Novena cures

Terri's Fight presses the campaign to prevent a Florida man's judicially-sanctioned starvation-murder of his incapacitated wife.

Starving Terri Schiavo to death is no act of love, writes David P. Rundle:

I was not aware that getting food and water was a medical act. I thought it was a biological one. If one cannot get those, one does not die quickly. One takes days to die, and horrid changes occur to one's body. Terri's death will not be a peaceful one…

Michael Schiavo does not know the true state of Terri's mind, and neither does her mother. But he could end this tragic fight by just divorcing Terri and letting her mom become her guardian. That would end this nightmare, reaffirm the value of human life and reject the hellish notion that starving an individual is an act of love.

Arguing in favor of that very hellish notion is USA Today founder Al Neuharth, who to judge from the cognitive powers on display in his column really ought not welcome the day when society commences mercy-killings of those whose minds are dead.

(Via Earl Appleby at Life Matters.)

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The image at top shows women praying before an altar inside St. Agnes Church in the McKinley Park neighborhood of Chicago in 1907. The photo is taken from the Chicago Daily News collection at the Library of Congress' American Memory site.

A search on cathedral returns dozens of images, including an interior shot of Holy Name Cathedral from 1909, these altar boys from 1902, a procession of choirboys from 1909, and a number of pictures from the installation of Archbishop Mundelein in 1916.

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Whose rite is it anyway?

Liturgical vandals have trivialised worship in Anglican and Catholic churches, former Catholic Herald editor William Oddie writes in The Spectator, but now, Rome is trying to do something about it:

One of his most striking examples of how oversimplified paraphrase rather than faithful translation had reduced the transcendent to the crudely quotidian, was his criticism of a familiar passage: ‘...so that from East to West a perfect offering may be made ...’. ‘A more faithful translation,’ Fr Harbert had suggested, ‘might run “so that from the rising of the sun to its setting a pure sacrifice may be offered”.’ The difference of meaning is vast: ‘from East to West’ is merely geography: from sunrise to sunset contains also the element of time; the Harbert version is not just more memorable, it also implies God’s creative activity, universal and unceasing throughout time and space, a dimension clearly present in the Latin original: ‘et populum tibi congregare non desinis, ut a solis ortu usque ad occasum oblatio munda offeratur nomini tuo’. This has emerged in the draft version as ‘and you never cease to gather a people to yourself so that from the rising of the sun to its setting a pure oblation may be made to your name’.

One notorious sign of the Pelagian tendency of the old translation was in its inclination to remove any sign of humility before God. The idea of God as being our superior (fairly fundamental, one would have thought), conveyed traditionally by the use of the title ‘Lord’, was frowned on, and wherever possible, ‘Lord’ tended to be ‘translated’ as ‘Father’. Any note of supplication tended to be downplayed; all this, Fr Harbert had said, would have to be reversed…

The effect of hundreds of such changes — impossible to convey without more space — has had a massive cumulative effect not merely on the accuracy of the translations, but on their beauty…

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Try singing this selection from a liturgists' committee statement on sacred music to the tune of "On Eagles Wings."

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I hadn't realized that miracles and divine interventions have been so frequently claimed by Mother Angelica, who maintains, for example, she was inspired to build her Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament when a statue of Baby Jesus came alive and spoke to her. She's a regular Christina the Astonishing of the airwaves.