Many priests went up physically alone to the altar of God on this Lord's Day. And many of them, no doubt, offered the Church's ancient worship which, especially among the crop of younger priests, has never been so popular as in the 1970's where a failed attempt was made in so many places to snuff it out.
And so this day stands out, among the few already past in this still young new year, as one replete with many graces uniting us to the Church of all time through the many offerings of the liturgy of all time.
The swath of a winter storm currently blanketing a large part of the United States with snow and ice, accompanied by dangerously low temperatures, has rendered venturing out a forbidding prospect for man and beast alike. And thus there will be, in many places, no congregation gathered.
It is the congregation which the disrupters seek to separate from our immemorial worship. That is for the reason that, if they see it, they might want it. This would upset the 60-year struggle to change the Faith and to change the Church "so it can't be changed back" - the petulant cry of the modernists and their fellow travelers in the last pontificate.
The only liturgy that will successfully lend itself to the modernist campaign to change the Faith is the one that is only predictable in the sense that is unpredictable, and stable only in its instability: different in every place it appears and rendering itself a perpetual source of division in holy Church. This liturgy of which we speak is the "on the spot" product pasted together like a groovy collage in the 1960's in order to replace and cast the Catholic Mass into the dustbin of history.
The priest when he is alone, with angels and saints surrounding and united with him, to pray the Mass will naturally choose that worship which he holds most dear in this age commonly described as one of options, if nothing else. And the option of the Tradition, as Pope Benedict made so clear in Summorum Pontificum, remains as sacred today for all of us it was for the Catholics of the two millennia that preceded our moment. The cohort of new vocations is nothing if not united around a love of venerable Catholic Tradition.
Make an act of spiritual Communion with the many holy sacrifices of the rito antico offered today. The storm also brought many private TLM Masses to areas in our country especially beleaguered by modernists and heretics who vainly seek to stamp out forever the liturgy, together with the faith and the reverence, which it fuels supernaturally.
Pray for the many Catholics who are tragically being persecuted for their faith by their own bishops. Oh, and while you're at it, pray for another big storm that will bring us closer to the day when every congregation will once again be united around their priest as he goes up the altar of God, the God who restores "the joy of our youth" through our sacred liturgical birthright, "ever ancient and ever new".
Ite Missa est. Oremus pro invicem.
