Month March 2023

Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. Loosely translated: “The norm of prayer governs the norm of belief; the norm of belief governs the norm of living.” Many priests nowadays (including myself) are asking, “What if there’s deficient lex in the orandi? Won’t that diminish the credendi and vivendi?”

I’ll summarize here the very many conversations I’ve had with numerous priests from across the country. These are faithful priests with a zeal for souls. Precisely because they are good shepherds, they’ve found themselves becoming increasingly bewildered and heartsick. Their pain now follows a predictable pattern. Their anguish and discouragement spikes on weekends, when they must offer Masses with their congregations. Why?

Read the essay at Homiletic & Pastoral Review Magazine.

Here’s a misleading phrase: “You can’t turn back the clock.” At face value, it’s unobjectionable. Apart from science fiction, humans experience time only as flowing forward. Time cannot be undone.

As part of a rhetorical strategy, “You can’t turn back the clock” can be deployed to show that however intense the nostalgia for the putative original innocence of the “Good Old Days,” we can’t get there from here. Fair enough. In this sense, history is replete with instances of people trying — and failing — to “turn back the clock.” A perusal of the list of “communes,” both religious and secular, that ostensibly were established to show the human race how to return to Paradise would suffice to illustrate the point.

Read the New Oxford Review essay.