Book in small chunks

Watch a book in progress.

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton
We’ll see about that.

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The bishop who lost his way: Tuscany in the 1780s

Pius X (1903-1914) is best known for promoting frequent communion, seen by some at the time as making a sacred thing unduly common and therefore less highly regarded.  This problem seems not to have risen until after Vatican 2, when communion became not only frequent but standard for mass-goers and everyone went -- as I noted in a National Catholic Reporter essay in the 1970s, calling attention to an unsung achievement of the council, namely that it had abolished mortal sin. In any case, this change of his and another, to teach catechism in the vernacular (!), are pretty tame stuff by today's standards. Let us, however, put a hold once more on this tenth Pius and his works, looking back a mere hundred or so years before him to the synod of Pistoia, a diocese in Tuscany, in 1786. Liturgy was dying on the vine. Jansenists had made worship barely approachable with hard-nose demands on worshipers. Quietists had made it irrelevant with their insistence on a God-to-individual hot...
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In worship, who comes first, God or the faithful? More than a conundrum.

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The Latin Clerk, The Life, Word and Travels of Adrian Fortescue - Book Review by Fr John Salter

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