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Pope Francis declared 2021 to be the year of Saint Joseph, husband of the Blessed Virgin Mother and foster father of Our Lord. Below are several traditional hymns and chants dedicated to Saint Joseph. About half of the songs are from the Divine Office or the Mass, and about half are devotional hymns. Te Joseph Celebrant The Liber Hymnarius attributes authorship to Hieronymus Casanate. Mode 1, Liber Usualis, 1961, p. 1447.

Monsignor J. D. Conway ran a Q&A column in several Catholic newspapers, such as the Catholic Messenger and the National Catholic Reporter. Below is the full transcription of a letter from June 9, 1965. National Catholic Reporter, Volume 1, Number 32, 9 June 1965 https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org/?a=d&d=ncr19650609-01.2.50 Question Box Q. l am here to complain, but I am not out to win my arguments, only to air them. I am a young Catholic (28) and pride myself in being of average intelligence and fairly well informed, but just not sophisticated enough to be able to accept the changes in the Catholic form of worship.

The following quotation is attributed to Pope Blessed Pius IX: Liberal Catholics are the worst enemies of the Church. (While I’m not sure that the rule is ironclad, I was taught that people with more than one title have the titles listed in order of rarity. ‘Pope’ is less common than ‘saint’ or ‘blessed,’ so I put ‘Pope’ first.) Says who? The header image is from the Lepanto Institute. It appears in a variety of places, including ChurchPop, the SSPX’s website, and Newsday.

Claim The following quotation is found all over the internet. It’s attributed to the philosopher Jean Guitton: The intention of Pope Paul VI with regard to what is commonly called the Mass was to reform the Catholic liturgy in such a way that it should almost coincide with the Protestant liturgy…There was with Pope Paul VI an ecumenical intention to remove, or, correct, or at least relax, what was too Catholic, in the traditional sense, in the Mass and, I repeat, to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist Mass.

There are four Marian antiphons that are sung throughout the liturgical year, during the Divine Office and sometimes after Mass. Alma Redemptoris Mater is sung from Advent to Candlemas. Ave Regina Caelorum is sung from Candlemas through Wednesday of Holy Week. Regina Caeli is sung throughout Easter. Salve Regina is sung from Trinity Sunday to the first Sunday of Advent. I made letter-sized (8.5x11) posters, one for each Marian antiphon. Included for each is a woodcut from Albrecht Durer’s unfinished work Life of the Virgin.

The Kyriale contains all of the chants for the Ordinary of the Mass, including Mass and Credo settings for the entire liturgical year. While there is some debate about how consistent these pairings have been throughout history, popular custom and tradition have nevertheless recommended to us several Mass and Credo pairings based on the season or feast. The chart and PDF below are intended as quick reference guides for singers or scholae chanting the Latin Mass.

Father Joseph Byron came to my attention because of his connection to a minor innovation, “dialogue homilies.” It is difficult to say with certainty what they were, but judging by results in the Catholic News Archive, they were an experimental feature of some liturgies practiced in 1966-1972. There is an oblique description of dialogue homilies in 1968: Nor have the dialogue homilies been the sort Msgr. Oesterreicher mentions with disdain. The people I’ve heard were sharing insights - often marvelously deep drawn from the Scripture readings.

The following quotation, attributed to St. John Chrysostom, is extremely popular in Catholic and Orthodox circles: When we speak of the wife obeying the husband we normally think of obedience in military or political terms, the husband giving orders and the wife obeying them. But while this type of obedience may be appropriate in the army, it is ridiculous in the intimate relationship of marriage. The obedient wife does not wait for orders.

An ongoing project of mine is analyzing papal documents by word count, paragraph count, and citation sources. Given the traction my latest chart has gotten, I’m going to use that as an opportunity to explain my research methods in more detail. Collecting The Vatican posts the full text of all recent encyclicals, including all footnotes. Thanks to the way the footnotes are formatted, I can fairly easily copy/paste them to Excel, delete the blank lines, and insert a table.

My birthday is this week, so I wanted to do a little data project that was more fun. Taylor Swift came out with a new album recently, and the number of colors mentioned in “Invisible Strings” inspired me to tabulate all of the colors she mentions in her music. So, eight albums later, here we have it! Methods I scanned the lyrics from Swift’s eight studio albums: Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989, Reputation, Lover, and Folklore.