the traditional Roman missal.

In authentic Christian worship, one must offer the holy sacrifice facing liturgical east; one must use a fixed anaphora; one must carry out an oblative offertory and signify unambiguously one’s intention to offer the divine victim; one must handle, consume, and distribute the Blessed Sacrament with utmost veneration, observing ontological distinctions between clergy and non-clergy and between men and women; one must respect the mutual parallelism of liturgy, theology, and architecture; and one must say or sing the antiphons, orations, and readings dictated by the rite, which together constitute a mature and rich expression of dogma and devotion.

if there was any Eucharistic liturgy that did not embody all eight of these elements—or that need not embody any one of them—it would stand in violation of the Vincentian canon and would not be a Eucharistic liturgy in the full and proper sense of the term. It would be a prayer service or paraliturgy with a consecration inserted into it.

Speaking more broadly, the Novus Ordo encapsulates the errors of modern philosophy: in its prejudice against the universal anthropological language of symbols, its inescapable optionitis, its monotonous verbosity aimed at immediate comprehension, its rubrical sparseness and vagueness, and the veritable Tower of Babel created by vernacular missals, it shows itself to be characterized by nominalism, voluntarism, rationalism, and relativism.

Martin Luther was an early proponent of versus populum celebration, which fit in with his non-sacrificial notion of the Mass: “Let all the vestments, the altar, the candles be, until they get used up, or we decide to change them. And if somebody wants to do things differently, let him do it. But for the real Mass among true Christians, the altar should not remain in its current form and the priest should always face the people—as we can undoubtedly assume Christ did during the Last Supper. Well, all this will come to pass in time.”

Because its architects were working under the influence of mid-twentieth-century theories of Christ’s presence in the congregation and in the liturgy as a whole—truths that deserve recognition, but not at the expense of the unique personal and substantial presence of Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist—the resulting Novus Ordo may be called the first “non-Eucharistic-centric” liturgy, in the sense of a liturgy that is not manifestly centered on the Real Presence of Christ under the species of bread and wine.

The Novus Ordo is stubbornly horizontal in its manner of practice: the hierarchical offices are either canceled out or confused, the distinction between clergy and laity is blurred, the roles of men and women are mingled in a way only conceivable after the Sexual Revolution, and instead of the verticality of simultaneous action directed to God, there is linear, modular, sequential liturgy in service of audience-oriented rationalism.

Apart from simple dialogues, the chant is contemplative music offered up to God, while the reformed rite calls for music “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

The orations of the Novus Ordo are notoriously dumbed down and edited for political correctness: they rarely use military imagery, for example, and go out of their way to avoid talking of human weakness, pressing dangers, trials and adversities, the captivity of sin, wounds caused by sin, offending God’s majesty, remorse, reparation, penance, enemies of Christ and of the Cross, God’s rights over men and nations, the merits of saints, miracles, apparitions, and the four last things.

The liturgical modernist or modern liturgist thinks that the historical development of liturgy is not included in the scope of Divine Providence or the Holy Spirit’s work of leading the Church into the fullness of truth; it is not a teleological process that culminates in maturity. It was never anything other than pure convention, something thrown together by a group of people at a particular time—nothing but “the work of human hands,” assembled by a committee of experts and animated by a pope’s command.

“The ritual setting of that central act is guaranteed… . It is the Spirit of God Himself who has moved throughout the centuries of our history and fashioned for us this liturgy, which therefore bears the weight not only of our beliefs but of that Christian history itself… . Our Western Mass enshrines and brings to us alive, as it were, the passage of Christ through the lands where our own civilisation, our own ways of thought and expression, were fostered and matured.”

The Holy Spirit takes countermeasures, so to speak, against the decrease of the connatural apostolic knowledge of divine truth (one thinks of Saint Paul’s “there must be heresies”

The Holy Spirit takes countermeasures, so to speak, against the decrease of the connatural apostolic knowledge of divine truth (one thinks of Saint Paul’s “there must be heresies”46) by ensconcing certain doctrinal propositions and liturgical rites across history as concrete parameters for faith and worship, like the inescapable givenness of Christ’s physical Body during His earthly life, or the continued presence of His Mystical Body on earth. Just as God revealed to Moses the exact pattern of the tabernacle he was to build,47 so too the Son of God fulfilled all the prophetic types in offering His own sacrifice as the perfection of worship— nothing was left to chance; every detail was deliberate and controlled.

It is seen as a blessing from the Lord, who, having raised up century after century of saints to enhance and enrich the liturgy, now seals it with His sovereign blessing, imparting to it a share in His own immutability and eternity.

The philosopher Émile-Auguste Chartier wrote: “It does not surprise me that the Church dreads change of even the slightest sort. Long experience has shown her that true peace of soul presupposes unhesitating prayer on the lips, and this in turn means that things are always said in the same way.”

Paul Claudel echoed him: Men of small and superficial spiritual understanding, heretics, and modernists, are forever itching to get their hands on things, to change everything, to radically reorder everything. The Church for her part remains attached to the unchanging order of her doctrine and her ceremonies, seeing, in the words of Genesis, that these things are not only good but very good. In her psalms and hymns, in every morning’s Mass, in the great poem of the liturgy—at once both a dramatic action and a chorus, which stretches out through the whole year—the souls of the faithful, thirsting for love and for beauty, constantly find the living satisfaction of their desire, as also their fathers did before them. Such a mentality was once universal, even taken for granted among Christians, in the West and in the East.

They did not chafe at the bonds of inferiority or push toward a forced originality but rejoiced in having received the sort of gift that no nation can demand or even expect.

The liturgy in its diachronic totality—a treasure of great perfection and beauty, a living reality born of the Holy Ghost in the womb of the bridal Church—was lovingly kept and handed down by the ordering of Divine Providence, which no pope dared disturb or oppose.

it follows that no one may repudiate what the liturgy has been for long stretches of the Church’s history without sinning against the Holy Spirit.61 Papal authority cannot be legitimately exercised to the detriment or the destruction of that which the Holy Spirit has raised up; such an exercise would be an abuse of office.

Canon 13 of the Seventh Session of the Council of Trent: “If anyone says that the received and approved rites of the Catholic Church that are customarily used in the solemn administration of the sacraments can be looked down on, or that ministers can without sin omit them according to their own whim, or that any pastor of churches whatsoever can change them into other new ones, let him be anathema.”

“The Sacrifice is celebrated with many solemn rites and ceremonies, none of which should be deemed useless or superfluous. On the contrary, all of them tend to display the majesty of this august Sacrifice and to excite the faithful, when beholding these saving mysteries, to contemplate the divine things which lie concealed in the Eucharistic Sacrifice.”

published in 1566, three years after the Council of Trent was concluded, says this about the Mass: “The Sacrifice is celebrated with many solemn rites and ceremonies, none of which should be deemed useless or superfluous. On the contrary, all of them tend to display the majesty of this august Sacrifice and to excite the faithful, when beholding these saving mysteries, to contemplate the divine things which lie concealed in the Eucharistic Sacrifice.”

From the 1950s through the 1970s, literally nothing was left untouched—and the changes were usually on a large scale, such as the wholesale rewriting of the rites of the Mass, of baptism, priestly ordination, extreme unction, the dedication of a Church, the consecration of virgins, the blessing of holy water, everything. This was not a revision but a rejection; not a reform but a revolution.73 It is disturbingly reminiscent of the ancient Gnostics’ denial that Jesus Christ has already come in the flesh.74 In virtue of the ironclad axiom lex orandi, lex credendi, such a rejection means a rejection of the doctrine and spirituality the traditional Roman liturgy incarnates.

We may also say, with Peter Lombard, that there are six kinds of sin against the Holy Spirit: despair, presumption, impenitence, obstinacy, fighting against known truth, and envy of a brother’s grace.79 These too are seen in the liturgical reform: despair that the faithful could enter fruitfully into the mysteries celebrated in the traditional rites; presumption in thinking to create rites superior to those handed down; impenitence in refusing to repent of and repair the obvious damage caused to the People of God by the scope and speed of the reform, in spite of decades of bad fruits; obstinacy in resisting the prior and authoritative claims of tradition; fighting against the known truth (lex credendi) to which the liturgy (lex orandi) gives expression; and lastly, envy of a brother’s grace, in the form of envy of the Byzantine tradition leading to unintelligent emulations of and mixtures with it.

This liturgy embraced all that I had found in each stage of my journey, yet went beyond them all. It was, and has remained, inexhaustible: an infinite vista opening backward to history, forward to eternity, outward to culture, upward to heaven.

Consider for a moment what charismatics and proponents of a “Reform of the Reform” have in common. Both are seeking authenticity, an encounter with reality, with the divine presence, with the grace of the Holy Spirit. The problem is that both are forms of anthropocentrism: we want to find God on our terms, not on His terms; we want to worship Him in our way, not His way. Be it through excessive emotion or a liturgical rite of our own design, we are bringing God down to our own level, instead of letting Him reach us and take us up to Him along a path He has already provided.

Like Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, we are looking here and there and everywhere to find Him, when He is standing right in front of us, in His gentle and glorious—though also veiled and mysterious—objectivity.

As we have seen, the result is that the liturgy generally degenerates into reflecting the age rather than speaking to it and sanctifying it. Or more to the point, radical deformations of the liturgy reflect not the face of Christ but the face of the dominant person or clique that imposes them, and so become vehicles not of worship but of narcissism, the cult of self which is the de facto creed of postmodern western society… . We are rootless and thus heartless, replacing self-sacrifice with self-service, with self as the only moral absolute, its inescapable subjectivity and impermanence denying the absolutism it demands for itself. Its secondary absolute, novelty, suffers the same inherent flaw.

Why do we need not just more beauty, not just more reverence, but above all, the objective content of the usus antiquior? The answer is that God intended us to have it. It was brought forth from the womb of the Church by the Holy Spirit; it was received, practiced, and embellished by innumerable saints as they climbed the ladder of humility to heaven; it was given by Providence with a view to our universal human needs and holy desires; it was, and it remains, a gift of God’s immense love, a fitting throne to receive the greatest gift of all, His Son Our Lord Jesus Christ.

we consider the Novus Ordo to be inherently an inferior form of worship.

The decision, therefore, to re-introduce a wide latitude and choice of options in the neo-Roman liturgy was a blow aimed directly at the traditional understanding and practice of liturgy, a blow against formal, public, objective, ecclesial prayer, and a confirmation of modern voluntarism and liberalism. In other words, the Novus Ordo did not challenge modern man’s hubris but capitulated to his proclivities.

It is the center; put the other way around, one who thinks of liturgy as a human artifact we can freely tinker with in the workshop will sooner or later treat morality as a social construct we can manipulate at will.

When we look with care and piety, we find that what tradition has bequeathed to us is far better than anything we might create on our own, no matter how many “experts” we cram on to a committee and how much papal muscle we put behind them.

Nothing we could ever invent sitting around a table would be able to compare with it for musical inventiveness, structural coherence, aptness of content, scriptural saturation, and integration with the Mass.

The undulating verses of the psalms, chanted in the eight Gregorian tones with their subtly varying terminations and framed by lovely antiphons; the gentle build-up to a chapter, a hymn, a versicle, the Benedictus or Magnificat antiphon, the Gospel canticle, and concluding prayers … Nothing we could ever invent sitting around a table would be able to compare with it for musical inventiveness, structural coherence, aptness of content, scriptural saturation, and integration with the Mass.

The liturgical reform, on the contrary, in the name of accessibility and adaptability to various cultures, Indonesian or Polynesian, Californian or Nebraskan, stripped the liturgy of its own distinctive clothing, ornaments, and symbols of authority, leaving it a naked slave to whatever agenda desired to press it into service.

The hyperpapalist view, popular since around the time of the First Vatican Council, transmogrifies the pope into a “combination Delphic oracle, globetrotting superstar, dynamo of doctrinal development, and standard meter bar of orthodoxy,”22 whose mind and will are, in and of themselves, always right, true, holy, and laudable.

Could we say that a liturgy which is a “compilation made according to pragmatic criteria … handled in a positivist and arbitrary way” is, for that very reason, not an orthodox liturgy? Could we say that any liturgy not “born out of the dialogue of love between the Church and her Lord” but rather assembled by academic experts and avant-garde bishops in dozens of study groups orchestrated by a secretary with decidedly anti-traditional views is not a “living reality,” an “expression of the life of the Church” that “distills the faith, the prayer, and the very life of whole generations”?

Never has it been proved more true that experts are like wells—they are deep in one spot, but narrow and cold—while tradition, home of the common man, is like the ocean— irresolvably vast, incomparably deep, fearful, sublime, teeming with fertility and nourishment, beckoning endless journeys.

Pope Benedict XVI distinguished between mere success, which technique can acquire, and wisdom, which comes only from the assimilation of tradition. The pope quotes Saint Augustine’s description of government without justice as a “highly-organized band of robbers,” in which might is separated from right. The same judgment may be rendered on Bugnini and the Consilium: they assembled plenty of technical expertise, and their finished product was endorsed by the might of the reigning pope, but they lacked—indeed, they repudiated—the wisdom of tradition, and thus forfeited their right to handle the Church’s sacred liturgy.

The fundamental error of modern man is his conception of himself as being so different from what man has been in other periods of history that he considers himself unable to submit humbly to tradition. By subscribing to this error, the modern Catholic bestows on himself a “pass” to step outside the common inheritance of the Church and to create his own peculiar structures, which always flatter his ego and satisfy his passions. His vaunted differentness, which in fact is nothing other than a lack of self-knowledge propped up by a scaffolding of slogans, becomes over time a state of alienation and isolation due to the habitual indulgence of disordered concupiscence.

At last, “the priest speaks to the people.” (But wait: I thought the liturgy was addressed primarily to God?)

Msgr. Ronald Knox’s critique of religious enthusiasm. It is just this hankering for feelings of enthusiasm or excitement that has led to ever-repeated efforts to stir up or stimulate congregations ever since the sixties, with ever-diminishing returns.

The message of the pope was clear: “For your own good, you will participate actively in these various ways—and you will like it!”

“What is really important in the world of doublespeak is the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program.”

“It is not an arbitrary act. It is not a transitory or optional experiment. It is not some dilettante’s improvisation. It is a law. It has been thought out by [wait for it] authoritative experts of sacred liturgy; it has been discussed and meditated upon for a long time [that is, for a few years of extremely hasty and busy committee work]. We shall do well to accept it with joyful interest and put it into practice punctually, unanimously, and carefully.”

Heraclitus, “you can never step in the same Novus Ordo twice.”

“It is Christ’s will, it is the breath of the Holy Spirit which calls the Church to make this change.

immediate comprehension of “plain language, easily understood, in everyday speech” is the least and lowest sense in which the faithful participate in the awesome mysteries of Christ. Sociologists have pointed out that dense, impenetrable, to some extent off-limits religious rituals are a powerful motivator for belief and devotion.

listening, and what is worse, impervious to words.”33 This observation was made only five years after he had imposed on the Church a liturgy outstanding for its non-stop verbosity, huge doses of Scripture, lack of silence, and paucity of non-verbal ritual.

“Modern man is sated by talk; he is obviously tired of listening, and what is worse, impervious to words.” This observation was made only five years after he had imposed on the Church a liturgy outstanding for its non-stop verbosity, huge doses of Scripture, lack of silence, and paucity of non-verbal ritual.

By November 28, 1971, there are to be no more Latin liturgies from the old missal or even from the new one.

The three addresses of Paul VI discussed above establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that his intention was to see the end of the 1,600-year reign of Latin, the end of the centrality of chant, and the turning of altars “toward the people.” He set the potent example from the throne of Peter; he provided the spurious rationale; he gave free rein to the national episcopacies in their mad pursuit of relevance and accessibility; he acted vigorously to suppress traditional “resistance.” In all these ways, we cannot understand the reformed liturgical books without seeing them through the lens of their maker, governor, and judge.

“All of the differences you are pointing to are incidental; after all, if the consecration happens, it’s the sacrifice of Christ, and the rest is window-dressing.” Often summed up in the trite statement “The Mass is the Mass, after all,” this objection is built upon a neoscholastic reduction of the Eucharistic liturgy to the moment of consecration. This ahistorical and rationalistic reductionism deserves to be rejected because it dismisses the constitutive role of historically articulated tradition in God’s self-revelation to mankind.

It vitiates any notion of identifiable families of rites derived from apostolic churches, with venerable texts, chants, gestures, and ceremonies, handed down within irreducibly distinct traditions of theology, spirituality, and custom that interpret, enrich, and contextualize the sacrificial offering while instructing and nourishing the faithful who take part in it. All of this—the rites, their specific content, and the understanding and way of life that go along with them—deserves religious respect and preservation, in deference toward our predecessors and in charity for ourselves and our descendants.

Reducing the Mass to a valid consecration is like reducing the nuptial act to a successful conception of a child. I sincerely hope no one is foolish enough to define the nuptial act as the conception of a child. The nuptial act is naturally ordered to the conception of a child, to be sure, but it has its own reality, its own meaning, that comprises more than conception; it is an expression of spousal love, which is designed to culminate in new life.

In like manner, the Mass is a privileged microcosm of unitive prayer with a Eucharistic finality.

Prolepsis is a figure of speech that means representing something as existing before it actually does;

Its removal in 1969 was not like a haircut but like the amputation of an arm or a leg; its replacement—a quasi- Jewish presentation of gifts, in which their divine, natural, and human origins are called to mind, and the people respond with a generic acclamation—is like nothing ever seen in Christian liturgical history.

the liturgy is sequential, a sure sign of the influence of Enlightenment rationalism;

Bishop Rob Mutsaerts of ’s-Hertogenbosch put it more succinctly: “We want to be relevant, apparently, at the expense of our own identity.”

the Most Holy Eucharist has been reduced in the minds of many to a mere sign of belonging, foodstuff for the “table of plenty”—not a supernatural mystery that requires the full commitment of one’s mind, heart, soul, and strength to Jesus Christ really present, against whom one mortally sins by unworthily receiving Him.

Faith is a permanent tension between, on the one hand, memory—hoc facite in meam commemorationem, lingering over the life of Our Lord and entering into the transtemporal mysteries of His factual, incarnate, historical life, preserving at every step our bond with what has been handed down—and, on the other hand, looking forward not to a man-made future but to the second coming of Christ from the East. The modern notion of progress is foreign to Christianity—even antithetical to it. As believers, we are always striving to be equal to our past, to be humble and grateful inheritors of it; we are not better than our past, and thinking ourselves to be better will only make us guilty of the sin of pride.

As Michael Fiedrowicz writes: Even the highest authority of the Church may not change at will the ancient and venerable liturgy of the Church. This signifies an abuse of power (abusus potestatis). The authority of the bull of promulgation Quo Primum is especially grounded in the fact that here a pope regulated the liturgy in the exercise of the fullness of his papal power and in complete consensus with the vote of an ecumenical council, and in addition, he found himself in accordance with the unbroken tradition of the Roman Church, as well as—regarding the fundamental parts of the Missal—in accordance with the Universal Church. Above all, the fact that the Missale Romanum of 1570 was intended to be the most perfect liturgical expression of the Catholic teaching on the Eucharist, as the Council of Trent had defined it for all times over against Protestant errors, is a significant argument that the Missal itself, as well as the dogmatic definition of Trent, should endure in this world, a time must come when tradition is vindicated

The infallibility of the pope does not mean in any way that he enjoys unlimited and arbitrary power in matters of government and teaching. The dogma of infallibility, while it defines a supreme privilege, is fixed in precise boundaries, allowing for infidelity, error, and betrayal. Otherwise in the prayers for the Supreme Pontiff there would be no need to pray “non tradat eum in animam inimicorum eius” [that he may not be delivered into the hands of his enemies]. If it were impossible for the pope to cross to the enemy camp, it would not be necessary to pray for it not to happen. The betrayal of Peter is the example of possible infidelity that has loomed over all of the popes through the course of history, and will be so until the end of time. The pope, even if he is the supreme authority on earth, is suspended between the summit of heroic fidelity to his mandate and the abyss of apostasy that is always present. —Roberto de Mattei The law of prayer is the law of faith: the Church believes as she prays.

It was and is a crime for Church leaders to treat the Church’s tradition in such a contemptuous way; it was and is an incalculable loss for the spiritual vitality and sanctification of her members; it was and still is the principal cause of the crisis of faith through which we have been passing in the decades since the Council.

No matter how valid a new sacramental rite may be, no one can create for it a history ex nihilo, no one can make it to be a treasure handed down when it is not. No matter how valid it may be, if it is defective in regard to the way of worship, it will be defective also in leading people to the end of worship.

A liturgical rite is constituted by its particular texture and content of chants, texts, ceremonies, the language it has made its own, the stance of the priest, the motions of the ministers, and so forth. These things are not supplementary to or decorative of the liturgy; they simply are the liturgical rite.

For it is possible to have a Novus Ordo celebration in which almost nothing said and done is held in common with what is said and done in the Roman rite as it historically existed: one can have different proper antiphons (or none at all), different orations, different readings, a different anaphora, the contrary stance of the priest, etc.; and even if all of the “right” options were chosen, they remain essentially “at option” and thus not inherent and constitutive of the rite.

It spread by its own inherent rightness, its superiority over what had been done before.

the architectural boundaries and barriers that turn spaces into symbols, and the entrustment of rites to men who exemplify the worship of God in their ceremonial vesture, scripted words, and carefully-controlled motions. In other words, a phenomenon that is routinely assumed to be anti-participational and anti-corporate is nothing of the kind.

Yet they fail to grasp the paradox—frequently experienced by attendees of the traditional rites—of the intense spiritual involvement, attraction, and even fascination provoked by the hieratic “distance” of the clergy in the sanctuary, the architectural boundaries and barriers that turn spaces into symbols, and the entrustment of rites to men who exemplify the worship of God in their ceremonial vesture, scripted words, and carefully-controlled motions. In other words, a phenomenon that is routinely assumed to be anti-participational and anti-corporate is nothing of the kind.

What happened in Paul VI’s reform was more like planting a new tree that looks a bit like the old tree and then building a wall to keep people away from the old tree.

Both regarded the post-Constantinian history of the Catholic Church as one of progressive darkening and pagan relapsation, a deviation from the pure, simple, authentic springtime of the early Christians who met in homes to “break bread” and remember Jesus, the wonder-working carpenter from Nazareth. This deviation, according to such reformers, reached its nadir in the Middle Ages, which then transmitted a superstitious cult to succeeding centuries, embellished along the way by the courtliness of the Baroque, until the clericalist dumb-show known as the Tridentine Mass achieved maximum rigidity. The fiery breath of the Pentecostal spirit melted this paradigm and replaced it with forms of worship more in tune with the living faith of Christians: first in the Reformation, then, much later, in the period of Vatican II and the sweeping reforms it ushered in.

Guéranger nicely identifies the irony that those who claim to be reviving a pristine liturgy are, in fact, creating a new liturgy that never really existed and certainly has little in that sense, a pure novelty that loses all the benefits of ageless and anonymous antiquity!

It is, in that sense, a pure novelty that loses all the benefits of ageless and anonymous antiquity!

History is, in that sense, irrelevant, except perhaps as an empty space within which conversions or charisms can happen, causally linked (if at all) by the conjunction of a preacher and his audience. The Catholic, on the other hand, sees the Faith as an historical, social, visible, incarnate reality, living a life that develops and unfolds, and that retains its earlier phases within itself while it grows beyond them.

In other words, their conception of faith is not the incarnational and pneumatological confidence in the unfolding of tradition that Catholics have always held, but, like Protestants looking for the stirring up of the heart in the revival tent meeting, they bring to bear a set of subjective criteria based on what they deem “effective” or “relevant.”

When a pope prioritizes environmental ethics, gives interviews to atheist-communist journalists, and eviscerates Scripture of its supernatural sense, we are already looking at the frightening prospect of a Church of Latter-day Socinians.

This mutation of Catholicism from its dogmatic-liturgical essence to a loosely-defined moral therapeutic deism in symbolic pantomime has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen for as long as the Protestant distrust of incarnational ecclesiology and the Modernist skepticism of divine revelation and apostolic tradition continue to exercise their sway in the Vatican, the academies, the chanceries—and upon the altars of our parishes.

There is, however, a solution for the Church of the Latin Rite, a solution as obvious as it is demanding: to leave behind the faux ancien, crypto-Protestant, congenitally modern25 papal rite of Paul VI and to return confidently, totally, and exclusively to the Tridentine liturgy—rich fruit of a continuous, organic, millenium-striding, providential, and Pentecostal development.

The Roman Canon was, and was always seen as, an apostolic heritage to be lovingly received, jealously guarded, and diligently handed on.

All of these goods are gifts from God, who may, in His wisdom and justice, deprive the Church on earth of the enjoyment of these goods if the faithful or their rulers should be so unfortunate as to be lukewarm in performing the opus Dei, or worldly in their attitudes, or cowardly in their preaching.

The story of how the words of consecration spoken over the chalice were changed for the Novus Ordo Missae is a potent exhibition of many interrelated problems characteristic of the liturgical reform in general: false antiquarianism; a defective understanding of participatio actuosa; an infatuation with Eastern praxis coupled with a contempt for what is uniquely Western; disdain for medieval piety and doctrine; a lack of humility in the face of that which we cannot fully understand and a lack of reverence for that which is mysterious; a mechanistic reduction of liturgy to material that we can shape as it pleases us (as we try to do with the natural world using our modern technology); and an impatience to construct new forms due to boredom or discomfort with old ones.

The reform of the Mass has fostered a profoundly anti-religious attitude among Catholics. Christian worship is no longer a gift of grace that is to be received on one’s knees; instead it is a commodity that must be met with mistrust and ill-will, then tested, and often enough rejected. Holy Mass, which formerly was a hermetically closed mystery, had now to open itself up to the confusion of opinions. What previously had been venerated as a super-terrestrial phenomenon is now seen to be something manufactured, something arranged. And what can be arranged, can be rearranged. Now there can be no end of arranging! Anyone can come up with good ideas for changing the liturgy. It is strange, however: the more the Mass

How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?

1908 was the year on the brink of revolution. Electricity, telephones, automobiles, aeroplanes, modern medicine, industrial mass production and new discoveries in physics and chemistry coincided with the deep loss of tradition and faith. Darwinian evolution, biblical criticism, materialism, secular philosophy, socialism, scientific naturalism took hold of the minds of Christendom.

Revolution was the meaning and power of man's energy and fuel of his step. The Church fragmented and became irrelevant: it poured into the Nation and took a step back into irrelevance. The spiritual desert was spreading. Chesterton saw this transformation before it fully take place.

Women were increasingly demanding education, employment, political participation and suffrage while men were becoming increasingly demoralised biomasses for the machine of the Nation. Industrialisation, urbanisation, office work and the changing family structures, spearheaded by feminism, led to the the tearing and ripping of the flesh.

A coin toss of optimism and anxiety flipped over and over to torture the minds of the masses: humanity is advancing toward a better future on one foot and something about modern civilisation is becoming dangerous on the other. Step by step, to the left and to the right, was the marching of the Revolution. Where are we going? No one know. Why did we start? No one could tell. All that could really be felt in Chesterton's mind was that this marching was leading humanity somewhere that is artificial, spiritually empty, and unstable.

Chesterton's troubles are simply and platonically laid out in Orthodoxy. Modern man must return to Orthodoxy if he is to stop marching and burry his toes into the ground he was made from.

Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness.

But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt.

This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dullness of life.

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.

Such men are indeed to madness near allied. Their incessant calculation of their own brains and other people’s brains is a dangerous trade. It is always perilous to the mind to reckon up the mind. A flippant person has asked why we say, “As mad as a hatter.” A more flippant person might answer that a hatter is mad because he has to measure the human head.

If thy head offend thee, cut it off; for it is better, not merely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a child, but to enter it as an imbecile, rather than with your whole intellect to be cast into hell.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them.

that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand.

But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers.

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

If a man would make his world large, he must be always make himself small.

We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.

We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own.

Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced.

The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance.

Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed.

Men were originally ranked and ruled. The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organized for the difficult defence of reason.

The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all—the authority of a man to think.

It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it.

We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks. We have found all the questions that can be found. It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers.

“Thou shalt not” is only one of the necessary corollaries of “I will.”

You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.

[Mary] did not praise fighting, but fought. We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior.

They have parted His garments among them, and for His vesture they have cast lots; though the coat was without seam woven from the top throughout.

This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common.

The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry.

It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.

Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush or the brook; but the singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists, and talked about the gods of brook and bush.

thing must be loved before it is loveable.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?

The vision always hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden.

In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.

[They live in] glass houses if they will not throw stones. For this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of the fact that the happiness is bright but brittle.

Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years.

A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex;

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire.

The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.

Now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were wilful. I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will. In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.

We were either unable to do things or we were destined to do them.

The proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.

“An optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist is a man who looks after your feet.”

A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. He has fought for the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag long before he has ever enlisted. To put shortly what seems the essential matter, he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.

The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.

Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilisation and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

Go back to the darkest roots of civilisation and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

The man who is most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly the man who loves it with a reason. The man who will improve the place is the man who loves it without a reason.

“Enough we live:—and if a life, With large results so little rife, Though bearable, seem hardly worth. This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth.”

Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four.

Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within.

That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.

The mere pursuit of health always leads to something unhealthy. Physical nature must not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed, not worshipped.

Stars and mountains must not be taken seriously. If they are, we end where the pagan nature worship ended. Because the earth is kind, we can imitate all her cruelties. Because sexuality is sane, we can all go mad about sexuality. Mere optimism had reached its insane and appropriate termination. The theory that everything was good had become an orgy of everything that was bad.

The only people who really enjoyed this world were busy breaking it up; and the virtuous people did not care enough about them to knock them down.

A woman loses a child even in having a child. All creation is separation. Birth is as solemn a parting as death.

divine act of making (such as severs the poet from the poem or the mother from the new-born child) was the true description of the act whereby the absolute energy made the world.

I had found this hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.

All roads lead to Rome; which is one reason why many people never get there.

What was this Christianity which always forbade war and always produced wars? What could be the nature of the thing which one could abuse first because it would not fight, and second because it was always fighting?

But then the modern man was really exceptional in history; no man before ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. The modern man found the church too simple exactly where modern life is too complex; he found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers.

Christianity came in here as before. It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another. It divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all.

It is true that the historic Church has at once emphasised celibacy and emphasised the family; has at once (if one may put it so) been fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children. It has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white, like the red and white upon the shield of St. George. It has always had a healthy hatred of pink. It hates that combination of two colours which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers. It hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to a dirty grey.

It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious.

He said, “If these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” Under the impulse of His spirit arose like a clamorous chorus the facades of the medieval cathedrals, thronged with shouting faces and open mouths. The prophecy has fulfilled itself: the very stones cry out.

circle—that circle which we have already made the symbol of madness and of mere rationalism.

There is no equality in nature; also there is no inequality in nature. Inequality, as much as equality, implies a standard of value.

Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision.

The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate.

The ultimate apotheosis would appear to be that of a man sitting quite still, not daring to stir for fear of disturbing a fly, nor to eat for fear of incommoding a microbe.

In light of our current political problems, I can't help but relay Churchill's comments of the past to captions of today's problems. I apply in his own words the visions of the past to today's dilapidated Britain.

widespread the peace in the entire known world was maintained from generation to generation, and when the first pristine impulse of Christianity lifted men’s souls to the contemplation of new and larger harmonies beyond the ordered world around them. The gift which Roman civilisation had to bestow was civic and political.

Step by step they were led to practices which disposed to vice — the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance they called civilisation, when it was but part of their servitude.

Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.

Night had fallen on Britannia. Dawn rose on England, humble, poor, barbarous, degraded and divided, but alive. Britannia had been an active part of a world state; England was once again a barbarian island. It had been Christian, it was now heathen. Its inhabitants had rejoiced in well-planned cities, with temples, markets, academies. They had nourished craftsmen and merchants, professors of literature and rhetoric. For four hundred years there had been order and law, respect for property, and a widening culture. All had vanished. The buildings, such as they were, were of wood, not stone. The people had lost entirely the art of writing. Some miserable runic scribblings were the only means by which they could convey their thoughts or wishes to one another at a distance. Barbarism reigned in its rags, without even the stern military principles which had animated and preserved the Germanic tribes. The confusion and conflict of petty ruffians sometimes called kings racked the land. There was nothing worthy of the name of nationhood, or even of tribalism; yet this is a transition which the learned men of the nineteenth century banded themselves together to proclaim as an onward step in the march of mankind. We wake from an awful and, it might well have seemed, endless nightmare to a scene of utter prostration.

We discern across the centuries a commanding and versatile intelligence, wielding with equal force the sword of war and of justice; using in defence arms and policy; cherishing religion, learning, and art in the midst of adversity and danger; welding together a nation, and seeking always across the feuds and hatreds of the age a peace which would smile upon the land.

We have seen that Alfred in his day had never hesitated to use money as well as arms. Ethelred used money instead of arms. He used it in ever-increasing quantities, with everdiminishing returns. He paid as a bribe in 991 ten thousand pounds of silver, with rations for the invaders.

There were three principles upon which sovereignty could be erected: conquest, which none could dispute; hereditary right, which was greatly respected; and election, which was a kind of compromise between the two.

Roman imperialism and Christian ethics, pervaded by the social and military system of the age, jealous for its own interests and authority, but still preserving all that was left of learning and art.

“If its walls were iron,” said Philip in his wrath, “I would take it.” “If they were of butter,” retorted Richard, “I would hold it.”

Moreover, when the long tally is added it will be seen that the British nation and the English-speaking world owe far more to the vices of John than to the labours of virtuous sovereigns; for it was through the union of many forces against him that the most famous milestone of our rights and freedom was in fact set up.

Government must henceforward mean something more than the arbitrary rule of any man, and custom and the law must stand even above the King.

But the Scottish war was one in which, as a chronicler said, “every winter undid every summer’s work.”

Idle weaklings, dreamers, and adventurous boys disrupted the nascent unity of the Island.

In the long story of a nation we often see that capable rulers by their very virtues sow the seeds of future evil and weak or degenerate princes open the pathway of progress.

Only Love creates the good, and in the end it alone can be perceived in all its dimensions and its contours in created things and, above all, in man.

I was never going to read Theology of the Body and all its different versions:

Theology of the Body Explained: A Commentary on John Paul II’s “Gospel of the Body” (2003), Theology of the Body Explained: Revised Edition (2007), Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II’s Sexual Revolution (2004), Theology of the Body in One Hour (2005), Theology of the Body for Kids (2019)

If one is to truly understand the core of one's message one must go straight to the source, no matter how difficult it is to penetrate.

I wish I stuck strong by my words because John Paul's work is indeed rather difficult to understand in isolation.

As I read, I began to understand that JPII was not talking about some obscure Adam, who was cast out of some distant Garden in some distant time. He was talking about me and how I could understand myself as one of God's most beloved creations.

Already in the light of the Bible’s first sentences, man can neither be understood nor explained in his full depth with the categories taken from the “world,” that is, from the visible totality of bodies.

JPII makes you understand the very logic and structure of the metaphysical world surrounding us. How is man alone (or lonely) if he is surrounding by people and things?

Man is alone because he is “different” from the visible world, from the world of living beings.

We existed from nothing, and God's constant happiness flows from Him and through our image He can exist in us, how then can we understand that creation is a gift through our own understanding. JPII explains this fact that we can understand creation as a gift from our very existence.

creation is a gift, because man appears in it, who, as an “image of God,” is able to understand the very meaning of the gift in the call from nothing to existence.

Then this is where JPII really struck me as he eludes to the purpose of the Woman: That constant troubling partnership of negotiations, compromises, mistrusts, dramas and more. Despite all of this, it is not good that man is alone. The sky is good, the earth is good, the animals and trees are good. The day and the night are good. But for the first time in all of God's creation, God declares and identifies the one thing that is not good: that man in his image is alone.

it is necessary to note that for the first time there clearly appears a certain lack of good, “It is not good that the man” (male) “should be alone,”

he affirms that, “alone,” the man does not completely realize this essence. He realizes it only by existing “with someone”—and, put even more deeply and completely, by existing “for someone.”

There is a linear dimension to God's love. His love points the way and carries with Him straight through Adam, "made in His image", to the point that even to His purpose is represented in Adam's existence. His existence is for others: Adam's purpose is to love someone and someone must be brought forth in order for His purpose to maintain His path.

After original sin....

On the other hand, we know that, due to the tendency toward sin contracted as a consequence of original sin, man and woman must reconstruct the meaning of the reciprocal disinterested gift with great effort.

On the subject of lust, JPII lays out a concrete explanation what appropriation will do.

If a man relates to a woman in such a way that he considers her only as an object to appropriate and not as a gift, he condemns himself at the same time to become, on his part too, only an object of appropriation for her and not a gift.

From possessing, the next step is “enjoyment”: the object I possess gains a certain significance for me inasmuch as it is at my disposal and I put it to my service, I use it.

Where does man go after Original Sin?

Christ orders man to return in some way to the threshold of his theological history! He orders him to place himself at the boundary between original innocence-happiness and the inheritance of the first fall.

Portraying the enslavement of Africans by white people as the chief type of slavery in the world’s history though has led many young white people to feel guilty and promoted a mentality of victimhood among a lot of black people.

I first encountered The Forgotten Slave Trade when a friend of mine couldn't believed I hadn't known about the enslavement of white Europeans to Africa. For pretty much my entire life, I and everyone I had known around me always thought it was the other way around. "Slaves" connotates African. "Master" connotates White Man. After reading Webb's collective stories of a "forgotten" slave trade, I understood that there is indeed a whole set of recent history that has been completely wiped off the common conscience of the Western Man - a man who is eternally guilty and persecuted for something he did not do and for something who's other ancestors did to his.

The annual event of St Patrick’s Day celebrates the life of a boy who was seized from his own country and carried off into captivity; St Patrick was of course an English slave. According to tradition Ireland’s other patron saint, Saint Brigid of Kildare, was the daughter of a slave (Joyce, 1911).

It was at one time a story known to every schoolchild in Britain. The Venerable Bede, an ecclesiastical historian of the Anglo-Saxon period, related how in the late sixth century Pope Gregory passed a market in Rome where he noticed some beautiful children for sale. On enquiring their nationality, he was told that they were Angles, meaning that they came from what is now England. He made a witty pun, saying ‘Non Angli sed Angeli’; not Angles, but angels. It was after telling this anecdote that Bede began referring to the inhabitants of the southern part of Britain as ‘English’, the first recognition that the disparate collection of Saxons, Jutes and so on who had settled among the Romanised Britons might actually have a national identity of their own.

Webb goes into great depths into the monstrous cruelty of the Barbary Slave States and how Europeans as far as Iceland were raided and taken to Africa as slaves. He then extends the history to the introduction of American naval power in ending the slave trade. Political power of colonisation, resource management and economic enrichment all balanced into the power surrounding the slave trade.

whole purpose of imperialism, taking over and colonizing the land of others, so that Britain would benefit. From this perspective, there would have been little advantage to seizing North Africa. There were no natural resources, nothing to exploit and, worst of all, it would put Britain on a collision course with the Ottoman Empire, of which the Barbary States were, at least nominally, provinces.

Why wasn’t the British army simply sent to North Africa and ordered to invade and occupy Algiers and add it to the various other overseas possessions of the nascent empire? The reason is simple. The British Empire grew by acquiring territory or colonies which would benefit and enrich the citizens of Britain. From America and the Caribbean came sugar and tobacco, India provided woven textiles, the Far East sent spices, Equatorial Africa sent ivory.

Webb ends solemnly not with a counter-black slaving narrative, to try and counter the most educated African slaving trade. Webb extends further to all modern manners of slavery.

Slavery may exist even without torture.

Slaves may be well fed and well clothed and comfortably housed, but they are still slaves if without lawful process they are deprived of their freedom by forceful restraint. We might eliminate all proof of ill treatment, overlook the starvation and beatings and other barbarous acts, but the admitted fact of slavery – compulsory uncompensated labour – would still remain. There is no such thing as benevolent slavery. Involuntary servitude, even if tempered by humane treatment, is still slavery.

The frame of the European paying the Barbary States to not raid, contrasting with the Americans who simply refused to pay and bombs the slaving ports ad hock.

The problem with that approach is that once you have paid up, there are likely to be increasingly outrageous demands for more and more money.

It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say:- ‘Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you, We will therefore pay you cash to go away’. (Kipling, 1911)

History, as well as common sense, tell us that paying a blackmailer or somebody running a protection racket will inevitably result in demands for further and greater sums of money, if once we give in.

Now if you are going to adopt a tough line in matters of this kind, then you really should do it before you hand over any money. This is what the British did, proving first to the Barbary States that Britain was able and willing to launch punitive raids on their cities should the need arise.

One big difference about the world 250 years ago is that things happened in those days at a much more leisurely pace than is now the case.

Writing as early as 1784, Jefferson had expressed his views as follows; The question is whether their peace or war will be cheapest? But is it a question which should be addressed to our Honor as well as our Avarice? Nor does it respect us as to these pyrates only, but as to the nations of Europe. If we wish our commerce to be free and uninsulted, we must let these nations see that we have an energy which at present they disbelieve. The low opinion they entertain of our powers cannot fail to involve us soon in a naval war.

‘Millions for defence, but not one cent for tribute’,

The tactics invoked by anti-Marian women, tantrums and bullying, have done much to simultaneously keep men in check while also creating a deep poison and division between the sexes. Both are marks of the fallen angel who wants to destroy the natural icon of God found in men and women living in harmony with one another. This raises the likelihood that there is something significant for women concerning the complementarity of men: maybe women need men to balance them out, to reign in their inclinations to insatiability, irrationality, and envy. Perhaps the “all conquering female” doesn’t know when to quit, except when she has truly conquered everything, totally demolishing it and grinding it into a powder (to borrow a phrase from Lenin). Perhaps it is this dominant political posturing of women, unhinged from rationality and civility, that has led us once again to the “terrible mother” type of culture? The matriarchy has been incredibly successful in making over women to be the whores, dykes, and bitches they envisioned.

As I was leaving Mass one Sunday in rural Georgia, I was talking to a fellow friend of a recent book I was reading called "The Anti-Mary Exposed". He has trouble understanding the disconnect between what he was told a woman should be and what he had experienced in university. For a long time, perhaps from the age of 16, I had come to accept that all women were essentially socialist lesbians, and there was nothing I or anyone else could do to stop them.

My friend who I was explaining this to was having difficulty in his dating life. He was of the classically conservative (or rather normal) type of wanting a family and children, whereas the women he was speaking to wanting nothing but to drink, party, work like dogs in the day and act like prostitutes at night, all in the guise of 'liberation' and 'freedom'. I told him that he needed to speak to other women. "Have you read 'The Anti-Mary Exposed'?" I said. To that question, a young girl right behind me pulled out a blue hardcover "You mean this?"

It turns out, 'The Anti-Mary Exposed' has become widely popular amongst young Catholic women, and ever since the COVID-19 lockdowns, BLM, mega woke, mass DEI, modern women have forcefully had their lives reoriented. What makes them so unhappy is no surprise to me that this Carrie Gress' book was rediscovered at such a time where modern women are the most dilapidated, depressed, lonely and suicidal than ever before.

I had known women like this my whole life: from MVP in high school to all the lib-tard witches in university. Many of the women were either narcissistically neglectful or monstrously controlling.

Aristotle saw that the way to establish a virtuous act is to find the “golden mean,” that spot in the middle of two extreme vices. If we look at the two kinds of extremes that women are tempted to—over-control, on one side, and negligence, on the other—then we can see that the virtuous woman is the one who balances these two extremes. It’s easy to think of the domineering and manipulative mother, on one hand, or the negligent and narcissistic mother, on the other, who can’t be bothered with her family’s needs. In the middle of these two is the good or great mother who is nurturing, supportive, attentive, and selfless.

Hostility to truth is nurtured by the love of lies

-Fr. George Rutler

After dating dykes, whores, lesbians, communists my whole life, Carrie Gress made me realise that I had forgotten the only woman in the world that truly loves me: my own mother. She fed when I was hungry, she put me to bed when I was tired, she took care of me when I was sick, she looked after me when I was sad. But I don't just have my own mother as a good example of a good woman: I have our Lady Mary. Carrie Gress made me understand that for those who don't have good mothers, there is still one who you can always look up to.

Mary’s surrender is based upon the reality that she knows she is loved, and she has no shame, no fear, no emptiness in her soul, no wounds of rejection or abandonment that compel her to keep something for herself the way that the rest of humanity does.

[Women] fulfill themselves by giving something of their own life so that others may live.

-Edith Stein

When a man loves a woman, it follows that the nobler the woman, the nobler the love; the higher the demands made by the woman, the more worthy a man must be. That is why woman is the measure of the level of our civilization.

-Archbishop Fulton Sheen

sacrifice is usually difficult and irksome. Only love can make it easy, and perfect love can make it a joy.

-Neumann

Every woman is called to be a bridge between her family and heaven. Women are called to spark the flame of the divine in the souls of the men and children they love. Women are called to reveal the best of God’s love and give those around them the means to find that love. Again, Christianity is full of saintly women, such as St. Monica, St. Helen, St. Cecilia, and countless others that led their husbands, sons, and daughters to embrace the faith—even in the face of martyrdom.

We look back and are astonished that women could accomplish so much because women “had no power” in these eras, but only because we are mistaken about the real power that women have—it doesn’t come from them, but through them.

Women have a unique gift to draw men and children to them—and through them to God—through their beauty.

Women’s magazines today offer us a different kind of beauty, a beauty to be used as a superficial means of acquiring other things we want: to allure men, impress our friends, or to be admired. The notion that what is beautiful should point beyond itself to the source of all beauty—the Creator—is far, far away.

most of the things promoted by women in our culture—being outspoken, assertive, independent, and ambitious—weren’t producing the kind of happiness I expected. I started paying attention to music, poetry, and movies, anywhere I could find evidence of what made for truly timeless and great women, not just those propped up by our culture. And what did I find? Remarkable and beautiful portrayals of women using interior capacities I had never thought about before: kindness, compassion, listening, anticipating the needs of others, sincerity, and goodness. Getting married and having children only made me go deeper to find and live these newly discovered virtues. I marveled at the fruits—my friends got closer; my children grew contented; my husband became more loving—all

The beads of the rosary, like the tiny stones used by David to vanquish Goliath, have much more power than we might ever know.

Part of being an adult is to stop complaining, whining, and blaming others for what is wrong and seek out real solutions.

I am often reminded by Sheen that humanity doesn't quite fit or belong to this world. In my own life, I have always felt the same way. In my own life, in school in particular, I always felt like I never belonged. I was always hated by the systems and social structures of the world that is too would be in the common habit of rejecting me. Sheen explains that Christ too experienced this, but He experienced in to a far greater degree than I could even imagine.

His own people hated Him, for they asked for His crucifixion; the law hated Him, for it forsook justice to condemn Justice; the Gentiles hated Him, for they consented to His death; the forests hated Him for one of its trees bore the burden of His weight; the flowers hated Him as they wove thorns for His brow; the bowels of the earth hated Him as it gave its steel as hammer and nails.

In my own line of work, it is rather difficult to undo the fortifications of studying, exams, tests, consolidations and the endless arrays of out-smarting the test and being the wisest. However, it was only until I entered another stage of academic life that I have become disillusioned and challenged by the very wisdom I hear from the most unthinkable places: from children.

heavenly Father is thanked for concealing His wisdom from the self-wise and the conscious intellectuals and for revealing it to the simple: “I confess to thee, O Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, because Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to little ones.”

Coming to the Catholic faith, Sheen explains that ornaments, vases, statues does not constitute the faith, but rather does the opposite, drives God away from Earth and fills our souls with objects of the world, which is not of God.

Religion is hated because it is religion, and possessions are only the excuse and pretext for driving God from the earth.

I constantly hear the endless droning of "eat the rich", whereby the desire for fairness and equality is backed by the grievous accusation that wealth accrues greed. However, perhaps it is more covetous for a left-wing activist to demand money from someone wealthier than he just on the basis that he is slightly poorer.

Simply because a man has a great fortune, it does not follow that he is a covetous man. A child with a few pennies might possibly be more covetous.

the more ties we have to earth, the harder will it be for us to die; and we were never meant to be perfectly satisfied here below.

In every friendship, hearts grow and entwine themselves together, so that the two hearts seem to make only one heart with only a common thought. That is why separation is so painful. It is not so much two hearts separating, but one heart being torn asunder.

“If you want people to stay as they are,” Sheen said, “tell them what they want to hear. If you want to improve them, tell them what they should know.”

I thoroughly enjoyed St Sheen's writing. It was fun yet fair. Sheen lays his words gently into the soul. He sooths gentle words into the wounds we have suffered here on earth. Every vice of this world blocks a man's true desire to beckon himself towards heaven. Sheen realised that. He meets you where you are. If there are any vices inflicting your own life, just know that Christ too was inflicted by them in the worst possible ways. And by knowing Christ, you may know a way to God, and be victorious over vice.

Italic = commentary / notes for the reader; rubrics / instructions to the celebrant or ministers

Plain text = variable / proper parts of the Mass (readings, propers, etc.); the rest of the Missal

Bold + Italic = sung parts of the Mass

(✠) is the Sign of the Cross

Introduction

May the intercession of the English Martyrs whose faith was nourished by the Mass of Sarum and the whole English Church rejoice in this inheritance and perhaps one day more people may come to know the mass of there ancestors. For as St Paul said

“Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle.” -2 Thessalonians 2:15

I would also like to Thank Frederick Edward Warren and A.H Pearson for there 1911 and 1884 translation of the Sarum Missal into English. I am sure that they would be delighted that it is still of use in 2026 and great credit should be given for there historical translation. I would also like to thank Aedan who helped me if there was uncertainty by referring back to the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite I am most grateful to him.

Asperges (Blessing of the Faithful)

(Blessing of the Salt)

Beginning at the step of the quire the priest will bless the water and the salt this will occur on all Sundays. The prayer follows:

I exorcise you , O creature of salt by the living (✠) God , by the true (✠) God , by the holy (✠) God , by the God who commanded you to be cast into the water by Elisha the prophet that the baroness of the water might be healed , that you may become salt *(Here the priest shall look at the Salt) *exorcized for the salvation of them that believe , and that you may be the salvation of soul and body to all that take you ; and from the that place where you shall be sprinkled , let ever delusion and wickedness , or craft of devilish cunning , when adjured flee and depart . Through him who shall come to judge the living and the dead and the world by fire.

R. Amen

Let us pray

(Collect) - Almighty everlasting God , we humbly implore that your boundless loving kindness *(Here the priest shall look at the salt) *that of your goodness you deign to ble(✠)ss and sancti(✠)fy this creature of salt, which you has given for the use of mankind ; that it may be to all who partake of it health of mind and body ; that whatsoever shall be touched or sprinkled with it may be freed from all uncleanness , and from all assault of spiritual wickedness . Through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son who lives and reigns with you in the Unity of the Holy Spirit, God, world without end. Amen.

Exorcism of the Water follows:

I exorcise you, O creature of the water , in the name of God (✠) the Father almighty , and in the name of Jesus (✠) Christ his Son our Lord , and in the power of the Holy (✠) Spirit ; that you may make have the power to root and transplant the enemy himself with his apostate angels , by the power of the same Jesus Christ our Lord ; who shall come to judge the living and the dead and the world by fire

R. Amen

Let us pray

(Collect) - O God who for the salvation of mankind has hidden one of the greatest sacraments in the element of water. Graciously listen to our invocation and pour upon this element (The priest shall look upon the water) prepared for several purification the power of your blessing that this your creature, serving your mysteries may acquire the effective power of divine grace for casting out devils , and for driving away diseases; and that on whatsoever in the houses or dwellings places of the faithful. This water having been sprinkled it may be freed from all uncleanness and may be delivered from hurt. Let no pestilence, no spirit corrupting linger there. Let all the insidious attacks of the lurking enemy be dissipated; and if there aught which threatens the safety or peace of the inhabitants, let it be driven away by the sprinkling of this water, so that it be saved by the invocation of your Holy Name they may be defended from all assaults. Through Our Lord Jesus Christ your Son who lives and reigns with you in the Unity of the Holy Spirit, God, World without end. Amen.

Here shall the priests cast salt into water in the form of the cross saying thus without infliction:

Let this mixture of salt and water alike to be made in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

V. The Lord be with you

R. And with your spirit

(Collect) - O God the author of unconquered might and King of the unconquerable empire , whoever triumphant magnificently, who puts down the strength of adverse power and overcomes the rage of the roaring adversary , and by your might subdue the onslaught of iniquity ; with fear and humility we entrust and beseech you , O Lord that you would deign to accept *(Here he shall look upon the salt and mixed with water) *this creature of salt and of water graciously illuminate it and by your love and pity sancti(✠)fy it; that whenever it shall have been sprinkled, by the invocation of your holy name , every attack of the unclean spirits may be parried and dread of the venomous serpent may be driven far away; and may the presence of the Holy Spirit be vouchsafed to be with us , as we ask your mercy in every place, through our Lord Jesus Christ your Son

While the water is being sprinkled the following Anthem is sung:

You shall purge me, O Lord, with hyssop, and I shall be clean; you shall wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Ps Have mercy upon me, O God, after your great goodness (Psalm 51)

You shall purge me, O Lord, with hyssop, and I shall be clean; you shall wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

V. And according to the multitude of your mercies do away with my offences

You shall purge me, O Lord, with hyssop, and I shall be clean; you shall wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

V. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be World without end. Amen .

To be repeated “You Shall purge me etc”

From Easter Sunday to Trinity Sunday a unique asperges occur but it seems the same as the Extraordinary Form.

After the sprinkling of the water the priest standing at the step of the quire shall say this verse:

V. Show us your mercy , O Lord.

R. And grant us your salvation

Then the priest shall say:

Let us pray

Hear us O Lord , holy Father , Almighty Everlasting God , vouchsafe to send your Holy Angel from heaven to keep, cherish , protect, visit and defend all who dwell in this habitation , Through Christ Our Lord.

R. Amen

Mass of the Catechumens (Or Liturgy of the Word)

While the priest prepares for mass in the sacristy let him put on his vestments and sing the hymn Creator Spirit Come.

Come, Holy Spirit, our souls inspire, And lighten with celestial fire. You the anointing Spirit are. Who does your sevenfold gifts impart

Your blessed anointing from above Is comfort, life, and fire of love. Enable with perpetual light The dullness of our blinded sight.

Anoint and cheer our soiled face with the abundance of your grace. Keep far our foes, give peace at home: Where you are a Guide, no ill can come.

Teach us to know the Father, Son, And you, of both, to be but One. That, through the ages all along, this may be our endless song :

Praise to your eternal merit, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

V. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created

R. And you shall renew the face of the Earth

(Collect) - O God, to who every heart is open and every desire known, and who no secret escapes, purify by the infusion of the Holy Spirit the thoughts of our heart; that we may merit perfectly to love and worthily to praise you: through Christ our Lord . Amen.

Then shall follow the Antiphon

Antiphon: I will go to the altar of God

Psalm 43: Grant me your justice, O God and plead my cause against a godless nation; rescue me from those who are deceitful and unjust.

You, O God, are my refuge; why have you rejected me? Why must I go about in mourning, while my enemy oppresses me?

Send forth your light and your truth they will serve as my guide.Let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place of your dwelling.

Then I will go to the altar of God, to the God of my joy and delight,

and I will praise you with the harp, O God, my God.

Why are you so disheartened, O my soul? Why do you sigh within me? Place your hope in God; for I will once again praise him, my Savior and my God.

Glory be to the Father….

Antiphon: I will go to the altar of God. To God, Who gives joy to my youth.

Lord Have Mercy

Christ Have Mercy

Lord Have Mercy

Our Father…

Hail Mary…

The choir will say the Introit (Office of the Mass)

Antiphon(Psalm 85:1) :LORD, you have been favourable to your land: You have turned away the captivity of Jacob

Verse(Jeremiah 29:11-14): I know the thoughts that I thinks towards you says thoughts of peace and not of evil ; then shall you call upon me and I will hear you I will hear you , and I will turn your captivity from all places.

Antiphon(Psalm 85:1) :LORD, you have been favourable to your land: You have turned away the captivity of Jacob

Doxology: Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

At the word Glory be to the Father the Procession is to go to the Altar in the Following Order Crucifer and Two Candle Bearers, then the Thurifer. The Subdeacon (Carrying the Book of the Gospel) then behind the Deacon **(With the Missal) then the Celebrant (Priest). Then let the priest begin the confession assisted by the deacon and the sub deacon.

V. And lead us not into temptation,

R. But deliver us from evil.

V. Let us confess unto the Lord, for He is good:

R. And His mercy endures for ever.

Priest: I confess to God, to the blessed Mary, to all the saints and to you: because I have sinned too much by thought, word, and deed by my fault: I pray, holy Mary, all the saints of God, and you to pray for me.

Servers: The Almighty God have mercy upon you, and pardon all your sins, deliver you from all evil, preserve and confirm you in good, and lead you to everlasting life.

Priest: Amen.

Servers: I confess to God, to the blessed Mary, to all the saints and to you: because I have sinned too much by thought, word, and deed by my fault: I pray, holy Mary, all the saints of God, and you to pray for me.

Priest: The Almighty God have mercy upon you, and pardon all your sins, deliver you from all evil, preserve and confirm you in good, and lead you to everlasting life.

Priest: Absolution and remission of all your sins, space for true repentance, amendment of life, grace, and the consolation of the Holy Spirit, the Almighty and merciful God grant to you.

Servers: Amen

If the Bishop is present no matter who the priest is let the Bishop say the confession at the side of the Altar then the May almighty God have mercy … shall be said (Presumably by the Priest who is celebrating) then the Absolution Prayer:

This is one of the most remarkable prayers in this entire mass the Bishops in Medieval England where not just powerful but sometimes more powerful than the peers of the realm. But as a sign of penitence, they are required to show Humility even to the lowest parish priest who would often be as poor as his parishioners.

The priest will then say:

P. Our Help is in the Name of the Lord

R. Who made Heaven and Earth

P. Blessed be the name of the Lord

R. From this time forward, now, and forever more

P. Let us pray

Then having finished his prayers the priest shall kiss the deacon and the Sub Deacon and shall say this

P. Receive the kiss of peace and love that you may be fit to perform the divine office at this most Holy Alter.

This shall always be done except for masses for the dead and the three days before Easter.

This practice is no doubt related to Jesus teaching in Matthew 5:24 to reconcile with your brothers before the Altar of God.

Let one of the Candle-Bearers fetch the bread, water and wine for the Eucharist. The other should fetch the water, basin and a towel.

The Candle Bearers will then put their candles on the Altar Steps and then the priest will say silently on the middle of the Altar with inclined body and joined hands.

Let us pray

Take away from us we ask you O Lord all our inequities that we may be found worthy to enter the Holy of Holies. Through Christ our Lord.

Priest then kisses the Alter in the middle and makes the sign of the cross on his face saying

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Then let the deacon place the incense in the censer and say first to the priest

Bid a Blessing

*The priest will then say *

The Lord in whose Honor this incense shall be burnt by him may it be blessed. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

The Deacon will then give him the censor ,kiss the priest hand and then incense the Altar on the right side then the middle and then the left side. The priest will then be incensed by the deacon. The priest will then kiss the Gospel held by the Sub Deacon.

*After this is done let the Third Repetition of the Office be sung with Glory be to the Father… Then the Kyrie *

Lord have mercy upon us

Christ have mercy upon us

Lord have mercy upon us

Then let the priests sits whilst the choir sings the office and kyrie. Then follows the Gloria in Excelsis when it is to be said the priest says it beginning in the middle of the altar then silently continues while the choir sings this chant (On Feast Days particularly of Our Lady this can change. The rubrics also contain information on what colours the vestments should be in this mass .The priest would wear red for most Sunday masses.)

Glory be to God on High

And on Earth peace to people of good will. We Praise you, we bless you , we worship you, we glorify you , we give thanks to you for your great glory. O Lord God heavenly King, God the Almighty Father

O Lord the only begotten Son Jesus Christ , O Lord God, Lamb of God , Son of the Father . You that takes away the sins of the world have mercy upon us. You that takes away the sins of the world receive our prayer. You that’s sits at the right hand of the Father have mercy upon us.

For you alone are Holy One, You alone are the Lord, You alone are the Most High O Jesus Christ with the Holy Spirit in the Glory of God the Father. Amen.

All shall incline towards the Altar when “Glory be to God on High”, “We praise you” and “Receive our Prayer” is said and at the end of the Gloria they shall make the sign of the cross also inclined towards the Altar. They will also sign themselves after “Glory be to You O Lord” and after the Sanctus when “Blessed is He” is said.

After the Gloria the priest makes the sign of the cross then turns towards the people raises his arms slightly with joined hands and says

The Lord be with you

The Choir answers

And with your spirit

Then let the priest turn towards the Altar and say

Let us pray

The deacon will also turn towards the people like the celebrant but behind him the sub deacon will genuflect and raise the celebrant chasuble.

At this point there are several rubrics which dictate variation in the prayers such as a wedding mass or memorials. This takes up about half a page and so is unnecessary for this mass. There is also the description of when the Gloria is sung not during Advent or from the Septuagesima up to the Easter Vigil .The collect is then said.

The number of collect is never to exceed seven in the Use of Sarum

According to the Modern Medievalism Blog the priest will sing the collects. On certain feast days there could be three, five or seven collects always in odd numbers. Number (2) and (3) are for illustrative purposes and are not from this mass.

Collects:(1) Lord, we beseech you, absolve your people from their offences: that through your bountiful goodness we may be delivered from the bands of those sins which by our frailty we have committed.

(2)O Lord, mercifully hear the prayers of your Church; that She being delivered from all manner of adversity and error, may joyfully serve you in all godly quietness.

(3) O God, from who all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed; Give to your servants that peace which the world cannot give, that both our hearts may be set to obey your commandments, and also that by you we being defended from the fear of our enemies may pass our time in rest and quietness. Through the merits of Jesus Christ our Saviour.

Amen.

All clergy members are bound to stand except during the Epistle, Gradual, Alleluia or Tract is chanted.

The subdeacon chants the epistle and lesson from the pulpit

The Lesson or The Epistle of St Paul to Colossians

That is why, ever since the day we first heard about it, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And we ask this so that you may live in a manner worthy of the Lord and become fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and continuing to grow in the knowledge of God. May you be fortified with the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be granted patience and endurance, with joy

After which follows the gradual and alleluia or tract and if applicable a sequence. These are said privately by the priest. *(Presumably said by the choir as well in chant).

Gradual.

But it is you, O Lord, that saves us from our enemies: and put them to confusion that hate us.

V. We make our boast of God all day long: and will praise your name for ever.

Alleluia!!

V. O Lord my God, in you have I put my trust: save me from all them that persecute me and deliver me.

This having been done the sub deacon should take the bread and the wine and prepare for the celebration of the Eucharist (He washes his hands and then pours the wine not the water taking the water cruet with him to the priest) and goes to the priest for a blessing and says

Bid a blessing

The priest answers

The Lord may (This Water) be blessed by him out of whose side flowed forward blood and water. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Then let the deacon before he goes to chant the gospel cense the middle of the altar. The lectern is never censed before the gospel then let him take the Book of the Gospel (Text) and bending to the priest standing before the altar and turning his face south let him say (Not chanting).

Bid a Blessing

The priest answers

The Lord be in your heart and mouth that you may preach the Holy Gospel of God. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

If the priest is celebrating without a minister, he says beginning with “Lord bid a Blessing” and changes “Your” to “My heart and mouth”. Then let the deacon go through the middle of the choir carrying the gospel solemnly on his left hand the thurifer and candle bearers preceding him (On double feasts let the cross bearer also precede him). At the pulpit let the sub deacon take the gospel and hold it to the left of the deacon. The right opposite the cross bearer stands. The candle bearers on either side. The thurifer behind the deacon turned towards him. Let the gospel always be read towards the north . Then shall be he say signing the gospel with his forehead and his chest with his thumb.

V. The Lord be with you

R. And with your spirit

The sequence of the Gospel according to St Matthew

Glory be to you, O Lord.

While He spoke these things to them, behold, a ruler came and worshiped Him, saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay Your hand on her and she will live.” So, Jesus arose and followed him, and so did His disciples. And suddenly, a woman who had a flow of blood for twelve years came from behind and touched the hem of His garment. For she said to herself, “If only I may touch His garment, I shall be made well.” But Jesus turned around, and when He saw her, He said, “Be of good cheer, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And the woman was made well from that hour.

After the Gospel let him kiss the Book of the Gospel which the sub deacon offers him and then carries against him leaning against his chest.

The Sarum missal contains no mention of the sermon but according to medievalist blog the sermon will occur after the creed rather than after the gospel as under the Roman Rite. Apparently the book of common prayer carried over this practice in its first edition.

The priest will at the middle of the altar begin the creed the deacon and the subdeacon return from the pulpit. The deacon will be given the Gospel by the sub deacon and then give it to the priest to kiss. The deacon will stand on his right side with the sub deacon ministering to him and the acolyte ministering to the subdeacon.

I believe in One God

the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible .

And in one Lord Jesus Christ the only begotten Son of God , Begotten of his Father before all worlds , God of God , Light of Light , Very God of very God , Begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father ; by Whom all things where made. Who for us men and our salvation came down from heaven. And was incarnate of the Holy Spirit by the Virgin Mary , And was made man ,and was crucified for us under Pontus Pilate. He suffered and was buried , And the third day He rose again according to scriptures , And ascended into Heaven , And sits on the right hand of the father . And He shall come again with Glory to judge both the living and the dead :Whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Spirit, The Lord and the giver of life , who proceeds from the Father and Son, Who with the Father and the Son , together is worshiped and glorified, Who has spoken by the Prophets

And I believe in One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins, And I look forward to the Resurrection of the dead, And the life of the world to come. Amen.

The choir at the beginning of the creed sign themselves turning towards the altar inclining . They also incline at the words And Was Incarnate , And was made Man , And was Crucified , World to come. They remain turned towards the altar till the end of the mass except during the offertory.

Then shall the Priest Chant:

V. The Lord be with you

R. And with your spirit

Let us pray

According to the medievalist blog there was a form of the “prayers of the faithful” said at this point in the mass in vernacular. This would make sense as this custom remains in the Book of Common Prayer. But as no source is provided and it is not in the missal it has been omitted.

Then is said the Offertory

Out of the deep have I called to you, O Lord: Lord hear my voice.

After the offertory let the priest let the deacon give the priest the chalice and the paten and the sacrifice kissing his hands each time. Then receiving from the deacon the chalice let the priest place it in its proper place in the middle of the altar and inclining raising it little with either hand and offer sacrifice to the lord saying this prayer.

Receive O Holy Trinity this oblation which I , an unworthy sinner offer in your honour the Blessed Virgin Mary and all you Saints for my sins and offences; for the salvation of the living and the repose of all the faithful departed. In the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, let this new sacrifice be acceptable to almighty God.

Having said this prayer let him replace the chalice and cover it with the corporas and place the bread upon the corporas decently before the chalice containing wine and water and let him kiss the paten and place it to the right side of the sacrifice covering it a little under the corporas. This done let him take the censer from the deacon and cense the sacrifice three times making the sign of the cross over it : then three times on either side : then three times between himself and the altar while he cense let him say this verse.

Let my prayer, O Lord, be set forward in your sight as the incense.

After this let the priest be censed by the deacon and let the sub deacon bring him the text to kiss. Then let the deacon cense the choir beginning with the rulers and then the deans side the boy inclining to each of the clergy as censes them then move to the precentor side. The sub deacon follows with the text for each of them to kiss (This is a simplification more explicit instructions are in the missal)

If it is a principal double feast then let the precentor be censed first

Further instructions are then outlined for if a bishop celebrates mass there would be two texts or relics for him to kiss.

Let only the sacrifice be censed if the creed is not sung. This being done let the priest go to the right side of the altar and let him wash his hands saying:

Cleanse me , O Lord , from all pollution of mind and of body that I may in purity perform the holy work of the Lord.

In the meantime let the deacon cense the altar on the left side and the relics. Then let the priest return to the altar and let the ministers place themselves on their steps. Then standing before the Altar inclining his head and body and with joined hands , let the priest say this prayer:

In the spirit of humility and with a contrite heart let us be accepted of you, O Lord: and let our sacrifice be in such wise in your sight that it may be accepted of you this day, and please you, O Lord my God.

Raising himself let him kiss the altar to the right of the sacrifice and let him give the blessing over it afterwards , signing himself saying:

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Then let the priest turn to the people and say in a low voice:

Brethren and sisters pray for me that my sacrifice and your sacrifice may be accepted by the Lord your God.

The clergy answer privately:

The grace of the Holy Spirit illuminate your heart and lips and the Lord graciously accept this sacrifice of praise at your hands for our sins and offences.

Then the missal has a number of prefaces that vary throughout the year including masses for the dead, lent, advent , Pentecost etc. The general rubrics state that there is the secret prayer before the preface.

Turning to the Altar let the priest say the secrets in number and order according to the collects that have been said before the epistle beginning:

Let us pray

Secret: (1) Let oblation of this gift cleanse us O Lord, we beg you and make us wholly worthy of the sacred things we have received.

(2) Protect us, we beseech you, O Lord, who serve at your mysteries; that cleaving to the things which are of God, we may wait upon You both in body and soul.

(3) O God, Who suffers not them that believe in you to be troubled by any terrors ; be pleased to accept the prayers and offerings of the people which is dedicated to you, and let peace, vouchsafed to us by your pity, keep the borders of Christians safe from all enemies. Through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son who being God, lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

At the end let him say aloud

World without End

Amen

The Lord be with you

And with your spirit

Then let the sub deacon take the paten and the offertory veil from the deacon. Let him give it covered to the acolyte to hold until the Our Father with the acolyte standing behind the sub deacon on the step. Let this be done throughout the year even during All Souls Day except for masses of the dead.

Here let the priest raise his hands as he says:

Lift up your hearts

We lift them up to the Lord

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God

It is proper and just so to do.

Then a large number of prefaces follow.

The following preface is to be said on Trinity Sunday and all Sundays following until Advent. The preface is to be chanted in the chapter house.

Everlasting God who with your only Begotten Son and your Holy Spirit are one God , are one Lord not one only person but three persons in one substance, For that which we believe of your Glory which you have revealed , the same do we believe of your Son , and of the Holy Spirit without differences or in equality that in the confession of a true and everlasting God Head both distinction in the persons and Unity in being , and Equality in Majesty be worshiped which Angels and Archangels praise , Cherubin also and Seraphin who cease not to cry with one voice saying

Then follows the Sanctus

Whilst he says Holy, Holy let him raise his arms a little and join his hands until the words “In the Name of the Lord” then let him sign himself on the face.

Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts; heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord. Glory be to you O Lord.

Then immediately with joined hands and uplifted eyes, let him begin, inclining himself,

Canon of the Mass (Or the Eucharistic Prayer)

Therefore, O most merciful Father, we humbly pray you through Jesus Christ your Son and Our Lord we most humbly pray and entreat

Here let the priest rise and kiss the altar on the right side of the Sacrifice `saying

to accept and bless

Here let the priest make three crosses over the chalice and bread saying

these gi(✠)fts these pre(✠)sents this ho(✠)ly and immaculate Sacrifice

Having made them let him raise his hands saying

which we offer to you in the first place on behalf of your Holy Catholic Church, to which do you vouchsafe to keep in peace, to guard, to unite and to govern throughout the whole world: together with your servant our Pope N, our Bishop N,

Here his own bishop is only mentioned

our King N.

The above persons are mentioned by name. Then shall follow:

all Orthdox and maintainers of the Catholic and Apostolic Faith. Remember, O Lord, your servants and handmaidens N and N.

Let the priest show due charity and pray in the following manner first for himself second for his parents both spiritual and carnal and for his other relations. Thirdly for parishioners and special friends and others and fourth for all present and fifthly for all Christian people. Here the priest can commend any friends. I counsel that the pause can’t be too long on account of distraction of mind , suggestions of evil angels and other dangers.

and all here present , whose faith is approved and whose devotion is known to you ; in whose behalf we offer to you or who are engaged in offering up to you , this sacrifice of praise for themselves and all pertaining to them ,for the redemption of their souls , for the hope of their salvation and security ; and are praying their vows to you, the eternal and true God.

In Communion with and reverencing the memory in the first place, of the glorious and ever Virgin Mary ,inclining a little, Mother of our God and Lord Jesus Christ ; and also of your blessed Apostles and Martyrs , Peter and Paul , Andrew , James, John , Thomas , James , Philip , Bartholomew , Mathew, Simion, Thaddaeus , Linus , Cletus , Clement, Sixtus , Cornelius , Cyprian , Laurence , Chrysogonus, John and Paul , Cosmas and Damien and all your saints ; for whose sake and prayers grant that in all things we may be strengthened by the aid of your protection. Through the same Christ Our Lord. Amen.

Here let the priest regard the Host with great Veneration saying

This oblation, therefore of our service and that of your whole family , we beseech you , O Lord , graciously to accept , and to dispose our days in your peace , delivering us from eternal damnation, and causing us to be numbered amongst the flock of your elect. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Here let him regard the host again saying:

Which Obligation we beseech you , O Almighty God , that you would vouchsafe , in all respects , Here let him make three crosses over each obligation to bl(✠)ess , ap(✠)prove , rat(✠)ify and make reasonable and acceptable, that it may become to us the Bo(✠)dy , Here let him sign the bread, and the Blo(✠)od , Here let him sign over the chalice and joining his hands say, of your most dearly Beloved Son our Lord Jesus Christ. Here let the Priest raise and join his hands, afterwards wipe his fingers and elevate the Host saying:

Who on the day before He suffered took bread into His Holy and adorable hands , and lifting up his eyes to Heaven*, Here let him raise his eyes to Heaven, to you his Father , God Almighty, Here let him incline and afterwards raise himself a little ,* gave thanks to you , ble(✠)ssed, brake*, Here let him touch the Host but do not break it for while the words imply Christ brake before consecrating , tradition teaches the contrary, *and gave it to His disciples, saying Take and eat you all of this

FOR THIS IS MY BODY

These words should be said in one in the same breath without pause. After these words let the priest incline to the Host , and with bowed head adore it. Afterwards elevate it above his head that it may be seen by the people and reverently replace it before the chalice making a cross with the same ; and then let him uncover the chalice and hold it between both hands , not disjoining the thumb from the forefinger , save only to make the sign of the cross saying:

Likewise, after supper, taking also this most excellent chalice into His Holy and adorable hands, and giving thanks to you, *here let him incline, *He bles(✠)sed and gave it to his disciples Take and drink you all of it

Here let the priest elevate the chalice saying

FOR THIS IS THE CUP OF MY BLOOD OF THE NEW AND EVERLASTING TESTAMENNT , THE MYSTERY OF FAITH , WHICH SHALL BE SHED FOR YOU AND FOR MANY FOR THE REMESSION OF SINS.

Here let him elevate the chalice to his chest or above his head saying:

As often as you shall do this , you shall do it in remembrance of Me.

Here let him replace the chalice , and rub his fingers over it in case of any crumbs , and cover the chalice. Then let him raise in his arms in the form of a cross joining his fingers until the benediction.

Wherefore also , O Lord , we your servants together with your holy people , calling to mind the most blessed Passion of the same Christ you’re your Son our Lord God , together with His Resurrection from the dead , and His glorious Ascension into Heaven offer to your excellent Majesty of your gifts and bounties, Here let him make five crosses : three over the Host and Chalice saying

a pu(✠)re a ho(✠)ly , a spo(✠)tless Sacrifice, The fourth over the bread saying: the holy Br(✠)ead of eternal life, *The fifth over the chalice saying, *and the cup (✠) of everlasting salvation.

Upon which do you vouchsafe to look with favourable and gracious countenance and accept them as you did accept the gifts of your righteous servant Abel, the sacrifice of our Patriarch Abraham, and the holy sacrifice, the pure oblation, which your High Priest Melchizedek offered to you,

Here let the priest , inclining his body and crossing his hands say:

We humbly entreat you , Almighty God , command these things to be carried by the hands of your Holy Angel to your Altar on High before the sight of your Divine Majesty , that as many of us , Here he shall raise himself and kiss the altar on the right sacrifice as shall by partaking at this Altar receive the most sacred Bo(✠)dy , Here let him sign over the host and Bl(✠)ood of your Son , *Here let him sign over the chalice , may be fulfilled with all grace and heavenly bene(✠)diction, Here let him sign himself on his face, *through the same Christ our Lord . Amen .

Here let him pray for the dead:

Remember also , O Lord , the souls of your servants and handmaidens , N and N , who have gone before us with the sign of the faith, and sleep the sleep of peace ; to them , O Lord and to all who rest in Christ , we pray you , grant a place of refreshment , of light and of peace . Through the same Christ Our Lord . Amen

Here let him strike his breast once and saying:

To us , also , your sinful servants , who hope in the multitude of your mercies , vouchsafe to grant some part and fellowship with your Holy Apostles and Martyrs , with John , Stephan , Matthias , Barnabus , Ignatius , Alexander , Marcellinus , Peter , Felicitas , Perpetua , Agatha , Lucy , Agnes , Cecilia , Anastasia , and all your Saints , into whose company , not weighting our merits but pardoning our offences , we beseech you to admit us. Through Christ our Lord , by Whom, O Lord , you ever creates , Here let the priest sign the chalice three times saying, sanctif(✠)y ,quick(✠)en ble(✠)sses and bestows upon us all these good things. Here let the priest uncover the chalice and sign it five times with the host. First beyond the chalice on either side ; Secondly in a line with it; Thirdly below it ; The fourth time the same as the first; Fifthly before the chalice. Here let the deacon having washed his hands let him stand to the right of the priest. Let him assist in the raising of the corporals ; and as he retires let him kiss the altar and the right shoulde3r of the priest. By Him (✠) and with Him (✠) and in Him (✠) is to you , God the Father Al(✠)mighty, in the unity of the Holy (✠) Spirit, all the honour and glory Here let the Priest cover the chalice, and keep his hands on the Altar whilst he says,

World without end

Amen

Let us pray

Admonished by saving precepts and following the Divine institution we are bold to say

Our Father

Who art in heaven hallowed be your name. Your Kingdom come . Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day your daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation

Let the choir answer:

But deliver us from evil

Let the priest say Amen privately

Deliver us , O Lord we beseech you , from all evils past , present , and to come ; and at the intercession of the blessed and glorious ever – Virgin Mary , Mother of God , and of your blessed Apostles Peter , and Paul , and Andrew , with all the saints *Here let the Deacon say give the paten to the priest , kissing his hands ; and let the priest kiss the paten. Then let him place it before the left and right eye : after which let him make the sign of cross on his face with the paten and then let him replace it saying: *graciously give peace in our time , that , aided by the help of your loving kindness , we may be both be ever set free from sin and secure from all distress. *Here let him uncover the chalice and take the Body, with an inclination, placing it over the bowl of the chalice. Holding it between the thumbs and forefingers and let him break it into three parts. The first fraction let him say: *Through the same your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, *The second fraction *Who with you lives and reigns in Unity of the Holy Spirit, God,

Here let him say:

World without end

Amen

Every Ferial Mass the choir kneel for the Sanctus to the peace throughout the year (Except from Easter to the first Sunday after Trinity Sunday). For feasts of three lessons without rulers and on an in octaves when the choir is not ruled. On weekdays from the first Sunday after the Epiphany to Maundy Thursday, and from Trinity Sunday to Christmas Eve the following prayers are said kneeling:

Antiphon. Yours is the power

Psalm 79: O God the Heathen have come into your inheritance…

Glory.

Psalm 67: God be merciful and bless us…

Glory.

Psalm 21: The King shall have Joy and love in Your strength…

Glory.

Antiphon. Yours is the power and the kingdom, O Lord; You are above all nations: Give peace in our Time O Lord.

Lord, have mercy upon us

Christ, have mercy upon us

Lord, have mercy upon us

Our Father.

And all of this is said without tone as well by the clergy in the quire as by the Priest with his Ministers. Then let the priest say intoning:

V. And lead us not into temptation.

R. But delver us from Evil.

V. Let God arise, and let him His enemies be scattered.

R. Let them also that hate Him flee before him.

V. Not to us, O Lord, not to us.

R. But to your Name give the glory,

V. Let us pray for the afflicted and captives.

R. Deliver Israel, O God, out of all his troubles.

V. Send them help, O Lord, from your Sanctuary.

R. And strengthen them out of Zion.

V. Be to us, O Lord, a strong tower,

R. From the face of the enemy.

V. O Lord, save the King.

R. And mercifully hear us when we call upon you

V. O Lord, hear our prayer,

R. And let our cry come to you

V. The Lord be with you

R. And with your spirit

Let us pray

O God , Who in your wonderous Providence orders all things, we humbly pray you that , rescuing the land which your only Begotten Son has consecrated with His own Blood out of the hands of the enemies of the Cross of Christ , You would restore it to the worship of Christ, by mercifully directing the prayers of the faithful who are instant for its deliverance into the way of eternal peace. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who being God, lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, world without end. Amen.

Govern we beseech you ,O Lord, your servant our Bishop and at the intercession of the Blessed Mary Mother of God , ever- Virgin , and of all your Saints , multiply upon him the gifts of your grace , that he be delivered from all offences , and not being left destitute of temporal aids, may rejoice in never failing ordinances. Through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who being God lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, world without end. Amen.

Grant, we beseech you, Almighty God to your servant our King, health of mind and body, that he, cleaving to good works, may be ever defended by your mighty protection. Through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who being God lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, world without end. Amen.

Here let him make three crosses within the chalice with the third particle of the host saying:

Pearsons’s translation does not have the crosses, but Warrens does. They have been added in this translation.

The peace of the Lord (✠) be with y(✠)ou al(✠)ways.

Let the choir answer

And with your spirit.

Then if the bishop shall celebrate, let the Deacon, turning to the people and holding the bishop’s staff in his right hand, with the crook turned towards himself say:

Bow down yourself for a blessing.

Let the choir answer:

Thanks be to you, O God.

Afterwards, the Eucharist being replaced on the paten, let the bishop give the blessing to the people.

At the Agnus Dei let both the ministers approach the Priest on the right the Deacon nearer, the Sub Deacon further, and let them say privately.

O Lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world Have mercy upon us.

O Lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world Have mercy upon us.

O Lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world grant them peace.

Here making the sign of the cross, let him place the said third particle of the Host in the sacrament of Blood saying:

Let this most (✠) holy union of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ be to me and who all who receive it health of mind and of body, and a saving preparation for worthily attaining to eternal life. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Before the Peace is given let the priest say:

O Lord, Holy Father, Almighty, everlasting God, grant me so worthily to receive this most holy Body and Blood of your Son our Lord Jesus Christ that I may therefore receive the forgiveness of all my sins, and be filled with your Holy Spirit and have your peace. For you only are God, and there is no other beside you, Whose kingdom and glorious dominion abides forever, world without end. Amen.

Here let the priest kiss the corporals on the right side and the top of the chalice and afterwards the deacon saying:

V. Peace be to you and to the Church of God

R. And with your spirit

Let the deacon receive the Peace from the priest on his right and let him give it to the Sub Deacon. Then let the Deacon carry it to the Rulers at the step of the quire and let them give to each side beginning with the seniors. On feasts and weekdays with no rulers let the peace be carried from the deacon to the quire by two members of second rank; the rest as before. If a Bishop is present let the deacon kiss the primary sub deacon *(More directions are given for bishops but seem similar to the normal process)

*After giving the Peace let the priest say these prayers privately before communicating holding the host in his hands.

O God the Father , Fount and Source of all goodness , Who moved by your loving-kindness did you will your Only Begotten to descend for us to this lower world and to take Flesh , Which I unworthy here hold in my hand *, Here let the priest incline towards the host , *I worship you , I glorify you , I praise you with the whole purpose of my mind and heart , and beseech you not to forsake us your servants , but forgive us our sins , that so we may be to serve you , the only Living and True God , with a pure heart and chaste body. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

O Lord Jesus Christ , Son of the Living God , Who by the will of the Father and the cooperation of the Holy Spirit has by your death given life to the world ; deliver me , I beseech you , by this your most holy Body and Blood , from all my inequities and from every evil ; make me ever obedient to your commandments , and suffer me not to be for ever separated from you , O Saviour of the world . Who with God the Father and the same Holy Spirit lives and reigns, God, world without end. Amen.

Let not the Sacrament of your Body and Blood, O Lord Jesus Christ, which I albeit unworthy to receive, be to me for judgement and condemnation, but by your goodness be profitable to the health of my body and my soul. Amen.

To the body let him say, before he receives bowing down:

Hail for evermore, most holy Flesh of Christ, to me before all and above all the highest source of joy. The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, be to me a sinner the Way and the Life, in the Name (✠) of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Here let him receive the Body, making a cross with the same before his mouth. Then to the Blood let him say, with great devotion:

Hail for evermore, Heavenly Drink, to me before all and above all, the highest source of joy. The Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ be to me, a personal healing to everlasting life. Amen. In the Name (✠) of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Here let him receive the Blood: which taken, let the priest incline, and say with devotion the prayer following:

I give thanks to you , O Lord , Holy Father , Almighty , everlasting God, Who has refreshed me with the most sacred Body and Blood of your Son our Lord Jesus Christ ; and I pray that this Sacrament of our salvation of which I , unworthy sinner , have partaken , turn not to judgement nor condemnation according to my sins , but be profitable to the preservation of my body and soul to everlasting life . Amen.

Being said let the priest go to the right side of the Altar with the chalice between his hands, his fingers joined as before; and let the Sub Deacon approach and pour into the chalice wine and let the Priest rinse hands lest any relics of the body and blood remain. If a priest is celebrating two masses, then he should not perform ablution but place it in the Aumbry until the end of the next mass and then take both ablutions. After the first ablution is said:

What we have partaken of with our mouth, O Lord, may we receive with a pure heart, and by a temporal gift may our everlasting healing be effected.

Here let him wash his fingers in the chalice with the wine poured in by the Subdeacon; after drinking which follows,

Let this communion, O Lord, cleanse us from sin, and make us partakers of a heavenly healing.

Hear let the deacon pour the water into the chalice, which having been drunk let the priest place the chalice on the paten, that if anything remain it will move onto the latter. Let him then say:

Let us adore the sign of the Cross, whereby we have received the Sacrament of salvation.

Then let him wash his hands the Sub Deacon ministering to him and in the meantime let the Deacon fold up the corporas and put them in the burse and while Communion is being said , let him place upon them the chalice with the offertory veil and give them to the Acolyte to take back in the same manner and ceremony they were brought with. After World without End and Amen let the Sub- Deacon carry the book to the right side of the Altar and the Deacon take the Chalice to the priest to drink if any remains .Then let the priest say Communion signing himself on his face turning to the people and with arms raised a little and joined hands say

V. The Lord be with you

R. And with your spirit

Turning to the Altar, let him say:

Let us pray

Communion Prayer (1): Therefore, I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours (Mark 11:24)

Then let him say the Post Communion, after the same order and number according to the Collects.

Post Communion Prayer: (1) We receiving the heavenly gift, beseech you, O Lord, suffer not to turn to our condemnation which you have ordained for the healing of your faithful people.

(2) O Lord our God, we beseech you, suffer not those to fall into the perils of this life whom you does permit to rejoice in the partaking of heavenly food.

(3) O God, Who are the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of Whom remains our eternal life, Whose service is perfect freedom; Defend us your humble servants in all assaults of our enemies; that we, surely trusting in your defence, may not fear the power of any adversaries. Through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Ending with

V. World without end

R. Amen

The last post communion being ended having made the sign of the cross on his forehead let the priest turn towards the people and say:

V. The Lord be with you

R. And with your spirit

Then let the deacon turn towards the Altar and say:

V. Let us give thanks to the Lord

R. Thanks be to God

Or else turning to the people say

V. Depart all the mass is over

R. Thanks be to God

This having been said let the Priest with his body inclined and hands joined say secretly in the middle of the Altar:

Let the obedient performance of my binding duty be pleasing to you , O Holy Trinity , and grant that this Sacrifice which I , unworthy that I am have offered in the sight of your majesty may be acceptable to you ; and may through your mercy obtain your favour for myself and all those in whose behalf I have offered it. Who Lives and reigns, God world without end. Amen.

Which ended let the priest rise signing himself on his face saying:

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And so, with inclination let them depart in the same manner they came in. And immediate after the Thanks be to God non shall be said in the quire when it is said after mass. Returning let the priest say the Gospel:

In the beginning was the word ….. (John 1-14)

Canon of the Mass

Reflections on the Sarum Rite

History of the Rite? The Rites development begun with St Osmund and is a synthesis of the Roman Rite and earlier forms of the mass used in the British Isles. It gradually spread from Salisbury to most of the British Isles. It has clear influence from the Roman Rite but is also clear that as the Rite is older than the Extraordinary Form then it could be argued that they influenced each other’s development particularly in the reverence shown for the Eucharist. It is the form of the mass that St Thomas Moore would recognise as the mass which evolved for the English People. Sadly, the reformation led to the decline of the rite as the remaining priests in England were trained in Europe. This means that they were trained in the Roman Rite and so gradually over time the rite fell into obscurity. The Rite did leave an impact the First Book of Common Prayer is heavily influenced by Sarum. This means that those priests of the Anglican Ordinariate carry over parts of the rite into the modern church indirectly by preservation of practices in the Book of Common Prayer.

What was the language of the Rite? The rite is performed in Latin much like the Extraordinary Form.

What would a Catholic Church in Middle Ages England look like? There is a number of unique features notably a Rood Screen these where similar to a Iconostasis in Eastern Orthodoxy but they developed independently. They contained images of the Saints and Biblical scenes painted onto them. But it also served the purpose of obscuring the Altar from the Faithful and physically separating where the Laity where not allowed to enter.There is also the fact that Medieval English Churches had also the Sedelia these are Chairs built into the stone for the Clergy (Priest Deacon and Sub Deacon). But when it comes to church architecture the most interesting are those where styles of older Churches collide. The Church of St Michales and All Angels in Essex is an excellent example. The Church is clearly built in Romanesque style as are the Frescos but the style on them has just a hint of Byzantine Icons. The artist would have been unlikely to see Byzantine Style Churches and so this style is likely to be unintentional development with roots in Byzantine artwork. The English Church of the Middle Ages truly did draw upon the great deposit of the Christian faith.

             Rood Screen :  Romanesque Frescos:

                 Rood Screen :  Romanesque Frescos:

:Sedelia

What did the Sarum Rite sound like? If you would like to know what the Sarum Rite sounded like the link to this website has chants of the mass in Latin along with the ability to buy vespers of the Sarum rite. They also have a large number of resources all for free so, please go and support them if you can .

What where the vestment colours of the rite? The colour of the vestments in the Sarum Rite is interesting, red seems the colour of ordinary time for mass on Sunday this would align with the ambrosian rite. There is also White for Easter to the Octave of Ascension. There is also notable absences such as the Feast of Corpus Christi and Epiphany not having assigned colours. The logical deduction would be that Parishes would use whatever they had. Yellow was also for the Feasts of Saints who where “Confessors”.

What does the Sarum Rite get right? The Sarum Rite is firstly a mass that emphasis the sacrificial nature of the mass. Not just by being Ad Orientem but by the respect shown to the Eucharist and the emphasis on Gods Mercy and salvation of mankind by the sacrifice on calvary. There are also moments of personal piety and touching prayers which I hope dispel the idea that the Medieval Church was not pastoral. There is an emphasis on Mercy and Abundant Love and the importance of the Holy Spirit such as at the start of the mass. This is a devotion many would be wise to emulate. The calendar is great at emphasising the English saints such as St Augustine of Canterbury, St Thomas Becket, St Osmund to name but a few. They have more prominent feasts in this calendar. The fact that so many English saints are borderline invisible is not good for the English Church we need there intercession.

What is the legal status of the Mass? The mass can be celebrated with the permission of the Local Bishop as the rite was never formally supressed. The apostolic constitution of Pope Pius V in “Quo primum” make clear that rites used 200 years before this edict was lawful. The Second Vatican Council and the subsequent “Missale Romanum” did not change this. The Sarum Rite emerged in the 11th Century and so clearly was not suppressed by Pope Pius V. This is shown by the fact that Bishop Mario Joseph Conti celebrated the mass in the year 2000. Of course, the practical challenge of finding a Latin missal and more importantly a priest who can read it may prove more challenging.

Could the Rite be Revived more broadly? In my humble view it could be lawful to revive the right on a more long term basis. My evidence is Pope Pius V himself. “Quo primum” makes clear that a synod of Bishops could adopt the Roman Rite with the “Consent of Bishops and Prelate”. In this case the lapse of time and rarity of the rite make it clear this has happened implicitly. So, if such approval could adopt the Roman Rite and discontinue an old rite then could the exact same process be used to revive a rite? There is nothing in the text that implies the adaptation is a permanent change in fact quite the opposite. It states they have “Permission” so if their consent changes surely the permission could be withdrawn. But before you worry I am not suggesting that the Bishops of England institute a rite by their own power the correct process would be a Synod of Bishops Assembled by the Pope .This is unlikely to occur but if a Bishop is reading this then at least convince your peers to reissue the missal of 1529 in a modern missal format. So, if a priest is able, they may be able to celebrate the mass by buying the missal. With the resurgence of the Latin Mass, I am sure there would be some demand.

Calling the Mass the Sarum Rite is wrong? I have used throughout this work the phrase the “Sarum Rite” the technical phrase is the “Use of Sarum” as it comes from a particular cathedral in this case Salisbury. Legally it falls under the broad Roman Rite as a particular use. This has no practical importance but the medieval world would have used this term so it is more accurate.

What our my future plans around this work? I would love any corrections or errors to be fixed. If any mistakes are found please reach out. I would also be happy to translate any other pieces of the mass if there is interest such as Requiem Mass or perhaps Resurrection Sunday. I would also be grateful if the Canons of the ICKSP could help me understand the calendar of the Use Of Sarum even I am confused. Perhaps your expertise in the use of the Extraordinary Form may be insightful.

Musical Notations

![](file:///C:/Users/clark/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image026.png align="left")

Thank you for reading no doubt you have a keen interest in the Liturgy if you got this far. I would ask you to pray for the Intercession of Saint Osmund for me.

O God who have raised St Osmund out of the flock of the English Faithful to be obedient to the Vicar of Christ and diligent in both learning and faith. May we through his intercession share these gifts of your grace

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Bibliography and Sources : Sarum Missal in English- F.E Warren- 1911,

Sarum Missal Done in English (2nd Edition) A. Harford Pearson (1884)

Catholic Encyclopaedia 1907-1912 ,Father Thomas Bergth , Brief History of the Sarum Rite.

Mass Booklet (Latin and English) ICKSP

Parsons Handbook by Rev Percy Dearmer (1899)

Latin Mass Society of England and Wales - “New and Traditional side-by-side”

Modern Medievalist Blog “The Sarum Series”

King James Bible

New Catholic Bible

New King James Bible

[1] Maxima quasque sacramenta (Latin)

[2] Amen is missing from the warren translation but would not make sense without so has been added.

[3] Psalm 43 New Catholic Bible

[4] The different versions of the Kyrie can be found on page 279 of Pearsons Translation.

[5] The number of collects vary the first is from the 24th Mass after Trinty Sunday the Second is from standard collects on page 286 of Pearson translation that can be used all year round it refers to “Whole Church”. The Third from page 286 as well and is for “peace”

[6] Noticeable difference to the standard end to most collects of Trinitarian Formula

[7] Colossians 9 to 11

[8] Matthew 9:18-22

[9] A number of the prayers and collects in the Mass have the phrase “Through.” As far as I am aware this the trinitarian formula it would not make sense for every prayer to end with it so I have adapted the practice of Extraordinary Form and used only one at the end. If this is right for the Use of Sarum is unclear.

[10] The word meet is used here in King James English this could be a number of meaning so proper was chosen from the options available if there is a closer word reach out to me and I will change it.

[11] The Pearson Translation contains the word Thee here where as the Warren Translation has no word and begins with therefore whether this is found in the original missal I don’t know. The canon of the mass is one of the few differences between the two translations

[12] All three prayers have the standard “Through.” I have interpreted this to mean “Through Our Lord Jesus Christ , Your Son , who being God lives and reigns etc etc.

[13] Noticeable difference as with the collects number 3 has unique ending not the same as the other two end with “Through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son who being God, lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit,”

[14] Unless they where part of the Minor Orders but I suppose that would make them Clergy as well.

[15] https://sarum-chant.ca/about/editorial-method/

[16] I have no idea whether this refers to Saints with the cognomen of Confesor or whether there is another meaning if somebody knows I will be most grateful.

[17] https://europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/the-tragedy-of-the-sarum-rite/?fbclid=IwAR1eZ6yoetl3mGyoCAQbezbZKdFV9bzLkm6qNfRkeZHGsYDg6EUXrbj_glQ

[18] Salisbury, Use of [‘Sarum’]

Nicholas Sandon

[19] https://lms.org.uk/missals

[20] https://modernmedievalism.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-use-of-sarum-brief-history-and-why.html

Despite widespread animosity towards the Boomer, few have really taken the time to analyse her in great detail. "Ok, Boomer!" is simply not a sufficient response to the Boomer's carelessness, selfishness and callousness. Should we chance ourselves along a new trajectory? Once the age of the Boomer will end and the greatest transfer of wealth in history takes places, it would be a deep intellectual waste to progress our civilisation into the next age without first dissecting the mechanics and tinkerings of the Boomer.

The Boomer is not limited to a specific age group. Download enough from parents, schools, state media and public institutions, anyone can become a Boomer. After all, what separates each generation (Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z) is their unique exposure to types of media and cultural change.

The Boomer loves thinking about "others".

One of the Boomer's principle ethos is to "always care about others before yourself". This makes her scope of care neglect her own children and gaze longingly to the ethnics of the outside.

The Boomer loves foreigners. She adores dark skin and "exotic" languages. In the early days of the Boomers global fetish, it was French, then Spanish, then Italian, and now she will foam at the mouth to anyone that she cannot understand. She is amused by them. She will gleefully squeak at the sounds of clapping lips and rolling tongues and will gladly have her throat tickled by their "delicious" gastronomy.

Given the obsession with "others", even the others we cannot understand, the Boomer has established this love on the premise that every other and every outsider is just like them, regardless of knowing what kind of outsiders are actually there. No matter what, she will defend others. These others could be child rapists, sex traffickers and paedophiles - behaviour which we haven't yet absorbed or accepted into our narrow "white, bland, boring" culture. In light of Pakistani Rape Gangs, this has made it difficult for the Boomer to continue to openly admit her love of foreigners. With true horror at their door, they still haven't woken up from their drugged-up sedation, closed their wide open arms and really reconciled with the delusions "hippie love" really brings. Their insane love of others and unending smothering of compassion strangled all forms of justice for the Rape Gang victims and has only led to the horrors we see today in the Rape Gang Inquiry.

At the back of her mind, she is scared. Confused and ashamed by her own works, she cannot help feel at the outset of her mind that none of this is real.

The Boomer sees everything as labels and categories.

The roaring ages of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s has been most overwhelming to the Boomer. She forms her world through categories, labels and names as a response to order this mass flux of media, events and rapid societal transformations. Rather than navigate this world as a fully integrated being, she has to navigate it through precepts and labelling axioms. This is synonymous with Moses giving the early Israelites the Law because of the hardness of their hearts. Having grown up with the most complex materialistically driven society, the Boomer has only managed to ground their politics based on the whims, desires and authoritarian wishes of a few men, rather than a God that loves and cares for them.

This has only led the Boomer to see the world as categories placed in discretely fitted boxes - something can only exist if it can be placed into a category. Things cannot and must not be true in themselves - and if they are it is chaos itself and must be rendered as disruptive, radical and dangerous,. It must have a legally associated category for something to be true. Subjects cannot exist within themselves and in relationship to others but rather must fit within the judge of the law of categories. The law itself is in terms of rules, precepts and pretexts; categories fail to recognise the implicit dynamic of these subjects: friendship, relations, home.

The Boomer will naturally object to identifying subjects in terms of their relationships: "Well! Things would just be chaotic and unrecognisable if we don't label everything." This is only true for borders and names unto themselves but the category is not the substance of the subject itself. Labels are attached to the object. However, in the Boomer's mind, the label is the object.

This idea was made most clear to me by the analysis of Carl Benjamin who recently has emphasised the importance of relationships between the individual ethnos within a common friendship. The idea stands in opposition to the superficial legal ties that have been imposed by the State without our consent. Benjamin branches this idea by dismissing the use of categories in one's main rhetoric and promotes the more useful dialogue of relations.

Attaching labels to relations and what once were subjects in themselves couldn't be more apparent in the state of modern so-called "dating". Labels such as "girlfriend", "boyfriend" and "official", "partner" are all labels attached to the real meat of the Holy matrimony of Marriage. Modern people, having been astute students of the Boomer, walk on labels everyday in order to get to the real object itself. Labels are flimsy and are easy to rip and tear away. (My greatest suggestion for young people discerning marriage is to be entirely in it or out of it - don't hold onto labels lest they tear away from the real husk of Marriage).

The Boomer is completely risk avoidant

When one wants to enterprise or innovate - in business, in industry or in politics - the Boomer will refer to her rule-based legal order. Rather than review the idea for its substance itself, she will cross-examine it with with the existing rigid framework.

The idea is new and the innovator's proposed idea might even be popular. It might even have a democratic mandate. It might also be superficially straightforward. It won't be rejected completely. Instead, he will hear things such as:

"This is not how things are done...We've never done anything like this before...This raises some concerns...We need to be careful...There are legal and reputational risks."

From this dialogue, the Boomer will offer the entrepreneur slightly modified versions of his ideas that protects the existing framework. Health and safety, ethical approval, legal review and safeguarding will all be leveraged in belligerence to the original idea. These alterations will appear as friendly.

Once these versions are accepted, the risk-taker has lost and has been absorbed into the Boomer's system. She will capture the ideas with competence and well-meaningful intentions. She will appear to share his goals and she'll warn him about feasibility. She will appear as sincere. He will have the illusion of progress and will simultaneously be praised for not rocking the boat.

Then, after the release of the ideas have gone ahead, outcomes will not change and the entrepreneur will be blamed for the stagnation. The blame will be transferred to him. Once it is clear that outcomes haven't shifted, the idea and its failings will become personalised.

"He promised too much. He didn't understand."

The Boomer has been culturally manufactured to block the entrepreneur and will present herself as someone that prevented him from going down a path that is much worse. She will also congratulate herself for preventing these hypothetical disasters by steering the boat along a familiar and designated course. Just like a quartermaster warning the captain about a potential iceberg and constantly changing the course of the ship. The quartermaster is able to justify all his well-intended actions by the avoidance of the hypothetical iceberg; the captain is able to thank the quartermaster for his keen eye and fast actions when in reality the ship is just drifting in circles and there is no iceberg.

This ultimately leads to a consistent failure to move successfully into new territories. It decapitates innovation and stifles cultural enterprise. Constant inaction, hesitation, delays and review upon re-review demonstrates that the Boomer, ultimately, has no faith.

The Boomer is aesthetically illiterate.

The Boomer loves Twinkl Primary School Fonts. She is aesthetically ugly and out of her depth given the abundance of material at her disposal. She adores new forms of media but fails to assign them hierarchically to make it aesthetically pleasing. As an unauthentic agent, this makes her rhetoric weak, dull and uninteresting. This not only makes her aesthetically illiterate but also lacking in authenticity. She struggles to create anything herself and has no way towards recognising her inner heart. This renders the Boomer as a reflexive parrot of the BBC: continually repeating the same well-to-do talking points of breakfast shows, news clips and daytime TV.

Surrounding her TV is further proof of her aesthetic ugliness. So much material productivity in a span of merely 30 years has given the Boomer a plethora of useless, cheap and ugly products. She failed to discern beauty and her home has since became a sedated shell of vibes. Candles, stones, little faceless ornaments, heart shaped ceramics has made her home into that of a fortune teller's. Sometimes you may see a statue of Buddha.

The Boomer is at the end of History.

She has finally seen it all. We are at the end of History. We are all liberal atoms floating at the end of time, removed from our contexts and delineated from our history. The Boomer quietly looks back as time itself is coming to a close.

While literal barbarians are destroying our country and are banging at the doors, the Boomer has no advice or wisdom to share. She was given everything and can mutter nothing more than "Well! That's just the way of the world."

The Boomer, ultimately, is tired.

The Boomer, after actively neglecting her family and refusing to guide her culture in exchange for the fancies of the world, is lonely. Caused by her own doing, everything that she sought out to achieve: independence, bliss, peace, silence - has been achieved.

Neglectful, spiteful, entitled: the Boomer sees everything that disturbs the "peace and quiet" as evil. She's cosy, warm, and well fed. What seems apparent to be an expression of bliss is really masking the true state of exhaustion.

In this tiredness, it will require someone else to take charge. Neglectful of her duty as a parent and custodian of the culture, the Boomer has cowardly and quietly slipped away. Her charge is left without an announcement or a plan of transition. The Boomer has dropped the ball; it's time for those who truly want to play to pick it up again.

If wisdom may be found anywhere, it can be found from looking at the Boomer and all her failures. The age of the Boomer is over.

The late Norm Macdonald, who I discovered after his death, was a quietly funny and a dim character. His act and his personality was based entirely on being relaxed, care-free and “anything goes”, except this stepped-back attitude creates many charming and inspiring moments to grow. In fact, Norm Henderson, the protagonist of Norm is also exactly like that.

But his life is far from relaxing: issued with a court order to be a social worker, Norm finds himself (trying to) help the lives of the lonely, the poor and the unfortunate. He makes new friends and adapts to his new life while reminiscing of the fames and attention that’s been taken away from him.

Although there are refrains to his success and the romanticizing as a hockey player, he begins to grudgingly accept this new life. He might not be as famous, or have as much money, or have as much attention, but he makes friends he can quickly and deeply care about, he faces moral decisions and challenges within his story, and albeit that he made a mistake and was kicked off his high podium as a hockey player, he doesn’t resent it. In fact, he begins to value this new life that has been given to him.

Norm is, to say the least, an idiot. He is, to say in the Orthodox Tradition, a Holy Fool. He makes mistakes and also has a charm about his idiocy. He doesn’t have malicious intentions, or hateful thoughts, and when he does, he quickly realises how they will affect his friends and those that he loves.

Norm, has the ascetic of the saints who adopted bizarre, unconventional, or foolish behaviour to embody humility, reject worldly vanity, and critique societal norms while remaining devoted to God.

Norm, as difficult as it is to contrast with his previous life, begins to adjust to this new life he has. Although it’s not the one he had before, and although it’s not filled with glamour and fame, there is one thing which makes the life he has been given far more valuable than the one he had before: it’s real.

As far as the script and writers and the audience is concerned, the people are real. His friends are real, and the laughs are real. Norm, as his name would counter-suggest, ultimately must reject the conventional norms and idyllic successes the worldly pleasures we’ve been conditioned to aim for. If he should choose to continue living this humble life in front of him he ultimately has to reject his life before.

In my own personal life, I have had many similar epochs of moments where I was on top of the world, and then suddenly crashed down the next week.

In sterquiliniis invenitur, in filth it will be found.

This list was created in part by watching and paying close attention to the habits and behaviours of parents and young couples.

Such a framework is not constructed over a day. We are creatures of habit and habits —when multiplied over and over again— make up all our relationships. I hope that you enjoy this list, and take from it an expanded list of your own for you and your family.

That being said, I may not be able to live the life I always wanted as a child (and why the hell should we??) But my children might be able to.

Wife

1. Love your wife.

2. Have the bloody fight! Get it over with!

3. What do you need? What do you want in a marriage?

4. Show her everyday that you love her and that you care about her.

5. Have a sh*t tonne of children. (Edited: within reason. I mention “sh*t tonne” mainly in response to the persistent mantra that having any number of kids is horrible, humiliating and degrading. Have children within reason).

6. A wedding is not an excuse to be a self-centred and self-serving deva (bride), focus on your wedding guests being happy.

7. Present a united front to your children. Even if you disagree with her, your wife should be on your side.

8. Saturday Date night.

9. Never disagree or argue with each other in public.

10. Don’t humiliate your spouse in public (in private, yes! Go for it!)

11. It’s not about asking “how many kids do you want?” You should just have unprotected sex with someone you want to build a family with, and see what God brings.

12. Children’s rights come before the immediate, self-interest of adults.

13. No reality TV shows.

14. Take your time. Have those moments of silence where you empty your thoughts and start again.

15. Mother and baby child take the bike instead of the bus. ( for health, exercise flexibility, bonding, and avoiding busy, dangerous and uncomfortable buses: a bus is essentially a big scary metal contraption that throws you around and shakes you about the place).

16. In social circles, have your wife sit next to you. In group pictures, have your wife be next to you.

17. Don’t be that guy who takes pictures of her for her instagram. (Take them with a good camera and print them out for both of you and your families)

18. Don’t keep scorecard with your wife. Show gratitude to your wife (makes sure she shows gratitude to you).

19. You do what your friends do. Living on one income will change your social life. You won’t be in the centre of town. You won’t have all those Netflix/Prime subscriptions. You won’t buy the latest iPhone. You won’t have the luxury handbags or fancy clothes. You’ll live modestly when you’re on one income, and you’ll live meaningfully.

20. Discuss admin and finances. How much do you earn? How much do you spend? How much do you invest?

21. Open a joint bank account and commit to running it.

22. Have time where you sit at a table where you plan and discuss things.

23. You can go to bed angry, get some rest, schedule a productive time to hash out after you’re rested and have slept.

24. When you go out, never ever split the bill

25. Catch your spouse doing good things and reward hr for it.

Babies & Children

1. Don’t scandalise your children.

2. Command respect in your home. Most of parenting is teaching kids to do things that they don’t want to do (chores, behaviour, moral and ethical choices). Do not become your kid’s peers. You are not on the same level as them.

3. Don’t discipline your children in front of people, they will be humiliated and they will lose trust in you.

4. Don’t give screens, tablet or phone until age of 16. No screen time. It robs them of their thoughts, humanity and beauty. It robs them of thinking. (Give dumb phone, where they can only contact certain numbers (you and family).

5. You do not have to spoil your one baby child with enormous amount of clothes, blankets, food etc.

6. Don’t bring your baby or kids to a heavily busy city centre.

7. In your church, take your noisy kids outside! They’re noise is disturbing everyone. You are not turning away from Jesus by removing you and your child from church. Take time to discipline your child. Don’t let your children’s tantrums blackmail you: “If I just do what they say, they’ll stop crying, they’ll behave and stop annoying me and everyone else.” Don’t be a bad parent, take them out and teach them that that behaviour is not acceptable in front of Jesus and amidst people in prayer.

8. No baby vaccines (question the vaccine)

9. Bring your kids to peaceful public places i.e. churches, library, work etc. Have your children around you at work and travel.

10. Only one main activity/sport at a time per child (allow an additional activity if needed).

11. Don’t buy baby food, have kids eat what you eat with smaller portions.

12. Don’t go on expensive days out, just spend time with them, they only want you.

13. You can still attend to your kids while lying down when you’re tired, read to them, talk to them.

14. Vet films for “sex scenes” before putting on film. (Or cut them out entirely by replacing the CD)

15. Gifts and presents that allow children to produce things (instrument, poetry, microscope, telescope, tools, etc), not things that produce things of their own (ie be in control of them) and make them consume all this unearned content.

16. Do not send your child to a public school.

17. Let children explore, play and do things by themselves, you don’t have to hover over them. Don’t always help them, tell them to give it a go. Try!

18. Drill it in that work is necessary for life.

19. Don’t be a strict family. They will go crazy when they are free. Grasp loosely.

20. Watch the really really really old children films with children.

21. Take children to library.

22. Encourage your kids to share and love each other.

23. Buy milk, not juice (it’s far cheaper and more nourishing)

24. Have children say “sir, mam” or “Mr, Mrs, Miss” to adults.

25. Do not put pictures of your children online.

26. Don’t bully your kids.

27. Read your children old fairy tales e.g. Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast

28. Teach your children to pick up litter wherever you are.

29. Be aware, understand and take action.

30. Catch your children doing good things and reward them for it.

Daughters

1. Teach your daughter how to dance ceilidh (only allow her to dance with other boys or men at your discretion, after a certain age).

2. Teach your daughter the realities of feminism and its demonic powers to destroy the family: they have an obligation to men, including her father and her brothers.

3. Sing with your daughter new songs with music or an instrument.

4. If daughter goes to university, look for highest male:female ratio.

5. Be careful what clothes you give your daughter, many coats and jackets are cut short to show butt and sexualise children.

6. Tell your daughter to look for a husband: he has to be “reliable, trustworthy, honest and Catholic”

7. Daughters do not need makeup, they need to just keep their face clean. I don’t care if it’s fun, it’s bad and a waste of time and it’s really bad for their skin and their face.

8. Vet your daughter’s friends and tell her that she can’t be friends with them if they are a bad influence - offer alternative friends.

Sons

1. Annual boys trip (4-5 days).

2. 5 min shower for boys.

As a Whole

1. Black and White TV: to avoid hedonism, luxury and distraction and over-stimulation. You need to bond with family and with yourself.

2. Jigsaw puzzle at Christmas.

3. Jazz and choral music in the background.

4. House games.

5. Have dinner with the family, and then sing songs with the family.

6. Hold hands as a family.

7. Origami (paper popper).

8. Packed lunches on couple and family trips, don’t go to cafes or restaurants: homemade cookies, cut fruit, sandwiches, chopped carrots, in boxes, wrapped in tinfoil.

9. All black or white sock, all the same size. All black pants, all the same size - easier and faster for laundry.

10. It’s important to do things together rather than individually in the home: watching TV, eating dinner and breakfast.

Thank you for reading my list of ideas on easy (and difficult) habits you can do to raise a family. My main priority, as it stands, is to get married and have lots of children. (Edited: Above all, love God and love your wife).

You open up the colour palette and you saw that there were multiple, distinct and very few colour tones of skin colours for different hands. Funnily enough, those skin colours are also attributed to so-called racial groups.

✊✊🏿✊🏾✊🏾✊🏽✊🏼✊🏻

Then you selected the tone of skin which matches yours and it gets placed in your emoji history so that it conveniently can be gathered again. You use it more often to express a wave, a gesture or a sign and then you use it everyday. Then with this hand gesture, being distinctly part of the five given racial groups, is now an image for how you express your gestures and hands.

You might think well, it’s not that big of deal, I’m just matching my hand gestures in the physical to what I can represent in the virtual. That’s an even bigger problem to get around. When we take on these emojis, we then embody the physical things they represent, namely, the isolation and boxing of people in distinct racial groups. Our bodies are filled with that category and the traumas, lies, and illusions the World attaches to that category.

We shouldn’t communicate and express ourselves based on the how the World wants us to express ourselves, but rather how God wants us to express ourselves as we express in Heaven. God wants us to express ourselves in truth and in love, not by self-imposed and worldly racial categories of power and division.

These categories, Black, Dark Brown, Brown, Tanned and White are self-imposed categories. Such self-imposition means that these categories are not real in themselves; they have been given to us by human authority, police recording devices and mere physical descriptions. The very fact that there are only five is indicative to the UK Police IC which matches exactly to the 5 regional codes they and other authorities use as a record. Moreover, any one of these racial categories can be divided into any number of sub-divided categories depending on the necessity for the world to justify the division of two groups. Since these groups can be sub-divided any number of times, they are not atomic in nature and do not make up the building blocks of life. (For example, male and female are indeed self-evident categories because they cannot be subdivided in themselves.)

Therefore, what you embody is an expression of a category that isn’t actually real or fundamental in themselves. These colours and categories aren’t real. What you’re doing is embodying a spirit of “Colouredness, Africanness and Blackness; explicitly being anti-white and anti-European—and anti-Christian. Hip-hop culture, gang culture, “black culture”, blackness…wife beating, drug using and drug dealing are justified forms of aggression and attitude by claiming that white people are racist and are trying to kill you. I believe this embodiment is so dangerous because it means all your actions of violence, abuse, manipulation, aggression and exclusion is justified: we’re doing it in the name of justice and equality.

There is no way of expressing these groups through messaging hand gestures other than through a sub-conscious one of power: “my group dominates your group, your group up-rises against my group in the way they identify themselves.” There is only an expression for one of power and there is no room for the embodiment of Christ.

The World, and the Devil who is the prince of this World, gives us these narrow and frankly useless tools of expressing ourselves. But God with his Divine Spirit, has given an elevated form of gestures and expressions that is not based on race, on power or on categories. We are not mere colours on a pallet, digits and bits designed to beep 1s and 0s. We are Sons of God, through Jesus Christ, he holds that promise and a guarantee of who we truly are.

Use the yellow hands. 👍

A Lie

I wish to begin by making this point as clear as possible to all Protestants who are reading this. You may have grown up in a Christian family, and came to your local church because you—like me—were guided by the Holy Spirit. He was pushing you to rekindle something that was lost —or are losing— in hope and in grace that you will seek it and attain it once more. This church you attend, the church which the Nicene Creed quotes as:

[The] one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

This church you attend, this church you have known throughout almost your entire life, is not the true Church. The Church, as we know it today, has been fragmented, displaced and split into torn and battered corpses.

I left the Protestant churches because I am utterly sick and tired of the glibness, the cowardliness, the shallow ignorance and the lukewarm rhetoric of who Christ is. I am utterly sick of the TED Talks and concerts that these churches pretend is glorifying God. The Catholic church, with its smells and bells, has offered stability and clarity (—and authority) of who Jesus Christ was, who He is, and who He will be in the times to come.

The Political Capture of the Church

When you move to a new city or a new place, it can always be apprehensive to find a suitable church (“my church” so to speak). Typically, you set out on finding a church that suits your needs in relation to the church’s focus on worship or prayer or family and community activities. For me, it became apparent that what I was searching for was a conservative and traditional community, routed in the clear message of Jesus Christ. I do not know what gave me this criteria, except perhaps the vision that where I go must be routed in a connected community. Substantially, this criteria could not be dissimilar from that of a politically conservative criteria.

So why I did choose the Catholic Church? For mere political reasons?

I have recently discovered that the political is not merely “mere”. What I noticed about the political is that it has ultimate downstream and upstream effects of how we view society and ourselves. What Protestants value the most is DEI, immigrants and refugees, the gays and trans, the abortionists and the feminists. When the conversation of questioning these topics are discussed in a church, it is immediately painted as “political” and cast aside.

“Oh we shouldn’t talk about politics…It’s too political for me…I tend to stay away from politics…”

Furthermore, when Pride Month or Black History Month come around, they promote it, display it and even fund it. “We don’t want to talk about it because that stuff is too ‘political’, not in accordance with Scripture”. Rather, “we don’t want to talk about it because our politics are already established.” They have already chosen a side.

You might argue, well that isn’t part of Scripture, my church focusses on the Word of God, and that’s enough for me. It is often more important to see what a church is not talking about rather than what it is.

In the words of Adlai E. Stevenson I:

"A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.

The political sphere is what shapes your daily decisions, your choices and your views of yourself and others around you. If the political has a deep affect on how people talk about you, and who you are, and how you view yourself, then yes! That is something I have a stake and an invested interest in.

Aristotle talks of the political as the “master science”, he writes

political society exists for the sake of noble action, not mere companionship.

This noble action is a ultimately a religious motto: a Christian motto. If we are to bravely enter the political sphere as religious conservatives, then making noble actions are one which we must bear. Noble, not of pride, or of imposing our individual beliefs, but of noble actions for the benefits for all.

If this is case, why wouldn’t or how couldn’t a religious perspective shape your politics? (Why is it that every Muslim unanimously hate Israel and support Palestine—and for that matter Hamas?)

I was a Man on a Fence

There was a story I read called the Man on the Fence. The story is about—well—a man on a fence. Jesus was on one side of the fence and he approached the man and asked him to join His side. The man politely declined and said “I’m on the fence”. Then, Christ and His followers left the fence and walked back into the distance, leaving the man alone. Later in the evening as the sun was going down, Satan comes from behind the man sitting on the fence, from the other side. Satan asks him to join him and his followers. The man replies “No, I’m on neither side, I’m on the fence. “ Satan says “That’s OK, I own the fence.”

When you take the stance of being “apolitical” or when you take the stance of being on nobody’s side, somebody else picks it for you. The people that pick your side for you usually don’t have your best interest in mind and I would bet that they are forceful, narcissistic, and tyrannical. I think we can all agree that the Left, after damaging property, rioting, starting destructive protests, sexually abusing children, funding abortions, harbouring illegal migrants and criminals, the Left is the side that holds and protects such values.

I won’t elaborate too long on the moral of this story but it’s fairly obvious what is happening when you don’t pick a side: the side is picked for you. Christ does not force people to come to Him, but Satan will sure as Hell force himself on you.

The Real History of the Reformation

We now turn to a brief history of the Reformation and another form of people having their beliefs enforced.

There are two main principles of the so-called “freedom” that the Protestant Movement has maintained: Sola Fide ("By Faith Alone") and Sola Scriptura ("By Scripture Alone").

Sola, meaning “by oneself”, an individual. Indeed, in Government, it’s vital that we see each other as individuals rather than belonging to any race or class of people. When the Government has stepped in, or introduced legislation which —on the surface—seems good and non-discriminatory, the system usually has the opposite effect and discriminates far more harshly than if the law was not there in the first place. This is evident with the growing DEI practises which directly excludes white men from society.

Martin Luther was surprised to find that his sola interpretation of Scripture was different to others. One of the biggest and most controversial divides came from Luther’s partner and most prolific supporter, Calvin. Where Luther believed in complete free will and by faith you may be saved, Calvin believed that God had already chosen who He would save (”predestination”).

You might believe that the Protestant Reformation was a call for religious freedom and a global liberation from the tyrannical claws of the Catholic Church. This is simply not true. The Reformation was a separatist movement, adopted largely by Scandinavian and central European kingdoms, which would result in a separate State religion under the rule of each kingdom’s monarch. What seemed to be a movement of liberty and national identity instead became a separation from the Church, with each nation having unelected and unordained (and unvetted) clergy, deacons and bishops in control of the national State. No longer was the King’s allegiance held to the line of St Peter himself, but rather his own interpretation of scripture (”Scriptura”) and whatever he feels fitting to be aligned to God (”Fide”).

What is not further discussed is how these movements were often exploited by Kings and nobleman to gain enormous amounts of political power in their country and in their subjects. Without the people’s consent, the monarch’s subjects were forced to renounce their loyalty to the Pope and to the Church, cut themselves from Christendom and many who abstained were slaughtered and displaced. Kings became the self-elected heads of their own church and their subjects were religiously bound— by law— to be under their spiritual rule of the monarch. If this was religious freedom, I couldn’t possibly imagine what real freedom looked like.

These divisions took place again more and more times, when taken to it's very end, will make everyone their own Church and each and everyone of us our own Pope.

This fractionation, this cutting and splitting and dissecting of the Church of Christ has happened so many times in the Protestant Reformation that I have come to one conclusion: the Protestant churches, and everyone in their body, are dead. The churches have become so split that they are actually blooded corpses, laying aside in the dirt and the fog.

What has further happened, is that the Left have taken this dead corpse, tied strings around it, lifted it up and pulled its strings around its limbs such that it would imitate a church like a mangled and disfigured old puppet. It walks like a church, it talks like a church, but it is by no means a Church.

Today, after hundreds of years since the Reformation, we are now expected to believe that this "pastor", this self-righteous and self-elected man, is wise and profound because he can gather a few people in a room and twist their attention at his will. We are expected to believe that by giving tithes to this man (—and sometimes to his bejewelled wife) we will have blessings of our own. We are expected to believe that this tied up corpse can motivate us to transform our lives, drive us to new understandings of ourselves, and we are expected to believe that his explanation of us is the Truth.

What else is this stringed corpse doing? This puppet of ministers and pastors weave and stitch Bible quotes together to feed a patchy leftist narrative for their congregation to eat, to believe in, and to follow.

Victim groups make victims their heroes. In the UK, when pastors speak of the poor and oppressed, they speak in a Marxist perspective. When about low-skilled immigrants who hate this country, we should have mercy to the stranger (Deuteronomy 10:18) as oppose to not bending the law to his favour (Deuteronomy 24:17). When about women in the Bible, they will yield it through a feminist lens and justify the women’s independence and disdain for the men in her life.

I am utterly appalled at what the Protestant churches have become in the UK: a drunken orgy of the unfaithful posing as the faithful.

Catholics eat the Holy Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ, so that we may be filled with His Spirit. Protestants stuff their faces with Leftist and Socialist junk, so that they may vomit and embody the Devil.

What has this Body become other than a puppet to be glorified?

Every Protestant church in the UK has been captured by the Left. Every single church unanimously believes in so-called Gay and Transgender Rights. Every church believe we should have free speech —as long it doesn't offend anyone. Every church believe in hiring DEI practices, showing how inclusive we are to the BLM and diversity mobs. Every church believes in the Feminist agenda, that women should be strong and independent, not needing any man, and simultaneously be a slave to the corporate ladder. Every church tolerates delaying marriage for the sake of money and "financial stability". Every church either believes that it is OK to murder your own baby, or that they are too cowardly to comment on it.

There is a huge dilemma in the Protestant movement that has culminated and led to the disaster in our culture that we all are witnessing today. Protestants refuse to address the cultural problems of our day and give a message that may rectify them. Instead, if you still do not believe me, maybe you could answer the following questions:

• When was the last time your church leaders encouraged young men and women to get married?

• When was the last time your church leaders discouraged ideas of Feminism, or did they begin twisting the word of God to appeal to the independent women who doesn't need a man?

• When was the last time your church gave you a clear message of Hope, Faith and Charity?

• When was the last time your church rejected Race as the primary optical factor in justice and the prime mode of embodiment?

• When was the last time your church gave everyone a clear and unifying message about who Christ is, rather than just some minor theory of who He was?

• When was the last time your church leaders actively encouraged young couples to get married and have lots of children?

• When was the last time your Church responded to the growing crisis of young women eager to kill their babies?

• When was the last time your church actually and explicitly said that men and women are different and need each other?

• When was the last time your church actually did anything according to the Spirit, and not in accordance with money, attention or power?

If the answer is never, your church has been lying to you about who God is, about who Christ is, and ultimately who YOU are.

I am not saying that the Catholic Church is absent of it's faults. It’s a human institution. The very evidence of its faults and its continued existence demonstrates that—even in despite of our errors—God will not give up on us.

Furthermore, there are homilies and addresses I deeply disagree with. The Archbishop of Liverpool declared Racial Justice Sunday and purported DEI practises in the Novus Order Church. In response to thousands of Pakistani Muslim gangs raping, grooming and even killing young British white girls, the outrage across the UK, he claimed, is instead a form of "islamophobia". The Muslim community has hidden behind that word for generations, but that is a topic for another time.

Conversely, neither am I knocking the achievements of the Protestant Reformation completely. The Protestant movement and the Evangelicals abolished and ended Slavery across the World. They led the single biggest transformation and the core realisation of self Governance which formed the United States of America. They have also fuelled many of our scientific achievements during the Enlightenment and motioned for radical advances in science, art and humanities. However, what I am knocking is that this liberal movement is finally coming to its natural end and I for one will not be a part of it.

Youth

As a young person, I trusted many of the institutions that branded the cross and elevated themselves as Christians in order to meet other young people. Notably, I trusted my University’s Christian Union (CU) that they would provide a solid platform for sharing the Gospel, being tolerant to understanding and offer a clear vision of Christ. Instead, CU is nothing more than management corporation, designed to create illusions and imaginations, promote propaganda and warp the message of God. I trusted CU would not be just another puppet for the worldly machine, that cranks out workers and scatters their followers in the fog.

I attended CU because, after all, it is “Christian”—it’s in the name. Their leaders spoke loudly and clearly, with confidence and with a deliverance that was impressive. Those who went to CU also went to church and said things such as “I’m living for Jesus,” and “Praise God” and “God’s love and kindness”. They offered the usual image of Jesus as though he was some powerless socialist hippy.

I attended CU. What did I find? I found sad, lonely, porn-addicted boys with no leader or spiritual father, no channel of trust and no structure of where to look or go. I found unsatisfied, spiteful and deranged girls who give their “heart and soul for Jesus”, yet can never seem to find the “right man” to agree with her Feminist, crystal worshipping, star-sign discerning, diversity and anti-racist, socialist views.

There was another side to CU I could not help notice. All of the managers of CU were self-elected business managers. They were capable with collecting money and managing people, but none of them had any background in theology or divinity (why would they?). All of the young women I met were extremely hesitant to even the idea of marriage, and would prefer to exchange the possibility of children for the luxuries and indulgences that a high-flying corporate career can offer: all of them were stark feminists. Many of the young girls were adamant supporters of abortion, one calling it a technological “gift from God”. Is CU unique in the so-called “Christian world”?

Not at all, I’ve been to hundreds of Protestant churches and met many communities, all of which have welcomed views of transgenderism, abortion, mass immigration and taxing the rich. To many of you, none of this is new. Your church is refusing to stand against these insidious claims of Being for the simple reason that they worship a powerless socialist hippy. I want to make this point as clear as possible: every Protestant church in the UK has been captured by the Left, and there is absolutely no way of saving them because the Protestant churches and the spirit that goes along with them are dead.

There may be the odd goose bump during worship, there may be the odd feeling of ecstasy during your TED Talk, but the spirit of the church is completely and utterly dead in the ground. It died well before you were born and there is no way of reviving it.

One Holy CATHOLIC and apostolic Church

Christ doesn’t want a piece of you, He wants all of you.

Like every Church, the Roman Catholic Church is an unfolding organism. It is a living institution. It is not built of stone, iron or gold. It is not even just about its people. This organism has been growing for almost 2000 years, and it started growing from the seeds of Christ himself into his first Apostles. The lineage of the Papacy has been riddled with thorns and nettles, but it has also been a line of some of the greatest leaders and deepest thinkers that have ever been recorded. All of that lineages has extended to St Peter and thus to Christ himself when he said:

"You shall be the rock I build my church."

If you would rather cut off the branches, shred the leaves, and try replanting these twigs to grow your own tree, I do not deny you that right. God loves us so much that He has given us the will to reject Him.

And you may also wish to reject Him through the faults of His Church. Through that love, the Catholic Church has many controversies, schisms, and is painted with a horrific history. Indeed, a tree that grows in the hot beat of the sun, shaking in the bitter coldness of the wind, such a tree does not grow perfectly or even how we would expect it to. Just as it is silly to expect a tree to grow perfectly symmetrical, it is silly to expect the Church to also be. Nonetheless, it grows firmly in the ground. What is important is not the supposed perfect Nature of the tree, but rather that the tree itself is rooted in the ground Christ seeded with his heart.

This seed has grown over time, as we are also beings of time. We don’t base our institutions on self-election or single-minded corruption. We base it on the lineage of Christ’s authority. If you believe that Christ’s authority has been lost on Earth through His church, how then can you believe that Christ has authority on Earth at all? How can you have authority to forgive sin (John 20:23), to love one another (John 13:34), and to being the truth to the world (Matthew 10:26).

I do not know what God has planned for us, and nor do I claim to know. The Catholic Church, does not claim or even strive to grow perfectly. It cannot. I extend a hand to you and invite you onto these branches, with faith that the tree will not be struck, or become uprooted by the forces of the world. Other weeds will grow and die with the seasons, but this tree I know, I have faith that I know, will continue to grow forever.

Concluding

Thank you for taking the time to read my article on Why I Became Catholic? It is important that we share this experience. In the UK, as it stands, there are 2:1 young Gen Z Catholics for every Anglican. These young people are not born into a Catholic family, they are coming to the Church because of conversion. In the words of Archbishop Mark O'Toole of Cardiff:

When you meet them and hear their stories, they say they are looking for clarity and stability

The Catholic Church has offered the family, the community and the Cross Christ has set out for me to carry. I am home.

If you wish to know more about becoming Catholic or are curious about entering into a Catechism, please do get in touch with your local parish or reach out to someone in your Archdiocese. It can be quite daunting to enter into the Catholic church, but be open to the Spirit, and humble yourself so that something new can take place, and something old may be left behind.

Marguerite Gérard (1761-1837) - ‘THE GREAT CAT’

I used to be a prime supporter of Feminism. In high school I was part of Mentors in Violence Prevention, a left-wing, feminist youth group which ran workshops and tutorials to young people, essentially explaining to them how violent and dangerous “real” men are and how there aren’t any distinctions between the sexes. After all, we are enlightened liberals believing that men and women are equal.

So yes, I used to be a supporter of Feminism. It was right around the time that I entered university and also the working world that I quickly realised what they had taught us was a complete lie. Men and women are indeed very different in abilities and strengths. By punching down on masculine traits we find in boys, what you’re left with are a bunch of sissy cowards who are afraid to approach women.

That being said, Feminism is the reason why you are alone. Back in the early 20th century, self-righteous elite women decided that it was undignified to raise children and run a home, and that they should undergo the same stresses and tribulations men go through everyday. We then discovered that women aren’t as physically capable to work in the mines, shovel the dirt on the ground or risk their lives (and their health) in the same way men still do everyday in long-hour jobs. But women still need to work?

In her “ground-breaking” 1949 work "The Second Sex" (Le Deuxième Sexe), the radical French feminist Beauvoir argued that economic independence was crucial for women’s liberation. She didn't just support the idea that women could work—she strongly believed that women must work in order to escape the societal roles that confined them to domestic life and dependence on men.

A key idea of hers was that women should not be content with the mere "choice" to work (which could be a trap if economic necessity wasn't there), but should actively participate in the workforce as a step toward equality. To her, relying on a man for financial security was one of the primary ways women were kept “subordinate”.

Nicolai Yarushenko, (1846-1898) "Dama con un gato".

Unlike Beauvoir, an American feminist named Betty Friedan focused on the idea that women should have the freedom to choose their paths in life—whether that meant pursuing a career, staying home, or balancing both.

Needless to say, both of these women campaigned on the assumption that taking care of children and running a home was undignified and beneath them. Both of these women also hated children, hated their husbands, had destructive relationships which did not last more than their patience and insanity afforded them.

And that is why you are just as miserable and alone as these women were. You are half-heartedly pursuing relationships expecting a full heart in return, you are wanting all the benefits and cares of being a women without any of the responsibilities that that comes with it and you aren’t ready to humble yourself to pursuing the meaning —and God —that will ultimately shape your life. Young women today are being told that they must work—they have to— as well as loosely flirting with the idea of choice and freedom while keeping up the desperate appearances of the phrase “I don’t need a man”.

A part of me feels that it isn’t so much women are needing men less, but rather the indulgences women are being offered through luxury goods, brands and retail can’t be supplied by a man. In other words, men are inadequate for the Feminist World.

The Feminist vision was about supposedly setting things straight, to —shall we say—liberate the woman from the supposed grips and chains of the man. But in reality, it was never about equality or justice, it was simply to vent and echo a deep hatred for men.

After finally being liberated, where did they go next? Did they live happily and freely? Did they live enlightened and prosperous lives? Did they become responsible and powerful leaders? Or did they simply become the slaves of a much worse master?

The Feminist vision of the world has led women ,who would otherwise be in loving and fruitful relationships, to being slaves for a corporate machine designed to extract every bite out of them, become trapped in the seasonal cycles of consumerism and marketing, all while being shallowly uplifted and glorified for their feminine beauty and self-righteous attitude.

In summary, the feminist experiment has failed—or succeeded, depending on who you talk to. Feminism sent women to work long hours in tiny cubicles for low pay for corporations which don’t give a dam about them. Feminism convinced women not to care about their husbands or even their own children. Feminism convinced women to value success, money and material possession over family and children. (Furthermore, Feminism sought out to abort children because it was thought that poor people shouldn’t have babies)

Feminism, in its purest form, says that women should be men and men should be women. The logical conclusion to Feminism is that women can be men and men can be women.

The Logic of Feminism

Pride is a movement that fuels hedonism, narcissism, perversion and child abuse.

Why shouldn’t women do the same things men do?

Women shouldn’t do the same things men do because women have children and children are vulnerable. Men do things which expose them to danger, and if women do the same things that men do, you begin to expose children to danger and neglect.

Well, aha! We now have the ability to kill our children and thus women are no longer vulnerable.

Women who sacrifice their own children for luxury, lifestyle or economic reasons are demonic and insane.

Well, aha! We now have the Birth Control Pill, I guess now we won’t need to have anymore babies.

The Birth Control Pill has led to sexual promiscuity, allowed men and women to gain maximal pleasure/reward with zero responsibility/sacrifice.

Well, aha! We now can have sex with whoever we want, wherever we want, whenever we want (with whatever we want).

The sexual revolution led to more heartbreak, pain and sorrow between the sexes, and led to the AIDS epidemic as well as the LGBTQ+ degeneracy, and ultimately Transgenderism, which questions the differences between the sexes, as it was in the beginning.

So, if Feminism has succeeded, where do we go next? The Enlightenment purported to look to the future, to imagine things that are not, and to see things as they are but protest how they should be. I have always found wisdom when looking at the past, at history, because that is all we really have.

Girl with a Cat, 1882 - Ivan Kramskoy

In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Eve awakes to find herself in the Garden of Eden. She rolls over and sees her own reflection and falls in love with her own beauty. God then commands her to look up, to which she sees Adam. Subsequently, she is disappointed to see him because he is not as beautiful as she is (or as she sees herself). However, despite this, Adam pushes through the hurt he feels and grasps her hand. Eve, excelled by manly grace, finds that there is much more wisdom, richness and fulfilment in loving Adam rather than loving herself.

Part of my soul I seek thee, and thee claim
My other half!' With that thy gentle hand
Seized mine: I yielded, and from that time see
How beauty is excelled by manly grace
And wisdom, which alone is truly fair."

John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book IV

I wish I read someone like Milton when I was rampaging with MVP. I wish I had the wisdom and understand he offered with just these short lines. Since very few people that read Milton can actually understand him, his message and his dream is routinely cast aside and misunderstood.

Although Paradise Lost was written more than 300 years ago, these images are so relevant today in how we structure men and women. Like Adam, many boys today are quickly being cast aside and are being replaced by nothing less than a mere watery reflection of Eve. Eve, obsessed by her own beauty, won’t look up and instead will only keep looking down. Unlike Adam, many boys fail to push through those feelings of rejection and take a hold of that hand with grace. Many young men are not enough for the consumerist/strong/independent women.

But I tell you, as I was told, to give them a chance. You have no idea what kind of wonders and blessings you’ll see if you do. You have no idea the kinds of value and meaning—and love—you will experience if you give each other a chance at it.

In short, in the words of King Louis IX:

“Be kind-hearted to the poor, the unfortunate, and the afflicted. Give thanks to God for all the benefits He has bestowed upon you... and take care that you live so as to deserve it. Above all, my son, love God with all your heart, and help your wife to love Him too, so that you may both go to heaven together.”

Ladies, how many times have you been offered this story as the story of your relationship with a man?

Specifically, the relationship between a man and a woman is one of power. When a man takes a woman as his wife, he takes her wealth and her autonomy, she is taken from her family and her name is replaced by his, she loses all choices of her own and she is forced to a work a subservient life in the home. Sher is further subjected to his leadership (despite how flawed it is), she is raped each night and forced to go through labour which could kill her, she is then subjected to caring for his infant that sucks away at her soul and her dreams.

Ladies, why question to do is: how much do you seriously believe that story?

How much do you believe that story? If so, what did it take for you to earn that wisdom? Did you go through any of this story yourself for you to rightly justify this story? Is this reflective of your life, your mother’s life, your grandmother’s life, and all the women’s lives that came before you?

What if I could offer an alternative story? When a man marries a woman, he marries her in a Holy Matrimony such that the two become one flesh. He takes her as his own and the world is never the same again. They love each other other so much that they can create another human being. This new person, this new child, is so uniquely connected to the mother that the mother is compelled to love, to nurture and to care for the child. She will never love anything more for the rest of her life. The man will labour and work till the end of his days, not for himself, but for his wife and his children.

Men and women do need to each other, and it’s about time we started acting like it.

I did this exercise to teach them that, although their abilities in maths are vastly different from each other, their fundamental development and cognitive abilities when it comes to dealing with real numbers are not. More importantly, I wanted them to understand that fitting numbers inside our conceptual abilities is painfully and shockingly difficult for any small number of objects.

Furthermore, what this demonstrates is that if we are finite beings, bounded by limitations, then there is obviously going to be a cloud of mystery that surrounds how we see the material. What is realized in popular scientific culture is just how cloudy our perceptions really are.

Our limited perceptions lead to common brick walls we just can’t break or get over, both temporally and spatially. Temporal limitations have led completely to the Big Bang and the unexplained miracle that is the beginning of the Universe. Spatial limitations in our analysis have encountered quantum mechanical effects once we scale to smaller and smaller fields of dimension. The universe holds many mysteries we just can’t fully comprehend, and that includes the mental capturing of just a few simple objects.

We can’t store objects in the simple sense. Therefore, it could be necessary to dismiss the notion that perception is a form of storage and that dismissing mathematical intellect as another form of internal storage may also be redundant. What makes you think your perception is from you? You and all your whims, flaws, needs and desires. What makes you certain that your perception is in you and not a gripped extension of you?

What makes human beings unique is our ability to extend our power to tools that allow us to extend our perceptions. What if the same could be true with the emergence of the mathematical intellect? This functional idea that I am proposing could link our human perception with the modern populous notion of modern mathematics, from which it has largely been disconnected.

The populous, new-atheist ideas make a few presumptions about the surrounding world:

(a) it is material, and

(b) it is right (and our deviation from that is wrong).

In the material sense, it is made up of objects, physical things, and the connections between those objects are purely physical and chemical interactions, which science has been describing in ever-increasing detail over the span of human history. It is right, meaning that it is objectively true; we can extract correct behaviour through what is happening by the laws of nature and by what is occurring naturally.

Although presumption (b) has its flaws in the moral sense—that we simply cannot link the world to what we ought to be right about—(a) is the presumption I am most attending to. As a scientist, I was trained and enticed into believing that the material was all there is—that objects were the world. But I soon realized that heartbreak, disaster, and failed relationships couldn’t simply be described by the shuffling and moving of objects, physical or chemical. After teaching maths myself, I don’t even believe you could describe or predict such events. Even if we could describe such events, who would hold the ethics behind such equations that connect love with familial disaster or happy endings? There is a mystery beyond the physical that shapes how we behave, a world that we have indeed explored through plays, art, literature and culture, and yet it is still so invisible that we cannot grasp it.

I am not by any means alluding to an equation that can describe the invisible. In fact, I completely object to the New Religious claim that the so-called “gaps” in our scientific understanding can be filled with the spiritual. Would that mean scientific progress is just our human ability getting closer to the spiritual? What would a human world do with spiritual or divine responsibility if we could even hold it? Science is not the progress or power to progress our entities into divinity. Let’s leave the spiritual in the spiritual where it belongs and not take the Enlightenment to its totalitarian end.

So there are two worlds through which complicated human beings navigate: the visible and the invisible. Both have well-established laws and consequences. Breaking the physical laws has much more immediate consequences: falling out of a building, electrocuting yourself with water and a plug socket, or cooking and burning a nice delicious roast. Breaking the spiritual laws is a little more mysterious. We feel the consequences in the form of our wife suddenly leaving us, being fired from our job, and the feeling when a loved one dies. The movement of the spiritual moves the material, and the movement of the material moves the spirit. It’s difficult to capture these processes even linguistically—mathematically would certainly be impossible. And nor should we capture it mathematically.

Capturing processes mathematically is not the same as realising them physically. As we’ve described, our models, which we layer over our systems, begin to break down if we extend them to different temporal or physical scales. We’ve demonstrated that even capturing physical phenomena, such as the so-called “global warming,” begins to break down in accuracy almost immediately once it’s extended years into the future.

Meanwhile, can we capture the spiritual mathematically? The answer is a solid no. I won’t spend too long highlighting that ridiculous claim: ask anyone to write a set of equations that predict the mystery of love.

Another claim I want to dismiss is “Maths is either right or wrong.” This is commonly repeated in educational circles, mainly to separate the sciences from the humanities because (apparently) people in the humanities are confused morally between right and wrong, and (apparently) people in the sciences are coldly beyond and unconcerned with the trivial grovelling of morals. (No doubt, the absence of scientists in moral and political discussions may have actually led to the vacuum that pervades our modern culture—but that isn’t the concern of this article.)

Mathematics is supposedly a non-biased judge, a blinds-eye, with no in-between, unlike the foolish political and social sciences. However, this linguistic trick of right and wrong creates the intellectual space of sides, in which you (being the robust scientist) occupy a side that is right, and anything outside this space is wrong.

Certainly, in education, people make mathematical errors, trips, and mistakes that lead to wrong numbers and wrong answers. But a deviation from the right area would still place you within the right area, just in a different part of the right. Psychologically, a mathematical error is a much more dramatic change to the “side” that you occupy. Rather, the space of “right” is so thin and straight that it is very difficult to move along without entering (or even being invaded by) both territories of the visible and the invisible.

When errors take place, you are immediately derailed off your line of thought, your logical process, and the impact of the material and the spiritual on the individual is the prime cause of the derailing. If the mathematical line of thought is a train going straight, the material and the spiritual are the elements encroaching on the line.

(I notice the same thing with my own students when I mark their work. Their logical perception is a train being pushed and pulled by their social circle, how they learn, what they learn, their spiritual state, and what movements are happening when they solve these problems. There haven’t been many explanations for the psychological significance of problem-solving, but it would be worth taking a closer look.)

If mathematics cannot completely describe the material due to our perceptive limitations, and neither can it describe the spiritual due to how we simply cannot grasp it, what can be described?

One of the benefits of having a line of thinking (a “line of attack”) is that we actually don’t have to occupy the media of the spiritual and the material to have a meaningful existence. In fact, our very humanity has been dictated by our abilities to plough through both spaces, taking inspiration (and hesitations) from both.

It is clear that both spaces are indeed separate. We cannot solve the spiritual with the physical—ask anyone who has ever tried to buy love with money. Neither would you build a skyscraper with the blueprints of freedom as your engineering guide. In essence, that is what being human is about: we move through both the spiritual and the material—what consequently emerges out of that straight line—to its highest and fullest degree— is mathematics and the pursuit of truth.

This modern world has seen revolutionary tools go through decades of self-transformation. A common odyssey is that of the stone-age arrow heads changing into the common chisels and machining tools we use today. The laser has seen its own adaptions and changes in the form of changing a continuous lasing radiation into a pulsed laser.

A pulsed laser, as oppose to a continuous laser beam, is a series of fragmented laser pulses that repeat cyclically. Shorter pulsed lasers with the same emitted energy will have a larger intensity (i.e. number of photons). Consequently, as matter which is being lased absorbs this energy, it will undergo a higher increase in temperature than if it was lasered with a longer duration pulse. With this increase in temperature, after the pulse is complete, the temperature decreases with the squared of the duration of the pulse across the penetration of the matter. In other words, due to the higher intensity of a pulsed laser we can apply a higher temperature to a material with a shorter penetration depth. This gives us far more precision in lasering surfaces while causing minimal thermal disturbances to regions below the surface –an advantage which is very desirable in increasing the precision of laser illumination, laser cutting, and spatial measurements.

The transmission of a laser pulse may be demonstrated by a cyclical Gaussian function:

This function, when applied to an oscillating electromagnetic field is chopped up into a pulse profile:

The width of a single wave cycle relates to the frequency (or colour) of the wave:

When a laser pulse travels through the modulator, it is chopped by a time-dependent phase function:

This consequently perturbs the frequency of the pulse, shifting the frequency by a marginally small amount, on the order of GHz from a 100THz initial pulse.

Although simply irradiating laser light has many power enhancement applications, can we do anything with the pulsed laser for communication purposes? Can we adjust this constant beam to something that can transmit information?

Some of the most useful laser-dependent technologies is not based on the laser’s ability to generate heat. Rather, it is based on the laser’s ability to transmit coherent and precisely directed signals.

Light, visible light which we can see, is part of the Electromagnetic Spectrum which also compromises radio waves. Radio waves transmit signals of light at a specific frequency at varying amplitudes, which are received by a receiver that then in turn is converted into electrical signals which we can process to a speaker.

Lasers can operate in the same way, where the amplitude of the signal can fluctuate in the form of pulses. Pulsed lasers can send bits and blanks of information which are encoded in a laser’s fluctuation in intensity at the transmitter.

For example, pulsed lasers can send bits and blanks of information which are encoded in a laser’s fluctuation in intensity at the receiver. We’ll discuss later how pulsed lasers work and the benefits of sending visible EM radiation as oppose to radio waves in communication.

LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) implements the transmission and receiving of light into directional scanning technology. By computing the time delay between sending a laser signal and receiving the same signal from a reflected object, the distance to the object can be determined. In the LiDAR’s surrounding, since the speed of light is constant, the distance between the detector and the object may be computed, thus building a comprehensive 3D map.

To generate a pulsed laser, we have to adjust our resonator by introducing a attenuator mechanism that switches the transmission of the laser beam through the output mirror as a function of time. This is known as gain switching and Q-switching.

Gain Switching

How are the pulses generated in a laser? When a laser is pumped with a constant power supply, the population inverse of the media increases to its maximum threshold. This induces an initial pulse of laser light to be emitted. This initial pulse is so strong that this stimulated emission of radiation drains the population inversion. As the power is constantly supplying energy to the gain medium, the population increases yet again to the threshold limit, before releasing another pulse of photons, and draining the population inversion, and so on in an oscillating behaviour. As the power is continued to be supplied to the media, the population inversion and the photon density stabilises to a constant value. This constant value continues until the resonator switches the power off, thus completing the pulse.

Q-switching

To physically switch the laser between pulses, an operation called Q-switching is used. Before the pulse escapes from the laser, an attenuator is placed between the output mirror and the gain medium. To physically determine the laser’s operation between Q-switches, we use a value known as the quality factor: a ratio between the energy stored and the dissipated energy per cycle as the laser radiation travels back and forth between mirrors. The attenuator allows the build up of stored energy in the resonator. Once the attenuator is removed, the loss of energy per cycle is minimised, increasing the quality factor and releasing a high photon density during the pulse. Once the optical losses are immediately increased, the quality of the resonator will decrease, leading to no emission of photons and the pump power will rather contribute to the build up of population inversion.

Types of Q-switches

Saturable absorber

Saturable absorbers are the most desired forms of attenuators due to the low point of failure. The attenuator mechanism is intrinsic to the absorber’s material and also has minimal points of failure as it does not require any mechanical adjustments.

Punched disk

The punched disk is a circular series of holes on a disk. When the disk rotates and transmits light through the resonator, emission is created. The design of the disk can be modified to alter the profile of the pulse. The rotational speed of the disk may also be adjusted to change the rate of the pulse.

Acousto-Optical Modulator

Some materials have their lattice structure modified sending a resonant wave through the material. This wave is induced by a piezo-electric mechanism which turns the material, often a quartz solid, into a grating. Incoming laser light from the resonator is deflected, preventing it from further spontaneous emission out with the gain medium. This system is very desirable since it can be modulated by an alternating current, allowing the pulses to be controlled based on generated electrical frequencies.

Electro-optical Modulator

The function of an EOM is primarily dependent on the central Pockel cell. A Pockel cell uses an electric field to apply electro-optical effects to fix the axis of polarisation. When polarised laser light is sent through an actively charged Pockel cell, an electric field is created within the cell and the polarisation of the light is rotated by 90° by a circular polarisation effect. An output polariser rotated perpendicular to the output will subsequently block the polarised laser beam. To allow transmission of the light, the electric field can simply be turned off. Just as in the case of the AOM, the EOM may be controlled using an alternating high voltage.

Pulsed lasers have revolutionized both fundamental science and practical applications, offering unprecedented control over light-matter interactions. Innovation and technological development has reshaped our tools in society, and pulsed lasers have been part of that reshaping. I have no doubt that pulsed lasers will continue to reshape our lives as we move forward into the future.

By 1960, the first laser was operated by Theodore H. Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu. In 1960, however, the larger scientific community merely saw this phenomenon as a reflection of the children’s sci-fi comics which were popular at the time. Since then, however, the laser has been an immense game-changing in fields ranging from manufacturing, medicine, scientific, hobbyists and some of the most used technological inventions such as Blu-ray players and communication devices.

Basics

What does a LASER mean? L*ight **A*mplification means to make light brighter and more intense. One the mechanisms to do this is by *S*timulated *E**mission*, or triggered by another source.

Lasers which we are familiar with are typically radiation in the visible section of the electromagnetic spectrum. Lasers can also come in a variety of other colours, such as infrared, ultraviolet, X-Ray, and in theory you could build a gamma-ray laser –however this is extremely challenging due to the intense Doppler broadening of your spectral lines from thermal motion because of the intense load and heat generated onto the gain (we’ll discuss what gain means later).

All of these types of radiation are externally generated. Technically, the very first “laser” was a microwave amplified device, or “maser” which were stimulated by radio waves.

How does this amplification work? We are familiar with holding a microphone up to the connected speaker, whereby a feedback loop generates an amplified electrical signal which is emitted as sound, which is received and amplified as electrical signal, and so on. This amplification is nearly instantaneous.

Similar to a signal processing platform that amplifies your sound, a selected gain medium may also be used to amplify a light signal. The gain medium can be solid, a liquid, a gas or even a plasma. By selecting different gain media, we select different wavelengths of emitted light. The external stimulation is typically created by a basic light or electrical current. The energy moved into the gain media will change their populations at each energy level. Raising them to a higher energy level before relaxing to the ground level, emitting packets of energy, or photons of light. Every photon that is emitted from the gain medium will have the same polarisation, phase, energy and direction of travel: they are coherent.

What is stimulated emission? Within your gain medium, the physical atoms contain nuclei and electrons. Depending on the gain medium selected or designed, the stimulated emission (i.e. light or electricity) can change the energy state of the orbiting electrons. In the case of the gain media of the 785nm laser is GaAs crystal. When the GaAs crystal absorbs the energy, the atoms are elevated to an excited state of energy. While energy is being pumped into the crystal, more and more electrons are excited a higher energy level. Once more electrons are in the excited state than the ground state, creating a population inversion. Simply having a two-level excited-ground state system will not produce light. A four-energy level system is required, whereby the mediator state will produce light.

The electrons of the atoms will start to decay to a lower state, and loose energy in the form of an emitted photon of light. The energy of the photon decaying to the original state corresponds to the wavelength of light emitted in the laser.

Once a single excited atom of the crystal emits a photon, the photon passing its neighbouring excited atom will stimulate the emission of another photon. This photon is matched in phase, energy, polarisation and direction. These coherent photons will continue to stimulate other excited atoms to emit photons, leading to a cascade of emitted photons in the crystal and an increase in intensity.

Design

In order to generate even more amplification, two mirrors are placed at either end of the gain medium. Just like our microphone-speaker example, this system loops streams of coherent light, amplifying themselves and increasing the intensity. This set-up is called a laser resonator, whereby the two mirrors reflect laser light back and forth across the gain media, and generate more radiation.

To extract the trapped light out of the crystal, a small pinhole may be added to one of the mirrors—or one of the mirrors can be 1% transmissive. This light exits the device in a tightly focussed and reasonably collimated beam.

Selecting the gain medium will determine what colour or energy your laser light will be. The table below shows some popular gain media and their corresponding colours.

Applications

There are several applications of lasers. Additive manufacturing also may be advanced by using a laser which hardens the melted resin when printing.

Some of the most useful laser-dependent technologies is not based on the laser’s ability to generate heat. Rather, it is based on the laser’s ability to transmit coherent and precisely directed signals. In territorial military operations, laser beams can be adjusted to emit invisible infrared light. This light is not visible to the target but is seen through the night-vision goggles, making it useful for military tactics.

Missile tracking technology may also make use of lasers, whereby a laser illuminates a target and the sensors of the missile make course corrections to direct the missile to the target.

When intersecting two or more coherent laser beams across a flowing region, an interference pattern is created. When a particle passes through this interference pattern, it passes and scatters regions of high and low intensities. This can be detected and analysed using a oscilloscope which shows a time-base of cyclical intensities, revealing the rate of flow across the pattern.

The Raman Effect

Raman spectroscopy could not be what it is today without the laser. The amplified directed light that composes the laser multiplied the intensity of the incident light which is necessary for the Raman effect. This has induced the Raman effect to higher orders of magnitude and reduces the exposure time necessary for a spectrum to be visible on a spectrograph. We owe it to the laser that we’re not waiting around to identify chemistry.

Nonetheless, Christ looked down at me above a set of staircases, and this painting became a constant reminder for me as I went to school, played rugby, went out with friends, till eventually I went to church as a Christian today.

Only recently did I pay attention to David Clark’s understanding of the miracle of Calming the Storm —through his writing of the Godfrey Thring’s 1861 hymn Fierce Raged the Tempest:

The wild winds bashed, the angry deep

Sunk like a little child to sleep,

The sullen billows ceased to leap,

At thy will.

So, when our life is clouded o’er,

And storm winds drift as from the shore,

Say, lest we sink to rise no more,

Peace be still

Poetry or a prayer, the message in clear. David Clark, a 19th century painter as a local village man spent time understanding the natural waters, the natural winds and in his prayer and painting he found himself learning how to see. Painting is learning how to see, and one learning how to see cannot help realise that seeing in a new way is indicative of knowing Christ. You’re life is not guaranteed to get better, you won’t have fame, or become rich, but you will see God and be humbled to understand that he can have a hand in your life—if you could only see it.

Like David Clark, I am also depicting Christ in my own ways. I have been working on multiple paintings which not only reveal my own story, but also the story of mankind through Jesus Christ.

Before I do, I need to study other depictions of Jesus Christ, and what better way to do that than to present to you some of the greatest works from some of the greatest visionaries and thinkers of the last four centuries.

Ludolf Backhuysen (b. 1630 Amsterdam), Christ In The Storm On The Sea Of Galilee

Ludolf Backhuysen was no stranger to the rough and stormy seas. As a art student, he would often place himself on a boat heading through stormy waters. By doing so, he was able to detail the nature of water and it's physical impact on boats as well as capture the rushing movements of the waves, the roaring calamities of its winds and the very terrors and fears experienced by his fellow Dutch sailors. From these accounts , Backhuysen gained a solid understanding the same terror which the disciples felt during their sail across the Sea of Galilee.

Salvador Dalí (b. 1904 Figueres, Spain), Christ of St John of the Cross

Salvador Dali, better known for his melting clocks, stick-legged elephants as a surrealist, Dali establishes another depiction of Christ. Dali was inspired by the 1550 drawing of Christ by St John of the Cross, a major Counter-Reformer in Spain.

Jesus is crucified, stretching down what looks like clouds and mountains. The angles and perception is skewed when glancing up to Christ (or down sat him), and across the water, most likely the Sea of Galilee with a fisherman idling around the water's edge. In this state, there is no blood, no pierced rip, no lashes and broken body. Instead, Dali offers a risen and cleansed depiction of Christ, a figure which rose again leaving the word in idle waiting, speechless to what he has done, and what he will do next.

Salvador Dalí (b. 1904 Figueres, Spain), Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)

In addition to Christ of St John of the Cross, Dali expresses another depiction of Christ. Funnily enough, Dali's interest in Christ was sparked during the events of the 1940s and 1950s. With the advancements in quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, World War 2 and the development of the atomic bomb, Dali began to think about the mystical concepts of nuclear physics and dimensionality and how their implications were felt on Science, Culture and ultimately Christ.

Michelangelo (b. 1474,m Florence), Pietà

There is not enough words to describe Michelangelo and his global impact on sculpturing. His deep ties to the Catholic Church fuelled a lifelong dedication to creating works that vividly capture the emotions and stories central to the Christian faith. His evidence of passion, hard work and craft is a testament to his faith and to how much impact Christ had on his life.

Pietà (or Compassion) is a sculpture of Jesus Christ after being taken down from the cross. Its intricate detail in the cloth, anatomy, and the solemn expression of Mary, the mother of Jesus, holding her broken son in her arms, is remarkable. The good mother lets go. She rests her arms open in acceptance and understanding. The good mother releases her child, allowing him to bear the burden of the world. The good mother opens her arms, risking her child being broken by the world.

Ivan Kramskoi (b. St Petersburg, Russia) Christ in the Wilderness

The temptations of Jesus Christ is laid out in great detail in both the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and is briefly discussed in Mark. Jesus, driven by the Spirit, goes into the wilderness and fasts for 40 days. At the end of his fasting, he conversates with Satan who debates about his temptation into power and glory. Satan lays out three scenarios for Jesus to do:

1. Turn stones into bread to satisfy his hunger.

2. Leap from a high place and trust angels to catch him.

3. Bow down to Satan himself in exchange for dominion over all the kingdoms of the world.

Being the son of God, Christ lays out three responses of salvation:

1. Man does live by bread alone, but by the word of God. We do not live by food, money and material possessions, we walk by meaning and live by the Spirit.

2. Do not tempt the Lord. God is not for you to do as you please, nor is he for you to do whatever you want him to do.

3. Worship the Lord, and only the Lord. Glossa Ordinaria lays it out very clearly: "See the Devil’s pride as of old. In the beginning, he sought to make himself equal with God, now he seeks to usurp the honours due to God, saying, If you will fall down and worship me. Who then worships the Devil must first fall down." Do not fall down at the lowest, but rise and look up to God, for that is the aim and the path which is most worthy of living.

Ary Scheffer (b.1795 Dordrecht, Netherlands), The Temptation of Christ

In Matthew 4:9, this is third and final temptation of Christ:

He said to him, "I will give you all of these

things, if you will fall down and worship me."

Mouth open wide, eyes looking up in desperation, Scheffer presents Satan as a desperate and pathetic creature, crouching in his own shadow, arms violently stretched out and below the light of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord softly raises his hand to the sky as if to say:

Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only

-Matthew 4:10

And Satan disappears, and the Lord's destiny and prophecy is fulfilled (Deut 8:3, Deut 6:13, Deut 6:16)

John Martin’s Trilogy

Here I've displayed not a 'human' depiction of Christ, but rather his effect on the world. Here, John Martin (b. 1789) is well known for his many landscape paintings, the settings of myths and the background of heroes. The Coronation of Queen Victoria (1839), Macbeth (1820), The Destruction of Pompei and Herculaneum (c. 1821), Seventh Plague of Egypt (1823), Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still (c. 1840), The Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah (1852).

The Great Day of His Wrath (1851)

The Plains of Heaven (c. 1851)

The Last Judgment (1853)

I hope you have enjoyed being taken into a world and wonder beyond your own. It excites me to find many of the artists here have established the theatre and the set the stage for the stories that we are all living today. I hope these paintings have allowed you answer to which story you are living in, and see that this reflection is not to far off it.

Nabateans and Bedouins

Ancient Arab navigators, also known as Bedouins, used the same methods as the Nabateans to navigate across the changing sand dunes. They adeptly used the North Star, or Polaris, to guide their travels across the vast and featureless sand dunes. They employed a simple, yet ingenious wooden device called a "kamal," which consisted of a rectangular piece of wood and a string with knots. By holding the kamal at arm's length and aligning it with the horizon and the North Star, they could determine their latitude based on the number of knots visible between the horizon and the star. This rudimentary tool helped them maintain a consistent direction during their night journeys. Additionally, the Bedouins recited poetry with a measured rhythm to track the distance they had walked. Each verse of the poem represented a specific distance, allowing them to estimate their travel over time. This combination of astronomical observation and poetic tradition enabled them to navigate effectively across the changing and shifting desert landscapes.

Combining these techniques, they could accurately locate towns, trade centres, water wells, and other landmarks. By knowing the latitudinal position of these critical locations, they could navigate the desert with remarkable precision, ensuring they reached vital points for rest, trade, and sustenance. This was also the method they used to accurately determine the direction of prayer.

Enter Dan Gibson: The 'Archaeologist's Archaeologist'

As a side project on his travels, he also examined, the architecture of ancient mosques. Gibson, using the ATLAS navigation satellites, built by the Japanese, pinpointed to the highest precision the location and bearing of each mosque. Gibson noted that the ancient mosques were not facing Mecca, but rather a different location. He arrived at a mosque, found the Qibla wall and the mirhrab, and pointed his navigation compass directly perpendicular to the wall.

For example, the Ibn Tulun Mosque in Egypt, built in 876 AD, is oriented to 145.4°:

The Abu Dulaf Mosque in Iraq, built in 859 AD, is orientated to 191.57°.

The Asham Mosque, built in 9th century, in Saudi Arabia is orientated to 332.2°

Every mosque, according to the Islamic tradition, has foundations oriented towards the Masjid Al-Haram. Many Qiblas are very difficult to find today because many mosques have been destroyed and built again, and so the original floor plans have been lost. Nonetheless, we can use our archaeological and detective skills to understand where the original Qibla wall is. Typically, the qibla wall is the longest side of the mosque and features a small space for the imam to be situated, known as a ‘mihrab’, when leading the prayer.

Since Dan Gibson's remarkable publications, the historical validity of the Islamic faith has come into question. In fact, nowhere in the original Hadiths or the Quran mention the words "Mecca" in regards to the direction of prayer. The words "Masjid Al-Haram" is referred to as the direction of prayer, but the word "Mecca" is never mentioned. It is only merely used as an insertion [Mecca] by translators and scholars. Furthermore, while the Saudis undergo huge renovations to the Al-Haram: digging deep into the ground before laying huge foundations, they have not found any artefacts, structures or evidence of the Quraysh tribes, which are said to have lived in Mecca. Rather, the only structure they have found belongs to the Ottoman Empire, hundreds of years too late.

So this begs the question: where is the Masjid Al-Haram, if it is not Mecca?

Spherical Geometry and the Great Circle

In this analysis, we can make use of the directions of the qiblas of different mosques. By drawing a line from the mosques, we can determine the point of intersection which each of them are facing.

Just like Cartesian coordinates, whereby a position in space is specified by the (x, y, z) coordinates, you can also define a position in space using (r, θ, φ), where r is the distance from the origin, θ is the polar angle from the z-axis and φ is the azimuthal angle from the x-axis. On the Earth's surface, which is assumed to be a sphere of constant radius r, we use spherical coordinates in terms of the latitude (Φ) and longitude (λ).

1. We can transfer these coordinates into Cartesian coordinates for a unit sphere:

2. Similarly, we can define vectors on this sphere in Cartesian space at different longitude and latitude points. The North and East vectors may be defined as:

3. Given that we can define the North and East vectors, we can therefore resolve a vector which sums to the direction vector of where our mosque is facing, given any bearing from North, θ:

4. Given that both the position P can be a position vector P, coupled with a direction vector D, we can take the cross product of both of these vectors to find the perpendicular face vector F. The face vector F is perpendicular to the Great Circular which is drawn around the sphere from the position P in the direction D.

   

5. Furthermore, we can repeat steps 1-4 for another mosque with position (Φ,λ) and bearing from North, θ.

4. In order to find where these two circles intersect, we can find the cross product between the two face vectors, giving us a vector which lies perpendicular to the face vectors and along the line of intersection.

4. Since the lines intersect at two points, we will generate two solutions; and because we know that the Masjid Al-Haram does not lie at the opposite side of the globe in the Pacific Ocean, we can reject points which are out of bounds of where we are interested in.

4. In order to convert the generated vector into latitude and longitude values (Φ,λ), we take the (x, y, z) components of the intersection vector I into our equations for transferring to spherical coordinates.

Let's Get Coding!

Copy and paste your own code into your IDLE and follow the instructions. You can also copy the coordinates of any mosque in your own knowledge. You can also confirm the latitude and longitude of the points by using Google Maps (since we don't have access to Gibson's expensive database from the ATLAS system). You can also confirm the bearing of the mosque's Qibla direction using an online map bearing tool (or using linear equations). I recommend acquiring the bearings and positions from Nabatean.net. Make sure to install the correct libraries: numpy, matplotlib and math.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib as plt
import math
#Petra----------------------------------------------------------------------------
#Xian Mosque, China
#23°8′53.74″N,113°15′19.61″E
#Bearing = 295°

#Sahi Ramdah Mosque, Oman
#23°32′35.66″N,58°23′54.11″E
#Bearing = 292.79°

#Kilwa, Tanzania
#8°57′32.93″S,39°29′53.86″E
#Bearing = 356°

#Al-Sawaf Mosque, Iraq
#36°11′0.70″N,44°0′11.50″E
#Bearing = 234.35°

#Siraf Early Mosque, Iran
#27°40′5.62″N,52°19′53.08″E
#Bearing = 282.1°

#Odigram Mosque, Pakistan
#34°44′35.31″N,72°18′51.17″E
#Bearing = 273°

#Mecca----------------------------------------------------------------------------
#Tiberias Friday Mosque, Israel
#32°46′34.59″N,35°32′38.39″E
#Bearing = 160°

#Qasr Hallabat Mosque, Jordan
#32°5′33.73″N,36°19′42.38″E
#Bearing = 163.55°

#Salalah Al-Balid Mosque, Oman
#17°0′21.55″N,54°7′50.11″E
#Bearing = 285.05°

#Banbhore, Pakistan
#24°45′8.34″N,67°31′19.00″E
#Bearing = 265.78°

#Asnaq Friday Mosque, Iran
#38°3′43.02″N,47°11′21.41″E
#Bearing = 207.11°



def dms_to_dd(dms_str):
    def convert_dms_to_dd(dms):
        # Split the DMS string into components
        dms = dms.strip()
        # Split by degrees
        degrees_split = dms.split('°')
        degrees = degrees_split[0]
        # Split by minutes
        minutes_split = degrees_split[1].split('′')
        minutes = minutes_split[0]
        # Split by seconds and direction
        seconds_split = minutes_split[1].split('″')
        seconds = seconds_split[0]
        direction = seconds_split[1]
        # Convert components to decimal degrees
        dd = float(degrees) + float(minutes) / 60 + float(seconds) / 3600
        # Handle N/S/E/W to determine positive/negative values
        if direction in ['S', 'W']:
            dd *= -1
        return dd

    # Split the latitude and longitude
    lat_str, lon_str = dms_str.split(',')
    lat = convert_dms_to_dd(lat_str.strip())
    lon = convert_dms_to_dd(lon_str.strip())

    return (lat, lon)

def P(lat, lon):
    x = math.cos(math.radians(lat)) * math.cos(math.radians(lon))
    y = math.cos(math.radians(lat)) * math.sin(math.radians(lon))
    z = math.sin(math.radians(lat))
    return np.array([x, y, z])

def D(bearing, lat, lon):
    lat_rad = math.radians(lat)
    lon_rad = math.radians(lon)
    bearing_rad = math.radians(bearing)

    N = np.array([
        -math.sin(lat_rad) * math.cos(lon_rad),
        -math.sin(lat_rad) * math.sin(lon_rad),
        math.cos(lat_rad)
    ])

    E = np.array([
        -math.sin(lon_rad),
        math.cos(lon_rad),
        0
    ])

    D = math.cos(bearing_rad) * N + math.sin(bearing_rad) * E
    return D

def cartesian_to_spherical(x, y, z):
    # Calculate the radius
    R = np.sqrt(x**2 + y**2 + z**2)

    # Calculate the latitude
    lat = math.degrees(math.asin(z / R))

    # Calculate the longitude
    lon = math.degrees(math.atan2(y, x))

    return lat, lon

#Example 1

coord1 = str(input(' Enter the coordinates 1, (ensure it is formatted as OO°OO′OO.OO″N/S,OO°OO′OO.OO″E/W) : '))
#"23°8′53.74″N,113°15′19.61″E"
bearing1 = float(input(' Enter the bearing 1: '))
#295

coord1 = dms_to_dd(coord1)
coord1xyz = P(coord1[0],coord1[1])
direction1 = D(bearing1, coord1[0], coord1[1])
Face1 = np.cross(coord1xyz,direction1)

coord2 = str(input(' Enter the coordinates 2, (ensure it is formatted as OO°OO′OO.OO″N/S,OO°OO′OO.OO″E/W) : '))
#"32°29′22.98″N,35°52′48.01″E"
bearing2 = float(input(' Enter the bearing 2: '))
#190

coord2 = dms_to_dd(coord2)
coord2xyz = P(coord2[0],coord2[1])
direction2 = D(bearing2, coord2[0], coord2[1])
Face2 = np.cross(coord2xyz,direction2)

L = np.cross(Face1,Face2)


#We know that the point of intersection must lie within a lattitude (-60,60) and (-25,130)
def select_valid_vector(I1, I2, lat_range=(-35, 60), lon_range=(-25, 130)):
    #"""Select the vector that meets the latitude and longitude conditions."""
    lat1, lon1 = cartesian_to_spherical(I1[0], I1[1], I1[2])
    lat2, lon2 = cartesian_to_spherical(I2[0], I2[1], I2[2])


    # Check if I1 meets the conditions
    if lat_range[0] <= lat1 <= lat_range[1] and lon_range[0] <= lon1 <= lon_range[1]:
        return I1
    # Check if I2 meets the conditions
    elif lat_range[0] <= lat2 <= lat_range[1] and lon_range[0] <= lon2 <= lon_range[1]:
        return I2
    else:
        print("Neither I1 nor I2 meet the conditions. Intersection out of range")
        return None

I1 = L / np.linalg.norm(L)
I2 = -I1
selected_vector = select_valid_vector(I1, I2)

intersect = cartesian_to_spherical(selected_vector[0],selected_vector[1],selected_vector[2])
print(intersect)



import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap

plt.figure(figsize=(12, 8))
map = Basemap(projection='merc', llcrnrlat=-20, urcrnrlat=50,
              llcrnrlon=-25, urcrnrlon=130, resolution='i')

lat_petra = 30.327947
lon_petra = 35.443665
x_petra, y_petra = map(lon_petra, lat_petra)
map.plot(x_petra, y_petra, 'bo', markersize=5)
plt.text(x_petra, y_petra, 'Petra', fontsize=12, ha='left')


lat_mecca = 21.422300
lon_mecca = 39.826202
x_mecca, y_mecca = map(lon_mecca, lat_mecca)
map.plot(x_mecca, y_mecca, 'bo', markersize=5)
plt.text(x_mecca, y_mecca, 'Mecca Point', fontsize=12, ha='left')

# Define the coordinates of the point you want to plot
lat1 = coord1[0]
lon1 = coord1[1]
x1, y1 = map(lon1, lat1)
map.plot(x1, y1, 'bo', markersize=5)
plt.text(x1, y1, 'Mosque 1', fontsize=12, ha='right')

lat2 = coord2[0]
lon2 = coord2[1]
x2, y2 = map(lon2, lat2)
map.plot(x2, y2, 'bo', markersize=5)
plt.text(x2, y2, 'Mosque 2', fontsize=12, ha='right')

lat_inter = intersect[0]
lon_inter = intersect[1]
x_inter, y_inter = map(lon_inter, lat_inter)
map.plot(x_inter, y_inter, 'bo', markersize=5, color = 'red')

map.drawcoastlines()
map.fillcontinents(color='white', lake_color='lightblue')
map.drawmapboundary(fill_color='lightblue')

map.drawgreatcircle(lon1, lat1, lon_inter, lat_inter, linewidth=2, color='r')
map.drawgreatcircle(lon2, lat2, lon_inter, lat_inter, linewidth=2, color='r')
# Plot the point

plt.title('Where do the Two Qibla lines intersect?')
plt.show()
# Create a Basemap instance

Let the Results Speak

1. Enter the map coordinates of the first mosque (in the correct format as mentioned in the input).

2. Enter the bearing of the first mosque (without the degree symbol).

3. Enter the map coordinates of the second mosque (in the correct format as mentioned in the input).

4. Enter the bearing of the second mosque (without the degree symbol).

In this example, we will use the Xian Mosque in China and the Sahi Ramdah Mosque in Oman, both built in 629 AD and in the 8th century AD respectively.

Try this yourself, and you will be surprised. If you do not wish to use the databank from Nabataeans.net, I have also copied the data for your convenience.

Then, as we look at mosques which are built much later, such as the the Banbhore in Pakistan, built in 727 AD, and the Asnaq Friday Mosque in Iran, built in the 9th century, both of them face an inaccurate point around Mecca.

If we categorise the qibla directions according to where they face most closest to, we can see that overtime the direction has shifted:

624 AD - 772 AD - Petra

706 AD – 772 AD - In Between

732 AD – 866 AD - Parallel

727 AD – 876 AD - Mecca

In more detail, we can see that the degree of precision of the Meccan qibla mosques actually becomes worse (not better) than the the Petra qiblas.

Liars, Thieves and False Teachings

How did the Muslim community react to Gibson's theory? Instead of analysing Gibson's data, or even having a meaningful dialogue with him, Islamic mullahs and scholars simply attack his credentials and his degrees. When did we need a degree to show that 2+2 = 4? When did we need a scientist to show that if you point somewhere, then you are pointing at exactly where you are pointing to?

Imagine spending 25 years in the field, analysing the data, being in the Middle East, on the ground, right there with the mosques, learning the language of Arabic, and some old git like David King, claiming to be the leading authority in Islamic history from the safe confines of the UK, calls out your theories as rubbish purely based on the fact that you "don't have a PhD".

Does Dan Gibson have a PhD? No. But do you? Do any of these so-called 'scholars' have any impactful piece of research which would qualify them to discredit someone else's research?

No.

In fact, David King pointed out that the angular error acceptable in Islam is 45° !

What do Muslims further say about Gibson's theory? They say it is a conspiracy from the West to dismantle the Islamic faith, that it is a complete fabrication designed by Governments of the West to control and spread doubt amongst the believers. Furthermore, Muslims are even willing to bash their own ancestral brilliance by saying the ancient Bedouin tribes were not good at precision navigation. In essence, they largely dismiss Gibson's arguments, bash his credentials, and make no effort to make a counter argument. How can you trust the views of someone who simply slanders and dances around the problem with lies, deception and belittlement.

Dan Gibson has done everything necessary to make his theory as clear as possible, with each point having a plethora of evidence to back it up. This is an injustice in academia, research and history the likes we have never seen before. It is utterly appalling that Muslims, Muslim scholars and historians have silenced Gibson's clear and concise proof that the earliest mosques never faced Mecca. The reaction from Muslims clearly demonstrates that there is a clear problem when it comes to freethinking within Islam. Is Islam a religion which upholds the truth, gives freedom of thought or even freedom of speech? If you are strong in your beliefs, then why can't Muslims evaluate the evidence and the arguments made?

Is it not every Muslim's right to know this information? Wouldn't someone from Saudi Arabia be interested in this clear proof of geometry and mathematics? Why are the mullahs, the sheikhs and Islamic scholars stealing the educated Muslim's opportunity to think for himself and become a critical thinker? Does Islam not uphold mathematics, historical facts, and the Truth?

To find more information on Dan Gibson's research, a summary of his findings is laid out in more depth in his documentary The Sacred City (2016) which has been translated into more languages than I can count.

You can also try it out yourself with the interactive Qibla tool, showing clearly the direction of multiple Qiblas of some of the oldest mosques in Islamic history.

Future considerations

• The Earth is not entirely a perfect sphere, it slightly bulges by less than 15 miles: The distance from the centre of the Earth to the equator is about 3,963.2 miles. The distance from the centre of the Earth to the poles is about 3,949.9 miles. Does this deviation have any effects on our Great Circle paths.

What is SERS?

More specifically, this enhancement is either through electromagnetic or chemical mechanisms.

When light interacts with the rough metal surface or nanostructures, it can excite coherent surface electron oscillations. These electron oscillations create strong electromagnetic fields at the metal surface. Molecules near the surface experience this enhanced electromagnetic field, leading to a significantly increased Raman signal through this feedback mechanism.

Moreover, the chemical enhancement is due to charge transfer between the adsorbed molecule and the metal surface. The interaction can result in an increase in the polarizability of the molecule, thereby enhancing the Raman scattering.

SERS is great!...when you don't mind 'gluing' nanoparticles to your sample. What if you have a sensitive sample? What if you don't want any surface or particle to contaminate it?

Can't we just make the instrument better?

Instead of applying surfaces and nanoparticles to our sample, we can enhance our signal by making a few instrumentation design updates. In this article, we'll evaluate a few probe designs which are geared towards this enhancement of liquid samples.

The Confocal Raman Microscope

The standard confocal Raman microscope consists of an excitation laser: providing the monochromatic light required for Raman scattering; laser line filter: ensuring that only the desired wavelength is directed towards the sample, removing any unwanted laser drifts. A beam splitter not only directs the laser light towards the sample but also allows the scattered light to pass through to the spectrometer. Objective lenses focus the laser light onto a small spot on the sample and collects the back-scattered light. High numerical aperture lenses are often used to achieve better spatial resolution and signal collection since they collect a wider angle of the isotropic Raman scattering sphere. The biggest advantage of any microscope is the precision its motorized XYZ stage: this allows precise positioning in three dimensions (x, y, and z), facilitating detailed chemical mapping of the sample.

When the back-scattered light passes back through the dichroic edge filter, it selectively blocks the strong Rayleigh scattered light and transmit the weaker Raman scattered light, ensuring that the spectrometer detects only the Raman signal. Furthermore, a notch filter is placed to block more Rayleigh scattered light. A confocal pinhole is placed at a conjugate focal plane to the sample, it blocks out-of-focus light, improving spatial resolution and reducing background noise. This Raman scattered light passes to the spectrometer which consists of a diffraction grating: this physically disperses the collected scattered light into its constituent wavelengths. The physically dispersed light can be mapped onto a detector, typically a Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) that captures the dispersed light and converts it into an electrical signal for analysis. The CCD detector is often cooled to reduce thermal noise.

Axicon Lens

Liquids are often stored in glass vials, meaning the sole viable option for conducting Raman analysis of a bioreactor is to pass a laser through a window separation. Therefore, this presents the problem of exciting fluorescence transitions within the glass which interferes with the Raman spectrum. Nonetheless, the use of an axicon lens has shown promise in Spatially Offset Raman Spectroscopy (SORS) and has been a central component for reducing the laser flux through glass windows, allowing the analyte within the container to be analysed with a reduced fluorescence spectrum. H Fleming et al. [a] demonstrate this application for the analysis of whisky through the bottle.

Elliptical Silver Satellite

Some lasers are very difficult to completely collimate (in fact its actually impossible). In my undergraduate work, developing a portable Raman device, the collimator we used didn't actually completely collimate the beam, so I had to assume it was a concave lens when I was applying thin lens equations to find the focal point of my Raman excitation spot. A similar problem occurs in all Raman devices, particularly those whereby the beam travels a distance larger than 10cm. How do we combat this divergence?

Communication signals also diverge. Electromagnetic waves used for sending communication signals are received using large elliptical satellite dishes which focus the signal onto the central receiver, the waves can enter the dish at any orientation and still become focussed onto the receiver.

The same may be applied to a laser which diverges in orientation when attempting to collimate. Let the laser pass through the liquid media you wish to analyse (hoping that no signal will be lost on the way), from there the multiple diverging beams can focus on the focal point of the elliptical mirror and induce Raman scattering at this focal point. Raman scattering occurs isotopically, therefore, the bottom scattering sphere will assemble onto the receiving dish, reflect off the mirror and pass through the media along the same path as the initial laser. Likewise, the top scattering sphere will pass through the media, however, will be diverged into a sphere.

There may exhibit some interreference from the top and bottom spheres since there is a path difference between the Raman light. This setup requires a further set of large optics to capture, filter and focus the light into the spectrometer, assuming that path differences, low flux densities as well as spurious scattering does not disrupt the Raman signal.

Gold Backscattering Mirror

Demonstrated by M. Lui [b], this is similar to the Elliptical setup, but isolates laser light which passes through the focal point and is wasted to the media. Instead of wasting this laser light, an hyperbolic gold mirror may be placed at the bottom of the container and enhance the Raman scattering by adding an additional excitation to the laser spot.

This method has been shown to enhance the Raman scattering intensity by up to 6x as much as without the mirror. I hope to use this method in my own work with regards to bioprocesses, whereby an immersion probe can have a gold mirror attachment immersed into the bioreactor, which can reflect the diffused laser light, and enhance the signal through backscattering enhancement. The biggest issue is that bioproducts are not to be touched unless they are FDA approved sensors. Reaching FDA approval would take up to 5 years, by which point another engineering firm has made a new design and has overtaken the approval process.

Freeform Optics

One of the most interesting assemblies is the use of freeform optics, whereby the reflection of optical surfaces is minimised by passing the light through a single optical component which totally internally reflects the light such that no Raman or laser light is lost in the process. These freeform optics have been 3D printed using the additive manufacturing methods, VeroClear, a glass material, printed by the Objet30 Pro, and has shown to collect adequate Raman scattering.

However, this investigation concluded that there is no enhancement, but rather a significant reduction in Raman intensity, demonstrating that this is method poses no advantage to the optical components. I believe a better material could have been used, with other materials instead of reflective surfaces and optically inactive surfaces. A method similar to the creation of standard optics, with the heating of glass would make the freeform optic more suitable as it would be similar to standard optical components. scattering light may have been lost due to spurious scattering from within the material.

Can you make it better?

Sure you can. With some investigative abilities and scientific demonstrations, we can engineer something to enhance our Raman scattering signal - without the use of SERS.

References

[a] FLEMING, H., CHEN, M., BRUCE, G. D. & DHOLAKIA, K. 2020. Through-bottle whisky sensing and classification using Raman spectroscopy in an axicon-based backscattering configuration. Analytical Methods, 12, 4572-4578.

[b] LIU, M., MU, Y., HU, J., LI, J. & ZHANG, X. 2021. Optical Feedback for Sensitivity Enhancement in Direct Raman Detection of Liquids. Journal of Spectroscopy, 2021, 5588417.