On the Square Today

George Weigel on sacred language for sacred acts :

It was just about a year ago that U.S. parishes began using the new translations of the third edition of the Roman Missal—an implementation process that seems to have gone far more smoothly than some anticipated. Wrinkles remain to be ironed out: There are precious few decent musical settings for the revised Ordinary of the Mass; the occasional celebrant (not infrequently with “S.J.” after his name) feels compelled to share his winsome personality with the congregation by ad-libbing the priestly greetings and prayers of the Mass.

Also today, Filip Mazurczak has an interview with Paul Hensler on Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko :

The Communist regime’s official media frequently denounced Fr. Popieluszko, and in 1984 three government agents stopped his automobile as he was returning from Bydgoszcz, where he said his last Mass. The police officers beat him to death with a rock, tied his limbs to rocks and heavy bags of sand, and threw his body into the Vistula River. Fr. Popieluszko’s funeral was attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners. Under significant pressure from Poland’s people, the Communist government put Fr. Popieluszko’s assassins on trial and, in an unprecedented move, imprisoned the policemen.

And in our third feature, David Corbin and Matthew Parks on the president of the economy :

In 2010, Republicans won a historic victory in the midterm elections, gaining sixty-three seats in the House and six in the Senate. They netted six governorships and twenty state legislative bodies. Although local factors always matter, this was an unusually nationalized campaign, driven by widespread concern over President Obama’s trillion-dollar deficits, health care mandates, and bank takeovers. Unfortunately, Mitt Romney abandoned this argument in order to run a non-ideological campaign—with disastrous electoral results.