Guides for Spiritual Communion and Confession in An Age of Closed Churches (downloadable PDF format)

Deacon Nick Donnelly's Catholic Survival Guide has been very successful since it was first posted here presciently, weeks before the Italian lockdown became a worldwide movement in which dioceses decided to deny regular Sacramental life to Catholics everywhere.

We have it now below in PDF format, in two files (one for the Spiritual Communion and Contrition guide, the other for the preparation for death guide), that can be downloaded and printed for easier guidance during this period.

To download, just click on pop-out (upper right corner) -- it will open in a new window or tab, and you can print or download the PDF file.

1: Perfect Contrition and Spiritual Communion:

The 'Eucharistic' Rosary?

It is perhaps no surprise and only natural that basic knowledge of the Church's traditional liturgical rites and pious devotions, let alone a real understanding of and sympathy for them, are scarcely to be found among adherents and advocates of the unprecedented and disastrous post-Vatican II construction of a new liturgy that was meant to replace the ancient liturgical rites of the Latin Church and thereby weaken or eliminate perennial Catholic eucharistic doctrine and theological emphases. Among the pious devotions for which they have no sympathy and understanding, we may count the old practice, formerly widespread but today all but fallen into desuetude, of praying the Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary and meditating on its mysteries during Holy Mass. As noted here before, the current reigning Sovereign Pontiff earlier this year spoke of this devotional practice as if it were an obstacle to participation in the liturgy. Opposition to this devotion in the modern Church sometimes extends as far as virulent hatred, with one lay Catholic blogger expressing his personal opinion that praying the Rosary at Mass is an "execrable habit" and "a practice born of the rankest of ignorance, generally performed by people completely unschooled in the Faith."

To Catholics living a hundred years ago, however, such sentiments would be not only unintelligible but indecent, irreverent, and prideful if not blasphemous and proximate to heresy. Not only was this devotion not thought to be an obstacle to participation in Mass, but the entire purpose of the devotion was to provide the laity with another way to enhance their participation in the liturgy. No doubt at least partly underlying the post-Vatican II antipathy toward the devotion is the widespread, lamentable inability or even refusal on the part of many Catholics to distinguish between the liturgical roles and functions of the priest and the laity at Mass and in all aspects of Catholic life. This blurring of ordained priesthood with the lay state -- a "laicising" of the priest and "clericalising" of the layman -- was behind, and helped by, the former intentional mistranslation of the Orate fratres (corrected in the current English translation of the Missal). Whereas the liturgy distinguishes between the oblation of the priest and the offerings of the laity at Mass -- "Orate frates: ut meum ac vestrum sacrificium acceptabile fiat apud Deum Patrem omnipotentem" [Pray, brethren, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God the Father Almighty] -- the former approved mistranslation of the Orate fratres erroneously spoke of "our sacrifice."