On the Square Today

In his latest On the Square column , George Weigel offers suggestions on how to break bad liturgical habits:

The long-awaited introduction of the new translation of the Roman Missal on Nov. 27, the first Sunday of Advent, offers the Church in the Anglophere an opportunity to reflect on the riches of the liturgy, its biblical vocabulary, and its virtually inexhaustible storehouse of images. Much of that vocabulary, and a great many of those images, were lost under the “dynamic equivalence” theory of translation; they have now been restored under the “formal equivalence” method of translating. Over the next years and decades, the Catholic Church will be reminded of just what a treasure-house of wonders the liturgy is.

Also today, David G. Bonagura, Jr. asks “W hat’s wrong with Dies Irae ? ”

November 2, All Souls Day, is the one of last liturgical remnants of the doctrine of Purgatory and the need to pray for the souls therein. Since the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, which called for funeral rites to “express more clearly the paschal character of Christian death,” the homilies and general aura of Catholic funerals have often ignored Purgatory and instead canonized the deceased among the heavenly blessed.